Heh, as a healer in PVP let me assure you that if there are other sorcerers in a match your chances of being ABLE to throw a bubble on someone are pretty slim - they bubble themselves and others already, so the lockout timer is in effect a lot of the time. Additionally a 3 second blind popping all over the place would be a great way to max out the other team's resolve meter for small effect. DPS seems to hate all things support when it comes to PVP... nerf healing, nerf bubbles, nerf anything that supports the other DPS I throw myself blindly at so that my strategy-free style of play is not impeded.

Or we could just alter the mechanics of the bubble: Any attack or source of damage less than <x> is reduced by 75% while bubble is active. Any attack of <x> or greater is completely absorbed, but ends the bubble effect. Have <x> be, say, 1000 at level 50. Then bubbles will absorb exactly one real attack before going down, but will not be taken down by most DOTs (yet will help with them somewhat). At present, bubbles absorb all of one attack anyway, so they would more or less play the same way, but it would mean DPS would have a strategic way of dealing with them - throw a moderate attack at an opponent to drop the bubble and then throw the big nuke at them. Additionally, the timing for throwing bubbles on one's self and others would become important, which it currently isn't. When it absorbs flat damage, you might as well bubble early because it'll absorb 2400 whenever it happens to occur. Becomes a part of player strategy in PVE as well as PVP.

The game just needs to run huttball when there are enough people queued. I think, additionally, the suggestion made in this thread would get more people queuing up for PVP, even on lower population servers. If anything, low pop servers are worse due to the fact that you're far more likely to face the really tough PVPers and premades if there are few people queuing up than you would if lots of varied skilled players were queiing up.

A very one-sided comparison, I'd say, by someone who doesn't actually play the class(es) that they're objecting to. Several of the abilities mentioned are only for healing spec'd sorcerers/sages who are certainly not going to faceroll anybody (especially considering there's a blanket 30% reduction in healing in PVP). Sorc/Sage lifetap is 15% health for 8% mana, which is less than it takes to cast one spell, plus it reduces your force regeneration by 25%, stacking 4 times... Force Storm/Quake costs a pantload of force rather than restoring any, and anyone using it in PVP is either confused, or just trying to stop multiple enemies from planting a bomb/capturing a turret. As a sorcerer, I'd love all the abilities the OP mentions, but I don't have them either... plenty of weak imitations of them, though, and other classes tear me up plenty in PVP.

Bubbles are fairly trivial as far as how much damage they absorb. Additionally, DPS bubbling people is usually detrimental to a group's efforts as many of them are not spec'd to increase the absorption by 20%, and they're almost certainly not using healer PVP set gear that decreases the lockout time by 3 seconds. It wouldn't be a bad idea to move the 20% increase in absorption into the healing tree rather than having it be tier 2 in a DPS tree, though. The Lightning tree (for sorcerers) actually has two of the three bubble-affecting talents for some reason. I think they'd be more at home in the healing tree as a whole. At the end of the day you need to remember that another character is supposed to be as good, mechanically, as you are. If you're pure DPS and they're pure Healing/Defense then they should be as good at keeping someone (even themselves) alive as you are at making people dead. Right now if you, as a specialized DPS, fight a healer one on one, you will win every time... it just takes you longer to pull it off than it would if they were also DPS. The issue DPS has is when they go one-on-one with another DPS, and don't notice a healer, they lose the fight as they should. Healers don't need more nerfs... they don't even need the nerfs they have... there just needs to be additional abilities that reduce an opponent's received healing when used, and an easier way to determine who the healers are on an opposing team. Well, and people using a bit of strategy by actually killing the healers instead of running, screaming at the first enemy they see every time and hoping for a kill.

Actually it either does not affect the motivation for it, or it decreases it. I will refer to both bots and going afk as stagnating, which is to say, being there but not actually participating. Under the proposed system the following happens. 1) If someone is stagnating to complete their daily or weekly quests then there's no reason to do it more than 3/7 times. Currently they would do it many, many more times, especially since they reduce their team's chances of winning by being there. 2) If someone is stagnating in order to soak commendations, credits, xp, then absolutely nothing will have changed. The issue of PVP stagnation is actually entirely separate, and there are plenty of things that can be done, but in this case it is either unrelated to this suggestion, or ameliorated by this suggestion.

Instead of punishing people for quitting warzones, howsabout just have the benefits tied to completing the warzone as I mentioned in this thread. That way there's really no benefit to quitting a warzone even if you are getting crushed. As it stands, you're either playing a warzone because you enjoy PVP, or because you're trying to complete daily/weekly PVP quests. In each case, being stomped into the floor by the opposing team means you actually benefit from quitting: either you're not having fun, so you might as well shorten the time to the next warzone by requeuing instead of completing, or you're guaranteed not to win, and thus won't contribute to your quests, so you're better off requeuing immediately instead of completing the warzone that will do nothing for you. Any system that is based on people doing something because its "right" or "fair" is a badly designed system - systems need to be based on self-interest if there's any hope for them to work. At present, if you're not winning, then there's a low self-interest factor.

There are two very serious design decisions that have promoted this issue... well, three if you include the daily/weekly quest completion thing I mention in this thread. The two in question are: 1) Purchasing PVP bags with commendations requires 200 merc commendations (world PVP) as well as 200 warzone commendations. There is simply not enough world PVP going on at the moment, and the rewards for it are trivial, so you end up needing 800 warzone commendations to get a bag (600 converts to 200 mercs). 2) The cost of centurion gear is way, way too high for how few centurion commendations you get in a PVP bag. The number of centurion commendations you get per bag should be multiplied by about 5. As it stands you're more likely to have champion gear faster than centurion (lesser) gear. If those two issues weren't in the way then new 50s could gear up in centurion gear fairly rapidly and then settle into the frustrating Champion gear grind that all the established 50 pvpers enjoy so much.

I don't think it would change the dynamics of Warzones in any way, frankly, other than to promote more participation in them. Premades will still destroy most pugs, even if the pugs happen to be decked out in champion gear and the premade is not (though we both know that'll never be the case). It would be true if there were rated Warzones, too - better players will win in the long run, and in a system where its easier to gear up it is easier for the good players to gear up, which evens the gear aspect, leaving only skill. The pragmatic benefits tend to outweigh the principle, I'd say.

I want to heavily suggest that the criteria for the warzone daily and weekly quests be completion rather than victory. The change would accomplish the following improvements: 1) It would make gearing up considerably less frustrating for new characters, especially if they don't start PVPing until 50. This would stop the threads and postings about how hard it is to get geared up (at least those that aren't just complaining about the RNG aspect). 2) It would deal, to a large degree, with the current issue of people quitting the match when they no longer think there's any chance to win it. Under the current win-only system, it is often more advantageous to quit and requeue when victory is impossible than it is to finish the match. If completing the match is the requirement then the opposite becomes true. 3) It would promote general PVP participation even when there is a well organized group dominating the matches. If you don't have to beat the better team to complete your quests then even if you're getting squarely beaten over and over, you have a reason to continue trying. 4) It would result in better geared PVPers overall. Even if players aren't particularly skilled PVPers then what will be holding them back is their playing skill, not their gear so long as they put in the time. 5) It would promote reasonable queue times as there would be no reason for people not to queue up at least three times per day. While it may seem like having to win 3 times would make someone queue more often, the simple fact is the percentage of people who will queue 20 times in a row in the hope of winning three times is reasonably low. Most people will just do something else if their pug luck is bad. Now, for the avid PVPers who will immediately be opposed to this idea, let me talk a little bit about the benefits to you. Even if you routinely wipe the floor with your opponents, this change will benefit you as follows: 1) Better geared opponents present a better challenge. You may think these folks haven't "earned" their gear, but you can't be that good a PVPer if you'd rather bad players be badly geared as well. Even well geared bad players will be easy prey to a good player. 2) Anything that promotes participation in PVP is good for you, as it means faster queue times and a lower likelihood that PVP as a whole will die off. You've seen what Ilum looks like - when not enough people are interested in something, it can go south in a hurry. 3) If completion is what contributes to the daily/weekly quests then people have every reason not to abandon matches. You'd be far, far less likely to see matches aborted due to opponents quitting when you're clearly outclassing them. 4) Bad players will never have better gear than you do, regardless, unless they've been playing a lot longer than you have, so this doesn't make your life any harder. Obviously the number of commendations that people get from a given match should still be tied to their performance - there still needs to be some advantage to at least doing everything you can to win a match, but the base process of gearing up for PVP should probably be based more around putting in the time than on getting victories over what will be progressively better geared opponents as time goes on. Thanks for reading... bigger thanks (bioware) if you actually do it!

The easiest thing to do would be to stop making all the requirements be "win x warzones" and have them be "complete x warzones". The daily and weekly quests are the main way you'll be gearing up, and general activity commendations can be more heavily tied to in-match activity such that even if you've got a crappy, inexperienced team, you're still being appropriately rewarded for your actions. First of all, it would encourage people to stay the course for matches rather than ditch them when they're doing poorly - this is a major pain in the *** in warzones like huttball. Quitting a match would simply result in punishing one's self... at present, you're better off quitting the match when you know you won't win in favor of requeueing for a match you might win (and thus complete the current necessary requirements for daily and weekly pvp missions). Second, it means that people who are gearing up can gear up at a reasonbly consistent rate even if it means suffering through being hammered by already geared players. Win or lose, they have no mechanical reason for getting frustrated by match outcomes or to be turned off doing at least three matches on any given day. Third, it means if you're in a PVP group that is slaughtering your competition, you'll still have competition lining up to get slaughtered. You won't get stuck with ridiculously long queue times because the losers from previous matches just don't feel like being punching bags anymore. The size of the active PVP crowd is not really big enough at the moment to have a system that discourages people from joining it. Something similar needs to be put in place to Ilum PVP as well, to get people populating the area.

Crit is particularly helpful in the long run, owing to the fact that you'll be using the Force Surge talent to keep your force up. Once you have force surge, you'll have a standard, low-output rotation of Resurgence > Innervate > Consumption which will work as healing when things aren't over-the-top bad. Resurgence will, by way of Force Bending, up the crit chance of Innervate by 25%, and any innervate crit will make your next consumption cost no health and not decrease your force regen. You can basically repeat that indefinitely without ending up below full force. Surge is spiffy and all, but it doesn't increase our critical percentage very much considering that only comes into play when we do crit. Alacrity is similar.. it never seems to increase casting speed enough to be of great use. It doesn't reduce cooldown time, so alacrity is more likely to help (should you ever get it up high enough to notice) with times when you're tossing out a lot of Dark Infusions, which I don't find is particularly often. This is all based on anecdotal experience, not detailed math, of course. When we get to the point that people are doing those heavy calculations, they may prioritize differently.

There are different types of macros... some level of macro support would be nice. For example, it'd be nice to be able to create a macro that simply casts a power on your companion, rather than having to click on them, cast, then click back to the enemy and so on. I don't see how that'd break the game. Add-ons... its a tough call. They can do cool things, but I agree that when they become required then something is wrong with the game - possibly there being too much functionality exposed to addons. An alternate way to look at it, though, is that when addons become ubiquitous, and basically necessary to play the game, then what has happened is a 3rd party has identified an excellent new feature that the developers should be implementing in the game itself in some way.

Hey, it does damage! It makes numbers pop over the enemy's head which, combined with my companion and my own meager attacks, makes for an absolute blizzard of sprouting numbers which, in turn, makes me feel tough. I'm not actually doing a lot of damage, but it looks very intimidating with all that math. So don't knock the droid.. As for bioware, they have a long history of just doing things and not bothering to tell anyone anything about it. I had a couple of buddies at Lucasarts back when KOTOR was being made and they had all sorts of colourful words they used when referencing the bioware people...

The STAP saved me 8,000 credits at 25, which I appreciated... it'll do the same on each character, plus it looks better than the other 90% speed mounts. I may be biased by the fact that I never knew they considered making it scale to your riding skill maximum, though. And hey, the little damage droid is fun too.