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.