You dude, summed everything up. Thank you.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=616779 Shows great stat distributions for all 3 types of tanks, for all levels of gear. If you're confused on how to use, basically the number on the left is the sum of all 3 of your ratings (shield, absorb, defense). You would add up the 3 numbers you currently have, find yourself (closest number to) on the list of sums, and then look to see where you're over or lacking in your stats. OR if you prefer having something to shoot for, you could just pick your highest stat, and find it on the list, and push your other stats up to meet the highest as you get gear.

If your marauder / sniper is 20-30% higher on your dps than the rest of your raid group, you need to replace some dps. My guild has run several group configurations for NiM content, never once a full group of maras / snipers, and only once did we have both a mara and sniper, and never have we had more than one of either. If your dps are THAT far behind a marauder / sniper, find new dps. They aren't doing their job very well. They beat that fight on the PTS (i.e., pre-nerf) with a sniper, marauder, mercenary, and operative dps as best I can tell. So yeah...you're wrong. You didn't need full group of snipers. You just needed full group of competent dps who could pull their weight. Like any boss fight While I don't disagree that the bottom classes (sins and pt's) could and nearly SHOULD receive a buff to their damage to be more equal in damage, that's two classes...TWO. You're ignoring the fact that sorcs, mercs, operatives, and juggernauts are all well within the average and fully capable of downing NiM content. Hell, you get a GOOD assassin or pt dps, and I bet that you could down NiM content with them. It's all about skill, dude. Something that you, and a lot of other people, don't seem to understand. People aren't parsing those super high parses because of the class they're playing (while it does have a role, that isn't the ONLY factor). They're parsing those super high numbers because 1) They got very lucky with conditions, procs, and RNG and 2) They are very, very good at playing that class.

There was not much carrying involved at all, actually. My mercenary was my 6th character to 55. I had already nearly cleared hm operations (tfb and s&v) with two of my other toons (assassin tank and operative healer), and had an abundance of elite comms. Because of that, coupled with some money spent, my mercenary was in full 69's aside from non-moddable pieces the day she hit 55. After that was a lot of flashpoint grinding for elite comms and potential drops, and a few runs through story mode ops for last few 69 pieces. It is incredibly easy to gear toons VERY quickly in this game, if you know what you are doing / are willing to spend some money on hilts / mods / enhancements. EDIT: And I should correct - I had not JUST hit 55 on my merc when I posted this (it has been closer to 1.5-2 months).

This doesn't really matter, honestly. If you have any other class that does an armor debuff in your raid, you still get that bonus (Sniper, Juggernaut, another Arsenal Merc). So the fact that you can make up that armor debuff based on your raid group's composition pretty much makes that argument invalid. Pyro is very viable for raids - it's just a bit more situational, as I've come to learn over the course of this. When I started the thread, I had literally JUST hit 55 on my merc. At this point in time I'm 5/5 hm tfb and 7/7 hm s&v with mine as arsenal. However, I have also cleared all this content specced as Pyro - that being said, our core raid group is comprised of 3 mercs and a marauder, so I still had the 20% armor debuff. I've pretty much stopped parsing any kind of damage because the way I see it (as I saw it before, and I've more or less returned to that way of thinking) if the boss dies, enough damage is going out - so why does it matter? Pyro is very viable in raids, to make it short. You just need someone ELSE to supply that armor debuff. And as far as pvp goes...pyro will beat an arsenal merc just about every time, unless you just let the arsenal merc freecast on you. Then you're ****ed.

For pvp, maybe yeah mercs are a little under the weather. However saying that BW hates them and wants them to never be viable is simply wrong in every way. Really good mercs / commandos can pump out some SERIOUS damage in warzones (there's one in my guild, and a friend of his on our republic side counterpart who put out 600-700k a game pre 2.0, and assuredly do more now - don't know what kind of numbers they put out in games now as I've pretty much stopped pvp-ing).

Yeah, my gear is terrible btw. NOW I'm about all 69's except implants / relics and my mh, so I'm not going to be putting up numbers like that. But I WOULD like to see a 3k parse! Looking into that sort of thing is generally useful to get better

Don't know if you're still following this at all Gyro, but I did try out some parsing and was interested with the results (especially considering the raving-mad discussions of how much better Arsenal is than Pyro). Granted that I'm not very well geared at the moment, the numbers in these cases don't matter as much as the differences! http://www.torparse.com/a/285642 -- here's my arsenal (tried to keep them both roughly around 3:45ish for accuracy) http://www.torparse.com/a/285631 -- aaaand here's pyrotech. Only 30 dps difference between the two. Granted, I AM better at pyro than I am at arsenal, but I don't think I made an "fatal" errors in my Arsenal rotation (just a couple powershots here and there, lol). I may do more work on this and get better at arsenal, just to see what differences I can REALLY point out. But for a pretty direct answer to the "what-so-many-think-is-answered" question: No, Arsenal is not necessarily better than pyro. It's what you prefer, how you play, and what you're more comfortable with.

I haven't actually delved much into the world of parsing for swtor; I've been trying to hold back from that, as I got really in-depth with it in WoW and it ended up burning me out pretty quickly. However, I do think I'd like to give it a try at some point if you have any tips / suggested methods to do it? My only method of "parsing" my damage is how often / if I pull threat from tanks, tbh. Which, if you pull threat on a ranged dps that's pretty impressive already, as from my experience on an assassin tank (primary character), ranged pull less threat than melee. I've downed up to thrasher on my primarily 66-modded pyro merc in hm SV, and was actually having to wait a couple seconds to start dps otherwise i'd pull (wiped us on Dash XD ). Because of this, I have serious thoughts that pyro is not only comparable to arsenal but possibly better. Though, like I've said, I have no parsing available to back this claim up. EDIT - I actually took a look at your post before posting mine, and felt that mine might still be warranted considering you can't stack the set bonuses anymore.

Hey guys, just to start things off I am in no way an expert on Bounty Hunters / Mercenaries in general. That being said, I have been playing a merc that I recently got up to 55, and I've been (what appears to be) the only pyro merc around anymore. So, I figured why not help out the people "taking the other path" with what's working for me right now. First off, here's the spec I've been using: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#300MZMccZfGbrzRrffzz.3 Of course, as with any spec, there are some talents here and there that are more or less preference (when you're deciding to have more health or to have stealth detection / ranged + melee defense, really doesn't matter from a pve standpoint), but in that build I do think I've taken all of the "necessary" talents for pyro. I especially want to point out the points into bodyguard and arsenal: Improved Vents is a no-brainer. Ironsights is also a no-brainer. I went with Mandalorian Iron Warheads instead of Stabilizers because honestly, if you're managing your Chaff Flare well, you shouldn't be getting hit to a point where you'd want to lose damage to decrease pushback. And here's the one where there may be some discretion, so I'll just explain my choice now: Upgraded Arsenal is without a doubt a better talent to take than Hired Muscle. While Hired Muscle gives you ranged and tech critical chance, it gives less ranged crit chance, and the only real tech damage attacks are your grenades and missiles (which I'm not even 100% sure that those ARE tech damage). Your big-hitters (Rail Shot and Power Shot) are ranged attack - they go off of your ranged crit chance, and scale with your mh/oh - aim - power, not your tech power. Ok, so now the spec is out of the way. As for stats, not sure really on optimal. I've been shooting for some random numbers I feel comfortable around: Roughly 30-35% tech crit (your ranged crit will be higher) Roughly 70-75% Surge 100% ranged accuracy 110% tech accuracy If you're at that point, then: http://pic.jpgdump.com/14347.jpg (If you don't want to laugh or have no sense of humor, at this point you want power) The biggest concern I think most people have is how to manage your heat. First off, let's just put out some good overall merc practices that I've gleaned over the levelling / gearing process: 1) stay below 30% heat as often as possible. You can easily do this by adding a rapid shot after each cast-timed ability (Power shot, fusion missile, NOT UNLOAD -- the point of doing an instant cast after a cast-timed ability is to "combine" the GCD of the abilities; with channeled abilities, it will seem just like using two instant cast abilities, whereas with a cast-timed ability, it will seem like you're nearly only using one GCD, as your GCD for the cast-timed will finish during the cast) 2) If you go above 50-60% heat and there is not a break in dps coming up, use Vent Heat. 3) Remember your rapid shots do more damage to burning targets (pyro only) - they aren't necessarily "bad" to use if you're around 40% heat or so. 4) Save your Thermal Sensor Override for high cost skills like Fusion Missile. Ok, so those out of the way, here's what my general "rotation" is: 1) Maintain Incendiary Missile at all times, and if at all possible, don't refresh it while it's still active (wait until just before it drops off to reapply, as it will take a second for the missile to reach the boss) 2) Maintain Thermal Detonator at all times (this basically means use it on CD) 3) Combine Thermal Sensor Override with Fusion Missile on TSO's CD - I use this for both big burst phases / opening, as well as aoe if DFA is on cd. 4) Rail Shot before using anything else (i.e., before you proc the free one) 5) Combine Power Surge with Power Shot on CD -- CAREFUL here, only do this if you're comfortable on heat. Power Surge costs 19 heat so you can blow above 50% doing this if you've just reapplied dots or just done another power shot. 6) Rail Shot on proc and CD. 7) Unload on CD provided you have the heat for it (unload is a FANTASTIC ability from a heat management standpoint. It is rarely not ok to use this skill). 8) Power Shot + rapid shot combo 9) Missile Blast - If you have literally nothing else to do or are looking to apply a burn and do a small burst rq. This only applies if you take the Volatile Warhead talent like I do. Lots of you may just tl;dr this, or ignore it (because screw pyrotech, that's why) - but this is a pretty good setup. I've been pulling threat off of tanks and dps using this setup since hitting 55 (only had campaign gear waiting for me, so wasn't insta-geared or anything), so it seems to do a pretty good amount of damage Please respond with comments / critiques, I'll see if I can justify myself to your criticism, or I can change the post to reflect your brilliant ideas!

It would be an immensely useful feature to allow another option when splitting a stack that would "split into stacks of ___". For example, you have a stack of 25 molecular stabilizers, and would like to sell them 1 at a time. The current method of doing so is to shift click that stack 24 times to separate into stacks of 1 item. The feature I'm thinking of would allow players to just hit a button to split into stacks of whatever amount the player types in, and then fill their inventory with those stacks. If their inventory could not hold the space, the feature simply wouldn't work. To go even further, there could be a "repeat auction" option in the GTN, where you could post an auction once, and then do so again for duplicate auctions x amount of times. Given the same situation as earlier, you have 25 molecular stabilizers you want to sell in stacks of 1, then the way it is now you have to drag each one to the GTN, and re-type the price for each item. No game-changers here, just time savers

While it isn't that big of a deal to just tell a person the characters you play the most or whatever, it would be really nice if, when you added a character to your friends list, all of their alts on that faction and within that legacy were added as well. It's something that Guild Wars did, and did very well. It wouldn't necessarily have to "add" all of their alts, but instead could simply show that you were online, but on a different character.

Saying there's over 100 servers and saying anyone who preordered should be in is kind of ridiculous, if you take into account that millions of people preordered this game. The waves are to ensure that there are no server crashes, no unexpected bugs, and no "WHATTHE****ISTHIS" moments. They're basically ensuring that they have the smoothest MMO launch in history, so I'm not complaining too much. I am, however, refreshing my email, facebook, and twitter pages while clicking over to my swtor client login every now and again (because if you didn't already know, the patcher is more up to date than your email. Open your client - there's a pretty good chance that when you get in, you'll be able to actually click the "play" button before you get an email).