You'd notice I said maybe, I wasn't too sure how quickly he re-stealthed after initiating combat. The Op's description did seem to indicate it was immediately after being popped, but I've had people level the same accusations at my Scoundrel after I had run away and waited for combat to time out. Having been on the receiving end of such ignorant accusations many a time I thought I'd just point out a potential solution. All the people who rage against me were like "omg you totally stealthed right away", and "right away" was after I ran outside their range, sat there till I timed out and stealthed whilst they sat and watched.

Maybe this might help. After 8 seconds of no hostile actions, you are dropped out of combat making it possible to stealth normally without having to use up the in combat stealth.

More damage? I'd be happy with a gap closer and some more survivability rather than damage.

Really depends on the situation. If you're outnumbered, then having a scoundrel/op healer on your side is great as their mobility healing is great. However in relatively equal fights, I find my Commando heals has better burst and is damn hard to take down with my shield up. Sage/Sorc healing is great, but I find em more useful in large scale group situations with cross healing available.

At level 20 you can only get moddable legs and body, the rest of the set is prototype (blue) quality.

I think you're generalizing a little too much here. Giving up because you're an elitist who expects to be winning from the very start is very lame and pretty poor form. But giving up because you're team is full of selfish pugs is different. When you're on a team that expects you to do everything for them whilst 5 of them chase down that tank and healer combo in the middle of no man's land for 5 minutes, don't be surprised if we give up. No matter how good we are, there's no way we're going to somehow cap that node with 4 defenders by ourselves (even more unlikely if you're a healer 90% of the time like me). It's actually kinda amusing when people start whining about me giving up when they weren't even trying in the first place (trying in the sense that they were aiming for the objective in an objective based WZ). Don't know about you guys or your servers, but I try to avoid pug WZs as much as possible because I find more than half the people in pugs are of the mentality "it's ok, someone else will get the job done." Whilst the mentality works sometimes when your opposition is of the same state of mind, come up against any team with even a shred of teamwork and you'll lose.

The video wasn't for the DoTs, it was just for showing that the supposed 8 seconds rule does not work properly.

Edit: quoted wrong person lol. Vids showing the 8 second fail. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=423352

Whilst I can understand that it's fun (I also enjoyed the ******** wisecracks), when was the last time you saw a fictional international best seller that had no substance? The combination of some of the answers I've given and the responses I've received were quite ludicrous. Just remember the topic was about the "story" element to it. The smuggler story is more like a bunch of one-liner jokes rather than a story.

If it worked as advertised, sure would be great. It's already been proven with vids that it doesn't always work.

Sorry I should of clarified, those parses were conducted on the ops dummy.

I can understand where you're coming from here. It's true if someone is going to die fast anyway then there's no need to setup and you can pop some of your other skills to help speed it along. The problem here is team metrics. As I said before, it's very situational. You never know when the target being beaten down is going to get healed, guarded, pop defensives or a WZ medpac. What looks like an "oh he's gonna die in like 2 seconds" can suddenly turn into a "what he's still alive after 10??". What Conc brings to these fights that Leth doesn't is a fast setup burst. That fast burst is usually more than enough to get people down before any effective healing can take place. The problem with setup bursts is that most people who actually pay attention in fights will know there's a burst incoming and can pop defensives/medpacs appropriately. I know you may feel that most people don't pay attention and will miss it. Just like how you later go on to talk about people not bothering with cleansing your DoTs. There's a problem with this approach, and that is that good players will notice what's going on , they will cleanse your DoTs(at least I know I will always cleanse, and I know my guildies do too). I know there are a lot of bads out there, but that doesn't mean you should judge the standard by them. I mean, I run a healer as a main spec and I've noticed that I only get interrupted maybe 1-2/10 WZs. Does that mean I don't need to factor in interrupts into assessing my builds functionality? Obviously not. Nothing I can really say against that. Cull does some very potent damage, and you can at least negate a DoT with your HoT. Though I'll say this much. As someone who is usually fully heal spec'd, our HoT, whilst handy, is not game changing as not all fights are decided by a tiny margin. My healer's most effective combo is HoT + AoE HoT with my a few instants and a few mains popped when possible. I think this may just be a server thing since there aren't many Sage/Sorc healers running around in mine. Most are either Op/Scoundrel (like me lol) or Commando/Merc (like my alt lol). As for focus fire see above. Also don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that these situations aren't always occuring (it may seem like I'm saying that but I'm not). I'm well aware this doesn't happen ALL the time. But I fell it happens enough that it needs to be considered. My main concern about the HoT midfight wasn't it's uselessness but rather how it's detracting from your DD abilities. As I said before, the HoT isn't useless at all (I'm sorry if I said that earlier or gave that impression cause I really don't believe that), but the cost of bringing it into play against what you could alternatively be doing is the issue. This is very true, not everyone will cleanse (and as you said some can't) which means this doesn't always come into play. As for being cleansed, I do a log of pre-made vs pre-made, so I find I get cleansed, a lot lol. Again it's not always teh case, and in PUGs I know was rarely (if ever) cleansed. Like you said, I don't dispute that damage capability of Leth. When I was using it I found I could beat the living daylights out of people. Hell, when I fully unloaded into someone I felt I probably did more damage than a Conc spec. The problem I have with the build is how often I managed to pull that off. I often found myself looking for people who my team wasn't focusing down as I didn't really want to waste my setup. My main problem with the build, and always has been, is the versatility of it. You want damage? You need to set it up. Conc on the other hand does more damage over shorter durations (that's only what I feel, I don't have any logs to back that up) and requires no setup, meaning I can jump into any fight anywhere at any given time and be effective. Leth has to pick and choose his fights, most of which often aren't focusing on the key targets (who are getting downed by your team). lol I kinda accidentally cut out your bit about survivability (whoops), I must say I agree and disagree somewhat on that point. If focused, Ops go down faster than any other other class I have apart from PT Pyro's. I only survive if no one wants me really dead. I'm currently trying out the hybrid spec again, we'll see how it goes.

How about this one? Do not needlessly fill the ball carrier's resolve bar. I can't stress this enough. People constantly fill a ball carrier's resolve bar whilst he's on the walkways meaning no one can knock him off or pull him off which are the 2 most effective way's to deal with ball carrier's (Aside from killing them). On my Vanguard if I see a ball carrier on the walkway I often jump off the walkway and pull him after me into the pit only to find that some scrub on my team decided to stun him again filling his resolve so he can just waltz right over the line whilst popping his defensive CDs and getting heals/guards. It's the same on my chars with knockbacks, people needlessly fill resolve bars making it impossible to defend. The only time I feel it's ok to go all out with stuns is when they're in the endzone.

Personally I find east and west works fine... When running pre-mades. When running pugs there are quite a few directionally challenged individuals who run west when you yell east and vice versa. Something simpler for these challenged individuals would make pugging so much easier in Void.

Story wise I think people totally overrate the Smuggler's story. At least with other there's a storyline of sorts. The Smuggler's arc is more like the life and times of Tom, Dick and Harry. No world changing events, no heroic protagonist who saves the world, no great spiritual/moral/existential journeys, nothing.

They're not the only ones. Hybrid Veng/Vig specs that pop Enure + Focused Defence + Warding Call in Soresu stance = Indestructible.

Totally agree with you on the gap closer issue, it's the only problem I have with the class. Stealth is an initiator not a closer, which got massively nerfed so you can't approach people unless you hit your stealth boost ability. Unfortunately most people fail to realise that. Burst damage wise however, I still feel we're only second to Snipers/GS.

First of all thanks for the civil reply, too many ppl on these forums feel the need to reply with flaming. This may be true, it may be just be my playstyle, I generally don't leave enough time to regen properly, but even then I feel the downtime between bursts between DF/Leth and Conc/Scraps is significantly worse. With Scraps/Conceal I can constantly throw out my skills without worrying about energy. With DF I find myself playing tactically "does this target really need a full burst?" "Is the gain worth the energy cost to drop a SC/EP on this guy?" etc. .etc. Sometime I make the right call, sometimes I don't, circumstances aren't always static and predictable, so a build with more versatility feels more useful. The difference between snipers and ops is that, snipers don't have to get in your face to deal damage, ops do, and are more often placed in situations where there's multiple enemies. Let's not forget Snipers also have far more tools survivability wise (knockback, root, cc immunity, cover, absorption [tier 2 marksman], Aoe shield) compared to Op's in-fight stealth which 90% of the time you get knocked out of in group fights and maybe half the time in 1v1 against competent players (well that's the success rate I have against Op/Scoundrel vanish). I agree totally here, however there's 1 major problem here. Focus fire. Unless you're pressuring a healer (which with your build you'll struggle with due to having your DoTs removed, and having to recast your 16 energy DoT every few seconds to make Cull viable is rather impractical), you should be focusing those key targets with your team. The more spread out the damage the more you leave your team susceptible to healers/guards/provokes. I'll admit this isn't always the case, and during those times when you're picking off single targets, I'm totally down with you. The problem I feel here is that, with on-going fights (e.g. huttball, or intense node fights) your HoTs are going to timeout during combat unless you run away midfight (which only hurts your team). You'll die many times making this point moot, but as DF I often found myself alive mainly because strategically I wasn't as important to take down as most of my team mates (tanks, healers, snipers/gs). Recasting midfight is painful, esp if I'm also trying to DPS. I also mentioned above, but with your current build with 23 in DF/Leth, you're DoTs can be cleansed. In short, against teams with more than 1 healer or attacking someone who can self-cleanse, you lose a lot of dps. Also you lose one of teh greatest perks of a DF/Leth build, that being, no one can go invis against you because with DoTs that cannot be cleansed they WILL be knocked out of it. The only time it doesn't help is when someon goes from stealth straight into an attack, but most times people save their stealths for emergency situations which require time for re-positioning/sneaking or escaping, which they won't have with your DoTs up on them.

They didn't kill the class. Healing is great. Also Concealment/Scrapper is fine. The only problem is everyone compares them with tank sins/shadows and mara/sents who have significantly better survivability, and in the case of mara/sent, have pretty much the same damage with a gap closer. Op/Scoundrel do more damage than tank sins/shadows, but the gap in survivability and utility makes the sin/shadow a much better in PvP (not to mention the gap between survivability is greater than the gap between damage).

Been there, done that, great delayed burst (need 2 GCDs to set it up) but even with AP by the end you have next to no energy after a full rotation and are thus useless for a very long time. Let's also not forget the DF kills your Mezz as it gets broken by DoT (and thh AoE dot means those nearby can't be mezz'd either) and it merely acts as another interrupt. Also don't forget your rotation is only viable against a single target, if they die, it's another 40 energy to setup the next one, and each target thereafter unless they get caught in your AoE DoT in which case it's only 20. Also let's not forget that you won't always have 2 TA/UH ready to go. Then there's your HoT proc, it's not always reliable (and for maximum chance of procs you have to constantly keep it up on 2-3 people which means MORE energy drain). There's also the problem where if your target dies before your AoE DoT is up again, your damage takes a hit cause you can only apply 1 DoT to your next target. In PvP it's often the case where the fights are ongoing, it's not all about 1v1, you won't always have the opportunity to duck out, wait to regen, pop up 2 UH/TAs before a fight, pop a couple of HoTs, wait for your energy to come back up, THEN dive back in. Simply put, the DF/Leth PvP setup is just not practical for those who like to play the role of DDs. Don't get me wrong, it's a build that can have great support. But a pure healer or a pure DD is going to contribute more to the team.

Of all the parses I've seen, I've yet to see a Vig/Veng spec top the 1400's, whilst I've seen Mara/Sent parses top 1700. Of course this is quite dependent on gear and skill. As for where those parses are, there's a few in the Mara class forums that I've run across in random posts and there's some parses in the DD Role forums.

Combined, Blade Storm and Overhead DoT = Plasma Cell DoT damage, and they're easily re-applied, so I wouldn't exactly call em negligible.

This. Though I might also add that Focus doesn't shine till you hit around 40ish and can hit the full tree. Without the Force Exhaustion (final tier skill) skill you're effectively halving (if not more) your dps. The only way you can build singularity for your force sweeps is through force stasis and Zen, compared to a frequent 18sec CD on FE which will give you all the Singularity stacks you need. Comparatively speaking, Combat at your level will have Precision Slash which is great for its 100% armour pen. Watchman is pretty decent too though it also shines when you hit late 30s/40 but it's still quite effective (comparatively speaking of course) at 20+.

Awesome thanks.

Just a quick question, does this skill affect vibroswords? Just wanted to try em otu for fun but noticed skill descrip mentions "lightsabers" rather than off-hand weapon.