This is the truth right there. About the only thing that makes sniper remotely viable is surge and its about to get the nerf stick. Accuracy is a complete waste of time since all our attacks are specials. At least operative can heal, Hard-mode Flashpoints main healer no problem! Sniper does NOTHING except damage, and they're not good at it.

If you have more than one sniper on you're team you've already lost. But what gets my goat aside from sorcs being obviously overpowered, they excel at both healing and damage so they easily get 8+ medals, and since most pugs are idiots and MVP vote only based on medals they also get those.

Sniper is a lot of work to play well in pvp, but its reasonably fun. I have found my niche to be bursting down cloth/medium armor targets who are at half health already, putting -20% armor on as many people as i can and slowing down enemies that are chasing the ball carrier. The role is support; Huttball is all about the force jumps/runs and snipers can support well by doing what i described above. Other maps have their opportunities like orbital strike on the door in assault so the bombs cant be placed/defused is useful. I do think that sniper should be buffed. And i think it will be for the simple reason that not many people are playing/choosing the class, and i think history has proven this, there is a need to keep the distribution of classes somewhat balanced. I would welcome a damage buff, the cc utility is completely useless in pve since any creature of importance is immune to it. Which means its just dps and its not that great at it, a 'sniper' specced in 'marksmanship' should do more damage than it does.

My bindings so far, and i still have a few i need to bind and practice on: (In Cover) 1: Attack 2: Ambush 3: Snipe 4: Followthru 5: Takedown (Out of Cover) 5: Debilitate - (to force me to replace cover often) C: -20% Armor R: Leg Thing F: Mobile cover `: Companion Attack X: Escape TAB: 3 second evasion thing SHIFT+SPACE Fog SHIFT+C Shield Probe SHIFT+2: Next Snipe Critical thing SHIFT+R: Aoe Blind SHIFT+F: Aoe Knockback pulse As far as rotations (PVE), its pretty easy, ambush and follow-through are cheap on energy. Use follow-through as priority whenever it is ready, use ambush whenever it is ready and fill the gaps with snipe as energy allows and normal attack when you get close to hitting 60%. If you're solo fighting i like to mix in shield probe, fog and other cc depending on how difficult the fight is. More difficult = use all your knock backs and stuns whenever they're up and get in close for pulse and knock-back ambush.

I think the ranged interrupt spell whatever it is called, is causing issues, after using it my abilities delay and bug out and it often takes 2-4 seconds for me to place a mobile cover. This happens in other situations but mostly just after using the interrupt.

Ambush frequently fails to fire when spamming snipe key while ambush is channeling. Many areas where mobile cover cannot be placed on Quesh around the main road areas. Random non-latency based ability delays and lockouts during combat. Natural cover's most often placed right next to enemies and roll-to locations facing the wrong direction essentially makes natural cover system useless beyond the first planet.

Yup, i went to the phase wall and it was blocked even though the quest pointer was telling me to go in. It was grey for me at the time so i figured i just wouldn't do the quest at all.

I'm around 30+ REs of one blue item without a purple. I don't know why i keep trying. A friend told me it might be because of the schematics level relative to my own (L31 char RE on L39 schematic) anyone know if relative level makes a difference?

That would be fine if they force 4-8-man to only be matched against other organized teams (you may be waiting a while). BW seems to care about casual players (based on much of this games design) and teams rolling pugs makes the battlegrounds not fun to play for pugs. It's impossible to win with your average pug (2-3x level 10 players and the other half who don't know their *** from their elbow) against crack team of L50 valor grinders who are probably talking on vent.

I think that its more difficult to get purples (and probably blues) from higher level schematics. I started RE early with level 21 implants, then 25s, 29, 33, 37 etc. and have 10+ purple schematics. The lower level items yield purples at a much higher rate, i would guess 15-20% at 21. By 37 i think it's below 5%.

If you take bio-chem without diplomacy you wont be able to sell ANYTHING, greens don't sell and nobody buys med-packs/adrenals/stims until 50. Green implants? if you could sell it the price wouldn't cover half the cost to make it. The only items that sell are blue/purple implants which require diplomacy materials. There are almost no materials on the GTN for biochem in on my server, so you're going to need to also take bio-analysis. And to level these three skills probably costs a million credits. If you're smart and lucky you might be able to purchase half of your skills from the trainer. This isn't slicing mate. All you're complaining about is that at max level, bio-chems have an advantage because of re-usable stims/adrenals/medpacks. What causes this condition is that these items REQUIRE bio-chem to be used - attack the root cause not the symptom and ask for these items to be usable by anyone, then you wont have people leveling up bio-chem just to use an item.

These are WEEKLY patches guys... and not just weekly iterations but weekly deployments to production, of course they're going to be a small set of changes each time and i think its quite astonishing. They probably code for three days and then spend the next two days on test/deployment - it seems like 2 week deployments would be better since the deployment stuff is a fixed cost. Maybe they'll switch once all the small bugs are cleaned up. If not fixing larger issues that span multiple weeks will be no fun amount of branching/merging.

I was wondering the same thing, before Christmas i was getting 50%+ success now im getting like 5% Karma catching up with me? stealth nerf? Does anyone have data on what the probabilities are?

Yes (you could be unlucky and find the same purple version you already have but you'll probably find a new one). You can also keep re-engineering the greens for different blue schematics. This thread will help: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=45866 ----------------------------[ Leadership ---------------------------/- Tempest ---------------- Critical ---- Fervor -------------/-------------\- Endowment -------------|--------------[ Supremacy -------------|---------------------------- -------------|--------------[ Exactitude -------------|-------------/- Anti-Armor Base Item -|- Redoubt --- General -------------|-------------\- Veracity -------------|--------------[ ???????? -------------|---------------------------- -------------|--------------[ Vehemence -------------\-------------/- Rampart ---------------- Overkill --- Commander ---------------------------\- Expert ----------------------------[ Hawkeye

Nice list; i agree the UI does need a serious overhaul. I would like to add: Warning when cancelling auctions I first found out that you don't receive your deposit back when cancelling an item after reading the cancellation mail, a 4k credit mistake - so i think it needs a clear warning on the confirmation dialog. I would have assumed that the deposit was lost except that i had already learned the deposit is returned if the auction expires. Plus you really need to solve these cases: Comparing a found item User finds an item and needs to compare against other auctions of the same item to understand if the price is reasonable. Very high occurrence!. Currently the user may try do this in a number of ways, all of which are inefficient and very frustrating: check the next 5-10 pages of items to find similar products listed at different stack sizes with different prices filter by quality to reduce the number of pages to then use paging method (a). sort by namethen use paging method (a) filter by partial name (standard expectation from any search function anywhere), which will then return no results, regather composure and attempt to key in the full name of the item. Suggestion: This one is easy, just add a button or context menu on the auction rows which inserts the item name into the search field. Alternatively do a <SHIFT>+CLICK or something (less desirable since its hard to discover/ you'd have to explain it in the tool-tip). And you would think it goes without saying but allow partial matches in the search field. . [*]Checking multiple areas Users will have a sequence of categories and items that are important to them and check these during each visit to the auction house on top of with whatever specific need brought them there. For example I want to find cheap sliced missions, new bio-chem schematics and a specific biochemical compound. I have to check these regularly because they're in high demand and disappear quickly. To do this takes a lot of clicks - it's time consuming. Its easy to dismiss the poor usability of the search form if you're only considering a quick in-and-out case but when you chain tasks it compounds the problem. Suggestion: Let users add an item or sub-category of items to a favorites list. This way i can click on my 'missions->diplomacy' favorite check the list. Click my 'Biological Anomaly' favorite and see all auctions for that item. Click on the 'Redoubt Something Implant' favorite and see if anyone else is listing at prices near mine.

I am ~180 in all three right now so i cant answer the 400 part but there are two ways to make some money to offset the cost. 1) Sell gathered items. The only thing that seems to be in short supply are biochemical compounds from bioanal and medical samples from diplomacy. 2) Sell blue and purple (artifact) implants on the auction house. The in-demand items mentioned above are the limiting factors in making quality implants. Get the upgraded schematics by reverse engineering green items you produce.

I gave up on using the natural cover system because 99% of the time the covers are 1m in front of the enemies, facing the wrong direction, or roll me into a group of adds. It's like they had to hand place them on the map and then moved all the creature spawns later. This was driving me crazy until i figured out that CTRL+F would force the mobile cover placement.