How would you rank the eight classes in terms of how difficulty they are to play? You can use whatever criteria you want (e.g. rotation, survivability, etc) to determine the ranking. If you don't want to rank all eight of them, you can also just list which class/spec you think is the easiest to play, and which class/spec you think is the hardest to play.

The scoundrel/operative healer is the best for PVP because the other two healers are too reliant on casted abilities which can be easily interrupted. Plus the fact that the scoundrel/operative has great escapes between it's stealth out of combat (2 minute cooldown) and roll abilities (you can roll 24 meters every 10 seconds). If you haven't already, I would definitely roll a scoundrel or an operative and try out healing on it. It's a lot of fun, and regular warzones are always in need of more dedicated healers.

I would argue that it is as follows: Sharpshooter is the most stationary. Dirty fighting is in the middle. Saboteur is the most mobile. The reason why dirty fighting "can" be the most mobile is because you can use your key abilities (shrap bomb, vital shot, hemorrhaging blast, and wounding shots) all outside of cover. However, it is dangerous to always fight outside of cover, as that leaves you constantly vulnerable to being leapt to, pulled, and interrupted. These are advantages specific to the gunslinger class that should not be freely sacrificed. In particular, you do not want wounding shots to be interrupted, as everything revolves around wounding shots. And aside from that, wounding shots is channeled anyways, so that in and of itself limits your mobility. Furthermore, speed shot is also important as a filler ability for burst. In between your wounding shots, you should use speed shot. This means that you spend a lot of time using channeled abilities as dirty fighting gunslinger. On the other hand, with the changes in 2.10, with saboteur you want to be regularly using your incendiary grenade and shock charge on targets. You should be constantly using your incendiary grenade as needed (as energy permits) so that at least one (preferably more of course) person on the other team is always slowed, and you should be stunning someone on the other team via the shock charge + incendiary grenade combination every 18 seconds. Unlike dirty fighting, with saboteur the only channeled ability you use is speed shot. The rest of the core abilities you use are instant cast (incendiary grenade, shock charge, sabotage charge, and thermal grenade) or casted (charged burst and XS freighter flyby). And on top of all of this, as a saboteur you can do two back-to-back rolls to cover 36 meters at once (via sabotage).

Playing mercenary/commando in warzones is quite brutal though. He should probably just focus on learning sniper/gunslinger. Sniper/gunslinger is still a difficult class, but not nearly as brutal as mercenary/commando.

Which of the three specs is the most powerful for soloing in 8 vs 8 warzones, in your opinion?

I haven't actually played DF yet. For the past several years I've been playing Sharpshooter/Marksman on my gunslinger/sniper, and I am very familiar with that spec. I've been playing Saboteur lately, and I can definitely say it provides a lot more survivability over Sharpshooter (and presumably over DF as well). I probably will try DF at some point, but the main reason I've deviated from Sharpshooter is because of it's lackluster survivability. But I get the gist that DF also suffers from lackluster survivability, perhaps even moreso than Sharpshooter, so I will probably be sticking with Saboteur for the time being.

Lol yeah, that's one reason why I am trying other specs. While Sharpshooter is fun and has great single target burst, it's just way too easy to get focused down. I've been playing Saboteur lately, and being able to do two back-to-back rolls for 36m (via Sabotage) is such a life saver, not to mention being able to have up to 40 consecutive seconds of CC immunity. Plus being able to constantly slow people and regularly stun them with Incendiary Grenade and Shock Charge is so much fun.

I’ve exclusively played the Sharpshooter spec on my gunslinger up until now, but now I want to try one of the other two specs. I eventually want to try both Saboteur and Dirty Fighting, but for now I want to focus on just one of them. Of those two specs, which one has the easier rotation? Which one provides better survivability in PVP?

I saw exactly what you described in a recent warzone. I was playing on my gunslinger, and whenever I would target and start shooting a particular sniper on the enemy team, I would get the "target out of range" message, accompanied by their character appearing to be dead and warping all over the place. Then suddenly they would be 60+ meters away, and everything would go back to normal with their character no longer appearing to be dead. This happened multiple times against this particular sniper. Do I have to record it in order to report them?

Whats wrong with that though? As a gunslinger, the new quesh huttball is by far my favorite map in the game, although I like the original huttball map as well. In my opinion, the quesh huttball map is the best designed map in the game, because having multiple levels adds more depth to it and allows for more strategies. Given that ranged classes only have 30-35 meters of range, it's a bit too easy for melee players to constantly harass ranged players on non-huttball maps, in my opinion. If I could, I would queue exclusively for the two huttball maps on my gunslinger. But I would be thrilled if they would at least give you the ability to choose to queue for only 8 vs 8 warzones.

This happened to me as well. I logged on to my Gunslinger, and I was not flagged for PVP upon loading into Oricon. However, I came across several different empire players while doing my dailies, and all of them had yellow names (flagged for PVP). I wonder if this bug is affecting only republic players, or is it triggered by logging out in Oricon and then logging back in?

I'm the one you talked with on the fleet. As I told you in-game, you get automatically removed from the warzone if you stay in the safe area for too long. The upper platform on Novare Coast counts as part of the safe area, because it's not intended for ranged classes to be able to just stay there and burst down players below indefinitely. You were not votekicked out of the warzone, you were automatically removed from the warzone for staying in the safe area for too long. You must have not seen the warning, but I guarantee you that's why you were removed from the warzone. Even if your team is getting badly beaten and the enemy team is spawn camping, you still cannot stay in the safe area indefinitely (and again, the upper platform on Novare Coast is part of the safe area).

It's not really fair, because certain classes (e.g., commando/mercenary and gunslinger/sniper) are not really viable at all in 4 vs 4, whereas every class has it's place in 8 vs 8.

Would that really cause people to leave? On the Bastion, the empire side has a much larger PVP population than the republic side. Players on the empire side have imp vs imp matches very frequently, and even pub vs pub matches happen as well sometimes, so it's not like this game is exclusively imp vs pub. If nothing else, they could do what DCUO did and make it optional: when you queue for warzones, you can choose to allow yourself to be placed in a team that is mixed with both imps and pubs. Players that don't like the idea of being on the same team with players of the opposing faction could choose to opt out of this.

Yes, it's true that premades in and of themselves are not the issue, and never have been. It's the extreme variance of the skill levels of players, even at level 55. Some players are exceptional, some are great, some are good, some are average, some are below average, and some are really below average. The skill level of players is all over the place in this game. The problem is that sixteen players are just thrown together to form an 8 vs 8 match, so in some cases it's like pitting a team of people who are in bronze league in StarCraft II against a team of people who are grandmasters. The skill cap in this game is no where near the skill cap of a game like StarCraft II, but this game could definitely benefit from players having a MMR and implementing a matchmaking system. But with the game in its current state, I think two things would have to happen for the player pool to be big enough for a matchmaking system: 1) mixed teams of imps and pubs in PVP would have to be allowed and 2) cross-server queues would need to be implemented. If Bioware implemented those two changes and then developed a MMR-based matchmaking system, regular warzones would become much more enjoyable for average skilled players (whether they queue solo or with a group).

Yes, I know this for a fact. They are all in the same guild, and it's a couple of specific guilds on the imp side on the Bastion that do this (the guild "Cherry Pops" is one of the primary ones). When I say four-man premade, I am not just referring to average skilled players grouping together. The premades (I am talking about specific four-man premade groups here, not premades in general) I am talking about obliterate everyone they come up against, especially when they are fighting players on the pub side. The DPS people in the group will routinely have scores like 900k or one million DPS, and 50-60+ kills and 0 deaths. This is on top of scores like 6-0 in Huttball or 100-0 in Novare Coast. It's a complete and absolute roflstomp, and they do it every day for many hours on end.

To be fair though, there should at least be an option to queue exclusively for 8 vs 8 objective based PVP or 4 vs 4 TDM based PVP. They are two entirely different formats, and plenty of people seem to have a clear preference for one over the other. Some classes, such as gunslinger/sniper, are MUCH less effective in 4 vs 4 as compared to 8 vs 8, because melee DPS has a huge advantage over ranged DPS in that environment. It's unfair to people playing classes like sniper/gunslinger and mercenary/commando having their time wasted by being placed in a 4 vs 4 match that they are probably just going to leave anyways.

But there are several four-man premade teams on the imp side on the bastion that play regular warzones for several hours a day and basically shred everyone they come up against without much effort. Are you saying that they are queueing for regular warzones because they want really easy matches, and that they wouldn't do 8 vs 8 ranked even if it were an option?

This still doesn't make sense to me, though. At the beginning of the game, the leap/pull immunity came from being in cover itself, and cover has always been available to both scoundrels/operatives and gunslingers/snipers since day one. It was never tied to any buff specific to gunslingers/snipers. Bioware had to be fully aware of this from day one. It's one thing if they changed their mind as to whether scoundrels/operatives should have leap/pull immunity in cover, but I don't see how this could have possibly been "unintentional" for two years. And their solution of simply removing leap/pull immunity, but still allowing scoundrels/operatives to crouch and take cover (with absolutely no benefit for doing so) is extremely bizarre. Until Raansu pointed this out to me, I was under the impression that scoundrels/operatives still have leap/pull immunity while in cover (I was away from the game for a while), because of the fact that they can still take cover. Mind you, I don't agree with this nerf to scoundrels/operatives (healers in particular) at all, but if anything they should have just removed the cover mechanic entirely from the scoundrel/operative class, as it makes no sense at all in its current state.

If they brought back 8 vs 8 ranked, that would probably help with the issue of certain premade groups steamrolling regular warzones at least somewhat. There are probably a lot of premade groups out there that simply don't like the 4 vs 4 TDM format, but would be willing to play 8 vs 8 ranked.

I took a break away from this game for a long while, and recently came back a few months ago. When I played in the past, scoundrels/operatives had leap/pull immunity while in cover, just as gunslingers/snipers do. Why was leap/pull immunity removed from scoundrels/operatives? That hardly seems fair, given that both AC's can take cover. And being able to take cover for leap/pull immunity while healing was always one of the unique benefits of being a scoundrel/operative healer, to give yourself more of a breather from the constant harassment from melee players. Given how much healers already have to deal with constantly being focused and interrupted, I don't see why the leap/pull immunity was removed. That change should definitely be reverted, because scoundrels/operatives can still take cover, but it provides no actual benefit.

What?! Snipers have had leap/pull immunity since the very beginning of the game, it's an intrinsic part of their class design. Snipers are extremely squishy, and when a melee class get within melee range of a sniper, they go down very easy provided you can keep the sniper within melee range. Snipers would be massively underpowered without leap/pull immunity! And entrench has always been 20s, I think it's fine as it is.

But the thing is, on the Bastion server at least, there are tons of four-man premade groups (on the empire side in particular) that play in 8 vs 8 regular warzones everyday, and pretty much decimate everyone they are up against, unless they happen to be against another four-man premade (which is very rare in a imp vs pub match). When some of these particular imp premade groups are queuing for regular warzones, the pub side just gets steamrolled over and over again. It's possible that these premade groups just want really easy matches, but then again it's also possible that they simply prefer 8 vs 8 over 4 vs 4, and so they have no choice but to queue for regular warzones as opposed to ranked, even though they know they aren't really going to be challenged much at all. I would think that Bioware could simply make queueing for ranked the same as queueing for regular warzones, meaning it's one queue, but it could put your team either in a 4 vs 4 ranked match or an 8 vs 8 ranked match depending upon how many players are queueing for ranked at the time.

What was Bioware's reasoning behind removing 8 vs 8 ranked and replacing it exclusively with 4 vs 4 ranked (arenas)? Why didn't Bioware just add 4 vs 4 ranked in addition to 8 vs 8 ranked?

I'll do you one better: Rule #1 of pugs: if a person on the enemy team is marked, immediately remove the marker and do NOT ever attack them. They are clearly not a healer (even if they are using those green abilities which heal teammates), and one of your teammates marked them only to point out the fact that they are not a healer, expecting you to remove the marker immediately upon seeing it! (yes, this has actually happened in warzones on multiple occasions)