I haven't noticed this issue (as tankassin or deception assassin) - are you using force cloak when you have active DoT's or debuffs (from death field) applied to enemies? I believe that if you have DoT's on enemies, then you are still considered in combat with them - I've noticed this on my madness sorc - even after I have died, if I have any persisting DoT's active on enemies, sprint's out ot combat movement modifier won't take effect.

I'm not getting a full 2% reactive healing from DoT crits... my hp is currently 18,934 (with commando buff, which I have, and I never leave the respawn locations after dying until I've refreshed my buffs). 2% max health heals would be 378.68 (ok, even if we round down, that'd be 378). Despite the fact that I was under the impression that our reactive heals were static (unaffected by pvp trauma debuffs), I still don't even see reactive heal values proportionate to what they should be with pvp trauma debuff (30% healing recieved debuff = 378 x 0.7 = 264.6 - rounded down again, = 264). The heal value ticks I see regularly are ~122 (even seen values as low as 49 from crushing darkness) - which is lower than what is possible even if I had pvp trauma debuff + mara/sent/sniper/slinger healing received debuff. Also, it appears as though the 1% healing received from crushing darkness ticks (obtained by wearing 2 pieces of force master gear) will not become overwritten by the normal 2% healing received from its DoT when it crits. And yes, I've also submitted tickets pertaining to Death Field hitting multiple targets (yet only getting one heal tick - which is also below 2% max health) in addition to all the reactive healing values being below normal. Anyone else having these issues?

What I meant by them having great sustained dps is that they can pop blackout (without being stealthed) to maintain their force (assuming they aren't dead after killing their first target) - and I'm sorry to see that the deception assassins you've been facing don't know how to stunlock or pop shroud.

Exactly what marauder can hit for 5k every GCD? This is a GROSS exaggeration. Also, I'm a 3/7/31 madness sorc. and all marauders are a joke. Snipers/Slingers, Shadows/Assassins and PT/VG are the only classes that give me issues.

And yet so many people still assume that people are hacking when they aren't - one example is to refer to my post immediately prior to yours.

At least 2+ times each night I (or my teammates) get accused of speed-hacking in hutt-ball (even in rateds, lol). I play a carnage marauder, so I have improved predation. "Speed hacks!" - is the first accusation. "Predation" is my rebuttal. "That's faster than predation! It's a hack!" - is their next excuse. "I'm not FoTM Annihilation, my predation is better" I'll reply. Then, of course, rather than simply leanring that I'm capable of tossing out my improved predation like candy if I'm not getting FF'd while my defensives are on cooldown, they say "You're using predation twice! Hacking!" - "Well, yes, I am using predation twice in a row, my good man! Thank you for noticing that I actually used my Frenzy ability to give me an immediate 30-stack of fury." So... naturally, their next claim is that "You're hacking the cooldown on frenzy! It's every 2m30s!" So I just sigh... Basically all I do is spam my lowest rage cost abilities (to build fury fast) and pray that they throw long-duration DoT's on me. Either they don't understand that I can build a full stack of fury in about 20 seconds while being attacked + spamming my low rage-cost abilities (which basically turns my damage into garbage), or they believe that the only way to build fury is to pop frenzy... can't figure it out. Chalk it up to "raptor hacks".

^^ Very true, but Deception can win 1v2's with proper execution. To me, Deception Assassin acts like a glorified concealment op, without the loss to sustained dps. It certainly requires heavy stealth-based tactics (mind traps and spike for opening) and then using force cloak to re-apply these stealth-based abilities if necessary (which, unfortunately, happens to be on a 2 min. cooldown). But it can certainly SHRED most classes without even needing to stun-lock them.

So far I've been rocking with a 2 (for 6% armor penetration)/31 (I picked up 30% aoe damage reduction - which is HUGE - I also have the 30% armor bonus)/8 (up to chain-shock and I get the 2% damage mitigation). Yes, it's meant to be a squishy spec, but the DPS it puts out is INSANE - particularly when you combine the fact that we can stun-lock (so I completely understand the logic behind the squishiness). Unfortunately, my spec has issues with roots/slows (slows and partial survivability increase. I haven't seen any other assassin spec be able to hit for over 5k consistantly like deception does - then again, we die much more often, so I suspect that's the reason. Against good players, I'd say deception's worst warzone map is hutt-ball (though you can still stealth ahead for passes + quick goals via shroud + force speed) - but only if they don't have weapon-based roots to stop ya.

I prefer the "give-and-go" tactic on my sorcerer. Someone passes me the ball since I'm ahead of them (yet still not within range for my force-speed to cause a goal), so I extricate the most capable ball-carrying teammate near me to me, bubble him use my aoe knockback, then pass him the ball - sometimes this might even be the same person that actually passed it to me, which is why I call it the "give-and-go" - an old hockey move where you pass to a teammate on the side (opposing team directs attention to him) while you keep skating forward and are now open further up the ice.

2 uses of Talent-Improved Predation back-to-back pretty much guarantees any Carnage marauder the ability to score (provided that their defensives are off CD) in under 10s even without using charge and they picked up the ball from center. It's called "RAPTOR HAXX!".

Not sure if you're talking about me, but if you are... thank you. =p

(bump) anyone able to confirm?

Look at it this way: if a sorc healer is out of force, he can choose to either die over a potentially SLIGHTLY longer period of time (assuming he at least has a bubble up), or he can use consumption (which healers can talent to reduce the HP cost by 4% AND they can talent to make it no longer apply a force regen rate debuff - effectively making it cost 11% health to restore 8% force) - using consumption will either result in the healer sorc. dying more quickly (if too much burst was present, typically) or it will completely flip the script for them since they can actually reapply their bubble and use heals again. Now, if you get the 4-set bonus from force mystic, that's a 3% health regen which will effectively make consumption cost a total of 8% health - after its regen timer - for 8% force which is a much better ratio compared to the base 15% hp cost for 8% force gained. But that's not all... if a sorcerer AoE healbombs the ground and uses consumption with the 4-piece seat bonus effectively as a pre-cast before enemies arrive, he will be gaining more HoT effects than usual, so it can actually be used for this purpose as well (works great if an operative healer has thrown 2 stacks of his HoT's on you, too).

Massacre ALWAYS causes an ataru form strike, it ignores the normal time restrictions on ataru form frequency.

You can improve the 2nd rotation by: throwing in force scream after your 4th massacre (you'll have a 0.5s window to get the 100% armor penetration + crit chance). Then you can spam massacre 2 final times, pop frenzy (if it's not on cooldown), then battering assault, pop berserk (or bloodthirst, depending on the situation) and massacre spam again until gore cooldown has returned - once it has, you can gore + ravage your target without much likelihood that they'll still have any stuns or knockbacks to prevent it. The first rotation is best if and only if your target cannot interrupt your ravage via knockback/stun/accuracy debuff - so keep aware of when they have used their counter abilities so that you can catch them while they're on cooldown - OR... wait until you have full resolve before you gore+ravage. Also, ravage doesn't cause any GCD (just like every other channeled or activation timer ability, so you can even instantly interrupt it yourself to use another ability), but they ARE correct that you should always ravage prior to force scream (instead of vice versa, since you're less likely to get the final tick of damage -the one that matters- from ravage off while you still have gore proc by using scream before ravage - part of this is due to the fact that you might need to reposition before you can ravage and even if you didn't, sometimes the lag delay between an instant ability's GCD and ravage beginning can take longer than 1.5s due to lag). Now, back to your plant to respec to carny so as to gear up: DON'T. Carny is rediculously focus-fired - mostly due to the fact that they cause roots, so when people can't kite you or can't even move to approach their intended target, they pretty much have to target you more often. Carnage/Combat also get focus-fired a LOT due to the fact that they can: a.) Pretty much melt any target if permitted to get a Gore-procced ravage run full-cycle and b.) Berserk + massacre spam is THE BEST method to pressure healers due to the 1s GCD (main-hand attack damage + off-hand attack damage + ataru form damage) so that's 3 seperate attacks registering every second - which makes it almost impossible for any healer to use activated heals provided that you're also using interrupts. Albeit, Massacre's damage certainly has a long delay before all of it registers - I can't tell you how many times I've died to someone using an ability (not DoT, actual direct-damage ability that doesn't have such a delay) only to have that target die from massacre or ataru form damage ~ 1.5s later - it is quite annoying. Also, carnage/combat is INCREDIBLY squishy compared to the other specs. It is much easier to survive for longer periods of time as Annihilation/Watchman or Rage/Focus since carnage almost always uses force camo offensively - ours breaks roots/snares, so we can regain position due to our spec posessing the least efficient gap-closing - anni/watch get 3s CD reduction and no restriction on charge's range within 10m, rage/focus get obliterate - anni/watch tend to use camo after they've thrown full stacks of DoT's on a target so that they can regain health without the possiblity of taking damage for its duration and rage/focus tends to use it to escape so that their shockwave stack-building abilities can reset - rage/focus also gets the 30s CD reduction on undying rage and more damage reduction. I grinned/bared the gear-grind as Carnage marauder, but I really don't reccomend it. I started lv. 50 pvp with BM chest/relic, WH relic/ear and everything else recruit.... yeah, safe to say that the only way you ever get full stacks of fury is by popping the frenzy cooldown since you're not likely to survive long enough to gain it through combat until you're ~ 2/3 battlemaster geared.

If they want 5-6k crits from smash (which are actually 3800-4200 against equally geared tanks, usually), they can't have much in the tank tree, so they certainly can't have the best of both worlds - it's one or the other. Mind telling me exactly which ability it is that is hitting you for 5-6k crits? Only thing I can possibly conceive to be coming close to that are rail shot/HiB crits (90% armor penetration) or maybe an Ambush crit from a marksman Sniper that has already used Shatter Shot on you - then again, it's also possible that you have full stacks (either from jugg/guardians, merc/commando tracer/grav monkeys or sniper/slinger) of armor debuff acitvely applied on you (and since they no longer stack with each other, the most armor reduction you can have at any time is 20% - my god it used to be ugly if you could survive long enough to get 3 separate 5-stacks of tracer/grav on you) - in which case, then smash MIGHT hit for ~ 5200 - rail shot could come close to that as well.

I think you forgot to mention that even though all force/tech powers bypass shields completely, the most powerful immediate burst damage ones are all energy/kinetic damage (exceptions being AP Powertech's Immolate and Madness Sorcerer's Death Field, yet they're nowhere near capable of dishing out 6k hits). The rest of the tech/force powers that deal internal/elemental damage happen to be fairly weak by comparison and the majority of them are DoT's. Seriously, though, the most significant damage being dealt in the game (rage/focus jugg/guardian/mara/sent's Smash/Sweep, Pyro P-tech/Assault VG's Railshot/HiB, Sniper/Slingers' Ambush/Aimed Shot, etc.) are either getting mitigated by your tanky armor (smash/sweep will be mitigated by 80% of your armor - it's kinetic damage and their spec causes 20% armor penetration), or they're going against your shields + Armor (i.e. rail shot/HiB, Ambush/AS, Ravage/Master Strike). Unfortunately, the tanking game (in pvp) blatantly prefers that tanks compeletely evade those attacks instead of shield/absorb stacking - which causes assassin/shadow tanks (10% base + 6% talented defense with a 50% defense chance cooldown) and juggs/sents (though only 5% base, they can get quite a bit from stance/talents and they have the best defense chance cooldown via saber ward - better than mara/sents, even). Lastly, I'm not sure if the shield chance vs. crit chance is direct, since I was duelling a fully tank WH-geared + shield chance auggied guildie on my carnage marauder (to show him how bad it is to do this) - my crit chance is 32%, his shield chance is 49.xx% and absorb value of ~54% (!!!) - well, I gore-proc ravaged him and certainly did get crits - dropped his 24k hp down to ~ 14k (thus, a 10k gore-procced full-cycle of ravage - though gore itself did ~ 300 damage). Naturally, however, any powertech isn't going to just let my gore-procced ravage run full cycle on them in practical pvp, but this was merely to prove a point to him on how bad shields are in PvP. So basically, if shields are DIRECTLY affecting crit chance, I wouldn't have critted against him - maybe shield chance value is decreasing weapon-based crit-cances by their value as a %-based factor (i.e. someone has say 50% shield chance and a carnage marauder has 32% crit chance, then perhaps the crit chance for the carny's weapon-based attacks is being reduced by 50% - making it effectively 16%?) - this would explain why I certainly notice far fewer crits against shield-using tanks with weapon attacks, yet still get crits. I could certainly use more insight on this matter.

I know they removed stacking buffs/debuffs, but I'm pretty sure they forgot to include Endure Pain + Rakata Med-Pac both increasing max health. I've seen quite a few Juggs/Guardians using fortitude stims (most of the tank-specced jugs I see with fortitude stims are ~ 23k HP without med-pac or endure pain active on average) and they'll suddenly jump to almost 40k HP via endure pain + med-pack. Not that I'm complaining, since most of these are tank-specced/fortitude augmented players and all you need to do is drop them to ~ 50% health, throw a DoT on them and switch targets since they'll pretty much kill themself when the buffs expire - yet I'm curious as to how they might've forgotten to include this is a stacking buff. Then again, I could be wrong and they might not be stacking, so it'd most likely be the result of a PvE geared/fortitude augmented/fortitude stimmed jugg that happened to pop both yet only endure pain's boost brought his HP that high. Could certainly use a quick confirmation.

Madness/Balance sorc/sages are lacking with our DoT damage (not only are they weaker than most other DoT's, they are also the longest duration, which results in very small ticks of damage, even when they're ticking on targets with deathmarks). Furthermore, the reactive healing values from our DoT's is FAR LOWER than 2% (I have 19.4k HP, 2% of that is 388, normal pvp healing debuff would cause my reactive heals to be 271.6, yet I'm getting reactive heals of 66-181, which is lower than if I even had a healing debuff applied from a sniper/slinger or marauder/sent). In rateds, if the enemy team has a Sorc/Sage healer (almost every single rated team will have at least 1 of them), you can pretty much factor madness/balance DPS completely out due to the fact that they will cleanse/purge their teammates... which leaves us with spamming shock/project and Death Field/FiB every cooldown (Death Field/FiB damage is a joke if it doesn't crit, btw - funny that we only get crit damage bonus via talent to DF/FiB while other classes -cough, pyros/assaults- get the same crit damage bonus applied to multiple abilities with higher base damage values), force lightning/tkt throw - which doesn't dish out much damage, is actually pretty appropriate right now due to the fact that it slows and we use it for wrath/procs and when we're completely out of force (which happens very quickly) - lightning is supposed to help us REGAIN force, but it appears as though the 1% force regained each tick isn't working correctly (force lightning costs 30 force, deals damage 4 times - with my spec, that would be 24 force regained for a full 3s channel + 24 normal force regen = net gain of 18 force when I use FL, but I find that It takes me 4-5 full channels of force lightning just to let me regain enough force to use an ability with a higher force cost). Seriously, I think Sorc/Sage DoT's need a much shorter base duration (with the same current damage values) or a solid increase to their DoT damage values (if they are to remain the same duration) AND a force cost reduction/increase to bring them in line with other DoT's/abilities of the same caliber. 1-2 melees aren't an issue to madness/balance sorcerers - we can strafe-cast kite very effectively, so I really don't think we need any form of defensive cooldown since we are SUPPOSED TO BE glass cannons... yet we aren't (lets be honest, the only way we can take out a healer is if the healer screws up - even if we are doing EVERYTHING right - i.e. interrupting the correct heal each time, and use knockbacks when our interrupt is on cooldown, etc.) oh, and of course they need to fix our reactive healing.

Really? How exactly did you augment your war hero Focus/Generator/Shield, Earpiece, Implants, Relic, Belt, and Bracers? Unless you're using PvE crit-crafted gears (for bracers, relics, implants, and non-weapon off-hands), it was impossible to have augment slots on them and if you WERE using all of these, you would've only had 701 expertise (assuming you were in full WH augmented gear for Helm/Chest/Gloves/Legs/Boots/Main-hand weapon) - or... 842 expertise if you were a dual-wielder - so even with your big HP bonus, you'd still get rocked. Now, even as far as PvE gear is concerned, you couldn't augment the best PvE gears until 1.3 (go ahead, craft yourself some weak-sauce lv. 50 gear and augment it - it'll still be significantly less total endurance than a guy in full campaign gear that wasn't augmented).

Regardless, I know my sniper's damage values were highest when he was lv. 10 - I was getting 3400+ snipe crits and ~3800 ambushes (non-crit!) - in the single match I played as a lv. 10 sniper, my highest hit was 6761 from an ambush crit. Damage dropped significantly after lv. 17 or so (despite being able to equip more gear) - so it's pretty obvious that bolstering takes into consideration the fact that you cannot equip certain items and/or cannot obtain certain abilities/talents for improvement at certain low levels and compensates you for that. I'm using sniper as my example since it was THE most significantly bolstered spec of all my toons at that level range.

Did you not catch on that those good players would also wait until they had full resolve before activating their relic/adrenal (or they'd activate it when they were NEARLY full resolve and stun-break off cooldown). Some classes have very powerful abilities (or abilities that are used to improve the effectiveness of others) on long cooldowns and they actually rely on these abilities to deal their most significant damage (they were typically used in conjunction with relic/adrenals). Some classes that suffer significantly from relic/adrenal changes: Tankassin/Shadow - recklessness ability has a long cooldown (this is what gives their shocks the extra 50% crit damage bonuses from energized shock procs) - thus, the significance of its damage has dropped remarkably. Madness/Balance Sorc/Sage - recklessness is our only method to virtually guarantee crits with Death Field/FiB - using relics in conjunction with it resulted in damage values FAR SUPERIOR to the values we see now - this was our most powerful combo to attack with (used to be ~3800 with relic/adrenal popped). Now, with 2x War Hero Power Relics, I'm LUCKY to break 3k damage with that combo. And Death Field does ~1400 damge for non-crits (up from ~1300's that I would get without relic/adrenal during 1.2). So... please, guys, enlighten me as to how TTK has actually decreased.

Implants are available at 20 from the pvp armor vendors - relics start at lv. 17 IIRC - though you can no longer use them in warzones.

I can see disabling XP gain from warzones to be useful (but abusable, yes, as many have already stated). But it would significantly aid those that did not pvp much prior to hitting 48-49 so that they can max out their WZ comms and RWZ comms for when they hit 50.

LOL - if heals were nerfed to the ground, why is it that ranked warzone teams always have AT LEAST 2 healers if they wish to stand any chance of winning? The only thing that got nerfed to the ground was "burst" (both healing and damage) windows. The only values that have significantly increased in long warzones are those of Pyro P-tech/Assault VG (which were always dishing out sustained damage values that closely rival that of other classes using burst windows) and *gasp* healing.