Star Wars: The Old Republic

[Don]

There's nothing avoidance about an Assassin/Shadow tanking. They might wear light armor but they don't have any special skills that make them less likely to hit unless you count Lightning Reflexes. With Dark Charge you're just as heavily armored as someone wearing heavy armor.

[Shrinweck]

They get more %defense talents than a juggernaut/guardian or powertech/trooper equivalent which equates to avoidance. Juggernauts only get that one defense talent that's based on retaliating every six seconds if memory serves. There's even the talent that returns force based on avoiding. They're more avoidance tanks than the other two tanking classes.

I've decided to respec my assassin to primarily tanking, as well, since I really want to be able to take that light sided DPS companion around with me. Interesting how none of the companions are force wielding healers. Maybe more disappointing than interesting.

[Shrinweck]

They're ramping up the experience needed to get legacy levels after twenty in the next patch tomorrow. Just got mine to thirty-seven. Hopefully this means the rewards after twenty are... rewarding.

[Eric]

They are nerfing my hybrid pvp spec in the next patch, grrr.

23/0/18 is so much fun(Assassin/Shadow)

[Don]

They are nerfing my hybrid pvp spec in the next patch, grrr.

23/0/18 is so much fun(Assassin/Shadow)

31/0/10 is way stronger and it's getting buffed. Although SWTOR is the closest thing I've played in a MMORPG where PvP as a melee is a decent experience, you still want to avoid dependence on meleeing whenever possible. You basically play like a Merc with a shorter range, and can kill anybody with 3 buttons. You might even beat a Merc some of the time too.

[Shrinweck]

I was employing what will be (he's 45) a 31/2/8 spec on my shadow but he's just PvE and I like that force regeneration out of stealth talent in the infiltration tree. I deleted my assassin and remade as a sorcerer which I'm liking quite a bit. He was 38, making him my second highest character delete. My highest was a 39 which was my scoundrel, in favor of a sharpshooter. The ability lag as a scoundrel made the class unplayable. It has probably been fixed by now but eh. Trying not to get too attached to my characters in case legacy calls for a mass cleansing of my characters.

This is probably why I have three characters in their forties and haven't maxed one out yet. That and endlessly running end game content is what made me sick of every MMORPG I've played that I've hit the level cap in. I understand PvP as repeatable end game content but seeing as how I'm not interested in PvP I imagine hitting that wall should be avoided. I'm still having fun going over PvE quests for the who-knows-how-many-ith time and seeing as how I put off all flashpoints until two weeks ago, I'm still having fun with them.

My sorcerer has identity issues and has something like 2000/2000 light side dark side points so I may just keep him around for when they get around to adding in 'gray-side' perks and vendors. Not really holding my breath on that addition coming any time soon.

[Don]

One thing I've noticed that is very funny at least in the boards is that people worry more about stat padding than actually doing anything useful.

If you do more than 300K damage you're usually having a terrible game because the only way that can happen is most of that damage is healed. Okay if you're a Sorc you can't actually kill anyone reliably so you have no choice there, but for any other class your goal should be to make sure someone stays dead. You'll have a hard time breaking 300K damage even if you were able to camp the enemy at their spawn point since respawn timer in this game is pretty long except for Voidstar attackers.

So most people showing very high damage number is generally just showing how they absolutely failed to kill anybody. I mean, it's still better than doing low DPS, but a dominant game would rarely see anyone on your team above 200K since the enemy should be at their spawn point most of the time. If you have a total of 60 kills (very high number of kills, not even always possible outside of Voidstar due to respawn timer) and each player has 15K HP, that's 900K of damage to distribute to 8 players. If you did 500K, that basically means the rest of the team put together is worse than you on offense, and one have to ask the question how do you get so many kills in the first place if the rest of your team is so bad. Now of course you can do more damage than that if the enemy healed successfully against it, but you usualy don't want this to happen.

It's almost like people agree to purposely not kill each other on Voidstar so they can put up these crazy numbers. I did 500K in one Voidstar that we won 4-0. If we chose to not actually kill anybody on our attack round, I can probably do at least 700K, but winning the game is still considered a good idea last time I checked.

[Eric]

Is it? Can't you net more valor/medals from farming in a loss then winning and getting like 4-5?

[Don]

Is it? Can't you net more valor/medals from farming in a loss then winning and getting like 4-5?

Well farming really means if you agree to not kill each other's healers, that way you can guard/do DPS/heal to pile up those numbers needed for the high benchmark points for medals. However, purposely not killing their healer is obviously a very bad idea and can easily backfire on you, so unless you already have an insurmountable lead, most people still end up killing healers anyway and if healers are gone, there just isn't very much HP left to get the DPS medals.

If you just chain kill people at their spawn, you'll rarely be able to hit 300K damage medal simply because the respawn timer is actually pretty long. If you do say 500K, it's almost certain there's an enemy healer that healed at least 400K, and that's the situation you want to avoid if you're interested in winning.

If you're only trying to get more medals, it's best to just have extended brawls and make relatively low focus on the enemy healer, but trust here is an issue. If the enemy tries to kill your healer and succeeds, you might lose the game. For example on Voidstar, on D I rarely kill the enemy healer (since they instant respawn) so a heal-strong team can rack up crazy numbers (and so does my team) without getting past the first door. Now, if my side is interested in putting up even crazier numbers, we can of course choose to purposely not kill their healer on our O round. However, since the enemy scored 0 in their first round, you obviously want to go for the win here first. In fact I just finished a Voidstar that went like:

Enemy O - 400K damage done, enemy score 0 (never got past first door).
Our O - 3 minute and 25 second win (the fastest possible is 3 minute, that's the time to run straight to every door and bomb it with no opposition), pretty much 0 damage done since I bombed 3 doors consecutively without stopping.

Now, to be fair, we could drag out the game on purpose after we bomb the first door since we already won at that point, but at that point you might as well just go for the kill. Time is valuable too!

[Eric]

Hey Don try this Madness build, loving the force/hp regen it provides, and the AE damage is pretty absurd.

I like how dots stop people from capping objectives in this game.

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#200McMZhZcMfRrMkrfz.1

[Shrinweck]

Interesting. Never thought about a madness build as an assassin/shadow, but I haven't given a lot of thought to PvP builds other than "I shouldn't get this because clearly it's for PvP"

[Don]

Madness puts up fancy leaderboard numbers but don't contribute as much as the numbers indicate, similar to Sorc numbers are always inflated. Wither is a much better AE than Death Field. Problem with that build is you got no root protection or improved snare in any way, so you basically have to hope you don't get snared or someone else can snare the enemy for you. It's not like you'll actually defeat anyone at range with Creeping Death/Death Field. That said if you like to melee this is a perfectly fine spec.

I don't like to play builds that depends on others to do the snaring when I'm a melee. If you're paired with a 31/0/10, then this build is perfectly fine. Then again, virtually any Assassin build works fine when paired with someone who has Wither, since the Assassin's only major weakness is difficulty in getting to melee distance, but nobody is going to escape from you after you get Wither on them. I don't think 31/0/10 is the strongest build in the game by itself, but trying to do DPS without Wither bakcing you up can often be very painful since Assassins are really easily kited if you don't have the root breaking Force Speed, and even with that, Assassins are routinely outclassed in the snare department unless you have Wither.

Generally speaking snare determines whether the damage you do is meaningful. You can always do pretty good DPS in any spec but if you can't snare the enemy, they'll likely get away from you and if you can't kill them, all the damage you put up just isn't very useful.

[Eric]

I think the reason Madness doesn't have a great snare or talent for Force Slow is because you can do a lot more from a distance. It's a dot-heavy build, 2 out of the 3 warzones involve stopping people from capping stuff and dots stop you from capping, and Death Field @ 30 yards doing AE is really helpful in that regard.

Creeping Terror is 30 yards, Death Field is 30 yards, Discharge is 10, Crushing Darkness is 10, Shock is 15, etc.

Basically, Darkness is the best PvP Spec for Huttball, protecting ball carrier, force gripping enemy ball carrier, AE slowing and diminishing the other team's defense.

Madness is better for Void Star/Civil War, stopping caps, AEing as you run up.

Deception....uhhh yeah I dunno, it has nice single target burst, but once reck and your trinket are down your damage is pretty meh.

[Don]

I think the reason Madness doesn't have a great snare or talent for Force Slow is because you can do a lot more from a distance. It's a dot-heavy build, 2 out of the 3 warzones involve stopping people from capping stuff and dots stop you from capping, and Death Field @ 30 yards doing AE is really helpful in that regard.

Creeping Terror is 30 yards, Death Field is 30 yards, Discharge is 10, Crushing Darkness is 10, Shock is 15, etc.

Basically, Darkness is the best PvP Spec for Huttball, protecting ball carrier, force gripping enemy ball carrier, AE slowing and diminishing the other team's defense.

Madness is better for Void Star/Civil War, stopping caps, AEing as you run up.

Deception....uhhh yeah I dunno, it has nice single target burst, but once reck and your trinket are down your damage is pretty meh.

Deception is just plain weak. It's not even very good at bursting because most people aren't stupid enough to stand still with their back turned so you can consistently Maul them. You have no survivality and your burst isn't noteworthy since building stuff like a 5 stack Discharge on average needs 25 GCDs (25% chance to build a stack per GCD).

You only have two attacks >10m (Creeping Darkness + Death Field) and you're not going to outduel anyone at the 30m range. If you trade hits at the 10m range, Darkness is better (Harnessed Darkness allows Force Lightning to pretty much win in any 10m trade hit scenario). It's probably stronger than Deception in the sense that you're not lulled into thinking you must have Induction before you can use Shock (Shock at 39 Force is not a great deal, but is still way better than doing no damage while being kited). Crushing Darkness is not really enhanced by Madness except Raze, which requires something to be in melee range. At any rate what most people don't get is that it is still a good idea to trade hits at 10m because getting to 4m is very hard against good ranged DPS, and against melee, if you hit them at 10m they can't hit you so free damage is always good. You don't have to be like Darkness where you can trade hits with Tracer Missiles at 10m but you certainly should make use of the fact that you can still put on plenty of pressure while outside of melee range.

I'm not a big fan of using dots to interrupt capping. I prefer to just kill them, and if hopelessly outnumbered, LoS with turrets buys you a lot of time until reinforcement arrives.

Assassins are probably the best ball carrier without charge but that's about useful as saying Microsoft XYZ is Zeus's favorite Microsoft product. Usually you just hand the ball off to a charger and have him work his magic, and he wouldn't need Guard anyway especially 2 out of 3 chargers are likely guarding someone else. If you don't have a charger you should have the ball instead of wasting your health guarding an inferior runner. Force Pull is probably the best Huttball defense move in the game, but offense (charge, charge ally) is usually what wins Huttball games.

The major issue I see with Madness is that you can't trade hits with Tracer Missiles at 10m, and they're the dominant form of ranged DPS (you can trade hits with Sorcerer lightning at 10m though) which means you've to get close, except Jet Boost completely disables most melees. It's only one matchup but there are A LOT of Arsenal Mercs out there.

[Don]

Deception is just plain weak. Their burst assumes the enemy stands still to get mauled the whole time which is unrealistic to say the least. For every 5 stacking Discharge you can do for 5000 damage I can do a 3 stack HD Force Lightning for 7000 damage 5 times as often. Yes it takes twice the time to channel FL but I can assure you the recipient is still totally dead when this happens.

Madness is okay at 10m but you won't beat Tracer Missiles at 10m, and Jet Boost is absolutely killer when you get into melee range. It's probably fine against any other matchup but Arsenal Mercs are very common and probably the dominant non-Huttball specialist powerhouse right now. That said the heals from dots is probably one of the better defenses against Arsenal Mercs who pretty much ignore armor, but you can't beat a Merc by simply not dying since they can heal.

Assassins are pretty good at Huttball but still weaker than anyone with charge so far as ball running. While Force Pull is a great defense, Huttball defense tends to be dominated by ranged DPS due to how the map is setup.

[Don]

Deception is just plain weak. Their burst assumes the enemy stands still to get mauled the whole time which is unrealistic to say the least. For every 5 stacking Discharge you can do for 5000 damage I can do a 3 stack HD Force Lightning for 7000 damage 5 times as often. Yes it takes twice the time to channel FL but I can assure you the recipient is still totally dead when this happens.

Madness is okay at 10m but you won't beat Tracer Missiles at 10m, and Jet Boost is absolutely killer when you get into melee range. It's probably fine against any other matchup but Arsenal Mercs are very common and probably the dominant non-Huttball specialist powerhouse right now. That said the heals from dots is probably one of the better defenses against Arsenal Mercs who pretty much ignore armor, but you can't beat a Merc by simply not dying since they can heal.

Assassins are pretty good at Huttball but still weaker than anyone with charge so far as ball running. While Force Pull is a great defense, Huttball defense tends to be dominated by ranged DPS due to how the map is setup.

[Don]

Deception is just plain weak. Their burst assumes the enemy stands still to get mauled the whole time which is unrealistic to say the least. For every 5 stacking Discharge you can do for 5000 damage I can do a 3 stack HD Force Lightning for 7000 damage 5 times as often. Yes it takes twice the time to channel FL but I can assure you the recipient is still totally dead when this happens.

Madness is okay at 10m but you won't beat Tracer Missiles at 10m, and Jet Boost is absolutely killer when you get into melee range. It's probably fine against any other matchup but Arsenal Mercs are very common and probably the dominant non-Huttball specialist powerhouse right now. That said the heals from dots is probably one of the better defenses against Arsenal Mercs who pretty much ignore armor, but you can't beat a Merc by simply not dying since they can heal.

Assassins are pretty good at Huttball but still weaker than anyone with charge so far as ball running. While Force Pull is a great defense, Huttball defense tends to be dominated by ranged DPS due to how the map is setup.

[Don]

I've come to realize Deception is some kind of festering wound that should not exist. It's not weak enough so that people can notice it's an outright joke, but weak enough that you're basically losing half a person for each person that's Deception speced on your side (or +half a person on their side). It's just strong enough to occasionally look like the class isn't completely garbage so you've to put up with guys who post "I own as Deception" even though the yoyo Lightsaber (Voltiac Slash) is basically a mark for death, i.e. any good player seeing that will instantly kill you because you just told them you're a class with okay DPS and no survivality and you want to die very fast.

Madness is quite viable even if the playing style isn't quite the one I like, but Deception is pretty much just a weaker version of Darkness. You do less damage, have less burst, and have way less survivality. But you get to throw your lightsaber aroudn like a yoyo, if you were able to find anyone dumb enough to not kite you given you have no snare protection whatsoever in Deception.

[Don]

Random thoughts on classes in PvP...

Juggernaut - Perfectly fine. Huttball ball carrier God.

Marauder - Overtook Sorc and Merc as the greatest Huttball stat padding class, while also redefine the way you can play Huttball without absolutely doing anything useful. They're probably the #1 '1on1' class right now, which is like saying Assassins are the best ball carrier without charge. Perfectly normal in normal terrain maps.

Sorcerer - Everyone still says they're overpowered even though they've always been a pretty balanced class. Maybe a bit on the weak side. They're cannon fodder for any class that has good abilities to deal with KBs. Still one of the top classes at putting up amazing numbers that are totally meaningless by dotting/AEing everything and never killing anybody.

Assassin - Like Mercs they're probably the best combination package out there. Mercs can't Guard or run the Huttball, and Assassins can't heal, but otherwise they can absolutely do everything else you'd need. Deception tree needs to be deleted from the game. Wither is the strongest support skill in the game by a wide margin. Pretty much all melee-oriented DPS is dependent on Wither because this one skill completely eliminate the enemy's ability to distance themselves from your melee.

Merc - Another class that can do it all except Guard or run the Huttball. Merc healers are immortal. They're not actually very strong but if you don't die, your enemy might eventually die or at least get bored and leave. Merc DPS is probably too good and requires way too much skill to counter effectively. PvE set bonus is completely imbalanced (2 piece +15% crit to Tracer Missile). Pyrotech mercs are up there with Marauder in terms of putting up absolutely crazy numbers that mean absolutely nothing.

Powertech - Another perfectly fine class. Sometimes they do amazing things and sometimes they die in 3 hits for no apparent reason. They're one of the top Huttball defender (root Grapple saves goals), and not bad at running too. Pyrotech, the shared tree with Merc, also excels at putting up meaningless numbers. The burst nature of the class basically means at any time there's like a 5% chance his enemy spontaneously dies and a 5% chance the PT spontaneously dies from overheat.

Operative - Concealment seems to be pretty weak, but the other DPS tree is actually quite strong. Operative healers are godlike on Huttball since they have very few heals with a casting time and movement rules supreme there.

Sniper - Seem to be a weak class overall, but no one plays them so it's hard to say anything for sure. Hard to say if they need help when you still see people pull out accuracy mods on a class that is probably the most dependent on accuracy in the game.

[Shrinweck]

A ton of people play snipers but few of them make it to 50 because the class is so boring compared to others (not including tracer/gravity mercs/commandos, but at least they do crazy high DPS). For some reason I found snipers more boring than gunslingers, which really makes absolutely no sense. Other than the poor choice of what the game calls "sniper rifles" but are actually heavy repeating rifles, which aren't fucking sniper rifles.

[Don]

Problem with Snipers is that they have no mobility and don't seem to do enough damage compared to Grav Rounds. I suspect this is because Grav Round is tech and most Sniper attacks are ranged and the difference between the two is huge. The 20% bonus from Cover is only useful against other Snipers, since Grav Rounds and lightning never miss. In theory this class is supposed to always win against another ranged (that's why Cover provides defense versus ranged) except 2 out of the 3 ranged classes completely ignore Cover. In fact, Cover only works on another Sniper.

[Shrinweck]

Has there been any word on 1.2 ever coming out? I constantly see developers mentioning it but even a loose ETA is never offered.

[Eric]

I gave them 1 more month after the free month was over, but then I quit, cute game, had potential, but just didn't have any highlights that made me want to keep playing.

Dungeons & Raids? WoW has more, they're better, less glitchy, and allow mods. Finding groups is far easier, and I have to skip dialogue 99% of the time because everyone has seen it.
PvP? WoW has more Battlegrounds, only Huttball is really fun, but not enough to keep me playing. I HATED going to Ilum and I was on the faction that had 5x the amount of the other side.
Mods? There are none, fire the person that made this decision, such a stupid choice for a WoW clone, your userbase could do amazing things to keep people interested.
Leveling is the only saving grace this game had, BUT the differences between toons isn't substantial enough to keep you leveling, class quests are unique, but every planet is the same aside from those.

I'm looking forward to Guild Wars 2, the fact there's no monthly fee is awesome enough in itself, because the group scenarios and end game pvp are pretty wild/fun based on the beta.

[kali o.]

For the record, I'll play SWTOR at launch. I don't expect to be subbed more than a month or two - as that should be ample time to play through a republic (commando) and imperial (nuker likely). It's a fun concept, playing an mmo for the story but until they add an end game, it's really all there is.

So make sure to note your server if you are there at launch too.

*cough*

The only thing that surprised me was how much of a joke Illum was and how badly it was handled after. And I will say I have never seen a game bleed out players as quick as SWTOR did. Well, it was either a mass exodus of players or something about the game just makes any portion of players leaving very, very noticeable...

Secret Garden is the next thing that looks worthwhile. But with Funcom & EA behind it...well, I am less than hopeful.

[Don]

You mean Secret World? Never heard of a game called Secret Garden.

According to Bioware the numbers are stable, and while people can certainly lie it's hard to get away with these things so we'll see. The server population looks lower but not different from your usual 'bored with current content' stuff.

The PvE raids are pretty much whatever. At this point I don't expect people to come up with anything really cool anyway. I think the Flashpoints should have allowed you to use all your companions so you can solo them because pretty much no one does them, and they're actually pretty cool from the story of point of view.

Ilum's original incarnation was bad, and then they somehow made it worse. Although Ilum was dumb in its original incaranation nobody really disliked the fact that you can complete your daily trivially if you have even a single friend/alt on the other side, and sometimes people even get bored enough to start killing each other just for fun. In fact Ilum was almost like the state of the game lore itself, i.e. you sort of have this war but nobody really want to break the truce so you only have random skirmishes in the middle of nowhere. That's good because Imps clearly outnumber Republics badly so open warfare would just result Republics getting decimated, but they can certainly jump a random Imperial and win, and the objective system means you can't openly retaliate because your faction guys will watch you die if you screwed up their dailys.

That said I think the WZ in SWTOR is the best I've played for similar environment, which admittedly isn't saying much. It's obviously all imbalanced and messed up but most of the time it's actually kind of enjoyable. In my server the Imperials ruled the WZs for quite a while, and then all the top players spontaneously got bored with winning all the time and now we're actually losing in the WZs.

[Eric]

Hutt Ball was the single most interesting part of pvp in TOR. It's the only pvp I've played in a game where people understood what they had to do and how to do it. People knew they had to get the ball, pass the ball, not hold the ball while getting blown up, know when to reset the ball, tricks to take down the ball carrier, keep the ball carrier from getting to his destination, getting the ball carrier to his destination, etc.

It was rather interesting vs your typical capture the flag game, where like 2-3 people are focusing on the objective and the rest of the team is running in circles killing each other on the sides. The map itself didn't really lend itself to you hiding anywhere or getting distracted. I was always pleasantly surprised when I saw people focusing on trying to win.

Now granted this might have been because you needed to win 3 warzones a day to get your RNG bag so people tended to focus on winning since the valor grind was so ridiculous, and once you did get it, the only thing that mattered was winning.

BUT even in the other 2 warzones, people fell into that cycle of ignoring the objectives and just chain killing each other while the other side 3-capped or took doors, or didn't bother to take doors, Huttball was just immune to this for whatever reason.

[Don]

Plenty of people ignore the ball and just deathmatch in Huttball.

Juggernauts are way overpowered as a ball carrier but other than that it's fairly balanced. Some classes are less useful than others but if you know what you're doing you'll usually do okay.

Alderaan basically is decided in the first minute and then you sort of just futilely try to change the inevitably if you're on losing or just defend until they lose.

Voidstar is actually pretty even except a lot of guys ragequit if you lose the first door even though it's practically impossible to hold the first door against an equally strong team (the respawn rate is way against you in the first door). However a lot of time Voidstar gets into perpetual stalemates and it's pretty boring.

What's annoying about all these maps is that they're ultimately still deathmatch maps in the sense that if you can definitely kill everyone on the other side you probably won't lose. Sometimes when you see all 8 of your guys back at spawn and then someone will still try to pull a page out of Sun Tzu's Art of War on how you're supposed to win this even though everyone on your side is dead. There's definitely strategy, especially in Huttball, but most games won't come down to that close, and a team that you need good tactics to beat will probably have a Juggernaut, who renders all strategy useless. If you front the Juggernaut he charges the defender. If you don't front him then any other guy on their team can run ahead and get friendly leap. If you knocked that guy off you still get charged.

[Don]

Random thoughts on PvP state of this game...

Huttball - Juggernaut too strong as a ball carrier. Force-users in general are much stronger than non-Force using counterparts for Huttball though it might be because Force users are generally stronger, but especially Huttball.

Alderran/Voidstar - Nothing interesting

Darkness Assassin and Mercs are like matter and antimatter. They're the two class competing for the best class and they can pretty much kill each other if they get the jump on the other guy. The Darkness Assassin probably will beat the Merc most of the time if they saw each other at the same time, so the Merc spends most of his time trying to hit the Assassin from as far as possible since you only need about a 2 Tracer Missile lead to win, and conversely Assassins try to hunt down Mercs to ensure they don't get that advantage in.

After that you got Marauders. They're in theory weaker than either two classes, but Marauders will beat either two classes quite handily if they get the jump. Problem is that Merc has a huge range advantage on Marauders, and Assassins can run circles around Marauders, so normally this isn't possible. However, because those two classes are busy killing each other, Marauders get a surprising number of good opportunites to sneak up two classes that they shouldn't be able to.

Next you get the Sorc, which is probably closest to balanced and often viewed as overpowered but not. Sorc will generally lose to all 3 of those classes due to its lack of burst DPS, but again since Sorc is not a big threat (relatively speaking) to the top 3 classes compared to the top 3 classes themselves, you'll often see Sorc get a ton of hits in from far away while the top 3 classes decide to just shrug it off (which they can) to focus on a bigger threat.

So in the end those 4 classes are all roughly equal because the strongest classes tend to cancel each other out.

Then you got the everyone else, who are just weak in general, though an oddball spec like DPS Powertech is so rare that most of the time the top 4 classes will just decide that you must not even be worth the time to kill, and you can end up putting respectable numbers when all the most powerful characters ignore you. Of course, if you get a player in the top 4 classes that decide to beatdown the less fortunate, then you'd be pretty screwed, but generally a top 4 classes has to fight another one because if you attacked say a Sniper (easy win), most likely another top 4 class will jump you while you're killing that guy and then you die horribly.

[kali o.]

You mean Secret World? Never heard of a game called Secret Garden.

Lol, yeah. Secret Garden is some book I've never read that my sister loved. Bah, you know what I meant.

I won't really reply to the rest of what was said, but I will say I have never been bored of an MMO quicker -- and that holds true for everyone I knew who was playing it. Honestly, it's just all so very sterile and by the numbers... These WoW clones all feel like Fast Food, no depth, empty calories and make me sick if I play too much. I really need Raph Koster to make/head an MMO again and get back to what makes the genre fun.

EA has to release quarterly numbers in April. Likely after 1.2 drops. I suspect sub numbers are currently around 650k, maybe spiking to 900k post 1.2.

PS - No one knows how to play a sniper. I'd roll over anyone 1v1 -- in fact, that was my only motivation for playing....making nubs jaw drop when the sniper they expected to be cake totally rolls over them. Completely under estimated class as the PvE tactics learned while levelling are completely WRONG habits when it comes to PvP. You also have no idea how Mercs/Commandoes actually work (and they are literally the worst class 1v1 and will only kill people stupid enough to not negate/prevent their full spike rotation for 10k), but I am not going to have a gameplay argument over a game I dislike. Mara's are tops 1v1 played properly.

[Shrinweck]

I'm still having fun with it but I'd be surprised if I'm playing it past May.

[Shrinweck]

Didn't really feel proper starting a new thread about it at the moment but I pre-ordered Secret World a few days ago. Looks pretty interesting. Weekend betas start in May. The investigation missions and classless characters attracted me to the game. Here's hoping Funcom doesn't disappoint another MMORPG launch.