Youch. Lot of bad decisions in how you describe your play. I gotta be honest here, seems like a learn to play issue. First off, the reason why someone would resist your knockbacks is the resolve bar. This is a crucial PvP mechanic and you need to learn how it works and how to work around it. There's a sticky in the PvP forum you should take a look at for that. Second, never wait until you're at 1/4 HP to use your shield: that's essentially wasting it. To get the most out of it's uptime you need to pop it early in a fight so that you get every second of it. Same with Kolto. You should be using them at 80% or so, depending on the situation. Thirdly, stunning into a flamethrower isn't going to get you anywhere. Flamethrower doesn't do much damage and you should be using that time to kite away while using your instants (ie rail shot, heartseeker, etc). And as I mentioned, the reason they then resist jet boost is that dart will fill their resolve bar. What you should instead be doing when melee closes is first using rocket punch to gain distance (and try to side strafe in the direction away from where you'll be pushing them as you do this to gain extra distance), then use instants while moving away to create space and give you room to start casting again. If they charge you, you can then use rocket boost and proceed to nuke away. That's a basic guideline anyway - using your knockbacks is highly situational and you need to learn through experience what works when. That's really the tip of the iceberg. There are a ton more tips and tricks you need to learn to PvP effectively as a merc. I highly suggest scanning the pvp-related threads in this forum for more info.

Here are some things I've learned about them over time that might help: 1. Cleanse their dots. Yes, you can do this. It helps a ton. Do it as you kite. 2. Use insta+conc as your opener, before you land anything that could dot them. Get range, thermal override + fusion, start your burst. I'm pyro so for me I immediately hit them with incendiary after fusion then start to kite away. If you can knock off 30% of their HP quickly, it might get them to waste a defensive cooldown early while you're at range. 3. Save your knockbacks for their gap closers. If they start right on top of you and you don't have insta conc, you're pretty much dead. 4. If at all possible, save dart for when they pop cloak of pain. This will give you time to heal and to get range, essentially wasting that cooldown. When they pop it, you need to stop attacking or it'll just keep rolling. 5. When they pop undying rage, just try to kite/knockback/fake cast and heal/whatever you can to survive while it's active. They'll wait until they're under 15% to use it, so be ready for it and try to keep one of your 15sec cooldowns in reserve for after it wears off so you can finish them quickly once it does. 6. They will almost always head toward you when they pop force camo, trying to use is as a gap closer and get close enough to open back up on you. So when they vanish, pop stealth scan just ahead of you, directly between you and where he vanished. Immediately start to heal, it'll put pressure on him to close as quickly as possible and hopefully you can pop him out of stealth before he gets to you.

Title says it all. Can anyone confirm? WIll hopefully hit 50 tomorrow and would like to know whether the set is broken well in advance.

Ugh so much fail in this little paragraph. First off, why will a pyro PT own with heals? They have a single defensive cooldown, a single gap closer and zero escape mechanisms despite needing to be in 10m range to do damage. Any team with even the slightest bit of intelligence will focus the heals and ignore/CC the PT until they swap. No guard for a PT pyro either, just taunts. Sure they'll stomp if they are getting heals, but so would any class, merc included. Realistically Juggs, marauders and assassins, all of whom have more defensive cooldowns and can take care of themselves on switches will have better long-term survivability (though you'd want to target the mara and cc the heals, but that's beside the point). Nobody will have 'pocket heals' because in ranked matches heals are going to get focused hard and will spend most of their time healing themselves. Which brings me to point 2. Why do you think pyro mercs can't pew pew on the run and/or contested? It's what they're designed to do, and have the advantage of being able to pop in and out of LOS. They don't need heals like a PT does unless the other team is making you their focus, in which case that leaves your team's DPS to go nuts on their heals in the meantime. It all balances out. Thirdly, to this idea that the best 1v1 classes come out on top during group encounters, well, that's nonsense. Ask assassins, ops and marauders whether they agree with you. Last, melee plus ranged is deadly yes. But the ranged in question is only useful in two scenarios: chasing down a nearly dead target and slowly killing melee by kiting in 1v1s. That's all. A pyro PT's ranged arsenal consists of a Incendiary, thermal det, rail, rapid shots, unload, and DFA. You can't kill anyone with those alone, certainly not anyone in a matched WZ. A PT's ranged abilities are to give them utility, not for killing anyone.

I have both a PT and a merc, play them both as pyro. The merc has more survivability as pyro. By far. I really think you've just seen some pyro PT do crazy damage in voidstar with a healer or got roflstomped by a pyro PT because you couldn't figure out you can cleanse their DoTs then came here to QQ about it. Here's the truth: pyro PTs are far, far better 1v1, but in small groups they're far more dependent on people not targeting them or receiving heals. There's no kiting away to heal for pyro, and needing to get into 10m range to do any real damage means you get focussed far more often. They're different clasess, with different playstyles, that excel in different situations. If you can't see that, then yeah, you're bad.

Brainless spec? Compared to arsenal? Is that a joke? Tabbing and dotting is just about the least effective way to play the spec unless you're just about dead and need to get dots on people trying to take an objective. Otherwise, like I said, you're doing it wrong. The spec isn't lacking, your understanding of the spec and how to use it properly is. And as for saying arsenal has more survivability? That's the icing on your fail cake.

If you have trouble PvP'ing as pyro, you're doing it wrong. Period. Sorry, but that's the truth of it. Either that or your definition of PvP is just blowing up whatever red text is in sight and going for random 1v1s.

I'm sure this has been mentioned, I didn't read the entire thread, but it's pretty hilarious that an AC whose entire range of damage bypasses armour completely is complaining about a tanking class having heavy armour while being able to hit hard. Just ridiculous.

Would definitely make us OP, unless it was 4m range. If it was 10 or 30, we'd be ridiculous. You're not meant to take out a healer 1v1.

I've done the gear grind thanks. I'm 4 pieces from full BM, got to BM before the Ilum change make it easy-mode. I cut through new 50s like butter. It's not fun, it's not challenging, it makes you sleepwalk through a lot of games, and I almost always solo queue. On my server less than half the 50s I see in WZs have the gear to give any kind of challenge, and that goes both ways as I'm often grouped with people who similarly get cut down by the opposition. I get that centurion and champ will be easier to get next patch, but why not give them something that's fairly low powered but will still allow them some degree of effectiveness.

This has likely been suggested before, it's too simple not to have been, but I thought I'd toss it out there anyway. Why not just have mods and enhancements with expertise on them? Make them craftable, with very cheap mats so that they can be bought cheap on the GTN and cybertechs won't become stupidly rich (or spread the patterns for various types across multiple professions). Give them lower stats than centurion, keep them at green quality level if you want, cap the total expertise possible from these at like 5%. It'd allow any fresh 50 with a bit of cash to go and gear themselves out in a starter set and be reasonably competitive, while providing incentive to continue gearing up. Like I said, there's no way this hasn't been suggested before, but I can't think of any reason not to implement it and I'm curious to see what people think.

Removing PvP gear altogether is a terrible idea. PvP gear functions to create an attachment to your character in the same way that leveling does. When you work hard for something, you want to enjoy it, to benefit from the time you put in. Now imagine an mmo in which leveling is as easy as it is in SWTOR and all gear is equal in PvP at 50. That places a tremendous burden on class balancing and the need for an experience in which everyone can contribute equally. What would instead happen is that everyone would create multiple 50s and play the flavour of the month exclusively because there would be no attachment to the character they had spent a month or two leveling and gearing up in order to be competitive. Now name me an MMO with both PvE and PvP that has managed to achieve the kind of balance necessary to pull that kind of a system off. It's a good idea in theory, but all it would do is shift the blame from gear to class balance.

Few things here: 1. You don't need to go arsenal. In fact I'd suggest against it, as pyro is the better PvP spec for mercs. It's more difficult to play and manage your heat effectively (and requires gear before the burst gets good unfortunately), but it yields better results. 2. That being said, PT pyro is superior. It's damage output is crazy, especially if you happen to know a healer to queue with. You're squishy as PT pyro though, so be wary, and you'll be fighting inside of 10m a lot in order to generate procs. You can still fight at 30m quite a lot but you're not as effective. 3. Yes, tracer spam sucks. Pyro is slower leveling but completely viable (I did it myself).

Was having this discussion the other day with a friend. I play a merc, specifically a pyro merc, and have had varying degrees of success against sages and sorcs, however to me it seems that the really good ones will beat me 75% of the time unless they clearly don't have cooldowns up. He claims it's the other way around, that good mercs really give him trouble and they should be able to consistently beat the class. I just don't see it. So what's the general consensus, do commandos and mercs give you trouble?

Looks like somebody hasn't learned to manage charge distances, manage charge cooldown timers, LOS after a knockback so melee can't charge/pull, etc. Just because you haven't figured out how to heal in combat doesn't mean that others haven't either.

That's ridiculous. If you're getting focused by multiple players or have nowhere to LOS then maybe. But otherwise, that's completely untrue, especially if you use your knockbacks well. You don't need to outheal the incoming dps completely, all you need to do is give yourself an extra few globals worth of HP to burst when your lockout ends (though again, if you use your surroundings effectively, you can easily get away for a quick heal or two). And if you didn't spec into med tech for shorter cast times then you have no one to blame but yourself for your inability to heal effectively.

That a joke?

Heal yourself. It's amazing how many people complain about a lack of survivability when they refuse to put points into medtech for .6 seconds off rapid scan and reduced cooldown on healing scan. Also, worth noting that baiting people into using an interupt by casting a heal once you take a bit of damage is always worth doing. Enjoy your free pew pew afterwards.

Unload, rail shot, power shot and rapid shots make up probably less than 25% of my pyro merc's total damage in PvP. If you're using power + rail to try to burst down a tank, you're doing it wrong anyway (unless you're in a 1v1 world pvp fight, in which case you're screwed regardless so long as they're smart and have CDs up). For every class that isn't a tank, as I mentioned, you've got enough accuracy with champ/BM gear plus talents to make the baseline 5% defence rarely come into play. As for PPA procs, they're nice but frankly you don't rely on them as merc pyro like you do as PT. When you go to burst, it's thermal>powershot>rail. You're hitting rail whether you proc PPA or not, and you've got it off CD if you're setting up burst. If you don't, then you're just denting them, you probably haven't taken them under 30% HP and it's time to turn and kite away. PPA is like a nice, unexpected gift in the form of heat reduction, it's not something you actively try to proc with unload and power shot. So yes, the point is valid, but I disagree that it's a significant negative versus going arsenal. Arsenal still uses unload to snare and in it's rotation when it procs (in fact I'd argue that arsenal uses unload more than pyro uses unload and power shot combined). Arsenal still uses rail and rapid shots. So a difference yes, but a significant one, and a reason to avoid pyro? Hardly.

This is a combination of false and inaccurate. Tech attacks cannot be shielded or avoided. This has been proven extensively by our PT brethren. This accounts for nearly all of your damage as pyro. The few attacks that can be (rapid shots, I believe rail as well), will almost never be due to the amount of accuracy on champ/BM gear and the fact that tech attacks start with 100% accuracy baseline. On top of that, you have 3% basically handed to you in the first tier of the skill tree, unless you'd rather invest 3 points in 500ish HP. You don't have to worry about your attacks being mitigated as pyro. Quite the opposite, your elemental-based tech attacks will do nearly equal damage to all classes (except where expertise comes into play).

I would say stay sorc, but it depends. Sorcs are far more able to impact a WZ when they queue up solo; a BH is much more team-reliant. Sorcs are also absolute beasts as dot/heals hybrid once they're geared and far better in 1v1 situations. However, if you queue up with friends often and have a reliable healer in your group, BH might end up being more fun. It comes down to this: what do you prefer more, big numbers and pew-pewing, or utility, cc and being a jack of all trades?

Here's your problem. Beating people implies you're more worried about killing people than helping your team win. Anyone can contribute to winning a WZ, regardless of gear level, as long as they focus on using what abilities they have. This is especially true in huttball.

No replies yet? Surely someone must have an opinion on this. Some of you 50s out there must have tried seeing whether stacking defence is worth it given all the accuracy rating forced onto most DPS sets. Or is it simply that there's no way you can add decent mods and enhancements to the PT set without sacrificing too much? Or does defence only counters basic attacks in PvP and not specials (ie not 95% of what you get hit with)?

Hey there PTs, I'm relatively new to the class (only lvl 24), coming from a merc after being unsatisfied with how linear their playstyle is. I've read that shielding and absorb are relatively useless at the moment, but I'm curious about defence rating. I'm not in a position to stack it yet given my level, but as I make my way up into the 40s and into 50, is it worth investing in for survivability? I'm currently playing as pyro after switching from shield tech and I while I'm much more useful offensively, I've obviously taken a hit in survivability. Plan on likely either playing straight pyro or Parakeet when I get to 50, so is defence a worthwhile stat for either?

Your ignorance is really starting to show. What's to stop you? Seriously? How about that if you use dart and put up 2 heals, you just generated at least 40 heat by the time the second one lands and are well on your way to full heat before you can get in more than another 3 tracers and a HS, which is clearly not gonna cut it? You gonna outlast the sorc that can DoT you up, LOS and heal? Come on man, give it up. I'm not saying mercs are awful or anything, but I'm starting to have serious doubts about the quality of opponent you're facing. Either that or you're relying entirely on stims to get you through and don't realize that not everybody has on-demand adrenals and heals through biochem.