I wouldn't want the cast animation for Dark Ward permanently, but I would like something slightly more obvious than a tiny buff icon telling me that DW is up. No brilliant ideas though, I'm just not quite happy with the current lack of animation

Depends on your spec. I'm assuming Deception or Madness? Endurance & Willpower for main stats of course. For secondaries get Accuracy to ~100%. It's probably useful There's a lot of discussion over which secondaries are best and at what rations, but a good rule of thumb is to keep power, surge and crit roughly equal as there are softcaps (diminishing returns) on them. There are some charts floating around on the forums which show which stat is best until x rating. From the tanking world defense > absorb > shield until ~700 rating, then shield > absorb > defense after that. I can't recall the equivalent for DPS stats, but I _think_ it's crit > power > surge until you're at ~3-400 crit rating, then surge > power > crit after that. But that's vague memories of a post I read once.

Depends on how much endurance you already have I'd say. Willpower increases your threat generation, Endurance increases your hp pool. Which do you need the most? Depending on what you're gonna be tanking I'd prioritise endurance until you have a healthy HP pool (17-18k), then pick willpower if your threat is low. Sadly in Columi gear your stats are mostly locked in. You can move enchancements to get rid of the useless accuracy, but still you'll wind up with ~22k HP and a fixed willpower at the end.

Wouldn't be that hard to sort tbh. I don't need a big button in the middle of the screen, I just want a few simple things Scaling on buffs/debuffs Moving buffs Short duration (<30 sec) buffs scale/move on their own The pain right now is that the buff icons are tiny, and they're in the middle of everything else. If I could just resize and move them a bit I could actually pay more attention to the game rather than those tiny, tiny icons.

Partially true. It's hard to say for sure when it comes to long fights, but you can notice trends in how much damage a 'sin is likely to bring compared to an OP etc. My personal feeling, having played both OP and 'sin at lvl 50, is the obvious "OPs burst like mad". After that it evens out and feels more or less the same over a bossfight. As an OP you can vanish + HS to burst again, as a Sin you do a higher and less finicky dps. Marauders are just OP atm though. I'm not sure their actual DPS is that different from Sin/OP, but they have sweet, sweet buffs.

Agreed. The patch is a fix of broken mechanics and a buff, not a nerf.

The outcome is binary, the chance isn't 50/50 though. The chance of getting energize is P = 1 - ( 0.7 ^ n ), n being the number of hits dealt. Assassinate -> 30% chance Trash, or Lacerate on two targets -> 51% chance Lacerate on three targets -> 65.7% chance etc

I noticed some funnyness while doing WZ's with my assassin alt, but I put that down to something related to guard + stealth. I was getting popped out of stealth from people at very long ranges, consistently.

Wasn't the expertise buff on the map changed to count as an adrenal as well? So that it wouldn't stack with other adrenals, or the PvP Expertise adrenal. Relic still stacks IIRC, at least I can't recall having seen anything related to that.

It's not so much that OP healers are underpowered, they just have a limited toolbox. Run into aoe, or a lot of movement, and you're in trouble. My biggest issue is that healing is boring. You have 3 abilities you'll use in most situations, two of which will be spammed. KI+SP on the tank, or random people taking damage, and 2xhot on the tank(s). The rest is extremely situational. But aye, an OP can get out a lot of healing for a long time. As long as there's no excessive bursts that is.

It takes a lil while to get up from the knockdown, even with the trinket. It's why HS fills the resolve bar completely instead of just 80'ish % like the incap time would imply. Still, if you have equal gear/level you're still way above 50% hp when you get up, and then the OP has no burst. Unless you're slow to react to the move setting up the backstab.

You lose set boni if you do that, as well as the higher armouring you tend to find in epic set pieces. From what I read in the devtracker they're planning on reversing that change though, allowing you to extract armouring from set pieces. Hopefully that also means the set boni.

I tend to agree with the OP, but I'll frankly admit I'm not the best PvP'er around. I'm sitting at valor rank 22, PvE being more my thing. Nonetheless from both PvE and PvP encounters there's two kinds of fights for me. You can pick off wounded players with a oneshot from stealth, then pop back into stealth after the CD on stealth goes out. Rinse and repeat. This also works on full HP lowbies and shoddily geared players. Otherwise it's HS->BS->Wait for resolve->Vanish->HS. Sure I can debilitate, flashbang and shiv without having the HS knockdown, but getting in backstabs is a pain. Debilitate often makes the game confused as to where their back is, flashbang only works if you have no teammates spamming aoe. I'd very much like the choice of opener depending on what I want to do. If I want to burst I can follow up with a stun that doesn't fill resolve afterwards. If I want them to not act for a sec or two I open with a short duration stun. This would also solve the ridiculous cases of PvE where I can burst down elites in a few seconds. Not to mention the hilarity of knocking towering driods flat on their face as well as taking 6-7k off their HP with one hit.

Columni hangs over your face if you hide your headslot. Almost all chestpieces with hoods work this way.

Only versus people with way worse PvP gear than you have. Yes, the burst hurts, but if I duel people I know to have approximately the same expertise as me I don't break 5k HS without stacking biochem buffs. I agree the 3 sec knockdown on HS is a bit over the top, but if that's nerfed to a root AB needs to be applied from Shiv as well or we'll be nerfed to impotence. We're extremely reliant on the burst, or having to count on the opponent having shoddy gear. I say wait and see what happens when you can no longer stack adrenals and buffs, as well as moving the lowbies out of our bracket. Operatives with a lot of Expertise will still deal insane bursts to players without Expertise, but the reverse is also true.