Honestly the # of people that would desire this are there. There is a larger LGBT community here than you think. The problem is the potential social backlash by those who are disapproving causing PR issues for the game. They deserve their romance options, every bit as much as we deserve ours. I might be straight but I can also see straight, and there is no reason they should be excluded. I can see how it can feel like a small slap in the face, one that they repeatedly get from all over the place. That being said, it's a relatively minor issue. But all of us can appreciate how relatively minor issues, left ignored, can bother us greatly.

It's not broken as per patch, just broken as per initial implementation. IE it works as intended just not well. I might get 2-3 schematics in a row, then spend over a week trying for a single crit. If you have disagreements with the change in how quickly you get things? That's fair enough. My disagreement is with heavy RNG completely destroying the usefulness of crafting sometimes, and yet being able to get something else with little effort. If you want to keep it difficult, give me progression or a very slowly increasing % chance as I fail. Don't give me a 5% chance to craft over 200 of something and still not get a schematic while another guy crafts it 3 times and gets 3 schematics.

Funny thing, when defenses and tracer/grav spam are eventually looked at snipers/slingers will likely be top tier DPS. Have a little patience. Sniper takes alot to play well but they can currently still dish out a good amount of punishment. When things get balanced out a little it'll likely be the best RDPS class for many/most things in PVP.

I don't think alot of the baseline abilities for each class should be baseline. If they are so hardcore about not having you be able to spec down multiple paths effectively, they should not give you baseline abilities that would be mainly for another spec. Those abilities should be gained by specing into those trees. Not via talent but via point investment.

Absolutely true. It's one reason there is so much contention atm about healing atm. Bubbles are more useful in that they PREVENT damage and that they are instant and very efficient in general, but healing faces the same dilemma.

Which is entirely USELESS without applying it practically. Ok it fits with the formula, I never argued that it did or it didn't. What I'm concerned about is how much damage does it mitigate practically? My crude analogy failed so I must bring about maths to illustrate my point. Bear with me, it's unfortunately a much longer route. Lets take 2 people, a sorc and a powertech. Lets assume a Gunslinger crits each of these players for 5,000 baseline damage. You go sniper boy!! For simplicities sake lets not include armor pen. A Gunslinger fires and crits for an amazing 4k dmg on the sorceror, aww snap that hurt. Or it would have if it had done more than 800 damage (3,200 hp shield). But now that shield is down and the sorc is primed for pain unless he pre-shielded. The sorceror is running 20% kinetic/energy mitigation. End result: 5,000 dmg * 0.8 = 4,000 dmg dealt. (20% armor mitigation). Effective shield protection: 4,000 base damage was blocked by shield thanks to mitigation. (4,000 * 0.8 = 3,200) Miraculous luck strikes and the sniper crits on the powertech and it doesn't get tagged by the tanks own personal shielding. Lets say he is running 50% mitigation and didn't pick up and %dmg reduction talents. The gunslinger hits him for 2,500 damage, not even breaking the bubble. An already tough target made that much tougher. End result: 5,000 dmg * 0.5 = 2,500 damage absorbed by shield. 700 damage remains on shield. (50% armor mitigation) Effective shield protection: 6,400 base damage can be blocked by shield thanks to mitigation. (6,400 * 0.5 = 3,200). This is why you must know how effective something is PRACTICALLY. If mitigation does indeed apply then higher mitigation reaps vastly greater rewards from a shield. Thus if you consider the shield balanced in respect to a sorc's survivability it would undoubtedly be imbalanced in respect to a tanks survivability. The irony is the counter to such ARMOR mitigation would be to use internal or elemental damage. The buff on sorcs/sages increases internal/elemental mitigation which would then stack with the tanks small internal/elemental mitigation increase. Would take a good set of testing to even see how much more effective, if any (kinetic/energy attacks have higher baseline damage), such attacks would be in that situation.

So resolve not working is the Sorcs/Sage problem? Because fyi, one knockback full blue's you on resolve, just like any other single stun ability the Sorc/Sage has. Any second stun, or knockback puts you at full resolve. Resolve not working is not a class balance issue. With my original post intact in the quote I'd like you to find any instance where I said anything about this being a sorc/sage problem. They get more mileage out of it than other classes and resolve working would be a moderate nerf to them, but I didn't touch on that at all in my post. Merely that the statement about resolve made was incorrect and inapplicable. Overly defensive much? If your only getting 2 stuns out of resolve your doing it wrong. Not everything fills exactly half a bar. Knockbacks certainly don't as I get triple knocked all the time. If you have a skill that does not fill at least half a resolve bar on a character you use THAT on them when they have half a bar. This still leaves them open for a 3rd CC. Considering you then still have your snare that is unaffected by resolve, they really better hope they have force leap up at the exact time they need it or they will fail to do enough damage to take out the sorc before succumbing to CC again. Also as mentioned earlier the root ignores resolve though the kb portion does not. Though few sorcs/sages even attempt to kb after their intial flipping charge in unless someone gets on them and starts hurting them badly when they are not paying attention. Then they hit kb almost every single time lol. The single highest skill cap for sorc is not healing nor is it DPS. It's proper use of your CC as both support and 1 on 1. It's in fact a significant part of the foundation of why sorcs/sages really are so powerful. I'll give credit enough to say that playing a sorc team play WELL is difficult as you have so many tools to juggle. The fact that their true strength is team play even though they are capable enough on their own is the reason so many sorcs/sages come to these forums feeling they are balanced. They really are not utilizing the potential of the class thinking that they are uber healorz or uber DPS. You can be that AND much more.

I wasn't going to say anything in this thread but your horribly wrong. Resolve is broken and even with it working right I have been double PBAOE KB'd with roots, then stunned, then restunned before the duration of the first stun wore off. That chain CC is within the rules of the current system. I've never had 2 pbaoe kbs alone max my resolve. This is all when resolve works correctly, which it simply doesn't alot of the time. I've been pulled/cc/kb/etc well after resolve has kicked in many times. Which is very frustrating when you exit CC and have 3 seconds of resolve left...

It's not detailed information. It's a red herring that is only useful information with combined with a plethora of other information that was not provided at all. It's like saying my car can only go up to 35 mph. But neglecting to mention that was the result of it being out of gas and coasting down a hill.

That's not the case anymore. FPS is also moving increasingly towards progression lol.

This was what the old timers said before gear became an accepted part of PVP, only from the other perspective. Now the jokes on us. What used to be PVP for fun is now PVP for rewards. What used to be PVP in decent gear and you'd be fine in most games is now PVP in X or your probably gonna lose. I hope you realize the cycle of gear based PVP can only go on so long before people start rejecting the carrot in increasing numbers as they gain MMORPG experience, life experience, and continually must farm in new MMORPG after new MMORPG to be competitive. How long before your tired of the same type of grind in yet another MMORPG you've moved to like a swarm of locusts? How long before your life changes and you no longer have the time required to be competitive? You are new. You will learn in time or you'll end up spending your days grinding for gear to "pown scrubs" for the rest of your life with a good chance of being alone. But you've still got your gearz right? Right?

I have to admit it's more fun fighting people on an even playing field than it is getting rolled for a month just to try and be competitive. Also, rolling people who pose no real threat gets boring pretty quickly for me. I guess i'm just not the "kick the kitten" type.

If the damage used to remove the shield is mitigated damage it makes quite a big difference actually. Essentially somebodies survivability is their hp + their mitigation = effective hp. Thus a 10,000 hp person with 25% mitigation requires 12,500 damage in reality to kill that person. 12.5k would be their effective HP. If that person only had 10% mitigation their effective hp would be 11,000. Thus vs mitigated damage the value of protection a shield provides rises sharply in direct proportion to the mitigation. In simple terms: the more incoming damage is reduced the better shields protect you if they are absorbing mitigated damage. The damage mitigation in this game ranges greatly. Passive mitigation of energy and kinetic damage ranges from 10% to easily in excess of 50%. Internal/elementla mitigation ranges from 0% to in excess of 15%. Defensive cooldowns typically add greatly to these for short periods of time. This adds entirely new wrinkles. If mitigation applies it would work very well against a sorceror or marksmenship gunslinger, but poorly against a dirty fighting scoundrel or a pyrotech merc. The difference in kinetic/energy and internal/elemental mitigation. Thus something simple as adding 3.2k hp might be like giving one person 3.5k hp and another 5k hp or more depending on the situation :3.

In that case your test is worthless for PVP purposes. If for example your target has 20% mitigation vs the attack via armor and does 5% less damage due to having less expertise that turns that 3,200 hp shield into 4,000 hp shield. Should this be one of the many fights where every person is not focused into the ground OR it's a 1 on 1 then you likely get 2 bubbles. Up to 8,000 at this point. If the Sorc/Sage pre-bubbles before the battle this can end up with 3 bubbles for 12,000 and maximize the chances of being able to put an extra bubble on AFTER the fight has begun. Any and all sorcs of damage interruption/slowing merely assist this. Even if you assume that you get 1 bubble in 60% of fights, 2 bubbles in 30% of fights, and 3 bubbles in 10% of fights you've changed the average absorption to 1,920 + 1,920 + 960 = 4,800 base before mitigation. So then added with 25% total mitigation that's an average absorption of 6k a fight for that player. Seeing as your own stats are 20% mitigation, and you have a fair amount of expertise, I don't think that's very far fetched at all. The effect would obviously be greater on a target with more defenses. Additionally lets again assume the lowest possible value of 3,200. Not accounting for multiple bubblings OR mitigation. You run into a point with 4 other people. You bubble them all on the way in. Before the fight has even started you have already mitigated up to 12,800 damage. Even if not all of it is used around 10k is pretty likely to be hit. All with minimal impact to your ability to heal/dps. Another point. If your playing team play the bubble has 5-6 second cd. The debuff is 20 seconds from application. This means that you can keep a bubbling rotation on up to 4 people while still having plenty of time for other actions. As long as you've got a memory good enough to play the base levels of simon sez you should be able to avoid the debuff handily. This would allow you to pump out around 8-10k healing consistently (between 4 shields) while using perhaps 25% of your time, leaving you free to heal or DPS the rest of the time. Again this is all without any mitigation being applied which maintains a constant level and spikes with abilities like taunt and defensive cooldowns. One final advantage I will cover for the moment. Tanks. Lets assume for a moment you actually have a tank and they decide "I guard der healorz!! YAYZ!!" You then have 30% damage reduction to the healer, 3.2k shields on both tank and healer (plus mitigation), defensive cooldowns and positioning tools, guard splitting damage against the person your already doing 30% less to...making it almost as good of a value to attack the tank with their higher mitigation/hp, and a healer. Even if the sorc/sage is not heal spec they can heal well enough for this combo to be extremely strong. Pair a tank with a scoundrel/operative or a commando/bh and I think you will find that when played well a sorc/sage comes out ahead. More utility, dmg PREVENTION, healing, decent to good sustained DPS. As you can see, shields scale with mitigation, health, teamwork, and battle duration. Becoming more effective as each is added. Straight healing also scales up with most of these, but not as much and is subject to interruption and cannot gain extra "healing" via mitigation. Fact is many sorcs/sages just do not properly utilize their shields because they do not realize how good they are. You'll see them almost always used REACTIVELY instead of PROACTIVELY except in the case of the sorc/sage taking care of themselves perhaps.

Agreed, they are working to make the butt plundering less painful, though they seem to aim to keep it there. But still, improvement is improvement. I will play for a good while longer at least. Unfortunately the game does have a set timer with such a system. Unless your end game PVP is 100% based on fun PVP encounters that will not grow stale because the cor experience is fun, then everyone will eventually leave because of this. Other games on the horizon merely hasten this. Happy people do not leave unless something makes them happier. They have a monumental task ahead of them to retain PVP players and I wish them luck.