Interesting points. I concur that the class is by no means "broken" but does definitely need some serious polishing. Hell, I bet most 50s feel that way about their respective classes at this early stage in the game. What I can't for the life of my figure out is why all of the classes that have heals are the ones that also got solid PVP usable long duration CC(Mezz). While ours is completely useless in PvP and in many PVE situations as well. I think there is alot to be said for the lack of utility arguments, and that one design difference would have gone a long way in preventing them. (To say nothing of how in my opinion, the DPS specs for the other classes that can also heal AND Mezz is just too much utility for one toon, shame I didn't have any interest in playing one of them because those kinds core of class design "OP" issues tend to live on throughout the lifespan of an MMO...but I digress. It doesn't matter at this point anyhow there is no way they could(will) give us a sorc/bh type CC and they damn sure won't remove the ability from them. I just wanted to vent about it. Bugs, abilities that need tweaking (shield probe), and lame talent trees aside..it is the only real complaint I have about the class. Speaking of shield probe, it would be nice if it actually told you how much it shielded for. "Moderate" is a pretty subjective adjective....

Yea I get those too, which has nothing to do with cover issues but I bet is the same kind of issue that causes cover abilities to not fire "fast enough" after entering cover. I read that if you don't spam your keys that doesn't happen...so it probably has something to do with the ability action queue window (will have to try messing with those settings tonight as well, I still have them on the .5 default)

I suppose it is possible that its a video card issue...but since these issues only really occur in PVP where the server response is not as peppy as in pve, I am inclined to believe this is not in any way an issue with my system. I went in and set the hotkeys in preferences, they are not hotkeyed from my ability bars, I don't see how this could make a difference but I will definitely try it the other way (from my ability bars) tonight and see if it makes a difference.

(Also posted this in the Imp Agent forum, these suggestions may have already been mentioned but without a forum search option, I could not find a thread mentioning them) Let me preface this with I am a level 50 Sniper, Valor rank 31. I'm running an Intel I7 with 16 gigs of ram, clean OS (64bit Win 7) with Swtor and the OS installed on an SSD drive (with very little else installed on the system) and an ATI 6850 and Comcast cable internet (last speed test was around 25mb for what it’s worth) I usually run 60fps in BG's (and even in the fleet) and have 40-80ms response times to the Swtor servers. I only mention this to point out that these "lag" issues are not caused by trying to PVP on some old 386 system on a 14.4 dialup connection. While I haven't done as much pvp as some of you, I'm by no means new to it. And all of us that play a sniper or gunslinger in pvp know how annoying the inherent lag in battlegrounds is when trying to use cover to get off the chunk of our abilities. There seem to be three main issues here. 1) You hit the key for cover(in place) and nothing happens, or it takes 1-2 seconds to actually go into cover. The issue with this is obvious, 1-2 seconds is the difference between cover pulse knocking the enemy where you want them, or giving them a fast track past the goal line in Hutt Ball (I've lost count of how many times that's happened to me now). 2) You hit the key for cover(in place), you go into cover and hit a cover only ability (such as spec’d instant snipe) and instead get whatever ability is on your normal (non cover) bar in the same slot. More than likely this is caused by UI delay, or latency, or possibly solar flares. 3) You hit the key for cover(in place) and get “unknown effect result”. Caused because the graphic for the ability will not work in the area you are in. So how do we as sniper/gunslingers try to deal with this? By having not 1 hotkey (cover in place), not 2 hotkeys (environmental cover), but 3 hotkeys (crouch) all for more or less one ability. As if our class isn’t already too hotkey intensive. (Some of our abilities seriously need to be looked at, we have entirely to many long reuse, extremely limited usefulness abilities for “most” of the player population to be able to adequately manage them without macro spamming keyboards, but aside from the fact that we shouldn’t need 3 hotkeys for cover..that is a topic for another thread). Anyhow, even with 3 different ways to try to get ourselves into some form of cover we still run into constant issues with abilities not working correctly because the server does not register us as being in cover when we hit them. So how do we(ahem Bioware/EA) fix this? Simple. First option - Make cover(in place) a simple stance buff that roots you in place and does not check for environmental limitations (such as placing the cover graphic in the air). Now this might seem like an unnecessary suggestion, however I think it is clear that there is much more going on behind the scenes when you hit cover than the server side registering a new buff being placed on your character. Second option (preferably in addition to the first) – Simply make any ability that requires cover, automatically place you in cover(in place) when used. There is no GCD on entering cover, so this would in no way change the “power” of the sniper class. However it would resolve 90%(yes that is a made up statistic) of all of the issues we have with the latency that occurs between hitting the cover hotkey, and not being able to use cover abilities when we need them. I would like to point out that every rare once in a while I will get into a match that seems to be just running better than normal. In these matches the cover lag issues are much less prevalent and the class is much more enjoyable. I would love it if every match went this way. Ok I’ve said my piece, feel free to rip this apart, troll, call me a nub, whatever. At least now when I complain to my friends about these issues I know that I “tried” to get something done about them.

(Also posted this in the PVP forum, these suggestions may have already been mentioned but without a forum search option, I could not find a thread mentioning them) Let me preface this with I am a level 50 Sniper, Valor rank 31. I'm running an Intel I7 with 16 gigs of ram, clean OS (64bit Win 7) with Swtor and the OS installed on an SSD drive (with very little else installed on the system) and an ATI 6850 and Comcast cable internet (last speed test was around 25mb for what it’s worth) I usually run 60fps in BG's (and even in the fleet) and have 40-80ms response times to the Swtor servers. I only mention this to point out that these "lag" issues are not caused by trying to PVP on some old 386 system on a 14.4 dialup connection. While I haven't done as much pvp as some of you, I'm by no means new to it. And all of us that play a sniper or gunslinger in pvp know how annoying the inherent lag in battlegrounds is when trying to use cover to get off the chunk of our abilities. There seem to be three main issues here. 1) You hit the key for cover(in place) and nothing happens, or it takes 1-2 seconds to actually go into cover. The issue with this is obvious, 1-2 seconds is the difference between cover pulse knocking the enemy where you want them, or giving them a fast track past the goal line in Hutt Ball (I've lost count of how many times that's happened to me now). 2) You hit the key for cover(in place), you go into cover and hit a cover only ability (such as spec’d instant snipe) and instead get whatever ability is on your normal (non cover) bar in the same slot. More than likely this is caused by UI delay, or latency, or possibly solar flares. 3) You hit the key for cover(in place) and get “unknown effect result”. Caused because the graphic for the ability will not work in the area you are in. So how do we as sniper/gunslingers try to deal with this? By having not 1 hotkey (cover in place), not 2 hotkeys (environmental cover), but 3 hotkeys (crouch) all for more or less one ability. As if our class isn’t already too hotkey intensive. (Some of our abilities seriously need to be looked at, we have entirely to many long reuse, extremely limited usefulness abilities for “most” of the player population to be able to adequately manage them without macro spamming keyboards, but aside from the fact that we shouldn’t need 3 hotkeys for cover..that is a topic for another thread). Anyhow, even with 3 different ways to try to get ourselves into some form of cover we still run into constant issues with abilities not working correctly because the server does not register us as being in cover when we hit them. So how do we(ahem Bioware/EA) fix this? Simple. First option - Make cover(in place) a simple stance buff that roots you in place and does not check for environmental limitations (such as placing the cover graphic in the air). Now this might seem like an unnecessary suggestion, however I think it is clear that there is much more going on behind the scenes when you hit cover than the server side registering a new buff being placed on your character. Second option (preferably in addition to the first) – Simply make any ability that requires cover, automatically place you in cover(in place) when used. There is no GCD on entering cover, so this would in no way change the “power” of the sniper class. However it would resolve 90%(yes that is a made up statistic) of all of the issues we have with the latency that occurs between hitting the cover hotkey, and not being able to use cover abilities when we need them. I would like to point out that every rare once in a while I will get into a match that seems to be just running better than normal. In these matches the cover lag issues are much less prevalent and the class is much more enjoyable. I would love it if every match went this way. Ok I’ve said my piece, feel free to rip this apart, troll, call me a nub, whatever. At least now when I complain to my friends about these issues I know that I “tried” to get something done about them.