That's a pretty ironic statement considering the population decline.

I wouldn't be surpised if there was a stealth nerf that makes it only work in HEC. I'll test it with Ion Cell sometime tonight.

Summary: The entire other team should manage their cooldowns around what one Sentinel is doing. It's also ok to instagib people even faster than triple proc, triple crit HIB resets of old. Conclusion: Sentinels / Marauders think they're raid bosses.

The run speeds works. I have tested it. The damage works. It's very obvious to people who have run the talent regularly. The problem probably revolves around people not understanding other classes. There are numerous classes who can get very significant damage reductions against Pulse Cannon. Multiple specs have 30% reduction from AoE damage. Some classes get abnormally high internal / elemental damage. If you get Taunted, it goes down drastically. Etc. There's a lot of things that will drop it's damage a lot.

I'm not seeing the snare on PFT / PG at 5 stacks. I just tested in a duel and my friend couldn't tell the difference. We could tell the difference on a Gut snare.

Eliminator is fine to run with Tactics. You lose out a little bit, but it's nothing worth worrying about. The set bonuses for Combat Tech do not benefit the spec on near the level that Eliminator benefits Assault.

I think this is more of a sign of bad programming. I've hit someone I'm standing slightly infront of before and missed someone clearly in the radius. It's probably some kind of desync issue, similar to people teleporting around.

It makes it similar to the Sentinel / Marauder DoTs. Condensing the damage makes it significantly more useful in PvP situations. This would increase the DoT damage tick to 250% of current. PvE, this would be an irrelevant change.

If they condensed the DoT into 6 seconds, it'd go a long way to making this ability useful. Just give it a 12-15 second CD.

Which is around 27.5% less damage depending on the target. Against 5k armor, a 5200 HIB from Assault will crit for 3595. Against 3k armor, it's 3767. On 8k armor, it's 3374. Then we need to factor in having to use Gut regularly if we want to use HIB regularly. This adds a GCD and costs 2 more ammo for very little damage. It's a lot of damage per CD, but to get that we far exceed a burst window. Due to this, it's not availabe for a target swap if we haven't preped the target which is really not the play style of Tactics. It's not bad in a duel setting. It's not bad to throw in on an autocrit for extra damage. It is bad to regularly use it. It just isn't that effective for Tactics. 2 Ion Pulses are significantly better than HIB and Gut in the overwhelming majority of cases.

It wasn't directed at you. You basically went through the same cycle I did when I made the switch. I went Tactics, didn't like it, and respec'd back. I felt that FT / PC was too difficult to pull off. I went back and did more theory crafting trying to make the changes to Assault work with my playstyle and decided that it was unworkable. I respec'd and then over some more time with Tactics I was like "ooooh... I can use FT / PC." You see a lot of PTs and Vanguards who will claim it's completely unusable and have never played the spec or played it for a short period of time. For a long time, that's what people thought the spec was all about. I think in some of my older posts I talk about how poor of an idea it was to be so dependent on FT / PC. It's definitely not intuitive to most MMO players here. To me, positionally dependent builds have really been less emphasized. On top of that, I can think of only one class in all the MMOs that had a playstyle revolving around a positional cone and that was the Holy Paladin in... Cata? Not sure. Effectively using the cone heal provided massive healing to the Beacon target. Honestly, I don't know what Fire Pulse's animation is lol. It's very subtle if there is one. There is an animation that's easy to miss on the target. It's basically a little bit of fire. I have all the talents for HIB and like having them, but I very, very rarely use it. I use Gut even less frequently. I pretty much just use it when someone else has made a target vulnerable, it will autocrit and I'm outside 10m, Fire Pulse is on CD, or I need just a little bit more damage. In 10 WZs, I probably use it 5-7 times and Gut around 2-3 times. I'm just not sure I can get anything better for the points.

I'll rephrase what I previously said- this is the difference between playing the spec for a long time and someone who's played it a lot longer than three days. The weakest WZ for AP / Tactic damage is Huttball. You can still do well in damage if you want, but HO / HtL is so dominating for positioning and running, you are probably hurting your team by doing so. This is the only WZ I consistently run Ion Cell. I play with a Sage healer, Watchman Sentinel, and Focus Guardian running Soresu. If you have the ball and are resolved in mid, it is an automatic cap if you have CDs up and you get Transcendence. You are immune to all forms of CC / movement imparing effects. Activate Reactive Shield, HO / HtL, and run. You will cap virtually every single time. You will out run everyone, you cannot be stopped. Voidstar is like being a kid in a candy shop with a million dollar gift card. The structure of the map naturally funnels people into clusters. If you can't consistently get full channel FT / PCs, you are a bad player or need more practice or your team is running the epic fail split door strat. If you think otherwise, you are simply wrong. There is not enough room for the other team to fan out if your team zergs a door. My group is AoE heavy. We pretty much always break 70 kills and frequently border or break 100. A very important side benefit to the AoE here is its disruptive nature. People will figure out what you are doing. They will frequently immediately stop what they are doing and disperse if they see you. This does make it marginally harder to tag them but not much. You have Harpoon. You have Neural Surge. I have 2 people with knock backs who use them to herd. The Guardian has an AoE stun. You can use the pillars to ambush people. There is a ~1-1.5ish delay before the attack graphic. If you initiate out of LOS, there is minimal response time. Civil War's structure is not as friendly as Voidstar but opportunites present themselves frequently. When people zerg a point, Pulse Cannon really shines. Fighting on the point is frequently dense but proper positioning is harder to achieve. In Voidstar, movement is much more predictable. Here it is substantially less predictable as there is a vertical component to consider. It's harder to position yourself here to avoid random AoE knockbacks as well when not at Mid. Mid, especially at the start if the other team pushes it, is much more similar to Voidstar. Other random notes- 1.) Yes, the spec is broken. I was hoping people would never mention that the Pulse Generator buff worked on all AoE. I have broken 4k on a Mortar Strike before on someone under geared. I frequently break 3250. 2.) Fire Pulse crits significantly harder than HIB / RS. I don't know why anyone thinks otherwise. It's confusing to me. 3.) You can run HEC and it is MUCH better for the spec. You also run Ion Cell better than a deep Tactics / Pyro build. 4.) Single target burst is good. No, nothing compares to the stellar alignment that produces triple proc, triple crit HIBs / RSs. Tactics has very predictable (on our end, not target) and controlled burst. 5.) Tactics must be regeared. Accuracy is meaningless and a completely wasted stat. You must mod out of this as fast as possible. 6.) Tactics has two completely different playstyles, both of which must be learned if you want to play the spec effectively. One is for AoE and one for single target. AoE is played at the 10m range and completely positioning dependent. Single target is melee and may actually use HIB. 7.) Consumables / Offensive CDs must be managed much more carefully. They will frequently double the total damage of a Pulse Cannon. When you use them, you want that to be a really good Pulse Cannon. You don't want to whiff with it or have it interupted because you used it incompetently. Sure, it might be interupted, but you don't want that to happen because of poor play on your part. A power relic, +25% crit buff, and a power / expertise adrenal 5x FT / PC has the power to virtually annihilate another team. If you can get an effective Mortar Strike in before it with buffs up, the two AoEs will kill anyone caught in it. This is extremely situational and you probably aren't going to get it off in anything but Voidstar on a big respawn or on a diffuse zerg. **Important note on Pulse Cannon usage: there are a lot of classes that have channels that go uninterupted. You can be shut down. This goes unsaid. However, if a team devotes the resources to shut you down, they aren't shutting down someone else and HO / HtL can be used very effectively to minimize our vulnerability to being tunneled. If you are being tunneled, you are also just a good AoE stun away from turning the tables. The more you play with the spec, the easier it is to get off good FT / PCs because you will learn and start automatically doing things that minimize the chance of an interupt. FT / PC has a 10m range while AoE stuns and knockbacks have an 8m range. You'll start to learn which players will immediately respond with a knockback and position them outside of the range when HtL isn't up. Consular / Inquisitor knockbacks has a long animation time. They will rarely interupt a FT / PC they don't see coming. If possible, never use the ability infront of someone with an interupt. Every fraction of a second matter and forcing them to turn around decreases the time they have to interupt especially if they don't have you targeted as targeting is very poor in this game. Minimize LOS exposure when possible when starting the channel. In my experience, the single most common interupt I run into is Force Leap. There are a lot of small things you can do that greatly enhance the probability of not having the channel broken.

Yea, someone in the other thread was saying HIB crit harder than Fire Pulse in Tactics. It was at least an easy way to figure out who to ignore on that thread.

I don't believe it does but I could be wrong. The actual buff says that it increases AoE damage not Pulse Cannon damage. Anyways... Tactics is a very misunderstood spec. I've played it pretty extensively now with some pretty good success. I think my crew has lost 5 WZs in the last 3 weeks? Maybe 6? At one point we had a 100+ win streak. Not sure how long it lasted, but I completely two armorment weeklies without going to Ilum. It can be extremely effective and anyone who says otherwise has absolutely no clue what they're talking about. 1.) Stock Strike is overrated. It's a situation ability / efficiency ability. I thought otherwise for a long time and it was one of the things I really didn't like about the spec. Between Gut and Stock Strike (sorry, I'm not going to bother with Empire side ability names because it'll slow me down), I really looked at Tactics as a melee spec. It's not. It doesn't have the flex range of Assault, but it is not a 4m spec. The situations where it is most beneficial to use is where you don't need more Pulse Generator stacks and it's free. It's also phenominal to follow a Fire Pulse when on low ammo. It's great to have that level of burst for nothing. 2.) AoE is abusive in PvP. Pulse Cannon reigns as king of abusiveness. The scaling on this ability is unbelievable. Factoring in all talents, on a crit, you get ~.65 damage per point of Power per tick. It's basically got a 12 second CD (15 seconds but it starts from activation). You do not wait for HtL to use this ability. This is overwhelmingly the defining ability of the spec and learning to use it effectively is the single most important aspect of Tactics. 3.) Tactics is primarily a positioning spec. This is unlike Assault. I konw you didn't want comparisons but this is a very critical playstyle distinction. For Assault, the purpose of positioning is almost exclusively tied to survivability. Superior positioning results in better kiting and escape options. However, the build is really a target selection build. Assault's real strength is the ability to very frequently annihilate a vulnerable target. With Tactics, positioning is the primary factor involved in determining effectiveness. Proper positioning greatly increases the number of targets you will hit with Pulse Cannon, the rapidity with which you can unleash Pulse Cannon effectively, and limits the frequency with which you will be interupted. Anticipation is a huge part of PvP. Always has been, always will be. For a healer, it's who's going to need to be healed next. For Assault (for me at least not being a tunneler), it was who's about to be the weak link. In Tactics, it's where do I need be in 5 seconds. 4.) HIB is worth using when it will crit. In PvE, Gut is a very strong ability due to damage per cooldown. In PvP, it's not very good. I rarely use it. I use HIB far more frequently but still very rarely. I use it only when it's going to crit and then usually only when someone else has made the target vulnerable to it. Otherwise, it's a waste of a GCD in non-1v1 situations most of the time. It's OK verse stealth, but I normally find Stealth Scan is more than sufficient. 5.) Single target Tactics isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be. The spec has good burst. It has extreme spike damage with Stick Grenade and the Fire Pulse delay. It is definitively behind here overall when compared to Tactics. However, like I said, it's not bad. This is where the area of Tactics where you really polish your game play. Knowing when to switch to a single target rotation / playstyle from a Pulse Cannon orientation is an area you can add some effectiveness later. Pulse Cannon is a niche ability- but it's extremely powerful in it's niche. 6.) Guard Bursting and swamping healers are two of the best features of Tactics. Catching a Guarded target and a Tank within AoE annihilates the Tank and AoE healing isn't that powerful or effective. You can overwhelm healers with AoE damage which will leave targets vulnerable longer. My group kills tanks very consistently before healers. Guard doesn't have great range. Most tanks will try to peel off a healer. They make themselves vulnerable to do this. Anticipate and take advantage. You can force them together with Harpoon. Know when you need to stun and when you don't need to stun. You don't need a Neural Surge in order to hit targets. It's just a huge help. 7.) This is not a solo spec. It's a team build. It's best when working with another AoE build that can help assist in herding. Otherwise, unless people of your team take advantage after a Pulse Cannon, you are just going to be dealing a lot of damage that doesn't kill and is meaningless. Sorry, I wrote this quick.

The problem with this is that Tanks don't get much more in terms of support. Look at the Guardian tank tree. What do you get? You get a decreased cooldown for the AoE taunt (nice but going away), decreased cooldown for Force Push, a stun, and no channel for Force Stasis. That's it. You can go a DPS spec and dish out a TREMENDOUS amount more damage and run Soresu for Guard. The ability to actually kill someone is infinitely more valuable than those other talents which are very minor. Troopers are a little better off but not much. The Bird build gives you every advantage a full tank build would give you but with the addition of actual damage. A good example of what tanks should be in PvP can actually be found in Age of Conan at release. The Guardian and Conqueror got stacking buffs whenever a group member who was not a tank was hit by non-AoE damage. The Guardian's Vengeance stacked increased their overall damage and massively increased the damage of Bloody Vengeance as well as reducing it's cooldown by over 75%. It basically turned into a one shot ability if stacked to max on a crit with virtually no cooldown. The Conqueror's stacking buffed increased the effectiveness of a group heal that proc'd on melee. When stacked to max, the group heal was also a group rez. Basically, if you didn't attack the tanks, there were massive penalties.

It's Pulse Cannon. I've already made the switch on live. Tactics is different on a very fundamental level in terms of playstyle. It continually gets undervalued in terms of overall damage and it's burst capability. It has pretty extreme spike burst that is above what I was able to do in Assault. Sticky --> Fire Pulse --> Stock Strike can all hit at the same moment which is a tremendous amount of damage. Assault can't tie as much damage into a single global like Tactics can; however, at least currently, Assault can do substantially more short window burst with resets. On a swap, it's hard to say who's ahead. Tactics isn't HIB dependent and doesn't require an Ion Pulse to start; however, the delay of Fire Pulse makes the burst essentially a two ability burst minimum. If Assault starts with HIB up on a swap, it's going to have a good chance of forcing a reset rather quickly. At that point, it definitely surpasses Tactics. Pulse Generator is the real game changer for me. I really didn't like it at first. It's awkward and vulnerable. On live, if you work with it for a while, you can get to a point where you can use it very effectively... with consumables up, its damage is simply abusive. AoE damage has some very significant advantages with most of the classes / specs that people play on my server and post about on the forums. Tanks and Guard are common. A Tank that gets caught in a Pulse Cannon with his healer (or Guarded target) is dead. We have a single target stun, an AoE stun, and a dislocation ability. It's not nearly as hard to effect this as many people believe, especially if others on your team are working with you to achieve the result. Now, there are some weaknesses to this. Taunt eliminates a lot more damage to an AoE than it does to a single target (same percentage). It requires more coordination than a lot of other builds do. You aren't going to pull it off if you get tunneled / focused. People will figure out what you are doing and try to stop it. The last part isn't necessarily a bad thing because if they are doing that to you, they aren't doing it to a healer. Additionally, ammo management is far superior. I think everyone knows this one though. It has a lot less survivability. That Plasma Cell snare is amazing. Tactics doesn't get something like that. You'll quickly notice the difference when trying to kite. Tactics has terrible kiting ability. It can get away pretty decently with Hold the Line but in terms of kiting, it's terrible. Overall, it's below Assault right now, at least in my opinion having played both specs substantially, but it isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be and situationally Tactics is superior. The primary reason I put Assault above Tactics for PvP is quite simply that the set bonuses are far superior for an Assault build than a Tactics build. +15% to HIB in Assault is light years ahead of +15% crit to Stock Strike. *As a side note, one of the things you have to do with Tactics is remove as much accuracy as you possibly can. It is completely irrelevant to a Tactics build in PvP.

With a change like this, you really don't need much in the way of testing. Its affects are pretty straightfoward.

Where are you getting 20 / 20 / 20...

It's not too difficult to do if your aren't the only person trying to accomplish that goal. There are a fair number of options outside of Sweep / Smash, but they are ones that people don't normally use (probably because the specs are absolute garbage 1v1 specs). Focus Sentinels have a two target Slash which is spammable and is superior to a normal Slash. Pulse Cannon in Tactics, while having the risks associated with a channel, is the hardest hitting AoE in the game as far as I know. It also deals elemental damage making it's amage on the tank significantly higher. Using it with Hold the Line offers some limited protection. Proper position offers pretty good protection vs. an interupt. In 1.2, it's going to get significantly better and easier to use with interupt protection (only a stun will break it) and a 70% snare.. Currently, it's awkward and few people stick with it long enough to learn to use it. Force in the Balance isn't that bad of an ability for these purposes. It's also instant and targetable making it signifcantly easier to use. This deals internal damage which, again, is superior against a tank. Smugglers don't have a whole lot here. Sweeping Gunfire is a bit difficult to set up but does some very solid damage for Gunslingers. Flyby is a lot of damage but a dot. Still good for pressure. Pretty much every class in the game has a stun of some kind and a dislocation ability. Roots are very common as well. If you want to make it work, you can make it work. The point is- you do have options. Most people just don't like the options and aren't using a playstyle to make it work.

The Counter to Guard is AoE. If you are running AoE burst builds, you can literally take down a 20k tank in the blink of an eye if you execute it on both the tank and the Guarded target. Guard damage bypasses pretty much all of a tank's mitigation. Straight damage reduction is the only thing that works. As the Guarded target is pretty much always going to be a softer target, you're looking at at least a 60% increase in damage on the tank.

Completely useless? No. Practically useless? Yes. There are just way too many abilities that ignore Defense / Shielding for them us to weight them with any kind of significance. What's really saving you in PvP is that DR. That matters because while the attacks that fail to bypass Defense / Shielding are extremely common in PvP there are FAR fewer that ignore Armor Mitigation and nothing ignores straight damage reduction.

15 from the initiation of the ability, 12 from the end :-p It depends Guardians have AoE snare. Are you CC'd? Are you tunneling on another target? If you are doing absolutely nothing but trying to avoid an AoE the whole game, sure it's easy, but you've also lost the game if you are doing that. Those are mine. Guardian has root, channeled stun, and AoE disorient which is very effective with the delay on Pulse Cannon. Again, without another person, it's much weaker. Damage that doesn't result in kills or progression in WZ objectives is meaningless. Without someone who can take advantage of or complement the AoE, it's pretty meaningless. Additionally, like above, if everyone is saving their CC and CC breakers to stop an AoE like that... the game is over, they've lost. Actually, I am. I've been playing the spec for a while now. It's very awkward at first. It's a completely different playstyle approach than Assault. Assault, I played more like a predator. Someone gets in kill range and they're dead. Awareness is a big part of PvP and it changes significantly depending on what you're doing. With Assault, the awareness was knowing when and who to target swap for me. With Tactics, it's much more about knowing when and how to use Pulse Cannon. Did I just see an Inquistor use an AoE knockback? Well, I don't want to use Hold the Line. Did a Warrior just use Awe? I have a short window where he's less likely to counter. Am I being targeted by one of the Marauders who will 100% of the time interupt my channel? He has to be addressed first. I have a 3x stack. I need to know where I'm going to be using Pulse Cannon which probably isn't where I currently am standing. I've become MUCH better with more experience in the spec at consistently landing Pulse Generator on multiple targets for the full channel. Try running it for a while, you'll start landing it consistently. Honestly, it's niche. It's a very powerful niche. I've never said otherwise. It doesn't work nearly as well pugging. For one, targets are going to get Resolved with meaningless CC and knockbacks all the time. You want to know what messes up my Pulse Cannons more than anything? Consulars and Commandos going bowling. And also, let's be honest- no one plays Tactics. Almost no one has any experience in this game dealing with AoE oriented groups. Melee is very popular. Melee makes this much easier to pull off. In the current state of WZs, it's extremely powerful.

I don't even view those as "real" macros. WTB- "Cast on Target's Target if Hostile or Target if Friendly" or "Cast on Focus Target" and other target oriented macros. Edit- I've seen and done that loop cap on the first door on Voidstar a lot. I've NEVER seen an interception like that.

The solution to most of the problems you bring up is a having another competent player. Proper positioning mitigates this tremendously. Next patch reduces interupt options. Hold the Line offers good but not complete protection. This is significantly less of a problem than you imply. Additionally, the CD on Pulse Cannon is 12 seconds. False. If the target uses CC breakers, he can move. I can turn. He has a limited window of escape. Additionally, the frequency with which the combo can be set up is significantly faster than the CD of CC breakers. False. 10m cone AoE does not require targets to stand on top of each other. The damage is back loaded into the final 1.5 seconds. It's possible. It's extremely unlikely. It's more likely that the tank is just going to take a lot of damage, then you'll get interupted and the tank will get tagged with Ion Pulse and Dispactch and die. We do it with consistency. Our ability to do it with consistency is probably one of the reasons our group hasn't lost a WZ in around 2 weeks. AoE bombs are powerful. It's actually like 3-5 times a WZ excluding Huttball. As I've said, most of the time, this is irrelevant. The only time we actively try to Guard burst someone is if we have to. Then we do it and it is effective.

I know you have. That's the problem- it is hard to counter with the consistency and frequency with which it can be pulled off. The problem I am finding you having is that you are making a little bit of a hypocritical argument. The purpose of tanks is to work with and support the team. However, you refuse to accept that the same can be said with a damage spec. It is the coordinated use of Pulse Cannon with other AoE specs / classes that makes it extremely effective. It is only slightly above average without this support. As is frequently the case, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Coordinated AoE burst is devestating in two of the three maps. Due to map design, Voidstar and Civil War very frequently force people into clusters due to map bottle necks and LOS issues. Huttball doesn't, but in Huttball, Hold the Line is a fantastic ability and as I've said, I run with a Guardian which is arguably the best overall ball carrier between Guardian Leap, Force Leap, and the ability to reset Force Leap and displace others through Force Push.