I think you hit the nail on the head. I feel like there is time for tactics and intelligent skill utilization during a fight and most importantly I like the overall strategy of the WZs themselves. That's why I love huttball and really dislike ancient hypergates. Sure there are times when you just get stun locked and die in 3 seconds but for the most part I feel like I'm always in control of my own destiny in a fight. I will say though that I might have felt differently if my first class wasn't a gunslinger. I tried to PVP on my Guardian and had no fucking clue what I was doing or how to control the situation whereas making the jump from PVE slinger to PVP isn't as great a leap.
I'll never understand folks who are against huttball. It's the neatest PVP style game I've ever seen. Maybe it existed in another game before, but whether it was their idea or not, it was the game that truly hooked me. It's the one game where you can have a team full of terrible dpsers and undergeared folks and still win with teamwork, and is the best benchmark for measuring teamwork (when the teams aren't stacked with leaps and pulls).
As Flunkie said, even as a terrible player you can contribute to a team by playing the actual objective in SWTOR. You might spend all game guarding a node and rarely fighting anyone, but you can be useful in SWTOR PVP regardless of skill level if you have an interest in being useful.
I am not a fan of deathmatch PVP. I'd rather play an FPS for that...that said, I don't like FPS games much either. The arenas in SWTOR were a neat concept, but the matchmaking is so lopsided most games (due to getting multiple heals on one team and none on another, for example) it's a foregone conclusion before it even starts.
If I could play SWTOR PVP right now with all the awesome players we lost over the past few years from GAF Empire, PD, Starsider, VM, etc, and the other ones we played against in those times plus the folks playing now, I'd still play like nobody's business. Unfortunately, with MMOs it is very hard to keep people playing for long periods of time with no real incentive. It works with FPS games to a degree cause you can get in and get out quick, but not so much an MMO.
When you go from playing folks you know and respect (albeit begrudingly) to folks who just group up to crush pugs and "LOL" and "try harder" each other, it's not quite as fun as it used to be. I still feel it's the best designed and balanced MMO PVP, though.
I never felt like I had time to breathe in 8v8 ranked and for the most part arenas...
Even at it's worst in ranked it feels like more time than you would ever encounter in WoW arena - even at relatively low rating levels, for example. SWTOR arenas are a different story, I'll give you, as they are just deathmatches. Sometimes you do get insta-gibbed there just because you run up against a perfect counter to your team.
And what are you talking about no time to breathe playing a sniper/gunslinger in ranked. As a former ranked healer, I resent that comment
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