Which means absolutely nothing. If I sell you a brand-new TV and put a sticker on it saying "TV-watching experience may change", then you take it home and the only channel it'll show is PBS, I can't point to that sticker to get out of having to refund your purchase. There are basic unspoken expectations in any purchase, which hold a lot of power despite not being explicit. (Take the "lemon law" most states have for buying used cars as an example.) EULA's haven't really been challenged in courts yet, and when they do they'll fall apart like wet kleenex since plenty of the stuff in them is legally weak. I'm not saying SWTOR has voilated the agreement, but you can't just say that we're wrong to complain just because we agreed to that EULA. Regardless, the question of whether we Operatives should stay subscribed is not affected by any EULA. They stopped providing me with a fun gameplay experience, I stopped providing them with money. I'll keep an eye on SWTOR to see if they realize their mistakes soon enough, but Guild Wars 2 is looking better every day; for all of their other issues, there's no question that ArenaNet knows how to balance an online game that can last for years. Frankly, my big question isn't "why are the Operatives complaining?". It's "why aren't the non-Operatives worrying as well?" Having been through many, many MMOs over the years, I've learned to spot the mistakes bad developers make. Even if my main hadn't been an Operative, I'd like to think I'd have noticed Bioware's actions here and recognized the signs for what they were.

When I transferred a Columi armoring over, at first it worked just fine. It didn't show on the piece I transferred to, but when I wore it, it counted towards the set. I was definitely still getting the 4-piece set bonus of my set, even though I had 3 pieces plus a newly slotted 4th piece that had an armoring from that set. Then I logged out. When I logged in again, it no longer counted. Was this because I logged, or because of something they did in that emergency patch? Who knows. Frankly, I don't really care any more, because I unsubbed a month ago and have been playing a few hours a week (just to stay social with my guildies) waiting for my subscription to run out. This is just yet another thing that the devs promised us and then didn't deliver. And for all the apologists, they DID promise us that set bonuses would transfer; there was even a direct question about that in a Q&A. There were no qualifiers on it, no "only on the new sets", it was a flat "yes, you can do that" answer. So, either they lied to us back then, or they've implemented a completely broken mechanism despite it being on the Test Server for several weeks. Neither of those options is very flattering to them.

Move out of AoE. Move back into melee range after a big knockback. Move away from the suicidal mouse droids that got past the AoEers. Move to attack the adds that just appeared before they take down the squishies. Move away from the big robot while you wait for the jet of fire to come down from the ceiling. Move back into melee range after a vortex attack that caused you to get sucked over to the position of an ally. Move away from melee range so that you can faceplant into a lightning ball instead of killing half your raid. Move back into melee range after getting stuck in a mind trap, or move to kill the mind trap that just captured your raid's best healer. Move to the next fairly weak enemy while your teammate tries to activate an ancient pillar. Move to a new position so that you can still be behind the boss after he focuses on someone new because he's got an incredibly shallow aggro pool. Move to where your AoE healers are so that you can stay alive during a missile barrage, and then move back into attack position afterwards. Move to kill carbonizing probes while the boss who's most vulnerable to melee attacks is waiting up on the ceiling. Move towards Soa after the pillar removed his invulnerability. Any of this sound familiar? Nearly EVERY boss in the current raids creates a situation in which a gap closer is a tremendous boost to damage efficiency, and without one a melee DPSer falls far behind the ranged types.

Same thing here. This morning, the first thing I hear after logging in is one of my guildmates complaining that Conceal Ops were still way too strong because one had just killed him. It won't change. We spent too long with no logging ability, and too few people ever tried out the class for themselves to see its downsides. We're the scapegoat that everyone can use to explain why THEIR class needs a buff, or why the system is broken. I had one person flat-out tell me that as a Sorc healer, he should never have to worry about being killed straight from stealth, because that's not how the game is supposed to be played. Just part of the reason I canceled.

Surge didn't get changed. Your items did. They redesigned some item sets to include more useful stats, and existing copies were changed on Live as long as you hadn't swapped the mods in and out before the patch went live. So that 390 you have now was probably 360 before the patch, or something similar, and you've lost 30 points from some other stat to compensate (possibly Accuracy). The ONLY stat whose equation changed was Expertise. As for the rest of your statement? Even if Expertise made up for the drop in DPS (and by definition, that's only in PvP that it changed, leaving us PvEers even worse off), everyone else got that boost as well and didn't have any offsetting damage nerfs. So maybe you can kill a target as fast as you used to (which I doubt), but that Marauder or Mercenary over there can do it even faster than before.

The only differences between the Operative and the Scoundrel: 1> The Operative uses a knife as his offhand stat stick and a Scoundrel uses a shotgun as his offhand stat stick. 2> Apparently, a couple specific Scoundrel attacks use a longer animation than their Operative counterparts, but this is supposedly getting fixed. 3> Operatives have a better story, better voice actors, and a cooler spaceship. 4> Operatives are part of the Sith Empire, which is inherently superior to that namby-pamby Republic. In terms of actual play, there's basically no difference at all.

All we really need is for them to do one of the following three things: 1> Add a Power/Crit enhancement. 2> Give us a reason to take Accuracy. Given that tech attacks start at 100% and almost no one has tech resistance, there's no point. But if excess Accuracy reduced Armor (and not just Defense) then we'd be happy to keep it. 3> Give us a reason to take Alacrity. As in, have it reduce the cooldowns of our long-cooldown abilities, instead of only modifying cast times (which we don't generally have). Any one of those would fix ths problem.

Exactly. All of you "L2P" folks really need to stop deluding yourself that the only people leaving are those who aren't competent to play the class. Some of us have played a LOT of MMOs, and can see the signs of a bad development team based on our past experiences. Good developers don't break PvE because of PvP imbalances. Good developers don't use "metrics" to balance everything, and actually play the game to see if things are in fact balanced in practice. And good developers don't keep nerfing the stealthy burst class because they're afraid of "teams of Operatives" stunlocking the larger population of sorcerers/sages and forcing them to ragequit the game. Is the Concealment Operative still playable after the past five sets of nerfs? Sure. Will they still be playable in 1.2? No doubt. But will they be a better choice for a PvE Operation than any other DPS class? Absolutely not; they won't even be as good as they are now, and right now they're pretty far behind the other classes. The changes going live in 1.2 make our sustained damage even worse than it is now, which is already pretty pathetic compared to any other DPS class. That's just bad design, and no amount of tweaking our rotations is going to make that okay. Some of us are just smart enough to see this and recognize it for what it is, instead of bragging about how we'll be just fine and all the quitters are just bad players.

I'll be rolling a member of the "person who plays other games" class. I don't PvP, and I wanted Concealment Operative for all sorts of reasons (cool ship, good story, able to stealth, able to spot-heal), and yet my class has been nerfed over and over again because of reasons that have nothing to do with me or my playstyle. I play a game to enjoy my time. Operative DPS just feels like a constant struggle against the mechanics, while my Sorcerer's abilities just flow together smoothly, and the 1.2 changes make it substantially harder to play a Conceal well. Sure, the really good players can still play well enough, but I shouldn't HAVE to time everything perfectly to feel like I'm contributing to a group. I'm not quitting because I can't play, I'm quitting because I no longer have any confidence in Bioware's ability to balance an MMO; the fact that it happened to my class just made me disillusioned more quickly, but I'd like to think that I'd have noticed how they've treated Operatives if I'd picked some other class.

They've added two more small patches to 1.2 since the original. One helped the Lethality folks out a little by allowing their DoTs to persist a bit after being cleansed, but other than that there've been no changes at all to what they're implementing in 1.2. It looks like all of the nerfs to Concealment are going to go in as-is.

It boosts both Defense (melee and ranged attacks) and Resistance (tech and force attacks) by 1% per rank. A couple percent won't make or break anything, but it's a nice little extra. Of course, Tech and Force attacks start at 100% accuracy instead of 90%, so if your opponents have even a little Accuracy on their gear(and who doesn't?) it won't make any difference in PvP, but in PvE it's come up from time to time. As for the original question, as others have said, Infiltrator's speed buff just doesn't stack with sprint. Being in combat, you'll move at 115% speed out of stealth and 100% in stealth (assuming 3 ranks), versus the 100% and 85% you'd have without that talent. Yes, that means it offsets the stealth 15% penalty in combat, but it's not ONLY when stealthed. As I've said in other threads, I'd love to see them just ditch the +1 stealth level and instead double the speed to +10% per rank on that skill. That'd put us at 130% out-of-stealth, nearly as fast as we move sprinting, and 115% in stealth, which'd allow us to catch up to a moving target in PvP without breaking stealth. If we had that, I'd honestly be okay with no gap closer, and since it's a second-tier skill it wouldn't only be available to Conceals. At that speed we wouldn't have nearly as much lost time on PvE Operations, assuming they fix the positioning bugs that keep us from backstabbing. Sure, the loss of three stealth levels would hurt in non-raid PvE, especially soloing, but that's what Sneak is for. Against bosses we never used stealth much anyway, and if your entire group can't stealth then you'll generally fight everything along the way. If Assassins kept the same +1/+5% effect on their own talent, it'd balance nicely; remember that for Assassins, the stealth detection skill (their equivalent of our Scouting) is in the tanking tree, not the stealth tree, so while we might not be as sneaky, we'd have a better chance of spotting other stealth users than they would. And their Force Speed would make up for them capping at 115% instead of our 130 in PvE, too. Of course, the devs would never take that suggestion. First, because they never even read anything related to Operatives, and second, because I canceled my subscription already.

Who said you can't use an Acid Blade? You ARE aware that you can start the fight, in stealth, with a Hidden Strike, right? In fact, if you move fast enough, you can often even get a Backstab in on that first burst as well (since the NPC starts in a crouch facing away from you), but that's really not intended I think. Sure, you can't Backstab once the fight's well underway, and our "rotation" basically boils down to Shiv, Laceration, and Corrosive Dart, but when you're facing an enemy with 45000 HP (the medium-HP ones on Normal), being able to knock a good ten thousand off in the first burst, plus an armor penetration buff for the first 15s (that's TEN attacks), can make a big difference as to how quickly we finish the fight. It's not so great against the high-HP ones, but the mediums and lows are easy kills. And remember, a Hidden Strike generates a TA, so that's one extra Laceration in your opening burst; you generally won't drop down to the weak sustained rotation until after those first 15 seconds, and by then you'll have knocked a good twenty thousand HP off the target at least. Ah, so you're just an idiot who can't read. Gotcha. Let me spell it out for you again. > Incisive Action (Medicine tree, first tier), with 2 ranks, reduces the cooldown time of Kolto Injection by 0.5 seconds and gives you a TA every time you use it. I explicitly said that I picked this Talent instead of Slip Away (which, while incredibly useful in solo PvE and PvP, is pretty much worthless in Operations or against flashpoint bosses). This completely changes the dynamic of a 1-on-1 PvE fight, like the Council. > That extra TA can be used to add another Laceration attack (which does far more damage than an Overload Shot, especially when you consider the Collateral Strike and its chance of refunding a TA on a poisoned target), OR to activate a Stim Boost. So unlike the traditional 3/31/7 PvE spec, my 5/31/5 can GAIN in effectiveness by healing between damage bursts, instead of solely hurting my DPS/energy to do so. This also means that in boss fights where the melees have to back away, I can actually DO something besides pew pew, something that builds up the TAs I'll need for the next round of "burst" damage. And, it means I can generate a TA before a boss fight starts to use on an early Laceration or Stim Boost, instead of having to wait until the fight's well underway to generate any TAs. > Stim Boost, besides refunding a good amount of energy over its duration, also adds an HoT to us Conceal types, restoring a nice chunk of our HP each time we use it. Being able to activate this without effectively sacrificing a Laceration is pretty darn handy. So while you'd save a little energy by using Rifle Shot during the gaps in your attacks, you'd be far better off, energy-wise, using a Kolto Injection and then using the TA it gives to grab an extra Stim Boost. Besides healing yourself for almost 10,000 HP (Revitalizers plus Injection), you GAIN energy in the process. With Incisive Action, effectively, I can refresh Stim Boost whenever it's up. Without that talent, you'd have to ruin your damage to get any stim boosts. So with the above three factors and the Hidden Strike I mentioned above, it shouldn't surprise anyone at all to hear that a Conceal DPS can finish the Council fight extremely quickly without taking any damage. If you're still having problems with those NPCs, then the problem's not with the character. Lethality builds can use a similar strategy, obviously, so it's not just Conceals (although the Revitalizers is very useful). ------------------ And finally, I explicitly mentioned the bugged NPC. In case you're unaware of this (and apparently you are), on 16-man there's often a single bugged Council member that deals the same damage as the low-HP/high-damage Council members (and at range, to boot), but who also has more HP than even the high-HP/low-damage members, over three times what he'd normally have. The thing is, the Council fight allows everyone ONE extra attack, heal, or buff before the 100% debuff kicks in. Knowing that one NPC is bugged, everyone should be prepared to throw that one extra helping hand onto whoever's soloing that bugged NPC. Heal the player, deal a big damage hit to the NPC, cast Guard on the player, and so on. So the person facing that bugged NPC doesn't actually need to WIN by himself, he just needs to survive long enough for the others to help (meaning finish their own fights and then come over to you) AND deal enough damage that those extra bits of help are enough to win. Send a healing Sorcerer against him and the Sorc will die too quickly, because while a bubble is great, their low HP and low armor class catch up FAST when you can't kite or stun your opponent. You'll die before anyone has a chance to come help. The same's often true of DPS specs that can't self-heal; no matter how good your DPS, you'll just run out of hit points too soon. Send a tank against him and he just won't be able to deal enough damage. Even with the help a pure tank often won't be able to kill him, even on Normal, even in full Rakata gear. Same goes for a lot of pure healing specs. It pretty much comes down to Mercenaries and Operatives, as the DPS specs with decent defenses who can throw a single-target self-heal. Also, since all of that NPC's big attacks are interruptible, we Operatives can keep the incoming damage from getting too out-of-hand without the usual drawbacks of a 10m interrupt and without costing a GCD. (Note that someone who's already thrown their big damage or heal to help you CAN interrupt, so once everyone else finishes their fight it'll be hard for the NPC to hit you with anything other than instants. So again, it's just a matter of can you survive long enough for them to help AND get the NPC low enough for their help to matter.) Now, maybe they'll fix the NPC. Maybe it's not bugged on Nightmare (haven't tried that). But it's hard to argue that Conceals are worthless in the Council fight when we're capable of doing things that most of the other raid members couldn't even hope to accomplish.

There's a lot more than that. Things like: > We lost 3% crit rate across the board due to the change to the Lethality talent. (That's an absolute 3%, meaning you'll go from a 38% crit rate to a 35% or something similar.) Besides just costing us 2-3% of our damage, this really hurts people like Medicine folks who depend on crits on Kolto Probe or Diagnostic Scan to gain TAs or Energy, respectively. > Due to the reworking of Culling, Waylay, etc. we now have 3 fewer talent points to spare; to take those talents and get the same abilities we had before the patch, we have to pull 3 points away from things like Inclement Conditioning or Infiltrator or something. > Laceration's Energy cost was reduced by 5, but Backstab's was increased by 5 (it's not "free" any more). On average we'll probably come out a bit ahead, energywise, except that the 2 extra GCDs we can't fill with melee attacks will now have to fill with other things, like Corrosive Dart, that cost even more energy per GCD. So we lose energy on average. > With the longer cooldown to Backstab, it also effectively gives a longer cooldown to Acid Blade's DoT damage. A longer AB cooldown means less time the target is "poisoned", which means fewer chances for Tactical Opportunity to refund a TA unless we also use Corrosive Dart (which costs a lot of Energy). And, with the change to Waylay, Acid Blade now effectively costs 2 more energy per use as well. > We lost the "giggle". There are quite a few threads over in the PTS forum discussing the specifics of each change. You should go search over there if you want to see more discussion on this topic.

I have to disagree; my Conceal does remarkably well on the Council fight, although I'll admit I've never tried it on Nightmare. I'm nearly always the first one finished within my raid, and on the bugged 16-man Normal modes (where there's one NPC with both high HP and high damage), I'm generally the one that takes on the bugged NPC. Being able to deal damage AND self-heal works remarkably well, even if my damage rotation basically boils down to Shiv, Lacerate, and Corrosive Dart. The key is that instead of the usual Slip Away talent to boost Debilitate, I instead put two points into Incisive Action, which allows my self-heals to generate TAs I can then use for Lacerations; this makes a big difference in my sustainable DPS as I'm not solely tied to Shiv as a TA generator. I'm not looking forward to 1.2, of course, and I've already canceled my subscription (36 days remaining, so I'll have time to change my mind if they re-think the changes), but on Live a well-played Conceal has no problems with the Council on normal or hard modes.

Exactly. Operatives add DPS for themselves, but they don't add a lot extra to the group beyond their DPS, which can easily be compared unfavorably to any other DPS class. Outside of damage-dealing we can spot-heal, we can combat-rez (actually pretty useful in Operations since it means a healer doesn't have to drop everything to take care of it), and... that's pretty much it. The rest of our tools are purely structured for raw damage against a single target, and most of our "utility" (stuns and such) aren't usable in Operations. But it could be so much different. Imagine if Acid Blade, instead of a +30% Armor Penetration buff for 15s on you, instead gave a stackable (max stacks 5) -10% Armor DEBUFF on the target that lasted for 30s. Not only would one Conceal Operative be handy for his ability to lay a couple armor debuffs on a raid boss by backstabbing (and through that, boost everyone else's effective damage), but you might actually want to bring two against REALLY armored bosses to ensure each boss stays at the full -50% limit. Or consider a similar change to Lethality. Imagine if Weakening Blast, instead of boosting future poison attacks' damage by 30% for 15s, instead gave the target a stackable (max stacks 5 again) -10% debuff to damage/healing dealt. Hit a healer with it and he now heals less, hit a damage-dealer and he now hurts your teammates less. Useful in PvP, although not game-breaking, and very useful in Operations for taking some of the heat off the MT and his designated healer. (Probably need to adjust the energy cost and/or cooldown, though, since this'd be a pretty substantial improvement.) We can come up with plenty of other, similar ideas. We HAVE posted many similar ideas in the past. Operatives can easily be shifted to being the debuff specialist class; we could become extremely popular in raids even if our raw, sustainable DPS was substantially lower than other classes since we'd be providing this great group benefit. But right now, all we provide is damage and we're just not that good at it.