I'll try to offer support for your choice based on the individual warzones, and my juggernaut based views will have to be taken as from someone who has not actually played the class but still has enough experience playing to hopefully give accurate assessments. Huttball: Juggernaut Many people will make a list for you of how overpowered assassins are in huttball, but you will likely find them far less overpowering in situations where it actually matters. Force speed+force shroud can get you to the goal more often than not IF you can get past the first flame. Having stealth makes it effective for getting into position, and force pull can give you a significant boost to defensive and offensive ball carrier/support manipulation. Force speed+force shroud can also ensure that you are the best class for reaching the huttball first and to prevent you from being stunned/pulled once you grab the ball. A good team, however, will stop an assassin. The assassin's mobility is highly limited compared to mara's, juggs, and powertechs because of the 15 second leaps. Premades will likely have leap utilizing players as well which can significantly hamper an assassin's ability to move around the field unless they stay cloaked, which as a tank you likely do not want to do an entire match. 5 seconds of force shroud disappears quickly, and you are quite vulnerable to knockbacks. Juggernauts can leap+force push which is very similar in utility to force pull, except it grants the juggernaut added mobility as well. Mobility is key, juggernauts have survival, and as the only class which can literally walk through the flames without dieing it is your best bet. Your CC's are effective at stalling a ball carrier and if you get knocked down you can usually leap up again. Civil War: Assassin Pretty straight forward, you are the fastest for reaching a location, you can stealth to defend points, you can restealth and interrupt without putting yourself at much risk to delay cappers, you can survive extremely well against groups for a short period of time (just like juggs of course), and you can force pull players away giving others valuable time to cap a console. Any time you are defending a particular location though and assassin or operative will have a significant advantage in utility. Voidstar: Assassin Besides the benefit of speed for reaching capture points and stealth for defending and attacking, you are more mid-range than juggernauts in a tanking spec. While the heavy AOE from a juggernaut may look nice, having to leap into the middle of groups is dangerous in the voidstar zergs. Assassin's can also pull healers or DPS into their own groups to greatly avoid putting themselves in dangerous positions inside the opposing groups. Novare Coast: Both Neither offer a clear advantage here as the most important tool that a tank offers in this case is his taunting for damage reduction. Stealth may seem like a superior ability here, but you will rarely capture a node solo, and never against a good premade. Despite the massive crying neither assassins nor juggernauts have the necessary damage to take a 1 vs 2 in a true tanking setup unless you are fighting pugs. Being an assassin trying to stealth and take nodes might even hurt your team's success as well, as what would be most important are your taunts in heavy conflict locations and other abilities. In the end what you will honestly have to choose is whether you like to stealth to get close to targets and being able to avoid a lot of damage for severl seconds, or being highly mobile with leap and taking almost no damage for several seconds.

It's not about being broke or not, it's about forcing me to do content I have no interest in just to afford to modify armor I already own. If I already own two pieces of armor, which I have put effort into acquiring both pieces of armor, then why make it even more difficult for me to simply combine those pieces of armor? You can like credit sinks but you have not actually argued against this suggestion, which is making people pay more when they end up with less in the end.

I am wanting to make 3 special sets of armor for my assassin, 2 PVP sets and 1 PVE set. Those require changing all mods on the armor. My sniper needs most of a set rebuilt, which is just the enhancements/mods. My mercenary is also going to need 1 PVP and 1 PVE set built, and the PVP set would require all the mods moved as well. What I am wanting to do would cost a tremendous amount of credits, and I do not believe the reason bioware would have for placing this cost on me is justified. If it is supposed to be a credit sink well that is an ignorant way to do so in my case because the only reason I would farm the credits would be to sink them in this manner to begin with. Would rather spend my time PVPing and occasionally doing an operation with my guild, not so much massive PVE farming and tradeskilling for profit.

I assumed there was one but totally missed it Seems it got warped there and I know where it is now anyways.

Can we have an option to strip all the mods out of a piece of armor without cost, but in exchange the piece of armor we stripped could be destroyed. I have no idea why players must be charged crazy amounts of credits at high levels to remove our mods from our armor, but surely this would be acceptable? That means transferring mods from one piece of armor to one of those empty pieces of armor would cost nothing, rather than something around 150-200k credits per piece.

I am a PVPer on the highest population PVP euro server, nothing like a 50 minute wait time to log in as 800th in the queue. Needless to say highest population PVP server also means the highest rate of PVP activity against the largest variety of players both good and bad. Saying you cannot execute viable levels of DPS while players have been executing viable levels of DPS simply refutes your statement entirely. You can given "appropriate circumstance". Those appropriate circumstances happen to be the same for any reasonably built high DPS with lower survival, you need support and you need to play much smarter than a tank. It is team based PVP afterall, and I would not expect you to stand inside a zerg and dish out high amounts of damage, but at the same time you are a ranged class that does have to be immobile like snipers but not get up close to do damage like marauders. If you can do massive DPS without having to worry about surviving then your class would be overpowered and broken, which is likely the case made against marauders/sentinels and also why snipers/gunslingers are considered rather balanced. I have agreed that sages/sorcs are a bit too easy to kill as DPS builds, but arguing that you cannot do DPS is a falacy. "We can DPS if we can survive" not "We cannot DPS" The important factor in that statement is that you need to be protected and supported just like a healer to do DPS, which is very much the same thing my sniper has to deal with. We cannot guage classes compared to ones that are performing too well which is likely the problem. I played WoW for 5 hours and uninstalled it, so any references to that game will not be easy for me to relate to. My PVP experience is with games that have more complex PVP systems such as Anarchy Online and Shadowbane. Valor did not determine their skill, it was their consistent performances in nearly a dozen warzone matches I can distinctly remember that was a sign of their skill. When I inspected them they also happened to be Social X and Valor 90+. The coincidance of being a high level of valor and also being the best sorcs on the server just made it easier to remember something about them. If you choose to focus on their valor ranking than fine, but I would focus more on the fact that they were performing the best damage with almost no deaths in every round we were in. Obviously they know what they are doing and it helps.

Your DPS is good, and I would not trust any sorc/sage who argued otherwise. Valor 90+ sorcs I have seen on ToFN usually do top damage and can generally be found with 0 deaths at the end of a match. I do not expect everyone to be able to survive like they do as that takes as much knowledge of other classes as their own, but I do expect that anyone can mimic the levels of damage they output.

I pity you because you obviously lack decent teammates when you pvp You think my mercenary has much better tools to allow me to survive? Hardly, I have about the same tool base as you do with knockback, stun, casted stun, and self protection tools. The only real difference is that your absorb does not scale with your level and thus works too well at lower levels but not well enough with 50's. What you are supposed to rely on as a healer is not your own toolset but the toolset of your team. I did point that out in a very specific manner.

Yeah you guys do seem pretty damn squishy Although in a group, where the team is working appropriately, your tools do work pretty well to keep you alive don't they? Of course I am referring to healers, I believe your DPS builds get absolutely smashed but I do not know what you are actually lacking that allows that. The utility of player pulling is also pretty high but I do not believe that warrants an easy kill. When I run into a DPS sorc I only think of two things: Annoying If I can get close to it I can go ahead and kill it then move on. To gain more survival though, would you guys be willing to take a nerf to damage? That is what players will expect for the trade-off given the assumed single-target and AOE damage capabilities of DPS sorcs. Again, I merely find them annoying so I cannot appropriately attribute a loss to sage/sorc capabilities.

Thank you...if someone is hitting those 600k+ damages it is AOEs which also means the other team was failing to spread out appropriately or burst down the necessary targets (healers then AOE DPS). You cannot nerf a class's AOE builds because the opposing team screws up. Stop blobbing up and taunt the DPS and their damage is already significantly reduced. I would imagine no one bothered doing anything correct in that warzone.

The more I read these threads the more I think "I really should be a healer more than anything else." Most of the complaints are due to team failures, the rest are due to individual failures. If you can't take a little pressure when having to heal then reroll your healers and go DPS or one of those FOTM classes. I can handle the pressure, I can put out 300k+ healing while being targeted, having to kite, having to use CC's, and actually relying on my team to protect me. The benefit of a good healer is more than a DPS and even more than what my assassin can do in any warzone, and if it is a little difficult well I think that is ok because I can literally turn the tide of a fight.

http://i777.photobucket.com/albums/yy51/Gatester/Screenshot_2012-04-21_19_57_45_789207.jpg My merc in pre-50 warzone...should I be doing better than that? BTW 1.2 patch increased how well a merc heals teams.

A healer dies to a DPS, likely in the same level of gear and using damage boosting tools. Is the complaint that a healer cannot heal himself and DPS a target dead in a 1 v 1, that you lack crowd control to prevent a melee class from chasing and killing you, or that if you do not try to kite a target or focus on healing that you may actually die? I can spam cure and kolto missile while kiting, and try to use my concussion missile with my instant activation to get away from people in a tight situation. If anything, 1.2 made good healers work harder and the bad healers are starting to give up. Was sick of seeing up to 5 healers in a warzone who could also do decent damage anyways, I think things are better now than they were and appropriate healers are becoming more common.

My Merc healer would get marked a lot, people would come around corners and pylons to kill me. Then I put on some juggernaut gear with my Aim mods. Now I do not get marked and focused so much, apparently I am just a lazy sith warrior

15% buff And unless you got completely owned it should have ran out before the fight finished.

Our utility is too high like you say, not our damage or survival. Players will not be able to QQ our damage down though, because despite their whining it is not possible to produce damage numbers that warrant a nerf. When people see an assassin or shadow do high amounts of damage they just assume they are tanks, but those are not tanks. My assassin is endurance>willpower and def/crit/surge built and produces maybe 180-220k DPS in most warzone matches but survives really well. If I was willpower and power/crit/surge then I would be a DPS built assassin. 14% defence rating and 16,000 max health is a DPS. I have 18,500 max health and 23.5% def rating, that makes me a tank.

If you are in DPS gear, does that not make you a DPS? If not, which part of darkness spec actually makes you a tank more than max health and defense?

You used your CC tools when the shadow was using his tech/force immunity. Thus using your tools at the wrong time. The shadow was behind the final fire on the path to the goal line. I know he was there because he does not have force leap to reach that position, the tech/force immunity cannot last long enough from any other location, and force speed does not last long enough from any other location. You did not stop the ball carrier who passed the ball to the shadow who was in a location in which he could score from. There were no warrior or powertech types to leap to the shadow, as that would have slowed him. You also lacked a class which could have pulled him. When he is recieving the pass he would not have used his tech/force immunity, he would have waited until after the pass was finished. You could have stunned, pulled, or knocked the shadow down in that time. The failure here, as I assumed, was not defending ones side correctly, not trying to make sure someone was not stealthed in a scoring position, not preventing the ball carrier from passing, not using tools at the correct time, and lacking the tools to stop a scorer who is so close to the goal line. These are actions that stop my assassin all the time, and actions I use to stop others.

Interrupts Pulls Stuns Timing burst after their tech/force immunity is down Using AOE's when they guard someone Closest thing to unkillable in this game is a devoted healer in a 1 on 1 fight. Other than that nothing in this game produces enough healing to survive fights indefinately. The healing produced by harnessed darkness is around 5-15% of the damage players produce which makes any such statements simply impossible. This means you are either using your tools at the wrong time or failing to use your tools at the right time (yes there is a difference with that statement).

There are counters to stealthing, even in combat stealthing, I would not argue that. It is when the counters fail and the stealthing is successful that it feels as if it works too much in the advantage of the assassin/shadow. This applies to all combat stealth though so my problems are with operatives/scoundrels as well. Especially considering that once you successfully stealth, you can then proceed to start mezzing whoever almost killed you and prevent them from taking an objective they should have rightfully won with little recourse. Low risk and high reward capabilities that a character more vulnerable than a devoted tank or healer should have.

My heal merc is a healer...I don't really need an interrupt there. In damage setup I have 2 knockbacks, and although one is weak it is an interrupt. I can also use an ability instantly given a moderately locked out skill, which means I can use concussion missile as a quick stun if I think fast. Never really noticed a need for an interrupt but I am not 50 yet so perhaps my view will change then. Honestly I'd prefer the second knockback to an interrupt as there is more utility in moving players anyways.

Almost always (as I think there was an LOS issue preventing it once) when a warrior leaps to you your character is unable to move until they reach you. It may not be in the effects but you are, in fact, rooted practically every time and there is nothing you can do to stop it. The actual root effect that is supposed to take place is the only part you can avoid.

The CCing from stealth while defending is one thing, since a tank setup is already going to have higher survival it makes it almost too powerful in defense. The other thing is that I do not believe assassins or shadows in tank spec should be without stealth, but that their effective stealth capabilities are reduced. Vanishing mid fight is a cheap tool but I will not voice my ideas on that as it applies to all stealthing by agents/smugglers as well. Either way I do not have a clear suggestion as to what I think should be done for tanks in regards to stealthing as opposed to damage builds, but I do not think a class who can sacrifice some damage for significant, albiet necessary survival, should also retain the positioning and utility capabilities granted by stealth in its full effect. Best I can think of is if the harnessed darkness proc is activated, the one everyone truly complains about and is entirely tied to the tanking tree, then an out of combat delay on stealthing could be added. Force tanks to be in the open longer, such as after a kill involving the damage boost , then they are forced to wait 10-15 seconds before stealthing again, then they become more like tanks. Damage assassins and shadows who lack survival are the ones who truly need to hide and heal in most cases.

Full battlemaster assassin with tank spec up to harnessed darkness, then points in madness for boosts to thrash and shock damage. My single target damage is pretty good, yet one on one it is almost impossible for my full battlemaster assassin to take out a full battlemaster healer with biochem. I have numerous, not one or two but a great many encounters where I am trying to take out the smuggler healer one on one and they somehow kite and heal up over 30 seconds, despite my interrupts working when they should and stunning at appropriate times. For all the claims of the insane damage my assassin should be doing, and primarily single-target damage, I would imagine I could actually kill equally geared healers more often than not yet this is not the case. In comparison, my sniper who is in champion with one piece of battlemaster, using engineering and lethality hybrid spec for AOE damage boost...I will repeat AOE damage boosting...and up to Cull in lethality. If I see a healer I can almost guarantee I can burst it down. They may get lucky with a biochem heal stim, which is about the best chance they have of surviving asside from LOSing me (something anyone can do to a tank assassin if not more easily), and I do not require being in melee range for my primary stun eaither. The burst is higher than my assassin, the DPS is higher than my assassin, the AOE damage is FAR higher than my assassin. My assassin has good survival, but it is a tank so what would you expect? My survival primarily comes not from my toolset alone though, but the failure of other players. If I pop force shroud early into rushing a group of players, if they are noobs then they all try to burst me down with all their attacks which get nullified. My defense is around 70% for 12 seconds as well, meaning most of their regular attacks will fail too. If they wait until my assassin stops glowing bright, white, and obviously immune to their abilities, then I die in a few seconds against several people. Just like a juggernaut with or without his shield, the survival is not due to the tools but the ignorance of attackers. As player incompetence cannot be blamed on the classes they are attacking, the only thing I can find issue with on assassins is the stealth itself. Stealth on a tank class makes no sense, although I know it is to counter warrior leaps as a gap closing ability, it provides too much utility and survival at once. Darkness (tank spec) should have nerfed stealth and then the class would honestly be just fine.

Was trying to think of the shortest way to title this thread and have it make sense but that is a bit difficult so please try to focus on my question rather than the title Something I have been wondering in voidstar is whether or not the side on defense in a given round should continue to be seperated, or given a wait period after dieing, once an objective is taken by the offensive position. To put it another way, when offense successfully destroys a door in voidstar, would it be fair for defenders who were defeated and waiting to re-enter the playfield from the wait areas to be allowed to enter again without waiting the full time? The barriers that keep defenders from entering combat again right away do serve a purpose obviously, and that is to actually allow the attackers to take an objective (would be impossible in most other cases). What troubles me is when the attackers just get lucky, and just before a door is destroyed the barrier keeping defenders out of the pvp is refreshed, giving attackers with speed boosts a clear path to the final room. This is not attributed to skill, merely luck on the timing of the doors being destroyed. So I posed the question in bold, which may not be much of an issue now but this could become an issue when ranked warzones are live. Should luck be a factor over skill, and should defenders be given a bit more reprieve in this manner?