This thread is making my brain hurt. People either don't have a firm enough grasp on how rotations and priority systems work or they're too blinded by their own outrage to see it. Or perhaps just trolling. It's been known to happen. Let me explain it. Rotations are made up of abilities used on cooldown, procs, and filler. Procs are usually supposed to be the highest priority, then the cooldowns, then the filler. That's why it's called filler, it fills in the gaps between the higher damage abilities. If the filler does too much damage then the cooldowns and procs can be ignored. That was the case with grav round. Damage, in theory, has been shifted to demo round to compensate for the loss of damage on grav round. The sum total, if you use all parts of the equation, should be the same. If it's not, they will put the damage back into the other abilities, the cooldowns and procs. Now, simultaneously, I believe there was a bug regarding the debuffs from grav round and how they interact with demo round. If I understand that issue correctly, it could make it appear as though demo round was not adequately compensated because it was inflating the damage from demo round under specific circumstances. That's fixing a bug that was never intended and that part is not something you should be looking to be compensated for. Anyway, I came here looking for info for my mid level commando I dusted off last night. You guys have a good day.

Yes and no, depending on the situation. You mostly want to use it to help set up a burst. 1v1 in a warzone I agree, it's more potent late in a fight when people are getting low so that they don't have a chance to react to their dropping HP and you can burst them down from half health to dead. 1v1 in open world PvP open with it. Do as much damage early in the fight as possible and keep them reeling from the surprise. Group PvP you can go either way. Use it to interrupt a fight and help save a team mate or as part of an assist train to make sure the target can't flee or kite everyone. If you're with a scoundrel they have a similar knockdown I think they can buy with points. Only one of you needs to open with the control while the other opens with raw damage. Knowing your group and what they're going to do helps a lot.

I found this odd. Granted, I'm not doing a sniper, I'm doing a gunslinger. And the gunslinger is a 3rd or 4th character, I forget which. But I went straight to Dirty Fighting and my reasoning for doing so was because it sounded very similar to the skirmisher spec for Shadow Warriors in Warhammer. That class was in a similar place to the snipers in that it was one of the tougher classes to play well, it was ranged (an archer) and where it really got good was once you learned how to properly kite people before they really got their claws on you and focus on mobility. Dirty Fighting, and thus Lethality, just seemed like a natural choice for PvP.

What I sometimes do if I'm curious is compare the ratio of damage to killing blows or solo kills to see how many people I should have killed or could have killed vs how many I actually did. Even then yeah, I don't take it too seriously and treat it more like a curiosity than anything else. High damage because I was attacking a healer the whole game and the healer didn't die is more a lack of teamwork issue than a class issue.

I think if I were to spec specifically for PvP as infiltration then I would use that spec but with the point from situational awareness moved into the Vigor for the extra 10 top end force. I can pretty easily burn through all my force after popping out of stealth when trying to kill someone and the extra 15 seconds on Battle Readiness, while an overall DPS loss, wouldn't affect any individual burst window.

Thank you.

But... I like the butts in this game. I can't look away from them half the time, male or female. o.O

I don't think it's fair to say that it's them. Every class has to watch a few things. Cooldowns, resources, and the battlefield. Some classes additionally have to watch procs and debuffs. Generally speaking, game designers will make classes that have to watch one of those five things more heavily not need to monitor the rest quite as much. But it's not always the case and here on SWTOR where we maybe can't customize our UI as much as we might like it can be harder to watch certain things. Additionally, think about player fatigue. People play these games to relax and have fun. How well is someone going to track all 5 of those categories after having gone to work for a full 8 hour day? On the flip side of the coin, what about near the end of a marathon gaming session having spent 12 hours straight on the game on a day off? How much more alert will the person who only had to track 3 still be? Regardless of individual ability, tracking more stuff simply requires more energy. I believe that you, playing the class that bores you with only 3 buttons, would outperform yourself playing the class with 12 buttons after a long day. Even if you were a little bored doing it. I have heard from interviews with WoW developers that they monitor things like this. Tanks get simple rotations because they have to watch the battlefield more. Developers also monitor things like how many keystrokes per minute a player needs to make in order to make their class function. If there is an imbalance with this here in SWTOR, which I suspect there might be, then it's something that needs to be addressed.

False. Geared out in only daily rewards gear and a piece or two of centurion's gear I was pretty routinely tearing threat off the ops geared main tank for my guild, sometimes even late in a fight when energy begins to be a problem for infiltration specs. Now, it's possible, since this is anecdotal, that there may have been something going wrong. Either he wasn't fully concentrating, I was on the wrong target, or maybe there were threat drops I was simply unaware of but all of my PvE runs have been quick and smooth and left people wanting to go again after. So if I'm doing enough DPS to keep the people I'm running with happy, I'd say shadow DPS is probably in a good place.

Playing as a female consular, I like the relationship my character has with Nadia. If I start getting *too* preachy she dislikes it and if I act genuinely interested in her or her culture, she gets happy. It seems like a good teacher/student friendship developing. As a guy I am definitely more attracted to Nadia than Iresso.

Agreed, this would work.

I liked how it was before this patch. Sure, it could be tough for some people to see if their longer cooldowns were available yet, but I could more easily distinguish between abilities that were on moderate cooldowns and abilities that are merely on CD because of the GCD. This is important because I anticipate my next attack during the GCD and press the button before the UI registers the GCD as finished to account for latency. Thus that bright blue-grey glow never really fades away and is basically just extra noise I don't really need. After playing for a good chunk of the evening last night I got used to it, so it's not the end of the world. However, I still felt like I had watch my actionbar more closely than the actual action and that's a bad thing.

As has already been pointed out, using blackout as a regen cooldown when you get low and maybe hitting an odd saber strike here or there will help. Also, while soloing you can use low slash or the stun from Holiday to move around the enemy and get a shadow strike. This is a good time to pause for just an extra moment and regen a little extra energy since you're not being attacked at all. Working in Tumult to these stunlocks will help as well since it's free damage. As an added bonus, that strategy will also minimize the damage she takes. The problem, in my opinion, isn't that infiltration has problems with resources. It's that the infiltration playstyle really encourages the mashing of buttons without thinking about those resources so when you do finally tap out it's a bit of a shock.

I figured it was just using the force to disable the enemies' shields. The only flaw being that not every enemy uses shields and it does damage instead of debuffing them and leaving them exposed to an attack.

I don't think particle acceleration on its own could make up for the loss of clairvoyant strike. Infiltration builds should have a pretty high crit rate already if they're gearing for it.

You might be surprised at how differently you perceive a class just based off the animations. I love my powertech, but I wouldn't want to play a vanguard at all.

I'm sorta surprised this thread is still going, but not really. These things need caps for a reason. Anyway, I just wanted to add this into the mix. I found it off reddit about a week ago. They've been in a big huff over copyright law over there, but it's very relevant to the discussion here because the article deals with it from the George Lucas/Star Wars point of view. http://blog.cgpgrey.com/copyright-forever-less-one-day/ The short version for anyone who doesn't want to follow the link is that copyright in its original form was meant to help encourage artists to make their creations and give them the time they needed to make a profit off of their work. The copyright for Star Wars would have expired in 2005 under the original laws. Instead, however, copyright law in the US has been extended to protect work for the lifetime of the creator +70 years. It's largely been pushed by Disney, which ironically built its empire off recycling old stories themselves.

Around level 30 or so (I think) he gains the ability to channel her as a stun. I think all healer companions get that ability, just his is uniquely themed for Holiday whereas Mako for example is an electric taser.

Well, I can't speak about Huttball because I don't really PvP. But I can say that in WoW we had reticles that scaled with the abilities and they worked just fine. I'm not saying use the FiB sized reticle for Huttball, just make it so that you can have one that's reflective of actual size for whatever the respective ability used. Death From Above and its counterpart Mortar Volley from the BH/Trooper share a similar problem in that they, too, hit an area larger than the reticle.

Um Tharan is not the lady's man he'd have you think he is. His woman is an artificial construct, however advanced she might be. He talks a big game, sure, but I don't think he actually gets that lucky. More bark than bite. I think it's actually kind of endearing, it gives him a rather boyish quality.

Two things make the reticle considerably easier to work with and neither of them have anything to do with the Balance tree. One is making sure your computer is running the game at an adequate level. My old computer struggled whenever I tried to place a reticle. For whatever reason my horrible framerate was just that much worse when I had to deal with ground targeting abilities. I picked up a new machine a few weeks ago and the smoother framerate makes a big difference. The other is good keybinding. If you're clicking your abilities to activate them you're doing it wrong and it's going to be that much harder, that much slower to target the ground where you want FiB to land. I wouldn't bind anything past about the 6 key if it's going to be part of my main rotation and then use modifiers and mouse buttons to add more. I do think it's -weird- that the spec's heaviest hitting ability is an AoE based off a targeting reticle, but it's definitely something you can adapt to. It's also not wholly strange given the tree is built around DoT's. I just wish they'd scale the size of the reticle to reflect the actual size of the attack it represents.

Hmm. Now I don't feel so bad for dying a bunch and feeling like I was struggling to learn how to play balance when I did it while doing this quest. My only thing to add to this discussion is that the medical stations didn't seem to have any visible effect. Whatever buff they were granting would wear off almost before I left the terminal. I just assumed the quest was a lesson in using resilience the way Lord Vivacar was a lesson in using interrupts. So now I feel silly... but resilience really does help!

I was actually following your stickied guide as a reference and got the impression combat tech was more for hybrid specs only. Which since it sounds like they're attempting to break the hybrids I'd rather not get too comfortable using one and I was ignoring combat tech. I'll try that too and see how much of a difference it makes. There's so much support for DoTs in the tree that the DoT from Force Tech's Force Breach seemed like a foregone conclusion. EDIT: Socially awkward penguin forgot to say thank you for the guide. For the others... I know I'll end up doing Kinetic at some point and ultimately it may very well be what I stick with since my powertech's gathering rust right now and I do like tanking. Just gotta get done tinkering with the character for now. Update: Playing with it for an hour or so after I got home, combat technique's a huge boon. Also, changing how I view double strike was huge. Instead of thinking of double strike as my filler and saber as my force conservation move, I'm thinking of it as saber strike is my filler and double strike is my force dump to stop myself from capping. Force is staying way higher overall and I'm seeing a lot more Force Strike procs.

I definitely was experiencing the bit about the AoE being larger and was learning to at times open with force breach and LoS stuff away from the mind mazed targets. Force Slow, on the other hand, has been banished to an obscure part of my bar for a long time. That might be the missing link here, so I'll give it a shot when I get home and see how I like it. Thanks!