FYI: You're playing a video game. The competition is inherent; You want to win because winning is more enjoyable. Exponential gear acquisition time makes the game less fun and less competitive.

Uncountered, excepting the fact that my gear is 15% less powerful than yours just by nature of being in PvP combat. Oh, and the additional, completely unremovable 20% decrease from the two classes that do the highest damage.

CM/Sawbones will almost always heal less than Seers because Salvation is absurdly powerful.

Ironically, the problem with people on the internet is that they're shallow douchebags who quote Sun Tzu. I guess we all have our burdens to bear.

You seem to have ignored an important part of my response. Of course rescue is a great ability in huttball, but in most cases it's no better than pass the ball, which every single class already gets. It's no better than intercede. Why not stack juggernauts? A tank+tank guarding each other are almost unkillable, why not use that in every game? A sniper camping past the fire completely controls that entire catwalk, why not have 2 of those for each walk in every game? Marauders have predation which allows their party to carry the ball at faster than base run speed. They have a 30m leap that ignores z-axis to let them get back to a catwalk when there's nobody to pass it to. They have 3 cooldowns that make them virtually unkillable for the duration of chaining them. Why not bring 8 of them and cap with impunity? Powertechs and tank assassins can kill a ball carrier in 3 seconds flat and it's almost impossible to counter. Why not have 6 of them so that the opposing team could never cap? The game is new. It has imbalances. There are plenty of gimmick strategies and comps that give you an advantage in huttball. If you can't see each of them for how they are and instead point out a rather average ability like rescue, you have a severe bias.

I said I don't know enough about the spec as a whole. It's very possible that it's an underwhelming spec. You're taking a single statement completely out of context and ignoring my argument as it stands. Every single thing I said about Smash can be proven empirically. I said that it hits extraordinarily hard. I said that it is 100% reliable in that it's guaranteed to crit. I said that it cannot be countered because it immediately follows an instant cast root with no cost that can be cast on anybody within 30 meters and LOS. These are all true. If you have problems with force leap not rooting somebody reliably then you're in the minority. Call your internet service provider. The game is not balanced around high pings or bugs. If this is so easy to counter I'd like you to name a few people who could counter it. Put them 30 meters away from a Warrior then have the Warrior randomly charge one of them with no notice. See how many times that person can stun him before he uses an instant cast spell. Two people on vent saying "Charge <previously marked target> in 3 seconds" is about as little coordination as an organized group could have. Moreover, I have no problem with coordinated attacks being powerful. If 3-4 people switch to a target and CC their defense then that target should die. My problem is that such simple coordination from as little as 2 people can nearly instantly kill a full health target. Smash is different than other problematic combinations because of its design. Concealment Ops do very good damage but they have no mobility tools. Their damage must all be done from 4 meters, and they do not have 100% crit chance on their abilities. Marks Snipers do good damage but they have a cast time and they do not have 100% crit chance. Deception Assassins do absurd Shock damage, but it must all be done in melee range, requires 3 separate stacked procs to be active and the casted ability itself to proc, it is done in 2 spells, and they do not have 100% crit chance on the ability. Smash does borderline absurd damage, can be instantly cast on any individual target within 30 meters, immediately follows a spell interrupt and 2 second root, and has a 100% crit chance. People seriously don't see a problem with this mechanic as it stands? I'm not asking the developers to nerf Rage specced Warriors. I'm asking them to make Smash a balanced ability and, if necessary, buff other parts of the spec if they're underperforming.

Your argument is completely irrelevant to this discussion. Just because there are other overpowered spec (even if they are more overpowered than you), doesn't mean that your spec is fine. Yes, many specs do entirely too much damage- I can name 4 off the top of my head, but that doesn't mean this issue get a free pass when it comes to balance discussion. I honestly don't know enough about the spec as a whole (nor do I have enough experience fighting them), but it's very apparent that smash (the individual ability itself) is a balance problem right now, and it will only become more apparent as time goes on. The problem with the ability is that it is 100% reliable, hits far too hard, and cannot be countered when used properly. I'm not talking about some idiot that tunnel visions the same target for 25 seconds then crits them with smash. I'm talking about somebody that attacks a target to build up buff stacks, charges to a person who is now unable to move, and uses smash before it is physically impossible for them to react to the charge. Smash is an ability that gives you on demand 5k+ damage to any individual target within 30 meters. What does this mean right now when a competent 4 man team (not to even speak of future 8 man teams) runs 2 or more rage specced warriors? They can kill any full health target within 30 meters in 2 globals. This is impossible to predict, impossible to counter, fairly easy to execute, and completely dumb gameplay.

There's no such thing as open world pvp in this game. Companions ruin any chance of making said type of pvp fun and balanced. As Ilum shows you can fix that particular problem with disabling companions in a subzone, but once that happens it's no longer open world. It's still a cage, just one that you can freely enter without a queue. Semantics aside, how would I fix caged open world pvp? Get rid of it. It's dumb and bad. There will never be balanced numbers (perhaps for select periods of time there will be, but not at all play times), and when it offers rewards then it's always going to be large scale group vs group, which fills no niche for enjoyment. Two groups of people running face first into each other and mashing buttons, where one player is completely insignificant to the outcome of combat, isn't gameplay. If players really like the ilum style of pvp, then there's absolutely no mechanical or gameplay difference into just making it instanced and with a population hard cap... so functionally a warzone. Just to clarify I probably sound as if I think Ilum being poorly designed is a problem, but I don't. I legitimately don't care if there's no open world or even designated pvp areas on planets.

If you're unable to have fun losing then you should stay far away from competitive multiplayer games. In every single one of those games, you're going to win around 50% of every match you play. That's not that bad normally, but you're not guaranteed to win one then lose one. You're most often going to win and lose in streaks, particularly when your population is small enough that you're frequently playing with the same people at certain times of the day. As a seer, PvP became fun around 400 expertise. As a combat medic, PvP was fun when I wasn't fighting people who could competently interrupt. As a sawbones, PvP was never fun and it never will be until they tack the talent tree onto the gunslinger AC.

Funny, because after 6 years of WoW I couldn't name a single pug (that is, outside of known, talented guilds) who could do anything close to what's necessary to win the average huttball game on my server. In reality, the average TOR player is probably about as good as your average <any other game> player. That's kind of the definition of average. From my perspective though, given the smaller population and smaller group sizes, the average player I meet seems a lot better here than in most other games I've played. This could certainly be a cognitive bias though, it's impossible to rank the objective skill of every single player and form empirical averages.

People play reactively to marauders because they're forced to. The game is based in reality, not theorycrafting. In reality, marauders will always do more damage to their target than their target does to them. If we don't use our cooldowns defensively, then we're dead before the marauder has to even think about using his damage reduction cooldowns.

I'm not talking about madness/corruption hybrids- hybrid is the best spec imo. I'm talking specifically about madness/corruption hybrids that go as high as backlash. Backlash competes with Creeping Death and 1/2/3% crit. The only Lightning damage talent you can get with those points is Lightning Storm, which isn't even close to the alternative contributions. You'll get an average of ~2 Wrath procs per Crushing Darkness cooldown--procs which aren't all guaranteed to be usable because they can occur during the same cast of Force Lightning. Once you consider that fact that you'll have to use some of those on Chain Lightning (which I cannot show empirically due to my woefully inadequate math skills), the number of Chain Lightning procs you'll get from Lightning Storm is approximately 4 every year. The math might be off on that number as well, but my estimations show it to be close.

Backlash is an ability that is absurdly overpowered in theory but completely useless in practice. It's not feasible for healers to spec into it because it requires sacrificing Force Surge--Our only ability to restore force. Force consumption is always higher than force regen, and once you're out of force you're forced to die or be nearly useless until you can get out of combat for 20 seconds. It's not feasible for madness sorcs to spec into it because it requires sacrificing damage, which is hard to justify considering what classes they're competing with. It's not feasible to spec fully into Lightning because it is among the worst specs in the entire game, making a strong case for being the worst spec ever. It does less damage than Madness (including 21 point healing hybrids) and it has awful mobility. The spec is designed around standing still turreting a single, awful spell praying for RNG so that you can actually use Chain Lightning. I never tested it for the short time I was specced backlash, but if it generates resolve (and presumably it does) then this is also an argument against speccing into backlash. Generating resolve is fine when the target is on you and you can control his positioning and (to an extent) debuffs, but not when you want to shield another player. In those cases, you're generating resolve from a CC that is almost guaranteed to be broken instantly by AOEs or preexisting DOTs.

DISCLAIMER I very much dislike the idea of rated warzones when you can only queue with 4 players. Furthermore, I see absolutely no reason for them to rush to implement rated warzones with this limitation. If technical problems delay the development of 8 person queues, then they should just wait to implement rankings. The entire point is a rated system is prestige, and there's no prestige in a team game when you can't control the players on your team. Ok, so, it seems like you guys haven't given this complaint more than 30 seconds of rational thought. You're not getting queued with "random" people. You're going to get queued with people who have roughly equivalent rating to you; That is to say, you're getting queued with people of roughly equal skill. You do unfortunately lose the benefit of 8 person VOIP, but so does the other team. While a rating system is ill-advised without an ops queue, it's not some abomination that ruins the game.

This is what happens in every MMO ever. The entire point of an MMO is to have a persistent world that grows progressively larger. If you keep adding new content but you don't lower the investment to reach said content, then eventually you have a game where it would take years to have a viable character. If you have such a steep entry requirement, people stop trying to enter. Your pool of players never grows. Your game stagnates and dies. When you play on the cutting edge of MMO achievement, you assume the risk of "wasting" time. Maybe you didn't know that when you started, but you know it now. Your choices are to keep playing because you enjoy the game, regardless of how much effort it takes to acquire things, or you quit the genre.