I'm calling out to all Ranked players from all servers, to discuss the state of Ranked Warzones at the moment.

I'd like your opinions on all the warzones, how they feel now opposed to what they used to feel like.

 

Please only post here if you're a daily-weekly ranked warzone player, and played on 2.0 even when nobody had gear yet.

 

First of all, setups.

I'm not going to ask you to give away your setup, neither will I.

But I can say that probably everybody is running with 3 healers now.

What I am curious with is how many different AC's you're using. For our team, we're using 6-7 different AC's. Depending on who's online.

How's yours?

 

Secondary, the warzones themselves.

 

Huttball

Luckily, Huttball is still one of the warzones that's still the same as pre 2.0.

It's all about keeping the middle, getting ready when they score, and mass cc and use cds to get the ball.

From there on, you pass it to the tank, a runner goes up, and you score or wait in the middle to prepare yourselves.

 

Voidstar

TTK has gotten out of hand. In ranked warzones, with respeccing during the warzone as a possibility (which I am NOT opposed to, it increases tactics) you can have your setup so that you can NOT get killed in the defending phase. Or just die the very few times.

On the attacking phase you go all out dps with minimal heals, and hope to score the few kills in order to win.

In games with good teams vs good teams (which is the only example I'm going to use in every warzone, not vs pug teams) there's just no way to cap. I'm not going to say here how, but there's a failproof way to defend the offdoor without ever getting capped.

This means Voidstar is all about the kills, which imo is no problem. There's finally a mindless slaughter warzone, always a fun thing when you're in the mood for numbers.

 

Ancient Hypergates

Ahh, the newest addition to the "stack" of warzones we have to deal with.

When it first came out and for a few months, this warzone was about capping your pylon, and then brawling in the middle. It was still so on the PTS. Sometimes the defender from the so far losing team would go and try to cc-cap the other teams node. This became harder in the beginning of 2.0 since the hybrid build was gone with no more insta-lift/whirlwind.

But now it has changed. Idk how it is now on other servers, but this tactic does NOT work anymore.

This warzone is all about preventing the other team from capping their pylon.

This is now so for 2-3 weeks on our server since teams are getting more adept at the warzone, and it has grown so far that you need to divide your team into 2 setups of 3-5 or 4-4 in order to prevent and at the same time try to cap yourself. You might kill the other team, but really, the odds are very low since tanks and healers are extremely good on our server. (This doesn't mean the dps are bad, on the contrary).

The worst we've had was a game up to x9 round (the last round, it automatically shuts down the warzone in the middle of this round) where only 2 pylons ever were capped by both teams together. It's a tedious display of mindboggling gypsy tactics for nearly 20 minutes where you rarely get to kill anyone, yet have to be on a constant lookout for cappers.

It's starting to basically depend on lucky setups you're sending to a side, which often means your other side is in danger.

The other idea is to send a tank, dps, dps, heal to each side, but this will just turn into no team ever capping anything. This way, it might turn out to be a second Voidstar where the win is depending on the kills.

 

The Civil War

Now, here's the warzone I have the most strife with.

Civil War has changed aswell. With the same problem as in Voidstar, there's just no way of wiping eachother in the middle. No matter how focused your focus is, with setups the way they are you. will. not. wipe.

This in a way makes it like Ancient Hypergates.

It's now all about the setups you send towards each node. Again, it's all about the luck you have who you are sending where and what team you're opposing.

And again, just like in Ancient Hypergates, you could send a tank, dps and a healer to each sidenode with another respecced healer and dps to middle for example. And it will go. on. forever. 30-40min matches are possible this way.

The actual problem in this warzone lies in the fact that whoever gets the 1st tick. Wins. Period.

90% of the time when you do send lucky setups to sides, that means that your other side is usually in danger too. And it becomes a race for who can kill the opposing team first and get the first tick before losing the other node.

Middle always is a stalemate, so once both sides are capped everybody except the node guarder runs to the middle to have yet another endless fight in the middle until your Ship has 0 hp.

The problem here is that you have to sit through 15-20minutes of pointless fighting when you know you are going to lose.

With the new skills stealthers have gotten it's become quite impossible to cap the opposing teams node before help comes pouring in. It's possible, but sadly very very rare for the defender to make a big mistake.

 

Novare Coast

Last but not least, Novare Coast.

This is a warzone I do not mind (from an assassin's/operative's point of view). It's still same old same old. One node guarder to the side turret, and the rest to the middle, to battle it out.

I am glad with this, because it's not a mindless fight over nothing. It's rather a fight over the capping point. Stealthers stealth out to cap inside, you co-ordinate stuns in order to cap a few points, and this goes on for many minutes until one team has the turret. It's not over though because with good co-ordination it's actually possible to cap it back. It's hard vs good teams, but it's possible.

To put pressure on the other team the defending team's assassin could go visit the winning team's assassin, to send someone from the middle to help them if needed, in hope of getting the upper hand at middle.

 

 

This was my big wall of text, I hope you enjoyed it.

I'd like to hear other renounced teams' opinions on what they think about this.

In my opinion, the basics to a few warzones such as obviously Ancient Hypergates and Civil War could be changed ...

They need to change the way capturing objectives work, either make it all like Novarre coast where its a progression or shorten the time it takes significantly so you can actually cc someone long enough to capture a node/plant a bomb /etc.

I don't think Ranked ever sounded so boring as in your thread...

 

I currently lead a team in a weekly competitive ranked night on a small server. I don't have too many huge thoughts on ranked right now (besides lack of participation), but am interested in hearing other people's opinions on the current state of ranked warzones.

TTK is fine in my opinion. No respectable team we have run against has had 3 healers. The OP puts a lot of emphasis on luck but all that sounds like to me is that he doesn't really understand how to adjust a strategy mid-game. Edited May 7, 2013 by DimeStax

You can tell the OP is extremely new to RWZs and actually has no clue what they are talking about. For starters no respectable team runs 3 healers, and secondly the strategies he/she mentions are PuG regular WZ strats. I could go on, but I won't if I don't need to.

 

Lol I was expecting a post like this.

I didn't give any strats away, except for the basic ones everyone uses anyway, which is only a guideline.

I've been playing ranked for a year now tyvm.

And for 3 healers, well we can only see how it works when we could ever got cross server queues against you then

Because on our server, a team started doing it and it worked. And other teams had to adapt to it to stay competitive

I COULD convince you why, but then i'd give all our tactics away.

 

Open your mind and don't keep it closed on only your tactics, like they're the only ones that work

 

::EDIT:: lol nice editing your post.

Luck is indeed a big word, as i said, we DO have a strategy that works (read again) but then it's just 4v4 where nobody dies

Edited May 8, 2013 by Aerilas

Lol I was expecting a post like this.

I didn't give any strats away, except for the basic ones everyone uses anyway, which is only a guideline.

I've been playing ranked for a year now tyvm.

And for 3 healers, well we can only see how it works when we could ever got cross server queues against you then

Because on our server, a team started doing it and it worked. And other teams had to adapt to it to stay competitive

I COULD convince you why, but then i'd give all our tactics away.

 

Open your mind and don't keep it closed on only your tactics, like they're the only ones that work

 

I went back and read more of your post and gave you the benefit of the doubt so I edited my original post. We would never run 3 healers though, we keep everyone up just fine with 2 healers and 2 tanks.

Edited May 8, 2013 by DimeStax

I went back and read more of your post and gave you the benefit of the doubt so I edited my original post. We would never run 3 healers though, we keep everyone up just fine with 2 healers and a tank.

 

You should play voidstar against us. we're unbeaten there for 2 weeks now. And I wouldn't say we're the top team

 

And i was basically just stating how it;s going for us now. Though I may have made it sound very boring. It's the truth though

Edited May 8, 2013 by Aerilas

You should play voidstar against us. we're unbeaten there for 2 weeks now. And I wouldn't say we're the top team

 

And i was basically just stating how it;s going for us now. Though I may have made it sound very boring. It's the truth though

 

The only time having 3 healers would help is in Huttball or on defense in Voidstar in which almost everyone respecs to tank or healer for anyway so I'm not sure if I would really count that. Any other time 2 healers and 2 tanks is just fine.

Edited May 8, 2013 by DimeStax

The only time having 3 healers would help is in Huttball or on defense in Voidstar in which almost everyone respecs to tank or healer for anyway so I'm not sure if I would really count that. Any other time 2 healers and 2 tanks is just fine.

 

^

 

/endthread

The only time having 3 healers would help is in Huttball or on defense in Voidstar in which almost everyone respecs to tank or healer for anyway so I'm not sure if I would really count that. Any other time 2 healers and 2 tanks is just fine.

 

Sigh. I CAN counter this, but then I'd be giving tactics away.

All I'll say is that, every factor team on our server (5) that runs this setup against one without a 3rd healer, wins.

This was tested at first, but perfected over a couple of weeks.

 

I'm glad people are sharing their thoughts though, I'm curious how it will work in hopefully ever cross-server queues.

It works in huttball, voidstar, novare coast (think more about what a 3rd healer can do). Ancient hypergates and civil war still suck though. doesn't matter if you have 2 oir 3 healers there. that's true

Edited May 8, 2013 by Aerilas

Sigh. I CAN counter this, but then I'd be giving tactics away.

All I'll say is that, every factor team on our server (5) that runs this setup against one without a 3rd healer, wins.

This was tested at first, but perfected over a couple of weeks.

 

I'm glad people are sharing their thoughts though, I'm curious how it will work in hopefully ever cross-server queues.

It works in huttball, voidstar, novare coast (think more about what a 3rd healer can do). Ancient hypergates and civil war still suck though. doesn't matter if you have 2 oir 3 healers there. that's true

 

I don't know why you're talking about strats like they're some big secret like if there is one king strategy to rule them all. There are many strategies and you roll with the one that fits your composition the best and you adjust it mid-game as you see fit. No, I would not like to have an extra healer on NC, if your tank and healers are half decent the extra heals are irrelevant. The only time an extra healer would help is if your tank and/or healers are sub-par and you need to compensate and hope for a CC cap because you're sure as hell aren't going to burn them down with DPS.

Edited May 8, 2013 by DimeStax

I don't know why you're talking about strats like they're some big secret like if there is one king strategy to rule them all. There are many strategies and you roll with the one that fits your composition the best and you adjust it mid-game as you see fit. No, I would not like to have an extra healer on NC, if your tank and healers are half decent the extra heals are irrelevant. The only time an extra healer would help is if your tank and/or healers are sub-par and you need to compensate.

 

you're looking at extra healer the wrong way. Plus, my GM wouldn't like it if I gave them away so I'm in no position to do so.

 

that said, i'm off for today, and would love to continue discussing tomorrow.

Hope we can keep this civilized

Edited May 8, 2013 by Aerilas

you're looking at extra healer the wrong way

 

that said, i'm off for today, and would love to continue discussing tomorrow.

Hope we can keep this civilized

 

Look man, it doesn't matter where you send the extra healer, if you're facing a good enough team they will identify which node you are trying to buy time on and which node your trying to take and they will rotate help over (presumably the appropriate classes depending on how well they know their stuff). If you're thinking about swinging a healer and a tank over from the beginning in order to prevent them from capping their own node then that was a strat that was used a looooong time ago and teams have long since learned to identify the cross and intercept it right off the bat. That's not even close to being a secret anymore.

Edited May 8, 2013 by DimeStax

The more healer a team has, the easier it is to counter every strat they can possibly do by merely copying their placement. It doesn't matter what really cool trick the other team has. The presence of additional healers reduces their ability to do damage and therefore your risk of being overpowered anywhere on an equal fight is drastically reduced. Of course you won't expect to beat them anywhere either, but that's fine as you are only preventing them from executing their surprise attack and should use the time during the stalemate to reorganize a better plan.

The more healer a team has, the easier it is to counter every strat they can possibly do by merely copying their placement. It doesn't matter what really cool trick the other team has. The presence of additional healers reduces their ability to do damage and therefore your risk of being overpowered anywhere on an equal fight is drastically reduced. Of course you won't expect to beat them anywhere either, but that's fine as you are only preventing them from executing their surprise attack and should use the time during the stalemate to reorganize a better plan.

 

Oops, lied and posted anyways

 

Finally, somebody who gets it.

 

Though, it's only a part of what a third healer provides for extra tactics. There's 2 more

Edited May 8, 2013 by Aerilas

I'm calling out to all Ranked players from all servers, to discuss the state of Ranked Warzones at the moment.

I'd like your opinions on all the warzones, how they feel now opposed to what they used to feel like.

 

Please only post here if you're a daily-weekly ranked warzone player, and played on 2.0 even when nobody had gear yet.

 

First of all, setups.

I'm not going to ask you to give away your setup, neither will I.

But I can say that probably everybody is running with 3 healers now.

What I am curious with is how many different AC's you're using. For our team, we're using 6-7 different AC's. Depending on who's online.

How's yours?

 

5, occasionally but not optimally 6.

 

Secondary, the warzones themselves.

 

Huttball

Luckily, Huttball is still one of the warzones that's still the same as pre 2.0.

It's all about keeping the middle, getting ready when they score, and mass cc and use cds to get the ball.

From there on, you pass it to the tank, a runner goes up, and you score or wait in the middle to prepare yourselves.

 

Emphasis on getting the ball at the pickup. Fire pulls and thus multi-speccing(in my comp) are invaluable as always. Mid control is important but focus on classes such as shadows, unremitting knights, and slingers more so. These are the guys grabbing the ball. Well timed roots are just as big as a kill on these ACs.

 

Getting the ball across the line I find easier these days. TTK has gone up marginally, in conjunction with increased mobility across the board you get a double whammy effect.

 

Overall, huttball meta-game hasnt much changed IMO.

 

Voidstar

TTK has gotten out of hand. In ranked warzones, with respeccing during the warzone as a possibility (which I am NOT opposed to, it increases tactics) you can have your setup so that you can NOT get killed in the defending phase. Or just die the very few times.

On the attacking phase you go all out dps with minimal heals, and hope to score the few kills in order to win.

In games with good teams vs good teams (which is the only example I'm going to use in every warzone, not vs pug teams) there's just no way to cap. I'm not going to say here how, but there's a failproof way to defend the offdoor without ever getting capped.

This means Voidstar is all about the kills, which imo is no problem. There's finally a mindless slaughter warzone, always a fun thing when you're in the mood for numbers.

 

Respec during RWZs is good. It adds another layer of much needed depth to game play.

 

I disagree with pretty much the rest of what you had to say here though. Burst as of 2.0 is just as ridiculous as healing is. Your team needs to be fast enough to stay ahead of guard swaps and immunities, while keeping up with the debuffs. No amount of heals can stop you from making your money in that 2-3s window after a target swap.

 

Watching the doors on offense, and putting a healer behind one every time will help dramatically. In the event of a four healer, four tank defensive setup(or something similar) tactics shift more to mobility and proper application of CC. Make your opponent over react and punish him in between for wins here.

 

Voidstar is still the same game as before. Harder to cap yes, but I like it.

 

Ancient Hypergates

Ahh, the newest addition to the "stack" of warzones we have to deal with.

When it first came out and for a few months, this warzone was about capping your pylon, and then brawling in the middle. It was still so on the PTS. Sometimes the defender from the so far losing team would go and try to cc-cap the other teams node. This became harder in the beginning of 2.0 since the hybrid build was gone with no more insta-lift/whirlwind.

But now it has changed. Idk how it is now on other servers, but this tactic does NOT work anymore.

This warzone is all about preventing the other team from capping their pylon.

This is now so for 2-3 weeks on our server since teams are getting more adept at the warzone, and it has grown so far that you need to divide your team into 2 setups of 3-5 or 4-4 in order to prevent and at the same time try to cap yourself. You might kill the other team, but really, the odds are very low since tanks and healers are extremely good on our server. (This doesn't mean the dps are bad, on the contrary).

The worst we've had was a game up to x9 round (the last round, it automatically shuts down the warzone in the middle of this round) where only 2 pylons ever were capped by both teams together. It's a tedious display of mindboggling gypsy tactics for nearly 20 minutes where you rarely get to kill anyone, yet have to be on a constant lookout for cappers.

It's starting to basically depend on lucky setups you're sending to a side, which often means your other side is in danger.

The other idea is to send a tank, dps, dps, heal to each side, but this will just turn into no team ever capping anything. This way, it might turn out to be a second Voidstar where the win is depending on the kills.

 

Funny, I find that exactly the opposite has happened. Two problems with your strategy. First is that you basically roll the dice when dividing up your team, because you never know what is coming from the other team. Second, and in addition to that, your ability to get players across the map quickly to respond to mis-management is hindered by large map size.

 

If the other team does a 4-4 and you do an 8-0 you will get the cap, or you're bad. Now if we use your strat and do 4-4s all game, rack up a bunch of kills without getting a cap, then cap with an 8-0 we win. The less risky and more of a brute force approach to to get your pylon and duke it out at mid using flybys to your advantage.

 

When you have a points lead in AH that essentially give you map control. It forces your opponent to make a move, when they make their move for your pylon, you get to say hey thanks for the free kills and possible double cap.

 

In conclusion to this, I find that pylon play is outdated now as its just too risky to pull off against high burst teams. I feel as if mid play is intended design due to the retro-activity of the points system. You do need to possess the ability to kill the enemy team though.

 

The Civil War

Now, here's the warzone I have the most strife with.

Civil War has changed aswell. With the same problem as in Voidstar, there's just no way of wiping eachother in the middle. No matter how focused your focus is, with setups the way they are you. will. not. wipe.

This in a way makes it like Ancient Hypergates.

It's now all about the setups you send towards each node. Again, it's all about the luck you have who you are sending where and what team you're opposing.

And again, just like in Ancient Hypergates, you could send a tank, dps and a healer to each sidenode with another respecced healer and dps to middle for example. And it will go. on. forever. 30-40min matches are possible this way.

The actual problem in this warzone lies in the fact that whoever gets the 1st tick. Wins. Period.

90% of the time when you do send lucky setups to sides, that means that your other side is usually in danger too. And it becomes a race for who can kill the opposing team first and get the first tick before losing the other node.

Middle always is a stalemate, so once both sides are capped everybody except the node guarder runs to the middle to have yet another endless fight in the middle until your Ship has 0 hp.

The problem here is that you have to sit through 15-20minutes of pointless fighting when you know you are going to lose.

With the new skills stealthers have gotten it's become quite impossible to cap the opposing teams node before help comes pouring in. It's possible, but sadly very very rare for the defender to make a big mistake.]/QUOTE]

 

The first minute of this match-up is the most critical to the outcome of the game, as it was before 2.0. Getting the side node first while keeping mid neutral is the name of the game, I agree. If you dont though, the game isnt lost. This is when real strategy comes into play.

 

For example, We had a match that we lose our side node first and were fighting over mid. The things that we did correctly were to send our sentinel and/or our shadow to their node on the regular to test their ability to react appropriately and to ease pressure off of mid for a lucky cap. This didn't end up working for us after a few close calls so I swapped a shadow with our tank at our node. Once the tank reached mid grenades went out and all of our DPS took off for their node, leaving both healers and our tank mid to hold it neutral and delay their response to the node. That and a stellar 1v1 performance from our shadow at our node won us the game.

 

The thing about rateds is that the smallest **** makes the biggest difference. All these pointless slugfests you speak about give opportunity for a new meta-game to develop at the higher levels, bugs and glitches increasingly make things harder to do but it forces you to make smarter decisions instead of mindlessly sending bodies to objectives and expecting to win.

 

Novare Coast

Last but not least, Novare Coast.

This is a warzone I do not mind (from an assassin's/operative's point of view). It's still same old same old. One node guarder to the side turret, and the rest to the middle, to battle it out.

I am glad with this, because it's not a mindless fight over nothing. It's rather a fight over the capping point. Stealthers stealth out to cap inside, you co-ordinate stuns in order to cap a few points, and this goes on for many minutes until one team has the turret. It's not over though because with good co-ordination it's actually possible to cap it back. It's hard vs good teams, but it's possible.

To put pressure on the other team the defending team's assassin could go visit the winning team's assassin, to send someone from the middle to help them if needed, in hope of getting the upper hand at middle.

 

This is my current favorite match-up. The way the cap is designed is a beautiful thing, and it demands perfect coordination and precise burst on key players to win. It is also a map that doesn't always require competent teams to move around. If they have the ability to reverse the cap on you, map control is anyones game at any time.

 

Slingers and thanks to 2.0 commandos are you priority targets. You cant cap with flybys backed by hunker down, and you cant cap with hold the line and mortar volleys going out. Finally a map where commandos can shine right? Focus priority targets, commence CC rotations.

 

Reacting to off nodes is easier thanks again to increased mobility across the board and the amount of time it takes to get a cap, again in conjunction with small map size.

 

Same game as before, just easier to micro manage.

 

 

This was my big wall of text, I hope you enjoyed it.

I'd like to hear other renounced teams' opinions on what they think about this.

In my opinion, the basics to a few warzones such as obviously Ancient Hypergates and Civil War could be changed ...

 

I like the current state of RWZs, nevermind all the other issues that plague PvP. Again we are forced to develop new ways of winning the same game which is what keeps us around right?

The more healer a team has, the easier it is to counter every strat they can possibly do by merely copying their placement. It doesn't matter what really cool trick the other team has. The presence of additional healers reduces their ability to do damage and therefore your risk of being overpowered anywhere on an equal fight is drastically reduced. Of course you won't expect to beat them anywhere either, but that's fine as you are only preventing them from executing their surprise attack and should use the time during the stalemate to reorganize a better plan.

 

First off, healing doesn't reduce their ability to do damage, healing only heals damage done; TANKING reduces their ability to deal damage. Since 2.0 you can litterally kill someone in 2-3 seconds if you focus them right. A healer will not be able to heal through focus fire without a tanks guard. You CAN use 3 healers in your setup but then your strategy turns into a CC cap one, in which case you better have brought along a lot of classes that can CC and players that are coordinated enough to use a CC cap strat. Even still the whole strategy can be thwarted if even 1 person has their CC break up. Bringing an extra healer may allow you to survive longer, but it doesn't help you take the objective (which you need to do if you want to win). Also, with an extra healer instead of a DPS you're not going to be putting a lot of pressure on the opposing team, which will leave them free to run around and do whatever they please including breaking caps and effortlessly watching the node instead of their own HP bar. Furthermore, healers tend to pay more attention to the HP bars of their teammates rather than to the objective so it's more likely for them to miss things like caps. DPS are consistently staring at the opposing team they are DPSing and are usually constantly scanning the field looking for over-extenders, vulnerable targets, and to break caps (which is what you want on NC).

 

Taking an extra healer is possible, but it's far from ideal in NC.

Edited May 8, 2013 by DimeStax

Three healer comps are there because the first two of your healers suck. 2.0 burst negates your healers anyways.

 

Three healers also makes you react, rather than taking a pro-active approach. I honestly dont remember the last time we ever tried to kill healers first.

 

For redundancies sake, three healers is always a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. Find two better ones, there isnt enough damage to heal with 3 at maximum potential, sir.

three healer comps are there because the first two of your healers suck. 2.0 burst negates your healers anyways.

 

Three healers also makes you react, rather than taking a pro-active approach. I honestly dont remember the last time we ever tried to kill healers first.

 

For redundancies sake, three healers is always a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. Find two better ones, there isnt enough damage to heal with 3 at maximum potential, sir.

 

^ QFT. If you need 3 healers then the two you have (or your tank) aren't good enough.

Edited May 8, 2013 by DimeStax

Three healer comps are there because the first two of your healers suck. 2.0 burst negates your healers anyways.

 

Three healers also makes you react, rather than taking a pro-active approach. I honestly dont remember the last time we ever tried to kill healers first.

 

For redundancies sake, three healers is always a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. Find two better ones, there isnt enough damage to heal with 3 at maximum potential, sir.

 

we have 2 of the best healers.on the server in our team. they rarely die. even in voidstar they max die once or twice. the burst is better. but still. you fail to grasp the 3rd healer's role at certain times. dont blame me for this. this goes to all of you

Edited May 8, 2013 by Aerilas

we have 2 of the best healers.on the server in our team. they rarely die. even in voidstar they max die once or twice. the burst is better. but still. you fail to grasp the 3rd healer's role at certain times. dont blame me for this. this goes to all of you

 

You used to bring a third healer to optimize bubble stun. One AoE sage heal, one scoundrel healer, and one bubble sage. This was used to offset the energy needs of keeping a bubble on everyone, that way you didnt lose raw heal power and gained the most game breaking stun mechanic in the history of any game ever.

 

Still though if you insist that somehow I cannot grasp a third healers role I would ask you to be a bit more specific. The only reason I can see it useful is D round in a VS.

 

That aside, your server must be loaded with a bunch of **** healers if you still need to take a third. Did it ever occur to you that its just as important to have amazing players assisting healers when possible as it is to have amazing healers themselves? What about bursting down the enemy teams big hitters?

 

Let me put it this way, you should probably re-evaluate expectations for your team on both an individual and group play basis, that is the root of your problem.

Having more healers allows you to run more tricky plays. For example in one game in NC I attacked enemy natural node with healer + me. The enemy sent their defensive team (healer X 2, tank, DPS) without realizing that the attacking team is also defensive. So our 2 guys fought their 4 guys for the next 10 minutes while we capped south since this gives us a decisive advantage elsewhere. Now this strat isn't as cool as it sounds if we only have 2 healers on our side, because that means there's only one of them left in south and if he dies then we'd have no chance of capturing south. But since we have 3 healers it's okay to run an unorthodox attack because there are still 2 left to go with the main assault.

 

Of course the flipside of that is that the enemy should've realized we've 3 healers and ask themselves is it really that likely we have enough DPS to push through their natural in such a defensive setup? If they saw through that the attack would've failed miserably. So more healers give you options, but they're not necessarily better options. Still, if you can't win the game straight up, you got to try something else. In that game we were consistently losing in the head on fight so we put our 3rd healer to good use. If it didn't work, we didn't lose anything because we were going to lose anyway. A lot of people are realy fixiated on the 'rated = 2 healers' paradigm that they fall into logic traps on how to deal with more than 2 or even less than 2 healers. It's simliar to how pulling your node defender to attack can someitmes lead to unexpected success as most people would never expect that last 8th person to show up. Are these reliable strategies? No, but your team isn't always going to be the stronger team and if you're the weaker team, you got to improvise to overcome the opponent's superiority somehow. Going with the same old tried and true strat pretty much has no chance defeating a stronger team that is also doing exactly the same thing.

Edited May 8, 2013 by Astarica

Now I see why people would prefer arena and ranked warzone community is fairly small on many servers that are not filled with hardcore pvpers. I read it and it sounds boring as hell. I am sure in the thick of it is a blast, clutch moments galore, text though my god it seems that it would be a akin to watching two holy paladins duel in WoW for an hour.

Hello i am a sage healer.

 

I think healing is ridiculus.... and running teams with 3 healers is like running teams with 4 smashers.

 

From the sage point of view they have made my class really really easy to play. From what i hear they have made scoundrels way easy to play as well.

 

Things that (ihmo) needs to be changed

 

1) remove insta salvation - This is the only reason ihmo that people run 3 healer teams

Mental alacrity as an active skill is more than enough

 

2) tone down scoundrels or put back energy management back in the game - we have operatives scoundrels in our server doing 2K HPS ...ridiculous

I dont have scoundrel but my friends say that now it is easy as hell to play one

 

Make our pvp life a bit complicated we will start falling asleep in WZs

Edited May 8, 2013 by Princz

I'm calling out to all Ranked players from all servers, to discuss the state of Ranked Warzones at the moment.

I'd like your opinions on all the warzones, how they feel now opposed to what they used to feel like.

 

Please only post here if you're a daily-weekly ranked warzone player, and played on 2.0 even when nobody had gear yet.

 

First of all, setups.

I'm not going to ask you to give away your setup, neither will I.

But I can say that probably everybody is running with 3 healers now.

What I am curious with is how many different AC's you're using. For our team, we're using 6-7 different AC's. Depending on who's online.

How's yours?

 

Secondary, the warzones themselves.

 

Huttball

Luckily, Huttball is still one of the warzones that's still the same as pre 2.0.

It's all about keeping the middle, getting ready when they score, and mass cc and use cds to get the ball.

From there on, you pass it to the tank, a runner goes up, and you score or wait in the middle to prepare yourselves.

 

Voidstar

TTK has gotten out of hand. In ranked warzones, with respeccing during the warzone as a possibility (which I am NOT opposed to, it increases tactics) you can have your setup so that you can NOT get killed in the defending phase. Or just die the very few times.

On the attacking phase you go all out dps with minimal heals, and hope to score the few kills in order to win.

In games with good teams vs good teams (which is the only example I'm going to use in every warzone, not vs pug teams) there's just no way to cap. I'm not going to say here how, but there's a failproof way to defend the offdoor without ever getting capped.

This means Voidstar is all about the kills, which imo is no problem. There's finally a mindless slaughter warzone, always a fun thing when you're in the mood for numbers.

 

Ancient Hypergates

Ahh, the newest addition to the "stack" of warzones we have to deal with.

When it first came out and for a few months, this warzone was about capping your pylon, and then brawling in the middle. It was still so on the PTS. Sometimes the defender from the so far losing team would go and try to cc-cap the other teams node. This became harder in the beginning of 2.0 since the hybrid build was gone with no more insta-lift/whirlwind.

But now it has changed. Idk how it is now on other servers, but this tactic does NOT work anymore.

This warzone is all about preventing the other team from capping their pylon.

This is now so for 2-3 weeks on our server since teams are getting more adept at the warzone, and it has grown so far that you need to divide your team into 2 setups of 3-5 or 4-4 in order to prevent and at the same time try to cap yourself. You might kill the other team, but really, the odds are very low since tanks and healers are extremely good on our server. (This doesn't mean the dps are bad, on the contrary).

The worst we've had was a game up to x9 round (the last round, it automatically shuts down the warzone in the middle of this round) where only 2 pylons ever were capped by both teams together. It's a tedious display of mindboggling gypsy tactics for nearly 20 minutes where you rarely get to kill anyone, yet have to be on a constant lookout for cappers.

It's starting to basically depend on lucky setups you're sending to a side, which often means your other side is in danger.

The other idea is to send a tank, dps, dps, heal to each side, but this will just turn into no team ever capping anything. This way, it might turn out to be a second Voidstar where the win is depending on the kills.

 

The Civil War

Now, here's the warzone I have the most strife with.

Civil War has changed aswell. With the same problem as in Voidstar, there's just no way of wiping eachother in the middle. No matter how focused your focus is, with setups the way they are you. will. not. wipe.

This in a way makes it like Ancient Hypergates.

It's now all about the setups you send towards each node. Again, it's all about the luck you have who you are sending where and what team you're opposing.

And again, just like in Ancient Hypergates, you could send a tank, dps and a healer to each sidenode with another respecced healer and dps to middle for example. And it will go. on. forever. 30-40min matches are possible this way.

The actual problem in this warzone lies in the fact that whoever gets the 1st tick. Wins. Period.

90% of the time when you do send lucky setups to sides, that means that your other side is usually in danger too. And it becomes a race for who can kill the opposing team first and get the first tick before losing the other node.

Middle always is a stalemate, so once both sides are capped everybody except the node guarder runs to the middle to have yet another endless fight in the middle until your Ship has 0 hp.

The problem here is that you have to sit through 15-20minutes of pointless fighting when you know you are going to lose.

With the new skills stealthers have gotten it's become quite impossible to cap the opposing teams node before help comes pouring in. It's possible, but sadly very very rare for the defender to make a big mistake.

 

Novare Coast

Last but not least, Novare Coast.

This is a warzone I do not mind (from an assassin's/operative's point of view). It's still same old same old. One node guarder to the side turret, and the rest to the middle, to battle it out.

I am glad with this, because it's not a mindless fight over nothing. It's rather a fight over the capping point. Stealthers stealth out to cap inside, you co-ordinate stuns in order to cap a few points, and this goes on for many minutes until one team has the turret. It's not over though because with good co-ordination it's actually possible to cap it back. It's hard vs good teams, but it's possible.

To put pressure on the other team the defending team's assassin could go visit the winning team's assassin, to send someone from the middle to help them if needed, in hope of getting the upper hand at middle.

 

 

This was my big wall of text, I hope you enjoyed it.

I'd like to hear other renounced teams' opinions on what they think about this.

In my opinion, the basics to a few warzones such as obviously Ancient Hypergates and Civil War could be changed ...

sad to say but all this is true... rdm WZs are ridiculous too now...

 

heal > lineup > skill > objectives...

 

heal output 25% over the top, new survival-abilities just dont work with some of the objective based WZs...

 

its a pity an pvp is less fun now...