When did the term "Viable" start to mean "Absolutely the same as everything else"? This is a clear cut case of you damned kids and your loud music whining about the smallest of details. Back in MY day, if your class wasn't "viable," the only groups you got were people who either liked you as a person or who didn't know any better. We fought our way to the Mid relic keep up hill in the snow BOTH WAYS. Juggernauts are fine. Coming from an Assassin and an Operative both level 50 and geared, having played to 40 so far on my Jugg, the only thing I have to complain about is buggy pathing during charges.

Its 15 bucks. Seriously, get over it.

It is worth pointing out that the dead do zero dps... Do not underestimate the usefulness of a threat drop.

Really guy? They did something nice for the people that actually play their game. Its not like 15 bucks will mean you're not eating for a week. Chill out.

Please stop asking for this crap. There are intended strengths and weaknesses built into each class, otherwise they'd all be the same.

Its not that bad.

Darkness loses a lot of its appeal when you're not in Huttball. Solo? Sure. Darkness is great. But if I have a competent healer, I will rip people apart as deception.

Can we please not make up numbers? Thanks. Especially where operatives are concerned, they don't need people spreading this kind of misinformation. And please don't get all indignant and try to justify, I don't care. Screenshot or it didn't happen. I'm guessing it didn't happen. Darkness does quite a bit of damage, but it is insignificant to being able to blow cooldowns and drop a consistent burst on someone. I will often have discharge and shock hit in the 4k range on geared pvp targets. With voltaic hitting about 2k per, thats 12k I've set up consistently when cooldowns are up. A stun at that point seals the deal against just about anyone. Darkness accumulates damage better because it dies less. However, having played one, shutting them down in a duel is pretty easy. Save stuns for Force Lightning and don't blow your discharge/shock into their shroud. They go down like Steve Irwin in a tank of stingrays. As for people trying to pve dps in tank spec, I'd either remove them from my group or leave rather than promote that level of idiocy. 31/0/10 is a perfectly viable tank build. The rotation isn't even different ffs ><

Agreed. Madness can't blow everything and drop a target. However, you can do a lot of damage to anything nearby. Sometimes, though, it is better to keep a healer focused on themselves rather than kill them. They could be back in 20s, and deception won't have the cool downs to drop them again. Sometimes better to just tie them up while your team demolishes theirs

Really not needed. Especially if you're the only class that doesn't get one. If that is true, it throws the pve need right out the window as 3 other people in your flashpoint group, and potentially 6-7 other people in your 8man ops group will have them. From a PVP perspective, you do just fine. If you're not doing well as a trooper, the problem is your personal skill, as it really doesn't take much to push high numbers with 1 key. A friend of mine is a vile clicker and he's always above 300k just mashing that tracer/grav. I might get him to make a video of this. At this rate, he'll have to replace his 3 key before the week is out.

Couple things, and forgive me if I missed this. On your cool down usage... Use power trinket and power adrenal. Use overcharge saber and surging power (or w/e the auto crit is...). This will get your discharges into the 4.5k range frequently. Also, swap targets constantly. If trooper or BM pops shield, get on someone else, then go back when the shield is gone. If they're healing, you should be ccing as much as possible while shield is up. When operatives hit their green bubble, use only force attacks. I'll even use force lightning in this case. Against other sins, wait a moment after two volt slash to see if they shroud. Against tank sins, it is crucial to save cc for their lightning. Between low slash, elec, and knock back, they should never get a full cast. This neuters their damage and kills their self healing. If 1v1 and your opponent has burned his cc breaker, force cloak, immediately mind trap them and destealth to seethe. I have gotten soo much hate spam over this. On marauders, set up your burst for when they hit 60%. Stun into shock/discharge, maul. They tend to blow their damage immunity as an oh crap button. Drop them when they're still sure of themselves. Almost always save shroud to use with force cloak. This ensures you make a clean getaway. Also, if locking down a healer, cc order is spike into low slash into electrocute. If you do it out of order, you fill their resolve with spike and electrocute.

Break these silly hybrid specs. 650k damage and 200k heals from a sorc/Sage is retarded. Make our maul proc remove positional req. it's a fraking light saber. If we're going fishing for internal organs, it doesn't really matter where we come in from. Make sorc friendly grip healer only or make sin grip baseline. It's not really that madness and deception are bad, it's that there are a lot of better options.

Frankly I'd be more inclined to think that Neech is the one trolling. I have difficulty believing that someone can genuinely respond in the ways he did.

I have never seen such arrogant ignorance. Neech, really? Firstly, calm down, then read the op again. You will notice (this time around) that the op says wait 2s after the opener to use cc break. Opener has a 1.5s duration. It isn't rocket surgery to deduce that he's talking about debilitate.

OP healing is all about those hots. That is the love you should be spreading most. I rarely use castables unless I need to burst heal someone so they don't die. If I need to do that more than once, it is typically because the player has decided that they suddenly can stop using defensive CDs, which means that they're going to die anyway. When engaged, I don't use my CDs to get away unless it is to vanish. I will use them to throttle incoming damage so that my hots can have time to tick. I lead with debilitate, and flashbang second to trap them in a longer duration cc. I'll typically use 2 casts in fb duration then start kiting with snare. One on one, few can kill me, but I do my best to drag them into friends. Tab key is the way most people acquire target, so ill get help by playing with that in mind. Jumping in the back screaming for help does nothing.

If you want the Darth Maul aesthetic, shadow will be much more up your alley. Assassins are much more of a melee spell caster aesthetic.

QFT. There is a LOT of wishful misinformation present in this thread. Take what people have said with a grain of salt. Firstly, regarding hard counter, this is a term used to say that no matter the skill involved, the fight is pretty much decided entirely based on class/spec. In that case, I would agree, that for an infil/deception, Marauder is a hard counter. If they pop their defensive cooldowns and you burst into that, you're boned. If you wait them out, you're boned. While I have beaten them in that spec it is because they made serious core level mistakes and did not understand how to counter me. As Darkness/KC I have a leg up. As madness, I'm probably on about equal footing. There is simply no reason to take deception/infiltration into competitive pvp. No matter how good someone is, they will not make up for the deficiencies of the spec. Worse, especially to other Sins/Shadows, we know the build isn't competitive, so your insistence will come across as willful ignorance and resistance to change, both of which have no place in competitive pvp.

These types of questions are extremely subjective. If we look at the spec in isolation, sure its viable. You can get kills, you can drop some targets quickly, struggle with others, but generally come out of a warzone on good terms. However... If we look at this in contrast to the other specs available, it is by far the weakest of the 3 due to its low survivability. As a Darkness Assassin (KC tree for shadow), when I see a saber-yoyo attack, I know I'm going to win. Worse, I probably will win at 80%+ hp due to the spec's incredible self healing and damage mitigation, even while wearing full dps gear + shield. To make the imbalance greater, on top of general durability, I have amazing utility. I can't express in words how useful pull is. I think this should be baseline for Sin. Last night for example, I stunned a juggernaut in the fire on the top level in Huttball. He somehow survived despite not getting heals and taking the full stun duration, so I jumped off the side, toward another pit and pulled him mid air. He landed in the just activating pit and burned to death. I pressed 2 keys and not only recovered the ball from a sure score, but proceeded to fight my way solo across the field and score myself. I have an AoE snare on a short cooldown that does ~2k damage or so and debuffs damage output by 5%. My initial shock does over 2k generally, then following shocks will be guaranteed crits for >3k. After my second shock, I can blow cooldowns and force lightning for 2k+ a tick and heal myself for 12% of my HP. So the spec is hardly lacking for damage either. I like deception. I like the way it plays, I like the way it feels. There just isn't a reason to play it other than for laughs. If you're raiding and pvping, you'll even find that madness(balance) is far superior for throughput, utility, and self healing. I'm frequently in the 650k-850k with that build in void star where everyone is in choke points and maybe 450k-550k in Huttball. My experiences are with 2pc battlemaster (saber/robe) rest champ gear.

The darkness spec makes force lightning or rocks uninterruptible and heal you for 12% of your total hp if it goes full duration. It's what makes the spec so good. @the drama, I hav e been extremely disappointed to find out that most of the players I respected have terrible attitudes. Generally, ill hear them use a word like scrub, at which point I face palm sadly and go on about my day. I do not know how this person plays on your server or how their reputation is, but the person I see on the forums is well spoken and helpful, and I appreciate that attitude greatly. It's one of the reasons I generally prefer the shadow forum as an assassin. Frankly it is frustrating sometimes, spending 4+ hours a night trying to improve your personal skill just a little bit only to lose games due to things out of your control and because people cant be bothered with obtaining even a basic understanding of the game. I am generally one of the nicer and more accepting people you'll meet, but if you do something like punt the stunned enemy ball carrier from the fire to the end zone, you can't expect me to say something like " It's okay, buddy. Try harder next time!". Especially if it decides the outcome of the game and I've been pugging against premades all night...

Could you please elaborate on the gearing changes?

Darkness is far and away the best pvp dps build as well. The self healing is crazy, damage is fine, and utility/durability outweigh any damage loss. Ideology doesn't really come into this. I don't give 2 licks about feeling like a tank or playing tank because I specced into Darkness. It gives me an edge in small combat and gives me a huge amount of utility. 12% of my life for hitting 3 attacks? Yes, please. Pull people out of the endzone into a fire pit? Yes, please. The big factor for me was bad players. Shield does nothing for Grav/Tracer or force attacks or DoTs. These are the main abilities I'm hit with in PVP. So it wont help me counter the bads, and all a good player has to do to circumvent my shield is play badly. So thanks, but no thanks.

Rakata stims/adrenals are re-usable by default.

This typically happens to me in pvp and is really quite aggravating. Rarely in pve as well. In pvp, I can usually get this to occur by attacking someone, especially with a DoT based attack then cloaking while they're still alive. Or if I've tagged a bunch of people with death field and have to get out of dodge... I'll be in combat for at least 30s. It was like this in beta as well. I honestly believe that somehow "Vanish" effects are more difficult to code than anyone realizes, because NOBODY gets the silly thing right.

Lets not fail to mention the force return from DoT ticks, which is useful in pve. Or the self healing. In pvp, this thing lasts 18s. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I have dotted an attacker on one of the side cannons in Alderaan, gotten on the side speeder, and been back well before the DoT was finished ticking, thereby preventing the guy from capping and saving the game. This ability is neither situational, nor is it useless. Assuming 100% uptime in any scenario is foolish for melee dps. Should it do more damage as a top tier ability? Yes. It is still worth both speccing into and casting as part of a normal rotation.

I find it highly ironic that your post contained no facts. Your dps numbers especially are pure fabrication, and I know where they came from because of their stench. DPS is not the damage a class can do in one second. It is the damage done over a period of time divided by the number of seconds that have elapsed. As we have no way to actually record this data at present, it can hardly be used as a basis for comparison of two classes. The skill cap for Sorcs is actually reasonably high, so I'm not entirely surprised that someone is saying that they're not that good. This game does no have a "Support Class." It has Healers. Damage Dealers. Tanks. You are trying to present your personal frustration as fact and proof that Sorcs are fine. They're not fine. The hybrid specs are quite broken, and I think once those are eliminated, We'd be at a point where we could re-evaluate.