most people understand that lightning is fun and won't expect you to be heals and the damage and utility is good, not as popular as some others but you can hold your own. assassins will get more funny looks when they dont spec tank, but it's not unheard of either. for pve there's really no reason not to do sorc, particularly if you want to dabble with both damage and heals.

/signed if it only applied to the sorc/sage's personal bubble itd be fine, but when the bubbles are spammed around by a healer its ridiculous.

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#101MMZfMRMrhddGRZMM.2 'deadly reprisal' is useless in soresu, and unless you stance dance so is 'shien form', and even 'single saber mastery' is debateale, the soresu bonus is meh for pvp, the accuracy, with as much **** as it gets in pvp, may actually be better free smashes from 'ruin' are awesome 'draining scream', well, does damage, which is nice 'decimate' from rage tree is great 'malice' from rage tree is not great, since i believe our only force abilities are smash and force scream, and especially since you ideally wouldnt use force scream without the +60% crit chance from 'savagery', which is essentially at 50 an autocrit. same thing for 'burtality' in tier 2 rage, vicious slash isnt used enough to justify the points and vicious throw should pretty much be autocrit.

definitely jetpack. and commandos could get a big ol grapple on their cannons as the mirror

crushing blow as it is now isn't that useful. the application of sunders and the threat, particularly the aoe aspect, are redundant with smash, and on top of that it has a horrible rage to damage ratio. having tinkered with various hybrids, my favorite in terms of 'flow' was immortal/rage, picking up obliterate. i like the feel of this spec because of the free force screams from obliterate, and in pvp especially the secondary gap closer/root is quite handy. this gave me the idea for a new 31-point immortal talent, a 10-meter range target area of effect root, helping pve jugg tank group threat generation as well as giving them a much lacking bit of uniquely immortal tree based utility in pvp, where currently we bring nothing more than any other jugg besides a bit more survivability, but not a whole lot more than a rage/veng speccer in soresu, and an extra stun and defensive cooldown, both on long cooldowns. i like to think of this wishlist move as 'smackdown' since i imagine the animation having the jugg doing a kind of force push like move, but slapping down rather than pushing out, and pounding the targeted area with the force, doing some damage, rooting and generating high threat to all enemies, and perhaps proccing a free force scream or something.

i dont see the big deal about killing healers. if i have the dps to kill a healer, surely i can dps down someone that the healer is healing. ill go ahead can cap right along with you. yes, i know it doesnt make it faster, but it means that red guy running will have twice as hard a time stopping us. stun the carrier stun the carrier stun the carrier stun the carrier!!! damn, didnt work.... why doesnt somebody grapple him?

a good ap powertech will almost never use railshot unless they have their autocrit proc for it, watch for the little blue head buff to pop, also a sort of high pitched harpoon sound

17.7 activation speed is pretty crazy, you should probably drop a fair bit in favor of crit surge and power, i think im at about 12% activation, cant recall what the exact amount for that is.

i think what he meant by missing sunders was sundering assault, and if a missed sunder doesnt build rage i could see it being rather annoying, but its not a high threat move, nor are our other rotational white damage moves, so accuracy shouldnt make a big deal there.

in the dirty fighting tree one can spec for an ability where, when corrosive dart and the aoe dot from df end, tehy are replaced by weaker versions of it.

what youre seeing is your 'cover bar'. its really pretty useless, just disable it in the preferences- interface section i think- and stick all your moves on the regular bars.

knights/warriors are the most melee class in the game. even their few non melee moves, discounting leap, require them to build resource first, and can only do that with leap and being in melee range. which, again, is why they have a more reliable gap closer.

ill agree with zachariah, granted doing so well with a spec so few do any good with is half of it, and ill admit, icuii makes me want to go start a petition for faster caps on civil war and/or a constant stealth scan spanning 30 meters around a sniper in cover, cause that wouldnt be op at all. also pux, lynx, fearce, boris, sinnestro, thesteve, frequencyz, paigan, oatmealsoldier and sintento have impressed me the most and the most consistently on an individual basis. ill leave the top guilds debate to people that do more ranked. theres other individuals but they run together, unless someone knows the name of that one sage that likes to hide behind pillars in voidstar. you know the one, they'll often use force speed to cross from one pillar to the other.

stats are numbers that translate into percentages based on various formulas, many of which are (to avoid the use of math words) curved when graphed such that at higher number values of the stat you receive less of a payoff on the percentage per point than before. this is what people refer to as 'diminishing returns'. you'll also hear people talk about hard and soft caps, but all that really matters is this: the highest number value of a stat where it is more beneficial in a sustained rotation to invest in stat x instead of stat y. the most common example, as you note, is the question of crit rating. too often people talk directly about percentages instead of the values, and in crit this can cause confusion, since crit chance is affected by two stats, crit rating and your main stat (aim, cunning, willpower or strength). through exhaustive testing by people who really really understand the specifics, it has generally been accepted that around 300 points of critical rating, it becomes more worthwhile to start stacking power, which has no diminishing return so provides constant increases to the percentages it affects per point invested. different classes and especially different specs will theoretically have different 'ideal' values of when power becomes more important, but imo anywhere between 275 and 325 is good. of course, particularly in pvp, people will opt to adapt their stats to their playstyle. for example, a scrapper scoundrel is dependent on crazy burst to gank people, so some of them choose to stack inordinate amounts of crit, the idea being that if they crit on the opener, they win even with a lower value of power, but if they dont crit then the amount of power sacrificed wouldnt give them the theoretical sustained damage post-burst to make a difference anyway. meanwhile (more commonly) people choose to start getting power before reaching the sweet spot on crit , since they prefer consistent sustained damage to the gamble on crits. personally i take crit to 300ish for pvp as well, since i find it a good balance between consistent base damage and fairly consistent small bursts. the 30% unbuffed claim on crit arose because generally, the point at which you get to the window on when to swap to power instead of crit rating frequently occurs when the percentage gained from crit rating and mainstat, plus the base vallue, adds up to about 30, but youll only be getting between 10 and 14 percent of it from crit rating. much simpler is surge. the shape of the curve on the surge return per point formula is such that virtually everybody agrees that you get it to 75%, and since it only comes from one stat, its hard to go wrong. also unlike crit and most other stats (but not power), no talents directly affect your overall surge rating, though every skill tree (i think) has a talent that gives direct percentage increases to the 'critical bonus' (surge) of certain attacks/attack types. thats an important note: all stat bonuses gained from talents are direct percentages and do not play into the diminishing return formula. other stats are more dependent on spec. all the tanking stats (defense chance, shield chance and shield absorption) have fairly constant, agreed upon values upon which to get to, though offhand i dont know them. alacrity is unique in that only certain specs will even notice a difference from it. those that do are those that use a lot of casts and channels, which is healers and ranged dps. the ideal value of alacrity for these, i think, is as much you can get after reaching proper values on everything else and still manage your energy. unlike crit, alacrity (and the tank stats, surge and accuracy) is generally not in direct competition with power due to where stats are placed on mods. (if you dont already, make sure you have your preferences set up so you can see the armoring, barrel, enhancement etc. of moddable gear visible, and you should see what i mean) therefore, once you're at the sweet spots for surge and accuracy, how much alacrity to throw in is the next question. since heals do not require accuracy, by design healers are 'supposed' to take alacrity, and again however much they do is however much they can handle. the only healer i play is a scoundrel, where uniquely our active energy regeneration mechanic is itself affected by alacrity, as its a channel. as such i have more alacrity than the commando or sage healers i run with, while they have slightly higher values of surge than i do, since its literally the only other thing they have a designed use for in pve thats in competition with alacrity. similarly, sages/sorcerers (for reasons ill detail in the next couple paragraphs) do not require accuracy, so even their dps gear has alacrity on it. like surge, accuracy has a generally accepted consensus on the ideal sustained percentage to reach, but only for pve, where the hittability of bosses is constant. in pve it's typical for dps to go for 100% ranged and 110% tech accuracy, which supposedly guarantees you will never have an attack not hit a boss. ive never looked close at this. for pvp accuracy is usually not as important, as only players that have tanking gear/stats have a noticeable chance to avoid your attacks consistently, and even then 'attack type' comes into play. put simply, in pvp the majority of damage flying around cannot be mitigated by defense or shield chance. when talking about attack types, the simplest way to categorize is white versus yellow damage, which comes from the color of the flytext when an attack deals damage. as i understand 'white' damage isall 'melee' (lightsaber based) and ranged (blaster based) damage, while 'yellow' is 'force' (take a guess) and 'tech' (anything a smuggler, agent, bounty hunter or trooper does that isnt ranged) damage. however i prefer to think of attack types in these 3 categories: weapon, kinetic/energy and internal/elemental. weapon damage is all white/melee/ranged damage, kinetic/energy is yellow/force/tech that is mitigated by armor, and internal/elemental is yellow/force/tech that isn't mitigated by armor. weapon damage is the only damage that can be, simply put, 'tanked', which is to say that it can be defended (fully avoided by various class based means) and shielded (reduced in effectiveness based on the absorption rating of whoever did the shielding), and in addition it is mitigated by armor. a look at the tooltip of any attack will tell you which of these it is. kinetic versus energy and internal versus elemental are in practice the same, its just an aesthetic difference based on the attack, for example fire based attacks do elemental. armor reduction, or armor mitigation, is another percentage you gain from a stat, however it is found in a slightly different place than the other stats. it comes from armor value, which is itself dependent on the armor rating of gear. for moddable gear, armor rating is determined by the armoring mod, but is not a 'stat' on it but an inherent value baed on the level of the mod. so, all level 26 armorings have the same armor rating, though they have different values of endurance and mainstats. the armor value gained from an armoring changes also due to the weight and slot of the gear it is placed in. obviously, heavy armor gives more than medium and light and medium more than light, while head and chest slots provide more than the other slots. finally the value from all the slots is added up and applied to the amor reduction formula to determinte the percentage. all reductions or buffs to armor are applied as percentages of the overall value, not straight to the reduction percentage. therefore, a target affected by 5 stacks of sunder armor (25% armor reduction) loses substantially less than 25% of their reduction percentage, and someone in a tanking stance (60% increase to armor) at best gets around 50% reduction percentage. all ops bosses, last i heard, have 5814 armor value, which gives 35% reduction. upon full sunderation, an attack will do maybe 5% more damage, unless its internal/elemental, in which case its unaffected by all armor anything. in pvp thats why 'dot' classes are perceived as tank-killers, since apart from more health to chew through theyll be just as effective on a tank as on anyone. this is particularly true since many tanks in pvp prefer to use dps gear due to the abundance of 'yellow' damage out there, but stay in tank stance since most of that yellow is kinetic/energy and therefore mitigated by armor. all mainhands and some offhand weapons have barrels or hilts in lieu of armorings. like armorings, these have ratings, and they provide, in addition to mainstat/endurance, min and max weapon (white/kinetic/energy) damage increases. at least i think thats how that works, i know the min/max damage doesnt affect heals, which are tech/force, so i believe its only weapon damage attacks that are affected. if anyone knows better please jump in, im no expert im just someone who's seen a certain move too many times to need to pay full attention.

come 1.4 i too will pick that up, although if I were a pure pve player i wouldnt, not enough stuns on the dps in ops to justify it, while there are still enough 'interrupt x or die' moves in high end pve to justify hitman as quality of life i think, though personally i take it (and 1.4 stabilized armor and the electro dart cd reductor) more for pvp reasons.

yep, no way to avoid diversion.

tell kaliyo to attack the toughest lookin mug in a pack and throw lots of grenades. stick with it, 20-30ish is always the most awkward period of leveling. youre probably die some but hey, not gonna keep any of this armor long anyway. have fun:D

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#301hMhZMsMrRrfkzsZb.2 thats the basic i wanna get teh deeps spec. havent done much pve, but the combat tech bonuses look as good as any and better than most.

/signed. so long as its not too easy for them to get out of the pits or over a voidstar wall, etc. that said, thatd be some sweet, well deserved utility.

no ty. the reason pts have a less reliable gap closer than warriors is that we aren't as completely gimped if we're not solidly in melee range. does it mean sometimes im reduced to missile blast for a couple gcds? sure. but thats the tradeoff of melee and range. to compensate for their ability to be fully effective at a distance we can't, they sacrifice some degree or another of mobility. which is a substantial part of why more instant-based and therefore more mobile ranged specs like madness sorc, pyro merc, lehal snipe or healing op are more popular. but even these have tradeoffs. they all have less burst than other specs, and dot classes can be pretty severely scrood by anyone with a cleanse.

im tellin yas. cybertech grenade

think the cybertech grenades have that effect

explosive engineering is a must, calucalted pursuit is decent, i take it over the free probe following emp since i use emp pretty exclusively as a 1 minute reset on adrenaline probe, so energy isnt an issue after using it.

leth/df is top dps in pvp due to the nature of dot spam, not saying they're bad, just pointing out that their damage numbers are inflated. they're also the best kiters of the snipeslingers, but the other trees have less need to kite. generally id say mm/ss is the most fluid spec, the ultimate turret, good burst and consistent high damage on one target at a time with one of the best defensive talents in the game with diversion, although it' mostly used to grief other snipeslingers. sab/engineering has high utility when played correctly and imo the best burst of the trees, but longer cooldowns on its most important talents than the other trees, much less forgiving to bad planning. df/leth is again king for dps numbers, and also has one of the most painful attacks in game in cull/wounding shots, although it requires 3 other effects to be applied first for it to be so. mercs are weird and sorcs are squishy

only move besides satchel charges i see him use in the first phase is 'flurry of somethingoranother' which can and ideally should be interrupted.