The gear is basically the same for leveling purposes. Upgrades are pretty linear on the way up, and your stats aren't a huge deal. Power/Crit/Surge are solid for both specs. If you plan on leaning more PvE-Solo early on, I'd suggest leveling Arsenal to Tracer Missile first. Mako is your only companion option early on, and double healer is slow going. On the other hand, you might enjoy Bodyguard early if you plan on doing a lot of flashpoints/heroic quests/pvp. Skill resets are cheap as long as you keep them infrequent, so if you feel like changing things up hit the fleet between planets. The hybrid seems like it would be better for leveling compared to straight Bodyguard, especially early, but I don't have any real leveling experience with either.

Well, now I feel like a *******. A blind *******. I stand corrected, and you need 2% accuracy from gear to reach 105%. That aside, That question is a little broken as far as english goes, so if my answer isn't what you're looking for I'm sorry. We do have a "Ranged" and "Tech" accuracy, but all special attacks have a 100% base chance to hit, and accuracy rating affects both equally. Rapid shots is not a special attack, and uses 90% as its base MH accuracy. OH attacks also incur some penalties, but they do incredibly low damage. It doesn't really matter too much if OH attacks miss. The way the character log is laid out does make it fairly confusing, I just snapped a little bit because of all the blanket statements that get thrown around on the forums. Also, when I get frustrated, I apparently hallucinate new numbers on talents and end up being a bit off the mark.

Honestly, I'm thinking the DoT would out damage the Armor Penetration, especially in the Burnout range. I also think having to rely on IM would be limiting. Side note: Why not just try it?

Not really worth it to sidetrack until you at least have Terminal Velocity, even then, I don't think I'd recommend it. It would slow down getting to some of the really great stuff at the top of the tree, a lot of which is rotation-changing.

Many of those things are very important, and potentially push the stat into dps-loss territory, especially with the first individual rating point. Neglecting the TV out-of-sync concerns and using 200(where the hell did this number come from anyway? a more reasonable number would be 39(ceiling, so your 5/s regen count is actually accurate)+66(vent heat)-~12(time spent above 40 while priming vent heat)) Full TV procs is an unrealistic assumption even without syncing issues. With 10% alacrity you're looking at more like 28-29 possible TV procs, and counting 75% of those is fair, without actually counting over a reasonable sample size. 10 Unloads is also more likely considering the 6 second ICD and 30% chance on TM only to proc.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=279723 The Mercenary Build thread. It's like 4th down on the page :X Still waiting on that sticky.

ALL special attacks, which is everything but Rapid Shots, has a base 100% accuracy. This includes "white damage" from Unload, Rail Shot, and Sweeping Blasters. Most classes have 5% defense chance base. Running with absolutely no Accuracy from any source will cause you to miss 5% of ALL your special attacks on average, not counting OH attacks. Mercenaries get 3% accuracy from Advanced Targeting in the Pyrotech tree. You'll need an additional 2% to hit the 105% cap. If someday you play another class/spec that doesn't have enough accuracy from talents, getting to 105% accuracy for PVP is the best value per rating point in terms of overall damage done. Edit: Removed me being an ***. Corrected some information. Sorry.

Now I see why Bodyguard has those alacrity breakpoints. The better answer to the question you asked in some other thread as to why Arsenal did not share the same behavior is because Arsenal doesn't have any sort of regular window where our skills are improved like SCG. Bodyguard isn't actually getting any more casts out of its heat, the casts are just in a place where they are significantly improved.

The issue now is at what values of crit and surge does power overtake crit. Without any sort of math, I'd still say crit to a little over 30%, and then just go power/surge if you've got enough accuracy. The surge nerf doesn't change our gearing very much, its just a nerf.

To be honest, I'm not very familiar with Bodyguard. I'm not entirely sure what you gain at each of those steps. For Arsenal, TV procs lining up again nicely for Tracer Missiles would require 33% alacrity, which isn't feasible. I can't think of anything else in Arsenal that is affected by alacrity other than an all around faster rotation. Technically, I suppose if you actually had heat to spare even after throwing off TV proc timing, some percent of alacrity would net you an additional cast over the period where you generate the additional heat. But that's pretty unlikely, and unreliable while TV procs are random. You could average it out and get fairly reasonable numbers, I just don't think its worth it.

I found it, but while posting something new. I couldn't see anything while editing my own post.

There is some way to "Vote" on threads. I've seen the ratings. I have no idea where the option could possibly be. You'd think it would be obvious.

The part I don't understand is why. This isn't going to make Accuracy or Alacrity more desirable, Surge is hands down still better. I wonder if they just thought that crits were too big across the board? I mean, its a sweeping nerf and we'll just have to deal with it, I just don't really understand. Edit: With those numbers it's a 4.5% overall damage decrease. But crit% changes based on buffed/skill used for us. It's a nerf, its just far too much of a headache to calculate the real loss. Not to mention everyone's exact stats are different. .55(1)+.45(1.8) = 1.360 .55(1)+.45(1.7) = 1.315

Alacrity is a different beast for us, and our resource system renders any sort of sweet-spot-holiness points inadvisable anyway. As of now, our core dps is limited by heat regeneration. We'll assume that heat stays under 40, since that's ideal anyway. Heat regeneration is fixed, so over the first 30 seconds of a fight we have 39 (base) + 145(passive regen)+ 40(5 Terminal Velocity procs)= 229 heat to spend. With no Alacrity, and just spamming Tracer Missile for simplicity, you can cast 14 Tracer Missiles with that amount of heat, 9 seconds of dead time. Now say you have 10% alacrity(about 350 rating). You still only have 229 heat to spend, so you end up with 11.1 seconds of dead time (30-(14*(1.5*.9))). In this example, you gain a generous(I'm rounding up) total of of two Rapid Shot casts worth of damage, which is something like 1.7k for me. It's hard to tell, each individual hit can crit, and crits aren't added to the total ><. For the same amount of rating in Power(which is like 2/5 as valuable or something), you're adding about 280 damage to each Tracer Missile(with its absolutely fabulous 2.0 power coefficient). That's ~3900 damage. Note:: I'm fairly sure Power and Alacrity are not worth nearly the same in terms of itemization budget(and if they are, they sure as hell shouldn't be), but I can't get in game to check, so pretend numbers it is. Now obviously actual heat usage is very different. TV procs will vary anywhere from 0-10, Unload and Rail Shot use less heat than TM. In fact, this particular example is almost worthless other than to illustrate that we have a relatively fixed ideal amount of heat to work with over a given period of time. From the other side of things, in order for alacrity to see non-Rapid Shot returns: lets magically assume you use an impossible number of four Rail Shots, and seven Unloads in that 30 seconds. You spend 6 seconds casting Rail Shot, and 21 seconds casting Unload, giving you a whopping 3 seconds to spend 117 additional heat. = Two TM casts. With a 10% alacrity(350 rating), you get 4.1 seconds to spend all that heat. = Three TM casts. So, a 2.5k damage increase here. The 140 increase in power that'd you get instead would be around 773 total damage to Unloads, 1064 total damage to Rail Shots, and 560 to TMs. Annnnd this comes out to about a 2.4k damage increase if you were to instead add power. Again, near worthless example to illustrate when alacrity would be giving you solid returns. But from these two silly examples, you can see that unless we have extra heat we literally can't spend fast enough, alacrity gives you a small dps increase by allowing extra time to use Rapid Shots that might be completely offset by the fact that *any* alacrity significantly reduces average heat vented by TV. I think you might even lose dps even if you had extra heat by adding alacrity. TV is no small part of our heat management, that extra heat might not be available. Now, the cool part, don't need math to discern if we have extra heat. Do you need to use Rapid Shots ever? Well then, you do not have enough leftover heat to see gains worth considering from alacrity.

Not true. All skills are affected by Accuracy. All special attacks start at 100%. The reason your Tech/Ranged accuracy sections appear different is because Ranged is listing your basic(Rapid Shots only) Accuracy first.