I've heard so many variations on this, would you care to cite your sources?

They can't trigger that without jump and they can't jump unless you leave cover. Hunker down early and you'll start with things in your favor.

You're wrong, the other poster has it right. There are 101 spec threads and the OP should've searched before crowding this forum with another.

Ugh it's stupidity like this that makes me feel like forum number crunching here is in the dark ages. 5% on our 4 most useful abilities equates to about a 4% increase in total DPS. Percentage increases of individual abilities is NOT ADDITIVE TO OUR DPS. People were doing the same thing in another damage thread a while back on the PVP forums.

Gunslingers here. You had nearly 5 months of superior animations that gave you a lot more than 1 augments worth of an advantage. Now you have to wait a few weeks for someone to RE a campaign vibroknife. BOOHOOOOO

I would even disagree with this. Nobody was putting out parsed combat logs which showed dirty fighting doing more than sharpshooting on target dummies. At most you could say they had roughly even damage. Then you could consider the nature of warzones, sometimes you only have a few seconds to shoot at a target before it dies - what can SS do? Charged burst, trick shot, quick draw. Name 3 GCD's that any other spec can do for the same amount of damage... or if you have quick aim up it would be aimed shot, trick shot, quick draw. Point is: Sharpshooters can quickly drops lot of damage on targets and move on, this is well suited to the nature of warzones and ensures we are doing close to optimal DPS at all times despite very non-optimal circumstances. In the end, I couldn't find a dirty fighting or engineering spec that could come close to me in terms of warzone damage.

SS got buffed today. I got top damage in over 100 straight warzones on my SS spec Gunslinger between 1.2 and 1.21. Whoever says that SS spec isn't good for PVP needs to unsubscribe and stop making ignorant comments.

Honestly I'm glad people like you are leaving. This game needs less mindless whiners.

1) Snipers CANNOT do over 6k damage in a single hit, I've shot players in PvE gear with all my adrenals, relics, etc. popped and fired off my highest damaging shot (which is channeled and on a 15 second cooldown) and despite being in the best gear available (full augmented) I can only expect to get my 5k medal a couple times a day. I have never broken 6k although it is technically possible if someone had 0 expertise. 8k? This is why I stopped coming to the pvp forums, nothing but exaggerated BS 2) Operatives are not a pure DD class, for a handful of credits you can also become the one of the best healing classes in the game right now - Gunslingers have 3 spec choices, DPS - DPS - and DPS.

My animations and performance have been as smooth as cream, sounds like you've got a **** connection (there's more to a connection than latency) or a **** computer, or both.

Don't listen to anyone nostalgia'ing over pre-CU SWG, it was always terrible. I played SWG at release and their team had never even heard of "diminishing returns" on abilities. That meant you could literally spend an entire fight stunned and on your back, not because you died fast... but because the other player had spec'd in a way that allowed him to keep you endlessly CC'd. Throw in the fact that some people could endlessly knock down large groups of players and you get an idea of what balance was like. Even when things got "fixed", early balance was so horrendous that once one broken class got nerfed into oblivion, another one would ascend into the throne of brokenness. I remember when I quit, any player with decent income could buy sets of armor + food + buffs that would essentially give them 99% damage mitigation. You could regenerate health and stamina easily, but your "mind" (blue) bar was much harder to regen, this led to every fight being about who could deal more "mind" damage. Snipers and Combat medics were 10000% better at this role than any other class, and so every fight immediately became about who brought more combat medics and snipers. Even better, combat medics didn't even need to actively damage you, they could just spam poison on large groups of players and unless you had a doctor cure you, you just had to sit there and watch your mind bar empty out until you died. TL;DR, SWG was ambitious and I wish more games tried an open-world approach to MMO's - but the balance was beyond horrendous at every point of the game's life cycle.

I rarely find myself 1v1'ing ops on my server, but here's something that I often forget to do. Drop XS Freighter on yourself during hunker down, it prevents them from vanishing and sneaking up on you for another opener, they can't use dodge to avoid the damage, and even 1v1 it still does enough damage to justify the energy/channel time (though its smarter to use it with illegal mods popped). Also always use your sabo charge during the dodge period if you aren't doing something else. There's also a psychological factor that will influence the op - unless they are hell bent on killing you, nobody likes the idea of standing in a giant pool of unfriendly flames to try and kill you, 80% of the time they will back off if you do this [assuming you let them back off ]

Ugh I typed up a thorough response and accidentally hit back, so let me summarize. Speedshot has a 15 second cooldown, how could our spec end up being speedshot spam and even if it did, why would that be a problem - if we could spam speedshot we'd be the most OP class in the game. DF and Sab are NOT for nuking healers before they can react effectively, only SS even offers the faintest hope of doing this against geared 50's. Pre-50 doesn't even give you the full toolbox of Gunslinger abilities to judge your experience by, nor does it give you the experience of much more durable opponents. The fact that you pop cover for the instant CB illustrates how much you still have to learn about the class. Instant CB is desireable for few reasons, if you need to do instant damage to kill someone before they can heal or pop a cooldown and you quick shots won't do the trick. It's also good for letting 1 tick of energy regen earlier when you are about to start off a chain of abilities. Conversely, instant CB is bad if you are pressed for energy since it frontloads the energy cost, meaning it is more likely to leave you stuck in a lower regen tier, it also does less DPS if you keep using the instant version since the GCD is 1.5 seconds, yet having any alacrity means that CB will fall under the GCD. Instant abilities always trigger the GCD (with some special exceptions for some classes) while channeled abilities will never trigger a GCD. When I pop illegal mods and burst volley procs I have Charged burst firing in under 1 second, that's 50% more DPS than instant CB since it allows me to fire off my next ability half a second faster. Long story short, you've got a bit to learn. Get to 50 and see for yourself before you lock yourself in to one spec based on pre-50 warzones that bear little resemblence to 50 warzones.

Except Bioware clearly made 1.2 to exclude PvE gear from PvP, every modification has expertise on it now and it makes no sense to use PvE.

As a gunslinger, I am one of two AC's that has no versatility in my class role. Either we DPS, DPS, or DPS. Outside of style preferences, the only benefit of playing Gunslinger over another ranged class is that you have versatility in how you damage. Unfortunately, our Battlemaster set has very little that makes sense. It has far too much accuracy and cuts us short on stats like power, surge, and (dare I say it?) alacrity. I currently have 4% too much accuracy that could go a long way into my power/surge/alacrity spots. I can attempt to remedy this by investing in our two related armor sets, and this goes a long way to give us a sensible set of armor - but Bioware appears to actively design against this feature. I purchased field medic gloves for the stats I needed, but then I saw that War Hero gear would only accept Battlemaster Gear from the same set, which forces me to go back and buy ANOTHER Battlemaster glove for War Hero since our War Hero glove stats are actually preferable. On top of that, our guns have long been a way to make our own choices in stat preference. BIoware even added a 3rd type of gun and let our "Enforcer" guns branch off into either "Enforcer" or "Field Tech", however - ironically enough - the best war hero gun is "field medic" and only those who bought "field medic" gun will get this preferable upgrade. This is a huge pain in the butt since we are essentially being punished for making choices we had no idea would affect us. The major differences in stats between BM and War Hero have no logic or reasoning, why certain pieces go from emphasizing accuracy/power at the BM level to Crit/Surge at the War Hero level is causing significant problems in how we try and itemize. The least you can do is loosen up the restrictions how what can be used as a "token" to convert into War Hero gear. Give us free flexibility on what BM gun we need for War Hero, let us trade in any Smuggler BM piece for any Smuggler WH pieces of the same slot. Do these things and you will have some gratitude from your PVP community after the Ranked Warzone debacle.