So far, been farming for a week or so, a couple bags a day + daily, and two days +6 more bags from weeklies, has netted me: 6 relics (LOL), one weapon, one gloves, two ears, one implant, and one focus. I have one of each relic. I'm never going to use any of them. I'm wearing the gloves and focus. My companion has one of the earpieces. The weapon is nice but I lost a bunch of crit and surge equipping it, so I'm a little upset at the sub-optimal stats. I know expertise makes up for that, but still. I think I bought with accumulated commendations more pieces of Centurion than I have Champion on me, simply because I can target what I need instead of get a random piece that I already have. Another set piece would have been nice over that time. Random bags are random. /sigh (Edit: btw valor 41)

Here's usually how PVP in deception works, actually: 0. Be stealthy. Goes without saying, but you want to get that force regen to allow you to complete your initial burst and then some. You also would prefer your target not know that you're there. Obviously. 0a. Optional: Pop overcharge saber and crit/surge trinket now. You'll get the most use out of them if you open up with them already on. 1. Spike. Get behind your target (though position doesn't matter much) and start the fun. Spike is your only stealth opener, and it gives you the added benefit of incapacitating your opponent for a couple seconds, enough for you to get off a free attack (or two.) 2. Voltaic Slash x2. No matter what, you'll want two of these before doing anything else. Make sure they actually land, with a glance at your buff bar, to see 2 stacks of Induction, so the next part comes off with the proper amount of burst. 2a. Avoid the temptation to use up that Exploit Weakness buff if it's there. In fact, don't even look at it. 3. Recklessness, and this is the time to pop your Adrenal/Expertise/whatever buffs if you want to. I believe one of them takes a GCD though, so you may not want to. 4. Discharge. Ouch. 5. Shock. Double ouch. By this point your opponent is either trying to run away or trying to do bad things to you in return. You may have already been stunned, knocked back, force choked, whirlwinded, or any number of other CC abilities, somewhere between step 1 and step 4. I assume you know how to deal with them and move on to this point. Generally speaking, I can get to step 4 fairly reliably against most targets, if I'm smart in choosing them and I don't suddenly get 6 other people running up on me and chain-stunning me. 6. Low Slash. The absolutely massive Discharge and Shock guaranteed crits should have taken a sizable chunk of health out of your opponent, even a tank with decent mitigation will be near half. (Why are you attacking a tank?) At this point you're finishing off your kill, and you want him ideally to stop what he's doing, which is either trying to get away, trying to heal himself, or trying to kill you in return. This also lets you flip around behind him and TRY to get off that Maul now, if EW procced. 7+. Options: Maul, more Voltaic spam, Force Slow, the branches of possibilities at this point are more complex, and situational. Remember you still have Electrocute, too. Remember to Jolt heals. Remember to Force Cloak and Spike again. To me, after step 6 is what distinguishes the good players from the bad. How do you deal with an opponent who is being squirrely and trying to do everything in his playbook to shake you (or kill you, or save himself, etc) when you've got a huge toolbox to call upon and need to pick the option best suited to counter him. Knowing the other classes and how they work is important so you can anticipate their oh-crap abilities and nullify them.

Just about every WZ I come out somehow with caps lock on because I went for shift-something and was off just a little bit That's the thing to remember about the "heat of battle" (lol?) is you WILL misfire once in a while. Most of the time it's not going to be a disastrous mishap but it's still frustrating. It's absurdly hard for me to change my keybinds after being used to them for a while because my fingers know the routine and I don't think of things as 1-6, QERFV or whatever, I just know when I need to hit Jolt I hit R and Electrocute is on E (and as I typed that I JUST remembered why I did that, heh.) If I was to "optimize" some things off of alt- ctrl- and shift- binds that I got later, I would be completely and totally lost for at least a day of warzones. That's also why it's so hard for me to change specs, because I have to move things around.

2700 is a tiny crit bro

Yeah, the expertise difference is pretty obvious, when you have bolstered level 11's running around, they go down really fast. I'm really looking forward to the 50's WZ bracket, it may mean less huttball at least! I see roughly the same numbers as Lina but not quite as bursty as that 6800 crit, that must have been quite a stack of cooldowns. I don't quite go so nuts on popping them all at once, I try to spread them out instead. To the OP's point ... I have heard a theory, and it makes sense, as I also noticed immediately at 50 what felt like a drop off in damage output. I've been told it has to do with the way the Bolster buff adjusts your stats. It takes the relative level of your gear compared to YOUR LEVEL and then increases your stats in the same ratio as if you were 50. So if you have really good gear for level 45 (example) it'll bump you to really good gear for 50. Now, if you get to level 49 and have not improved any of your gear since then, you won't have nearly as good of a bump because level 45 gear at level 49 isn't as good. Make sense? Once the Champion pieces start coming your way, you'll feel better about the damage, anyway, and you'll be picking up expertise, which helps both damage and survival. Good luck!

I think your "personal experience" with the Deception assassin must end at level 15 then. WE ARE NOT DARTH MAULSPAM. God, if I had a buck for everyone who thought that Maul was our primary ability, I'd ... er ... have a lot of money. Do you know what my hardest hitting abilities are as full deception? Shock and Discharge. I can't hardly use Maul against another player because of server sync issues, where my target appears to be directly in front of me facing away from me, but in fact is 5 feet ----> that way, facing towards me, and I have no way of knowing exactly where the server got out of sync so I can't even guess. I only use Maul on dudes directly running away from me (which is stupid, so they are bad, and deserve it) and when EW is up, which it isn't all the time, so this is very situational. And in PVE ... yeah, you'll use it when EW proc is up, but that's about it.

Happily, the test server patch notes have some of our tanking stuff buffed. Boost to Dark Charge healing, and now it scales with level. Boost to Wither dmg (and also threat) helping our aoe tank ability.

This happens to me with Unbreakable Will, even though it's off cooldown, and yes, it's very obvious, as it's the ONLY LIT UP BUTTON ON THE HOTBAR And it doesn't go off until I mash the hotkey like 2 or 3 times, or after a full 1 second of being stunned, which is the difference between life and death when faced with another player with 1.5 - 2s abilities that you lose 1 full second of interrupt potential Combine this with the ridiculous sync problems in pvp, such as I Spike someone down and they appear to be right in front of me, but in actuality are 5m off to the side and in the other direction, which I can tell because when they stand up they "warp" over there. There's really no question why ranged classes dominate, because generally speaking dudes they're shooting lightning at are SOMEWHERE in front of them within 35m, so it doesn't matter if it's off a few meters in either direction. It certainly matters quite a bit more for melee.

/popcorn

Is it troubling to anyone else that I made my assassin a girl so I didn't have to worry about not wearing pants?

My friends, we are the new "banana shoulder" class. I'm sure a few people in here remember shaman tier 1 in vanilla wow, right? Now all we need is a picture of some fat kid wearing a dunce cap with no shirt on, carrying a cardboard Darth Maul lightsaber, and these enormous foil-coated shoulder thingies to make the rounds on the internets, and the cycle will be complete. /shame

Yeah, I need to check what the 235 crit/surge is actually doing on my char sheet when I pop it, but I never have time to look when I'm actually fighting, and I never remember that I want to check when I'm standing around not using it. I'm kind of peeved that Bioware intended everyone to be biochem. I get, what, a relic, that I can get an almost equal version of from PvP, as artifice, but you guys get super awesome reusable stims?

I re-bind Q and E from strafe, in fact, I have QERFCX and ~ plus alt- and shift- versions of those, as well as 123456 (alt- and shift- also) bound to most of the things I use. Yes, there's a lot to use. No, my setup won't help you. You need to figure out your own and work your fingers into it to get used to it.

^^ I found it absurdly easy to reach these numbers at 50, so much so that I wondered how ridiculously things would scale once I started getting end-game gear. But I noticed that the pieces you pick up are NOT fully moddable. For instance, the Champ DBLS just has stats. They're decent stats (but no crit? *** bioware?) but they're not OPTIMAL though. Granted, that's a pvp item and we're talking about pve, but still, you can get a couple of your "starter epics" through pvp and probably do just fine in HMs and ops. It's really the tanks, not the DPS, that I've seen having problems gearing up. PS - had to buy the DBLS anyway, because it's purple. Or maybe just because the dmg range is higher than my daily badge hilt.

Hmm ... How much fun should I have with this? Ok, I'll try to be serious, because I think this was actually a serious question. Your end game armor looks stupid but in different ways than the Consulars'. I know the fatman body does actually get a bigger speeder, not sure about the -ahem- size of his saber. (Really? Was that a real question?) Darth Maul is a Deception assassin. PLEASE NOTE: Just because the class archetype is named Darth "Maul" this does NOT require you to use Maul on every GCD, in fact, this has provided more whining on these forums about how the class sucks than almost anything else. Twi'leks don't get hoods, even if it's a hooded item. Sorry. Wow, those were totally out of order. Anyway, hope that helps!

Well, you're not asking anything that makes sense. You want opinions on less effective skill priority lists? Or do you want the "best" so far of what we've got? I pointed you at the accepted "best" priorities. You can either use them, or not, I care little, as you're not tanking for me. I believe the two links I provided are the best references you'll find on the subject. The authors have done more work researching the particulars of the class than you or me. If you've got conflicting evidence that their conclusions are incorrect, feel free to provide the relevant facts that suggest otherwise. If you're asking for something simpler, I'm sorry, but like a prior poster said, this isn't a simple class to play. There isn't a set rotation for darkness, or madness, or deception. Like the first few minutes of a football game, where sometimes the coach scripts the first 10 plays, you can open with a preferred order of skills, and in fact I believe that particular list is also detailed in the posts I linked to you. But once the game starts you adapt to what your opponent is doing, and once you start fighting a mob or a boss you have to adapt to not only what they're doing but also what you have proc'ed or on cooldown. That's way more depth than I really wanted to put into this, which really can be summed up as "read the stickies, that's why they're there."

Like I said, I leveled to 50 as Deception, easily. Did I die? Yeah when I was bad, or not paying attention, or just sloppy, or needed to interrupt something that I didn't. On story bosses, pretty much. Killing mob packs was simple, I could just mow them down single-target style. I never got stuck on anything (until the very last fight, but you know what, your story "end boss" SHOULD be pretty hard.) So again, what's weak about it?

I think they should just make every ability fire off automatically once it's off CD. You can just stand there and point your toon at the mobs and hit "enter combat" and it just uses all your abilities for you! You wouldn't have to think about anything, or prioritize which abilities to hit, or notice a buff icon, or a proc, or check cooldowns. All you'd be responsible for is moving out of the fire on the floor. And I bet people would still fail at raiding. FYI - this is sarcastic. People seem to miss that in some of my posts.

Ugh, yeah. Not having the waypoint was annoying when I did this. They should probably fix it, surprised neither of the last two patches did.

I have no feelings of inadequacy at 50. I put points from 10-40 into Deception, never looked back. OK there was that one day I tried Madness in the 30's, but I was in college, and everyone was doing it, and I didn't inhale .... Er, wait. So, yeah. Deception is fine. You can do lots of damage if you prioritize skills correctly, watch for procs, and manage your cooldowns. It's actually a lot of fun. Like the prior poster, what exactly is the problem you're having?

Sarcasm fail. Yes, I know. The OP asked for a rotation. I told him there was none, it was a situational priority list based on procs and cooldowns, and pointed him at the stickies where this information is presented in great detail. He said "I don't want that" and I told him he was bad. You didn't catch it. Perhaps I should be less subtle.

This pretty much goes for any class/spec leveling up, but what I did, when I got a new mod of whatever type, either from quest or cleaning out commendations before going to the next planet, is that I'd check my gear to see what the LOWEST mod rating was, and then upgrade that one. Do I have more comms left over? Get the next lowest, etc ... That way you keep your gear relatively up to date across the board. To maximize your mod level most efficiently, also only wear a new piece of gear if 2 out of 3 mod slots are better than what you're currently wearing. In that case, you'll take the one that's better in your current gear and move it over. Otherwise, just take the one that's better from the new piece and put it in the current gear. Obviously if all the leftover pieces are crap, and wouldn't be upgrades in any other gear, you can just "overwrite" the mod, but hang onto the good ones. This is more level 50 advice, though, as you'll out-level pretty rapidly the other stuff, so no need to save them. It's also only worth it to BUY a new piece of gear if every mod is better than what it's replacing. Otherwise, buy the individual mods, it's cheaper, and does the same thing. I still have the original of every piece of orange quest reward gear I got because I just kept upgrading them, so there were very few times a new quest reward was better across the board, so I didn't take them. Once you start getting lvl 50 set gear (pvp or columi or tionese, etc) you'll want to start wearing those instead, because they've got the armor stats "baked in" to force you to actually wear fugly clown suit gear. Otherwise, no one would ever wear them. Seriously. Anyway, that went on a tangent. Keep your mods updated, you'll be fine.

Yup. Those are your big hitters, and if you want to cheese big numbers (cuz people DO like seeing big numbers, no doubt) you pop Crit/Surge relic + Expertise stim + Recklessness when you have 2 stacks of Induction and an EW proc up so you can go right into Shock -> Maul -> Discharge -> (probably) Assassinate (if someone's not < 30% for this, they're getting heals.) Then go post it on youtube "zomg 4x 6000 crit" and get us nerfed. 6000? Well, if I can pull off those at 4000 now after just hitting 50, imagine in full pvp gear, right?

I laugh when you guys throw rocks at me. Then I just feel bad. I think that means it worked.

Yeah, we were fine last night with our only 50 tank (a Jugg in quest gear basically) until the end of Boarding Party, and he just got his face smashed once we got the Cmdr down. He couldn't withstand burst dmg, and we all knew it was his gear, including him. We're gonna try again tonight. That having been said ... you can farm Black Talon as much as you want in crappy gear, apparently. DPS was never a problem, I'm full custom gear with a couple pieces of Champion (31% crit, 89% surge, 95% accuracy) and sadly I was just constantly pulling off him even with Guard on me. Force Cloak early, and often. I'd be looking more forward to tanking if I didn't have to build a tank set basically from scratch, since I didn't build it as I was leveling up. I guess I could get the basic armor/mod from the GTN, make the enhancements, and I can make a tanky lightsaber too, just need a few of the Biometric crystals.