Sentinels have good gap closers, and bring a 15% damage/healing buff that just great. They are most sought after melee DPS. Guardians and Assassins have gap closers, so they can at least keep up on the boss when damaging. Scoundrels and Vanguards have no gap closer, no buff. Not desirable as melee DPS. I am fortunate to be the raid leader, so I get to see all the end game content. If you are a scoundrel, and want to see the end game, spec Sawbones. Get your commando buddy to spec Gunnery.

So here's the questions. Have you leveled a Smuggler or Agent? Why/why not? I have a level 50 Scoundrel Did you enjoy the story? I loved Act I, and was thoroughly let down by Act II and Act III. Did you enjoy the mechanics? Why/why not? Scrapper isn't enjoyable until level 36 at which point it becomes amazing. In end game PvE we are a melee class without a gap closer, which seems silly. Dirty fighting is frustrating to play because it's very unsatisfying, and you are a class that's primarily fighting at 10 meters but has to be in melee for it's resource builder. Are these classes an important SW fantasy to you? Yes. I wanted to play the class that got by and excelled despite not using the force. I liked being the underdog that rose to the top. Unfortunately, Bioware doesn't agree with that as a viable player fantasy, instead I'm the underdog that plays a niche role in support of the players fantasy that actually matters. This ultimately is why I hated Act III. Do you still play the class? If not, why not? I do, but I'm leveling a Sentinel pretty quickly to replace him. Mostly because Sentinel is a class that actually makes sense in end game PvE DPS roles.

This was also "in the game"

I think you may not understand. Troopers/BH have a debuff they stack that does help other troopers/BH. Demo Shot does +5% damage per stack of Gravity Well on the boss. Gravity well stacks to 5 for an individual commando. So if you have one Commando/BH in the raid, it'll do max +25% damage. If you have four Commandos/BHs, it'll do +100% damage. I do not believe that any other class has anything that rewards raid stacking like that.

6 minutes to kill a boss with 1.7 million HP = 4722 DPS from the raid 3000 * 3 / 15 = 600 DPS from bringing extra commandos with the low end of your formula This exploit accounts for 12% of the damage the boss takes. More than a tank brings to the table.

My group may just be in a very specific place DPS wise. I will tell you that swapping a single commando DPS is the difference between wiping and winning easily. Without, we'll tend to enrage on bosses around 9%. With the commando, we easily clear the enrage. Also, because the buff skews both players damage, it's increase to the raid DPS doubles. Going from 1 gunnery commando to 3 gunnery commandos will cut about a minute or more off of a boss length.

We're reorganizing our hard modes, so I'll be healing for a while and our Commando is respeccing DPS. One of our players pointed out that what we are actually doing is exploiting Bioware's game mechanics to make content easier than it should be. I'm wondering if this behavior should be considered against the SWTOR Terms of Service. I know they've handed out temporary bans for taking advantage of bugs in the past. I'm wondering if they would consider this on the same scale as those. Or do combat mechanic bugs not count, since all it does is inflate your numbers?

We had a number of players lose interest in raiding, so itemization is a bit of a problem. We also have an issue finding any Jedi Knights to come raid. And yes, the bug is commandos stacking their vortexes to do more damage. I guess the question is, do most raiders consider it cheating to do this? The damage increase is very noticeable. Swapping out any melee for a second Gunnery Commando seems like a ~15% increase in raid DPS, assuming equivalent gear. Adding a third Gunnery Commando is even worse, but at that point your demo rounds are critting in the 7000s range (in early HM gear) and aggro will become a problem.

Back story: One week we brought 3 Gunnery Commandos to our raid. All were well geared, and we flattened everything in Hard Mode noticeably faster. Later we discovered that this was in part due to a bug allowing multiple gunnery commandos to do significantly more damage with Demo Round. The past few weeks our DPS crew has been a better mix: 1 Gunnery Commando, 1 Gunslinger, 1 Scoundrel, 1 Sage or Guardian. We've been struggling to eek past enrage timers. Yesterday we were getting frustrated with Bonethrasher. We decided to swap myself (Scoundrel) and one of our healers (Commando). I have 5 pieces of Rakata and the rest is Columi. Our commando had mostly Tionese gear. The damage difference was noticeable. After that point we didn't have a single problem with enrage timers so long as the DPS didn't die early. My buddy's point is that of course it's easy because we're exploiting. I wonder what you all think. Should it be considered cheating to bring multiple gunnery commandos?

Sage. In HM Operations, I have healed it all as a Scoundrel with a commando backing me up. It was always a very tense triage setup with designated times for one person to cover for the other while they regen'ed their resource. It was satisfying and incredibly fun. Then the next week we brought sage with less gear than either of us. I went back to DPS, and she made healing easy enough that both of our healers contributed significantly to the groups DPS on the bosses. Sage is the best healer. Their mechanics support a more flexible playstyle that is useful for all content in PvE.

Got an experiment for you to run. One night, ask the Commando or Sage that is currently healing you to respec to DPS for the night. Offer to cover heals for them. Just use the same gear for healing that you do for DPS. I did this last week. Our raid was smoother, the healers had less stressful healing, and the enemies died much much faster. This is why Scoundrels have problems as DPS in raids. It's not impossible to win with scoundrel DPS, it's just more difficult than the alternative.

Even if you are playing Lethality/Dirty Fighting, that means you aren't doing optimal damage. Backblast/Backstab are a lot of damage to toss into the mix, and crit often thanks to our 2 piece set bonus. I'm the raid leader, so I get taken as a dirty fighting Scoundrel. That said, when I can I prefer to heal instead of DPS when I can, because melee DPS is a severe hindrance to the raid. We just did a run with 3 Gunnery Commandos and 1 Gunslinger, and it was the smoothest run I've ever been on. Short Answer: The raid has room for 1-2 melee DPS. 3 Melee DPS will simply not work on some fights. All things being equal I'd rather almost any other DPS, but things are never equal. Get good gear, work to overcome your weaknesses, be better than the other guy, and you'll probably get a raid slot. If you want to get an easy DPS raid slot, level a Merc/Commando.

Well those people should feel free to spend that 300k per hour on consumables then. Biochem is still the hands down best crafting profession to have.

Dear OP: I just finished a Hard Mode Karagga's Palace with three Gunnery Commandos. I will agree with every point you make if you can complete Hard Mode Karagga's Palace with 3 Scrapper Scoundrels. Or hell, three DPS scoundrels at all. EDIT: Actually hell, you don't even need to kill Karagga. Just post a video of your 3 scoundrel DPS raid beating the Fabricator.

So we've been casually raiding for a few weeks. Last week was our first attempts at hard modes, which we cleared 4/5 EV and 1/5 KP. This week we were going to focus on Karagga's Palace. Our typical group make up is: Guardian Tank Shadow Tank Sage Healer Commando Healer Commando DPS Commando DPS Gunslinger DPS Scoundrel DPS This week our Guardian Tank and Sage Healer were unavailable, but we were able to pick up a geared Guardian Tank and Commando DPS. So I respecced my Scoundrel to heal. We flattened the place. Everything died noticeably faster than it ever had before. Healing was more manageable than it ever was before despite trading a better geared Sage for myself. And now that I'm looking back on it, I realize that if we'd gone in with our normal group, we'd probably have won as well. But it wouldn't have been as easy. And it wouldn't have been as stress free. For the record, I'm not saying that Melee DPS can't raid. That would be stupid. I'm just saying it seems like as a scoundrel, I'm noticeably less effective and more heal intensive than my Gunnery Commando counterparts. I feel like there needs to be a better incentive to take Melee DPS past the token Sentinel. As it is, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to bring one other than the inspiration Buff.