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Dysnomia <Vodka> The Fatman U.S. East PvP Hey guys, I'm currently streaming warzones, raids, hm flashpoints and more at: http://www.twitch.tv/deadeye_x Currently playing madness, love to answer questions and interact with viewers! Thanks

I'm not trying to be mean, I just don't think any of this is right, I'm confused on most of the stuff you're trying to argue... regardless the "rotation" I listed was simply a priority of force using spells, I didn't include saber strike because it obviously should be used when low on energy, there most likely will not be a set "vs vs discharge maul shock repeat rotation because the cooldowns are different and the maul buff is based off a proc, and regardless of whether or not CS gives RNG to the shock ability, the math remains the same, its probabilities... an ability that does 20 damage is not as good as an ability that does 10 plus a 50% chance to do 30 more (10+(.5*30))=25

Indeed, with the way they're interpretting armor penetration, it seems that the thrashing blades is the better choice, as well as going for chain shock over the 7 points in darkness, but I'm not too surprised, with so many talents and abilities influencing the damage output / force cost / critical damage done by shock, an ability that increased the overall effectiveness of shock by ~22.5%, it seems worthy of spending 5 points. They briefly discussed the rotation, but to me it looked like this would be the typical priority for spells: Assassinate > Discharge(5x) > Maul (EW) > Discharge(<x5) > Shock(2x) > VS Correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems to be the general idea, obviously cooldowns being used earlier in the fight for maximum efficiency. The way maul works, I believe the ICD begins from when the buff triggers, not when it is consumed, therefore, you would have the opportunity to place maul into the rotation at any point you want before the buff expires without losing any sort of overall dps. Basically putting spells such as discharge, assassinate, and shock on cd before using maul would increase dps because they would be back up sooner.

I completely disagree with your maul suggestions, I think it's actually great that at least one of our abilities requires us to be behind a target, its a form of backstab, and without that requirement tanks could spam it, which doesn't seem to make sense. Jreaperx early when I got stealth I wondered why in the world we didn't get an extra action bar in stealth, then I figured out later that it's because we only have three (two if you don't have the blackout talents in deception) abilities to use in stealth only, doesn't seem to warrant an entire new bar. My own suggestions - The graphic where maul glitches is incredibly frustrating, but I think aside from that, I would really love to see more abilities requiring the use of stealth or maybe even the blackout buff to be present to use, aside from that I'm really happy where we stand currently, definitely a very fun versatile class Oh, and maybe, just maybe, we could use the darth title soon, that would be super. *Edit* I essentially agree with everything panda said, and yes, Voltaic Slash does indeed look pretty awesome.

Wouldn't duplicity still be worth it? I'm thinking something like this: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#200Mc0MZhZcMfRrbkrfz.1 *I haven't actually played madness yet, this is just the best build I could put together before trying it.

This happens to me all time, you aren't alone in your troubles haha

The cs-madness rotation wouldn't differ from the darkness one, the beneficial proc from CS doesn't require you to do anything differently. I believe the math that was linked above was comparing the two specs side by side, not just CM, unless I'm mistaken. Even with the extra 6% damage from surging charge, and the 9% armor penetration, it seemed CS was still slightly better, unless their understanding of armor penetration was incorrect.

I see, well if it you're gearing it to be a pvp spec, then I would go as far to say that force pull is required, especially in huttball. As far as tanking, it would not be required but would be extremely useful, but obviously the points in duplicity would be meaningless, freeing up space for you to add additional points elsewhere.

I'm curious why you think that thrashing blades is obviously the better choice over charge mastery for a start. If you think about it, 6% armor penetration vs 6% VS damage if you go the chain shock route. 6% arp, although I'm not exactly sure how it would contribute because of lack of research (6% flat increased melee damage?) Would ultimately effect VS, Maul, Saber Strike, and Assassinate. As far as I know, it does not effect spell damage, so shock and discharge would not be effected. I find it hard to believe that 6% arp on all of those abilities would not outweigh a 6% flat damage increase on VS, even if it is our *likely* highest damaging ability, especially considering that the 6% arp would apply to VS as well as a number of other melee abilities. Regardless, the question indeed becomes the damage of shock in our overall dps versus the overall damage of (voltaic slash + maul + assassinate + saber strike) * some coefficient of armor penetration you would be missing from the CS build assuming you take 2/3 charge mastery, as argued in the above paragraph. Possibly .03, but I'm not going to say that is for certain without some sort of testing that armor penetration equates to flat damage percentages. You then would need to multiply the (overall VS damage * .06) and (surging charge damage times .06) and compare it to the (overall shock damage * (.45*.5)), essentially the exact same calculation that you made in your post, I just thought I'd explain it a bit more as well as change thrashing blades with charge mastery. I would assume that the damage from surging charge would be less than 10% imho, but obviously it was an estimate and most of these arguments will be void until we have some sort of damage meter to compare them to, but it helps to have equations set in place when the time comes. The last point I wanted to make this post would be the number of VS's per minute versus the number of Shocks is always going to be 2:1, so you could almost make it an argument of 22.5% increased damage from shock versus a 12% increased VS damage + 3% armor penetration + 6% surging charge damage, I'm not so quick to say the later could outweigh it. Love the ideas, keep em coming!

This looks to me like an incredibly viable pvp build, but it seems odd that you would skip force pull and instead take 3/3 duplicity... I thought maybe you were intending to take this spec as a mainly tanking role, but due to a few different talent choices it seems more geared torward pvp... care to explain a bit?

@ sankalp If we could get a typical rotation set for each of the possible specs (mainly chain shock vs no chain shock) we might be able to make a reasonable assumption from that point regarding which would be better, if you'll reference my post right before this, by weighing the number of possible extra shocks per minute we could compare that to the extra damage benefits from the alternatives, assuming we had the typical dps rotation. Of course as mentioned earlier, stats could definitely throw this off, but desirable stats can be worried about either later or in a different thread.

Well it's not a flat 9% crit 100% of the time (obviously that will be the goal) but as you can see in all 4 builds I put together, I picked up Exploitive Strikes. The justification about possibly NOT taking the two talents you mentioned would be to pick up Chain Shock, which certainly is not a useless talent. I leveled as deception, and in the beginning I had no difficulty, but as I neared around 35-40, killing elites became extremely annoying because you would have to use khem val or telos in order to even compete, and khem would typically die and you would be left with little to no health unless you popped your 20 min cd. I think it's definitely do-able because I did it myself, however one of the other specs *could* be better, I have no experience with them. You bring up a very good point, although endurance is somewhat helpful in terms of survivability, I don't think anyone will argue that chain shock is essentially a 5 point investment, however I don't think you should write off the extra shock damage just yet. The GCD is 1.5 seconds, which means that at most you are able to complete 40 spells per minute. When talking about the opportunity cost of not taking chain shock, you need to compare what the other spec would offer. 6% extra damage from surging charge, 6% extra damage on each VS and 3% armor penetration assuming you went with the 2/31/8 build. The question becomes whether or not 6% more damage per VS which only has a certain percentage of those 40 possible spells (more could be determined on this to get an approximate amount of VS per minute) + 3% armor penetration + 6% more damage on a very minimal surging charge damage would be equivalent to ~2.25 shocks which can actually accumulate to quite a bit of extra damage per minute.

I think some of your ideas are essentially the question I'm asking in my first post, however I don't think giving straight damage from level 50 abilities will give you exactly what you want for a couple of reasons: mainly - we don't have a set rotation, meaning that of course we may want to use assassinate > maul with proc, but what comes after? obviously shock with the buffs stacked to 2 is very good, but does it take priority over discharge? when should discharge be used in the rotation, when is it appropriate to, etc. Another reason would be the way assassins stack stats, for example if a player was to go for straight power and accuracy, the talents surrounding the darkness tree over the madness tree *could* be more viable. Just a few issues I see surounding that. As far as the point spread issue, you mentioned you would rather have all 10 points in one tree. Although that would be nice, I almost guarantee you won't put more than 7 in darkness under any condition because exploitive strikes is so good. You may put 10 in madness, but my guess would be a split between the two for maximum efficiency.

Yeah sorry about that, I guess when I copied it over some of the links didn't want to work, they should all be working now. As for your first armor penetration concern, I would only imagine that the 9% would stack with a debuff on the target, there's no reason in my mind that would prevent it from doing so (i.e. armor pen stat from WoW stacking on top of sunder armor) but i haven't done any testing on it. I personally don't know whether or not our force spells would benefit from armor penetration, but if I were to guess I would say no, again if we had dps meters all of this would be very easy to test. My problem with your current spec is the extra points that you have in deception between resourcefulness, entropic field, and avoidance. You only need 2 of those 6 points in order to get to voltaic slash, and although each of those talents could be extremely useful depending on the fight, it would seem better in my eyes to spend those talents in other trees to get damage benefits, versus situational survival talents.

Some people may be wondering, as I am myself, where in the world do we put our floating talent points as deception Assassins? This is what I was intending this thread to be, a discussion of the ~10 floating talent points assassins have after getting essential points in the deception tree. The basic build before any points are added would be as follows: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#200ZhGMRkhMbz.1 As you probably noticed, a significant amount of talent points are left blank at this point. This is because this is the first point I personally see where many different options are left for a deception pve assassin to choose where to put two points in order to get to the 6th tier (crackling blasts) level. Now there are multiple options, most of which will be situational at this point, but I will list them anyways: Resourcefulness - Obviously very useful for fights that require alot of AoE, and the 30 second reduction on saber overcharge cooldown is an added bonus, making it the obvious choice in my opinion compared to the alternatives, which seem to be utility only. Entropic Field - 30% reduction from AoE effects, obviously extremely helpful to reduce healing strain on fights where you take alot of area of effect damage. Avoidance - If I were to choose a talent that could be compared to Resourcefulness in overall viability, I think this is it. Obviously the reduced cooldown on the "trinket" type ability from WoW is extremely helpful, on any fight where you are crowd controlled by a boss, however the 2 second reduced cooldown on jolt could turn out to be extremely useful, pending boss cast abilities that are interuptable. At this point, I would still take Resourcefulness over this in terms of overall viability, but that's my opinion. Static Cling - This could be extremely useful in fights requiring a substantial amount of kiting, otherwise fairly useless. Insulation - I wanted to just mention this for the reasoning that if a boss has some sort of unavoidable physical damaging capability, this could be a useful talent to pick up, otherwise seemingly useless. So this leads me to my next "basic" starting point build: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#200ZhGMRkhMrtz.1 This fills out the deception tree, leaving us with 10 points remaining to put in either Darkness or Madness. This is where I hope most of the discussion in the thread will occur. At first glance, chain shock seems like an incredibly good choice, as having a 45% chance to trigger a second shock of 50% damage would be extremely nice. However, a closer look makes me question my first assumption. I personally see four options to choose between from this point in terms of the 10 floating points. Option 1: 2/31/8 (With Charge Mastery) http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#2000MZhGMRkhMrtzZf0c.1 Option 2: 2/31/8 (With Thrashing Blades) http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#200MZhGMRkhMrtzZf0c.1 Option 3: 7/31/3 http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#200Mc0MZhGMRkhMrtzZc.1 Option 4: 0/31/10 http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#200ZhGMRkhMrtzZf0cM.1 *It should be pointed out that Crackling Charge was not picked up in any of the builds because it applies to Lightning Charge's Discharge Effect only. It should also be pointed out that in Option 3, You could possibly take 3/3 Electric Execution over Exploitive Strikes, but I made the assumption Exploitive Strikes was better pending any evidence. Many of these questions may be answered in time pending any mathematical calculation, patch changes, or any theory crafting within this thread, but I wanted to get everyone's first impressions of the different builds, and any thoughts you had. Hopefully this thread helps get that accomplished. *I had originally put this thread in the SI section, but it more appropriate here.

Bump I'm having the same issue as well, no Darth title, just a blank slot.