If you're serious about being a more skilled gamer, eliminate any wireless mice / keyboards you're using. Even the "best" wireless products (and that's fairly subjective) introduce a noticeable lag, stutter, and the possibility of having a dreaded "battery died" moment. I'd recommend you pickup a good standard keyboard and a wired mouse - you don't need to buy into dropping $250+ on a mechanical keyboard and Razer Naga Epic either, tried-and-true mice like the Logitech G400 (a re-release of the legendary MX-518) and a basic Microsoft Digital Media Keyboard were enough for an entire generation of pro gamers, and the both of them together won't cost you more than $50 from an online retailer.

Ah, it begins again. You people complain about a class, then it gets nerfed (Operative). Then you complain about more classes (Sage, Mercenary) and they get nerfed. Now you complain about Marauders, and you lick your chops at the prospect of more nerfs, ignoring that it's getting to the point where we literally don't have any class that has any *flavor* or *burst* left in the game. What are we going to reduce things down to, a bunch of classes that do 1 HP a hit, where we wail on each other for 4+ hours hoping someone dies? Is that a fun, balanced game to you?

My proprietary systems indicated that Operative DPS is 20 ~ 30% behind Anni Marauders. In addition, the Marauders provide a raid heal, can spec a short CD interrupt, have better movement, better survival, and provide a bloodlust. We have removed all DPS Operatives from raiding, and the only thing that saved the Snipers was the raid wall. There's no point in having fragile, low DPS classes. My Operative, my first toon, leveled ONLY FOR PVE, is sitting on the shelf where it will remain, I wish it were otherwise, but I can't possibly sit here as a progression raid leader and ask my raiders to maximize their performance (max your companions, get all datacrons, do your dailies every day on your main and alts, etc) and then sit there on the weakest class in the game asking them to carry me. All a non-healing Operative does is get carried. If you believe otherwise ("I'm super skilled but somehow magically wouldn't be super skilled at a better class") you're lying to yourself to avoid the reroll.

He's having trouble leveling. Marauders and Sentinels are straight-up the hardest class to play in the game. They're actually made of paper, the primary reason they stay alive is that their CDs are strong. If he's a player who is dying playing Tanks, what's going to happen when he plays a Mara / Sent and doesn't use his CDs properly? He's going to die, over-and-over again. Sentinels don't even get their healer until their mid-30s, so what's he going to do from 1 - 35, being someone struggling to play the game? Die. Over. And. Over. The best class to play if you don't want to die is a Sith Sorcerer. Why? Khem Val. You start the game with the best tanking companion in the game. Play as DPS spec, you'll find its quite forgiving. The only caveat to playing an Inquisitor is that your Chapter 1 quest boss is tough for beginners - so be sure to party up when you face them, remember you lose *nothing* by doing single player content in a group.

So, an update, I gave up on playing my Operative. It has a role as a healer, but that's not a role I want to play. I'm playing a Marauder right now, because any nerf in the short term to Marauders is going to be in the form of knocking down their survivability, which won't remove them from raids. Operatives won't get a buff in the short term because as long as stealth is an integral part of their gameplay, people will rage at the Stealth + Stun combination and they will not be allowed to have the DPS to translate that into a kill. Long term, I hope the class is fixed. As is, it's simply not enjoyable to play in a raiding environment. The fact that your single target damage, especially in burst scenarios, is so low, and that stealth plays so little a role in raiding, just combines to make it "meh". Until the PVE and PVP aspects of the game are split apart more firmly (including ability damage - why can't an attack do X damage to a boss but Y damage to a player?) we're going to be a class in poor shape

The peoblem is THE OP IS CORRECT. The nerf has little impact on DPS sorcs and no impact on Assassins. Maras become even more overpowered, and Snipers will become used again once people realize how much has been fixed. The OP doesn't do anything in PVP for premade teams. They don't kill healers well, that job is best left to a Marauder, they aren't carriers or planters like Juggs and Assassins. They don't endlessly AoE the door like a PT or have the utility of a Merc. The best thing about Stealth is using Sleep Dart to keep people tripped up in conflicts, but you wouldn't need to do that if you had an Assassin or PT to yank-and-spank. OPs don't have a useful role to their team. If you're still linking WZ damage or talking about your 1v1 kills, YOU ARE NOT AT THE SKILL LEVEL TO DISCUSS PVP CLASS BALANCE. On the premade circuit, amongst players who will be the top ELO when rateds come, the issue is that OPs lack utility for what are ultimately objective based games. Any trick you think you can do, another class does better.

My data comes from proprietary analysis software my group developed during our pro MTG years, it's not useable by anyone without a post-graduate mathematics background. We don't show our software to non-members, and we're all currently in retirement. If we do start up again, that may change. And the coding absolutely does work that way. Taunt generates aggro in PVE. In PVP it provides a damage debuff. The game can flag abilities to not affect players already, it would be easy to make a debuff that did not affect players, so as to make our PVE damage higher without impacting PVP

I have an extensive analysis background, I already know for a fact that conc Operatives are 30% behind in DPS. I'm asking George to justify that without the worthless "well you can clear the content... right?" Give Conc OPs a unique stacking debuff that only works in PVE that increases our DPS by 30%. It's obviously possible because taunts work differently in PVP than PVE. It is bug fixing as far as I'm concerned, since stealth does not work right in raids.

I too would like to see the entire game balanced around unranked sub-50 1v1 PVP. /sarcasm In all seriousness, don't take random PVP 1v1 as any indication of your skill, the abilities of the class or the balance of the game, especially sub-50 and especially when it's not high ELO-matched pre-mades going against each other.

There's a high demand for Snipers and Sniper re-rolls in 16-man Operations right now, because of the Shield Wall and high DPS (especially post-1.2). You are going to see a few Snipers getting power leveled by high end guilds, who are forcing some of their Sorcs to reroll since so many guilds are already running way too heavy on Inquisitors. One of the guilds on my server was offering full Rakata gear, both of the Nightmare-mode speed run titles, and all of the vehicles in the game for joining.

In your interview you said Operatives are within 5% of Maras, was that in reference to PVP? It can't possibly be in reference to PVE due to DPS downtime and abilities not functioning (stealth). Is there a plan to address the significant PVE DPS loss of the Conc Nerf that was, to the best of our knowledge, entirely a PVP balance nerf?

SWTOR is not "clicker friendly". If you want to be remotely competitive, you're going to need to learn to keybind. For example, you might *think* that Guardians are light on keybinds, but then you get adrenals, buffs, non-GCD abilities (meaning you need to hit them between GCDs to maintain DPS) and a host of target-plus-hit abilities. Suddenly you're going "oh, I need to use a mouse AND keyboard, and the mouse needs to be targeting / moving, and the keyboard needs to be bound". Learn to keybind. Learn to use your keyboard. There is no class that works well for a clicker, and anyone telling you otherwise is doing you a disservice because you are simply not playing well as a clicker. You will get a host of abilities by 50 on every class, and the few that are "low" on abilities still have too many situation-specific abilities, non-GCD CDs, and area-target abilities for a clicker to ever play seriously

No, he's making things up since every other claim he tried to make was disproven. We have far too many people who don't play OPs cheerleading nerfs because they hate anyone with stuns in PVP. In an imaginary world where OPs scaled better with gear than other classes, we would be totally screwed, because the class would be balanced every tier to the best gear. That would mean that during progression, or while you are farming emblems, you would be EVEN WORSE because each piece of gear you were missing would be an even bigger stat loss. For both raiding and PVP you do not want heavy gear dependency, because again, you are tuned to your top possible gear, meaning until you have it you are even worse off.

As late as 2007, it was the norm for an MMO to have less than 1% of the players actually see the end-tier of an expansion. As late as 2004, it was the norm for an MMO to require months of played time, in a guild, as a group, simply to level. The notion of MMOs being built for regular gamers is something new, they used to be built around a "carrot on a long stick" philosophy that has only recently changed. There was no "good old days" where casuals were raiding. Even now, the amount of time it takes to level, gear out and clear raid content is huge compared to other genres. This is a genre about making a commitment and working together with other players. The one game in the genre that has removed that requirement lost 2 million subscribers last year ... it's not hard to see how important class balance and the social aspect are to an MMO. I am of a skill level and experience level in MMOs where I have the luxury of playing whatever class I want. I've played in some world-first guilds over the years and have experience as a pro-gamer, so I get to throw my weight around as far as getting into guilds. Most people don't have that luxury, and because of that, I want the class to be balanced. I don't think it's fair that I see Operatives who are telling me that they can't get into raids because people are saying "rDPS only", "Sorry we're looking for a Sniper", "no we don't want OPs". That's not fair to them, and that's not happening because "those mean old hardcores are discriminating", it's happening because people just want to clear the content on a Friday night, they don't want to sit there wiping for an hour trying to carry some class, especially if they themselves are casual players who don't have "OMG LEET" DPS and can't really afford to carry people. As far as your threat, how low and rude of you. I'm championing that Operatives should be balanced so that raid leaders want to bring them to raids. I deserve some respect for wanting my fellow Operatives to *get to enjoy the toon they worked hard to level*. You apparently are okay with them being imbalanced. Do you even have an Opertiave? You think it's okay for people to be thought of as the worst PVE DPS? You think that's a a healthy state for the game to be in? I deserve some praise and thanks for refusing to back down on this issue until the class is fixed.

That you didn't take the time to read, don't understand how raiding works, and use MMO terms as though their usage hasn't changed since 1996? DPS refers to the role of dealing damage, the damage they deal and damage-per-second. It can also refer to a singular hit ("I took a crap ton of deeps") which obviously refers to instanteous damage, not an average like damage-per-second. And if you're actually arguing for an archaic parlance, why are you not using terms like chain, mez, hate, gibs, train, debuffer, grep, etc? Yeah buddy, I played MMOs prior to UO too, we've come a long way from bad D&D slang mixed with FPS-punk terms. You never hear mages called Timmys anymore, things have changed. The days when it was acceptable to have a beater whose class wasn't primary damage are long past.

several thousand DPS over the course of a boss fight. The issue with nerfs designed to deal with the PVP out-of-stealth opener is that what may only be a few hundred DPS during short PVP fights will be thousands of DPS over the course of a 6 minute fight. That's a problem, especially if the class designers aren't attaching some kind of PVE-only benefit to the abilities (such as a slowly stacking debuff, or similar) that compensates for the issue without affecting PVP. I can complete 16-man Nightmare-mode raids with 15 people, so technically I can carry any class through the raid. Does that make it acceptable for a raid to carry a class? Does that make it so that people are going to want to? No. There are two problems with your line of thinking: 1. It's completely ignorant of how raids work. A raid leader's job is to maximize the chance of success. They will do everything in their power to get the most skilled players they can playing the best classes. If they see a class doing significantly less damage, or think they can improve their raid's ease of killing a boss by replacing an Operative with a Sniper, they will actively look to do so. 2. It's completely ignorant of how hardcore raiders think. No one who is raiding Nightmare modes wants to be carried. There is no gear bonus to doing Nightmare over Hard, you do Nightmare mode and challenges purely *for the sake of clearing the content*. Those kind of players don't want to be carried, they want to actively contribute, they are challenge-seekers and take pleasure in being the best-of-the-best. Getting a nerf bat to swing at an epic boss takes away the fun of playing the game for them. It's not okay for a significant class imbalance to be ignored on the premise that someone technically could have a few Operatives and still clear content. And unlike other parts of the game, it's not optional, there's no menu setting I can flick to make Concealment playable. I can technically remove my helm and clear content - that doesn't make it okay for Bioware to remove helms from the game, nor does it make it okay for them to force everyone else to clear content without helms.

The L2P argument needs to stop. Target dummy DPS is meaningless. In Operations, Marauders do significantly more DPS than Operatives because their DPS uptime is higher, and their abilities function correctly. Ranged DPS do even more damage, again, DPS uptime and ability function. This is why Lethality *in practice* is so much better than Concealment. In Operations, Lethality can maintain its DPS via dots and cull while still at 10m. Even Shiv has far looser requirements than the vital Acid Blade / Backstab of Concealment.

The stat discrepancy between a BM geared 50 with their Matrix cube, all their datacrons and their biochem stims / adrenal / medpac.... and a fresh 50... is massive. You are going to struggle until you gear out.

You completely missed the biggest issue. What would be a modest reduction in PVP burst is a massive reduction in PVE DPS over a 6 minute fight. Sustained DPS rotations will now include Overload Shot for a net DPS loss over several thousand over the length of a raid boss. This is an issue, and when you consider the loss of acid blade uptime, Lethality is the viable PVE spec. So, of you bought into Operatives because you wanted to be a stealth / knife melee DPS in raids, you are not going to be happy with how the PVP nerfs have affected PVE.

L2P is not, and will never be, a legitimate argument. We aren't comparing what two inexperienced 50s are doing in a boss encounter. We're discussing the difference between a skilled marauder and a skilled concealment OP. I'm only interested in the classes performance at the level where the players are within a few DPS of literally perfect maximum possible damage, because at that point we're discussing bringing the class over the player. I believe most people who are discussing class balance put in the time to be good, they're not asking what their rotation is, they're asking if they should play on an alt or go lethality, because concealment doesn't compete in PVE content.

The folks over at Sithwarrior don't have the math background to use my software, their own formulas are off, and they're wrong about a surprising number of things. I spent years as a pro MTG player and because of that made a serious investment in getting post-graduate education in statistical analysis and game theory, among other things. I have zero interest in giving that out for free in the name of "helping the community", nor am I going to hand it to someone else so they can make ad revenue from Razer. My knowledge already paid for itself in winnings years ago. Since my retirement in 2010 what I do is for me alone. Don't like it? Tough cookies. The burden of proof is on you. I already called all of the nerfs that were coming weeks ago based on estimates of the tools Bioware was using, though I didn't look at operatives heavily as I'm not as concerned with PVP burst as they are. I don't particulaly feel I should be obligated to teach you non-linear regression, vector math and complex modeling just because the only tools out there are shoddy excel spreadsheets that are too simple of a model to test encounters. - Just wait until 1.2, the combat logs will allow data mining that will end the debate anyway. We won't have to have a discussison on sithwarriors garbage statistics and low granularity when we can just pull up DPS averages of the top 10% of players of each spec and know with 100% certainty that the data matches the live server.

L That isn't a reasonable complaint. The OP went to the store and bought a red bucket. Now they're throwing a tantrum because buckets are going to be coming in blue. A reasonable person would just buy a blue bucket and move on.

... what MMO are you playing that has unlimited potions? WoW has a strict 1 per encounter rule, and no one uses health potions because that would lock you out of your DPS potion for the burn phase. Rift doesn't allow unlimited potions, neither does LOTRO. The last game I can think of that left more than 1 potion until the servers closed was PSO, where every player could have 10 of each rank of consumable, and figths were tuned around them... so you had to grind those along with as many auto-rez dolls as you could carry.

Of the changes they are making, the nerf to healers and medpacs makes sense to me. What bothers me most is that because so many people whine about legit changes, they ignore posts with actual problems. If they tune the fights around single medpac, then casuals who don't even buy medpacs are just one heal behind hardcore players. If they tune the fights around 3 - 4 medpacs, casuals who don't want to buy medpacs are forced to get them, because it starts to be a lot of healing they are not doing.

I have a piece of proprietary software which can model encounters. It's not something you can "watch" as it's not a spreadsheet or simcraft-style exe file that you can just run. Concealment in PVE operations runs roughly 30% behind Maras. Lethality does better, due to running higher dot uptime and having so little of its damage "cut off" by the lack of functional PVE stealth, but it's significantly behind Snipers, takes more damage and doesn't offer the raid wall. Come 1.2 when we have logs, normal players will be able to see the DPS issues on Concealment during actual encounters, as the target dummies won't show you the issue, which is a combination of non-functional abilities and DPS downtime.