As the title says: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#400bZrI0boRZGbbkrMhd.1

seems to be a pretty standard sab/df hybrid setup and yes a lot of snipers use/have used that sort of setup before for pvp. The downside to it over say pure lethality is you have to give up more of the defensive minded talents as well as cleanse protection. If an enemy healer with cleanse is on the ball, your damage will suffer pretty bad.

I don't like this spec at all. Here are my points:

 

1. Enemies with ability to cleanse tech, commando/merc scoundrel/operative will be a pain for you to deal with. In an instant he can cleanse all your 3 dots, and if he is lucky the explosive probe too, or at least some of the cluster bombs.

 

2. Cull will be worthless against (1)

3. Cull without weaking blast is much weaker, you give up quite a lot of your damage.

4. Your dps gain from engineering tree is compensated by the loss from what you did not take in lethality. Devouring microbes are very important

5. You cannot cast all 3 dots at once as you will go energy bankrupt 60 energy just for 3 dots is insane (also you did not take the lower energy cost for interrogation probe and explosive probe

6. this build overall requires much longer setup than standart 31 pts cull. As i understand you want to start culling after you have all 3 dots and explosive probe. It's overkill for target that is engaged with other enemy while way to slow to start damaging someone you fight in 1vs1

 

I think you are heavily gimping yourself with this build. You have more choices but they are all kinda weaker. In any build that has Cull, you need to Cull often. Since you have engineering tool belt and interogation probe, you see to want to use grenades and IP often. I am not sure if you can use all of these in a standard rotation while keeping Cull on cooldown.

 

With full lethality, second Cull always spells death for most of the classes. You don't need all this extra stuff form engineering to be powerful.

 

1.2 killed the hybrids for sniper. Lethality and Engineering highly profit from being 31 pts invested. MM has a PvP problem with rapid fire ability which does not find much use outside of (50% alacrity builds (alacrity relic, TA, 4% alacrity skill + sniper volley)

Edited May 27, 2012 by NoTomorrow

What you two pointed out was correct, but now that I have tried it, I can say that energy management was the biggest issue. Sure, I could do insane burst damage on one enemy, but after that, I had basically no energy at all. However, not bursting wasn't an option because the sustained damage was lower than for full Lethality, so I switched back.

Leth/Eng hybrid was better before 1.2, but with changes to lingering toxins, weakening blast becoming free, and cull down to 25, full Leth is better and takes care of the energy management problems that you had to go hybrid with before.

Your best bet to improve your energy gains is to try throwing your corrosive grenade at more than one enemy. This way more critical dots will give you higher energy regen. Lethality overall scales incredibly well with higher crit chance. My Cull has reached as high as 66% crit in one 5 min session.