I'd just like to say thank you for this tip, helped our team down this boss on sunday. We've tried shouting out directions previously, which usually made everyone run around like headless chickens. Stay or move is easy enough that everyone got it.

You can do either operation without having done the story quest or the other operation first. But you won't get the speeder unless you do all the story quests, includng the H2 (but you can just run to the ops manually).

I think having both in the same thread would be more interesting. You could make them as two separate posts though, and since you have the second post already just editing the pyro guide into that could work. Or start a new thread. If there are any shared sections (gear maybe) that could either be it's own post or in the first one.

I just hovered the last recorded damage, forgot that the torparse graphs are a bit unreliable. Apologies on that and will try and remember that for the future. Regardless, you're both doing great things with pyro now.

Reposting my pyro parse, now with amr profile (hopefully making it easier for Falver in the process) Monzcarro - Mercenary - Pyro - 2/8/36 - 3207.91 http://www.torparse.com/a/453351/time/1381413985/1381414294/0/Overview Amr: http://www.swtor.com/community/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=6830858 (although I use reusable stim instead of prototype that the armory suggests, but they didn't have reusables)

I meant the top dummy pyro parsers, haven't seen real world stats. apologies for that. Edit: Though looking at the two parses, your damage numbers are a bit misleading. While both have a fair bit of dead time at the end before exiting combat, odawgg has a lot more. If you look at damage when the last damage was dealt in both parses, odawgg beats you with 3563 vs 2983.

There is a pyro guide on the republic boards, with a fair bit of discussion. The guide itself advocates a hybrid spec though, while the current top pyro parsers are going full pyro.

Monzcarro - Mercenary - Pyro - 2/8/36 - 3207.91 http://www.torparse.com/a/453351/time/1381413985/1381414294/0/Overview Pyro is seriously something else right now. Beating my best arsenal parse with almost 250dps, without really knowing what I'm doing. My gear is 78 offhand, otherwise all 72 (except for a lone 69 armoring).

Also try and stay as spread out as possible, the poison grenade is an aoe attack. As has been suggested, the mercs can cleanse anyone, and the assassin and sniper can cleanse themselves (with force shroud and evasion respectively).

So when are you adding a Pyro chapter to this guide?

I agree with ArchangelLBC on the heat issue 100%.

I really like these answers, they are detailed and thought through. Now they just need to deliver on these words as well. As for a couple of direct questions we were asked. 1: in regards to arsenal's barrage proc. It currently sits at 45% which is terrible for RNG, because sometimes the damn thing simply won't proc. My suggestion would be to do something similar to what was done for Snipers with Snipe. Firing off Trace Missile gives you a buff that stacks twice. When you get two stacks, barrage procs. So basically remove the RNG completely from that ability. Every other TM resets unload and that's that. It does mean that the proc rate would be pretty much 50% instead of 45% which we have today, but that can be adjusted through other means. 2: About heat, I don't mind the heat system as it currently stands, it's just a little too harsh as is. Not many arsenal mercs were complaining about heat before the set bonus was changed. So just have the skill that reduces the heat cost on rail shot remove it completely, then we can keep the current set bonus and call it a day.

My EWH relics still have 60 expertise.

I think it makes a slight difference which set bonus you use though. Running with the old 4-piece, you mostly use rail shot as heat venting, so it's not as crucial to get the maximum damage out of it. If you run with the new set bonus you might want to get 4 stacks before the first, since you won't be able to do HSM + RS every time both come off CD anyway like you can with the old one. I separate the two in my opener and keep them separated most of the time.

Like mentioned, there was a bug on the PTS where defeating the cores didn't always open the doors to the next room, so the panels were added to circumvent that. They're not meant to bypass the fights, just a safeguard in case some trigger doesn't work properly.

You class balance changes after the ones in 2.5 that Musco mentioned in his post? Pretty sure there won't be any between 2.5 and 2.6.

I am very happy with these questions and think they are good both in content and formatting. Great job Odawwg.

I really like this phrasing as well. I'll just be a bit nitpicky and suggest some smaller changes in order to remove unneeded repetition: "Discussions within the community have revealed that a lot of arsenal mercenaries don't bring as much to a raid as a marauder or sniper in terms of dps. Feedback from the combat team indicates that this is because of our utility abilities and that's the trade off for that . A lot of the community would be happy to trade our utility to become more desirable in raids as the utilities we are given aren't being, well, utilized." Something like that.

The adds come at roughly one minute ntervals, so personally I save DFA for that. But I'm not using it regularly in my single target rotation anyway anymore. But yeah, on WH I'd hold it, depending on how many orbital strikes your team has... Edit: Going off on a tangent here, but DFA only hitting five targets while having the same cooldown (or longer) as Orbital Strike, while also hitting for less damage and having a smaller area completely baffles me. It's not as resource intense, and OS has positional requirements that DFA doesn't, so I'm fine with it being weaker. But let it hit everything in the area at least...

First, I love how you structured your questions. Asking the question first, then giving our version of things is great, hopefully that will keep the devs more open-minded when reading the question to save us from any knee-jerk reactions to bits in the comments they may percieve as faulty. Also, I think the comments were very well written to avoid antagonizing them, so great job so far. For the pvp questions, I prefer the second one, partly because I think (with limited pvp experience) that ease of being shut down is a bigger issue, and partly because I feel the healing question is already covered in the PvE question. At least to a degree. I also think it'd be a good idea to restructure whatever PvP question we end up using to be more similar to the other two questions, but there's time to do that before submitting and you probably already have that planned. Edit: Also, I much prefer the original wording of the PvE question that AMightyKnight's version. I feel the latter is a bit more hostile in it's tone, or at least written with the assumption that the devs are deliberately trying to misunderstand or ignore issues. While that may be the case, I think we should try and be as respectful as possible while still getting our point across, much like the snipers did (a class that got really good answers)

120 crit is fine. At 72 gear basically up to 200 crit is pretty much a toss up. Sims have power to be slightly better, but not by enough to be significant. Same with relics. SA is best, but the other two are close enough that it's more a personal preference. BA pulls ahead a little, but CN is fine. best option is of course to have all three and swap between them as the fight demands. I wouldn't swap for the arkanian though, since that will be a dps decrease. As for rotation, read the very first post in this thread and you've got all the info you need. Mercs don't have a rotation per se, we're priority based. So basically use whatever is off cooldown and higher up on the priority list while being mindful of your heat levels. If you want more detail help with your parses, post a link to one and those more skileld than me can probably analyze it a bit more

You're purposely trying to confuse them commandos so they won't claim spots on our leaderboard right? If so, I approve.

Sounds great. It would also be grat if you could post rough drafts of your intended questions a few days before so we as a community can help fine-tuning them. Either way I'm pretty sure our questions will turn out good.

Except Asation dropped rakata in story mode, same as Denova.

Seeing the dev responses to powertechs today, I think maybe we need to rethink our strategy a little and turning their own answers against them a little. They keep hiding behind armor debuffs and executes when the dps disparity is brought up. So I'm thinking an initial question could look something like this: When doing dummy parses we're trailing behind both snipers and marauders a fair bit in both our dps specs. This difference can only grow in ops situations when they gain executes (both) and the armor debuff (marauders). Is it your intention for those two classes to stay ahead? If not what kind of improvements are you thinking about for mercenaries? Our own priorities would be to get the energy reduction on rail shot our old set bonus used to give back, an offensive cooldown for increased on-demand burst and maybe an execute ability of our own (maybe like making Heatseeker Missile autocrit on targets below 30% health). Something like that would be my PVE question. For PVP I'm not sure. It's kinda pointless talking about our interrupt sensibility given the answers sages got.