oh well no I don't care for spoilers really. Har awesome.

So as anyone who played a Sith should know, Sith politics is really nasty. At the moment Darth Malgus and Grand Master Satele are held up as the face of their respective factions. However it seems entirely possible, likely even, that someone will try to off Malgus for their own personal gain in the Sith heirachy. He is after all the one telling everyone what to do all the time, a very nice position of power there. I think such a change in leadership would be awesome and would truly reflect the Sith culture, as well as help make the world seem a little less static. So the question in the title is not whether he can be killed, it is certain there is probably a Darth lord or two that wants to kill him. The question is- do Bioware have too much invested in Darth Malgus as the Empire figurehead to ever kill him off, even if the lore makes it likely?

Sorry I should have put a TL;DR version in there. TL;DR- make expertise penetrate expertise damage reduction, instead of increase damage done, so that it doesn't mess game balance up.

I think the biggest problem with the game is it follows the same design as WoW. All the "serious" content is loaded into end game, yet they keep making end game obsolete with new content. While the new content isn't the issue, the spending months making the previous content for it to be dumped in the toilet, and doing this repeatedly, means there will never be much end game content. Is the idea of reusable raids, ones that can be scaled up through different level brackets, that bad? I call this disposable game design. Like building a city, then levelling it and rebuilding it when you want a better city, instead of just adding to it.

In World of Warcraft there was a long wait before PvP was given "decent" item rewards. The big argument back then was you needed to raid to get PvP gear. Yet the devs were stuck with the concept that raiding should have the better rewards. Resilience PvP gear was a way to give PvP'ers good gear without it upsetting the PvE gear balance. The biggest problem with resil though was it skewed healing massively. Consider a character with a large amount of resil, they take significantly less damage than a player with none, while in PvP. Yet healing did not get scaled back also, it increased. This caused the problem that healing went up as damage taken went down, leading to healers that were effectively immortal and could keep a whole team up single handedly. Now Bioware tried to fix that by making expertise also increase damage to other players. The problem here of course is that it is a percentage increase to damage done. Damage output is already higher than healing output (which is good in a way, no immortal god-like healers). So just like in WoW, every single time there is a new tier of PvP gear with higher expertise caps, there will be huge balance issues and tons of balance tweaks will need to be made. Specifically as damage output is already higher than healing output, higher expertise caps will increase that discrepancy, leading to healers becoming less and less effective and players that have very large single damage attacks becoming more and more overpowered. A fix? Make expertise penetrate other players expertise damage reduction, instead of giving a percentage damage increase, and only allowing a maximum of 10% increased damage to players when there is a significant expertise difference. This change would mean that players in roughly equal PvP gear will hit each other "normally". A player in PvE gear would take only slightly more damage as a PvP geared player but would hit like a wimp. Damage and healing in PvP would scale to roughly equal levels as PvE. In fact because of a change like this there would need to be no special rules for healing, since damage output wouldn't scale up so hard. PvP'ers still get gear that is better for PvP. Finally the balance issues caused by percentage scaling wont be an issue any more, thus leaving devs more time to add content, rather than try to fix balance again. Does this seem like a viable change? Good or bad idea? Discuss

Totally agree with this. Do not understand why this was never really done in WoW. Group vs Group, pug vs pug. How it should be.

Yes warzones. Instanced PvP battle zones. I like gearing up, though I don't like over-simplified stats too much. This games seems alright, since force reserve is limited it means things like alacrity and crit have different values in different areas. No I am not the social type but in exactly the opposite way you describe. I never quit a WZ, regardless of anything. I will fight to the end. I play on a PvE server because I also like PvE content and plan to hopefully raid when I can. I have never played in a premade group in this game, currently I am level 45 and my ideas were based on collecting knowledge about what people are complaining about and moulded with my own ideas and values. I like MMO's, the permanency and interaction give more meaning to accomplishments than the simple back-patting a single player game can do. I really fail to see how making a warzone with equal gear takes anything away from the social aspect. In fact a forced level field is probably better for competitive play because it removes any doubt gear had anything to do with a win or loss. Now if you are finished with your ad hominem argument, got any actual thoughts on the proposed ideas?

I really don't like the idea that gear determines skill in PvP, to an extent. Why can't there be a battleground where skill alone determines your success and all gear is equal? I can think of a couple different ways to implement this. Plus it would remove all argument of gear inequality too. First- Hutt Battle Arena. Some Hutt that operates what would essentially be gladiatorial games. The lure is each faction brings the best of their heroes for a brutal game of skill. Each team has a couple minutes to choose pre-determined sets of gear in team colours (can be random too! red, blue, green, etc). Winning side gives prestige to their faction and loser brings shame. Second- Shuttle Sabotage. Takes place on the outside of a space shuttle carrying a VIP. Since it is in space each team needs space suits of sorts (provided and with pre-determined stats). Teams have to attack and defend at the same time. One team has to attack the control droid at the front of the craft. If it gets sliced the ship is commandeered and the VIP lost to the enemy. The other team has to sabotage the engines (deactivate them) to ensure the shuttle cannot be commandeered. Beware the edges, getting punted into space results in a trip to respawn! Competitive PvP really needs something like this. You still get tokens to get other PvP gear yet it is a style of PvP that allows those that love competitive play to play on a level field. Good ideas, or bad? Discuss.

I can see where the OP is coming from. As some background in World of Warcraft, before resilience, people complained that you had to raid to get the best PvP gear (and seeing a warrior in AQ gear with a couple healbot raid buddies was a frightening sight). Blizzard probably felt that you should not get on par gear from PvP, since raiding was "harder", and they were still stuck in the old school mindset then. Resilience was added and this allowed them to put out "on par" gear for PvP players without upsetting PvE gearing too much. However resil was/is broken, since it only decreases damage taken. It broke healing in PvP because DPS went down as healing went up, to the point you get games where hardly anyone dies and healers are effectively immortal. It is also probably the reason why (particularly warlock and death knight) self healing was nerfed into the ground. So right now in SW:ToR they made a safe MMO so of course it had to have a PvP stat, since "hardcore PvP'ers" expect it. They implemented it so that it gets past that problem in WoW, and also increases damage to other players so healing doesn't get massively imbalanced with gear level (aka tier) increases. Now back to OP's thought experiment. MMO's have come far since resil in WoW was first implemented, there is no real discrepancy between PvE being "better" than PvP. Also since gear is so easy to get now why can't they just ditch a PvP only stat. Hell roll your face on the keyboard and you get some loots. Since there really is no need for a pure PvP stat it doesn't really need to be in. Plus without it game balance becomes so much easier, damage reduction can be altered through armour and by changing buffs so easily, rather than having to balance and adjust things constantly with every new tier of PvP gear. Proof? Look at WoW, almost every patch that released a new PvP set they have fiddled with healing, self healing and mortal strike (healing taken debuff) effects to try to rebalance things.

Can definitely see what this post is saying. Kind of surprised no one really agrees. Do you really think a top PvP'er thinks it is unfair to use healthpacks in PvP? Or you know when you have that one guy that just follows you for a bit and because of him you can't heal or run away or cap an objective, yet when you try that on him he always gets away. Do you think a top PvP'er ever complained about someone breaking LoS behind a pillar and healing? Hell here is one of those make believe rules that most people seem to follow. The opposing teams fall into two sides with a clear split. The odd person will charge each side but generally the split remains and shifts as people die. I sometimes charge in and blast out all the CC I can to break that up. I will sometimes run around and attack from the side, that always gets the healers. I don't follow that rule, I observe it and abuse it because most people lack the wits to even realise they are following it. The good players already know about that though, and will already have counters. If you don't even realise you are following such a rule how can you ever hope to beat someone that already has a counter to it?

But then half the players would never get it done!

Before battlegrounds in World of Warcraft there was a lot of world PvP, Tarren Mill brings back memories . However a lot of the people that complain quietly complained about being ganked, PvP in questing zones, that sort of thing. Not only that but huge numbers of people in a small area causes lots of lag, client and server side. SW: ToR is the very definition of safe design. In fact it seems like they tried to redefine safe design to make it even safer. By safe I mean sure bet, by the numbers, mass appeal. The gameplay, while fun, is incredibly generic and my Sith Sorcerer is so similar to a WoW warlock that even some abilities of the same function have the same names. So no there is no way they would make an "unsafe" design choice that would garner complaints like encouraging world PvP outside designated PvP areas. "Casuals" wouldn't like that and this game is definitely designed to be casual friendly.

Was a similar but different situation in vanilla World of Warcraft. It was different because lots of people wanted to be the "cool" paladins, the holy warriors. However at end game Paladins back then were heal bots. Or they wanted to be night elf hunters and pretend to be awesome, which they weren't. Conversely a lot of the PvP'ers with the mean PvP skills rolled horde. So Alliance had massive queue times from the over-abundance of average players and Horde had fast queues of vicious PvP'ers that tore alliance to shreds. Just like WoW then though there is the odd premade on the disadvantaged side with so many healers that it is nigh impossible to kill anyone and they basically heal the enemy to death. I hate those Republic groups with 5 healers so much Seems the same weaknesses are present too. The "good" side has weaker PvP skills but an excess of good healers means they make mean PvP premade groups. The "evil" side has the nasty PvP'ers but they don't work together well, rather they use each other and so fall apart against a premade.

Is there any way to change the field of view? Getting frustrated with the limited view, especially in PvP. It feels like my peripheral vision is cut off and it's annoying. Zooming out far increases field of view only a little but makes targeting harder and also makes your character really small. Honestly I'd prefer using 1st person perspective but with such a small FoV that kills PvP and PvE awareness. Is using a widescreen resolution worth a shot? Or is there a better way to change it?

Kind of flipping what I side upside down. I am saying that sorc healing is fine, it isn't enough to keep someone alive and that is how it should be. If you use CC and healing and DPS you are more of a benefit to your group, and stop more damage coming in than if you just healed. I don't top healing of course, though I do some, I do not try to keep people full health, I heal them to stop them dying. You don't have to win with full health. Sometimes letting one team mate die and killing an enemy may lead to victory when only healing would lead to defeat. Madness is not a healing spec, but the healing is decent. I like it because it is a hybrid spec. WoW destroyed the viability of hybrid play, here I can do that and it works. If you want to only heal in battle then play World of Warcraft where pure healing works. Here it seems throwing the odd lightning bolt or CC with a heal is far better for your team than just healing.