I'm a 57 Assassin so I'm still a couple days away from BM and a few weeks away from having the full BM set. In the mean time I was able to go to a few Ops with my guild and picked up a couple pieces of Rakata. I subbed in the pieces (implants/belt/saber) and found that I did a bit more damage but felt much less durable (31/0/10 spec). My crits were bigger though, so I had a few more KBs, which was nice. Anyone else have similar experiences (talking Stalker gear)?

At what point do you guys recommend using T3 gear instead of Pvp gear? Is fully stacking expertise the best or is the increase in HP/Willpower worth the trade off at say, ~500 expertise?

I've been telling everyone in my guild to try getting to 8%~ expertise and using t2/3 gear after they do. Almost everyone that has tried this agrees that it is the way to go. The ones that don't like it still believe that expertise has to be absolutely capped on their toons because it's the PvP stat and that makes it awesome, yet they still complain about having 2-3k lower HP than myself and lower stats all around.

On my Sorc healer I hover just under 6% expertise and just over 17k health without buffs. I do fantastically and have great survivability like this. Granted, I'm using Champ gear that I could re-mod and get better stats. Sitting on 18k health, 550 bonus healing, 39% crit and 66% surge when buffed is pretty nice though ;]

Now, the thing you have to really focus on when doing this is gearing yourself out correctly. That means getting rid of the awful stats in your gear [in your case accuracy] and swapping it for something better, IE power, surge, or crit.

I've been telling everyone in my guild to try getting to 8%~ expertise and using t2/3 gear after they do. Almost everyone that has tried this agrees that it is the way to go. The ones that don't like it still believe that expertise has to be absolutely capped on their toons because it's the PvP stat and that makes it awesome, yet they still complain about having 2-3k lower HP than myself and lower stats all around.

 

On my Sorc healer I hover just under 6% expertise and just over 17k health without buffs. I do fantastically and have great survivability like this. Granted, I'm using Champ gear that I could re-mod and get better stats. Sitting on 18k health, 550 bonus healing, 39% crit and 66% surge when buffed is pretty nice though ;]

 

Now, the thing you have to really focus on when doing this is gearing yourself out correctly. That means getting rid of the awful stats in your gear [in your case accuracy] and swapping it for something better, IE power, surge, or crit.

Completely agree about the enhancement/mod situation. I've already dumped all the enhancement and replaced most of the mods with better end/willP/Crit mods.

31/0/10 practically gets no benefit from the Rakata PvE bonus (+15% crit to thrash) and all PvP armor is the way to go.

The DPS/survival stats are strictly in favor of PvP armor over PvE armor of the same tier of gear. Most other classes, depending on your perspective, either have very bad PvP set bonuses or very awesome PvE set bonuses. In the case of Assassins, they're actually balanced. Deception/Madness would have a stronger argument for 4-piece PvE but you're giving up a lot for it too.

31/0/10 practically gets no benefit from the Rakata PvE bonus (+15% crit to thrash) and all PvP armor is the way to go.

 

The DPS/survival stats are strictly in favor of PvP armor over PvE armor of the same tier of gear. Most other classes, depending on your perspective, either have very bad PvP set bonuses or very awesome PvE set bonuses. In the case of Assassins, they're actually balanced. Deception/Madness would have a stronger argument for 4-piece PvE but you're giving up a lot for it too.

I thrash quite a bit fishing for energize procs. You only need 4pc of PVP set to get the recklessness bonus (or 5% damage when guarding). How do you feel about wearing enough gear for the set bonus but filling the rest in with rakata? You'd sacrifice 1-3% expertise for an increase in end/will

I thrash quite a bit fishing for energize procs. You only need 4pc of PVP set to get the recklessness bonus (or 5% damage when guarding). How do you feel about wearing enough gear for the set bonus but filling the rest in with rakata? You'd sacrifice 1-3% expertise for an increase in end/will

There's even less reason to switch to Rakata non set pieces. Expertise even on the last piece (650->700) beats the difference between Rakata and BM unless you NEVER get healed, and if you never get healed you're dead either way.

Now this is only for the same tier of gear (Rakata versus BM). If you have say Rakata belt/bracer from Synthweaving and only Champion belt/bracer then maybe Rakata is worth it. Rakata is definitely better than Centurion, and Rakata versus Champion is too close to tell. In that case I'd pick the piece that seems to have better secondary stats (i.e. if Rakata budgets secondary into accuracy, probably better off with Champion piece, and vice versa).

One interesting piece is what to do with the Relic. Although BM again beats the equivalent PvE relic, there are no fire-and-forget type PvP relics. This game already has way too many keybinds to keep track of and despite your best efforts you'll likely to forget to use the Relic at every opportunity. I see a lot of people wear a top end PvE relic with some generic 'chance to do more damage on hit' effect, or even just a Matrix Cube since you can't forget to use a passive effect.

There's even less reason to switch to Rakata non set pieces. Expertise even on the last piece (650->700) beats the difference between Rakata and BM unless you NEVER get healed, and if you never get healed you're dead either way.

 

Now this is only for the same tier of gear (Rakata versus BM). If you have say Rakata belt/bracer from Synthweaving and only Champion belt/bracer then maybe Rakata is worth it. Rakata is definitely better than Centurion, and Rakata versus Champion is too close to tell. In that case I'd pick the piece that seems to have better secondary stats (i.e. if Rakata budgets secondary into accuracy, probably better off with Champion piece, and vice versa).

 

One interesting piece is what to do with the Relic. Although BM again beats the equivalent PvE relic, there are no fire-and-forget type PvP relics. This game already has way too many keybinds to keep track of and despite your best efforts you'll likely to forget to use the Relic at every opportunity. I see a lot of people wear a top end PvE relic with some generic 'chance to do more damage on hit' effect, or even just a Matrix Cube since you can't forget to use a passive effect.

So you fully disagree with the assertion that ~500 expertise is the soft cap. Maybe things will become clearer once I get to BM. I almost exclusively solo queue so heals are, unfortunately, tough to come by in my case.

I've been playing with my keybinds to find a better place for relics (currently trying Shift+MouseScrUp/Down). If /when I pick up PvE relics I could definitely see myself using them.

So you fully disagree with the assertion that ~500 expertise is the soft cap. Maybe things will become clearer once I get to BM. I almost exclusively solo queue so heals are, unfortunately, tough to come by in my case.

 

I've been playing with my keybinds to find a better place for relics (currently trying Shift+MouseScrUp/Down). If /when I pick up PvE relics I could definitely see myself using them.

People call 500 the softcap because that's roughly the amount of Expertise you have when you have the 4 piece PvE set bonus. The reason to do this is because the class has a strong 4 piece PvE bonus, not because 500 is some magical number where Expertise stops being useful.

The poster child for this kind of gearing would be Arsenal Merc, who gets a +15% crit to Tracer Missile with 2 piece PvE bonus. There's no way 100 Expertise is anywhere close to +15% crits to an attack that accounts for at least half of the DPS of a spec, so of course you wear PvE gear. It's not because Expertise caps. It's because PvE set has +15% crit to Tracer and PvP set does not. In the case of Assassins, though, our PvP set bonus is actually pretty good, so we don't need to wear PvE gear for the set bonuses.

At some level you've to trust people will heal you some of the time. Let's say you have 15000 HP and you get healed for 15K before you die, then 1% of mitigation is roughly equal to 2% HP. If you look at games with any healer (not your pocket healer, just anybody who is healing speced) expecting 15K healed per death is reasonable. If you are constantly in a game with no healing whatsoever your survival is just not anything worth discussing because you'll be dead no matter what you wear.

For Relics I see a lot of poeple do one activated relic + one passive relic. I think the logic is that you can simply use on your adrenal/relic/big CD all at the same time when you prepare to burst DPS, but since the second relic has a 30s cooldown before it can be used, it's very unlikely you'll make good use of the second relic's activated ability since it'd be out of sync with your CDs. Since there are no PvP relics with passive stats, PvE is the only way to go. If there's a relic that does 40 endurance, 50 expertise, chance to proc 220 damage I'd certainly use that over 70 endurance + chance to proc 240 damage, but the former relic doesn't exist while the latter does.

Great thread, thanks for the clear responses. I've bookmarked this as I've just hit 50 on my Assassin and have been wondering how to gear him.

I'm not sure what answers were gained but more power to you!

At what point do you guys recommend using T3 gear instead of Pvp gear? Is fully stacking expertise the best or is the increase in HP/Willpower worth the trade off at say, ~500 expertise?

I recommend everyone to only use T3 gear if you find it given the fact that T2 will be the best for us non hackers in 1.2.

I recommend everyone to only use T3 gear if you find it given the fact that T2 will be the best for us non hackers in 1.2.

Please explain...

Please explain...

The 1.2 gear is apparently classified as tier 2 gear, so to use T3 would require a time machine.