This. Not 100% sure where Otto goes off to, but Takky is in Japan, the time difference makes things rather difficult.

Another reg hero thinking he's good purely because he can see when node is being capped. Newsflash bro, good players can do that and actually be a good healer, dps, tank or whatever at the same time. All I see is someone who can't play an assassin. And yea, warzone rating might not mean a whole lot, but doing well in ranked games as opposed to regs speaks volumes. Can we let this thread die yet?

Check your dev tracker folks, fix is in with 2.1 on Tuesday.

Mostly because if you do that, then Spinning Kick will consume a Potency charge, which is a huge waste. Ideally as full Infil the 3 charges are consumed by Breach, Project, and the second Project from Upheaval. As hybrid, the 3 charges go to Breach, FiB, Project, with Upheaval left to chance. Sometimes you have to spend 1 charge on Force Slow or Force Stun which is annoying, but both of those still do more damage than SK, if I recall correctly. SK is the biggest waste of a Potency charge we have. If SK is on cooldown, then I do pop Potency in stealth and open directly with Breach, gaining my inital SS proc from Low Slash rather than SK. Your button mashing point is excellent for those learning the spec, and probably should be followed until one is ready for advanced tactics. Myself, I've been playing Infil since launch, maining it since 1.3, and opening rotations are completely autopilot for me.

I'm sorry, you are whom, and you do rateds when?

The better question is why do you take regs so seriously as to make a thread about it?

I do feel that CS's distinctive animation is not quite as big a deal as it used to be. Pre 2.0, full Infils biggest burst required 2 uses of CS before Project. Our 1v1 "ganking" rotation was always CS>CS>Potency>Project>Breach. Always needed those 2 setup gcds, which when they are as distinctive as CS, was a problem. Now in 2.0, my opening rotation has changed to Spinning Kick>SS>Potency>Breach>Project. Give or take SK, which has a cc attached, there is no setup to our opener. No more CS giving all the goodies away. Sure, you will use CS afterwards, but by then the fact that your target is almost dead in about 5 seconds has already given away that you are Infil. And after that opener, you cannot accurately predict when our burst will next hit, unless you have the Infil player targeted, in which case playing hybrid won't make you anymore unpredictable at all. Some excellent discussion and good posts here. People have brought up points that I had not considered, and I'm learning new things as well. Awesome stuff.

Because their large scale dps sucks. Survivability is fine, as previously mentioned, the buffs to that aspect in 1.4 makes us plenty durable. You see less damage because we are actually doing less damage. Deception is one of the worst sustained damage specs. Yea the opener is brutal, as it should be. This is why Deception is a great small scale spec, and the good players use it in small scale fights. Because then we get to use that opener more. Even in large scale fights, Deception functions best picking off people one at a time, rather than just charging in and trying to nuke everyone.

I would highly advise against playing the OP's Deception build. Just to clarify for everyone, Electric Execution DOES NOT APPLY to Discharge, only to the Surging Charge proc.

I do have to point out that it was actually Wakalord and Majinn who came up with the spec, Shin picked it up later. On to the debate. When Potency is available, the hybrid (0/31/15) will always out damage a full Infil build. This is because Potency automatically grants the 3 Breaching Shadows. Basically you get all of the Infil rotation, plus FiB. Superior burst by about 4-5k (not exactly sure how hard an average FiB hits now, it can hit for 5.5k in an xx/xx/28 spec.) The trade off is in your sustained damage. It is true that Project lost 30% extra damage, but with CS, it automatically gives a Shadow Technique proc, which hits as hard or harder than 30% of a Project, and is also internal damage. As hybrid, your Projects will still be weaker. Also you will have far fewer Breaches. Is FiB a fair trade off for regular Breaches? Well it's already known how much great utility FiB is. It hits for less than Breach, but is aoe. One of my biggest issues with FiB is actually the aoe. Infil based builds do the most damage when they can leave combat and reset Potency regularly. If you drop FiB on a group of enemies, you are now in combat with all of them. Now it will be highly difficult to get out of combat, as opposed to being engaged with only 1 enemy. And if you only use FiB on a single enemy, you'd have been better off with the harder hitting Breach. This is of course N/A when you do have 3 Breach stacks ready and can use both abilities. My other problem with FiB is the cooldown. 15 seconds is not a lot, but for an ability that you depend on so much, it is quite high. If we look at the time to build a fully stacked Breach without Potency as a full Infil build, it is about 12 seconds at the most. (2 uses of CS buffed Project, which has a 6 second cd, plus 1 from Shadow Tech proccing on its own. This should always happen atleast once in the 12 seconds you need for 2 Projects.) If you get lucky Shadow Tech procs on its own again, Breach can be ready in as little 10 seconds. Far superior to the 15 second cd of FiB. And without either CS or Potency, breaches will take a very long time to build as hybrid. I wouldn't even consider it a main ability anymore as it becomes so unreliable. Couple of other small points, don't forget that another advantage of hybrid over full Infil is that with Adjucation, crits on Double Strike hit harder than CS crits. However, crit is a lot lower in 2.0, so it is less reliable. Hybrid also gives up the 3% accuracy, 9% arpen, and 6% to either CS or DB that you get from the bottom of the tank tree. The accuracy in particular hurts, as it will require more accuracy on gear, which means less surge, which means weaker crits. In conclusion, 0/31/15 has superior burst phases to full Infil, as well as the utility of FiB. Full Infil has far better sustained damage, is easier to gear for, and will have burst phases more frequently, even if they are less powerful. My personal opinion is that full Infil is a superior spec. Looking at things in terms of ranked warzones, our biggest asset is our burst. As full Infil, our burst is already sufficient, I find FiB to be overkill more often than not. In ranked, the biggest problem is how often we can burst. If we aren't bursting regularly, teams are better off with other classes like Sentinels or Telekinetic Sages, those that can burst almost as hard, and more often. Ranked games tend to be one giant fight at the middle, with very few opportunities to leave combat. This means less Potency uses for us, which hurts the hybrid more than full Infil. It is not worth bringing a dps Shadow for the burst they can do every 75 seconds if they are going to suck for all the time in between. All that in between time, full Infil does better. The hybrid is fun if you are attacking the off node or something where you can guarantee a quick and easy 1v1, but I would take full Infil over the hybrid any other time.

OP makes a thread about this every other day

Oh I can still kill them easily, that's not what I meant. I meant that now bubble completely absorbs upwards of 6k at times, which seems ridiculous.

Yea, I've noticed this too. I don't know if there was a ninja buff or something, but those sorc bubbles (the spammable one, not godmode) seem to absorb an insane amount of damage now. I've had entire 6k Breaches and 7k SS's completely absorbed, where as before they used to only absorb 3-4k I think. No idea whats happening.

Unfortunately I don't have the capacity to record, I might get around to some parses if server lag is tolerable one night. I'm not necessarily saying that my 93% is correct, or optimal. Apologies if I came across like that. I'm just stating what I run with, and I base things off of how often I'm missing an attack that I wouldn't normally miss. I'll keep testing as always, but so far I have yet so see any significant reason for me to go back to 97%, which is what I initially ran. Dropped all the accuracy from my enhancements in favor of surge, and in all my games since, I've only had maybe 2-3 occasions where I thought "crap if I still had 97% accuracy I would've hit that."

We've got a Tactics/ Tank Vaunguard in our guild who easily beats some the best slingers and snipers on the server. I don't know exactly how, but there's been a lot of QQ about Hold the Line.

See I don't ever get that. I've had off days (hey, we all do) when my Shadow has dumped literally 15k damage into Saber Reflect, and doesn't get even scratched in return. I'm talking not even 1k damage taken.

I am aware, IMO 25% buffed, or 20% unbuffed is still too high in PvP gear. http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/character/37cc3133-7794-41db-bcb0-d9349e0cde27 There's my estimated setup in mostly 27 level gear. Note that for some reason it does not take into account the +3% accuracy from talents, so I'm actually at 93%, not 90%. Players do not have the same defenses as Operations bosses, I find that 93% is enough for me.

Except that with your rotation, the second Shadow Strike won't be procced (10 sec internal cd on Impose Weakness) and Force Potency will not be up the second time either, since you still have to wait out 15 secs of the cooldown, 30 if you don't have the 4 piece Stalker set bonus.

That may be true in PvE, I'm not sure I'm not a PvE'er. For PvP though, 25% crit is too high. Due to the addition of expertise to it, PvP gear has less of all the other stats. Trying to get 25% crit with PvP gear is only possible if you utterly destroy your bonus damage. I'm going to be playing with somewhere between 21-24%, depending what I find works best. Also, Accuracy is not needed for PvP in the same way it is for PvE. I run about 94% Accuracy (mostly from skill tree talents) and dump the rest into Surge.

Serendipitous Assault is what you are after, one Partisan, one Conqueror.

Funny thing is he's changed his sig now.

11. PvP players can recognize a comedy thread when they see it and respond accordingly. PvE players think it's serious, along with every other thread in this section.

As do I.

Spinning Kick > Shadow Strike > Potency > Breach > Project is my opener, always. After that it's situational. Another Shadow Strike (usually procced on its own) and then Spinning Strike kills them if you get lucky on crits, use some CS or an unprocced SS if it doesn't. Don't be afraid to use an unprocced SS if you have a ton of force to spare. A full force bar is wasted damage potential, so you might as well use it up with the hardest hitting attack we have.

/signed. A lot of them looked really good, I'd love for them to come back.