Dear Bioware, I don't often post on your forums and try to only do so when I feel a glaring mistake is being made. It's been a given in MMOs for years now that PvEing should give you the best PvE gear, and that PvPing should give you the best PvP gear. They are distinct progression curves for two distinct demographics with minor overlap, and any attempt to 'balance' the two is at risk of overpowering one set if the maths work is shoddy. I'm basing my concern on the following statement:

 

"Quote: Originally Posted by RobHinkle

 

A caveat, I'm at home with a sick infant so my numbers might be a little off, but I think the expertise value while under Bolster was set on underworld gear at 1332."

 

I take this to mean that wearing full Underworld in PvP will give you 1332 'free' Expertise, and that your internal theorycrafters feel that full Conqueror's additional 668 Expertise more than offsets the extra stats on Underworld gear. Here are my problems:

 

1. HILTS/BARRELS: Even if we accept that your overall assertion is correct (namely, that 1332 Expertise for top-end PvE gear is the right balancing point), nothing stops a good minmaxer from wearing full Conqueror + Underworld PvE weapon. The weapon will still have 2/3 of the Conqueror weapon's Expertise, but a -vastly- superior set of PvE stats. Rough guideline: a Conqueror Vindicator lightsaber has 423-635 Weapon Damage and 847 Force Power. An Underworld Vindicator Lightsaber has 503-754 Weapon Damage and 1006 Force Power. The Underworld piece furthermore has a net 63 more Power, 34 Str and 27 Endurance due to being stat-budgetted with 72's, not 65's. It's trivially clear to me that the higher ilevel weapons from PvE flat-out beat PvP ones in any context.

 

2. BALANCING POINTS VARY BY CLASS: If indeed you are aiming to make PvE gear viable in PvP (a terrible, terrible idea so I hope you're not), you need to worry about a whole new set of balancing considerations. A DPSer double-dips in Expertise: they want the PvP damage boost, and the reduced PvP damage taken. Aside from a PvE weapon (see above), they may very well need Expertise all-round. But does a PvP tank care about his PvP damage boost, or PvP healing? Not that much; primarily he/she worries about reduced PvP damage taken. As such, if Underworld were balanced/acceptable in PvP for a DPS, it is highly likely to be overpowered for a tank. This is exacerbated for healers, whose PvP healing boost is only 20% from full Expertise, so approximately 13.4% from full Underworld's Bolstered, 'free' expertise. Full expertise - ie, full conqueror - gives them 6% more healing (13.4% to 20%) and roughly 10% less damage taken, relatively (62.5% instead of 70%); OR they can use the PvE gear and gain the full Endurance, Willpower and secondary stat benefits of 72's gearing, so roughly 4k more HP, 240 more Willpower and 600ish more secondary stats (which can be minmaxed as desired for optimal healing). In short: you can't really make PvE gear viable for all classes without likely making it 'too good' for some roles.

 

The honest solution to all this? Sticking to what was once claimed in a dev post I believe: namely, that high end gear would receive no expertise boost. There is no doubt in my mind that a simple fix is to say: anything above 65s gear gets no expertise bolster. You save yourself all the hassle of working out smooth curves, and preserve your progression lines as distinct. Arguably this is nothing new: 1.7 and prior did have a lot of discussion of whether a -few- PvE armorings added optimality vs full PvP gearing, but the 'edge' gained was so marginal as to not be a big issue. This one is.

 

TLDR: Bolstering top-end PvE gear is wrong, the 1332 free expertise peg for Underworld is a mistake and it needs to be set much lower to safely preserve PvP gear from being outclassed by partial or total utilisation of PvE gear.

Edited April 17, 2013 by Sidrath

i agree with you and your is a good analysis, fixed the naked wz issue devs next steps should be imo:

 

1) fix the augments bug(reported by a few posts and i think already addressed

2) fix the PVE gear issue, that at the moment is contained by the short time the ex-pack has been live but that will grow worse day by day since pvers will grab that gear.

change the lvl 55 bolster to only bolster itemlvls below 60 aka lvl equip/nakeds to an imaginary set two lvls below partisan, every item with an itemlvl of 60 or more will not be bolstered at all.that way newbs will be able to participate in pvp, pvler have to strip naked as their undworld gear gets no bolster and will be as effactive as an newb.

 

increase pvp weapon lvl as done before(funny how repetitive bioware makes its missconceptions even though they have their infailable metrics ) if they would be lets say lvl 68 they would be bis in pvp but far away from bis in pve...

You're worried about someone queueing with 1332 expertise? I would be too if they were on my team. They would do nothing but die to the people who actually have gear. I'm mostly Partisan at this point (only 3 pieces left to replace, saving comms ftw), and I'm sitting at 1900+. Edited April 17, 2013 by Ovan_Oh-One

You're worried about someone queueing with 1332 expertise? I would be too if they were on my team. They would do nothing but die to the people who actually have gear. I'm mostly Partisan at this point (only 3 pieces left to replace, saving comms ftw), and I'm sitting at 1900+.

 

As explained in 1., you can use full Conqueror + PvE weapon and get about 1950+ Expertise (so practically the cap of 2000) but also 80 more weapon damage (on a base of 420, that's a colossal jump), as well as 50 more Force/Tech damage bonus. Wouldn't you trade 50 Expertise for that?

Edited April 17, 2013 by Sidrath

Hilts/Barrels

 

There was some coverage of this on the PTS forum. I was concerned at first that the PvE barrels would be better than the PvP ones due to their higher native tech/force power, but this seems to have been taken care of.

 

Haven't checked at 55, but in 30-54 warzones all weapons were bolstered to maximum 1006 tech/force power.

 

I tried this with EWH weapons, PvE greens, empty shells. Every time I had 2012 tech power (i.e. was getting 1006 each from main hand and off hand).

 

Check out your actual tech power by mousing over your bonus damage in the tech/force tab once you have entered a warzone, and report back if it isn't 2012. Otherwise this is a non-issue.

As explained in 1., you can use full Conqueror + PvE weapon and get about 1950+ Expertise (so practically the cap of 2000) but also 80 more weapon damage (on a base of 420, that's a colossal jump), as well as 50 more Force/Tech damage bonus. Wouldn't you trade 50 Expertise for that?

 

Yer damn right!

Also I only scrolled to the TL;DR. :3

Really good point Wainamoinen, the Tech/Force is flatrated to 1006, though not things like weapon damage. So it becomes a tradeoff of 50 Expertise for 80 Weapon Damage and 10ish Force/Tech, some Endurance and secondary statting. Still pretty sure any DPSer with a decent white damage component to their output will do better with the PvE weapon, which ought to not be the case.

The second issue we want to address is concerns over the balance between level 55 PvE and PvP gear. We have seen some reports from players around the forums and in this thread that they are seeing players wearing Underworld or Arkanian gear having higher stats under Bolster than people wearing Partisan or Conqueror.

 

After some investigation, it appears that this is true, but it is not intended. Although we always want to keep the PvP environment competitive even for players not wearing full PvP sets, Partisan and Conqueror should be performing better in Warzones than their PvE counterparts. We will be deploying a fix for this in 2.0.1 which will be coming out on Tuesday.

 

I know there is still a bit of confusion around the Bolster system, how it affects stats and Expertise and I am working on getting some more information on it. Sometime after 2.0.1 I am going to work with the combat team on getting a “mathy” post explaining a bit about Bolster and how it works which will hopefully work to clear up some confusion. As you can imagine, it is a pretty complex system.

 

I hope that alleviates some of your concerns with the issue of PvE v PvP gearing and thank you all for your feedback.

 

-eric

 

 

This should settle it: PvE gear in 2.0 is indeed outperforming PvP gear owing to some dodgy maths. Kudos though, good to see Bioware admitting the problem instantly and deploying a patch for it next week. Fingers crossed the 2.0.1 fix works as intended!

This should settle it: PvE gear in 2.0 is indeed outperforming PvP gear owing to some dodgy maths. Kudos though, good to see Bioware admitting the problem instantly and deploying a patch for it next week. Fingers crossed the 2.0.1 fix works as intended!

 

My god, you guys just can't play the game without making sure you have the ability to own someone outside of skill vs skill can you, it's got to be a meat grinder for PVE players or you just aren't happy.

Edited April 18, 2013 by Elfa

This should settle it: PvE gear in 2.0 is indeed outperforming PvP gear owing to some dodgy maths. Kudos though, good to see Bioware admitting the problem instantly and deploying a patch for it next week. Fingers crossed the 2.0.1 fix works as intended!

 

I hope they fix this soon, This whole gear thing is confusing and frustrating.

Why not just stick expertise on all PvE gear! Why do the PvP'ers have to cater to PvE'ers?

My god, you guys just can't play the game without making sure you have the ability to own someone outside of skill vs skill can you, it's got to be a meat grinder for PVE players or you just aren't happy.

 

See the problem that few recognize is that you are the guy that would toss me out of your Op party because I didn't have 68's or 69's. But you are upset if you have a gear requirement for our world.