My experiences with sniper has been that one of them can just dominate a match. Maybe that's because their rarity makes good ones stand out more, dunno. I've also come across some ops that were extremely hard to kill.

Random change, they should make serrated blades not suck, and put rail on pws or change charged gaunts.

Parakeet is dead in 1.2, no reason to bring it up. Also stop talking about gimp shield generators on pyro builds like anyone uses them. Tank builds wouldn't even use them if heat regen didn't depend on it.

BH pve helmet and chest look alright, and the trooper pve helmet would fit on BH armor. The BH pvp helmet would look ok if they ditched the red mohawk and the buck rodgers fins. Overall armor needs to look more robotic its a powered armor cyborg suit. I have no words to describe the jedi knight and the only passable things on the whole smuggler set are the pvp chest/pants. Trooper should have like pouches and ammo belts and what not on their gear like a real special forces elite soldier. Their pve set looks like a super hero outside of the helmet, and the pvp set looks like a hasmat suit with stupid boots. Sith warrior pve armor would look awesome if it ditched the loin cloth and added like a darth vader control panel on the chest. Some more conventional boots and a black color scheme would also help. Agent pve helmet looks like a baboon or something, terrible.

gw2 removed healing and tanking, they only have to make a simple x/y/z formula to balance every ability. It would take a massive amount of idiocy to ruin that. They were even smart enough to create a single consistent set of buff/debuffs that could be applied across all abilities. Swtor on the other hand has some really hack things in it that make it evident they didn't do a complete top down design. This is leading to some rubberband balancing like were seeing with expertise scaling. I'd also like to point out the stupidity of the yellow/white damage mechanic that makes no sense and sounded laughable when George tried to defend it in that guild summit interview or whatever.

Having a 5 man lightsaber train roll over you has been pretty annoying in the 1-49 lately. Its not something that wins however, that would be trooper zerg at low levels.

pyro has an advantage in non duel situations. Similar to an operative but with range over stealth, frontloaded burst made up of all instant cast makes it a devastating class to deal with when given the initiative over a target. If you want to say a pt is crapping on you for half your life with td>im>rail>stun>fb>rail while you are distracted, missing cooldowns etc then there really isn't anything we can say to help you.

What I wrote is in regards to 1.2. Using a gcd on RB isn't going to out perform a gcd used on EB+Flame burst. Without RB a shield build can get all of the damage talents available to an IF build. As IF You put 23 in shield and then up to hitman and RB in tier 3 AP and you still get left with 3 points that are going into shield or weak talents like adv tools anyway.

so close at the end, and both unused stuns just waiting. Decent video, but the red spam was a little distracting.

A full shield can skip empowered tech entirely and pick up jet speed, rebraced, no escape and oil slick. It will also still have the points for iron fist and hot iron and proto cylinder or 1/2 of power armor. Iron fist builds aren't gaining damage over the new heat blast and they lose heat management. They aren't gaining damage reduction if they give up rebraced or oil slick and they lose utility if they give up no escape and jet speed. Those are all good abilities that IF has to drop 5 pts of. Hitman is pretty much the only thing going for this build. I would say that makes it a specialist group vs group build and not a solo play build.

I'd take flameburst over power shot anyday. Similar damage with 100% chance to proc spam plus tech over white damage and its elemental and its instant. Also power shot is getting nerfed 10% for no reason. That would be enough alone but they attached ppa to unload which sucks without riddle and barrage. Speaking of riddle and barrage they should have dropped those two and pinning fire down to tier 2 and 3 of arsenal, trashed integrated systems, made muzzle flutings effect baseline, and dropped enviro suit to tier 1. Target tracking goes to tier 5, maybe light em up to tier 6. That keeps arsenal the same, compensate bodyguard hybrid for the super gas and ps nerf and allows pyro merc to give up td for barrage.

The DFA/Mortar change looks to me like it was done so that the minimum range couldn't be trivialized. In its current form you can stun someone in melee, channel it right inside the min range and hit them with it. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks it was part of their effort to nerf merc/commando healer damage, but more likely it had more to do with straightening the edges so to speak as far as presentation.

Yes its bugged and it gimps assault vanguard Ion Pulse. Without the first tick the ability deals no immediate damage and deals no damage until the 3 sec mark causing Ion Spam to lose half its plasma damage given that the gcd is only 1.5 sec. Its really a bigger deal then it appears since with the surge talent proc ticks can get up to 1k on crits which is quite a large immediate damage loss. The Powertech equivalent works properly so its no tooltip problem.

free 16 heat rp every 9 sec, immolate for 8 heat replaces a 16 heat FB in Ironfist rotation. Flamethrower for 25 heat over 3 sec replaces two 16 heat skills over 3 sec in Ironfist rotation. I doubt the heat management is far off and probably superior given how inconsistent shielding is. Also take into account quell will be free in 1.2 so that helps.

Being able to do flameburst and heatblast in one gcd for one ammo should kill this build next patch. 8/31/2 with ion gas should become the new tanky/damage/utility build until they kill that build too.