All these proposals and posts say you haven't been here (SWTOR) for very long. Resolve/CC wasn't much of an issue in old 1.0. It used to be the case that overlapping stuns would have their resolve values added. It also used to be the case that slows and roots also added to your resolve bar. Roots actually added a fifth or a quarter of your resolve bar. A hard stun and a root were enough to fill up a persons resolve bar. Warriors leaping wouldn't always be able to land smashes (because they couldn't forever keep the resolve bar from filling by only using roots). Shadows wouldn't always be able to low-slash spike. Powertechs had to play smarter with their CC because Carbonize + Grapple was a white bar. The CC in this game doesn't need to drastically change as you seem to think it does. All that needs to happen is resolve needs to go back to 1.0.

You can absolutely destroy clickers by passing right through characters (you must be facing an opponent to initiate an attack, so if you are behind them all the time they cant hurt you) Some classes - namely Assassins/Shadows and Operatives/Scoundrels have attacks that only work when attacking from the rear. If you play at a high level all melee fights are usually "jousts" in attempt to shut out classes like Assassins and operatives, and to really force impeccable timing of attacks because you need to be facing an opponent to initiate an attack. By constantly moving you can get into a better position to grab a medpack or expertise buff By constantly moving you can get into a better position to defend objectives By constantly moving you can lure baddies away from objectives while your team-mate caps.

This topic has been beaten to death. It was answered in February 2012 with the following answer: Why should you keybind: More fluidity for many classes Vastly improved performance for classes with Defensive Cooldowns off of GCD Vastly improved performance using the CC-breaker (trinket) More freedom to use the mouse to control the Camera to improve situational awareness Easier to target-swap for bursting through a healer What happens when you dont: For many classes you suffer degraded performance (inability to pop defensive cooldowns fast enough) You appear to have slower reaction time when doing things like "throw the huttball" Degraded situational awareness causes you to miss things like players open for passing the huttball, player count balance at objectives, healer peeling opportunities, focus target opportunities You impede your team-mates What many keyboard-turners and clickers do not realize is that by binding all of your skills and abilities to keys, you gain a lot of free time to use your mouse, readjust, pan your camera. Doing so every 10 seconds gives you a swath of information that makes or breaks a great player. If you're a clicker you need to face facts that a Good player is the best that you can ever be. If you want to be a great player (who carries teams) you need to take the next step and do whatever you need to do to improve your situational awareness. I can guarantee you that the best clicker in this game will not be even close to the level of situational awareness possessed by a keybinder + mouse turner.

All I see here is someone who is clearly out of touch with the problem. I think you don't understand causality. To play ranked matches you need players To get players you need to make them want to play To get players to want to play you need to give them a reason to play ranked matches. What you still don't understand and 4 people have already stated it on this thread is the 3rd bullet. You seem to think everyone who is playing this game or will play this game in the future should think and act like you. Newsflash they don't. If these forums have shown anything is t hat there are disparate groups of people who completely think two opposite things. Summarizing your post (without all the crap): "Players should use skill, pride, gear, and e-fame as motivation to play ranked arenas because that was my motivation in another game". But, you've got to face facts that they don't. The problem aren't the people who currently are playing ranked. The problem is the people who aren't. They aren't playing because its no fun. Its no fun to them because of _________________________________________. You don't seem to understand that games only survive if they are fun. The declining population in ranked only strengthens the fact that something is wrong with ranked warzones only a handful of people are having fun. What damning about the whole situation is people who actually regularly and religiously participate aren't having fun - its a chore.

This reads like someone who hasn't done ranked. You really don't. You play a very limited number of specs, and team compositions. You learn how to face a limited number of specs and team compositions. You rarely get taken into (team) ranked unless you're fully geared and decked out. You don't get much respect - only maybe 100 people will ever know your characters name. Its the classic case someone who thinks they're a celebrity when nobody knows who they are. A better analogy is a star in some random obscure country may have a million followers. The audience is the world of 5+ billion people.

Vanity items won't change much if they adhere to the typical SWTOR vanity-ness. New gear isn't really that cool. In fact I prefer to roll around with old Battlemaster set pieces because vanity-wise they're rarer than anything new that comes out on the Cartel market. The only way Vanity items could drive up participation is if they were something cool like a lightning/fire aura that is permanently applied to your gear pieces (i.e make another module like the "dye modules"), or an add-on to your gear that creates after-images of you as you move. The vanity-items need to be permanent - not consumables (people eventually give up because the vanity-ness goes away and the grind isn't worth it. The vanity-items need to cost a lot - otherwise there will be a very temporary rush at the beginning and then dead participation at the end The vanity items need to be visibly cool - gear isn't good enough because there are old gear sets that are both cool and more exclusive.. The vanity-items need tiers - so people can feel like their making progress to the super-ultra final vanity-effect (which costs a ****-ton) People say the game needs this and that, but they don't understand "people". Bioware's game designer for SWTOR doesn't understand "people". Game developers keep trying to find something "new" and "cool" that seems like fun. But they never consider how "people" think. Just look at other games. "Perfect World" has crappy class balance, and pretty bad PvP (worse than SWTOR). What kept their PvP communities thriving is the fact that their is progression - and it drives deep engagement. They have gear that glows. Gear that is visually distinct. Such gear is obtained both through PvP engagement and money (with which people have invested $20,000+ worth of it).

If they've allocated points into the Carnage/Combat tree they get a 30% AOE damage reduction passive. Combine that with Coak of pain and they're setting at 50% If they need to reduce damage because your bursting them even more, Saber ward makes your orbital strikes feel like sorcerer dots (tiny and insignificant. If they're full Carnage/Combat they've got another +6% damage reduction from a stacking buff. Too many Snipers read melee wrongly. You may be able to face tank an annihilation/watchman or rage/focus marauder/juggernaught. But a carnage marauder will not only be able to face tank you, and rip you to shreds. I can't help but laugh when I play my sniper at all the people who think sniper is a hard counter. Its a soft-counter to the Warrior class, and weak to 1 spec in that class. Don't bother wasting time dropping an orbital when facing a Carnage/Combat marauder - it doesn't work as an area of denial. Roll, knockback, root, flashbang, are your friends (just remember NOT to dot him before using a flashbang to setup burst.

Blizzard admitted it was a failure. Blizzard arguably had much much more experience with Arena's than Bioware has. Everyone I play with quit the game when 8v8 rateds went away. Cool story. Depends on the server. The rest of the remaining community is trying to help - you just don't see it. The top notch players I talk with share frustrations with this game. Classes not being viable, and boredness because their is no variety in the teams and compositions they face (as a result of non-viable classes). No gear to grind No competition to face Boring when you actually face good competition.

Ranked failed catastrophically because it became boring: Boring because wins are easy (for good teams) Boring because loosing is all that ever happens (bad teams) Boring because there is a lack of depth to PvP strategy (stalemates) Boring because there is no variety (always pit-off against the same team and class compositions) Boring because everything is too predictable at high-level play.

Having the Ataru/Carnage marauder with 3 smashers works well. The ataru blooding ability lets them build 30 stacks before the fight begins. This lets the 3 smashers use their 30 stacks of fury on the instant smash while the carnage marauder bloodthirsts. 3-bloodthirsted smashes opening is devastating

Its not bolster. Its the WZ Medpacks and Adrenals. Adrenals is 15% damage reduction, and a medpack heals about 1/3rd of your health. Step back. In PvP start with the assumption you're "terrible". If you start from the mindset that "I'm not a baddie", you will never figure out where you need to improve. Light reading on the spec's is good, but really reading on how you deal damage is useless. Why? Everything goes out the door when it comes to PvP. Unlike regular mobs, players WILL try and make you waste your skills. They WILL try and dodge your attacks. They WILL ruin your damage windows/procs. Their objective is to survive, yours is to kill. PvP is all about utility. How many roots or forms of CC do you have? Do you use them effectively? On the right person? at the right time? You're not yet adept at PvE much less PvP. Stacking rage = bad. Stacked rage means you didn't use abilities or skills which significantly increase your damage output. You should be nearly at 0 rage if you've been using your class to the fullest extent. This is why marauders are a little overtuned. They synergize too well with healers while other DPS classes get shafted. Annihilation was good for suvivability. Not the case anymore since the nerf to their heals in 1.2. Carnage and Rage have better survivability than Annihilation. Carnage's ability to break roots, AOE damage reduction, and 4-6% stacking ataru form damage reduction make it better than Annihilation while it dishes out some pretty mean burst. Rage Shii-Cho and passives provide it with an obscene amount of damage reduction on top of their defensive cool downs. I have a marauder and in comparison to the other classes its far too tanky for its damage output and gap closers. The Undying Rage change was very necessary. The lowbie brackets are all about who has more learned skills and abilities on their character. All of this goes out the door once you hit 55 where everyone has all their skills and are ready to hit all 20+ of them. On many characters I can absolutely destroy people in 1 on 1. PvP isn't about 1 on 1 unless you need to keep someone else busy (harassing the off-node or healer). You need to build situational awareness. You need to know who is around you and what they're doing at all times. I've gotten to the point where I know who has spent what cooldowns during the course of an engagement. From that it is easy to identify the Sorcerer, Operative, Mercenary, Power Tech, Marauder, Juggernaught, etc who really cant stop my onslaught of 25K+ damage in 3-7 seconds. Mechanics (Knowing how to effectively use your class) Situational Awareness (knowing where people are, what they can do) Strategy (Who can be focused? Psychological Warefare) You're lacking experience in all 3. The first is easy to solve. The other two require substantial practice, experience, and complete understanding of other classes.

Ranked PvP for new teams requires a commitment that sounds like you're not ready to take. You will have close to no RAIDing time because prime-time matters when queuing for team ranked PvP. If you're a seasoned team queuing anytime isn't a problem. If you're new to the scene you'll get ROFLstomped when the queuing teams consist of those who've been running ranked PvP/premades for over a year.

I take it you're new here. Auto-crit skills within classes make stacking power/surge better than any other stat combination. You can nerf the stats all you want, but until the auto-crit mechanics are changed, power/surge will continue to remain the best stats you can find on mods/enhancements.

There was a hard counter for the guard. It existed a long long time ago. Its name was Madness Sorcerers. Back in the very very distant pass they had this 30 meter instant 8 second mez called whirlwind. They also had this 30 meter 4 second hard stun. But guess what? They got the nerfhammer applied to it and now you have a guard/heal combo that doesn't have a hard counter. Now to combat guard you need to have good teamwork (1) to keep the healer busy and everyone else piling onto the tank. In the very very distant past, you would have the madness sorcerer keep the guarded healer busy for a total of 13 amazing seconds of no healing awesomeness thanks to the instant whirlwind (with 1 second stun that applied even if you used your breaker). Alternatively you could have had the sorcerer keep the tank busy for those 13 seconds too. Either way one person died. Today's problems are not a result of healers being overly powerful. Today's problems are the result of nerfing a class that played a part in the rock-paper-scissors of healer, tanks and DPS. The counter to the tank+heals is CC. Bioware nerfed the CC-spec.

You need to stop. I highlighted why you're getting a hard beating in 55 PvP. You are getting bolstered. If you're not decked out in 55 gear you're getting bolstered to Conqueror gear. You're just missing the augments which account for close to 5K HP. The reason you're getting beat is not because of gear. Its because you have no clue how to win or play your class. The sooner you realize that you're fighting against experience the sooner you can move on and actually beat people in 55 PvP.