Anyone who has put any credible amount of effort into clearing ECHM has been done for awhile. It took us 5 hours total to clear the content. It's not hard mode, it's non-casual mode. Some of our alts are in full BIS now too. It's a painful wait.

I wouldn't have a big problem with this if there was indeed a 63 ilvl for nightmare mode. Grinding your buns off to get mid level equivalent isn't really that annoying to me. Unfortunately, nightmare mode is a myth. The only good change about all this is that I can make a BIS set by putting 61 armoring/mod/enhancements in rakata gear with augments, which saves me from having to use some of the poorly itemized armorings in the campaign pieces for sorc DPS.

I hear ya man, it's a huge struggle to keep my guild together-- so to speak. Sure we've got 10-12 players who play lots of games together, but those few guys who only want to raid and are pretty much never online otherwise, are disappearing from our ranks 1 by 1. It's even harder to recruit to replace them because we recruit them to raid an hour and a half a week, and most of the time we just do 1--8 man since it's so much easier and faster.

It's ironic that's for sure. A post commenting on how silent bioware has been, and then bioware posts in the thread-- silently.

They could have made nightmare denova in less than one week by just tweaking the bosses slightly. Instead it's been MONTHS, and we don't even hear about it anymore. It's not comin' fellas! PVE is done for.

Being an avid PVE'er means min maxing, just like an avid PVP'er would. It's why bioware nerfed biochem, because everyone in their right mind went biochem. Their design for trinkets is flawed. There are only three kinds of trinkets in this game, pure stats, pure on proc, and pure on use. Aside from the fact that there is absolutely zero creativity in trinket / relic design, the bigger problem is that now everyone in the game needs two PVP relics to be min-maxed for PVE. It would have been much smarter to just put 120 expertise on the trinkets with 90 end and call it done. Now I have to go PVP, even though pvp in this game is awful and imbalanced.

I only have 2100 WP. I have a ways to go before 9000.

30% better trinket for 600 hit points? Yes please.

So, I was checking out the new PVP trinkets, and I found something astounding. A trinket with 113 power on it statically. The PVE trinket on use is 315 power for 30 seconds, 2 minute cooldown. That's a static 78.75 power, IF you use it on cooldown; which sometimes you can't intelligently do. 113 power is also better than the proc trinkets thanks to recent armor debuff nerfs. So what gives, why do we have to PVP to get our BIS PVE trinket?

What?.... I'm talking PVE DPS.

My major concern with patch 1.3 is the huge change in the way of armor debuff stacking being removed from the game. While the change itself isn't necessarily bad or good, the effects are disastrous. Prior to this change, a few classes found a relative balance as far as DPS is concerned. There were a few classes that are useless dps and should never be brought to raids (assassin, operative), and one that really sucked (merc), but the balance of sorcs/marauders/snipers felt really good. The introduction of this patch has buffed marauders in relation to other classes because they are the least reliant on armor debuffs. The problem is that marks snipers went from viable to.... bad, with this patch. Mercs have also taken a serious hit to their usefulness. Is the design intent for us to stack marauders? It seems that way. They're so much better than everything else right now, it's not even close. Why in the world would you, Bioware, make such a huge change without counter-balancing to deal with the serious imbalances that you've introduced with this change? Why was this change made at all? This is just a really bad design decision.

Considering the design of the encounters, sorc dps will win the most fights. If there was a spank and tank fight with no movement or adds, marauders and snipers would win.

Remember that there are huge RDPS nerfs coming in the form of removing armor debuffs. 1800-2k DPS in 16 mans will fall down to 1600. 16 mans will become significantly more difficult, while 8 mans will become easier. 8 mans become easier because the augments will caused increase DPS, while not really suffering from much if any loss from armor reduction, while 16 mans will take a huge hit in armor reduction that won't be made up for by augment slots.

The thing most people are overlooking is that while lightning sorcs do get a great benefit from the armor debuff stacking, next to marauders we're effected the least by it. The armor debuff stacking nerf is the biggest nerf to snipers, followed by also pretty substantial nerfs to mercs. What this just means is that sorcs will lose to maras every fight, but still crush all the other classes, and that there will just be a rediculously huge gap between mara/sorc and everyone else. They're not fixing anything, they're just making marauders #1 dps all the time even when they're running around half the time, and they're nerfing everyone else into oblivion; just another example that bioware devs have no clue what they're doing.

Try and get 300 crit, alacrity, and surge, and then sink the rest into willpower and power.

Lightning will feel very clunky at first when you play it, and you'll be forced to make "decisions" about what to cast, which is really not the case with other specs. It takes a good amount of time to become acclimated.... but once you do it should be within 1% of hybrid, if you play hybrid perfectly-- which I personally don't think is realistically possible. Madness will perform better by yourself without armor debuffs.... In a 16 man raid on a target dummy I did madness and parsed about 1450 a few times, and did lightning and was parsing over 1550 up to 1600. This was in full rakata, before any upgrades, on the PTS.

It's also only a mathematical standpoint from a perfect world case. In WoW arcane mages are slightly more dps than fire, but nobody plays those because they're so much harder to "play perfect", it's not practical. In reality, fire will do more damage almost every fight just because of the human error factor, so regardless of the math fire performs better. That's kind of what I've experienced with madness or hybrid too, because force lightning is your filler and yet so much of your damage, so every single tick has it's importance and your rotation/dot sequence require little room for error to maximize. Lightning is far more forgiving and in my opinion actually require more intuition and more intellectual play to do correct, and doesn't have the high fluxuation based on human error.

You can switch prior to the debuff falling off... Just as long as your tank is smart enough not to attack the boss, just taunt.

I'd like to see madness get force improvements so that it can excel in a multi target fight, and let lightning get single target improvements so it can be better at single target. The only reason lightning sorc dps is so strong right now is because all of the fight mechanics either include some adds to chain lightning or an extra boss to dot. In a single target spank and tank fight, snipers should crush everyone, with marauders and juggs cuddling at second, and then everyone else there in the middle. At least, that's how target dummies for 16 man have played out in my experience. I hope they don't fix the armor debuffs. That will kill all the relative balance in the game. Marauders will suddenly become super insanely strong, and everyone else will be greatly punished, snipers the most, mercs the second, and then sorcs third. (based on percentage of damage mitigated by armor.)

Your DPS is so high?... When you're not in campaign gear? I will admit, the fight is very annoying now that my guilds DPS is very high. It feels like you can AFK for 15s every time he throws a rock. Other than that though, DPS being high is meaningless.

Z&T is completely undertuned, even for hardmode.It was previously tuned fine on the PTS when it was originally released, and a few guilds managed to kill it even in that form. Now it's completely a joke. How are people struggling with it? They nerfed it so incredibly hard that even though only 4 people in our guild did the fight on the PTS, we one shot it in 16 man the first night it was out, 12 people never seeing the fight before. There are no composition restrictions. The fight is so versatile that if you have ENTIRELY melee dps it's still doable, you just need to change your strat slightly.

It really does all come down to debuffs. It also comes down to having nobody that's terrible. If you're entire raid is pushing great numbers, then everyone elses numbers will go up.

Why do I feel like I'm one of the only people in this thread with English as a primary language.....

Two little known facts: 1) Out of all classes, lightning sorcs are going to provide the best all around DPS in HM EC 16 man for the most fights, due to movement, and circumstance. For my guild, the last three times we've done 16 EC HM, of the 12 fights lightning sorcs won 11 times. That one time on tanks a pesky marauder snuck up on us. Lightning sorcs are very gimped during add phases, so it makes it hard to do more than ~1650 DPS on this fight. But the rest of the fights are all easy wins. 2) In HM EC16, every group that has at least 2 sorc healers will have a significantly easier time. Sorcs don't need to be changed in any way for PVE. PVP, well, that's a different story.

I used to think it was important to try and inform the sorc community that we actually do amazing DPS right now... Now I'm kind of just thinking it's better to let the community continue to rant about how much we need a buff. I mean, I'll be honest, I wouldn't mind. If sorcs get a buff though, everyone in my raid will QQ that the best DPS class just got stronger.