Played almost everyone up to chapter 3+(and watched the rest ) I'd rank them as follows: Republic: Smuggler >> JK >>>>> trooper >>>> JC Empire: SW >> BH = IA >>>>>>> SI (too many "ghosts" for me) Overall: Smuggler >> SW >> JK > BH = IA >> SI >>>> trooper >>>> JC Many people love IA due to large number of endings, but the companions are awful as said before and the writing has many weak points imo. I loved the IA story at first (was my first char), but after I actually played the other storylines, my opinion changed. All of the highly ranked stories have interesting twists, smuggler has the best lines in the game hands down. Also, going SW is much more interesting as gray/light.

I agree a lot of people have different opinions, hence I wanted to add mine Not at all. I would expect the game to leave me at 1 hp, maybe give me a debuff or so instead of flat out killing me. Imagine reading a book and your character dying and then self rezzing 2 hours later. Why not self rez again?

This is gonna be long, no tldr and with MAJOR SPOILERS from other stories, primarily smugger/jedi knight/sith warrior and bounty hunter. E.g. stories which are all imo better than the IA storyline. I've warned you A lot of people posting share the quoted sentiment, I do not and I often get the feeling these people did not play the other storylines. IA was my first storyline and I was fairly amazed by it too at first. After playing/going through the rest though, I must say my initial 9/10 dropped to about 6/10. After playing through almost all the stories up to at least chapter 3 and beyond (and watching the dialogues for the rest), i'd definitely rank both warrior stories above the IA one and the smuggler one just stomps all over it. There is a lot of unexpected in many other stories as well(more on that later), the one plus of ia's story are the 5 different endings compared to the usual 2 or 3 by the other classes. However the characters and writing is not up to par and the only thing that IA story has that the others do not are the few major decisions one can make which affects the set of possible endings. The reason I would rank it at 6/10 at best is due to poor characters, overall lack of choices and character influence and weird story twists that, imo, do not make much sense. Also, a lot of things in the story are predictable and in fact hinted by the dialogues if you listen/read. A perfect example of this is when you talk with watcher X about "conditioning". The whole chapter 1 as well as majority of chapter 3 are basically following this pattern of hint/hint/hint "big surprise" (well not that big if you actually went through the dialogues ). The following wall of text will compare a lot of class stories, so be warned if you intend to play them! Overall, the IA story has good endings and has choices that can affect them. However, it lacks in characters and the writing and dialogues simply aren't as good as in the other good storylines.

I wish I had 2 minutes cd on my ballistic shield... But then again, the poster has a lvl 50 sent and a lvl 50 pt so he's just another fotm reroller. Both MM and Eng have their uses and are good specs. MM is good against other snipers(diversion) and has very good burst and single target damage against non-tank classes. Eng has improved defensive cds and has much better aoe which can be used for area denial and seems to be much more useful in rated than MM(just take a good pyro instead). Personally, I think MM is amazing for regular wzs without a full 8 man group/solo. In competitive play, imo it just doesn't offer enough compared to a mara/pyro. Engineering on the other hand is much better for objectives and has better defense, being a much better choice for rated. In NC or voidstar, engineering is amazing to keep people off the nodes/doors. That being said, I think they should change the plasma probe/ig to simply apply a dot for as long as you are in the area. That way it won't break caps. I don't like gimmicky specs and sadly eng is one of them atm. It just limits the class potential and pushes it into that particular spec to get that extra utility.

No one is asking for perfect balance, other games have shown how hard it is to achieve, just look at wow. What people are asking is for it to be fairly close. As such, a 3:1 ratio is kinda acceptable, since that means a sorc/comm/insert x here have a much better chance to get a group and can perform their role instead of being outclassed by a pt in almost every way or pigeonholed into a specific spec to even by viable(such as snipers, and it will most likely get nerfed since the 18 second fire and forget probe is OP). A 20:1 ratio is a joke.

20:1 class ratio. Even if we throw away the OPs team, it still comes down to at least 10:1. I would say 2:1 would be acceptable, 3:1 kinda pushing it. 10:1 is just godawful. Imagine if in sc2 zerg won 10 out of 11 matches vs protoss. This is how bad it is atm. I had a lot of faith in bioware, but sadly the above post is spot on. Even blizz is now admitting their mistakes iwith regards to certain other well anticipated game and is attempting to fix them. Bioware is the exact opposite. Complete silence and every patch just seems to make the matters worse. The pvp in this game was considered extremely well balanced. Now it really has worst class "balance" I've ever saw in any mmo and I can't even bring myself to use the word "balance" to describe the strength of different classes in pvp. 20:1 class ratio in ranked warzones. Never thought they would even let it go that far...

Excellent data, despite the fairly small sample side. I really hope the other guilds will add up their numbers. 20:1 ratio for maras vs snipers/mercs. Remember all the qq in wow when 2.2k+ arenas had some classes at a 3:1 ratio? In this game, we have a 20:1 ratio in competitive play. Can you say best balancing team ever? Also, I can't believe some of the claims in this thread like "snipers are fine" or "mercs are fine". I mean, look at the data. There are 20 marauders for each sniper/merc. Not to mention, snipers are only really useful using their aoe node denial spec and dps commandos are most likely pyro. If they were "fine", you'd see way more of them.

Heavy armor (~31.5% mitigation in wh gear) and 25% damage shield on a low cd (usually very close to 1 min). Plus several talents to further improve their mitigation that can be taken, depending on spec. The shield bonuses are additive and provide 35% mitigation vs elemental/internal(with the appropriate class buffs, can be talented even higher) and 56.5% mitigation vs kinetic/energy, which are pure tank levels of mitigation. The shield cannot be countered in any way unlike for example evasion or saber ward, where 1 stun completely negates them(since you cannot dodge/deflect/parry while stunned). The shield is equivalent to having around 35% extra hp. On a 1 minute cd... And before this "heavy armor does not matter nonsense", the only class that more or less ignores it are pts. Even annihilation mara's bleeds are only around 35-40% of his damage, and everything else is mitigated by armor. Sorc's force lightning is energy damage btw(sages do primarily kinetic), as some of the posters in this thread are apparently unaware of. The only spec doing primarily elemental/internal damage and/or that ignores armor are pyro pt's. Everyone else, including ann maras, leth snipers, ops etc. do primarily energy/kinetic damage. Operatives can also bypass a lot of armor, but in their current state it takes a good player to use them effectively. For comparison, full wh medium armor is just shy of ~26% energy/kinetic damage reduction. So yes, heavy armor does matter. Also, personally I'd prefer pt's changed rather than nerfed. Make it so that it takes much more skill to pull the numbers they do now. That will be more than enough to 'fix' the class.

Nope. Pts are one of the easiest classes to play with only a few buttons. Not saying any class in this game is hard, but pts are extremely easy to play, if not the easiest class to play. All major pt skills being instants certainly doesn't make this class harder, on the contrary. As such, even a bad player can do well with a pt. A bad mara will do much worse. Not even close. Only a lethality sniper would put out better numbers, but a lot of his damage is from dots and his burst doesn't even come close to pt's burst. MM does weapon damage and as such any target with armor and possibly a shield mitigates a ton of their damage making their effective damage much lower. Unlike pts who rely on attacks that either ignore armor, or are elemental. Not to mention, a sniper dies much faster when focused and has to be stationary to do a lot of his damage. The only specs harder to kill are actual tanks and all marauder specs due to their insane cds. Everything else dies faster and has worse defensive cds. Even a dps jugg is easier to kill than a pt. 25% damage shield on an effective 1 min cd is simply too good. Juggs saber ward can be negated by one stun and relies on rng for weapon damage mitigation, pt's shield is always active. Add in heavy armor(~31% base kinetic/energy mitigation from armor with good gear) and full mobility(everything is instant). Not to mention if you are being focused you can just swap to ion cell. As said and explained many times before, a pt is not squishy at all. You have heavy armor and the best defensive cd outside of tanks and maras. Master strike/ravage are weapon attacks mitigated by armor and shields and are channeled with a long cd. Rail shot ignores 90% of target's armor, is instant and has lower cd which can be reset. On medium armor and higher, rail shot hits significantly harder than the last ravage tick. Not to mention, you can see that ravage hit coming for 3 seconds and use a kb/cd to counter it. That being said, pvp in this game was never close to balanced (maybe pre 1.2 but there were still outliers) and bioware had made next to no effort to actually properly adjust classes in pvp even when backed by hard data and evidence. The test server has been a joke that they did not care about at all(pts doing 800k+ damage a match? who cares...). So everyone's best bet is to stop qqing and reroll a pt/vg

Yup. The only tankier classes are actual tanks and maras with all their cds up. Heavy armor actually matters because most of the attacks in the game(such as force lightning which does energy damage) actually do get reduced by armor and unlike medium armor which is only a few % better than light, heavy armor actually is a significant upgrade over medium. Even for classes like Anih maras,bleeds are only about 40% of their damage, the rest are mostly weapon or force attacks reduced by armor. Their shield is an amazing cd that adds a flat 25% damage reduction against all types of damage. So against energy/kinetic damage, they can have close to 60% mitigation(35% against internal/elemental) as long as the shield is up. Not to mention, they have amazing mobility. Everything they do is instant so they can actually freely move around unlike snipers/sorcs who have to stand still to do real damage and as such can kite, los etc. while doing 100% of their dps. What's not to like? With no signs of nerfs in sight, it's time to reroll one

It's too early to tell yet, it's still on the ptr. From the looks of it, most of the ranked games have 3-4+ maras per side.... Lets give it a week or so of ranked matches on the ptr and we'll see. I doubt the adrenal nerf is the only damage nerf of the entire patch, given current ttk times. But maybe it is. 1.3 is not live yet and i'd expect at least some changes will be made. Atm, your best bet is to copy your pt/mara on the ptr and start owning people

Not trying to compare sniper's/pt's, just trying to give an example of a similar ability. Again, the problem with rail shot is that for 16 heat, it is a 30 meter range nuke that does amazing damage that other instants, outside of talented smash(and even then, smash costs much more than 16% of your resource bar.), can't even dream about. Hidden strike used to be close, but we all know what happened to ops. Other ranged abilities that can do comparable damage, like sniper's ambush, or sorc's chain lightning, have much higher resource cost and also have a cast time. I understand rail shot has a requirement of the target being debuffed, but this requirement is more or less non existent for pts. The idea of simply increasing the heat cost of rail shot is also a good one, as that would mean a pt has to be more careful with his resources. As is, rail shot (and HIB ofc) is just way to good in it's current form. Low resource cost, instant, 30m range, exceptional damage. Something has to give imo.

Railshot is a completely overtuned ability. It has very low resource costs, hits harder then any other non-execute type attack, and is an instant. Sniper's ambush has 2.5 seconds cast, does less damage, and costs 60% more resources. Simply put, railshot's damage should be reduced by roughly 35% percent to put it in line with similar abilites. After that, i think flamburst could use a 1.5 seconds cast.

It doesn't have to, just has to be timed right so he can't finish the big nuke cast/channel cull etc. Snipers do not have a 1 second gcd cooldown, so they can only do so much. If the mara is close to dead before he reaches the sniper, the mara is bad and did not manage his cds properly (or, did not los away forcing the sniper to move).

If you use leg shot, he just force camos onto you. If you knockback after, he can either pop a defensive cd, or if he was smart and you are obfuscated, just wait it out. Even if you do 10k-12k burst before he is back on you (not gonna happen as anything but MM spec and him being bad), after he is back in melee range you will die before the 12 sec cd on leg shot is up or shortly after. Again, talking about decent maras here which are fairly rare given all the fotm rerolls. Bad ones you can often 100-0 before they get to touch you.

As said many times, at 50 everything changes. Low lvl pvp is not balanced and snipers are actually very strong before 50. At 50, you will NOT kite a mara who has a spammable 12 seconds 50% slow, force camo to break root and can easily trinket your 2nd cc/knockback since their resolve will be full by then. That is of course assuming you knock them far enough(more than 10 meters). Good maras (emphasis on good, many fotm rerolls running around these days) destroy any sniper/gs 1v1. They have superior damage and way better survivability with many cds to cripple your weapon damage as well as tech attacks. As said many times before in this thread, snipers countering maras is a complete myth. They are simply more viable than commandos/mercs atm and many people want the legacy 5% crit buff so they level one. Plus, the smuggler story is really good (agent is 2nd worst in the game imo). Edit: Same, I use crouch instead, take cover is very situational. That being said, crouch is still extremely buggy (try doing it on any non level terrain ,the legs of the NC turrets with their meager slope are enough) and it bugs out with "unknown effect result" error. It's also NOT instant, takes around 0.3 seconds or so. This can be easily tested by binding something like a grenade to the same key as ambush in cover bar. Press that key quickly after pressing crouch and you will throw a grenade instead of casting ambush.

Plasma probe (and the pub equivalent, incendary grenade) can be kept infinitely on an objective, preventing a capture as long as the sniper/gs lives. It can be used in voidstar, civil war, as well as novare coast (usually it's possible to stay outside of it, but it's fairly hard when placed properly). It's a fire and forget aoe that prevents any interaction with the objective. It has 18 seconds cd and 18 seconds duration, is instant with 30 meters range. I agree it's really stupid, and imo should at least require the sniper to be within los of it to stay active. The way it is now, i can just put it on a side turret in a civil war and run around the back areas for a long time. Then quickly pop back and drop it. Often, the enemy team has to run around and search for you first, while being unable to cap the objective. Most snipers/gs on my server are this spec now. It's not that bad in pug play where you can just focus the sniper. However, 2 guarded/healed snipers in rated can most likely keep this on the voidstar doors indefinitely. It needs to be nerfed. Imo the lag issue is a bigger problem. I root a running ball carrier in a huttball match, and his real position is easily 4-10 yards further than shown in my client. My client never got properly updated. Actually, NO ONE's client did, aside from the actual person who got rooted. So my team may think he is before/in the fire pit, while according to the server he is actually behind it. This is completely unacceptable and it boggles my mind it wasn't fixed yet. If it's a sprinting sorc, his real position(e.g. server side) can be over 20 yards away from the one shown in my client until it updates (takes 3-4 seconds easily). This is with 40-45ms btw. Please fix this.

Just wow. You cannot focus a guarded and babysat healer in this scenario. He can heal through 1 dps easily, so with guard he can heal through two of them and throw a heal on the tank here and there. The tank can taunt the dps which gives the healer extra room for even more heals. He can use cc's to take a break from damage, the healer can also kite and los. The dps will die sooner or later to the tank. If you are a healer and lose with a tank to 2 dps, you either need to get some gear or seriously learn to play. If the tank is a sin/shadow, such scenario is not even a contest. Also someone needs to look up how guard works and how much actual mitigation it provides. Healers are still too strong, the numbers prove it. 700k+ healing in a warzone is stupid. You can ignore the facts and claim that you want your OP healers back. I and most people who actually do group pvp disagree. If anything, healing should be nerfed a bit more and survivability buffed.

With guard and taunt in game, if a healer can fairly easily heal through 1 dps, dps would essentially become useless. A guarded healer can than easily heal through 2 dps, keep the tank guarding him up, and toss some extra heals around him. Currently, this is actually fairly close to how it in the game and it's broken imo. The damage is also a bit skewed due to mara's/sent's pulling stupid numbers. If anything 1v1 should be around gear/skill with either side having equal chances of winning.

It's amazing how delusional or bad most of these so called healers are. Healers are balanced with guard and taunts in mind. 3 healers in a group with a few tanks and a couple of dps can wipe the floor with anything I've ever seen so far. This game is not balanced 1v1, healers are powerful in group encounters. Yes, that means 1v1 you will most likely lose unless you can kite/run away. If you cannot pull 400-500k+ healing in a voidstar healfest (none of the teams capable of breaking through the first door, this usually involves 2 teams with 3 healers each) get better gear and learn to play. I've seen 650k+ post patch plenty of times. Overall, healing is still very strong and geared healers do very well. Of course, this assumes group play where your tanks actually protect your healers and swap guards accordingly etc. Sorry your merc can't facetank 2-3 people anymore, but anyone with any sense of reasoning agrees that was broken. If anything, I would buff the survivability expertise provides and nerf healing even more(buff surv to damage levels, nerf the bonus healing more). Also, I would look at alacrity stacking. 1.3-1.4 seconds/big heal, or even less for mercs, makes them pretty much unkillable as long as the alacrity cds are up. Really seems the drs on alacrity are either broken or non existent, comapred to for example surge where it's next to impossible to pass 82% crit. TLDR: Good and geared healers with proper support are still amazing. The problem lies somewhere else. EDIT: Removed wrong quote ^.^

It's not like the look of that gear matters. Everyone will be running around in crit crafted oranges in 1.2 anyways. Almost 200 of extra str/aim/cunn/will from augments is hard to pass up on, even if all you are wearing is lvl 11 orange gear with war zone gear mods.

Wall of text inc I saw a lot of snipers/gs do this, not a big fan personally. The one thing that this class has is damage and burst, DF is sustained with terrible energy managment. This is more of a personal preference but I prefer to be able to drop important targets fast and I do not like keeping targets dotted(unless they have vanish and I am going for the kill that is) so I can use my cc. I have full champ gear, most of it remodded to get rid of accuracy(why do all our BM pieces have acc?....................). Close to 40% crit, 86% surge, close to 400 bonus damage. I am often top damage, except when you have one of those 600k damage 100k healing sorcs running around or are against a lot of med/heavy armor melee. The problem with the class is that we have retarded damage/burst, but it gets mitigated by anything. As such, we are godlike vs a team full of sorcs, but next to useless vs med/heavy armor team(leth/df trees are a bit better in this department). I mean, half of the classes have saber ward(or equivalent) as a base skill which can negate most of our damage. Honestly I feel like our attacks should be made tech(no shields/dodges, but still mitigated by armor/talents) and our damage output reduced/adjusted to compensate. We also have no defense aside from 20% aoe shield. Shield probe is a complete joke(50% damage absorbtion, does not work on all attacks, absorbs around 2k, 45secs cd, compare this to 5k sorcs shields on 15 secs cd), our evasion does not work on 90%+ of the attacks. The irony is that our defensive cds work really well against other snipers/gs's, but are a joke against anyone else. Make our defensive cds work, or give us something else. Really, just giving us 1 get out of jail card would make this class so much more enjoyable. Vanish/sprint on 3 mins cd, something to be able to hit to at least try to escape. Or just make shield probe analogous to sorc's shield. 15 secs cd, self cast only, same absorb numbers, same mechanics(not affected by mortal strike debuff). In terms of 1v1(assuming equal gear, 600+ exp), you will not beat any decent melee who knows when to use his cds and when to reset the fight. Sorcs/BHs are doable as long as there's no pillar around. Healing mercs are really tricky and require a well timed cc/interrupts. Against melee, you only get 2 of any knockback/stun/mez before they get a full resolve so you have to rely on your root as much as possible. Since each melee has 2 or more escapes(vanish or jump, trinket, immunities, etc.), a slow, several cc's and way superior defensive cds, they will simply outlast your damage and demolish you once your cc/roots are used up. A geared maruader only needs around 8 seconds of uptime to kill your 16k hp 620 exp sniper through both shields. This is easily doable if he is good. My low level sentinel alt completely demolishes snipers 1v1 and he is still lacking a bunch of cds.

This. This game has around 10x as many choices in terms of quests/leveling/decisions as wow ever had. Gl skipping the lvl 1 zones because you want etc. Seriously, did you really expect to go anywhere as lvl 1 and do anything you want? Really?

The game seems to have way too many bugs at the moment. Sure, they are not as fatal as closing servers 2 weeks after the launch and having everyone on them start over, but the amount of bugs seems to be way over the top especially after such a long beta. From AH sorting, to abilities/talents not working, to class quest problems(having to stand right on top of a boss to do damage as a sniper seems kinda lol), invisible quest text, mining nodes that are not clickable, various graphic glitches, dismount lag, ability lag(I have a good rig and for me this seems to happen only in rare occasions) and many many more. It would be also nice to know which bugs are you guys working on or which can we expect to be fixed soon. I mean, certain other popular MMO has bugs that weren't fixed for years, but many of the above cases should be fixable fairly easily. The game also does not seem to be optimized too well, the graphic is not that great to require such hardware and still run at like 40 fps or so while certain latest shooters are doing 60-80+ with much better graphics. At the moment, fixing bugs should be your number one priority, way ahead of any new content, as I believe that's the major issue this game has at the moment and there are just way too many of them. Honestly, I haven't played a game with so many bugs since some of the older tes series games. Especially from bioware, I did not expect this at all.