Tracer missile does Kinetic Damage and is a tech ability, not a weapon-based ability. It ignores most defenses and a large chunk of armor mitigation. My bad though, i thought it dealt elemental damage (meaning it would have avoided all defenses, period) - since im always on fire when it hits. My bad assumption, there, but Kinetic/Tech damage is mitigated at a lower rate (mouse over your armor) - whereas a sniper's shots - all but Lethality builds - are all weapon-based and mitigated by every defense in the game.

I agree with removing the requirement on some of the attacks - there are enough incentives to be in cover anyway (immunity to interrupts, some leaps, etc, defensive buffs like dampers) to make it preferable, but with the cover requirements on any attack that doesn't hit like a noddle and a combination of all the bugs and the ease with which you are prevented from taking cover (any root will prevent it for the full duration, effectively providing the enemy with a Non-dminishing, permanent Sniper-CC) , means that you can effectively be infinitely CCed and your dps reduced to almost zero for very little cost to the enemy. Making it so you could use Snipe, Ambush and Probe outside of cover would mean that even if you got trapped out of cover, you could still do SOMETHING useful. (Particularly Ex. Probe - its got a massive cooldown anyway (far too long, imo, for the little damage it does), so who cares?), but with all the OTHER benefits cover provides, you'd still want to be in it anyway.

My primary issue here is how much you downplay heavy armor. *Most* classes you are fighting are ignoring armor, rendering the armor type irrelevant against those classes, meaning, against these classes, SNiper and Merc/Commando are relatively equal. Against the classes that DO have their attacks mitigated by Armor.. heavy Armor is stupidly good. I regularly CRIT on heavy armor targets with Ambush (and already debuffed by Shattering Shot) for less than 1/2 of what the tooltip says the NON CRIT HIT should be. Grav Round, though, ignores armor. In any Sniper v Commando/Merc fight, the Merc is going to turn the Sniper into hamburger. T. Missile/Grav Round are on a lot shorter cast than abilties the sniper has that actually do similar damage, hit harder, and ignore our defenses. Anything we try to fire back is mitigated into the ground by armor and defenses, and didn't hit as hard to begin with. It is a lot easier as a Merc/Troop to Step into LoS, pop off a quick Grav Round/Missile, step behind your stripper pole (to LoS return fire) step back out, get off another round or two before the enemy finishes their long cast, step back, etc. A sniper just cannot do that.

you will -CRY- when you run into full-PvP heavy-armor classes. i fairly regularly CRIT ambush on a debuffed target (already has the -20% Shatter Shot debuff) such as a trooper or guardian.. for 600. CRIT for 600. The tooltip says it should HIT for 2700 Sniper damage (non lethality) scales incrediby poorly... the worst of any class ive seen. You get.. maybe 2 attacks that dont get mitigated by EVERY SINGLE DEFENSE AND ARMOR. Lethality does good damage to hard targets, but lower against everyone else and is INCREDIBLY energy hungry, meaning in a sustained fight you're awful. I think Sniper is in a pretty good place defensively, IF our damage supported our relative fragility. Right now, we have a medium about of survivability and tank, but our damage is WAY too low given how vulnerable we are.

Lying doesn't suit you. Even when i break the first stun, i essentially start the fight at 30% HP or lower. There's no way to come back from that unless the other person is drooling on their keyboard.

Funny, i play a Lethality spec'ed sniper right now for PvP (Internal damage is the only viable sniper path unless you like hitting people in heavy armor for less than 1/4 of the regular damage), and i put a DoT on every other energy-user i see. Never seems to stop an Op or Smuggler from vanishing at will. They just cleanse it first.

And yet, a team with 3 healers on it will win handily over a full DPS team, with most of the healers gaining Immortal and other badges.. and a lot of bonus valor and badges from the win... enjoy your 40 WZ comms for a loss, when the team with healers gets 80-100 for the win.

There hasn't been a highly successful MMO released that was primarily focused on PvP - EVER. Guild Wars avoids a PvP stat by having two entirely separate games. Entirely separate. Every skill does something different. It's two different games, that are tied together by the same engine. EVE's PvP is the #1 reason new players to EVE quit playing. It is so brutal that it is one of the things CCP cited at their panels at Dragon*Con this year as a reason why the game is still so niche. CCP is successful, given their limited fanbase, but considering they just closed their US office due to failing profits... yeah. As to why Expertise needs to exist: To make up for PvP/PvE stat imbalances that do, in fact, exist, and need to exist. As raid tiers progress, and difficulty, perforce, progresses, PvE gear will scale exponentially - it has to, to keep up with bosses that might literally have 2-3x as much health as an entry level raid boss. At the same time, player health pools simply DO NOT scale thusly, and CANNOT, due to the way items are built. If you DONT implement a "PvP stat", you get Vanilla WoW: Hardcore raiders in their T3 or the few no-lifes or cheaters who had HWL/GM gear 3-shotting everyone else with impugnity. It's not a matter of opinion, man, it's MATH. Now, if anything, the bonus damage and healing from Expertise needs to go, and the damage reduction needs to be slightly buffed, and it needs to be ONLY a damage reducer. Also, other PvP issues prevent it from being that serious, anyway. Try playing a Marskman Sniper or a saber-wielding melee dps. Having 90% of your damage mitigated by every defensive stat in the game AND armor, while other classes (Sage, Pyrotechs, Ops/Smuggler) have their damage IGNORE all armor and defensive stats... is fair. Right?

Not but the UI can display all sorts of stuff at the wrong time. My wife and I, sitting in the same room, have had the UI display different scores at the exact same time. Ive been on my trooper and showed the Imperials ahead (by 5) and my wife's machine (as her sorceror) showed the scores equal. I see people still moving around, when she sees them already dead. Bad UI is bad. No one's arguing that.

Trying to pretend like this is the issue this thread is discussing is amusing. Reading is hard. No one is disagreeing about the fact that the guns should all be neutral-facing.

Yeah, its a giant conspiracy. The world is out to get you. ... do you realize how absolutely absurd you sound? What *possible* motivation could Bioware possibly have to give one side an advantage over the other? Occam's Razor. you should look it up. One of the guns faces the republic ship, one of the guns faces completely away from either ship (center i believe) and one faces the imperial ship. I usually cap the east node, and that one is facing the imperial ship at the start of the game, or at the very least neutral, because it always takes time to spin into position before firing. The western gun, i b elieve, faces the imperial ship or is neutral. Now, im not arguing that the guns shouldn't all be neutral, but that is such a trivial thing. How about you just.. dont let them cap it. It isn't hard to prevent a cap. As a lethality sniper, i can keep 4 guys off the node.. forever.

Or you could learn to read. Too hard? Ill sumarize again for you: you capped a node. It took a few seconds to spin into position. The imps capped a node, THAT WAS ALREADY FACING YOUR SHIP, so they instantly got the points. Thus, they scored before you. Easily reproducable. And it can happen in both directions. One of the guns faces the imperial s hip to start, but usually that's the one the imps cap (at least on Port Nowhere). BTW, im not trying to just cover up a bug. I play on both sides (ive got a trooper that i play some IRL friends who didnt want to be empire), on Port Nowhere. Ive reproduced it on both sides. Ive got nothing to gain by covering up something that would screw me on my second character. Tinfoil hats. Take em off. edit: Id rather they spent their time dealing with real, game-breaking exploits and bugs, like: - the door exploit on Voidstar, where you can become untargetable and cap or prevent caps on th e door literally forever. - the through-the-pillar bridge control exploit on voidstar. - the middle-cap exploit on Alderaan where you can stand on the building and cap it through the floor by spinning your camera through the structure. (You have to edit your ini file to allow you to get more camera distance, but it is possible). - the LoS bug caused by the ball stand in Huttball. - the "strategy" of denying your enemy the score in Huttball by gripping them up into your safe zone, instantly killing them, when they are two pixels from scoring on you. - exploiting the LoS caused by the gun controls in Alderaan that prevents some AoE from htting you. (The sniper supressive fire, for instance, wont hit enemies that are behind objects, and standing on the gun control removes you from LoS, so the AoE wont hit you) allowing you to cap even when the enemy is AoEing you. All of those are much bigger problems exploited by BOTH SIDES of the community that need to be fixed.

I have tested it myself. As an Imperial (Sniper, Port Nowhere) i just LOST A GAME because of this 'bug' (btw, it isn't a bug). Seriously, we lost 5 to 0. That close. What is happening is this: (and it can be reproduced fairly reliably *if* you can manage to cap a turret *just* before the global score pulse) - when you cap a turret, you get a "bonus" tick the moment the gun spins into position and opens fire. *Usually* this is happening during the relatively longish downtime between global score pulses, so you dont notice it. It just *happened* to occur in the split second before the global score pulse, so what you saw was: bonus pulse for gaining control of the gun followed IMMEDIATELY by the global score pulse. Since the cannons dont all face the same direction on the start (which is just dumb, ill give you that), sometimes the imperials OR the pubs can get the bonus tick instantly if the cannon they capture is already facing the enemey ship. It's not a bug, it's not a conspiracy. Take off the tinfoil hats.

Ive got no idea how this is possible. I'm Armstech/Scavenging/Investigation. My skills were higher level than I was the entire time i was leveling. Just from questing and space missions (the dalies) i was *easily* able to afford all my skills, afford my speeder skill at 25, the speeder itself, and have plenty of cash left over. I didn't buy the 100% speeder skill the moment i hit 40 -though i had plenty of money to do so - just because it didn't seem worth it when i didn't know how much money i'd need as i approached 50. I hit 50 with over a million in my bank. A *MILLION*. I bought a nice set of purple implants for 50k each, grabbed level 50 purple armoring, mods, and enhancements for all my gear, and then bought the speeder skills. I still had 200k left over after all of that. Ive been doing dalies for the last. .10 or 11 days, and i now have 1.5 million and nothing to spend it on. ALl my skills are maxed. Money is NOT hard to come by in this game, and if you think it is, you're doing something wrong. Tip: craft stuff to level your trade skills, then VENDOR IT. Youll make buttloads of cash.

Thats not in the 1.1 patchnotes. What's in the 1.1 patchnotes is that removing those mods via unintended bugs is now closed. All that was promised was "in the future" all mods will be removeable and set bonus' transferable. There is still no way for crafters to make those mods either - im Armstech, and the best barrel i can make is a Mastercrafted 22 (rating 124), my Champion's gun is 136. Crafters are entirely frozen out of the endgame unless they make earpieces, implants, or other biochem parts.

Since hard mode raid or champion's gear has level 56 mods that cant be removed, that cant be obtained any other way, as well as set bonuses, then no, they dont become the best gear in the game. 28 of a rating does not beat 5 item levels on all three mods and a set bonus. What it would do is keep them in the ballpark, however, as currently, at end game, after being able to fully mod your gear for viability for 49 levels, you dont get to do that anymore at 50.

Except it isnt. Disengage always works (because it targets you). Cover pulse frequently, very frequently, fails, because it is cast on others, and resolve renders them immune (among other annoying bugs).

Since the game doesn't support Direct X 10 or 11, you were never running the game in either of those modes. Game supports Direct X 9, only.

I didn't misrepresent it at all. Most of our abilities are *multipliers* of our weapon damage. 50 damage difference is 100-250 damage on a lot of shots. I found this out the hard way, when a really cool looking blaster rifle dropped in a FP and i wanted to use it. I made a new barrell for it (yay me) of the same rating as my sniper rifle... and immediately noticed while out fighting mobs that i was hitting *significantly* less hard.

It's not about "Squeezing every last erg of damage". It's extremely noticable. Hundreds of damage per shot less.

Of course, neither is ever killing anything. You think MM damage is low, wait till you see massive 150 damage COrrosive Dart ticks rocking your enemy's socks off.

Who knows? I have no problems with a six-core processor and high end ram and a one-generation old high end card. None. Who knows what other variables there are invovled in your machine? how many background processes do you have running? what motherboard chipset? firmware updated? BIOS updated? A problem with the specific build of driver installed? For every device that needs one on your computer? This is windows. ANYTHING could be wrong on your rig that causes zero problems with other games but causes the one conflict somewhere that slows SWTOR down.

Right, but that in and of itself might be an issue. If something about the install process is disabling SLI or messing with settings on systems like this - then the other people having issues might be having issues because something changed and they didnt think to look at it. If you had enabled SLI last week, why would you bother to look this week to make sure it was enabled, since you know you didn't disable it? Something about the way the SLI drivers interract might have caused issues with it disabled. I'm running a single-card solution and have never had a single framerate problem other than Fleet, and i dont know that i call that a "problem" - i mean, 300 people in one relatively small area is going to cause slowdown. It just is. Even then i still get 30fps (i play with Vsync enabled) solid in Fleet, so im not complaining. My wife runs my old machine, (For reference, im running a Westmere Xeon, Hexacore, @ 3.06Ghz and a Radeon 5870, 12GB of RAM; she's running the old machine, two dual-core Woodcrest Xeon's @ 2.66Ghz w/Radeon 4870 and 8GB of RAM) and she has similarly never had a single problem. She gets a solid 60fps with most settings on high everywhere but Fleet. (For reference, the Westmere chips are i7 based, the Woodcrest are C2D). A friend of ours who has a similarly beefy rig (Core i7, lots of ram, single-card nVidia high end solution, unsure exactly what) also has no issues. Another friend of ours who IS having issues and has an almost identical rig - you guessed it - has two cards. I just sent him a text to check his SLI settings and see if something has changed. My money is on something like this being the culprit.

SLI/Crossfire being a culprit wouldn't surprise me one bit.

This is wrong; i have a Champion sniper rifle. Yes, you can still use a Blaster Rifle.. if you want to deal less damage. At the same ratings, the two guns do different damage. See the following links: http://knotor.com/items/635737 - Champ's blaster rifle, rating 136, top end damage: 453 http://knotor.com/items/635738 - Champ's sniper rifle, rating 136, top end damage: 499 Almost every single shot you have is based off of your weapon damage. Using a blaster rifle will lower your damage. Blaster Rifle's are for Operatives.