Quote Hey everyone,



Our combat and PvP teams have been hard at work addressing the issues of naked Bolster and the itemization issues attached to it (like War Hero gear). Here is some very detailed information on everything we are going to be doing to address these concerns right from Alex Modny. If you want the basic info here is a quick synopsis, read on for the full debrief:



TLDR: Going into a Warzone completely naked will now be worse than wearing gear. War Hero and Elite War Hero gear is viable again.





Quote: Originally Posted by Alex Modny Naked Bolster The main change being made to Bolster is how it treats item slots with no items in them aka the naked bolster. If there is a slot without an item in it, that slot will only be bolstered a portion of what placing an appropriate item in the slot would. This will remove the naked bolster situation. Being Naked in a PvP area will now be much worse the further you go up the PvP progression.



In addition to these changes we fixed many underlying bugs in the Bolster system and tweaked some numbers to make Bolster give a little less stats than it does currently. We also corrected an issue where relic slots were being treated in our system as expected to give out more Main Stats than they were. This caused relic slots to be overly valued in adding to your DPS stats when mostly they add Endurance and a Proc. All of these changes should pretty much squash out Naked Bolster as being undeniably better than any set of gear. There might be cases where Naked is ever so slightly worse but that is usually a case of the equipped gear being not so great for PvP. If you see players in PvP playing Naked from now on you should expect them to be underperforming stat wise and over performing cojones wise.

Elite War Hero War Hero and Elite War Hero (referred to as WH and EWH from here on out) gear is now better! It is no longer worse than Naked Bolster. The reasons why WH/EWH had less stats and were worse than old Bolster is because it is ‘old’ gear and this ‘old’ gear used a different stat budget where it got its stats from. This ‘old’ stat budget (which isn’t used in 2.0) accounts for Expertise into the budget (Partisan and Conqueror do not) meaning they were lower in Main, Secondary and Tertiary stats to account for the Expertise the items had. This will be removed and the stat budget the Expertise was taking be refactored into the Main, Secondary and Tertiary stats. The net result is WH/EWH will have no Expertise and increased stats, but Partisan will still be better than it. The ranking you will see in effectiveness is WH < EWH < Partisan < Conqueror.



However, we have an issue with this conversion, the Expertise crystal in the WH/EWH weapons. Because this crystal is used in Partisan and Conquer and the system is unable to edit based on condition which item the crystal in the WH and EWH weapons still have Expertise. It is recommended that you replace this Expertise crystal with PvE crystals. We apologize that we weren’t able to fully take all the Expertise off the WH/EWH and that some players will lose customization, which is very important to us and to you.



Older PvP Gear (Battlemaster, Champion, Centurion, Recruit, and Recruit Mk2) did not receive this free upgrade conversion. At this point in the SW:TOR item progression, these items are simply out of date with the current power level and are not recommended for use.



There is a very important note in regards to how the bolster system handles mixing expertise and non-expertise mods on a single item: The short answer is, you shouldn’t do it. The longer answer is, players are much better off than when they decide to make an item a PvP-focused item, they replace all of the mods inside it with expertise mods. The bolster system handles “PvP” items slightly differently than “PvE” items, and putting even a single expertise mod inside an item tells the bolster that the item is a “PvP” item. The result of this situation can be less than ideal for a player in either content channel, and certainly isn’t working as well as we intended. We continue to discuss fixes to this particular issue, but players can work around the problem by making sure they are either pure PvE items or pure PvP items. Note: This is only with mods on a per item basis, mixing different items on a full character is fine.

Gear vs. Skill Pre-2.0 PvP was all about your items. Being ‘the best’ meant you had EWH with augments and no one could touch you. This situation was unfortunate because it made the PvP game too harsh on the ‘have nots’ and made the grind to EWH much more bitter because of getting your face pushed in the mud day after day. The gear gap was too big and some players became non-contributors quickly because of the gear gap. It wasn’t fun for the majority of players. In 2.0 we don’t want to totally get rid of PvP gear progression, we still want a gear gap but we want to tone down how overpowered the top tier gear is versus the lower PvP gear so that the moment to moment gameplay is more enjoyable. We want everyone you group with to be contributors from a gear standpoint (them not responding to “inc grass 3” calls or not throwing you the Huttball when they are immobilized is something we can’t help :P). We have seen the argument of Skill vs. Gear throughout the existence of MMO PvP and we are of the opinion both are good for an RPG, falling on one side of the scale (gear has no purpose in PvP vs. gear is the only thing that matters in PvP) is not desirable. It is a balance act, sometimes it will slide too far on one side or the other and we will correct it but this methodology, the balance between skill vs. gear, will result in the most healthy PvP game and community possible for the long term. P.S. Thanks DarthOvertone for making us laugh during this tribulation.



-eric



Eric Musco | Community Manager

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