This is just theory crafting, but with the massive presence of operative healers, the mando healers e-net could be some kind of game changer. Just consider you force guard of the healer, fear, e- net the operative and hard switch on him. Seems pretty hard to counter to me.

Genuinely people, plz stop doing that. 100,0000 Damage Per Second ? As I said you probably solo DF and DP NiM, next to one shotting everything in pvp. When you mean your total damage done, it is 100k damage. When you mean your DPS find, but be care full with the 'k', 1.5k dps in an arena or wz ist pretty good, 2k is really good, 2.5k is the land of superb smashers (pre nerf), 3k I have never heard anybody doing that much in full wz or arena, 3.5k is only definitely only possible in PvE. @Boba: Afaik Snave hasn't done much yolo like in the last 4 months, most of the ranked was team ranked on the TRE. And while really love the server, it is not really competitive the ranked division. It is still absolute worthwhile seeing what he does. But i am not sure if that is the help the OP's needs. @OP the devs basically said, go heals in reply to the Operative questions when it comes to ranked PvP. The two dps spec, while definitely not being as bad as they were like a year ago, still need some suriviability love in order to totally viable. Every sense person focuses the Operative, since well they are squishy. Since I don't do yolo, and wouldnt even consider bringing my scoundrel or operative into solo ranked ever, I can not really help you on that front.

About the Stealther capping thing especially in CW: The primary point of stealth dps play is, to create uncertainty in the enemy defense. They can be certain with how many they have to defend a node not under pressure, drawing enemies away from the main fight. And yes the off node is worse to hold than mid, but simply killing the node guard and taking is changes the dynamics drastically. The enemy team now quite some pressure to get mid quickly and a decent operative or assassin, can hold on without support against 2-3 inc for quite some time. All this already give your team some edge ticks. It exposes weakness in their communication and can immediately punich. And it makes lives for healer a lot harder, since healers usually prefer a stationary death match to running all over the place to nodes. I tend not to sap cap anymore, at least when i can say with a reasonable amount of certainty that it is a 1v1. The reason for that is that as stealth dps you use most of your advantage in a 1v1 situation once you unstealth. You might get the node with a sap cap, but the node guard is still there, most likely with full resolve or close to it. If he now manage kill you, well the cap was totally in vain. Most of the time it is the better idea (unless it is a tank) to burst him down and then cap, also because it makes it hard to call incommings (you have plenty of time to do that while being sapped). Addition Sorc and PT can still stop you from capping. Point is a well played stealth dps, usually is a good asset to your team in objective wise, even if hardly he hard does the damage than those engaging in the main fight.

E-Net also keeps warriors from leaping, marauders from camoing, sorcs from bubbleing and sins from stealthing and phase walking. It is generally a royal pain in the ***, but it is that for most of the classes not just operatives. As DPS operative how often could you utilize the old damage from orbital strike... i miss it though but almost exclusively as a healer, hidden strike got a flat damage buff, it is the talent jarring strike that was changed and the knockdown was removed. At this point (the change is live for more than 3 months now), there is no point of complaining anymore (and guess nobody really wanted that change), since they even said it is not comming back. You can still play the class and you can play it successfully without the knock down. Cover nerfs was uncalled for, since i dont really remember anyone complaining about it. And it was only 1-2% of the operative population that effectively used cover in heals to maximum effect. Concealment and lethality in a very bad way had to pay for healz being too stronk.( still the nerf did nothing about medicine still being the best pvp heals spec in game, by quite a margin). While there have been these nerfs, (and again they do hurt), for once there have been plenty of buffs as well especially for concealment, some of them rather pointless as the one to overload shot, others the massive upped the damage potential. The play style has changed a little bit, but i think overall you say concealment now is in a better place then pre 2.0. And it seems we entered a periode of more frequent class balance changes. I don't think operative should behave like mercs and sorcs did and do (aka self proclaimed most nerfed classes in game). We are far from being FOTM, but the situation is by far not as terrible as some people make it.

its all about the 1v1

/hug and yeah ^this

Ranting is fine with me... and yeah there a lot of things wrong with the class, but in a way we have to be reasonable as well (not that i am saying you are not). I dont think having burst and sustained does necessarily exclude each other.... carnage/combat actually has both, one of the burstiest specs in game, but still a really good sustained for that. and i think the current state of concealment is close to that. I think our rotation just became more spammy (and easier), but i think we can fairly say the burst potential despite still being hardly controllable, is higher than it was pre 2.6. For PvE (which i havent done in any remotely serious sense in like 5 months), the situation is like similar to a marauder. You cant just really do all the end game pve content with just one spec. Some fights prefer Anni (tank and span), some carnage (burn stuff quickly) and some even call for rage ( AoE Adds down). When I was still doing PvE there was just one thing blatantly obvious, some fight prefer lethality and some are classical concealment fight, (yes strangely i was allowed to DPS). Those fights with many adds where you eventualy have to tank some (yes that happens) there is no way concealment would work. Tank and Spank is concealment land for sure. And yeah this game doesnt really have many melee friendly fights, but as you said that affects all melee... actually vanguards and operative a bit less, then say assassins, maras and juggs, since we have some pseudo range to still have some up time. I see what you mean, but i think the burst is still there (even better than it used to be for a long time), but the class feels really different now. We now have a gap closer that can actually be used without screwing up your energy management.. Is the situation fine, no absolutely it is not, but i dont think it is sensible to make is sound worse than it is.

Seriously Vengence is one of the easiest spec in game now, it is borderline boring, and in its state now one of the most forgiving spec the game has. Smash never really was rocket science, so dont get the point about juggs. Assassins well yeah, there is some juice to deception rotationally, but you can get the hang of the basics quickly and get way better results compared to concealment. Concealment is relatively boring rotationally now, but the thrill always came from trying to stay alive, since its defense are still underwelming. As in the state of the game it is easier to get better results on juggs and assassin compared to dps operative. The Eximen was on Pot5 as well, but it doesnt matter, he is generally considered good, despite having a kind of interesting personality. Now the last part. This Thread is about the removal of the KD... and again nobody playing the class wanted that to happen (at least not in his sane mind)... but when you speak about what now is ranked the KD is about the most useless thing you can imagine. For hard switches it only filled unnecessary resolve and had no additional benefit. If the concealment operative wasnt immediately burnt we would actually be quite useful in there, the 30s CD on hard stun, the possibilty to cleanse operative flashs and yeah quite some serious burst, while still offering good sustained damage (a rare combination in this game). If the survivability wasnt that meh, we could have a solid spot in group ranked.... but ranked is dead anyway. @Haystak I think atm there are more DPS scoundrel and operative in game since a long time. The class is still no where it should be. But we are clearly no longer worst in slot. I know you edited your post but just one thing. The assassin 10k mauls arent as frequent as they are often made on this forum. Even with the force crits buffing melee crits it only happens once and so often. Assassin have more control over their burst, sure, but this effectively has and a half minute cooldown and it can completely go wrong. Sure Deception is the better PvP spec, but i dont think there is a point in focusing on assassins too much. Assassin game play is quite dissimilar concealments if you look at it. And they have quite different strength and weaknesses. Our Burst is more dependent on RNG and we are more dependent on force/tech attacks (while assassin have quite some stuff that is melee), but the main is remains that we just melt too easily.

with smart cc and controled burst you might still get the 2 healer + tank combo (granted with a pure PuG group and probably non of those people one would call outstanding this still not gonna happen).... but seriously who does run a premade with 2 healers and a tank ... not only is it super ineffective... it is outright idiotic

There hardly was anyone playing operative as concealment, finding that the 2.7 change to jarring strike was a good idea, but it doesn't make the spec useless. In fact the 2.6 brought laceration into play and made us less reliant on the opener. What Adovir said you can kill any class, (maybe not any player, but there arent so many demi gods left, that play their classes to max potential anyway) if you do it right, stun locking doesnt work anymore, but the changes to exfiltrate finally gave us a reliable gap closer and kiting tool, energy management got way easier and we even got some defensive buffs in the last patch, plus they added an interrupt to jarring strike, to give it a bit more utility again. Yes, it plays differently now, but it is possible to adapt and being capable of doing an operatives job. And yes the class is still rather at the top, but heck it has always been like that. And yes the removal of an iconic effect hurts but in same ways they are in a much better place than they were around this time last year. You said something about the snipers knockback root.... if that troubles you as an operative it is l2p or better l2cleanse&roll. Snipers are still easy prey for a mildly skilled concealment operative. Btw on the bright side, the removal of the knowdown made withbarring a non issue, which helps a lot when you are attacking with another stealher. And you would believe how many people use their breaker on the root

You have already been answered, but i just like to point it out again. operative healing doesnt get any good until the 30s, and you exactly name the reason... energy management. I think the best level spec for the lower brackets is concealment (played my operative a concealment only for such a long time till i respecced heals at some point, and my scoundrel that was primiarly intended to be a healer, as scrapper till about 32 and then switch sawbones). The new talents that come with 2.0 are what makes the medicine ridiculous and really easy. So when you reach mid 40s you will definitely see, that energy management becomes a non issue and that you hardly have to cast anything. So it is a massive change compared to the lower levels.

if you are really pull 250-380k dps you are a demi god and probably solo NiM bosses in PvE. Ok so more seriously leaving the "k" out, and taking what you probably meant 250-380 dps is pretty low even for carnage. And it is possible to do signicantly more. Top carnage players can consistantly beat 1k dps (i am not one of them, but managed that quite a few times as well). A common theme to me is that there is hardly any really good maras and sents left, that would explain why hardly see any other mara doing much more. And also what Tanvir said. Carnage's strength is the massive relatively controllable burst, it is killing maschine spec and not a fluff your numbers spec. Lethality and Madness pull the massive numbers, you kill stuff. If you run parsec you might ee how crazy this burst can be, it is even hard for an operative to heal through that.. EDIT... stupid me. Making fun of him using the 'k' incorrectly and then doing it myself... ;(

both carnage and rage have root breakers... I was one of the few that said, that uncleansable dots and /or more damage wouldnt fix anni for pvp, it needs a root breakers as well and some better means to stay on target....

we are not talking about external stream or something. You can stream your stuff on twich and people can decide to watch it or not.... that is already possible. The thing is it is unlikely and not so easy to implement that in game... especially (and that was my main point) for BW, given their track record.

Yeah after seeing Warriors and Spellsingers in action, I surprisingly don't think SWTOR class balance is that bad. they have some serious issue over at wildstar, especially since pvp and especially the better is tied to ranking. Meaning that only when you above a ranking threshold you can buy the better pvp gear. Unlike swtor gear means quite a lot there. So you get people win trading to get their rankings boosted, they get the gear (to do that they farm non ranked) and then tank their rating down, to have easy wins or boost friends up. So basically competitive pvp end up being non competitive. When you are leveling through pvp, you will rage a lot because a lot your team mates a literally brain dead.... they are bots. With only 8 abilities to be actively used, and so much AoE flying around, you can usually only have like 2-3 dps abilities on the bar the rest is for cc breakers, escapes, cc or heals. This has the consequence that game is pretty spammy (you spam like one or two abilities most of the time). The game has more CC than SWTOR, but at some point everybody tends to spec into tons of Interrupt armor... making CC useless again. So it is pure derp fest, with no so much strategy being involved. I gave it a bit more than one month, and tried to get warm with it. I have not completely given up, but seriously needed a break.

you only get the open right if you use resilience exactly after shadow strike (back stab is operative), The stun after spinning kick only lasts 2s. using resilience early is only good option against a combat sent, for the other two you might wanna save to either cleanse the dots from watchman or avoid the inevitable smash. Either way if you just open on a non brain dead sent like this, it is very likely that he is spamming camo already on the knock down, ruining the sweet little rotation you posted straight away. Also blindly usesing low slash against a class with two massive white damage blockers can be lethal... for the shadow. Imagine you wanna low slash and just got pacified, no mez, no shadow strike proc and no positioning advantage, instead you got rooted and PS.... if you dont have deflection or your hard stun up against combat this could really be your last seconds. When you low slash in a 1v1 you might wanna use mind crush as well to get maximum burst out. Anyway all your secenarios involve him not popping any CDs, not using grenade (which I do quite a lot when playing sentinel and if it is only to interrupt or striking a sniper out of cover) and you assume it is a nub playing combat.

I do think that this a good idea and especially if we still have an alive ranked community this would be absolute awesome, like in terms of an e-sports aspect. I doubt you will ever see it happen though, since despite initially sounds easy to do it, there are some problems involved, that arent easily overcome. PoV, I am not even sure they the possibility to set camera to get neutral perspective. Even when Arenas were on the PTS before 2.4 hit and the official stream broadcasted some matches, they used live footage of a stream, so it was his perspective. I don't know if a non player depended is supported for live use ( they surely have the possibily for developmental purposes.) Knowing other aspects of the game, even they such a feature, it probably would be very chunky in live (game engine sadly isnt the best). Additionally even if that would be easy, the 8v8 maps are big. One non movable camera would no be enough to see what is happening in that match. And again since the engine isnt great, i doubt it could handle placing many movable cameras to get an entertaining perspective. Talking of real sports for a second, there is quite some effort necessary to get sport broadcasting to work and make it entertaining. BW is not renown for their efforts towards the PVP community, just saying. So probably the easiest solution is the only practically possible, take some players PoV. But whom to take? Or take multiple, then how is it decided what is currently visible? I took just one point basically and a lot of difficult questions and a lot additional requirements arise, which with the track record of the devs simply makes this very unlikely.

Usually Vodrin is spot on... but i think I remembered that as well... the first time i played smash it was just ridiculouslly OP especially because of UR/GBTF Agree about the squishiness, although there classes that were worse off still. I think nobody ever denied dps juggs needed better CDs. Well specced my jugg vengeance the first time at around april this year, so i am not a proper judge on all the time. But RNG is always a factor that makes a class harder i would say, even if vengeance never really was hard. but now it is just like ridiculously easy in comparison with both mara spec (smash still is brain dead), and that is the point. when you switch from most of the other classes to mara/sent you get instantly hit that you have to work a bit harder to get the job done. If you take the effort it is really rewarding, and the class is quite strong, but it takes a bit more (not terribly much though) to get there. I just have this impression of people reroll the class and think it is proper faceroll, which it isnt if dont know what you doing.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!! That's I i gonna quit this game for WS..... Damn I already did this and came back. Screwed

+ rage, focus had the hp penality reduced (effectively only 1/4 hp lost on activation). If a smasher was acompanied by a decent pocket healer, he would never die and smash the whole enemy team to death.... it was OP as **** and game breaking. For the spec the nerf was totally warrented, the other two spec were at least to my knowledge never really seen as OP at that point and UR/GBTF, was nice to have but not really game breaking. In my mind just removing the the talent from the focus/rage tree would have been enough of an nerf. His main is a shadow, and he is pretty good on it. But you are right he doesnt have a mara... he has a sentinel. And although playing the wrong spec most of the time (focus ) , i would say he is quite on good on it as well. And compared to all other classes sentinels have good CDs (GBTF is kind of crappy now) but the rest if used smartly can make you pretty damn tanky. Started replaying earlier this week and yes my main is a combat sentinel. If you dont get spam CCed (which happens less since people probably forgot how to play against sentinels a bit), and you pop your stuff at the right time, you still last decent while even without a healer topping you up. Yet if you are hard stunned you are as squishy as an operative. Well it is a down side, but seriously sents have some of the best CDs in game. Pacify and Camo pure gold in so many situations. All this QQ Marauders are so bad threads, say only one thing to me. People rerolled Mara because it was an ez mode pwn class, after they player maybe merc or sorc and than they suddenly realized that it is not as easy as they thought. It strikes me that most of the QQ came up after the smash nerf. So that emphazised my impression, since Smash really was too easy for the rewards and the other two tree require more attention to what you are actually doing (and what other are doing and all that stuff). Sure the class has issues and can be frustrating at times, and there definitely might be a necessity for QoL changes, but it is no single way underpowered. If you think it is, sorry it is L2P. What is the case, is that other class became easier to play in recent patches, vengeance jugg is a great example for this. There was a time nobody played Vengeance except those that played it at launch and stuck with it, because they like the special dynamics and tools it has to offer. Leaving ED out of the picture for a moment, in successive patches this year, the RNG was remove, an addition root was added, a ravage CD recet.... the spec became really easy to play (it used to be one of the more challenging spec in game.... but people could always do well with it). It is currently very forgiving to play and to get you damage done (no more rng and stuffs) and the iconic vengeance ability makes you hard to counter (one can also mention weapon damage increase in 2.7 vengeance massively benefited from that)....add ED, it becomes super easy. Sorcs got all there RNG removed in the DPS trees and for Madness the damage of FL was buff recently. So even worst madness sorc on the world can get some freaking damage tab dotting and lightning spamming. now madness on assassin (havent played it ever so cant judge it), became quite a lot easier as well. Mercs got some perks and and easy pyro pt got his game buffed. Even concealment got it damage and defenses buff and is compared how it played last year at this time much easier. Basically every other class has throughout like the last 8-10 months become a lot more forgiving and almost all got damage buffs as well (one way or the other), some got more survivability. So i would argue switch from any other class atm to mara/sent might give you the impression it is underpowered in comparison. The reality is it just has very different play style to most class, and takes a longer time to be any good with it (well unless smash).

2) you can actually use the build in focus target and acquire focus target's target function, so only one guy in your team has to manually switch. the situation you described sounded like you had some agreed strategy from the start, so pick one of your team to be your "target caller" (they died out a bit with the dead of 8v8 ranked), you all put this person on focus target. The fight starts he pick the target you all should attack, you hit your aquire focus target's target keybind. derp derp derp sorc pop bubble, your caller switch to secondary target, again aquire focus target's target... derp, derp derp, etc ... etc, etc This has the advantage that actually one one person has to get the new target by either clicking on the icons the, the player or tab targeting. The focus target mechanic is quite powerful and i would say not so many people actually use it.

I think Juggs have enough tools to do some peeling for healers even as a dps and it surely does help you team. So yeah you should do it. And ofc you should use the taunts. If you play huttball you stance dance to guard a ball carrier. This is the kind of second job, Juggs can fullfill and should. DPS spec of classes with tanking trees, should use their taunts, stance dancing isnt really viable with assassins (and guarding somebody considering the class is really squishy without tanking gear and a tanking build isn't such a great idea), and a bit harder on pts compared to juggs, PTs can peel quite well with the pull, so that is ani option as well. with the heals it a sometimes tough. Madness sorcs can often get into tight force management situations, so off healing other team mates can be something that you dont get to do very often. But the healing your self definitely goes if you play it smart. DPS ops are the worst off healers in game, so only the occasional self heal with be possible. The base line heal is just too expensive and too inefficient considering the energy management to be use on others. Mercs quite decent off healer and that AoE can be used on team mates rather easily. But for all of them goes if you have the resources and you see a team member struggling it is wise to get a heal of to help him. these classes have the extra utility from tanking/healing tree, they are quite useful and one should use them.

when did DF Scoundrel get nerfed.... they were pretty much always not really optimal for pvp, despite pulling massive numbers, but not killing a thing? But yes I think if I don't play it for fun and giggle sometimes, I rarely see one. And the other spec werent nerfed to my knowledge either, it is just others got buffed. Lightning Sorc was in a decent place with 8v8 ranked (people didnt play madness back then because the lack of burst), but with the changes to madness it is simply more attractive or the smash hybrid. There still some to be some rage/focus players around but clearly not as much as pre nerf. Only logical the spec was a bit too much back then, so everybody and his mom played it, for doing massive damage easily. This ez mode high reward effect now is largely gone.

That doesn't make sense. If somebody does like arenas but did like RWZs, there is no way to force him to do that, he would be more likely to leave the game. And that is what basically happened. Some people tried arenas on the PTS which was up a like one or two weeks after the announcement, didn't like them -> unsub. Despite all its flaws and the problems of getting the people together to do it, ranked 8v8 was what made the backbone of what you can call PvP community. Especially since you need 16 people to do it, it required a lot of organization and coordination. In other words you needed guilds, with leaders, schedules, proper team recruitment, team tactics and practice. Proper PvP guilds were a must have and the whole point of of being in a pvp guild was RWZs, it was basically organized like PvE guilds organize their raids. And guilds needed interact with other guilds to set dates for the matches. The whole social dimension was part of it, thats what drove the community aspect. Well known players in this game's community like Snave, who for most of the time was not part of his guilds ranked team (due to being a concealment operative), still contributed massively to the ranked community and ofc his guild. You don't need pvp guilds for arenas, although with current decline in the population you probably still need to organize the matches to get pops at all. And it is not even surprising that much that many of the bigger names quickly disbanded after the announcement as there was no point in being in a guild anymore. One other thing, I can only speak for TRE and TOFN but after transfers it was popping quite heavily on both servers (and yes TRE is a PvE server), it only really died when the removal was announced. The loss of a lot of dedicated pvper also hardly can be denied. It is funny we did arena kickballs a while ago (since ofc no pops) and we got quite a lot of people on to do it. And yes it was great fun. But our server did the same thing like a year ago, with about 6 times the participation on the RWZ format. I think this says something, and also that the kickball format died after a few weeks with arena completely. And finally, I think PvP in this game would be in a much better state than it is now, if 8v8 never was removed. Arenas are fun and i think nobody was against their introduction and some people preferred them to RWZs. And I see no reason why they couldnt have coexisted. Waiting till all people are there for your RWZ matches... lets do some arenas to get ready, seems like something people would do. Same as the first people start going to bed and you cant backfill your full premade. Stuff like this. With PvP guilds still in place and present in the amount they had pre 2.4, i think you might even have a high arena population.

2.4 start of arenas remove of 8v8 ranked went live in the beginning of october last year. It was announce at the beginning of august. And there has been quite some vocal protest against it, both on these forum and other media. There never was an official response to that.... and yeah most ranked players just quit the game after that. BW even stated in their initial announcement that 8v8 might return at some point later, which Musco's FAQ then effectively ruled out.