I welcome the adjustment, we did just lose 3% crit in the patch..... 5% is not that big of a deal, if you're posting 1300dps and 80% of your damage is from the abilities that were buffed that is about 50 dps. I guess i haven't factored crit damage 75% on top of a 5% larger base = some more. But yeah.

Its a combination of poor wording on bio-ware's part and some mis-information on the forums. People logically assume 'defense' to includes all defensive capabilities or misread it as 'defenses'. They should have just called it avoidance or called out dodge/parry etc like they do on the retaliation tool-tip for marauder. Also, people see the extremely poor itemization of 58 level gear and assume it has so much accuracy for a good reason, but there is no good reason it was a mistake.

Your post made my day, you don't know anything about me but somehow jump to some spectacular conclusions. *gets out the popcorn*

Yeah it made my decision to go all orange+augment very easy. 108+ power and endurance yes please.

I have both marauder and sniper, marauder is much easier. Its been confirmed by bioware devs that sniper is a very difficult class to play comparatively and in fact most of the QQ about sniper dps is because of this, only the top % of players can actually attain comparable dps.

When im on the forums at work, and find a post i hit reply and it tells me to login, fine i login and then im stuck like in no-mans land of account management and the browser back button doesnt even work properly to get back to the page i was on. Cool now i have to go back in thru the front-page and spend 5 minutes finding the post i was going to respond to. Its bloody frustrating. Just take me back to where i was or was asking to go. thanks.

This is great news, would you be so kind as to post some logs from your snipers, with 5+ it shouldn't be too hard to convince someone. We'd love to look over their performance for ourselves.

This is actually quite amusing for me, merc is probably the easiest class to play and the armor debuff bug had to fixed because it was overpowered. You still have more utility than a sniper, and yes other classes have had to roll biochem to keep up with YOU for quite some time now.

4 months of beating our heads against a brick wall

I am no stranger to hard content; i ran a progression guild after wow's launch; at that time it was coordinating 40 people per raid on Ragnaros. We were in ****** in blues running 12 hour /day progression trying for server and world firsts, we would log off inside the instance to continue raiding the next day. And there were no youtubes videos or strategy articles, You came up with strategies as you went along to the problems you observed. I do understand the rush and drive and satisfaction with all this. I don't care if they make hard and nightmare twice as hard as it is now; from some of the posts in this thread talking about how easy it is, completing hard mode 4/4 within a week. You guys SHOULD have a challenge because that's what its all about for you. There's obviously a wide gamut of casualness within 'casual players', but from people i know:: You would call them 'baddies', they make mistakes, tunnel vision, have lame gear etc. But they're not unintelligent, they just aren't the type to research how to balance their stats and maximize their rotations etc. Many are real-life friends, colleagues etc, If you want to play with your friends, you need to consider raid balance as much as you can, but, its not simply a matter of 'only raid with capable players', that's contrary to the point of enjoying the experience 'with your friends' They're engineers and managers and housewives, who also want to spend time with their kids, maybe they play to escape from the stress of their day-to-day, maybe they alternate with console games when and if they have time, and most of them play for the 'social aspect', to hang out with their friend who may have moved across the country and experience something together. Well these players have been playing all the content so far, 4 months in they've done the flash-points and some story-mode EV/KP. Now BW has released a patch, which has awesome new content right? new stuff to do and explore? banners across the launcher and website saying 'check out the cool new content we've made for you', why did they release content? it's to keep players interested in playing the game for a while, so that we keep paying our monthly subscription so they can all remain employed. Its not a matter of expecting something for nothing, being handed loot for free, its about wanting to have some fun and see some new content, if you put that out of reach and say only really good players can get new content then these people will get bored and stop playing.

I am deadly serious, why do you even care how hard story-mode is? and don't say loot because i already said if they nurf it to this extent they obviously have to nurf the loot handout. I'm talking about players who just want to log in casually and have some fun, the game has launched new content and these people do not currently get to enjoy it.

A large portion of the player base is semi-casual, for many due to real-life constraints like work and kids. I think story-mode should be within reach of the majority of 50s with decent gear (columi+some rakata) for the purpose of enjoying the new content, you would think retaining the monthly payment from these players would be incentive enough. Right now it is WAY too hard. We dont want access to the best possible gear, make it drop columi and keep the good stuff locked away on hard and nightmare... we just want to have some slice of the fun. If you're so cool as to beat this in columi wearing an eye-patch then cool, hard and nightmare mode should be designed for you where hard mode is very hard and nightmare requires the perfect class composition and top-notch players with top-notch gear.

If you look at these logs trended on torparse it shows how much the ramp up time at the start effects total dps. On most of these fights from 30-100% you were very consistently doing ~1200 dps.

Great post. I think a lot of the sniper looks good in theory but in practice it just doesn't work out like its supposed to. "People cant force charge you while in cover! well you are forced to move to be able to shoot your targets, or someone will just cast a cc or knock-back and you're no longer in cover and get charged. SWTOR has very effective and low cool-down gap closer abilities so being ranged isn't as much of an advantage as you would think. Obviously the target switch time and travel-time-saved is better but somewhat mitigated by the amount of LOS from the level design. The sniper gets eaten alive by pretty much anyone up close and forget about it if you're being targeted by multiple people at once. I also play a marauder and have never had a problem with getting to a target, i don think there is a significant delay in damage delivery. The mara has much much better survivability - defensive cool-downs that work against force users up the yin-yang and is also given things to help with avoidance such as retaliation bypassing dodge/parry. The reality is that snipers do good damage (in the right hands) - comparable to other classes, but its very difficult to play and with less utility and less survivability. Combine that with no solid story, force power or unique appeal. I think the largest draw is that people like 'snipers' from the whole camping in the grass and getting headshots from a 1000 yerds image - and when people realize that this is not how the class actually plays out, i suspect it adds to the negative column.

Lesson #1 they don't care what you want.

Yup, i have a BEAST of a machine with SLI and overlocking and what-hav-you. I would like to crank all the graphics and turn on a million times anti-aliasing but the game is locked on piss-poor quality mode. Ridiculous.

The best looking gear is random green level x crap that is worth nothing, it would have been nice to be able to steal the look of these items. Since augmented orange gear > everything you have two choices, look like you're supposed to for end-game gear (which are 99% ugly) look like the existing ****** crew skill schematics. (which are 99% ugly)

Since everyone was lead to believe they could reverse engineer 'almost any orange item' to acquire a schematic of the same look - and this is not true - can we please get a list the stuff which can yield an orange version of an item. Campaign? Yes Blackhole? No? Battlemaster? No - but you can buy the schematics from pvp vendor. War Hero? No - but you can buy the schematics from pvp vendor. Legacy Exalted or Renowned? No Columi or Rakata? No That orange you have laying around? No Vendor-bought crew skill crafted green/blue/purple?No Random Green\Blue\Purple world drops? No That about right? please correct me.

If you go to another page, lets say you hit next page like 3 times. And then you're like. which page am i on? well i doubt you can figure it out because the only visual difference is the text is bold, but because of the white font color its really really hard to tell which page you're on. Its also not indicated anywhere else other than the paging control. It would be more usable if you changed the text color for the current page. Thanks.

On the community page for example you have VIEW developer tracker VIEW system alerts VIEW server status VIEW patch notes the VIEW part is distracting and unnecessary, it actually makes it hard to read and scan for the words which differentiate the options; its particularly bad because of the font-size and emphasis difference between the text. Just remove the view part and it will look and read a lot better.

I haven't read this thread yet its on my to-do list so i apologize if this has been suggested already but i want to get this down before i forget. Ballistic Shield - make this a targeted ability Just like how you choose the location of orbital strike. If you could place a shield at any location you like it would be be a substantial utility increase, allowing you to protect people fighting in an area without having to stand in the middle of it - which is pretty much suicide

I opened 8 BM bags in a row, a month or so ago, and got none.

I like the videos, that's a great way to show people what you mean. It would be better if you could make the videos larger, that page is fixed for 1024 so you could easily double or triple the dimensions without impact and then users don't have to leave to watch it on you-tube. I realize you feel you have to set up that you're credible enough to write a guide. But i think posting all those big numbers like the 6k+ crit is deceptive and not the sort of expectation you should be trying to set; talking up the class is unnecessary, almost nobody will be able to max their gear and set up the perfect scenario as is required to achieve that.

Ive seen this thread a few times now and i think the range advantage should get buffed. Range in practice is 30m or less due to many of the abilities you need not being 35m and because of the long cast times you need a time buffer where the target isn't going to run out of range, which is likely if you're sitting at 35m. An increase to 40m would be a good idea then we can fully operate at 35m.

I think if you're a seasoned intelligent MMO player then you'll do just fine with a sniper, you'll figure out the weaknesses and do what needs to be done to minimize them. You'll do good damage in pve and you'll become a vulture in pvp taking out wounded and squishy targets; you'll prey that your team is making a good enough distraction for you to remain unnoticed. If you're of average-to-poor ability then you'll probably hate it and change class.