if you want to heal, you can use a blaster rifle as a commando and lose no effective healing (since it is tied to tech power, not mainhand damage) you'll lose some max damage for all weapon-based skills (full auto, high-impact bolt, hammershot) and additionally lose the ability to use charged bolts or hail of bolts at all.

this thread is a prime example of how this type of thing can backfire if handled poorly. what is a commonly-accepted truism: assassins/shadows need some work, is argued with such hyperbole and lack of understanding that people are simultaneously arguing that 1, it's not true, and 2, it should be that way. there are so many misconceptions over this conversation that i don't even know where to begin and if i'll even cover them all, but here goes: saying that assassins need help and shadows are fine is just ludicrous. assassins and shadows are mirrors and mechanically work the same. shadow/assassin spikiness is an issue. the problem with this stems from bioware's metrics: time to kill (ie: just hitting a tank until it dies) and how that doesn't really apply with actual boss mechanics. to clarify, shadows/assassins are actually better in the time to kill metric than the other two tanks, but due to their designed spikiness, have a tendency to just blow up from specific big energy/kinetic attacks such as terminate from the operations chief. if they simply changed the damage type of these big attacks to internal/elemental (and lowered the value to compensate), shadows would probably be back on top as best tank class again since they do much better against this type of damage than the other two tank classes. bioware's stated goal of dps is 5%, not 15%. are they within this goal? in practice, no. snipers/gunslingers are performing much more above metrics due to the fact that orbital strike/flyby are so powerful in a single-target rotation. there is also a fallacy in looking at dummy parses when, converted to a raid setting, many classes would gain a lot: armor debuff, execute moves and talents, etc. and in fact, shadows/assassins have the most to gain from dummy parse to actual boss fight. the only spec in the entire game that loses/gains absolutely nothing from dummy to boss fight is arsenal mercenary / gunnery commando because they have a built-in armor debuff and no execute talent or ability. what's more, engineer/saboteur can 'wall bang' the dummy, creating super-inflated parses. the problem as a result of this is that people use the highest-possible parses as the 100% marker that other classes should fall in line with, not taking into account that it's performing above intended design metrics. they then completely ignore the fact that many of the numbers can be slightly misleading, due to the fact that there will never be an execute phase, and many classes parse without an armor debuff. so, are shadows within 5% of other classes. probably not, but there's a lot of inflated numbers out there, and the most salient point i can give, the world first kill for dread guards (pre-nerf when they had more health, did a lot more damage, and had a 30s tighter enrage timer) completed it with a balance shadow, where no one was allowed to be carried in that fight. even if they are performing outside of the 5% target, they are still perfectly viable for the hardest content in the game. in terms of progression viability, wild-berry is a very good example of someone who's not only completing nightmare content as a shadow, but doing so in balance and infiltration, and ranking on the current 2.0 NiM progression leaderboards there is no 'utility class' and i don't know where this idea started. all classes have utility (though some more than others, which has been stated will be addressed), but no class is useless on its own and only exists to buff the efficacy of others. kinetic combat is a tank spec, infiltration is a dps spec, and balance is a dps spec. shadows have no healing spec (not sure where this one came from either). and that said, there is no design philosophy that classes that can heal or tank are specifically intended to do less dps (there was an ambiguous statement in the sorcerer answers that led players to suspect the devs might feel this way that was blown way out of proportion, but that was clarified later in the juggernaut answers). as i said earlier, all dps specs are intended to be within 5% of each other. TL;DR: assassins are fine. they need a little bit of a help, but threads like this are hurting the cause rather than helping it.

do you really need anything more than that though?

it does not.

i would really love to see zeltron, but i think the top 3 possibilities are voss, togruta, and nautolan, because they're in-game already and fit the parameters of what the devs said we could expect: speak basic and romances 'wouldn't be weird' voss is a toss-up for me, though. i think they would fit more as a companion than a playable species. i don't think nautolan would have any issues being playable for any class, but i would say togruta is probably next because there's already a companion in-game and therefore some of the coding is already in place for the species to work with certain gear types

all GTN kiosks are linked as of a very long time ago. maybe over a year ago now it was changed.

that has nothing to do with DPS

lots of people like to troll when anyone asks this question too. not very friendly for newer players. even if someone speaks out and explains that it's a bug, it usually continues because they don't believe it.

when that post was made over a year and a half ago, that statement was true. why bump this thread to dispel information that was true at the time it was posted?

the problem here is that the class balance team isn't even failing at its job like the OP is saying. they could maybe do it a little better, but when discussing class balance, no one is ever satisfied, and a balance team's job is never really done. but looking at parses... 5minutes on a dummy is not a qualitative way of checking to see how well a spec performs. even looking at overall damage in a boss fight isn't always a good qualitative metric because classes aren't balanced around doing the same sustained dps over time. some specs are designed to do higher burst and less sustained and vice-versa. balance is boring due to the changes in 2.0, but it by no means is a terrible spec. looking at the 2.0 DPS Leaderboards thread, we see that the highest dummy parse for balance shadow is M-knightrider - Shadow - Balance - 8/2/36 - 2898.23 looking at his AMR profile, we can see that he has a good bit of 75s, so this is probably close to the highest someone can do on a shadow right now (on a dummy) scoundrels and gunslingers (especially saboteur) are performing above metrics due to the use of flyby in a single-target rotation. this is slated to be fixed, but it until it does, they can't be considered the target to match in terms of class balance. there is, however, an informative thread from paowee that goes over the potential of the smuggler rotation sans-flyby (which shows that they perform even less than the above parse) but we can match it with sentinels, the current highest parse being: Gorband - Marauder - Annihilation - 36/8/2 - 3358.67 i'm not going to count the armor debuffs, but looking at the DPS Scalars thread, we see that shadow dps benefits 7.03% in execute phases, so the 2898.23 dps is actually 3101.98 so this is actually a 7.6% difference, which is what Keyboardninja (probably the best theorycrafter on the forums) asserts is the current disparity between highest/lowest dps. 7.6% is outside of bioware's current target of 5%, but it is well within the OP's 15% and certainly not nearly as bad as the claims of more than a 20% difference, which the OP has claimed before. TL;DR, it's really not that bad. the difference in dps is outside of the targeted 5%, but it is not so huge that they absolutely need to stop everything they're doing right now and halt all other projects to fix it, especially since certain balance changes are already slated to resolve a major issue causing this disparity. in addition to this, other specs are performing below balance once you take into account raid performance (which is the only performance that matters, not dummy parses). as a clarification, i'm not mentioned infiltration because it's a high-burst low-sustained spec and additionally does not have a very large amount of data available to say one way or the other how it's performing anyway.

my lack of knight buff has been stalling me on transferring my VG over, but i'll try to think of something. he doesn't not have full 72, but he's a mixture of a lot of things (61 armorings, crafted implants/earpiece), underworld/arkanian relics, and 72 MH/OH with lots of 72/69 hand-me-downs from my commando and i feel confident enough with the tactics rotation to do it. i could practice with assault enough to do that one as well as it's very similar to the commando's (procs just happen 1.5s earlier/later)

i would like to introduce to my good friend grav round

i think that this is a really good topic of discussion, but maybe it should be posted somewhere else where it will get more traffic. it seems a lot of people gloss over this part of the forums.

the part you quoted is from the resource management question, which frankly shouldn't even mention pyro as it does not have a problem with resource management before the change. as for the concern of progression viability, the very first question is asking about this for all three specs and even makes a point that arsenal is more valued than pyro because of the armor debuff, so it runs into competition within its own AC.

i had a totally serious reply until i realized this was a troll thread. gg OP, you got me

they were in an egg group called fairy (and presumably still are), but there was no fairy type

i feel like it needs to be said, but if the OP would stop making QQ threads every 20s about how awful assassin dps is, he could play the game and find out that it's not nearly as bad as he thinks it is. this is the fallacy of judging dps from arbitrary dummy parses, especially with regards to a class like assassin where they have a lot to gain in execute phases, perform really well in them, and, due to many boss mechanics, is generally the most important dps phase window that can never be tested on a dummy.

yeah, i said this in the shadow questions thread and think it applies here as well: i think the developers and the discussion occurring after the responses are going relatively well, so even if we get some 'heal to full' type responses, we can air it all out, and EricMusco will march down to the combat team war room and raise hell for us.

there's a rogue bit of BBcode right here: Changing the 4pc eliminator set bonus in 2.0 otherwise, it looks really good. i'll say again that i love the format for these.

i think every person who purchased RotHC should each make a separate thread stating their opinion on the issue.

i think another good point to make is we probably won't see any balance changes until after every specific AC has had a chance to ask their questions, so i wouldn't worry overmuch about not getting to ask something now.

rogue squadron was an arcade shooter, not a flight sim like x-wing

this is an unrealistic request, because i seriously doubt they'd give us a set bonus that rewards us for walking into an AOE while in stealth. the numbers are unimportant, i'm just guessing as to what we could expect if we got such a bonus based on other similar bonuses.

i guess we'll find out on tuesday. that would be really cool if it did that.

i think the increased damage after using shoot first fits into this and does really well with the class concept. i think we would probably have to expect one dps bonus and one utility / defense bonus, so what would people prefer as an enforcer dps bonus? +15% crit chance for back blast OR +x% damage for x seconds after using shoot first? i think the values we can expect would be maybe +4% for 15s or +10% for 6s or something inbetween (maybe +5% for 12s?)