To duel another sniper, I wouldn't play Lethality. (I would play an Engineering/MM hybrid: better front-loaded burst, better defensive cooldowns, and diversion neutralizes diversion). I'm confused about why you think a Lethality sniper's strength against MM in 1v1 is relevant to the discussion, particularly for ranked. I mean, a concealment Op will generally beat a sniper, and they're the worst DPS spec in the game and never used. (And shouldn't you be attacking my healer anyway, since your position is that "your job as a DPS is to kill the healer FIRST"?) Your job as a DPS is to contribute as effectively as you can to the warzone. You most often do that by killing people and peeling for healers. Sometimes it's easier to kill people by chain- CCing healers while you focus down someone else. Sometimes it means jumping on the healers to help your marauders with them. (Making healers' lives miserable is more a maraudery task.) Sometimes it means burning someone out of position. Lethality isn't the most popular spec for ranked because of dots create fluff damage; it's because Cull is better burst, harder to mitigate, and can better handle a wider variety of targets. MM is not a mobile DPS spec because it can't do damage on the move. Every every second MM is on the move is a second that a MM sniper cannot do a single attack in his or her main rotation. It can move quickly across the warzone, but that's a utility and defensive ability.

I disagree. Marksman has higher sustained single-target DPS, but that's not as useful as what Lethality does. Lethality has frequent high-burst windows from Cull + Takedown. It's hard target switches and sudden burst that gets kills against good teams. MM's "maxed burst" windows are less bursty, up less frequently, and more easily mitigated by defensive cooldowns than Lethality. Sure, your dots can get cleansed in ranked and don't do "real" damage or create real pressure. But dots is not the value that Lethality actually brings to the table. (And spamming dots for high DPS numbers is a bad idea anyway in ranked; mezzes are important to stop guard switches before a target is bursted, to peel for healers, to stop their healers, and to get caps.) Getting a target double-cleansed right before a Cull just doesn't seem like a huge risk: it's a lot of coordination, takes two global cooldowns, while other burst is happening . If a target does get double-cleansed, Cull someone else or SOS. Healers LOSing your Culls shouldn't be a huge issue, particularly compared to MM (against MM, they can LOS everything). If a healer is being focused down, he should being choked or rooted by a marauder If he's not being focused, it's questionable whether the Lethality sniper should even be going after the healer and dotting him up (preventing mezzes) rather than getting on melee or targets of opportunity. Interrupts also aren't much of an issue, I find. Pushes has a meaningful cooldown and knockbacks aren't often used against snipers, because the snipers are in the back lines, away from classes with knockbacks. Hard stuns aren't used just to interrupt a Cull-- they're used to stop people from using defensive CDs when they're being focused. Can you get every Cull off? No. But lethality is better because the single-target DPS is spikier.

She-Ra + Wonder Woman = Win http://imgur.com/JBXFR8H

For what it's worth, this seems to be a game issue related to the recent backfill change; I've noticed the same thing on the Bastion, and I hear it's a new issue on other servers as well.

Uhh....need moar PVP relevance. "Keeping dots up" is useful for fluff damage, but actively sabotages the team. Dottted people can't be mezzed. Dots are easily healed through, so you're not killing anyone. ( It's burst that matters in PVP.) By focusing on "keeping dots up", a sniper bolsters his or her ego at the expense of winning the warzone. If you're going to be the King of Dots, go Lethality -- at least one person can mezz that way. Engineer snipers are about survivability and objective control in PVP. You have great burst, but only every 25.5 seconds (Explosive Probe --> SOS). Maximum burst is Target Acquired --> Explosive Probe --> Ambush --> SOS, but that takes a while to set up. Most engineering snipers use Frag Grenade as filler. Use Plasma Probe strategically. It can be a placed on an objective to stop caps, used offensively to stun/interrupt, or to slow incoming or outgoing enemies toward an objective. The roll is wonderful burst. But be mindful that you can't use it defensively if you use it offensively. That said, I love knocking people into walls and then double-rolling them. Be aggressive with the cooldowns you can reset (Shield Probe, Roll, Entrench), because you want them to be on cooldown when you do reset. An engineering spec for PVP looks something like this: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#400rz0MZbIMrRRbRrzGzZh.3

That's not what OP was talking about. OP is level 30 and is excited about fluflf numbers from dots without lingering toxins.

Farewells are bittersweet. After a little over a year on Begeren Colony, I will miss playing with, and against, the many awesome people on this server. Thank you for the fun games, and for carrying me through many an op and flashpoint. Best wishes, all, and goodbye!

I would expect a slight decline in the regular PVPer population (10%), but that's a minority of a minority. Otherwise, transfers are fairly expensive. I would expect outgoing transfers to be offset by incoming transfers. That said, I don't think Begeren Colony does have higher population than other servers. "Heavy," "Standard," "Light," etc. population loads appear to measure population against server resources, and different servers can handle different loads. Begeren Colony is "very heavy" with two instances of fleet when other servers might be "heavy" with four or five instances of fleet.

Voidstar respecs happen in-between rounds when there's plenty of time to respec -- particularly if one team has taken a door, because then you can start at 27 seconds in round one and still have the full intermission period. (I would also classify it as a strategic choice, not a tactical one.) That has nothing to do with a respec macro. Every ranked group runs at most one healer on offense and every healer/tank they can on defense. I always respec to Engineering for defense and Lethality for offense in ranked -- it takes me about 10-12 seconds to go to Engineering and a little over 15 seconds to go lethality. (That's admittedly the only time it's super-useful for a sniper to respec midwarzones). As for your switching healers example - that seens like a really convulated tactic with marginal utility. It wouldn't work in ranked warzones, not because of voicechat, but because healers are extremely identiifable. I doubt it would work in normal warzones, for the same reason. Just remark the healers. Coordinating DPS when there's multiple healers around is tricky in pugs these days, but that really doesn't have anything to do with respecs, it has to do with heailng being OP . There's not a lot of exploiting going on in ranked, actually. It's true that people don't like playing when the other team has massive advantages. But the real advantage, and it is both huge and very difficult to overcome, is familarity with ranked warzone strategies and practice coordinating, plus the fact that incremental skill advantages become significant multiplied across 8 players. ( I expect to shortly be on the other end of this. ) You have to be willing to lose a lot of ranked warzone games to overcome those things - often losing badly - to get better. And it sucks. I think it's silly to pretend that the barrier to entry is anything else. I doubt it. You're just.... wrong. It's hard to be angry or offended by that.

I'm not sure the Constitution is really the best example; it's broadly worded enough I don't think it's possible to interpret it as if it contained technical criteria. There are different schools of thought on how to interpret it, but those are policy-based (and I don't mean, policy-based in an outcome determinative way). That said, I really wonder why Bioware is saying that basically any macro is prohibited by the TOS, except macros that dynamically cycle keybinds. It just makes for confusing guidance. Presumably people who dynamically cycle keybinds do so because they see it as providing a mechanical advantage of some kind. "No macros whatsoever. Using software to remap your keys is okay" would be much clearer.

I think people are significantly exaggerating the tactical utility of a respec macro as anything but a QOL function, particularly in ranked. In any competitive match, if a DPS is going down while healed by two healers, the DPS is not going to be alive six or seven seconds later when a third healer would be available (after a period of helpelessness that would make the respeccer themselves acutely vulnerable and unresponsive to attacks); the DPS would be much better trying to offheal until the real healers can burst the DPS up. Regardless, I hope Bioware creates some kind of option to store specs, whether they added a cooldown to retrieve it or not. Switching specs every other warzone map is aggravating. As far as I know, ITK was the only guild able to queue last night. (We were able to avoid being put on the same team in regs, happily; it's always a bit embarassing to be on a 7 or 8-man, particularly since I get vocally irritable when the situation is reversed. At least if you're put on the same team as an unaffiliated 4-man, it's verifiably not your fault that it's an unfun warzone.) I wonder if it would be for the best if there no /say in warzones. Not sure the social pluses in communicating with friendly people on opposite factions outweigh the trash-talking minuses, and even well-intended statements, like a "GG" initiated by the winning team after they crush you, can be aggravating. I'm sorry to hear that was going on. I think the real cause of slow queues and lack of ranked, though -- at least last night -- is double-XP weekend.

Bioware wouldn't do that, because it wouldn't be in their financial interests. A huge chunk of the playerbase would quit the game--- not out of spite, but because it would be way less fun. Many people play MMOs for months and months because of the social ties they form in game. Interfering with that would make the game less "sticky." Not everyone plays MMOs socially, of course, but those who do are more reliable subs.

I think a lot of confusion comes from the wording of BW's previous post stating that "It is okay to bind a macro that performs abilities after each other as long as it still requires the user to press the button on the physical keyboard each time a new action is performed." I have no idea what kind of function Bioware intends that to cover, but it seems to involve more than remapping keys. So my "binary question" is: Can we treat that guidance as out-of-date and effectively overruled? (I think the answer should be 'yes,' or it will be a continuing source of confusion)

No one uses huttball speedclickers --- except possibly you, given your history with projection. If you let it get to a click-off, people with lower ping always win. (Which is why, as a 100ms ping player, I try not to let that happen.) If you're struggling to pick up the ball, though, I suggest that your first priority should learning to position yourself at mid when the ball spawns --- I never see you there. Gotta learn to let go of the scores you can't prevent.

Uh..... that's the effect of a parse gimmick, not actual damage. Those ultra-high 3300 sniper parses reflect damage from "scatterbombs," the small bombs laid in the wake of an engineer sniper's roll, all hitting the same target. This is achieveable in parses vs. the operation dummy, because you just roll into the wall every twenty seconds. Almost no one plays an engineer in progression raids because it's impossible to get 100% of your scatter bombs to hit a single target, every 20 seconds, in any kind of real fight. Take out any parse with scatter bombs, and I think the highest parse is held by a marauder.

When they take away ravage.

Can you explain how it could possibly affect the outcome of a huttball match that a player spends 7 seconds respeccing before the match begins rather than 15 seconds?

Presumably referring to this individual: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacagawea . Why he is referring to you by that name is a mystery that is no doubt best left unexplored.

Agreed. /puke.

One of the reasons you "can't depend on anyone else" is that by marking random targets you have not even confirmed are actually healers, you're making it harder on your team. You're negatively impacting team performance to make yourself a little bit more useful, because you apparently can't keep track of marauders/juggs otherwise. Do not use target markers as personal tools. They are team coordination tools. FFS.

But notice he hasn't. Spoiler: 45 minutes of Melyn failing at walking. Threid kicked his butt.

Welcome, and I would especially like to thank you for the late-night PVP pops.

I don't think going "lone wolf" caused the problem. The only time I see people get annoyed with people not following a declared plan (2/6/2 etc.) is when the whole team horrifically goes instead 2/2/4 or 1/1/6 or something. Or when your team has the tic, there is an extremely close fight over mid, and someone abandons it to go try to solo the other team's node, leading to both nodes being lost and turning a victory into a defeat. But it doesn't sound like this was the case. I'm really surprised you were able to kill two people and cap a node as a tank. Was this at level 55? Maybe people are more peevish in lowbies; I don't play them much. Maybe they ignored you because you came off as "ragey." It sounds like they derped, but people may be more prone to get offended by raging when they know they made a mistake. That said, I'm not surprised they were not able to take mid even with 4-v-2 at one node. First, if two of those at the side got soloed by a tank, so the other team probably didn't miss much having them at mid. Second, if you had two at east node, and one at west node, that means it's 5-v-4 at mid. If one of the enemy 4 at mid is a good healer, that's an advantage that takes a while to play out. Third, it may have been 4-v-4 at mid. You would normally two-guard each side once you have two nodes, and someone might have abandoned mid to duo-guard west because they anticipated that would be the more vulnerable of the two sides.

Comments (particularly comments trashing the other team in close matches) lead to discussions. That's kind of how it works. Your self-congratulatory back and forth with your brother on the subject, before I commented, was three or four posts all by itself. There would be a lot less discussion if you just didn't respond. Try to take the higher road, practice what you preach, and see where it leads.

I can't follow that logic. They killed two high-DPS targets ten times each, keeping them in the spawnpit. And they did it with much much lower overall DPS. I'm guessing the healer was guarded almost all of the match. Why bother fruitlessly trying to punch through a healer's guard and peels, letting the enemy DPS run wild to get kills of their own, when they were so successful killing Slade and Zython? That seems more like intelligent play to me.