Title, can't seem to find a way to unsubscribe - did they move that button/option?

If you communicated with the player base they wouldn't be doing....your job. Take a look at how some people good at this over at WoW are handling their expansion release. Instead, you ban your own players.

Hey bud, That was occurring because there was a bracer in the game (B-300) with an enhancement slot, allowing people to sport an extra enhancement. However: -there was no effect of going over 2018, your bonus damage was still capped at 60%, etc. They were getting extra surge or whatever, but not expertise. -the bracer was fixed with today's patch, so it won't happen anymore anyway. See ya round.

Confession: my guily pleasure is playing a few games of lowbie pvp every now and then. However, the patch today changed bolster in the 10-29 bracket, and not for the better. I'm mostly curious if anyone else has seen these changes, or if I happened to be in a few randomly bugged warzones. Pre-patch the baseline HP was around 30k, today my HP jumped to 38k. In addition, the damage being dealt (or TTK) seemed to increase dramatically. I took some time too peruse logs and compare similar abilities and found some interesting entries (same character for me, same level and gear): TODAY - 3.2 23:48:24.423 xxxx hits you with Maul for 4,620 energy damage 23:46:54.201 xxxx hits you with Discharge for 4,394 internal damage 23:46:45.025 xxxx hits you with Shock for 3,497 energy damage BEFORE - 3.1.x 00:15:59.099 xxxx hits you with Maul for 1,485 energy (absorbed 812) damage 00:16:25.880 xxxx hits you with Discharge for 1,837 internal (absorbed 1,080) damage 00:16:09.607 xxxx hits you with Shock for 1,581 energy damage You can see that the damage increased by a factor ~2.5, way outpacing the HP gain of .8. These were two different players, so they may have had varying degrees of expertise - would that even explain the difference?

I was going to say this. There's no space to be an *** when the alternative (regs) is so readily available. CSB: I played a lot of 8v8 and Season 1 of arena, did pretty well in that. Hadn't played since, but one night during S3 figured I'd give it a shot. Started well, 4-0, then the next two games got paired with a couple dudes from the same guild and we lose both matches. I received such a remarkable amount of flame/hate/abuse from these two that I turned the game off and didn't fire it up again for a few days. I haven't pvp'd on that character since. The kicker is that people like this can turn off a new player every day or even every hour if they really get in a groove. I curious so I looked them up. Both had between 1250-1300 ratings with 100+ wins each, meaning that they're generally not very good. You're not going to get people to play with you if the environment is so full of hate that it's not enjoyable. I don't mind losing as long as it's interesting, but I'm not going to sit around while someone tells me to uninstall the game because I'm terrible, etc. It might be only a small portion of the player base in ranked that behaves like this, but if only 1% of the players can drive off everyone they come into contact with your community will shrink over time. That's the problem you need to address. The folks who play ranked and want ranked to grow need to vigilantly osctracize anyone with a poor attitude. Throw out a gg even if you lost, let 'em know you're the good guys.

Hello, Previous to the 3.0 update I could run the game on high settings and have very good frames-per-second video of the game action. Since then, I've noticed in Warzones and a few op bosses (in particular Underlurker) the fps drops incredibly, to the point that it's not worth playing. Interestingly, this isn't across all instanced areas - did a hard mode Dread Palace the other night no problem. I have reduced my graphics setting to the lowest possible with no improvement. Have the computer requirements for the game changed?

Your efficiency couldn't have been above 35%. There isn't a single fight in any of the new operations that requires that much constant healing to all 8 members of the raid. The only fight that does require a lot of raid-wide healing is Underlurker. In this instance it's much more efficient to use Wave when behind the rocks or at non-stand-in-the-cross times. It will heal for more than the hot, hitting 6-8 people at once. This frees up approx 6 GCD's per rotation to be used on the tanks or dps that are getting hit harder. I don't doubt that you could get through story mode stuff doing this, but you're dumping a lot of healing responsibility on your partner, as well as wasting a lot of time refreshing hots on people that don't need them.

Lowbie Mando Raiders, a level 24 instance. I haven't leveled a healer in a while, and although my main is a commando I figured I'd do a merc, just to see the story. Generally I do the flashpoint daily and that's it, double back for class missions when I've dinged a few levels. Groupfinder pops and it's me healing, Jugg tank, Assassin dps and MARAUDER. Trash Before First Boss MARAUDER wants to up the degree of difficulty and pulls an extra pack during one fight. "Ok, no prob. You want to skill check me, I got this." MARAUDER doesn't believe in out of combat healing. MARAUDER does believe in starting each encounter. To his credit, the Jugg was in tanking stance but i don't think realized the problem here. Boss with the Two Dogs MARAUDER and the other two players leap to the middle. I'm not sure who the boss has aggro on, but it doesn't really matter as all three of the hostile mobs and all three of our melee are stacked in a juicy red circle of death. Every now and then one or both of the dogs will aggro to me, which is actually an improvement as it gets them away from the boss. The Assassin is kind enough to notice and walks over to poke the dogs occasionallly when this happens. Our melee seem to have decided on dividing the mobs equally between themselves and inserting an interesting pacing mechanic into the fight. All three mobs die within seconds of each other. Aim legs drop. MARAUDER needs them. Trash in Corridor There's five mobs in the pack: 2 melee and 3 ranged. Each dps (let's be honest, there's no tanking occuring) picks a ranged and moves down the corridor to engage them. The two melee mobs beeline it for me like I'm the hottest thing since N'SYNC. I stand there facetanking while our dps whack away. Eventually they kill the ranged mobs, but since they're now further up the corridor and not interested in turning around (MARAUDERS dont retreat) none of them notice I'm still getting attacked. It takes about 20 seconds for one of them to finally figure this out, and again my friend the Assassin is kind enough to come kill the mobs that are all over my ***. Seriously, I stood there healing through this for 20 seconds. As we continue *every* mob, even ones blatantly out of our line of travel must be engaged, by MARAUDER who has a thirst for digital blood. Convo Screen Right before this the Jugg disconnects. While waiting I'm curious so i check achievements. Yup, both on their first toon. Eventually the Assassin gets around to vote-kicking the afk player, MARAUDER agrees. I pull out Mako and off we go through more trash. Right before the last boss we get a replacement who decides he doesn't want to walk all the way through the instance and leaves. No prob, Mako it is. Turret Boss I type something like "when turrets spawn kill them, ignore the boss." MARAUDER leaps. Boss goes to first turrets. Assassin switches to a turret, but MARAUDER can't be bothered to attack some dinky robot when there's a real live Mandolorian there to be butchered. MARAUDER follows the boss around the room, aggro'ing every set of turrets. Assassin and I die on the second set. By the time Assassin and I get back after respawning MARAUDER has Vette out. I try again with the 'turrets first' communication. Seems to go better, MARAUDER acknowledges and confirms receipt of this information. However, on the first set of turrets MARAUDER again stays on the boss. Lines of text spring from my fingers: -turret -attack the turret -stop -turret I will concede that this isn't terribly clear, but I'm a bad panic typer. It works! MARAUDER is now willing to lower himself to attacking the turrets. However, by the time this goes through the second set have spawned and are shooting us from across the room. We're making better progress now, the problem is that Vette is still targeting the boss and the third set pop up early. -vette -switch vette's target This is obviously some sort of witchcraft and is dutifully ignored by MARAUDER. .... .... Somehow we all survive and boss dies. 2 aim pieces drop, MARAUDER recognizes my efforts by allowing me to Need on them sucessfully. Thanks for saving my bacon Assassin buddy. You're gonna go far.

For this to work, you'd have to do a couple things: 1. Change how stats are distributed on gear. Currently you choose between power/crit and surge/alacrity. Make gear have only one of those stats per mod, so that you're choosing between all of them. You probably just remove power, maybe surge as well and make surge a static value. This could go a lot of ways. 2. Change the stat budget so you get as much (or more) secondary stat as main stat. Enough alacrity to double your cast time, for example, so that you're really choosing between casting double the abilities or casting abilities that hit twice as hard. Combine this with some radical changes to skill trees. Just off the top of my head, I'd think that everyone would want 2x abilities - I'd have to think about it. Basically, you're talking about a whole different combat system, or a whole different game. This game doesn't give you much choice, you're dead right about that, but it's sort of a feature. It's really really hard to get class balance right when the classes can be so different.

From two years ago: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=349821&highlight=annihilation+droid+solo This is sort of an exploit, depending on how you define it. If you managed to kill it in a straight fight then kudos. Going back to the old content can be fun.

The 'guard good' crowd is missing the point. Is guard balanced when there is a tank there? Sure. The problem is when there isn't a guard. Guard existing in the game requires large inflation in both DPS and HPS output. This results in the high TTK and 'op healers' that get a lot of complaints in these forums. A secondary trickle down effect of this is the strength of the dps in tank stance. If you removed guard from pvp you could lower everyone's output - and more easily tweak this via the expertise stat - while still keeping the 'tanky' stats of shield/absorb. It'd just be a choice your team makes - mitigation vs. damage. Taunts, which require more effort/skill, become the only active mitigation tool and you lose the effect of doubling the target's effective health pool. You get a handful of effects from this - hots are less powerful in this scenario (sages/troopers are better relatively), lower DPS across the board has the same killing impact, less reliance on *boom dead* gives resolve a better effect as you're not getting killed through a 4sec stun. Positioning and smart cc use become more relevant in determining a winner. Bottom line is that guard absorbs too much damage too easily which has a handful of negative effects on the play of the game. Remember when the Reactive Warding relics were bugged and a handful of people said "wait a minute, this is actually kind of nice"? It'd be like that. It's worth noting that guard is essentially a pvp mechanic. It's not necessary for pve where threat should be more important anyway. Heck, removing guard and buffing taunts would at least raise the skill cap a bit.

Wanted to give a thumbs up to these guys. I was in the guild briefly after a merger of my former guild into theirs, although I soon quit to pvp full time. They're a good group, solid raiders. If that's your thing you should give them a shot. Very democratic, solid base to play with.

A quick look around some hosts shows about $20/mo. for 50 slots. You can enable group pay so people could drop a dollar in now and then. That price isn't prohibitive if you're willing to dive in and get it started.

Do your thing Kxx.

It's the same problem with 8v8s. There are a handful of players who *are* that much better and entry level teams don't have much of a chance to win. If the only teams in the queue are good and another team decided to give it a chance they get blown up a few times and head back to regs. This makes sense, I can't blame anyone who has this experience, and I don't see a way around that unless 10+ teams are in the queue at the same time. On the flip-side, I am really enjoying the solo ranked, even more than 4v4s I think. It allows a better entry point for newer/less experienced players. However, Kxx is right pops are slower for that over the last week. As I don't see any solution for the 4v4 queue, perhaps switch efforts to consolidating queues and promoting solo? If there's 3 teams in ranked queue and 12 solo'ers at any time, having the groups disband into solo makes that queue much more interesting and solves your 'let's balance teams' concern. Once people get comfortable in solo perhaps they'll branch out to 4v4s more? Solo also lets you expand your social network a bit which is helpful long-term for forming 4v4 teams. tl;dr - abandon 4v4s for Solo Ranked?