The problem is that the source of the imbalance is not bad players or even lack of communication. It isn't even the absence of healers as you earlier suggested . . . it is gear imbalance, plain and simple. Of course, players who enjoy the success of premades would LIKE to believe its because of their superior skill -- social, tactical, strategic, or mastery of their class and understand of other classes -- and thus they come onto this forum and tell everyone to learn2play. But the reality is premades tend to be collections of players whose gear makes them elite, they then band together for the ultimate steroidal power trip. You see another elite player, you invite him to the group, and eventually you have a group of nothing but elite geared players reaping destruction upon anything in their path. Give everyone the same gear, however, and really the whole phenomena of a group of elite geared players vs poorly geared players goes away, problem solved. Unfortunately, this won't happen because Bioware believes they need to have some system of reward in place so that players feel PvP is worth their time.

Ok thanks! I did read somewhere that the knife made a difference to knife attacks, but I guess I was misinformed. Thanks again.

For concealment, is the quality of your knife actually more important toward your DPS than the quality of your main weapon (your blaster rifle)? I have a barrel I bought for my main weapon, but my knife is also custom quality, not sure which weapon I should put the new mod into. Any help will be greatly appreciated!

So don't complain unless you play a healer? -10 internetz for making no sense whatsoever

I see, the whole PvP problem is solved! Don't play unless you are a healer!

^^^THIS^^^ The problem isn't really even premades, imho. If everyone were equal, premades would only be a minor annoyance, as they are in pre-50 pvp. The problem is that 50 PvP is so completely imbalanced, it just isn't fun for a new player to be humiliated over and over and over and over, no matter how skilled they are, just to compete. It is much more rewarding just to roll a new character and PvP through pre-50 WZs where you really are competitive right out of the box. Premades are superior because the people who put the teams together recruit only the most elite players they can get, not because they possess uncanny organization or because their strategy, easily communicated using teamspeak, is so superior. They decimate their opposition because they are all uber geared up while their competition from the PUG includes people still in recruit gear, maybe 1 or 2 in EWH, and the rest somewhere in between. Yes, their communication would provide them with an advantage against a team without such communication, but not necessarily victory if the other team possessed equal gear all around. Gear is really the problem. You could even things out by having a matchmaking system that places teams against roughly equally geared teams, but then what is the point in even having all this PvP gear at that point?

I was topping the charts on my sin at level 15. The only classes that were rough in the teens were juggs and operatives, both late bloomers. Seriously though, I think any many ways pre-50 pvp is just more solo casual player friendly. More balance, slower pace, less CC, far fewer premades and less need to be organized. 50 pvp demands that you gear up (which is much easier to do if you have guildmates to help you), play as a team, and be serious. If you prefer casual, you will prefer pre-50, if you are very serious about pvp and getting organized you will prefer 50 pvp. If you look at people's complaints about level pre-50 pvp -- except for a few clueless people claiming pre-50 pvp is even more imbalanced than 50 pvp -- most of the complaints are about how players are unorganized, just focused on 1v1 rather than the maps objectives, that there are too many newbs in it, that no one plays as a team, etc. All of these complaints center around the same theme: that pre-50 pvp is "too casual". Conversely, if you look at the complaints about 50 pvp they are just the opposite, they center around the theme of how level 50 pvp is misery for the lone casual player. You need to gear up, you need at minimum to form a premade, preferably you should join an elite pvp guild, you should use voice communication, etc. If you don't do these things, if you just jump in a pug after a long hard day at work because you are bored, you will get destroyed . . . over and over. So 50 pvp is much less casual friendly than pre-50 pvp, and that really is the key difference. People prefer one over the other are people who prefer more solo styled casual play versus heavily team oriented serious play.

An excellent article from wired.com released this morning talks about SWTOR's move to free2play and the future of theme park MMOs: continue reading @ wired.com

It sounds too me that you don't really understand f2p, and that is perfectly OK since many people are in the same boat. The problem for people in your camp is that they are at a loss to explain why f2p is so rapidly replacing the subscription model in the MMO world and is nearing the point where it has entirely swept subscriptions right out of existence. If subscriptions are the best way to make money, why are most companies switching to f2play? The essence of the subscription model is that people pay for entertainment, it is the standard model used since anyone can remember. In this view, ultimately the key to making money is to get people who are willing to pay in order to play. The problem with this model is that in today's online world, there are SO many options that you just don't get enough people who are willing to commit to just one game in order to pay. The essence of the free model is that the key is popularity. In a world of so many options, a popular game = a better game, at least in the public's perception, and the better the game the more people want to play it, and the more people want to play it, the more other people think it might be worth trying. And with no cost whatsoever, what harm can there be in trying it? The more people playing it, the more money comes in just from skimming the top. Not from charging people TO play it, but from charging people for any extra perks they might want (a perk shop) and in some cases from charging companies to allow them to advertise through the game. This is the standard model used by internet companies and products across the board, from Facebook to Angrybirds. Right now SWTOR is using a hybrid model, usually these models are referred to as Pay2Win. If you want to win, you need to pay real money. (Sure, you can play some aspects of the game for free, but anything that involves grouping with other players requires that you pay in order to compete and participate realistically. Showing up to a raid wearing green/blue gear isn't going to work, period. Same for PvP. The hotbar issue is just the first thing players immediately noticed in terms of limitations that will prevent the f2play'er from really being able to participate, but it is hardly the worse or most clearly intended strategy to force someone from f2play into subscription.) The problem with the pay2win model is that new intelligent f2p players, who aren't necessarily in love with the game enough to subscribe, realize that they will never really be able to complete so there is no point in committing more time to the game and they leave. But even though those players were never going to pay in the first place, their presence in the game is vital in order to provide the game with energy and vibrancy. Lose enough of these players, and you are back to a dying SWTOR. SWTOR is still putting all its money on this stupid story thing. Admittedly, it does have great story, but it forgets that it has such tremendous potential in its group PvE and PvP content. PvP in SWTOR is terrific, and could be so much better with some work, for instance. But f2p only really applies to the solo story part of the game, participating in the other aspects of the game, which really are the aspects that keep a lot of people playing this game and need more love, these aspects of the game basically require a subscription which kills the much needed injection of fresh energy. With SWTOR's f2play, I had expected that subscribing would give you certain perks and advantages -- and admittedly, the free respecs is an example of just that -- but instead it appears subscribing more or less provides you with all the necessities you need to play any part of the game beyond the solo story arcs. It isn't giving you extras, it is giving you essentials.

The hotbars thing reveals that SWTOR isn't really free2play yet -- not in the true sense of the movement that is rapidly replacing the old subscriber model in the MMO world -- it is still a subscription based game that is merely using "free2play" as a way getting new players to try out the game, similar to how some games are free2play up until level 20. You can't REALLY play the game in its full glory without subscribing, so it is definitely not free2play in the true sense (like GW2 is). It is evolving from being a pure subscription model toward a pure free2play model, but it is obvious that it isn't there yet, subscriptions still represent the core of their revenue. I don't think you can even subscribe to GW2, even if you wanted to. The essence of true free2play model has to do with the underlying philosophy that shot so many internet giants to the top like Google and Facebook . . . namely, that the value of an internet product lies not in how much it costs per customer, but in how many people are using it. (If Facebook charged everyone a monthly fee it would die a very rapid death.) In the MMO world how many people "are using it" is vital. Just look at how amazing SWTOR felt the last couple days with so much more participation and energy flowing into the game all at once. The ideal for a MMO is to have lots and lots of people and enthusiasm revolving around the game so that more people want to be a part of it. Look at WoW, was it REALLY that much better of a game than all the alternatives out there? No, its success largely lied in the fact that everyone was playing it, so everyone else wanted to play it. No one wants to pay a monthly fee for a barren MMO in which you barely run into another player (e.g., Auto Assault . . . oh, don't remember that game?) Letting players play a skeleton version of the game for free -- which doesn't allow players to realistically compete in PvP or endgame PvE -- is just a fancy marketing ploy to get people to try out the game so eventually they subscribe. That isn't free2play, that is just a subscription based game using some aggressive advertisement strategies. Nevertheless, with this patch they have laid the foundation for a true free2play game which eventually they may very well transition into. (And they will have to advertise it as "TRUE free to play" in order to get back everyone who they pissed off from the first free2play scam.)

I think it is pretty obvious they don't quite get the philosophical essence of free2play which is if you give freely and generously, players will in return pay freely and generously. GW2 is a model of this. If, instead, you are stingy and make players feel like they need to buy stuff in order to compete, every purchase they make feels dirty and insulting on some level, and angers them just so slighting that after enough purchases they've had enough. I'm saying this as a subscriber.

The people arguing with the math -- or insisting that skill somehow mysteriously makes the math irrelevant (despite the fact that the statistics automatically take skill into account) -- are the same people who don't believe in climate change . . . stragglers not willing to catch up to the modern era. Nevertheless, the issue is, as usual, PvP. If you removed PvP from the equation these statistics would be damning and there would need to be balancing. Obviously in PvE raw dps matters tremendously. But in PvP other things need to be factored into consideration, such as: 1) Burst vs sustained DPS. In PvE against bosses this distinction is meaningless, but in PvP the ability to unload the majority of your damage in a brief interval can be devastating to your opponents. This is precisely why operatives and scoundrels have such terrible DPS according to the stats right now. They used to have comparable DPS, but it was all front loaded in a quick burst, resulting in players getting killed almost instantly (i.e, before or shortly after stun lock expired). The devs needed to tone them down, but they couldn't change the fact that these classes are designed for burst (at least through certain specs), so all they could do was lower dps which obviously hurt pve performance. 2) Range vs melee. There is an inherent advantage to being able to use range in PvP, whereas in PvE this advantage seems rather trivial. If you have sorcerors hitting as hard as mauraders you will have calls for nerf, not in PvE, but in PvP it is almost guaranteed. The reason people are OK with Maurader dps is precisely because there are ways of escaping it, of getting them off of you. It is much harder to escape Sorc dps. 3) Healing. In PvE the fact that a sorc has heals and bubbles doesn't matter much if they are dps spec because they aren't there to heal. But in PvP these abilities can be lifesavers and help diversify the players ability to manage each unique encounter. You can't just give healing capable classes the same dps as classes without healing, they tried that. The result was the 3 most complained about classes in the early days of the game were Mercs, Operatives, and Sorcs . . . the three healing classes. All three were nerfed. This was never due to their PvE performance, only to PvP. 4) CC. Look at the maurader, he has very little in the way of CC. He has to struggle to get in and stay in melee range. In PvE this isn't an issue really, mobs just stand there and take it. But in PvP no one is going to just stand there, you need to work to stay within melee range. A lot of the time you simply will not be doing dps because you can't. Against a sorc you will be knocked back, stunned, rooted, snared, mezzed, you name it. So naturally the damage you do do needs to be higher once you get into melee range. If you just gave mauraders the same dps (or even a measly amount higher) than other classes, this might be fine in PvE but in PvP it would just mean the class was more effort than it was worth. When the game first came out there was less DPS disparity, and the classes were closer to within this 5% ideal that keeps getting mentioned. But once PvP started class balance issues almost immediately appeared for the reasons I have given. Most of the classes performing poorly in DPS today are the direct result of the balancing measures that were taken in response to the early days of PvP. Nevertheless, I think most people would agree that -- in terms of class balance -- PvP is better today than it was a year ago.

The pay to play model created the illusion that every MMO made since WoW was something of a relative failure; and this illusion, in turn, created an atmosphere of cynicism and negativity about MMOs in general among the playbase. But the real failure was the pay2play model itself. Once that model is removed -- which I think will be complete in a few years (i.e., all MMOs will be f2p) -- it will seem that the MMO world is filled with one success after another. MMOs haven't been failing because they suck, they have been "failing" because a subscription model for gaming is an oxymoron.

If you knew me you'd know I'm definitely no fanboi of SWTOR. All of those games will be f2play in a couple years. You can quote me on that.

This was inevitable a long time ago, not because SWTOR failed, but because Free2Play represents the future of the industry. Instead of being a bunch of old farts, more conservative gamers need to wake up and realize that gaming just became a little bit more of what it already is: too good to be true.