No. Nothing is op as sin and oper. When i play on my sin and oper i can kill merc fast with his shield on and with pop of all 10 heal stacks. During 5.x people had to stop damaging merc with that shield on, be more "clever", avoid hitting in shield and what now? 2 sins can easily force merc to remove his shield earlier to get 10 stack heal since 20 % dr is nothing and even then when shield heals merc for 70k those sins doing 70k in 1 second with their mauls. And if merc is hited by 2 sins and oper or 3 sins it is death... you can run, push but you are dead fast by being forced to pop all dcds very fast no matter how skilled merc is. Same about sorcs and snipers. They all die fast when focused, they can't escape eternal rolls, double stuns, leg slashes, force speed with immune to slows and roots.

 

ON the contrary, sins and opers can't be killed that easy - double vanish double regen, swap to life warden after second vanish, eternal rolls with cc and stun immune + vanish. All these make dec sin and conc oper most difficult targets to kill.

 

Even in scenario where merc/sorc/mara are not the targets and free casting they can't kill enemy target as fast as sins and opers will kill their target on same free cast since sin and oper have both huge burst and sustained damage (doing 65k biggest hits plus 9-10 k dps while other specs doing 35-55 k biggest hits and only 7-9k dps). Dont forget that sin can guard his focused team mate and use taunts while oper can offheal them.

 

Overall, every day when i play ranked i can see 5-6 games in a row without mercs, snipers, marauders, sorcs and juggs. Only opers, sins and dot pts. Maybe few maras or sorcs sometimes

I played ranked since pre season went live almost every day and I can confirm this to be true....

As a marauder main I was shocked at first when I saw that days went by... and barely any marauders in que, mercs or even snipers. Most of the que was deception sin and conc operatives. Every day I find myself teamed 3 and occasionally 4 stealth teams. It feels like an infection. The previous TOP classes like merc or mara are not very present anymore and people are getting nuked by sins and conc opers very fast.

To be honest.... playing a melee is very challenging now, especially a Jugg, but overall it's fun. This of course doesn't mean that it's good from a class balance's point of view. Once again bioware have overdone things and look how things turned out to be. The live season will be very comic because I already get a lot of games where 2 opers are roll chasing someone across the map. :D Some games are pure comedy with 2 opers running after someone with the rest of the team running after the opers.

Marauders can vanish and regen too.. not as easily as sin because getting out of combat can be a pain, but it makes our life a bit easier.

I played ranked since pre season went live almost every day and I can confirm this to be true....

 

As a marauder main I was shocked at first when I saw that days went by... and barely any marauders in que, mercs or even snipers. Most of the que was deception sin and conc operatives. Every day I find myself teamed 3 and occasionally 4 stealth teams. It feels like an infection. The previous TOP classes like merc or mara are not very present anymore and people are getting nuked by sins and conc opers very fast.

 

To be honest.... playing a melee is very challenging now, especially a Jugg, but overall it's fun. This of course doesn't mean that it's good from a class balance's point of view. Once again bioware have overdone things and look how things turned out to be. The live season will be very comic because I already get a lot of games where 2 opers are roll chasing someone across the map. :D Some games are pure comedy with 2 opers running after someone with the rest of the team running after the opers.

 

Marauders can vanish and regen too.. not as easily as sin because getting out of combat can be a pain, but it makes our life a bit easier.

I also play ranked every day after work and iam tired to see this every day - https://imgur.com/a/qYlXQRy. i swapped on oper/sin and feeling like a king in solo ranked compared to other classes....but playing only two specs gets booring pretty fast tbh....sometimes i play marauder and merc which are my main classes and feeling like all my role is to survive and hope that sins and opers in my team will do all job while iam winning time for them and giving net in right moment when enemy target has full white bar. This is just stupid because at 5.x patch i could play merc,sorc, mara, oper,sniper and they all were ok for ranked, nearly close to each other even though it seemed that merc/mara are a bit better. I wished previous patch class balance returns back

I also play ranked every day after work and iam tired to see this every day - https://imgur.com/a/qYlXQRy. i swapped on oper/sin and feeling like a king in solo ranked compared to other classes....but playing only two specs gets booring pretty fast tbh....sometimes i play marauder and merc which are my main classes and feeling like all my role is to survive and hope that sins and opers in my team will do all job while iam winning time for them and giving net in right moment when enemy target has full white bar. This is just stupid because at 5.x patch i could play merc,sorc, mara, oper,sniper and they all were ok for ranked, nearly close to each other even though it seemed that merc/mara are a bit better. I wished previous patch class balance returns back

Lol no, I'm good off the sniper/mara hard swap 5.0's garbage. Tune down concealment and deception and everything will be better for the most part. Carnage, madness, and a few others might need a boost but everything else can be played in 4's now without being rolled by a single overpowered comp.

Lol no, I'm good off the sniper/mara hard swap 5.0's garbage.

.... compared to your double pt cleave garbage? Swaps so much more fun, complicated, satisfying.

PT set bonus exploding all over is a little much and the stealth classes seem a bit overturned but even with that being said balance feels better now than it has a lot of the other times I’ve played.

Rémove that and pt is back to being garbage again. You should fear when attacking pt, it's already glass cannon even now. It's not much,

PT set bonus exploding all over is a little much and the stealth classes seem a bit overturned but even with that being said balance feels better now than it has a lot of the other times I’ve played.

Considering that PT are the same garbage they were for 3 years and are dying first in solo ranked 80% of the time, we really cannot be mad at that set bonus honestly...

It can be countered, but we might be too busy mashing the keyboard..

Lol no, I'm good off the sniper/mara hard swap 5.0's garbage. Tune down concealment and deception and everything will be better for the most part. Carnage, madness, and a few others might need a boost but everything else can be played in 4's now without being rolled by a single overpowered comp.

You are talking about tr while i meant sr since tr died after season 10. It became as a wintrade field where classes and specs doesn't matter. You can queue tr but if you won't ask anyone to queue against your team you will sit in queue forever. We should focus on something that exists, alive and mostly legit. Snipers weren't fotm in sr during previous seasons, playing them was extremely hard. Touching them now is not a good idea whereas all classes are on nearly same position except dec sin, burst oper and dot pts

Issue with sin imo is that it doesn't encourage you to play the class properly.

Someone pointed out that the open is reck, spike, discharge, stun then three maul back to back.

This imo is the only issue with the current design I have. As a decep' sin you're supposed to use Maul when you have duplicity procs, not spam it because it's just too good even without.

Good balance should reward good gameplay, not braindead spam.

However, I have to warn too, that the only reason sins are "op" is because of this flaw in the design. Remove the maul spam without duplicity and you have what I'd call a balanced class against the other class.

Let's rewind back in time to 5.X era, I'm sorry but I don't want to go back into this time where as a melee you had to either tank or be a mara to survive long enough for merc/sniper to cycle through their defensive.

Most spec in the game now are unbalanced. Mercs have too much defensive, snipers too, mara are still as good as before (except Carnage, poor dude needs a buff), now dot PT/burst Sin got some buffs too because at the time it was just almost impossible to survive in ranked or unranked if your team didn't put way too much ressource into you to make you survive.

Peoples are complaining about seeing only sin/oper in game now, but I think most of you forgot how queues looked like at the start of S8, full with only mara/snipers/merc. FOTM rollers still exists, deal with it, and we're all lucky because they're as bad on sin/oper as they were on mara/sniper/merc at the time.

nerfs are needed, but nerfing only sins and oper because they're "op" would just put back the old trio on top. Which I frankly don't want to happen because I don't see the point of reverting back to another unbalanced era. Instead of asking for nerfs to one spec, try and ask for nerfs for every spec that was OP in the last two or three years. Because as soon as you nerf burst sins, dot PTs and oper, you can be sure that those old FOTM will come back, which we do not want to happen.

nerfs are needed, but nerfing only sins and oper because they're "op" would just put back the old trio on top. Which I frankly don't want to happen because I don't see the point of reverting back to another unbalanced era. Instead of asking for nerfs to one spec, try and ask for nerfs for every spec that was OP in the last two or three years. Because as soon as you nerf burst sins, dot PTs and oper, you can be sure that those old FOTM will come back, which we do not want to happen.

I've seen this sort of sentiment a lot, and I think it speaks to Bioware having a flawed approach to balancing classes. Rather than making small changes to things that need changing, they try to get the balance perfect in broad strokes, so they often end up over-buffing or over-nerfing.

But it doesn't have to be that way. They could easily make some small tweaks to deception and concealment set bonuses to tone down their burst. Then see what the community thinks. If it wasn't enough, they can do something else. And they could make changes like that relatively frequently. Rather than waiting a full year and doing a huge balance patch that seems as likely to make things worse as better.

Sadly, there's an even more fundamental problem: Bioware doesn't listen to the community's feedback when it comes to pvp balance, nor are they aware of what's happening in ranked. They seem to rely solely on whatever metrics they choose to look it, which I assume boils down to just raw, overall damage numbers. Hopefully things will be different with 6.0.

You are talking about tr while i meant sr since tr died after season 10. It became as a wintrade field where classes and specs doesn't matter. You can queue tr but if you won't ask anyone to queue against your team you will sit in queue forever. We should focus on something that exists, alive and mostly legit. Snipers weren't fotm in sr during previous seasons, playing them was extremely hard. Touching them now is not a good idea whereas all classes are on nearly same position except dec sin, burst oper and dot pts

Yeah sadly that is the case nowadays. Though instead of asking for a nerf, we should be asking to bring everything else that's lacking up to par. We always ask for nerfs when something is over tuned, but then BW manages to totally mess something up when trying to balance with nerfs.

I was reading PTS forums on daily basis and no one ever mentioned anything OP about Sins in their respective threads. All you could read is that how garbage their set bonuses were compared to other classes. Look how that turned out to be..

 

The only place were there were hints was on discord.

That doesn't remove validity from the OP's thread, though.

Also, changes were made right up to the last day on PTS. It's not some big surprise that players on the live server are complaining far more than those from PTS about sins or ops having too strong of gearing sets or tacticals etc.

Number one, the amount of players on the PTS was minascule. Number two, thousands of players have poured hundreds of hours into playing these classes/against these classes and are far more aware of what's going on now than what was happening on PTS.

You can't use anecdotal evidence alone to prove your point that people are just overreacting and irresponsibly lying now about how OP'd certain classes are compared to others due to strong tacticals or gear sets.

These people are showing screenshots of massive damage being dumped in split second times by sins on top of classes renowned for having strong DCDs (mercs no less lol) and they don't even need to respect the DCDs now because of the amount of damage they are able to output in short periods of time.

I don't really care now, have no dog to fight in this but I think you are a bit blinded by your bias and if I had to guess I'd guess you main a sin or op. That's not a bad thing, I get it. When they boosted mercs, I was overjoyed because I had played the class since the start and it was always a free kill to most other classes until they buffed the mercs DCDs.

Thing is, let's be honest here and not just you, but others defending sins... Take the bias lens off, and at the very least celebrate the fact sins are over-performing don't pretend it's not the case though. Trying to deny their present state won't do any good especially when so many others know the truth.

The funny thing is it used to be DPS mercs were said to be brain dead easy. Especially Arsenal which was always very easy to play. Mercs always got this label even though it hardly was true especially when considering the healing merc and the dot spec merc. Now, since 6.0, the sin is getting labeled easy FOTM, and for dec sin it definitely applies when you consider how easy it is to use their absurd burst.

Yeah sadly that is the case nowadays. Though instead of asking for a nerf, we should be asking to bring everything else that's lacking up to par. We always ask for nerfs when something is over tuned, but then BW manages to totally mess something up when trying to balance with nerfs.

I am a big supporter of this. ^

I rarely cry for nerfs, I rather see other clases be brought up to par instead. Why? Because when classes get nerfed they don't just get their numbers adjusted, they often times get entire rotations altered and abilities get gutted or even removed.

Every time a class gets nerfed the class ends up in the dumpster for YEARS. What started out as fun, becomes a complete garbage spec that only gets played for novelty purposes but never for their performance and it won't get revisited for years.

Anyway, point is people should stop asking for nerfs, this gaming company has proven for years they are incapable of nerfing properly. Unless you want to see a class get neutered and have all the fun stripped from it. In that case, go ahead and demand for a nerf.

That doesn't remove validity from the OP's thread, though.

 

Also, changes were made right up to the last day on PTS. It's not some big surprise that players on the live server are complaining far more than those from PTS about sins or ops having too strong of gearing sets or tacticals etc.

 

Number one, the amount of players on the PTS was minascule. Number two, thousands of players have poured hundreds of hours into playing these classes/against these classes and are far more aware of what's going on now than what was happening on PTS.

 

You can't use anecdotal evidence alone to prove your point that people are just overreacting and irresponsibly lying now about how OP'd certain classes are compared to others due to strong tacticals or gear sets.

 

These people are showing screenshots of massive damage being dumped in split second times by sins on top of classes renowned for having strong DCDs (mercs no less lol) and they don't even need to respect the DCDs now because of the amount of damage they are able to output in short periods of time.

 

I don't really care now, have no dog to fight in this but I think you are a bit blinded by your bias and if I had to guess I'd guess you main a sin or op. That's not a bad thing, I get it. When they boosted mercs, I was overjoyed because I had played the class since the start and it was always a free kill to most other classes until they buffed the mercs DCDs.

 

Thing is, let's be honest here and not just you, but others defending sins... Take the bias lens off, and at the very least celebrate the fact sins are over-performing don't pretend it's not the case though. Trying to deny their present state won't do any good especially when so many others know the truth.

 

The funny thing is it used to be DPS mercs were said to be brain dead easy. Especially Arsenal which was always very easy to play. Mercs always got this label even though it hardly was true especially when considering the healing merc and the dot spec merc. Now, since 6.0, the sin is getting labeled easy FOTM, and for dec sin it definitely applies when you consider how easy it is to use their absurd burst.

As a Marauder main, I have hardly any interest in defending sins and ops and crazy braindead OP;ness.. I think you totally misunderstood my post by assuming I was somehow defending sins.

I know OP very well as I do ranked with and against him on daily basis so I totally support his point of view on this matter.

What I said about PTS feedback was just by observation as I never expected such a radical change in the meta for 6.0. I was expecting it to be more or less the same, but I heard rumours ingame right before release of 6.0 about sins being crazy good. Then I got confirmation of it after thing went live and I first got sapped by a sin and my HP somehow vanished..

I am a supporter of sanity in PVP and I am convinced that it's never going to happen in this game and I also believe PVP problems go way beyond class balance. They go straight into game engine being what it is territory and how it handles this crazy mobility classes received over the years. I could care less about how garbage PT is or how OP Deception got when I cannot kill an Oper because he I see him on top platform and I cannot leap up to him only to find out that he is in fact DOWN, or when a guy just vanishes into the map then shows up like 15 meters further away.... These things break PVP more than class imbalance does, but whatever. Glad you thought I am some delusional sin main.

My goal is just to enjoy whatever is left of this game and worry less about... irrelevant things that we obviously have no control over.

PS: Mercs are still very good but they somehow vanished from the que in pre season.. We will see how many we will have when s12 goes live. That fact that such a strong class was put aside by players in favor of stealth speaks volumes about the current state of balance.

PS: Mercs are still very good but they somehow vanished from the que in pre season.. We will see how many we will have when s12 goes live. That fact that such a strong class was put aside by players in favor of stealth speaks volumes about the current state of balance.

I think that it's mostly a case of FOTM rollers, again. You'll see when they nerf sin (probably in the next patch, if they only care) that players will probably return to merc. The class is still strong, and no matter how OP sin is, reflect and kolto are burst-breakers. The fact that even the absurd burst we got right now can still be facetanked by one of these defensive cooldowns (or in the case of reflect, force a swap target) says a lot about the class.

Sins are op, for the reason I detailed above (burst should happen when you have duplicity procs, not by spamming maul when it doesn't proc dupl') but nerfing them right now would just break balance even more imo. By "nerfing" I mean the Bioware kind of nerf. The nuke nerf. The one that Hatred got early in the game and still hasn't fully recovered from.

I think you totally misunderstood my post by assuming I was somehow defending sins. Glad you thought I am some delusional sin main.

My bad. haha

My goal is just to enjoy whatever is left of this game and worry less about... irrelevant things that we obviously have no control over.

If a new MMO comes out, would you consider it, or are you staying with SWTOR till you hang up the gaming mitts?

That fact that such a strong class was put aside by players in favor of stealth speaks volumes about the current state of balance.

This is true, too. It does say a lot lol.

I never thought mercs in their present state would be surpassed as far as dynamic performance is concerned. Granted they are different for sure, mercs being ranged and relying on strong DCDs allowing them to do damage even when tunneled etc., while sins are stealths I don't need to go on about their strengths we all know them too, heh.

Point is, sins are quite dynamic right now. I'd rather see BW consider making the crappy specs dynamic in their own rights. There are many sub-class specs that need some attention, and that includes two of the three healers!

When only one of three healers is viable in max settings, that's a serious problem. Hopefully this gets addressed sooner instead of later.

My bad. haha

 

 

 

 

If a new MMO comes out, would you consider it, or are you staying with SWTOR till you hang up the gaming mitts?

 

 

 

 

This is true, too. It does say a lot lol.

 

I never thought mercs in their present state would be surpassed as far as dynamic performance is concerned. Granted they are different for sure, mercs being ranged and relying on strong DCDs allowing them to do damage even when tunneled etc., while sins are stealths I don't need to go on about their strengths we all know them too, heh.

 

Point is, sins are quite dynamic right now. I'd rather see BW consider making the crappy specs dynamic in their own rights. There are many sub-class specs that need some attention, and that includes two of the three healers!

 

When only one of three healers is viable in max settings, that's a serious problem. Hopefully this gets addressed sooner instead of later.

New MMO ? Like a new Star Wars MMO ? I would consider it it's a new SW Mmo.... but I won't leave SWTOR. New game means another huge time sink to get familiar with , so no way. I have an ESO account, but never actually bothered to play it.

I found that enjoying the game is much better than obsessing about the outcome of SR games and what happens to your rating.

Yes, mercs are still good and have the same defenses that allow them to shoots rockets in my face for free for multiple seconds.

But it seems that being stealth and melting people's HP close to 50% after opener is much more comfortable and desirable in 2019. Mercs are for old fashioned people.

I just read that PT is getting buffed and Juggs get their super ED reset tactical ? Oh man it feels like my mara is getting shafted heavily.

I just read that PT is getting buffed and Juggs get their super ED reset tactical ? Oh man it feels like my mara is getting shafted heavily.

Pyro is getting a decent damage increase for no apparent reason, it already does very strong dps which is NOT represented fully on a dummy.

I say no apparent reason because AP is both worse and ignored

ED cd reduction tac only technically exists so far. Maybe available for christmas.

The thing is that none of the existing MMORPGs can ever be anything but a hilarious joke when it comes to PVP without a total redesign. Even if PVP is just one aspect of the game your building, if it's going to be involved, and actually work and be taken seriously, it has to be the primary consideration in building everything. The big problem is pretty much all surviving MMORPGs with any kind of player bases are PVE games that were designed with PVP as a side consideration and as a result the balance is based around PVE contribution primarily, and how this stacks up in a direct class to class or role to role comparison is at best secondary. What's worse, in an attempt to compensate pretty much all MMORPGs put in skills and selections that are primarily designed with a PVP focus, being underperforming in PVE, but very powerful in a PVP environment. This is used as a justification for many PVE skills conversely being far less useful in PVP. This leads to PVP builds and PVE builds, even in games where you cannot have seperate builds saved for one character and switch between them with a toggle, and need to respec to seriously change what your character can do.

Looking at SWTOR for example you can find numerous specs that are fun to play but useless, or at least underperforming in PVP. Like how a heavily DoT focused Lethality Operative is going to always be far inferior to a burse focused Concealment Operative, and perhaps it can be argued Sniper will do better than any sort of Operative based Agent. Simply put when this kind of disparity exists, you are never going to be able to have anything but a huge joke in PVP, as anyone who does well at it will likely be using a character specifically built and geared for it, and anyone else is largely going to be a victim.... or at least substantially less competitive. For PVP to work the "play what you want" mentality must exist there as well as in PVE, making all options at least somewhat competitive and preventing any kind of "dominant builds" from existing unchecked.

My basic solution to this problem is to treat PVP as sort of a joke, I have a bit of fun with it, but put a minimal effort into it and do my own thing. I refuse to "tryhard" in a game that isn't even trying from a game perspective... and that means any MMORPG out there right now with PVP is something I just can't take seriously as none of them were designed from square 1 with the right kind of mentality. Rather than thinking "how can these abilities we made with raiding in mind work in a PVP environment" they needed to think "now that we've balanced PVP, how can we build multi-group PVE encounters that employ those tools".

To simply give an opinion before you consider who does the most damage, or who is the most durable, and what spec is "the ultimate", you need to address the most basic issue of MMO PVP that goes back to the beginning, and that is players using crowd control abilities on each other. One example I give for how broken SWTOR is from the conceptual stage is that numerous types of characters have multiple crowd control options, and it's very easy in PVP to get "stunlocked" especially if you have multiple at least pseudo-coordinated people acting in concert with their CC abilities as the CC-breakers will never come back as quickly as you can be stunned. A good portion of my own deaths, as well as admittedly those that I cause, involve some form of CC being employed, and in many cases the target (or me) having very little agency at the end of the day lacking any real ways to break or avoid it.

Another point to make is that due to the need to cleanse status effects and such in PVE content, it seems numerous types of characters can bypass them, and survive a considerable amount of punishment from DoTs. This is not uncommon in MMORPG games to be fair, but it does mean that "burst damage" becomes the determining factor and being able to to more consistant damage via other abililities and things like DoTs borders on the useless. As long as this remains the case it excludes character options from viability, and makes PVP a lot more of a limited joke than it should be by forcing people into specific niches.

Another problem with PVP in MMORPGs is that PVE requires "the holy trinity" and yet the tank part of that trinity consistently seems to be given very little effectiveness when played as a tank, because in PVP it's damage dealing, not resiliance, that is also king.... healers can still help people survive however. In PVP oftentimes "builds" lead to burse damage so high that even characters with maximized defenses get shredded like tissue paper due to hard coded limits on defenses intended to prevent the trivilization of PVE "Raid" type content by allowing characters to become virtually immune to damage.... the fact that defense gets capped much more severely than attack (as bosses can have millions of hit points where players are far more fragile) makes being a defensive fighter a joke... omitting roughly a third of the characters that should be participating right off the bat.

Briefly in the early days of "Champions Online" I saw some really interesting PVP when defense was viable, and you had long fights between defensive powerhouses, and DPS-types were not dominating (too fragile). It lead to a still broken, but amusing paradigm shift, but it didn't last due to the expected complaints from all the glass cannons. It however showed that when designed properly defensive based characters can be made viable... they were however brought down by all the screeching whiners who wanted it all to be flashy offensive wars.

At any rate I guess the point here is to say "balance isn't impossible, but nobody is going to redesign their existing games to achieve it". See to "Fix" PVP in SWTOR to the point where I would consider it worth doing more than goofing off with and actually consider putting in an effort, they would have to re-build all the characters basically from scratch, and most of the group based PVE content to be doable with that new design. PVP would have to have design primacy. They would also have to have a sort of "stalemate" idea where say a defense focused and offensive focused character going up against each other would be roughly 50-50 assuming similar skill levels, as opposed to the current situation where the offense will generally make a joke of the defenses, and the defensive specced guy just won't do enough damage to matter to even a "glass cannon" who will burn him much faster in proportion. In the new paradigm CC would either have to be made entirely ineffective agaisnt players (anything that removes player agency is bad IMO) or anti-CC moves would have to be almost always availible, with CC mostly having the function of slowing someone's rotation or breaking a "combo" by forcing them to work in another button, with the actual practical "stun" being a global cooldown in their way after hitting the button or whatever. SWTOR isn't quite as bad as old school WoW (which was hilarious) with teams of AOE fearing Shadow Priests taking turns (so whoever started the chain fear won) but I think the amount of CC thrown around is approaching that level.... you know now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I have ever died in SWTOR in PVP (and I've died a LOT, I don't even try and be seriously good at this) without some kind of CC, and usually multiple ones, being involved in my death. Conversely I think almost every kill I've made has involved me, or someone else, doing something along these lines to the target at some point..... so there you go... probably priority #1 if they ever wanted to fix this (but it will never happen). Priority #2 would probably be to mitigate the primacy of burst damage by making DoTs far more effective against players and harder to bypass or simply heal through.

Not trying to whine but will they balance the dps - heal ratio?

I can´t outheal 1 dps - I´m hindering my team if I list as heal.

I mean I could logg on my oper dps and delete other classes but I´d rather play healer ...

Not trying to whine but will they balance the dps - heal ratio?

It's not an accident that healing was not scaled with 6.0 healthbars.

5.0 healing levels are not coming back.

5.0 healing levels are not coming back.

Sad.

Well onward to pve, where healing is good, overtuned dps is great and no one sleeps with my mother. Huzzah.

The thing is that none of the existing MMORPGs can ever be anything but a hilarious joke when it comes to PVP without a total redesign. Even if PVP is just one aspect of the game your building, if it's going to be involved, and actually work and be taken seriously, it has to be the primary consideration in building everything. The big problem is pretty much all surviving MMORPGs with any kind of player bases are PVE games that were designed with PVP as a side consideration and as a result the balance is based around PVE contribution primarily, and how this stacks up in a direct class to class or role to role comparison is at best secondary. What's worse, in an attempt to compensate pretty much all MMORPGs put in skills and selections that are primarily designed with a PVP focus, being underperforming in PVE, but very powerful in a PVP environment. This is used as a justification for many PVE skills conversely being far less useful in PVP. This leads to PVP builds and PVE builds, even in games where you cannot have seperate builds saved for one character and switch between them with a toggle, and need to respec to seriously change what your character can do.

 

Looking at SWTOR for example you can find numerous specs that are fun to play but useless, or at least underperforming in PVP. Like how a heavily DoT focused Lethality Operative is going to always be far inferior to a burse focused Concealment Operative, and perhaps it can be argued Sniper will do better than any sort of Operative based Agent. Simply put when this kind of disparity exists, you are never going to be able to have anything but a huge joke in PVP, as anyone who does well at it will likely be using a character specifically built and geared for it, and anyone else is largely going to be a victim.... or at least substantially less competitive. For PVP to work the "play what you want" mentality must exist there as well as in PVE, making all options at least somewhat competitive and preventing any kind of "dominant builds" from existing unchecked.

 

My basic solution to this problem is to treat PVP as sort of a joke, I have a bit of fun with it, but put a minimal effort into it and do my own thing. I refuse to "tryhard" in a game that isn't even trying from a game perspective... and that means any MMORPG out there right now with PVP is something I just can't take seriously as none of them were designed from square 1 with the right kind of mentality. Rather than thinking "how can these abilities we made with raiding in mind work in a PVP environment" they needed to think "now that we've balanced PVP, how can we build multi-group PVE encounters that employ those tools".

 

To simply give an opinion before you consider who does the most damage, or who is the most durable, and what spec is "the ultimate", you need to address the most basic issue of MMO PVP that goes back to the beginning, and that is players using crowd control abilities on each other. One example I give for how broken SWTOR is from the conceptual stage is that numerous types of characters have multiple crowd control options, and it's very easy in PVP to get "stunlocked" especially if you have multiple at least pseudo-coordinated people acting in concert with their CC abilities as the CC-breakers will never come back as quickly as you can be stunned. A good portion of my own deaths, as well as admittedly those that I cause, involve some form of CC being employed, and in many cases the target (or me) having very little agency at the end of the day lacking any real ways to break or avoid it.

 

Another point to make is that due to the need to cleanse status effects and such in PVE content, it seems numerous types of characters can bypass them, and survive a considerable amount of punishment from DoTs. This is not uncommon in MMORPG games to be fair, but it does mean that "burst damage" becomes the determining factor and being able to to more consistant damage via other abililities and things like DoTs borders on the useless. As long as this remains the case it excludes character options from viability, and makes PVP a lot more of a limited joke than it should be by forcing people into specific niches.

 

Another problem with PVP in MMORPGs is that PVE requires "the holy trinity" and yet the tank part of that trinity consistently seems to be given very little effectiveness when played as a tank, because in PVP it's damage dealing, not resiliance, that is also king.... healers can still help people survive however. In PVP oftentimes "builds" lead to burse damage so high that even characters with maximized defenses get shredded like tissue paper due to hard coded limits on defenses intended to prevent the trivilization of PVE "Raid" type content by allowing characters to become virtually immune to damage.... the fact that defense gets capped much more severely than attack (as bosses can have millions of hit points where players are far more fragile) makes being a defensive fighter a joke... omitting roughly a third of the characters that should be participating right off the bat.

 

Briefly in the early days of "Champions Online" I saw some really interesting PVP when defense was viable, and you had long fights between defensive powerhouses, and DPS-types were not dominating (too fragile). It lead to a still broken, but amusing paradigm shift, but it didn't last due to the expected complaints from all the glass cannons. It however showed that when designed properly defensive based characters can be made viable... they were however brought down by all the screeching whiners who wanted it all to be flashy offensive wars.

 

At any rate I guess the point here is to say "balance isn't impossible, but nobody is going to redesign their existing games to achieve it". See to "Fix" PVP in SWTOR to the point where I would consider it worth doing more than goofing off with and actually consider putting in an effort, they would have to re-build all the characters basically from scratch, and most of the group based PVE content to be doable with that new design. PVP would have to have design primacy. They would also have to have a sort of "stalemate" idea where say a defense focused and offensive focused character going up against each other would be roughly 50-50 assuming similar skill levels, as opposed to the current situation where the offense will generally make a joke of the defenses, and the defensive specced guy just won't do enough damage to matter to even a "glass cannon" who will burn him much faster in proportion. In the new paradigm CC would either have to be made entirely ineffective agaisnt players (anything that removes player agency is bad IMO) or anti-CC moves would have to be almost always availible, with CC mostly having the function of slowing someone's rotation or breaking a "combo" by forcing them to work in another button, with the actual practical "stun" being a global cooldown in their way after hitting the button or whatever. SWTOR isn't quite as bad as old school WoW (which was hilarious) with teams of AOE fearing Shadow Priests taking turns (so whoever started the chain fear won) but I think the amount of CC thrown around is approaching that level.... you know now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I have ever died in SWTOR in PVP (and I've died a LOT, I don't even try and be seriously good at this) without some kind of CC, and usually multiple ones, being involved in my death. Conversely I think almost every kill I've made has involved me, or someone else, doing something along these lines to the target at some point..... so there you go... probably priority #1 if they ever wanted to fix this (but it will never happen). Priority #2 would probably be to mitigate the primacy of burst damage by making DoTs far more effective against players and harder to bypass or simply heal through.

Such a shame that most people on this board don't understand anything from your post... You are too much ahead for the average keyboard warrior to understand.

The thing is that none of the existing MMORPGs can ever be anything but a hilarious joke when it comes to PVP without a total redesign. Even if PVP is just one aspect of the game your building, if it's going to be involved, and actually work and be taken seriously, it has to be the primary consideration in building everything. The big problem is pretty much all surviving MMORPGs with any kind of player bases are PVE games that were designed with PVP as a side consideration and as a result the balance is based around PVE contribution primarily, and how this stacks up in a direct class to class or role to role comparison is at best secondary. What's worse, in an attempt to compensate pretty much all MMORPGs put in skills and selections that are primarily designed with a PVP focus, being underperforming in PVE, but very powerful in a PVP environment. This is used as a justification for many PVE skills conversely being far less useful in PVP. This leads to PVP builds and PVE builds, even in games where you cannot have seperate builds saved for one character and switch between them with a toggle, and need to respec to seriously change what your character can do.

 

Looking at SWTOR for example you can find numerous specs that are fun to play but useless, or at least underperforming in PVP. Like how a heavily DoT focused Lethality Operative is going to always be far inferior to a burse focused Concealment Operative, and perhaps it can be argued Sniper will do better than any sort of Operative based Agent. Simply put when this kind of disparity exists, you are never going to be able to have anything but a huge joke in PVP, as anyone who does well at it will likely be using a character specifically built and geared for it, and anyone else is largely going to be a victim.... or at least substantially less competitive. For PVP to work the "play what you want" mentality must exist there as well as in PVE, making all options at least somewhat competitive and preventing any kind of "dominant builds" from existing unchecked.

 

My basic solution to this problem is to treat PVP as sort of a joke, I have a bit of fun with it, but put a minimal effort into it and do my own thing. I refuse to "tryhard" in a game that isn't even trying from a game perspective... and that means any MMORPG out there right now with PVP is something I just can't take seriously as none of them were designed from square 1 with the right kind of mentality. Rather than thinking "how can these abilities we made with raiding in mind work in a PVP environment" they needed to think "now that we've balanced PVP, how can we build multi-group PVE encounters that employ those tools".

 

To simply give an opinion before you consider who does the most damage, or who is the most durable, and what spec is "the ultimate", you need to address the most basic issue of MMO PVP that goes back to the beginning, and that is players using crowd control abilities on each other. One example I give for how broken SWTOR is from the conceptual stage is that numerous types of characters have multiple crowd control options, and it's very easy in PVP to get "stunlocked" especially if you have multiple at least pseudo-coordinated people acting in concert with their CC abilities as the CC-breakers will never come back as quickly as you can be stunned. A good portion of my own deaths, as well as admittedly those that I cause, involve some form of CC being employed, and in many cases the target (or me) having very little agency at the end of the day lacking any real ways to break or avoid it.

 

Another point to make is that due to the need to cleanse status effects and such in PVE content, it seems numerous types of characters can bypass them, and survive a considerable amount of punishment from DoTs. This is not uncommon in MMORPG games to be fair, but it does mean that "burst damage" becomes the determining factor and being able to to more consistant damage via other abililities and things like DoTs borders on the useless. As long as this remains the case it excludes character options from viability, and makes PVP a lot more of a limited joke than it should be by forcing people into specific niches.

 

Another problem with PVP in MMORPGs is that PVE requires "the holy trinity" and yet the tank part of that trinity consistently seems to be given very little effectiveness when played as a tank, because in PVP it's damage dealing, not resiliance, that is also king.... healers can still help people survive however. In PVP oftentimes "builds" lead to burse damage so high that even characters with maximized defenses get shredded like tissue paper due to hard coded limits on defenses intended to prevent the trivilization of PVE "Raid" type content by allowing characters to become virtually immune to damage.... the fact that defense gets capped much more severely than attack (as bosses can have millions of hit points where players are far more fragile) makes being a defensive fighter a joke... omitting roughly a third of the characters that should be participating right off the bat.

 

Briefly in the early days of "Champions Online" I saw some really interesting PVP when defense was viable, and you had long fights between defensive powerhouses, and DPS-types were not dominating (too fragile). It lead to a still broken, but amusing paradigm shift, but it didn't last due to the expected complaints from all the glass cannons. It however showed that when designed properly defensive based characters can be made viable... they were however brought down by all the screeching whiners who wanted it all to be flashy offensive wars.

 

At any rate I guess the point here is to say "balance isn't impossible, but nobody is going to redesign their existing games to achieve it". See to "Fix" PVP in SWTOR to the point where I would consider it worth doing more than goofing off with and actually consider putting in an effort, they would have to re-build all the characters basically from scratch, and most of the group based PVE content to be doable with that new design. PVP would have to have design primacy. They would also have to have a sort of "stalemate" idea where say a defense focused and offensive focused character going up against each other would be roughly 50-50 assuming similar skill levels, as opposed to the current situation where the offense will generally make a joke of the defenses, and the defensive specced guy just won't do enough damage to matter to even a "glass cannon" who will burn him much faster in proportion. In the new paradigm CC would either have to be made entirely ineffective agaisnt players (anything that removes player agency is bad IMO) or anti-CC moves would have to be almost always availible, with CC mostly having the function of slowing someone's rotation or breaking a "combo" by forcing them to work in another button, with the actual practical "stun" being a global cooldown in their way after hitting the button or whatever. SWTOR isn't quite as bad as old school WoW (which was hilarious) with teams of AOE fearing Shadow Priests taking turns (so whoever started the chain fear won) but I think the amount of CC thrown around is approaching that level.... you know now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I have ever died in SWTOR in PVP (and I've died a LOT, I don't even try and be seriously good at this) without some kind of CC, and usually multiple ones, being involved in my death. Conversely I think almost every kill I've made has involved me, or someone else, doing something along these lines to the target at some point..... so there you go... probably priority #1 if they ever wanted to fix this (but it will never happen). Priority #2 would probably be to mitigate the primacy of burst damage by making DoTs far more effective against players and harder to bypass or simply heal through.

Man I've been feeling this way for a long time so it's pretty nice to see someone that shares the same thoughts about MMO PvP game modes as I do.

No MMO operates with competitive PvP integrity in mind. Not even Guild Wars 2, a game with an amazing combat system that feels like it was tailor made for PvP. MMO's are not the place for someone looking for a sound PvP game because the game mode is a distant afterthought.