PvP Season 3 & A Look at Some Battle Records

I completed the PvP Season 3 reward track last week, taking one more week than the absolute minimum required to complete the season, and I wanted to once again jot down some thoughts on it.

First off, I remember telling people at one point that I didn't really mind Galactic Seasons and PvP seasons overlapping all that much, since the Galactic Season sometimes has PvP-related objectives and there can be some synergies. This was the case last week as well, as there was a weekly objective to earn medals in PvP.

That said, I've kind of changed my mind about this, because I really liked the way PvP Season 3 largely fell in-between Galactic Season 4 and 5 this time. It was much easier to focus on earning my weekly PvP points with not much else going on. More of this kind of spacing things out, please.

The changes the devs made to how you earn warzone medals were definitely noticeable and had a clear impact on how quickly I could complete medal-related objectives. I said last season that I wasn't going to go for the 2000 medals achievement again, since I was only about halfway there after completing the track and essentially would have had to double my efforts just for that achievement alone. So I didn't even look at it much this season, however when I checked after completing the reward track, I was actually about two thirds of the way there, which is a pretty dramatic improvement, and I don't think I suddenly got that much better at PvP.

AFKers are still annoying, but I saw fewer of them this season than last time. On a side note though, is it me or have GSF players become a lot more kick-happy recently? It's like they want to use their kick function as much as possible before the devs take that away too... I swear it feels like hardly a match goes by without me seeing someone get booted for inactivity.

The only really odd encounter I had in a warzone this season was in a Queshball where a gunslinger had somehow managed to entrench themselves on one of the lines above the playing area. They weren't unreachable and could technically still be attacked from range in certain locations, but obviously there was fighting happening in midfield as well and most dpsers seemed to want to focus on the closer threats even while the slinger kept raining death upon them from above. I was wondering whether that was some sort of exploit, but I never saw it happen again after that, so it might've just been the result of a knockback gone wrong or something like that.

One thing I wanted to do at the end of this season was take a look at my battle record. We used to have a very basic one in the past that recorded wins and MVPs earned, but I long suspected that it was a bit dodgy and eventually got my proof when I did a PvP weekly on a char whose stats were on zero to begin with, and afterwards the record showed fewer wins than I had literally just achieved.

When the devs got rid of ranked and added seasons, they also added a new battle record, so I wanted to look at what sorts of numbers I'd accumulated there over the last three seasons... especially since I often felt like I was losing all the time. (No kidding, the other week I lost twelve matches in a row. That hurt.*)

The stats revealed that things weren't actually as bad as I had thought, though I'm not sure whether these new battle records are entirely trustworthy either. For example I found that several of my characters had zeroes showing in most of their fields in a way that made no sense (e.g. 82 matches played but zero damage done or taken), and whatever "K/D" is supposed to be, it's clearly not the number of kills divided by the number of deaths as listed on the record (e.g. 209 kills divided by 46 deaths is most definitely not 0.819).

Still, assuming that there's at least merit to some of the numbers, they were interesting to see. I have a few characters on whom I do PvP more often than on others, but in general I try it at least a couple of times on every new alt. Of the fifteen battle records I checked for this, my worst win percentage was 33%, but that character had actually done only three warzones since the introduction of PvP seasons, so it doesn't really say anything. However, most were actually close-ish to the fifty percent mark, either a bit above or a bit below. Considering that I solo-queue 99% of the time, that seemed pretty alright.

The highest win percentage belonged to my level 77 Vengeance Juggernaut with 73%, but she's also played "only" 15 matches, so not a huge sample. The spec did seem pretty powerful and easy in warzones whenever I played her though, not to mention that she's in a pretty good place in the midbie bracket at the moment, near the very top and wearing the previous expansion's endgame gear. which undoubtedly helps a lot.

The honour of most matches played goes to my Nautolan Corruption Sorcerer, whom I created a few years ago for the sole purpose of PvPing. She hit the level cap this expansion and I've continued enjoying playing her there even at 80, meaning that she's up to over a hundred matches played at this point. Her 54% win rate is alright in my book.

Interestingly, my second most played PvP character is my Bodyguard Mercenary, my main's Imperial mirror, who's played 91 matches since the introduction of seasons, but somehow she's got the lowest win ratio of any of my characters aside from the aforementioned alt who only played three matches. Her win rate is only 43%, and her average damage taken is 38% higher than the Sorc's despite the heavy armour and in spite of also doing 36% more healing on average. So she does more healing but loses harder. Where's the justice in this world?

*There was a wholesome happy ending to that particular story though. Back on fleet I spawned in next to a guy who'd just been killing me in my previous match and they waved at me. I did a /cry since my dozen-long loss streak was getting me down and they expressed sympathy, followed by an offer to team up. Being on the same team after that, I noticed that person being nothing but constructive in chat as well. Then a couple of guildies wanted to join in too and my losing streak was balanced out by a win streak as we queued as a group of four for a few matches. More than anything I was kind of impressed by the rarity of meeting someone so friendly in PvP. I gave them my sincere thanks for cheering me up when we had to part ways again.