no hes right.. 90% maybe not but is sure as heck over 75% it is mostly insta cast only every once in a while should you have a cast bar and thats for TB and maybe CD as a filler.. maybe a random force lightning or something pick your poison i don't know which is statistically better. if you don't get the lighning bolt proc.. use force speed when needed with a 15sec CD with guarentee of 2 proc and then other random procs it is often up. if you are pvping regularly and don't have the moving TB you are gimping yourself.. but if thats how you like to play go for it. you have to have it for competitive arena

Don't want to give it away too much but.... interrupt thundering blast casts. Win. Then again 90% of the players don't know what that means.

mobility is based on procs and skill point and fairly easily countered. TB is mobile when skill point applied (which is a must in pvp) Shock and .. some ability i don't remember the name of. TB procs a CL. Force speed procs 2 Lightning bolts. insta. then affliction which lightnings primary use for is for TB crits every 9 seconds or so. if every ability crits and procs then someone will most likely die. otherwise.. you get healed and kill the sorc in the next 5-10 seconds if his barrier is on its THREE MINUTE cool down.

and the non-sorcs QQ cause they're no good. Assassins and PTs should be higher up nerf bat radar than Sorcs and merc/trooper neds a buff... though i do agree Force Storm/Quake needs some fixing. personally I hardly ever use it unless protecting from a capture because i don't like breaking people's CCs... my damage is lower than some of these sorcs that pull out crazy numbers. then too you got these invincible PTs and assasins doing 15k dmg against full expertise.. but that's okay because thats the class you play.

pretty much it. Newbs using force storm in pvp for big numbers breaking other peoples CCs. You get big numbers because of storm, you are not good. fix storm, buff chain lighning a bit would probably fix that issue. Madness, death field spreading dots makes big dmg numbers and big heals. most of the dots are not a big deal to heal through as they're not that potent.. mostly fluff damage and accidental heals since most dps don't like to throw a heal or taunt for somereason.. unless it is an accident ;-) as lightning i usually get 200k heals with bubbles and self heals throwing a rejuv on the actual healers just to help'm out if needed.

I used to hardly ever leave matches but after 3.0 i'm finding myself leaving much more. Usually it is because i don't like people i'm grouped with. Or i see the other team and I know it is a premade off the bat. If i'm there for more than a few minutes I won't leave.. I don't care if i win or loose so much doesn't bother me out side of ranked but i rather not be getting pub stomped.. i'll leave and come back a bit later when they finished their dailies. Other reason for leaving.. Real life kicks in and i have to feed or change the kiddo, this usually happens when my team is winning though :-( If/when they make cross server queues it would be nice if they could put a group que and a solo unranked queue.

small bubble is about one hit maybe a bit more or less depending with a 20 second debuff. burst shield which is almost worth less now.. in the rare time it does stun i am greatful though. got two heals one that heals up about one big hit the other is a MINOR dot deterant. The other heal dps sorc has heals about half of big hit, 1.5 cast time and a force eater... you'll only see this cast really if someone is trying to get their healing medal or in a desperate move to try to save a ranked match. once in a blue moon it works. Immunity bubble is bad. Sorcs get 10 second of no damage assuming their not netted and a little bit of healing if they got the spec point. every 3 minutes during those 10 seconds they can do nothing accept tab out and google "how to kill an assassin" Unlike other classes their defensive CD is defensive only.

yes. if pt/vg has their CDs they can live longer. Likewise if sorc is focused and has their one CD off a 3 minute CD they can live for another 10seconds at least but during those 10 second they can do nothing. other than hope for a heal.

your connection looks okay givin this trace route. Not amazing but not horrible either. the request timed out is NOT uncommon and nothing to concern yourself with as long as your getting to the end host. Many ISPs disable/block the ICMP protocol (what ping and tracert/traceroute use) on their routers for many reasons, one to help limit DoS attacks. when you have issues THEN run a tracert from the command prompt. You can also do a ping -t 159.153.68.252 when this happens as well. ctrl+c to stop the ping. I think someone else also mentioned this.

hey trixe, i was queued with ya a few times the past couple days, Blue'Nova. been frustrating but fun

damnit fell for another troll. so gullible sometimes i am

LOL at PTs deflecting to sorcs/sins. PTs just don't die lol Sorcs are probably close to where they need to be with 'okay' survivabilty and okay damage (remember much of their dmg when spreading dots)

pick a class you like and get good at it. most any class can do decent. vanguard/pt seem to be the more durable classes now.

You must be talking about unranked queue where 1.2 million dmg is common and no one really cares if they win. its actually not nearly as bad as you think. I really sounds like there are other issues. Gear, spec or skill discrepancies Bubble stops maybe one hit and on a 20 second CD (due to Debuff) oh wow i block one hit every 20 seconds (one on one).. thanks bioware! Much of the heals you see are probably bubbles on others. Since their damage is generally weak a little utility is nice especially when you see a sniper bout ready to ambush someone. Barrier is a 3 minute CD (reduced with a skill point no one takes). Healing from it a few thousand. when a sorc uses it, peel off and come back in 10 seconds. Maddess sorcs damage is a lot of 'fluff' damage and fairly easily healed through (spreading of dots). Lightning is not so much. nether do much burst If you have your cooldowns you will win the sorc little doubt unless you are bad. If he has his cool downs (doubt full if its down to 1 on 1) and you don't, you don't have much of a chance. that is fairly normal of any class. the healing is not all that over powered considering much of it is done when it doesn't matter. bubble heals ~800-950 every few seconds which should be broken quickly if it is one on one, big self heal has a 30 second CD and HoT is like half of a hit with another hit over time. maddness heals are not all that much more.. a few hundred here and there. Much of the healing is also fluff. Most classes have some sort of heal, they just don't use it either cause they don't know or they didn't get a chance too. I have both a sage and a sorc. they are almost an exact mirror. They feel different but play the same. now you want to talk about OP? Vanguards but maybe that is because i havn't played one yet to learn the weakness. They don't usually kill me but i sure as hell almost never kill them.

TL;DR: You are a jerk, grind WZ's like we did and get AT LEAST 1800 expertise before queuing ranked in PRE SEASON. once the season starts don't queue until you are AT LEAST fully unranked geared. "1300 expertise lol piss off" - that was probably me if you are on the same server. If it was I don't say that to harass you. I say that to help you get a clue not to cry about it. tough love ;-) Hopefully after reading the responses.. you know your mistake. (first off getting in the ranked queue with out the gear, second crying about it on the forums lol) sounds like you had bad comm management when you hit max. if you where going for pvp you would've had nearly capped ranked and nearly ranked regular. That would've gotten you your main hand ranked and another piece of gear unranked. Assuming you do the dailys there are 300 regular and at least another 300 from the matches. another match or 3 and you got another piece of gear. (and a handful of ranked comms to go with it) You can have full unranked gear in about a week just with the dailies and weekly. In regular WZ's those of us who pvp alot will pick on you for having 50k hp and 1300 expertise but really it is expected pay no never mind, that is one of the reason unranked is there... In Ranked you are just bad and need spanked, sent to your room with out dinner and given a lump of coal on Christmas. ( or a new player who has not learned yet ) you DID NOT do 219k dps. You did 219k damage. You where also a glass cannon (compared to others in your class) because you didn't have the extra 20-30% Damage reduction. I see people with high health and know they're PVE geared and pretty much ignore them or go after them first just to get them out of the way. I'm guessing you lived most of the match and where free casting much of the time cause .. no one cared. now if you are a sorc with 45k hp and 2018 expertise people will pay more attention. You are a new player (or at least new to ranked) be more prepared. Get 1800 expertise (which is easy btw) Augment your ranked gear when you get it. Use class appropriate stims

It is pretty clear when someone is in PVE gear. shear massive amounts of HP lol. I saw a sage with 50k hp. NO clue how but I don't think even ranked pvp gives you that much though i havnt' tested out the augments much yet. we targeted them first they melted FAST so probably little or no expertise.. or maybe just no skill too /shrug. For teammates inspecting those with 50k+ hp you'll see it is mostly pve gear and about 1300 expertise. I've gotten hit for 14k crits at almost 2k expertise. I can see someone getting hit for 20k with 1300 expertise. While i don't think PVP is broken.. Bolster and resolve does need some work As far as bolster I think it should check gear levels vs expertise. If you have a high gear level and low expertise it should give you less of a bolster as a punishment for being a pve player in pvp. thinking about it it may not work at all.. damnit well i guess i dont' have a fix.. but someone fix it dang it! lol.

I suck at PVP but love it. Just started ranked yesterday just to give it a try. Sorry to those whos rank i might have dinged a bit. Well except the one op healer who thought they where awesome and was talking crap but ended up having less healing done in the 3 matches with him than I (dps sorc) despite living through most of the matches... i'm not sorry to that person ;-p Anyway learned a lot in those matches Usually in for sure losses, trolling the team can help the time go by a little quicker At launch years ago on my first sorc, in hutt ball, hiding be hind boxes spamming consumption healing self for medals and getting MVP votes for my massive healing. Stunning people standing in bad stuff. As healer, letting people die just because they're jerks or fighting off the nodes. As tank, guarding other tanks who try to guard and cant cause their guarded (reapplying if they click off and i notice) Pushing, overloading or dragging people do healers.

I heard that they purchased the rights to Sony's SWG and decided to upgrade the graphics from pre-CU and label it The Old Republic 3.0. then they'll release CU in about 6 months as a Major update, and then next holiday season release the NGE expansion so they can shut down the servers the following summer. That is just what I heard from a reliable source.... one of the voices in my head :-) of course completely not true well except the voice in my head... i'm just still bitter about NGE and CU lol

probably a little bit, but with those SSDs probably not much at all. If you are getting more memory for games, probably not worth it right now unless you multi-tasking quite a bit.

Never heard of such an issue. though maybe an older SATA port

Something is seriously wrong OR running on an old SATA interface if thats all the faster the drives are going If you just have one PC .. maybe two to back up.. then just use a reliable usb3 drive.. but if you are sharing files/backing up over say 5+ devices.. go NAS with Gigabit network wherever possible. I don't have a mechanical drive to test in my home PC but on the one i tested at work last week (Dell Optiplex 9020) it got ~90MBps My 2 year old Samsung SSD gets about 430-480MBps Reads. bit slower writes and similar speeds on my other 3 SSDs about the same age (give or take) my older SSD gets about 200MBps Its 4-5 years old and runs like a champ. Copying files to and from my NAS is about 75-110MBps depending on what others are doing in my house but never less than 70MBps. and that was with crappy Western digital Green drives. i haven't really tested my WD Red drives much but i know they're a bit faster, but i'm bottle necked by gigabit network. My USB3 4TB drives that i mainly use to back up the NAS's important data (an oh shi*t house burnt down safeguard) goes at about 75MBps in eyeballing it nothing official there. and its great for what it does.. back up one system (the NAS) From those numbers, the throughput of the NAS is on par with fairly standard mechanical drive BUT the seek time is much slower especially if the data isn't cached, so don't get any ideas about playing SW:TOR off of a NAS... though i might try it just to see how messed up it is ;-)

We are getting way off topic but since the original topic was.. well for lack of a better term... senseless ... i think we're safe ;-) Wireless AC is pretty quick but is consider this. My Wireless AC topped out at about 40MBps transfers.. which is pretty darn good I think. BUT that was one single wireless device with only AC enabled. I also had to enable G and N on the router for some other devices like older tablets a printer visiting phones... blah blah blah. Once enabled I would connect quick but actual transfer rates plummeted. I'm not an expert on WiFi that is sure, but like anything the more devices you hook up the more it will slowdown. Imagine doing a 100GB backup at sub 25MBps speeds.. yeah its not fun especially if you get wacky interference and your WiFi disconnects lol.. speaking of.. my parents house.. had tin ceilings in the kitchen.. every time we turned the microwave on... wifi would go out (this was in 2002) Wired Gigabit can do over 100MBps pretty consistently. Simply having a device plugged into a switch doesn't slow it down hardly at all other than maybe a few broadcasts. Unless something is actively transferring data it will be fast. cheap netgear prosafe switches work pretty good for 20-50ish bucks for a 5 or 8 port. I just bought a 50ft and a 25ft CAT6 cable for under 10$ shipped Its not too expensive to setup. I would make my own cables but i lost my crimper and tester in a recent move :-( ANYWAY If you only got a few wireless devices you'll probably be okay BUT always go wired if possible it is better in almost every way except for setup and actually running the cables EDIT: Hard drive speeds especially with NAS's in RAID , and SSDs are much faster than the average wired gigabit network much less Wireless AC. A decent SSD can do about 500MBps transfer Gigabit wired can do a bit over 100MBps transfer. Mechanical RAID depends on the amount of drives and other factors but should be well over 150MBps. So no wireless is not on par with hard drive speeds... but networks are getting faster :-)

Its called a NAS because it is Network Attached Storage. Yes many are just fairly simple file servers.. many more do other things as well. I use mine for storage of data i don't frequently use and finished productions. among other things. Synology and QNAP make some very nice ones that can do a lot of useful things standard. almost everything GB lan, was thinking bout 10GB but.. way to expensive on my budget (not to mention overkill) WIFI will work for many things but I wouldn't want to copy 100GB of data to my NAS on wifi.. use wired. I use a NAS instead of local storage because it is more convenient for me. I can turn my pcs off and still have access to my documents, music, pictures and movies because the NAS is always on. NAS boxes usually have some sort of RAID setup.. in my case SHR which gives me some protection against a single drive failure (saved my butt a couple months ago) Also in my case i built my computer to have no mechanical drives (though i did end up getting a blu-ray burner) and I needed space for static data. A NAS was a logical choice for me. They have OS's on them, usually some flavor of Unix of Linux with a custom GUI. FreeNAS, QNAP, Synology.. all pretty good just keep them updated. They are not for everyone and can get expensive. Example a Synology 4bay is somewhere around 700$ Plus three NAS drives and if you need network switch and/or cabling you can get well over a grand quick. You can also build your own too for a bit cheaper. If you are just looking for a simple back up.. just get an external USB drive (or two). If you got a few devices all accessing similar data along with the backups then a NAS maybe something worth looking into.

The problem with your 'real world' tests and assumptions are vast :-) really not your fault it is an MMO situations change. hour by hour, minute by minute or second by second. there is no control. Also the only real effect you mention of an SSD is general load times. The responsiveness of the drive (not the through put so much) can have great effect on other aspects of the game. For example, remember getting 5 FPS in Ilum PVP? went to SSD was getting 30+ (which was good at the time considering my other hardware) Also the hard ware you are comparing it with. is also fairly decent. If you where going from say a 5400rpm green to an SSD you would probably see a greater difference. YOU don't need an SSD. But if you set it to your boot drive and put your apps on it you will see much greater responsiveness including quicker load times. Your mechanical drive is pretty good. despite the 5.9 rating windows it isn't bad. In fact as far as 2.5" drives go the 7200rpm Scorpio black is one of the better laptop drives out there. unless you got a really bad or REALLY good mechanical drive or RAID it will almost always be 5.9 experience rating. Moral of the story ignore experience rating it is crap :-) Some people, like your self won't see much of a benefit in game by switching to an SSD (in terms of load times). Others unlike you who have a serious bottle neck with their drive will see great benefit. Also, no.. it is not a religious issue. It's a priority to cash (not cache hehe) issue. If you got a few extra bucks go with the SSD over mechanical. Over all performance, not just SW:TOR will be better. TL;DR: people shouldn't just take our word for it. If you buy a SSD JUST for SW:TOR you are doing it wrong

About 2 years ago (give or take) there was a similar discussion somewhere here on the forums. Yes you get a boost in load times. In my case I consistently can hear others abilities, move and take action but the bioware load screen is still active. I'm not sure if the network/server lag or if it is a bioware thing to make sure the screen is shown? Whatever the cause slows things down. There where load tests done (some by me) back then loading SWTOR from a ram drive. There is an 'add-on' (called Unleashed i think) that will take parts of the game and load it directly into ram as a drive for faster read/write. It helps smooth the game out. Running the full game from a ram drive provides a minor benefit in my case but did smooth out some of the fps drops at times. Granted to run the game from a ram drive you will need enough ram to put the game in RAM, Unleashed i think requires 4GB of memory to work well... while putting the full game in memory you'll need a lot more, at that point getting a 60GB ssd is MUCH cheaper and will provide similar benefit. The general conclusion then was if you are having some trouble with load times and fps drops a SSD could really help smooth it out. OP's tests are hardly conclusive as it is hard to tell which instance you will log into, Biowares crappy server lag or general server load. one load may take a few seconds the next may take 30 long story short. Yes get an SSD if you can afford it, it will really help regardless what you do. BTW: if i had to wait 50 seconds I would be VERY upset ;-) SYSTEM: i7-3930k@4.25GHZ, Samsung 830 SSD, ADATA SSD, 2xOCZ Agility 4 SSDs, 64GB RAM, MSI GTX970 on a Rampage IV