The evidence doesnt really support this claim. Gunslingers seem to be the ones who love power the most. Telekinetcs (middle tree) likes a lot of power, but optimal is not 0 crit. Balance (right tree) wants quite a bit of crit, as in everyone I know who does nightmare has between 350 and 550 crit. Remember, as your bonus damage goes higher, your benefit from each crit goes up as well. So the higher your bonus damage, the more crit you want to have. Which is why your gearing strategy in arkanian is not the same as it is now in dread master.

Treek will do more damage, take about the same, but also heals in tank stance. Qyzen also uses a techblade which is harder to upgrade, unless you craft them. Her abilities are just better than Qyzen's, so if you have equal access to both, go with Treek.

44k means they are stacking too much endurance. Also, the scaling isnt 100% with bonus damage/healing. You have to account for the static number as well. Example: your 500 bonus heals = 3810 Bubble in healer spec My 1308 bonus heals = 6712 Bubble in same spec

Well the thing that not everyone realizes is that the stat curves are different for each level. So by changing to level 60, they will be inherently different. When we went from 50-55 when the patch came out my stats were the same... until I hit level 51, and it gradually changed to the "new" formulas by the time I hit 55. Also, most of my abilities had a new rank between 50 and 55, which also meant, new numbers to run since now base damage and bonus damage multipliers were different. Since those affect what you get out of power and crit, those will be important things for people to consider before declaring a new stat priority as the best. I am under the assumption that each spec will get at least one new ability. Since we really have no real info about theses abilities, we cannot get accurate calculations. I also assume that new ranks of abilities will show up for class abilities, and that abilities granted in the tree (like sever force (creeping darkness) and turbulence (thundering blast) will have their numbers adjusted to simulate a new rank. The formulas for stats like crit, surge, accuracy, alacrity, shield, defense, absorbtion, and the crit from mainstat will probably all be slightly adjusted to account for the higher level gear having a higher expected amount of stats. I hope this makes sense. =þ

Each discipline? No one really knows since no one knows how skills, abilities, and stats will be tweaked with the level increase. Currently: Healers want a bit of crit in their gear, but much more power. Optimally keep crit around 100-200ish, but remember, more stat, is better than less of the optimal stat. 0 Crit is no longer optimal in the higher gear like it was in arkanian. You do want at least as much alacrity as surge at a minimum. Most people have 6 alacrity pieces to 4 surge pieces. Some run 7a/3s and some run 5a/5s. Use the ratio that feels right for you. Similarly middle tree wants a bit of crit to optimize the crit/power tradeoff. Similar numbers to healing around 100-200ish crit should be good. Right tree wants more crit since there is no auto crit and the tree gets bonuses to surge values. There is nothing wrong with having 400 crit in this spec. And no one should have less than 200. Also note that swapping a piece of power to crit when optimized might be something like a 10DPS (or hps) loss. But if that piece is higher level and has more stats on it, you end up getting more DPS from the stat boost than you lose from the switch to the less optimal stat.

The surely you are going to say the same thing about disturbance for telekinetics. The truth is balance is a sustained damage spec and TK is burst. If the fight is a long one, balance will win. As TK you have to kill the balance guy fast, interrupt his TK Throw, and possibly purge his dots. The specs are fairly well balanced for PVE. PVP is just a separate can of worms. Taking something away for the sake of PVP is not going to work unless you can counteract it by also giving them something in return to maintain PVE balance.

All the mobs? Are we talking about healing during trash mob pulls? This was in reference to boss fights where you cannot knock back a boss. Not using force wave is just playing the class wrong. It is needed if you are going to do the high end content. Im not talking about sm that any competent healer can solo heal, I mean the nightmare stuff. Im not going to speak about PVP since Im not an expert on it. No one on the server is going to out heal my scoundrel in 8m content. Scoundrels are just that much better. But when it comes to 16m, you will be hard pressed to find a fight where my sage doesnt out heal said scoundrel. On top of that, the sage will spread the healing around more consistently instead of the group that the scoundrel is rolling hots on. The biggest disadvantage with scoundrel is they do not prevent any damage with armor buffs so they have to heal for more. The do a bit more healing that is really required to close that gap however, making them top for content with 8 or less players. But scoundrel is also the one class you can double heal with and do well. Commando double heal sucks because of trauma probe, and sage double heal sucks because of force armor.

That's an ok guide for basics if you dont know anything, but it isnt the best guide out there. I would prolly go with orderken's guide, or you can read both (or all three if you want to check out my old outta date guide) and see what works for you. Since I dont care what the imp names are, ill call them by description. Use the small instant with a hot to start, follow it up with the channel, you can do an instant noble sac/consume thing at the end with it being off cooldown (basically do this EVERYTIME). And use bubble as filler until your next instant hot so you can use the buff on your ground aoe heal. Then when position makes sense, use your aoe knockback that heals ON COOLDOWN since it heal for 0 force meaning you have a net positive when you cast it. Also you can use force mend whenever you want now since it is kinda off the global cool down. Keep using your bubble as the main filler heal on tanks between your good abilities. And also try an alternate which tank is getting your small instant hot so that they both keep the armor buff. The short cast time, now sometimes instant heal is a little more tolerable to use since you can kinda get force back off the GCD . I still dont use it a lot, and the super slow heal almost never gets used now. (unless you use mental alacrity and your crit bonus to the next two abilities ability). A well played sage is the best 16m healer around, and I would rather have one than a commando in 8m assuming the same ability level on both healers.

Are we saying they did maths right ? Inconceivable !!! - I do not think that word means what I think it means.

I dont particularly feel like checking the math, but if they went the opposite way, ie made the bonus to cooldowns match the bonus to resource gen by making it slightly lower, then that works just as well. Currently in game they are not he same. 10% more resource is not the same as 10% less time.

My wish list huh ? Well since they are changing a lot, who knows how things will really stack up compared to the changes in 3.0. That said: Force Potency - 60% was great when i had ~40% crit on my healer pre 2.0, now it is just annoying. Make this 100% so it can be a reliable offensive cooldown. Lightning - remove the pushbacks. Balance - Im not unhappy with it now. Id rather see how the changes with balance play with everything else first. Seer - Make the noble sacrifice mechanic work the way it should have worked. Meaning, it is off the GCD while you have resplendence stacks. Keep the 1.5s ability cooldown (which needs to scale with alacrity - see below). Do something about salvation. Something. Either people who walk into it get a hot applied to them equal to how long salvation still has to be on he ground, or allow it to be cast on a person (like yourself) so you can move that thing around. Global - Make alacrity work as if I had designed it. Meaning the maths would be better. So yes casts are faster, as well as the GCD like now. Also, it would extend to ability cooldowns, and dot/hot ticking speed, and correctly apply to resource regen. Meaning you would get 1/(1-alacrity%) bonus to resource regen. So say I have a 8.67% modest Alacrity on my scoundrel. Instead of 6 * 1.0867 = 6.5202 resource regen, I would get 6 * (1 / (1 - .0867)) = 6.5696. The difference is not much, but you will see that Alacrity just makes things faster this way, without making things wonky and breaking sustainable regens. It also makes alacrity not broken for classes that have to build resources up (knights). We are expanding to level 60, which means they will have a new formula for each stat at that level anyway, so you can make Alacrity be a little bit less per point than planned so it doesnt become a super stat.

I didnt mean to imply you dont play balance, just you are more of a TK guy. I was always a a balance guy, thats probably due to it being more accessible to someone who is still a healer at heart. Im better at both sage healing and scoundrel healing than balance dps. Ive honestly never put points in alacrity since the 2.6 changes. I did better with the crit. As far as concentration being a waste compared to clamoring force, that is probably true. But I am not ever last, and I am occasionally tops in DPS. The spec I use lets me kill all the bosses, so I am good with it. If I get stuck DPSing after this next xpac, Ill prolly do what I do to healing and actually try and maximize it, but I was under the assumption that I was dpsing because I was the best DPS of the healers and we needed a DPS. Ive never come close to running out in my spec. Not even multi dotting and bubbling when needed. I can see how another spec would be better dps most of the time tho. Are you saying 2(crit)/8(2 in clamoring force/1 concentration) is what you are using? Im sure it is not 100% (what mechanic in this game works as intended 100%?) but the first challenge is almost always me 50%ish or the balance shadow (30%ish) with the other two being about 1 in 5 combined. If I dont get it the first time, I am almost guaranteed the second one. Maybe 10% of the time do I not get either challenge. Maybe its not based on threat, but it has to be based on something. Or we have the strangest RNG ive ever seen.

I agree with most of the stuff Ive read in the thread. I just thought I would point out the two minor inconsistencies I see since I am currently maining a balance sage (I cant believe Im not healing) while I know you run Telekinetics (or the imperial equivalent: Lightning). I do not run out of force on my sage. It just doesnt happen. I run 3/7/36, the two points that increase your force regen rate with a cast of disturbance (lightning strike?) make a positive difference with force, and the DPS hit is not worth respeccing for (since I have enough DPS anyways for every fight) Raptus is merely a case of not wasting everything on the wrong add. I almost always have the most damage total between the two adds in the challenge, and I do not even hit both adds with FIB when i enter. I almost always only have one challenge since it seems like the person held out of the challenge is based on threat. But even if I have to do both, I dont have a problem. I always get my three stacks for mind crush by attacking spinning raptus. Then I cast instant MC, (adrenal, MA, FP which I saved for the challenge), FIB, TKT (he is dead) then both dots while other guy is shielded, then tkt, 1xdist, then tkt until i can FIB a second time before the challenge ends (but he is usually dead before then). The only fails are when someone messes up their rotation. This is most likely not ideal, but it gets the job done.

This may seem like a silly question, but are you using your companion? A healing or tanking companion helps a lot if you are having survival issues. Also make sure that companion is in the right stance. And you can also use your crowd control abilities like force lift (whirlwind for sorcs I think) to keep one tough baddie out of the fight until you finish off the easier guys. Also force mend is a force less heal you can use off the global cooldown to heal yourself

It depends on what the developers want to do. If they do not like that implementation (no animations or visible hanging hood) then they probably still wont do it. It doesnt make what I wrote wrong however. I did not imply they were stupid. It is possible that they have not considered that as a makeshift solution that would make some people (possibly even most) happy. I honestly do not see how "the world's problems" can be equated to a hood toggle in a video game. I dont think implementing a UI checkbox, giving it a boolean variable, and adding it as an or to the logic that already exists in the game is equivalent to determining the outcome of an undefined program with undefined input. As a whole, I seem to be getting negative responses from people about trying to be helpful. I know everyone likes beating up on the guy who looks like he is attacking the devs, but that's just not the case.

I guess the main thing to consider is what people really want. Would animations and showing the hood down draped around the shoulders be the optimal solution? Of course. Is it worth the work.... probably not, though Dark Age of Camelot had it and Mythic was merged with Bioware to help create this game. But thats really unimportant. The part people REALLY care about is if the hood is on, or if the head is uncovered. Make a checkbox in the UI that says "Pretend this char is a twilek or wearing one of the helmets that hides hoods". Which would basically be changing something like if(character.race == "twilek") { //hide hode code here } to if(character.race == "twilek" || character.setting.hidehood) { // hide hood code here } so all you would have to do is add an or (the ||) to your if statement and have it check also the boolean variable (true or false) for hide hood. The hour or two I quoted should be far shorter, but it covers testing, compiling, and finding this particular piece of code. Is this a be all end all solution? Of course not. Would most people who have lamented the lack of a hood toggle be satisfied? Probably. I know I would be. There is nothing stopping them from adding in animations later if that is what they want. Something is better than nothing in this case, and it doesnt really have to be all or nothing.

You mean armchair game programmer who has a degree in computer science, writes games, and teaches courses on game programming. Make sure you get the whole thing =þ

There are plenty of helmets already that cause hoods to disappear, like my old columi helmet on my commando who had a guardian chest piece shell for a while. All they would have to do is apply that logic to make the hood hide while not displaying that particular helmet. The hood wouldnt be hanging from the shoulders, but you have to walk before you can run.

Making something that would be functional shouldnt take longer than an hour or 2 considering the content currently in the game. Im not sure if the lack of a hood toggle is a case of not wanting to do the work, or not having anyone smart enough to realize how easy it would be.

Your balance rotation seems a little off. FiB and MC are on 15 second timers and should be used on cooldown, SF and WM are on 18s "timers" and should float through the rotation. Using a static rotation will lower your DPS, but not by a whole lot. You need to have 110% force accuracy, and put the rest of your tertiary stats in surge for balance. Crit should be 200ish, but more stats are better than less stats so keep the 186 pieces over the 180 pieces even if you get more crit than "ideal". Most people find it easiest to keep pieces of the rotation as blocks. FiB and MC are usually kept together so they are always cast consecutively. SF and WM are cast together for most people as well. So you would do something like this: Notice how the dots (blue) move one spot down each time through. MC/FIB SF/WM TKT->Dist TKT->Dist TKT MC/FIB TKT->Dist SF/WM TKT->Dist TKT MC/FIB TKT->Dist TKT->Dist SF/WM TKT MC/FIB TKT->Dist TKT->Dist TKT SF/WM MC/FIB TKT->Dist TKT->Dist TKT->Dist TKT MC/FIB <--- start Also. Potency is technically best used on a TKT->FiB instead of two TKT. The reasons are its slightly more damage, and using all 4 ticks of TKT messes with the timing of the rotation a little. Just make sure you do TKT first since if FiB hits more than one target, it will consume both charges. I usually hit MA right away, adrenal as soon as the last dot is applied, and potency on the last TKT before the second FiB. The reapply each as they come up only delaying Potency if needed to put it in a good place. This may not be ideal, but I get 3775 on average on my parses in similar gear and 3850 has been where Ive topped out

I think Nala did a great job. I put in my suggestions in the thread as well. I think I personally would have said something like. 1) TK needs full push back protection on ALL casts/channels (dist, turb, tkt, mc) not a subset of those. 2) Give sages a defensive cool down off the GCD, or allow self casting of force armor and force mend off the GCD. 3) Make sages not be the clear third option for both PVP and PVE healing. The changes to balance and TK removed a couple of those questions an left with those 3 issues which all affect PVP and PVE. Survivability is an issue that affects DPS and healers both for PVE and PVP. Even if damage output and healing output were the same, being squishier makes the class less attractive than other alternatives. Comparing damage taken numbers doesnt really tell the story of a DPS honestly. Being better about mechanics can explain who takes the most vs the least damage. What matters is how much someone takes in the intense unavoidable phases. Big bursts of damage like 36k vs a sage is totally different than 30k to a gunslinger or a commando because now any random 3k hit will finish off a sage while you have a larger margin to save your gunslinger/commando. Same goes for burn phases with constant damage going out. A little bit more damage being taken in a burn phase like DP Council means that much more healing needs to be done to down the boss. If it is close, that can make the difference (Brontes DF NiM as an example, and we all know the DP council fight will be like this). Healing is a more difficult situation to address. Everyone has different styles of healing that works for them. I personally go the force efficient route and barely use noble sacrifice. Changing the set bonus to have noble sacrifice not eat into your health as much will hardly help me at all. I would much rather have the 50 force, but I am probably in the minority, since it seems no one else follows what I do. Being able to noble sacrifice more doesnt actually mean you get to heal more, it means you heal less because you have less casts to do healing with. Scoundrel and commando dont have to stop healing to manage resources, the use cheap heals (or free ones) to manage energy/ammo. Also, sages are the least mobile. AMP and MP need to be cast. Kolto pack needs to be cast. The occasional UWM needs to be cast. Sages need to cast salvation, and healing trance. Sages who arent me also use deliverance. More casts means more movement punishees sages the most. Healing trance being the best heal and it being channeled means it is punished the most since breaking it earlier to move still puts it on cooldown where a cast would not be on cooldown. And salvation is the least mobile AOE heal. Kolto bomb is instant and can be recast every 6 seconds. Kolto Cloud is instant and once applied, follows your targets around. trauma probe and slow release medpack are sort of like aoes in that they can be mass applied regularly (closest thing sage has is mass force armor which is a huge drain on force compared to the other 2). Concussion charge is almost equal to force wave. The shorter cooldown makes up for the higher positioning skill requirement of force wave. You lose so much healing from salvation getting wasted that movement in PVE makes sages less useful than the other healers. In PVP it is worse because an AOE can negate salvation completely. I think Bioware should do the following: 1) Remove force armor from the GCD for self casts. Do the same for Force Mend. High in the balance tree should have a cost reduction for self force armor, TK should be fine on cost. Make the force armor debuff character specific. Dont punish sage healers for being with another sage healer. And dont punish a group for having a sage healer and a sage DPS. (On a side note, make trauma probe usable by more than one commando healer as well. It should work like SRMP) 2) Make healing not suck. Salvation needs to be more mobile somehow. I proposed having the option to cast it on a target and they radiate the healing from themselves (self cast is fine). Give PVPers set bonuses they actually want. How about the healing trance bonus for 2 piece and noble sac doesnt cost health for the 4 piece. PVE can stay the same, or make rejuvenate have a 1.5s shorter cooldown. Then you can use conveyance on each healing trance and each salvation. That will make up for the 50 force (and the less potent sacrifices) with more stacks for noble sacrificing or cheaper salvations. And add a little mobility that is currently lacking. Theses are not over the top changes. They may not even be enough, but they would be steps in the right direction. We can always test and see how this all works. An important distinction is that these suggestions improve the situation for all players not just players who play one style. And to end the wall of text: Why would you change your policy after the last sage/sorc disaster to say you will not release answers to questions on a friday because then you couldnt respond to the outrage everyone had before the weekend? Clearly it didnt change anything since we are now a week removed and there has been no response to what is clearly a negative response.

I assume this means the PTS forums are not even read since the same thing was mentioned there in the following thread: Its time: Ammo counter for the Trooper

Disappointed that Bioware doesnt understand how their own game mechanics work. Basically you are saying if you want to have a sage DPS, you better have a sage healer with them to be their defensive cool down. Other classes have something so that they can survive a hit at less than 100%. Sages only have barrier, and a GCD using reactive Force Mend which doesnt help if you are dead. Make force armor cheaper and off the GCD when used on your self on the tier under turbulence/sever force. So your response is please give us your feedback? There is plenty of feedback already in the forums in the top current sage issues thread. 50 pages worth actually. If you remove the health cost of noble sacrifice on the PVP set, make it the 4 piece bonus or it will be in PVE as well. On a separate issue, Sage healing is behind the other healers in PVE right now. The devs may not notice this since they dont really know what the top capabilities are of each of the healers. I know there are probably better sages healers than me out there, I just havent ever seen one on my server. I out perform the top known sage (me) using my scoundrel in current NiM ops. I also have an easier time healing with a commando than a sage with my scoundrel. If you are going to balance DPS based on the top players, then you need to do the same with sage. I have given my suggestion on a modification to salvation that closes this gap here: [Petition] Sage Seer: Suggestion to improve QoL without buffing max potential HPS The same things that make sages fall behind in PVP make them fall behind in PVE. Your response is basically: We dont want it that way, so we are not going to change it. Seems like we should get a refund on our question. You do realize that your stated goal is for the player to rely "ALMOST SOLELY" on the force and to use the lightsaber as a "SECONDARY WEAPON". Mission accomplished if this were the scattergun for the scoundrel. Since it is not, you have failed in your own goal. I dont think people are asking to replace every animation. I think more people are wanting something like the scoundrel has, where there is an ability or two that uses the weapon we have. Or MAYBE even have the abilities channeled from the saber like a staff/wand. It would be better than nothing. I personally dont care a whole lot about this, but the response sounds a lot like: We really dont care what the players want so we will pass the buck to the cartel market team and then maybe you will see something. Reminds me a lot of the H2F and L2P responses from last time. The responses from last time and this time have validated the idea that the sage as a difficult to master class as the devs stated. The problem appears to be that the devs cannot master them.

It may be easier to just label the time zone as PT instead of PDT (the PST is incorrect). Then you dont have to worry about S for standard or D for daylight.

The best thing about the questions is that you could flip the PVE and PVP questions and they would still be legitimate. Feedback was a clever way to sneak in 4 more issues =) It would be really nice if all the classes could get to a point where each class has some slight advantages and slight disadvantages instead of some classes being glaringly weaker than the other options.