Correct.

another tankassin enters the fray

This is false (or at least misleading). While it is true that the purple Battlemaster/War Hero gear you acquire from PvP Vendors will no longer have a Valor Rank requirement, crafted (orange) Battlemaster/War Hero gear still has Valor Rank requirements of 60 and 70 respectively, and it is these versions which will be highly sought-after/utilized by keyboard warriors and min-maxers (since they'll have the ever-important augment slots when critted).

Yes, you can. There are screenshots of the recipes from the PTS.

Ops/Scoundrels have already been nerfed to high Hell, and you want BioWare to take the nerf bat to them a THIRD time?

Standard priority on attacks is Incendiary Round (if the target is not burning and it won't hurt my ammo regen) > HiB (whenever its off CD) > Stockstrike > Sticky Grenade > Ion Pulse spam to try and proc Ionic Accelerator > Hammer Shot to try and control my ammo regen rate. This is, of course, interspersed with Riot Strike, Storm (as an additiona interrupt, gap closer, or even just free damage), my stuns, and Pulse Cannon/Mortar Volley depending on how mobile my opponent has shown he is willing to be (for example, Operatives move around too much to bother, while Sorc's traditionally stand still and eat every AOE tick).

It's true! And I did it all without pushing a single macro button that Storm'd + Stockstrike'd + Made Me a Ham Sandwich + Did My Laundry.

Like someone said earlier, Bioware attempted to inflate class complexity by flooding every class with mediocre/mimicked abilities, arbitrary internal CDs, etc. Nowhere is this more evident than in the sorts of hoops a Marauder has to jump through to be effective in a DPS role. So I /salute you for being able to herd cats efficiently~!

Taunt was on its own independent keybind for all the footage used in this video. I never said it doesn't make it easier. Macroing definitely makes managing certain cooldowns and abilities easier; that's the definition of a "quality of life improvement". I said there was a difference between convenience and automation, and some posters support that sentiment. Yeah, you're probably a better player than me. I certainly never said I was an amazing player and this video isn't meant to showcase that. Also, @kbstealer: Stop stealing my killing blows~!

I gravitate towards tanking roles in this game (because I like heals and I like being useful), so I feel that my job in PVP is to guard healers and peel threats off of him/her so they can freecast. This means that, when I'm guarding someone, I'm going to be harassing whoever is attacking them, so I should (generally speaking) always be taunting a threatening player. I'm not saying that I don't help focus fire healers and such, but that's not my primary role. I attack enemies with my regular keybound abilities if they happen to be a target where taunt would not be worthwhile. Honestly it was a lot easier to manage before I specc'd Carolina Parakeet. Now that I have to watch carefully for my Ionic Accelerator proc I was finding that I was neglecting to keep Taunt on cooldown all the time. When 1.2 hits I'm probably going back full Shield Spec again which should free up a bit more of my concentration

Fixed that one for ya

Thanks, oozo, I'm a big fan of your movies and playstyle, so I'm glad to have you in my corner on this one. Seriously; people don't realize just how many people (especially hardcore PVPers) are using licensed macro-ready peripherals to play games like these. It's not even a matter of automation, but convenience. also, can of worms involving macros = officially opened Thanks for your constructive feedback! Unfortunately, this'll probably end up being a series since I'm a big fan of Sun Tzu's works, and as for the music... well, at least its not dubstep or some crappy metal band from the Norwegian church-burning scene. I'm confident Bioware is aware of the Razer Naga and its abilities and that, so long as its macros aren't being used to automate the game or specifically time abilities so that they fire in exact sequence with a single key press, I'm not doing any wrong here. But given what Sweeet posted, I'm going to go ahead and stop using "Repeat while assigned key is pressed" just to be on the safe side! This, this, a thousand times this. I actually consider Vanguards to be pretty faceroll when it comes to rotation; I can't imagine the sort of hoops something like a Marauder has to jump through to be effective.

Whoa, blast from the past! Yes, that's me. Hola, Carlito-- from Anna, Aeshe, Erom, Vehaven, Alic, Targus, and Tahlia.

Vanguards have a lot of Elemental and tech abilities, which will chew through your Damage Mitigation and (for the most part) completely bypass many of your Defensive cooldowns (notably, the ones which increase your class Defense %). So long as they are smart enough to not empty the rest of their ammo bar while you have God Mode switched on, they've got a good chance to win the fight. However, a well-played, well-geared Marauder can and should defeat an equally skilled equipped Vanguard so long as they are Annihilation/Watchman specc'd.

I'm actually a Vanguard, not a Merc. My class is located in the thread title.