Actually, it lasts up to 8 seconds. Leg shot is a really good root even with breaking on damage, but not that game-changing when we have 30m gap closers which all have roots, and offensive pulls. Leg shot is the Marks spec sniper's off-switch for Cloak of Pain. Shield Probe is rubbish - you probably do not have 300 bonus healing, in full BM I had around 230, on a good day a sniper might have 250. 250 bonus healing means your probe will absorb about 1.5k, if you spend two (utterly utterly pointlessly wasted) talent points on it it will absorb just over 2k. On a 45 second cooldown. I have no idea where the rumours started that it absorbed 3k+ which is stil bad on a 45sec cooldown..

Like I said, I'm perfectly happy to engage a Mara 1v1 if I start the fight, ie. I seem him ~30m away and I enter/am in cover. If he starts the fight, ie. pops out of force camo or a leap with a root/snare opener, or I just plain blunder around a corner into him, different story.

I'm really tired of people beating this drum. Pre 1.2 the healer tank combo so significantly outweighed the DPS classes in value that DPS builds were sorely under-represented. 1.2 adjusted the damage/healing balance slightly, but significantly enough to make DPS both appealing and viable, and the player base responded accordingly. The resulting rise in representation of DPS is why TTK seems to have dropped so sharply, yet even now when you run against a team with two tanks, 2+ healers and enough organisation for even the most basic guarding and cross healing, they still take forever to kill. Go figure.

Oh, amusing. Surely at least one of the 7 other ACs should give you.. oh I don't know, at least 25% of a problem? You know, since you're all about the balance and all?

Basically. Same as Mara/sent - if they start the fight, you're in trouble, if you start the fight, they're in trouble. Ops/Scound are much easier to escape from though.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ This is how it happens. It doesn't matter what reason someone may have for chosing not to accept when their queue pops but sometimes they just don't enter. Basically, you get 16 people queued the server goes "Thank you very much" devides them up into two teams, and starts the warzone. If two of those 16 people don't enter the WZ, and nobody else is queued, what do you think will happen?

The stats come from the parts, not the "shell", same mods, same stats. The only difference is the damage you get from the barrel. A barrel in a sniper rifle just gives more damage than the same barrel in a Blaster rifle, the same way as an Armouring mod gives more armour value in heavy than in light or medium. When it comes to stats on locked items, it's still just the sum of it's parts.

Expertise actually does the complete opposite of favouring DPS over healing. I'll use your numbers as an example. Expertise 1020 Bonus Dam 20.13% Bonus DR 16.76% Bonus Healing 11.08% Ok - what you need to understand is that the bonus DR, completely cancels the Bonus damage. What am I talking about? Here, we'll pretend you're fighting someone else with 1020 expertise. They hit you with an attack that does 1000 damage, their expertise +20.13% increases that to 1201.3 damage. Your expertise then decreses that by 16.76% - now pay attention, that's 83.24% of 1201.3 which is: 999.96 (1000 damage). So, when you're fighting this guy who has the same expertise as you, neither of you do any extra damage to each other at all. Damage wise it's exactly the same as if you both had 0 expertise and every other stat was the same. But!! You still have +11.08% healing. The only time DPS does "bonus" damage from expertise is when the person doing the damage has more expertise than the person they are attacking, you get bonus healing from expertise at all times.

Ah, ok - I did think it was full CC immunity. I stand corrected.

Straight up, Sniper rifles do more damage than a blaster rifle of the same level and quality. When you're levelling, it doesn't make much difference, go with whatever is an upgrade.

Yeah, it's only snares and roots - no effect on mezzes and stuns. I had it as a "must have" power prior to 1.2 because of the root/cover bug, but when I specced out of it after 1.2 I missed it so much I picked it up again. Very handy being able to drop a root or slow every 45 seconds without having to blow Escape.

Ok, it looks like you interpreted what I wrote to get the opposite of what I meant. I'm saying you should add Explosive Probe to your Lethality rotation, I realise that when I wrote "drop on" it could have come across as me saying leave it out. I also didn't question your hybrid energy management, I was saying that I thought you might be leaving explosive probe out of the Lethality rotation because pure leth can have regen issues on a single target.

True, but this is why I run a Lethality spec with Tool Belt. In the right conditions, I burn a lot of energy in setup and can push myself safely <30, because the lower I go, the more targets I'm lighting up, and the more significantly my Lethal purpose regen will kick in. Ideally, I run out of energy when i run out of targets - which is a win. Frag grenade is my "throw away", it's available every second GCD and when I've got Lethal porpose ticking away at maximum capacity it allows me to turn >10 energy/second regen straight into damage instead of waste when everything else is on cooldown.

He should, like dropping his Exp Probe on the Leth rotation too. His problem is possibly energy regen on a single target when compared to Eng/Leth because he doesn't have Methodology with pure leth (making probe a lot more energy intensive.)

More of a PVP issue (since PVE damage output has to consider agro as well as resource management), but I'll always say that energy you're not spending is damage you're not dealing. No energy problem? Burn more energy.

Lethality does not really deliver decent damage (compared to other specs) until you can Cull, and corrosive grenade wreaks havoc with your CC. You get a lot more mileage from the other specs in the first three tiers of talents. Personally I think Eng is the better leveling spec (PVE wise) because you can just AoE muscle your way through most solo content. The Hybrid spec you hear about is most probably the Eng/Leth hybrid that was quite popular for PVP prior to 1.2. The basic elements of the build are here. Essentially the build revolves around Cull and Exp Probe with Imperial Methodology. There are a lot of variations on the build, most people would take deadly directive over Razor Edge (personally I Shiv everyone who comes within 4m of me, it's great damage for the time and energy), and the two points I put in Vitality Serum in that link might be put in any of the skills in tier 1-2 in Eng (personally I go Tool Belt). Usually if you're going to PVP with Leth you'll get full Lethal Dose too.

No, it does not. Since you refuse to believe me, It will take you <10 minutes to level a Consular to level 3. Run at a group of those flesh-guys, hit Force Wave just before you get to the group, and keep moving "through" them while you're in the air. They will be knocked back from the place you land, not where you started. Lag may mean your mileage may vary, but I play on a server with <30ms pingtimes.

Anecdotal - neither is actually instant there's an animation, then the effect. I've been sent flying by sages and troopers while my pulse goes off uselessly in the air 10m away too. You did know that you can still move during that little animation leap for sorc/sage knockback, right? So you can actually start it before you're in position.

"Our" mezz is one we share with Ops, although we have 30m range and they have 10. You should also know that Sorc's can spec to have an AoE mezz go off when their bubble bursts, they can cast this on every single member of their team, and you can even cancel the bubble-buff yourself to just set it off if you want/need to. Also, the sorc mezz (whirlwind) has no travel time, can be specced to be instant and to turn into a stun for 2 seconds when it breaks on damage, they can also spec to reduce it to 45 seconds cooldown - no question it is in fact the current best mezz in the game when specced up. I'm not talking about any crazy 31/31/31 sorc builds either - some of the old, pre 1.2 favorite Sorc Hybrid builds can still spec for all of the CC I just described above. Talk to me about Flashbang when we can get 8-man premades, but until then it's a decent hail-mary single target CC or an enemy team resolve filling crapshoot (same goes for Backlash, though). Leg shot is indeed amazing, but everyone with a leap has a 30m range root that has no travel time on the same cooldown. Nothing touches that 8 seconds though - as long as nothing touches the guy who's rooted. Don't confuse my point and think I'm trying to say that Snipers are bad, or have no utility. But seriously, actually find out what other classes can do before you come in saying "no way man, we need restrictions because we can do all this awesome stuff!!". Every class can do awesome stuff (truth be told, Mercs do get a bit shafted) especially if they are actually specced for PVP and not just for "Moar Damagez!". I do find it interesting that you seperate marksman as having "less" CC. Sure, they lose a couple of Talent intensive snares, but they have a better Cover pulse, an extra knockback and since they are not reliant on DoTs for their damage Leg shot and Flashbang are better with MM builds, because the MM sniper has a lot more control over when they break.

My take on the choice between Efficient Engineering or Augmented shields is pretty simple: With Efficient Eng you can drop all three probes from a "cold start" over 2 GCDs - in this time you'll regen 18 energy. Without Efficient, you'll spend 60, gain 18 and be on 68 from a 110 start, if you have efficient engineering you'll be on 80. One GCD later the guy with efficient engineering can spend 20 energy and still be on 66 (full regen threshold) the guy without efficient wil drop to 54. Still, your adrenaline probe point is good. As for Augmented Shields, last time I saw numbers printed for Shield Probe was back in February, and at that time it shielded 921 + 2.59*(tech Healing bonus value). When I was full BM I had about 230 tech healing bonus (I haven't checked for a while, but it's maybe 240 now? Giving it the benefit of the doubt we'll even say 250. So, with 250 healing bonus, your shield probe will absorb 1568 damage - I can't stress enough how little a 15% boost to that is worth from a whole talent point. The short version is: Shield Probe is outright garbage and spending a whole talent point to get an increase of less than 250 points absorbtion - nope. I haven't seen any news about a buff to Shield Probe.. so there ya go.

His 10th point is probably heavy shot if it's a PVP build. And I'd have thought you'd have gotten a point in vital regulartors instead of vitality serum, since you have EMP. I'm also curious that you value efficient engineering above Inventive interogation. I guess if I was going to make a 10/31/0 for PVP it would look like this

The point he keeps trying to make though, is that he's not making himself "gimped" for damage by chosing def augs over cunning augs. Firstly, just in full WH without any augs a sniper is quite deadly and will still kill the face off anyone nice and quick, secondly the difference in damage gained between the two aug sets is negligable - you'd need thousands of parses to be able to pick up the difference after the RNG effect on all our attacks. Ultimately he's killing people at the same speed with either Aug set. The difference is 720health, vs 3.75% defence, realise that in full WH you've got 18k+ health and the exchange comes down to chosing between a <4% increase in health, or a 3.75% increase in defence. Accuracy obviously is a factor, but not even close to every attack gets delivered with >100% accuracy once people start min-maxing their gear, and once you're in cover your basline is up 20% against ranged anyway. Even if we assume that you only get a benefit from that defense against 10% of the attacks that come your way (and that's a conservative estimate) it's still +0.375% mitigation against <4% extra health. Put a healer behind me, and mitigation is worth more than extra health. After realising it's probably not clear from the tone of my post (it should be based on the numbers), I should say that I don't think def is worth it. But there would be situations where it is, and the cooldown scenario of Smoke+relic+cover where he's pushing ~55%/75% melee/ranged defense that extra ~4% can make a difference. When the opponent only has a 25% chance to hit with range, chipping 4% further out reduces their potential damage from those hits by almost 20%. Not a bad boost to a "Oh S***!!" button.

I think you guys are coming out of the woodwork now because. A) Eng snipers from Pre 1.2 were good with a less effective tool-bag, after 1.2 their goodies just got better. B) You guys are just so non-squishy and when specced dampners with the shield up you've got crazy Alpha mitigation. C) You've got some really excellent and viable synergies to build on, talent wise. Everytime I look at the Eng tree it calls me away from Leth... not yet though.

Exactly - I don't know what kind of numbers we're talking, because I haven't crunched or tested any yet, but if your net gain in survivability outweighs the gain in damage output that you give up for it, you're looking at a viable build option for some purposes. I do know a single +18 cunning aug barely shifts my real numbers - we're talking an increase of maybe 0.1+ of a percentage point of my total cunning value. How bad would defense have to be for me to not get more real benefit from it?

Or... live as long as possible to prevent a cap and/or until help arrives...? Doing an extra 10% damage and losing an objective doesn't win games, living longer and saving it does though. Of course, the shoe can always be on the other foot and it comes down to not killing defenders fast enough, but when it's a situation where I'm "going to die anyway", staying alive longer counts for more than damage that doesn't result in advancement of objectives.