Doesn't compute. Creating your own ruleset for a game that has rulesets dictated by someone else doesn't work. I could also send myself to county lockup everytime I exceed 50 MPH (in NY). And that's the hardest of the hardcore PvP. In a game like Shadowbane, it was about losing your guild city, not the scrolls/junk in your inventory or your gear. Getting up at 3 AM DID frickin stink though.

There is no such thing as better PvP without consequences. In fact, there's really no such thing as PvP without consequences. What we are all doing is farming valor points to complete dailies and open BM bags to get loot to beatdown the scrub that queues up in Warzones with almost no gear, look at our amazing numbers, and make youtube videos. Those are just the facts. As a Shadowbane player of old, when we were able to win 10 on 30 or 10 on 60 battles with coordination and focus targeting, I cannot even believe I am playing this game. I suppose the only reason I am is simply because there's nothing else to play. Player versus Player means you are testing your mettle against another non-scripted player. No risk means you are dueling, which is probably the single least important, but definately required, aspect of a PvP game that is about grouping, warzones, battlegrounds, arenas, etc.

Ever play a Voidstar and wonder how you/your teammate set that door? It's because, for the most part, that the enemy team is dead due to DPS. I regularly play warzones on my BM shadow, rack up 400k+ damage compared to the next highest at 160k damage. OP must think I was being useless in that Warzone since I didn't set any objectives. Most people also don't know that Good DPS is the most difficult part of assembling a group of people to play with. Just look around you in the Warzones, most people may have good gear and still rack up terrible numbers because they don't understand their class. When you have a premade of 4 DPS all pulling 300k, you notice a huge difference in how consistently you set doors, how you don't need to "ninja" anything.

Both healing and dps sages accomplish the same medals. DPS sages won't go much over 75k healing. A healing sage won't go much over 75k damage. If you're playing Alderaan or Voidstar, dotting is a huge aspect of playing healing sages.

Most people are so black and white on this issue. They cannot fathom that kills DO matter, regardless if it's objective based PvP or not. In Huttball, I typically kill all of their ranged pullers/healers/dpsers up top. Now that may mean that I'm top damage, and according to your metrics, that's useless. But it isn't. Warzones and PvP in general are accomplished through teamwork to achieve objectives and the actual killing of people. If you haven't met a premade of really solid dps, you can't tell how much it stabilizes your teams goals and advantages. In other words, DPS isn't the sole important mechanic in PvP. Nor is raw healing, or raw protection. However, it IS one of multiple IMPORTANT factors in how successful a team/premade/pug is in a Warzone. You're right in your assessment that it's not the only thing, but wrong in that it means very little.

And that itself is an issue. For example, Sorcerers are NOT a powerful 1v1 class. They take time to take out. Assuming an even balanced of classes, ranged and melee, tanking and healing, a sorcerer is not the primary concern. The strength of the sorcerer lies in 2 aspects: control and high consistent damage. My shadow is a source of burst damage. Combine the two, and you have a good mix. Alone, however, a sorcerer takes a while to kill something. Most people don't understand this because... The sheer number of sorcerers that are rolled in this game is ridiculous. Too many people wanted crazy cool electric palpatine. If you look over sorcerer skills, AOE abilities are on par with all of their direct damage abiltiies. Those that hit for 3 targets and 5 targets are as good as the nukes. So the problem isn't sorcerer burst damage. However, given that multiple sorcerers will create good burst, AND in addition to group burst (combined damage), it looks OP as hell. Every day there's a post crying to nerf sorcerers because of this exact issue. The way to fix it is simple, increase single target damage and nerf AOE damage abilities. I highly doubt their metrics could find this, or it would have been fixed already.

In order to resurrect PvP in this game, they need: 1. Arenas 2. Rated Warzones 3. More Warzones The direction of the game has already been set. In other words, rewards based, no risk PvP is the direction. It's too late to make PvP meaningful in a world where PvE is king. This is what happens when you make gear wholly important for your character to compete and function. Even the PvP is PvE. So make your rewards, go the way of WoW. The direction makes plenty of money. Stop breaking things like Ilum on a constant basis. Transform it into Wintergras/AV whatever you want. It's not the formula or the ideas. It's the system itself. It can't be "fixed" for a pure PvPers perspective. If anyone thought going into this that it would be going in a completely different direction from WoW, you are/were kidding yourselves. There are way too many people that call themselves PvPers but are simply disguised PvEers. If you feel that your grind should be worth something in PvP, you are PvE'ing. If you feel that your gear should improve over time, you are really PvE'ing. Char progression is about PvE. Player killing is about PvP. Mixing the two causes a bunch of crybabies to ***** about PvP balance. There literally was nothing wrong with any of the classes in this game except the possibility of too many sorcerers/sages in a Warzone doing burst AOE damage. Instead they went ahead and nerfed stuff that people simply cried about, the vocal minority comprised of idiots. If you don't believe me, go look at pure PvP games like Shadowbane was back in '03/'04. People whined and cried to each other about which guilds were attacking their cities, which guilds were the "zerg" guilds, which guilds were the *******es and which were the good guys. They didn't argue about which purples should have which stat, or which stat should be removed, or which warzones (it was all world PvP) had exploits, or which classes were too powerful. If you want to PvP, if you call yourself a PvPer, then sit back, relax, and wait for a real PvP game (possibly forever) to be made in the MMORPG genre again. This and WoW are not, were not, and never will be real PvP. Until then, I am enjoying the slaughtering of undergeared, low skilled "PvPers" in my BM gear.

Left and Right is very simple. It's coming out of your spawn and the direction you want to be in. I can't tell you how many times cardinal direction has confused the crap out of the team I'm on in voidstar, running around with their heads cut off.

I've always felt the design of this class was to blame. They are not very powerful 1 on 1 for certain. But if you take a Warzone like Voidstar and put 3 sorcs on one side with AOE/TT build, you will be dominating most of the game. The AOE damage is so good that when you have multiple sorcs, you are literally bursting, but together. That is when I notice sorcerer/sage damage being way powerful in warzones. Wouldn't mind if they received a single target damage buff to trade for that.

lmao.

Trash talking is always in healthy competition by the way. Name me one sport that isn't filled with trash talking.

Clearly what people say on the internet bothers this person. And no, I play Republic side. I pretty much taunt and slaughter imperials all day. They may have more players, but they are worse players on The Fatman server.

Actually, hilariously I might add, there are distinct advantages to being imperial in the actual abilities and animations of the game. BWs response to fixing faction balance was enough for me to roll Republic. One word: Huttball. But other than this, Assasins/Sorcs have the clear advantage with Lightning Strike compared to Project just off the top of my head. This kind of bush-league design is pretty stupid. Add to that even the COSMETIC difference of a stream of lightning bolts flying at someone versus little pebbles (LOOOOOOOOOOOOOL) and you have even worse faction imbalance.

People like the OP shouldn't PvP at all. Why bother doing anything competitive? The bosses in EV and GP oesn't talk smack.

And that's the frickin problem. They feel if they tell us, there will be ways that people will find to work the system, and that's true too. The problem is you cannot just leave us in the dark here at all. The consequences are WORSE than if you did. It calls for KILLING PEOPLE. KILLING PEOPLE SHOULD COUNT THEN. It's that simple. Otherwise, CHANGE THE OBJECTIVE of Ilum. Change the quest to do something else. It sucks not getting credit for killing someone because another player killed that guy previously. What kind of quest is kill, then get reward, but some players that you can't tell doesn't count?

Terrible idea. Just make ilum give NO REWARDS, so no one is forced to do the quest. Freebies aren't the answer. Remove the daily/weekly or simply shut down Ilum until a fix/rehaul is complete. It's a joke of an area. Applying small band-aids doesn't work.

BWs incarnation of World PvP is awful. Huttball is awful. Their claims of things being fixed and not being fixed is awful (warzones wins not counting still an issue). This seems to be a very minor counting issue. You win, it counts. You don't win, it doesn't count. In Ilum, GET 150 KILLS. Doesn't say get 150 kills that give valor. Doesn't say every kill should give you valor. Kill 150 people, tell me how many of those counted. At this point, I couldn't give a rats *** about valor. I want my weekly and my daily kills to count. You're punishing someone that WASN'T kill trading in order to stop kill trading. That alone is stupid. Some of us are standing in our base pulling people in slowly, every 45 seconds for a kill. Not counting really puts a damper on even doing that for Ilum.

Keep bumping this. This is probably more ridiculous than patch 1.1 which made Ilum into a kill only zone with few armaments. Now the killing doesn't even work in the system they created.

Huttball isn't a real warzone nor is it real PvP. My concern would lie with Alderaan/Voidstar. Maybe a check to see how close players are to objectives would make this work better. You must be within 50m of the objectives for the kills to register.

I think the majority of my posts regarding ilum on this farm has been to change the POPULATION CAP to FACTION POPULATION CAP. No one seems to really give a crap though, especially not BW.

Edit: actually, that's a good idea. The only problem you run into is that people will be farming kills rather than playing objectives. Hey shield, this is incog.

I'm explaining the difference styles of nerfing possible. Rather than go all in on a 20% damage nerf on shoot first and a 20% armor pen reduction for flechette round, they could be a lot more creative. The truth is is that my class offers a lot more burst in 3 GCDs than an operative has, but that isn't nerfed. Players and developers are not really playing a class to understand the mechanics. Instead, there is whining followed by nerfing. I could go into more details about other tweaks such as multiple sages offering way too much damage on an AOE scale as well, but this isn't the thread for it. I'm trying to demonstrate the need for tweaking verses ruining an entire playstyle to achieve the same results that you could by tweaking. It covers both the whiners and the nerfers. Would you prefer the one liner that says "stop the f'ing nerfs and stop your whining" instead? I would say posts like yours offer the least amount of constructive criticism and add to the flood of one liners that are no different than the crying that exists on here.

I felt this game is very balanced as is. They needed to tweak some things here and there, not nerf scoundrels/operatives like that. They needed to nerf shadow tanking stance, not remove the choice of using tanking or shadow stance. Nerfing comes in different forms. For example, it's probably unintended that a Shadow (class I play, Valor rank 62 now in BM gear) to be able to put out the damage I do while standing in tanking stance guarding my healer, holding a side 2 on 5 before reinforcements come in. I get that. So maybe you should nerf combat stance to -10% damage. If not enough, nerf it to -15%. Instead, they just make it so stance dancing really is impossible. Costs a full energy bar to do it. It essentially removes a whole style of playing. They nerfed the damage of a shadow in combat stance by making the rotation incredibly clunky as opposed to actually NERFING THE DAMAGE (which was the whole problem to begin with). They already have stats/buffs/ideas that change how PvP vs PvE works. They could have done this with combat stance as well. Rather than a dynamic, changing, fun class to play, I just stay in DPS stance now hitting things. That is the problem with developers nerfing things. They don't think about how the actual classes play.

Troll. 2/10.

I have been saying for weeks now that the FUNDAMENTALS of Ilum are broken. It simply cannot work. PvP for no risk, all rewards, cannot be world PvP. It must be warzones/arenas/rated warzones, and so on. That is the only way to have any type of "balance". Otherwise, every server will have 1 side that is factionally imbalanced. The other way to make world PvP with no risk and all rewards is to remove factions. You cannot have world PvP in a faction based, rewards based system. It simply is impossible because people will always try to find the best way to achieve the goal. It is human nature. When they will scrap the idea of Ilum, toss in 3 or more warzones, add rated warzones and some arenas, is beyond me. But it is necessary for this game's PvP. Short of revamping the whole system and make it non-loot based. For world PvP to work, you must have: 1. NO FACTIONS, or even factions. VERY EVEN FACTIONS of PvPers (not achievable). 2. NO LOOT. Everyone is similarly geared, and therefore, the only people PvPing are the ones that enjoy PvP. 3. SOMETHING TO LOSE. You need to be able to risk something or it isn't fun. No one plays poker to always win pennies. The fun is in losing big vs winning big. In old PvP games, this included towns, loot off other people's bodies (to grief them moreso than adding to your shiny purples collection). Start with a 5 minute run back. 4. IF YOU WANT TO MAKE ITEMS PART OF THE GAME of PvP, then you should go the route of SWG, have heavy durability penalties, and everyone having access to the same gear (purchaseable from player vendors for credits). 5. MORE HIT POINTS. Make teamwork essential to actual PvP. You need to call targets. You need to all focus down targets. By focusing down, I don't mean 3 dps on a healer. I mean 9 out of 10 players on a player. You need powerful healers and heals. If you absolutely want to fix ilum and absolutely refuse to give up on it, then: IMPLEMENT FACTION POPULATION CAPS. 40 on 40 or 48 on 48 will allow the lower faction to even have a shot at fair PvP. FACTION POPULATION CAPS, not GENERAL population caps are the key. Setting the cap to 100 and fighting 70 on 30 means we stand in our base and pull people in to turrets while they pull us out. Really, this isn't PvP. The system doesn't work unless it works for almost everyone. This still wouldn't fix gear disparity, but it is less of a problem with even balance. Make fighting at the Republic or Imperial base give NO VALOR, NO CREDIT. People are still confirming this with the new patch notes which are incredibly cryptic, which leads to the next point. MAKE CLEAR WHAT THE RULES ARE. Ilum PvP gives: 1. Valor 2. Credit toward Weekly/Daily Who seriously PvPs to guess whether 1 or 2 or 1 and 2 are accomplished in a SYSTEM BASED ON 1 AND 2. That doesn't even make sense. Hey, kill this guy and you may get credit for the daily/weekly, you may not. You may get valor or you may not. Really? The fundamental flaws of PvP in this and WoW IS the fact that it is rewards based with ZERO risk. You must have one and the other. I'm not certain why people would even PvP without the risk. The whole idea of PvP is a concept that says you want to challenge and be challenged by another player. You want to see if your skill is higher or if his skill is higher. You're not there to look to see how much gear he has or show off the gear you have. That's called sitting in the Fleet with your BM weapon out/cool mount/rare mini-pet.