just scroll through and see how many people feel the need to call 'Force Cloak' 'Vanish.' Note to readers, when someone opens a thread labeled deception, and starts spouting how someone is stupid for not using darkness, you can ignore their post. look for their replies in a darkness thread if that's information you want. I assure you, both are viable (and we are open)

Just to point out, the argument of picking your battles has no place in discussing WZs. If you get to pick your battles like that, you're playing bad teams anyways. The main problem between darkness and deception is utility. Aside form the survivability, you get more stuns and pull. Utility is everything in a WZ. I can (and have) pull the same numbers as both specs, simply because as deception I can still go dark charge for survivability, and guard for the medals (or ZOMG protecting a healer or flagger). I can sit at either end of the field in huttball and control the game to defend or cherry pick goals, because the other team simply cant spare enough resources to remove me. I can defend a turret or door against most of a team just long enough for someone else to arrive to continue interrupting. Instead of trying to smash my head against that healer, I can move him to the other side of the battle, and then deal with him as I please. with mind trap/force pull and then recklessness, i moved the 'stealth side' door defender so far away, he couldn't get back in time to stop an instant bombing of the first door in voidstar. None of this is bragging, I'm terrible at pvp. I've just learned to play strengths. darkness has a much larger bag of tricks. I would be happy if deception were a bit stronger. I have no problem being a glass cannon, until I see other cannons that are less glass, the same amount of cannon, and their cannon actually shoots instead of being a club. On the other end of the spectrum, force pull alone would make me never leave deception if I had it. If picking my battles is going to be the argument, I'd like to be able to force them just a little. Also the reason a deception assassin should never beat a darkness assassin IS that utility. As it has been pointed out multiple times, deception relies on proper use of buttons. These particular buttons all have short time in play. A semi intelligent darkness assassin will either shell up or lock you down when you use your buttons.

Ideally you would have both the stalker and survivor set, and replace the mods between the same pieces (pull the tank mods out before you put the dps ones over them) but that is slightly ridiculous with the BM gear. Just use that as a comparison point. Look at the stalker chest and get whatever level mods you can of the same type to put into the survivor chest.