What's 121am? And I doubt a group of 8 on vent are sitting around for an hour and a half just to get 130 wz comms.

Good point, I guess the counter-argument would be to increase recruit gear stats, but that horse has been beaten to death on deaf ears.

I think one of the main problems is that the Battlemaster grind (if you can call it that) teaches us that logging in for an hour a day will get you geared in no time. Like I suggested in my original post, one solution could be to increase the cost of Battlemaster so that it takes people a little bit longer. In the long run it would still take people the same amount of time to get all their gear, but it would spread out the rewards a little bit more evenly.

I generally play between 7-8:30 in the morning, it's really my only option of play time. On the Shadowlands there's usually enough people on to get a full unranked warzone by 7:15-7:45. As much as I'd like to try ranked warzones, they just don't happen during my available time frame. I understand I have my own reasons for being unable to use the best methods to get rewards, but I really feel like it shouldn't hinder me as much as it does.

As it is, playing only unranked (I understand things will be slower this way), the only ways to get significant amounts of rwz comms is through the daily and weekly. I may get 30-40 rwz comms from an unranked win and as few as 20 for a loss. Say I average 1 win to 1 loss, that'll get me approximately 30 rwz comms a match. With no daily or weekly help, it'll take 67 games to get a piece that costs 2000 comms. Throw in 1 weekly and 4 dailies (I usually don't get them done every day, I play mornings when queues are a unreliable), I would still need to play 44 games. This might not be a big deal for someone who has plenty of free time (this isn't a rant against people who have more time to devote, they SHOULD be able to get nicer things), but 30-45 games could easily take me 2-3 weeks. It's just not fun for me seeing no progression for such long stretches.

How often/long do you play? I'm not saying that your experiences are unreasonable, I think I may speak a bit more from a "casual" (1-2 hours a day) perspective. It's not so much about doing better than War Hero players (I'm often top damage with only 3 WH pieces), it's about getting that nice little reward to keep me hooked. It's just like pushing at the end of a play session to get that bit of XP to make you level up. It doesn't really make anything easier because by that point you're moving onto harder areas, but it's still something to look forward to.

This is not a post about entitlement or only caring about gear. I do however believe that the frequency of rewards isn't properly tuned. You can easily get a full Battlemaster set in a week or two even if you have limited play time, but then you switch to War Hero and it can easily take two weeks or more to get a single piece of gear. Like I said, I'm not asking that it be super easy to get the best gear, but the level/gear MMO genre is pretty much defined by giving players rewards frequently enough to keep them hooked. I haven't logged in since Friday when I purchased my third piece of War Hero gear and realized how long it would be until I got another. For the record, I do enjoy PvPing for the sake of just playing the game but with only 4 warzones things have become a bit stale. Even if the rewards were purely cosmetic I believe that would be enough for players like myself to keep working at it as long as we were able to get them at a reasonable pace. One solution to this problem could be to increase the cost Battlemaster gear and decrease the cost of War Hero. They don't need to change them by big margins, but enough that people don't start to expect that this is how fast gear comes. Another solution could be to increase the amount of rated commendations you get but don't allow exchanging of warzone commendations to rated. At the same time, introduce a new vendor with various cosmetic rewards. This would also let players buy PvP consumables (as it is, people saving for War Hero really don't have the luxury of buying these and they took them out of the daily quest rewards). My stance will probably get some (or a lot of) flames, but I think my concerns are valid. Just trying to be constructive.

1) Changing the duration was good, there's absolutely no point in continuing to play an extra 5 minutes if the loss is guaranteed by the other team getting to the core in 10 minutes. Sounds like you just liked seeing inflated numbers on the scoreboard. 2) You're actually saying a random winner is better? 3) You can counter the opposite side getting zerged after respawns. Once people start dying, the defenders need to reposition. You don't need all the defender respawns coming to help attack the remaining 2 or 3 attacks on the left. This is user error, not a flaw in the warzone.

The problem is they have to balance stat weights to PvE gear otherwise there comes a point where Operation gear becomes better than PvP gear. PvE gear needs logical gaps otherwise people could be raiding the top level Operations with fresh 50 gear. It's unfortunate that there needs to be a balance between the two, but it just has to be there. Luckily, as someone posted above, a week of being useless and you'll have enough BM gear to be valuable.

If you're leveling a new Vanguard, Shield Spec is pretty fun and very viable (Storm and Harpoon are so fun in Huttball). If you're 50 already, you need to decide what role you really want to play. I was SS for a while but ended up realizing I was trying to play it as a DPS. 1v1 I could pretty much hold my own really well, but as stated above, if a healer is involved, forget about it. I was hard to kill, but there's times you just need to be able to kill something quickly. I switched to Assault and regeared a bit and am pumping out some high numbers and can burst just about anyone down real quick with little to no damage to myself if I pop my cooldowns (which is great for solo capping). Without cooldowns though, just note that we're pretty darn squishy despite the heavy armor. I haven't tried Tactics though, as far as I know though it's still pretty viable.

#stillrelevantat50

It only goes faster in Novare Coast. The other 2 though give no speed benefit for multiple people capping (which isn't to say it's not useful in a few situations).

You say that like you're always facing good players. Not everyone's smart enough to use a targeted AOE to interrupt everyone. Also, sometimes it's hard to get both people with your AOE depending on location. I was in Alderaan this morning and myself and one other person were capping mid. A sorcerer came up and did his AOE knockback but missed me because he couldn't get both of us without coming to our side of the node, which led to me capping. Would a better player have stopped us? Probably, but the fact of the matter is that it worked in our favor. This isn't to say that it should always be done this way. I'll often times peel off in order to AOE stun respawns trying to give my teammates just another second or two that they might need. This doesn't happen enough though, and I think this is really more what the OP is talking about (knowing when to run interference vs trying to cast long enough without being hit).

That's a risk I'm willing to take

Whenever I get a bunch of people clumped up to aoe with ether Mortar Volley or Pulse Cannon, some Consular always seems to come by and uses their aoe knockback, knocking everyone out of my damage radius. This happens a lot. WHY U HATE AOE!?