Despite being continually nerfed by BW I've continued to play my level 50 scoundrel/scrapper. I grew up playing this character and I really have no desire to create yet more alternative characters and dump hours into them getting them to level 50, I'd rather refine/improve my scoundrel/scrapper. I don't pvp, it holds zero interest for me, thus my scrapper never did anything 'bad' or out of balance in pvp. I do enjoy playing pve and going on raids/ops/hms whatever with friends and guildmates, well at least I did until last night. Last night, 15 minutes before my designated raid time, shortly after I had rushed home and given up dinner to be available to participate I was notifed by my raid group leader that I was being dropped from the raid group and replaced with another DPS person who could do more damage and help the group avoid enrage timers and make the raid "easier". This was a guild I had been in for some time, had gone on several ops and was working my way up to full rakata or better gear (I'm mostly rakata or augmented orange at this point but still have some holes to fill in). Now I can't improve my character, no one wants me on a raid. Suffice it to say I dropped that guild like a rock because I don't want to be a part of a group that would treat someone that way. Especially after how much I've given to the guild and helped out on quests and crafting, buying a ship droid and sharing, etc. etc. in the past. I was able to get my dps up from an average of around 900 to an average of around 1200 using dps analysis tools and experimenting with re-specing my tree and altering my rotation slightly, but that still wasn't good enough. While I blame my guild for their treatment, I also blame BioWare for placing my character in that situation, where he can no longer effectively hold his own as a DPS class character. I've seen lots of suggestions about how to fix the scoundrel/scrapper style characters but haven't seen any BW participation in those topics. What I'm letting you know here is that your changes have profound effects on people and whether or not they enjoy or will continue to enjoy this game. After last night's slap in the face you can probably imagine that I don't want to continue playing this game and I'm on the edge of dropping because of it. If I've reached level 50 and can't do the flashpoints or ops, etc. to get better gear because people won't go with a character of my class, then what more is there for me to do? Dailies? How long do you think that is going to hold someone's interest? I know there will be answers like "find a better guild" but from others I am talking to, I'm not the only scrapper this has happened to. I don't want to be a burden on other players, I want to be able to hold up my end of things, but as it stands now you've made it impossible to do so in the eyes of most. I also don't want to "guild hop" and last night after I dropped my guild (one of the 3 large guilds on my server) I was invited by one of the other 2 within 15 minutes but declined because the experience had left such a bad taste in my mouth for guilds and the game I wasn't sure I wanted to join another or even continue to play the game. I'm giving it a few days to think it over but without any sign that the future would be better/brighter for the scoundrel/scrapper I don't see myself continuing much further. Here's one suggestion for you that I haven't seen made before. Tie my monthly fee to the effectiveness of my character in the game. We could have an independent 3rd party site where player classes are rated on several different points to arrive at an overall effectiveness score between 0 and 2 with 1 being that a person pays the going price for monthly access to the game. If your class gets a .5 score you pay half price, if your class gets a 2.0 score you pay double monthly. A nice simple pay for performance system. Right now a scoundrel/scrapper would be almost free every month! :) Last food for thought for you BioWare employees, if your manager told you that you had to do more work and get paid less for your job tomorrow, how many of you would keep at your jobs? For how long? That's what it is like to be a scoundrel/scrapper...

Throwing my hat into the ring on this one as well, so many negative things done to smugglers/scrappers that it almost seems like this class is going to be deleted soon.... effectively that's what is happening anyway with the lack of new smuggler/scrappers being created...

Well guess what happened to me last night? Despite respec'ing my scrapper for better dps and despite cleaning up my rotation a little to eek out some more dps (avg 1200 now), I was told by my raid leader for my group in our guild that I was being replaced by another player who could do more dps because they didn't want to hit rage timers and it would make raids easier. This was 15 frickin minutes before the raid began and something I had rushed home for to participate in and given up dinner for just so I could be treated this way because I'm playing a scrapper. Thank you BioWare, thank you for taking me away from people I had been playing with, thank you for placing me in this situation. For the record I quit that guild as I don't want to be a part of any guild that would do that to someone in that manner. I was invited to join another guild on my server within 15 minutes of word getting out that I was no longer in my guild because people know that I go around helping others whenever I can. I declined because I was so frustrated and I'm not really sure how much longer I will play this game anymore if negative things like this keep happening.

Ok thanks, I should have clarified that I was talking about fighting mobs on my own, so it seems yes I need to toss in a flash grenade or dirty kick before the backblast in those situations, but I concur that on a raid if the tank has aggro I should be able to do this rotation without issue. I'll let you know after I try it during tonight's raid. Thanks for the clarification! BTW I'm slowly moving my stuff over to augmented orange armor that I make and I can make the augment that is cunning/endurance. Should I be using that solely, or should I also get some power augments?

Ok I decided to try your new rotation: New rotation flechette round>shoot first>vital shot>back blast>blaster whip>sucker punch>quick shot> flurry of bolts And when I can get everything to land I am getting around 1200dps with a max one time of 1948dps, but overally average 1000-1200. The issue I have is that your step 4 isn't working 95% of the time. Let me explain. I stealth I load up the flechette round I shoot first At this point I'm now out of stealth and the target has spun to face me. I vital shot Now here's the problem, how do I backblast? I've drawn aggro, the target is facing me, no matter what I do, I can't get bhind the target to backblast. At this point do I skip backblast and go on with the rotation, or throw in a dirty kick, then backblast and continue the rotation? Like I said, 95% of the time I can't get backblast off. Now, IF and only IF you spec the ability to knock down on shoot first then you could get another shot off because your target would be on the ground, but I spec'd the 3/31/7 tree as described above and that specifically lacks the knock down ability of shoot first. Any assistance in getting this to work better/smoother greatly appreciated!

I'm going to throw my 2 cents in coming at this from a different angle. I'm a scrapper and trying to help my guildmates out as a "DPS" character on various ops and HM's. Yesterday I installed one of those dps logger tools to see what kind of DPS I'm doing and despite using the best possible weapons and having mostly rakata or orange augmented gear, I'm getting around 900-1000 max on the dps meter. As others have pointed out, post 1.2 I'm doing less damage and I am burning energy faster. If some other scrapper out there is doing substantially more damage in PvE I'd love to hear your rotation because I've tried several and can't seem to do any better than this. Here's the kicker, I don't give a $*()#@# about PvP. I don't want to play PvP, I've had too many bad experiences with it in the past in other games so I swore off it for swtor. Yes I know you can get valor for better pvp armor but if I'm not doing pvp then what do I care right? I can get the gear I need through HM, Ops and crafting (armormech) and from guildmates. Where I really have a problem with 1.2 is that I'm no longer a desireable DPS to take along on a HM or Ops for the rest of my guild mates. I feel like they are having to lug me along and make up for my DPS shorcomings now. There isn't any HM or Op where I need to "smuggle" everyone and sure my ability to cc 1 human and 1 droid pre-combat is nice but I can only re-cc the droid at best, and other classes can do the same. This class was originally advertised as being able to stealth in, do a butt load of damage and stealth out or walk out if you killed something. That's what the makers of this game advertised when I was selecting a class. That's simply not true anymore, several other classes can stealth in as well so that's not an advantage, and once I get in, I can't deliver an overwhelming amount of firepower, even in a limited timeframe. I also agree that having to stand behind or two the side or face an opponent for different attacks is cumbersome and slows our attacks down, especially in situations in PvE where the thing you are trying to kill is running around or getting pulled by some Jedi in the group so you have to go run back over, get positioned, reload your fletchette round and try again, etc. It simply drops your ability to do damage way down. I can't count the number of times I've gone to attack only to get the message that the positioning condition hasn't been met. Sometimes I'm standing in perfect position and it STILL gives me that message because something in the game is messed up at the moment. Like others I have hundreds and hundreds of hours into playing a scrapper, all of it PvE and post 1.2 this class is not a lot of fun to play. I grind through dailies, having to ask for assistance on Darkness on Ilum while other guild mates can solo it with their class. I have to get sneaky on Belsavis and pull a few tricks to solo, while again other classes just push their way through and move on, so the daily grind has gotten longer, the rewards have not increased, in essence I'm doing more work for less return. How many employees at Bioware would like to do more work for less pay? Please, a show of hands! No, I didn't think so. I agree with the items proposed by the OP for potential fixes. If the class isn't good for PvP as many of you are saying, I can certainly say that things have gotten worse in PvE to the point where I am at times a burden on my fellow guild mates and no one like that feeling. I would add one other potential fix to the mix: Let me re-spec as an entirely different character class, which of course will never happen because Bioware wants you to create more characters and spend more of your time and $ getting those character classes to level 50. Sorry Bioware, not going to do it just because you nerfed my scrapper. If scrapper isn't fixed by 1.3 I'll probably just drop the game altogether, which is a shame because I do like the game and I have fun with my guildmates, but that fun is getting less and less and eventually the diminishing return will cause me to leave the game and give Bioware $0 a month from that point on. Oh wait, one other thing, the scrapper nerfing is ALL MY FAULT, yes you can blame it on me. You see once upon a time I created an awesome X-Bow character in Asheron's Call (old school mmorpg for those who don't know it) and for the first few months of that game I was tearing it up and could take down anything in the game even solo'ing some things I probably shouldn't have been able to. What happened? Someone took notice and completely nerfed my X-bow character. I suspect that person was hired at Bioware and started watching my Scrapper. :)