Georg Zoeller on Time To Kill (TTK) in PvP

You may have missed my previous post based on Taugrim's evaluation of the Patch 1.2 PvP changes. In it, I expressed (like Taugrim) that the recent changes to time to kill (or, TTK) in PvP were not positive. Since the patch, TTK has dropped quite substantially, which I feared might represent a shift away from Bioware's previous design philosophy of longer, tactical battles instead of the extremely bursty PvP in other MMOs.

It seems that my fears may have been misplaced. A post by Georg Zoeller on the official forums on Friday has clarified that they are aware that TTK is lower than intended and that they are monitoring the situation, though no changes besides the Tracer Missile/Grav Round bug fix were confirmed. 

He also explains that some of the TTK is caused by expertise disparity, since expertise has intentionally been buffed to be the single most important PvP stat. While I agree that expertise should be incredibly important for PvP to dissuade people from using PvE gear, I am afraid of the stat inflation this could cause. Ultimately though, Bioware has shown that they are not afraid to rebalance ratings in order to make the game work better, so I remain cautiously optimistic.

It also comforts me greatly that they have acknowledged that there is an issue, though their explanation is fairly vague beyond the expertise mention. Georg notes that "stacking debuffs are creating a real TTK issue", but there's no real example of what debuffs are stacking, whether or not this is a bug, and how exactly one could fix this if it isn't a bug.

At least we didn't get a confirmation that design goals had shifted and they were aiming for lower TTK - that really would have broken my resolve (see what I did there?). In all seriousness, this is reassuring news.

I've included the post below for your convenience; you can click to enlarge.

Communication wins games, Part 1

It wins games. Honestly.

If you've been in a PvP warzone with me, you've heard me say it - communication wins games. It sounds like a silly slogan or something that your high school basketball coach would say.

It is 100% true.

As rated warzones grow nearer (though how close they are exactly is still uncertain), I have been attempting to prep my guild for them. I've been appointed "PvP Officer", with the possibly-dubious honour of wrangling people into 4-person units and getting them to work together in preparation for eventual 8-person Rated Warzone groups. While my experience has been mostly positive, I have noted one thing that separates a good player from a great player. That thing is communication.

It is my experience that oftentimes the most valuable contribution you can make to your team is information. There have been games where my stats were not great, but the information I relayed to my team earned me multiple MVP votes.

I could probably write three or four articles on communication in warzones, but for this post I'll focus on what normally goes wrong with team communication and how to fix it. This could be your guild's warzone group, or it could be a pickup group. It could be via ops chat, or via a voice client like Ventrilo, Mumble or Teamspeak. Regardless, here is what normally goes wrong with communication:

1. No communication. Duh, right? This one is extremely easy to solve, but requires co-operation from your team.

• If you're in a pickup group, do not be afraid to communicate.
• Discuss strategy before the game starts (eg. "Drayn and myself will go left, everyone else mid, ok?"). If no one offers any answers, then dictate a strategy to your team that makes sense.
• Look at your team composition - if multiple members are in the same guild, they will likely be trying to operate as a unit in the warzone. Plan accordingly.
• Are you guarding a healer? Let them know, so they know to keep you alive. Are you a healer? Tell your team, so they know to peel for you and/or guard you.
• Prompt your teammates for information. Let's say you've won the fight for the middle turret in Alderaan Civil War and you don't see any more enemies incoming. Where else are they likely to hit? Your other turret, obviously. Ask, "How is east flag?" and find out where your team needs to be.

• Don't be afraid to prompt your team to do something (eg. "Call those incs, communication wins games", "Pass, I'm above you", "run ahead of me so I can throw it"). 

2. Late communication. You need to get into the habit of calling out information early - if you're wrong, you can always amend what you've said.

• As soon as you see enemies approaching, the first thing you do is call it out to your team. If you are killed and afterwards type "there are two at east turret", you've waited too long. No one can possibly respond to your message in time to save the turret. You've given good information, but it was too late for anyone to use.
• Similarly, if your side on Voidstar is being demolished, take the 1.5 seconds it takes to type "left help". I can assure you the extra GCD you lost will not have turned the tide for your team if you needed to call for help in the first place.
• Did you just clear out your objective? Tell your team immediately (eg. "east turret clear"). Don't wait for someone to ask you. If you don't tell your team, they may continue sending players to help you, leaving another node undefended.
  
  

3. Inaccurate communication. Sometimes what you've said makes no sense or doesn't tell your team anything. Be precise.

• State your position, amount of opposition, and urgency of situation. (eg. "2 inc east I am alone") Stay away from one word remarks that contain none of these (eg. "stealther". This doesn't tell your team anything meaningful).
• Be as accurate as possible when calling numbers because other players on your team will make decisions based on your information. Do not exaggerate. Don't say "THEIR WHOLE TEAM IS AT EAST TURRET" if there are only 6 of them there.
• Did you make a bad call? Did you say an objective was clear, but then two operatives appeared out of nowhere and introduced you to the pointy end of their vibroknives? Call this immediately. Your team will be making decisions based on this info, and they need to know you need help. And no, you won't be able to solo the two operatives.|
  
  

4. Meaningless communication. We've all done it. We've all sung "What is Love" into Ventrilo, or complained about a particular class in ops chat. It's best to know when to back down. I'm not saying "don't have fun", just know when to switch to the business at hand.

• If someone is trying to talk in Ventrilo and you're not saying anything important, let them speak. If they don't start speaking again, prompt them to start or ask them what they just said.
• Similarly, try not to spam ops chat about how Scoundrels are so OP, or about how you are eating pizza right now. People need to see important information, too.
• If you're trying to relay important info via ops chat and there is a lot of chatter going on, consider sending the message twice: you can hit enter to open the chat prompt and then the up arrow key to populate the message you just sent. Hit enter again to send.

These are the basic mistakes that people make with regards to communication - hopefully you find these helpful and pass on these tips to your guild! As always, I welcome any feedback you may have.

Gear Selection: Tanking or DPS gear for PvP tanking?

A lot of people have asked me about how defensive stats work in PvP, and whether they are worth it if you want to tank in PvP. Here is a link to what is, in my opinion, the best explanation, from the wonderful Taugrim:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=213530

If you're not familiar with our defensive stats, here is a previous post of mine explaining what each of them does. I recommend you read that first, if you aren't familiar with them.

To summarize the information for you:

Attack Types:

There are four ATTACK TYPES: Melee, Ranged, Force and Tech.

You can only shield and defend against MELEE and RANGED attacks. Every class in the game has at least one Force or Tech attack.

Some classes are more reliant on Melee and Ranged attacks than others: for example, Immortal and Vengeance Juggernauts; Annihilation and Carnage Marauders; Marksmanship Snipers (and their Republic mirror classes).

Damage Types:

There are four DAMAGE TYPES: Elemental, Energy, Internal, and Kinetic.

The damage type does not determine if you can shield or defend against an attack, but armor reduces damage from Energy and Kinetic attacks. You can also, via skills, get Damage Reduction to specific types of damage.

Pros/Cons:

Pros to wearing tanking gear:

• Tanking stats may not be amazing in PvP, but they do have an impact, allowing you to stretch survivability to the maximum
• Tanking gear has more Endurance anyways

Cons to wearing tanking gear:

• Reduced damage output
• Tanking stats (besides endurance of course) are completely useless against specific opponents, like sorcerers.

Class-specific Information:


Immortal Juggernauts and Defense Guardians received a sizeable single-target damage buff in 1.2 since they can now gain access to Single Saber Mastery in Soresu Form. They also can use Vicious Throw earlier (at 30% health instead of 20%). Because of this, DPS gear is really personal preference for Juggernauts who are tanking in PvP.

Currently, Assassins and Shadows can get away with wearing a lot of DPS gear while tanking because, more than any other tank, they can choose when and whom to engage. In addition, they are naturally the highest-damage single-target tank in the game. 

Powertechs and Vanguards can mix and match with a good deal of success, but again this is mostly personal preference.


My verdict:

Wearing actual tanking gear is worth it, if you want to make tanking your primary focus. It does give you a survivability edge.

If you're queuing solo all the time, you may do better in DPS gear.

Community Spotlight: Trooper Commando

That uniform is only regulation on Hutta. Maybe not even on Hutta, actually.

This is the first installment of what will be a recurring feature on Thrown Gauntlet. Each week I'll be looking at a site that supports the Star Wars: The Old Republic community, be it a blog, podcast, information database, or otherwise. My hope is to point people to other websites they may also enjoy and to bring the SW:TOR blogging community closer together.


Trooper Commando bills itself as "your guide to SWTOR end-game", and it is exactly that. There are many things that I enjoy about the site, but let me highlight a few for you.

• The boss fight videos. Not only are they clear and easy to watch (check them out here), you get something in their accompanying article that I very much value, having led raids in the past: the 5-second recap. These guides are invaluable and I definitely recommend you take a look!

Every raid leader has done this, but usually you don't have it written down in front of you and it sounds a lot less coherent.

• Timeliness of information. Accomp, the site's admin, is part of a raiding guild which recently was selected for guild testing on the PTS. This meant that he was able to provide guides to Explosive Conflict, the new raid, based on testing he had done with his guild. Having the information on Day 1 that the patch goes live makes the site an invaluable resource.
• Dedication to improvement. Accomp is continually seeking ways to improve the site, asking for feedback and encouraging discussion. He's always willing to take feedback and integrate that into the site.

• Contests! Accomp has a promotion going on right now where you could win a code for a Taun Fawn pet for doing nothing more than being a member and being active on the Trooper Commando website. Go check it out!

In summary - Trooper Commando is already a great resource for Operations guides and commentary, and should only improve. I highly recommend you check out the site for yourself and that you follow Accomp's twitter account, @troopercommando.

Have a website you think I should look at, or that you think should be in the spotlight? Let me know at throwngauntlet@gmail.com, or let me know on my Twitter account, @ThrownGauntlet. I'm always looking for new blogs, resources and fansites to review!

A look at Ask Mr. Robot's combat log feature

I finally got the chance to dive into the new operation last night. Check out these awesome guides by Trooper Commando if you're going to be diving in yourself. Had we made more progress, I'd probably be writing an article about the operation itself. That's the bad news - we didn't make it very far. It wasn't because of the guides, though.

Here's how to enable it in-game.

The good news is that, thanks to Ask Mr. Robot's new combat log tool, we were able to find out why. If you want to do this, you'll first need to enable combat logging from your preferences menu. Be advised that this can decrease system performance. I didn't notice any slowdown myself, but my system is fairly robust when compared to the system requirements.

Mr. Robot recommends that your entire operations group disable and then enable the in-game combat logging feature at the start of a raid to ensure that your timestamps more or less match up.

Once you're done the raid, you need to head to http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/combatlog. There, you'll be able to upload your combat log, which is stored in My Documents/Star Wars: The Old Republic/CombatLogs by default.

Once you've selected the log, it is crucial that you fill out the rest of the information it asks you for (character, server name, guild name, time zone) appropriately. We had an issue where one of our guild members uploaded the log but with the wrong time zone - as a result, Mr. Robot did not know that they were in combat at the same time as us, and the logs looked strange. If you have any issues, you can head to http://blog.askmrrobot.com/2012/04/combat-log-merging-help/. There is plenty of support available and you can even ask Mr. Robot directly if you still need help.

After that, Mr. Robot will look to see if similar logs have been uploaded by the rest of your raid. If so, you'll have the option to merge into those logs, so all the data will be in the same place.

Once everyone's uploaded and merged, you've got yourself an in-depth look at what happened in your raid.

Example log, courtesy of Ask Mr. Robot

I'm quite impressed with the detail and flexibility, and based on Mr. Robot's past track record I have no doubt that this feature will only become better with time.

The only issue I had was that we could only have one person merging at a time, which meant that it took a bit of time to get it done. Again, I have no doubts this will be addressed an improved, given time. UPDATE: I've received word from the official Mr. Robot twitter that the one-merge-at-a-time issue is being addressed already! Can't wait to test the new version!

Overall, a great start by Mr. Robot, and when more functionality is added and it is optimized for multiple merges, I bet it will be one of the go-to tools for SWTOR combat logging.

My custom Darth Revan appearance

Since all gear added in 1.2 (War Hero and Campaign gear) will carry the set bonus on the armoring slot, I decided I would begin work on a Darth Revan custom appearance.

I would be lying to you if I said I wasn't a Revan fanboy to a certain extent. When I logged on after Patch 1.2 was implemented and found that my Champion War Leader's Headgear was showing under the hood of the robe I had saved (Primeval Paragon's Body Armor), I emitted a squee born of the nerdiest kind of joy imaginable.

The helmet clips a bit, but it's still squee-worthy. This is the /inquisitor emote.

This is definitely still a work in progress and, as such, any input or tips on possible items to use is certainly appreciated. Please note that I am a Juggernaut, and I want this appearance to be functional, so medium and light armor are out of the question for me.

I'd also like to clarify that since most of this gear isn't craftable, you will not be able to take advantage of augment slots for the moment. Bioware has stated that we will be getting a way to add augment slots to existing gear in the future, so it doesn't hurt to start working on your set now.

Having said that, here is what I've used for the essential bits of the costume:

Head Slot: Champion War Leader's Headgear

In my estimation, this is the most Revan-like headpiece available. In fact, I think the model is actually the same as the one used for his actual mask in-game, it's just re-textured.

The Vindicator (DPS) version of the Champion helmet looks the same. Unfortunately, Champion items are no longer available, so you can't go get this one if you don't already have it. The Recuit War Leader's Headgear looks the same, but is not fully customizable.

Chest Slot: Primeval Paragon's Body Armor

Robes. Heavy armor. The two things don't converge as often as I would like, and so this item is the one being used. Having said that, it actually looks pretty close, although Revan's chest has what appear to be banded armor plates on it and this has a more "body armor" look to it.

Both this, and the DPS equivalent (Primeval Vindicator's Body Armor) are purchased with Corellia commendations. I prefer this version to the DPS equivalent, because the Vindicator's has a grey stripe down the back that looks strange and out of place.

Leg Slot: Sith Archon's Greaves


These are the most ornate-looking robe leg-slot item I could find. The bottom of Revan's robe is actually pretty plain-looking, except for the huge buckle (which will hopefully be implemented in some form or another as a belt eventually). By default they are red, but if you unify to chestpiece, they become black but with a red accent on the back and sides (see the image at the top of this post). You don't see the back and sides most of the time except when falling or jumping, due to the chestpiece I've used.

There are other items you could substitute here, but I found these worked the best. This, however, is a random world drop, so it may be difficult to come by. Check the GTN on your server, sometimes you can score them for cheap.

Leg Slot Special Mention: Prototype Sund Tech Chancery Legwraps

These aren't heavy armor and they aren't customizable, but I mention them because they are obviously patterned after Revan's lower robe section. I've included some screenshots of them so you can see what I mean. Hopefully we one day get a heavy armor customizable version.

Hands Slot: Sith Archon's Handgear


Finally found a glove slot that I don't hate. I'm using the Sith Archon's Handgear, color-matched to chest:

I think they're simple enough to work. They are red by default, so I couldn't leave them as-is. Revan's actual gloves are more bronze-colored, but they have a similar look (plate over the back of the hand). I'll keep my eyes open.

Feet Slot: Undecided


Revan is normally depicted wearing pretty unremarkable gloves and you don't usually see much of Revan's boots. For practical reasons, I'll be wearing short boots if possible with this outfit, as the Battlemaster boots clip through the robe when I run. The Sith Archon's boots are a possibility, but they don't color match very well.

Any tips here are appreciated!

Belt: Ugh.


If they would make a belt slot item that looked like the waist on Revan's robe, I'd be set:

Unfortunately, I'm not holding my breath. For the moment, customizable belts are also the exception, not the rule. A Jugg can dream, though.

For the moment, I'm using the Champion War Leader's Belt with unify to chest.

Weapon: Elegant Modified Lightsaber [Augmented], Red Lightsaber Crystal


                                                

Above is a prop of Darth Revan's lightsaber. As you can see, it is very simple, and so I've used a simple hilt. It doesn't hurt that it has an augment slot in it. The schematic has a chance to drop from lockboxes and from Treasure Hunting, I believe. The only real reason to craft this weapon is in hopes of critting to get the augment slot - otherwise, it's just an orange shell.

Summary:


Well, that's where I've gotten so far. If you have any tips on usable items or have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments!

My Reaction to Taugrim's View of Patch 1.2 PvP Changes

If you don't already check out Taugrim's stuff, I highly recommend you do. He has an made an extremely insightful post that I think is pretty much spot on regarding class balance in PvP in 1.2.

While I think the rest of Patch 1.2 is overwhelmingly positive, the class balance changes worry me. As pointed out by Taugrim, the "Time to Kill" (or TTK) has dropped substantially since the patch. The combination of healer nerfs, Sentinel/Marauder buffs (an extremely popular class now) and changes to Resilience and how it affects healing are, in my opinion, the likely culprits. Here's my comment over on Taugrim's blog:

I agree pretty much across the board. Time to kill is significantly shorter and it has a seriously negative impact on classes that aim to protect or heal others. I am still shocked that Sentinels/Marauders were buffed, and I wonder idly if the buffs to them are not partially responsible for the dramatic reduction in TTK. 

I can’t see how Bioware will let this stand, though, as it runs counter to what they had stated as their PvP goals before release. Unless, of course, those goals have changed.

I honestly do hope that Bioware re-evaluates these changes, but only time will tell. It would definitely be nice to know if they've decided to go in a different direction with PvP, though I seriously hope this isn't the case.

How are you finding PvP and, specfically, TTK in Patch 1.2?