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I have a fair amount of experience with Hatred Sin, though I wouldn't consider myself a PvP genius, so perhaps take my advice with a grain of salt. Hatred is a pretty squishy spec. To give you an exact reason as to why people say that it melts in PvP, Hatred has roughly 24% less Damage Reduction than Deception, due to a lack of Entropic field (9% DR) and Dark Embrace (15% DR after using Maul). So right out the gate, you're going to be taking 24% more damage than your Deception counterparts from any given attack. Additionally, Hatred lacks Low Slash, which is a tool which allows you to not just control enemy players, but mitigate damage by locking out an enemy DPS 4 times per minute, for a total of 16 seconds of Mezz for every minute that the match goes on. If you just assume that an enemy DPS does about 5k damage per second, Low Slashing an enemy DPS on cooldown will prevent an incoming 80k Damage per minute. So already, you can see how the damage is racking up against you as a Hatred player. Layering onto this, Hatred's damage mainly comes from being able to cleave it's DoTs onto other players. Sometimes the queue makes realizing this goal rather difficult. Basically, the main reason to bring Hatred over Deception is the ability to pressure an enemy team with DoTs, but if the queue isn't mostly melee, you won't even have that going for you, which means you're effectively a worse version of Deception, lacking the tools to control enemy players as well as lacking the raw Damage Reduction to keep yourself up in the fight. Hatred requires a lot of nuance in learning when to Line of Sight and kite (yes, you kite a ton as a melee dps in this spec), and learning when to sit in the middle of the fight and AoE things. That being said, if you still want to queue Hatred, I highly recommend the Quick Escalation build. You run 45% crit chance so that all QE procs after the initial one have a 100% crit chance, and you will basically just be spamming Leeching Strike to mitigate damage by healing back most of the damage that you take. It's fun to pull off but pretty difficult when played at maximum efficiency, since that would require you to manually right click off the QE buff after 3 stacks in order to prevent Leeching Strike from going on cooldown, allowing you to continue spamming Leeching Strike for more healing. Overall though, I wouldn't recommend taking Hatred into Ranked, mostly for the reasons I've stated above, and also because it has a steep learning curve and even after thousands of hours of gameplay, people won't approve of your decision.

If you guys really wana see how bad hatred is, go ahead and queue up now in the preaseason, since there's no drawbacks to doing so. The moment that people find out you are hatred, you will immediately be the target of the entire enemy team and will be squished flat, almost immediately. The spec takes a bit more than 25% more damage than it's Deception counter part due to a lack of certain DR passives, as it is. It's just a terrible mess of a spec defensively and only excels when you aren't being focused.

I wasn't gonna say this, since it felt subjective instead of objective, but I personally feel like there is a much larger discrepancy between how Teamwork is viewed on DM compared to NA. When I would Queue on NA, there was a lot of arguments in /2 (pvp) channel about who wasn't doing enough DPS or healing or anything scoreboard related. Often times, plays that heavily favor the team at the expense of personal stats on the scoreboard were often overlooked and just not recognized. There was a lot more number farming and less strategic knockdowns. There was much less peeling. Cross guard was almost very rarely a thing and specifically only a thing when very specific above average players were in the queue. Meanwhile, on DM, I literally don't even have to ask for a guard when I'm low, I just receive one. And on top of that, I don't have to click off my team-mates's guard in order to guard them, they will instinctively drop guard so that they can be guarded, when necessary. There have been so many times when a team mate will go out of their way to help you when on NA it would rarely happen. I've been knocked down on Mandalorian battle ring by the enemy and had a Sorc pull me back up specifically at a strategic time, when multiple enemy dps jumped down to chase me. I've had hard stuns and mezzes get cleansed by friendly sorcs/operatives, which is incredibly rare on NA. I'm not talking about healers cleansing, I'm talking DPS players who are cleansing stuns/mezzes, which is insane. The level of cooperation is just miles higher, and you don't even need to ask for these things to happen via typing in /ops chat, it's just expected that people will behave this way. Trying to get people to do these things on NA would be like pulling teeth and would only occur when a specific set of high skilled players on are in, which coincidentally, happen to be the same players who play on DM as well, they will simply queue NA if there is a streamer streaming NA matches, since they have toons on multiple servers. Overall, I would say this: It's preseason, there's no elo at stake and the queues are popping literally all day at any time on DM. If any of you haven't tried it, now is the best time to do it. Just server xfer over and if you don't like it, move back. The experience is leagues better than what happens on NA and it would be awesome if NA even had a crumb of similarity, because then I could queue with a ping of 20 again instead of 150+, lol.

The issue with defensive amps is that there isn't "one size fits all" amp, so to speak. For example, if you use Reinforced Armor, that's not gonna help you at all vs force/tech damage. Likewise, if you use Tech Aegis, that does nothing vs white damage or force damage. In PvP, the comp of the enemy team changes every game, so it's impossible to have the correct defensive amps at any given time. The only amp that works vs ALL damage types is En Garde, but that only works in the first 10 seconds of combat, which is why it's only good on classes like Sin/Mara which can reliably break combat multiple times, or Powertech/Jugg, who die so fast that the 10 seconds that En Garde provides is legitamtely worth it for the 20% damage reduction in the opener of the match, which is when they will take the most burst damage.

Ranged/Melee works the same, there would only be a difference when you take into account certain passives that allow Ranged defense to be greater than Melee defense. Off the top of my head, Predation gives increased ranged defence, as does that one utility for Snipers, which gives increased ranged defense by 20%.

Yes, the lag is considerably greater. I myself have gone from 20 ping on NA servers to 150-250 ping on EU servers. It's worth it for the constant solo ranked activity though.

For context, I was on an Assassin, using Maul on a Powertech and then on an Operative. Myself and two other players, named Shinra and Furkai, tested this back in November. Our methodology was using full 1.2% Weapon expertise amps, and then maul 10 or 20 times on the PT and then later Operative (heavy and medium armor users. After doing a sample size of about 20 mauls, we would then divide by 20 to get the "average" maul hit. After we got our average hit, we would replace 1 Weapon expertise amp for one 2.5% Armor Pen amp, and replicate this test over and over until all of the amps were eventually Armor pen. What we found was that as we replaced Weapon Expertise amps with Armor pen amps, maul damage went up on both the PT and Operative, up until about the 3rd amp. After that, each Weapon Expertise amp that was replaced with an Armor Pen caused maul damage to start going down. The "sweet spot" so to speak was 3 Armor pen amps and the rest being Weapon Expertise for maximum damage mauls. This test can be replicated for similar results, for anyone wanting to try it out. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ We also did a test on Alacrity to see if it was possible to fit 3 GCDs into a simple 4 second Hardstun. This was important to figure out because at the time, it was the difference between fitting a triple maul into a single hardstun or only fitting 2 mauls in a stun before the target could recover and use a DCD. There was some really crazy results with that test, which to this day are still unexplained. But the tl;dr of that test is that alacrity appears to not work in thresholds but instead has a weird effect where it seems to work and not work as you gain more and more rating. I really want to get back to testing Alacrity, but have also been asking the devs to just release their combat formulae since that would make theorycrafting easier and it wouldn't require as much 'feet on the ground' work, so to speak.

Idk, I think the EU ranked population is overall larger than the NA population, especially when you consider that many previously NA only players are now also playing on EU servers.

I use 105%. You will be hard pressed to find anyone using 110%. The stat pool budget is pretty large atm so you could definitely get to 110% and have a decent amount of stats left over for 1213 alacrity (1.4 GCD) and the rest to be dumped into crit, but to me it kind of feels like a waste to add a ton of extra accuracy rating just to specifically never miss white damage on Inquisitor classes.

So, with ArPen it's not good to go full ArPen over weapon expertise usually, but there is a sweet spot where you want 2-3 ArPen amps and the rest wep exp, that will usually deal more overall DPS than full wep exp or full arm pen. I have yet to understand why this is, but based on testing that's what myself and others yielded.

I have yet to see anyone here explain this, so I figure I'll throw this out there. But the reason 105% accuracy is recommended is because of the base defense chance of all non-inquisitor classes is 5%. The base defense chance of inquisitor classes is 10%. Example non-inquisitor: https://i.imgur.com/LXn0Y4w.png Example Inquisitor: https://i.imgur.com/880G7rb.png That is why it's recommended to go 105%. Because when you add 5% accuracy to your base, you will never have your ranged attacks defelcted or your melee attacks parried on any non-inquisitor class, which is majority of players. When you gear for 110%, you are specifically adding accuracy only for the sake of not missing white damage on Assassins and Sorcerers. Which could be considered a waste.

Well even for DoT specs, periodic intensity will out-do force sensitivity or tech wizardry almost every time, even on players. So the spreadsheet is still correct for those as well. Defensive amps are trash unless you are using En Garde and are specifically an Assassin or a Powertech/Marauder.

The BiS amps for PvE is mostly the same for PvP, just use the spreadsheet for picking BiS amps for pvp.

A large portion of the people who are top 3 for one class, stopped at 200 wins to persue top 3 for another class. In fact, looking at the leaderboards now, there are more than 5 people who reached 200 wins for a top 3 on at least 2 or more classes. So naturally, if you stop queuing to play another character, your wins will no longer go up on your main character. I say this to say that many of these players have 600+ wins, which is close to 1500~ games played across multiple characters. Assuming games have an average length of 7 minutes each, that's nearly 200 hours of solo ranked per person. That's a lot of PvP. That being said, I do agree with Rating decay, almost every major game with a ranked scene has decay in some form, so I don't see why it shouldn't be implemented here.

No more tactical swapping for Sins/Ops/Marauders. The ability to finally change utility points in between rounds, that one alone is the largest one for many classes. You can finally dump useless utilities vs range comps if you have melee based utilities. Or take better kiting tools against a melee comp, etc. This patch is an overall nerf to stealth classes though. Not to mention that the new set bonuses are pretty wack.

Survivability - Hatred has considerably lower DR than Deception. This means that you will take much more damage in the same time frame than someone under similar conditions who are playing Deception. Hatred's selling point is supposed to be that you can heal for damage you deal, but currently, you can't heal for a high enough value to mitigate enough of the damage you're taking. Damage - Hatred's damage is similar to Deception's now that Death Knell has been nerfed, however the survivability is worse, so you'll spend more time running away and kiting to survive, which means less time is spent doing damage. Control - Hatred lacks the control aspect that Deception has. Because you can't control players as often (every 15 seconds as deception) they can do more damage to you, once again, hurting your damage output. Overall, its just a flimsy spec.

https://vulkk.com/2019/12/17/swtor-6-0-deception-assassin-pvp-guide-by-krea/ Scroll down to the section titled: Tips vs other players. It's specifically tailored to assassin, but it goes over multiple buffs that each enemy class might have that you need to pay attention to. Simply augment my tips for sins to whatever class you're playing to combat each of these buffs. For some classes, there are also pictures of the buff icon that they gain, so you have an idea as to what to look for.

I made a video displaying what MR set does for Hatred. Overall though, this set is really only okay for regs. In ranked you won't be in stealth enough times to make use of the passive and Death Knell will just provide more damage than MR will over the course of a match.

That's because Death Knell was nerfed, so you can no longer get 3 Maul Auto crits, instead you only get 1 now. So this nerfed the damage significantly.

If you have both shroud on vanish and extended shroud duration by 2 seconds, thermal det will not take you out upon explosion, just put you in combat.

Make sure you're taking the utility that gives you Shroud/Resilience upon Vanishing out. If you have that utility, that means that you are being pulled out by either: 1) Still having your guard on a friendly player 2) Getting hit with an AoE white damage effect (melee/ranged damage) That's the only way to get popped out of stealth as a sin, so we're talking things like Sniper's AoE, Merc's AoE, Marauder and Juggernaut's Mad Dash or AoE melee ability, Assassin's Lacerate, stuff like that.

Well then maybe I can help out. Don't worry about guarding anyone until you master surviving yourself, first. Same with doing damage. Don't focus on your "rotation" (I say this loosely) until you can handle yourself defensively. I generally like to start with Shroud. Reason for that is that it has a pretty short cooldown and by the time you cycle through the rest of your DCDs, Shroud should be available again. I would say that you're good to shroud almost always as soon as everyone clumps up together. Reason for that is because there will almost always be some type of AoE CC going out at that point, be it a grenade or Awe, Flashbang, or whatever, and Shrouding at this point will give you more uptime on your target while also resisting any heavy hitting force/tech abilities that might come in. The 2nd DCD would be Deflection. I use this right after Shroud, but I will save it if there are a ton of Maras/Snipers on the enemy team, because then you will actually probably need the 50% Defense chance portion of it vs all the white damage. But generally speaking, you will cycle this DCD in right after Shroud, since the white damage defense chance part is mostly useless anyway. After that, I'll use Force Speed + Adrenal for the DR when I see large spikes of damage incoming my way that I can't avoid (PT burst, Sniper Ambushes, etc). I'll use Overcharge Saber at this point too to try to heal a bit of damage that I've been dealt by this point. At this point, you are out of stuff and your only remaining DCD is Vanish and CC breaker. I highly recommend that you are constantly Low Slashing an enemy DPS that is NOT being focused or splashed in AoE, so that you mitigate a lot of incoming damage. At all points in the game, Low Slash should be on cool down because you've been using it to control various targets. I highly recommend Vanishing at 60% HP. 60% is like around 140k HP. The reason I mention this number, is because if you are Hard Stunned for 4 seconds, and the combined average DPS of the enemy team is 8k DPS (just an example), in that 4 seconds you will likely sustain like 128k damage, meaning you'll be very close to death. Just takes a few lucky crits to kill you from that point (and trust me, I've been blown up this way MANY times by overjudging how much damage I could take in a hard stun). So after 50-60% HP, vanish out and heal up so that you can get back into the fight. Now after you've learned all that and it becomes instinct on which DCDs to use and when to use them, *then* you should focus on optimal damage rotations. And then after you've got that down, you can finally move on to guarding players. I say that learning to guard should be last because guarding will increase your incoming damage exponentially and it's very possible to die by overguarding. Ideally, you only guard when your team mate is in a hard stun or is out of DCDs and is kiting to survive until their next big DCD comes up. You should also be dropping guard if there is another friendly guard on the team so that they can cross guard you when you are out of DCDs as well. Overall, Sin is pretty squishy, they are much less resilient than some of their other melee dps counter parts, the benefit of Sin is stealth. You can't really have uptime in a fight when you are being focused, because you lack the DCDs to do so, unlike a marauder or PT or Jugg. Your DCDs are instead meant to allow you to succeed in small skirmishes, so use them that way. You go in, do some heavy hitting abilities and kind of phase out so that you aren't focused, and when you are focused, your Defensive kit is better suited to allow you to drop all focus from you all together and to re-engage on your own terms. Good luck friend and if you're in the sin/shadow disc, feel free to keep asking more questions if you have any. Edit: Last thing I wanted to mention. Because Stealth is the whole reason to play a Sin over any of the other non-stealth melee dps, I figure I should explain it's true benefit and how to get the most out of it. Stealth allows you to engage on your terms. What this means in Ranked is that you should be initiating the fight by "getting the jump" on the enemy team, so to speak. Run over, get a sap on a target and open with a Spike on an enemy. This will immediately set the pace of the fight by putting your team "ahead" in damage, so to speak. Now there are a few caveats to that, such as making sure that your team is close enough behind to follow up on your opener, learning when and who to sap, etc. But I think the biggest issue that most players have with Sin in Ranked is that they aren't utilizing Stealth as much as they should. You have the element of surprise baked into your class, so use it offensively to set the pace of the match, and also use it defensively to set your terms of re-engagement.

Really REALLY bad. Like, miles worse than Deception. Really don't recommend running Hatred in Ranked.