With the loss of our critical bonus to rocket punch (perhaps justified, but with no kind of warning or justification from devs it still felt harsh and unwarranted), I've simply taken the two points I had in that talent and moved them to rebraced armor. If we're not supposed to do any damage, then another 16% armor doesn't hurt, right? This is the build I'm running now: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#301Mc0MZZGoGrdRrRhR.2 34 points may be a heavy investment into ST, but there are five points in there that I feel are invaluable for PvP, namely the speed boost from jet charge, the immobilizing effect of grapple, and the ion cell snare. I also quite simply could not live without the reduced CD on grapple, especially in Huttball. I actually feel better about my role now that we've had damage nerfed. Pre-1.3 I would occasionally get too caught up on trying to burst someone down, rather than doing what I should have been doing as a tank (debuffing, taunting, CC'ing). Now that my damage sucks I don't have to worry about that.

I'm full BM supercommando with a couple of war hero pieces (I put it in my pre-50 armor though, because the BM/WH armor is awful aesthetically). Once you get out of the mentality that you're there to be DPS'ing (and the damage nerf in 1.3 helped with this) and you're one of the most utilitarian classes out there. Taunts should always be on CD (but don't waste the AOE one on a single target unless you absolutely have to) and combined with combust, oil slick, jet charge, grapple and your CC's, and PT tanks can make life really difficult for the other side. Our shield is also very, very underrated. It's worth remembering that all warrior AC's and snipers/gunslingers-- the AC's that put out the heaviest damage-- put out a lot of white damage (snipers almost exclusively put out white damage) and this has to get through our shield and is then mitigated by armor. If you don't think it makes a difference, switch gas cylinders out for a while and see how much faster you die.

Did you guys even read what he wrote? You get jet charge at 30. You get sonic dart at 30. He's asking how to get aggro PRIOR to this. The railshot talent to generate aggro is also late 20's. I'm mostly a PvP tank and have done only a handful of flashpoints, and they were all at 50, so I don't know how much advice to give you. Death from above is a solid option, and if you have flame sweep then you have grapple, which I believe generates high threat not just on the target but on other mobs if you open with it(?). Explosive dart is also nice for AOE threat.

There's quite simply no way a tank-specced powertech hit you with a railshot for 4k. It was almost certainly a pyrotech.

Hey, I've started levelling a scrapper and I'm having fun with the build, with a couple of caveats. Firstly, getting sucker punch at 20 has made my life easier, but I'm still a little while away from getting some game-changing abilities (disappearing act and tendon blast being the big two) and a long way away from 'shoot first'. Basically, opening on people and killing them before they get away/their buddies take notice and atttack me, locking me in combat, is proving to be quite difficult for me. I'm trying to find an optimal rotation to burst people down and keep them from kiting me without the benefit of tendon blast or the shoot first stun. My questions are these: 1) Should vital shot be worked into a scrapper's opening rotation? The DoT helps with whittling their health down if used early, but it's one GCD less for the other essentials. 2) I open with backblast, due to the positioning requirement. After that I'm not sure of the optimal rotation to be using to burst them down as quickly as possible. The essentials seem to be blaster whip, dirty kick, pugnacity, and sucker punch, but how should I be prioritising these? At the moment I tend to do this: backblast>dirty kick>pistol whip> sucker punch/pugnacity... I'm not sure whether it's more important to get pugnacity up as soon as possible, or work sucker punch in for the extra damage. As I mentioned above, I'll sometimes throw a vital shot in the there, as at the moment it takes me a while to whittle enemies down.

It's astonishing how many people are deluded into thinking people will care about their goodbye thread.

Unless there's concrete evidence, you can claim hacks or lack of hacks until you're blue in the face and it really doesn't mean a thing.

Speaking as a healer, trauma is fine. Without trauma, DPS would quite simply not be able to keep up with heals of between 2.5-6k every GCD.

Yeah, surgical probe makes this class. Once you've got that plus surgical precision, you are nigh-unkillable unless you get focused hard. You certainly won't ever get 1v1'd, except if you're a fresh 50/retarded.

And BH's have railshot, unload, explosive dart and a ranged auto-attack. Plus whatever ranged options their AC gives them. Melee are completely gimped if they can't get to melee range.

I'll be doing pretty much the same. Should have a good couple of months before they work around to nerfing pyro, realising they over-nerfed ST and fixing it.

We get two free flame sweeps, which I guess(?) is a slight increase to damage. The AOE slow will be useful in VS/Huttball too. But the fact remains that this very much seems like a nerf for the sake of nerfing. It's not as if PvE tanks are going to become OP all of a sudden with their 2k rocket punch, and for PvP it's just a massive loss to DPS. And yes, we're tanks, but that DOESN'T equate to zero DPS, especially when we've only got the one ability hitting for any real damage anyway. Guardians/Juggs got screwed too, and sins (about whom everyone was QQ'ing, not only because of their survivability but ALSO their damage output) don't lose any damage at all, and they get a lovely dev blog post justifying their nerfs at least.

QFT. My hardest-hitting attack as a PT still crits for less than 2k. I, as a full tank-geared tank, have a 12-13% crit chance unbuffed (I have the operative buff from legacy, so it ends up at 17-18% but it's still not great). My operative healer has a 37% crit chance and has a stealth attack that hits for ~2k before crit, two more very hard-hitting melee attacks (that are actually tech attacks and so ignore shields) and a ranged attack that effortlessly crits for 2.5k (explosive probe). Add to this orbital strike, and for a character who is not spec'd for damage at all, he can pull pretty respectable damage. As a PT tank I either have attacks that hit for around 1k before crits, or I have channelled attacks that end up hitting for around 3k but never do, since nobody's going to stick around for the duration of flamethrower/DFA. And this would be perfectly fine. Except for the fact that my survivability is gimped by defensive stats that are mainly ignored by all but two classes.

It's a bit of a sweeping generalisation to say that Republic players lose most of the time. You're assuming what's true on your server is true on every server.

Are you sure it was the same op? They all look the same at 50. And an op can under no circumstances vanish whilst in combat twice in a row like that.

To be fair, this is completely incorrect. This patch may make us suck even more at damage, but our pull, charge, taunts and AOE debuff bring a lot to the table in any WZ.

I can see your point, and I suppose that if these changes go live I'll find out for myself what the changes do for our utility. It's just hard to wrap my head around an out-of-the-blue nerf to our most heavily talented ability (we still have the CD reset and the critical damage chance, albeit nerfed significantly). The changes to threat are irrelevant to PvP, but two instant-cast free elemental AOE attacks is nothing to sniff at, I suppose.

Not solely CD's, but marksmen get 'siege bunker' to reduce AOE damage by 60%, and engineers can talent to both significantly boost their shield probe's power and reduce its CD instantly upon activation of EMP discharge, as well as talenting a flat damage reduction when in cover and reducing the CD of ballistic shields (an amazing AOE defensive CD).

That's splitting hairs- you knew what I meant. We put talent points into the tank tree for a 100% proc on the dot from rocket punch, and a 100% chance to snare, so yes, essentially, RP/SS is talented to produce a DOT/snare effect. Semantics do not detract from the fact that RP/SS is the bread-and-butter ability of the shieldtech/shield specialist.

Not quite- it's a whole different ball game on Tatooine, and then it's back to occasionally glimpsing a member of the opposite faction. I can count on one hand the number of opposite-faction players I've seen after leaving Tatooine.

^This. If you want us to tank, let us tank by having our defences applicable against more than 30% of all attacks used in PvP. For Chrissakes, pure DPS classes like snipers/maras get amazing defensive CD's, and we're getting torn apart by Force/Tech attacks.

Are we talking about the plaza area? I've never seen a single Pub there on any of the four characters I've levelled through that area.

What safe zone? I wasn't aware there were any on Nar Shaddaa.

Exactly. So they added the AOE snare to rail shot, which is a nice buff, and then without warning or justification nerfed the hell out of our primary ability. You yourself just said it doesn't hit for amazing damage, so irrespective of what we're gaining, where's the justification for nerfing it? From a PvP perspective, do the gains really outweigh the losses?

I wonder why?! Is it because our (PT's) entire ability to mitigate damage is worthless in PvP, and now we're getting damage nerfed to really kick us in the balls?