While I cannot speak for Team Fortress, you are dead wrong for the other two. All fighting games that are actually asymmetrical have winners and losers. Only a portion of characters in every such game is actually balanced as to be competitive at relatively the same level. That's why Tier lists and metas exist, and why some characters see zero representation in the tournament events. And Starcraft is a different beast altogether. Starcraft has only three factions to be balanced against one another, and the teams involved are massive. Original Starcraft took three years of balance patches since the Brood War expansion to settle where it is today. That's three years of balance changes and no new content. And it's so delicate that each new map pack released by Blizzard decides the meta. And Starcraft II's last patch was barely a year ago. That's five years of balance changes without new content. And by the way, there might be another one on the way. And we are talking about a product so delicate that changing units stats by percentiles can affect things. By comparison, TOR has 8 classes with 3 specs each, for total of 24, which need to be balanced for three different types of content, all of which can be played at different levels and interact with one another. You won't see them balanced unless the team in charge of that will grow to the size of the entire TOR team as a separate entity.

Stop with this condescending ********, I've been playing this game as long as you have, and I main Vengeance Juggernaut. This is not my personal problem, this is a biological limitation. The studies show that an average targetted reaction time (which is where you consider what you click, and when, and it doesn't matter if its a keybind, or an icon you click with your mouse) is 450 ms. In the current PvE meta and stats distribution, the GCD for DPS is 400 ms. That means that an average human being is going to struggle with basic rotation, never mind keeping track of dots, resource management, buff management, debuff management, positioning, and DCDs. This isn't a theory. It isn't something that you can just shrug off with "Well, you can learn that if you want to". It is an actual, existing, measurable, scientifically proven biological limitation. That's why the difference between an average parse and top parse is in thousands of DPS. That's why most people cannot achieve the same results on live bosses as they can on dummies. And it's the reason why most people will never touch content above Story OPS, because if you actually look up those guides, and the likes, all of them will tell you that an absolute minimum expected of a DPS toon is using a 0.4 GDC on a offensive ability, and doing so every time the cooldown ends. Doing just that, and nothing else, is the limit of what an average person can do. And I'm saying that making some of the now necessary abilities completely gone is good for the community in the long run. You've the most popular large media franchise in the world tied to a system that is, frankly, obsolete, and incredibly hard for new people to absorb.

It's been ten years since the game's release, and they are working with third party engine, which limits their ability to affect changes in it. You really shouldn't be that surprised.

You know, restating things ad nauseam does not make you right. People are only as helpless as they chose to be is a flat out lie, because while you can easily learn what is the most optimal way to play the class (And, by the way, using all of your buttons in both PvE and PvP will usually lead to suboptimal play, rather than optimal one), will be affected by your ability to concentrate, and use your agility in tandem with targeted reaction time. There are four pages of factors that affect those abilities, and most of those are beyond our control. I only touched upon the most extreme ones. Also, I've had a laugh on your "1% can't dictate that the game should be change towards them". You are this one percent. Basically, the only people in this game to ever utilise all 30 buttons are the high-end PvP players, the smallest, most insular part of the player base. In the every other area of the game, and that includes the NiM raiding, to try and utilise all of the buttons is to play sub-optimally. If, playing as either Tank or a DPS, you waste your GDC on Freezing Force, you are playing suboptimally, full stop. What's more, you literally have a problem with ONE, I will say it again, ONE choice at the current state of the PTS guardian. And that's the Lvl 70 choice between Enure, Blade Blitz and Saber Reflect. If all three of those were available on one the builds that focused on picking the active abilities whenever possible, you would have literally no leg to stand upon, unless you really are so adamant that Freezing Force is absolutely necessary for high level PvE and PvP content (spoilers, it's not, and using it in 99% of the situations is going to be bad for your effectiveness). And that one is a casual fix. And if you say that you use all 31 buttons Guardian has constantly, and they are all indispensable to your play style, I will flat out say that I don't believe you, and ask you to produce analysis of the combat logs, which is a casual thing to do for anyone who plays this game seriously.

Do you have actual argument for streamlining the gaming experience for people who cannot handle 30 buttons, sometimes physically, or do you not? Because I brought it up twice now towards you posts. You ignored it both times. I have friends with disabilities of upper limbs that play SWTOR. I personally suffered due to medication that caused me lowered reaction time and situational awareness that made it borderline impossible to play high level PVE and PVP in its current states. I've known people who suffered from depression and anxiety, and found it incredibly hard to play the game at the high level due to how much management it requires. You have, across all threads that you have been active in thus far, provided no arguments for what should be done to make the game more approachable to people, other than "Yeah, it's all their fault because they don't do research, when it's really simple". Because it's not, and no amount of "Git Gud" will fix that.

I don't appeal to emotions. I present to you a simple argument: The team behind the game has acknowledged that they have made a mistake by adding so many defensive utilities into the game. Therefore, to fix that mistake, they are now going to remove defensive utilities from the game. There is nothing wrong with that reasoning. You don't like it, because you like the way the game is playing right now. And while that's perfectly fine, it doesn't make it any less of an argument from emotions than anyone liking those changes. You don't present tangible argument. You have no proper research to support your position. I do not either, but I'm not pretending to be objectively right. Yeah they do. It's called a budget. It is massively easier to remove the abilities that cause problems than to adjust 27 flashpoints and 11 ops. Especially when you also have to create content for the new expansion. And to be quite frank, some of those defensive abilities that they have left in the game I would have removed entirely from the balance perspective.

The fact that it's not actually happening? There is a very helpful spreadsheet for that. The only ability that seems well and truly gone is Freezing Force. No, actually, I don't. Since there are no official stats, you have basically pulled that out of your ***. And ranked PvP, the most insular part of the game's community, source of drama, toxicity and similar present matters, counts, according to the official leaderboards, about 7000 characters. That's characters, not players. Dunno how many of those are dead accounts banned for win trading and the like, but I suspect a lot. That's across all servers. Why should such a tiny portion of the games population dictate how it will play? Especially when the whole game is otherwise build around PvE experience? And they will not look for it here, but rather on reddit, or from the members of community they trust. This board has been considered the most hardline part of the community, and the most negative one, for a really long time now. Word on the street has been negative from the beginning. Again, you are acting as if this was a new thing, but it's not. This happens every expansion. This happened when the system that people now so hotly defend was introduced. You can literally go, and read page upon pages of DOOM back from 2014. This isn't new. It's a routine at this point.

Or they actually did. And maybe notice the change history of those abilities. Like the fact that cooldowns of all of them have been severely reduced, or that they also come with powerful utilities that were not originally there for the abilities. To use a simple example that spring to mind instantly, Enure has now the half of cooldown it did at launch, and can cleanse with utilities. Saber Reflect got a master utility that nearly doubles the ability duration. Those are massively powerful upgrades. A lot of people make claims about how they have played since the beginning, and seem to forget how the game evolved over the years. DPS classes have gotten enough defensive utilities that it is entirely possible to solo bosses of MM FPs with a DPS companion. Let me say that again: It is entirely possible to solo a boss that's supposed to require a balance team of four to overcome. It is actually one of the recommended ways of getting tech frags! I've seen videos of people soloing operations bosses. That is, very clearly, not the intended way to play the game. So, you are left with two options: Either increase the difficult of all the content in the game to the point that only top 1% of players will be able to successfully finish it, or you take away the tools that have made classes too powerful for the content. And catering to ultra elite players was never a particularly efficient solution, especially from a F2P game perspective. And by the way, regardless of what doomsayers say, it doesn't actually have that much of an impact on the player base. People will preach how everyone lowed MoP WoW gameplay, but ignore the fact that the game population has steadily dropped in that era, not risen. And people have always said that anything Bioware does will kill this game. I've heard it since 2012. ****, you can actually go back to the Disciplines threads from 2014, and you will see the exact same type of doomsaying. "They are dumbing it down! This will kill the game! Stupid devs ruining everything!". And yet, the game is still around. As it always is, despite the overreactions on this board.

PvP in TOR is a mess at any rate, mostly because of the amount of CC that makes it incredibly un-fun for players who know their class, but cannot press buttons fast enough to counter debuffs. Doubly so because ranked is so closed off that most people that are left are those that actually are highly proficient in the current system, and will focus kill any new player that appears. You don't have enough defensive utilities to deal with focused CC from multiple players, even if you are a veteran yourself; you simply can manage to make yourself enough of a nuisance for that to not be effective. And some of those abilities are simply not fun. Take Furious Power/Force Clarity. A toon with full Descent of Fearless should basically always press that button as soon as new charge appears, because that's the best way to keep 10% damage buff. Many defensive abilities basically do the same thing, being panic buttons. There are enough of them in the game that a skilled player can, without much difficulty, run 4 man MM flashpoints by themself. Do you believe that to be working as intended? I would rather have 20 abilities that are substantially different from one another, and have different applications, than 30 in which some are basically duplicates. And yes, I would be in favour of vastly reducing the number of CC abilities in PvP meta, which, in my opinion, are the biggest drain of fun factor from PvP right now.

Well then, how about you just learn to play better so that you don't need all those abilities, and they can be removed? Not very nice, when people are flat out dismissive of you, now, is it? It's where you quote the part of my response towards PvE rotation. You know, the one that uses between 15-20 of 30 buttons on Vigilance Guardian. If the ability is only used at the highest level of PvP play in a majorly PvE game, then it is superfluous. And also created an additional barrier to entry for the PvP, and is in no small way responsible for the ranked community being, on average, toxic. To be honest, I hope that ranked in the current form will be completely and utterly obliterated. Ranked PvP community of TOR is consistently the worst part of the player base, and also the one that contributes the least to the overall state of the game, because it exists in its own closed off world, and basically gives nothing back to the community outside of occasional death threat towards a newbie. My entire experience with PvP in this game has been negative, up and including the fact that one of the members of said community basically killed a guild that I was a part of.

That's why we have the feedback thread though? If the overwhelming majority want Saber Throw back, it will be back. And I'm not in the slightest surprised that it was placed in the optional category for this iteration of the PTS. Remember, TOR gets your combat logs. As Saber Throw is a filler option for both DPS specs, it is likely that in stats it shows at being not used that often, mostly because while it can be useful, it is not essential. We have at least six months of testing which abilities could be removed, and which should stay. If you think something that you really like, or consider necessary is missing, by all means, make your voice heard, but people are going too far in the other direction, threatening to quit the game if even the most menial of abilities are removed.

It's about accessibility. You can easily do any PvE content up to NiM without using every ability on your bar. As a matter of fact, trying to actually use them all is going to be actively detrimental to your play style, both as a tank and as a DPS. Standard DPS rotation on Vigilance/Vengeance involves a third of available buttons, plus six DCs. Just try to imagine the amount of screaming that would ensure if you'd have wasted your GDC on something like Chilling Scream/Freezing Force as a DPS.

Eh... this relies on a rather far reaching assumption that a total overhaul of every class in the game will not be accompanied by adjustment to NiM content. It is entirely possible that overall damage outputs of NiM enemies will be lowered to account for the changes. That is to say: It is too early to make declarative statements about the absolute end-game content when all you have to go on is one class which was not optimised for raiding over long months.

The reasoning provided in the latest Bioware post applies: They are looking for reactions without detailed developer input. Probably because that's what going to happen on launch.

So can we take that as admission that Vigilance/Vengeance actually doesn't need thirty active buttons in PvE? Because the argument is not "Yeah, we should cut down the number of available buttons as much as possible", the argument is "Every single button is absolutely necessary, and removing any guts the class". Which is stupid. And untrue. PvP could actually use less abilities. As it stands right now, ranked is the most impenetrable part of the game, and getting hit with four stuns in a row and destroyed instantly just isn't particularly fun. And really, if you class (and mine, for that matter), is a joke in PvP with or without them, I don't see a problem. You are already playing suboptimally anyway.

No? This is not a matter of intelligence. It never was. You could train an average monkey to do buttons in a sequence and press DC on low health. This is a matter of manual dexterity necessary to achieve good results within the system. And yes that is a barrier, and yes, there are people who inherently cannot achieve a level of dexterity required to handle 30 buttons. Lack of natural talent, medical conditions, all of it affects the ability to play the game well. This is basically gating the end-game content behind a skill that adds nothing to the game. Ability to push buttons fast is not engaging, it is not strategy, because majority of people will do what guides tell them to do. Less abilities with more complex application pushes the game away from it being reliant on ability to push buttons fast, to a more thinking experience.

Here's a thing though: The entire reaction to the PTS thus far is basically "Git gud!" to the lower able players, with a litany of complaints on how the devs dare cater to people not at the highest possible skill level. And yes, there will be players who will never try group content because they will feel that they cannot possibly juggle all those buttons. It's, by its nature, exclusive behaviour in a supposedly social experience. Insisting on ultra high skill ceiling for MMOs is stupid, because it makes it so much harder for people to be part of it, and frankly, it offers no benefits. Ability to push buttons fast is not a skill; Starcraft basically died by trying to make it so. I main Vengeance. In sub lvl-75 content, you get thirty buttons to start with, plus stims, medpack, two relics to a total of roughly 35 buttons. Core rotation for vengeance is ten buttons, plus 6 defensive cooldowns, for a total of sixteen buttons. And I'm sorry, but if the lack of chilling scream, or whatever it's called on the rep side, makes it impossible for you to play the game, then I question your credentials of being a vet players. Are there things that could be improved about the current state of PTS? Yes. Is threatening the devs about how you will leave if they dare to remove anything from frankly unnecessarily overcrowded bars a good feedback? Nope. The number of people who tried to be constructive are drowned out by the drama queens who, again, declare the game dead while doing absolutely nothing to justify their stance. If this is this helpful, kind NiM and ranked community, then I will abstain from it, because it frankly seems anything but. It's basically elitism in all but name.

Yeah, the percentage of players playing ranked and NiM ops is so tiny as to basically make it inconsequential in the long run. According to starparse, we are currently at roughly 250 NiM ops done per week across all servers. If all those people quit the game right now (and they won't, because sunk cost fallacy is a thing), you would barely notice. And frankly, the ranked PvP is filled with arseholes that will tell you to kill yourself for even slightly suboptimal play, and as such, they can all go burn themselves in hell and the game will be better for it.

You know, in that vein, I would actually love to see all of the people who complain about the abilities being trimmed to post their combat logs. It's not hard, literally anyone can do it, and anyone with star parse can view them at their leisure. After all, stats speak harder than words. If you use the ability constantly to the point that it is part of class identity for you, it shouldn't be too hard to actually show that in tangible way, instead of just griping.