Hey, at-least augment your gear and use a Stim before you enter a WZ.

DP
/5char

This is such an idiosyncratic distinction that I don't know why you're making it - meaning it's too small to matter.

The classes that get a bonus from talents to their mainstat obviously want to aug with maintstat, to get the free points.

The minor MINOR increase of damage you get per power point from running all power augs does not make up for that 9% bonus (or 6%, depending on class)

Plus, you're ignoring the crit chance you gain with mainstat.

So all in all...preference preference. do what you want, power or mainstat, just make sure to augment!

Maybe he just correctly assumed that everyone plays smash?

Maybe you should get educated yourself first before assuming someone is wrong. All classes that has 9% main stats bonus should always use main stats augs, which includes PT, merc, ops and sniper. Classes with 6% main stats bonus should also use main stats augs (juggs maybe depending if you are playing rage or veng). The only 2 classes that are better off with power are marauders and sins.

Fyi, 1 power provides 0.23 bonus damage, main stats provide 0.20 bonus damage + 5% for mark of power and 6~9% for main stats bonus. You can do the math yourself.

Also, I understand people who are resisting getting augged as it is costly. People who are refusing to stim do not make any sense. Stims cost virtually nothing (~8K every 2 hours). What ever you are doing (PvP and PvE at any difficulty) it makes no sense to forgo 169 main stats/endurance and 69 power/defense.

So I'm reading over all of this and it seems to me that there's a bit of a disconnect going on.

At the risk of potentially putting words in his mouth, I completely SithBracer's comments (my emphasis, above), but the responses I'm seeing seem mostly to be about, "people can't afford augments, they're too expensive, and we shouldn't expect them to buy augments when they queue up for PvP." But that's not the argument I see him making. Instead (and maybe I'm wrong), it sounds like he's saying that a person who obviously has the credits (shown by his buying a veractyl) chooses to buy an item which he considers useless when he could be buying something which could help his team.

I both do and don't see a problem with this. On the one hand, that veractyl may have been purchased with CC, so that player may not have any credits to buy augments. However, if that person is choosing to spend credits on vanity items when they could be spending credits on items which will make them of more value in a warzone, that is a decision (conscious or otherwise) to say that they don't value other players' gameplay experience enough to put off a vanity purchase until they've improved their PvP stats. I know no other way to characterize that behavior other than to call it selfish.

If PvE contents had no mechanic that allowed players to be kicked and I willingly chose to join a SnV raid in sub-par gear, I would be screwing over the rest of my group. Yet people don't complain about that because there is a mechanic for kicking undergeared players. PvP players don't have that option. Also, while I haven't entered ranked queues yet as I don't feel ready for it, everything I hear about queue times for RPVP on Pot% indicates that they do not have the option (realistically) to queue ranked if they want to do PvP at all. Further, there is no separate reward (that I'm aware of) for doing ranked PvP other than the rpvp comms earned per match; the only daily/weekly rewards for PvP are for unranked.

In short, the system that is currently in place allows PvE players to kick undergeared/underskilled participants, it allows time for leaders to check gear before starting content, and it allows people to backfill into an op/raid/whatever at any point, with players allowed to pause the game and wait for that. PvP, on the other hand, forces players into a situation where a.) there is no time to gear check, b.) there is no realistic mechanic to kick people, c.) there is no way to reliably find people to backfill. In such an environment, it makes sense to me that a player would ask that other players queueing for warzones fill a minimal set of standards for doing so, and it also makes sense to me that another player would get angry at people who willingly and knowingly choose to ignore some rather basic things that would really help them. Unlike in PvE, PvP players do not have the recourse that PvE players have to ensure that members are meeting these minimal requirements, so what does he do? He talks about it on the forum. In short, he may be a bit rude about advancing his point, but I do think that SithBracer has a very good point to make.

Having said all of this, though, I also say that there are a heck of a lot of variables involved here and it it painfully easy for people to misunderstand some of this or just straight up not know what to do. When the forum community (most of whom have read through posts on the subject ad nauseum) can't agree on exactly how bolster works or what type of augments players should use, how is it reasonable to expect players in game to know these things?

How many players actually look at other players' gear, I wonder? How many have ever actually taken the time and out of those people, how many have a clue? Does that make them bad people, or just unaware?

For what it's worth, I previously avoided using stims but spent a lot of time, effort, and credits adding augments because of two reasons:

1. My playstyle didn't always lend itself to a two hour stretch where a stim would be active during warzones. I'd often go back and forth shopping, comparing, and researching. SWTOR would be open (with my main character active) for quite some time while I tried to figure out what was the because Conqueror piece to get at that moment. In such circumstances, the stim would largely be wasted.

2. I have Synthweaving at 450, along with a Cybertech at 450, and spend a lot of time on crafting, so augments, etc., aren't as hard to make for me. As such, getting to purple augments across the board was a viable path. I had about a third of my gear augmented purple, several more at blue, and maybe 2-3 pieces unaugmented when I hit 55.

3. The augments "feel" like a more permanent investment. At least on the orange shells, I know that the one-time cost was all I'd be spending. The stims, otoh, are a throwaway operational expense. Having some background in business, I like to avoid the latter whenever possible. That behavior carries over into my gaming.

Having said all that, though... I am using stims now.

I do a check people gear a lot before WZs. Not necessarily everyone but here are a couple of hints that indicates how skilled is your team:

1- Stimmed people tend to play much better than unstimmed people regardless of gear. It is an indication that the person understand how the gearing system works, as stims gives the most bang for your buck of all gear in all environments, for the effort you need to put to obtain them. In my experience people who are stimmed are also augged and in PvP gear. I typically do a head count of who is stimmed or not and if less than 3 other people are stimmed I consider leaving the game.

2- People wearing conqueror shells. These are typically unstimmed, unauged and do not have full expertise. You should never wear conqueror shells as these you turn in for obroan. If the person is wearing more than 1 of these, they typically don't know wth are they doing.

3- People below 27K HP. These always do something wrong, either unequipped gear or wearing old PvP gear.

4- People wearing EWH, WH and BM shells. These are typically geared and know what the heck they are doing.

5- The more unique the person gear looks the more likely they are highly geared and skilled.

Of course there are exceptions, but these do work.

P.S. I am not picking on you for the stims. Most people play style is to run PvP dailies till they finish it, so they chain que game after game, thus there would be no logical explanation for not using stims. That is why most people who know what they are doing are stimmed.

First, George, I don't know if you're intentionally misspelling varactyl (sithBracer probably is, I recall correcting that spelling to him before in another thread), but just in case it's an accident, it's spelled with an a. If you feel this is "grammar nazi-ing", feel free to ignore this - I myself always hope I'm corrected if I misspell lore words.

PVE is different, because you can choose to queue for S&V or you can choose to queue for False Emperor HM. S&V requires gear - what gear it requires is stated in the quest for S&V (it has "recommended gear" for each difficulty I believe). And unless False Emperor HM was buffed when 2.0 hit, it still has the old tionese minimum. And people in tionese had around 15-17k hp I believe. These both are at group finder at level 55. When someone is kicked from S&V group, the group isn't telling them to stop queueing for pve until they get better gear - they are telling them to move to a "lower bracket" of pve. If you are a player grinding for your pve gear/vanity items/not grinding money at all because you find it boring and feel like doing a little pve, you can queue to "bracket" your gear is good enough. But if you feel like doing a little pvp, it's regs or nothing. There's no "lower bracket" to go to. Kicking someone from S&V is denying them from doing S&V; kicking someone from a reg match is denying them from doing any pvp.
I don't know about you, but denying someone from pvping altogether simply because the enemy might have a smaller number of crappy geared players does also sound preffy selfish to me. Especially since you don't even lose any rewards from losing the match.

Which brings us to my second point: in pvp, you don't know what the enemy looks like until you have queued and joined a match (and possibly played it for a while). Best case scenario, you queued to "False Emperor HM bracket" and got matched with people who also queued for that. Worst case scenario, you queued for that bracket and got matched with people who queued for "S&V HM bracket". Most likely case scenario, you get matched with some people who queued for "False Emperor HM", some people who queued for "SM Czerka labs", some people who queued for "S&V SM, and some people who queued for "S&V HM". So the crappy geared people who queued for the "FEHM bracket" didn't queued with "Good geared people, please kill the enemy for crappy geared us while we sit back and watch" in mind. They queued with "good geared people, please kill the good geared enemies while crappy geared us kill the crappy geared enemies" in their minds. From my experience, there usually is at least one or two crappy geared people in pretty much every team.

In your post, you keep talking about sub-par and minimal requirements. However, what is minimal requirements for regs? Ask that question on the forums, on general chat, from hardcore pvp guild, pve guild, casual leveling guild and bioware emplyee and you get very different answers. Imo, only the last one can be the "right" answer. Even the people in the forums don't seem to agree: some people say the minimal requirement is at least x amount of augments (blue or purple), some people say augments don't matter at regs. This is why I find "minimal requirements" to be mostly an opinion.

You are saying that people that buy vanity items instead of improving their pvp stats are selfish - there's logic behind it, I get that. However, I'd like to ask you, do you think a person should be restricted from buying any vanity items until all the level 55 characters he occasionally pvps with are in full purples? If yes, that would be pretty bad news for people with multiple alts at level 55 or people who mainly do pve and therefore put the costs of pve ahead of the costs of pvp. They'd have to spend quite a long time grinding money until they can buy a single vanity item. This might be okay for people who don't care about vanity items anyway, but these vanity items may be very important to some people. I can only imagine the joy a huge fan of Revan gets from finally getting those millions of credits to buy Revan's mask. I certainly wouldn't have heart to tell him that he has to get all his level 55s to full purple augments before even starting to save for that mask - especially if he has multiple 55s.

Last but not least, I'd like to point out that
A. in pvp, an undergeared/underskilled person might cause a loss, which can make other people annoyed. In pve, an undergeared/underskilled person might cause wipes and not being able to finish the fp/ops, which can make other people annoyed, give you repair bills and cause you not to get comms and gear. I'd say there's a difference in there.
B. There are a different ways of "asking". If you are asking a person to augment their gear and don't start namecalling them or raging at them when they say "not right now thank you", I have nothing against it. If you are asking a person to augment their gear and do start namecalling them and raging at them when they say "not right now thank you", I don't like it and I also would call it demanding, not asking.

George, I do realize this came to be a lot longer post than I was supposed to write (I was planning on going to sleep almost 2 hours ago, lol), and I understand I repeated myself quite a bit. This is because I'd really like to hear your thoughts and counter-arguments to my thoughts. If you don't feel like providing them, that's fine (or if you thought this is just too long to read - I honestly couldn't blame you for that), and if you don't feel like writing "a novel" to this thread in order to respond to this "novel" of mine, feel free to PM me here on SWTOR forums or on the rbs's forum.

TL ; DR
I could agree with demanding people not to queue with crappy gear to regs if there was a lower bracket they could queue to.
I could agree with demanding people not to queue with crappy gear to regs if it was sure all their opponents in every match will all be much more geared than them.
I could agree with demanding people not to queue with crappy gear to regs if you'd get 0 comms and 0 credits for losing.
But since there isn't a lower bracket they could queue to, there are crappy geared people queueing on the opposite faction too and you get full rewards even if you lose, I can't agree with demanding crappy geared people not to queue, no matter if they are crappy geared by force or choice.

Duran'del Here:

There is an excuse:
1. I REALLY wanted that dewback.
2. I can't afford Augs and stims because I spent it all on dewbacks
3. I don't PvP much. I really do not feel like I need to augment or Stim up.

Not everyone has min-maxed, fully augmented conquerer gear. Not everyone mainly PvPs. Some people do PvP for Relics, armor, and vanity pets(That Akk puppy from the PvP items vendor... I MUST HAZ IT!). I personally will not PvP once i get to valor 60 on my 'mando, valor 40 or Obroan Relics on my Op, etc.

Also, if you're saying no one should PvP until they have full conquerer gear, how will they get the comms? What if they haven't PvP'd since they got out of the first bracket(10-29)?

the reason's i go in warzones without augments is because augments are expensive and i don't have that many credits sitting around.... though i do work on it