PvP fun

[Mud]

Okay, for a run down on what you need to do to gear for PvP.

You do warzones, warzones, warzones. Doing these will give you Valor and Warzone Commendations. Think of Valor like rank. Level 60 Valor = Battlemaster. You can buy some armor items with Warzone Commendations, like level 20 and 40, but not really much at level 50.
Instead you exchange Warzone Commendations at a 3:1 ratio for Mercenary Commendations. What can you buy with Mercenary Commendations? Not much, but once you have 200 Mercenary Commendations and 200 Warzone Commendations you can buy a Champion Gear Bag (Unique). That means you need a total of 800 Warzone Commendations to buy one Champion Gear Bag.

This gear bag gives you a chance at Centurion Commendations and a chance for a broken gear item that can be traded for Champion armor. With Centurion Commendations you can buy Centurion PvP armor/gear. Or with those lucky items you can get Champion armor. Both types are wearable by level 50 and not restricted by Valor level.
Here is the grind…

You can do pvp daily and weekly daily.
Pvp daily = 1 Gear Bag
Pvp weekly = 3 Gear Bag
For each Warzone you do you gain 50-75 Warzone Commendations based on win/loss, and a few other things. So lets say 60 Warzone Commendations on average per warzone you take part in.
That’s 13-14 Warzones for 1 Gear bag.

Each Gear bag is random. You can get 1 Centurion Commendation, 2, 3,e tc. And gear from them is VERY random indeed…some have reported 20+ bags with no gear.

But for a full set of Centurion Armor/Gear you need 432 Centurion Commendations.
If you get on average 2 Centurion Commendations per bag, you need 216 bags…remember for 1 bag you need 800 Warzone Commendations!

So if you only do warzones for these commendations, you need 172,800 Warzone Commendations, or around 3k Warzones!!!

Have fun farming!

The good news is that you would have to do this anyways to get Valor, and you get XP for pvp, so don't wait till level 50, start early!!! There are other ways once you get to level 50, there are daily and weekly open world pvp quests...but right now they are not working for us since we are out numbered by emp forces 8:1

[noobas]

While that post may be intimidating, it's certainly not 100% accurate (I'm not saying mine is either btw!!!).

First off: it gets WORSE.

Champion gear bags are UNIQUE, and, you can't open them until 50, meaning, once you've got your first one (I bought at level 40), you can really only store up WZ commendations... which maxes out at 1000.

Secondly: it gets BETTER.
At 1000 WZ comms, you should definitly be in the process of swapping them for MERC comms. (3:1 as mud said).


Third: Build up your stores of merc comms (I don't know how many you can store, but if it's 1000, thats a total equivalent of 4000 WZ comms you can hold (1000 merc coms =3000 WZ comms+1000 regular WZ comms),

Fourth: which means you can buy a total of 5 more champion bags, for a total of 6 champion bags immediately upon dinging 50.
(holding 1 unique+5 bags @ (200WZ+200merc comm/1 bag)

Fifth: By the time you're about level 40ish or so, you'll have a significant portion of your toolset, and, if you are PVPing regularly, you will be getting a LOT better at it. I started at 20 on my GS and by the time I hit 40, I knew how to kill, how to survive, and who to target. By 45, I'm regularly hitting 7-9 medals per round and always in the top 3 ranked - meaning, I'm winning MVP votes regularly, and, getting a lot more valor/commendations per round than before.

FINALLY since each champion bag has a chance at piece of armour (not as rare, in general, as mud may have alluded to), you could be rocking pretty decent armour in a couple of slots a couple minutes after dinging 50 if you followed the previous 5 steps on your way, and, you'll be a lot more competitive at 50 when the real grind starts than the poor suckas who busted 50 on solo quests.

[Chrisax]

And can we know the name and address of the perv who created that system?

*head hurts, need to re-read*

Thanks a lot Mud, I don't know how much time it would have taken to get the whole picture without your post.

Question: where do we go and click to begin with? (I forgot although I did t a much lower level and two times with Noobas and Bredin lol)

[Elrojo]

As Chris said, where is the PvP terminal for normal and daily/weekly pvp mishes?

Also as I imagine there will be some evening out of obtaining items. Unless the game goes down the path of "too bad" its only in the first yr of release and they will get feedback that certain things were either too hard or too easy to get and modify accordingly. I doubt, with all of the things it will take to make an end game toon, that they will only make certain things harder to get, usually it gets a bit easier.

Not to make a direct comparison, but look at how AO progressed. Initially it would have taken my dude well over 6 months to get to 100K VP to get all of the crat suff needed. Now it can be acheived in 1-2 months at most.

While the advice is good for "right now", i'd say to not go nuts trying to get all the stuff and grinding until you bleed. This kinda thing will just cause burnout. I still think its going to be more advisable to just spend enough time doing the warzones to make it worthwhile, but not so much that you get sick of it.

But thanks guys. I am 23 and I think i have totally neglected PvP, mainly as I'm not really sure how my dude works fully, pretty sure im in crappy gear and the whole game is still a mystery for me atm

[Chrisax]

As for myself, the reason I didn't really do PvP is simply that I wanted a level 50 able to help all orgmates everywhere. It's done, except that tradeskilling is just a pain (schematics to get, and some necessary items from hard mode and Ops only!) but that's not the topic here. So I'll soon do PvP which seems interesting from the little I did.

One comment about PvP in general: I saw people saddened by the fact the Empire was kicking clan bottoms too often at the moment. We shouldn't get desperate about this right now because I think the reasons for this situation can be found in the history of SWTOR development:

- in the long-term beta (not the 3 days one), people were in majority playing Empire (and even Sith it seems); this means that Empire has, at the moment, a core of seasoned players bigger than the Republic. This shouldn't last too long and, if that core drops SWTOR after a while (as they are actually playing for more than a year for the older ones), the situation could even maybe (?!) be reversed.

- bad guys are always, in all games I know -RTS, FPS, MMORPG- more organized for PvP and it takes time to good guys to wake up and realize they need to be organized too. Let's hope and let's work too. This brings us to the third point...

- what I saw in PvP is that people just don't behave as a team / group. It's a FFA fight. (Which is dramatic for some support characters that can't survive alone like pure healers.) So even just two people working together have a serious advantage. Nothing new: AO's BS anyone?!
Typically, an Empire character is followed by another in stealth mode who pops up and ganks you when you start what you think is a 1 vs 1... and ends up in a 2 vs you. It's a classic, really.
If republic can't have a full group acting as a group (not sure Empire really has that anyhow), then it should be enough to have some smaller groups where people work together. We saw in AO's BS that three AP's working together was many times enough to win BS... just an example of course.

[Mud]

PvP missions are found on the Fleet in the Combat Skill section. The place where your trainer is located. Here are also the pvp vendors.

Chris it's true Beta had a lot of Empire players, of course many of those played Empire beta because they wanted to be Republic when live launched. But besides that, it's more than vet players. It seems to be ratio (we are sooooooooooooooooooooooo outnumbered it is just stupid) and with some classes being a bit OP and not having true mirrors on our side. When I play my Sith warror que times are almost instant, also they are not really working together any more than we are, it's just some classes more OP than others.

That being said last night we won 5 Warzones in a row, it was great! We had lost 7 in a row before that...but I think we really need across server pvp like other large MMOs, hope they do that soon.

[noobas]

IMO, 2-3 guys working together in AO Battlestation is totally different from 2-3 guys working together in warzone in SWTOR.

The reasoning is as follows:

In BS, the points are SO far apart, theres the capping point, 2 hallways, three transporters, mid, then the same thing agin in the other two points... everything is SO far apart that 3 guys, really, have to be working either together (in which case omni can just divide and conquer) where they can produce kills reliably, or, divide and conquer, in which case communication isn't even needed, you just need to run+cap without fighting.

SWTOR, on the other hand, can really really benefit from a few guys working together, because:

1. Mechanics favor working together: two words: GUARD. TAUNT.

2. Because the distance required to travel to cap a point/or bomb in alderan is so close, you get constantly swarmed by opposing teams, therfore, if three guys are able to hold a point (Mid) it's a huge huge huge benefit to your side. Holding left can be done by one dude in greens, so left shouldn't even be mentioned, but, if one side is held and mid is held by 3 people, then that leaves 2-3 guys to run'n'gun, or try to catch right off gaurd and do a quick cap.

3. in huttball, 3 guys who know how to pass, leap to each other can produce goals in 10 seconds vs the minute or two a PUG can even IF they can hold the ball for that long.

When rojo gets acquainted with his toon more and starts doign some PVP, maybe we can get on TS3 and try working together a bit. If we had a third, lasa maybe, could be really strong team. (chris+mud not usually online when we are and in 50 bracket.).

[Chrisax]

Question: I've seen on Org chat now, many times, "Huttball OH NO!".... I haven't tried it yet. Why do you all seem to hate it?

[Bredin]

I am not a fan of it so far. Some love it, for example, Easyrider really likes it and does well. Maybe after i get the hang of passing I will like it more. Passing is really needed to do well in huttball.

[Chrisax]

WOT EEZ HUTTBALL ?

[noobas]

The game objective of huttball is to get the ball over the opposing sides line. each time over is a point. Game ends after 15m or 5 points I think.

The PVP objectives are the same as others.

Passing isn't "needed" to do well.

you can do well if you know the layout, which ramps to use, have a tank gaurding you and a healer to heal you (providing *you* are the ball carrier), otherwise, you can just kill people, use CC, roots, stuns to seriously mess up the other team, or, if youre a tank/healer do the obvious support for the carrier.

Alternately, if you like the huttball objectives and want to be tricky without passing you can use force leap/force push/vigilance leap (whichever the gaurd leap is) to friendlies.

works better than passing since it can't be intercepted.

[Chrisax]

Hmm... Can I use the Jedi Sage's rescue power: it allows me to instantly teleport a friendly target to me (to save the person, normally). Or will they lose the ball?

[Mud]

it works well Chris, I do it all the time

[noobas]

yup chris, and, with proper positioning, with 3 sages, and one ball carrier, you can score after the ball returns to the cradle in about 6 seconds.

[noobas]

So, just a quick update.

Since this discussion began, and mud's original post, i've been really pushing a lot on warzones. After one weekend of solid play I was able to

1. increase my valor rank from about 20 to 29
2. set aside 350 merc commendations
3. spend 1160 WZ commendations
4. have 400 WZ commendations remaining

Which, all in, means I gained 350*3+1160+400=2610 WZ commendations

I also made around 150k credits

And dinged 46 and 47 on warzone wins.

All in thats fairly good progress. I'm hoping to be valor 40 when I ding 50. We'll see how that goes.