I feel like people often put way too much emphasis on Rage being less durable than Vengeance not because the difference is significant but because everyone always say it and now it's become an accepted truth that few people ever challenge. On paper the differences sound pretty significant but when I play Rage I don't take most of my damage immediately after leaping so the DR Vengeance gets after leaping, while nice, just isn't that big of a deal. The CC immunity that Vengeance has is very nice of course since that's ultimately what keeps Rage in check. I'm okay with that, if it was any different we'd be OP as hell. Outside of those things, the defensive differences between the specs are relatively minor and anyone who says Rage lacks escapes doesn't use Mad Dash or Intercede enough. Intercede is how Rage gets out of trouble and it has been like that since the day they made it cleanse movement impairing effects. Plus, let's be honest here -- any spec that has defensive cooldowns like Saber Reflect and Focused Defense (forget the imp name) isn't exactly helpless when the heat is on. Rage/Focus has infinitely better defensive options than Tactics Vanguard or AP Powertech. Who cares if Vengeance lives a bit longer when their crap is so easily healed through. Fluff is fluff. If you took a poll of Sage/Sorc healers and gave them a choice between having a good Vengeance player on their arse the entire warzone or a good Rage player on their *** the whole game, Vengeance would win yet another popularity contest.

Just my lightsaber. I've tried different sabers thinking my normal MH might be bugged but still no luck.

My Sage Pihkal on the Harbinger can no longer use Force Armor, Force Potency or Mental Alacrity. I've deleted the local files and tried to repair to no avail. As you can imagine this is game-breaking. Here's a video that shows all 3 abilities are no longer usable from either the abilities section or when placed on my quickbars: https://youtu.be/Xo34WsWVsxs

Pretty much yeah. 5k HPS for a healer is nothing these days so you need to be able to bring the thunder, interrupt like a pro or bring friends. If you can't do at least 2 out of those 3 things the healer can practically ignore you.

You'd be much better off skank-tanking with Vigilance/Vengeance. I've seen good ones that can consistently do a million in both protection and damage and if you're at that level you're literally doing the work of two good players.

The best way to learn how to deal with stealth classes is to do a lot of node guarding. At first it will be a pretty miserable experience and you're going to do a *lot* of respawning but that's okay, as long as you make the inc call the second you're under attack. If you do, your team mates really can't complain and you'll get loads of good practice. Anyone who's new to PVP should spend time guarding nodes -- you'll learn how and when to use interrupts and CC and by failing you'll also learn when not to use them and why in addition to learning the ins and out of individual class match-ups. There's really no better pvp training than node defending!

In cases where there are multiple healers and your team is having trouble burning one down, as a ranged dps one of the most useful things you can do is set the healer who isn't being focused by your team as your focus target and then use the focus modifier to interrupt him on cooldown while still pressuring the primary target. Also pay close attention to the Trauma debuff on your primary targets. If you notice that it's not being applied consistently then make the decision to own it and make it your job to keep the target debuffed. It's a thankless job but once you start doing it you'll see pretty quickly how much a 20% healing debuff can impact the course of tight games. In regs you should generally do whatever it takes to keep yourself alive unless the enemy healer is under 30% in which case I'd ignore the attacker and try to finish the target off. Generally, it's much easier to target melee targets because you can keep them in front of you and stay within range. If you're working with another ranged dps and have voice comms then two ranged working together will always be preferred. The lead dps just needs to announce his target switches so you can re-acquire the new target efficiently. If you ever do this, try to stack mostly on top of the lead dps but a few meters behind him so you can tail him easily while still maintaining a common LoS (this works well when playing with random players too -- it's much easier to tell when they've switched targets if you're behind them! Plus, they almost always end up being your meat shield ).

I bail all the time and don't think there's any shame in it at all. Playing hopeless games is a waste of time. It's because I have a demanding job and make every effort to do it well that I only have a limited amount of time to play. I have no problem at all playing out a competitive game and can still have a lot of fun even if I lose. What I have a problem with is sticking around in games that are clearly hopeless. I'm not a masochist and don't think there's anything to be learned from persevering in hopeless situations. It's a far better use of time to leave and look for a more competitive game where I'm not going to spend half the game waiting to leave the spawning area.

As someone who's played on the Harbinger for years now and was there when Pubs were clearly the stronger side overall even though they never had the best individual players I think most of the current problems are due to a serious shortage of healers. People tend to focus on the premades but in the evenings there aren't enough Pub healers in the queue and they get farmed. Ultimately this is a failure by Bioware. If you're going to remove most of the self-cleanses *and* have specs like Madness in the game you absolutely have to implement a matchmaking system that ensures each team has healers otherwise the uneven distribution of healers makes it very difficult -- and most important of all -- no damn fun at all if you find yourself on a team with little or no healing. DoT, die & respawn is no one's idea of a good time. It's a never ending death spiral because the problem feeds on itself. It isn't fun so people stop queing pubside which just leads to even fewer healers and even less fun and so on and so forth until they unplug the servers and shut off the lights.

Imo, the opener is key and it's really what everyone fears when talking about our damage. The thing that makes Tactics/AP so good is that the delayed detonation allows us to fit all of our best attacks inside a double relic proc window consistently: SG -> AP -> TS -> CB (fully primed auto-crit) -> HiB -> SS. Both relics will proc before CB and HiB in nearly all cases and by this time you've closed the gap on someone and can then begin the normal rotation with gut etc

Who says you have to use it strictly for knockbacks? It's an 'oh sh*t" cooldown now, so it's useful anytime you know you're about to eat a lot of incoming damage and it works against the most popular and dangerous specs in the game.

I'll be shocked if Vigilance and Vengeance can out dps Focus and Rage now in warzones. Unless the enemy team is especially cooperative about grouping up I just can't see getting out dps'ed by a Vig/Veng. The extra mobility from Combat Focus combined with being able to use Dispatch on any target after leaping have completely solved the biggest issues the specs had. They have completely the changed the play style and made a clunky spec sing. It's not even close atm, Focus/Rage are clearly better . Better at killing, better are imposing their will on a match and as always, better at doing damage that's difficult to heal through.

Admittedly, with the Hunker Down/Entrench after our roll proccing the 6s speed boost it's much easier for SS/MM to give up than Engineering so I don't blame you for holding on to it for dear life. The beauty of Flourish Shot is that you can spam the hell out it so even with all of the abilities that purge movement impairing effects there are always windows where you can snare someone and they can't do much about it. e.g Tag a Sorc healer with it, he pops Force Speed to proc Egress and break the snare and you just immediately hit him with Flourish Shot again and now he's moving at 50% speed with a Trauma debuff tacked on for good measure.

I've given it up in favor of Lumbering Impact and the heroic utility that adds 5s to Flourish Shot effects and turns it into a 15s 50% snare and adds a Trauma debuff for the duration.

Rage is just flat out better than Vengeance now. All of it's problems were solved and if you know how to read the discipline screen and aren't an idiot about choosing utilities it was given an additional ranged attack that regularly crits for 10k. I'm guessing the smash monkeys hopped up on Alacrity don't want to hear it but it's their turn to play 2nd fiddle for a while.

Exactly. Which is why in the older screenshot you can see I was min-maxing with half Aim and half Cunning. It was BiS for SS/MM pre-4.0 and the fact of the matter is that the Accuracy change is a pretty significant buff to Sharpshooter, Marksman and any other class/spec that relies a lot on Ranged or Melee damage. I don't think any other specs are more centered around white damage than SS/MM but I might be wrong. Had a 25k Aimed Shot earlier. It took an hour for the smile to fade. http://imgur.com/hb2Lydq

The fleet bolster terminal doesn't hand out the Endurance/HP bolster buffs but it does buff damage output. Not sure if that's intended or a bug though. Also, I seem to be getting an ungodly amount of XP from PVP. Two warzones and I have 280k towards level 61 and haven't done a thing other than those 2 warzones.

Here are two screenshots, one from today and one from months ago. Unfortunately in the old screenshot I wasn't highlighting the Accuracy area but you can clearly see it was 94.43% previously and 101% now. http://imgur.com/a/Ams6i

So the character screen that shows I have 6% more Accuracy now than I used to have is wrong? It clearly says Ranged Accuracy, most of my attacks are ranged attacks so I assume my Accuracy has gone up because the screen shows me it has gone up. What am I missing here?

I just finished my first two 4.0 warzones as a Sharpshooter Gunslinger and wanted to share my thoughts. First, I want to qualify this by saying that this is still mid-tier and I've only faced off against a few people with new abilities and no one knows what they're doing yet. That said, we're in *much* better shape than I was anticipating at least at this stage. First, the Accuracy change is a huge boon to Sharpshooter/Marksman as expected (see screenshots in a later post for Accuracy example). The first thing I did was drop all of my Accuracy enhancements bringing my Ranged Accuracy down to 101% in warzones. Overall, Crit Multiplier is down to 62%+ but Crit % is way up to 31%. Within the first minute of my first warzone I had landed the largest hit I've ever done: 21,892k. All told I had 3 Aimed Shots greater than 20k in my first two games. The increase in % to Crit combined with our built-in bonuses to Crit damage have significantly improved overall damage output and the Accuracy boost allows us to absolutely punish lightly armored enemies -- seriously, you'll notice this right away! Also, the 25% DR on Force/Tech attacks we can spec into is the best "oh sh*t" defensive cooldown I have at the moment. Whether that changes later is still unknown. Prepare to dine on the lightly armored and expect some QQ. Enjoy it while you can.

Also, the AoE stun is super important and can win matches for your team whether they realize it or not. The trick is learning to use it in situations where your DoTs don't break CC. The best Guardians/Juggs do decent damage but provide massive amounts of utility with things like skank tanking, intercede or even just being a meatshield so the light and medium armored heavy hitter teammates can do their thing longer.

The change to Cover Pulse will end up being the most important 4.0 change for PVP Snipers/Gunslingers. Yeah, we got screwed on the new ability with no lube, but 25% Force/Tech DR at fairly brief intervals is a welcomed change...still, that 3 min cooldown is a slap in the face and we should bytch and moan until we get some love.

With no beta test prior to launch and no one internally who has enough juice within the org to advocate for PVP there will be at least two game-breaking bugs (that Sorcs and Sins will somehow benefit from) which don't get patched for the first month and a handful of lesser but serious issues that drive people crazy. It's been a slow motion car crash for a while now but a few months after the hype train leaves the station and the Force Unleashed has come and gone and it dawns on a lot of people that they're being asked to pay $15 a month for a very expensive. mostly single-player game with nothing to do in the gaps between content updates, well, that's when things will get really ugly....

Tokichiro, Focus Guardian 27 Killing Blows http://imgur.com/RU6nmce Mozza, Gunslinger 2,632,886 damage http://imgur.com/cnptYEb I noticed that one of the screenshots above has a Command/Merc healer result that's awesome: Methiana, Commando 3,720,293 heals http://imgur.com/cnptYEb