You're acting like people want the class/spec gutted where that isn't the case from what I've read. Fury just needs a slight dps decrease to bring it in line for pve and that would barely affect pvp. For maras as a whole, RA needs to be nerfed because that was what made mara dcd's over the top (they were arguable the most balanced class defensively in 4.x). People have been talking about RA being too strong since 5.0 launched, it's just gaining more traction now because fury has slightly better defensives than the other specs with stun immunity and can stick on targets easier and more people are playing fury now than before. It's also pretty easy to see how fury has gone from "underpowered" to op. It was in fact always incredibly strong but people rarely played it and never played it optimally for dps. Now that is is played a lot more, people start complaining more.

So according to your logic mercs were not only balanced before their dcd nerfs, but could even be considered underpowered because someone could just not take trauma regulators and buffed kolto. Do you see how dumb that sounds? RA is too strong of a utility and like the merc utilities, should be nerfed. Also you didn’t even mention camo which is a strong dcd as well to stop focus, I’d expect more from someone who claims to know a lot about maras.

So the simplest way to put it is to use corrosive dart and sniper volley on cd and then do that standard rotation in between all of that. To expand that, between every sniper volley, you will get 4 PB off, 3 Ambushes off (therefore also 3 sets of snipe), and the FT after every one of those (so 10). So think of the rotation as 3 full rotations starting with PB with an extra PB at the end. In between all of those you will have filler spots between every sniper volley. You can't fit anymore of the major abilities without delaying sniper volley so you can delay the main abilities 1 gcd sometimes to use a filler ability and there won't be a dps difference because sniper volley is like a hard reset of the rotation. Most of the time you'll end up using those abilities on cd but sometimes they'll be delayed a gcd or 2. The best way to use those fillers is to keep corrosive dart on the target at all times since being able to use that is not affected by sniper volley. With the remaining filler spots you either use takedown when under 30% (easiest to use right after ambush and the use followthrough right after), sniper when above 30% and energy permitting, or basic attack when you need the energy (will usually only happen twice in a 2.5m parse a bit before a sniper volley when no energy cd's are available if done correctly). The best way to set up CD to be used on cd for the rest of the fight is to use it right after the opening ambush and to use a 3rd snipe right after snipe, snipe, FT in the opener before the 2nd ambush (first non-precasted). That will make the next CD be right after the ambush, FT after the 3rd snipe.

Not only is marauder already one of the best classes for pve, but a nerf to ruthless aggressor would have zero impact in hm/nim ops because obfuscate can't be used on ops bosses, unless you want to argue that trash/adds should be balanced around.

Sorc dps have cleared every nim fight without being carried. Is madness below all the rest dps in its category? Yes and probably should get a slight buff. Is it a terrible class that can't do anything without being carried? No, the best sorcs have proved that.

Well the thing with the alacrity isn't 1.4s vs 1.3s, I've tested both in multiple specs as well as some other people I know for other specs in most nim raids and there isn't a noticeable difference, but anything between those 2 thresholds for most specs are wasted stats because it doesn't actually do anything besides slightly increase energy regen which only really helps a small amount of specs like io.

The reason why I said to stop doing those was because it looked like it slowed down your activating of rotational abilities. The main thing I saw in that parse was that you were activating abilities much slower than you should. With that alacrity, you should be activating Cull every 7.9s on average while you were using it every 8.7s on average. It looks like that reason is because you are sometimes using 5 gcd's between culls when you should only ever have 4 gcd's between culls. Using cull more often will also help with energy because it is energy positive. You also weren't using takedown after every cull which hurts dps and energy since takedown is cheaper than lethal shot.

There's a lot going on so I'm only going to focus on the 2 major ones that I see for now and see where that takes you first. It's better to take things one step at a time and not everything at once. Use the gearing of the 3rd parse you posted too. You never need to use cover pulse or shield probe in a parse and it is slowing down your rotation every time you are doing that so don't use those. The small delays each time add up to a big difference. 2nd thing is always use weakening blast on cooldown right before every other cull. You are using it before every 3rd cull after dots and WB does a lot of damage so delaying that not only hurts energy because of its cheap cost but you are also losing out on a lot of damage.

Sorry it took so long for me to respond, yeah the orbital strike was the main thing that increased dps and it's important to use it as much as possible with an energy cd. What I do is I don't snipe after the opening orbital since I'm always just under what I need for energy when I do that and try to stretch my energy cd's for orbital. Looks like you generally do what I do with pairing orbitals with energy cd's except for 1 time since you don't have anything else up. Also another time you flashbanged since you didn't have anything else. To avoid that, you want to use roll in the first filler window when you will be using roll and thermal grenade for the 2 filler spots. That way you can roll in the second filler spot for the next rotation and the only time where you will have more than 2 rotations back to back where this will be broken is after the first adrenaline probe when you have 3 rotations in a row with those 2 fillers. That's when you use imperial preparation to be able to do that 3rd rotation. Takes a bit of practice to get used to that and not always using thermal grenade in first filler window but it's better for parsing because you can roll more. Also it doesn't look like you're quite hitting abilities fast enough (specifically plasma probe) since you're using plasma probe and series of shots .2 seconds slower on average than my parses. It's easier to hit it on time right after SoS but as long as you double tap the ability and the second tap is a few tenths of a second before the gcd ends then it should be good. Getting a bit luckier helps with getting top parses too. Best of luck

Do you also plan on overhauling almost every spec as well so they aren’t absurdly boring? Almost every spec has a hard hitting ability that isn’t resource intensive so they would just end up spamming that most of time. Like for virulence you’d do dots, WB, then spam cull until WB comes back up, then until dots need to be reapplied again, and repeat forever. Sounds incredibly boring to me, and most specs will function similarly, which is what you are trying to reverse. If you try to avoid that by making those abilities resource intensive then you just end up basic attacking significantly more which is also very boring (see why most people hate pyro right now even though it does great dps). Your change would in fact make most specs more boring instead of less.

Yep, that’s what I use.

Both threads are pretty outdated and with the discovery of how alacrity interacts with the gcd, almost useless. Any of the calculations for crit and alacrity are useless for both threads now.

You could always put it in your sig.

Name: Ryannack Class: Sorc Record Broken and Spot: Arena HPS #1 Number: 11684 Guild: Origin https://i.imgur.com/GVUawRb.jpg Name: Ryannack Class: Sorc Record Broken and Spot: Warzone HPS #2 and Overall healing #2 Number: 8921 / 7360219 Guild: Origin https://i.imgur.com/fuppOfP.jpg

So the things that I noticed: 1) Your knowledge of the rotation is fine, nothing really that I can help with that. 2) You're trying way too hard to clip Speed Shot and Wounding Shots. If you look at your parse, you have 34 ticks of WS for every tick except for the last 2 (last hit). So you could've potentially gotten 21 more ticks in if you didn't clip it early which is over 5 full WS. Same with SS but less so. 3) You should try running a higher alacrity, I personally run 1884 (15.54%), which is 4 enhancements and 10 augments. As long as you're above 15.4% you should be fine, alacrity is wonky in this game and these numbers work best. If you do this then you also won't need to clip at all in order to not delay abilities. This will however make energy management a bit harder. 4) At the end of the parse you should do an extremely energy negative rotation, especially if you still have Cool Head available. Having extra energy at the end of a parse isn't necessary so it's better to use more dirty blasts and less basic attacks/rolls to maximize damage.

I didn't notice any bugs, it's just the range of dps you can get in any given parse has shrunk by a lot. With the current energy regen from dots, it is like having a 50% crit chance on every dot and internal part of lethal shot. If you were running a lower alacrity and had a higher crit chance, then 50% crit chance was decent but the upper limit was way higher, so you'd have more overall energy in the old system than the new system for the best parses. If you were running higher alacrity and lower crit, 50% crit chance is incredibly good. So far someone's already gotten a 10.3k parse (not far off from best before change) so I suspect that the possible max parse has not changed much. I only parsed a bit so far and always had really bad crits though. I suspect for most people there's an issue with the castbar bug. I've parsed virulence so much that I can just listen to the cull/SoS ticks, but for anyone who hasn't gotten to that point, it's way harder to make sure the next ability is hit immediately after cull/SoS ends. Even if there's only .1-.2s for each channel, that's a lot of extra time added that would severely bring down dps.

Yeah, the components weren't changed for MM operations like everything else, makes upgrading gear by doing MM ops so incredibly slow.

I don't play virulence in pvp much so I can't really comment on most of it, but weakening blast counts as a single target hit, not a dot. So if you have dots on a merc, put weakening blast on them and they hit reflect, then they'll heal off of every weakening blast tick. Or if they hit reflect in the middle of a cull then they'll heal to full pretty quick because of the sheer amount of non-dot damage ticks. They can also get all 15 stacks for trauma regulators really quick and can click that off for all the immediate healing if they need it immediately.

2 reasons: 1) Easiest rotation of the 3 to optimize. 2) It has an armor debuff and a debuff that increases ranged damage taken which are the 2 best debuffs for sharpshooter. The debuffs that the other 2 specs get are not nearly as strong for that particular spec. (df increases internal/elemental damage taken, sab increases aoe damage taken, both get the increase to ranged damage taken).

Yes it can parse over 10.6k, it does very high sustained dps. Also what I find the most fun is maximizing my flame burst usage while not overheating. It requires me to think a few gcd's ahead of time of what will I be using and will it overheat me. If I was just able to spam flame burst without worry all the time then it would take all thinking out of the spec.

Yes, pyro uses about twice as many rapid shots as io.

12 out of the 18 damage specs have to use basic attacks to maintain a stable max dps rotation, northing wrong with it and doesn't necessarily hurt a spec's dps. Look at pyro, it is near the top (if not the top) in basic attack uses but is also one of the highest sustained dps specs. Hard on resources does not mean resource management is bad.

The goal is to use the highest possible damage rotation while also not running out of energy. Using a basic attack or a roll isn't a bad thing, most specs are forced to in order to deal optimal dps. The only specs I can think of that don't are sorc specs (depends on whether you view force lightning or lightning strike spam basic attacks or not), fury/rage, lethality, and vigilance. So that's only 6 out of the 18 damage specs that won't use a basic attack, 12 of them do. Engineering only even needs to use 1 per rotation which isn't bad at all. When it comes to the downtime all you need is a gcd or 2 every few minutes, not large or frequent breaks, even just having the occasional ability lag that most people will have in an operation will be plenty of time. There are significantly fewer fights where you will have an apm and uptime as perfect as a dummy parse and that's the only time where that energy will catch up to the point where you'd have to basic attack twice.

2 things to note. The tooltip for speed shot doesn't update with the energy decrease for it that you get in the tree, it's actually only 16 energy. And you should never use that second thermal grenade. So that's an extra 18 energy that you would no longer be spending which would make the rotation 4 energy negative. That 4 energy is barely noticeable unless you go through the rotation several times without any breaks or using energy cd's which really will only during parsing and only once throughout the entire 2.5m health.

Except it's not clipping, you're using ferocity first then abilities after. You have around .3 seconds of wiggle room to activate an ability after ferocity if you have a 1.3s gcd, absolutely no clipping required. They tried making the old ferocity on the gcd once, the dislike of it and how much it hurt how the spec played made them scrap it.