Maul spam is bad news bears. If you don't have Exploit Weakness up, don't use maul. At 25 force with partial arp, it's terrific. At 50 force with no arp, it's pretty much the worst ability the class has.

And increasing hit size by 0.3% doesn't amount to nothing? If we're down to pinching pennies, we might as well take the nickel.

Some folks might get hung up on your first paragraph if they even read the whole thing, but you make some pretty good points in the middle of it all and make some pretty good suggestions as well. For example, the timing being a problem rather than the actual burst amounts (many of us have been mentioning this for a long while in various forms) and that survivability probably wouldn't be as big an issue if it were different. To boil things down to a simplier form and that would be easily implemented code-wise… 1. Make stealth itself grant Exploit Weakness and independent of the usual ICD. Darkswell skill would probably be a good place to put it in the tree. So, if you're milling around in stealth, Exploit Weakness is always up on your buff bar making Maul a legit opener option. 2. Make consuming Exploit Weakness automatically grants stacks of Static Charge. I would probably suggest just 3 stacks instead of a full 5. This behavior could be put right on the Static Charges skill. And this would give Assassins an option to front load damage from stealth by opening with Maul -> Discharge and moving forward the timing of part of their attack sequence. Now, I wouldn't agree with just giving Deception +30% force regen as a method of fixing sustained damage. Force management is part of playing the tree and we're supposed to be using Saber Strike some of the time. With +30% force for this tree with its efficient attacks, force management pretty much goes away and it dumbs down the tree and lowers skill cap. Sustained damage needs to be addressed a different way. Look at Pyro PT for example…they have even more resource management to worry about and have to regularly use their basic attack, but yet their sustained damage is just fine. Deception needs the same type of thing.

And while you're setting all that up, like you said - attacking the guarded target waiting for taunts to run out and so that you can later CC 2 tanks and 2 healers and then do your hard swap and hope it works - you already have dead dps because your tanks were mindlessly guard camping their assigned healers. Maybe your tanks will get better by the time you get to play anyone really good in cross-server action.

Pretty much every MMO ramps up end-game PvE difficulty in early content cycles. SWTOR is already trending that direction, and it would be difficult for Bioware to not increase difficulty given how easy everything has been so far. It's also common sense to give players a difficulty progression across content as they gear up as well. Of course it's not absolutely guaranteed that difficulty increases, but it's not reasonable to assume anything else will happen.

Two things to keep in mind when comparing Concealment dps to Deception dps: Ramp-up Max sustained damage Deception has ramp-up and almost literally no opener. Concealment starts bursting pretty much immediately. Because of this, Concealment's burst is more likely to occur and more likely to be effective. Deception's resource system is much more forgiving because you can dump resource for burst at any time without consequence to future damage. However, if Concealment manages their bar properly by staying in the max regen range, they can produce substantially more sustained damage than Deception.

On the rest of the guardian discussion, yeah the hybrid spec has to work harder at snap aggro. But it also does a bit more dps with things like free force sweeps and burns on blade storm (with lower cd) and even regular slash is higher single target damage per focus than guardian slash anyway. Played right, it does more dps than full Defense and that helps offset some of the lose of innate threat built into guardian slash and hilt strike. It also helps a boss die quicker in a long fight. The other angle is that the hybrid spec can even afford to gear a tad of dps stats and still come out ahead on total mitigation and health bar stability.

I'm surprised you made this statement since most of what you put out there is reasonable even if I don't always agree with the conclusions. Our health pools won't scale nearly enough for self healing to "scale very well." Improvement in terms of hps will be very incremental compared to increases to incoming dps. The big issue isn't even the gear changes themselves; it's the increases in difficulty as new tiers come out. So, conceptually just hold gear constant for now. As difficulty ramps up, bosses will both hit harder and put out more overall dps. It'll create bigger spikes in health pool and the tank mitigation model de-emphasizes self-healing (because it doesn't change at all based on incoming damage) and increasingly emphasizes real mitigation (of which we are lacking.) The other tanks just have better mitigation models for difficult content in terms of both health pool stability and total damage mitigated. Even if you think things are balanced now, they won't be when content is designed to stress healers and tanks with damage more. It won't matter that Shadows are better for easy content because the content is easy no matter what tank is used.

Well, here's some tips... Force-healer Ear Striker Implants Power Relic x2 (Infiltration doesn't proc the proc relics often enough for them to be better) Force-master Focus (Stalker generator can come out the same in the end too, but takes more mod/enh changes to balance out) Augments -> all Willpower Run the Mods with 41End & 64 Will. (The ones with less base stats and higher power/crit are technically slightly higher dps, but Infiltration is too squishy to run ultra-low endurance builds effectively. These instead come out stronger overall giving max Willpower and more HP.) Run Enhancements that have 27 End & 41 Power/Crit. Using those, swap Mods and Enhancements with different stat combinations (Acc/Surge & Power/Crit) until you target stat balances of: ~250 Crit -> everything else into Power ~ 265 Surge & 265 Accuracy (Adding extra Surge at this point gives very little return because it's already so far into DR. Infiltration depends a lot on several white attacks for damage, and the accuracy is still useful here because classes have 5% or 10% base avoidance plus you're likely to have a -5% accuracy debuff. Running ultra-low accuracy builds is definitely a dps loss compared to balanced.)

The problem is you're overestimating the difference damage. Your crits don't hit 200 damage harder just from switching willpower augments to power augments. You saw the math earlier on the change in melee damage and force damage on the character sheets and how small it is. Look up your abilities and find the coefficient to multiply that difference by. Even pre-mitigation, the difference isn't anywhere near 200 damage.

It's not the easy way out; it's optimizing for performance. You can put the exact same effort into a different class that has more dps potential and brings more group utility and the entire operation group will benefit. I'm not recommending people reroll necessarily. Madness is viable enough to complete content. It's just recognizing reality. L2P only goes so far because it applies the same to every other class as well.

I wouldn't say "never" as I pretty much prove that wrong on a semi-daily basis. I agree that the spec is underpowered, but in terms of specific role as "stealth dps" there's only one other spec in the whole game to directly compete with. If you're highly skilled with the spec and have a strong sense of timing and macro awareness, you can make it work and contribute. But in most cases, yeah...a team is better off with one of the fotm specs that are not Assassins. Tanksins are a better overall pvp spec than Deception, but in high-end rated groups with very specific roles tanksins are even more outclassed in their role (by Juggs) than Deception is in their role. Hybrid Juggs are massively better dedicated tanks and Rage Juggs in tank stance are better dps tanks. I definitely wouldn't call that "amazing." Solo node guardian niche is the only thing tanksins have going for them.

Guardians don't have threat problems if they're good. Also, trying to beat an enrage timer isn't license for a dps to be stupid, like give the tank no chance to establish aggro. As for scaling with future tiers of gear, tank threat scales up too - it's not like it stays static. At the very least they get additional base stat and it gets scaled up with their currently huge threat multiplier. And people tend to forget that if threat is actually an issue, it's entirely possible for tanks to pick up tiny amounts of dps stats at the most potent parts of the DR curves to scale up their overall threat in a big way with very little investment. And in an environment where the worst case scenarios for tanks involve relying on armor, health pool, flat mitigation, and cooldowns it doesn't even cost much in real survivability because none of those things generally get sacrificed. I do agree that Shadows have an easier time with it, and they do produce more dps which has some value. As for Guardian cooldowns compared to Shadow, a lot of Guardians are running the hybrid spec with Commanding Awe and Unremitting. That gives them another 15% reduction cooldown on Focused Defense and another 20% reduction cooldown on Force Leap. (Along with 4% more flat mitigation and free Sweeps.) The sheer number of cooldowns that work for nearly every situation eclipses Shadows, even as good as Resilience can be. It's more about making sure the healers' job is easy and manageable than it is trying to compete long term for mathematical totals at the expense of periodic health spikes and potential bad rng that risks tank deaths. And you bring up scaling for threat... how about scaling of incoming damage in future tiers. Shadows survivability in good gear is relatively okay now because content is easy. If content ever gets difficult, the Shadow survivability model is just going to get worse and worse compared to other tanks.

Two things to keep in mind... Every tank got huge threat-gen buffs in 1.3. Single target threat is a complete non-issue in tanking now. Shadow has no useful threat advantage. If you're going to bring cooldowns into it, Guardians beat Shadows like a drum on cooldowns if they spec right and still maintain a big passive mitigation advantage.

Something I've mentioned several times before in this forum... Stealth would be much more useful and the long cooldown on Force Cloak wouldn't be such an issue if the game engine didn't continually refuse to drop combat all the time. Back before release even, the Devs were putting out class preview videos and such and talking about class design intent and such. Back then, they used to talk about Shadows/Assassins as having several options to escape to stealth all the time. It wasn't just Force Cloak; they specifically mentioned combos like Low Slash + Force Speed as a reliable method to escape and get back to stealth and then restart the fight before the enemy had time to recover. Also, Force Lift was mentioned and even just snaring someone and kiting/los. In real game, none of that stuff really works because you have to put half a warzone map of distance between your enemy before combat will finally drop. I think they designed the spec on the assumption that combat drop was quick and easy, and then at some point in beta apparently set combat drop rules such that it nerfed stealth into the stone age.

That's a big part of the issue. The dev said all specs were within 5% of a target for their "grace" period of attack. That grace period couldn't be more than 30s or so because the only way Infiltration can keep up with several other specs is by essentially force dumping a full bar. Once that force buffer is gone, regen rate throttles dps way too much to keep up. Maybe they can tack on a tad more time to the period and let average damage float down to the bottom of the range. So, what Infiltration is supposed to be good at is burst damage, but their own design target forces it to be roughly the same as everyone else. The spec is then left with a bunch of weaknesses to offset a hardly existent advantage.

In a PvE setting, Project for Balance spec is an overall dps loss because it's so force inefficient. Even just using it to put up Twin Disciplines is technically a slight damage loss long term. Twin Disciplines just helps offset the long term loss. So, the only reason to use Project as Balance is to produce max burst in a short time window, for which Project is a good option for the spec. In PvP, needing to output burst can be....quite frequent. So, the Project talents have a bit more value in a PvP build than they do in a PvE build. However, the same can be said for survivability talents or stun CD reduction, etc; they have more value in a PvP build than a PvE build. So, the choices just get that much more difficult to make.

I play all specs but primarily Infiltration, so I will limit my comments to it. Infiltration: 1. Most players literally do not want an Infiltration on their team in either Warzones or Operations. They will generally only take Infiltration players if they cannot find good players in competitive specs or out of unwillingness to exclude a friend. 2. Infiltration is not as horrible as most other players think, but it is underpowered in Warzones and Operations. It needs better sustained damage and for stealth to be much more heavily integrated into sustained combat functionality in order to become a useful, competitive spec. Because the spec does not have special damage capability and is highly vulnerable to direct attack, its identity needs to be like a slippery eel that is difficult to pin down.

When you taunt a PvP target, it just puts a 6s duration debuff on them. If they attack any of your teammates with that debuff on them, they do -30% damage. If they attack you (the person who taunted) they do normal damage. Just imagine if a healer had a 30% damage reduction cooldown for themself - it would probably be OP. That's pretty much what taunts are in PvP, it's just that teammates have to do them for each other instead of themselves. And they're resource free and off the GCD. They're great utility in PvP; it's just that every class with a tank spec has them.

You say just general class names, so I'll assume you're comparing Balance to Watchman. I can buy Balance being 15% behind Watchman in sustained damage. It's more like 15-20% if the Sentinel is as good as the Shadow. However, this thread is about Infiltration, and it's 25-30% behind Watchman for sustained damage. If you're seeing closer gaps, your Shadows are much better players than your Sentinels.

Okay, so it's not a teamplay spec in a game that entirely teamplay in end-game. Even if teamplay isn't meant to be its strength, it still has to be at least competitive with every other spec in that environment because it's the only environment we play in due to other choices in game design. Right now the only way Infiltration is competitive is by just grossly outskilling other players. When other players are able to even just match your skill level, bad things happen. There's a lot of individually truthful statements in the developers comments, but on a whole they just function to obscure reality, which is very frustrating.

I'm not sure... All I can suppose is that they are somehow squishy targets or at least temporarily squishy targets. There's also some bugs in the game where damage gets reported back added together when things hit at the same time or almost the same time. Occasionally I get some inexplicably big numbers, too...even on things like Saber Strikes that are too big. Try testing the WZ powerups yourself with some guildies. Use some heal or damage abilities that hit for consistent damage. Some classes have some channels that always tick for the same amount instead of having a damage range - that tends to make it real easy.

On a certain level I agree with him, but... The end-game is played in Operations and Warzones. That's it. You can be a hit-n-run lone wolf all you want, but the game is played (and won or lost) in groups with sustained activity. When you put the spec in those settings, it's underpowered, period. There's no place in operations for a part-time fighter. Even a lone-wolf in PvP has to be able to fight toe-to-toe to have any success as a lone-wolf. Can great players still get good results with it? Sure...I do. But that doesn't mean it's "okay" compared to other specs.

It's not very useful to try to put it into a static number like that because scoreboard numbers vary so much from warzone to warzone depending on how things happen and what everyone is doing. But, essentially the answer to what I think the intent of your question is yes, some can. Deception Assassins are capable of ~80% of the overall damage that a Pyro PT can do in WZ's.

The WZ buff doesn't increase damage or healing anymore. The tooltip still says it increases everything, but it's wrong. Tested it out with some guildies and it only affects damage taken now, just like the adrenal.