My biggest annoyances with the game: 1. Orbital station loading screens and "empty" space. The is literally nothing other than 1 quest giver on any orbital station, yet you need to run through them every time you go to the planet. It's a huge waste. Ship -> Docking "tube" -> elevator -> orbital station -> shuttle -> planet. It's all a huge waste of time and polygons. Travel between planets could be much simplier. The direct shuttles for L50 daily zones is a great improvement, but there is more that could be done for pre-50s. 2. Operations, death, and travel. Why are you kicked out to fleet upon death, for an added loading screen? Then have to load back into the instance? Why do the speeders drop you off vast distances from the bosses? Why are there so many interior/exterior area transitions that kick you off your personal speeder? It makes travel an unneeded hassle. While I can understand it's a form of death tax, it's insanely annoying and draining. If an operation isn't going well, this is the part I get sick of. It's not the difficulty or the failure or even an occasional buggy mechanic, it's the damn load & ride back that takes 5 minutes.

This is the serious hinderance to operatives in general. TA can be a pain to generate, then it doesn't last very long. The DOT breaking CC issue is also why I stopped playing lethality (sniper) in PVP. The damage output is great, if left alone. It's just too self-limiting to not be able to use any of your control abilities though ,so 1v1 you're incapable of using your best tricks.

Cull has 2 separate types of damage. The straight weapon damage, which is white and not effected by WB. The bonus damage for having CD and CG present is also a "poison" and is effected by WB. Easy way to tell is apply WB, then hit Cull with the CD and CG up. Then watch the WB stacks tick away.

You shouldn't ever be in that situation though. You will always have SoS/Ambush ready for filler after every other cull.

Your basic rotation is CG-CD-WB-Cull - Filler - Cull Filler is Orbital strike, Takedown, SoS, Ambush, Exp Probe, Rifle shot (whenever low on energy) You can use shatter shot if you want. Usually the boss is armor debuffed by someone else in PVE (mercs, juggs, etc.), so it's not usually part of my normal PVE rotation. You want to keep your dots on full strength all the time for max DPS. If you're really hurting for energy, you can use the lower strength/lingering toxins ones to prevent a drastic drop in DPS, but it is a loss. You will usually have a GCD you can throw a rifle shot in while in the reapplying DOTs phase of your rotation before Cull is up again. Snipe sucks for lethality, just use rifle shot instead. The damage is marginally better than rifle shot and it's energy cost is horrendous (MM gets a lot of talents that boost snipe, Lethality gets none so it is really a poor power for this build). The other trick is to drop orbital strike, then use relics/adrenals as soon as it's done casting. You'll not waste 3 seconds of the buffs time channeling orbital strike, but you'll still see the benefit. As an opener, I usually CG-CD-Orbital-adrenal/relics/WB-Cull - Filler. For gear, I'd really get more critical rating. You need >38% critical chance to maintain your energy with lethality (40% is better, but it's easier to get with better gear).

People will often use the PVP shells (battlemaster) for PVE to get the 2-piece set bonus which ups the duration of Orbital strike, the hardest hitting power in the game. The 4 piece PVP set bonus is not very useful for PVE though, so it's mixed with 3 pieces of PVE shells/gear. You swap all the mods/enhancements for expertise free ones and skill armorings across the board for PVE

And as a follow on to this, if you must run back to the boss for whatever design reason/decision... Can we at least make the entire instance count as an "outdoor" location so I'm not constantly mounting, getting kicked off my speeder (e.g., "speeder aren't allowed here"), remounting on the way to the boss? The long run backs are made that much more annoying by the seemingly arbitrary restrictions on where in the raid personal speeders can be used. For example, TfB boss 1. You initially mount your speeder, get kicked off when you go into the building that has[had] 2 spawns in it, then remount, go 250m, get kicked off, run the rest of the way to boss.

Personally, I like finishing class quests (i.e., Corellia) at L48 then going to Ilum or Belsavis (daily section). As long as you're not harassed constantly while questing there the xp is much better. The quest xp alone is about 2x that of the Corellian class quests.

+1 Temple is faster but more difficult in that you get aggro as well and have to heal 2 characters (her and yourself). Kaliyo is slower, but you only have to worry about her. Scorpio is probably better than Kaliyo (with equal gear), but it's such a pain to gear her up to the same level with all the needed modification swapping to "create" good droid gear.

Use WB closer to the start of Cull. cull-sos-ambush-cull-RIFLE-cg-WB-cd would be better. It make more difference if there is another agent using DOTs in the group as you don't want them eating all your WB ticks.

I'll have to recheck this, but poison's run about 1/3 of a lethality's DPS (Cull 1/3, and everything else 1/3...roughly). The weaker DOT help with energy management, but are a DPS loss.

I have to agree with NoTomorrow on this one, I think you just did better after the switch. 1650 DPS is pretty low on a dummy with that level of stats (unless you really screwed up optimization) so you had a lot of room to make up.

Operative is best for PVP generally. For PVE, operatives are good on the move. Sorcs are good for group healing (great AOE puddle) and mercs tend to be better tank healers. On the whole, they're all viable for PVE and a mix is usually best.

...anything to cut down on the loading screens.

speeders that actually take you to a boss, rather than to a point after the previous one with a long run back to the next one. A "medic station" to rez inside of the instances (at the start?).

I wouldn't sweat it. It's close enough that it's not worth the effort to regear to get ~1% more accuracy.

yeah, a little oversight.

Well, the way things are itemized you can choose between accuracy, surge, and alacrity. I'm assuming you're talking DPS specs. You generally want accuracy such that you've got 110% ranged hit chance. Surge to around 250-300 (~75-77% critical damage) After that, it's largely choice. Alacrity is fine and is more useful the more channeled skills you use. It can make heat harder to manage, but there isn't much to be gained from any other stat. For Power, you're basically choosing between it and critical rating. You typically want about 350 critical rating, then stack power. -- For heal specs, you pretty much will take some alacrity as accuracy is useless. Crit/power tradeoff is basically the same. -- For tank specs, someone else will have to chime in.

Definitely, sitting at 30m and not worrying about TA procs is much less taxing.

Definitely, it was long overdue that someone put a good guide thread together.

You buy augmentation kits off the GTN or craft yourself. In general, it's not worth it to constantly upgrade them.

They're generally fine and you'll rarely have issues. But when they're bad... they're really bad.

I personally would skip the bonus quests from here out. There is no benefit to being that overleveled. 2-3 levels over makes things easy, 6-7 just means you're missing out on a lot of potential xp by doing severely underleveled quests when you could be doing ones closer to your level. Alderaan's bonus quests are also above the level one would normally finish the class quests on Alderaan. I forget but I think they're around L35 missions.

I recently got a 560Ti. I'm very happy with the results. It runs very smoothly (1900x1080) and is affordable (~$150 after rebate). As someone earlier mentioned, most of the better cards require the PCIe 3.0 standard slots, which people who are upgrading probably don't have.

I think this is a good direction for a unique class. Also, a support/DPS role with a focus more on buffs and debuffs is a definite omission from the current classes.