Morphling will be subbing for Daz of Grim Determination

If you have Treek, consider using her instead of Mako. Since Treek uses Aim gear, it is easy to keep her geared up since she can get all your hand me downs.

For pvp it is irrelevant. Merc Pyro may have the top parse numbers, but it is probably the worst dps class for arena in the game. Short chopping UL to use your 2x RS provides much better burst than Arsenal's Unload. In basically the same time window. And it is non-interruptible. Which is the key. Just try using that Unload with a melee on you in an ranked arena. LOL. Force Shroud and Evasion are not cleansing. Against a competent enemy operative/scoundrel you are just playing a losing game with Pyro DoTs. Triage costs a mere 1 energy net of GCD recovery, and it is going to negate 3-4k of Pyro DoT damage. With the presence of a Pyro, Triage is elevated to the scoundrel's best insta-heal. If enemies aren't doing that to you, then they simply aren't very good.

I've seen Bodyguards do well in ranked. The key thing is you can not play them with a healing only focused mindset. Healing centric? Yes. Healing only? No. The idea is for the Bodyguard to delay initially. Ideally all enemy dps come to you. You want that. AoE mezz and move away. When they pursue, use HO. What you are doing is buying time for your team's dps to get an enemy player vulnerable. When that happens, you Electro Net them. Then pop your bubble and start healing. This is the critical point in the match for a Bodyguard team. At this point you are pumping out heals and the enemy team is severely pressed. Your team needs to convert this into the match's first kill. If it doesn't happen your team is in trouble. But it usually does.

Sorry, but Merc Pyro is just a bad class for PvP. Was the worst class in the game for PvP after 2.0 and still is. Against any good team in arenas they will initially focus the Merc Pyro, the Merc will pop his shield and then all opposing dps will shift to the other dps or the healer. 12 seconds later they will come back and finish off the Merc. Optional for the other team to have their tank shut down the Merc with stuns and interrupts while the Merc's shield is up. You simply can not have your team give up a kill that quickly in arenas, which is why no one wants a Merc Pyro on their team in an arena. The only subclass you see less often in ranked pvp than Merc Pyro is Mara Annihilation. And that has more to do with the strength of the alternative Mara dps trees. With Merc Pyro it is straight up due to the weakness of the subclass. But as far as some of the other beefs with older posts, such as why IM-DoT multiple enemies - I say why not? Blow up your heat stack right away, pop Vent Heat and do it again. The heat goes away when you are dead. Which you will be when fighting any reputable team in ranked pvp by the time heat is an issue. And is Merc Pyro ok in regular warzones? Well in the same way that Sorc heals is OK, I suppose. Which is to say, just because a class is worthless against skilled players, doesn't mean that a skilled player can't make it shine vs. dopes. That's what we call "putting lipstick on a pig".

Amongst the healers, Sorc the squishiest. Amongst dps, it is more complex. Sorc actually is less squishy when attacked by a group. That's because used correctly, their bubble and sprint can extricate them from a group of as many as four attackers IF the Sorc still has teammates alive. In contrast so many of the Merc dps' defensive abilities work best against a single opponent and indeed need to be chained together to deal with a single attacker. So Arsenal is actually less squishy than Sorc when attacked by a single melee, but worse when attacked by multiple. In many ways Arsenal is a bit like Jugg Rage from a defensive standpoint. Merc Pyro on the other hand is worthless. No root. Pathetic knockback. Weakest snare in the game. Weakest sprint in the game. Free kill for any decent melee. Simply attack, watch the Merc Pyro activates his shield, go attack someone else for 12 seconds, then come back and kill the Merc Pyro. Works every time.

LOL. What, actual facts were too overpowering for you?

In retrospect this was predictable. With 1.4 many, many Sent/Maras respecced into Focus/Rage. So of course the meta average productivity numbers for Focus/Rage dropped as people relearned their craft. And as expected that meant the only ones left playing Watchman/Anni were those devoted to the spec, i.e. experienced players. So meta average productivity numbers for Watchman/Anni rose. Ergo, nerf Watchman/Anni. BW will always be nerfing the weaker subclasses, because only the die-hard devotees to that subclass continue playing it. And thus even those it is weaker, the higher player skill of those using it will mean it has a higher meta average damage/protection/healing.

You have to understand what BW means by that statement. They do NOT mean that each player is within 5% (dps+protection+healing) of every other player. Rather they mean that the meta average of each subclass is within 5% of every other subclass. That is how BW manages class balance. The problem is that those meta averages do not account for variances in player skill. And who plays Merc dps anymore? Virtually no one. Only the most skilled, most geared, most stubborn players. And so BW manages class (im)balance by nerfing those expert Merc players until their meta average productivity is equal (within 5%) of the meta average productivity of FotM subclasses that are filled with undergeared players still learning to play their class. When you compare top players in different subclasses, in order to eliminate variance from player skill, the true order of subclass dominance is evident. Jugg/Guardian rage/focus are at the top with the ability to score up to 1.2 million damage. Mara/Sent rage/focus are close behind. Sorc dps can do the same if completely unmolested, but 1 million is a more realistic target. PT/Vanguard can manage 1 million damage, but are more reliable than Sorcs. Merc dps can manage about 800k, or about 50% less than the best dps classes. Now you begin to understand why Merc dps will always lose a 1v1 matchup between players of equivalent skill. Put simply, managing game (im)balance using meta average productivity is a bad policy. But it is the BW policy.

Couldn't agree more w.r.t. Ilum. They need a system with objective boxes/chests spawning at truely random locations throughout Ilum. And no I do not mean rotating amongst 20 fixed locations. That just causes crowded camping and the attendant lag. Truely random locations. And if one faction is winning most of the spawns in the last say 10 min, then there should be a higher probability that the spawns occur near npcs of the other faction. Proceeding until spawns actually occur in the losing side's home base. As far as the RNG system, it was bad. That does not mean all RNG loot systems are bad. If they had made BM bags cost 3 times as much and made the chance of a a BM token 3x as large, everything would have been fine. But BM did not understand the statistical theory behind one sided (downward) variance and the result was thousands of pissed off customers. Math matters.

You guys still don't get it. BW doesn't think Merc dps does too little damage. All the metrics that BW looks at tells them that Merc dps do far too much damage. That is why they repeatedly have nerfed Merc dps. How can that happen? Simple. Virtually no one plays Merc dps anymore. On my server I am basically the sole Merc dps left. I can go an entire week in normal wz without seeing a Merc dps. So virtually the entire meta average productivity of Merc dps on my server comes from me. And 90% of the matches I am the high dps on my team. Things are probably the same on other servers. The only people left playing Merc dps in PvP are the most skilled, most geared, most determined players. So when BW looks at their weekly meta average numbers, they see maybe 80 matches played by Merc dps on my server, and the average productivity is FAR HIGHER than that for any other subclass. The problem of course is that BW's meta average metrics do not control for player skill/quality. So they will continue to nerf Merc dps until the very best Merc dps players have productivity equal to that of the average, undergeared noobs playing the FotM. This is exactly what we have seen for the last six months.

You can't be serious, can you? Explosive Dart costs 16 Heat, which takes 3.2 seconds of recovery time to dissipate. In exchange it does AoE damage to up to 3 enemies. Compare that to Smash. Smash costs 3 rage which takes 2.75 seconds of recovery time (Assault) to generate. In exchange it does AoE damage to up to 5 enemies. And the damage is about 3-4x greater than Explosive Dart. In what imaginary world would the Merc's AoE be considered a "decent bang for the buck"?

I don't think the new wz map is ready for primetime. The game mechanics they have described in being on that map are borked with the new stealth abilities. There is no counter to a team of 4 operatives (2 healing, 2 concealment dps) and 4 tank assassins. They will start cloaked and then uncloak to pick off two enemies (4v1 on each). As soon as the kill occurs, they will stealth out. Rinse and repeat. When the time comes to fight over the central room, they do the same thing and then keep fighting with their 8v6 advantage. No way the other team will get kills with everyone on the stealth team being a tank or under guard. On normal (non-deathmatch) maps, you can at least defeat a stealth player by forcing them to cloak and run away. That gives you the terrain objective. But in death match that gets you NOTHING. In death match the ability to use Exit Combat Stealth to prevent death is a trump card that usurps EVERYTHING.

Just stop. They aren't going to make Tracer Missile and Power Shot insta cast abilities. They will do something minor. Like make Jet Boost, when triggered, remove any movement impairing debuffs on you. Similar to how Sorc's sprint ability works. They don't want Mercs to do more damage. They want Mercs to spend more time running away.

The entire concept of using JetBoost immediately after being Force Charged is dubious. Since you are rooted for 2 (usually 3) seconds after the Force Charge, your lack of movement means you negated nearly the entire benefit of the JetBoost's snare. Moreover the Vengence/Vigilance Warrior/Knights will be immune to ALL the effects of your Jet Boost at that time. You are better off eating the initial damage and then then using Jet Boost after you are no longer rooted. At that point, then you can get some separation from the melee attacker. Now if they changed JetBoost so that when you used it, it removed all negative movement effects (just as the Sorc Sprint ability does), AND allowed it to override Unstoppable/Unremitting, then you might be on to something....

None of this is going to happen until they get x-server queues up and running. While some servers have enough populations, the RP servers, the Oceanic servers and even some PvP servers lack the queue depth to support a further subdivision of level 50 pvp queues.

This is the biggest issue. The Hero engine just doesn't seem capable of handling 20+ player toons at the same time in the same area. Hell, even in wz, there are flashes of lag at the start of a match when 14-16 people surge into the same area. As this is an engine limitation, the only way to have open world pvp is to design it around that limitation. Which means dispersed, RANDOMLY located objectives. And by random, I don't mean an objective/chest that rotates amongst a fixed number of locations. Those will just get spawn camped, leading to the exact same lag problems. The objective's location needs to be truely randomly located over a wide area (Ilum is sufficient for this). If there were say, 20 such sites located randomly on Ilum, each rewarding 50 Mercenary Comms, you might have people willing to do open world pvp (assuming you can trade a Merc Comm for say 2 Normal WZ Comms). Ideally the location of such objectives would be influenced by which faction has gotten the majority of the recently picked up objectives. So if the Imperials have gotten more objectives recently, there would be a tendency for new objectives to spawn in areas with Repub npcs. If the Repubs had gotten a long run of all the recent objectives, the new spawns might even occur in the Imperial base! Want to organize a large group from your faction to invade the enemy Ilum base? Now there is a reason to do it. Clear the neutral space of all objectives, then push on into enemy areas, and finally their home base! Yes, if activity was focused solely on a base, lag might enter the picture. But even those bases are pretty large. Personally we've had 20+ friendlies vs. 10+ enemy players (assisted by turrets and npcs) in an Ilum base fight and there wasn't that much lag because some were attacking directly inside the base and some were at the entry and some were even down the elevator. Open world pvp can happen in this game, but it needs some forethought by the devs to manage around the weaknesses of the game engine and the two faction game design.

Merc AoE ability is above average relative to other classes for PvE purposes only. Sorcs are better at it, and even PT/Vanguard is about the same given the poor heat/damage profile of Sweeping Blasters. Still, Mercs are above average AoE dealers for PvE. But in PvP, Merc are definitely below average AoE platforms. The only viable AoE attacks the Merc has in PvP are Explosive Dart and Fusion Missile (when combined with TSO and Power Surge). Everything else is going to be interrupted leaving you with a heat headache and little else. That gives you an AoE attack every 13.3 seconds, with the vast majority of those coming from the very weak Explosive Dart. Compare that to the dozens of Smash Monkeys roaming warzones, who if properly piloted can get off a auto crit Smash every 10 seconds or less. A Smash which does about 4x as much damage as the pathetic Explosive Dart. In a densely packed warzone, a top tier player piloting a Smash Monkey will score damage output about 50% higher than a top tier player using Merc dps. In a warzone featuring mostly 1v1 activity, the Smash Monkey will still output damage about 30% higher than the Merc dps. With better survivability and more team utility.

There is still so much to do before those desirable items you mentioned can come to pass successfully. Season 1 of rwz w/o x-server queues is pointless. The new wz is broken because of how stealth classes work. 4 operatives, 4 assassins - kill two players each time your team comes out of stealth, and then when node fight happens, fight it out with your 8v6 advantage. Automatic win.

I don't think this is the answer. Merc/Commando dps is already lower than any of the preferred dps classes. The only way Merc/Commando can be even semi-viable is if they are shooting ALL the time. Giving them a disengage ability that takes away from the time that they can be shooting at the enemy simply makes them even less effective. Hmmm, with that taken into account, yeah, this is probably what BW will do...

They aren't going to do anything helpful. What I'd like to see is Ironsights add +3% to Accuracy AND +3% to Aim per skill point used. That's a small change, easily programmed and implemented. Nor can one argue that it is overpowered. Gunslingers already have a talent that adds +30% to accuracy. Right now Mercs are screwed because the offhand weapon accuracy is so low that virtually every GCD you are handing an enemy melee a free riposte/retaliation. You are literally doing more damage to yourself than you are to them when you try to fight them. That is broken beyond belief. Of course they won't fix that. Instead they will give us some minor root/sprint that prevents us from attacking back for 15 seconds. Doh. BW doesn't get it. Their objective is still to reduce Merc dps output, which they consider far too high relative to other subclasses.

They are not going to take away gear grind. With no x-server ranked pvp, and perhaps only 1 new wz map per year, there is NO other mechanism to keep subscribers other than to put them on a treadmill. For that business reason alone, gear grind will continue - in PvP as well as PvE. To alleviate the issues with gear disparity in PvP, BW will constantly move up the lowest (free) tier of gear. Recruit Mk-3 will certainly make an appearance down the road. By doing this they can constantly put a carrot in front of the noses of hardcore PvP players while keeping the gear gap with new players constant. Let's face it, right now the biggest reason there is a gap in performance between new and experienced players isn't gear. It's skill. ToR PvP combat is extremely complex compared to other MMO PvP systems. And new players will have a huge skill gap to close, as well as a gear gap. But you put an experienced player in full Recruit Mk-2 gear, and he will eat alive a new player, even if that new player was gift wrapped a set of WH equipment.

Which is the best class depends on personal preference. Which is the worst class is not under dispute. Merc/Commando is clearly the worst class in the game. 80+% of veteran players will state as much.

Merc/Commando dps is the worst pvp subclass in the game. How bad is it? Even when I am on my Merc dps in a wz, I will seek out and kill enemy Merc/Commando dps first. Because they ARE a free kill. Too bad no one plays them anymore.

The concealment types always have low productivity numbers. Doesn't mean that they aren't adding to a team just as much as a toon that has twice the productivity numbers. Just another reason why meta average dps/heaing/protection is a horrible way to gauge play balance. As far as lethality/DF, those are incredibly powerful toons if handled correctly. I've run my DF in about a dozen lev 50 pvp matches in full recruit gear and have never failed to be top dps score. You just have to avoid tunnel vision w.r.t. your targeting selection. In that sense the toon plays markedly differently than most other subclasses and that may be a hurdle for some.