You can go into cover and probe someone if you can't close the distance and have nothing better to do, or you can use physical cover to block incoming ranged attacks completely. The latter is almost completely unused by operatives but can be crucial in many PvE scenarios.

The most consistent way to get the 5k is to look for the lowest HP person on the team (because they probably also have the lowest armor and expertise), shatter shot them, and adrenal + relic ambush them. If it crits, grats! You got a 5k medal. If it doesn't... try again in three minutes. Long story short: the medal system is really, really stupid.

Diversion was overpowered, period. Stuff like this encourages class stacking and breaks PvE. It also creates a huge gap between 16-man and 8-man, as you can bring a lot more debuffs and keep the boss debuffed for a larger percentage of the fight.

Being able to crit crafting gear just adds another layer of customization restriction. Instead of being stuck with PvE/PvP gear as it is, now we are forced to acquire a piece of crafted gear with an augment slot - nevermind that many of the best looking armor in the game is either a random world drop or acquired from a vendor. It's a stupid change.

I have a feeling that these bugs have more than one cause, and the incompetent EA QA managers knock off something in their bugtracker as "fixed" because they found a solution for one repro.

This is 100% not true. Entrench is supposed to protect against knockbacks, and usually does. I've made many an inquisitor do the "*** huh?" backpedal after their knock-into-the-fire-and-laugh maneuver whiffed against my big red happyshield.

Your experience matches my experience. It's not as good as I hoped it would be. It does still help when you want to use OS in PvE or line up several expensive abilities together, but Engineer's Tool Belt is better hands-down for PvP (and, arguably, some PvE scenarios). It's a bit of a let down, but it's pretty far down on the list of things to address.

Anything that you can use hard cover against is trivial. Everything else can get pretty interesting. Thankfully, there's actually a lot of PvE mobs and abilities that you can block completely with cover. Using Lokin helps a lot.

You don't have anywhere near a full ability rotation until mid- to late-thirties.

I have a pretty big collection of armors, but my installer is being terrible so I can't get some new screenshots. =/ Anyway, some item set keywords to look out for on the AH if you're looking forward to when BW finally fixes armor customization: Vendetta (similar to PvP/progression video armor, but better!) Master Medic Eliminator Elite Sniper Hooligan Scorpion (not my favorite, but it has a few neat components you can mix and match) Recon (identical to Hammer Lookout, which is probably easier to get for anyone L30+) Marauder's Headgear can match quite a few different sets, as the whole face respirator thing doesn't necessarily make you look Sith (especially if you don't have any corruption). I'm working on the Imperial Pilot uniform as well, but it's a helluva grind. All I have left are pants and boots. Oh, a fun note about the imperial pilot's helmet: if you wear it without the chestpiece, then you don't have a neck. Literally. At all. The helmet floats over your shoulders like an abstraction of a Pixar character. It's pretty awesome, and makes the thing worth getting for laughs alone.

Entrench seems to fail versus knockbacks when used with physical cover and the knockbacks come from certain angles. I had this happen several times in huttball matches last night, although enough other things were going on that I don't know if I could say this was the cause. It also fails versus various PvE knockbacks and knockdowns in EV, but that's probably by design. I just wish it was consistent, as it's an absolutely clutch ability for the first boss and yet does nothing for the second.

I could understand emphasizing alacrity if alacrity affected energy regeneration. It doesn't, so...

I'm fine with my sniper for the most part. I just wish cover actually did anything to ranged attacks that aren't from other snipers, and that off-GCD instants that require cover actually worked without having to guess whether my current cover state is broken or not and if I need to pack up and move an inch or two, hammering my keys, to make the gosh darn thing register. Snipers bring a stupid amount of utility to PvE for a pure DPS ranged class with high burst capability, and high ranged burst capability with good CC isn't exactly bad for PvP.

Iif you want the best story in the game roll an Imperial Agent! Of course, snipers have their own set of woes and op-eratives are getting nerfed. If you want to do PvE, though, snipers are fantastic. Competitive DPS, no risk of melee ugliness on encounters with lots of it, and some seriously absurdly good raid utility defensive tools. Diversion is probably the most clutch ability in the game for PvE.

The only change that needs to be made is for grav round and tracer missile to be considered ranged attacks and not "tech" abilities that ignore defense.

I see very, very few gunslingers. I can think of less than five that I've seen in a warzone at L50 more than once. The few I do see tend not to understand the class very well, either. Other than that... possibly shadows? I do see more commandos and sages than anything else, and about an average amount of both jedi knight classes. Servers aren't linked, of course, so I can't speak to any other server's population. =/

Assuming that sunder debuffs behave the same in PvE and PvP, then snipers and mercenaries are king. Ranged DPS is almost always preferable to melee, as you have a lot less movement to worry about. MM snipers have diversion, which may well be the best cooldown the raid has. Mercs are DPS machines, plain and simple. Both have outstanding defensive cooldowns for PvE. To clarify something - some friends and I tested various armor debuffs in outlaw's den last week as we were suspicious that the debuffs might actually be stacking. Some PvE mobs will stack the same armor sunders so much that they can actually reduce you to zero armor, and it didn't make much sense that the player abilities would work any differently. We tried various combinations of shatter shot and tracer missile from multiple people, and in all cases they appeared to stack additively. So, yeah. If they do that to raid bosses then why bring anything else? Oh, another note: threat drops either flat out do not work or reduce threat by such a small amount as to be inconsequential. They're pretty much worthless.

Snipers are pretty bad without the full talent tree and all of your high level skills. Unlike a lot of other classes we tend to have a more balanced advancement curve and don't get all of our core power play abilities by level thirty. Example: orbital strike is unbelievably useful and is absolutely a core spell, but we can't get it until we're hours away from the endgame. If your team sucks, though, you're going to be hard pressed to do much. You can't be the only pressure on the team or you're going to get trained down. If you have anyone covering for you at all then you're going to kill the enemy very, very fast. I've been leveling a mercenary and I've done a fair amount of PvP (as opposed to zero PvP while I leveled my sniper), and while I feel a bit more flexible overall I can definitely feel the shorter range and lack of an interrupt. I also can't trick undergeared and inexperienced players into breaking a debilitate and then kill them instantly with a long flashbang burst setup.

It works on raid bosses and stacks with itself. It can also cause any class to miss just about any ability in PvP, so the idea that it's only useful against snipers and gunslingers is rather silly. It's probably one of the most broken and overpowered spells in the game to be honest. Two snipers or more and you can trivialize almost every boss encounter.

I believe a dev did post that they're going to do this in a future patch. I doubt we'll see it before the second rakghoul content in March, though. Edit: took me a while to find the post, but here it is: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=1398252#edit1398252

It's only truly effective against other IAs, particularly snipers. Same as cover.

Vendetta looks slightly different, but it is the same model set and has mostly the same color scheme. The L50 PvP sets also share this model set and have a variety of color schemes. Honestly, I like the imperial officer look that many of the sets have, and I wish the endgame PvE armor looked even remotely imperial. It's easily one of the dumbest looking things in the game and breaks with the visual design of the class completely.

You can fire missiles at hard targets while the torpedo is on cooldown or after you've fire all of your torpedoes. I don't think the design is a bug per se. It's just a bad design, and torpedoes should have their own key binding.

Affection affects crafting speed and critical success rate.

You're gonna want at least one sniper for (nightmare) operations. Diversion and ballistic shield are extremely useful, especially on the first boss. Snipers can also line up some of the best burst combos in the game, which is a must for Soa.