Deception until 30's, after that darkness start to become rather good (slow killing but take the healer compaion and you're near invincible during leveling). Both work really well for leveling. Madness takes good situationall awareness as you have to keep trap of a crapload of stuff going on (you got 8 abilities in your rotation, procs to track aswell as dots to track for refreshing at 50 not to mention "buff" abilities like recklessness and force shroud). wouldnt recommend madness unless you're good at tracking stuff until they improve the UI and makes it easier to track DoT's and procs.

Lethality raiding is just fine, you get more mobility but you're more reliant on your poison dots as a trade. Im using a hybrid engi/lethality spec and do some crazy dps. Only problem i have is 1: expl. probe still require cover (full leth dont have this issue) 2: short term fights kills my energy regen unless i just lob frag grenades and do AoE. (this isnt a problem on boss fights though). Still, the mobility i gain is great, and keeps up my dps in movement heavy fights. And my dps is quite good to boot. In short: its viable. Just make sure you got a minimum crit of 40% and you're good. as for burst: not really needed during boss fights, you still got snipe/Series of shot to kill any adds that may spawn (1st boss karaggas palace ex.) and for trash clearing you can either AoE or just focus on a high hp/priority mob. For mind traps on SoA you can get 2 rotations off at them with no problem.

Depends on your spec tbh. but use explosive probe right after Ambush OR Snipe. (it'll land on the target right before snipe/ambush hits despite being used right after). Use laze target before the snipe. Before commenting further, tell us something about your spec first =) (torhead got a talent calculator if you want to link it). oh and your level.

just answered a similar topic. http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#400bsrbdZrI0bRRbRZh.1 go imperial metholodogy first in engineering. Once you got it, take 6% crit talent in lethality. THen focus on marksman for snipe/sos damage and accuracy + some defensive boosts if you want them. (you should get distraction). Either way 16 points to engineering (lvl 25) 3 points lethality (lvl 28) 5 points MM (lvl 33) after that you can pretty much choose where to go yourself. Granted i recommend ballistic dampeners + distraction from MM atleast.

Engineering rocks at early level until end of time. Reason is all the good talents they get straight of the bat (+10 energy, +9% cunning, reduced CD for frag grenade/flash bang, improved aoe damage and explosive probe damage, interrogation probe etc etc). When i leveled my sniper i went up and including last cluster bomb talent in eng. THen picked up the 6% crit talent in lethality before i took the accuracy and snipe/cull/sos? damage talent in marksman. After that 20% armor red. to ambush and the 1 sec shaveoff on its charge time from snipe/SoS crits. at lvl 42'ish i went marksman, and at 50 i swapped to lethality once i had enough crit. Leveling spec does NOT equal "endgame" spec (aka 50). A more chaotic, spread out spec is often better for leveling than a "x/31/x" spec. Check the talents, what they offer, and which abilities you use. A tip for "Hard fights". Get distraction from MM, its golden. An example of spec: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#400bsrbdZrI0bRRbRZh.1 Go for imperial methodology first, then swap to lethality for its crit talent, then marksman for acuracy/snipe/sos damage talents. After that its up to the player to decide. Bring enough damage to bring down anything, with abit of defensive oomph when needed. Again this is a leveling spec, do not count on it for lvl 50.

Find a high hp elite, bring a healer. Kill it with one spec as if killing a boss. THen repeat it with the other spec. See which died faster of the 2. Your questione had gotten a answer. Not a definite answer like stats nor meters, but a answer nontheless Afterwards remember to take into consideration factors like movement, cover and so on.

You dont use snipe or ambush as a lethality, snipe is generally to costly and ambush got too long cast time. You might use snipe IF you want extra damage fast and can drop cover aswell as spare the energy.

just to add: knock a marksman/engineer specced sniper out of cover (with any cc ability) and they're nearly defenseless and useless. They got entrench, but it lasts "only" 20 sec with 1 min CD, forces them to stay immobile for its duration to keep it (if they move they loose the buff). As such decent players will simply LoS the sniper until entrench wears off, then come back and knock the sniper out of cover before proceeeding to trash him/her. Just to note that all main marksman abilities requires cover. Same for Engineer except for their AoE. Cover is our greatest strength and our greatest weakness as marksman/engineer sniper. Sadly the weaknesses vastly outdo its strengths. In PvE: In boss fights (talking HM FP and Ops especially) that requires movement, marksman/engineer snipers become next to useless. (Bonus boss boarding party, Soa hardmode phase 2/3, directive 7 last boss is 3 examples of this.) Cover is a good idea, but a really bad design in a MMO game as it currently is. On a sidenote: Lethality works well in both pvp and pve since its not dependant on cover. on the downside it requires cull to be actual useful, with high amount of crit to prevent energy starvation.

To flesh out that: He's lvl 43 so be aware of 2 things. 1: You'll loose some defensive abilities, go 31 pt lethality, then get the 10 energy/9% cunning from engineer before getting damage to snipe/cull etc from marksman. At his level he got 34 skill points. even so go full leth, (31 pts) then flesh out the 2 engineer skills before finishing with marksman (last 3 can be spent on more accuracy for pve if you want) at 50 you'll want to change your spec and flesh it out more toward lvl 50 pvp. 2: Lethality depends majorly on critical hits, low critical rating equals bad energy regen. He should be made aware of this. He can run into the risk of starving himself having to spend time to regen, pop adrenaline probe or just fire rifle shot if eithe rof the first two is not an option. That said: Lethality is the best PvP spec atm for snipers. (bar people who use engineering for control purposes).

It was a response to "fun" abilities. never said anythign about its usefulness. Still it is useful, learn to time it aswell as placing it near tag objects in alderaan f.ex. it does 3k crits a pop for me (i got 15% AoE talent but not the crit damage one). That would be near 4k a pop with the 30% crit talent.

...and reset all class story titles and the class story quests itself. + a once per 3 month limit (with a 2 times within a day "in case of missclick or regret"). Right now i'd say "Why not?". I would say "no" earlier, but with the problems as is "why not"

There are plans to fight the problems with combat mechanics, wether it'll solve the problems with cover i do not know. It should atleast fix the unresponsivness of taking cover and trying to use abilities before the opponent knock you to hell and yonder or stun you to japan.

Series of shot does more damage than ambush (its the heaviest single target hitter a engineer/marksman got in terms of damage done regardless of channel/charge/instant with the exeption of orbital strike). The downside is that its channeled for 3 sec. Meaning you can pump out more damage with other abilities in the same time period. Use it either as a opener to whittle away some HP on the target, on low hp targets to finish them off without causing core abilities to go on CD. Or when nothing else thats better is avaible (filler basically). Just remember, its dots linger after its done shooting, you might be able to take advantage of this. In PvE its good, open up with ambush/snipe -> explosive probe. Then follow up with series of shot to proc the probes cluster bombs for example.

I was Armstech while leveling, making barrels to keep my sniper rifle up to date which was dandy. I got myself full orange gear as fast as i could, used commendation tokens to buy orange gear, stripped its mods and added it to my orange gear. sometimes swapping out some orange pieces. I used the GTN actively to get cunning mods/armouring and dps based enhancement for my orange gear. Lastly i made sure i did every FP atleast once, this is more RNG based but it did help gearing up. Credit wise mods on GTN is fairly cheap, you can swap it every 5th level if not bit later. Swapping out mods can be abit costly though (taking mods from token orange gear) but use the GTN actively and you shouldnt run into trouble (aka make good items and GTN them.) When you hit Voss, you should start prepearing for HM FP's if you plan to do those. Voss commendation gear count as lvl 46/48. Belsavis as 44/45, corellia as 48/50. Try to do HC quests as often as you can for tokens edit: before i forget! PVP!! For equiptment there's 2 tiers: LvL 20 and LvL 40. Nice way to gear up at those stages. For Weapons, there's several tiers starting at 20? and up beyond 40. This gear only cost war zone tokens, and is easy to get. Downside is that you might want to save war zone tokens, convert it to mercenary tokens when nearing the limit to buy champion gear spoil bags for lvl 50 pvp/pve (PvP gear is useful for PvE when gearing up!)

Most melee (this count for healers too) got interruptable abilities. Learn which do alot of damage and which does not and use your interrupt accordingly. About melee who use their "defensive CD's", run away. abuse LoS, drop down a level, run around pillars and try to confuse him. Just stay away and try to take minimal damage during this time. Once their CD's wears off, take them down. Learn how to handle resolve. When to use your stuns/roots. Getting debilirate talent is a good option since it adds a short time speed boost when using debilirate. Know when to use your CC break and when not to, dont use it on easy to break or short duration CC, use it on their harder CC or when absolutely necessary.