PS: I forgot to mention, the reason you don't update your gear after 41. When you go to Makeb, get the GSI buff. From this point on, every story line quest you do will have some means of bolstering you up to the right gear level for the content you are doing, either via GSI, or straight buffing you up and giving you a combat droid to help you out.

I have a couple basic rules for leveling any class in this game (excluding tanks). Stats: Your main stat (in this case Willpower) > Power > Everything else. That's it. Gear: Get a full set of adaptive, use a pilot suit from your mail if you have to. At level 21, update it all to level 21 mods, enhancements, armorings and lightsabre hilts through comms and/or crafting (pre 21 who cares, level naked, it's not like it's hard). Update it again at 31, update it again at 41. You will use the level 41 gear until 60. The above works for any healer or dps. Now on to Sage/Sorc specifics. How to level: Leveling Skills and spec you say? Don't care if you wanna heal, spec TK/Lightning, take the utility that grants 25% bonus damage to Force Storm/Force Quake. Bind every key on your keyboard to Force Storm/Quake. Target mob, roll face on keyboard. Repeat until 60. With 12X Exp, do your class quests. That's it. when you hit 47, abandon your class quest. Don't care if it's not done, move on. Come back later if you want. Go to Makeb, do the Makeb story line. When you hit 55, do the Rishi storyline. Then do Yavin, then do Ziost. At this point you will be 60, and you should have enough comms and drops from Ziost to be fully 186/190 geared (cuz you've been saving comms since 41). Congrats, you're SM Ops ready. Go read dulfy as a starting point for your endgame career. It's a bit out of date but not much. It's gearing and rotation and break down of skills is still relevant.

Personal Experience, your mileage may vary: First night of HMs with the changes I hated it. Out of Force'd constantly, people died. Second night, started being a little more proactive with my Consuming Darkness. Begin to pay more attention to how many stacks of Force Surge I have at any given moment. HPS slightly higher than pre 3.3. Third night, deciding on how to spend Force Surges, either for CD or Reviv becomes a primary focus of awareness. VERY proactive in Consuming usage, begin using one CD at 70% force to bump me back up in the 90% range and keeping myself there until "burn" phases where I need to pump out healing. Throttling up and down is VERY effective. During down time use Force Surge procs on CDs to ramp up Force pool, burn phases use them for Insta-Revivs. Outcome: 300-500 HPS higher than pre 3.3, no gear changes depending on the fight. I like this change. A lot. Took me til the third night to get it all worked out, but I'm looking forward to my raid times this weekend.

It was my understanding it was nerfed due to it's being too nice of a heal for tanks in PvE and not nerfed due to it's burst dmg for AP in PvP.

I've played this game since Beta. I have never seen the issue described in this thread. I blame the hardware you're running, not the code.

You sir, win all my internets for the day.

I don't always reply, but when I do, it's in a 1 yr 5 month necro bump'd thread.

At lower levels (under 25) just WZ queue chaining will level you faster than questing. 25-35 they kind of start to balance out. 35+ PvE starts to bring in the exp faster than PvP queues. Your mileage may vary. Personally I can't quest grind anymore on my alts. It's just tedious to me. I do the class storyline, maybe a few quest lines per planet, and then move on. I will just find a place to grind mobs over and over instead of questing if I want to level but am not in a WZ mood.

As someone who has been /lick 'ing his friends in greeting dating back to the mid 90's (MUDs FTW) I whole heartedly /sign.

I took a break from the game. At launch through 1.1, I played a Mara and a Powertech. The forum was NOTHING but ************ about how bad Mara's were. How much buffing they needed. Meanwhile, I'm ****** face with my Anni spec thinking "these fools complaining we need buffed?!? ***, we own." So now I'm back. And, well the fools got what they whined for, we got buffed, now the nerfherders are out in full force. Surprising? No. Stupid, yes. Moral: Gaming companies should stop balancing their game based on forum QQ.

Yes, from being on the receiving end of it. LOL. If they dump their energy bar, from range, unfettered (meaning you can't LoS or stun them or no one else is around to interrupt them) you die.

I went Rage 10-20, Carnage 20-25, Anni 25+ and I'll be sticking with Anni from here on out. I started my mara as an alt to my 50 PT, I think my mara might become my main when he hits 50 and I get him geared.

Shhhhhhhhh, you're giving away secrets to the bads. I do something similar with my PT. That expertise adrenal is a far better defensive CD than offensive.

Any Advanced class is fine in PvP in the right hands. Juggs are fine, Snipers are fine, Ops are fine, Mercs are fine... it's the player, not the class.

Purely "Best Burst" nothing else to consider, hands down Sniper/Gunslinger.