They took everything

I agree with Evo. Stealth provides enormous tactical advantage. Provided you know how to use it. There's a lot more to stealth than "hit first" and "sneak up on someone".

This. Unfortunately, this always happens with this game. When the forums are overflooded with crying about certain abilities, devs respond with nerf. I really hope they don't do the same thing with assassins.

I wish they would make that new root on the opener baseline at least, lord knows the opener for dirty fighting is underwhelming enough without the target waltzing away.

Sadly its going to happen eventually.

Spike doesn't do (much) damage. I recall BW mentioned in some dev blog that they don't want one skill to do a lot of things at once. Originally (1.2) they nerfed the knockdown and the damage of Hidden Strike, because they didn't want both, strong CC and strong damage on an opener.

And now they seem to be trying to divorce different ways of opening on different stealth classes. Sins would open with a low-damage knockdown, then follow up with damage, while Ops would open with damage and follow up with CC... or something.

Who said it would be spike? With the murder of scrapper we all know they are going to do the same thing to assassins sooner or later.

Any way the wind blows....

I agree with the catering to bads and crybabies sentiments. The KD makes dumb and impatient people mad, and placating them is a higher priority than challenging people to learn tactics or otherwise raise their personal bar.

This is how a game fails. TEXTBOOK.

Cater to bads and casuals. Maintain substandard numbers for a while cuz real mmo players go elsewhere and TALK ABOUT IT. Then your bads and casuals leave you for the next best things, your few loyal diehards quit due to no one to play with and a game they have been made to hate over time.

GREAT JOB!

Bioware/EA: "The company that fails."

This is their new motto, post it everywhere.

i sense soon people will run the forums because the get globaled by teams of combat sentinels leaping at them and wrecking whole teams appart within seconds, because now that smash will lose its appeal sents/maras will probably try out the other viable tree at bit more.

As both a scrapper and concealment operative, i think thats it for me. This nerfs was just one too much (and i gave up on the class so many times and always return). I don't know exactly how the changes will switch the mechanics of fights, but despite being the best healers in pvp, we always lacked burst to really heal through sudden damage (that is why burn the tank actually works in the current arena setting). Now they makes us even worse at keeping a target under fire up. It might have reached a point where the more bursty healer could have a slight edge now, but i we'll have to see. Might focus on my assassin and shadow now for the stealthy fun, but i guess they are next on the list, when calls for nerfs swell up again.

Dark times ahead. Sounds like endgame.

correct me if i'm wrong but if the devs were really concerned about the the KD, perhaps they should have down something about the kd grenade, thats a hell of a lot worse than the 1.5 sec kd ops had...