Played a good 4 hours worth of Tacticals back to back for social point grinding. During the very first Tactical I noticed things were off. The damage from trash mobs is severely skewed. I ran as as a focus guardian then switched to vigilance towards the end. I mostly opened and had to rotate cooldowns on every pull. Koriban incursion - (All DPS) Trash hit excessively hard. Party members all died multiple times ( I died once. ) Directive 7 - (All DPS) - Entire party died on the very first pull. Each mob pull ripped off the bulk of our health despite cooldowns. Blood hunt - (All DPS) - Wiped twice with the joss fight before quiting. The heal stations being right at the edge is retarded given that both bosses have a knock back. Think of the melee!!! Battle of rishi * 2 - (1 healer and 3 DPS) and (4 DPS) - No issues Kuat Drive Yards - (4 DPS) No issues. Last boss was a little hairy Maelstrom Prison - (4 DPS) Optional boss has no healing stations. Bosses smash rips off almost all your health with cooldowns up! It is brutal!

You've missed your calling! You should be a developer!

Fake casting doesn't work. No jug worth a grain of salt is going to activate saber reflect until just before ambush reaches full cast. You are eating your own ambush + follow through and there's nothing you can do about it. It's a lame mechanic which needs changing. 1 minute cooldown on broad ability resets is fine. Again, engineering had that prior to 3.0 and it was not overpowered. It brought snipers into line with all the other classes and it was the ONLY time a turret spec has been worth a damn in this game. All other classes have received significant buffs since then. It probably still wont be enough considering the fact that snipers can no longer keep melee classes off of them. Melee classes have too many ways of closing the gap and this will only increase further.

a) 1 minute cooldown on their ability reset. 3 minutes is a joke. Engineering had a 1 minute cooldown prior to 3.0 and it was perfectly "acceptable". The meta has changed heavily in favor of other classes since 3.0. b) Ballistic dampeners needs to build charges while in cover. Being forced to move out of cover for a class that is supposed to stay in cover is a pretty poor oversight. They aren't meant to be out of cover. All their defenses are tied into cover. c) Give snipers a decent way to heal themselves. Engineering a) Change the plasma probes stun mechanic to what it used to be prior to 3.0. That is, targets already affected by your interrogation probe are stunned for 2 seconds when affected by plasma probe. Increase the duration of plasma probe back up to 18 seconds. b) Give engineering more burst. c) Bring back wall banging! This was hands down the most fun thing in the game. Marksmen a) Remove the red iron sights beam from ambush. This allows any jug / guardian easymode saber reflects which are capable of ripping off half your health easily via saber reflect. Perhaps also introduce a mechanic where saber reflect can only reflect back 30 - 50% of your ambush + follow throughs damage. Virulence a) Rework the rotation so its not such a pain in the ***.

It's "HIS" wishlist. Put your own up instead of bashing him for it... geez.

Merc / Mandos suffer from 3 distinct problems however 2 are directly related. 1)Ability bloat I've always felt that merc mandos have too many useless or situational abilities. 3.0 compounded this issue by bringing into the fold even more bloat while also trying to chain in all those useless abilities to give them some kind of functionality. For instance Pyro mercs have a total of 6 dots. 6 DOTS!!!!! The amount of setup time to put all those dots on a target is asinine in PvP and pointless in PvE unless you are fighting a boss. They also have 2 methods of dot spread, both of which are extremely inefficient and hard casted to boot. So what would I do? *Replace serrated shots with fusion missile for IO mercs as their level 41 ability. Fusion missile should be an instant cast ability to make dot spreading fluid and interesting. *Remove power shots from the game and replace it with missile blast. Missile blast should be a cheap heat cost filler ability that procs everything that powershots used to proc. It doesn't have to hit hard. *Flame thrower -> give it to powertechs as a PT only ability. It's a melee ability which doesn't suit the mercenary ranged play style at all. *Redesign explosive dart to trigger when your player deals direct non periodic damage instead of a delayed 3 second blast. In other words make it function similar to the operative poison injection ability. This would allow it to synergize really well for burst purposes with other abilities. The blast should knock NPCs DOWN or BACK. The blast presently pushes all NPCs away from the blast radius which is counter productive. *Super charge stacks should build on more core abilities. * Kolto shot for DPS specs.... really? Mercs were better when this function was tied into rapid shots. It's used only to build super charge stacks by the DPS specs. Needs to go. 2) Mobility Lack of mobility is DEATH in PvP. The two classes which have the most problems in PvP are the two least mobile. That should tell you all something. Their lack of mobility is due to the present "hard casted" reliance built into the core of all their specs. Unlike snipers, mercenaries have a means to reduce their reliance on hard casting. I just don't see the point of giving them procs when they could remove the issue altogether by removing their reliance on hard casting. Why is hard casting a problem? Self rooting diminishes a ranged classes ability to kite which translates directly into lowered life expectancy. Any form of casting also opens the door to complete ability shutdown due to stuns, knock backs and interrupts. In other words, you MUST give hard casting specs broad long duration immunities + good survivability cooldowns or they fail miserably. This has only occurred once since beta and that was engineering in the run up to 3.0. Post 3.0 no turret spec has been worth a damn. 3) Anti focus cooldowns. Doesn't need elaborating on.

That does happen on occasion. It's more of an issue if you take predation off the fury system or don't use it at all. Back when I played this game prior to 3.2 I never had a problem with mobility. I ran carnage and would generate enough fury to pop predation again before my pred dropped off. Frenzy was a second layer used for berserk burst on priority targets or WORST case scenario popping predation again to break a double root if desperate. The key is mobility. What's changed since I played last? A second pred utility which benefits Fury greatly but is a mobility loss for carnage., no health cost undying rage and a few tweaks here and there. Annihilation i still meh. My main point still stands. Predation usage is what separates ****** marauders from good ones. Predation = more up time for you and your team = more opportunity to generate fury stacks = extremely hard to kite = more damage for you and your team. Spamming berserk = poor uptime on target = being kited out the wazoo = low damage = low mobility training dummy.

The ego will deflect rather than stare into its own reflection.

I don't know why you're laughing. The meta since 3.0 has been a kite vs anti kite arms race. How many marauders spam berserk only to be kited to bits. It's why Bioware took predation off the fury system via a utility for all those who couldn't detach themselves from berserk spam. PvP is about mobility now more than ever especially for the marauder.

Difference between a good and bad mara post 3.0 has always been predation usage and it's as simple as that.

if I had to hazard a guess as to why they are doing this it would be due to technical issues. They will be able to reduce all the equipment bloat by a factor of 4. It's a load of resources freed up which can then be used elsewhere. Think of it as spring cleaning. A lot of the bloat from vendors and FP drops will be gone as well. Crafting will be streamlined. Overall I think it has the potential to be a positive change.

Statistics require context through gameplay.

"A prophecy that misread could have been." - yoda. And that's my point. Developers no longer play the games they develop. Instead they rely heavily on statistical data. Statistical data has 2 massive problems. The first being it takes time to manifest. That is, while anyone who plays the game knows inside of 10 seconds how class changes will affect gameplay, Statistic need time to accumulate before they can be interpreted. The real world effect is that the player base becomes increasingly irritated at class changes or lack thereof while the developers sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for their metrics to manifest. That's pretty much the story of swotor. The second problem is the ease in which they can be misinterpreted. Ultimately, you "NEED" good full time paid game testers if you want to develop a good game. Statistics don't cut it.

Worshiping metric gods is a poor substitute for real world experience. It's akin to a person reading a bunch of cook books and then claiming they know how to cook.

The AOE change is rather short sighted. I'm guessing none of the developers thought to stack on each other and spam cap in their internal testing. If they wanted to make it easier to cap nodes in a fair manner they should have implemented a mechanic where the amount of allied players in the immediate vicinity of the objective lowers the time it takes for any one person on your team to cap the objective. Doing that they can also get rid of the retarded force fields at the respawn points..