I will preface what I 'm saying with the fact that all alleged nerfs to Scoundrels/Operatives are still on the PTR and have yet to be implemented on live.
I am a level 50 Scoundrel Scrapper spec who has made the slow and quite boring grind to 50 with the sole purpose of pvping on this character. After logging on to the forums today and reading about the purposed nerfs to this class I was a bit baffled. I am not a Battlemaster yet but I am closing in on Centurion so I am no stranger to the ins and outs of how this class works but it seems that some of the devs and fellow forum posters do not understand.
Every class has a role. Tank , healer and dps to be simple or to get a bit more in depth we could say absorption tank, ranged burst dps, hot healers, stealth burst dps and so on and so forth. The purposed nerfs for this class do not seek to "balance " this class with others but rather to gimp the class into another role. The skill Shoot first receiving a 20% dmg reduction is way overboard. It is the opener for the class in pvp and assures us good opening burst dps on a target. If you are in pvp and get hit by a Shoot First and it feels like you got hit by a truck its because you just did and its intended to be like that. If you lower this damage the message its sending to me is that you would perfer we didn't play like a stealth burst class but rather like a sustained dps class not unlike the gunslinger. But this can't be because you see, you want to nerf our key skill from being able to sustain any type of reasonable damage on a target by lowering Flachette rounds armor pen from 50% to 30%. Okay so I'm seeing less bursty, less sustained. But at least we will get to keep the utility and disabling part of our class strong........... nope, K.O knockdown time cut in half from 3 secs to 1.5? So what we are left with is the removal of our strong burst damage, reduction in any type of sustained damage after said weak burst and removal of our initial disabling ability.
Are you trying to nerf us or change what class we are playing? The scoundrel , in Bioware's words, is supposed to sneak in knock the crap out of an enemy and then escape. If other classes are to weak in comparison to us then buff them to help them deal with fighting our class, don't gimp us. I have my problems with other classes where I flip out a bit after getting lit up by a sith inq or find by self trailing after a juggernaut that s eating by damage like mothers milk but the difference is I'm not calling for them to be changed because they beat me. If you believe a class needs to be changed because you just got pwnd and you can't handle it then maybe pvp isn't for you.
PS: All those sweet videos you see of lvl 50 scoundrels/Ops in full champion gear stacking buffs blowing up level 10s shouldn't be the catalyst for change.