I don't think anyone in this thread is trying to suggest that Maras are hard to kill when you start attacking them from max range. The performance of a hybrid build with IP snare and cluster bombs (and I'm assuming IM) isn't entirely relevant to the performance of "Lethality". Once you're bringing adv. interrogative techniques into the equation, you're really starting to talk about Engineering vs Maras, not so much Lethality. A 100% uptime snare (IP) is a vastly different creature vs a Mara than a 6 second snare (CG). "Oh yeah, Lethality totally shreds Maras, just use the Engineering tree!!" See what I did there?

The rest has been pretty well covered already, but if you mean "How does Lethality do against a Mara in PVP?" the answer is: It's not ideal. Basically Lethality revolves around having your DoTs up at all times, which gives you two major problems vs a Mara. 1) Your DoTs will break your roots and mezz early. 2) Your DoTs will keep Cloak of Pain up. These are two of the worst things you can do fighting a Mara, the only thing worse is to prematurely hand him a full resolve bar. Fortunately you can still burn them down pretty easily from cover at 30+m, but if they close on you with force Camo or start the fight at melee range, you're fighting an uphill battle with Leth.

No, he didn't. Always this simplistic assumption that "LOS the sniper then heal" = "Healer out of fight". Not even remotely. Good healers can and will LOS you and maintain LOS on their teammates so they heal them. You have switched targets to someone who is being healed by a healer who can basically freecast because you can't touch him, meaning you either move and lose entrench (a loss for you) or you stay put and let the healer free-cast (a loss for you). GG Entrench. It's a great power, but it's incredibly circumstantial and you really need to put it in perspective. If any class had a root that could last up to 20 seconds it would be game-breakingly OP in PVP, with that in mind - actually think - how good can a power that only works if you don't move for up to 20 seconds really be? Ultimately, it depends entirely on what they mean by "properly". By the existing formula, a full WH Sniper will get around 1.8-2k absorbtion from the probe. Any change that does not drastically increase that ammount, since this is a defensive cooldown on a 45 second cooldown (in such illustrious company as force camo), is pretty much a waste of time and effort. They should dump the absorb altogether, since it will always mean the power is either a poor-man's Static Barrier due to cooldown or OP due to excessive absorbtion, and put it on a flat damage reduction for 15s, say 15%, which is something that scales perfectly with everything.

It's no a joke. Maras have all the tools they need to never be further than 10m from a Sniper once they get into melee range, and to then always have equal or greater movement speed than the Sniper. Bad ones try to walk up without using cooldowns from 35m on a sniper in cover, get chewed up badly and then come and say that snipers are the "hard counter" to Maras. Walking up to a Sniper who's actively burning you down from max range is the tactical-failure equivalent to face-tanking a Mara, no matter what class you are it's a stupid thing to do.

It's not difficult before you get him, but it's completely auto-pilot effortless once you do get him. There's been debate in the past that there is a tradeoff; no downtime with Lokin but faster kills with DPS companions. But in my experience, you should personally be doing so much more damage than any companion you have that the difference between lokin and a DPS companion in time to kill anything but boss/champs is pretty insignificant, and when you're taking on bosses and champs lokin is still better for the survivability anyway.

Not always. Speaking as a Leth sniper, I'm about a shade of a half-step away from a "caster". Many, many, many times I've had some Mara stuck to me while I sit and take it - I'll stun his Ravage, or cover pulse him to buy myself 5 seconds of breathing room - whatever - but I don't run because I'm killing his healer, and mine is healing me, and right after his healer dies or goes away - so does he. It's possible, I assume, that sometimes a DPS sage is doing the same thing - you're just not that important. Your first instinct needs to be "do what needs doing". Sometimes that's not running away.

Pretty much what KonastantinT said. Ranged attacks and snares in this game pretty much universally require that you either. a) Remain motionless. b) Stay inside gap closer range. Or both of the above. After that kiting becomes pretty implausable and basically comes down to only being possible when you catch a melee class with all of his gap closing abilities on cooldown - in which case the melee can usually just LOS the ranged class and chose not to engage in the sure loss.

Oh, I agree you can make some pretty viable MM hybrids which get access to a lot of MM goodies and IP for example, but the snare breaks the DoTs, like I said. Edit: not DoTs, roots But I think adding a snare to a 31 point MM build is a dangerous move because it potentially puts inescapable Rapid Fire SOS+SOS+SOS on the table as an "on demand" option. The comparison to sages/sorcs with respect to snares from range isn't quite fair because they are not uninteruptable and unchargeable I personally think it would be nice if the MM tree converted some of the Ranged/Energy damage into Tech/Internal, I've also said before that I think a +5m to tech range talent (placed too high for heavy Eng/Leth hybrids to access), and maybe some better armour penetration (hybrid accessible). I think the dependancy on cover is good to stay, but they need to stop balancing "in cover" powers around being uninteruptable and then seemingly simultaneously forgetting that you're also rooted. My number one gripe about LOS for snipers is that sometimes my own cover blocks LOS. Shoot dude BAM BAM, crouch -> LOS blocked. Stand up again BAM BAM, crouch -> LOS blocked. For the love of god, calculate my line of sight from my position as if I were standing at all times.

The Snare issue is clearly deliberate, and it's part of the attempt to keep snipers from becoming OP (I personally think that they are too careful about this in general). The reason our snares are all attached to DoTs is so they break our roots and our mezz. At the moment, MM basically gets better (longer lasting) roots and mezz, at the cost of no snare. Leth and Eng get snares, but at the cost of root and mezz duration. You and I both know we'd like the best of both worlds - snares that don't break our roots - and if we're honest with ourselves we both know why we want them.

This is completely true except for one little thing. Every Slinger/Sniper I see gets a Corrosive dart, I can usually spare the GCD and the energy and they can't do anything about it. the extra bonus is it hands me back some energy off Lethal Purpose ticks. Apart from that, I actually agree with you that MM snipers get way too much of a bad rap for PVP. Less mobile does not mean - can't move at all, and because they don;t rely on DoTs for their damage at all, they actually get better mileage from legshot, flashbang and coverpulse because they have complete control over when they break them themselves. A MM sniper can leg shot, then take the time to probe->ambush->FT->laze->Instasnipe and all of that damage lands basically the same time that in takes to cull - and the MM sniper will not break the himself root before the ambush lands, and he can then throw a flashbang and get the entire duration of the mezz to work with with no risk of breaking it himself until he chooses to. If the MM sniper starts with a cover pulse it's even better because he knocks the target back with the ambush, and can follow with a leg shot instead of flashbang. I was eng/leth pre 1.2 and I've been Leth since 1.2 but I've played around with heavier MM builds and it's obvious to me that tweaking MM to make it more viable is a very difficult balancing act because it would be very easy for MM to become OP - at the moment the real problem with MM is that it's too easily mitigated.

No, he's not. He just listed Mara vs sniper basics 101. As in, if you can do what he said when he said, you've got all the "clever" that a sniper can throw back at you covered, and you've still got a few tricks up your sleeve. Mara vs sniper is: "when sniper does A, you can do B, or C, or D" Sniper vs Mara is: "When he does A, do B, unless you already did C, or he did E, then think about Z, and make sure you don't do X". The major difference is if a Mara just starts mashing buttons at a Sniper, he's just being a bad player and does some damage to the Sniper, but if a sniper just starts mashing buttons at a Mara, he's outright doing it wrong, handing the Mara a full resolve bar and keeping his Cloak of Pain up.

You know that a sorc can totally LOS you with column and still have LOS to heal the targets you're switching to, right? I always find it amazing when people talk about how invincible they are, and then the scenarios they come up with hinge upon their opponents being obviously terrible.

That's not going to happen, and I'm hardly an advocate for Snipers becoming OP. Like I said, cover has good benefits, but already balanced by trading mobility for those benefits - don't mess with cover. But I'd like to see the MM tree lean towards better armour penetration and possibly getting some tech/internal to replace some of the ranged/energy. Maybe even a +5m to tech range placed high enough to not play nice with leth/eng hybrids.

This, apart from the other problems that MM has, is the core of the matter IMO, mobility. Lack of mobility in PVP is death. This is why interupt immunity in cover is not OP in PVP (can't move). It's why entrench is not OP in PVP (can't move). It's why having a tiny bit of extra range is not OP in PVP (can't move while chanelling/casting most of it). Then in the design phase they went on and forgot that they already balanced those advantages with the cost to mobilty, and then it seems like they still tweaked most of our core skills (which MM is built upon) around being immune to interupt and having longer range. We're paying for that already guys... Here's the point where I start talking about how Snipers have more disadvantages for every advantage than other classes do, and I get told I'm talking nonsense...

Lightning spam sorcs are not the problem (lightn-interupt, nothing, nothing, lightning, lightning, lightn-interupt), it's the instant+proc madness/hybrid guys that can be scary even after 1.2 9 times out of 10 the best they do is hurt you a bit and leave you grinding down a bit more on DoTs after they die, then there's that one time they get this perfect storm of cooldowns, procs, and crits and you've seen ~18k health vanish in way less time than you thought was possible for a Sorc to pull off. The only 100% kill targets are bad players, and their AC is irrelevant.