Can't really speak for PVP but PVE Vanguard dps is just fine. In my guild I'm almost always #2 in dps even when I'm undergeared and playing with good players. I fully expect to top that once I'm geared out. I play assault spec and I love it.

It's definitely worth it. This is especially true if you took the Spacer talent to reduce the activation time down to 2 secs. I don't think there are any other abilities that you can do in 2 secs to beat the damage of xs freighter flyby. To the person that said 9 seconds, that's just wrong. You are only tied up for 2 seconds casting this, after which you can go about your rotation. Also, if you hit that ability that increases your alacrity, it will also shorten the activation time on flyby.

My whole point was that there's no sense in crying about a supposed advantaged on the Imp side when they're also crying about different advantages on the republic side. It more or less evens out in the end especially when you're crying about a 26 skill barrel. At least you CAN get a 26 barrel.

Well hopefully you're using burst volley on cool down and you're specced into Foxhole I think it is, for the extra energy regen (and staying in cover). You shouldn't have to weave in too many basic attacks.

OMG, don't bring up this old argument. Why does the republic get an offhand that can hold an augment slot but Imperial don't? Why do the last patch changes benefit republic side more than imperial (I'm talking about illegal mods). It all evens out, that's why. Be glad you get to spend millions to get a better barrel. The imp can't spend any amount of credits to get a better offhand. Nor can they spend any amount of credit to make 30% more tech accuracy benefit their main hand weapon more than it does. Don't complain about this, it's such a small thing.

So Ckoneful, are you saying you spam stock strike and ion pulse even when HIB is on 6sec internal cooldown? You must also have hammer shot in there somewhere, because otherwise it's impossible to keep ammo high.

I'm an idiot for not mentioning this in the original post, but this is a PVE rotation. Many of the points made here in the thread are great points, but they're PVP oriented. I'm looking for practical consensus on PVE rotations and how often people include other abilties in their rotations when HIB is on 6sec internal CD.

There's only really 2 ways. Look on the gtn and note items and prices for a few days and gather lots of information. Or you can start putting stuff up for auction. If it sells quickly, it's in high demand. Just keep in mind that when you're looking at prices, you're generally looking at the cheapest prices for a given item. If they priced it too low, those items will move FAST. But if even the cheapest price for an item doesn't sell, then the sellers are either pricing too high or there's no market for that item. So keeping that in mind, if you're putting something up for auction and it sells really fast, then look to see if maybe you priced it too low. If there's a ton of other people that priced at a similiar price to yours, but you happened to undercut them just slightly, then you know about what your item will go for and it's high demand. If you looked, and just one other person had items priced at where you sold, then maybe that person is selling for too low (and you just happened to follow their lead). In this case, see if it makes sense to buy up there stock and put everything back up for auction at a higher price. Sometimes this works and sometimes that goof ball that is underselling (usually a farmer) will keep putting stuff up at reduced prices. If that's the case move on. If you're selling crafted items. Be sure to check on the gtn for the price of all the material that went into making the item. If the materials are selling (count up everything in total) for more than what you can get for the crafted item, don't sell the crafted item. Just sell your mats. You just saved a ton of time not crafting up a bunch of stuff that's going to net you less. One last thing, you have to keep checking the market. Sometimes what's in demand one week is out the next week and vice versa (especially true after certain patches). So be sure to change with the market and don't expect that what sold last week is selling this week.

so you wouldn't use mortor volley or pulse cannon as filler during the 6 sec CD period?

I don't understand certain sellers sometimes. There is no way to profitably sell those at only 5,000. And the only way to get them is to run missions that cost at least 1,700. I mean why bother at that point? These are the same people I bet that sell crafted items for less than the cost of the materials to make the item. I mean if you're going to do that, just sell the mats for gods sake!

Are you kidding me? Those missions cost 1780 credits each and am always able to run 3. That's 5,340 credits each time I run missions. I almost always manage to get a neural augmentator within 2 or 3 runs and I usually net 2 augmentators. They go for about 20,000 credits on my server. I sell the basic material back to the vendor for 111 credits each. For just running missions and not doing anything, netting anywhere from 25-40k credits every couple of hours doesn't seem bad to me. Keep in mind, you just run your missions then switch toons or go do something else. There is virtually no way you're spending more than it's worth to do these missions.

I believe they are under miscellaneous. All I do though is type in the search box, "augmentation kit" and change the rarity to blue, and it pops up all the level 5 and 6 kits.

That only increases the damage if AP crits. Also, PVE is all about downing bosses. Nobody really cares what happens on trash as long as your going through it fast. And I can't think of any boss fights where you need to CC that would be affected by AOE damage on the boss. I realize AP does more damage but does it justify losing a point in your talent tree? You're either losing 3% aim or 3% crit. And again, AP doesn't proc Ionic Accelerator and doesn't help our ammo management. I don't think it does enough damage to justify what you're losing. The combat parse that Suryi did above proves this. Though I would love to see more parses from others to really put this to bed.

Assault Plastique is absolutely an inferior skill and not needed at all for PVE. It doesn't proc Ionic Accelerator, which means it doesn't lead to a free HIB or a refund of 1 energy cell. Everything you do should be geared toward pushing out more HIBs. Anything AP does you can do with Sticky Grenade for only a little less damage and without spending a talent to do it. Putting AP in your rotation does not increase your dps, so why use it?

I'm a SS Gunslinger and I use Akavi 90% of the time.