It would be nice, especially since my raiding character is a Sage. But at least I know that I am only part of my problem, instead of all of my problem.

I have added sheets for a Trooper. I had to do the testing on the "Gav Daragon" combat dummy, instead of on my ship, as I was unable to hit the operations dummy sufficiently consistently to remain in combat, leading to large gaps when the character stuttered trying to attack it as the combat was being terminated. Both Trooper (Commando) tests were done similar to the Sage, using zero (0) alacrity rating, with an “Ability Action Queue Window” of 1.0 seconds. The"rotation" in the rotation version was "Grav Round" sent every 50ms, 200 times, then "Hammer Shot" sent every 50ms, 400 times; this "rotation" drew down energy cells, then allowed them to regenerate, while remaining in combat. For this sheet, I have added an additional column and summary block, which includes only the delay between casts of "Grav Round" (i.e.: a value is only present if the current and previous ability are both "Grav Round"). This new column really needs more data points to be interesting, it just hadn't occurred to me until I was finished testing and making pretty spreadsheets that this would be something I wanted to see. The "Hammer Shot" spreadsheet is exactly what it sounds like, a whole lot of "Hammer Shot". What I am starting to get from this is that it may be that instant abilities ("Hammer Shot") suffer less from ability delay than abilities with a cast time of 1 GCD ("Telekinetic Burst" and "Grav Round"). Yep, I understand. To an extent, I understand and accept that casting will probably not be perfect, I was just concerned that the casting I was experiencing was 4%+ longer than advertised, when I had expected something something like a maximum of 1%. I had hoped that there might exist people who had had similar issues, but had found a way to resolve them, but it is appearing that that may not be the case.

I have sub-65 Warrior, Inquisitor, and Trooper, which I expect means they don't have the talents/features unlocked that make long-term spamming of some (actual) ability feasible. After I get home from work, I will try with the basic/free attack on my Trooper and post an update.

A very reasonable suggestion, and thorough explanation, thank you. I had not considered that 250ms would be insufficiently frequent when a considering all other factors that add delay. I have added another sheet to the spreadsheet linked in the original post, re-doing the test and procedure from the second "Telekinetic Burst" test (4-piece, 0 alacrity, etc.), but this time sending the instruction to cast the ability every 0.04 seconds (40 milliseconds). Unfortunately, the results appear to be approximately the same as sending the instruction every 0.25 seconds. After repeating several times, I could not get as large a continuous dataset as with the last, I guess I was unlucky with procs (or lucky last time), but 400 casts is probably still a large enough dataset to see a trend. They say misery loves company, and I am glad that I am not alone in having this issue. Also, thank you for taking the time to do some testing, knowing I am not some sort of special snowflake case is reassuring.

Yes, I am aware of APM. This post discusses how abilities are taking longer for me to cast (based on the logs) than the advertised time to cast them. That each ability takes longer to cast than it should necessarily pushes APM down. As I noted in the post there exists a *possibility* that I had the computer press the ability key ever 0.25 seconds to eliminate human error and deal with the occasional lost packet. While it is possible that there is no solution, I would like to think that I am not the only one to have experienced this problem, and that perhaps someone has experienced it and has a solution (or can at least explain it).

Issue My abilities take longer to cast is greater than their advertised casting time. This results in less abilities/actions per minute, which is negatively impacting my DPS. Question Is there a way to minimize or eliminate the extent to which abilities take longer to cast than the advertised time? I would appreciate not only insight into a solution, but also the cause. Story I found that my DPS against a dummy was far below the target value per the optimal stats and DPS rankings by Goblin_Lackey (I have stats approximating the 220 recommended). Having done my best to focus on getting my rotation “right”, the gap was still large. I read through the assumptions in that post to see if I was missing something crucial, but I did not appear to be. Feeling like my rotation was probably not “wrong enough” to cause the gap I was seeing, I decided to look at my combat log in StarParse, to see if my issue was that I was queuing up abilities that were still on cooldown when the current cast had finished (i.e.: ability is on cooldown party-way through the current cast, but it “looks like” it will be ready by the end of the cast), since that would be an obvious place for failure to occur. When I brought my ability usage into Excel and compared the time between ability usages, I noticed that the gap was almost always greater than the ability cast time (which would indicate that there is some pause between when a cast completes and when I activate the next). Since my problem seemed pretty easy to solve, I played with a dummy focusing only on getting my casts to have no possible gaps, mostly ignoring rotation. Looking at the gaps in ability usage after, I still found that the gap was greater than the cast time of the abilities. I tried setting my graphics to low, disabling flying text, disabling sound, altering the Ability Action Queue Window, and even connecting via VPN through a server in Los Angeles; nothing resolved the issue. Next, I tried using automated keyboard input for a single ability, to be activated every 250ms, which was both less than half my Ability Action Queue Window, so that the queue should be guaranteed to always have an ability in it. Still, the gap persisted. I am out of ideas on what I can do to mitigate the gap, and am hoping someone knows of a solution. Data/testing I play a Telekinetics Sorcerer, that's what testing has been done on. All testing was done using zero (0) alacrity rating, with an “Ability Action Queue Window” of 1.0 seconds, and by sending the instruction to cast the ability every 0.25 seconds. The test was halted once Force was almost depleted, so that not having sufficient Force would not end up skewing results. I tested with each of “Weaken Mind”, “Disturbance”, and “Telekinetic Burst” (the latter twice). The testing of “Weaken Mind”, “Disturbance”, and one of the “Telekinetic Burst” tests was done while naked. For the naked “Telekinetic Burst” test, I first built up five (5) stacks of Telekinetic Focal Point (5% alacrity), so that I could get the largest possible number of casts while also having a consistent amount of alacrity (5%). I tested “Telekinetic Burst” a second time with the 4-piece set bonus (cost reduction), but still no alacrity. In this latter test, since I had more Force to play with, I built up the Telekinetic Focal Point stacks during the combat, and then cast a “Telekinetic Wave” to indicate the point in the combat log at which five (5) stacks of Telekinetic Focal Point (5% alacrity) was achieved. In the spreadsheet, only the ability casts after that point are included, so that alacrity is consistent, but the building of stacks is in the Parsley upload linked on that sheet. Google docs spreadsheet Proactively responding to some questions Q: The ability use is not written to the log at the exact instant it is cast, and the time it takes to write to the log can vary, does that not make ability cast times in the log useless? A: Over a large number of ability casts, the average time between them should be consistent with the actual time to activate them. If, for example, an ability takes 0.1 additional seconds to write to the log, then all ability casts will be offset by 0.1 seconds, and therefore the time between casts in the log will be equal to the time between casts in the game. If an ability takes a variable amount of time to be written to the log, but we all abilities are in the log, then any “extra” time to write one ability (which would increase the gap with the preceding log event) will be precisely made up for by the reduced gap with the next log event. Q: You did not provide a measure of your ping, does that not contribute? A: It might, but it should not. If the “Ability Action Queue Window” is, in fact, a queue of size one on the server, then my ping is irrelevant so long as the next ability gets into that queue before the ability currently being cast finishes; that is the entire point of an action queue. If it is still relevant, my ping is generally in the 30-60ms range, though I have seen it spike to 165ms before.

Requiring 3 full sets of gear (the one you're wearing, and the 2 you had to rip gems out of) to create 1 full set of gear is more abusive than most MMOs. And it's not even 1 of each piece, instead you will end up needing a large number of a certain slot that happens not to be horribly itemized (and probably level 56).

You can do hard modes as a fresh 50. Strangers may not want to take you because your low level gear means that they are more likely to fail. The solutions to this are to upgrade your gear (for example, a mix of 49 daily and crafted blue gems), or to find a guild that has an interest in gearing you up. Your premise that strangers who have no vested interest in your success should be helping you, or that the game should somehow make them do so, is foolish.

It was fine pre-50 because a single healer's output was about the same as a single DPS'. It isn't fine in geared-50 vs geared-50 because a single healer's output is less than a single DPS'.

MVP votes reward a minimal additional amount of everything, but if a healer got everyone's vote (literally) it would make up for the medal imbalance. However, most people vote for top damage or top medals, of which a healer is neither.

Healing sorcs don't have anything that hits that hard. We're using a 1.5 second cast base class spell as our "big hit", if it actually did that much damage we would be a touch overpowered.

Lose your way to gear and be better for it for having to overcome a gear disadvantage? Gearing up really doesn't take that long (though removing the 50 PVP blues certainly didn't help). There exist 16 champion bags that you can earn per week requiring very few wins per day; about 1 in 5 has an item and with no slots filled it's likely to be something you don't have. Anyone who wasn't the first 50 had to fight up some sort of gear disparity. Your geared opponents are essentially at a plateau, with the upcoming trinket additions allowing them to climb a bit higher.

If you're under 50, your contributions will be, in order of importance: 1. Stuns, interrupts, and movement spells (such as pull and push) 2. Healing 3. Distracting the other team from killing 50s (crits on you are just so big!) 4. Being one of the maximum number of targets of an AoE. The more of 1 or 2 that you have, the more useful you are; so a class/spec that gets them at earlier levels is more useful in PVP. It's likely that abilities are introduced slowly and in the order in which they will help your character most while leveling, instead of pumping out all of your utility spells at the start. Thus, if a class is seen to really benefit from [utility spell that also helps in PVP] while questing, they may get stuff that makes them better at PVP than another class of the same level.

For gloves/hats, I rip the gems out since those actually have the gems I want in all slots. For other slots, I give it to my companion who uses the same armour type. Once he's geared, I'll build an offspec set.

Griefing is essentially the only thing that differentiates a PVP server from a PVE server. While I would agree that it shouldn't happen in Voss cities for lore reasons, this idea of buffs and such elsewhere is silly. If you didn't want to grief and be grieved, PVE server offer Illum for level cap open world PVP and battlegrounds for instanced/balanced PVP.

Bubble actually counts towards healing. A way to test this, if you have enough healing power, is to run over a fire with a bubble up at the start of a match; you will get the 2.5k heal award if the fire hits you and the bubble had enough HP. Not that healing isn't incredibly bad due to trauma and medal imbalance, but that one isn't an actual problem, shields are counted correctly.

I was a sorc healer, and I cast almost exclusively healing spells because that is where my talent points went. I got KB and the heal medals. I was then a sorc healer who made sure to waste GCDs hitting things so that I could get kill credit and damage. My healing suffered far more than my damage went up, because the my damage per second is laughable compared to my healing per second. I could generally get the 75k damage medal, but never the 2.5/5k medals, and usually 10 kills. This was actually the least fun I have ever had PVPing, because I knew I was playing badly, I knew I wasn't helping, and knew I had no choice if I didn't want to get screwed over by a system that is so heavily weighted against healers. Now I'm a sorc DPS. I get 2.5k, 5k, and 75k healing medals and I get all DPS medals (kills and damage) except for the 5k one (can't hit that hard). I also never cast a healing spell, except for my shield. 400k+ damage, 100k+ healing it aint no thang. The way I'm playing now takes far less situational awareness, far less skill, and does less to help the team win (not far less, because I am without question dropping large groups of people to 50% or so health in a couple of seconds). However, I am far better rewarded than I ever was playing a healer. Also, this notion that a specialized healer should DPS is laughable. You have only so much [resource], and there exists a GCD; as a healer, it is seldom the case that your laughable DPS is worth more than your heal. Unless your team is /really/ hurting for healers, as a DPS it is seldom the case that your heal is worth more than your DPS. This is just the nature of specialization; if you can heal for 2.5k in 3 seconds or put out 4k+ damage in that time, which is the better choice?

Trauma is fine. As much as I would love to put out my actual healing numbers in PVP, it would probably be too strong. I would appreciate some love in the area of medpacks not counting towards healing, healing a person within the last X seconds before they got a kill counting towards my kills, and my shield counting towards Protection. That would pretty much equalize me with other classes in medals without me needing to focus on tagging everything in the area for credit.

I roll about half of my time with a premade and half solo queuing. If pubs don't want to face our premade, that should be up to them. If they drop and re-queue from the dominant side, they already have a queue time, likelihood of Huttball, and no guarantee of not facing another premade as penalties. If they re-queue from the weaker side, same thing but presumably slightly shorter queue and equal chances of Huttball and the other battlegrounds (lucky buggers). They also never learn to overcome adversity/get better at the game, so there's another disadvantage they suffer (albeit unknowingly).

This isn't correct, or even close to being so. Someone who leveled to 50 doing PVP will have at most 1000/1000, which is enough for 5 bags (likely 1 piece of gear). So the level 50 PVPer will have 1 piece of gear over the level 50 PVEer. Note that 1000/1000 represents about 2-3 days of PVP, depending on medals, and that the PVEer could have earned those over his entire 1 to 50 career. If all they did is level in PVP, they will be in level 40 oranges with level 40 blue gems, and a level 46 or 48 weapon; these levels correspond to the last PVP gear refresh before level 50. This gear also has exactly zero expertise. If all they had done is PVE, they would have been in a mix of level 45-50 blues and 49-50 greens. The only advantage that the person who PVPed while leveling has over the one who PVEed is experience/knowledge/skill (call it whatever makes you feel best), and he is at a gear disadvantage. Finally, low levels who play well can be useful, I had the pleasure of encountering a low-level healer tonight that was able to keep himself hidden while helping me keep myself healed as 4 players tried to down me at a void star door. He wasn't putting out level 50 PVP geared heals, but they were good enough. Was he useful when they caught him? No, he dropped instantly, but he found a niche where he was useful and played that for all it was worth. At levels 20 and 40, a PVP player out-gears anyone else at their level, because they obtain a complete gear refresh of blues. About 5 levels after that, they are equal to someone their level, and afterwards they start hurting as the gap continues to widen in favour of PVE. Their companion likely suffers a similar fate (if you're leveling through PVP, the primary companion will have these sets too, since you need to spend tokens on something). At level cap, a PVP player will eventually have better gear for PVP than a PVE player, assuming the PVE player never PVPs except the one time he meets the PVP player. A PVE player will have better gear for PVE than a PVP player, assuming the PVP player never PVEs except the one time his (role here) is compared to the PVE player.

10 seconds without being hit by CC? This must be a glorious land in which to PVP, and I hope to find it some day. Also, please hotkey your trinkets/items, it should not take you 5 seconds to pop two cooldowns.

If you think of the commendations as rewards instead of welfare cheques, it makes more sense. Winners often get paid better than losers, either on salary for their long-term success, or in bonuses for short-term success. If you want some sort of in-game justifications: Huttball: Two teams fighting in a show match. Void star: "I came back with the data you wanted" vs. "Ya, the other guys got that super important data, but I tried like REALLY hard, so a little something foe my effort?" Civil War: Taking control of an area that your faction wanted vs failing to take control of it, and losing a large troop transport in the process.

This needs a bump. I think restricting stat-based relics to battlemasters only is a little silly, but that PVP relics have no stats at all is far worse. I currently have 4 or 5 unexchanged tokens sitting in my bank because there really isn't anything worth buying; if it doesn't even have endurance, I'm not going to wear it in PVP.

Your PVP players are used to fighting things that hit back, and having to survive that. Your PVP players probably are not. I believe that "suck less" is the best advice you can give them.

PVP gear of equal tier has worse stats than PVE gear for PVE. PVP gear of a higher tier may have better stats than PVE gear of a lower tier. You should support this rather than oppose it, it provides your potential recruits with a source of gear that will help them be useful in their first raids, instead of being dragged through. Expertise exists to soak item points from PVP gear so that it does not become best in slot (BIS) for PVE. A PVP item will only be best in slot for PVE if the maximum PVP tier ever becomes higher than the maximum raid tier, which is not currently the case.