You guys gearing wrong or something? My thrashes as darkness spec can easily hit for combined 2000-3000+ damage. Pre surge nerf my thrashes crit for nearly 4k total damage.

I had 500k damage and like 5 kills the other day. The other team had 6 healers with 2 million combined healing and a rage jugg with 700k damage.

I'm not here to call any class overpowered or underpowered, but i've noticed rage juggs doing a ton of damage in the last two weeks. Where it used to be operatives and bounty hunters on top, im seeing juggs getting 600, 700, 800k+ damage with highest hits over 6000. I consider my damage to be spectacular for a 'tank' class and my highest hit is around 4k usually. They of course are not tanked spec'd so the increased damage is to be expected. As a geared valor 71 darkness assassin I generally never lose a 1v1, or even come close to losing, but as of late good juggernauts have been wrecking me in seconds, or my guarded healer just as fast. Again, not calling anyone overpowered, but I definitely have seen a shift of power in juggernauts in the last 2 weeks.

bounty hunter has a spec'd ability that makes them unstoppable/knockable/pullable/stunnable for 8 seconds.

Just use pve gear, its far easier to get columi or rakata gear from raids. I got 4 piece bonus in a single raid, as opposed to 2 months of pvp'ing before I got a mainhand anything weapon.

I'd take Talos personally... mine is in full champion/battlemaster gear.

If you arent running out of force doing a normal rotation you are doing something seriously wrong. during a 15 minute fight you've spent something like 800 force keeping up dark ward. The number of abilities you are rotating is irrelevant, its the fact that thrash can be used every gcd until you are out of force, even if it was the only ability in your rotation, you'd still run out of force pretty quickly. Approximately every 2 dark wards you've put up, you've lost a thrash. For me, 1 thrash can be anywhere from 1500 to 3500 damage total. In 24 seconds you've lost 1 thrash out of 16 possible. Thats 6.25% damage, added on to the stat loss from using a shield gen you are now doing ~10% less damage than me. About 500 expertise worth of damage.

Then you are losing a lot more than 3% damage from the lost force cost of keeping it running.

I think the main issue for me is wasting 10 force every 12 seconds or whatever keeping dark ward up, if you say you only use it on the rare times when someone is focusing you, I say use a focus that is useful ALL the time. So either you are bleeding out force keeping it up or you are carrying around a dead weight in your offhand thats gimping your damage. If they change the absorb shield to proc off all damage, then I will consider it. Right now its way too situational to try to waste force and damage on.

I'll take 3% damage thank you.

I run one champion power relic and one battlemaster power relic (different cooldowns aside from the global 30s trinket cooldown.)

Ya know it is possible to complete objectives, win the match and still earn a lot of medals (unless you are a healer, and thats been covered already in this thread.) They arent mutually exclusive.

Focus.

Spam shock and thrash until 3 stacks of harnessed darkness then force lightning.

I dont use discharge in pvp.

Yeah except getting expertise past 500 or so isnt really worth it, so 4 piece pve at some point is going to be your best choice.

Yep, no change.

Personally I like the bull hat better than the feather cap, even though it makes me look like: This

I changed a couple of 56 surges to accuracy just because I had a couple level 58 accurancy enhancements lying around... but yeah I dont think it makes much of a difference.

Seriously. Get a healer friend and guard him and between your darkness self healing and his you'll be unkillable by less than 4 people. I can still get the 75k healer medal post shockfrozen water nerf.

Go darkness, gear up, wreck people, never die.

Still getting the 75k healing medals without shockwater.

I havent done the numbers but I believe this is true.

I dont think anyone disagrees with you that healers get shafted, I even made a point of this in my original post.

The problem I see is that in the Darkness tree, there are 3 plateaus of key skills. Blood of sith, harnessed darkness, and wither. In the madness tree you have chainshock/torment, claws of decay, and unearthed knowledge (and creeping terror). If you are sitting in between those skills in both trees you are wasting potential. Your build sits in between both plateaus instead of going for one or the other. That and trying to spec and use maul outside of a deception build is nearly a complete waste when you can get a thrash with claws of decay that crits almost as hard. I disagree with your opinion of force lightning, I find it works most of the time and saves my bacon more times than I can count. tl:dr 3 points in duplicity over 3 points in harnessed darkness is a bad idea.