My favorite is in Alderaan when all the dps finally get a node captured and run off to let the healer defend it.

Guioki is correct - the 20/21 build is based entirely on being able to escape. Tumri's response about survivability talents is a clear slippery slope fallacy. Obviously some survivability is good, but taking ALL of it in a 20/21 is bad.

The forked lightning one is a dps loss over other 20/21 builds if you are dot-tabbing correctly. I will tell you from playing 20/21, 3/7/31, and 13/28 that of the three, 20/21 is my least favorite. It's certainly the least dps, and doesn't feel quite right as a ranged dps because of the ways you have to use the cc offensively to take full advantage of them.

Please return to page 81 and read my lengthy detailed post describing exactly why the CC capabilities the OP identifies are NOT game-breaking. No other class really needs it. Sorc is the squishiest class in the game. There is no way to show exactly how much damage a Sorc/Sage is taking, but with their squishy-ness, it's certainly needed. Also, the ones that are putting up impressive healing numbers are probably running the 7/13/21 hybrid, which is specifically geared towards self-healing, and has output on par with the other hybrids. In fact, 7/13/21 does almost as much damage as the defensive version of 13/28, albeit most of it dependent on AOE damage (1258 and 1268 respectively). Show me a class that has that much given to them and people wouldn't scream op as much. I suppose you mean like scoundrel and commando, both of which have the capacity for good self-heals and high damage. Or any tank spec, because protection is functionally (for the target) the same mechanic as healing... better actually, because they never take the damage, and the tank can mitigate that damage better through incoming heal buffs. Yes, clearly - it has nothing to do with actual math and game mechanics. It's only because all the Sages in the world, none of which actually USE those talents (or if they do, are gimping their dps) want to keep them around.

A man after my own heart.

If you want the most effective build while retaining the CC capabilities, you probably want this spec, which includes those CC talents you wanted. It relies on Mind Crush rather than Weakened Mind - MC is a faster dot with more up front damage - and also extends your range on TK Wave by 5 meters. This one reports in at 1234 dps. Personally, I don't really care, because I'm not the dedicated CC person. But if we were running 8-man premades, and I WAS the dedicated CC person, I'd be up in arms about this. I played the 20/21 CC spec for a bit when we were doing 4-man groups trying to queue with other guilds at the same time. It's incredibly effective in Alderaan - a single 20/21 sage can hold off the entire 6-person zerg for that left-side turret long enough (for someone else) to cap it. You do next to nothing for damage, but by being that dedicated CC person, you don't need to - you just sold your life for an objective cap. Nobody runs this spec in Pugged WZ because they don't want to hear everyone else calling them a baddie for the -20% dps output. That said, in order to make use of this build, you essentially have to actually die when you use it. Basically, to hold them off, you're dropping your ranged cc's on approach, sprinting into position and using the knockbacks and other slows to break up their zerg into a stream of 1v3's. But almost invariably, when you get into knockback range, you'll make them mad, and they all turn and just destroy you. As a ranged dps, the talents just are not that useful, for reasons I've iterated before. You essentially sell your life to use them offensively, and if you need to use them defensively, they are only effective in a case where you are going to die anyway. If you use them offensively, you've wasted all your dps talents. If you use them defensively, you've wasted extra dps AND you're screwed anyway - it's Lose-Lose.

I skipped this particular build because it's a complete waste of at least one talent point (in Lightning Storm). The only good way to proc LS is by channeling your aoe (longer cast time than Chain Lightning) or by casting Lightning Strike (same cast time as CL). Alternatively you can chance it by wasting the Wrath proc and hoping for a double proc, but then you lose the 20% buff to your aoe. This build reports as 1208 damage. This one also wastes the point in LS. It actually reports in at less dps at 1196 - you might think it would be more dps, but the proc rate on Lightning Effusion is high enough that it extends the usability of the rotation. In the first build, you would see the highest dps gain by moving that point to Force Horrors (up to 1216 from 1208). In the second build, you would see the highest dps gain by moving that point to Lightning Effusion (up to 1225 from 1196). Hardly - this one reports in at 1226 dps... None of these builds is also particularly useful. We are still talking about roughly 8% drop in dps in order to pick up two extra CC's. One of which hurts your team, and the other is useful only situationally, or against melee. Bottom line is, if you want to be a team player, don't take the cc talents unless that is your specific job on the team. And if it's your job, take them all. Respeccing to take "advantage" of an aoe mez and aoe root is tantamount to a choice to be less effective for your team. Or to put it another way - what are the advantages of taking both of those?? Neither is long enough to keep people off a node while you cap it. Neither is good for stopping other people from capping a node (you have three ranged aoe's for that). If you have enough people on you that you need an aoe root, you are going to be dead anyway. It seems that all these talents do is let you live just a bit longer at the expense of ~8% dps and making it harder for your team to cc things.

Actually, for the most part, Sage dps is pretty mobile. If you time your procs right, you can stay entirely on the move, stopping only to channel a 1.5 sec TK Throw procced off Psychic Projection. Other than that, a 13/28 or 3/7/31 should be inst-casting everything. I'm also going to have to disagree on the burst dps. It's not quite as high as other classes, but there are basically two ways to get some quick damage out. First, you can channel a TK Throw to proc presence of mind, and then drop a Force in Balance and TK Wave back to back. This would give you ~8k in the space of 4 GCD's. Second, you can hardcast TK Wave and chain a FIB onto the end of it. This should unload about 5k instantly due to the slight travel time on TK Wave. But yes, by all means, please link my post to sorc/sage QQ'ers =)

I'm going to reiterate what I posted in the first thread with some more specific updates on what people have said in both threads... My original post on this can be found here at the bottom of the page. Assumptions I'm using for math: Willpower: 1737 Force Power + Power: 1442 Crit/Surge/Alacrity: 410/153/346 (values from the spreadsheet BiS.) DPS numbers are an "ideal" fight Rotations are also "ideal" A quick note too about the specs I'm using (I'm not going to go into full TK because I know absolutely nothing about TK past the 4th tier): First - a standard 3/7/31 build for balance dps. Second - a standard 0/13/28 build for hybrid dps. Third - "full cc" build (the dreaded 0/20/21). Fourth - a dps/cc build (0/19/22). And last, a Tidal Force dps build (0/19/22). Up front - here are the updated dps values for these builds: 3/7/31 - 1275 dps 0/13/28 - 1326 (1268 for above build. 1326 build is this one AFAIK.) 0/20/21 (cc) - 1063 0/19/22 (dps) - 1216 0/19/22 (tidal force)- 1216 (Note - a full TK build reports as 1285 dps.) I should also note to maximize for the 1326 build, you must be getting a full 18 second Weakened Mind, as well as forgo the instant force lift and 20% buff to your bubble. More on that later. The OP alleges this list of utilities (#4 missing in original): **** I'm going to add the 2 sec root from Sever Force. Not all of these abilities are available at once. Also, I think we can dispense with #14 because the capacity for self-healing is shared among 3/8 classes in the game (sage, commando, scoundrel), not to mention Guarded By The Force, which is essentially a self-heal given their dots' healing. More notes on bubble. The values above are incorrect. The general thought at the moment is that trauma and expertise do not affect bubble value. The long and short of this is that expertise could not affect the value if trauma also did not (because expertise healing is trauma-ignore, not more throughput). This would make bubble values too low for anyone but BiS geared to get the 2.5k heal medal for a bubble. Current estimates of bubble values are between about 3.3 and 3.7k. The values from the BiS assumptions in the spreadsheet linked above yield a 3310 bubble. Popping a 380 power trinket with those would give you a 3564 bubble. Now, the meat and potatoes... First, it's of critical importance to note that no Sage build can take advantage of all of the above utilities. In fact, without severely gimping one's dps, no Sage build can take advantage of most of them. Second, the two most-complained about talents (the aoe mez and aoe root) are not that useful. The aoe mez is good for one thing - saving the Sage's butt. It does that pretty well, but in doing so, harms the rest of the team because it builds lots of resolve. The aoe root is pretty good in some circumstances, but because it is tied to a knockback, it will not work on targets with full resolve. Third, many of the utilities mentioned don't apply to all classes. Roots and knockbacks are useless against ranged classes who can stand still and nuke you and who never come into knockback range. Almost without exclusion, the Sage's utility talents *being complained about here* are useful against melee - the Sage's natural sworn enemy. Fourth, the OP ignores the balancing game that one must take to have access to all this utility, but still put out decent damage. This point is where I focus most attention. Looking above, you can see the dps values for the different specs. Note that the two cc-heavy specs fall well short of full dps specs (by 20% and 8.3% respectively). Considering the immense loss of the pure cc spec, I'm not really sure there is much point in talking about it - it's a cc machine, nothing else. That said, the fact that a 0/19/22 dps spec retains the cc ability merits consideration. I believe the points I made above concerning the type of target on which the gained cc is useful stand. Sages need tools to escape melee, plain and simple. A good marauder or operative is a real pain in the rear to escape from alive. Personally, I find marauders to be more of a pain than operatives. That said, taking the two aoe cc talents from the TK tree away from Sages probably won't hurt them much. But it probably won't help the enemy teams much either. The root from knockback is useful, yes. The aoe mez is useful to the Sage, but harms the team overall. The question remains then, whether hybrid specs really are that overpowered. The answer, I believe, is - not really. Were they in fact vastly overpowered, I would expect to see a Sage doing 1.5-2x the damage of other classes, and this just is not the case. I will admit that the skill:damage ratio on a sage has a much lower curve than other classes, but after a certain point, skilled players of other classes are on par. On a related note - the discrepancy in DPS seems to widen with gear, so for the majority of players, a hybrid spec is not going to pull as far ahead in pure dps numbers. Also, I'd like to briefly dispel the notion that Sages "mash one button" and faceroll. Whoever started this idea is a complete moron. In a 15-sec rotation, a hybrid Sage will use 6 or 7 different abilities depending on procs. For a full Balance Sage, it's 7. Sages do not stand there and mash TK Throw - doing so is a HUGE dps loss. Last but certainly not least - some info about my Sage: I currently use a 0/13/28 build, and I enjoy the playstyle very much, especially when Imps are dumb and gather in groups for me. That said, I play the more survivable version of the 13/28 build, picking up the self-heal, instant force lift, and bubble buff and taking the lower dps. I'm seriously considering switching to a full Balance build, if for no other reason than to show the nubs out there that hybrids are not really doing crazy damage like everyone claims. Sorry for the wall of text. TL;DR : No dps sage worth their salt would ever be able to access all of the available cc talents. Many of them don't actually apply to non-melee classes. And the dps difference is not that big for hybrid/full-31.

I didn't ask why I was doing BAD - I asked how to do BETTER. You obviously have no understanding of a tank's role in PvP, so either become useful, or quit spamming my thread. And as for tank buff - none of what I asked for was a buff - it would simply make guard actually useful when dealing with ranged attackers (and in PvE - i.e. Kragga). Also, I thought it was pretty clear that I wanted any increase to damage to be offset by longer cooldowns. Please learn to read, and actually contribute.

Yeah, I've been using the aoe taunt pretty much on cd, and I know it does give that 30% damage reduction, but I would like to see some other effect that makes it feel more tank-ish, rather than what amounts to an AOE guard. I also realize that my CD's are defensive, but I feel like in order to do my peeling job properly, I should be able to kill the thing that I peeled, even if it means that I can't kill another one for several minutes.

Looking for some advice on how to play my guardian... I'm currently level 32 tank spec, so please keep that in mind. The long and short of it is that it seems like I don't do much damage, don't have high protection values, but I get stuff done for other players fairly well. Since I'm leveling with a mix of pvp/pve/questing, I have a lot of the traditional tanking stats, which may be gimping my damage a bit. So I feel like all I do in warzones is leap to an enemy to peel it off someone and hound it with my mediocre dps until it runs away in frustration or someone else helps me kill it. I'm constantly blowing my aoe taunt, though the range on it is deceptively short IMO. Often, it seems impractical to stick next to a healer, because while guard it helpful, the people nuking the healers are almost invariably sorcs or mercs, meaning that they are doing so from more than 15 meters - leaving me with the choice of guarding the healer or peeling the target off. The one saving grace does seem to be that as a tank, I can usually hold an objective long enough to get reinforcements before it is capped. I make a pretty good ball carrier too. It seems like my utility as a PvP tank is more gathering aggro than actually soaking up the damage. Often, after I peel off of someone, I don't get the needed heals to keep me alive. Some of my abilities are very frustrating, so much of my aggro is gained by irritating the enemy rather than the taunts being effective. I don't know - maybe there is something wrong with my playstyle... My quick wish list: 1) Extend the range of guard to at LEAST 30m, preferably more like 45. Seems useless in pvp and pve at the moment. 2) Make "taunt" actually work on players - forcing a target switch or at least forcing them to drop their current target (latter is better imo). 3) Balance the damage output a bit better for the class - I'd like to be able to blow some cd's and actually down a target, even if the cd's on those talents are increased. I realize the third will probably change at 50, but it's a little frustrating being a lowly 32 and not really feeling like I have a "place" in pvp... Thoughts?

lolololol!!!!!

Just an update - tossing some numbers around theorycrafting shows that expertise/trauma probably does not affect bubble. Here's why: If it did, we would see a -30% throughput on the "pve" calculations, and expertise would eat "up" into that - i.e. 10% expertise would mean a -20% throughput. I regularly get the 2.5k heal medal for a popped bubble in WZ's, which means that my bubble must be exceeding 2500. Plugging my stats in, if expertise/trauma affected the value, I would expect a 2316 bubble - well short of 2500. It's doubtful that expertise would affect the throughput of the bubble independently of trauma, because expertise is technically a trauma-ignore, not a throughput buff. Also, I should note that it seems that a 4k bubble is probably out of reach at current gear levels. Setting stats at 1500 willpower, 1500 force power, 400 power (and popping the 380 power trink for 780 total) yields a 3739 bubble.

While I absolutely do not agree with the OP, I do think that just dispeling the dots is really an unworkable "solution." Because of the way the raid frames work, we see all buffs and debuffs on players, including procs. There is no way to tell without a mouseover whether a new de/buff is a hot, dot, proc, or other cd. WTB WoW-style "display only dispelable debuffs" UI option. Hopefully this will be fixed in 1.2.

I'm not sure why there is any confusion on this. ALWAYS orient by the map/minimap - what else would you orient by? Your position or which way you are facing?? Sorry, but that's just plain stupid. Also, it shouldn't matter which way you call it out because east/west and left/right (well, right/left) are the same. Furthermore, there's also no reason to prefer one over the other, because the same idiots that confuse right and left are going to also confuse east and west.

This is interesting - I thought that surge was capped at 80%.

It's not 20%. It's the exact same on you as it is on a tank. The value of bubbles scale with willpower, power, and expertise, not endurance. The fact that it happens to be about 20% of your hp is immaterial to the fact that the bubble absorbs the same amount across all classes. Is it really that "significant" of an amount? Not really, considering most classes can knock it off with a single gcd. The root of that issue is that damage happens super fast in this game.

*wince* Balance Sages can get a 2 sec stun on broken force lifts.

Regardless, the real problem is the unfounded assumption that the bubble is a percent of hp.

To be sure, one can validly make that claim... However, I seriously doubt that the multiple times I've seen crazy bubble values, this has been the case. Also, as someone posted earlier in this thread, people have been basing the absorb value off of a percent, which is just plain incorrect.

Ah yes, that's a good point... So let's assume they did in fact spec that talent. BTW, the 20 at the beginning of the second half of the equation is the Expertise percent cap - nothing to do with talent trees. Throwing some numbers around, it looks like you can get a 3K bubble with moderate stats: 1250 WP 1250 Force/Power 250 Expertise ^---- Will give you a 3090 bubble with the 20% buff from the spec. Expected at full BM with some trinks and such? At: 1500 WP 1900 Force/Power 600 Expertise ^----- Will give a 3886 bubble. Popping a 300 power trink can put you at 4109. I'm not sure what the very upper range of gear stats is, but if someone wants to give ideas to me, I'll run the numbers. Seems that 3.5k bubble is certainly not out of reach, and neither is 4k. But anyone who says 6.5k is off-the-wall batspit crazy.

All formulas so far are datamined from Bioware's stats. The coefficients for Willpower and Force/Power are well known to be 0.14 and 0.17. This has been verified and tested numerous times, both ingame and stripped from XML: stat_cbt_healing_power_force += STAT_rtg_attack_power * 0.17 stat_cbt_healing_power_force += STAT_att_willpower * 0.14 stat_cbt_healing_power_force += STAT_rtg_force_power * 0.17 The equation for healing is also well known: Ability Healing Max = Coefficient * HealingBonus + StandardHealthPercentMax * StandardHealth (edit - there's also a healing min, but the health percents for bubble are the same - there's no "range" of bubble values). Coefficients and other data for Force Armor are found on TorHead, presumably mined. PVP effect percent calculation is also well known: PvP Trauma Ignore % = 20 * ( 1 - ( 1 - ( 0.01 / 0.2 ) )^( ( Expertise / max(Level,20) ) / 0.72 ) ) I combined existing formulas to calculate this specific skill, so, no - I did not make up the formula on my own.

A 3k bubble is definitely possible. Got really curious (and I HATE people spamming lies about how OP sage is, especially bubble) so I did some digging around. Because of the expertise buff, you can get another whatever % out of a bubble (11% I think is the dx=1 point for expertise), so it's a little better in pvp. But generally, this seems to be the formula: Bubble = {3.27 * [0.14(Willpower) + 0.17(ForcePower) + 0.17(Power)] + 0.164(BaseHealth)} + 20 * {1 - [ 1 - ( 0.01 / 0.2 ) ]^[( Expertise / Level ) / 0.72 ] } Where BaseHealth is the ability BaseHealth, NOT the player's. There's a lookup chart at sithwarrior.com. I'm also assuming that Force Armor Rank 5 is trained at level 50 (making BaseHealth 7085). Plugging my values in (1293 wp, 1210 fp, 296 p, 294 exp), I get an expected 2768 bubble. Not too shabby. You can get a 3k bubble with 1500 wp, 1300 fp, 300p, and 500 expertise. There does seem to be DR on how effective increasing particular stats are. I'll have to graph some stuff to find what those are.

I would really love to know where people are getting this idea that a sorc/sage bubble is 6.5k absorb?? I've seen it a couple places, but most notably by Tumri. Just FYI, I played with the numbers, and to get a 6.5k bubble, you would need: 4000 Willpower 4360 Force Power + Power (in any ratio) 6000 expertise (just shy of the 20% cap - yes, that's THOUSAND). These stats give you an expected 6500.02688 absorb bubble. Where are people getting the idea that this is possible? Please show me how to get these stats - I would LOVE to have that much power.