I guess this can explain why I feel like 95% (a lil more than you) of pvpers are not smart when it comes to pvp =p

 

I must admit its amusing to see that I think so differently than most of you. Then again, I've always said my strategic mind is my best asset when it comes to pvp; hybrid clicking does have its weaknesses.

Successfully using a mechanic that shouldn't even be allowed, dps specs using guard, does not give you a "strategic mind".

I am impressed with that Jugg healer.

 

That Jugg healed for more than both mercs combined, and nearly as much as the sorc dps.

Always makes me have a little laugh when I out heal classes with dedicated healing abilities on my just or sniper.

What makes me nearly cry is when my dps Sorc out heals our healer and all I was doing was healing myself

For target priority, assuming equal skill and gear, I generally go for the squishest player first while focusing crowd control on the strongest player. As far as classes go in terms of difficulty to kill them, I'd say from easiest to most difficult: Powertech => Juggernaut > Operative => Assassin > Sorcerer > Marauder => Sniper > Mercenary

Operatives and Assassins are actually pretty easy to kill with good coordination, though Operatives are easier to kill than Assassins by a slight margin. However, this list assumes everyone is of equal skill, so an unskilled set of team mates who lack the knowledge of certain PvP mechanics will almost always fail to handle an operative properly, which might lead to operative being further to the right of that list. Assassin is probably close to Sorcerer as far as the ability to kill them, however I would say Sins are more important to kill since they can bring more utility and burst than Sorcerers. Basically, in my mind, my kill order works like this: If one of their team mates were to die, which one would it have to be to weaken the enemy team's overall ability to win the game. With this mindset, it's sometimes better to utilize an unorthodox kill order if it means gaining more leverage for your team relative to doing the basic "kill weakest advanced class then strongest" strategy.

My game plan looks something like this:

Assess the enemy team composition, Sap the strongest player and open on the weakest, while utilizing one or two DCDs so that most of the enemy's heavy hitting abilities are taken by me instead of my team.

If you play a class that can mitigate a lot of damage with various mechanics, it's best for you to open for your team. This will give you the inherent advantage of having the enemy team blowing their major cooldowns on you instead of your team mates, meaning they can focus more on DPS instead of surviving.

You almost always want to utilize your Focus Target Modifier to mezz out the strongest player *or* the healer, depending on the enemy team comp. For example, If the enemy team composition consists of 3 dps, 1 healer, I will opt to mezz out the healer whenever I can see they have no resolve on my focus target bar and that I have at least a mez available. This means also paying attention to the healer's cast bar to use Focus Target Modifier to interrupt their hard casts.

Kill priority should also depend on the map. On a map with a lot of LoS and choke points, I will simply LoS rDPS while focusing my kill potential on melee DPS. This is more effective than mezzing them since as a melee dps, I can continually run around LoS obstacles while still utilizing 10m range abilities to deal damage to my kill target. This requires a good sense of positional awareness though and you need to keep track of all of your enemy's rDPS to do this successfully. If they have 2 ranged dps, kite one and mez the other.

I've actually put a lot of thought into this before and considered making a video or something, but I feel like it would just be me rambling incoherently about strategies like a play book, and I'd probably come off as a crazy nut job who takes the game too seriously, lol. But I feel like there's not very many good resources for advanced Ranked strategies since a lot of it is stuff you pick up along the way, but not necessarily share with others, due to the competitive nature of Ranked.

 

I must admit its amusing to see that I think so differently than most of you. Then again, I've always said my strategic mind is my best asset when it comes to pvp;

This is why I prefer objective pvp. I like the strategy and tactics needed to out smart or out play your opponent using combat skill and also my mind.

I’ve always been into strategy games that require more than button mashing. I’ve never been really great at playing button mashing games on consoles because I’m dyslexic and my fingers are too. It’s why I mainly play PC games.

The console games I’ve always liked have been things like Mario, racing or flight simulators or strategy and building. FPS are ok if they are strategy based like real combat, but I have no interest in games that are like doom. Even Overwatch is a bit too much like one of those console FPS for me to like. I’m also an avid chess player when I can find someone who will still play me (I don’t lose that often).

I really liked WoW pvp in the early years of it and swtor pvp (R.I.P. 8v8 ranked). I still enjoyed reg objective pvp till the dps farmers made it all about numbers instead of actually winning. Since 5.0 I’ve played less and less of this game. Going from 50-70 hours a week to 4-5 hours a week is a massive reduction in play time.

For target priority, assuming equal skill and gear, I generally go for the squishest player first while focusing crowd control on the strongest player. As far as classes go in terms of difficulty to kill them, I'd say from easiest to most difficult: Powertech => Juggernaut > Operative => Assassin > Sorcerer > Marauder => Sniper > Mercenary

 

Operatives and Assassins are actually pretty easy to kill with good coordination, though Operatives are easier to kill than Assassins by a slight margin. However, this list assumes everyone is of equal skill, so an unskilled set of team mates who lack the knowledge of certain PvP mechanics will almost always fail to handle an operative properly, which might lead to operative being further to the right of that list. Assassin is probably close to Sorcerer as far as the ability to kill them, however I would say Sins are more important to kill since they can bring more utility and burst than Sorcerers. Basically, in my mind, my kill order works like this: If one of their team mates were to die, which one would it have to be to weaken the enemy team's overall ability to win the game. With this mindset, it's sometimes better to utilize an unorthodox kill order if it means gaining more leverage for your team relative to doing the basic "kill weakest advanced class then strongest" strategy.

 

My game plan looks something like this:

 

Assess the enemy team composition, Sap the strongest player and open on the weakest, while utilizing one or two DCDs so that most of the enemy's heavy hitting abilities are taken by me instead of my team.

 

If you play a class that can mitigate a lot of damage with various mechanics, it's best for you to open for your team. This will give you the inherent advantage of having the enemy team blowing their major cooldowns on you instead of your team mates, meaning they can focus more on DPS instead of surviving.

 

You almost always want to utilize your Focus Target Modifier to mezz out the strongest player *or* the healer, depending on the enemy team comp. For example, If the enemy team composition consists of 3 dps, 1 healer, I will opt to mezz out the healer whenever I can see they have no resolve on my focus target bar and that I have at least a mez available. This means also paying attention to the healer's cast bar to use Focus Target Modifier to interrupt their hard casts.

 

Kill priority should also depend on the map. On a map with a lot of LoS and choke points, I will simply LoS rDPS while focusing my kill potential on melee DPS. This is more effective than mezzing them since as a melee dps, I can continually run around LoS obstacles while still utilizing 10m range abilities to deal damage to my kill target. This requires a good sense of positional awareness though and you need to keep track of all of your enemy's rDPS to do this successfully. If they have 2 ranged dps, kite one and mez the other.

 

 

I've actually put a lot of thought into this before and considered making a video or something, but I feel like it would just be me rambling incoherently about strategies like a play book, and I'd probably come off as a crazy nut job who takes the game too seriously, lol. But I feel like there's not very many good resources for advanced Ranked strategies since a lot of it is stuff you pick up along the way, but not necessarily share with others, due to the competitive nature of Ranked.

Thanks for the info. Everything you said makes logical sense and I try to do exactly the same (but obviously not executed as well).

I would probably watch a video if you made one because the strategy side would interest me.

Even in objective pvp you pick up or develop strategies for dealing with multiple types of scenarios and they can be hard to explain properly because they shift depending on the situation of the whole match (not just what you are doing personally).

I often roll my eyes when I see the same vanilla tactics at the start of every WZ and people telling me to L2P because I won’t follow them. Then I have a giggle when we win because if it wasn’t for my strategy at the start, we would probably have lost badly.

But of course I get those same vanilla dps farmers telling me I’m bad because I didn’t get the same dps as them. It doesn’t matter that I scored 6 times in HB and carried them or that my delaying tactics holding up 3 players at a node because my team won’t respond to calls or my delaying tactics helped them cap the other node.

I know Arena is different and seeing really good players like yourself using strategies is awesome to watch.

I've actually put a lot of thought into this before and considered making a video or something...

I also would watch a video, for whatever that's worth. I remember your sin/shadow guide, and some of the tips in there I still try to emulate (and usually fail ). RIP the phasewalk trick though. I'll admit, I really don't understand arena strategy.

In 8s I at least (usually ) understand why a turn around happens; what one side did wrong or the other side did right to flip the momentum. But in an arena, I'll be in a game where we get crushed in round 1, and then round 2 it reverses, and I'll have no idea, really, why it went different the second time. Once in a while my team might purposely change up our strategy, or I can see that the other side does... but usually it looks like the same thing is happening to me, except at the end the other side now has 4 people standing. And then for round 3 I don't really know what to try to get the desired result.

I often roll my eyes when I see the same vanilla tactics at the start of every WZ...

I refer to them as "happy meal strategies".

VS: all left, stealth right!

"oh, you mean happy meal combo #1".

For target priority, assuming equal skill and gear, I generally go for the squishest player first while focusing crowd control on the strongest player. As far as classes go in terms of difficulty to kill them, I'd say from easiest to most difficult: Powertech => Juggernaut > Operative => Assassin > Sorcerer > Marauder => Sniper > Mercenary

 

Operatives and Assassins are actually pretty easy to kill with good coordination, though Operatives are easier to kill than Assassins by a slight margin. However, this list assumes everyone is of equal skill, so an unskilled set of team mates who lack the knowledge of certain PvP mechanics will almost always fail to handle an operative properly, which might lead to operative being further to the right of that list. Assassin is probably close to Sorcerer as far as the ability to kill them, however I would say Sins are more important to kill since they can bring more utility and burst than Sorcerers. Basically, in my mind, my kill order works like this: If one of their team mates were to die, which one would it have to be to weaken the enemy team's overall ability to win the game. With this mindset, it's sometimes better to utilize an unorthodox kill order if it means gaining more leverage for your team relative to doing the basic "kill weakest advanced class then strongest" strategy.

 

My game plan looks something like this:

 

Assess the enemy team composition, Sap the strongest player and open on the weakest, while utilizing one or two DCDs so that most of the enemy's heavy hitting abilities are taken by me instead of my team.

 

If you play a class that can mitigate a lot of damage with various mechanics, it's best for you to open for your team. This will give you the inherent advantage of having the enemy team blowing their major cooldowns on you instead of your team mates, meaning they can focus more on DPS instead of surviving.

 

You almost always want to utilize your Focus Target Modifier to mezz out the strongest player *or* the healer, depending on the enemy team comp. For example, If the enemy team composition consists of 3 dps, 1 healer, I will opt to mezz out the healer whenever I can see they have no resolve on my focus target bar and that I have at least a mez available. This means also paying attention to the healer's cast bar to use Focus Target Modifier to interrupt their hard casts.

 

Kill priority should also depend on the map. On a map with a lot of LoS and choke points, I will simply LoS rDPS while focusing my kill potential on melee DPS. This is more effective than mezzing them since as a melee dps, I can continually run around LoS obstacles while still utilizing 10m range abilities to deal damage to my kill target. This requires a good sense of positional awareness though and you need to keep track of all of your enemy's rDPS to do this successfully. If they have 2 ranged dps, kite one and mez the other.

 

 

I've actually put a lot of thought into this before and considered making a video or something, but I feel like it would just be me rambling incoherently about strategies like a play book, and I'd probably come off as a crazy nut job who takes the game too seriously, lol. But I feel like there's not very many good resources for advanced Ranked strategies since a lot of it is stuff you pick up along the way, but not necessarily share with others, due to the competitive nature of Ranked.

I agree with almost all of this, but some of it seems based on theory, not actual ranked games. Your section about ops is a good example. Sure, with coordinated nets/hardstuns, you can kill an op more easily than a mara, but is that a realistic expectation for 95% of solo ranked teams? No. Trying to lay out complex strategies that involve too many moving parts does not work in solo ranked, even if on paper they are the superior strats. It is far better to simply set a primary target, secondary target, and a cc target if appropriate, so that your teammates have clear goals for what they have to do. If you try to make up too much stuff on the fly, given the fact that there is virtually no communication possible mid-round in solos, you are often going to lead to damage split onto 3 enemies while your teammates drop one by one.

I refer to them as "happy meal strategies".

 

VS: all left, stealth right!

 

"oh, you mean happy meal combo #1".

LMAO. Thanks for making my morning

I agree with almost all of this, but some of it seems based on theory, not actual ranked games. Your section about ops is a good example. Sure, with coordinated nets/hardstuns, you can kill an op more easily than a mara, but is that a realistic expectation for 95% of solo ranked teams? No. Trying to lay out complex strategies that involve too many moving parts does not work in solo ranked, even if on paper they are the superior strats. It is far better to simply set a primary target, secondary target, and a cc target if appropriate, so that your teammates have clear goals for what they have to do. If you try to make up too much stuff on the fly, given the fact that there is virtually no communication possible mid-round in solos, you are often going to lead to damage split onto 3 enemies while your teammates drop one by one.

Actually, it's not really based on theory, it's based on personal experience. Although, I will concede that now it's not really applicable information anymore. For example, back in Season 4, when the game's population was in a much better state than currently and we still had some of the more prominent players in ranked (Mosh, Double-Bubble, Venrin, Lukewarm players, etc), the overall skill level in any given ranked match was MUCH higher than it is currently. So these were, in fact, strategies that were not only employed, but were successful in shutting down enemy players of these advanced classes. Personal mannerisms and toxicity aside, Mosh was known for being an exceptionally powerful Operative player. However, he still played a class that had a very strong weakness, which is what I posted in my previous post which you call theory. A lot of us were able to shut Mosh down when he was on the enemy team and he would rage pretty hard, but we were only able to shut him down because we knew of the weakness of the advanced class, and exploited it.

The fact that this is now considered merely theory and isn't a consistent enough strategy to work in solos is really more of a testament to the current state of the playerbase participating in ranked, not the difficulty of the strategy. The strategies that I've explained are simple, even in practice, but there is a baseline skill requirement to employ those strats consistently enough to get results and honestly many of the current solo players lack those skills, mostly because many of the really good players have left, meaning the new wave of solo players are only facing other players of equal skill. Which is good for a positive playing experience, but negative for growth, as it leads to a player plateauing at a much lower skill level than they would other wise be able to obtain by playing against better players. Another reason that I personally believe is a much larger issue, is the lack of real end game information for Solo and Group Ranked for this game. There are a lot of nuances to both forms of Ranked which aren't explained well or expanded upon because the competitive nature of the game makes people want to hoard their secrets and keep their strategies to themselves. This is good for personal growth and ranks, but bad for the general population of future PvPers. It's part of the reason that I'd love to make a video series on these nuanced strategies; so that more players become more knowledgeable and better over time, leading to a more competitive and fun Ranked experience.

I actually tried to do something like that years ago with

Anyway, I don't want to go off onto a tangent and I apologize for the long winded post. But to summarize, my point is merely that my personal strategies weren't always just theories, they were actually used in previous seasons when the overall skill level of solo ranked was higher than the current season, purely because of the players who are currently piloting certain advanced classes relative to the caliber of player piloting the same advanced classes in the past.

 

My game plan looks something like this:

 

Assess the enemy team composition, Sap the strongest player and open on the weakest, while utilizing one or two DCDs so that most of the enemy's heavy hitting abilities are taken by me instead of my team.

what's surprisingly difficult in yolo is getting ppl to make use of that mezz. I'm not making this up: I've had ops roll as fast as possible out of the gate, sap the guy he's supposed to then open on the burn target while the rest of the team is still halfway across the map trying to run there. d'oh!

But to summarize, my point is merely that my personal strategies weren't always just theories, they were actually used in previous seasons when the overall skill level of solo ranked was higher than the current season, purely because of the players who are currently piloting certain advanced classes relative to the caliber of player piloting the same advanced classes in the past.

What you're saying might be true, but I don't think it is, and frankly, I don't fully believe your anecdotes. I played back in season 1, when the most people were playing, including all of the "best" players, quit the game for about 4 years, and have played again in season 10, getting gold in both seasons. The players behave exactly the same as I remember from season 1; there are good ones, bad ones, and average ones. I've also played a lot of other competitive games, such as Overwatch, at a high level. Players are always the same in a setting where they are randomly thrown together. Your posts remind of Overwatch players obsessed with "meta" picks, insisting that you constantly counter pick against enemies, or employ strats that pros or streamers use, rather than just having people play the heroes they're good at at a high level (which is the actual way to succeed).

Ultimately, we'll probably have to agree to disagree here, but I just want to note for people reading this to learn about ranked: the important thing is to master your defensive cooldowns and properly focus the agreed upon target, all of the other stuff is good, but really secondary, and can often lead to worse results. For example, there are sometimes players that will complain when we lose a round like this: "you guys didn't cleanse me when I was mezzed, and no one knocked off the mara that was on me, and you didn't keep cc's on the healer enough." All fair points, but the real issue was that all of the dps were hitting different targets, rather than all being on the one marked as the focus. If people can't even focus a target properly, expecting them to execute anything else is counterproductive. One must embrace the real world, not how it ought to be.

What you're saying might be true, but I don't think it is, and frankly, I don't fully believe your anecdotes. I played back in season 1, when the most people were playing, including all of the "best" players, quit the game for about 4 years, and have played again in season 10, getting gold in both seasons. The players behave exactly the same as I remember from season 1; there are good ones, bad ones, and average ones. I've also played a lot of other competitive games, such as Overwatch, at a high level. Players are always the same in a setting where they are randomly thrown together. Your posts remind of Overwatch players obsessed with "meta" picks, insisting that you constantly counter pick against enemies, or employ strats that pros or streamers use, rather than just having people play the heroes they're good at at a high level (which is the actual way to succeed).

 

Ultimately, we'll probably have to agree to disagree here, but I just want to note for people reading this to learn about ranked: the important thing is to master your defensive cooldowns and properly focus the agreed upon target, all of the other stuff is good, but really secondary, and can often lead to worse results. For example, there are sometimes players that will complain when we lose a round like this: "you guys didn't cleanse me when I was mezzed, and no one knocked off the mara that was on me, and you didn't keep cc's on the healer enough." All fair points, but the real issue was that all of the dps were hitting different targets, rather than all being on the one marked as the focus. If people can't even focus a target properly, expecting them to execute anything else is counterproductive. One must embrace the real world, not how it ought to be.

It's fine if you disagree with me and don't believe my anecdotes, that's fair and I don't really have any hard proof to provide that supports my point. For what it's worth, I consider myself to be a high caliber player for my advanced class (assassin/shadow) so I'm not necessarily speaking from the perspective of some new player to PvP. I played in Seasons 4 through 8, played about 2 weeks of season 10 and am now back for 11. From what I've seen, while there are still veteren players from the old days, the average quality of Ranked matches now are slightly worse than before in the previous seasons where I played a lot more .I think that you'll find that if you tryhard this game for long enough, you'll realize that there's more layers to the PvP in this game than initially meets the eye. Like many MMOs, even the most simplistic content can have incredible depth, and swtor is no different.

Regarding your overwatch statemtent, I don't think that's really comparable, nor that example applicable to this game. This is a game where you cannot counter pick a class after the match has begun, your odds of winning don't have anything to do with counterqueuing since that's not a real strategy due to the inability to swap advanced classes or even specs once the match has begun. I actually agree with you on the last part, you should play what you are comfortable with and perform best with, regardless of the current meta. Mosh played Operative at a time when it was one of the weakest of the melee classes, and yet he made people who were playing FOTM classes at the time look like they were complete novices. This was because he had an intimate sense of what his class could and could not do and used that knowledge to push the boundaries of the class beyond what your average PvPer knew the class was capable of. That's why he was able to do stupid things like 1v2 and 1v3 people and win.

As far as your second paragraph, I would argue that a players ability or inability to master their own class by knowing how to utilize their DCDs properly is a good example of what I meant when I said that the caliber of players in the past were above those of the current day. Part of what it means to be a good player is knowing the bare minimum basics of how to utilize DCDs, proper positioning, and a basic knowledge of how to employ your DPS "Rotation" (using that term extremely loosely) in PvP all at the same time. What separates average players from good players tends to be mechanical skill. The ability to predict what your opponent will do before they do it, how they will move, the ability to gauge the current flow of the battle at any given time, tracking not only major DCDs which is easy to do, but also offensive cooldowns to know how much damage your enemy is capable of, the list goes on. So yes, while the underlying point is that as a newcomer to the thread, you should learn to use your DCDs in PvP and how to stick to a target, I would not agree that everything else is a low secondary to that, because everything beyond the basics are just as important to know if you want to become really good at your advanced class in PvP. Granted, if you don't care about being really good, or even improving, then by all means, settle for just learning the basics of how to use DCDs and stick to 1 target. But don't complain that you don't see the results you were hoping for when you stepped into ranked if you aren't willing to go beyond the basics.

I suppose my overall point, as to not detract off topic, is that while you believe that too much information will cause things to go awry, I believe that too little information contributes to the same outcome as your premise. For this reason, I think it's better to teach those people who contribute to the chaos of Ranked the finer mechanics of the game, so that something as simple as killing an operative becomes more commonplace instead of being an impossible feat.

I suppose my overall point, as to not detract off topic, is that while you believe that too much information will cause things to go awry, I believe that too little information contributes to the same outcome as your premise. For this reason, I think it's better to teach those people who contribute to the chaos of Ranked the finer mechanics of the game, so that something as simple as killing an operative becomes more commonplace instead of being an impossible feat.

You make some good points, and you might be right in the long run. But my overall point, to this thread's question, is that when you're coming up with a strat, and you need to explain it to your teammates, you really need to know your audience. I'm not really saying people shouldn't strive to get better and incorporate more advanced strats and understandings into their gameplay. I'm just saying, practically speaking, that if I know I have mediocre teammates, or if they're unknown to me, I'm just going to call a simple "cookie cutter" strat, because that's something they should be able to reliably execute. If I try to ask them to do something more complex and they fail, that's on me for trying to make them into something they're not. Once you're actually in a ranked match, it's not a teaching moment, it's the time to do whatever it takes to win.

One must embrace the real world, not how it ought to be.

When I go into pvp, I almost never go in with the mind set of embracing the reality of what I have as teammates and what I am going up against. When coming up with my more common strategies, I always assume that all the players I am going up against are "smart players" and wont make major mistakes. By assuming this, I create much better habits which keeps my skill level high. If someone ends up being weak, ill then take that into account and take advantage of it. But by assuming that every player is good, there will never be any negative surprises because you made your plan according to them not being bad in the first place.

I agree with krea (Welcome back!) that you should encourage more complex strategies to help improve the player base. One of the major points behind ranked is that you want to in a way be the best that you can be. When facing a losing situation by following the simple strategies, you need to adapt and try new things if you want to win and more often then not this requires even more complex strategies. I don't think any ranked player should accept "this game is a loss" type of mind set. People who even allow themselves to even think about giving up instead of trying to figure out something new in order to win, plain and simply don't belong in ranked to me.

The average player might not execute the more complex strategies, and sometimes not even understand them, but one thing is for sure, if you dont try, you will not learn and therefore won't improve either. I encourage every pvper to think when they play, ask them selves questions about what they themselves are doing and/or trying to do. If your successful great, still ask yourself why it was successful (same goes for if what you tried did not work). I honestly feel that the encouragement of simplistic strategies is at the same time discourages people from thinking when they play. They become simple people just following orders without question and therefore without thinking. The lack of thinking is an epidemic problem that most pvpers seem to be affected by and that needs to change if you want the quality of pvp to improve.

To your dps should not be allowed to guard comment, guarding as a dps is situational and costly at times. I almost always am forced to use my resilience as soon as I guard to make my guarding the most effective possible. This means that not only the person they are targeting is using a dcd, a squishy shadow like myself is forced to use an extremely important dcd too. I really dont like people who advocate for simplicity in this game, its the complexity of the game and vaste range of abilities and decision making especially in pvp which makes the pvp in this game so much fun. Use ALL the tools available to you (no hacks ofcourse) if you want to play any class to its highest potential, and for shadows guardians and vanguards, this includes using guard as a dps spec at key moments to help better your gameplay and increase your chance of winning.

"dps should be allowed to guard"

do you know why people say no to that zurules?

because one of the last matchs I had before I said f*ck this game. sorc healer/jugg dps/jugg dps/pt dps vs sorc hlr/merc dps/merc dps/sorc dps.

can you guess which team with the meme specs won? can you guess which team rotated guard back and forth and not one of them could be tunneled down?

this is not a isolated problem. this hypothetical issue happens every single time there are 2 or more off tanks in solo ranked. this is why the most respected people in swtor say, "dps should not be able to guard and/or without a dps penalty"

Ultimately, we'll probably have to agree to disagree here, but I just want to note for people reading this to learn about ranked: the important thing is to master your defensive cooldowns and properly focus the agreed upon target, all of the other stuff is good, but really secondary, and can often lead to worse results. For example, there are sometimes players that will complain when we lose a round like this: "you guys didn't cleanse me when I was mezzed, and no one knocked off the mara that was on me, and you didn't keep cc's on the healer enough." All fair points, but the real issue was that all of the dps were hitting different targets, rather than all being on the one marked as the focus. If people can't even focus a target properly, expecting them to execute anything else is counterproductive. One must embrace the real world, not how it ought to be.

Lets repeat this one more time:

"the important thing is to master your defensive cooldowns and properly focus the agreed upon target"

This so much.

It took me a long f***** time to get comfortable with jugg dcds, and I can still to this day get a brain fart, and somehow forget to observe my health . Being able to survive focus-fire longer your own focus target is absolutely the key to winning. Everybody can do damage, but very very few can really survive under pressure and not panic.

I don't think any ranked player should accept "this game is a loss" type of mind set. People who even allow themselves to even think about giving up instead of trying to figure out something new in order to win, plain and simply don't belong in ranked to me.

I completely agree with you on this part. I don't ever accept anything as a loss, and I've been in plenty of games where someone says that at the start where we end up winning. And obviously if something fails in the first round, it's reasonable to try something else in the second. As to your other points, I disagree, but my points have already been made.

To your dps should not be allowed to guard comment, guarding as a dps is situational and costly at times. I almost always am forced to use my resilience as soon as I guard to make my guarding the most effective possible. This means that not only the person they are targeting is using a dcd, a squishy shadow like myself is forced to use an extremely important dcd too. I really dont like people who advocate for simplicity in this game, its the complexity of the game and vaste range of abilities and decision making especially in pvp which makes the pvp in this game so much fun. Use ALL the tools available to you (no hacks ofcourse) if you want to play any class to its highest potential, and for shadows guardians and vanguards, this includes using guard as a dps spec at key moments to help better your gameplay and increase your chance of winning.

I've played with you a bunch of times this season (when conveniently it wasn't your goal to be top 3 apparently). I'm not saying you're bad, but the only special thing I've seen you do is constantly make use of off guarding.

"dps should be allowed to guard"

 

do you know why people say no to that zurules?

 

because one of the last matchs I had before I said f*ck this game. sorc healer/jugg dps/jugg dps/pt dps vs sorc hlr/merc dps/merc dps/sorc dps.

 

can you guess which team with the meme specs won? can you guess which team rotated guard back and forth and not one of them could be tunneled down?

 

this is not a isolated problem. this hypothetical issue happens every single time there are 2 or more off tanks in solo ranked. this is why the most respected people in swtor say, "dps should not be able to guard and/or without a dps penalty"

In this situation, the team with no guard actually had a very good chance of winning. they all have 8 second ccs for the healer, they all have long range interrupt for the healer when he is white barred and doesn't have his interrupt immunity. 2 nets will shut down those jugs dps hard, the melee team has no speed boosts, so the ranged team could kite extremely well if they work together. if the melee wants to cc your healer its only 6 seconds + they need to get into range of them which should be away from their kill target( assuming it was not the healer)and on top of that the ranged team can basically cleanse any cc, including hard stuns while the other team cannot do it. The ranged can go in los spots so they their healer has to move to follow, same can be said for the melee to los the range, but If the ranged do it they can off heal while the melee dps is basically doing nothing. In this scenario I could also be splitting damage on the pt, and the first jugg who guards. (sorc on the guarded target, so most likely the pt because they heavier on aoe, mercs on the first jugg who guards. if the second jugg begins to guard, a cc can be used on him to give a big burst window on one of the other targets)

If your ranged team did not do this, they did not play that composition correctly in my books. Again this is no guarantee that the team with no guard would win, but in that comp, they should have a very good chance to win.

There is a penalty for dps guarding, besides the use of multiple dcds most of the times, if the one who is doing the guarding is cced, the other 1 who would be the guard swapping partner would often not be able to then guard the other guy unless they manually click off the guard which I am certain, very few people have the awareness to do that and then do it fast enough for it to make a difference to save themselves.

I really dont know who you refer to as most respected people in swtor are, atleast in NA (I never played in europeen servers) i'd have a very hard time trying to think of names that still play this game or are outside of the group of people that ive been playing with for years that I would even consider to be respectable in the first place when it comes to competitive pvp.

I can't stop watching this thread, it's so juicy.

Where's the popcorn?

 

 

I've played with you a bunch of times this season (when conveniently it wasn't your goal to be top 3 apparently). I'm not saying you're bad, but the only special thing I've seen you do is constantly make use of off guarding.

I honestly would of liked to of had the title for this season, it doesn't beat All-Galaxy for me but its actual a good one to me compared to many others in the passed. I didn't have the time or the patience anymore to play enough games to get to top three. 2/3 of my games I had people throwing games on me, for their friends on other team, etc. Until they actual do something to get rid of these behaviors from competitive play, I don't see myself putting the effort to drag myself through that ******** over and over again for long enough to get top 3 one more time.

Season 9 was the last season I gave bioware anymore faith, I gave it to them probably longer than most people, But when those who abuses the backfilling bug, and decline bug to get to top three and literally did not play a single game after the day they fixed those bugs and they still got the top 3 titles. Not to mention I sent them screenshots of one of them admitting to it ingame, not even in discord so that they had the logs to see it for themselves. They knew exactly what to look for (the amount of times they declines games, the amount of game that they actually got backfilled), they did nothing. So yeah, ranked now has basically lost all meaning of competition for me.

If you don't mind me asking, who are you? because your forum name doesn't ring any bells to any ingame characters.

Lets repeat this one more time:

 

"the important thing is to master your defensive cooldowns and properly focus the agreed upon target"

 

This so much.

 

It took me a long f***** time to get comfortable with jugg dcds, and I can still to this day get a brain fart, and somehow forget to observe my health . Being able to survive focus-fire longer your own focus target is absolutely the key to winning. Everybody can do damage, but very very few can really survive under pressure and not panic.

I’m trying to teach my wife how to use her DCDs again on multiple classes because she’s not needed them in pve for 4 years. If we had no DCDs in the game she would be a star.

Recently she started playing pvp. She’d always been too scared because she freaks out and panics. With reg pvp getting worse in quality and with me often saying to her, “you are better than most of the muppets on my team, why don’t you come play”, she’s finally agreed to play and she’s getting into it. I even caught her playing pvp by herself this week (which is a first)

We’ve been training in the Rishi SH and when we fight, I can see her monitors from where I sit and guide her when to use them and when to hold off. She is getting better, but sometimes I’ll look over and see she’s dead and all her DCDs are still up.

I wish we’d had the Rishi SH from the start. The ability to train there and explain basic tactics is great.

Recently she started playing pvp...

I think you probably know this, but just in case not... over in general Snave & crew have mentioned they are running some PvP training. I think they have a couple maps left to do, plus links to recordings of the trainings they've already done... http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=959790

I actually tried to do something like that years ago with

As well as with

, which explains in-depth resolve mechanics. Both of these mechanics are extremely important for PvP, and not really explained very well at all. But the low view count led me to believe that this just isn't the type of content that people are looking for, nor care about.

I always appreciated your guides and videos. I would totally be interested in updated content and additional videos. Side note, when it comes to Sins and Shadows, the changes to the class the past couple years have been painful to many of us, and updated info and insights would be welcome.

I think you probably know this, but just in case not... over in general Snave & crew have mentioned they are running some PvP training. I think they have a couple maps left to do, plus links to recordings of the trainings they've already done... http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=959790

Yeah, I’ve tried to get her to watch some. But she gets bored and loses interest fast if she isn’t actually playing at the same time.

It’s all practical learning for her or nothing. Even when I’m trying to explain stuff to her I can see her eyes glassing over if I talk for too long or in too much detail.

I have to show her and get her to do it or it goes in one ear and the other. Usually the best way to demonstrate my point is smashing her into the ground to prove a point. (Seems harsh, but it’s the only way she takes it in).

I usually go pretty light on her to let her confidence build up. But if she’s being really stubborn or something, I have to go all cave women on her arse to make her understand.