Good for you having some extra difficulty. I solo'd the Heroics on Balmorra/Nar Shadaa during Closed Beta using a Darkness Assassin and Khem Val. And that was hard. Had to swap aggro at the right times, use multiple medpacks and use every CC available. And abuse Line of Sight constantly. I personally feel that it has gotten considerably easier to do the Heroics solo; more so with the Companions being made comparatively stronger. Player Character strength has taken a bit of a hit with 4.0, but solo ability isn't as tied to specific classes any more. Having access to a Healer early is AMAZING. The companion Tanks are able to hold their own with a bit of healing on the side. Solo'ing is still a massive timesink though and does not approach the efficiency of good group.

But good Sir, you forget healing. Your changes bring glory to the Empire, but left unchecked the peon Sages, Scoundrels, and Commandos will try to gain medals via healing. The same goes for tanking; we must ensure the supremacy of the high level master race.

Not leveling to keep a certain gear state on a particular level. So someone being particularly abusive, being level 57/59 would refuse to gain any XP, credits and comms from a warzone. Simply leave the Warzone at the end before the stat screen comes up. I used a variation of this to maximize my WZ comms income as I neared cap back around level 49; I would fight to the end, but wouldn't accept the rewards from bad games. Because you do absolutely nothing else to gain XP on that character, you never level thus keeping a fully optimized gear build relevant forever. Pretty sure that WoW had the same problem.

The only people who might posit a defence of this are the same people who would leave Warzones to stay in the sub-60 bracket because they are unable to cope with the more balanced fights at level 60. Spend less time molesting lowbies and you might learn to play at level 60. See? I can make unwarranted straw-man accusations too! And it is ideological, derides the target and does nothing to further the discussion. On topic, I feel that the bolster affect at 55-59 overbuffs the character especially in conjunction with the high-end skills and talents. To actually die meant I had played exorbitantly badly, rather than being outplayed by my opponent. Previously when the level brackets were 10-49, I could create an ungodly twinked level ~12 sniper which would hit for upwards of 12k and could actually compete. I have yet to meet a sub 50's character that posed a challenge to my geared toons. I think that balance has rather gone a kilter with 3.0.

My theory is that the optimal twink would be a level 59 with that penultimate Discipline talent. Level 57 would be another option, with many specs gaining a game-changing skill. So either you would have to avoid gaining EXP, or you'd delete the expansion from your account once you hit 59. Is the latter even possible?

Regarding DOT's. Does each individual tick count as an attack for the sake of the "reduce cooldown 3s once every 1.5s when attacked" ie Evasive Imperium? If true, unsure about the net effect of this towards Lethality DoT's.

I used to twink out my alts when Lord Adraas was still around, but the difference was that I let myself level. Every ~2 levels I had to get BIS purples for my character. I took them into higher level planets to grab extra datacrons so bolster would have an augmented effect and used the best shard datacrons. One of my old friends was my supplier (who made a few million off of me) and was also the only character who could beat my twinked Lethality operative reliably in a 1v1 (he was Concealment). I miss the good fights I had against peers, but there's no beating around the bush. It was undeniably seal clubbing which was not fun to the clubbed.

It's nothing about wanting fair play and all about being a pedophilic apex predator forever. Why do the grind at all when already sitting on top of the foodchain to begin with?

Why would they level at all? Experience is awarded at the end of the match iirc, hence the oldest twinking here was sitting at level 47-49 permamently.

Theme song? There is only one themesong. "Cajoling, they cry that I am fightin dirty..."

Now that the speeder bikes to the side nodes are gone I can't recall many games that have been won by taking both side nodes. Your best bet is harassing a side node and trolling reinforcements while switching to mid quickly.

Ahhh, allow me. The "silver problem" is a phenomena where the mobs on Belsavis forget who they are, where they are and who their friends are. It is a most regrettable condition that the years of interminable imprisonment have imposed upon their now-fractured minds. The condition is most prevalent among the people known as the Esk-Ka This race has been imprisoned since the time of the Rakata Empire and, as a result behave most erratically. In my Consular's observation of these inmates, she noted that some walked with underwear on their head, others balancing their peculiar melee staves on said heads. A noted aggressiveness was present when talking of restructuring the medical facilities BelsaCare for better longevity. The more stable ones she was able to persuade to her cause, but now thousands of inmates stand in place or in eternal patrols, staring and trying in vain to remember their former identies. If any in the galaxy have heart to change their plight, please send donations to my guild's charity. EDIT: ((I noticed that on my 12x characters I could get to level 47 on Makeb while still using gear from Coruscant/Korriban. It was too easy previously, some scaling up was necessary but might have been too much)).

To be more specific the way that it was stated they have a goal for each specific damage role and each spec's optimal rotation is meant to fall within 5% of that goal. Thus, going by the statements in the OP/Sniper livestream, the difference between specs could be 10% and that would be working as intended.

What is the total area that Carbine Burst covers? I ask because this tells how many mobs it can be expected to spread to assuming that they are pulled to be directly in front of a tank. Second, will trying to reach an optimal spread place the Operative outside of any healing puddles that would be expected to hit both the tank and the melee group?

Given the number of times you have been "stunned", I am surprised that you have not been unsubbed. 1v1 capability does not translate into effectiveness in a Warzone. The only time that a 1v1 might matter is contesting a node, in which case burst matters more than sustained damage (unlikely, would be interrupted by reinforcements). Instead, the developers' vision of sustained damage stealth suggests a continued pressure DPS in the midst of a fight, for which the Operative's defensive capabiliies give it little staying power to apply that pressure. The defensive utilities were designed around a bursty skirmisher rather than the persistent brawler that the developers are trying to make.

Bear in mind that when asked specifically about the lack of defensive cooldowns that would allow an Operative to stick in a sustained PvP fight the devs were at a loss for an answer. Their math is probably spot on, but their vision of Operative as a sustained-stealth-dps package doesn't translate into reality. Their answer to that question raised the spectre of an offensive shadowstep ability, but that ignores the crux of the question: survival when in a fight (a problem that keeps DPS operatives and Snipers out of Ranked). As they have not acknowledged the problems present now, I have little faith for them to solve any problems they create.

Annoying that. Stat prioritization is going to change from Cunning-centric to raw stats. For the rest, well it wouldn't be a SWTOR patch if it didn't nerf Operatives. Also one of the devs seems to have an obscene fascination with Carbine Burst. I get that it is meant to be similar to the function of FiB/DF for Balance/Madness but the opportunity costs and clunkiness of the skill mean that it will not get used. EDIT: Carbine Burst is a horrible ability and attaching our DOT spreading ability to it is a horrible idea. Fragmentation grenade or even better, Corrosive Grenade (sniper Lethality) would be far better ideas. Carbine Burst is a high cost skill in both energy and TA, and requires a specific positioning that no other DOT spec has to deal with.

Would be great if role could be detailed, as if taken at straight class the numbers can be misleading.

I encountered a chest bot on Belsavis. My solution? Flag for PvP. Stand right in front of them, where the chest would spawn. Hilarity when they click on you, auto attack occurs. Om nom nom. Blood for the blood god.

Actually it would be a boost to get Datacrons early due to the Bolster system. Some of the datacrons would be hard to get to such as Corellia- others like Ilum are fairly open and accessible. Itlum is particularly nice to visit early because it yields a few Shards in locations that are more accessible than the alternate planets (can't equip multiple Matrix cubes though ) As the character levels the gains from Datacrons diminish until endgame.

After playing against my own guild a few times, there's nothing really like the feedback from nerdrage when it's personal and on Teamspeak. For same-faction why not place individual members of premades across the teams? In primetime when the cues are more active and cross-faction is most common, 4-man and 8-man premades would still be intact, armed and fully operational. When less active, they'd be split up and be able to assess their own team-mates worth from the viewpoint of an enemy. This would have the potential side-benefit of having the cues pop longer with solo cue'ers having more of a chance in the later hours as opposed to the current situation.

We should swap it up, make Biochem have top-tier stims that require materials that can only be looted off the dead corpses of your foes in PvP (granted automatically on kill with a 5% chance and per 1k objectives). Seems fair that if PvP'ers must PvE to get top-tier gear/buffs that the PvE raider crowd should have to do some PvP activity to participate in their raids.

Even if there is a cap on PvP commendations in 2.0, would it be on the PTS? They would be wanting some variance in gear, that a cap would limit, to tell how it's going to look like on the actual 2.0. This is the sort of thing we need a direct callout to the Devs for clarification on.

Scamper also has an energy cost to it. Spam it too much and energy will go towards the nether regions where it's slow to regen (from 5 per second to 2 per second). Energy Level Regeneration 80-100: 5/sec 60-80: 4/sec 40-60: 3/sec 20-40: 2.5/sec 0-20: 2/sec

For the OP: how does Force Speed in stealth make any sense? If anything, Scamper makes Operatives more comparable with Assassins regarding mobiility. They've really needed this for the past year.