It's pretty simple when you think about it, there's something mara's/juggs have to do that no other class does. Warm-up That's it in a nutshell. Every other class starts out with full force/full energy bar/empty heat bar(abilities cause heat), we start out with an empty rage bar, and have to build it to use our higher end combos and attacks, often to full in order to do a full/top end rotation. This also includes fury, of which we can instantly fill it up only once every 2minutes 15 seconds(gear+skill tree expertise) to 3 minutes. Snipers and some other classes have to use 1-3 abilities to get some buffs up to do some of their best rotations, however we have to do 3 abilities to build up rage to use 3+ more abilities to build up buffs to do our best rotations. While we do our 6x1.5second=9 seconds of abilities to prep up for our best rotation, other classes have done their rotation already. Fundamentally we have to have rage built up before we can be on par with everyone else. So starting out in huttball mara's are innatly behind in dps until the first kill or until they've beat on someone to get full rage then move onto another target, where any other class is already ahead of the game. What I would like to see is channel hatred build our rage pool to 12 if you let it run its full duration. It can still wear off at the same speed. I think it by itself would help bring us in par. You can't use it while in combat anyway so the only "advantage" would be to bring us on par with everyone else. Just my 2 cents anyway.

want something that will really screw with your heads? shii-cho form carnage build: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#1000cZGGrM00roMZGMRrz.1 near free force scream, on reduced cooldown, gore+vicious slash spam, with berserk making vicous/slash spam free and give a 1 rage refund every hit Designed to build up and use little rage to provide sustained dps, with some root from deadily throw and obliterate to keep you on your target. More of a moderate/sustained burst then a high burst short-lived spec. Not terribly effective but a viable hybrid.

im so tired of the whole rage is the way to go argument in marauders. Yeah do rage, geared up it does great!.... for a pure DPS class, the SHARED tree does our BEST, when JUGGERNAUTS who are TANK/DPS HYBRIDS can do the SAME damage only 30% BETTER because of a class only expertise. Let me do the math, pure dps class x damage, tank/dps hybrid class x*1.3. I thought pure dps was supposed to be stronger? Just because its useable doesn't mean it's working as intended!

I like the changes so far to the way cyber/biochem works, but I also noted that some of the high end crafts of these crew skills are only useable if you have that crew skill maxed out. Which lead to the become biochem or get out mentality in some guilds etc... I see it as another way to make your character more unique and defined. What I see needs changed is a similar setup with the other crew skills. for example being 400 in artifice allows you to build slightly better lightsabers(hilts specifically) then anyone else without artificing, that only an artificer can use, as long as you keep your skill, improving your damage. Same for armstech with barrels. Synthweaving and armortech can build better armor protection for themselves that others couldn't use. so if you go that route you can further define your character by improving damage, or improving defenses, improving self healing, improving utiltiy with grenades and so forth. It's adding essentially another level of expertise to your character design that might further pull you away from the bandwagon. Whats everyone's thoughts on that? Since any class can pick and choose as long as the improvements are marginal and balanced right I don't see any issues. Yeah everyone might get a little more damage(~1-2%), some might get that same increase in defense or biochem for healing etc..

it's too early in the day for buffs

speccing annihlator in combo with quinn should help, anni has 2 ways to provide heals, both via dots. One is the expertise that if you crit with your bleeds it also heals you, so if you land a crit on a bleed, each tick of the bleed until it wears off heals you. You can also hit berserk(at 30 fury) if it's up and every bleed/dot period heals you AND your group for 100% of the damage done on the bleeds as well. That is where the extra "survivability" comes from when they say annih is good for operations and flashpoints etc. Plus its easier to maintain a moderatly high dps sustained for a period of time with annih whereas carnage and rage are for kill it quick then rest. So combine pro-longed heal over time with pro-longed damage and its a good pve combo for the difficult critters.

even charge+choke+smash would be somewhere around 6-8k depending on talents, also does smash give a 2.25 bonus instead of just 2? technically its 25% per tick, and crush does 5 tickets instead of choke's 4, but I don't know if it caps out at 100% or 125, in which it would hit even a little bit harder. (what's really sad is juggs do even more damage with rage then mara's do, and this is our best burst dps tree..)

Dear god that is worse then I thought it was. At least we have some numbers to go by and hopefully BW will read this far into this post, cause that is a huge problem that needs addressed, as well as a place to start anyway.

You can do the hilts, the crystals, and the enhancement slots, the mods I've not been able to make yet, not sure if we ever do it might be an armstech thing.

Yeah thats what I've started doing now, I'm 36 with 248 artifice, 254 arch and 400 th, and my class quests are at lvl 40/41 right now so i've been trying to do just pvp and artificing to get up to my level in lightsaber to try and reverse to purple and essentially do the same thing, I started at 0 artificing though so, so far I've sucked in about 12 hrs grinding that up, and for the most part I've been on loosing huttball matches so money from pvp to support it has been very lacking. Space mission dailies help though too. As for the youtube post, despite the fighitng sub-lvl 50's thats probably the best one I've seen yet, at least he is solo in majority of those fights which is a huge bonus. I've seen soo many videos of here is how awesome marauder is, I'm killing things with 2 other allies helping me in addition to them having half life to start with!

This, going back to the equipment point, it makes a huge difference, but its a time/money sink involved in making your class as easy to grind as any other dps class on the imperial side =p thats the only true issue @katastrophe, if you expect to roll the class and grind through it purely by loot and rewards, especially if your someone who doesn't like the side quests and tries to focus on just doing the class quests thats where you will have the most problems and complaints, as other classes ie sorc can go through mostly just class and occasional side quests as needed with 1/10th as many problems and issues. It's not that you "CAN'T" do it, its everyone else can do it better!

I wish we did have it, but sadly like force pull is sith assassin specific, force push is juggernaut specific.

what level were you? what level was baras? what gear was on you/pierce? kinda silly to say that without any useful information to describe how epic it was! =p I soloed jaesa's master through every fight too! and I used vette! It's not as epic if I said he was lvl 35 and I was lvl 36, it is more epic if I said I did it as a lvl 32 and he was lvl 35 etc...

torhead numbers issue aside I'm not convinced your numbers are right either, if you were doing 14k burst dps, hell with rage pre-built up(not hard to do) lets add another 4, 18k burst dps. Then carnage marauders should able to walk up and destroy someone within 6-7 seconds. You would be seeing the equal number of scoundral hate threads to marauder hate threads in terms of pvp domination. Even with armor reduction you only need to score ~12k burst post redux, that's a 33% reduction which is more then most classes have. I've yet to see a carnage spec do that to anyone of equal level. Then what your on a 12 second cooldown before starting the rotation over? Rage can start it instanty using the force crush and charge instead of obliterate and choke, though would be slower the 2nd time around and not quite as high, I think your still doing more dps/cc overall rage then carnage. Until some numbers get proven reliable there's no end to the argument.

Yeah I had a upper 20's assassin, and a upper 30's sniper and a bh in the upper 20's in beta and the shear effectiveness sub-50 is night and day vs other dps classes. I can't personally vouch for lvl 50 yet but from what I've seen I've yet to be impressed. I'm just hoping to be in place when some changes come through.