I'd like to add that the synergy between marauders in the same wz is not as easy as just grouping them all together. As one marauder benefits from another marauder's buffs, he is no longer able to build fury stacks for himself to keep this synergistic cycle going (exception made with frenzy which is up every 2.5 minutes). That being said, having a combination of anni/carn/rage/ maras are indeed powerful. let's say you had 4 anni, 2 carn and 2 rage. your 4 anni maras with 4 sec disruptions and high single target damage will put a lot of pressure on enemy casters (dps sorcs, arsenal mercs) and enemy healers either directly or indirectly through dps'ing an enemy caster so hard. With the ability to self heal and at times heal others, you can expect these four anni maras to be hard to kill. your 2 carn maras on top of being able to root a person for a consecutive 8-9 seconds (imagine huttball). have the one of the highest burst in game with berserk'd massacres when needed. With good coordination, they can also keep your group running at +80% run speed for a 1/4 of the match. your 2 rage maras if put together for smashes will more than half a person's hp if not outright kill him from 100%. have a shortened CD on the best defensive ability in the game, Undying rage, allowing him to be in the thick of as many people as he wants for long enough to pull of a >5k smash (and that's conservative). For those of us who think maras cannot survive focus fire...we can...saberward and undying rage are powerful defensive cooldowns. While it is true that you can stunlock them before they pop cooldowns, a good marauder that knows what's coming will pop unleash (which heals 10% of your life for rage maras with the chance to crit the heal) followed by some or all of his available def. CDs depending on how good he feels about the situation. This can all be done instantly (or even macroed!) as none of these things run off of the GCD. And while you're trying to kill a marauder with either saber ward or undying rage up....you are wasting a lot of your mana, rage, heat, ammo, energy, but most of all time while the marauder is absorbing half of it, and/or taking ~20 to ~50 damage from even your hardest hits that do land....if you were focus firing this one or two marauders that have these cooldowns up....what do you think the other 6 or 7 marauders are doing to your team? You can be sure that they are not standing around watching their buddy get focus fired =)

really really good PT. Definitely check this out!

/signed operatives need something like shadowstep as a gap closer particularly in wzs with different levels like huttball. However it should require line of sight. otherwise, it will be op for ball running.

Recommend! it's good!

yup. and people are doing it already. 4 augment slots. that's an extra 96 Strength/Willpower/Cunning/Aim/Power/Surge. It's insane and surely not intended. Please fix this.

While Biochem is a very hot topic as a crafting profession, there are lingering problems with professions in the game where people are taking advantage of crafting PvE bonuses from multiple professions that are not being addressed. Despite what most people say about biochem being the only viable profession (which is true for PvP), this simply isn't true for PvE. The difference between prototype hyper-battle grade stims and rakata stims are: 32 Might/Aim/Cunning/Willpower & 13 Power what other professions have done for themselves is make augmentable (via crits) Rakata belts and bracers, giving them an extra 48 Might/Aim/Cunning/Willpower which you may or may not argue as being roughly the same. Keep in mind, these belts and bracers do NOT require their associated professions to use. Rakata Stims now require 400 Biochem to use...Crafted Rakata gear should require their respective professions as well because what's happening right now is people are crafting their augmentable Rakata belts and bracers, getting the extra stats from augments there, then jumping to Biochem for the Rakata Stims. End result: They gain the PvE advantages of multiple professions. BW, please address this problem. It requires only a simple solution.

Yeah...you clearly have not done the Soa fight yet. He cannot be charged at during the burn phase (part 3) which means the melee dps can do 1 of 2 things: 1) foot it from the mind traps to the boss. usually this is on the other side of the room which means by the time you get there, you can only get 2, maybe 3 hits in before he's back to immune. 2) stand around near the boss and wait for him the crystal to drop of him so you can dps him. Problem with this is you'll soon have a quarter of your raid if not half of your raid in mind traps if the melee dps are just standing around doing absolutely nothing. So clearly, this is fight, and many others is just not working out for melee.

I'm glad I'm not alone in this. What I want to know from BW is this... is this trend going to continue? I haven't seen any official response from BW about this melee dps vs ranged dps issue. I don't like having ranged DPS literally 'carry' me. I have +1400 strength and I need to be carried by my ranged DPS counterparts that are way less geared. It's embarrassing. I'm actually working on rerolling mercenary at the moment as an escape route from melee dps cause there's no word on this issue and playing melee DPS is just plain frustrating and unrewarding.

I'll like to stress one point already covered, IMO too briefly on this thread. Melee DPS and virtually all boss fights (except for one that I can think of) is a joke. For example, I play a marauder and I spend more time running between mind traps and Soa, running away from lightning orbs than I do DPSing the boss. My ranged counterparts just stand somewhat in the center to be in range of everything and have a jolly good time going through their DPS rotations. From my experience, you bring too much melee DPS and you can't down Soa before enraged timer goes off and the group wipes. The same goes for many, many bosses out there. I'm a lvl 50 Marauder and already decently well geared +1400 strength. I can tell everyone that Mars/Sens will tear your face off in PvE and PvP (but not any more than a +1400 primary stat of any other DPS class) ... the problem is we don't get very many chances to stand there and put damage on anything. Have you ever tried closing down a sniper who's covered on the bridge in huttball? lol. Can't force charge...you have to run at him...all the while he sees you coming and you're being shot at. Once you get to him, he stuns, position himself in whatever way necessary to knock you off the platform...since you can't force charge at him because he's already back in cover, you cease to become his problem for the next 20 or so seconds for you to get back up on that platform...in which case he just starts shooting at you again. I don't even bother with those encounters anymore. If a sniper starts shooting at me, I just force camouflage and run away cause it's stupid to try to attack him.

Anyone else see the problem with melee dps and the Soa fight? We spend more time running between mind traps and Soa (Soa cannot be force charged against in the last phase), running away from orbs than actually DPSing the boss. On the other hand, the ranged dps if stationed correctly will never run into an orb unless the orb is targeting him, be in range of both Soa and mind traps. My experience with Soa so far is if you bring too much melee DPS, you'll never down the boss before it enrages and wipes the group. Boss fight is just way too melee-unfriendly. What are your experiences?