I have the class down cold - I will not attempt to justify it to anyone. You will be a nightmare to no-one, but you will give non-tank classes a moment where they will be on the defensive. That is all you bring i'm afraid. DPS Op is a relatively weak class. Its DPS parses at 15% lower than Sent/Mara and 8% down on Sorc/Sage. Your cooldowns are massively inferior, both in quality of the mitigation and the time of cooldown. One merely has to compare directly with Sentinels, Vanguards, Shadows in particular. You will have inferior utility outside of stealth, which takes on average 30 seconds of waiting to get OOC or your 2 min vanish. You will spend most of a Huttball match flying off decking and doing the run of shame back into melee range. You will have no gap closer, no ranged CC of any kind. You will do good DPS, and great opening burst if you crit. You will be a terrible finisher compared to every other DPS in the field. Finally, the positioning bugs that this game exhibits due to ability lag means that LOS and kiting is nearly futile which particularly effects a melee DPS glass cannon class with poor mitigation. Useless, no. Relatively weak, yes and demonstrable with fact, not subjective opinion nor all the L2P in the world. I wish you luck.

With a big enough pool - either through merging or cross-server - the Rateds can play at their varying levels, PUGS will play PUGS, ideally at similar levels of gear and coordination, and Premades will play Premades. Does anyone NOT see this as solving the problem, and why would BW not implement this? Right now, the only way to get a win for the dailies is to wait until the two guilds that form premades to get bored and go raiding. One enterprising fellow subscribes to their website to know when they raid, and waits until then to queue. I saw a thread polling us about win rate. Its funny, people are quoting 90% and that just shouldn't happen in a balanced pool. Anyway, it partially answers my question. Yes, there is a problem, they might fix it in the summer. Can I suspend my account until then? Better fortune to us all - even the Operatives.

Too much drama in the title? Apologies. I can only speak for what I see and the servers I play on, but I think we all know that the populations on many servers is falling. It has reached such a low now that PvP is no longer fun, and therefore no longer viable. I am keen to hear if this is a common problem, and any solutions and more specifically timelines for those solutions. It goes like this - low population server, usually light - long WZ queues and the matchmaking system throws PUGS up against the Premades as that is all that is available. In our case, only the Republic forms Premades so this matchup happens roughly 75%. A massively lopsided match ensues, Iterate several hundred times. Now the republic has a significant gear advantage, and matches become more lopsided. Iterate further. Many of the competitive PvPers from the disadvantaged faction quit, re-roll republic, or cease queuing. Queues are now longer, and those entering are less geared and experienced, widening the competitive gap. I don't have access to population metrics but it has reached a point now where people are simply not engaging in PvP and those that do are struggling through a gear grind where they are essentially crops for the opposing faction to farm. The solution would seem to be either server merges or cross-server queues. If we do not get some indication that this is going to happen soon, you will have not have enough population remaining for it to matter. Please give us some news regarding implementation of the measures you are taking to alleviate the population issues and I suggest you do it before the matter becomes terminal. So to sum up, is population loss a significant problem game-wide, and is it going to be fixed shortly as they relate to PvP? I don't mean to inflate its importance or imply any exaggerated sense of our own importance but I can honestly say that several subscriptions hang in the balance here. Good luck all, especially you Bioware. It must be heartbreaking to have all your work feel like its doing as much harm as good. I hope you find sustainable success through this.

Take the personal attacks out - post the logfile. They dont lie, they dont troll. Go to the Marauder forum, their numbers are posted for all to see including spec, setting and gear. This conversation is proving to be everything thats wrong with design by anonymous democracy. Focus on the question at hand which is: are we DPSing at a serious disadvantage post 1.2 or not. I say yes. You say no? Show me the file.

So far what we see from parses where people actually link the logfile, and not anecdotal "I parsed it and did x dps", is that Operatives are not 5% behind, they are 25%.

The numbers don't lie - as a sniper you do between 20 - 35% less DPS than an equally geared Mara and this is not even talking about utility. You do 30-50% less than a DPS sage build. This is from compiling a dozen engagements from seven different snipers versus fourty odd samples of Marauders, Sorcerers, Operatives (don't get me started on how low THAT is) and Tracer BH. Don't tell me that all seven need to L2P, and they are geared across the spectrum of PvE and PvP gear. Now - doing well in Warzones. It is possible but you know perfectly well you are no match for a Mara or Assassin of equal gear. I defy you to produce a video of such. Dueling comps and log parsing are more reliable than your anecdotal evidence. The "official" statement that Snipers had the highest DPS is simply not bourne out either in testing nor real engagements now that we have Combat Logs. We were deceived. Do your own math and you will see. This has nothing to do with my credibility, nor my valor level, build, gear or skill level. Average enough samples, as we have, and the numbers speak. We are performing at a disadvantage and there is not a thing we can do about it except work with what we have. Good hunting all.

Well I would say you have your answer, in the near term, in Huttball. This IS an arena map, that yields no better nor worse rewards than any other and is accessible to all who choose to PvP. I think BW was smart to include it as an outlet for that form of competition without losing the "something for everyone" egalitarianism that they need to get a profitable subscription base. Although it is the least connected to the "story arc" it seems to be described widely as the most fun, or innovative. Well done BW, I plan to enjoy this.