Someone didn't play Vanilla.

3 Interrupts. Intimidating Roar is almost overpowered. Intimidating Roar + Camo + runtohealthpack = lolgg

I have seen many a Marauder with the Centurion chestpiece and there is most definitely a hood. Did you pick Jug and not realize it?

Being that high in Rage and not having Crush is severely gimping. And, furthermore, getting Juyo Mastery and talents that give benefits to Shii-Cho in Rage is just stupid. The way the trees are designed it's fairly difficult to get a working hybrid spec, as you see above. Each one is heavily based around a Form and the real bulk of the important talents are pretty high up each tree. There's some eFamous ex-WoW player who champions a full hybrid spec and apparently does fine with it but, imo, he's really just gimping himself.

Expertise as it's currently designed is near-gamebreaking for fresh 50s to get a start in PvP. The way it's currently designed you should cap out your commendations from 10-49 to get some Champion Bags off the bat; coupled with the Ilum weekly/dailies and PvP weekly/dailies it's not that hard to get Cent/Champ geared fairly quickly; especially after the change to bags. No class has it easy as a fresh 50. I don't care how hard you Tracer Missile there's absolutely no way a fresh 50 Merc can hold a candle to me on even my worst day. Melee have it rough in PvP in almost every game (more so in ToR due to knockbacks, etc) so getting knocked back and focused by two BM Sorcs is going to hurt. Hard. A little piece of advice that goes for both PvE and PvP: Every time you die you should ask yourself a question: Did you not pop your cooldowns quick enough? Did you mess up your rotation? Stand in fire? Should you have engaged at the time you did? Should you have Charged that Sage if you were unsure if his knockback was up? Should you have gone straight across the middle Huttball area or tried to LoS any potential attackers on the rafters that were out of your view? But, most importantly, "why did I die?" Notice how that last question can be answered by all of the previous ones and, unfortunately, that's only a small sample of possible reasons why you died. PvP is a learning experience. Learning how to do well as a Marauder will transcend to every other class and, furthermore, every other game you play. Learning from your mistakes is key, and being able to actively think on your feet will make you incredibly powerful. On top of that, learning to think on your feet exceptionally well on a Marauder will only make you better with other classes. I hate to say it but Marauders have a very high skill cap. Compared to other classes that have it relatively "easy" melee in general is usually tougher to play and Marauders are by far one of the harder melee classes I've ever had the grace of playing. Whether or not it should be the way it is is a completely different matter, but the fact remains you can't be bad and do well behind a Marauder.

Oh god I'm dying.

You are just an original e-thug aren't you? OT: Good post; only thing I would add is to use your Defensive Cooldowns early and often; as I say they're not o-$hit buttons.

Annihilation's self-heals while using our healer you'll find to be the easiest. It helps cushion the relative lack of survivability the class has. I leveled 1-50 as Carnage with our melee DPS companion and never ran into any real problems, but for the more inexperienced player they may find it too difficult. In order of ease of leveling I personally would rank it Annihilation > Carnage > Rage. If you're playing for story you may find you won't want to use our healer because he's kind of bleh. Edit: made it spoiler-free for your pleasure.

My advice is to use her Exsanguination stance.

I can say right now that after the initial warmup/first few Deadly Sabers I do I only glance at bars to watch cooldowns. If you need to be constantly staring at your bars/buffs/your targets debuffs so be it, but it isn't required and is more than likely a skill hump you'll just need to pass over.

If they can propose a balancing strategy beforehand that will insure it isn't completely comp based I'd be more than happy to see arenas. The main problem is that the innate balance issues small-comp PvP brings will just break it before it starts. At this time two Sorcs have enough utility to where it would be incredibly difficult to counter them. Not to mention a Sorc/Assassin to have a dps Sorc be able to heal and have guard.

It's not that arena itself was imbalanced or at all a bad idea, but the implementation of it and Blizzard's reluctance to balance abilities twice (around PvP and around PvE, similar to Colossus Smash) made it an absolute headache for them and caused certain specs to be completely worthless in one or both aspects of gameplay. http://wow.joystiq.com/2009/11/13/blizzard-arenas-were-a-mistake/ There's a reason MLG dropped Arena and the only tournaments are Blizzard sponsored. I'm pretty sure BioWare's already said they, depending on how it worked out, wanted to try to push the rated WarZones into the eSport scene and adding arenas would absolutely kill that.

Considering Blizzard has said over and over they regret adding arenas to the game due to the horrible balance issues it brought around I highly doubt we're going to be seeing anything more than rated WarZones, which are coming soon. On top of that I believe BioWare even said they have no plans for an arena system.

The burst is incredibly intermittent. Annihilation's damage - and healing, for that matter, depending on your Crit - is over time. Annihilate can hit very hard - bleeds timed with a hard-hitting Annihilate will burst as hard or harder than a Smash.

Use who you want. Not using Quinn will make leveling a bit harder but you can do it with any spec/any companion. I was Carnage with Jaesa from when I got her till I concluded my class story and never had any problems.

1v1 you can't compete with self heals and internal damage. On top of that, even Kricys concedes that Annihilation is incredibly overpowering compared to Rage.

Retaliation won't apply Deadly Saber if it's used within the GCD. Try using Scream/Smash and then use Retaliation and chances are it'll apply Deadly Saber.

Acrobatic != reverse grip. Reverse grip, specifically the one used by Starkiller, is best used with Shien or Djem So style. Djem So is the preferred style of Darth Vader, hence why Starkiller used it.

Annihilation and Carnage are both viable - Annihilation will do more but you're not overly gimping yourself by going Carnage. The problem with Carnage is that - specifically in Nightmare modes - the Ataru proc range bug (it doesn't proc on large hit-box bosses) is almost game-breaking for some fights, for example Bonethrasher.

This is actually the hybrid build that I use for PvE and PvP. The only thing you're missing is Narrowed Hatred which, depending on your gear, is completely unnecessary.

The Retaliation issue isn't a bug; it's not aligned to the GCD at all and therefore won't apply Deadly Saber properly if used out of sync with the 1.5 second application cooldown Deadly Saber has. Test it during the GCD after a Scream/Smash and I'll be quite surprised if it didn't apply.

This as well. Any damage you see flash across your screen that's Yellow constitutes a Force Attack, while White is a normal physical attack. The same goes for Tech/Ranged.

The entire point of the heroic areas is that they require a group. While I understand the frustration with not being able to do them it's a problem with the management of the population by BioWare and not a fault with the class.

The server population crisis, so to speak, is a completely different problem all together.