Jolt is off the gcd, you don't have to lose out on a skill to use it.

I think you may not be understanding how the resolve system works or how much resolve each of our moves generates. It does matter if you use LS or Elect first. The first reason it matters is because LS has a 15 sec cd whiile Elec is twice that. In a rushdown, abilities with lower cd's should be used first so they can refresh and be chained. The second reason is that LS generates a great deal less resolve than elec. And, I may be mistaken in this, but I believe LS generates a good amount less resolve than spike as well. This means that LS + any other cc ability will put an opponent just short of a full resolve bar but won't actually give them the bar till you hit them with the next cc, allowing you to chain 3 cc's to their resolve bar, be it LS +elec+ LS or LS + elec + spike. Using a any other 2 cc, however ie: spike + elect, gives the opponent a FULL resolve bar, and bars you from utilizing your third attack. This is why you should never open with a spike. You're robbing yourself of a third chance to interrupt a cast by blowing the ability in a manner that it doesnt do anything meaningful. Also, I'm fairly sure that spending 2 secs casting a crushing darkness when you could have gotten your first 2 voltaic slashes in is detrimental to burst, not beneficial. Crushing darnkess has no business on your bar unless you're specced into madness for raze. Finally, mind trap generates just short of a full resolve bar just by itself and it's generally detrimental to sap someone if you plan on attacking them. Sap is a great tool for controling a 2v1 or 3v1 situation, especially if one of your opponents can heal. But generally, it's a really bad idea to open on someone you've given free resolve to. Sap the guy you're not gonna kill first or play sap games to force a cc break, then wait for the resolve bar to go away before opening. I don't mean any offense by this, but your comments tend to lead me to think that you generally play a madness or darkness/madness hybrid spec, both of which have better up front standing survivability than deception builds, so they don't require as much precision with cooldowns. Deception's goal is to kill quick, and control the fight for as long as possible, and while you may be able to get away with using cooldowns out of order or giving opponents free resolve 1v1 vs similarly geared opponents, you'll be hard pressed to win 2v1, 3v1, or against opponents who outgear you if you don't fully utilize the control skills of the class and efficiently maximize your burst. (Generally, I've found that situations of more than 3v1 are unwinnable for me at least, so I don't really ever put myself into those situations unless I'm just trying to stop a cap or something).

Plus the cd on spike is 20 sec unless you're running around with a 2 pc remodded tank set, which is an option I suppose. Generally, a deception rushdown on anyone you're targetting isn't going to last 20 secs and, if they're a serious caster type requires you to expend a lot of lockdown to win handily (deception doesnt have great up front survivability... its survivability lies in avenues for control and escape). Generally, you're going to want to jolt your opponent's first cast, low slash the second, electrocute the third, and spike a fourth if needed. This WILL fill their resolve bar, and they'll get the fifth cast off. By cast 6 your jolt should be back up. If they're still alive by cast 7 you're doing something wrong or you're on the wrong target (there's an uncc'ed healer healing the guy you're trying to kill). Opening with spike not only fills their resolve bar by the time you get to elecrocute (barring you from cc'ing them again in any case) but also won't be up again by cast 4, which occurs at roughly 8-12 sec into the fight as your spike is on a 20 sec cd. Bottom line, opening with spike does very little for you but saving it gives you one last card to play that can be very beneficial.

Why can't people figure out that opening with spike is bad. The skill does next to no dmg and the stun only buys you one skill... a skill you wouldve opened with anyway. SPIKE IS NOT AN OPENER FOR DEC SINS. Dec sins should use spike just like any other sin uses it... as a low resolve cc/interrupt. Some caster getting a heal/big nuke off and your jolt/low slash/electrocute is on cd? vanish and spike him. Did your opponent pop Uber_cooldown_01 and force you to vanish... then proceed to start casting a heal? Reopen with spike and chances are you've outlasted the majority of his cd without letting him reset the fight. Spike is a valuable control tool of last resort. Don't waste it at the start of a fight to get a measly 500 dmg head start. The ONLY reason to ever use spike as an opener is when someone is on a ledge and you want to spike him down off of it for better positional advantage in the fight.

well technically you can run into 8 ppl and come out fine... you just have to vanish after you kill the guy

Darkness sins fall into the same category as those people who thought riftblade/reaver was a viable spec in rift and who play as prot pvp in WoW. It's a gimmick 1v1 spec that can basically only do 1 thing: force non healing classes with little or already used cd's into a 1v1 in some dank corner and slowly kill them. Sure, your numbers may look good in a warzone because increased survivability, great sin cooldowns, and the fact that any players who know what they're doing effectively ignore you till the rest of your team is dead means that ... hey, you rarely die. The problem is that once you finish being impressed with yourself and your medal count, you realize that you offer very little to a cohesive team unless you're running a huttball or something (and, lets be honest, any sin can slap on dark charge, get past the first flame jet, and be home free for an unstoppable score so you don't really have a monopoly on that faction of play either). Low dps from darkness specs results in an inablility to kill any healer that knows what they're doing and a similar inability to clear out cap nodes and doors fast enough to guarantee a good cap/plant. Deception is the way to go because it HAS the burst and the lockdown to take down healers, which really are the linchpin of any team that isn't just a faceroll victory. You have amazing survivability in the form of cooldowns, and can basically survive or escape any situation as long as you use your skills wisely. Bottom line is that if you're having trouble being successful as deception, you probably just don't know how to fully utilize the tools of both the spec and class in general since you've been running around as a tank being healbotted for so long all you know how to do now is spike thrash thrash shock. The key to successful deception play is not spamming your abilities, but timing your burst with a string of control to guarantee a kill. You're not an operative, so you don't open with burst. Use voltaic slash and your standard maul proc strikes until you force a heal, lock them out with jolt, pop cd's and unload your discharge and shock for burst (with cd's you should be able to shock for about 5k, possible chain shock for about 2k, and then discharge for about 5k... giving you a possible good 12k dmg in 2 gcd's that autocrit with recklessness), follow with a low slash to allow for another maul, electrocute into an asassinate. If they're somehow still alive you can vanish into a spike or even vanish into a sap to fill out their resolve bar and then finish them off with another maul or whatever (your jolt will be back up by this time also). The strength of our spec is that our lockdown skills generate very little resolve, allowing us to lock down for longer durrations than any other class in the game. People just have to realize that we're not pre-nerf operatives and we don't take someone from 100-0 in a burst (unless they're undergeared). We pressure into a position where we can lockdown and burst from, say.. 70-0 or 60-0.

I took that last one already

and once again, the level that the raiding bar has been set to with encounters starting with sunwell makes vanilla raiding seem very juvenile. Comparing Yogg-0 or Heroic LK to Cthun or horsemen/KT in Naxx 40 is like comparing Naxx 40 to deadmines. It really has become that much more complex, intricate, and demanding. You didn't need addons to raid on the cutting edge of vanilla wow for a simple reason: Vanilla wow was easy. The game has changed, and the expectation of serious raiders has changed as well. Nobody would play a game that offered Vanilla wow's raids as an endgame anymore because, well, with the current caliber of top raiders, the encounters would be cleared within days of the first characters hitting max level. Raiders want a challenge. We want content like Heroic LK, content that requires optimal use of addons as well as perfect play, top dps, and super dedication. That's what we're hoping for out of this game. That isn't to say we hope the entire game is like that. Most of us realize that there is a huge casual playerbase that has different goals than us. For them, storyline, rp, or gear is the major motivation to play the game, not excellence and achievement. And that's fine. The game should have content for them, and plenty of it. Not everything in the game should require perfect play or perfect players. But some of it should. There should be something to aspire to... that ultimate achievement fight or two that only the select few can accomplish... challenge bosses or challenge modes. And this type of encounter requires addons, voice com of some sort, and statistical tools to evaluate performance. Some people choose to take our time spent in this game more seriously than most others, and ironically enough, we're usually not the ones that act "elitist" and kick casuals out of groups. Half of us don't know our "gearscore" and the other half don't know what gearscore is. We don't use addons to measure our leetness, we use them to augment and evaluate our play. So if you don't like addons, don't use them. It's your perrogative, but it doesn't change the fact that they make any mmo a more diverse, malleable, and overall, a better game. And so I leave you with this metaphor: I eat steak with a knife and fork. This doesn't mean eating steak requires a knife and fork, and it's your choice if you want to eat steak with your bare hands, ripping chunks of it off with your teeth. We'll both end up with steak in our bellies. But when I walk away from the table, I don't have steak sauce, residue and meat juices all over my clothes, face and hands. Everyone in the restaruant isn't staring at me in utter horror and disgust. Sure, we both ate a steak, but arguably... one of us did it better than the other one. Likewise, I raid with addons. Does the raid automatically wipe if someone doesn't have addons? Necessarily (although it is more likely). But at the end of the day, one of us is the better raider. One of us performs better, is better alerted to situational dangers, and has a better grasp of both what other raid members are doing and our overall place in the scheme of the raid as a whole. We may not have wiped, but the man who uses his tools is, undoubtedly, the better raider.

I raided in vanilla too. In retrospect, the fights were one dimentional, simple, and incredibly forgiving of mistakes. The caliber of player that raided in a top 10 world guild in vanilla could not even pass an app in a US top 200 guild in sunwell, a US top 300 guild in ulduar, or a US top 500 guild grinding heroic LK. The bar has risen so much higher in terms of encounter intricacy and the demand for raidwide perfect play it really makes good old naxx and Cthun just look like... a loot piniata. While I can't speak too much of Cataclysm since the trend towards 10 man raiding just wasn't my thing and I left the game, I would hope that SWTOR can deliver at least the level of raid content that Rift did in it's initial raid zones (preferably without the massive nerfs and dissapointing second tier that followed) and hopefully can give us content that far surpasses Trion's meager offerings in difficulty and challenge. Because, well, as much as I love a good story in this story based mmo... if I didn't want a challenge, I'd just go watch a movie.

I'll agree with you on gearscore, it serves no purpose to a serious raider. I never used it and, really, to this day, don't really know the mechanics of how it spits out some strange number. But you can't have seriously raided any endgame content in WoW if you can sit there and tell me that A) you dont need addons to succeed, and B) you can tell that people aren't doing their jobs correctly without the use of addons at that level of play. Lets just take the notorous Heroic LK, without timers for valks/defile that fight would have been virtually impossible. Without combat log tools it's very very hard to determine which members of your raid are having trouble getting out of defile on time. Tank damage is high enough on shamblers that it is difficult to discern whether the tank was killed rapidly due to regular damage durring enrage or if an interrupt was missed. Valks split up so your raids couldn't aoe effectively? How do you tell which paladin missed his stun when they all say they did it? Mistakes in raiding at a certain level are far more minute than the typical ... oh he died because he stood i the void zone. DPS checks are close enough so that if one raid member performs just 10% below the par for the other dps of his class in the raid, you wipe. "Problems" that wouldn't even be viewed as problems by the average raid guild doing post nerf or older content need to be addressed. And, unfortunately, raiders who would be superstar players in any other guild, sometimes need to be cut or benched. These decisions need to be made by an informed, not an arbitrary raid leader. And addons are a necessity at that level of play.

Nothing will change the fact that a raid leader needs tools to accurately assess what is happening, both mechanic wise and performance wise in his raid. Unless, again, of course, if the game is so easy that it can be facerolled to win. Then, well, ya, you don't need addons. But you also won't need a brain, eyes, or ears. If you gave Hellen Keller a lobotomy she would suceed in games like that (think: DCUO, Post 1.0 (nerf) Rift, DDO, etc). Yes, if a game is brainless and encounter are set up so that you actually have to really try hard to fail, then you don't need addons, tools, or parsers. But why would we want to play those games? Lets hope for our sakes there's challenge, and some interesting and intricate game mechanics to be had in SWTOR. If there isn't I'll be rather... dissapointed.

Ok... lets all be reasonable here. Recount is simply an analytical tool. It's intended purpose is not to "kick someone out of a raid" or separate "billy badazz" from "norman noobie". Rather, the addon, and other combat log logging/parsing tools like it, serve to help the serious raider discern what exactly is going on in an encounter. When a raid enters an encounter and wipes, the logical response for the raid leader is to ask "what happened?" At the very worst level of pug raiding the typical response is simply "dunno... we died" which, unfortunately, while being an accurate summation of events, does very little to foster improvement." Higher caliber or more experienced raiders might answer something along the lines of "the boss used an aoe attack and one of the healers died... after that we couldn't keep up". This helps a bit more, and can be accomplished without an addon. However, deeper analysis is fairly impossible without statistical tools, and such analysis is immensely powerful when raid encounters are challenging and well tuned to gear level and the skill level of cutting edge progression raiders. Consider the same example of the aoe from the boss discussed above. Without addons, the typical raid leader really can only have one reaction to the wipe: turning to the healer and saying "why are you dying, maggot... stop that". A tool such as recount, however, can show damage taken spreads. This may show us that DPS a, b, and c were playing hopscotch in fire and taking much more damage than the other 5 dps in the raid. Now let's assume the encounter was a 2 tank taunt switch type encounter. Recount will show that Tank A somehow takes 40% more damage than tank B even though their time spent tanking is relatively equivalent. Moreover, a healing output meter might show that one of the healers is 40% lower than the other 2 on healing throughput. All these factors show the raid leader deeper, underlying problems that culminated in the said healer's death to aoe. Thus, rather than screaming at the healer to spam heals and l2p, the raid leader would be able to recognize that said healer was actually doing his job just fine and his death was a combination of multiple other failures in the raid by other members that placed an insurmountable tax on his ability to keep the raid up. Let's not forget that recount is a damage meter also. Maybe your raid is attempting to kill "Guardian of the Butterknife of Doom" and you guys always seem to be fine for a while but when the boss gets to around 10-15%, he keeps killing everyone in the raid. Like instantaly. The raid leader might scream at healers to keep people up. Raid members might be baffled at what someone is doing wrong to nuke the whole raid for a million dmg. But Recount will show that each attempt lasted 5 minutes 1 second... and your raid is dying to a hard enrage timer. Recount will further show you the reason that your raid is wiping: Harry Hohum is doing 10% of everyone else's dps. What's he doing wrong? Just click on his name and it will show you that 100% of his damage comes from saber slash. This might seem fairly self evident, but lets be honest, in a raid scenario, without addons, it's actually harder than you might think to figure out who the guy spamming saber slash while he watches the latest survivor episode is. He's swinging like everyone else, and everyone's swinging while standing on top of each other. Bottom line is this: sure, if you're leveling up or playing content so easy that you can faceroll through it with a tv remote in one hand and a burrito in the other, you don't need recount. You'll succeed anyway despite the inperfections, antics, and epic failures of your party sooner or later. You don't need to know that curious george was playing in fire because you can just carry him through content regardless of how bad he is, and you don't need to know what event caused what wipe because there isn't a wipe in the first place. However, I for one hope that SWTOR isn't that type of game beyond the initial leveling push. When I step into a raid, I want to be challenged. I want to be held to a standard of perfect play, not mediocrity. Bosses shouldn't die just because no one in the raid was ********. They should be overcome with a perfection tempered with precision, performance, and excellence. True progression bosses will require perfect positioning, pinpoint taunts, superlative cooldown usage, and superior threat from tanks. They should be tuned so that dps not only needs perfect rotation and minimal downtime, but also the use of calculated risk into hazardous positions to meet the dps check. Healers should be taxed with a barrage of raid and tank damage that requires both preventative and reflexive healing and cooldown usage. The raid as a whole should be required to maintain a cutthroat level of raid awareness to minimize environmental raid damage and raid wiping mechanics. Difficult encounters, the type of 500 attempt bosses that try, test, and temper true raiding groups and guilds, reap the finest and, really, the only true rewards to be had in MMO's: not some transient cheap piece of gear that you'll replace in the next instance or patch, but the ability to say "We did something that requires effort, dedication, skill, and perseverence... where so many other people fail, we've succeeded." Nothing is truly of worth if it's not worth working for. And it is at this level of play, my friends, that analytical tools such as recount, world of logs, wws, and a whole slew of other analytical programs and performance addons become not only desirable, but entirely necessary. Not to find out who sucks and doesn't belong in the raid (because, believe me, at this level we're talking about a collection of probably the best 2-3 players of each class on the server, and not a single one of them "sucks"), but to analyze what is really happening in the raid. Progression raiding necessitates that the raid leader and, indeed, each raider, know and understand where the damage is coming into the raid from, as well as how the raid's outgoing damage is performing. Raid deaths must be analyzed to determine how they can be avoided in the future. Boss mechanics must be understood from the mathematical side. These tools allow us to understand complex game mechanics as well as maximize our own effeciveness as members of a raid. Correctly used, they turn 100 attempt boss fights into 10 attempt fights, 20 attempt fights into 2-3 shots, and virtually impossible encounters into the epic multi-hundred attempt boss fights we remember for the rest of our gaming lives with fondness and nostalgia: M'uru and KJ, Yogg-0, Heroic LK... encounters that define what it means to achieve in these games we play. There are two types of people who want recount based mods: the fake elitist and the truly elite. The fake elitists want to show off their dps in pugs. Fine... who cares... most of them don't really know what true top raiders are even capable of in terms of dps and performance. Fake elitists suffer from big fish in a fishbowl syndrome and generally give these statistical addons a bad name. Ignore them. The truly elite, however, use these tools the way they were meant to be used: as essential raid analysis tools. Don't clump the truly elite with the fake elitists. Chances are you've never even grouped with them because they tend to stay within their own guild or group only in the circles of the top few guilds on the server. They don't hate you and you don't know them. They've never kicked you out of a pug because ... well... they don't pug. But they're what everyone in these games want to be. The top dog on the server (or maybe even in the nation/world). One day, if you try hard enough and reach high enough, you'll join their ranks... and then you'll realize that the addons you thought were epeen damage meters are actually so much more.