Pretty close to my build. Taking Anatomy Lessons over Keep Cool is a no brainer. I also take Psych meds and Surprise Comeback over Holdout defense, but that's more of a judgement call on survivability vs burst dps. Overall I think you are over estimating the amount that you will be doing up close dpsing due to how you are neglecting vital shot talents. Without Flechette/crit damage bonus, you are going to be very lucky to get someone down 50% with your burst, so really you roam around stealthed until you find someone injured and hope to finish them off, or a squishy that you can damage a bit, but most of the time you are going to be running away. You are heavy into healing, but if your HoTs are active on in combat players you cannot stealth, and if you vanish your heals get negated so really you are going to be in the open way more than a pure Scrapper. Implication is that you are going to be fighting at range most of the time, making frag grenade and vital shot your main damage dealing abilities.

Umm.. Daily Commendations are from PvE quests, not PvP. Only requirement is that you have completed your class quests. They don't take many either, so, you could probably get a couple level23 mods a day if you ran both belsavis and ilum.

Hard to tell without knowing what the Champion drop rate is going to be post patch, but I am assuming it will be a super low percentage given the fairly generous commendations. Basically I think it comes down to how much you already have. If you have no Champion gear then open them! Yes, you could have horrible luck, but I think that it is common to get a piece every 3-4 bags. Problem is really the mainhand, which is 127 tokens.. which is a lot. If you are only missing 2-3 pieces or less, then save them since the odds of getting that lucky are probably not too great.

The answer is nothing. The same way you use your Hoth commendations, or your Belsavis commendations. Or maybe like, use them up along the way since even if it is 3 weeks (which it isn't), it will help you get champion gear. Don't understand why you are complaining about getting extra stuff.

Didn't you read the notes? They are bumping up the number of Centurion tokens you get so you get your 'predictable' gear progression while decreasing the chance of getting Champion gear randomly. Hopefully get people to stop complaining they got 5 helmets or whatever.

Neat info, but impossible to tell where the tradeoff is without seeing the other side (ie, what giving up Expertise gives you). To me, the drop off after 600 expertise actually seems pretty bad and would probably be a logical point to switch in pve gear. For 100 expertise you are only getting 1% bump.. Will also depend a lot on your playstyle and how much boosting crit/surge/whatever has on your burst ability etc.

I think the patch did make it worse. Only got credit for 2 out of 5 wins. Previously, I wouldn't get credit maybe 10-20% of the time.

You can beat everything with player made stuff that you can buy off the GTN. I know this because I did it. Didn't even know about the vendor until after I hit 50 actually. Key is to upgrade missiles ASAP because you can just spam them at everything and you will be able to beat the higher level missions. When you get 30 tokens or whatever, which isn't that hard to get, buy the shield/gun converter thing, that will help you even more.

Did they fix Sedatives so that it didn't debuff/aggro pve mobs? I also question taking 'Keep Cool' over 'Bedside Manner' (or anything else for that matter). 16 energy on a 90s CD equals 0.18 energy per second, assuming you use it exactly on CD, which you will never remotely do. I think it is by far one of the most over-rated skills.

While you do have a point, I think Sawbones have a bit more utility. We have more long duration cc's. No complaints with dodge though. Works well and especially with vanish. If you use dodge then vanish, you will almost always escape in PvP. Or throw a flash bomb, purge then vanish.

What are you talking about? Pre-nerf, if you did 2x Scrapper you could probably kill the guy before he got up off the ground, you wouldn't need 9s of stuns (or whatever). You could do snares before even with full resolve btw. Overall, all these "wow, we are even better" threads are just stupid. The FACT is that shoot first/Flechette got nerfed, which is a significant blow to upfront damage. Nobody made you spec into KO to begin with, if you wanted to not fill the resolve then don't knock them down? Usually you can get in an attack or two before the guy figures out what is going on anyway. So yeah, if you don't mind waiting for all your cc cds to be up, and like taking longer to kill stuff, the patch makes you WAYYY better.

FACT: If you hate gear progression, go back to CS. They aren't going to make a zillion brackets to cater to every little imbalance.

Basically the way it works is that the ranking goes: Centurion -> Champion -> Battlemaster, where Champion is quite a bit better than Centurion, but Battlemaster is only a little better than Champion. There are two ways to get gear: commendations and quests. For commendations it's pretty simple, you need 200 warzone and 200 merc commendations to 'buy' one Champion gear bag from the NPC. For playing warzones you'll get something like 50-70 commendations for an average game, and you can convert warzone commendations into merc ones for a 3:1 ratio (ie, you need to realistically get 800 warzones commendations, 200 + 600 to convert into 200 mercs for one bag). Quests are broken into Ilum quests and warzone quests. For warzone quests, there is a daily you can complete by winning 3 games to get 1 bag, or to win 9 games in a week to get 3 bags. Ilum quests work in the same way in that you need to collect 30 armaments/kill 30 enemies in a day or 150 in a week to earn 1, or 3 bags, respectively. Lastly, when you get a Champion bag, you have a chance (say like 20%) to get an item that is directly convertible into a piece of gear, and you will also get 3 Centurian tokens that you can save up to trade in for your choice of Centurion gear. There is a lot of complaining on the forums because the gear that the bags give out is random, so there is a chance to get nothing repeatedly or duplicates. When you hit rank 60 valor you can use Battlemaster bags which will give you a piece of Battlemaster gear and Champion tokens. The Columni and Rakata vendors require drops you get from Flashpoint Hardmodes and/or Operations.

Seriously? Run the missions that say "Compounds", not the ones that say "Samples." Despite your concerns, I assure you both factions have access to all tiers of bioanalysis loot, although the rarity may vary a bit.

Of course reusable items is for the lazy, but not the rich.. more like the cheap. For example, the Prototype (blue) heal packs do more than the purples. If you wanted to maximize the effectiveness you would craft a lot of blue ones and just them exclusively. People don't do this because it is more cost effective to use a slightly inferior one repeatedly. Not sure how this is relevant to the discussion whatsoever though. I am a biochem, I do NOT have Rakata. I am not a alone as a lot of people buy my stims/adrenals off the GTN and I make money off these people. The lv48 items are about 20% weaker than the lv50 rakata ones but take considerably less work (ie, takes 30 seconds to buy one off the GTN). Due to diminishing effects on most stats, the realistic loss in effectiveness is under 20% (ie, surge +450 is NOT 26% weaker than +565). Have you actually tried selling green stims? If your server is anything like mine you will be taking a loss. The materials used to make a stim/adrenal is in demand and goes for like 1,000-2,000 credits each. You would need to sell your stim at 15k just to break even. That is not happening for a green consumable (especially since the purple one is only 4-5x the cost). Your logic is frankly baffling. There is a never-ending hierarchy of gear in MMORPGs, you will never have the best (ie, expansions/tier x+1/etc). Why bother buying lv50 mods if you can loot better ones in HM? Why bother looting low end HMs when you can loot high end HMs? Why bother crafting anything at all since there is something always better that can be looted (and or/made from rare loot)? Can't you simply accept that some people, especially casual players, just want a simple experience where they can mess around for a couple hrs a week? These people would be 100% happy with gear/equipment that is 80-90% effective as the top end stuff without the time commitment?