They are making Centurion gear five times quicker to gain (15 Cent and 7 Champ coms per bag, compared to 3, 1+1 currently), along with reducing the RNG aspect of bags so you can also be sure to get several pieces of Champion gear a week. That means that people will be able to get their first bit of Champion and a few Cent pieces the moment they hit 50 (6 bags) and so jump straight to expertise 120ish. Do your WZ dailies for three days and you get another 6 bags (probably 8 inc comms.) You'll be able to comfortably hit Expertise 250 inside a week and supplement that with the solid Ilum/Belsavis daily gear. All in, you'll maybe have 5-10% worse gear than Full Champ at that point.

What Dirty Fighting needs most is for Hemorrhaging Blast to grant Upper Hand. Two bleeds on a target, Hem up and then wounding shot, blaster whip, wounding shot is already an almost dead target. While a third bleed would be interesting it would make Wounding Shot pretty crazy. Maybe thats a good thing, but... I'm not sure it is needed as much as the fix to our UH management and then a gap closer/sprint.

12 attacks, 3 stealth buttons, 7 defensive/resource management options, 2 heals.... thats 23 abilities excluding the PVE only ones (Cheap Shot, Slice Droid), Adrenals and Medpacs (3 slots) and then a few other things that you actually need to activate every time you die in PVP ... Yes, Scoundrels have a tonne of buttons that they need to use most of due to energy management, targeting restrictions, CDs, etc.

The 'energy issues' are mostly a Dirty Fighter problem. If you try to minimize the range issues then you get energy issues in their place. The last HM I did was False Emperor with a Commando (Heals), Shadow (Tank), Sage (DPS), Me (Dirty Fighter, offheals.) I think we wiped four times, twice due to hitting the enrage timer on HK and once due to hitting in on Malgus. Certainly not terrible, but we had four good players in mostly Champion gear so... I definitely felt like I wasn't putting out the same sustained DPS as the Sage (who had worse gear than me.)

And sometimes he remains on your ship even if you choose options that mean he'll never get close to your ship. Ivory is pivotal to the Belsavis plot, you'll meet him then.

We definitely have issues in Hardmode FPs. The problem isn't so much the nerf as the mechanics of many of the boss fights though. Basically, we have issues with sustained DPS and we have issues with having to spend half a fight chasing a target and/or avoiding nasty things on the ground while trying to still put out maximum damage. We have a lot less leeway on Enrage timers than a ranged dps does due to both Energy issues and range issues. Viable just about, just harder than some of the alternatives.

I'm pretty sure that, for now, its just making Centurion Gear very quick to acquire (5x faster than currently) is what they mean by closing the gap instead of that they'll be making the Champ/BM stuff worse.

Keep in mind that with the new system fully kitting yourself out in Champion gear will cost 743 Commendations - 107 bags. Thats 4-5 weeks of grinding pretty hardcore (all dailies/weekly plus a reasonable amount of extra bags bought.) The new system removes the random and duplicate element but it isn't going to let people quickly gear up in Champion gear. Centurion, sure, but Centurion isn't that great anyway, compared to what you can get just by doing the PVE dailies for a week. I actually think that the people who will benefit the most from the change are people who have 65% Champion gear and now keep getting duplicates. We'll be able to finish our sets in a week or so without the rage of 'Oh joy, my fourth pair of gloves and still no pants.'

I've won games from being THREE turrets down - with a PUG. Usually a couple of deadweights quit and if you're lucky somebody decent joins in their place. Attack a weak turret asap (Right is actually normally the best option for this) then leave 2 there while everyone raspidly zergs another turret (middle often works better, due to the slower respawn times.) It leads to tense, tight games (once we won by 5 points!) So, while I would support moving the side speeder dropoff points about 10m or so I definitely don't agree that 2 turrets down = loss. Maybe 65% of the time it does, but if you work hard and together you can turn it around. I actually find Civil War the most balanced WZ, the respawn-runthrough issues in Voidstar make facerolls there a lot more common.

Camping Ilum doesn't award any Mercenary Commendations. You can get 100 kills, pick up 50 armaments, capture all five bases... and still no Mercenary Commendations. Its only the slow-spawn chests on Tatooine that give out a few Merc Coms currently. I half agree with the OP. They should either (1) implement Merc Coms properly or (2) scrap them entirely. 1 per kill wouldn't be that excessive once they fix Ilum.

You mean Powertechs who (1) Are a Ranged DPS Class (Technically, although they have some nice up close abilities) and (2) Have Grapple? They also, of course, have access to Jet Charge which is a proper gap closer. Melee classes SHOULD have better gap closers than ranged classes.

Apparently its a 25% drop rate so from 20 bags 'average' would be 5. 3 is unlucky but not THAT unlucky/unlikely.

You're repeating a rant that most of us have had. We really need to have some of our abilities fixed to let them hit harder.

Now they finally fixed the CD on Flashbang using it at the start of a boss fight means you'll normally get to use it again right towards the end when you need it most. It works reasonably well and I can only assume they balanced the fights on the assumption that we'd open with it to give us time to set up.

While I want a gap closer badly they also sound pretty lousy. 20 energy per second? so within 3 GCDs we're out of energy assuming we had full to start with... Seriously? Wow. What we need is a simple 20-30 energy to active Sprint that gives maybe a 35% boost for an extended period (15s? 20s?) on a reasonable CD (60 or 90s.) Usable in Stealth ideally but I could live with it being out of stealth only. Heck, I could even live with it not stacking with out-of-combat Sprint.... Just let me get out of the pit and back into the action a little more quickly please.

Stealth doesn't work as a gap closer in the PVP maps that we have. Maybe 1 on 1 if you catch somebody napping but most of the time... no.

You have to be careful with managing your energy but it is possible. You need to know when to burn it down and when not to. Generally if it will finish a fight, do it then DA if necessary while it recoups. Or in hectic PVP defenses just burn down, dot like crazy, die and then when you respawn you can do the same again. A bit crazy, but I've held Turrets in Civil War 2 v 5 like that for long periods.

Likewise. Then again, we have a pretty tight knit community and appreciate our healers a lot.

The PVP nerf was badly needed. The issues that Scoundrels have in PVE are now going to be seen more clearly, which is in many ways a good thing. Scrappers were screwing the metrics up and obscuring the many issues with the class. Hopefully, they'll soon fix those and let our melee class with no gap closer and serious energy management issues (if you want to put out solid DPS) become... more balanced at everything.

You get Republic vs Republic games occasionally (seriously, its lets than 1 in 25 WZs for me) but by all accounts on many servers Imperial vs Imperial games are closer to 50% (or more) of WZs. That's a pretty clear indication that there are more Imperials. As is the fact that at the same time the Imperial Fleet/Ilum can have twice as many people as on the Republic fleet.

To be honest respecs are so cheap (free if you haven't done one in the last 7 days, otherwise upto about 10k if you don't chop and change all that often) that offering a special free one is probably entirely unnecessary. For the amount of development time they'd waste implementing it... I'd rather they spent that time fixing our bugs instead.

Each medal gives you 5 commendations and 50 valor. You don't actually get them really, just your totals for those two things will be higher than they otherwise would have.

I've had a fair few Rep v Rep Huttball games in the 50s bracket. I think it's just one of those statistical quirks - even if you average twice as many of one faction you'll still get spikes where the lesser side have more people wanting to PVP at a particular point.

Anyway, to answer the original question: yes, it is worth swapping the mods in Champion/Battlemaster gear. You have to do something with your duplicates right?

This. Taking forever to get back out of the pit is much more annoying than not being able to knock back. Give me a movement buff to get into combat instead of all of them being to get out of it... Something less extreme than Sages but which lasts longer... maybe a 25% buff that lasts for 15s or so. Nothing extreme...