Not just in terms of how they look, but also in sound design. Case in point Railshot/High Impact Bolt. Bountyhunter version has a menacing looking laser-like animation, and a satisfying meaty sound. Meanwhile the trooper version looks like a ball from Pong and sounds like a single popcorn pop. If not for the ability being on cooldown I'd hardly know if I fired it. Pretty much every bountyhunter ability looks and sounds better. I really hope at some point they will have a look at the trooper abilities and make some abilities a little more meaty.

It's frustrating. How hard can it be to tweak a couple of abilities to increase dps for these classes without increasing burst too much. People aren't demanding massive reworks, just a bit more dps so numbers are closer to the average and these specs become viable.

Any update on class balance? DPS between classes varies wildly with Arensal mercenaries being rock bottom to the point where they get excluded from ops and even master flashpoints and fury marauders being faaaar above all others.

It's so sad how little damage arsenal puts out. Even an AOE spec like engineering sniper does more single target dps Arsenal, MM sniper and Carnage marauder all could use some hefty buffs, but especially arsenal.

That's a very selfish way of looking at it. Basically without premades the average amount the vast majority of players would need is 7 or 8 matches to get the 4 wins. But with premades you have a smaller group only needing 4 matches, and a larger group needing more matches to get the 4 wins due to the auto-losses against premades. However I really don't care about that, what I care about is that matches with a premade are so lobsided it saps all the fun out of that match even when you are on the team with the premade. I honestly don't understand why people even queue up as a premade vs randoms, but they sure as hell aren't true pvp'ers as we are looking for a challenge in PvP, that's the whole point of it; fighting intelligent opponents with the victor being decided by a combination of luck/skill/class balance. If you just want to stack things so much in your favor that you can roll over everything you may as well just farm npc's as it amounts to the same thing.

I got booted and can't log back in. Other servers work fine.

6.0 had the same issues 7.0 has, just different specs excel. If they reduce the potency of fury, AP, madness and rage a bit, then buff carnage marauder, MM sniper & arsenal mercenary a bit then maybe we will have something a bit more closer to balance.

Previously the various warzone boxes (on victory/defeat , daily or weekly) dropped 306 rating items. I've noticed that since hitting level 80 the 50+ boxes that I have opened so far in addition to the warzone adrenals and medpacs only drop some tech fragments now. Is the only way to get better gear upgrading the 320 vendor set at the upgrade vendor?

Since this morning I can no longer login (location Netherlands), getting a 'login service is unavailable' error. Everything else internet related works fine. -edit- Well it suddenly works again -edit2- No it doesn't work, it now hangs in the server selection screen saying a connection error has occurred Tracert: https://i.ibb.co/yd29ggP/trace.jpg

There are no nerfs on the PTS?

This topic needs to be on the first page. No other class is doing as bad as merc/commando atm

Fury is the current flavor of the month.

I have noticed no difference. Matchmaking was always crap with one team having 2 healers and the other team none or one team having mostly level 70+ and the other team being mostly level 45-60's.

After playing more and more ranked arena matches, the situation is essentially now that the team with most marauders wins

45 seconds cooldown, lasts 6 seconds, you can use it twice so (45 - 12)/2 = 16.5 second average cooldown between cloaks. But that assumes the marauder will immediately after cloak be in combat again. In reality they will attempt to move somewhere behind terrain, heal up and when they get back into combat they will again have the 2 cloaks available. Note that I'm not saying this should be nerfed. But people shouldn't call the marauder a glass cannon. I'm more survivable (in PvP) on my marauder than on my Juggernaut, and both are infinitely more survivable than my AP Powertech.

I notice this too, groups are avoiding Mercs (especially Arsenal) because of their low dps. This needs to be fixed. Mercs are not in a great place in PvP either. Not bottom of the food chain but definitely not one of the top classes. For example in ranked arena Merc survivability under focus seems to be about on par with Juggernaut (judging from damage taken per death that I typically see). However (rage) juggernaut's damage output is greatly superior to (arsenal) merc. I'm okey with it being slightly lower since merc is ranged (on the other hand juggernaut has better CC) but the difference is easily 25% lower.

Marauders are not easy to kill. In fact it's one of the most survivable classes in PvP thanks to the double cloak. They also have pretty decent survivability during cloak of pain & saber ward uptime, although it is true that when those are on cooldown they do drop fast. But that's a moot point because when a marauder gets below 30% health he just cloaks -> predation and heals up somewhere. Sure he is temporarily out of the fight but you don't kill them unless the Marauder screws up / gets unlucky by getting netted/stun locked at low health while his CC break in on cooldown. I don't think the damage output is the issue by the way, nor do I think its bad Marauders are at the top currently. Some class needs to be and they are easier to deal with than the trollolrolling operatives we had in previous years.

Fury Marauders have become the new operatives.

Not only do mobs seem to soak up more damage meaning everything takes longer, the rate at which new abilities unlock feels so much worse than what it was. There are stages where you don't get any new abilities for 7 or so levels which is way too long, making it feel like you don't progress at all.

Not a valid argument, since Fury Marauders also significantly outparse Arensal and that's just as easy to play. I'd argue that juggernauts/marauders should do slightly more dps due to being melee rather than range, but the difference is a bit much atm.

You are doing something wrong then, my PT does way more DPS than my Mercenary. They absolutely destroyed the last bit of fun the PT/Vanguard class had for me with 7.0, but DPS is not the problem.

This. Groups should fight groups and random solo players should fight random solo players. It's not rocket science.

In the early years of swtor Mercs/commando used to be the weakest PvP class. They got a lot of buffs over the years and in 6.0 they were actually quite good imho. Now with the ability to have a minigun armed mandalorian bountyhunter I started a new commando which is now level 76 and honestly it's been super disappointing. When I hit 75 I thought, yes now the fun begins, but even with 306 gear (not augmented) and the tactical I still hit like a wet noodle compared to every other DPS spec. Survivability-wise its still in a good place despite have to make a lot of hard choices in the skill tree, but even when I'm ignored for most of the say arena match and can do non stop damage until I'm the last one alive, I still only do like 60-70% of the total damage the opposing team's top DPS'er. I actually start to feel as a detriment to my team. Compared to my main (Fury Marauder) this class is so much harder to do well with for relatively little reward. Does the class become a lot more potent at 80 or is this just the new state of the merc/commando?

Yes mercenary/commando has definitely received the short end of the balance stick. It wouldn't be so bad if damage had increased to compensate for the reduction in survival tools, but that hasn't happened with mercenary/commando being the lowest parsing DPS class in 7.0 apparently.

THIS! Even without touching the ability descriptions it would be fine. I've been super disappointed with the 7.0 'expansion' that my plans for a dual vibroswords wielding melee bounty hunter were ruined with this weird arbitrary restriction. I mean at this point who cares if players can use force lightning or force choke or whatever during their class stories. Immersion for other players cannot be the issue as the class still says 'marauder' or 'sorcerer' or whatever, and players already have the option to dress up as a mandalorian bounty hunter while playing as say a sage or juggernaut.