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.

You should do this. 3% endurance is nothing. It also allows you to play a CP spec in pyro stance to hit damage medals more easily once the tank ones have been gained, or if all the dps is terrbile in your huttball group. It gives you much better dps in pve making it a better offtank spec. Speeds up solo pve a lot too. You should be in ion pretty much always, but its nice to have the option of significantly more dps and less IM reliance over a few hundred health. If you are wedded to ion stance then get cardio package, if you want the flexibility bursting flame is better. It doesn't matter much either way, they are both just filler.

Other classes have vanishes or sprints. If you dont have these you have heavy armor. If you dont have vanish, sprint or heavy armor you are a sniper. Who do you focus down for free kills?

Doesn't the auto follow camera in this game make strafe only keybinds really awkward?

Ranged is only railshot, unload and rapid shots. Every other attack ignores cover entirely. Running behind them doesnt cancel the 20% defence bonus. It only cancels the natural cover 100% defence while not shooting. Think of it as an added layer of LOS. Snipers have all the tools to deal with PTs in theory but in practice snipers are easy kills. Particularly easy to abuse with LOS. If they pop entrench or their bubble and you can LOS them, do it. If they leave cover they just lost their cooldowns. Pyro will often win a straight dps race when the sniper 30m bubble isn't up because explosive fuel is a much better damage CD than the 20% alacrity CD snipers get. Hybrid PTs can abuse the heck out of them with roots preventing cover if they catch them moving about. Hybrid PTs will also be in ion and have shields, only lethality specced snipers will do any significant damage past this. Lethality snipers don't require cover so they often don't use it, as cover is buggy, unresponsive and unusable in many locations. If they do this they are suddenly vulnerable to interupts and pulls. If you interupt cull you've probably won. In cover they cant be interupted by quell. Use this to spot the clever lethality snipers! If you interupt snipe with a stun it doesn't really matter if they trinket it. The time casting was wasted time, and theyll have to cast a new one before they can do anything of note. Fast ambush and followthrough both require snipes to land before use, delaying a followthrough by delaying a snipe is a decent dps loss. In a group guard your healer and/or use taunts, get them to dispell, begin chuckling. Lethality is the only threatening spec and it has terrible sustained DPS because of large initial energy costs and is neutered by poison dispellers. Save your trinket for the 4 second melee stun. Only trinket flashbang or roots if you are certain to score a kill. Lethality specs dots will break roots and flashbang for you! When knocked back by the cover pulse use death from above (cant remember if DFA works rooted, if cover doesn't why should flight!, im almost certain it does though!). Smart snipers will interupt this. Bad snipers will move out of cover (use cc or pull now) or bathe in it. The root lasts for 2 if attacked or 5 seconds if not. The sniper will ideally be placing explosvie probe on you then winding up ambush to make more use of the 5 seconds. You need something to pressure him at this time and DFA is the best tool for this. In summary don't engage lethality snipers in an open field with entrench and their bubble up alone. Fortunately LOS objects are everywhere so this doesn't come up. Everything else is pretty easy.

Next patch is nerfing surge. Might turn out that stacking power is the best way to go for everyone!

Snipers stand up out of cover while snipe is casting. Smugglers stay behind cover while their equivalent is casting then pop out as it fires. This is incredibly marginal as it only affects the natural cover green shield / LOS cover effect, both still get the defence bonus anyway.

Yeah they need to bring back killing companions. Replace him with a second ships droid so your crafting doesnt suffer. The BH story is pretty terrible though, generally forcing you to kill when it makes no sense while you have to take this walking blob of porridge aboard. My IA can be everything from space Batman to space Nazi, my BH is a murdering jerk who either enjoys his job (dark side) or isn't bothered (light side). It would have been nice to have a light side option for the BH instead of just being an assasin or merc. Y'know bringing people to justice. I guess the terrible BH voice acting only suits a dark side style.

You are crazy for leaving out heat blast for GAJ. If you are stunned etc heat isnt a problem as you wont be spending any. You have to be stunned etc every 15 seconds or more to beat heat blast, but you also have to be stunned with a decent amount of heat active or you would have just naturally dropped the heat during the stun anyway. You could be stunned etc 3 times back to back at 0 heat so you have vented nothing. Plus heat blast deals damage and is controllable heat venting. You are crazy for thinking the endurance talent compensates losing 2% mitigation in any way. If aggro is an issue dont try to get yourself out of it by praying for stuns for free heat. Drop the jet charge sprint and put those 2 points into 6% aim. Dont worry about rounding up trash if it is dead so quickly. I know you are trying to compensate for pugs but the dps have their own tanking cds they can use, if the second or two difference from not having the speed matters it will be enough. Just go with the standard pve tank spec. Its standard for a reason.

Are you sure? Base accuracy for tech attacks is 100%. This is most of our abilities. Ranged attacks are 90% base but this only comprises rail shot, rapid shots and unload. Why overcap specials when you could use those stat points on crit or surge and generate more damage and aggro for the cost? Missing the occasional railshot or rapid shots isn't going to break your aggro hold if you've spent the points on making heat blast, rocket punch, flame burst and flamethrower crit or crit harder instead. Especially as a tank spec where railshot is only once every 15 seconds. Now if we knew what boss resists were we could get enough accuracy to override resists on tech but no more, but no combat log makes this a pain to do.

I have learned. I learned that if I reroll my sniper into a powertech i'll do more damage and be valuable to a team. Good luck as a sniper versus any of the +defence cooldowns which screw you hard but are ignored by mercs and sorcs. When you only bring dps finding out that the most common type of defencive cooldowns exist to screw you hardest hurts viability hard.