Orbital Strike seems to have a high damage coefficient, probably because of its long cast time. In Lethality spec, I've critted 4.6k on a Sorc with Orbital before (enemies were zerging our turret in Alderaan, I popped relics adrenals and had the +15% expertise buff). I've heard Engineering spec Snipers are able to pop the 5k medal because they have a +30% crit damage talent... always wanted to try it someday, but Engineering feels rather gimp compared to Lethality. But yeah, some people argue that the optimal PVE dps set actually includes 2 piece battlemaster for the extra tick on Orbital Strike - I don't think any other ability can rival Orbital's damage per time / damage per energy if all 4 strikes hit the boss.

Orbital Strike is mostly used for Area Denial anyway in PVP. It stops cappers on Alderaan and Voidstar for 9 seconds without bonus, 12 seconds with bonus. It's certainly worth using, if you're losing a node and not being focused, you could cast it and run out of LOS and there's nothing the enemy can do to stop it. So yes, the extra pulse is nice, and it's also amazing for PVE bosses that stand in it, better than the equivalent sniper PVE set bonus anyway. As for + range on distraction and takedown... lets just say it's won me more than a few games. Huttball carrier with low hp running to the goal, and you need to take that super long shot at 40m on him. Or healer nearly dead and casting a heal on himself but is just too far away for a 30m distraction would be enough for 35m. I can see that these abilities would be useless if you just tunnel vision your current target. But very often the best distract and takedown targets are the other ones on the battlefield, which might be far out of range of your tech abilities.

Congrats on being bad. If you're expecting a 300% increase in damage done by wearing PVP gear, you're in for a nasty surprise. I'll do you a favour and tell you to just quit PVP now before you waste your time. You won't see a 300% damage increase. As I said, do the math.

You're useless as a new 50 in warzones because you don't know how to play the game yet. Maybe you thought you knew how to play the game, because you were owning people in the 10-49 bracket, but guess what, they didn't know how to play the game either. Even if you were given the same gear, you would be destroyed by battlemasters in WZ who've had hundreds of hours played. Go play a game like HoN or MW3 where everyone has the same gear, you step into a match as a fresh player and you will get absolutely destroyed. The difference between a baseline level 50 and "full champion geared" is noticable, but not as great as you might think. Did you think you could get to 50 and hit the Hardmode and Nightmare mode in your level 40 gear and greens and do anything except die over and over? Why do you think PVP is any different? Get a full set of level 50 purples (doable in a week) and PVP is completely fine. The damage output difference between a full purple 50 and a full champion player is about 10%-15% Do the math, and stop blaming your gear for doing low damage. Too many players look at Champion geared players doing 400k damage and then whine that they do only 100k damage and think the difference is gear. Even if you magically were given Champion gear you'd only do maybe 125k.

I'll just summarize the cover issues (and save you reading a few months worth of QQ) 1. When taking cover on strange geometry you get the "Unknown Effect" error message and nothing happens. You can't always choose perfectly smooth ground to take cover during PVP or when you're running around DPSing a raid boss. 2. Immobilize effects prevent cover from deploying. Some effects have long immobilize durations, during which time a Marks/Eng snipers are crippled because most of their abilities require cover. This effectively turns an immobilize into a stun against snipers, forcing us to use our CC breaker on something that doesn't even build resolve. 3. Alas, if only cover actually gave us 20% ranged defense. Of the 8 classes in the game, 3 are ranged (Sorc, Sniper, Merc) and of the 3, cover really only works against other snipers. For example, you cannot dodge most Merc attacks (eg. Tracer Missiles), and you cannot dodge all Sorc attacks (eg. Force Lightning) That being said, I think cover is fine, it's just a couple of things that irritate players. Sure there are some bad points, but the benefits that cover provides the class is immense.

Heal medals aren't achievable now. There are 10 medals achievable for pure DPS like snipers. Guaranteed Medals 75k Damage Done 300k Damage Done (if you don't get this you're doing something wrong) 10 kills 25 kills Killing Blow 2.5k hit That's 4 you should get as baseline, without any effort. Now the other 4 medals will require you to do specific things. 5k hit (make sure you have the gear to make this happen, find a sorc/sage, force him to burn his bubble, pop your trinket and adrenal and fire your ambush at him. 40% crit chance, gogo. engineering spec snipers can achieve this with a trinketed orbital strike too) Solo kill (the sorc in the back you scored your 5k medal on? you can probably burn the rest of his HP down before anyone interferes) 1k defense (keep attacking the enemy ball carrier in huttball and you'll get this eventually) 2.5k defense (you should get these 2 by default on alderaan, but you won't be able to get this on any other map). Voidstar - 8 medals Huttball - 9 medals Alderaan - 10 medals 5k hit takes some luck, you may only get it every other game. Solo kill as well. Sometimes the stars align and you'll get 10 medals on Alderaan. But if you're not pulling 300k minimum + 25 kills every full length game for the baseline 6 medals, there's room for improvement. Average medals should be 7-9.

You're right when talking about Huttball. Lethality is certainly much less reactive than MM. Lethality looks at the battlefield, and makes an action plan and sticks to it: dart everyone, wait until you get a good cluster of enemies then grenade then wb and cull. You do overall damage, but you can't switch target to the ball carrier. On the other hand, Lethality gets an AOE snare that cannot be dodged or deflected, which is something that MM does not have. For emergency situations, when you absolutely need to kill the ball carrier, I've found that Series of shots hurts a fair bit (there's a fair number of talents that boost it in the Lethality tree) and so does Explosive Probe with the +15% talent, which you should be getting anyway for the +15% to grenade. If the target was below 50%, you could Explosive Probe+SoS+Takedown for a kill, maybe. For Marksman in that situation, assume their crucial dps skill is on cooldown as well (Ambush) and they need to take someone out immediately - it would likely go Probe+Snipe+Followthrough+Takedown for more damage, but not all that much more.

In larger fights Snipers will win the dispel war, since cleanse has a 4.5 second cooldown, in which time we can apply 3-5 dots. The primary reason there aren't dispels however is that the most popular class (Sorcs/Sages) cannot dispel our dots. Non heal specced Troopers spend more time and more resources dispelling than it costs to apply the dot in the first place. Melee classes will cripple marksman dps far more than it cripples lethality dps, so that is actually a point in favour of lethality. This mindset of killing enemies in a short time frame should impact healer triage as well: suppose you are a healer on defense, and you judge you have a healing deficit in that fight of 16k every 15 seconds. That means you could in theory lose 1 player every 15 seconds. By rationing your heals you can to some degree affect when the deaths occur. The normal healer always tries to prevent deaths by healing the lowest hp person, but this actually makes things worse - if you had 4 players, and you always healed the lowest hp person, and the enemies didn't focus fire (say) you could keep everyone at alive but at low hp, until some point where all of you would die at once. The smarter thing to do would be to continually heal the group but let one person soak damage and die first - so about 20-25 seconds in you will have 3 quite healthy players and 1 dead player - so that the 1 dead player can respawn and rejoin the group before your 3 healthy players die too. This is triage in the case of having a healing / damage deficit of course, you're making the best of a losing position but played right you can sustain this indefinitely as you're always getting respawns. If you're in the happy situation of having more healing than damage then this calculation doesn't even apply, just heal all incoming damage.

Seems this debate comes up every few threads: Some lethality snipers will post huge damage numbers, marksman snipers look at them and feel insecure because they can't match those numbers then they will come up with arguments saying "LOL damage doesn't mean anything, Marksman kills people faster which is what matters". Anyway, in my experience killing people slower is a desirable feature, not a bug. You may be thinking, huh? Consider a typical pitched battle scenario in Voidstar (side door, roughly 4v4) or Alderaan (mid turret, 4v4). The marksman sniper will burst the enemy targets one by one, with a marauder jumping on their healer to stop him healing. Sniper pops trinkets and cheers when his Snipe+Ambush+Followthrough+Takedown crit for huge numbers, killing the first enemy. He then works on the 2nd, then 3rd. But by the time his team kills the last enemy, the first one has already respawned and has returned to the battle Compare this to a Lethality sniper. Again, your Marauder jumps on their healer to prevent him healing. Lethality pops all trinkets, DOTs everyone up, effectively doing higher total damage than the marksman sniper. No one dies for the first 20 seconds, but everyone is steadily dropping lower from DOTs, and their healer is struggling to get away from the Marauder and focusing on self healing. About 30 seconds in, everyone is at 20% hp, and it's time to Cull, Takedown, Series of Shots, etc. Entire enemy team dies within 10 seconds of each other, you now have a clear field to cap. Players need to start treating Voidstar and Alderaan like one of those raidboss encounters where you have "4 enemy mobs that need to die within 10 seconds of each other or else the encounter resets". Lethality naturally lends itself to this playstyle. Conclusion: Not only does Lethality do more damage overall, it's also more useful damage because it allows you to kill their entire team at once. Marksman thinks small - they only focus on one target. Lethality thinks big - they want to kill the entire enemy team at once.

1. I get the 5k Single damage medal in about half the games I play Simple steps - first, make sure you realistically have enough Power and Surge to do this. It is more difficult to achieve now, but if you don't have the stats to support it then you're defeated from the start. Since surge diminishes so quickly now, it's pointless to use the Surge+Crit trinket. You should use a Power trinket and Power adrenal, for a total of something like +800 power temporarily, which will translate to about a +20% damage boost. On my sniper, this boosts an average Ambush from 2900 to 3500 I'm sitting at 74% surge. This means to achieve a 5000 crit, you need a 2870 base hit after armor reduction, or 3376 before armor reduction. As my average ambush hits for 3500 before armor reduction, this is well within the achievable range. I'm assuming here a Sorc/Sage has 15% armor reduction after Shattering Shot is applied, and that my expertise and targets expertise are similar. In reality though, you will be gunning for the worst geared Sorc/Sage in the WZ. Now that you know if it's possible, it's time to actually do it ! You have a 4 opportunities to get the medal each 15 minute warzone, because your Adrenal resets every 3 minutes. In those 4 opportunities, you have a 40% chance to crit, so say you get 2 crits and 2 non crits. Of the 2 times you do crit on average, you had to make sure that 1. The Sorc doesn't have a bubble (watch him carefully, when was the last time he bubbled, if not can you force him to use it or burn through it etc) 2. No one damaged the Sorc too much that he had less than 5k hp (overkill damage doesn't count for medals) 3. You don't get interrupted (use entrench if you're popping all your cooldowns, use rapidfire or flashbang to ensure you don't get LOSed) ------ I get the 300k damage done medal on nearly every match, unless I'm defending an empty node in Alderaan. My highest damage done is 600k - a "good" game for me is 500k, while a bad game 300k. I play Lethality, which does the most damage, but it's more spread out. Marksman thinks small - they just want to kill one target. Lethality thinks big - we want to kill their entire team at once. For example, when I pair up with another Lethality sniper, if we get the enemy clustered and put 2 dots on each person... so 4 dots per enemy - that's 14k damage per enemy over 20 seconds. If we popped trinkets that's more like 17k damage per player. Basically what happens is that suddenly their entire team realises they're at low health, and they all die at once in a wave. Of course while this is happening we have a Marauder or some class harassing their healer and forcing their healer to focus on healing himself. This is particularly helpful in Alderaan or Voidstar, when you want to kill all their team at roughly the same time so they all go to their start point for you to have an empty field to cap. This is opposed to how Marksman works, where they claim their "burst" damage is more useful in killing a single player, but in reality all that happens is enemy players die one by one, and respawn one by one, and keep coming back to defend the point, so you never cap it. Contrast this to Lethality, where everyone drops lower and lower and suddenly all 4 enemy players die. In any case, that's how you achieve 600k damage. Corrosive dart = instant cast, average 3k damage over 18 seconds, returns average 6 energy from procs. Corrosive Grenade = average 3k damage too, find a group of players clustered, hit 3 of them together = 9k damage, returned 18 energy from procs. That's why Lethality will never be outdamaged by marksman in a WZ. Run around, DOT everyone, no one can cap anything, have total peace of mind in Alderaan and Voidstar. People usually say that Lethality is useless when enemies dispel. The problem with that logic is that... Sorcs/Sages are the most common class... and they're the only healer that cannot dispel our DOTs. I can dot faster than a Merc / Operative can dispel, so I really don't mind if we start engaging in a dispel war, they will lose. --- Good luck, hope these pointers help.

A lot of the "skill" in playing PVP games is carried over from prior games. If you've been playing PVP in WoW since 2005, for example, having done the HWL / GM grind, doing premades for thousands of hours, then participated in all Arena seasons and ended up in the top 5% or 2% of your server population, you will feel right at home in SWTOR as the mechanics are identical. Not uncommon in our group to have nearly 1 year /played/ on those accounts - as in literally 1 year logged in over 7 years of real time, granted a lot of that is AFK time but it's still a lot). We just have to accept that some people will have an edge that you cannot ever overcome. Some people have nearly 10 years experience playing competitive PVP. I find playing a Sniper easy. I reckon playing a "stronger" class like Sorceror or Mercenary would be easy too. Yes I get the 5k medal and 300k medals - you just need to get lucky on a crit (40% chance) with adrenals and trinkets up (3 minute cooldown) on a Sorceror with bad gear (nearly every game) who has no bubble or guard (just be patient). You'll have 4 attempts each game to score that medal. Is it all gear? Not really. None of the other snipers on my server will ever outdamage me in WZ, even though there's plenty of battlemasters and I'm not one. A "good" match yields about 550k damage, even after the nerf, regardless of who wins. Even in a bad match I will earn the 300k damage medal easy. I only solo queue. Peak is more around 600k damage done. Battlemaster gear is only a slight upgrade over champion. Wearing half champion and half columi is enough to make you competitive against battlemasters. How you do it? Situational awareness, being aware of your range and potential threats, staying alive, constantly using energy and managing it so you have maximal output for the entire match. It's not any different in principle to a DPS maximizing rotation in PVE - always stay within 60%-100% energy and don't die. However, it's not to say there isn't a problem. So there's an elite group of top 2% skilled people in the game who claim there isn't a problem with the class and can show huge damage done figures. But the game should be balanced for the majority. If the majority of snipers are having issues, then we need to acknowledge that. Judging by the performance of the battlemaster geared snipers on my server, who seem to do sub-par damage, I would say snipers do need a little something. Just not sure what. Playing a sniper is all about playing to your strengths. No class auto-wins every other class - it's not a 1v1 game. A lethality sniper will lose to a merc of equal skill, and also lose to a operative of equal skill. In some ways, lethality is benefiting indirectly from the amount of sorcerors running around, since they are the only class that cannot dispel our dots, and they're the only class we can consistently score our 5k crit ambush on.

Assassin medal - for solo kill - does happen semi regularly in the flow of the normal game for me. I play a sniper. I just pick a healer in the back line who is light armored (Sorc) and has poor gear (If i'm lucky I find someone with 13khp). I pop all my trinkets and cooldowns and burn him down. 5k Ambush crits will do that, and Cull does an absolute crapload of damage with trinket and adrenal up. Sometimes it works and he dies before he manages to LOS me, thus awarding me a solo kill medal, 2.5k crit, 5k crit, and quickdraw medal. All the solo kill medal requires is no one else damage him, so the better your gear, the faster you'll burn him down before anyone on your team realises they want to help out. I'm not sure if this is very practical for other classes to achieve, but I quite often end up with an Assassin medal at the end of the match and I wouldn't be able to recall fighting anyone solo.

The OP is full of nonsense. So then let me ask you one question: Have you ever seen a match, where a team won by a huge margin, but everyone got only 1-3 medals because they were "playing to the objective" (which supposedly gives you no medals)? While the entire opponent team got 8-10 medals because they were medal farming but lost the game? No? Neither have I. That's because getting medals and winning the game are inextricably linked. If your entire team gets 8-10 medals, I can tell you the game was probably won. Basically if you get low medals, you're a bad player with low damage / heal, bad reflexes, poor situational awareness. Don't delude yourself into thinking that you contributed the most to the team as a way of explaining your poor performance. Look, you can stealth ninja plant the bomb in voidstar. This takes, what, 10 seconds? THEN YOU WILL HAVE TO KILL THE ENEMY PLAYERS WHO COME TO DEFUSE IT! That's how you get all your medals. Anyone who is actually good at the game will have time to win the objectives and score all the medals they need. The primary way you win Alderaan and Voidstar is making enemy players dead so they can't capture objectives, and so they can't kill your friends so you have more people to defend objectives. Majority of games are won or lost at the crucial moment when 6 players are stuck in the waiting room and there's only 2 players actually in the field defending the objective. Why? Because one team had the ability to kill, and the other did not. And that's what the damage medals are about. If you can't do the damage, you aren't pulling your weight. I'll bring players to a Voidstar match who do 500k damage / healing each, and we'll keep your team dead most of the match and we'll see if you can successfully defend the doors. You make a team who does 100k damage / healing each and see if you can actually defend anything when you're all lying dead and all 8 of my team are still in the field...

Of all the "known" PVPers on the server, I don't actually know any snipers or gunslingers. There are famous players of other classes... but I can't actually name any Snipers or Gunslingers with any recognition except myself perhaps... I do 500k-600k damage in a good game with about 9 medals, and no I don't exploit on healing medals... and I mostly solo queue. I'm consistently a clear 100k damage above the next highest player, sometimes 200k above, and it is a very rare day that I don't top meters and top kills. Does doing a lot of damage and scoring a lot of kills win you the game? I don't know, but it's fun, and that's why I keep playing. I speculate that the irritating cover system and lack of mobility turns people off PVP before they get any good at it, reducing the pool of good players. And of the limited pool of good players, there isn't much incentive to make videos because they just aren't that interesting. What is a "clutch" play for a sniper / gunslinger anyway? What "amazing" plays are worth showing? Playing a sniper well is a lot more subtle and less flashy than a Guardian chaining 2 leaps in a row to score in Huttball, or a Sentinel chaining his two immunities back to back and killing 2 enemies within 10 seconds while staying at 1%, or an Operative sneaking up behind someone and killing them in 3 hits. I would say playing a Sniper well is closest to being an expert tank driver in Battlefield 3, the same principles apply really. You have a weapon with amazing range and amazing damage yet get into the wrong position and you can be killed in a heartbeat. But you can't tangibly show "superior positioning" in a video. All you can show is you shooting people, and no one shooting back, and of course there will be 20 comments on the video that your enemies were "noob" and "no one attacked you" and the video isn't worth anything. I've thought about making videos, then realised no one would want to watch them anyway. All you would see is a sniper shooting people from a ledge over and over, or a sniper tab-dotting enemies one by one and refreshing them. Yet if it was really that simple you would expect to see 4 snipers join every WZ and get 500k damage each because they are overpowered and easy to play. But that's not what happens, and I can't really explain to you why some snipers can do it and the majority can't.

In PVP you also do 30% less healing due to the PVP Trauma Debuff. Read the amount of healing done on the tooltip, and compare it within the warzone and outside it, that will give you a better idea of the bolstering you got (this worked when I was below 50 some months ago, not sure about now) Also your skill tree plays a large part in boosting your healing output as you gain levels, it's not 100% due to simply being higher level. A low level healer will always do less healing simply because his skill tree isn't fully fleshed out yet.

I used to have problems getting the daily done too. Then I got better at the game. Below average players will have below average win rates, enough said. Nowadays, I'm disappointed my PVP dailies get done so quickly. Today I picked up the quest, queued 3 matches, won them all, highest damage done by a mile, over 500k when the next highest didn't break 300k... then thought, damn, I can't play PVP any more for the next 24 hours /sadface/ But I agree with most of the posters here - the problem lies in the fact that there is no deserter penalty. Many players - like yourself - will quit the warzone if they think their team is weak. The actually good PVPers on your server are undoubtedly doing the same - they are zoning into the matches you're in, seeing nobody worth anything there, and zoning out. If you're actually good at PVP, those same good players will zone in, see you are there, and think, damn, we won this. They'll stay and fight. Your win rate will go up dramatically. And good players start banding together. Bring 4 battlemasters to a match and your win rate goes up like crazy. Being good at the game has a multiplicative effect - you're not only contributing more to the team, you're also ensuring the good players who zone in stay, and you're more likely to be able to play in teams with battlemasters. Welcome to PVP.

I suspect this was originally intended, the ships I've visited all have a teleporter pad... Beam me up, Scotty!

Please don't brag about Lethality numbers. We only do crap damage, below 100k per warzone, and our PVE damage is crap. Really. Do not try this spec. It's a waste of respec cost. /// *whispers* hush. do you want to get us nerfed? Ah hell. I've seen more and more people start using Lethality nowadays, so I guess it's not going to remain a secret much longer. But yes, my damage done in WZ went up significantly when I specced to Lethality, personal best of well over 400k, and 300k+ is really not unusual anymore. Having damage that completely ignores Trooper and Guardian armor is fantastic, and we do SO MUCH BETTER against melee now that you don't need cover, and can simply use Debilitate stun (talented for less cooldown and gives +movement speed) then kite with all your instant attacks (corrosive grenade, corrosive dart, weakening blast, then pop trinkets and adrenals then cull for absolutely insane damage).

There were a few cases where the Light Side / Dark Side choice seemed rather strange, but most of the time maybe we just lacked the proper context to understand it. For example, the missile launch sequence in Candemimu. SPOILERS ABOUT IMPERIAL AGENT CLASS QUEST THAT EXPLAINS THE KILIK JOINING RITUAL