Snap shot and Stroke of genius are hardly any DPS increase, unless you are indeed trying to fit an extra shot in a relic duration or WB. Yes, both utilities make your Lethal shot instant, but they don't remove the GCD caused by using the ability. How is casting an ability for 1.5s any different to using it instant and then wait 1.5s till the end of the GCD? In addition, while Snap shot may have some use on bosses with lots of movement, Stroke of Genius requires you to waste a GCD to use Cover Pulse (no dmg) just to use an instant ability that will damage the boss at the start of the GCD and not 1.5s later. For example, that part in your rotation: The damage from LShot will occur 3s (TD+CP+instant LS) after the end of Cull If you don't use Stroke of genius, the damage will occur at (TD+ 1.5s LS cast) = 3s after the end of Cull. So what are you gaining exactly by putting a point in that utility?

A few things my friend... 1. The nice skill you've put on number "7" is called "Berserk". Use it every time you build 30 stacks of fury. You can't ever just sit on 30 stacks like you do all the time. 2. Predation - also at 30 stacks of fury when your team needs speed. For example in the first fight you could have used it to help your team get to the bridges faster and open them before the enemy can counter. 3. Disruption - you've bound it to "U", but never use it. Learn what skills are key to each class and interrupt them when you fight. 4. Learn how to differentiate between the different specs, how to identify the tanks and how not to make them your primary targets. In the first battle you spent the opening minutes trying to bring down a guardian tank, which was backed by a healer. Don't do this. Ever. 5. And final. You have a skill called Obfuscate on your bottom row. It's quite useful - learn what it does, bind it and use it.

I've been playing my sniper extensively in PvP lately, mainly due to the lack of PvE content and the summer "low activity" period. I tend to change my build quite often trying to find the answer to the question the op asks. The benefit from playing each spec can be divided into 3 sub-questions 1. What's my survivability against melee. 2. What's my survivability against ranged. 3. What's the overall utility I bring to the team. The damage itself is not an issue for any sniper spec as the people mentioned in previous posts. 1) Lethality Lethality has probably the biggest problems when defending against melee. I've found out that when I'm playing lethality, I run around chasing healers etc... and that leaves me vulnerable to jumps from warriors/knights. So the lethality snipers have to cope with that in addition to the usual stealth classes. Lethality has the "disadvantage" of dots ticking on your enemy all the time. When defending from a melee class that means that the roots from cover pulse and leg shot are 2s. The slow from corrosive grenade is only 6s and the corrosive mine you leave when you roll is just good for another 2s while they get out of its radius. Against ranged, lethality is probably the best of all 3 sniper specs. The fact that you only have to stay in one place for EP+SoS and that you can cleanse all dots with evasion gives you an edge against everyone, including all other sniper specs. The utility from lethality spec is the offensive power of the corrosive grenade and the pressure your dots put on the healers (except operatives) and tanks. Shatter shot + dots + cull just annihilates enemy tanks. 2) Marksmanship Against melee it's the second best spec. The additional slow to leg shot you can get from the debilitating shot talent, the knockback on ambush and the additional distance to cover pulse, plus the prolonged time of entrench mean that you can just sit in cover and dish out damage to your attacker while keeping him under control. When the attackers are more than one, it's another story Against ranged you're pretty much a sitting duck. Mercs and sorcs can damage you as much as they want, then hide to heal themselves. If you have any combination of ranged enemies that includes a marksmanship sniper with diversion off cooldown you're pretty much gone in 3 seconds. The real offensive benefit of the marksmanship snipers is the damage they do to operative healers and the ability to quickly change targets when your current one vanishes/hides etc. I usually respec to Marksmanship when I see that many operative healers are queuing at the time. 3. Engineering Against melee the engineers are the best spec. Anyone that comes within 4m of you will suffer greatly. Against ranged it's the complete opposite. Your plasma probe is easily avoided, your scatter bombs don't work at range and you have to rely on some clunky mechanic that requires you to use Quickshot to try and finish an opponent. Quickshot usage has always bothered me the most when playing engineer. Why on earth am I forced to use a skill that no other sniper spec uses in any form. Both Marksmanship and Lethality snipers will shred you to pieces as you don't have any means to counter Diversion or dot+LOS. The great advantage of the engineer is the node guarding and personal protection against melee. You'll be really good in Arenas, Novare coast and Voidstar, have some limited usability in Ancient Hypergate and Alderaan(guarding) and completely useless in any form of Huttball. When I play sniper in any spec, as soon as I see a plasma probe, I start hunting for the engineer. It's so easy to kill them at range and brings so much advantage to your team when they die that I don't think any excellence at node guarding can compensate the big mark you get when people see plasma probe in Voidstar 4) Hybrid (engineering/lethality) Just a few words. It has insane burst, but your energy suffers so much when you can't finish channeling Cull or SoS that more often than not you'll be in a situation where you'll be starved for energy and forced to use rifle shot. It may only be a personal preference, but I prefer to use full lethality.

3. There are certain combinations of position in the starting area, camera direction and zoom that will allow you to manually target the enemy team members through the starting gate before the match has started. I know it's possible on Novare coast and Voidstar, that's why I always stay in stealth or to the side of the barrier, behind a solid wall until 2-3 s before the zone starts.

It's not really as simple as that, although the benefits from taking other than primary stats datacrons aren't that great. There are 4 types of attack - Force (Willpower), Melee (Strength), Ranged (Aim), Tech (Cunning). The Agent/Smugler has ranged as well as tech attacks and while Cunning gives bonus to all of them, Aim will also give bonus to ranged weapon attacks. So while Aim should never be taken instead of Cunning (for Agents), a free bonus from Datacrons is always a plus. The same for Warriors/Knights. Strength is basic, Willpower is useful for force attacks like Force Scream/Blade Rush. So for all classes I'd recommend taking both types of datacrons, except for Sages/Inquisitors who don't ever use their lightsabers for actual damage, therefore Strength is useless to them.

The askmrrobot.com link in the first post also has the skill build (step 8) - just press the skill tab on the top.

I don't see the new patch going live before the first half of April. Not with the current bugs to the new bolster system and the need to iron out the class balance with the new skills. When we reach 55, there will be 2 options - Either our gear will be bolstered to the expertise level of the new level 55 recruit gear, or we'll be forced to start from scratch and use the recruit set. The devs are trying to get the first option working, so it will make sense to min/max now and have a decent bolstered gear at 55 than being forced to use the new Recruit gear, full of Critical rating, Alacrity and god knows what else. In both cases, having the max possible WZ comms and ranked WZ comms will help you to buy some 55 gear immediately and start PvP-ing on a competitive level. Also, make sure you have enough cash and a friend who can craft the new level 9 augmentation kits and augments. Most likely their price will be sky high on the GTN before more people can gather the new crafting materials and start mass-crafting augments and selling them.

The specific thing about the Carnage spec and more or less any other Marauder build is that we reach our full potential late in the leveling process (after level 40 more or less). At level 24 you got Force Choke, which is a fine ability that builds you rage while at the same time gives Quinn some time to heal you up. The next good ability will come from the Carnage tree and is Gore (which you can get at 30 if you don't waste points elsewhere). Gore gives you 100% armor penetration and when combined with Ravage deals massive damage. You should get Towering rage (level 4 in the tree) right after Blood Frenzy and when you get BF, you can make the Gore-Ravage-Force Scream combo within 6s which is something amazing Regarding the stats, you can't do much till lvl 50. Make sure you get as many orange pieces as you can and that all the mods in them have more strength than endurance. The other stats you're looking for are Power and Surge. The critical rating is not so important and the reason for this is that when Blood Frenzy procs (30% chance from Ataru form + Ataru Mastery) when you also have Towering rage, the Force Scream you use in that 6s Blood frenzy window has 100% critical chance. Combine that guaranteed critical hit with Gore's 100% armor penetration and you'll see Force screams that do 1200-1500 damage as early as level 30-35. Regarding your alacrity question: Currently our Berserk skill (for Ataru form) reduces the force cost of the attacks we use for proccing ataru strikes (Vicious slash which is later replaced by Massacre) and reduces the Global countdown for these attacks by 0,5s (making the GCD 1s instead of 1.5). With the changes to Alacrity in 2.0, it will reduce the global countdown for every class. That's why they also change the Berserk skill for Ataru and give us 30% Alacrity, which effectively does the same thing and lowers the GCD to 1 - 1.1s. So we'll already have max alacrity during our berserk phases and it doesn't make sense to invest in additional alacrity on our gear. Doing so will probably mean to sacrifice some more important stat like Power, Surge or Accuracy, which doesn't make much sense. Of course the testing on PTS goes on and we'll have access to tons of information what stats are most useful for Carnage in 2.0. Especially when PvP is repaired and we can do some testing there too.

15 seconds

Finally on PTS ... The root effect for deadly throw is still 3s, so you can remove that from the first post.

On the swtor-spy skill tree I saw that the Displacement skill now gives a 6 second root to Deadly Throw (was 3). Can someone confirm that on PTS please?

I'd say it's a matter of personal preference and game style. The operative is the sneaky type of char. You'll have stealth and plenty of stabbing attacks. You can also choose the medic tree if you feel like it. For me, the downside of operative DPS gameplay, especially in PvE is that you need to get at close range to use some important abilities, while at the same time you lack the survivability the true melee classes have. So for PvE choose operative only if you want to become a medic. The sniper on the other hand is all about dealing damage at maximum range (30m). You can't stealth, but the general idea with snipers is to get at the targets at 30m and shred them to pieces before they can get to you. With the sniper you'll get a choice of 3 pure damage specs and from my experience I'd recommend going marksman in the beginning, but also try the Lethality spec when you reach level 40. They're both really good, but the gameplay is different and you'd miss a lot if you stick only to one spec without trying the others.