You are correct. I only mentioned it, because you included it in your original post.

It may all be anecdotal, but in my guild (most people with close to full rakata and rakata weapons), our snipers tend to finish their mobs on council faster than our mercs, assassins, and marauders. We don't have any dps sorcs usually, and this is only comparing the same level hp mobs. Also the difference doesn't appear to be significant. Regarding the mechanic, the reason why many people say heat is easier than energy is because tracer crits refund heat, have a lower heat cost than sniper, and they get 15% crit to tracer on their 2 set. MM energy management is also pathetically easy to manage in a pve setting though (looking at you followthrough), it's just doesn't seem as cut and dry on paper. In fact the only resource management that actually seems to be somewhat difficult is operative healing, lethality sniper, and veang jugg

Actually for the dart animation the sniper shoots off a container attached to his left hand. It doesn't come from the rifle. I don't care what they call the class. I was just pointing out that no matter the spec, snipers still use a lot of gadgets and tech abilities that may not be in line with what most people envision as a true sniper class. Then again, a true sniper would have way over 35m range, and probably get one-hit kills, so a certain amount of realism has to be sacrificed (especially considering it's a star wars game).

A spec which still uses a probes (adrenaline and explosive), ballistic dampeners, a knife attack, multiple grenade attacks, checks its facebook account while resting, etc

Meh I'm kind of in the same boat. The classes I should be able to do well against are also the classes that tend to have a dispel. Sure I go positive every WZ (in terms of KB/D not just Kills/D), but a lot of that is because I can get off some good damage from the periphery of the battle. I know we're not a tank and I'm not saying you should just run straight into the mix and expect to do well. That being said, operatives, assassins, sorcs, and mercs are all brutal to fight if they know what they're doing because of dispel. I can beat plenty of the dumb ones, but that's not really an indication that the class is doing well. Oh my stats, full champ set, lvl 50 sniper, lethality spec, valor umm mid 50s I think. I encourage people to keep playing their sniper if they're having fun. After all it's a video game, and it's not like you can't find something else to do or something else to play. The endgame pvp content goes by very fast anyway since as of yet there are no arenas, rated wzs, any kind of meaningful world pvp, etc.

Nope.

Nah we use it as a DPS check, so when we do so, we make sure to time the guys on the 100k ones. Everyone is pretty geared too 5/5HM EV, 4/5HM KP.

Or just see who kills their mob quickest on 4th boss EV. I seem to always be the first or second one to kill my mob (compared to other dps classes on the same type of mob). Then again, even our dps jug finishes within a couple seconds of me. Edit: Obviously this is an imperfect test, but should provide at least a baseline.

Meters would be nice. Interrogation Probe is probably more damage over time, but I know WB before a Cull makes me more bursty. So again it comes down to which role you want to fill.

First of all thanks for making and sharing this video. It takes some guts to put yourself out there. I'm not a god of snipers or anything, but here's the good and bad from what I saw. Pros: Targeting - Target selection was pretty good. Sometimes you were kind of off on your own, but usually you were on strategic targets. Cons: Rotation - Too many Culls without Dart on the target. You're losing out on a huge part of your burst by only having CG on the target. Inconsistent playstyle - Are you going for spread damage and general harrassment or trying to burst people down. Your decision of which you want to do greatly affects which talents and spec to run. I'm not seeing you fulfilling either your max single target damage potential or your max spread/harrassment potential. Spec - I'm just not a huge fan of the interrogation probe spec. This is a personal opinion though so I guess it's not really constructive, but I just think that you could be doing better in a WB spec.

I used to think this change would make us slightly OP. But lately seeing output from other classes, I can easily now justify it.

16 man

We cleared 5/5 HM EV and 1/4 HM KP (doing the rest later in the week) with 2 jugg tanks earlier tonight. Never on a single fight was threat an issue. Mitigation seemed fine too, well because we cleared it. I've run several HM FP's with the same jugg tanks where there is a lot more aoeing of trash, and had no issues with threat. I can't speak to any of the damage issues, but from an endgame PVE tanking perspective they're fine.

You know what? I like you sir. A lot of the sniper gripe I have though comes from dispels wrecking me as lethality and my inability to contribute to a huttball game nearly as much as a jugg/inquis. Sure I top damage 90% of the games I get into. But smart opponents (we're seeing more of these) know that I'm countered by dispelling my dots, and unfortunately my damage done doesn't necessitate winning the huttball game.

I like your cover pulse idea a lot. I don't like your 15% dmg boost on cover since that would alienate lethality, and to some small extent engineering. I really don't see too much wrong with the class though. I don't play lethality because I feel that MM is broken/bad - I play it because it just fits my playstyle better as a kiter/skirmisher. Yes cover can be a little buggy, so any small fixes there will help, but beyond that and maybe a few quality of life fixes I think the class is in a pretty good place right now. Edit: Sidenote - I'd trade almost anything for a disengage, but it would probably make us OP.