OP -- The one big piece of advice I would give you is on your talent trees. I run 2/8/31 and am doing pretty much top damage in my 16M raiding guild these days. A couple differences from your spec: **I think you can ditch marksmanship. You can make up the difference in accuracy with your gear by swapping out just a few mods/enhancements, and I think it's worth it at higher levels of gear. This allows you to take explosive engineering, which will make four of your regularly used abilities (EP, OS, frag grenade and CD) hit harder. Consequently, EP should be higher up your priority list for filler between culls -- like, use it on cooldown during those phases. You should also be using BM or WH shells on two of your main pieces, giving you the two-piece PvP set bonus. This makes OS hit four times, giving you more returns on your 30% AoE increase. I could see maybe taking marksmanship if it's going to lead to something worthwhile on the second tier of that tree, but there is nothing worth taking there to justify spending points in marksmanship that can just be made up with a little gear tweaking. **It's not a huge deal, but IMO it's not worth getting deadly directive over razor edge. Alacrity is just gonna contribute to energy management problems, and it's not going to make your DoTs tick any faster. Shiv, you might end up actually using. **I don't know why you'd want your CD to slow its targets rather than reduce the cooldown on escape, cover pulse and shield probe (choosing adhesive corosives over hold your ground). Most if not all boss encounters are going to be immune to CC, and it's not like trash is around long enough for movement speed to be an issue. The three abilities with reduced cooldowns can all come in handy multiple times per fight. That's it for the skill tree differences. I would push the crit percentage to the 38-40% range. Rotation looks fine, except upgrade EP and eliminate snipe from the list. Work on maximizing OS connections and double dotting, these two things will really set your dps apart that extra bit.

I'm calling shenanigans on that video. First of all, it's from very close to launch and a lot of things have changed since then. Second of all, the players he is going against in this video must just be retarded. As soon as I saw him successfully take on four enemies (including a healer), I had to switch it off. Don't get me wrong, he's doing a good job and everything, but please... But yeah, love playing my sniper! Engi for PvP, Leth for PvE. Pretty serious force to be reckoned with in both.

Fair enough. Never really had trouble with KP on any mode with any toon, although I guess Jarg and Sorno can be tough on healers. The nerfs to EC SM do bring it a step below, though. I was also partly going by gear drops, which is a good indication of which Op you should be doing when -- and they all drop the same level gear.

It's great to see all the replies to this thread and to know that I'm not alone in my observations. I definitely hear the point that some of you have made that, when pugging, leaders will opt for higher geared players to counteract the lack of coordination and general unpredictability of PuGs. The instance that led me to start this thread, however, was not one of these cases. It was a guild run for which they were looking to only add two dps. I was very clear with the leader that this was an alt and that my main had been through TFB HM (16M at that, which IMHO is much harder) many times, so I knew the fights and assured him I wouldn't be a liability. I offered to run a parser with the rest of his dps to make sure the gap wasn't too significant. I asked which of the voice programs they were using. In short, I did all I could to demonstrate that I'm a reliable, knowledgable player and it would make up for any perceived lack of gear. How did he respond? He ignored me! Before this, I had never been ignored by anyone and I've been playing this game since launch. I was being completely respectful, even apologizing if I sounded condescending while explaining the gear requirement. Totally baffled me and, I must say, compelled me to start this thread. Which brings be back to the thread's title, "sad state of operations." Are we really at the point where people would go so far to fake proficiency that raid leaders need to be so skeptical? Why can't you trust me to self regulate and only apply to encounters I know I'm suited for? Would I have brought this toon for EC HM or TFB HM? Hell no! I'd need at least full rakata first for just the former. And how was I trying to get to that point? By running TFB SM, duh. I take a lot of care to monitor how I'm performing and determining what level of encounters I'm able to do. I know I might not be in the majority on that one, but are there really so many clueless idiots out there that are irresponsibly joining groups they have no business running with? Was it really so hard to distinguish me from them? The whole thing left me with a very bad taste in my mouth and completely disillusioned with our seemingly ignorant player base.

Right, this is my point. Unfortunately, this seems to be a widespread perception. My post is both lamenting that fact and hoping to inform people to the contrary. In fact, just in this thread, someone equated TFB SM with EC HM. It's confusing, but the real hierarchy is NiM EV = NiM KP = EC SM = TFB SM < EC HM < TFB HM. Wish more people would understand that.

This is what I'm stockpiling black hole commendations on my main for. As they have added new items to be purchased and we know they will be doing so again, I am hesitant to waste comms on gearing up alts when I can just run ops with my alts, which is fun. That's the point -- I do actually find it fun going through the gear progression with a new character. Although I've experienced all of the ops and bosses, I find it new and exciting doing them with a different character that accomplishes things differently. Plus, it's actually exciting downing a boss again when you know there might be an upgrade in it for you. That is, if you are even given the opportunity to be there...

Good points. For what it's worth, I did tell the guy that it was just an alt I'm gearing up and I know what I'm doing. He also had an issue with my gear itemization, but he did not seem to understand that this was not my final gear configuration. I'm gearing up! He complained that some of the mods in my gear were not updated...well, that's because they were lettered mods and the columi mods I already had were better (I look at main stat + power in comparing mods). He also complained that all of my pieces were not augmented. You really want me to augment pieces that I plan to upgrade shortly? Come on.... It just seems that, with almost all of the gear available without having to set foot in an operation, the art of running ops to gear up has been lost. Do people not do this anymore? People just hit 50 and immediately buy all the campaign gear and run operations that are way too easy for them? Sounds like a whole lotta fun...

This thread is not, as you might have expected, a criticism of Bioware -- it's more a problem with how the player base is tackling end-game operations. It seems as though player skill is at such a sad point that people forming ops groups are imposing gear restrictions way beyond what they should be for a given operation. I am gearing up an alt DPS sorc, and I got turned down from SM TFB twice last night due to my gear, which is full rakata except for two pieces of columi. Um, am I delusional or does SM TFB drop rakata? How am I supposed to gear up if groups doing the content that drops the gear I need will not take me? You really want me to grind black hole comms and credits to buy individual mods/armorings to gear up, just so I can over-gear content and put ops leaders' minds at ease? No thanks, I'd rather do it the old-fashioned way. It's pretty simple: I need rakata, SM TFB drops rakata. Thus, I should be doing SM TFB. Come on people, this instance is not that hard. I do 16M HM on my main with my guild, and people are acting like you need full campaign for story mode. 80% of TFB is about mechanics -- get them down and you're good, as long as you can do decent DPS (and have tanks and healers doing their jobs, as well). Has player skill really dipped to such a low that people don't feel comfortable doing the content unless they completely out-gear it? Anyone else found this to be the case? It's pretty sad. Man up and challenge yourselves.

Listen, I'm not disputing that DPS-specced scoundrels/ops are something you rarely see in progression raiding. You don't need empirical evidence to tell you that, observation is enough in this case. But using these incomplete parse lists to make the argument that the specs are unquestionably not within 5% of one another is just not tenable. We clearly have a lack of scoundrel/op parses to look at because the player base has already done its own work in rooting them out. How do we know that this bias didn't arise from a difference less than 5%? We've arbitrarily labeled 5% as acceptable because that was the developers' stated goal, but how do we know that we haven't already rejected that threshold, without realizing it? Returning to the original observation that the sniper with that top parse only did 1385 damage to the actual boss -- do you think a campaign-geared operative couldn't pull that same number? I think they could. They might be limited a little trying to move between the boss's positions into melee range without a gap closer like marauders have, but I'm pretty sure there's a skill in one of their trees that ups movement speed after using debilitate. They could do this each time, just before the boss moves. Not saying it would be easy, and it would certainly take a great deal of attention and resourcefulness, but isn't that the fun part of learning fights? Of course, ops get orbital strike too and could use it just as devastatingly on those adds (not that that's relevant in meeting that 1385 DPS, just saying). Anyway, I just worry that the player base might be making uninformed decisions -- like rejecting certain classes/specs and not even giving them an opportunity to see how certain encounters and mechanics might play to their strengths -- that limit everyone's enjoyment of the game. The tendency is to look at the devs and level the blame at them for not meeting a stated goal, but maybe we've already wasted the opportunity to see if we've met that goal.

I'm not seeing how you can search by advanced class and filter it by encounter. Searching for operative, it returns a list of 1167 parses...no way i'm going through that to find one from Writhing Horror. Plus, we can be fairly sure that most of them were healers..

Ok, I also just took a deeper look into these pages upon pages of parses on all these sites that some of you are referencing as gospel. Aaaand...you might want to slow your roll there. I started at torparse, thanks to the link provided earlier. There are really not that many pares there. I took a look at the TFB final boss fight, and under 16M HM there are only 22 and 16 parses posted for DPS and HPS, respectively. Switching over to 8M, there is indeed a Top 50. However, the difference between the top (legitimate) parse and the 50th is 264 DPS (1711 - 1447). Obviously, with values so spread out, this is the Top 50 of not so many. Switching to an older fight that I figured would have more data, like Kephess in EC, I was surprised to find even fewer submissions! 16M HM one again had only 18 entries in its Top 50, only four of which were even over 1000 DPS (the top was 1124 DPS, entries 9 - 18 had less than 600 DPS, and the 18th was a whopping 81 DPS). 8M was not much better: top parse was 1455 DPS, only entries 1 - 20 were over 1000 DPS, and No. 50 was 419 DPS). Clearly, we're not looking at the cream of the crop here. So where can the cream of the crop be found? I headed on over to askmrrobot in hopes of finding it. Instead, I found more sparsely filled lists. There are zero (0) parses uploaded for 16M HM TFB. On 8M, the first 25 entries for Writhing Horror range from 1866 DPS (about 600 lower than our top parse on that fight from torparse) down to 1590 DPS. On EC's Kephess, more of the same huge variation between the top spot and the 25th spot. TL;DR please don't go taking things as given that you have either heard from someone else, seen yourself through rose-colored lenses, or are flat-out lying about. More importantly, don't shove them in other peoples' faces to make them feel stupid for holding the opinions you do, like you have some scientific foundation upon which you're basing your views and they are just idiots. In my opinion, the jury is still out on just how far apart the DPS specs are. We really don't know. Anyone pointing to these parse dumps as the be-all, end-all is doing so with an agenda.

Ok, this goes back to my point that different encounters favor different classes, and that part of the fun of learning new encounters is figuring out how to best use your spec to maximize your damage. The fight in question, the Writhing Horror, is totally and completely in a sniper's wheelhouse for one reason, and one reason alone: Orbital Strike. I know because I play a lethality sniper and myself and the other sniper in our guild top the parser every time on that encounter. You leave some DOTs ticking on the jealous male and set up an OS over the pheromones and bing, bang, boom, DPS is off the charts. There are so many of those little adds, and there is no limit on the amount of targets it hits, it's actually pretty ridiculous. At one position, you can even place OS in such a way that it strikes the boss at the same time. If a sniper did not have the top parse on this fight, I would be worried. See those jumps on the damage graph every, oh, 60 seconds? Guess what the CD on OS is. Looks like he even laid down an OS at the end when the endless stream of adds spawn to pull some crazy numbers at the end. Anyway, my point is that all fights are not like this. Some fights are more difficult for snipers. Some fights are more difficult for marauders. I didn't look, but I'd wager that some of the other top parses on this encounter come from sorcs and bounty hunters for the same reason that snipers do so well -- AoE. If you look at the DPS he did on the Writhing Horror itself -- which is all the really matters in determining whether they hit enrage -- he only did 1385. Nothing to write home about. The problem with these parse lists is not, as some have asserted, that it does not take into account the human element. Of course it does. The problem is that the numbers don't necessarily reflect the damage being done to the boss as a single target. You can argue all you want about how "multitudes" of "incontrovertible" statistics back up your assertions. But as evidence goes, it's shaky at best. If you pulled up the parse from an operative/scoundrel who did that same fight, you'd probably see pretty similar DPS on the boss. Anyone want to find one?

Although I agree with the general thesis of your post -- that PvP concerns prevent dps specs from being completely balanced in PvE -- I also have to disagree with a few of your points. First, burst damage is not irrelevant in PvE. There are a few boss encounters with quick dps checks that require good burst, such as both Kephess fights in EC and TFB. Second, ranged/melee balance is very important in PvE as well. While melee dps might be higher in general, there are certain mechanics on several boss encounters that absolutely require ranged dps and good balance/organization in a raid group. The general dynamic currently at play in raid group composition is that you need marauders for their dps and group utility (bloodthirst, predation), but it's a tradeoff since they're harder to keep up and you need ranged dps for certain elements as well. In general, the point that is lost is that it's not as easy as the OP and others might believe to balance the PvE dps output of all of the specs without making a dramatic impact on PvP balance. While I doubt that they have given up entirely on it and might very well be tossing ideas around, the current imbalance is not so egregious as to make it worth taking a big risk in ruining balance in other areas. Honestly, almost all dps specs are fine and welcome in top raiding guilds so long as the players have enough skill to perform well. In my own guild (5/5 TFB 8M HM, 4/5 TFB 16M HM), we have dps sorcs, mercs and juggs parsing right up there with the rest. No one says it should be easier or harder for some specs to attain similar dps numbers. If they have to work a little harder for it, it makes it that much more rewarding to learn fight mechanics and how they apply to your specific spec in most efficient way. Each encounter is different and favors some classes over others. It's one of the beauties of the game, and any guild that doesn't recognize that and eschews good balance/variety in their raid group is missing out. Really, the only spec you never see is operative/scoundrel dps, and that is as much because they are melee as because their dps numbers aren't at the top. But the current state of things is not dire enough to go shaking things up to the degree that some on here are advocating. Be careful what you wish for.

Ok, I've seen the separate DR on cunning's contribution to crit chance referenced all over the Internet, but have yet to see it graphed or really analyzed. My question is, at what point does it stop being beneficial to add cunning over power due to small marginal returns? I am full campaign transitioning to dread guard, and my cunning is already through the roof raid-buffed (not logged in now, but I think like 2350 or so). I'm starting to switch out some skill augments for overkill ones because my crit is where I want it to be and there is just no way that additional cunning is really impacting crit chance much at this point in the DR curve. So, I ask again: has anyone graphed this curve and determined the point where cunning's contribution to crit percentage is negligible?

I usually tend to try to avoid the sharp lightbulbs. It's just not a good design decision..