cool vid, you definitely know how to play the class well, your opponents are horrible and your healers are awesome I am curious why you use sonic-missle so rarely? especially with them in a big group? wouldn't it be a benefit to everyone to use this everytime its off cooldown for the damage reduction? also why don't you utilize grapple more often to pull the people off the doors and why do you use flame-sweep? I haven't really found a reason to use it yet, especially in PvP

I think you are giving up a TON of damage in favor of a pretty weak reduction in heat... You are dropping everything combustion so you can pickup a 8 drop / 6 seconds... you will use way more then that to make up the damage loss.

Just curious - since you've already gone so far up the AP tree, can you put points into Shield Vents in ST to kick in the Kolto perk? should result in you getting more health way more often If you are looking for a passive build I don't really understand why you are putting so many points into offensive skills. Pass on the ion, add High Energy and get the speed boost that Pneumatic boots gives you. Put more points into venting heat to kick in the Kotlto Vents to basically result in a constant life gain, your whole build is around NOT getting stunned, so it doesn't make much sense to have a 20% reduction in damage if you are not going to get stunned anyway.

Since 1.1 I've been having a ton of issues with my grapple, I'm not lvl 50 (42 or so) and don't have the stun but I would say it works fully about 1/2 the time. Most of the times when it fails it shoots out, wraps them up and then just nothing happens, often it will pull them but drop them somewhere in the middle.

Story trumps rules?

If I go straight damage I normally get 4 or 5. I never get the 2.5k hit but usually get the damage and kill medals and the quick kill. I easily get 3 or 4 more if I do some guard and taunting. keep in mind if you have a group of bad guys fighting and you drop a sonic missile in the middle you will get a medal pretty quick

eventually your opening attack will kill most of the mobs, but your primary role will be somewhere between a tank and DPS. Watch how fast your friends in their light armor get crushed by heavy hitting mobs and you will know where you place is as you level up the Pyro tree you start doing more damage as well. we never hit the same level as Sith Sorcs but we also don't have to hide in the back. You will primarily use Flame Burst, Rail Shot and Rocket Punch with random Incin Missles and Explo-dart thrown in adn then rapid shot when you get high heat

I really thought about that when I got paid out for killing him... his bounty was like 5k

back points out of the pyro tree and get to second tier Shield and get a 9% AIM increase and the 16% armor bonus. Hot iron gives you a +6% bonus to Flame Burst, but you can get a +6% to ALL fire in Shield, the improved canister really isn't that good something like this would probably work fairly well http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#301hMhMZrZfhMrzGhMM.1 just a suggestion. If you really want the detonator you can rework it to get there but its really not that amazing compared to what a superheated rail will do, plus you get Rails for free. A flameburst + canister + all the fire damage addons will hit hard and its an instant. Thermal Det is a stronger version of Explosive Dart and shares the cooldown, so you use either or, plus its single target, explo-dart is multi target and it knocks back all hit enemies.

I think its the shield mechanic that is broken to be honest. It seems like they built it and went this will be great for tank/defense! then they forgot that almost every attack bypasses it and then they went combine that with heavy armor and these guys will be like juggernauts but with fire instead of force! then they made abilities that negate and bypass our armor completely. and then they tweaked damage and dropped BH down

yeah your experience mirrors mine. The amount of CC and slows that some of these classes have is just amazing. I've started getting that magical stun dart a lot lately, I think it comes from smugglers and ops?, that and the sound stun last forever but we do have grappling hook , sadly I've had a ton of issues with it not working lately

So do combust cyl DOT stack with Incin missile DOT? I've never seen it happen

The best is when you get 3 - 4 commendation from random mob drops on the way TO the mission then your reward is 2500 credits and 1 commendation - You never get credits up front or for any "in dialog" options that I have found... ie: Kill this worm for me... type stuff, unless you have to go elsewhere and get a full mission for it you won't get anything... and Mako doesn't share in my blood lust

turning off ALL her attacks and setting her in Med mode will make a huge difference, they finally fixed the re summoning issue where her crap would all turn back on randomly, now she stays at a healer. All I have to say is after dealing with companions in Skyrim... i LOVE my companions in this! hahah

Does anyone know which DOTs stack, if any and if not how is it determined which DOT is active? for example if I use Incin Missile and blaster w/ Ion cyl. do the 2 DOTs stack or does one replace the other? Will multiple Incins stack or just renew the timer?

Only one of your abilities is melee (rocket-punch), possibly blade if you went up the AP tree. The rest are designed to be mid range (4 - 10 m+). this range will keep you out of striking distance of the melee classes and keep them from beating the snot out of us while they try catching us. Also breaks line of sight for longer casting targeted abilities if you can go behind them.

nope, ED won't do anything but damage to the strong mobs, it will put a few second stun on weaker ones though. for stronger mobs just use it for the damage that it does and the splash damage helps weaken the second mob if theres more then 1

open with Death from Above to wipe out the small guys, then finish them off before engaging the big guy. While they do less damage it is constant added damage which can be easily stopped but a few quick attacks each. Death from Above, Railshot one while he is down, hit another with incin missle, switch to the third and stick them with a dart. when it goes off it should finish all of them. If not line them up for a flame thrower and it should do the job. Do the opposite of what the mob does if possible, for most standard (non-boss) mobs I just go toe to toe, running around and kiting will end up pulling more bad guys into the fight. Keep Mako on healing duty, make sure she has all her abilities turned off and her healing buff turned on and make sure you are updating her in Cunning armor, it makes a huge difference on the amount she heals. use your area attacks wisely (Explo / Flamethrower) but focus all damage on one mob

what build are you using that you can stand toe to toe with a melee and win reliably?

Make sure if you want Mako healing that you turn off ALL her other abilities... she will have no problem letting you die while she puts a 1 min hold on a mob that she could kill in 15 seconds

the amount of CC and slows is insane and I have pretty much the same experience you do, if the opp I'm facing hits me with a solid CC or a long slow I'm pretty much done. if I can't stay in close I'm going to have issues. I definitely cannot go toe to toe with many classes. Armor is nice to have but when all the abilities bypass it then there isn't much of a use to having it. Healers are the absolute worst. I can't out damage their healing abilities and will end up overheating before they run out of heals

Its what I've done for the most part and its worked very well, Pyro starts out strong and just builds from there, there are very few skills that don't add something solid to damage in that tree Shield has a lot of marginal abilities which won't do much good to you until you get to be higher level. Once you get passed the first 2 tiers in ST it gets pretty unhelpful, especially with the shield mechanic the way it is

Or even worse, when all the rewards are companion gear that is 6 levels to low!!! Sadly I love killin, and if that means taking a pay cut... at least my blaster is warm

Keep in mind we also have Neuro-Dart and Sonic Missile, both cause instant hatred but I agree. I don't know how a flame thrower burning you wouldn't result in a ton of hate. Personally if my choices were between a little sniper hiding behind a wall or a guy torching me, I'd probably kill the guy in my face burning me Also I would LOVE for them to fix what they broke with our cool downs. Explo-dart is nearly unusable now because of the cooldown timer being so far off, I have significant issues with Death from Above not going off when I use it, my degauss is lit up all the time whether I'm affected or not. I've had issues with Rocket Punch showing as unusable when I'm right next to the mob and I'm even getting a timer on instants which should have no cooldown like flame burst

I was looking at some abilities last night and trying to come up with some numbers around which is actually better in several situations... lets hear what everyone has to say (keep it civil and try to use numbers from your char/playing) - I'm lvl 42 BH - Lets start with FireBug (PT, lvl 5). I'm going to round some numbers for ease of the math (and I'm lazy) and I'm going to assume if you put 1 point in, you will do 2 for a 30% increase My Rail shot does approx 950 damage (873 - 1088) and my critical multiplier is 50%. So every time I succeed on a crit hit my rail shot will do approx 475 additional damage. So we have 475 * .30 = 142.5 additional damage per crit - Now lets look at Puncture. which allows a railshot to ignore 20% of the armor. Using the same est railshot damage as above (950 damage / hit) and using my AC: 5865 w/ a reduction of approx 45%... so based on these numbers if I get hit with a 950 point rail shot, I should take approx 522 damage, approx 428 will be absorbed. so if 20% of my armor is ignored, in theory that should mean I will take approx 86 more damage then I would have initially. so at 60% maxed out my rail shot which would do 522 will instead do about 258 added damage, for a total of 780. Now that's against Me in my lvl 40 pvp armor, the returns on this ability are greatly diminished because it only affect the amount the armor would negate and the vast majority of classes have substantially less armor then we do. What do you guys think... is it worth it to get greater armor penetration or greater critical damage bonus?