The Arena is one life, it plays much more strategically and is over way faster. Inevitably you will face some sort of control or focus & pressure where whereas in 8v8s often you will go by potentially never having to deal with such. It is dishonest to compare the two when it comes to TDM, I am not saying you are saying that but rather explaining the large difference between the modes. While you can get away with a lot of things in Arena, you will get away with a lot more in warzones. Part of the appeal honestly to me, for SWTOR PvP was the ability to both impact but also not impact so heavily I cause a loss when it comes to 8v8. While one person can carry it, it's not designed that way and has way more forgiveness across the board. It is still in fact this way, the meta, however, is far more punishing and if it was to change it'd be more obvious to see. The issue with Arenas in general is that it's not competitive and just used as a conquest farming simulator. Most players who are remotely good at their class can achieve way higher than just a 50% win rate in the arena and often the losses they'll take aren't even in their control. Even when it was ranked it was at times this way, it's essentially gambling with odds, and those odds are betting on yourself. There's so much that can go wrong that you just can't control and with it not being anything more than a casual outlet it's not going to change. Here's a great example of the current state of Arena & showcase of those out-of-control situations. Until there's better matchmaking or more of a restriction on group sizes/group composition requirements for match start it'll be a mess competition-wise. I've said times before, though I am really just talking to myself at this point. Restrict group size limit to 4. This allows groups to face off more often as odd-sized groups are more often pitted against solos & 8stacks are left in queue till they get solos. Restrict Arena Group DPS limit to 2, enforcing tank and heal roles to fill 3rd and 4th slot. This allows better match making and less abuse of solo players. Rework MMR, while it's a useful factor - there are too many things to account for. Average damage, healing, and so on is a metric that should heavily enforce MMR. Note this short video for more info. Give incentives to play below max level PvP - Tech frags, commendations, something to allow gearing without being max already. Not having gear going into lv80 PvP is miserable period. While there is truth in what you say - regardless of how many people will say otherwise, no one can speak for everyone. Not everyone is out there to flex or want to play against pugs. I often have to sneak online just to play against another group just to get one match and they'll disband afterward. Which I have no issues with it at all but a lot of other people do. Do I think they should be forced to play other groups if they're in the queue? yes. Do I think a 2-man should go against an 8? No. The problem is MMR system doesn't work and when groups are involved they functionally are useless. Often these group leads or groups in general will have a low win rate meaning MMR means almost nothing. The role queue and premade vs premade need amped up more than what it is to have any functionality and MMR as a whole needs reworked. Reducing everything to a 4-man limit would band-aid 90% of the problem as it's impossible to fix it completely. Alternatively, make the mercy rule functional and giving an ability to avoid all backfills like you can with a group finder queue for queued PvE help. While the mercy rule would need to be adjusted per map, it would end the incredibly unfair matches quickly allowing people to have more fun in the long run instead of having less fun and more likely to log out after the match is over. Balance will likely never be obtained due to the randomness of SWTOR's PvP & skill differences while also having blaring balance and meta issues it's silly to make players sit a full match of 0-600+. 7.2 was supposed to be the "PvP" rework, instead we got less content, ranked removed, arena gutted into conquest simulator, and larger groups for warzones so players who couldn't handle that one guy can now bring 5 of his buddies to make sure the job does get handled. It's truly a shame and I did multiple videos and countless threads over the years talking about potential changes etc, all quite reasonable and likely low effort by them that'd still meet the quality and replayability standards of the original game. Just to share one of those with you guys is the idea of Solo Ranked 8v8, I have posted about it many times and advocated for it many times. This would be a fun seasonal thing during summer or winter that'd amp the population and show players how the game modes get played when everyone's working together. It'd also seep out into regular play because regular matches could be used as practice grounds. If they simply just added the slightest effort and did away with top3s/class-specific rewards we could still very much so have a format of ranked to this day. Sure it wouldn't be as expressive and some class combinations would be better from season to season, but that doesn't even need to be a conversation, make the rewards legacy-wide. Anyway, I haven't played in nearly a month which is one of the longest breaks I have taken since 2.0 that resulted purely out of me being bored & lack of PvP player base acknowledgement. Sadly, other games see so much effort from their development teams over the years while this one progressively gets worse. Without gutting the game further we were in a state that could have gone into maintenance mode and still been rather fun. The bones & core of this game's PvP was leagues above majority of other games. Things it got right are. No Macros - More room for human error, more engaging gameplay, and strategies evolve slower. Amazing visual clarity - meaning just by playing you can tell everything going on not requiring things like Addons or programs to help you. A unique combat trinity - While most games have t/h/d they do not all have the guard mechanic nor the same taunt functionality. This allows for less brain-afk gameplay & more finesse in gameplay to deal with good tank players. Amazing audio clarity - Every ability sounds good for the most part with a few exceptions. Before glowy buttons, we had audio cues when things were ready. Some still exist, audio reaction time is twice as fast and this was incredibly engaging and still is. Every class was unique - Nothing was generic, while now we're closing into that looking at PT the most generic melee I have ever seen. It didn't used to be that way. All the support roles were different enough and effective enough to create completely different strategies. Warzones with exception of OPG & Quesh were designed well, with plenty of reasons to engage in combat. Minor exceptions Civil war speeder removal. OPG is king of the hill but too big, quesh's biggest mistake was removing leap to in zone. Punish bad play, not reward it. Utility - Before both times we were pruned we had a lot of it, now we have less. There's certainly a fine line but 5.0 was a good example of having enough and so were 4.0 and 2.0. There's some more but most games fall flat when it comes to having enough depth but also being in general clear visually and still engaging. The Star Wars appeal brought me in as someone whose still not seen the movies in 2024, I am coming close to 30 now and I really have no excuse to still have not watched them, but I stayed for the amazing design fundamentals they had. I say a lot of things in the past tense here because, in the current state of the game, I don't feel the same way anymore. It's a shell of what once was and players are unhappy, so much so they'll sabotage each other's fun, for fun. tl;dr anyway, PvP is in shambles, the arena is dead for a magnitude of reasons, and competitive left years ago. The core of the game is fading away to cater to a casual audience forgetting it's an MMORPG. Part of the appeal of playing MMORPGs is character progression and depth. There are many layers and simply the wrong layers are being peeled. The great mishandling of BnS PvP in NA pales in comparison to what's going on here.

The entire basis of objectives in every single game that has PvP is to create a position to fight for. It incentivizes group gameplay and sometimes different strategies - which nowadays are executed so poorly or are solo executed with no one else capitalizing. Whether someone is actively playing objectives or not, it does not change the fact core gameplay is designed for fighting and around fighting. When or if you run into a match where everyone is like-minded and playing objectives combat is heavily involved no matter what because you cannot win without it, the only time you can try to fight otherwise is simply by being dishonest with the skill level of everyone involved.

Leaving a penalty for anything but ranked was silly, sure after heavily abused like 4+ leaves in an hour or so maybe limit it but it's not helping anything in the long run for the health of the game. Ultimately it serves the purpose of preventing players from giving up at first sight of a loss making the match spiral harder. It is, however, a bad way of handling things and the mercy rule should be changed to not just work off of too many leaving but rather if there's too much of a lead. Matches are never going to be perfect so why continue to fail trying to balance them? Just make the outliers end sooner so everyone can have a better experience at the end of the day. Now as someone who solo queues - I don't play much anymore often because of this too & the group size allowed for premades. I get backfilled a LOT. My main toons will sit in the queue on average of 20mins+ only to play a match that's half over more than 65% of the time. It's not fun nor engaging, I don't want to play the backfill at all if I am being honest. So constantly leaving would only hurt my enjoyment further of the game as a solo player - though if we could avoid backfilling as a whole it would no longer be an issue. Now getting into group sizes - as it's been stated many times before, anything more than 4man is far too much. It needs to be restricted back down.

That's crazy, there may be a cause-and-effect going on here. Being serious here, jokes aside. There is no incentive to learn or play the game properly, much less a mode that isn't balanced and effectively the quickest Conquest Points for the least effort. You are likely not going to have a competitive Arena that is made up of pugs for a casual mode. The best you could obtain is a grouped arena but even then it's debatable when facing other groups if it's competitive or not. There is no reason to further complicate a basic system. SWTOR is missing a lot of functions and generally would of benefitted a lot by allowing us to use placable markers like we can in raid to quickly convey info. Sadly, that never happened so we have one tool that doesn't require typing, markers. Having them mean more than one thing sort of makes it pointless and sometimes completely redundant. For example a tl;dr of every marker from when I played. No one uses them nor takes them seriously anymore in my experience much less today's standards of arena. The best thing I can offer you in regards to "plan" and picking a "target" is to make your plan, if it goes badly someone will likely recommend something else. Or see your plan's flaws and recommend another. Here's a quick tl;dr for picking a target if you're not experienced. Simply put, the game isn't as straight forward and that depth is part of the reason many fell in love with it's PvP. Nowadays most of that's gone and the shell of the game just leaves people confused because it's trying too hard to appeal to an audience that doesn't even like its PvP. If I wanted a simplistic pick-up-and-play PvP game I would play one, part of getting into an MMORPG is the depth and value of everything you do making the experience more immersive. Rewarding the effort you put into learning your class just like it would in many other pickup and play PvP games but to a different level. They either need to prune and remove many more of the old complex systems or go back to how it was. Being in the middle of the road just frustrates both parties and makes it near impossible to have a competitive match let alone a fun time when trying to play casually.

bump few of mine. But yes it's borderline dead.

The debuff could easily be changed, it's a silly reason to be against it other than wanting to see Marauder continue to be terrible defensively. Back in the day, Diversion was a single target ability - much like how obfuscate was. Today, diversion exists, and pacify doesn't. Most of the tools both pure DPS had were vital to their playstyle and ability to deal with and survive in the metas they were in. The original variant of Ruthless Aggressor was indeed overboard. But in general, without defel marauder right now is paper. It doesn't need to have pacify, but rather Ruthless Aggressor itself is a good solution if changing pacify was even on the table. The point, is having more defensive power doesn't suddenly make it broken, but rather more playable. If the class had Undying Rage (most iconic ability) or pacify baseline right now. It would not make me play it anymore than I already do, it would, however, allow me to play it into more compositions that usually make me instantly log off of it. Everything has issues but, marauder currently has no solution to its playstyle. It doesn't get passive 4-6k HPS healing, it can't afford to usually drop a set bonus for second wind and it doesn't have the same damage on Fury / Annihilation to consistently have kill pressure for how squishy it is. Every other class in-game, I mean every single one of its peers that does the same thing does it way better. Madness > Leth > Viru > Pyro > I/O > Veng > Hatred > Anni. AP > Rage > Engi?LOL > Deception > Carnage > Arsenal > Marksman > Fury > Concealment. Fury being one step above concealment is only debatable due to concealments awful defensive capabilities nerfing it's uptime as disengaging is its only dcd. While carnage can do damage, it has the same issues of durability - It's also very reliant on maintaining stacks to keep up consistent damage and it's quite easy to prevent that with many different knockbacks with automatic roots still in-game. Shards of mortis should just be removed and we'd see how bad marauder is as a whole. It would leave zero outliers.

bring back a pvp change while you're at it too.

Not here to debate anything, I don't mind what you said because I wasn't doing anything but trying to inform. I'll say it again though, Augments do matter in PvP. As stated previously level sync is currently the only thing happening in max-level PvP atm, so this means bolster isn't available to bring your stats up. So missing augments will account for thousands of stats missing. 2,394 power, 2,394 endurance, and 1,820 secondary to be exact if you were missing all 14 golds. Everyone in higher item rating gear gets synced down to 336. The augment is ignored by sync, there used to be a lot of bugs and actual bolster issues since 7.0 dropped and I reported nearly all of them and attempted to document, showcase, and educate people about it. I don't like stat advantages and I want everyone to be on an even playing field, gearing treadmill for PvP can be fun but not when the average player is missing augments or being fed wrong information greatly hindering them.

The games Balance went out the door in 6.0, force bound was a band-aid to hide it, grit teeth healing removed from score board, etc. 7.0 only made it worse due to pruning and low stat pools. Some specs need critical and have more value in scaling from stats while others get new free critical passives, free passive auto criticals and so on. Looking at rage/ap/hatred/deception putting them levels above the rest if augments were removed or not. Fundamentally I think we've gone too far and without a lot of changes across the board we won't see balance and that's fine. But a meta shift is way overdue. So many ways to do so, here's just a few ideas. Healing set bonuses are generally lacking and have no good AoE options, unnatural pres to everyone with resurge/reviv was amazing when it bugged out & was meant to be a dxun set. Operative seeing some DR once again like revitalizers back for medicine and or an interesting playstyle changing setbonus. Mercenary having a relatively interesting setbonus would be nice too, I think a way to change how trauma regs would work making it an aoe but weaker instead of the way it is now would be very cool. Talent changes, more drastic ones would be interesting, removing the basic obvious choices and making them base line would go a long way to make things feel better. DR passives, Predation, undying, and so on. Pruning was not really a positive for the game but it can be if done right, sadly, I think it was done horrible making many classes way weaker than ever. New tacticals - looking at spiteful saber, Primed ignition, stormwatch and a few others that only amplify rotational DPS which isn't very "meta" nor applicable for PvP. Something that could alternatively rival the damage these offer would be helpful or simply removing them because they functionally remove options for some of these specs to do competitive DPS. Higher stat pool & HP, we're currently in a burst meta and damage being as high as it is, it's very easy to abuse that meta. More health will make it harder to burst and require more pinpoint play & open up more build options which helps playability of some of the suffering specs. As mentioned not every class has built in auto criticals nor do they have critical passives so higher stat pool helps them perform a lot more than the ones who get it free. Undo pruning but keep setbonus changes and tactical changes. Just give utility and abilities back, like Pull DR and many more. My Sentinels hotbar has like 8 different empty slots now along with Combat still being classified as RANGED when it's a melee. Pls. Tl;dr a new expansion is probably only way we see any combat changes & simply lowering premade group size would fix a lot of the issues. The games too casual with almost no population allowing for anyone who knows how to PvP to just group up and stomp everyone. If another larger group forms that knows even better, the latter usually disappears and the cycle just loops yet again. The only people truly suffering is the solo player and generally anyone whose not running a full group. allowing past 4 was a mistake, it can still be fixed. The damage done to the game however with bad decision after bad decision PvP wise. . Well, that's going to take a lot but thankfully most people who do PvP for the sake of it, are diehards for the game and would be satisfied with minimal changes.

Augs matter. Like a lot, there is no "bolster" in max-level PvP and you receive no stats for not having augments. The level sync function only lowers higher item rating gears stats nothing else so functionally it's not a bolster but a sync. Augs do not pass 336 so they don't get touched.

If power yield lasted 30 seconds again for AP it would simply be an unbearable class to deal with. They did the right thing and it's still very strong defensively. It only feels like a glass cannon when you're fighting way too many or using your DCDs too late. You have to be far more proactive, damage reduction is useless if you don't have a hp pool to make use of it.

The game has a mercy rule but it never goes into effect unless enough players leave. Leaving has a penalty. Backfills take anyone regardless of role. Declining is possible, regardless of role. These all play into each other, but generally, anything above 4 is too much. They had it at 4 for a long time and it mostly worked outside of the double premade queue sync. It'd still be a gamble most of the time if there were more than 4 groups. Arena is centered around T/H double DPS for the most competitive ranked format, which is gone now but it'd be a shame to see that go, so adamantly against it. However, a 2-man limit for the arena would work and the only way to have more is if you queued tank & heal also, preventing 4 dps abusing solo queue players. The same concept could be applied to 8v8 too without harming matchmaking much, it'd also likely make the matchmaker work better due to not having to deal with odd-sized groups. Making a separate queue would just kill things regardless, good players are still going to stomp solo queue, and premade will die out because the majority of them only want to be the meat grinder, not the meat that is ground. There are countless times this has been shown, including in group ranked when we still had it & ranked 8v8s. Off-topic of what you said but rather to add more to the post. Inevitably in today's state of game we just see TDMers playing against nobody for the most part, then OBJers fighting against TDMers who don't care about the OBJ which is just a never-ending loop of neither facing anyone in their style of gameplay. Sadly, most join up for rewards and conquest instead of learning anything or attempting to, it's very easy to be discouraged but everyone starts somewhere. If you cannot fight you are not useful to either TDM or OBJ player. You are also neither style of player and need more time to understand the game, the larger groups won't give you that chance to ease into it, it'll be trial by fire which immediately puts everyone off. This is completely understandable, so a step forward and arguably the easiest is just limiting group size back to how it was and calling it a day. Until there's some sort of ranking, you can't convince players to play competitively in a certain style that directly takes away from their fun. Most don't stop to think - Hey, why did he throw the ball away? Well, there are only negatives of holding it and if you can't do anything with it / don't have someone to pass to objectively speaking you're a ticking time bomb. The increased penalty for holding the hutt ball should have gone away with 7.0. Why isn't anyone guarding? If there are not any suitable classes and you ask this question, just guard yourself, a lot of players nowadays have no patience to sit there and defend a node that isn't attacked, let alone defend a node that won't ever receive backup - which is often nowadays. It's far from a fun activity and I wish it'd be redesigned the game is much more fast-paced than it was back then when those modes were created. Why is no one capping? You make yourself a target, someone who can cap from stealth is arguably the best to do so, plenty of times there are distractions but no one caps, simply everyone rather have fun fighting other players than clicking a shiny button. If you ever have to ask you should already understand the players you're with. You also should be aware of when you should be contributing to the team fight instead of spam-clicking the shiny, which is important. And generally, there are a lot of reasons someone may not do the objective but there's little reason for someone to not attempt to fight or attempt to learn to fight. The basis of most objectives is to give more than just fighting, it's to create a fighting point and create control over it. Including being able to defend and react to calls. I played a lot of objectives in the past and the majority of the people who queue today that call themselves objers would never get the ball, cap the node, etc. The basic fundamental they all ignore is how to fight and kill or pressure someone out. If they don't know how to deal with it they get pushed out and capped on, then killed until the game is over. It becomes a stale and generally boring thing unless everyone is on the same page. The maps are always the same, the players are different, the specs are different, and the combat is always different. Leaving TDM style players more to do in the game in the long run while objers only continue to get more frustrated. Simply a redesign of these archaic modes incentivizing things like mid-control would go a long way. I doubt we'll ever get it. While a victory screen means nothing to me, neither does defeat, it's gone far beyond that point for me at this point - I understand why most want to see the victory screen but it's also majority of the time the people who see the action the least.

Tab target my friend. The main unique thing about this game is that the tank has an actual functional role in PvP. If they're made useless this game becomes even more silly and not worth playing. Tanks provide a different style of play when both teams have it, tunneling into just one person becomes a bad play and requires everyone to use more thought and swap between targets more. Fundamentally, the tank & heal arena is the most competitive form of PvP we still have left and if the roles were made any weaker, this game instantly revolves around just being a good DPS player, playing meta. Boring. Should they be hit a bit harder, maybe, but not sin. If you do this specs that are already efficient at tank tunneling (which I am not talking about direct tank tunnel but indirect, things like lethality, EC Lightning, and Pyro excel greatly at) become even stronger. It also puts people more into a burst meta because if hit too hard burst will just do too much damage that a tank can't survive the guard damage. Healers aren't up to par and this is a massive issue in this expansion and it's well shown. Adding in another mechanic that further lowers their already low healing input outside of just trauma would be brutal. Almost no point in playing it, everyone just runs 2nd wind and DPS/tank, which would be more effective most of the time. I do understand we play at different levels, but this isn't an issue, put more effort into your gameplay or play something meta and you'll see it firsthand. If any of this were to happen everyone good at DPS would just make people quit at a record rate and overall decrease the enjoyability of the game. Here's a recent example of just a healer dps game, while being target priority #1. A tank would make things winnable for my team, in general, any other front-line contributing would. The issue here isn't that we got out healed, it's that we got outmanned. Even with the damage being down, any relief in my damage taken would turn tides. A perfect example of why you'd ever want a tank to help the front line & punish bad play. Anyway, I don't want to just showcase examples because it's not that complicated. If anything, slap tanks a bit damage or control-wise and move on. Better yet, just buff healing and rework some of the control on tanks. Anything more will just make matters much worse and I would be able to show case and abuse them immediately. As for the rest, forums formatting is fundamentally broken and keeps wiping my response so I won't bother. tl;dr players aren't at the level they should be and should put some moderate effort into their gameplay.

walk back into it, oh, good luck reaching it.

Veteran's will still bully new players, without proper mm that'll always happen, proper mm can't even work due to population but it's still a step forward from than current state.

Match making gets completely broken when groups larger than 4 exist. They sit in queues for ages and end up going against solo queuers quite often. There isn't much more that needs to be said, it's an abomination and needs to change already, so here we are making another complaint about it. As for the arena, it's just not competitive and it could be. Hear me out. Limit the premade queue to 2man and if you want to do a 4man, require tank & heal. Just that, it would make it more competitive and give a reason for groups to form for it. Also, enforce matchmaking more or give us a way to see whose in a premade or not so everyone can see how the match making did work. Sometimes there is a premade on your team and you just don't know it.

I'm glad people are finally accepting that this is a reality most times.

DoT DR doesn't save the archaic design of the class. It's a damage sponge and likely always will be, when the damage gets lower everyone's defenses are stronger. Mercenary/Juggernaut becomes quite intolerable when damage does ever get lower. Ideally, instead of reflecting mercenary would have made use of another DR defensive and generally would make it a much worse target for tunneling, while also just removing the bad play of reflecting at max hp just because. Heatseeker should be the auto critical over rail shot, as for sustain, both carnage and arsenal should see its 3% accuracy from the cylinder/form back if not a bolster of 10% accuracy, in general, would be nice to see, though this would hurt sorcerers and assassins they could easily do anything else but adding in RNG. Damage spread is on the issues regarding several specs Arsenal being one of them, annihilation another, fury is now included, Virulence without dot explosion (though still strong, it's relatively reliant on a sustained target). Another bad spread is MM which requires a bit too much channeling which shows its head-like arsenal issues with archaic design. Roll ambush is a creative way to help with it, though I think it should be a talent or baseline instead, without the damage amplification, which seems to be a common occurrence they forget the sniper has a laze target giving it a free auto critical and when you stack any % dmg increase on those it's massive. Anyway.. The ruthless aggressor is fine, obfuscate base ability doesn't need to exist. Giving it either a baseline or an undying baseline should happen. Durability is the issue. A stun is nice but I think we should either move towards less cc or give it all back. So what happened to mara should be passed down to others. Furys damage is turned into more of a parser sustained spec due to its auto-critical removal. Players would click off their stacks during parses to inflate their DPS and parse times. It was not legit and was barely applicable if ever in actual raids and neigh impossible to practically make use of it in PvP. It was strong for sure, but not as strong as it was looking on parsely.io. They seemingly also fixed this issue and should add it back, that'd solve its issues, it's a pure damage class that has 2/3 specs purely reliant on sustain, while one is semi-sustain but can burst better than the other two simply due to a busted tactical and having an implant that gives it an auto critical. Crazy that just having an auto-critical change specs completely, was something I brought up in 6.0 that made and broke meta with the exceptions of pyro & leth then elemental conv. Revitalizers were huge, it should be a thing, no damage reduction is just unhealthy along with no stun dr. I am fine with no stun dr but no dr in general is unbearable. Concealment has no issues for its damage and has two different playstyles for sustain and a more focused brust. Its issue is less ability to heal, no damage reduction that's worth anything & in general reliance on 4-meter abilities that get completely ruined by roots and slow without a move speed buff of its own (evasion helps). Tree rework and adding back a long shroud should be a thing. Movement options become baked in or more available to be picked. Hatred getting even slightly some DR would go a long way for the spec, overcharge saber being baseline would also in general be nice. The class is weak and only excels in certain areas and those areas most players whine about it being too strong, when in fact the whole situation they're dealing with is unbalanced by default. I think it's fine, though I would like a roll to heal with a CD reduction to 15s CD as a talent. Individual performance against people who don't have you as a priority or even care about dealing with you isn't very important. Put it in a scenario of an arena, hypothetically, do you think you're going to win if we're mirrored and I am on melee to pummel you all game? Likely not even with the current state, now take those options away it'd be a brutally fast loss. Madness is the new noob spec like how Juggernaut used to be before Mercenary, instead of it still being mercenary it's just moved on to madness. I don't think it's a big deal because competitively it can't hold its own, range classes fall off incredibly hard when under proper pressure, and even more so if they're a channeling class like madness. While in full DPS games, it's good sure, but the moment the enemy team has overwhelming damage it's no longer that good and quite awful, it's just the price you pay for playing certain things. I can probably never convince you of it, but there are reasons I do not play the spec because it is quite literally that easy to shut down without support when you're going against supports. Anytime I pop off on it is simply because people don't put enough effort into shutting me down, give up, and or completely ignore me / can't get to me. It's never a situation where I just face tank and laugh and carry on as usual, one sin could try to 1v1 me all game long as madness and my overall team pressure nearly evaporates. When I play something like a melee that presence rarely disappears. I know it feels awful as a mercenary to play into madness, but in general, it's also awful to play into Pyro, leth, viru, and generally any spec that has sustained damage. including hatred, which will just kill you through reflect. If they say nothing regarding to pvp outside of seasons for the coming patch I doubt we will see much of anything other than maybe one more gear bump and then a new expansion. And that's assuming we'd ever get one more. Then maybe we can actually get some changes.

Sorcerer's damage isn't that crazy, things like reduced CD on Force speed are obnoxious and should get changed but I wouldn't say it's going to change the class much when or if they do. The actual damage gain from this isn't that big (try and test it yourself, polarity is the big one), I would rather them pull away from using an escape ability for damage, however. Cleanse is already there, so dunno about that one, but Pull DR should be exclusive to healers if it does come back. If it's a choice for DPS it should be an option that has a meaningful impact. 3% Damage reduction isn't much but when it's stacking 3x that's 9% DR, that's what Marauder has on something IIRC. It's not a good idea to just nuke the durability of classes that are reliant on archaic ways of doing damage by turreting and channeling. As we go further and further from the original image, these designs and functions will just become more and more useless and often get redesigned, note ravage. If anything the % health healing is more of an issue when it comes to survival. DR + Healing is what makes things feel unkillable, a good mix is what makes it strong. Looking at lethality as a prime example it has a healthy mix of healing and DR. Another way for the DR talent they have is simply to make it easier to fall off. Making it go off force leach for full stacks/convert full stacks to 1 stack is just an example. But as is, I don't feel it's that bad because when it comes to madness doing proper damage it is very reliant on channeling. It's when DoT explosion & Death brand come into play that it becomes incredibly easy, too easy imo. But they do give up team fight ability to run Death Brand and or dot explosion so in a way they're not great at everything, they sort of have to pick one, and being a way more durable duelist is one of them and I think most just need to accept it, when or if they nerf it and it's not targetted at % health healing it's likely going to be either not enough or dead in the water. Pooled hatred just shouldn't exist for Juggernaut tank, but yes the 10% nerf on crushing blow during taunt was barely a nerf. Depends on the variant, if it comes to 0CD it's plenty easy to outplay in PvP, though annoying. Dominate on the other hand is quite obnoxious but the durability isn't that good, if the DR gained from leap was 6-8 seconds, maybe, but it's not. The main reason this class can pop off so much is due to the ability to constantly get its burst back up and running, each combat drop resets vital abilities, that used to be vengeance only iirc. Then made into a talent. Now it's baked into all 3 specs. A simple change like that would nerf its ability to go go go and make it less obnoxious to deal with in stompy matches. Fury was mostly just good because of its ability to constantly disengage with a cleanse tied to it, its damage was good but only comparable as it couldn't hit as hard, and it also didn't have the same ability to pop off as hard either since it didn't get any sort of meaningful reset. Not trying to latch onto your comment or anything personally to you, but rather I think even if they took anyone's advice it should be well thought out and not overboard. It's much easier to make smaller adjustments as you go or bring up other classes to the same point (which should be done honestly, a lot of things are not too great and some things are indeed outliers) or in general just add more options for tacticals, talents, set bonuses and generally a redesign of talent loadout, really anything that'd make a meta shift outside of gear increase. New augs even would spice things up a lot at the moment. Preferably not super expensive ones either, the 300 IL money gate is extremely lame and has been for years now.

I think 4dps queues are an abomination so I think you understand where I stand. You explain the situation yourself, but it can go further than just this. This is spot on for what usually happens, only waiting until none are in queue to manipulate it. I would agree, though it's an issue with MM and population, not anything else. Idea MM/population most good players don't have lower-rated toons or are too busy pushing their mains. I can't imagine many were left in the first place. But having a consistent/good tank increases the competitiveness of matches. As for players not doing so well, it's not your fault, simply a matter of no one willing to play the role to compete. If they cared about it they would have queued tank instead. There's a fine line between waiting for the queue to be dead and just queuing but it's typically repeat offenders when it's the first one. Should have been nuked after mishandling s12. They then continued to fumble the ball into s13 even worse. One team had an 800-rated player and no top 3s, next season they're all 2k+ with them all getting top 3s for perspective. The number of people playing from s10-s12 dropped more than 90% by s13 landing. The mode was truly the most fun, but again, hard to get into and with a cannibalizing population. This is why I would love it if they made it only possible to queue tank/heal arena in group queue for the arena. Leaving premades out of soloq matches at the very least. It'd also just in general make it more competitive. Pugs would still go against it from time to time but they'd likely be able to find a pug healer or tank if they think they can win they can get their rematch. NA had a few teams, though it's much easier to just show you the majority of the games instead of listing.

Maybe against non-internal or elemental. There's a reason why certain specs are good at dealing with tanks, even ones that don't even have these damage types either. The stats simply aren't as effective as they should be or it'd be more commonly used. I am sure you realize how much of an exaggeration this is though. A proper tank stat or a pointless tank stat requirement to use a guard would solve a lot of the headaches immediately. This is spot on but you should always be running a shield even as a skank there's almost no damage gained from using a focus. While there's a lot of durability gained for both guarded damage and incoming damage for running a shield even if it's full of DPS stuff. Tank relics are typically pretty good depending on the ones you use. This, however, doesn't help like 99% of players who queue tank in PvP, it's not often you see the role done right and even less a reason to do it right as most DPS aren't doing as much as they should on an average basis. The fact that this is even a saying is a sentiment of how bad it was. I can't imagine every group is this way but it hurts casual arena, it's funny even saying casual and arena in the same sentence but that's the reality now. Without some sort of restriction like only being able to queue Arena in a group with Tank & Healer I don't think it'll ever be readily dealt with in a good way. Therefore never being competitive let alone mentally engaging, I know that EU has a higher standard of average players so it's likely better there. What's unhinged is to deny it was very much so a thing. There are many more examples of manipulating the queue, which is essentially what win trading is, while I only uploaded the good games (talking about game footage, unrelated to an extent but an easy way to look back upon swtor ranked and see it through a nonrealistic light of only the good) I considered to be highly competitive they're only a small fraction of the total games I played, if I uploaded those you'd see well over 30% of those games were manipulated in some way. Countless people could be mentioned but let's give it a perspective instead as that's not allowed. How many matches have you had where it's a tank versus no tank & or a tank without any clue what they're doing, or doesn't try against x tank but will against any other? How many healer games like this? DPS matches even? It's a lot more than people give credit and it was a very real thing, there were so many different ways to manipulate the queue, and even after they changed how backfilling worked it was still very commonly manipulated to actual success instead of going to a random person in the queue. This is only touching the surface, as there is more to it than just that but you get the point. It would be naive to think it wasn't happening and simply inexperience to not notice. There were countless win streaks specifically on both NA & EU that went on for over 15 in a row near the end of seasons when they were known for consistently winning 48-52% of their games. The odds of winning over 15 in a row to gain over 200 something rating is incredibly unlikely. Throw in queuing "normally" during prime time to "cover" it up and make it look legit only to do it again was what several people did and got away with it. When it comes to policing, it didn't happen or only happened after the fact. A pitiful existence abused until the end. As for the final two seasons, they were the most uncompetitive of all, with so little play, so little contribution & generally a rightful end to a non-functional ranked mode. The whole concept of ranked needs redone in SWTOR if they ever bother again. It can't just be added back in as it was. While GR was notoriously abused and rightfully nuked it didn't change that there were actual teams & real competitiveness in that mode, just like sometimes solo ranked had. Sadly, most don't handle losing well and want easy wins instead of facing a better team, making it a top 1% game mode that cannibalized anything else that stepped in. When put into perspective about 1% of tors population is diehard PvPers and even 1% of that were the ones who played this mode competitively, incredibly small, incredibly dead with a gate to entry, so the average person's experience isn't applicable much like how you're questioning if the person even played 'solo ranked' I give you the perspective of someone whose played both modes competitively. I enjoyed facing them ages ago because the average skill level was much higher & it was way more playable. Team size as mentioned is a great solution. Anything above 4 is an abomination along with pure DPS groups past 2man. This is just the reality of a casual mode. There's no real way to check someone like there is in many other aspects of life or games. Doesn't have to be that way, but it does hinder the idea of having any sort of consistency or ability to cycle out the unexperienced PoV. While they're important, they're merely casual and frankly, that's what PvP is now. But the moment they continue down the casual catering path the quicker the game's PvP will die, FFXIV is a great example.

The only useful thing gear wise from 6.0 was the fact left side was fully shared. Coming from an expansion where we didnt have that it was helpful, then we got set bonus restricted gear kind of regressing. Anyway, 306 was the only redeeming factor of it, there was no more gear to get and a PvPer would be just as geared as a PvEr meaning the transition between both was made easier including giving PvPers a chance to accurately parse without having to go pve. Which I miss, but I am not gonna go grind something I don't enjoy anymore.

There's a magnitude of difference in PvP today compared to before. It's a complete disservice to say PvPing in a PvP mode shouldn't be the main objective, the entire creation of objectives was to give reasons to fight, locations, and advantages or disadvantages of doing it. King of the Hill on Odessen favors any team fighting AoE spec, hutt ball applies movement penalties to the carrier, ancient hyper gate is a more simplified version of Civil War, Civil War is a team allocation mode, void stars a zerg / off-node fighter map, Novare coast is civil war but with more emphasis on mid-fight as it's closer to both spawns. So on.. There are flaws in each map and some classes just do better depending on allocation or map type. While there is a large amount of all types Obj/Tdm/afkers it's more so difficult to differentiate afker from objer at times, than a tdm vs afker. It's rather disconnected to think someone keeping multiple people's attention isn't benefitting your team by giving a numbers advantage, which by the way is stronger than ever now than before. While both types of players are required to win, even just tdmers would do as long as one is okay with not participating quite often to do community services like guarding a node or clicking a shiny with little interaction. We don't need the afkers. It's far too apparent people can't handle dying or losing to the point they grief their allies. TDM players aren't griefing, they're playing, arguably a lot more than Objers are. They both want the same thing, action, however, objers most of the time face no opposition in what they want to do and get caught in the crossfire of people wanting to fight. In terms of ability to play, objing is less APM, less skill, less effort, and generally lacks gameplay action when doing community service as node defense. Nearly all objectives and how to play them are solved and aren't very dynamic, the only people still getting capped on today don't know what they're doing or no one comes to back them up. While it seems like I am dogging on Objective playstyle, I assure you I am not. I played strictly objectives or objectively for a long time in this game and with as many wins/games I have at a higher level it does become meaningless. There's nothing to chase, nothing to go for, and no one usually to oppose, it's an empty hollow existence that leads you to despise your teammates because they don't do what you expect them to do. If you play objectives and rely on someone else to get the job done at any point you're likely having a terrible PvP experience and generally all fun is drained from the game mode for you. Learn how to be self-sufficient and lower your standards of what someone may do, if it's not enough for you start grouping with like-minded players. The list of reasons why someone may not do what you think they should is far too high. A lot of people still can barely run the game, most will accidentally open a menu that will lag them out in the panic of just getting the hutt ball and so on. Generally, the game isn't competitive, and when it's not there are a lot of people there casually and unprepared, it's like ranked elitism brought to the casual pvp mode, the same thing you'd hate from ranked players you're doing to those unprepared casual warzone game mode players. Do what you still have fun with, but if you're relying on others and not trying to group you're doing yourself a complete disservice and blaming the wrong things. For those who don't believe a TDM-style player or even someone who just wants to kill isn't beneficial, here's a backfill (someone already considered this a loss) that's won single-handedly. Here's another playing objective on one of the worst specs to play objectives on my main/most known toon, I also talk about the topic of Objers. And here's an example of fighting against odds all game and pulling ahead for being capable of doing so. What we were able to do directly caused the win and made playing objectives free for our team. For future reference, most maps now include kills for points if you own a node, so in things like Hypergate, or Civil war, getting kills is greatly benefitting the team. Voidstar goes off of kills if tied on distance/time, huttball goes off of the last person holding if tied, OPG is unique and goes to the highest number past 600 if tied, and doesn't end till someone ticks over 600. Novare only ends if a team hits 0% so on. While I may not be the average player it doesn't change the fundamentals of the game, people may not make as big of an impact, and I may not always, but that's where the team part comes into play. Sometimes an enemy team will just be better, it's nothing but a sore loser to not accept that and get angry about it, your teammates are not your enemies so don't treat them like they are, join and help them you'd be surprised how much can be done if you stay together instead of giving up or going alone. As for quality, it's due to the lack of competitiveness, there's no reason to learn and the majority of objectives don't face the fighting they used to. Objectives used to be perma fighting and no longer is that case, the objers today would get solo diffed 10x over by any of the ones that played ranked 8v8. You still have to learn the fundamentals of PvP and how to fight/play your class, as most do not bother to learn, don't bother to gear, and generally don't know the first defense of their class. If people played to at least 50% of their potential impact for their class PvP would be higher quality, it's sad that I say 50% but that's a realistic number that most could hit with some low to medium effort. If everyone played 75%+ the PvP honestly just wouldn't be fun anymore, there's severe balance issues and no amount of playing objectives would save anyone. Some combinations will team wipe out even the best of players and if everyone becomes capable it's much easier to do so. So... I would say just step back and remember this is just a game, people will play it how they want, if you want a competitive mode ask for it, both types of players need each other, it just so happens one side is far less experienced and capable, which also inherently lowers the other sides ability due to lack of competition. tl;dr this can just be seen as elitism for objs like how ranked elitism existed for people not knowing how to play. It's the same thing except that warzones aren't competitive and are intended as the casual mode. Normally I don't bud into these conversations anymore because both sides are disillusioned by what they want rather than what the game is in reality. One side hates the other, yada yada, lot of logic and reasoning is never useful due to people's feelings being hurt, which, honestly I feel is inevitable because it is often a skill issue on both sides. Now for something more constructive as I don't personally have any issues with either type of player and would love to see objectives mean something again with players competently playing them - because frankly, playing them now is far too easy and makes things stale. Here's a video I did in regards to different game modes and trying to deal with obvious team balancing issues & giving a reason to play objective overall again including ranked modes for such. Including a new exclusive tdm mode for players to truly learn and push their ability. tl;dr of the video is Solo Ranked 8v8 & how to balance it including maintaining a feeling of reward. 6v6 TDM with functional limits on class stacking to keep it diverse but still consistent enough to build reasonable compositions by chance. Map redesigns including potential for tdm on every map, including reskins of the same maps to spice it up with low effort by devs to be created. So on, shorter video.

solo queue ranked 8v8. end the debate of obj vs tdm ty (non low effort suggestion here)

I'd worry about it not having a population in the first place rather than an impossible balance. We used to get currency for doing PvP at a non-max level that'd help level up upon hitting max level or gear mains. Giving the incentive to play lower level PvP outside of just playing PvP. Currently, I think it only contributes to conquest and conquest contributes little to nothing for lower-level players and isn't impacting anything but the guild when it comes to account-wide or legacy-wise.