Again, I've never once said that Alacrity is better than Crit or Surge. I've stated that it is a better theoretical dps increase than a non-dps utility talent (AKA more endurance). There's alot of things I didn't take into consideration in the above napkin math, There are also alot of assumptions made that cannot be confirmed until there is a combat log available. So remember, if you have 2 points left over (Almost everyone does when they build their arsenal build) Alacrity is theoretically capable of more DPS than +2% endurance

Damage is never done in a vacuum. Damage is done over time... Let's say N is the amount of time a boss fight occurs in seconds. For the duration of that combat you have available 200 + (N * 5 heat) + ((N/3) * 8) heat. This equation assumes 1 use of vent heat and that you maximize your heat regen time at 5 per second and you always vent heat for crits. Let's use a value of 120 for comparison purposes. 200 + (120 * 5) + ((120/3) * 8) = Amount of heat you can use for this boss fight. Simplified that's 800 + 320 = 1120 heat that you can use for the duration of this fight. Let's assume you have 4pc so railshot costs 0, TM, HSM, and Unload cost 16 heat. So, how many abilities can we cast with 1120 heat? That would be 70. So that means we get 8 * HSM, X * Unload, and the remainder are TM. Now here is where we need to make guestimates. How often are we going to cast Unload? I would guestimate that it will be 8 + 0.5 * 8 (or 1 and a half times as many HSM) which is 12. Let's add all those times up! 8 * 1.5 (HSM) + 12 * 3 (Unload) + 50 * 1.5 12 + 36 + 75 = 123 That isn't even counting the 1.5 seconds for RS i imagine we will use on CD (Which is 8) OH MY GOD... it takes longer to cast the abilities than we have!! Now, if I had some haste, I could maximize and get those additional casts in. Do you understand now why people who completely dismiss alacrity are not doing themselves justice? Am I saying that alacrity is good? no, I'm saying that it has the potential to be useful, but there is absolutely no way to tell until we have some kind of combat log to know how often we cast spells.

For one, no one has mentioned stacking alacrity, we can all agree that it's not a stat that you want to stack. Secondly, good players minimize the damage that they take and don't need those utility spells to increase their health pools. You have CD's that mitigate most "unavoidable" damage, if you use those in conjunction to not being a blithering idiot, you are no harder to heal than the person with a few hundred more hp's

The discussion is whether the 4% (or 5%) alacrity from talents IS BETTER THAN A NON-DPS UTILITY TALENT. The answer to that is yes. I have 0 alacrity on my gear, but those talents decrease my cast times on Unload and TM. Therefore they have a measured benefit over a utility talent that has no measurable benefit to my dps.

Quite right, I just think of the GCD as anytime you cannot cast a spell, which includes channel time for another spell or during the GCD from an instant cast.

That's not right at all.. All characters have X alacrity. For Mercenaries, X = Make TM cast at 1.5 seconds and unload at 3 seconds. So talents that increase your Alacrity by 4 (or 5%)% increase by x * 1.04 (or 1.05). Alacrity the stat increases your Alacrity by N or (X + N) * 1.04 (or 1.05). So those talents ALWAYS increase your alacrity, even if you have 0 on your gear. ALSO NOTE: Abilities with cast times do not invoke the full 1.5 second GCD. Their GCD is the amount of time they take to cast. Therefore the GCD for a TM with enough alacrity to cast it at 1.4 is indeed 1.4, not 1.5. PPS: It is my opinion that System Calibration is better than Critical Reaction. I think 4% alacrity is always better than 5% that can drop off in certain situations. PPPS: Do i think Alacrity is good for a merc? I don't know, without a combat log, there is no way to tell, however I think it is better than a utility talent that doesn't do any damage. I kinda remember a newsletter or something mentioning how alacrity affects your heat regen rates, but I cannot confirm that it does without a combat log.

Maybe i'm responding to a troll... But pushback refers to the effect of taking damage increases (Or decreases in the case of unload) the casttime of a spell. This pushback results in a loss of damage. So for example: Unload takes 3seconds to cast. You take damage while channeling the spell. this damage has a chance to reduce the cast time by 0.5 seconds. This makes it so that the third tick of damage does not occur. It's easier to conceptualize on a spell like Trace Missle. TM takes 1.5 seconds to cast.. if you get hit during this, it will add X amount of time onto the cast before it goes off.

I concur.. it's fairly difficult to craft one of those with an augment slot. It's not like there are hundreds of them on the AH and are dirt cheap. I think the trade-off of End vs DPS stats is a good option.

Just look at his post history. He's a troll and is unabashed about it. I do not know why BW continues to let him post on the forums.

I just wanted to say that I logged in specifically to report this individual. He constantly posts outlandish drivel to incite the forum community for his petty entertainment. If you look at his post history, you will realize this to be true. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=283108

Go pull a piece of armor/mod/enhancement/barrel/hilt out of a level 50 item. Then come back and tell me about the re-usability of these items.

Have you unsocketed that barrel yet? In high level gear it's more expensive to "Reuse" some barrels/armors/enhancments/mods than it is to purchase new ones.

No... Their developers picked different numbers out of the hat. Also, it may be that Tera is not optimized for a multi-core processor, whereas SW:TOR is, hence the greater requirements for a multi-core processor.

You do realize that there is no magic formula for determining what minimum requirements are right? It's more of a question of asking your developers: What is the minimum hardware that you feel a person could reasonably expect to play the game on? Does that mean that you cannot play the game with less? No, it just means that you shouldn't blame the developer for crappy performance if you do not meet the minimum requirements. However, that does not mean it's not possible.

awesomely awesome

I concur with this post and agree that Bioware is doing a good job. This may not be fast enough for some blokes out there, but I feel they are working diligently to address all of our issues.

This message is hidden because Gummiebear is on your ignore list.

I believe that the OP and some others in this thread are jumping the gun. You say that you have to have max DPS for hardmodes to succeed and that heat is limiting you. I disagree and say that until you have hard numbers of what your dps and other's dps is, it might be that because of other classes lack on DPS it is causing you to have to push your heat moreso. Until there are more comparative values out there, you can't argue against the mechanic.

I just wanted to quote the truth. It's nice to see someone who posts well thought out, grammatically correct and relevant non-conspiracy theory thoughts.

You obviously do not understand what the problem is that is causing them to throttle graphics. Just because you can run the current textures at 200FPS does not mean that you would be able to run the HD graphics in a playable manner.

The sky is falling.. why don't you run?

FYI, Just because the engine does not use multiple cores does not preclude SWTOR from using multiple cores.

Here.. read this: The Mythical Man-Month (Wikipedia)

In some other thread, the creator of this website explained exactly what it is. He uses the population information from the server status to estimate the load on the servers. It's interesting information and is probably fairly accurate in usage, but again, it's an estimate of an estimate which is a lot of guesswork. It's an interesting viewpoint of the server usage, but that does not indicate a reduction of subscriptions or lack of enthusiasm by the playerbase.

I just wanted to point out that you've hit on what a considerable amount of people miss. It could be any and ALL of those things. Degradation of performance mostly can be traced back to a root cause, but there is also the possibility that many different factors contribute to the extreme differences that players are seeing.