As a long-time player in Red Eclipse, this is the first part of my guide aimed at helping players perform better in PvP. This part covers most of the basic mechanics of the game, and the second part describes the warzone itself and how to use these mechanics correctly. If you have any questions, find a bug, or have an idea for improvement, please contact me in-game or email me on this site.

Star Wars: The Old Republic of PvP is essentially a party-oriented game mode. Different roles in the group focus on different aspects of combat. The best 4-person party for most content (including PvP) has 1 tank, 2 damage dealers, and 1 healer, compared to 2 times each for 8 people.

In general, it's always a recurring complaint that healers can pull up more numbers than PvP damage dealers. But if you think about it for a moment, it's not unreasonable to be like that. The game is designed around the setup of these Trinity teams, and the healer needs to be able to reasonably hit both damage dealers and the enemy team's tanks.

Class
Player characters in Star Wars: The Old Republic belong to one of eight basic classes (four for each faction), each with two advanced classes. Advanced classes in the same base class have a few things in common, but generally play very differently. Advanced classes are selected when creating a character and cannot be changed.

The nameplate above each character's head has a small icon called a class icon that allows you to quickly identify the enemy's class. The base class icon is no longer visible in-game, but is included here as it is used throughout this guide to refer to both advanced classes.

Discipline
In addition to the advanced classes, you must also select a field. Each advanced class has three areas. At least two of these are intended to deal damage (three for Marauder and Sniper), and the third is either healing (warlock, operative, mercenary) or tanking (assassin, jaguar note, power tech). There is no way to change the character's advanced class (aside from deleting it and starting over), but you can change the discipline almost anytime, but not while in a warzone or PvP queue. (This is not entirely true due to a bug. If you queue as a group, only the person in queue can change the field and the rest.)

The table below provides an overview of all the areas available in the game. For each, we provide an assessment based on how much we recommend trying out in PvP for that spec. Please note that this evaluation is highly subjective and does not directly represent the feasibility of a particular purpose, especially the ranked PvP class.

Ability
Abilities (skills, spells, whatever you want to call them) are the combat actions of SWTOR. Most skills come from the class you choose, but you also get some skills that are specific to the field you choose. Understanding how abilities work is one of the basic requirements for being a good SWTOR player.

Financial resources
You need resources to use most of your capabilities. Each base SWTOR class is a type of what we call primary resources, each of which is strength, rage, energy, heat, and some have secondary resources to manage. Secondary material is required for some skills.

Sysinquisitor
The main resource of the Sith Inquisitors is the Force. The assassin has 100 four reels, while the sorcerer has 600. That's not to say that sorcerers have it: their abilities also require more strength. The Inquisitor passively regenerates force over time at a rate of 8 forces/sec.