Technically, you really should have two specs, or at least be proficient in two. One for dirty fighting and one for sharp shooter. The reason for this is because SS far exceeds dirty fighting when fighting bosses with adds and you have to switch to them quickly. With SS you can front load your damage and keep a steady amount of damage going out, even as soon as you swap targets. With DF, you have to re-apply your dots and hope that wounding shot isn't on cd. With that said, DF does more dps on fights where there are no target swaps and ones with a lot of movement. Luckily, the gear setup is fairly close to each other and you can get high numbers with the same gear, as long as you are playing your character correctly. With the field respec available to us, there's no reason to not do it. Also, the more times you switch and get used to switching, you can swap specs, put in your talents, and put your skills on your bar in like 15 seconds.

The ability delay is what got me to initially quit the game when it first got released, about 3 months after the release. I came back to the game about 4 months ago and when I first came back, the ability delay was gone. I enjoyed the game immensely when the combat worked right. However, once 2.0 got released, the ability delay has come back into the game. Granted, it isn't as bad as it once was, however it is noticeable and it's annoying. If it's still in the game by the time final fantasy xiv: a realm reborn gets released, I won't be sticking around.

If you want to watch the story for these flash points or operations, just watch it on youtube. It's very selfish to make three other people wait an extra 10 minutes so you could watch the story. Queuing up for a flashpoint you already know you are going to be relying on 3 others to complete it and chances are they've already seen the story. No need to make them suffer so you can see the cutscenes. So, just go to youtube and watch it.

Wouldn't the absorb relic be more powerful though? For example, the absorb relic when procced adds about 10% damage reduction. As you've shown, the uptime is pretty much the same, and as a shadow tank with the shield skill, you have about a 50% chance to block. With the enemies hitting for about 5k/hit, in the 6 seconds the proc is on, you figure 4 attacks from the enemy, 2 of them getting blocked, so that's 1k dmg mitigated. Also, there is no ICD with blocking in general (as far as I'm aware), so the more enemies you are tanking at once, the more powerful the absorbed amount of damage is.

I don't understand why the heal relic is best. With it having a 20 sec cd, over the course of a 3 minute fight you'll only heal yourself for 457 x 9 which is 4113 and that's assuming you have it proc every 20 seconds. When it procs, it heals for less than 1 tick of your heal from telekinetic throw and barely anymore than the proc from just attacking. I fail to see how that small amount of healing will save you from dying. Unless of course, I'm just missing something.

Most likely the problem isn't that you suck or your gear sucks, the problem is most likely the healer. Before people look at that statement and get mad, let me explain. The reason so many tanks die often on trash fights is because lots of times, the enemies put some kind of dot on you and for some reason the game likes to have all of the enemies use them right off the bat. Many times you get 3-5 dots on you and as we all know, dots tick hard especially when they are stacked on you. Now the reason I say it's the healers fault is because most healers don't realize that and they see you HP spiking up and down quickly, and their first response is to just try to heal through it. The dots plus the attacks from enemies can easily make the tank die whether he's in 58 mods or 69 mods. For some reason people seem to think that the only time you need to cleanse is when you are fighting a boss, but all it takes is a quick cleanse and the fights become super easy to heal. So basically, if you want to ensure you live even though you have a healer that doesn't cleanse, remember to use your resilience to cleanse the dots. Hopefully it'll be back up when you need it again.

EDIT - I'm sorry, I didn't notice the "for pvp" part of the title.

You don't need much accuracy for pvp to land your hits unless you are fighting a tank. PvE on the other hand you need massive amounts, like 450 rating or something like that to be at hit cap and that's with the 3% acc talent and the 1% acc you get from having melee tank pet passive.

You're right, I was doing something wrong. I had been trying out many different specs and the last time I had tried out the full sharp shooter spec I was in lesser gear than I am now. Now I'm close to full 69 gear and with full SS spec I pull 2400-2500 dps on target dummy and the spec I linked I was doing around 2200.

I would love to be able to put skill augments in my gear but... you need a very large amount of accuracy to reach the hit cap of 100% (110% special attack accuracy). Granted, I don't have any 72 gear, but still - all but two of my enhancements are accuracy related using 66 purple accuracy/power\crit, the other ones have some surge, my augments are mk 7s and 8s with accuracy augments and I am still at 99.5% accuracy, and that is including the 1% bonus from companion. Needless to say, it's a bit annoying... I mean ya, I can still put up decent dps numbers, around 2300 dps, but still - I wish I could budget my gear a bit more into surge enhancements or skill augments instead of focusing so much on accuracy.

This is kind of unrelated to the current discussion about orbital strike, but it is about the marksman gunslinger. I've been messing around the marksman build now that I have decent gear, mostly 69s, and I have found that instead of going pure marksman up to the final talent, I get more dps if I set it up like this http://www.swtor-spy.com/skill-tree-calculator/gunslinger/21/?build=223001202120211121200320110000000023320000100000000000000000000000300000000000000000000000000000&ver=20 It's a 32/11/3 build and it's basically the same as the normal marksman build, but instead of the final talent, you trade that in for the engineering dot called shock charge in the 3rd row. I really enjoy the marksman playstyle and I get an extra 100 or so dps with this build. Anyone else try it?

While that's true, the fight is still bugged. I ran it tonight and I couldn't unshackle the tank as a gunslinger. When he was shackled I ran up to him, ran over him, around him, and no matter what, I couldn't break him out. The healer had to break him out and for some reason the healer was the only one I could break out. Maybe there's some sort of hidden part to the fight that when someone gets shackled, only certain people can break them out. Next time I run it I'll look more carefully to see if I get a buff/debuff telling me I can break the guy out.

I could see them charging for race change, body type change, and things of that nature. But aspects like hair, hair color, skin color, facial hair, horns, and jewelry should only cost credits.

For me, Makeb was garbage. It was nothing but a total pain with how it was set up via the planet itself, dailies, and soooo many enemies. Leveling through it the first time was so bad, that the 2nd guy I got from 50-55 I literally only did it via level 50 dailies. Story wise, I don't know, I skipped it. The question now is, am I bored with the expansion? No, not at all. I find the raiding quite enjoyable so far. Granted, I've only completed scum and villainy and haven't tried the other raid yet. I will say however that I would have preferred level 55 hard modes would drop 66 quality gear, Sm ops 69, HM ops 72, and NiM a tier higher than HM. The only good thing about drops in story mode ops is getting a tier piece and a relic seeing as the drops are the same quality as hm fps. Aside from that however, I am pretty happy with the expansion so far and plan on sticking around for at least a while longer until ffxiv realm reborn is released.

They are hard? That's news to me. When myself and two friends (gunslinger, commando, and scoundrel healer) hit 55 using 58 mods we were clearing them no problem. Before you say we were carried by the tanks, they were usually hovering at around 27k hp. We just used CC when we could and if we wiped on a boss, it was because we didn't know what the fight was about in the new HM version of them. With a quick tweak to strategy instead of just doing whatever, we killed the boss in the next try. So to say they are hard is really nothing but a learn to play issue.

Ability delay was one of the major reasons I left this game a few months into release. I came back to it about two months ago and with it gone, the game was really good. Now however, ability delay is back... Not quite at the point it was before, but it is noticeable. It doesn't happen all the time, but it definitely happens. It seemed to come back within the last week or so. I hope they fix it.

Last night I was gathering on Makeb and I asked the guild where to find Biological Compounding Agents on Makeb. A guild mate said he was getting them from noxious ferns... I had been getting them, but instead of what I was asking about I was getting Metabolic Enhancement Agents. I asked him where on Makeb he was getting them and I went to where he was (grappling hook 7 or something like that) and I was still getting the same thing. I ended up looking them up and it turns out that while there are four new mats, there are only two different nodes on Makeb and the nodes have a chance to drop different items... What..The..Eff? How about replacing all the old crafting item nodes with the two other kinds of mats you need for crafting the newer items? With the huge pain that comes with gathering mats on Makeb, the price of mats on the GTN far out price the actually stuff you make with them. For example, ONE Metabolic Enhancement Agent goes for 10k (cheapest I've seen was 8k). Once again the way they set up gathering on Makeb makes the gathering professions much more profitable than the actual crafting professions so it's actually cheaper to gather mats, sell them, them buy the things you need/want. They REALLY dropped the ball on this aspect of the expansion...

They should have changed one of the talents in middle tree to make weaken mind (sorry can't think of name for sith version) have it's dot tick have a 30 or % chance to make turbulence (final skill in middle tree) instant cast and reset the cd on it. That would have made the middle tree more viable and more fun. Would it have made dotting up multiple enemies turn you into a turbulence throwing machine gun? Possibly, but the skill doesn't hit super hard anyway, just a bit harder than disturbance. The class is already close to being an elemental shaman from wow, might as well go all the way when going into the middle tree. I wouldn't complain one bit -_-

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that feels this way. I was doing some more gathering today and it was sort of frustrating. Normally I enjoy gathering mats because I get to turn off my mind and know that I am able to progress something such as my crafting skills. But the way Makeb is set up, I just get annoyed most of the time.

Anyone else notice how much of a pain it is to gather mats on Makeb? It really boils down to three reasons. 1) Zones are small. It's like they designed the planet to basically be different buildings that you go in. A result of this is even if you get all the nodes in the zone you are in, the ones you gathered in the beginning have not respawned. I go around with bio-analysis and archaeology and even with two different kinds I still have to wait for respawns. This leads me to reason number 2. 2) If there is more than one person gathering mats, then it's very hard to find nodes to gather from. Designing a system where if more than one person is gathering mats then finding any nodes become difficult is a bad design considering it's expected to have multiple people gathering materials at any given time. Each zone should at least be able to support two people. 3) This is my biggest pet peeve with the planet, and that's that many nodes contain old materials. This morning I was going around and over half of the bio nodes were immunity seeds and the other one from corellia (sorry, the name alludes me right now). The same was happening with archaeology nodes. I could understand if say the area with level 51 enemies contained lower nodes to help people transition a bit better, but after that it should all be the level 51-55 mats (according to crew skill mission tab). Aside from vastly prolonging the time required to gather mats, the only thing it adds is a major annoyance. So basically in my opinion they need to do two things to make gathering new mats on makeb a better experience. One, reduce the time for node respawns and/or increase the amount of nodes. And two, remove the old materials from the planet when you get passed the level 51 part of the planet. Because currently, gathering mats on Makeb is nothing but a painful experience.

Is it possible to get inside a hard mode flash point without using the dungeon finder tool? If so, and you are running with guild mates/friends, why not just go to the flash point that you want to go in?

I would like them more if instead of cartel coins they gave mounts or armor sets or pieces. Spending hours on end to get an achievement to get 100 cartel coins isn't exactly a great motivator considering that basically equates to one dollar.

Not only is it because as someone said that if they kept the same DR throughout you would have insane secondary stats at max level, but also, don't the stats on your character sheet represent an enemy of the same level? For example, you can have a 10% defense chance, but if you fight a level 20 enemy at 50, you will deflect pretty much every attack. So it's not so much that your character is getting weaker, but more so that the enemies are getting stronger.

When it comes to the unique class stories, I am not sad at all that they didn't make new ones and instead decided to do one story on makeb like they did. The way I see it is the first 50 levels with the class stories was basically an introduction to the character/class. Now that you know the background of the different people, they can all band together to face a massive threat to the galaxy as opposed to being a one man wrecking crew. Perhaps in the future they can add a side story for your class, but I would prefer they keep doing it like they did this time around.

So there's a talent way up in the telekinetic tree that allows mind crush to have a chance to tick twice and make turbulence have a 30% chance to shoot a 2nd shot. I think it would have been better to do two things with that talent spot. For one, move the proc chance on turbulence down to the other talent lower in the tree that works for disturbance and force wave. And two, but more importantly, make mind crush have a 30% chance to tick twice but ALSO reset the cd on turbulence and make it instant cast. This would have made a full tele build more attractive and also give a bit more oomph to mind crush. I wish they would have done that, but I guess it's too late now.