Same here, endless loading screen, also Red Eclipse

From my experience, at most levels of GSF play Gunships with Ion Rail are at the same level as T2 scouts or bombers. Only problems I see is that in TDM: 1) The skill floor for Gunships is a bit to high. 2) There is no reason not to stack Gunships close together. Other games have a risk factor involved if all your AA Units or squishy long range damage dealers are stacked for maximum firepower.

Very nice!

I mostly complain about Tilia stealing my kills. Oh, and about lazy gun ship walls in TDM, like every scout pilot. (Its a union thing)

Interesting Topic. One thing we can only speculate about is Imperial fleet doctrine and the role Tie Fighters play in it. From ANH we know that Star Destroyers are very capable ships. Fast enough to chase a ship class described as a Blockade Runner, while having enough armaments to easily overpower and capture it. Even Han boasts about how he outran a couple of them. So maybe all the focus was on capital ships, dealing with small craft was not really on the radar and therefore the budget for TIEs and pilot training/recruitment was not sufficent when faced with the experienced veterans of the Rebel Alliance in later engagements. So one possible explanation for ROTJ is that even after the Death Star I was destroyed, fleet doctrine still put no great value on having superior Fighters and Bombers. The Rebels upgraded their ships, Imps were still on the same machines as in ANH. So we might have had Aces in mastered ships vs. halfways decent pilots in stock versions

EA has bought the rights to develop Star Wars games. If there is a Star Wars star fighter game, it will be done only by EA, till at least 2023.

The problem with Strikes is more that there is always a ship which would do better in the situation your in. Big dogfight? Scout with BLC. Defending a satellite? Bomber. Area Denial without a satellite or long range combat? Gunship Apart from rare things like a T3 Strike with Charged Plating diving into a 3 Bomber satellite, I never find myself playing and thinking "man I wish I had brought my Strike" *shrug*

Just wanted to say : Thanks for the work you do here

If you want to keep the incentive to do SM raids, just have the last boss drop a fixed 192 token. For example, you can get the Belt Token at Rishi and the Bracers Token at Bloodhunt. That might lead to people farming the good 192 mods, but that would not be such a bad thing IMHO. Or just put the 192 Implant and Relic Tokens here, Ravagers and Temple drop those like candy anyhow

As I remember it, 8 man ranked involved a lot of stalemates. Having a team defending with 7 Healers/Tanks and 1 Mara for the speedboost. For attack afterwards most respec to DPS and switch gear to their second set. Huttball was very often decided by who had the better clicker or macro to grab the respawning ball. In theory you could change the maps and mechanics to make them better for serious play. There were even some very good ideas in this forum at the time, like "make the huttball spawn randomly in one of a couple of places". However the participation was so low, that BW decided to not invest in that part of SWTOR and make Arenas instead. With their focus in 2015 being "Story", whatever that means, I dont see them spending the Dev FTEs on something like this. Would love to be proven wrong though

Bioware is in a bit of a pickle regarding Sins in Hatred Spec. In PVE the self heals are a decent compensation for the higher incoming damage thanks to the comparatively low armour. And the defensive cooldowns are rather important in the current, often melee unfriendly, tier of Ops. Be it Torques fire vents or exploding carts on Bulo etc. Changes here would have to be done carefully, to not make the life of a Shadow/Sin in PVE Ops a lot harder. Their raw DPS numbers are pretty in line with the majority of the DPS classes, so any nerf to a particular ability would have to be compensated elsewhere. That makes nerfing the burst of the spec rather complex, without redesigning the whole thing. And Dot-Spread is something Bioware added in 3.0 to allow every class and spec to deal decent AOE damage. Thats not really something I agree with as a goal, but I doubt they are going to abandon that principle that soon.

Just wanted to say that I very much enjoyed the early look at the changes for 3.0 so far. The streams are well done, informative and you guys come across as quite enthusiastic about the changes. Thanks for doing this

If you up for a challenge, join the Imp side on TRE and help us kill Tillia and the Unrelenting 4 - 8 man premades

That is one of the things which I find very annoying about the whole ship req calculation. There are situations in TDM where the best thing is to stay close to your gunships and wait, not to fly into the maws of the enemy, trying to get a kill on those 4 enemy gunsheep parking between two asteroids. Strangly you get rewarded with more reg for flying to your doom...

My experience is that Ions are great against heavily shielded targets under a satellite, but not so good in open space. They dont work as well as they should because they are in a Strike Frame, which imho is in a bit of a weak spot when you have to get pretty close to someone like a T2 Scout or a gunship. Jousting with Ions can work pretty well, but most ships can simply decline to joust with a Strike. Basically for me : Nice to have on occasion in a domination, still no reason to fly anything with Ions in TDM