I prefer some maps over others, but I'd rather keep them all for variety's sake. They're all fun, and any map can seem broken or like it needs to be retooled when a team completely botches its mechanics. For example... That's why you don't let a sorc camp up there. Knockbacks are good for that. Haven't noticed the jitters myself, although op double-rolls sometimes look like black magic on any map. On old Huttball, can they double-roll through the air, or is that a display glitch?

Other people have already addressed why imposing fake-difficulty is a bad alternative. To summarize some explanations, and maybe add one or two more: 1) Fake-difficulty doesn't conjure up the same kinds of psychological responses in the player 2) Having to rely on the suppression of player growth is directly contrary to a major reason people play MMOs--the development of one's character in a social setting is a significant draw 3) Achieving things under false difficulty conditions arguably doesn't make you better at the game, as the only situations you learn to manage are those that aren't actually balanced around any existing player experience 4) The critical element of imposing fake-difficulty--not summoning your companion--effectively means that you can't practice tanking or healing while doing solo PvE content in any meaningful way. Your companion won't be summoned and therefore won't need either. 5) Learning how to better play one's class to cope more effectively with actual in-game situations is a useful endeavor for someone who wants to stick with the game. It's also really satisfying. By way of an example, the first PvP game in which I was able to be an asset after several games of sucking was a really good experience. Learning how to cope with imaginary scenarios is of much less obvious utility. The player who imposes a false difficulty condition on him or herself will always be aware that the false condition exists and could easily be removed. When content becomes difficult only for bogus and self-imposed reasons, it's essentially impossible to conjure up the same kind of psychological response as when the content is unavoidably, actually difficult. If you're a procrastinator at all, you might be familiar with a somewhat similar feeling: Even if you try to impose artificial deadlines on yourself so that you feel pressure to complete things, the background knowledge that a given piece of work isn't actually due will undercut the illusion that the deadline meaningfully needs to be met.

If I'm understanding correctly, you find the gameplay elements of the game uninteresting, yet you continue to play because you enjoy interactive, digitally rendered cut-scenes. May I recommend to you a combination of books and creative writing? I feel like you're doing yourself a disservice when you mess around with SWTOR's overly structured stories and the more-or-less-necessarily repetitive non-class storytelling elements. I don't say that to be a snooty, presumptuous ***** (though invariably it will come across that way), I say it because what you're telling me is that you genuinely don't enjoy the gameplay elements of the game, and nothing in your post suggests some variation will make those elements interesting. If gameplay won't be interesting, why play a video game? Okay, so it's an interactive movie in which you can play dress-up with the digitally rendered doll who most often appears on camera. That's fine and I genuinely wish you all the enjoyment you can extract from a game in which the class stories follow a peculiarly formulaic storytelling structure that ought to shatter anyone's sense of immersion after their first character, but how does a game developer develop a game out of non-gaming? And why in god's name would they want to? You sound like you'd really enjoy playing a pen-and-paper Star Wars game, and maybe you do. But SWTOR is delivered in the medium of a video game. If what it's meant to accomplish or provide consumers isn't tied to the things that make a game a game, then it shouldn't dress itself up like a video game--it's a waste of both the gameplay and the storytelling resources already being and continuing to be devoted to the game's ongoing development.

Quoted for truth. I read through the first couple of pages of the thread and then pages 22-29, which is currently the last page. (Apologies if I missed the killer argument buried somewhere on pages 3-21, but evidently so did everyone else.) From my own impressions as someone who's just come back to the game and from what I've read other people saying, I think it's true that players can get through a huge percentage of content literally without engaging in combat mechanics beyond hitting Ctrl-1 to set their companion to attack. That's a completely ludicrous state of affairs. Like Stradlin said above, that people are trying to defend it is "utterly surreal." A game the mechanics of which revolve around combat that doesn't require the player to engage in combat isn't a game, it's a tour. I mean... It's honestly mind-boggling to me. Gameplay is content, too. Learning to play the game and your character, getting better at it, conquering things that challenged you--that's content. Your abilities and the way they work and the way your class works and the way your class and build and abilities interact with other players--that's content. Rendering that all a triviality until you hit endgame and can do the same PvP and instanced content over and over and over... Do some people really want that? My head is caving in. If you're okay with essentially employing the W key, Ctrl-1, and your right mouse-button to progress through content, what is it you get out of the game? Do people literally just want to watch the story cut-scenes? Do a lot of people play just for that? Because the cut-scenes are on YouTube. You can actually go watch them without playing. You can dodge the screaming monsters in fleet and the inane, lowest-common-denominator political analysis in gen chat on Coruscant and Dromund Kaas by watching someone else play, which is only a tiny step away from walking yourself through it when your companion does all the meaningful work. Something about this game has me hooked so that I keep trying to come back to it, but no game I've ever played has so consistently managed to squander its phenomenal innate potential by completely botching game balance.

While I think there was some repetition previously, I felt like there was enough to do that I was able to make a lot of choices about how I leveled. That kept the game fresh for me across multiple playthroughs. (It helps that I like basically everything--PvP, space missions, FPs, Heroics, whatever--except maybe seeker missions.) Even if I ended up repeating some content, enough time had passed by the time I did that I didn't mind it. The fact that leveling took a while contributed to that, because if it takes a few weeks to finish the class story, the low-level missions won't feel as repetitive when you return to them. Maybe it's a the-journey-is-the-destination thing for me and other people, whereas others like something else. I get why someone might prefer the new system, but I don't understand why the existing XP-buff-with-items system didn't already address the grind concerns of those who like faster leveling. Having said that, I don't really care if it stays as is if they introduce an item to slow XP gain. It might still be a problem for new players who are less likely to go looking for an item like that and more likely to be overwhelmed with having so many abilities so quickly, but maybe since new players won't be used to something else, they won't really notice it.

I'm with the OP, and I'm surprised to see that no one's raised what I feel like is the most obvious problem with a too-fast leveling process: You don't have time to learn how to play your class. I'm trying to come back to the game, and like gsummers above, I just ran a couple of warzones on my new character. Without me expecting it, doing the actual WZs and the associated missions raised me 3-4 levels--so now I have several new or newish abilities to try to get used to all at once. Obviously I can figure stuff out over time (and not pick up the PVP daily, I guess), but the game feels a bit rushed now. What was wrong with offering XP-boost items for people who wanted to speed through the class stories? Why invalidate existing sidequest content when a system already existed that helped people avoid it if they wanted to? A mandatory speed-up to leveling progression feels like such an ain't-broke-but-fix-it-anyway move to me--especially since speeding people up to the endgame content just speeds up the rate at which they'll complain about it being deficient.

I'm a Sharpshooter Gunslinger, and generally I feel like the class is decently balanced for what it should be. If left untouched, I can do pretty good damage, have lots of flexibility in target selection for helping finish people off, and can partially hassle healers. If I exploit range, escapes, and what DCDs we do have, my survivability isn't that bad if moderately pressured. If focused, I typically melt, which seems fair. I think we're meant to be glass cannons, so that makes sense. What can be frustrating are the unequivocally absurd LOS-heal scenarios with sorcs/sages Metthew mentioned above, the death resistance skills of ops/scoundrels, and decent or better sins/shadows generally (but probably only certain specs). I have no experience playing scoundrels and almost none with shadows, so it may just be I'm not as aware of their weaknesses, but from in-game chat and the boards, I get the impression they're both widely considered OP. In the sorcs/sages scenario, I literally don't think it's possible to win that fight 1v1, much the way it wasn't possible for a 50 Jugg to kill my 50 Combat Medic under 1.2. That isn't to say that no slinger/sniper will ever beat a sorc/sage 1v1, just that a reasonably skilled sorc/sage with any access to LOS impediments probably shouldn't ever lose that exchange if starting it with 60% or more health. I think GS/Sniper could be left largely untouched (SS/MM spec, anyway) provided certain other specs are downgraded a bit. However, there is one situation in which I think we're nearly useless: Quoted for truth. I'll concede that, having just come back to the game recently, the 4v4s still feel a bit new, but the nature of Arena fights makes me pessimistic I'll be effective against decent premades. In pugs it's been hit or miss, with some instances of what Arc described mixed in with more matches where I've at least not been eviscerated in seconds. If two sins want you dead from the start, there's about a 90% chance you'll be dead from the start. Or one sin and an op, probably. Otherwise, you're in there with a chance.

I was about to post to report the same issue (also with a screenshot, which I can add if needed). Mine was also on Corellia, as was another mention of this bug on a reddit thread from 2 months ago: Someone there mentions that it happens when someone levels out of the bracket, which sounded like a good explanation... Except that both the OP here and the incident I was going to report happened in 60 PVP. Obviously no one leveled out of the range.

I think I'm missing something because this doesn't really make sense to me. Why wouldn't lower level gear just produce smaller effects? In other words, why would lower-level characters be working with the same Crit percentages (or Accuracy or whatever) as higher-level characters? Wouldn't it be simpler if a level 50 in level-specific gear maxed for Crit Rating just had a lower chance to Crit than a 55 in maxed-for-CR gear appropriate to his own level? If there's a slow increase in percentages for all stats as players level and acquire higher-level gear capped by the practical limitation of a finite number of gear slots and also by limited stats on that gear, players can see and understand their progress in a straightforward way. What we have instead is counter-intuitive--my level 55 main, mostly in new PvP gear, somehow has inferior performance as compared to a level 50 of the same class that I mostly use for running Diplomacy missions (geared in a mix of old WH/BM PvP gear and orange armor pieces with Makeb modifications). I'm happy to take your word that that's standard in MMOs because SWTOR has been the first I've played seriously enough to reach end-game content, but I don't think that the approach feels any less arbitrary in its practical consequences because it's common in the industry.

Thanks to all of you for what's been really useful advice. I get so used to seeing the histrionics on the PvP threads that I sometimes forget that forums can be useful. This was interesting to me: For whatever reason I'd always thought you couldn't cap a node while in cover, but now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever actually tried it. I'm excited to give this a go cause I routinely find myself going for nodes knowing full well I'm about to get CCed by a stealther but hoping I'll be able to respond well enough to survive.

Appreciate the replies from all three of you. I'd backed off of Vital Shot to an extent after reading some suggestions here on the forums, but I'll bring it back against tanks. With Flash Grenade/Dirty Kick, basically I'd been running into the same problems with that as with Leg Shot--the CC resistance--but I knew sins had at least one total CC negator, so I wasn't surprised when those weren't working. I had just noticed that Leg Shot in particular seemed to be resisted a lot, which is why I brought that one up by name. I'd been reading about stacking Accuracy so I've sort of had an eye toward that, although I've mostly just been trying to round off the Partisan set. The back-to-the-wall thing though... I'd started doing that when watching nodes, but it can be kind of impractical in other situations, can't it? Especially considering our LOS-dependency. For example, trying to push into mid on Hypergate or approaching a node on Novarre, we're kind of out of luck, right? (And sadly, considering the number of matches in which pubs have been getting steamrolled on my server lately, those are familiar positions--which is why I'm here trying to make sure I'm not a liability in pugs). Although having said that, I could still try to make more of an effort to use walls.

Alright, I find myself lately having a lot of problems with sins in 55 WZs. I don't remember having that many problems pre-2.0 in 50s WZs for one reason or another, but maybe I just wasn't running into as many good ones. I'm kind of working on leveling a sin on the side to learn more about the class, but I figured I'd ask on here for some advice in coping with them as well. I seem have three main problems in dealing with them. First of all, I have a hard time damaging them. I was told they have a lot of DR to weapon damage so I've tried making a point of mixing in more sab charges and grenades, but as a Sharpshooter I don't have a lot of non-weapon damage options. This has always been the case and as a result I tended not to target them in group-combat situations, but obviously you can't just pretend they aren't there. Secondly, and I feel like this is somewhat of a new development (although maybe not), is that attacking from stealth they can reduce me to about half-health, then restealth, then pop back out and 2-3 shot me. I'm not really sure what to do about that--Defensive Screen melts really quickly and as far as I know Dodge isn't going to mitigate Force attacks at all. Even if they don't do the restealth thing, if you're basically starting a fight with a 50% health handicap, you're gonna have a bad time. Finally, the obvious response--to establish and maintain range--doesn't seem to be coming off as well as I'd like. I'm not sure how many CC-resisting abilities they have, but I get the impression that beyond some across-the-board CC-negating ability (like our Hunker Down), they also have an additional way of resisting at least roots and maybe also knockbacks. I could well be wrong here, but I definitely am not having success keeping range on them. Hightail It + Leg Shot seemed like the obvious way to go, but if Leg Shot isn't working, I'm at a bit of a loss. Any advice would be appreciated, although I want to stay as a Sharpshooter spec. Thanks in advance.

Appreciate your work in keeping this up, especially cause it seems to be pretty hard to find live streams of good gunslinger PvP play.

I've been getting repeatedly owned within single WZs by different people depressingly often lately. Somehow I seem to have gotten way worse in the last few weeks, although I'm not sure why. Stealthers in particular are destroying me. Not really sure what I'm supposed to do when an Assassin pops out of stealth behind my Gunslinger (obviously before the stealth detection builds up), reduces me to 48% health with what seems like one attack, re-stealths, then two-shots me on coming back out-- but I'm trying to learn. I'd talk about times I wasn't on the receiving end of repeat-pastings but as I'm basically terrible now, I probably shouldn't.

Yeah, the frustration thing with hugely imbalanced kill tallies is very real. Someone brought it up on a nerf-heals thread too and basically took the position that if you're in a pug with no healers against any team with 2-3, you're gonna have a bad time.