Ran the numbers last night on my Trooper against the operations training dummy and AS was about 50-75 DPS lower than gunnery with my full rakata/war hero gun setup. So all things considered pretty damn close. Now this is a perfect world scenario requiring no movement or repositioning, so things may vary on a fight by fight basis.

Anyone know where you can get an orange pattern for the gun that does match the icon of the custom/elegant assault cannons? The one that looks like http://www.torhead.com/item/1bGb2CM/clan-varad-fusion-x-autocannon

Your spec is terrible for direct damage. First you have decided to boycott one of our highest damage most cost efficient abilities because it "is not worth 6 points." Personally I happen to like an ability that can crit 3 times for 2500+ apiece and leave me with more ammo than i started with. Second no cell charger? Our biggest problem is ammo management in order to sustain a high level of damage output. Next we have demo round which is one of our best abilities in pvp due to its instant cast, high damage on a short cooldown. Burst damage is king in pvp. You do not have the healing of a full healer, or anywhere near the damage of a full dps. If you plan on playing a support character, what is grav round bringing that makes it worth giving up so much in the healing tree? Yes it does slightly more damage than charged barrel and has an armor debuff but you are not trying to kill anything anyway. You are trying to support others while they do the killing.

Because I lost the vote for which server type we would be on. Our guild decided on a PVE server. Id rather have them around to do content and PVE with than find some random guild on a PVP server to run with.

We do not need to, we just need to be on the receiving end of one in PVP. If you have done either then it was fairly obvious a nerf was coming. If you have either played a op/smug or been on the receiving end of one and it was not obvious that a nerf was incoming there is really no point in offering up suggestions on what "should be done" for the very same reason no one asks blind people which shade of blue would look best in their living room.