Howdy Shadows, I've been toying with the idea of getting rid of CS for FiB. Used to play balance shadow all the time until 2.0 for obvious reasons. FiB was such a great tool and I miss it but trading in CS for it would get rid of an awful lot of burst potential. I'll probably try it out just to see but I was curious what you all thought.

Yeah my guardian likes that as well. Patch notes on PTS for 2.0 looked interesting. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=600569

I've been playing since early release last year. I really like this game. Sadly I have said this as well. I'm considering it. I've already pre-ordered so I know I'll be here at least until this expansion. The reason I've been saying that recently though is probably not the same as you or your friends. Mine is because everytime I see patch notes (since f2p) you see more information about the Hutt Cartel and ways to spend real money as opposed to the fixes. Don't get me wrong the amount of fixes are pretty consistant from before f2p. You just have to get through all the garbage to see anything, imo, worthwhile in the patch.

It's got to be the guy on Ilum (Pub side) who you have to rescue for the daily. I don't know how many times that guy has been shot down and rescued. If you kill all those fighters it surely isn't those guys because they are dead lol

-4500 healing. Impressive lol!

I have a bunch of alts and friends making alts so I send my companions out to pick up stuff all the time on my artifice. I end up picking up some of the purple mats on the way and it is not to hard to put up 4 level 31-39 purple quality crystals and make 20k a piece. Thats not a lot of money but it is steady and keeps my friends up to date as well. 27-43ish purple does ok on the market for enhancements. The money is steady like I said but you won't make millions if that is your goal.

I suppose it really is a flip of the coin on adding a new bracket. Personally I think it will probably be a good idea. The problem with a third bracket is once again population. Will there be enough to support it? 55 by itself no real issues on population. 1-45ish again I don't think it will be a big deal. If the number goes up to 50 then you may have a 50-54 bracket which I don't think it would have the population to support that. The reason I don't think it will have the population needed to support it is because of the disparity in gear. Imagine being a brand new 50 going up against a twink 54? Yuck. How many people would want to do that? Perhaps the Mk2 recruit would not be good to give at 45 as it probably make the rest of your leveling pretty meh. Mk1 at 45 with the ability to get some BH gear? At level 50 you get the mk2 and can start earning WH? 10-54 would be even worse on someone trying to figure out pvp than getting whacked on by a 49 twink. 50-55 I think people will hate even more than being a fresh 50 now because of the huge disparity between recruit and WH/EWH. I have no problem with paying my dues as I think that is one of the ways you learn how to pvp better in the higher bracket. Interesting discussion so far I'm curious to see what more people think.

Your right I don't think a new tier set is needed either I was just taking a stab at what may come in the hopes that maybe we can give some input. I thought about a 50-55 bracket. My reasoning for suggesting a third bracket is say I hit 50 on toon X and I get recruit gear (oy yay!). Recruit gear on a new 50 now against a geared 50 in WH (Not to mention EWH) they get pummled. Period. Right now I do it because you have to pay your dues imo. How bad is it going to be as a new 50 facing a 55 that is fully geared out. That will make, imo, new people even less likely to want to try and get involved in pvp. If you don't do any pvp until you hit 55 though, well, too bad for you. Anyways like I said just an idea that I thought I'd throw out and see what might come of it after we kick it around a bit.

Howdy all, I want to start out by saying this is an idea thread not a qq thread. Having said that I notice there are lots of complaints about the gear gap. I don't really think it is that big of a deal at this point but some do. When level 55 is available I'm guessing that BW has something planned with how the current brackets work. Lets face it, a new 50 in a 50+ pvp bracket would just be miserable to grind up when there are 55's geared out to contend with. So I was thinking a tad about how to readjust the brackets so they work. My first take at this is a 1-44ish bracket, a 45ish-54 bracket and a 55 bracket. With that I was thinking BW could bring back the battlemaster gear and let people start gearing that up at 45. You can buy it with regular comms and it is a far shade better than recruit gear that would be given at 45 instead of the current 50. For those at 55 I am guessing once again that they will introduce a new tier of gear. Without knowing what BW is planning I can only speculate but right now I'm thinking make it only obtainable, at least initially until we can observe the vaunted metrics go to town, by adding a comm that can only be obtained in a ranked WZ environment. No trading up for it just straight up ranked WZ's. Perhaps a non-pug WZ to get the new comms? Not sure yet. To be fair I really don't have a problem with the way things are right now but when the new level cap comes out I can see where there are going to have to be some changes made. Hopefully we can get a constructive thread going and possibly give some input on how we'd like to see things come RotHC.

I'm grinding WH gear out now too and am about half way to full WH. While far from an expert I play the MM tree as well. Quite honestly it sounds like you just need some more WH gear. I find when I put up the red shield it is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. You get focused. It happens and you die fast. Something I've done lately is using the orbital strike as an extra defense when I get a melee on top of me. Many times it will back them off for the duration of the strike where you can either re-position or lay into them. Situational dependent of course but when it is off cool down and you don't need it on a node seems to work pretty good. I know there are other snipers here who can say for more about this than I but thought I'd at least respond.

Cool vid. Much cleaner. Some pretty good shadow play too. I'm not a video critic by any means but the graphics in this game are good enough you don't really need to tweak things to much. You can sit back and enjoy the video and see what people are doing. Just my opinion though. Nice work I'll look for new ones when you post them!

Hey Dend, What I saw was pretty good. Like I said I spent more time watching all of the video to see what it was going to do next rather than how you were driving your shadow. I did go back and watch it again trying to focus more on what you were doing before I posted originally. Sorry if I came across as rude totally not my intent. I couldn't have done what you made here and I thought it was cool. I just had a harder time focusing on the shadow play more than would be the norm.

Howdy Dend, Always like watching pvp vids of Shadow's! You never know what you may pick up. You did an awful lot of stuff with the video that I sure couldn't do like the color fading and such. This might be just me but honestly it was a bit too much. I didn't get to see a good shadow perform as I was busy watching what the screen was doing. For me at any rate it was a bit hard to follow at times. Busy perhaps is the word I'm looking for. It was a cool video just not a good shadow video in my opinion. Hope that makes sense and not trying to be rude just thought I'd give you my impression of it. Way better than I could do though hehe.

The only pve gear I would use would be your weapon and perhaps your offhand for the higher base damage. Everything else Mk2.

Good idea. Seems to be a good solution to get some kind of involvement in anything end game really. I think this is more of a longer term solution but I'd love to see it implemented. Longer meaning development time for it. Two ideas I'd like to throw out there for a small short term solution would be: Huttball- How many players on a proffesional sports team all get along? Why not let the factions be intermingled in this one WZ just to change the face of WZ's a bit. Top 5 planets (level wise)- Put a Fort/Outpost on each one way out in the boonies. Let them be taken over and for each fort taken over your faction earns 1% increase in xp. If one side owns one fort no bonus for a maximum of 3%. Adds a bit of a reason to do some pvp in the open world. Spreading them out over 5 planets should cut down on the lag I'd think.