That's just your personal experience. People bring all classes to raids all the time. StarParse stats show 2 sages for each gunslinger, true, but that's hardly a monopoly. Btw, I frequently bring madness for progression and I can tell you it matches or beats lightning quite often while needing almost no healing. So I think I'm in the right mind Yes, I remember those targets for dps balancing... You missed the point though. Those targets were for something like the training dummy, with the idea that across actual fights the dps of different specs, or damage groupings as they called them, should perform equally well. If you want spec segregation of dps in non-dummy fights, then we disagree on a fundamental level. I think in true balance each spec should shine on some bosses or at least be okay on all. So on average across all bosses they should all be about equal.

Lightning completely sacrifices its aoe capabilities to get ahead, while Madness and Virulence don't. So they're both better picks on any bosses where you get multiple targets. You use burst as a label, but it's a spectrum. Go ahead and quantify burstiness of each of those specs. And I don't understand, why do you think it would be fair for Annihilation to outparse Lightning on most bosses? Ah but comparing top parses has even more flaws. For one, Lightning has more variability to it than Viru. As well as a much larger sample size. It's practically guaranteed it'll produce a higher outlier. On a side note, I always find it amusing when it's said bad parses are pulling down a spec without any data to base the assumption on. It just seems you're very biased, exaggerating lightning's advantages and not talking or seeing where this amazing dummy dps (which even by top parses it's only the 6th spec) doesn't translate to real world. It has to trade dps for most of its utility (both bubbles, cleanse, offheals, pull) while virulence only has diversion on-gcd. Staying on utility, I'd take 20% damage reduction for 25 seconds any day over 10% mastery (=less than 5% dps) for 10 seconds and longer cooldown. Another thing you never bring up is pushback. One pushback every 10 seconds equals about 400 dps loss but snipers never have to deal with it at all. But to bring this back on topic. Telekinetics is in a good spot in pve. And when I say that I don't mean it's great and want it to be the best, like ZUHFB seems to insist (actually I rarely play it right now). I mean that across all the raids in hm ops it's ranked #10 out of 18, in nightmare it's #12. I have no idea why you'd nerf that and call it balancing. I'd even argue that, while unintended, Halted Offensive as an optional cast is a great idea as it gives the spec depth. It's not just a thoughtless i-win button; it's worth using in some situations and it's a dps loss in others. To make the best of it takes skill. And don't get me started on Madness nerf. Imo the most undeserved of all.

Hey Chris So the tactical in this form doesn't really bring enough to the table to be worth using in most scenarios. The aoe slow effect would mostly be useful in pvp where I thought we were moving away from abundant rotational slows. As for the other part of the tactical; Force Storm for Madness is pretty weak. In most cases it's barely worth using it over single target rotation. With 15% damage bonus on slowed targets it'd still be terrible and it wouldn't make Storm better than Overloaded Strike, even on 6+ targets (I'm trying to say that Force Storm is too weak and not that Overloaded Strike is too strong). I could even argue that the tactial would be better used by Lightning since it has slow on Chain Lightning and a crit passive for Force Storm. Anyway, I'd be fine with removing either or even both of those effects and just bring back Demolish spread from the old Slow Mercy tactical ("Death Field spreads Force Slow's effect. Demolish hits all nearby targets affected by your Deathmark and Force Storm does 15% more damage to targets affected by your Deathmark."). That way the tactical might actually be worth considering. We could use some clarification here. Is this meant to add or to change the current Disintegration passive ("Increases the critical chance of Force Lightning and Lightning Strike by 15%")? Same question for Lightning's Convection change. In any case, the spec doesn't really need more self-healing. Its weakness is damage output. I understand that Rho is bugged, but even so the spec is barely competitive. Even with the slight buffs this is still a cumulative nerf of around 5% (more, if Disintegration is a change). To offset the damage loss from Rho, Force Horrors would have to be increased to 30% and Lightning Barrage to -15%. I can't understand nerfing a spec that's already one of the worst. I'm not sure if it's reached even average levels since 3.0, based on rankings on dummy and in ops... On a more general note, looking at rankings, the top damage dealers on >90% of raid bosses have been melee classes for a long time. I understand the reasoning for setting target ranged dps a bit lower than melee (though I'd believe that instead, pushback and interrupting casts when forced to move should balance out melee's uptime issues), but isn't this a bit much?

Rho fix is quite devastating. Lightning barrage is actually a buff, but all in all madness will lose ~5% dps with these changes.

May be a coincidence or may be worth exploring, but for me it has only happened when the group had someone who was in a different guild. Can anyone refute?

Nah that was never the case. They probably talked about death field's stacks that got consumed by other sorcs' dots, which was only really an issue if you had a madness and a lightning sorc, the latter of whom "stole" the former's stacks. About mobilty; both lightning and madness are pretty mobile, though both also need to stand still for certain abilities. Lightning probably has a slight advantage in damage while fully mobile, though in some cases madness can pull ahead by spamming dots on everything that moves.

Nightmare Brontes is a terrible gauge of viability. There isn't a hard enrage on that boss. Your chances of a successful kill go up with higher dps, but good tanks and healers (both in class and in skill) can buy you more time. Idk what your point is. We're in 5.0. Current benchmark is gods nightmare. On those bosses, sages/sorcs represent from 0-5 % of total dps classes, based on starparse stats. TK/Lightning less than half of those. Yes, the topic is old. But so is the meta. God I miss the times of class balancing every few months.

I disagree about ramp up on damage below 30%. I've been around since before that passive was added. Back then one of the top requests was to give sages an execute. Players wanted a skill like Spinning Strike or Dispatch, but what they got was damage boost on dots. There was a tradeoff though. The overall damage of dots stayed the same, so to compensate for damage buff below 30% the dots dealt less damage than they used to above 30%. If you keep that tradeoff in mind, it's easier to see why the passive is bad. It's especially obvious in pvp. Targets spend very little time below 30%. Healers naturally target those to keep them alive. Abilities like Enure, Adrenaline Rush, Focused Defense are used at around that health percentage. A burst execute might help in those situations, but dot pressure won't. Furthermore, if you see a target low on hp you don't want to use dots. You want to use frontloaded damage to kill them asap. If you use dots, much of their damage will be wasted if the target dies. That last fact also carries over to pve. Both world pve and raid boss adds will often die before dots fully tick, so it's not worh using them. Best use is usually on raid bosses in burn phases. I would argue that often pushing to burn phase is as demanding as the burn phase itself. Also, with many bosses "dying" at 10% the executes' effect is diminished (not only sage/sorc suffers from this). In Gods from the Machine operation some adds have to be pushed to 50% or 40% so executes also don't help at all. So as far as I'm concerned, I would prefer the execute talent be replaced by something else and to redistribute the damage buff to the overall damage of the dots. If anything, execute should be on Force Serenity, but looking at the history of dev changes and their class philosophy it doesn't look like we can expect any changes in this department anyway.

Tying a defensive cooldown to threat drop is already bad. Sometimes when you're getting hit you want to either pop a defensive and tank for a while before it switches to somebody else or threat dump immediately and save the defensive. You want to use a threat drop to do more damage. Do you see a problem with that?

I would be careful with adding additional effects to situational abilities (and slows to rotational abilities, but that's a different matter). Especially the Overload idea, for reasons already specified by others. There are better suited abilties Sorcerers have where you could add effects to; Consuming Darkness and Saber Strike. Consuming Darkness is nearly useless for both dps specs, but since it doesn't have a global cooldown, an internal cooldown on the effects would have to be added. Saber Strike is completely useless to the advanced class. Now would be the perfect chance to redesign it. There are plenty of options (not necessarily relating to the quoted effects), but I'll just give a few ideas. Saber Strike becomes a conal attack (probably not what the class needs, but neither is a weak melee attack). Or it is redesigned to make the saber float around the force user and deflect/reflect x amount of attacks or x% of attacks for the next y seconds, or giving x% alacrity buff on damage taken. Or just some plain damage reduction if you want to be boring. Of course, the ability would need a cooldown and balancing. Perhaps even taking it off global cooldown, depending on the use. Personally I don't pay much attention to animations; for all I care you can wave the lightsaber like a magic wand and get the Energized Overload effect. Still better than getting it with the actual Overload.

They aren't theoretical, they're actual uploaded dummy parses. Sample size is still pretty small though, they reset with 5.10.

Tbh the meta has been so stale for sorcs and sages that I'm not surprised this is happening. Sitting at the bottom end of the dps charts since 4.0, now more than 3 years ago, has made them a running joke among many.

It's pretty significant to be off by a factor of 2. Imagine saying Death Field / Force in Balance hits for 30k. The 2 log lines actually provide all the relevant info. There was a single Weaken Mind hit, it did connect, it was fully absorbed and it caused a Focused Defense heal. The heal seems to happen before the dot tick, but it has the same timestamp so there's no doubt what caused it. Did you mean the shield/absorb with the offhand? That's represented differently, the lines include "Shielded" then. Absorb in combat log is only for abilities that absorb a certain fixed amount of damage. You're right, I omitted the part where Force Armor is applied. That's because the game doesn't care what ability caused the absorb, they would all work the same, so I didn't find that part important. But if you're interested, here's the part of the log that you missed: [14:48:53.335] [@Sage] [@Paypel] [Force Armor {812736661422080}] [ApplyEffect {836045448945477}: Force Armor {812736661422080}] () [14:49:05.957] [@Opponent] [@Paypel] [Weaken Mind {812861215473664}] [ApplyEffect {836045448945477}: Weaken Mind {812861215473664}] () [14:49:06.293] [@Opponent] [@Paypel] [Weaken Mind {812861215473664}] [ApplyEffect {836045448945477}: Damage {836045448945501}] (1229 internal {836045448940876} (1228 absorbed {836045448945511})) <1229> [14:49:07.197] [@Paypel] [@Paypel] [Focused Defense {2793700132388864}] [Event {836045448945472}: AbilityActivate {836045448945479}] () [14:49:07.197] [@Paypel] [@Paypel] [Focused Defense {2793700132388864}] [ApplyEffect {836045448945477}: Focused Defense {2793700132388864}] () [14:49:08.698] [@Paypel] [@Paypel] [Focused Defense {2793700132388864}] [ApplyEffect {836045448945477}: Heal {836045448945500}] (9468) [14:49:08.698] [@Opponent] [@Paypel] [Weaken Mind {812861215473664}] [ApplyEffect {836045448945477}: Damage {836045448945501}] (2101* internal {836045448940876} (2101 absorbed {836045448945511})) <2101> There was no other damage before Weaken Mind.

Sorry, what? Bubble absorbs 12-15k damage. Even if it did prevent Enraged Defense, the amount of healing lost would be unrelated to the amount of damage absorbed by the bubble. But to my knowledge it doesn't prevent it from triggering anyway. Here are 2 lines from a combat log that show it: [14:49:08.698] [@Paypel] [@Paypel] [Focused Defense {2793700132388864}] [ApplyEffect {836045448945477}: Heal {836045448945500}] (9468) [14:49:08.698] [@Opponent] [@Paypel] [Weaken Mind {812861215473664}] [ApplyEffect {836045448945477}: Damage {836045448945501}] (2101* internal {836045448940876} (2101 absorbed {836045448945511})) <2101> Focused Defense heal triggered from a dot tick that was fully absorbed by the bubble. Sorry for offtopic. I have my own opinions about OP's issues, but I'm only posting because of Cunningham's Law.

I'm not sure why that bit of ancient would be relevant anymore. By now every spec in game has enjoyed a few months or years of good performance relative to others. During 2.0-3.0 devs buffed a number of specs. In 2.8 balance/madness was buffed to become 2nd highest parsing spec. That lasted until they released 3.0 expansion Shadow of Revan - about 5 months later.

Another nightmare mechanic bleeding through: Taking damage from blue Radiance while player is polarized red gives a stacking buff called "Positive Polarization Shift (polarization toward the positive Radiance causes you to take increased damage from the Negative Radiance blast.)" which increases all damage Esne does to that player if he switches to blue polarization. It does not happen with red radiance however.

The amount of damage it absorbs without Telekinetic Defense talent (which makes Force Armor 10% stronger) is 3838 + 2.79 * [your bonus healing] .

Has it become standard on this subforum to base everything on feelings? A log shouldn't be difficult to attach 1. Applying dots 2. Recklessness and Death Field (note the crits) 3. Ticks from spread dots. original target removed. Note the lack of crits Conditions weren't ideal, but the log should be good enough. TL;DR ticks from spread dots applied by a critical death field are not autocrits. If you're sure you saw autocrits I'd like to see a log though.

You can test it with almost any selectable character. While you run around inside the red circle they project on the ground the distance meter will stay at 0.0m.

I think you'll have to post the logs . I just tested it, thinking that it's possible they ninja changed it in 4.0, but I'm still getting +10% threat when less than 4m from center and +30% when further as it has always been. Edit: only saw your edit after posting. Everything is normal then

The way these things usually work is that the damage is calculated for each individual tick and it includes all the current buffs on you and the debuffs on target. So yeah the existing dots will benefit from the 8% crit you apply after.

Did some quick tests to see if it's an isolated case. I got similar results though. Average time of 1.589 s for Disturbance and 2.09 s for Telekinetic Throw as Balance

To add to this - at the start of 3.0 I needed to perform ~10000 simulated parses to get the accuracy to about 3-5 dps. That was with Telekinetics, which used to be more RNG-ey than it is now, although the extra crit we carry now adds some randomness. I had to do at least 1000 when calculating dps with all the stat possibilities just to see trends and to cut out the obviously bad combinations. I haven't touched SimulationCraft in a while now, but I think it did 10k parses by default.

Since there appears to be some confusion about whether or not Disturbance and Lightning Strike are worth using I decided to do some calculations. Since Rippling Force is not a dot, but Lightning Burns is, the results differ slightly between republic and imperial side. I used GoblinLackey's BiS stats, but trying different combinations won't change the outcome. Republic side: Results: Disturbance - 5098 dmg Telekinetic Throw (3 ticks) - 4719 + 435 = 5154 dmg Imperial side: Results: Lighting Strike - 5098 dmg Force Lightning (3 ticks) when Death Marks aren't on target - 4719 + 518 = 5237 dmg Force Lightning (3 ticks) when Death Marks are on target (detracted damage that's stolen from another dot) - 4719 + 570 - 93 = 5197 Please correct me if you spot any errors. It looks like in both cases Telekinetic Throw or Force Lightning does more damage than Disturbance or Lightning Strike. In addition it restores more force and simplifies the rotation. Related bugs: Rippling Force isn't a dot, but Lightning Burns is. This has been the case since at least late 2.x, probably 2.0, but I did not have a Sorcerer back then to be able to know for sure. It seems 4pc set bonus does not decrease the cost of Telekinetic Throw / Force Lightning at all. Need to retest that to confirm.

You're right, I was only looking at his numbers and it looked like an easy solution, 760 healing, 4 ticks, matches tooltip . If I put some thought into it I'd see 760 per tick is way too low for Makeb. I went there to try it myself. Wandering Mend tooltip was 3564-4039, it healed for 3840 on one try and similar numbers on others, so it seems it's working as intended. Maybe it was a Rejuvenate tick, as you said.