Concealment is pure single target dps. You won't top the chart unless your team mates are real **** or other operatives. Focus on objectives, particularly off node capping/harassment and running the ball in huttball. You can still be the game changer.

I've actually pressed my face on the keyboard very lightly... had to attempt that about 20 times to not press alt+tab or win+d or shift+r and all the other stuff... And my face is standard issue... If your face can hit only one line of keyboard A to ', ear to ear roll i wonder how big your keyboard is... Unless you're a gnome (really small face?) you're welcome to try and see what happens PS: take your time to get over the feeling of "what the thundering **** am i doing pressing my face on a keyboard?". I sure did...

You should've at the very least placed your face on the keyboard in the described manner to get a more realistic combination. Like so: 2 svcdt6bnmp, cyfr5u76

Makes fun of guy with 1300 expertise Gives unlimited power to 3 people CC breaks root Force speeds away Excellent first ten seconds. I'm afraid i didn't bother with too much of the rest.

Pretty happy with the dps actually... Wouldn't mind if they buffed it but it's not strictly necessary. What i would really love would be for Kolto Probe used on self not to break stealth... Then all would be right in the world as far as concealment is concerned

Breach costs less than Double Strike, and the force on Cascading Debris is consumed with each tick rather than upfront since 3.0. Breaking it early will not give you force problems. Also, using Breach rotationally will not impact the protection building at all. The only thing it might do is make you move Shadow Strike to after Cascading Debris, and more importantly reduce the Particle Acceleration procs. I fear we'll be seeing our dps go down a bit

Hatred DPS numbers in PvE could be better but they are far from bad if you take your time to learn what you're doing. It relies evenly on Force and Melee attacks. Deception can perform good-ish, but you'll have a hard time finding an ops group that wants you for NiM raiding if that is your goal. It is a bit more Melee centered, but you'll still have to use Force attacks frequently. Either way your damage taken will be through the roof until you get the hang of it. Hatred has the self healing to alleviate a bit of that problem. All in all, if you want a Darth Maul experience you should probably go for Carnage Marauder, even though you'll be missing the double-bladed lightsaber...

That would either be the shadow stealthing out briefly and you having autotarget on, or your fingers trolling you by pressing whatever your next target keybind is (default is tab). If this was happening consistently, I'd put my money on the latter.

Volatile substance isn't a tech debuff. It deals tech damage when it goes off but the actual debuff isn't listed as anything. It just sits there waiting for a poison tick or two to blow up.

I have mained the class since 1.2 (when i joined the game). Currently have 2 assassins and a shadow. Basically shelved since a while after 3.0... It's still my favourite class but i only ever play it when i'm bored or i'm on a losing streak i want to get out of. The class used to be lone wolf king with a very high skill floor. Good Assassins were devastating, and bad Assassins didn't even tickle. There were very few average assassins. 3.0 changed that. Deception (which was my go to spec for pvp) has been left in the dirt, and Hatred is over the top. It requires an amazingly terrible player to be terrible with Hatred, and still I have seen plenty of those... I enjoy it but it's no longer the loner guy class. Or rather, it performs so good in group fights that it feels like a total waste to be harassing off nodes and all that, which to me is the charm of a stealth class. I think we were in a very nice spot just before 3.0. Both specs were good in pvp and Deception needed just a small boost in sustained to be viable in pve. That didn't last long though unfortunately Really happy with darkness though

Hey Operatives/Scoundrels o/ I've recently joined the gang and i've played a few solo matches lately with average success (about 1/2 win ratio). I'm not really satisfied with it because i feel responsable about the losses and carried on the wins... I'm still in the experimenting phase, so my utilities are all over the place. Today i tried out +5% dmg redux/+15% speed/-15s debilitate cd, 10m root/heal on shield probe and evasion stealth/heal and damage redux on stim boost and i feel like it's going a bit better but i'm not done tweaking yet. What is your experience in ranked (solo or group)? How do you guys go on about being useful and not feeling like shark bait?

Patch note 2.5.2 Sith Assassin Darkness • At 3 stacks, Harnessed Darkness now grants Dark Protection while Force Lightning is being channeled, regardless of if damage is dealt by it or not. I noticed tanking Sword Squadron Unit 1 for the first time yesterday (usually i take n°2) that Depredating Volts doesn't refresh/build up Dark protection when the unit is shielded. I'm guessing any immune target would cause the same issue. It is still doable to keep up Dark Protection in that fight, but still... Wasn't this supposed to be fixed a while back?

It isn't if you want more sustained damage. But then again, why would you want sustained damage on deception

Don't

Great chance to bring back 3 separate roles forums don't you think?

Don't feed the troll, sir

well one entity kill drops 4 of those, and it can be repeated more than once per lockout so...

What about the Crest of the Dread Master? The tooltip does state something more than the normal dread guard mask does it not?

I will respect that, but since clearly i'm not the first to point that out i'll just say: Think about it. - [i think that operatives/scoundrels are better healers personally. ] If you're talking about DPS operatives off healing better then i'll be pleased to inform you that they no longer have Kolto Injection. All that's left for them is Kolto Probes, Kolto Infusion and shield probe. All of those have what you seem to think is a long cooldown (i know i know kolto probe doesn't have a cooldown... still, it only needs to be refreshed every 15 seconds-ish to be on the safe side and keep 2 stacks up), and the first two are heals over time, while the third is a shield. - On that note, shields such as shield probe and static barrier DO count as heals for the amount of damage they absorb. While your hp doesn't go up, it doesn't go down either. They are actually better than a heal since they can actually stop you from dying and they don't risk over healing you. - Unnatural preservation is definitely 100% OFF the global cooldown. - I will leave alacrity talk to some other math guy if he ever shows up. Let's just leave it at personal preference until he comes. - Not quite sure why you would mention strike and thrash... I trust you know they are only to be used for trolling purposes? - You are very right about Storm Brewing. Increases crir chance of force storm by 15%, i completely missed that. Reverberating force however increases surge (critical damage is surge), not crit chance. - Shock doesn't do good damage. It really doesn't. 3.5 -4k crit is terrible. It's not much less than lightning BOLT (terminology here... lightning sorcs should remove lightning strike from the quickbar, or put it somewhere remote for safe keeping in case they respec often). Bolt however procs a whole lot of things that makes everyone elses life harder. Maybe chained shock would make it worth it, since it has a higher proc rate and higher damage than forked lightning, but you would be giving up a precious utility point and put at risk the various procs you get from the other abilities. - 1.5 to 2.5? Are you charging up chain lightning? oh my... The only two "charge up" abilities as far as damage goes are thunkdering blast and crushing darkness at 1.4 seconds actually. Storm is a channel and I'm not counting bolt, because if you have to charge it up, you can afford to do it (no one is hitting you). If you can't charge it, it becomes instant (someone just hit you and proc'd it). Sorcs are far from stationary. Force mobility affects your main ability that should be used on cooldown and hits the hardest. You are greatly underestimating its value. - As for the crit and surge itemization, you said [to balance out between surge and critical rating]. I read that as "swap one for the other until you find the sweet spot". That is impossible to do precisely because there are enhancements with both crit and surge. The balance for dps/healers happens between crit and power and between surge and alacrity (and accuracy for pve dps).

Okay well... Not saying it's your case but from my own personal experience, if a sorc force speeds backwards he is almost certainly a keyboard turner, which for a stealther that knows what he's doing with a good connection is a free kill, especially if the sorc standing far away from the fray (as he should be). As for mistakes well... - You should never find yourself in the situation of having to use consumption - Don't shock. Just don't do it. Shock procs nothing, deals less damage and costs more force than all other instants. Use it if your target has 1k health left and you don't have any other instant ability available and you're afraid he might be healed. That's really it, especially since you don't even mention picking up chain shock (rightly so). - There are actually many instant abilities. The only things you have to stand still to get off are crushing darkness, force storm and occasionally lightning bolt and dark heal (if you have to charge up lightning bolt, you can afford to stand still). That is a terrific amount of mobility for a ranged class with so much damage potential. - You mention healing capability, first by saying it's awesome in one little sentence [capability to be extreme healers], filler text about roots and slows (nothing to say there) and then you go ahead and describe why healing sucks in the next paragraph [the class has very few filling healing abilities... snipsnip]. Sorc offhealing is great. Unnatural preservation is on a relatively short cooldown considering it's free, powerful, instant and off GCD. Resurgence is quite... meh. Dark heal on the other hand is pretty good: Not at all cost efficent, but since force and force regeneration are a non issue, healing up becomes perfectly doable (during downtime). No mention of static barrier, which is effectively a 7k-8k heal even without Corrupted Barriers. Compared to the other two healing classes, offhealing is beast on sorcerers. - Gearing wise, endurance should not be a focus at all. Don't even mention it. It comes inevitably with all gear but you should not even glance it's way when gearing up. You greatly underestimate the value of alacrity. Alacrity doesn't just make the GCD faster. It speeds up your DoTs and it reduces cooldowns. You don't mention accuracy (which should be 0 for pvp by the way). That means you run with all surge enhancements? You're in the DR curve deep if that's the case. Nothing about crit, except [another approach is to balance out between surge and critical rating.]. You cannot "balance out" crit and surge, because they come in different slots in the enhancements (read as:you cannot swap crit for surge) - Speaking of crit, you seem to mention this a few times but there are exactly 0 passive crit chance boosts. Lightning sorcs only have an autocrit on Thundering blast on targets affected by affliction and then there's Recklessness, which you don't mention at all. There is a passive 30% surge boost on 4 abilities (CD, CL, TB, LF). - I won't get much into utilities, they vary much depending on map and preferences, but if there is one "must take", i'd say it's Force Mobility. Thundering blast is your main ability. - I actually giggled at [i just pumped out 12.5K damage within 5 seconds.]. Assuming your target has affliction up, thundering blast deals 9k damage and an affliction tick is 1k (let's be generous). Also, if you're doing it well chain lightning will have proc'd and it's instant. 4k non crit right there. That's at least 15k in 1.5 seconds. - Advice on melee is kind of lacking... You assume it'll be a 1 on 1 with a generic class. Every class is kited in a different way, and based on what you observed the enemy do. No point in kiting a powertech if you know he has HO and pull ready to be used for instance, or a jugg if he just walked up to you (especially since you don't take emersion). You have to survive until your resolve bar is up or barrier for their onslaught. it really helps if you know the class you're up against. I'm sure there's more. I pvp on sorc only occasionally and these are the things i spotted in a half-rush.

wot wot Gonna need clarification on that. Do you like... hit force speed and then the S key? As in actually force speed backwards?

Only depredating volts replacing force lightning, and conspirators cloak having a fixed timer now. And recklessness now grants extra absorption. Personally i'm still using it as an offensive cooldown anyway. Also, you can now safely open with crushing darkness for extra threat. If you have the old 4 piece set bonus, KEEP IT!. 4pc and 6pc of the new one are much worse for pve

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=616779 http://dulfy.net/2014/01/06/swtor-darkness-assassin-tanking-class-guide/ You didn't look very well did you

Oh i missed the math then ^_^ haven't been around the forums lately. I actually just popped in to ask what others thought about this precise issue and stumbled upon this thread. Anyway, i was referring to HM in my previous post. Dark ward is no problem at all, except the Underlurker which i forgot about Just don't have the assassin tank the adds. No tank swap is actually required... This of course if you're not running double assassins

What we're looking at is: +5% shield chance, approximately +1%(m/r) DR and +2%(i/e) DR _vs_ +76 endurance +72 willpower, 3 stacks and 3 seconds of DW, lower cooldown on taunts. Haven't done any maths about endurance vs defensive stats, but i have a feeling the old 4pc is better. The only fights where you consume 15 stacks in less than 15 seconds i can think of are Sparky (dog sitting duty), Bulo (pirate duty) and Revanite Commanders (the whole fight is an extended trash pack anyway except for final phase). Personally, i main tank Sparky, Jugg companion takes pirates and lol @ commanders. Lower CD on taunts? Meh... That sounds a lot like a pvp thing I will stick to dread master set bonus for this gear tier until proven wrong, i feel like suggesting others to do the same