Viable, but not overpowered in solo ranked. Hilariously unkillable demon-gods in regs if well played.

Sorry my post is all twisted around bro, people were typing walls of text faster then i could keep up. Also, dude is using paradox a dozen times in a single paragraph, and *my* post is hard to read? This one, troll or no, I really hope continues to get fed. 11/10.

Uhhhhh... Let me just push my jaw closed before I drool all over my keyboard and figure out where to start here. No. No please do not spread corrosive dart before starting single target damage. I'm going to skip right over the fact that as the best solo class in the game, you really ought to be guarding, or taking their node, capping their door, responding to calls, etc. We'll assume someone else is doing that, and you plan on spending the whole game in mid. What you're doing is generally referred to as "fluff damage". This is damage that, although it makes your numbers bigger, doesn't really accomplish much in the fight. Most weak AOE and dots fit into this category. Your numbers go up, but your damage is easily soaked up by aoe heals. Now, you may be looking at sorcerers, hatred sins, lethality and thinking "their fluff damage isn't useless, why is mine?". The difference is that their fluff is rotational. They do not *lose* anything spreading their damage around. Deathfield spreads their dots, but will be used anyway, chain lightning is an AOE that hits a single target hard as well, and the fact that corrosive grenade hits the two people next to the operative's primary target is just, well, fluff. Concealment does not work like this. You can stick on a single target, *or* spread corrosive dart. So what *should* you be doing? In the seven GCDs it takes you to spread your dot, there's a good chance I've already killed someone. Or I'm glued to a healer, and I guarantee forcing him to single target heal himself and kite, as opposed to freecast, is helping the team more then having 7 corrosive darts ticking. Yes, being in the thick of things, you will take more damage. You will also die more. You survive longer playing the way you do because no one cares about the concealment operative skirting around the edges of the fight. They care about the operative repeatedly murdering their healer, or their squishy ranged dps. Regarding opening from stealth. Is it as big a deal as when we still had hidden strike? No. Is it still good? Yes. Opening from stealth allows you to sap a target before you open, gets you an extra 1-2k damage on backstab, and most importantly a free tactical advantage, otherwise you *will* be starved for TA during your rotation. It also surprises people, and inexperienced players will often forget to pop a defensive until it's too late. (Or equally good, panic and pop *all* defensives at the same time). TLDR: Dead squishy > corrosive dart spam You should probably look up cortex. Same with intelligible. The biggest word is not necessarily the best word to use, and some of them are about as wrong as your operative play. Edit: damnit someone beat me to most of this. RIP me. Edit2: If this is a troll, and I really hope it is, then I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favorite troll on the Citadel. Edit3: For the love of god man, look up intelligible, read the definition, and then use intelligent instead. Second time now. Looks like another point for cortex as well.

Guys, the example is someone *who didn't even get into bronze*. Bronze. The cutoff for that is what, like 1100 or something? 1200? So yea, if you want the top tier reward as someone who managed to 0-10 their placement matches, you're going to have to work for it.

I wouldn't expect to notice a difference when min/maxing your gear. The question is whether the difference you don't notice is worth it.

Floplag is more or less correct talking about playing to win, against playing to number farm. However, one thing to remember is that if no one caps the first door, the game is decided on kills. If you repeatedly stop the cap but die 15 times to do so, there's a good change your team will lose anyway. If you're on a pure melee class there's not much you can do about this, but if your class has a ranged option I'll try to fight from behind one of the pylons, out of line-of-sight of most of the enemy team, but still able to stop caps from range. If people are just angry cause their dps is higher then your dps, eh, I'll take the win over dps any day.

No, you cannot activate sleep dart on a target in combat. You *can* activate sleep dart on a target out of combat, and then have that target put himself in combat during the dart's travel time, but that doesn't seem to be what happened to you. If the operative was the last one alive from the enemies you were engaging, and he combat stealthed, that would drop you (and the rest of your team) from combat regardless of hots. Otherwise I'd just put it down to weird bug.

Except it's eight.

A utility point. Nice to see someone understand the massive power difference between off-gcd defensives and abilities like sorc barrier that prevent damage output while active. As much as I hate the idea of class homogenization, it cracks me up that just straight up replacing Kolto Overload with something similar to Sorc barrier would probably instantly fix mercs solo queue woes. But since that's unlikely to happen, your comments on chaff flares are probably a more likely avenue for buffs. I totally agree and would love to see them change IO to 100% resist 4/5s duration, and you could even do a similar thing with Arsenal. Increase the number of absorbs to say 8, reduce duration to 4-5s. Keeps them strong against focus by multiple people, but not overpowered in a 1v1 scenario.

If playing on a US server isnt an issue, Bastion and Harbinger both have good Q times.

I guess we'll see how it plays out, but this is in my opinion an awful, awful change. Spending the entire game tab-targeting through people in mid stopping each cap individually is going to be super fun. Ditto for trying to stop 3-4 people from capping simultaneously in Ancient Hypergate. This change will not make the number farmers any more likely to stop caps, it will only force the people who do pay attention to spend even more time doing it.

Bastion you can usually expect the capper to stay and guard the node, though I've noticed in Novare especially people often zerg mid with 8 rather then sending a guard. I think occasionally people mistake a guard who goes for the node and gets globaled for no one having gone at all.

I'm hardly "hung-up" on 1000%, the opening post clearly states that as the increase, and later mentions getting 40% health in under a second. So what, about 12k hps or higher? Look, I'm not anti-merc. They need some changes. But if mercs continuously ask for ridiculous, crazy buffs, they're going to get nothing. If mercs want Kolto Overload to be able to reliably stand up to focus from multiple players, they're probably going to have to accept a nerf somewhere else, because the 8 second duration will be very, very strong in smaller fights.

Right, so take this with a grain of salt, but... L60 Sorc healer, 2/3 174 PvP gear 1/3 168 PvP gear. Slight min/max towards power. All buffs applied plus L55 reusable resolve stim. NO 10% bubble utility. Tested on guild flagship, so no bolster of any kind. No proc relics running during testing. Pre-patch absorb: 5692 Post-patch absorb: 5802 Net change: +110 lololol

Lightning sorc is pretty mobile these days, could also give Powertechs a try, lot of 10m range options.

Over an obscenely long amount of time... sure, I guess?

Stealth classes don't do it because being expected to guard pylon every game while everyone else farms mid is boring. Other classes don't do it because signing up to sit on a node for 10 minutes until a class specifically designed for 1v1s comes along and kills you is boring *and* you get blamed by your team for costing them the game.

You're not going to get the recognition you deserve for this gem.

Combat stealth is indeed a more effective way to drop focus, I compared Kolto Overload to Undying because you can attack for the full duration of both cooldowns. Earlier in the thread someone mentioned making dps abilities "break" the healing on Kolto Overload, which could also work. But while I'd like to see mercs be equally viable as much as the next guy, asking for a 1000% increase on healing, with no trade-off, will never happen.

Since when has a 1000% increase in anything been a "small change". Bioware could definitely up the hps of Kolto Overload. In return they would probably have to shorten the duration. If mercs want an anti-focus cooldown of similar effectiveness to a marauder's undying rage, you have to remember undying rage has a base duration of only 4s.

Do people seriously think we're an all-girl guild? Not sure what any of this has to do with hacking. Do I need to see something before I believe it? Of course not. But if I walk through a park three times a day and never see any litter, you're going to have a very hard time convincing me it's a dirty park. Maybe every once in awhile someone tosses a bottle on the ground that I don't see, but it doesn't meaningfully effect my, or anyone else's, time in the park. There's plenty of "anecdotal evidence", there's very, very few videos. People call hacks all the time, in-game, on the forums. They accuse people of critting too much, stunning too long, being immune to cc, damage, not taking enough damage, moving too fast, pretty much anything you can think of. Yet in all this, the only actual evidence is a couple videos of hilariously obvious speed hacks. After being called a hacker myself maybe a couple dozen times, my skepticism is rather high. I didn't mean to imply that the person with the most /played is always right, merely that with quite a lot of time spent in swtor pvp, I consider myself rather well-equipped to have an opinion on pvp hacking. If you've seen multiple cases of hacking in warzones then I suppose we'll just have to disagree. Gratz on having a ton of creds I guess.

This, pretty much. lol. For so many reasons.

Try actually reading my post. In the last section I mention how sometimes this game just sucks at properly displaying player positions, especially after leaps, pulls, and rolls. This is not some sort of hack. This is swtor, and its crappy engine. Also, after over 100 days /played, the vast majority in PvP, if I haven't seen it then yeah I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist. Have I seen weird stuff? Of course, but in the overwhelmingly vast majority of cases it can be explained by a class ability, game bug, or just swtor's general oddness with position skills. The game sometimes messes up especially when it involves potential elevation change. Let me give you an example. In Civil War, the middle capture point is surrounded by a balcony on either side. The balcony has a "guard-rail" type wall running around it to stop people from running straight off, but you can easily jump over it and back down to mid. However, just on the other side of this guardrail, is a tiny ledge. A trick I often use on my sorc healer when I have melee on me is to run to the guardrail and jump over it, but land on the ledge instead of jumping down to mid. When I do this, on other people's screens it often looks like I actually jumped down to mid. As in the game shows me, on the ground, for about a second or two, then I'll disappear and reappear back up on that ledge. On my screen, everything looks totally normal. Guild members playing on the opposite team have asked me what the hell happened in Teamspeak, which is how I discovered the graphical weirdness. When you see something you don't understand, ask someone about how it may have happened or if they've seen it before. The quicker you accept that hacks effectively don't exist in this game, the more you'll improve as a player. It's not that there are literally no people hacking in this game. There are probably some. But the percentage is so infinitesimally small, Bioware obviously has a pretty decent handle on it. Edit: This all applies to PvP only. I'm sure people use speedhacks/bots all the time to farm credits or pve mats.

The thing is, pretty much none of them are. If .0001% of players are hacking in some way, it would take (and someone check my math), 62,500 warzones on average to find a hacking player. Bioware *is* aware of hackers, which is part of the reason they are so rare. The credibility of people calling hax has at this point been so trashed, because people will call hacks on anything. You can not hack 100% crit chance, increased damage, longer stuns, anything to do with resolve, etc. You *may* be able to hack your speed, or teleport, but it looks like Bioware has done a pretty good job cracking down on these. Don't believe me? Check for yourself. Google swtor hacks, and start looking through hacking forums. Try to find a current hack that is updated, not full of viruses, and modifies something like damage. Lag in this game, especially regarding operative rolls, and all kinds of leaps/pulls, is a problem, and you will occasionally see people disappear, reappear, and do all sorts of weird stuff. It's especially bad on both huttball maps. I've gotten called a hacker many times because of it, but this is the game. Not some mythical hack.

I may be wrong, but it looks like you're using that dueling ring flagship decoration? Operatives, and I'm assuming snipers, can't roll on large portions of that thing, which is kind of a big deal. edit: Also, rip to kiting classes if they can't leave that ring.