/sign

/sign

I realize that a lot of viewers of this section of the forums are serious PvP players, and you may not run with "PUGs" all that often, however I want to reach all PvP'ers here with a simple message: Let's build each other up instead of tearing each other down. Here's the deal: when you lose a match, or are losing, it's really, really easy to blame other people. And hell, you may be RIGHT - maybe they ARE bad. But regardless, you can't win by just telling people they're BAD and they should GT\FO. The only way to win, especially with an expanding playerbase (think "F2P"), is to *educate* instead of berate. Here's an exchange that happened just a little while ago over on Harbinger/Empire: http://imgur.com/ZLHJkmR I blurred the names of the two people making these comments because I'm not out to get them - I'm out to shatter this misplaced *mindset*. If somebody's bad at, say, Huttball, what's more useful: yelling at them so they (and lots of others) don't queue up, or EDUCATING them, so they do better the next time they queue up, and every time thereafter? We all had to start somewhere. Let's make a decision as a community to stop berating people for being "bads" and instead do the RIGHT thing - and you know it's the right thing, don't even play like you don't - and start LIFTING EACH OTHER UP. It's always easy to gripe, moan, complain and blame. It takes real intelligence and character to teach others. I challenge the PvP community to prove they're good enough to be inclusive and helpful instead of childish and spiteful. Are you up to the task?

Thank you all very much for your advice in this thread. My main problems appear to be that I was "face tanking" as you so eloquently put it as I'm used to playing melee characters. I have a tendency to want to get up close and personal in every fight, and even though I *knew* not to, I still had to really, really re-focus on that. The other main thing was switching to madness. Holy god. That spec rocks. Now that I understand wrath procs and how force lightning procs off of it, I'm doing so much better. When I posted this I was barely pushing ~44-50k damage in warzones. My first WZ after this advice: 123k. That's roughly a 3x improvement. Thanks guys!

Hey, thanks Jay. Right now I'm lightning spec (forget the actual name, maybe that's it - the one in the middle) at level 39. I briefly played with madness and found it interesting, but have been so used to just casting mad bolts that I hadn't really considered sticking with madness. Maybe I should revise that notion. How much does gear in these sub-50 WZs really matter though? I'm wondering if I had some +willpower I may do a lot better. Thanks again man!

Just my two cents here. I have a 38 Vanguard and a 39 Sorc. I find that the Vangaurd (defensively specced) can take a metric crapton of damage and hold off 3-4 attackers for several minutes if I play it right. The sorc on the other hand spends more time in the spawn area than in the battlefield because he loses about 30% health every time he's hit, meaning that if I get anywhere near anyone at all, I get insta-gibbed. That's WITH the bubble specced to take more damage and blind players after it bursts. That's just been my experience with the two classes thus far. I'm not saying anybody's right or wrong, just that that's my experience - take it for what it's worth.

Hey guys, I've recently been trying a damage sorc build in PvP that works pretty well in PvE (I mean I can drop stuff insanely fast, it actually feels OP). However, in unranked sub-50 warzones, I'm seeing that my damage numbers are nowhere near what the top contenders have. For example, I just got out of a warzone and had a damage total of about 44k. That's it. Others had over 230k. Even though I think we were up against a premade, it's obvious to me that I'm just plain doing something wrong with respect to dealing damage in a warzone since I'm getting my *** handed to me time and again, usually by a zerg of 3+ players at a time. Now, I can see the math here: somebody gets big numbers because they have backup and don't die, whereas I have zero backup and spend more time in the spawn area than on the battlefield. But I think there may be more to it than that alone. So my first question is, can anyone recommend a really good sorc PvP DPS guide? Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, since you get a scalable buff in these warzones, how much does gear actually matter in the sub-50 WZs? I admit my gear could be better (it's not 100% purples and perfect mods everywhere), but it's fairly decent - I'd say about average, maybe slightly above average. So are all these people getting 3-4x the damage that I do just better geared and backed up by a team, or is there something else going on here likely? Any advice ya'll could provide would be appreciated. Thanks.

Great feedback. I'm just looking at getting one small feature implemented at this point but I agree with opening it up with more open world PvP objectives. As for seeing increases in queue time (I think that's what you meant), yeah that's a reality we'll just have to face if you choose to queue for unpopular warzones. But that's the rub: right now, we don't know what's popular and what's not, at least not with empirical evidence. Implementing this queue change may show, for example, that Huttball is unpopular compared with Novare Coast or something (change the names as you like, this is just for the sake of example). If that happens and BioWare can see, with raw data and hard numbers, that the majority of players shy away from Huttball, they can then start to ask the community and those players: Why? Why don't you like it? I'm sure we could all give them a host of reasons. And again, this is for your most hated warzone here, not necessarily Huttball (as I know there are plenty of people who like it just fine). And that's the secondary effect of this feature: by showing the numbers and giving players freedom, we can show exactly what's "wrong" with a specific WZ and then BioWare can iterate changes as necessary to make it more fun. End result: selectable warzones AND more fun warzones than what we have at present. The other thing that you brought up - open world PvP - is something I fully agree we need to see more of. That's a much bigger set of features and content though, whereas all I'm talking about is separating one queue into 5 separate ones and allowing the player to choose which ones to enter; speaking as a software engineer myself, that's a smaller change to implement than creating entire new sets of PvP content However, your point is nonetheless valid and if you want to put in a feature request for it, I'll /sign that right away.

As the game currently stands, queuing for a warzone basically makes a random one "pop" for you. That could be one of the warzones you don't like. Other players have voiced similar concerns to me on several occasions, that they would love to be able to "de-select" or whitelist certain warzones which they're willing to participate in. So this is a feature request: please implement selectable warzones. From a UI perspective, I'd envision it working something like this: - Click the queue button - Have a series of checkboxes for each warzone - Un-check the ones you don't want to be in queue for I think everyone understands that this may mean that you have a longer queue time before getting into a warzone depending on how many people queue for which ones. I think that's a fair (and probably unavoidable) tradeoff. Now, I did bump into an old thread that mentioned that this behavior would be implemented after a cross-server PvP queue is implemented, however that player never cited any source of credibility (nor any source at all), and I have no idea if those design decisions have changed at any point. If that's still the plan, could we please respectfully request an update on that project's status and expected implementation date? Other players, please /sign to give some visibility and hopefully push developer action on this. Giving people the option to queue for which warzones they want to participate in gives the players more freedom and very solid feedback to BioWare on which warzones are most and least liked, thus giving them a way to know which ones need the most work and prioritize accordingly. Thank you.

Hey guys, I'm rolling heals in warzones as a, presently, 34 sorc. I seem to do fairly well - I'd say we win ~50% of the time, which seems about right (these are all pugs, keep in mind) and my healing numbers are usually in the ~250k range per match. I usually have my medals maxed out, so most folks would think I'm doing a decent job. Well...I don't. See, in most WZ's that have an opponent that has a clue, they usually target and zerg the healers - they're priority DPS targets most of the time. And I'm really struggling with how to handle that. I just can't take the burst damage even with the bubble up. So a typical encounter goes like this: I come back from being killed, race to the "hot zone" where I can heal the most teammates, start throwing one or two heals - by the time the first one is done, at least one Jedi is force leaping on me. Then another. I pop my bubble if I haven't already, hit my overload to push everybody away, continuing to heal either myself if I think I can outheal their damage, or my allies if I don't think I can. But here's the rub: right in that moment, I have a decision to make; if I stay I can continue to heal my allies in a fight, who may or may not be coordinated enough to try to kill the guys killing me (like I said, I'm straight puggin' it). That may be enough in some cases to keep or capture an objective with those last few seconds. My other option is to force speed the hell out of there, out of LoS and attempt to recover. I do that sometimes, but if I do, sometimes the other guys aren't smart enough to pursue, but most of the time a coordinated team is. So maybe I can pull 1-2 away from the encounter for a few moments, but that may not be enough to make a difference. So my main problem/question is, how would more experienced healers recommend I deal with getting zerged like that? I just plain can't take that kind of burst damage, nailing ~30% of my health every second. Thanks for any input you can provide. (Present spec is all 25 points in Corruption, and I generally gear for max willpower and take endurance and alacrity as I can get it - should I refocus for endurance/alacrity?)

One other twist we could have built on top of this: Imagine there's an unknown planet with a powerful "force presence" on it. There's a temple or something that goes insanely deep and is filled at varying points of depth with harder and harder mobs to kill and you have to kill them to get into instanced flashpoint raid areas that progress in difficulty the further down you go. So like, layer one has the easiest mobs and the easiest content and should be available for people in beginning raid gear, layer two is harder, three harder, and so on. Of course the gear quality dropped should be commensurate with the difficulty of the raid instance. So to get to this planet, you'd need certain combat bonuses for your faction. And those combat bonuses only apply to assaulting the ancient planet's defenses and gaining access to the temple (so they don't mess with other PvP or PvE gameplay). And you get +X% "Force Planet" (pick a name for it) "Assault" by conquering space territory. So the idea is you basically conquer a bunch of territory to get your faction's armies strong enough to assault and take control of the planet this mysterious ancient Force temple is on. Once you're strong enough, you assault it and possibly - if you win - gain access to the temple. Then, and only then, can players of the faction that currently controls the planet gain access to the temple. Once inside, the temple could/should/would be a huge, insanely deep "descent into hell" kind of thing with all kinds of creatures, aliens, force users, robots, and so on to kill. They all have a good chance to drop extremely powerful items, lots of money, and so on. You'd have to clear a world-accessible level to get a raid group to the front door of a raid instance, and you may have several of them increasing in difficulty of both the content and the trash "protecting" the entrance to it along the way. You could go really, really deep with this. The overall idea being that control of space sectors gives you the ability to access the "best flashpoint in the game" that would be a major raid experience with multiple raids/flashpoints to choose from.

So some people were talking on Harbinger tonight about PvP in other games and how there are usually larger, faction-based PvP objectives. We'd like to propose something to EA/BioWare as an idea. Please, use it, tweak it, do it up and do it right Improve on it if you like. This is just a friendly request from players and fans of the game. So imagine you have sectors of space. Each sector controls a specific faction bonus - say +5% to XP, or +1% credits on drops, +5% chance for a blue or purple drop, +5% crafting critical, that sort of thing. Add others if you like. Each sector has either a planet or a space station that is the main control point. Faction PvP could happen by having players travel to a location in their ships and assault the base or planetary defenses. At that point, "alarm bells" go off for all members of the opposing faction who want it (figure out an opt-in system) and they can go to defend in ships. This bring us space dogfights. If the attackers make it through the defenses of the space station or planet, they land on the planet's main base or force themselves into the launch bay of the space station and then have to continue the assault on foot. The defenders can then also get into the base or station to defend against the attackers. NPC mobs would be set up to defend throughout, with a raid-style boss at the end. Kill the boss and you take control of the station. You could reward the defenders with valor points for successfully defending a major enemy offensive (the larger the engagement, the more points they get), and the attackers get points for a win. Both could get valor points and possibly XP for killing enemy players throughout the engagement. Then, when a station is captured and owned, the faction that owns it gets the bonuses assigned to that sector of space. Feel free to iterate on this idea all you like - we'd just like to see something more "meaningful" than grinding multiple battlegrounds over and over again. Thanks!

Now that the server transfers have happened and many people have made the move to more populated servers, what are your plans for the servers that are still there with really low population, and the characters there? Will they be force-transferred at some point to their destination server? When (roughly) do you plan to make this transition? A follow-up: Is there a paid character transfer service on the way? (Or anything that would let me consolidate my characters on Correllian Run / Harbinger into one server). Any idea when that might be implemented? (Rough estimate is fine).

Oh, and as an aside, it's probably possible to pull this off by just adding one server per region (or even re-purposing an old one after other mergers) and then offering people the chance to transfer over there (I'd be willing to pay a fee for it and I suspect others would too). Just labeling it "Late Night" would probably be all that would be required to be successful. It's no different than having an RP server - just a preference in the way you play the game.

Yeah it's an annoyance, you're right. I've tried that before too and the PvP lag is definitely bothersome. It's not so bad in PvE but in PvP it can mean the difference between victory and defeat in a not-insignificant number of cases. Additionally, rolling on other servers could present language barrier difficulties; i.e. if I were to roll on a German server, as I don't speak German, I'd probably not do so well and it's not reasonable to expect them to all speak English just for me, just like it's not reasonable for a German person to have to roll over on a US server because s/he works nights either.