This. Most of the good stuff is already basically lost. I haven't decided to leave yet, but I have sometimes pondered what would happen if I replaced the contents of my stickied posts with an essay on everything that is wrong with the game. I doubt anything would happen, honestly, though the community team would eventually catch on and probably just unsticky the posts as they found them.

It would need to be one WHALE of a set bonus. My memory from four years ago is a bit foggy, but I don't believe any of the set bonuses which changed in 2.0 are quite that exciting. The only possible exception would be the pre-2.0 operative 2 pc set bonus, which increases the crit rate on Backstab by 15% (was changed to crit rate on Shiv in 2.0). All of the really good pre-3.0 set bonuses were carried over into 2.0 and thus have higher tier armorings which provide them (e.g. the assassin tank set bonuses are still amazing, as are the sorcerer DPS bonuses).

In general, I agree with the principle of the thing. Marksmanship is ranged, extremely high burst (with the advent of super crit), has LITERALLY no target swapping penalties, and has good AoE and survivability. It should be the lowest parsing spec in the game. However, it doesn't take much effort looking over Bant's list to see where balance is screwy, even in this revised world. Fury and Rage, for example, have far lower burst than most people believe. Carnage substantially out-bursts Fury and has much better survivability and strong AoE. Fury and Rage are both melee specs with significant >4 meter penalties and more setup than many other burst specs (such as Carnage and Deception). And yet Fury is one of the worst parsing specs in the game, and Rage isn't far behind. Logic? Another example would be Arsenal, which is parsing higher than Lethality (a melee, sustained spec with the longest setup time in the game, no AoE and limited survivability), Pyro (a melee sustained spec with an unavoidable 3 second channel in rotation and the worst target swapping in the game), and even Virulence (a ranged sustain spec, more of a peer to IO than anything else). How about the fact that Madness parses significantly behind IO, despite extreme immobility, worse target swapping, lower burst and no burst survivability? (remember that IO has a rotation which is 100% mobile outside of one cast once every 15 seconds; no gimmicks, I do mean 100%, and without loss of DPS) Or of course, the perenial whipping boy, Hatred. Why on earth would a sustained melee spec with poor AoE, no burst, significant setup penalties, and literally no survivability be parsing closer to the bottom of the heap than the top? I agree with you on Bioware's stated balance goals, but they clearly aren't following those goals very closely if you judge by the latest set of changes. Only the Marksmanship and AP changes make any sense in the grand scheme of things.

Nope. Not really. Duh. I want more content. Oh yeah, I forgot about that… Got him through valor rating. People complained about that? Ditto PvE. Huh? Yeah… no.

Actually 10k in the opener is pretty weak for most DPS classes… HM is easy. Realistically, Master-Blaster and Revan are the only two hard "hard mode" bosses, and Revan is substantially easier than he once was. The highlighted OP system forces high tier raid groups to do content that is boring to them and largely a waste of time. It serves to do nothing other than remove an hour from a raid night; an hour that could have been more enjoyably spent on something challenging. To be frank, I'm not much surprised at the content of this announcement, though I did hold out a sliver of hope that George's original wording was the intended design and not a typo. SWTOR's current endgame design is incredibly asinine. Ignoring the need for new content demonstrates this fact quite amply; the OP announcement is merely the icing on the cake.

I just did some testing with a Sorcerer in Lightning spec. Naked, with prestacked Focal Point (so, 5% alacrity). Average delay was 1.5055s, min was 1.407s and max was 1.572s. Expected value was 1.429s. So, this is definitely a bug, and it definitely affects all (or at least several) classes.

Off topic… Welcome back. :-) Didn't realize you were resubbed.

That's only because of the double-stacked set bonus and how it interacts with super crit. It doesn't really matter though, because unless you're godlike at tracking ICDs and you happen to have a person who needs 30k+ healing at the exact moment that both ICDs are up and you don't need to use a Kolto Injection on someone else at exactly the wrong time… it's going to be overheal. The 6pc set bonus is far, far superior.

For PvE, all three are balanced. Ops have the highest output, while Sorcs are the most flexible, but Mercs still have the best burst and some of the highest single-target output. Play the one you like the best. For PvP… uh… yeah, Sorcs are the best and it isn't even close.

The counter-argument to this is that gear as a reward is meaningless if it rewards non-achievement equally with achievement. It's like how money would be without value if everyone had a personal money tree in their front yard, doling out cash to whoever walked by. As an extension to this line of thought, if you're not pushing hard operations content, you don't need 224s. You can solo every SF pretty easily even in 198 gear, and that's just about the hardest thing any solo player will experience in the current game. Sure, you may want 224s, but realistically they won't make any difference in how you play the game or what you can achieve. Unfortunately, all of this is invalidated by the fact that gear is already rewarded for non-achievement activities. It takes exactly zero skill to lockout farm HM Soa over and over and over again the week it is highlighted, and yet that is exactly the activity which has given everyone in the game a 224 main hand. I feel no sense of achievement this week in lol-walking through HM KP, despite the fact that this is precisely the activity which gives the most potent rewards. Basically, gear is meaningless now. It's monopoly money. It is gold in a society that makes bricks out of precious metals. It's still something that is required to push the hardest content, but it is not something that is granted exclusively by the hardest content. The incentive system in SWTOR right now is broken and stupid, and because it has been broken for so long, it really doesn't make a difference if it is broken further (i.e. by allowing optimized 224s to be crafted).

I haven't done the math in a long time (i.e. since 2.4), so this may have changed, but assuming things maintain the same ratio as before… The Ephemeral Mending relic actually does provide more raw HPS than either the SA or FR relic. Unfortunately, healing isn't just about pumping HPS on a single target. You don't have any control over the Ephemeral Mending proc (it can proc on CC'd targets!). So this means that you're effectively getting a random HoT, once every 20 seconds, on some target you know not who. Much of that healing in practice ends up being overheal, because you simply can't predict or control it. The SA and FR relics are still random procs, but you control where the potency goes because you control who you're healing and with what abilities. This makes them inferior relics for a sustained, single-target healing burn (think: Raptus healing challenge, but longer), but no such healing situation exists in the game. For that reason, the Ephemeral Mending relic is not BiS.

I think the inquisitor in particular would be very interesting, but the Trooper should also be revealing. I can't decide which scenario I like less: if this is a bug with the whole game, or just with one class.

Do you have other classes to test with? This really sounds like a bug, and I'm curious if it's universal.

Your methodology is excellent. I wish more people asked questions this way… Unfortunately, I don't have a good answer for you. Your log looks like that of a player who isn't correctly using the ability action queue, but having a queue of 1 second and automatically pressing Burst once every 250 milliseconds basically rules that out. You're absolutely right that the queue should have the next item in it. The only thing I can think of is that there are some timing pathologies that we're missing. Half the ability action queue is indeed the break point for guaranteeing entry. You're at 1/4th, but 250 milliseconds isn't actually that much time. Your ping is around 60ms, so that's 190 milliseconds left to account for. Add in input lag caused by the game engine (let's say another 20 ms, which is actually less than I think it is), and server sync lag (could be as much as 100% of your ping, or another 60 ms) and we can account for a fraction of that. We're still left with 110ms of unaccounted time, so I'm not sure if that's accurate. When I play, I do tend to spam my ability repeatedly (far faster than 1/250ms) when I am in an action queue window. You could try that (set the automated keyboard frequency to something like 1/40ms; my music background suggests that I'm spamming my abilities right around that rate when I parse). I'm not sure if it will fix the issue though. It's possible that this is an underlying bug with the game engine that you've surfaced

For the record, I finished KotFE's storyline in about four hours, not counting Chapter IX. Most of that time honestly came from the fact that I missed the speeder in Chapter IV, so I spent a lot of time literally walking around an area which is actually quite fast to traverse. Given the rate at which I was doing the chapters, if you subtract that lost time, it probably only would have taken me 2.5-3 hours to complete the whole thing, without spacebarring at all, with some exploring, and with significant thought put into certain conversation options. Cut out the exploring and the significant thought, and 2 hours doesn't sound all that implausible even if not spacebarring.

Becomes a lot more viable if your tanks cooperate and understand how your various cooldowns interact. Easier to use Marksmanship, certainly, and probably no DPS loss to do so, but Engineering is certainly possible on Kephess (and several other bosses which initially seem hostile to it).

*shrug* I had a similar line of thought when they first announced it, but on further reflection, I don't think it matters. 220 gear is trivial to obtain. 224 gear is only slightly less trivial. Gear progression largely doesn't exist anymore, and I'm mostly ok with that. The only problem with the loot system now is that NiM raiders are forced to waste time on HM in order to get BiS gear, and that problem could be relatively easily fixed by making NiM drop 224 instead of 220. I don't actually care if casual crafters can make themselves 224 gear, even optimized 224 gear, since anybody (casual or otherwise) who really wants optimized 224 gear can get it quite easily already by just doing the highlighted hard mode. Gear isn't a status symbol anymore, and it's hardly difficult to obtain, so adding another avenue to get BiS only affects me in that it makes alting easier.

Yes, I'm upset. My write-up of my opinion is here. The thing I'm really worried about is the fact that the percentage of the population who regularly do operations is actually quite small. The percentage of that population who clear the hardest content (NiMs + 3.0 HMs) is microscopic. So a microscopic subset of a very small percentage of the overall population are the most directly affected by this. As a member of that subset, I'm beside myself with frustration. I have no idea if it will make a difference though, when the majority of the game is probably quite happy.

I'll make this brief… Story is not content. To be clear, I started playing this game in the first place because of story. However, even with that enthusiasm and focus, I wasn't planning on playing for very long. Because story doesn't last. I played KOTOR I probably over 30 times, and ME1 almost that much, but that is dwarfed by the amount of time I've spent in SWTOR. The time I've spent in SWTOR has not been because of its story. I've certainly played all of the story content, and I've enjoyed it… the first time through. But now it's over. I have no desire to re-play even the KotFE storyline, despite its excellence. Story doesn't retain ongoing activity in the game. Story is flavor. Content is substance. Content is something that you do in groups, because people are what give meaning and variety to repetitive actions. PvP and GSF are the embodiment of this philosophy, but PvE (especially operations) are as well. Operations, GSF and warzone maps. These are content. These are what players have poured endless hours into repeating, despite the unchanging nature of the boss fights or objectives or terrain. Nobody is pouring that amount of time into any story. SWTOR needs new content. Desperately. There hasn't been a single piece of new PvE content since 3.0. There hasn't been a single piece of new PvP or GSF content for even longer. Without content, communities have nothing to do. Guilds die and players leave. All you have left are solo players who log in for a few hours every week, trickle-consuming the story. I'm not even sure there's a question in here, other than the obvious "when will you release any new content?" And don't say story, because story isn't content.

I'm still around, sort of. Haven't done that much theory crafting lately, mostly because I'm depressed about the way that tank stats work and sort of down on the game in general. But I'm still here! Hopefully Bioware will announce something interesting tomorrow.

I'm more interested in getting that control utility on cooldown so it can't be used against my healer, or any of the DPS with me who do more damage with their channels than Depredating Volts. It's true that getting interrupted out of a DV in a duel is annoying and sometimes you could have applied better uses to that time, but even then you can leverage the resolve generated.

Even with that strategy, unless you have Recklessness up, you should still use Shock on CD. It would be different if Shock had a longer CD and/or Energize didn't reset the cooldown, but those conditions are the opposite of true. Depredating Volts is really underappreciated in PvP, because people see it's an unprotected channel and it feels easy to counter. The fact is that it does a crudload of damage, and if someone burns their control CDs to interrupt your DV, you've immediately won a victory that is far more valuable than a few damage ticks.

Without watching Krea's video, I don't see a rotation suggestion, but if he advises holding your Shock usage (or worse, waiting for the proc), he is simply wrong. Shock should be used on CD unless you have something substantially more important to do (like a stun, a pull, or a depredating volts).

Technically, the old Dread Master 4pc is still better than the new 224 6pc set bonus. It's not a large gap though. I certainly wouldn't switch away from your Dread Master armorings until you have a full 6pc assembled, but once you do, feel free to switch over. The most annoying thing about the new set bonus, honestly, is the fact that we don't have anything to spend our third Recklessness stack on. If only Reck worked the same way as Laze Target… The nice part though is that the new 6pc avoids the problems of the old 4pc destabilizing the new Madness rotation (variable alacrity FTL).

More than likely the case. :-) I'm certainly not happy about this one.