Are all the people impressed by this watching the same video? Some truely dire opponents, or they had no cooldowns up. The guy force choking you in entrench for example. Marauders not using cooldowns and getting bursted, marauders using cooldowns then getting lost on their way to you, free casting aplenty, BH ignoring health packs till execute range. The sniper is played as well as could be expected but the targets are being played about as poorly as could be expected.

Truth be told it isnt very good. Smart melee will save their cc break for debilitate. Especially against lethality specs who break their own cc with their dots. If you try to run you are now out of cover and will be leaped. When another class uses a stun they'll sit there and kill you. When a sniper uses a stun they get running away speed. Says everything about the state of the class.

I understand how soak tanks work. You just wont find a fight where 15/10 is appreciable mitigation. The effect is so minimal that you'd do the fight without it just as easily. How close would the fight have to be that it matters? Close enough that your luck or lack of it with the RNG of criticals swamps it 10 times over. The instant 30% heal at least fills the role of an emergency heal or silence counter. 15/10 doesnt. I do agree that PTs are in a good spot for tanking, but its in spite of the tanking cooldowns not because of their different HoT and accuracy debuff cooldown features. Outside of cooldowns they are the most solid, predictable tanks which healers like, especially when non sorcs struggle with having to heal spikes.

Im just disappointed that you can't ignite it.

No matter what way you market it the HoT is terrible. If the HoT is making any difference you may as well swap out your healer for a pet, cause even Mako makes 15% health over 10 seconds look bad. The fight would have to be on the razors edge for such a tiny hot to matter and if it is making a difference what is happening for the 110 seconds it is down? You don't solve group damage with accuracy debuffs either, you tell the dps to stop screwing up, bring less melee dps to cleave heavy fights or learn to hold aggro better.

You aren't looking too hard then. Vanguards have a +25% crit cooldown and set bonuses of +15% crit on their hardest hitting shot, high impact bolt. As full DPS they will have +6% crit to everything and +12% crit to plasma attacks. All plasma attacks ignore armor, high impact bolt will ignore most of it. The Vanguard only has 2 abilities mitigated fully by armor used every 9 and 15 seconds. They are fairly hard hitting but as you can see not the bulk of DPS. Only high impact bolt is ranged, everything else commonly used is tech. They also passively apply their main dot with their spammable attack so they'll perform just as well under dispell pressure. You add all this crit to a trinket and stim and suddenly you are losing 12k health from 3 attacks that burst together in the space of a GCD. Plus its not like sniper burst where its over till the next cooldown or energy comes back, they can proc cooldown resets on high impact bolt. If the dice roll in their favour you start to see ridiculous sustained DPS because not only is the cooldown reset, it makes it free to cast and procs an 8 heat vent. Which gives you more heat to proc it again and so on. Basically a Vanguard critting on all of their attacks is no fluke whereas a sniper critting on all attacks is. To put it in WoW terms Vangards are like Shaman when windfury was at its height. If fortune goes their way they'll rip your head off with procs, with a mid 40s% crit chance on their heavy hitter which they can add 25% crit to every 2 minutes.

Truth. The only thing you missed is that other classes have a resource pool while the Sorc/sage has a resource Ocean.

It would be better without the Star Wars. Nothing ages so poorly as science fiction and Star Wars is ancient. Plus the morality choices would be open rather than the clumsy comic book villain empire choices. Hopefully its just a test run for a Mass Effect MMO

You can turn huttball around but the ease of defence on alderaan and voidstar means that if you fall behind you may as well leave. Just about the only reason any objectives get taken on those maps is boredom causing people to wander off and stealth classes.

Rotations depend on your spec. All the rotations use rifle shot at some stage. As a new sniper your main problem is that none of your rotations are available to lvl 31 when you get followthrough or cull, or lvl 36 when you get series of shots. Till then just try to stay above 60 energy and use ambush and explosive probe on cooldown.

They need to fix the warzones so that a comeback is possible. If you lose side turrets you'll never get them back. If they blow up one door in Voidstar the games over. Huttball is 90% class composition that determines victory. Some classes are just garbage in that map. It has the same problem that WoW does with WSG. The only thing keeping it going is that sorcs are everywhere so generally you dont get teams with no good huttball classes. Imagine the hell it would be to get an all sniper team. Only huttball has the possiblility of turning a set back into victory. The others require the other side to screw up massively to lose. DOTs, travel distance and respawn times are just not tuned right for 2 out of 3 of the maps. Till then ill continue to port out.

It not the end all be all but If you want to tank in ion stance you should get it. Its not just a gap closer, it is both a root and interupt. If you want to make a pvp tank primarily to tank it's another tool for protecting someone. If you want to play a DPS class with taunts you can do that but you are not filling the same role without guard. If you want to play pyro in ion stance that is viable too but its a trade off where you sacrifice 2 roots, some durability and more mobility for more DPS.

If you want to test it duel a tank and ask them to watch their character sheet as you hit them with it. It will also depend on their stance. Or even more easily, queue for pvp. Wait to get tracer missiled, observe! For example in tank stance I get 60% more armor. Its worth about 10% more DR, though I also get a flat 6% on top of that from the stance and a talent point which skews things.

It doesn't take them down from 40 to 20 or 40 to 32 DR It acts on the armor number value, not the DR. It makes it somewhere around less than 4% DR reduction on tanks.

Yes they can be cleansed, for the most part it doesn't matter as they are applied as a side effect from your standard direct damage moves. Its more of an issue for hybrid ST/pyro PTs who are a little more reliant on IMs dot for energy return, but it doesn't break anything, just lose a slight bit of damage and heat return.