Tbh bolster changes and breaks so much I don't even keep up with it really. But when 248s was the max item level the gear disparity was painful. I was perfectly fine with the toons on my main server that were 248s + 240 augs, but when I went to another server to try it out, 242s (excluding left side) and 236 augs were not enough against fully geared teams. It may not be as bad now but facing a team of full 258s in solos when you and maybe the rest of your team aren't optimized still sounds somewhat painful.

Nice strawman skippy. Everything you said, is a non-factor and irrelevant to what I'm saying. I'm strictly speaking of item level and instances where anyone will be crushed against a team in max gear (over bolster) when they only have gear that is at or under bolster level, and they have 3-4 of the entire team tunneling them, because of extra percentage of dmg you'll be taking that bolster doesn't cover.

I'd like to see you que up in 252s as a melee class and then go up against a team in full 258s and get tunneled by all of them. You won't do any damage and you won't survive for long. It happened to me when I was in mostly 242s on an alt and the other team was mostly full 248s.

Actually, I'll admit I was wrong in that regard. My bad. I agree with you and foxmob. There should be a short pre-season period for any expac or major patch in case any exploits or imbalanced class changes arise that would severely affect ranked play. I'll reverse my stance. I just think I was coming from a perspective that it takes BW forever to fix anything or make consistent changes, and ranked seasons are long as it is and they have made no effort to shorten them to 3-4 mo despite past claims they would do so, so I jumped to the conclusion that pushing back what'll likely be s12 further down is not good.

He's doing great in his little forum duel against those 2. If there was a top 3 for forum pvp, he would definitely deserve a spot

To clarify, I don't think que dodging is outright cheating. Wintrading is. Backfilling was (before they fixed it). Botting is. Que syncing is. However, it's a form of que manipulation and it's not honest play at best and nefarious at worst.

Fact: he's never called either of you guys terrible. Fact: group ranked is virtually dead and full of wintrading and cheating, thus throws shade on the claim that it's the "pinnacle of ranked pvp". Fact: your top 3s don't mean much if anything at all due to all the rampant wintrading, cheating, que manipulation and the old way solo ranked matchmaking worked in that it stacked all the higher elo players against all the lower ones.

I wouldn't consider it "highest skill" when these granked elitists - who are the absolute extreme minority in this game, like all of them could unsub forever and BW wouldn't lose anything meaningful cause there's only like 10 of them lmao - love farming mat farmers and the game mode is tainted by being a bastion of wintrading. That is what I'm referring to.

I'm speaking strictly about all DPS vs all DPS btw

These posts by the group ranked elitists are beyond comical. 4s being the "pinnacle of swtor pvp". Give me a break. Yeeeaahhh, keep begging for meme pve guilds and mat farming teams to keep queing and wintrading with all your friends to chug buckets of elo down your throats. That sure is the pinnacle of ranked pvp!

I just wanted to hit on this and say that that IS quite a large disparity. If you're not full or near 258s and you're simply 252 or under, and the ranked team you're facing is 258 you will get destroyed. All of your dcds will not mitigate all of that inflated dmg. You will feel like you're getting completely shredded.

Par for the course. There is no deterrent. A friend of mine told me they made a few toons on Star Forge and said team ranked is nothing but full of wintrading. You guys have only issued a handful of perma bans. Solos aren't fairing any better; getting friends on alts or alt accounts to throw for you on the opposing team and EU is full of literal bots from he who shall not be named. Also, why haven't you guys opened up a dialogue on some of these wintraders seemingly having control on customer support? He who shall not be named has admitted to being employed by one of your EU locations, likely the one in Ireland where your ToS team is based. He has insiders that are aiding and abetting his and his friends' illegal behavior. Ugh I give up

Not only do all these new gearing additions sound gimmicky as hell (least of my concerns tbh), they also look like they're gonna be a balancing nightmare. We've had 3 years of the same lopsided, ranged-heavy meta. How can we hope they'll fix stupidly broken classes for PvP in, at the most, a season's time when they take ages to handle class balance???

It's not that I'm not excited. It's that I'm hoping for the best but expecting the worst. Keith gave us crappy Ossus gearing and other extremely unpopular stuff just like Irving

I like Keith but he gave us the class nerfs in 2018, the 240 augs and, most importantly, the Ossus gearing that have been widely unpopular. He repeated a lot of the same mistakes of his incompetent predecessor