Raided on a hunter with Aptitude for T11/T12 while raiding with my Ret(Technically my main) in a semi-casual guild to play with an IRL friend. I think my rankings look pretty good IMO. http://raidbots.com/epeenbot/us/stormreaver/poomanchu/ http://raidbots.com/epeenbot/us/stormreaver/pxxmanchu/

So you read the first two sentences and decided to post instead of taking the 60 seconds to read the rest. Fine. I'll bite. Only a moron talks about server rankings. It's assumed you're talking about world or US/EU rankings when you say top X in raiding. If you'd like to see where I was DPS wise(Always top 5 even when my class was considered UP) I still have combat logs for my last year of WoW raiding in zipped logs(<3 World of Logs client auto-zipping my log files). I'd give you TOR logs if I could but I deleted them after uploading to DPSMeter(which seems to be defunct..) since there was no convenient WoL client like in WoW. IDK exactly how many people used the site but I did have by far the best melee parse for Kephess by about 200 DPS and had top mara parses in 16 except for Toth&Zorn the last time I checked(which was months ago to be fair). In WoW: Enigma, Blood Legion(left after a few weeks, I hate them), Infamous, Aptitude(Merged with rival guild under the name "Accession"), Fused(Though they were like 70th or something in ICC and died in Cata, it was my first real raiding guild). In SWTOR: Wrath. I quit when the guild died. We were 7th world/4th US according to the T1 forum thread and by T2 we had like 9 of our original members and had to recruit random semi-casual players from the crap server we were stuck on. This is what happened to pretty much every pre-launch raiding guild. Some went 8-man and struggled to survive. Others decided it wasn't worth it. Anyways I've said all that I wanted to say. Good luck with SWTOR.

What do you classify as a "true" raider? I was among the top ranked(WoL wise and guild wise) raiders in both SWTOR and WoW. I raided for a fun challenge and the number of people in the raid didn't really matter to me all that much. The reason people seem to look down on the 5-man size is because WoW has conditioned everyone to think less people=less difficult. Nothing could be further from the truth because that's only true when you intentionally tune it that way. In reality it's sort of the opposite when considering two similarly tuned encounters. In 25M raids in WoW what generally happens in every guild from the casual normal mode guild to the most hardcore top world guild is a few people in the raid lag far behind the rest in terms of skill and knowledge and as a result they get carried by the upper 4-5 people that are forced to pick up the slack. In SWTOR raids the same rule applies and the top few players carry the bottom few in every guild. The less people you have the less a person can be carried. I know this from experience because in T11 we had one slacker that we were forced to take due to a lull in recruitment. In 25M we were still able to blow through the content. When we decided to split to two 10Ms temporarily to make up for a string of absences I found it almost impossible to carry this guy. His DPS was terrible and he died all the time. This didn't matter when he was one of 25. It definitely mattered when he was one of 10. In a 5M size properly tuned encounters become nearly impossible when anyone in your group is bad. The double boss encounter we had gotten truly was harder than H25 Rag for me because we had one guy that was bad(It was Beta Weekend so it was excusable IMO) and we couldn't pick up the slack. When my guild did pre-nerf Rag I didn't find it very difficult at all. We had two bads and we easily carried them through it and the only difficulty was getting people to stop screwing up the indiana jones phase(the rolling ball phase) and the last phase. The only thing I had to do was avoid the fire and pew pew. Ground targeted mechanics are a joke to me and my DPS has always been great so the fight was easy for me in comparison to the new mechanics I saw in GW2. There was one boss attack in particular that I found very refreshing. It was a 1-shot that you couldn't move out of and so you had to time it perfectly within about a half second and dodge roll(split second invulnerability) to live. Fast forward to SWTOR and it's easier raiding than I've ever done. T1 was basically all about who had 16 people hit level 50 quickly so I'm just going to ignore that. I will say that I enjoyed pre-nerf HM Soa because it was good enough that I felt I would enjoy Nightmare, which they nerfed into the ground the week after. HM EC was a joke too because we cleared 8M HM in two days and cleared 16M HM in three days. The most difficult part of T2 was actually finding enough raiders to actually go in. Pre-launch we basically auto-declined anyone that didn't have extensive high end raiding experience and the logs/references/screenshots to prove it. In T2 we were reduced to begging anyone on Vulkar Highway(Our crap server) with a pulse to whisper one of us for an invite(Yes invite, no app. We had didn't have enough to raid). The minute we had enough raiders the difficulty seemed to have vanished because instead of doing content 2-3 players short we were doing it with the number of people it was tuned for(and it was tuned way too easy for the correct number of people). HM Kephess was probably the most difficult encounter(everything else died in a few attempts) and after doing it once I got bored of it. There's literally nothing I had to do as a Marauder except do lots of DPS(I pulled 1800+ without effort on this fight and 1900 when I gave a crap) and avoid being stupid enough to stand in the predictable purple ground AoE. Sometimes the fight threw me a curve ball by giving me the bomb and I had to tab over to the walker and force charge(Whoo excitement!). The other fights were all basically "run over and hit this and then run over and hit this other thing" with a few extremely easy ground target effects that gave you an hour to move out. GW2's open world "zerg" bosses actually the equivalent of quest bosses just FYI(Think Firelands quest chain mini-bosses and Lich King scripted mini-bosses that nobody remembers because they died in 5 seconds). In addition to this they actually scale with the number of people within range so they don't become a joke with too many people. There's one champion giant in particular where there were over 30 players fighting and it still didn't die because a lot of them didn't listen to the people shouting out strats and wiped everyone else as a result. The dungeons are also not WoW/SWTOR dungeons, they're full blown raids on a 5-player setting. I find it funny how the few people I know that still play SWTOR bash GW2 PvE content without any actual knowledge of it. I bashed TERA when there was a mass exodus to that game because I actually tried it, knew what the game was like, and knew it was bound to fail(which it has). I'm praising GW2 because after one beta weekend I didn't feel like logging in to TOR anymore. Don't get me wrong I loved TOR at launch and hoped that the game would succeed. I've never ordered a collector's edition of any game in my life except for TOR. I spent hundreds of hours on the game and when my guild was dying I struggled to recruit when most of my guildies had already started giving up on the game. I mocked all the people that were quitting as impatient morons and defended TOR like a hardcore fanboy and usually I'm never the most positive when it comes to MMOs or even games in general. I did what any player could be asked to do but Bioware just didn't do their part for the game and now it's a bit too late to start. In general gaming forums when people talk of MMOs these days they say "It'll be another SWTOR" or "Just look what happened to SWTOR" or "They're doing X so they won't be another SWTOR", etc. As for the competition WoW's Cataclysm X-Pac wasn't as bad as this. Yes the pre-XPac void is inexcusable but when they are putting out content it's generally good. T11 was only completed by about 1-2 guilds per server by the time T12 came out. Last I heard T12 was barely completed by most guilds by the time T13 launched. In SWTOR the mass majority of raiding guilds of any sort have completed the most difficult content in the game and have been clearing it for months. Rift has it's issues with a few classes being stupidly easy with macros but the Hammerknell raid that they currently have at end game is on par with Ulduar and Sunwell with the last boss being sort of a M'uru before it got nerfed(Now apparently it's Yogg+1 difficulty). What does SWTOR have? Lightsabers and Force Lightning at this point. I hope SWTOR's raiding scene develops and that it becomes worth it for me to come back one day but I don't expect it to. If there was actual difficult content that required me to put forth effort to more than pull my weight in a raid then I would come back in a heartbeat.

It's sad to see SWTOR hasn't changed since I last visited here. My former pre-launch hardcore SWTOR guild died shortly after clearing HM EC months ago because of obvious reasons(no recruits, lack of content led to people not showing up repeatedly, etc.) and a lot of us decided to stick together for GW2. Actually GW2 "explorable mode"(Heroic Mode) content seems to be fairly difficult judging from the beta weekends. I'm not a stranger to hard raiding content either, I was top 10 world in WoW(and always near the top of the meters in DPS) and raided SWTOR with a guild full of former top WoW players. A lot of the criticism seems to be the 5-man size content but aside from small group sizes the content is far harder than anything SWTOR currently has to offer, in fact when a "dynamic" boss appeared at the same time as a pre-set boss(this can happen sometimes, it's not a bug) it was harder than pre-nerf H25 Ragnaros(IDK about Spine/Madness since I quit after finishing 4.2). Yes I know that the double-boss encounter is random but that's part of why I came to love GW2 PvE content, replayablity. Even if you're doing an instance you've done loads of times before a random dynamic event can occur that completely changes everything about it. The ongoing exodus of raiders from SWTOR wouldn't be happening if raiding wasn't repetitive and pointless(I was best in slot 2 weeks after EC HM with only ONE real HM clear because of blackhole tokens). The fact that the gear grind is replaced by the prestige grind(max level gear stats are normalized) means that players can't get carried by gear either, it'll always be fairly challenging. ---------------- Personally I think SWTOR's ship has sailed. I continually come back to check this site for some decent update that might want to make me come back and when 1.3 launched I even went as far as to look up what raiding guilds ended up on Prophecy of the Five(my destination server) and almost apped to Cali Killed Nox(the only decent guild on a so called "megaserver") before reading the patch notes and seeing that they STILL hadn't released Nightmare mode. They just aren't putting out content fast enough and the content they do put out isn't competitive with the other options on the market right now. Most people would rather play Pandas or GW2 than sit around waiting for update after sub-par update. In addition to the sub-par updates almost all of the content they do end up putting out caters to the casuals even more than WoW currently does, which is an amazing feat. If you notice SithWarrior is basically abandoned and the ones that do post there are generally morons aside from the few original pre-launch theorycrafters that stuck with SWTOR. I did about 3 warzones solo after months of not playing and literally did not die the entire match while scoring at least twice in each match. The majority of the community is still terrible at the game in both PvE and PvP and Bioware will continue to cater to them as they try to at least keep SWTOR afloat. The raiding content just isn't going to satisfy anyone that wants challenging content at a decent pace.

Your bleeds only heal you. Berserk heals your party. Don't use Berserk during the council fight. Just take it off your bars temporarily.

Snipers are by far the absolute best class for point defense. Point defense is a crucial part of every single WZ. Yes they will be a very important class to have on any rWZ team.

No. Str>Power even in nearly full blackhole gear. I have 2003 strength fully stimmed and buffed. I have 777 power. Spreadsheet still have power at .957 for every 1 point of strength. Stop posting like you actually understand things when you're clearly just guessing randomly. It also doesn't matter what your base crit is. The crit gained from str and the crit gained from actual crit rating is separate and the diminishing returns do not affect each other. The idea is to get around 160ish crit rating and then stack Str>Power while getting as close to accuracy cap as possible without going over.

The biggest thing a hybrid DPS brings to a raid at this point are taunts and cleanses. Both are major tools that can make or break some encounters. On T&Z for example the healers will rarely be able to fully keep up with the stacking DoT cleanses and a hybrid DPS can provide a lot of raid utility though the occasional cleanse with an insignificant hit to DPS. On Firebrand & Stormcaller a hybrid can either taunt Firebrand to avoid having the tank get the debuff and avoid having your tanks do a somewhat risky tank-swap. On FB&SC a hybrid can cleanse the yellow targeting circles. On Kephess a hybrid can taunt Kephess during Breath of the Masters in a pinch to avoid having the tank get 1-shot. With this hybrid utility in existence the question then becomes this: What utility can pures be given to balance this out? The answer from Bioware seems to have been Bloodthirst and Ballistic Shield. They also seem to be balancing Marauders/Snipers to be on the higher end of the DPS spectrum. This seems pretty fair. A quick peek at top Sorc/Merc/Hybrid parses show that the gap isn't very large and in actual encounters with movement and up-time taken into consideration all classes can be very competitive. There doesn't need to be a "hybrid tax" that means pures will ALWAYS be higher DPS but there does need to be special care taken to ensure that pure DPS classes are never on the LOWER end of the DPS spectrum because DPS is the only role they can perform and having them be one of the worst classes at their only role would make the completely useless in every way. A certain other MMO that dropped their 5% hybrid tax policy still follows this general trend of not letting pure DPS classes fall below the middle of the pack. Even when I played this other MMO as a certain hybrid plate tank/dps/heal class I felt that a system that kept pure DPS classes from being one of the worst at their only role was fair.

You can't RE PvP gear at all.

The last time I saw his gear I noticed gets close to 40% crit when fully buffed which means his TM crits 55% of the time with the 2pc set bonus. He then goes into stacking power. I'm not sure exactly how much alacrity he has. His Aim is over 2100 fully buffed though.

So you go killed by multiple players ganging up on you. Boo hoo.

rWZs can't be too far away now. Quite a few teams are forming up and it would be in your best interest to find one before you're stuck with the bottom dwellers of PvP.

A lot of you seemed to have missed this. Honestly complaining that one of your 3 specs and numerous hybrid options is bad is just whiny. Use this spec and stop crying about just one of your specs being sub par. You don't see me crying about how Carnage and Rage specs are absolutely horrendous in PvE do you? There's even another variation of this spec that's potentially more damage with less armor debuffs. http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#200MIMso0cZhMZfMcRr0z.1 With this you also use Maul and your stealth turns into a DPS cooldown basically.

No offense but nobody uses DPSMeter.com at all right now. The logs that do get uploaded are likely just random test logs like the one I uploaded the other day to see what kind of output you guys have. Your site has a lot of potential but the mass majority of top guilds have never heard of it yet. Merc DPS is heavily dependent on Crit and since the mass majority of players don't remod gear to min/max your results will be skewed. Annihilation Maras, Sniper, and Sorcs don't have an extreme reliance on one specific stat so they will parse much higher with default modded gear. Merc heat management is tied entirely to crit and they scale extremely well with the stat and extremely poorly without it. Our top Merc is lightyears ahead of most mercs on our server and even most mercs in other top guilds because he min/maxes his gear perfectly. It's night and day between a merc that gears correctly and one that doesn't.

We actually don't archive our raids atm but we're going to start doing it after tonight. I never realized that there was even a way to do so lol. I'll give you a link after tomorrow's raid. One thing to note though is that Pyro Mercs are DEFINITELY not the top DPS spec. Your arsenal mercs must be doing something obscenely wrong. Our top merc Boo actually tried out both specs a few times and as Arsenal he pulls 1700-1800 DPS on the raid dummy while as Pyro he pulls something around 1300-1400. It's just night and day. No merc in a progression guild should be pyro.

I saw the raid key you linked in the Mox thread and was very confused. I just can't understand how your mercenaries are so low and your sorcerers so high. It's the opposite in my experience. "Boo", a mercenary, is one of our top DPS in 16M and absolutely destroys the other ranged DPS except for "Vicious", a sorcerer, who's usually ~equal. Our strat was mainly a consequence of Mercs having weak AoE outside DFA and our Assassin having nearly no good AoE with his spec. We didn't really have a few people AoEing a long time though. The adds always died before the next pack unless there was trouble separating them and even then they were sub 5% and died before the next pack was separated from the shield. I'll link a video below. http://youtu.be/lO_FKPQODuI Don't mind our hurpdurp last phase. We didn't figure out the 1-shot mechanic was avoidable so we just tanked the boss near a wall(for KB) and burned him before we ran out of battle rezzes lol. At least we'll be ready for nightmare in case they make the 1-shot unavoidable in that mode

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#200MIMso0cZZfMcRrbkb.1 The top assassins use this spec but not a lot know about it yet. It's obscenely easy to play and it's the top DPS assassin spec. Basically with this spec you spam Thrash and keep Death Field and Shock on cooldown. Use Crushing Darkness if it procs. In 16-man raids with 5x Armor penetration debuffs you'll do a LOT of DPS. Nearly all of your damage is kinetic though so the spec falls behind if you have no Juggs/Merc/Snipers in your raids to apply the armor debuff. You're welcome.

Now it makes sense. We use a Merc, Mara, Assassin, and Sorc DPS comp. Your strat minimizes the effectiveness of the Marauders while maximizing the effectiveness of ranged DPS. The way we do it is we have the tank drag the adds away from the Shield/Warrior and the assassin/merc burn them down and then switch to the adds. The shield add is dead pretty quick and the 5 other adds that spawn are dead or close to it right before the next group spawns. This allows me to always have five targets to AoE. My AoE is capped to 5 but it's extremely potent when used correctly. Having your Marauders truck it to the Warrior is probably what hurts them the most.

Hmm. Those numbers seems extremely good. We actually have one Sorc that's always neck and neck with me but he uses the hybrid build and I almost always win. I wonder if switching to a 3/31/7 build would push him over the edge. The other sorcs in my guild use madness and typically don't come close at all. I'll be giving them a link to this thread since so they can see how amazing Lightning can be.

Were you AoEing and using the spec/rotation/etc. that the OP was using? I'm really intrigued as to why the Marauders in his group are always below the Sorcerers. I admit a lot of my damage was AoE but still it's a bit strange to me. I'll attach a screenshot showing the Mox Parser with my total damage done and the sources of my damage. Keep in mind it's 8-man so I didn't have full armor debuffs and my DPS would be higher on 16-man. http://i.imgur.com/2Lul5.jpg

In my experience while dummy DPS varies a lot the actual DPS during boss fights is very close. Bioware seems to have balanced the encounters to leave all classes DPS viable. For example a month ago I thought Sorcerer DPS was terrible. Now the top three DPS in my raid are myself, an arsenal merc, and a sorcerer. I've also heard people talking about Vengeance DPS potentially being one of the top DPS in the game on actual encounters. Powertechs don't do amazing on dummies but on real encounters they're arguably the best in the game because they can do the majority of their rotation at 30 yards and don't suffer a large DPS loss from movement like full ranged DPS. They end up being a very potent mix of melee and ranged that has the best of both worlds. Don't let anyone tell you Guardians/Juggernauts are bad DPS. This sort of crap was spread long before we even had hard numbers to suggest that they were lower in DPS(which they aren't and the in-game testing suggests they're one of the better DPS classes). The problem is the majority of people are terrible when it comes to in-game knowledge. They base everything off their limited PvP encounters and random PUG group experiences. Guardians/Juggernauts typically tank and have a rotation that's more involved than your typical Sorc/BH so the average DPS Guard/Jugg does a bit worse than most. The masses assume they're bad DPS based on their anecdotal evidence even though they're great when played right.

How much DPS do you end up pulling on the Kephess HM. Unfortunately between launch and 1.2 we lost quite a few raiders and have been struggling to do 16HM but on my last 8HM Kephess kill I ended up doing around 1550 DPS with 2 armor debuffs in the group. I'm wondering what exactly you're doing so I can pass on the info when Sorcs on my server pull out the "MARAS SO OP" card. I haven't seen anyone come close, especially not a Sorcerer. Is Lightning really dramatically better? Keep in mind the DPS players in my guild aren't bad by any means. We cleared 4/4 in 8HM the first two raid days we tried(and we only tried because we didn't have the healers for 16 that week).

The boots are simply amazing. Your crit seems a bit high. Your power seems low. Buy boots and reslot some crit into Power. Your absolute first priority should be 2x Power/Surge Implants and 1x Power/Accuracy Earpiece though. Those are just such amazing upgrades from Rakata or even augmented biochem implants.

DR of the crit from Str and the crit from crit rating is separate. Strength is and is likely to stay our best stat even over power but by a small and nearly insignificant margin. The thing is the higher base weapon damage and power you have the more valuable the crit from strength is and as a result the crit from str can be thought to scale off of power from strength making it very unlikely that Str will fall below power in value unless you have absolutely terrible weapons and an obscene amount of strength. TL;DR - Augment Strength.

Great job. Your parser is simply amazing for what little time you had to work on it. One suggestion/request I have is a way to customize the pop-outs a bit more. A way to scale the entire thing to be smaller and more compact would be great. Another UI improvement would be the ability to show DPS in place of Damage Done and for that number to be placed on top of the bar instead of beside it. Basically my main concern is the efficiency of the UI because I'm very big on having a UI that maximizes visibility.