Another vote for Camelot Unchained here. Probably the biggest argument for it is: It' MAIN FOCUS is PvP, no PvE crap, no raiding, no solo leveling etc. Also consider the following: We have seen many "WoW Competitors" being hyped, rise and fall during the last ~15 years. Many of the went F2P or were closed down completely (I'm looking at you Warhammer Online!). There is one game that came out quite a bit before WoW and is still going on a subscription base. And this is Dark Age of Camelot! It is running almost 15 years now if I'm not mistaken and even though it is totally outdated enigne-wise and a real pain to play control-wise (especially if you have played WoW), it is just so good in it's core game mechanism (which is PvP) that people are still willing to pay for playing it. It even outlived it's own inofficial successor (Warhammer Online). Actually, if they would just re-release DAoC with a new enginge and WoW-like user-interface, it would definitely be THE choice for a PvP-MMO. And now comes Camelot Unchained which is from the same designer as DAoC and comes with the same core PvP system, so I have high hopes for it.

PT/Vang have a spammable AoE slow, too (with the slowing utility). This skill also does decent AoE damage AND applies trauma to everyone around. Only drawback is that it has a smaller radius. I think as far as PvP-tanking goes its currently PT > Jug > Sin

I didn't even know the thing with the crit roll, and even without that, absorption is pretty bad, and I'm quite positive that power/might is better in most situations. Just calculate it like this. Even if Sonic Barrier is only 5k damage, you can use it every 12 seconds on CD. 5/12s is just a bit over 400 dps mitigated. Something like 40% shield chance/30% absorption grants you only between 10-12% additional mitigation depending on enemy crit chance, so you need to be damaged constantly for around 4.000 dps to make the shield as effective as Sonic Barrier in terms of defense. On top of that comes Sonic Wall. I'm not exactly sure how the scaling is for shield absorption vs. power, but I'm quite confident that power comes out on top if you add up all the effects it has on mitigation. You also get more damage from that even if that is not your primary focus.

One of the major problem seems to me that the defensive stats are kinda weak actually. If you shoot for 40% shield chance/30% absorb you only have an effective 12% additional absorption. This does not even work against all damage types iirc. You should also have almost 40% armor absorption, which further reduces the effectiveness of absorb stats, because, on average you only absorb 12% of the 60% that go through your armor, which is only 7.2% damage reduction. Armor doesn't work against internal/elemental damage, but shields don't work against that either (or am I mistaken?). I think the major important stat for defense is Endurance. The absorb stats can probably be neglected in favor of a higher damage potential.

Boosting all dps classes to crazy levels is definitely NOT the answer. I have always been of the opinion that ANY burst should require some sort of preparation. The ability to just unload your burst instantly at the start of the fight with no restrictions is just really really BAD game design (which has been proven a lot of times in WoW arena). That said. If anything then Mara and PT have to be brought down to the level of other DPS. In my opinion there should be four categories of DPS in an MMO: 1. Ranged Burst DPS: Has high burst damage but is restricted by line of sight and having to stand still to unload their burst (aka having cast times), mage in WoW would fill that role 2. Ranged Pressure DPS: Has a high damage uptime due to many instant spells, also higher mobility compared to number 1 but very low burst damage, DoT warlocks in WoW are an example 3. Melee Burst DPS: This one has strong burst damage but like the ranged DPS has a low uptime on the target. In case of the melee this is caused by having problems with being kited or controlled. Rogues in WoW currently fill that role. 4. Melee Pressure DPS: This one has high sustained damage but low burst. The high sustained damage comes from having very good distance closing abilities. DoT Death Knights in WoW are an example of that. There are always balance problems if some class falls into more than one of those categories, which means having high burst without being restricted by LOS or kiting. Additionally ANY sort of burst should require some setup (like 2-3 GCDs). Otherwise the restrictions of the burst classes would not do anything because you could unload your burst at any moment if you have uptime on your target for just a short time. That said, Marauders and Pyros just have it to well with having burst AND very high uptime on the target. The classic MMO design is usually that the rogueish characters are the melee burst DPS, the warrior type characters are melee sustained, the mage characters are ranged burst and the warlock characters are ranged sustained dps. In SWTOR the archetypes are a bit scattered around the specs so most DD classes have a burst and a sustained spec. Imo Pyrotech should actually be sustained DPS because it has some focus on DoTs and high uptime because of the ranged instant spells. However burst is clearly too high for this spec. On the other hand Marauder carnage should be burst imo (because Annihilation is the sustained spec). Thus, it should have lower mobility than the other trees. But with its roots and Force Camouflage breaking CC on a quite low cooldown this is clearly not the case. However classes like Concealment Operative and MM Sniper are quite well balanced actually. They both have strong burst but have issues with uptime (sniper because of being stationary and line of sight issues, operative beceause of mobility). This is how it should be.

I would agree on the opinion that balance is only obtainable if you have a good 1v1 balance. Or to say it in other words: The addition of any class has to add the same amount of power to the team. When I read Blizzard's statement about dropping support of 2v2 arena, because: "We need to balance healers to heal against 2 dps in 3v3!" it really became obvious to me that they really have absolutely no clue about PvP. This statement in itself meant they want to make healers stronger than dps on a 1on1 basis, which is totally the wrong way. Another solution is to incorporate a really heavy rock-paper-scissor system. However, that system usually also implies quite heavy restrictions for group compositions, because you need a certain balance of the available roles. That said, balancing 1v1 has nothing to do with balancing around duels. The point is really that the addition of class X to a team has to add the same amount of power as the addition of class Y to a team, and almost any pvp game I know has made to mistake of making healers a stronger addition in most cases than DD's. That's why I'm really interested in the GW2 approach now, which is to just remove that f***ing class roles altogether.

Yep, usually you only get into trouble when focused by more than one enemy. But, so what, if you're outnumbered you're supposed to lose if your enemies are not totally stupid. You need the help of a healer or tank in that case, that's what they are for. That said. None of the other ranged DD's really has better tools to survive being focused by several enemies. Only the melee DD's, especially Marauders, have good anti-focus tools. But still, in this game the main anti-focus strategy ist the possible doube-protection of being healed by a healer and guarded by a tank, preferrably at the same time.

As far as I understand it, there will be ratings and rankings. So you're not playing for gear but for getting the top spot in some ranking. Maybe it's not activated yet because... which indicates that there is a transition phase in which there are no active ratings yet. But there will definitely be ratings. I really like the idea that you don't play PvP for items but for points and ratings instead, maybe they will also introduce titles or bragging items if you achieve certain ratings like they did in WoW.

The real solution to save PvP from baddies is to give all people the same gear so the bad players can't win by just playing longer and getting superior gear to fresh lvl 50 players. I have to second the opinion posted some posts above, I really can't understand the desire to have a gear war in PvP. I blame the developers of WoW to bring that **** of a system into PvP. The real PvP games like Guild Wars or Dark Age of Camelot have either equal gear for all players (GW) or a much less steep gear curve (DAoC before ToA that is). The wannabe successor of DAoC which is Warhammer Online was partially ruined because of their totally messy gear curve, which was inspired by WoW and makes starting PvP with a character in leveling gear an absolute pain in the ***.

Guild Wars 2 will fix it!

Its always funny for me how it seems that so many people think of PvP as a solo game. Sorcs are very powerful in only one aspect of PvP, and that is solo play. A Sorc with the standard 0/13/28 spec is a jack of all trades, but master of nothing. This makes the class very strong in 1v1 and solo WZ play, but this is not the main focus on PvP. In real group PvP Sorcs encounter quite big problems. Their damage, escpecially their burst, is actually lower than that of other DPS class, and in group play, it's not DPS that kills, but burst. Also, their healing is much lower than that of pure healing classes and gets easily outdamaged in group vs. group situations. If 2 DPS Sorcerers for example, are up against a target that is getting healed by a skilled healer, chances are very low that they will get the kill. This is totally different for 2 Gunslingers or 2 Marauders. I bet if they ever implement arenas in SWTOR, you will see very few DPS Sorcerers in the top teams.

To add something: Another interesting spec system is that of Guild Wars, which is a quite interesting approach to balance. In GW your are limited to 8 abilites, which however, you can basically choose freely among all abilities available. This creates an extremely large number of possible builds. The balance goal in this game is not to make all specs equal in strength, but just to make sure every ability has one or several counters. This way, sometimes builds emerge that are considered OP, but it is always possible to just design another build that utterly destroys this OP build, so balance is actually kept by the player community. You can see a similar "balance design" in WoW Arena. Often there emerge some FOTM arena comps that are really strong. But quite soon, players start to form teams that are not good in general but specifically good at beating just that one strong composition. However, this is not as dynamic as in GW, because in WoW you can't freely change your class, while in GW you can freely change all your abilities.

The talent tree design, which is obviously inspired by WoW, is imo the most stupid specialization design around. All from the beginning this design is always a "you think you have choices, but you don't"-design. They only reason why hybrid specs are/were viable in both WoW and SWTOR is actually bad design of the 31 point talents. Actually, it pretty much doesn't matter if they force you to go fully into a tree by tailoring the 10pt+ talents towards their own tree or by making the 31pt talents so strong that they are obligative to be viable, or (like WoW) directly force you into the 31pt talent. By design, the choice between going hybrid or going fully into a tree is basically, the 31pt talent of one tree vs. the 11pt talent of another tree, or the points 25-31 of one tree against the points 11-16 of another, and so on. If the design proclamates that talents deeper in the trees should be more powerful than the early ones, than there is no choice in reality. If, on the other hand, the design doesn't proclamate this, the whole design of structuring the specialization into trees is unreasonable. The reason for this is quite clear for me. It is much harder to balance like 70 possible builds vs. balancing only 24. They force you into one tree while keeping the illusion of choice. In WoW they have recognized this and in the next expansion they will completely remove the trees for that reason. Many people complained that speccing is simplified by this, but they don't recognize that specialization in WoW is currently even more simplified, the tree structure just implies an illusion of choice and the new structure openly shows that there is actually only a choice between filler-abilites, which don't have much impact, at least in pve. Imo, the best spec design in the MMO world is still that of Dark Age of Camelot. For those who don't know. In this game the talents deeper in the trees are more powerful, but also cost more than the lower talents. In SWTOR and WoW every talent costs 1 point. In DAoC, the first talent costs 1 point, the second one costs 2 points, the 3rd one 3 points. So in this game there was the option to go fully into one tree and almost completely negleting the other trees, or the option to go 2/3rds into two trees. In SWTOR the respective system would be to be able to go 31/10 or to go something like 25/20, so the choice is now the talents 25-31 of one tree against the talents 11-20 of another, which is not atomaticlly won by the first option even though the deeper talents should be stronger by design.

I'm afraid you will be disappointed with both of them. First, Death Field is not the main ability for Madness for either of them, it does good damage but is on a 15sec CD. Secondly, the healing on it is barely noticable to the degree that you would probably not notice it if they just removed it. At lvl 50 it heals for ~1% of your total life, that every 15s is basically nothing. If you want self-healing you should either go for Sorcerer and use the castable heals, even the small castable heal heals for almost 10% of your life, or you should go Darkness Assasin and spec into Harnessed Darkness, which gives you a 9% heal on Force Lightning after every 3 casts of Shock. As Darkness spec getting 3 shocks takes about 15s, so its up as often as Death Field but heals for 9 times the value.

Did some serious number crunching in the past on stats and here are some things to note that I came up with doing that: For average DPS Power/Cunning are usually better than surge/crit Surge has quite rough diminishing returns which generates something like a "soft cap" at 80% crit damage (around 230-250 surge) Surge hard caps at 100% crit damage (around 1150 surge if you round to full digits) The diminishing returns on surge are so strong that there is even a point where power/cunning not only increases dps more than surge but also crit damage (this is at about 600 surge, going higher than that in surge over power or cunning gives you NO benefit at all). Crit rating also suffers from diminishing returns and should not be raised higher than ~400 before you get seriously high power/cunning (seriously high is around 1700) In terms of pure damage basically all offensive stats outperform Expertise As far as crit rating/accuracy goes the Battlemaster set is pretty much ideal as it puts you at around 100% hit chance from accuracy and at around 400 crit rating where rough diminishing returns start to kick in anyway. The only stat the set is really lacks is surge. But as stated earlier ~230 surge is usually enough. You can get 102 surge by using battlemaster implants. So in the end you are only lacking about 120 surge. To get that last points of surge you can do what you've already done or what the previous poster suggested, use lower level gear or get similar level pve/crafted gear. Even if you go without that 120 surge its not THAT big of a hit, especially if you use the surge adrenal for bursts. Just as an example, with 120 surge your crit damage is 166,88%. With the adrenal you're at 191,95% (15% increase by adrenal). If you had 230 surge your crit damage would be 180,26%. Withe the adrenal you're at 196,80% (9% increase by adrenal) If you had 700 surge, which you would reach if you could replace all power/accuracy with surge your crit damage would be 197,04% and adrenal would put it at 199,52% (1% increase by adrenal). So the 580 surge going from 120 to 700 increase your crit damage by ~19%. In comparison (from my damage calculation spreadsheet), an additional 580 power would increase ALL your damage (including crits) by around 23%.