Star Wars: The Old Republic (The Thread)

[TheFeniX]

But really, I think that's put me off thinking about trying SW:TOR. I didn't like it in the first place, but wow. Just wow.

It gets EVEN BETTER!

There's Diminishing Returns on multi-killing the same character over and over (which is bugged), but this doesn't apply to the instantly respawning turrets in the bases. I've read they give ~200 valor per kill. So, as long as you do any kind of damage to players and turrets, you can get around 1000 valor PER MINUTE.

So, the gear disparity is going to be absolutely hilarious as Imps reach Battlemaster rank in hours by farming the base over and over. There's also reports of level 16 Rep players (obvious Imp alts) being farmed there as well. Now, this will likely lead to bans for that player, but what about all his buddies?

Holy Shit, this is hilarious. I'm on the shit end of the stick playing Rep and I honestly couldn't be laughing harder at the SWTOR forums. It's basically:

Republic Player and/or Actually Intelligent Imperial Player: "This imbalance is terrible. Ilum needs to be shut down and the valor rolled-back."
Average Imperial Player: "QQ moar scrub, GTFO GB2 WoW!" "umad no skill? I would kill 10 Imp Battlemasters myself if I rolled Rep."
Mindless Middle Idiot and/or Star Wars/Bioware Whore: "Guys, they'll fix this. You suck for being mean to nice Bioware/EA. Real fans will continue to sub. Roll an alt and STFU. STOP SAYING MEAN THINGS."

Dude... it's the WoW PvP forums. The circle is complete. Bioware has become the Master! I'm paying $15 this month just to see where this train-wreck goes (Things can only get better right.... RIGHT?).

The only thing I'm annoyed about is that my PvP gear gravy train to supplement my PvE gear (which is much more annoying to get) has stopped for me, but is going even stronger for Imps. I can imagine many PvE Imps using Ilum to get Battlemaster gear which will blow away anything but Rakata when it comes to PvE. Seriously, a full set of Tanking Battlemaster gear would likely let me walk through heroic OPs if the stats are to be believed.

[Joviwan]

TOR is the best game that was made 12 years ago, as far as I can tell. It has about ten thousand problems that have been fixed in other games for a decade, and it's often startling at just how much is broken, stupid, or otherwise completely bass ackwards.

I've never seen an MMO that hated friendships and hated playing with your friends more than this one. "Sprint" should be a level 1 power. Grey items and lock boxes literally have no purpose and shouldn't exist. Why can I holo-call in a party conversation but not when I need to run 10 miles to turn in a quest? Why can I not make moral choices in a holo-call? Why can't I place my own markers on a map? Why does anyone care about +3% damage?

There's more, god there's more. And that's not even mentioning the classic Bioware problems regarding writing. Hint: for maximum lightside points during a quest, make sure you do whatever the most recent person you talked to asks you to do, regardless of how assinine or stupid it is. 90% of the time this is the lightside choice.

[TheFeniX]

Has anyone else been keeping up with this hilarity?

It's funny because the whole PvP situation on Ilum isn't that bad on our server, which actually makes the problem even worse, which I'll get to. On servers where there's a huge faction disparity, the gameplay is non-existent. The few Republic are farmed for little gain by the Imps, but it's not even a fight but an AOE fest of subscriber destroying magnitude. I've heard of many low level Rep alts being used by Imps to farm Valor.

I have an i7 (4 cores, 4 threads), 10 GBs RAM, and a GTX560 and Ilum is literally an unplayable mess with ~30 Reps and ~50 Imps. Everywhere in our base is 11 FPS. Looking at the mob of Imps drops it to 1 FPS, probably lower. Looking at the performance manager, my PC isn't utilizing 20% of it's resources (I need to get another GPU monitor, does Nvidia still offer a proprietary one?). After 1.1, mini loading screens will pop up constantly on Ilum, even during combat. But everyone is having this issue. I can literally Force leap into a group of Imps, throw my AOE, then stun, and haul ass. I got out of there 5 times without dieing.

The atrocious engine optimization aside (and to get to why this server situation is worse for PvP), we're still bottled in our base with Imps holding everything. We have to stack on the turret and wait for big heals, then do a push on the Imps when they get too close (we almost wiped them more than a few times). We did 3 of these pushes (I got my daily in the first push) and by the time I left (maybe 15 minutes), I had gained ~1 full Valor Rank (went from 19.5 to 20.5). Since the Imps controlled everything, they should have been getting 4 times that amount of Valor.

I kept up with the forums last night and the PvP area was nothing but calls to roll-back with posts being deleted and topics being locked. When I logged off last night, there was still no offical word from Bioware. This morning all I can get from the SWTOE website is "Due to extremely high volumes of website traffic, you have been placed in a queue to access the page you requested." which, after 10 minutes, I'm still stuck on it. The top login bar is broken on Firefox, but works for IE.

But the biggest laugh is because the site is basically down: people who wanted to quit over this issue can't even log in the cancel their sub. As I said earlier, I'm hanging around for another month to see where this trainwreck goes. It's like I'm playing Brink again: everything is broken and buggy. There literally isn't an area of this game I can think of that works 99% of the time.

[charlemagne]

It's hilarious that every MMO will run into issues with horrible network code and non-existant performance with more than 10 chars on screen. It really is as if every MMO developer has been locked into a windowless room with no internet access over the last 10 years. Did they seriously not anticipate this?

It just baffles me. Bioware not having made an MMO before is no excuse because you still could look at other MMOs and try to not make the same mistakes.

[TheFeniX]

It's hilarious that every MMO will run into issues with horrible network code and non-existant performance with more than 10 chars on screen. It really is as if every MMO developer has been locked into a windowless room with no internet access over the last 10 years. Did they seriously not anticipate this?

This isn't a netcode issue (well... not all of it). I don't have access to my choke/loss, but during these fights on Ilum, my latency is fine. Sure, there's some people teleporting around every once in a while, but for the most part it's all graphical lag. It's the engine just choking trying to deal with that much information on the screen at once.

There's also the massive issues with ability lag which, some posters who claim to know a good amount about the Hero engine have stated, is related to the way the engine handles hit-detect or ability channeling. Basically (and I'm vastly simplifying here), all abilities have to get "permission" from the server before they even begin to fire, unlike many other MMOs. This leads to my Guardian freaking out trying to throw a blade storm, whereas in WoW the ability would fire, but if it turned out to not be valid, I would get my resources (mana, runs, etc) refunded back. Melee sucks in PvP, but SWTOE makes it unmanageable.

On top of that, many Republic Mirror classes have longer animation times before their ability (even instant-casts) fires. A prime example is "Project" for the Consular. You rip a rock (or piece of environment, funny when it's an astromech droid) out of the ground and throw it at a player. But the client doesn't seem to request hit-detection until AFTER the rock is thrown. So, you can sometimes be stuck literally ripping multiple rocks out of the ground only to have the ability not fire. It's most telling when your rock has just begun it's forward throw animation and you get stunned. It just disappears in mid air, sometimes right before it would hit a player.

To really see how stupid it is, stealth as a shadow, wait for a player to start planting a bomb (so he's not moving). Open up with project and if a player hits you (by quickly tab targeting) with some form of interrupt or CC (even after you've "thrown" the rock), it will disappear and not stop the bomb-plant. I've had this happen numerous times and project is an instant cast.

It just baffles me. Bioware not having made an MMO before is no excuse because you still could look at other MMOs and try to not make the same mistakes.

They could have played their own game at some point. Closed beta testers have been coming out of the wood-works claiming BW's known about these basic gameplay issues for months, some claiming over a year. Even 8 vs 8 Warzones get pretty choppy graphically. If all 16 players end up at a point, you will have issues hitting anything as melee.

And that's just not acceptable. We're talking about an MMO that can't handle 16 players in the same spot fighting. Rift and STO had no issues with double that number. It gets bad when 70 players are fighting 30 mobs during invasions in Rift, but it was always playable and my FPS never dropped i the single digits like SWTOE does all the time. The only game I've seen in recent years that shitty was Brink.

[TheFeniX]

An official response from BW:

"In addition to these changes, we’ll be reducing the population cap on Ilum. This should help increase performance by requiring your client to render fewer characters on-screen at once."

It's like how Brink made their 16 vs 16 into 8 vs 8 with bots and everyone was happy... right guys? RIGHT?

EDIT: they capped the area, but not the factions, at 100. So, you're still seeing instance with like 13 Reps and 87 Imps. I can't stop laughing.

[Civil War Man]

1. Bioware actually does have a huge hard-on for Imps (like Bliz and Horde) and doesn't care that this would happen.

For all of the faults in the game, I do not get this impression from it. While the story does project the sense that the Republic would eventually lose if the Empire got its shit together and stopped stabbing itself in the back, they do actually get to capitalize on the backstabbing and get legitimate wins. In Balmorra, for instance, though the Republic should probably thank the Bounty Hunters for that.

Even if Bioware favors the Empire, they at least have the Republic actually fight back. As opposed to WoW, especially post-Cataclysm WoW, where everyone is instructed to stand in awe of the invincible Horde juggernaut and the Alliance only doesn't get destroyed because the Horde keeps failing to follow through.

On the other hand, I do see a lot of parallels between the players of TOR and WOW, in that there seem to be a lot more fanatic Empire/Horde players than Republic/Alliance, and they seem to be less likely to have a character in the opposing faction if they primarily play Empire/Horde. I was actually at a party recently when the subject of TOR came up, and one of the people seemed to react with visceral disgust when he learned that everyone else had either decided to play a Republic character before rolling anything Imperial or were splitting their time between alts in both factions.

[Steve]

I must be weird, because I've only rolled Republic so far and I'm not sure when I'll ever roll Imp.

[White Haven]

The Republic has corruption issues politically and has had its military brutalized by the pre-Treaty Sith offensive. The Imperial military as a whole is expanding at a breakneck rate to try to fight the much larger Republic on even terms. The Sith, specifically, can often rely on individual superiority to offset numerical inferiority, but the reason they have that sort of individual superiority contributes directly to their numerical inferiority, so that's something of a self-defeating advantage. Sith infighting produces a relatively small cadre of extremely lethal individuals, but at a fearsome toll of the almost-as-lethal individuals that in a more sane society would be backup-singers to the top shelf killers. This is made even worse by reactionaries within the Sith who actively attempt to sabotage or directly murder any attempts to expand the Sith more quickly, seeing it as a violation of Sith traditions despite the Empire desperately needing more Sith than actually exist.

What you have to remember about the Treaty of Coruscant is that it came about because neither side could sustain the war. The Sith needed time to digest what they'd taken so they could actually build into an Empire worthy of the name. The Republic had just been sucker-punched in the everything to the point that they didn't know which way was up. Now, for propaganda purposes, the Republic is quite happy to point at the treaty and say 'we had no choice, they had us at gunpoint.' The Empire has it harder, though...because what the average grunt on the street sees is that the Empire had the Republic at gunpoint and then broke it off with a treaty. And the mythology of Sith superiority means that the Empire can't admit to the fact that it needed a break as badly as the Republic, if not more. That all creates even more backstabbing and infighting, because you have the lower and middle ranks convinced, not unreasonably given the propaganda they're immersed in, that their leaders are weak.

In the Empire, 'he was weak' is a perfectly valid reason to murder someone and take his job.

The Empire had to stop the war at a remarkably bad time. A bit earlier and they could have said 'The Republic is stronger than it appears, look, they stopped us HARD at Ulthor VI.' A bit later and they could have said 'Hah hah we've got Coruscant garrisoned to a fare-thee-well and they can never take it back, now we can sit back and watch the Republic self-destruct.' Having to stop where they did put them in a position where there really wasn't an internal narrative that'd be acceptable to Imperial society.

[Ritterin Sophia]

The Empire had to stop the war at a remarkably bad time. A bit earlier and they could have said 'The Republic is stronger than it appears, look, they stopped us HARD at Ulthor VI.' A bit later and they could have said 'Hah hah we've got Coruscant garrisoned to a fare-thee-well and they can never take it back, now we can sit back and watch the Republic self-destruct.' Having to stop where they did put them in a position where there really wasn't an internal narrative that'd be acceptable to Imperial society.

There's also the matter of what we learn during the the third part of the Sith Warrior's class story, even the highest echelons of the Sith and Imperial society were left without direction..

[Darth Yan]

One of the timelines mentioned how imperial confidence was shaken at the battle of bothuwai; Even though the battle was technically a draw they had sunken to actually begging the defenders to surrender and they ultimately would have needed to pull troops from other locations to sustain; the lost suns talk about how the battles of Rhen Var and Alderaan also helped to halt their advance to the point where they started to feed on each other. Revan's link with Vitiate also encouraged the timing. The Emperor was already thinking about peace, revan sped it up.

There are some things about infighting with the Sith. One of the flash points Red Reaper involves a pureblood with lunatic with trying to attack what they view as a weak and corrupt sith empire.

[TheFeniX]

For all of the faults in the game, I do not get this impression from it. While the story does project the sense that the Republic would eventually lose if the Empire got its shit together and stopped stabbing itself in the back, they do actually get to capitalize on the backstabbing and get legitimate wins. In Balmorra, for instance, though the Republic should probably thank the Bounty Hunters for that.

I'm not talking so much about the Lore as the way the game plays out itself. The game is still pretty buggy and broken, but the Republic side gets it even worse. The problem is that there's a massive faction imbalance on probably 90% of servers. While most have an over-abundance of Imps, there are servers where the 5:1 or greater imbalance goes to the Republic. That's not really the issue though. The issue is that every change BW has made has favored the zerg faction. They gear up faster because they can do dailies faster. Since they have a wider selection of geared 50s, they can help new 50s gear up. There are plans to create more same-faction warzones. Since Champ PvP gear is great for doing hardmodes, this will bleed into PvE as well.

And since, unlike WoW, there are no larger WZs to get "lost" in with your undergeared player, the barrier to entry with PvP (either Warzones or Ilum) is massive. You will hate doing WZs and your team will hate you for being undergeared. Try being melee on Ilum and getting your 30 kills for the day: it's atrocious and we're on a more equal ratio than most servers.

But even without the imbalance: Since many instant casts are not actually instant for Republic players, we're put at a major disadvantage even when compare to the Imperials dealing with ability lag, etc. Shock for the Inquistor is instant-cast and instant hit. Project for the Consular not only has a long "wind-up" animation, it also won't hit, do damage, or stun until the actual rock is out of the ground and hits the opponent. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar as I've tested both personally. And this does effect PvE as well.

My Awe only makes people grab their heads and do the boogie-woggie for 8 seconds. The Jugg equivalent knocks you down, forcing a "getup" animation which, though PvP forum posters will claim doesn't affect your reaction time, gives you another 1-2 seconds of being effectively CCed.

Meanwhile, complaints of this nature on the forums are met with "QQ more L2P scrub" from Imperials. So yea... it's WoW.

I was actually at a party recently when the subject of TOR came up, and one of the people seemed to react with visceral disgust when he learned that everyone else had either decided to play a Republic character before rolling anything Imperial or were splitting their time between alts in both factions.

That idea is hella-stupid (and yes, I see people like that all the time), but there actually is very little reason to main a Republic player other than masochism. Your end-game gear is pathetic (for a JK think: Retarded Space Samurai). You want a purple lightsaber? Hahaha, so what if the only person ever to use one in the movies was the most hard-line Jedi ever: it's a Sith color now, fuck you stupid Republic. I could go on but it's tiring.

What I actually came here to post: We've merged with another guild and started raiding. There's only 2 right now: Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace. Both are pretty short, sort of fun, but easy as Hell even for first time SWTOR raiders. Most of our wipes were due to fights bugging out and that shit gets old fast. We'll probably start hardmodes next week. So.... anyone who thinks SWTOR raiding is somehow different than WoW or other MMOs...... I laughed about this before release and I'm laughing even harder now. Yea, it's different because you can sleep through most of the fights, unless it bugs and wrecks your shit.

Oh yea, "Hard Enrage." Get used to the term, because it's Bioware's idea of inspired fight mechanics.

[Mr Bean]

Enraging is a bag of dicks. Your moving along on something like Hard or Nightmare Black Talon or Esseles something that's dead easy to do at 50 just as it was at 12 and then you hit the end boss where you get your actual raiding gear and the boss enrages and now the entire fight is a DPS race against time as the bosses defenses double, their damage triples and now it's not even tank and spank but oh shit DPS, DPS, DPS oh shit and the boss one shots your healer because just because they are enraged their traditional mechanics don't stop.

And you won't find out if your group is competent or not until the end boss (Or mid boss with Athiss) which is annoying as hell. More over being one shot under any circumstance is not fun net code being net code. The reason this is not Star Wars:Call of Modern Galactic Combat is their net code is only average meaning the split second timing you need for some Flashpoints in hard mode is only possible for some connections. I've seen Australians grouped with Americans on a European server fight most WoW instances just fine but it can be terrible on something like False Emperor on hardmode if you have one member in Washington on your Eastcoast server.

Also let me say this again, equipment and crafting is great from 9-48 and once you hit 49-50 it's balls since nothing is worth making that pvp won't get you better in 1/1000 less effort. Bio-chem is king from 48-50.

And more annoying since 50s are in their own PVP bracket there is an annoying habit of 40s to play nothing but pvp from 45-50 and hit 50 with 8000 warzone merits because your no longer see 50's but 45s are just as bad in that fighting someone who's got all their talent points, extra cc breakers and because merits are stupid expensive for most items.

[Mr Bean]

Merit cost examples of stupid warzone merit costs
FYI average warzone merits per 15 minute warzone is 15 for never getting a kill and just poking people to 120 if you dominate the entire field and kill the entire team single handily while healing your entire team single handily.

Cost of a warzone medpacks (Restores 35% heath, = to a lvl 50 blue biochem medpack) = 30 merits, they are single use
Cost of a warzone stim (15 second damage/armor buff) = 30 merits
Cost of a lvl 14 warzone green box (Random green item) = 70 merits
Cost on market of a lvl 14 green item, 400 credits
Average credit reward from warzone 1200-4000 credits.

[TheFeniX]

Also let me say this again, equipment and crafting is great from 9-48 and once you hit 49-50 it's balls since nothing is worth making that pvp won't get you better in 1/1000 less effort. Bio-chem is king from 48-50.

The funny part is that you're half right, because Biochem is king in PvP. Synthweaving lets you craft a Rakata level Belt and Bracers that are BoP. Except... you could then immediately drop Synth and grab biochem and keep the gear. BW nerfed Biochem, but didn't understand that raiders were demanding it because it's still the only viable endgame profession. Keep Biochem as it is, but make other professions viable at endgame.

And more annoying since 50s are in their own PVP bracket there is an annoying habit of 40s to play nothing but pvp from 45-50 and hit 50 with 8000 warzone merits because your no longer see 50's but 45s are just as bad in that fighting someone who's got all their talent points, extra cc breakers and because merits are stupid expensive for most items.

That's about the only option they have though. They will eventually hit 50, but then they're going to get stomped, so they whore up as much valor and WZCs/MCs as they can to make the grind almost bearable. And since the Champ bags bought through comms are Unique, you can't even save up multiples and work the lotto system earlier. Also, there's no intro PvP gear (either crafted or purchased) because BW removed the purchased gear when the game went live.

The problem is it's not even a grind, but a lotto system. You can do like 4-5 hours of PvP, even less during Call to arms in WoW and get your decent PvP mainhand. Some guy did the math and, without doing dailies and working the lotto system, and buying champ bags (only getting the guaranteed commendations), your Cent main hand would take 65 hours of constant WZs to get when averaged out. That's idiotic to say the least. Meanwhile, guys like me can get lucky and get 5 pieces of Champ gear in 3-4 hours of PvP.

There's also nowhere for the 50s to go when they hit BM. They will always either be at the top of the food-chain in PvP or fighting on equal level. There is no other option for them. In WoW, you can run into season geared players in normal BGs, but they aren't getting anything for it as Honor is worthless once you grind your 352 (or whatever gear). In SWTOR, as they get better gear, it just means they can stomp undergeared players easier and get even more gear. Meanwhile, those without the gear or the numbers in Ilum, cannot complete dailies and try to pray to the RNG gods.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I can think of worse ways to do PvP (albeit very few ways), but the "haves" on the forums constantly see no issue with it, claiming that WoW is just as bad of a grind which is so unbelievably stupid. Cries from the "have nots" are constantly met with ridicule. And there's still no dev response other than "we're working on it."

Merit cost examples of stupid warzone merit costs
FYI average warzone merits per 15 minute warzone is 15 for never getting a kill and just poking people to 120 if you dominate the entire field and kill the entire team single handily while healing your entire team single handily.

The medal system is hella-broke. It rewards not completing objectives. Plant all the bombs and cap the data: 0 medals. Whore kills, use medpacks, and just damage yourself and heal back up: 7-9 medals that come with loads of valor and commendations. Win or loss: whoring medals is the way to go, especially if you've already completed your daily/weekly and I've been told this in OPS chat when I bitched about a healer spamming sacrifice and healing himself: "I got my daily nub so fuck off"

Gives these assholes an arena system and get it done with.

[Mr Bean]

The fact you don't get a medal for completion objectives is the great bit of obviousness that pvp was not play tested anywhere near as well as it should be. Watch my sniper at 22 getting 7 medals and the top scorer because I sat in the middle and spammed snipe and ambush and leg shot as the 50s ran around stomping my team to a 6-0 loss in 8 minutes meaning I get more rewards then them? Sad.

[TheFeniX]

The fact you don't get a medal for completion objectives is the great bit of obviousness that pvp was not play tested anywhere near as well as it should be. Watch my sniper at 22 getting 7 medals and the top scorer because I sat in the middle and spammed snipe and ambush and leg shot as the 50s ran around stomping my team to a 6-0 loss in 8 minutes meaning I get more rewards then them? Sad.

Go to Tatooine: get the moisture buff. Go to Hoth: get the reusable 50% out-of-combat heal water. Get into huttball match, stand in the fire at the very beginning. Drink water: get 2 (I think) healing medals. Right-click the "Refreshed" buff. You can now do this every 10-seconds if you're out of combat (which is hilariously easy).

Working as Intended!

[Mr Bean]

Go to Tatooine: get the moisture buff. Go to Hoth: get the reusable 50% out-of-combat heal water. Get into huttball match, stand in the fire at the very beginning. Drink water: get 2 (I think) healing medals. Right-click the "Refreshed" buff. You can now do this every 10-seconds if you're out of combat (which is hilariously easy).

Working as Intended!

How many medals/xp per rank can this net you? My Sentinel is hilarious bad at pvp and could use the medals to get his 40's gear so I can save some credits.

[TheFeniX]

How many medals/xp per rank can this net you? My Sentinel is hilarious bad at pvp and could use the medals to get his 40's gear so I can save some credits.

Oh Hell man, I don't know. I just do it to piss our Sage off. But, use that water every time you drop combat (it will heal my Guardian for like 9.5k) and rack in the healing medals with a class that can't even heal. Focus on low-level characters for damage and KBs and you'll rake in the valor/comms. But BW also stealth raised the cost of the level 20 and 40 WZ gear, so, there's that too. I just went last night and got the water for my 22 Shadow, but PvP is about dead for me.

[TheFeniX]

BTW: does endgame Republic gear look stupid?

Is the Space Pope reptilian? (BIG pic)

Seriously, the consular looks like he/she is giving a prostate exam to a duck and went a bit too deep. NOTE: I still do not have the Columni Chest-piece and I thank God for that.

[Mr Bean]

Whoever started the trend of ridiculously huge pauldrons needs to be hunted down and tossed into the Phantom zone. Second off the half and half thing does not work. For example if my character has a beard (As all good villains do) and puts on either helmet that vanishes but you can now see his or her beardless and thus less intimidating face. Which is fine if that face is covered up by a glowering visage but it looks like someone took boxing headgear and glued bits on.

Apparently the entire Sythweaving profession custom gear makes these two getups dignified which is why per TOR numbers the lowest crafting profession.

[Ritterin Sophia]

BTW: does endgame Republic gear look stupid?

Endgame Empire isn't any better.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-30cm0etnuHc/T ... +armor.jpg

I mean lvl 20 and 40 gear look fine, but then you hit the 50s and herp derp.

[Pint0 Xtreme]

I'm pretty annoyed by the fact that expertise isn't part of the mods that come with the PvP gear. I thought the whole point of exquisite gear is so no one fucking looks the same and, with the inclusion of the PvP gear system, that's exactly where the endgame ends up trending towards.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

They said they're going to make PvP item stats (including expertise) removable and moddable... when that's going to be, who knows. I've stopped playing my 50 almost entirely, because the endgame PvP just isn't fun anymore. PvPing on my sub-50 alts is much more fun.

[Pint0 Xtreme]

They said they're going to make PvP item stats (including expertise) removable and moddable... when that's going to be, who knows. I've stopped playing my 50 almost entirely, because the endgame PvP just isn't fun anymore. PvPing on my sub-50 alts is much more fun.

I didn't know that. They need to communicate those things better! And also, I've found that stacking expertise tends to have diminishing returns. At some point, more expertise becomes virtually worthless.