Pop your raid buffs at the very start for him - you can burn a ton of health off before he does the first wave of mechanics. Makes the whole fight a lot easier.

I love this game - it's my favourite ever - Bioware have given me years of amazing games & I love them for that. Really though there's been some massive screw ups in the core of the big important expansion that you chaps should talk about in your retrospective of the release: 1. The main reason people bought the expansion was the two new operations. These are bug ridden, don't drop the correct loot, biased towards certain classes (all Bounty Hunter HM clears), and are next to impossible to get them to work with group finder. This really should have been your main focus for the expansion. 2. Performance issues - really shouldn't be a problem in a well established MMO. I haven't seen anyone moaning about performance in the new Warcraft expansion. 3. Really frustrating bugs that were so easy to check before go live. I'm talking about the bugged instances of the Rishii datacrons (if you're going to make content that takes hours to do - make sure it works perfectly so you don't annoy your subscribers!). Another example was solo Revan - seriously the main boss of the expansion wasn't working in the build you released? 4. Class balancing - don't just pander to the loudest group on the forums. Look at some stats. I see you're looking at the Marauder for the next patch. The Marauder works fine - look at something like the operative where most people have stopped using them, especially in DPS OR Deception Assassins - you really crippled those classes and they need some love. Just look at the Dulfy guides for some objective feedback from people who have a good objective overview of all the classes and their relative effectiveness to each other. 5. Don't take content away from people - when you get to level 60 you no longer have all the GF options you had before. Expansions are supposed to add content, not limit their options on previous content. 6. Work on your feedback -> triage -> dev -> test feedback loop so that you can promptly action community feedback effectively in small iterative cycles. Small agile iterations that you can work closely on with your core beta testers. It's still the best game ever in my opinion...so hopefully you can find some useful information/pointers in the above. If you need a highly qualified development manager (who just so happens to be obsessed with your game) - give me a shout

What I would most like to know is: 1. The mob(s) killed most often in the game 2. The mob(s) killed least often in the game 3. Mob with most player kills in the game Do you have those stats please Bioware?

Come on Bioware. Let's have this please

Yeah Cull is a freakin' death storm when your poisons and lethal blast are up and ticking. It's too much damage for most trash and a waste of energy, so I would say go engineering for the leveling and then switch over to lethality for the final end mission/end game. Lethality is the boss/elite mob wrecking machine.

I've seen a lot of boss fight videos, and yours are some of the best. Really nice work chaps!

I don't understand why you can't make bosses instances/phases like ops/FPs ... surely it's better to lock people out for a day once they've down the boss, rather than force anyone wanting to face the boss to wait for 2 hours?! Seriously... what other game forces you to wait 2 hours to do the content you want to do because someone else has just done it? It's ridiculous! The worst part is you can't tell the boss isn't there until you've all travelled across the galaxy, and then across the planet. Then when you get there and the boss isn't there, you have no idea if you have to wait 5 minutes or the full 2 hours. It's getting even worse now the servers have a good healthy population, so the bosses are constantly being taken down. I love this game, but this is by far the worst thing in SWTOR for me by a long way.

Great post KeyboardNinja. I have a reasonably well-geared Immortal spec Juggernaut and although I can tank the operations reasonably successfully, I definitely struggle to be as effective as Darkness Sith Assassins and Powertech Bounty Hunters. I definitely feel that I need to be healed more, as you've pointed out. I also feel that I completely reliant on taunt mechanisms for keeping aggro... otherwise it's a struggle to keep attention away from hard hitting DPS and effective healers. I know they did a bunch of changes to address threat in this patch, but to be honest not feeling a great deal different still. In situations where I know survivability is not so much an issue, I am using might stims and buffs instead to try get more threat too. Limiting the armour debuff to 20% max hasn't helped matters much either!

Loving this build now. I've got just under 1800 cunning and 38% crit chance, 74% crit multiplier... and I'm pulling up huge numbers in HM FPs of anywhere from 1700-1850 DPS. My rotation is shatter shot > corrosive grenade > corrosive dart > weakening blast > cull (face melting time!) > series of shots > orbital strike (ambush if that is on cooldown) > cull > REPEAT Getting a lot of critical hits from the cull which keeps my energy topped up nicely most of the time. Have to be very careful though as if you do pop all your energy and have no adrenaline probe, it's a long long wait to get any energy back to start a proper rotation again!

Did a few flashpoints with the full lethality spec, and boy does it burn down single targets and bosses fast! Very impressed. I am finding it's better to be methodical and a little slow with your rotation, rather than spamming it as fast as possible. This way you ensure everything ticks for as long as it needs to, and you don't find yourself running low on energy. It is a lot harder to energy manage the lethality spec, but it does give you a larger DPS return per energy used. Energy return from crits is nice. I have about 34% crit chance, so get a fair chunk returned back when I cull. Any other tips on the energy management and rotation?

What made you switch back to full engineer build?

So overall impressions are lethality is pretty good! I took down The First, Grandfather, and Battledroid R4-GL solo so that I could have a good idea of damage to boss level mobs. Getting around 1100-1200 on the bosses now: http://www.anjesoftware.com/?file=7938 http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/combatlog/2a419f42-367f-4f01-8fa4-a72a2ed06067/player/1#d=0,t=1,b=1 So overall looking pretty good. Think I will give the build a full run through ops and I'll report back.

So general consensus is give Lethality a go as it's likely I'll get a good DPS increase, especially after patch 1.3. I'll give it a whirl now. I'll see if I can get some parsed combat logs in the next week or two as well.

Thanks for that. Has anyone done any parsing of combat logs in ops that show what the difference in DPS is between engineering and lethality? Do any lethality snipers feel they're quite squishy without the extra defense the engineer can have?

Hi everyone, I'm a Sniper Engineer on my main alt (Darshiva - Nightmare Lands btw), and so far running through FPs and Ops using this build for a great balance of survivability plus a ton of DPS: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#400bIMrRobRrsZhZbcM.1 My question is has anyone used a similar spec to this in end game ops AND also used the Lethality DPS spec? Marksman I am not a huge fan of, I tend to like playing any thing that utilises DoT. What are your thoughts as to the strongest PVE end game build(s) when comparing engineering and lethality?