If I was regularly facing a full team of heavy armor users ... I would respec to Lethality too. If there's no Light / Medium armor to hit then Marksman is kind of pointless. Fortunately most teams have at least 1-2 of them, I just mark them up and kill them repeatedly as they respawn. It would be a metagame related decision: I could see a scenario where if there were full heavy armor teams fielded, then teams would switch to pressure type builds instead of burst. I've done it before with another Sniper, it then becomes a pure DPS / Heal race while our Marauder pressures their healer(s)... my main complaint is that there's no way to tell (besides having a good memory) whether the DOTs belong to you or your friend, especially if they are dispelling. I'm pretty sure Ballistc Dampers doesn't get wasted on DOTs, only direct attacks (the kind that interrupt caps) but I need to test this. You said being able to root somebody for the full duration is not a life saver? Again, I'm talking about organized PVP, which is what the game should be balanced to. You're not playing a 1v1 against that Marauder. You are coordinating on voice chat to destroy your kill targets. Typically, we're going after their healer or some DPS class that just blew his cooldowns. A Marauder decides to come towards me. Leg shot and keep DPSing my main target. He comes towards me again, I Cover Pulse, and keep DPSing my main target. If I need to move, that's fine - he cannot leap to me while immobilized. After the Cover Pulse is over I can Legshot again and keep DPSing our kill target. All this while I've been doing good DPS to our kill target(s) while the Marauder is doing exactly 0. You just need to have the confidence to move and re-enter cover before the immobilize on your Leg Shot / Cover Pulse breaks., even better if you can utilize natural cover roll to put distance between yourself and the Marauder and put you closer to your kill target. And if he wants to waste his CC breaker on an immobilize... just so he can leap to you while you're relocating... you can just Flashbang him immediately and ignore him for 8 seconds. Yes, Lethality can do this as well, but only if the Marauder was not previously dotted - Corrosive Grenade has splash, and many times I see them just putting Corrosive Dart on everything for the energy regen.

This is just false. It sounds like you haven't played an MM sniper before, if anything MM is the hardest spec to kill. I'd much rather face stealthers as MM rather than Lethality. 1. Ballistic Dampers isn't something that Lethality can pick up. That gives you better than heavy armor mitigation: you can facetank through 3 Grav Round / Tracers with impunity then reset cover for another 3 charges. Lethality gets my vote as the squishiest spec. 2. We aren't DOT based like Eng or Lethality so our CC (cover pulse + legshot) is always available for 10 seconds of continuous CC on a melee class), and then a Flashbang if you need another 8 seconsd. Eng or Leth don't have the flexibility to switch from DPSing a target to CCing - once you've put a DOT on them you're committed to fight to the death, something which you might well lose against a Shadow / Scoundrel. 3. Entrench gives 60% protection against AOE, there are many spells classified as AOE which players use as direct damage, for example, Force Smash (which easily crits over 5k) can be well mitigated by Entrench. Similar to Death Field which can crit in the region of 4k. You can have a nearly 50% uptime on Entrench with the MM talent. Look I'm not denying our damage gets mitigated. I repeat - look at it from an organized PVP point of view: if some enemy player is at low hp, he'll get getting a heal inside of 3 seconds. Marks can do far more damage in 3 seconds than Lethality, who has to load up the target with DOTs first. Lethality and Eng is a PuG friendly build.

Marksman isn't all that bad in PVP. While Lethality would often break 600k damage for me, Marksman is a full 100k lower, so we're looking at 500k. I'm toying with Marks because it's more agile at target switching. I play with a premade on voice chat, and when we're facing another premade, we need to coordinate our burst DPS. With 3 DPS on voice chat you will be burning down / swapping targets very fast: in 2-3 casts, we can take a player low enough that he either dies or panics and blows all defensive cooldowns and screams for a guard. Once that happens we could immediately target swap to something else, depending. While lethality does more damage than Marksmanship if you get your full rotation off, the reality is that you won't, in higher level games. Time-To-Kill is about 3 GCDs if you have 3 players coordinated against a single target - a Lethality player wouldn't have got to cast his Cull yet. By about 3 GCDs you'll have heals and a guard landing on that focused player, so he's got to either be dead at that point, or it's time to target swap. I find that Lethality simply cannot keep up with the fast pace of the game at higher levels. Corrosive Grenade holds you back, having a 12 second cooldown - with focused DPS you either kill targets in seconds or you've already swapped out. There will be large portions of time where you don't have this available. Also the windup is too slow: you need to cast grenade+dart+wb before you can unleash your cull. Premades will be looking to take out vulnerable targets - and the window for doing so is very small. The leader will call out (hit Star now) - coz he sees Star has over-extended, isn't topped off (at 2/3 hp coz the healers are currently healing the target your team is pressuring), doesn't currently have a guard, and he knows that all 3 DPS have ready access to him - so you just go Ambush+Followthrough+Takedown and your job is done, then your leader instantly calls a new target and you can get right to DPSing again. Lethality just can't do that. Your CG and SoS will be on cooldown and the leader will be asking for DPS on the target and you have to say, sorry, waiting for cooldowns. Or he'll yell at you saying I NEEDED BURST DAMAGE 5 SECONDS AGO and you say, it takes me 5 seconds to DOT my target up before I can cull. Then why didn't you use Ambush and SoS? If you were using that, why aren't you playing Marksman in the first place? I have similar issues with Engineering, where Interrogation Probe and Explosive Probe have even longer cooldowns, making target switching not viable. Also, +30% crit damage on SoS is far better than Electrified Railgun, at good gear levels (>42% crit) At least in my experience, Marksman has enough benefits to consider using in organized PVP.

The Sage / Sorc seems to do ok in PVP. Admittedly I only play two class, a R70 Sorc and a R70 Sniper so my experience may not be representative. I regularly play in and against premades which are acknowledged to be the best on the server, and I don't feel either the Sorc or Sniper class is holding my performance back.. But for the Sorc at least, the thing that strikes me most is that you need to play a PVP spec - other classes can get away with a PVE spec and still do fine. I suspect most of the crying about Sorcs and Sages stem from players who are attempting to PVP using a PVE spec. The fix I propose would be to make some of the PVP critical talents baseline. I'm thinking of the cooldown reduction on Force Speed, snare on knockback, instant cast CC... not all at once, but at least some of them - so that even PVE specced Sorcs / Sages can be competitive in PVP, like other classes. Of course a fully optimized PVP spec will do better. But as it stands, a PVE specced Sorc is disproportionately weaker than any other PVE specced class.

Good players will use both, but keep in mind the limitations of natural cover - 1. You may not end up exactly where you want to be, and this will cause LOS issues. 2. Repositioning after entering natural cover will cause you to lose your "enter cover" buffs. For example, losing Ballistic Dampers is a big deal. 3. Currently, Entrench / Hunker Down is bugged in natural cover: it has a very high chance of simply not working. The cooldown will go off, the animation may or may not play, but you will still be vulnerable to CC. If you are planning to get into position and then pop Entrench / Hunker Down you need to make sure you are using portable cover as opposed to using natural cover. --- Natural cover is a great tool for moving around the map quickly: even though you are snared, you can "roll into cover" quite some distance away at instant speed to help you gain distance from the melee character who was attacking you.

Players who don't understand how to play the game are unsurprisingly bad at it, and are likely to complain about how frustrated they get with the game. The people who understand the nuances and strategies behind it, achieve 95% + win rates with their premades and can take down even 2 people at once with proper use and timing of CC and counters. That about sums up this thread, sadly, the actually good players are having too much fun playing to post on the forum.

I've been playing since launch. I PVP competitively and know by heart the damage ranges on most skills on normal hits and on crits.. Crits do (1+Y)*X. Not sure what else you want to / need to hear.

I propose the radical solution of removing the ability to solo queue into PVP in order to solve the many problems that are crippling PVP in SWTOR. This is the way Guild Wars did it in 2006 - you could only queue as a full group of 8. This is exactly how PVE works in this game, so why shouldn't PVP work the same way? In PVE you need to spam general chat for the classes you need, make sure they are of the appropriate gear level, and make sure players are available to play until the end of the instance. This will solve all the following issues: Leavers - almost no one will leave a game in progress without a very good reason - the same way people rarely leave HM flashpoints and Operations if they know what is good for them. Poor Class composition - no more whining about lack of healers or dps, you completely control your team composition Disparity in gear - like Operations leaders, you get to control the quality of the PuGs you bring with you. PuG vs Premade imbalance - everyone is a Premade now, so no one has cause to complain. The end result is that players will become more social in an MMO - they will have to form PuGs, just like PVE, and slowly get to know one another and add each other to their friends lists, and eventually form teams.

^ THIS Ideally the SWTOR would also abolish solo queue but then all the casuals would start crying. Guild Wars was one of the most competitive PVP MMOs back in the day, in 2006 there were $50,000 USD top prizes which was unheard of at the time. The PVP only allowed you to queue as a full premade of 8. If you wanted to queue with less than 8 you had to take bots. There was no solo queue. If you wanted to play and didn't have a team, you had to create a PuG or join one - much like PVE now. This forced players to become social and get to know one another, and the good players would remember each other and start forming PuGs more often and eventually they'd form a team.

It sounds like it's their group-matching algorithm working as intended. The system prefers to match a full team of 4 versus another full team of 4. The situation might have been that there aren't enough solo players to create a full 8v8 match, however there was a full premade of 4 on both factions queueing against each other. Say something like a 4 man empire premade + 12 empire solo queuers in queue, and you're 10th on the list of solo queuers. On the other faction, a 4 man republic premade + 6 republic solo queuers in queue. This is how the matching algorithm goes. 1. The system will not set a premade vs full solo queue - for example, 4 premade empire + 4 solo queue VS 8 solo queue empire. Or, 4 premade republic + 4 solo republic VS 8 solo empire. For obvious reason, it doesn't want premade vs full pugs. 2. There aren't enough solo queuers on either faction to set up an 8v8 solo queue game so that alternative is out. 3. The system then has to create a 4v4 premade team, and pick 4 solo queuers from either faction. You're 10th on the list, so the solo queuers 1-4 get in. After the match ends, all players immediately requeue, same thing happens - not enough solo queuers to create an 8v8, so a 4v4 premade match gets set up and solo queuers 5-8 get in. This is where you are standing in fleet basically going ***. Similar situations can occur (which I have seen) where full premades take an extremely long time to find a match: usually when there's a lot of solo queuers in the pool, but no other 4 man premade queueing at the time. Anyway, it's a price well worth paying, most players prefer to have a longer queue if it means they get a fairer match.

^ from personal experience that is how it works right now - Defender points are given as a continuous stream, divided between the players standing at the node. One player standing at the node can rack up the platinum defense medal, but if your whole team sits on it the whole game you won't get much.

Well I'd like to offer an opposing viewpoint: the moment Bioware introduces 8 man premdae queues, I will quit the game. (yes, I know it is coming. I'm just enjoying the game right now as it is). Here's why: Some element of randomness is required to make games interesting. I run with a good premade: sometimes we go for weeks without losing a single game. If premades had total control of their entire team, you'd enter the battle, and judging by the guild name on the opposing side, already know the outcome. Say you've lost to this premade 10 of the last 10 times you've fought: you'll be pretty sure you're going to lose the next one. By introducing 4 random players to each side, you mix things up a bit. No premade can have an unlimited winning streak, simply because there is always the chance they get total noobs on their side. You'll go into battle and see, well, the enemy premade is generally better than us. But you'll put up a damn good fight, because, who knows, maybe the 4 randoms on your team are better than the 4 randoms on their team. And conversely, even though you see a weaker enemy premade on the enemy team, you can't let up the pressure - you have no idea how good their randoms are. I cannot imagine how boring the game would become if the randomness got taken out of it: you'd see many teams enter the fight and just give up immediately, knowing they can not win against an 8 mean team they've already lost to 10 times in a row.

Marauder's Deadly Throw and Shatter Shot... if both are present on the target, will it receive -40% healing? I do see my heals hit for 20% less sometimes, then I know one of those debuffs are present, but I'm wondering whether it does in fact stack. Then a Sniper+Marauder focus fire would be pretty strong in rated...

It's basic game design if you think about. Most games that want to differentiate DPS specs usually do it on the axis of Burst vs Sustained vs Utility They will make one spec good at Burst damage, able to output large amounts of damage and switch targets quickly. But their Sustained damage will be poor. And another spec will have good Sustained damage, able to keep up high DPS on a single target. But their Burst is poor, it takes time to ramp up and they have difficulty target switching. This is precisely what Marksman and Lethality are - Marksman is the burst tree with less sustained, while Lethality is the sustained tree with less burst. Yes Cull does a lot of damage when you pull it off, but it's not something you can pull out at will. For example you used Corrosive Grenade on the ball carrier and he passes to someone else - now you have to wait 12 seconds before your Corrosive Grenade cools down before you attack the new ball carrier. On the other hand, the Marksman sniper doesn't slow down at all - he can lay down his burst damage immediately on the new ball carrier. If Marksman has superior burst, better target switching AND highest sustained damage, there would be absolutely no reason for anyone to play Lethality.

The reason people get backfilled into existing WZ is because one team is down a player, making it 7 vs 8. You can only remove this as an option when 7 vs 8 never happens... the only way to do this is to make it impossible to leave a WZ, for whatever reason. Even if you remove the ability for players to leave the WZ, they can just AFK, turn their computer off, or do something else. There needs to be a drastic penalty for leaving WZ then, in order to prevent people from doing so and making their team play 7 vs 8 for the rest of the match. Something like instant-deleting their character. Only then can you have the option of ticking a box to not queue for an ongoing WZ.