on this humorous side note, you might be able to use it for mobility.

true, it's because we're always moving. I find the flamethrower channel of pyro to be much easier on dots spread. It's easy to see the cone, and (I'm not 100% sure on this) all ticks can spread the dot, so you can correct your spread. It's funny because both flamethrower and carbine burst are 10m length cones with probably the same degree arc. I just wish they'd let us have corrosive grenade just like snipers.

yeah. Give it some weapon damage initial damage, make an animation like crippling throw. A general lightsaber throw would be boring, it'd be cool if it was a direct throw forward, sort of like the force unleashed charged saber throw?

This is the most accurate analysis I've seen in awhile. Ruffian's not bad per se, it's just not as useful for the average player against the average player in the average warzone. In those long fights with tanks and healers and sonic the pts and transcendence, ruffian can put out considerable deeps, definitely more pressure than scrapper. Scrapper shines against lone opponents with no group support. But I find that scrapper's troll roll immunity is just too good to rek burst classes. ruffian of course needs to draw out the fight and prepare. Such play style is bad for offense, and pretty ok with defense, until enemy help arrives of course. At least with scrapper, you have the option to go mega offense front load, or to bide your time. More options is of course more versatile. And a good offense is a pretty good defense. With the addition of blood broiler, and the rebalancing of scrapper's damage around Backstab being the opener, I've found that getting knocked out of stealth is not a tragedy for scrapper (or at least, not anywhere near as tragic as pre 3.0). still would blood boiler -> bludgeon -> backblast -> hurt, you'd lost the equivalent of one global of damage (or less) in backblast's out-of-stealth damage, and would technically gain a GCD worth of burst or so (since my out of stealth rotation is backblast -> blood boiler -> bludgeon). The main issues afflicting ruffian are the overabundance of UH, energy, and global cooldowns needed to play to the fullest. Of course you touched on the globals. If ruffian just did more damage but had scarcer resources, it could actually be more useful in more situations.

In my experience, ruffian's numbers aren't that much bigger than scrapper's. Maybe I have a selective memory, but dot spread is substantially more difficult on scoundrelthan any other class imo. Scrapper is significantly better, I'd say.

That'd be pretty crazy.

He called it the DOT bomb because it was a BOMB that gets triggered by DOTS. Blood broiler curiously is still considered a poison enough to proc free laceration. And lethal strike does more damage overall than backstab (both in and out of stealth) on a non crit, just like every ability replacement. The only reason concealements would hit harder is because of the 30% surge talent that lethality lacks. The two abilities are definitely best for the two specs that they are in.

Would take a good non stealther over an average stealther for any role, at any point in the game. ITT: A lot of people need to L2P their role

Natural cover has stopped lightsaber throw before. My hypothesis is as such: Being crouched in cover gives a 20% bonus to ranged dodge. Snipers, like everyone, have a 5% dodge chance for all white damage. The frontal cone of cover 'covers' all white damage if the sniper is not attacking. Diversion will give "miss" messages, not "cover." Evasion will give "dodge" messages, not "cover."

I do that, mostly because I just gear for concealment I haven't tried gearing otherwise, nor have i done any math it's just not worth it imo

I don't really have that much accuracy, but I don't notice it that missing that much. Just go mostly power, get a bit of crit, get a lot of surge. If you want numbers, many say 250 crit, about 74% surge I'd say, the rest dump power.

First I'd like to monologue about damage. I feel weaker post 3.0. This could be because 1)ramp up time or 2)not many big numbers like concealment. 1) In regards to the ramp up and clunky rotation - Carnage is easily shut down by stuns because it has a few long cool down hard hitters. Lethality has no hard hitters really. It also has no long cooldowns. So, it's a rather constant, sustained stream of WEAK damage. If it were powerful, it would be unbalanced. So, lethality's rotation still suffers from stuns, in that it is delicate, requiring many actions per minute. Take AP, a great spec, as an example. It has 15 sec CD, 9 sec CD, and a move with an effective 24 sec CD. And one 6 second CD. Those are some decent CDs, resulting in a sine-wave of burst damage. At its crests, it is good. When they're stunned or kited or their rotation is broken, they charge up for a great FRONTLOADED sine crest. TL;DR Carnage's sine wave has too high, unpredictable amplitude. Our low sine wave approaches a horizontal line. We need a balance, I think, since we cannot sustain too much power. 2) in regards to numbers - Concealment benefits from a 30% surge bonus that lethality lacks. Others report that our dots are weaker post 3.0. I don't know that for sure, since I never tab dotted, I always loved to cull people. I feel that pre 3.0, the internal damage of cull was the spotlight, but now, the ranged damage takes up more of the numbers. This leads to more shielding and armor mitigation. It's also just weaker. Also, weakening blast is again white damage, so use the same argument of impotency against defenses. This is all compounded by the psychological effect of no huge yellow numbers, and a slow ramp up time that can be outhealed. Backloaded specs inherently aren't good, because interrupting their rotation just makes them have to start again, whereas for front loaded specs, interrupting them allows them to start again. See the subtle wording? an AP powertech gets to bide his time and reset his burst. We have to charge ours up again. Annihilation has the right idea of backload, since it gets these buffs as combat goes on: more rage, more fury, more annihilator - all three of which get worse as time goes on. I propose a similar stack-based system, whereby lethality becomes more potent as combat goes on: cull can give us <insert generic stack name>, which gives us like up to 15%+ more cull damage/dot damage/damage reduction/whatever. TL;DR lethality is punished a lot by having to reset combat. At least reward us when we don't reset combat. Having to replace dots and regather TAs doesn't count as reward, unless cull is made extremely, EXTREMELY powerful. Give us lots of stacks like annihilation's trademark

Having orbital back isn't that important once they nerfed it awhile back. back when it was able to tick for a whole lot (6k was normal, and that's old lv 55 numbers). When they made the entire 9 seconds marginally more powerful than frag grenade, they had killed it for everybody. That said, explosive probe was only ever used by concealment, which now has a more mobile, internal, poison effect. It's status as a poison means it can proc a free TA off of laceration, meaning you don't need another GCD for corrosive dart after acid blade wears off. the only thing that 3.0 really robbed operatives of was an opening hidden strike followed by a backstab.

Stuns as a mechanic to get ahead of the enemy in rotation is a horrible mechanic. It takes zero positioning skill, movement skill, or any skill at all except to activate a cooldown. Actually, I take that back. It used to take enough skill to keyboard-turn to face the enemy. But apparently that was too demanding, so bioware widened that range of sight As if a cooldown-based number game such as mmos weren't bad enough, the primary way many get kills is to whack a paralyzed enemy. At least a mezz has a strategic use for capping and what not. the only, and I mean ONLY use that a stun should have is to prevent the usage of defensive cooldowns. Maybe I'm just biased against a cooldown-based game, meh.

OP's sentence structure is coherent, his argument makes sense, and it is backed by what appears to be some decent psychology-ish thing. That said, let me talk about some decent gametheory-ish thing called nontransitive games these are like rock paper scissors. you'd know that none of those three are the "best," that's why it is called non-transitive. quickly demonstrates how a nontransitive rock-paper scissors dynamic affects relative populations of LIZARDS over time. I've heard similar arguments that such dynamics and meta play are what mmo pvp is about. So one of those 'non-selfish' things you can add to your list, op, is playing classes that are hard counters to FOTM. OP's analogy is spot-on

You need the Yavin IV Expansion in order to get the Mantle of the Force. Ha. ha. it doesn't work as well now that Yavin is an actual in game place for anyone on the forums

I'd love that. I feel like Kolto Probe ought to be our spiritual replacement for the old pre 2.0 stim boost revitalizers: a constant nice heal. Being able to set it up in stealth would be very powerful.

Well, it looks like they fixed automated defenses. Too bad a 36 sec STUN BREAKER never hit the live game, damn it, I would have enjoyed it.

Balance is not objective. Bugs such as this one are. Balance takes a lot of design. Bugs such as this don't take too much design. It worked at some point, and I doubt any major redesign of the game occurred since 3.0 to warrant this inability to do anything.

But they can't fix plasmatech/pyrotech's adrenaline fueled/automated defenses. It's been in here since 3.0. Why do I bother

then we've proven that this game takes relatively no individual skill, it's a team game.

fixed.

only bad players get globaled.

they have burst and that's about it. Pyro funnily enough surely has better sustained deeps (granted pyro has even less burst and is even squishier). That said, AP is far from tanky, like in a vengeance guardian sense. Vengeance guardian is, I dare say, the tankiest DPS. Surely it was true pre 3.0, though recent rebalancing of madness/hatred heals + all the utilities may certainly make an argument against me.

Pretty much. I play as Marksman and so I desperately want the 3 sec entrench after cover. If I hit forward too fast, then I never enter cover, and thus never gain entrench, and thus never lose entrench, and it follows that I don't get the Seek Cover movement bonus. You'll just learn to hit it at the right time, can be frustrating for newer players.