Tanking is far more enjoyable on assassins than juggs, imo. Just to add to the discussion.

I was doing BH dailies about 20 minutes ago and I jokingly said "Now watch.. we're going to need new servers again" in mumble. lol The cycle repeats.

I just hope they allow PvP->PvE transfers. I can understand the argument against the opposite (PvE->PvP). I just have a 50 shadow on a pvp server that I would like to unite with my main server.

I've spent $80 (+2400) and I have mixed feelings. I did get some cool stuff, but I also got a lot of stupid stuff. Like I really don't need 6 of those invisible chest pieces. My super rares were: 2 Satele/1 Malgus statues 2 pink-purples (end/crit) I did get a blaster rifle for my operative (was mostly excited about this) and a double bladed saber for my assassin. Honestly though I would like to see the single bladed be purchasable on its own accord. Way too many single blade users out there for how rare it is. And I get it.. it's supposed to be rare. Problem is you can buy a double for like 75k. A single is 10x as expensive. Supply is not meeting demand in an equal way. I do approve of how rare the Nihilus mask is though. I've seen like 2 total. I was worried we'd all be Nihilus clones.

Didn't read all 10 pages of this thread so if I'm repeating what has already been said, please forgive. Name one MMO that isn't in some aspect F2P. I don't understand how this signals anything. Even WoW is F2P up to level 20. The fact of the matter is we've come a long way from the days of "One MMO to rule them all" and the market is saturated. People simply aren't going to want to lock themselves in with subscription models anymore unless they are a die hard fan. I currently play TOR as my primary MMO. That doesn't mean I don't hop into GW2 or EQ2 from time to time, and I wouldn't be able to do that if I had to pay subs as the amount of time I play those other games doesn't warrant $15/mo. TOR isn't the next big thing, but it's not the next big dud either. So long as we stay in the hundreds of thousands and maybe even grow a little (we totally could with a well timed expansion) then anyone that claims TOR is irrelevant or dying is being obtuse. Far inferior games have lasted many years.

The price points are fair. I'm more than willing to pay for cool stuff that in the end supports our game.

Except it doesn't. Operatives have been broken since like February. That's 9 months.

If your argument is ultimately all DPS should do 100% damage, I can't say I would disagree with you. Failing that, yes my point is exactly the fact that 5% is minor enough to fall within the realm of RNG, Player Screwups, Gear, Whatever. I would say with some degree of confidence that my personal DPS will fluctuate 5% plus or minus for any given fight attempt. When you impose a 10% "penalty" then you start to notice quite a bit because you still have your +/- 5% fluctuation on top of the penalty. A 100% class that gets favored by the RNG gods ends up doing 105% for one attempt and Class B (with 10% penalty) gets shafted and does -5%-- now we're looking at 1275 vs 1575 (going with a 1500 average again), as opposed to say 1425. 300 DPS is significant. 75 is not so much. Is there an arbitrary line in the sand? Yeah I'd say a 10% range from top DPS to bottom DPS signifies a problem, assuming equal gear/equal content. We can't really include skill in this discussion because good players down content and bad players tend to not, so for sake of argument we're going to assume that everyone here is capable of doing what their class is capable of doing.

A 5% difference is a small enough window to be accounted for by RNG or other small variances. 95% of 1500 = 1425 80% of 1500 = 1200 Plugging those numbers into my previous example yields drastically different raid results.

No. It's a numbers game entirely. The only time its possible to carry someone 20% behind is if your other 3 (assuming 8 man for this) are doing enough DPS to beat the enrage timers. If they aren't then it's physically not possible to defeat the content. Assuming a required 7000 DPS over 300 seconds (5 minutes)(2 tanks at 500ish and 4 dps at 1500ish for ease of numbers) Tank 1 - 500 DSS Tank 2 - 500 DPS DPS 1 - 1600 DPS DPS 2 - 1400 DPS DPS 3 - 1500 DPS DPS 4 - 1200 DPS That puts you 90,000 damage short at the 300 second mark. Assuming 2.1m health (Writhing Horror has 1.8 so again we're just using nice round numbers here, but its a close comparison) that puts you 13 and a half seconds short of the enrage. You can't survive 13 and a half seconds of enrage. In this scenario everyone would have to up their DPS by an average of 100 (1700, 1500, 1600) to compensate. It should never be a situation where one class can't go unless the other DPS (by design, not by skill) have to carry.

This is exactly the kind of things parses show. Here is a link to the highest DPS posting on torparse for the Writhing Horror encounter. It's a sniper. When you click on damage done it tell us: his exact damage breakdown over 324 seconds. We can see based on his abilities that he is lethality/engineer hybrid spec'd and we can see by his damage breakdown that he has 40-45% crit-- which would imply to us that his gear is either BiS or just short of. You can see his rotation down at "Damage Dealt Broken Down by Time". It breaks his abilities down to when he used them by the second. It's easy to discern what is going on based on this data. We have mountains of this data.

Yes this thread is about PvE. And it's not just a ranged vs melee debate. Powertechs, Marauders, and to a lesser extent Juggs and Assassins all do reasonably well (not to say Juggs and Sins couldn't use more buffs, but they aren't hopeless). Operatives are uniquely bad in all aspects of PvE DPS.

To the naysayers/deniers-- You still haven't addressed why there are zero operatives/scoundrels anymore. If SimC and torparse and every operative/scoundrel in the game saying things are broken isn't enough-- how do you account for the fact that no one can stand playing these classes anymore? Just go to the respective class forums and see how desolate and abandoned they are comparatively. It's no longer about whining just for the sake of a few slight injustices. It's abandonment due to grotesque imbalance. Operatives back in January/February were WAY more popular than they are today, so don't try to chalk it up to glow-stick envy. The original excitement for these classes was reasonably average/high. Now there is no one left. And you still want to sit here and say "It's fine l2p" without ANY of you actually being an operative or scoundrel, let alone one that can provide any sort of data to prove that we are wrong. You just bury your head in the sand and say "your data is wrong because there is a possibility, somewhere, maybe, that an operative/scoundrel could prove you wrong but they just haven't yet because they are too good to care, or something." Having a class as 1% or less of the population IS game breaking for the people that want to play these classes. This needs fixed and it needs fixed now.

I have a campaign geared Op and a BH/campaignish geared Sage and I deny this. An Op will do better on the dummy, sure, but the rotation doesn't transfer over to real raids well, as it's far too tight. Movement, target switching, whatever will really tank your energy efficiency. Sages only real setback is mobility. Target switching and whatnot don't hurt them nearly as much.

No not everyone uses it. But that's not how sample sizes and the law of averages work. Torparse gives us a sampling of the raiding community. Of that sampling we can clearly see that one of two things is happening-- no operatives are there to parse or they are parsing, but not high enough to break the top 50. Both are a problem.

Go to torparse.com and tell me when you find an operative or scoundrel. They don't even have to be near the top. Even the bottom would be a good start. There's generally about a 20% range from 1-50 per fight. We'll wait.

So I just checked torparse.com There isn't a single Operative or Scoundrel in the top 50 on any fight in 8 OR 16 HM (or SM) TFB. Clearly you guys can see this as being a problem. Right? Like how is this even up for debate anymore?

Again, I state to those that living in the theoretical-- The proof is in the population numbers. You can argue all day until you are blue in the face about pures vs hybrids or whatever, but at the end of the day there is a problem if an entire class stops playing. There are less than a handful of main-class Operatives/Scoundrels on each server. An even smaller number of those mains actually main spec DPS for PvE. This is a design problem. There needs to be an incentive for people to play things other than Maras and Snipers. Right now there isn't any. There is no such thing as off-healing in this game. If heals were instant cast and cost no resources but healed for less we'd be able to discuss off-healing, but as it is currently there is zero incentive to even toss out heals if you are DPS'ing. 2.5 second cast times for heals that barely heal for anything means you are just better off trying to kill the boss before it kills you. You can't just start healing and act like its utility when its blatantly detrimental to your role. The argument is "hybrids shouldn't be as good as pures because then nobody would bring pures!" doesn't mean you should balance the game to where pures are so much better than hybrids that you never bring hybrids. It's not fun gameplay being the class that brings no intrinsic value to a raid group. And that's why no one plays Operatives and Scoundrels anymore. This needs changed.

The proof is in the pudding, as they say. Operatives and Scoundrels are extinct because no one wants to play inferior classes. If you Maras/Sents are okay with that for your own ego and can't see how that's a fundamental gameplay problem then I don't know what to tell you.

So here we are rounding into November and Operatives and Scoundrels are all but extinct because they still struggle to compete. DPS Sages and Sorcs are also on the endangered species list. If the internal testing is saying operatives are capable of parsing anywhere near 5% of the curve they are wrong, Bioware. I love my operative. It's by far my favorite character as I loved the story and I love the companions. I'm just tired of having to heal to be useful on this class. 5% difference is fine. No one is going to sweat the difference between 2k dps Maras and a possible 1900 dps operative. This is no where near the case. It's damn near impossible to break 1700 as an Op. Hell even 1600 is a struggle, especially considering how stupidly tight our rotations are. That's a 20% difference. Not even including Mara group cooldowns. Why in the hell would you willingly bring a class that does 20%+ less DPS? I just don't understand, Bioware. Powertechs are in a solid place right now in this respect. They do similar numbers as Maras but don't bring the group utility. Fair tradeoff imo. Juggs and Assassins are close enough to the curve that it's more forgivable, but they're still lacking comparatively (madness assassins apparently do amazing theoretical dps, but I haven't seen that translated into actuality). Operatives? Yeah.. freaking.. right. We're coming up on the year marker. Can year 2 be the year of equality? Please?

Dromund Kaas >>>>> Coruscant. That alone makes leveling empire alts more tolerable for me. God I hate Coruscant.

Why wouldn't we? EQ2 has always had a pretty stable, albeit smaller population than even us, and they pump out lots of expansions. I don't expect that we'll get the full intended experience that we got with the base game, and I wouldn't be surprised if they axed a majority of the voice acting, but there's no reason we won't see content just because we aren't "the next big thing". 2nd place is still worth milking.

Everything is "viable" when played and geared correctly. Old tired adage, but it's true. If you are ever sat for low DPS its because either you aren't doing what your class is capable of doing or your raid leader is bad and thinks everyone has to be at the uber max. Sorcs are, however, on the lower end of the spectrum. I think it's a reasonably fun spec though (I play a TK sage alt from time to time).

Now that we know what's available, I say we discuss what we would like to see going forward-- Personally I would love just a basic hooded black robe for my Sith. It's an iconic look that has been missing from this game. I'd also like to see some imperial trooper gear for Bounty Hunters (like Pierce's first set) and SiS gear for smugglers. What else do we want?

Crafters don't really make a whole lot of interesting looking gear as it is. Out of my 5 50s I only wear crafted gear on one character (my gunslinger wears a polyplast ultramesh jacket). Everyone else wears tier gear for the most part.