Going assault on commando just makes you a significantly weaker Vanguard. Why would you choose that?

Pyro for Mercs is like Lethality for Operatives; it's a broken spec for the class. Pyro makes PT's burst machines thanks to the lower cooldowns on their Rail Shot procs and their ability to stay mobile (along with their abundance of utility skills compared to ours, including a jump, pull, and interrupt). They inherently get out more railshots quicker than we do while being more mobile and useful. Essentially, if you're playing a Pyro Merc you're just a gimped Pyro PT. The problems with the latest patch are the decrease to Arsenal burst, since numbers at the end of a match mean nothing when you're ignored by the enemy team thanks to subpar burst. BW was on record saying our overall was fine, but they wanted to shift some damage away from Tracer Missile while making up the difference elsewhere. It was completed somewhat successfully, although losing TM damage to get more Unload procs (which are more likely to be resisted), was a bad trade off but the HSM buff made up for it. Now, HSM is doing 25% less than it was pre-1.2, and even less by most accounts. Saying it's "fine" isn't the issue. A heal spec Merc can do "fine" damage if they try. It doesn't make it acceptable.

Hit 50 fresh out of early-access with my Operative. Decided to level a Commando to "help the other side". Few weeks after hitting 50 got sick of the Rep side being filled with idiots and started leveling a Mara. Having tons of fun. /shrug

I feel as if the people who do the combat system haven't told the people who design the armor stats that defenses don't work on anything but white, "normal" damage, which is what causes them to overload on accuracy. Regardless, in PvP, every class has at least 5% base-evade, so if you have 0 accuracy and 0 accuracy talents you'll have a 95% chance to hit with tech/force and a 85% chance to hit with white damage. Equal-level, unbuffed monsters have 0% evade so you'll always hit with tech/force and miss 10% of the time with white, normal damage. Use that as your benchmark.

Damage at the end really doesn't mean anything. I can spend all my time dotting and AOEing and put up ridiculous numbers without being a threat. No one is scared of me, despite the warhero gear. That marauder next to me, though? He takes longer to engage, has less on-demand AoE and spends less time on target than I do, resulting in lower over-all damage. He also gets targeted and dies more often thanks to being up in the targets face and swinging his light sabers around. But when the enemy sees him, they are scared. When he force leaps to you, you need to pop defensive cooldowns or you'll be running back from the graveyard in a few seconds. Yet his damage is going to consistently be less than mine. Putting up screen shots like this only hurt the class, and I hope you realize that. We are sub-par single-target DPS that can deal big end-game numbers thanks to on-demand aoe and being low on the enemy kill list thanks to our damage being healed through/mitigated quite easily. Try doing an organized 4v4 against another group, or even an 8v8 if you want to get crazy. We have no objective utility that a Sniper or Sorcerer can't do better, we have lower single-target DPS than virtually every other class barring an already out of stealth Operative, we have the lowest survivability next to a Sniper (who at least gets some group utility and serves as a hard counter to tanks/maras) and are the single easiest class in the game to shut down via the interrupts that every class besides us have. To give you a little background, I have a Warhero Operative who I semi-retired ages ago after going full rakata/BM early, and spent most of my time on my Trooper. My Trooper felt powerful compared to my neutered Op but, in much the same way, had a role (ranged burst built for assisting the take-down of targets). With our debuff seemingly nerfed and our sustained/burst down from what it was only a few weeks ago, we are forced to do what you did: spam AOEs to inflate our end of warzone damage numbers while making our team wish we had picked Powertech.

You played a team of healers and spammed AOE attacks. Impressive. I appreciate all the evidence against the complaints that our bigger damage abilities have all received a significant damage nerf post 1.2 and many times do less damage than the tool tip even on fully debuffed NPC's.

Pyro's skills that proc Rail Shot are on a shorter cooldown than that of Merc's, making the Assault tree inherently stronger as a Pyro. Pyro's can cast nearly twice as many Rail Shots as a Merc can. Give us the ability to spam Rail Shot like that and I'd gladly take a nerf to Demo Round damage. In any event, the real issue is that BW claimed that they were going to make Demo Round post 1.2 do more damage than it did pre 1.2 to make up for the Grav Round nerf. Now, Demo Round is doing less than it ever has. Is this intended? Is this a bug? Who knows. One things for sure, though. BW didn't do any testing on 1.2.0c before they rolled it out.

The game is in decline because the Dev's don't seem to test anything before putting it up, continue to fail to meet expectations and have been incredibly sloppy with any sort of change (10% nerfs are more like 20%+ nerfs on live, never any comment from dev's on the specific issues, only talking about "metrics"). They said in an interview that they balanced based around "6 of us sitting around a table talking about what doesn't feel right. We make changes and do internal testing then go off that". One of them laughed about "doing hundreds of duels against each other". It's just mind-boggling that this is how the most expensive MMO in history is being run.

The problem is that whatever change was made has made Demo Round significantly weaker than it was pre 1.2 and pre 1.2.0c. Can we get confirmation as to whether or not Demo Round, as is on live, is as it's intended? It's dealing less damage than High Impact Bolt in PvE despite it having naturally higher damage and five vortexes being present on the target. I feel like 2 minutes of testing on live would show this...

I'm pretty sure the sets have similar stats (some pieces are surge on both sets, while some are acc). But BW pretty much puts way too much emphasis on Accuracy. I'm not sure what the devs are thinking and why they keep talking about how important it is, but on the live servers (which the devs apparently don't play on), surge is way more valuable than accuracy.

The items specifically say you can only receive the effects from one.

Tankassasins, PT Pyro's and Maras are the dominant classes right now. Agents, Sorcs, Mercs and Jugg's can't compare. Not only are these classes able to outburst and outdps the other five, they all have more survivablilty skills. There's obviously a difference between the three OP AC's right now (pyro's have more burst but less survivability, sins have more survivability but less burst, and maras fall in between), but I'm not sure how someone playing this game can't see these huge disparities. The real problem is the fact that there's currently three OP classes, with Pyro's having already received a "nerf" (which did nearly nothing to their overall capability, which any person testing the patch could have seen), tank sin's have remained virtually untouched, and mara's have actually been BUFFED. Classic Mythic.

The real problem here is twofold: there was no mention in the patch that solo damage would change and BW has apparently not tested it nor even played a merc/trooper in the current live environment. This means that it falls on the player base to let them know that, of the one change they made in a patch, they broke something? The level of incompetence is mind boggling. When this game collapses, it won't be from lack of content or class imbalance but from a dev team that has no idea what it's doing and, quite honestly, doesn't seem to care a whole lot.

When grav round got nerfed,Bioware claimed they were just rebalancing our damage, having demo make up the damage lost from grav. While this didn't seem to be the case, the nerf wasn't too bad. Now, demo has taken a flat 25% nerf. Is demo round doing less damage than 2 days ago? Was grav vortex giving a 50% boost before? It's unlikely, because someone would have noticed a +50% buff from vortexes. Either way, if we were balanced around per-1.2 damage numbers, we are certainly doing less overall now than we were. BW Is really going to need to buff something to get us back to pre-1.2 overall damage.

Big 'ol bump. Can't understand how tanky classes can keep their burst while we lose our sustained and our burst while being super, super squishy. Sigh.

The issue is that since you can only transfer set bonuses from new gear, it's going to be quite a while before there's any real demand for critted gear (unless people want to give up set bonuses for +18 main stat). Considering the low amount of mats needed to craft the gear, there will be no shortage of it once people start getting their WH gear.

I crafted an augmented Supercommandos body for my trooper (since I like the color scheme better). Moved all my mods/augments from my unaltered Battlemaster Eliminators body to the new one, but the set bonus doesn't show up. If I unequip all but 2 pieces, the piece of Eliminators will recognize the body piece as being part of the set, but I don't get the bonus (my Concussion Charge ability doesn't get the cooldown reduction it should). Unless I'm doing something wrong, this seems real, real bad.

I assume that you cannot learn the recipes of ~any~ orange item? I just ran through Athiss quick with the idea of trying to get the recipes for the gear there, but failed at every RE (and no "chance to RE %"). So I assume this isn't going to work. What, then, is the point of REing something to learn the schematic if nothing seems REable?

If by fixed you mean "making it 10% more effective", than yes. My point is that you're complaining about exploits when there's perfectly valid ways to make these encounters guaranteed and quick wins, so getting an extra rez by heavily nerfing your damage by bringing an Operative or Assassin doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

Alternatively, you can just do a 16 man, have a set up of: 1 Jugg tank, 1 Sin tank, 1 Operative healer and 13 Commandos. Have 1-2 spec heals and skip Bacta Infusion for Grav Round and the other 11 spec full Gunnery. Put 13 stacks of Grav Vortex on the boss and lol as each demo round hits for over 18k. You wouldn't even have to blow up mind traps on Soa since he would switch phases before he puts out more than 4, and everyone in the raid but the tanks can heal. When you can run set ups like that without an issue, I'm not sure why you're worried about the worst DPS class getting an extra revive.

Tracer/Grav buffs the damage of our other 3 damaging abilities. No using it until it procs FA, has 5 debuff stacks on the opponent or 5 charged barrel buffs on yourself is a decrease in damage. People who spam the skill until everything else is ready are doing it right. But not sure how this is different than saying an Operative "only" spams Shiv, Backstab and Lacerate.

That's perfect! Thanks!

So I plan on switching to Armormech, getting my augmented armor pieces, than switching back to Biochem. My issue is that I don't really feel like getting to 400 to RE the infinite supply of BM gear you can farm. In saying that, does anyone know where you pick up your first set of orange armor? I'd assume it's from some lower-level heroic or FP, but I haven't found anything yet.

Gunnery, and grav vortex more specifically, allow for increased burst from your teamates as well as yourself. Gunnery also does more damage, has better ammo management (especially with the Curtain of Fire change in 1.2) and has higher burst. It's less mobile, but there's very few warzones that don't encourage you to plant your feet at an objective, anyways. Besides, go run a Warzone with a buddy whose specced Gunnery as well. If you each cast 2 grav rounds and than a demo, you're looking at 8k+ from your double Demo's alone, on top of the grav round damage (remember, you get the +% from vortex to Demo's damage, but you also doubly benefit from the -armor). While Assault may be better in something like an arena where the enemy team will coordinate their interrupts, the pure damage output of Gunnery is still huge. Besides, Assault is really more a PT/Vanguard tree, like Lethality is more of a Sniper tree.

Grav round cost/cast time is the same as long as you take Muzzle Fluting, all they did was nerf the Medic tactic of not going into gunnery for Fluting and spamming Charged Bolt when Super-Charged Cell comes up. Guys, let's not forget the biggest point of this update: THEY DIDN'T CHANGE VORTEX STACKING! Which means that having two Commandos is still going to give your Demo Rounds +50%, 3 will give +75%, etc. Add to that higher Demo Round damage, and we are still very, very powerful. Can anything stop a group of 4, synced up Commandos in a rated? Even if you are guarded, 3 GCDs (2x grav 1x demo) from even 3 commandos will insta-gib ANYTHING.