One of the reasons given for the changes to a lot of classes such as removal of skills or making some really strong skills a choice between each other was to make balancing easier and thus better overall, something I believe anyone supports, especially in pvp, the problem is that statement comes with high expectations.

In WoW for example devs during legion also said they created pvp templates with default stats in order to be able to balance more often and better, yet everyone playing during that time remembers that their statement ended up being a lie since they didnt balance more frequently at all and the balance did not really improve with specs remaining broken for months. Many people remember this and I hope the same doesnt happen here.

I understand that you obviously can never truly know if something is overpowered because it dominates for two weeks, what if something else appears to counter it after 4 weeks? What if something more broken is discovered 5 weeks in, meta takes a while to figure out etc. and thus you conclude you should wait before making balance changes.

These arguments might make sense but go directly against the statement that you want more better balance, you can and imo should absolutely have better balance through frequent balance updates for two major reasons.

1) Even if you do a mistake and nerf a class that wasnt overpowered and only the community had the false perception it was overpowered it isnt a big deal, because frequent balance updates means you can literally buff that class on the next update which isnt gonna be 5 months away, and by making that nerf>buff process you also shatter many false community perceptions.

2) Only way to break the meta, you never leave balance stable enough for a meta to form if you keep doing balance updates, that also means people dont feel "forced" to play what is meta because they would know you would nerf it soon, in contrast to games like WoW where devs dont want to be "disruptive", so people know if they reroll to the meta spec they ll be overpowered safely for 6 months outside of rly egregious cases which only rly exist during the start of an xpac/launch.

I obviously do not know the costs or effort require to create more frequent patches with small balance updates but I believe if it is possible to be more frequent, they absolutely should because it has far more benefits than "not being disruptive" mentality.

Theoretically, balance patches could be rolled into the current bi-weekly maintenance patches (though every two weeks might be a bit much considering the type of game SWTOR is). Further, a lot of balancing would be adjusting numbers and percentages - likely in an internal database - and I don't imagine that would be too difficult in practice to accomplish. The harder part would be establishing a team that constantly checks player feedback, PvP stats, times to kill and dps levels for PvE etc.

I'd rather have more frequent balance patches where the combat styles go up and down in terms of viability over the course of a year, than what we have currently where a poorly performing class will sit in the gutter for over a year with no changes. Further, with combat styles, we'll have two combat styles to switch between and 6 disciplines within those. This means that even if one is over-nerfed, we can simply swap to our other combat style until the next patch.

The devs also talked about making PvP changes next year, and part of that (though we don't know what these changes are yet) depends on how well the combat styles are balanced. You can improve the quality of life for PvPers, add PvP gear for e.g. but if a combat style feels terrible because they're underpowered and haven't received a buff in months - players won't want to play it in PvP.

Hopefully the fact that the devs are going through the effort of rebalancing every single class and setting a new bar + creating new set bonuses means that they do care and will begin to balance more often beginning with 7.0

If we could get one balance pass each month I'd be happy.

than what we have currently where a poorly performing class will sit in the gutter for over a year with no changes.

Frequent balance patches have so many advantages I am honestly uncertain why so many devs in general avoid them, the benefits far outweigh the problems and it also deals with the very big issue of community perception, the playerbase would be very different if they knew that what is currently dominating wont be dominating 2 weeks from now so no point investing in it, instead they can play what you enjoy and can invest in that instead.

And that leads to a very different community mentality.

Further, with combat styles, we'll have two combat styles to switch between and 6 disciplines within those. This means that even if one is over-nerfed, we can simply swap to our other combat style until the next patch. .

Completely disagree with that mentality though, because one disciple I enjoy isnt good, doesnt mean I should be forced to play another i dont like simply because that is doing well.

Disciples are often quite different and have different playstyles so usually that is the core reason you are playing them, you arent playing sniper cuz you love all the disciples, you play sniper cuz you enjoy engineering sniper specifically! Changing into a disciple you dont enjoy is not an acceptable response to bad balance

Mainly saying this cuz I ve seen this argument before in order to justify bad balance/long balance patches and it seems to happen because some people just dont seem to understand that some play disciples they enjoy rather than what is doing well.