How the hell did u hit for 6.1 k in a warzone.... Someone was naked? Pre adrenal nerf? Think the biggest hit I've even had in pve is 5.8 k with Tk spec with 1 armorings short of BIS. Biggest hit I've had with balance in pvp is ~ 5.2k...

That's interesting lol. I find Tk is great for kephess. In fact it was the main deciding factor when I finally switched from balance to Tk for good. It's the only fight I can reliably beat the sents and commandos on for parses. Hardest part is keeping tremors up between phases but I've mostly managed to figure that out. I'd say pilgrim is the best balance fight. I'm considering switching to balance for the new raid zone because of movement/ learning fights though. It's a bit more forgiving for movement and being distracted by new mechanics

Um... for a sage healer/dps accuracy, weapon damage, defense are completely worthless stats. At that level you probably aren't melee'ing or shouldn't be. Hilts are an important source of force power however so you should still upgrade it if possible, it's just not as much as priority as it would be anyother class. If you are questing to level... go to the most recent planet you were on and go shopping at the commendation vender. By whatever armoring, mods, enhancements +/- hilt you can. If you're a twink just get someone to make the appropriate armorings/ mods/ enhancements or buy them off the GTN. Just buy whatever has the most willpower. At level 37 stat optimization really isn't valuable really as you'll be getting near mods/enchancements in 2-4 levels anyways.

Well you've changed it a bit from last night but it's still pretty horrible. Glad you ditched the 900 alacrity rating though!! You have 0 power rating, way too much crit, way too much alacrity. Lightning is dependant on high power and reasonable alacrity (one of your main spells is gonna autocrit everytime... that's 48% of crit rating you waste every time you cast it). Crit/Alacrity/Surge are subject to dimishing returns, and they are significant at the levels you have listed. . Primary stat and power do not. For example, you have >900 crit rating. Drop that by half and you've freed up 450 points for power. This will decrease your crit rating by ~7% but increase your bonus damage by ~100 increasing your overall dps substantially. Stat priority roughly willpower > power > crit > alacrity > surge assuming you have ~ crit 30-35, surgery >75, 7-8% alacrity. There is a BIS post in this class forum you should take a look at. For lightning bis crit rating is as low as 164 for level 61 gear.... you have 900! And making a set of gear for both PVP and PVE is not a good idea. A expertise of 545 is terrible for PVP (about the same as recruit gear?) and you'll have subpar dps for PVE. PVE gear is NOT PVP gear. The only PVP gear you shoudl use for PVE is the relics (+/- barrel/hilt if you do white damage and the PVP version has better damage rating which is irrelevant to sage/sorc).

Pve? Tk> balance > hybrids. Not a huge difference in damage between the specs. Tk is more complicated dynamic rotation but more fun to play. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=499627

You have expertise in your gear but have PVE heal set bonuses? I'm confused... Are you asking for pvp or pve. For PVE: Keep your spec as is. The stat optimization in that AMR profile is horrible though. Not sure if you want critique on that or if you just looking for feedback on the spec. Maybe you're working on it still. - Get rid of every single one of those alacrity augments and replace with resolve - Switch all but 1 or 2 of those mods to advanced aptitude 27. Keep 1-2 advanced mettle. - replace all those enchancements and replace with advanced adept enchancement 27 and maybe 2-3 advanced quick savant 27 (probably shoot for 11-12% alacrity with all 63 gear) - switch the expertise crystal to power For PVP: consider switching to madness 3/7/31 or 7/3/31. Get proper PVP armorings (stalker or force masters). Do as above except replace with war hero equivalents and swap quick savant with more adepts if you are going to do madness.

Ok. Keep sacrificing dps and taking Inner strength over clamouring force to keep your rotation force neutral. To me dropping a dps talent for a 9% cost reduction talent is an admission that the spec has force issues. I agree it's off topic..

sorry to hear you stopped playing. None of the changes to sage/sorc should affect dps at least from looking at the pts patch notes. I'm not on the pts server though. The new gear is in AMR but with different names (Denova/Hazmat -> Dread Guard) and a greater selection on the AMR site than what i've seen posted anywhere. Dulfy.net has all the venderable gear. Not sure what non-set piece drops we can expect... but my understanding is that both NiM EC and TFB will be complementary in filling out a full '63 set'.

A typo. You're right it's only ~ 20-30%. 30% from BIS simcraft parse. 20% from most parses posted. Still a huge chunk of dps with high DPET and when I parsed it with simcraft ~ 1% dps difference using clamoring force. But thanks for agreeing it's an important ability which was the point. Yes i think you should take clamoring force if you want to do your best damage (you made this thread complaining about your relative dps to other classes, remember?!?! ). There is no point to finishing a fight will full force. Running with clamoring force you'll still (almost) never have problems with force unles you're being inefficient. Why wouldn't you take a 6% dps buff to 1 of 5 of your abilities? Look 6 posts up. I clearly stated that movement should have no effect on your dps. Look 2 posts up. I simply stated that moving has more of an effect on FORCE REGENERATION for balance and helps TK. You move with TK you get 10.4 force/s and a 59% force reduction on project (20.8 force - 18.5 force = +2.3 force for a 2s move) You move with balance you interupt your TT channel (but still pay the upfront cost), full cost project (9% -reduction if you spec inner strength), and only 8force/s regen (16 force - 41 force = -25 force for a 2 s move ignoring the wasted cost of TT). Balance relies almost exclusively on pyschic barrier for force regen, which you can't do when moving. I finish most fights with 50-60% force in balance spec. I finish all fights with 80-100% spec'd TK even when casting project, heals, bubbles, forcequake etc. Balance does NOT have better force regen than TK which is your ONLY point I'm refuting.

If you look closesly at the simcraft data you're relying on... you'll notice the madness/balance spec has the 9% less force for each cast which most do NOT take (I certainly don't when i spec balance). Look at the RPE section... all the abilities are being cast ~ 91% of the cost. Removing that takes your 'RPS out' to 15 from 13.6... ie. force negative. Now you could take inner strength I suppose and not take clamoring force or disturb mind.. but then you are nerfing your dps (mind crush is ~ 40% of your dps and your highest DPET) ~ 1798 vs. 1783 or 1%. Even if you take both resource abilities in first row of TK tree you are only force neutral while you are standing still but not really in any practical situation. Add in movement and TK becomes force neutral/positive and balance force negative. http://www.simulationcraft.org/swtor/130/Sage_Sorcerer_Raid_Campaign-HeavyMovement.html

There are two fights you can have force issues on with balance: - Sc/fb if you are on the ground moving for every reticle and dome, casting a cure or a project everytime you move, religiously keeping both dots on both bosses, dotting all 3 adds, +/- occasional bubble/ heal. - transduchan add phase on kephess. Casting FiB and forcequake (+/- a bubble as invariably ill get agro) will destroy your mana pool. - after an in-combat rez. With Tk I have never had a force issue in the above situations. While on 95% of fights you won't have issues with force using balance, saying it has superior regen to Tk is not true.

Just thought I'd point out that double dotting is just as advantageous for TK/lightening. In addition to the dps increase of casting our 2nd highest DPET ability you'll get more PP procs. No reason not to be dotting both sc/fb. That's just too easy to do. Even on the shield phase.. that's 4-5 s to run into the dome giving you enough time to dot all three on the way to the dome. With TK you have the force regen to do it... with balance especially if you're curring/doing the script you may have force issues during last phase. You'll get a PP proc every internal CD with three mobs dotted. And you'll Turb at least two of those mobs anyways. On T/Z it's a bit tricky to dot both because of fearful.. but possible as long as your tanks are extremely predictible. Movement should really have only a minimum effect on your dps, at least after you learn the encounters. NiPil is a bit unpredictible and probably the worse fight for TK/ any ranged really. The effect of movement for gunslingers (dirty fighting > SS) is probably same/better as sage. I have no experience with commandos other than the observation they are hindered a bit more than sage if they are on the ground during SC/FB. There is no jousting for melee except maybe during leap down phase on kephess in HM EC and boulder phase of Z/T so movement really has minimal effect for them. For the most part they can dance around the circles etc while still maintaining dps.

Sniper's stun is 4m range... They have a 30 m blind. Quite different imo

Mind posting a parse to prove that >.>

Hard to compare between different raids imo. Different setups/ bloodthirst/inspiration/ different roles (scipt dancing on sc/fb) etc. Best would be to have 2 similarly geared sages/sorcs in the same raid. I tried to replicate that with two similar runs over two weeks but kinda failed. While we had similar raid composition we really kinda sucked last night (took 3 hours vs. 2 hours last week). Also breaking in a new tank past two weeks. But i parse every HM ops i do so I can certainly share it. As for your OP, I took advantage of my respec/gear swap to do some parses on the ops dummy. Pretty much identicle between the two specs ~ 1575-1600 using exotech stims, rakata adrenal. Kinda frustrating though when I parse on my gunslinger (not optimized but all 61 BH gear with 4pve bonus, a war hero offhand, almost no HM ops experience on him) who i mainly pvp with. I parse ~1750 on the dummy with him using prototype stim and NO adrenals. Even if i dont amor debuff I parse 1600-1650 with noob mistakes like running out of energy when my regen skill isn't up. So yeah, sorc/sage dps could use some love.

Well the gear linked is my TK setup. For Balance I switched 1 quick savant for adept and, and one aptitude for mettle (idealy I should have switched 2 QS for 2 Adepts) as stated. Switching my mods/enh back today I noticed I still had an aptitude 26A mod :/ That's been remedied today lol. That's a nice parse for Z/T. I can find a parse for 1300 for myself using balance spec but that's cherry picking. But without a parse or knowing your raid composition it's a bit hard to interpret. For example, I had no inspiration (bloodthirst) for the first 2 fights on both parses. Also as our raid dps increases we end up sitting on our hands waiing for the 'jump' (waiting for fearful to drop off the tank, waiting for the boulder to land so it doesn't miss and/or waiting for taunt immunity to fade from the mob). On the balance parse from last night there is a full 15s of no dps from me during one swap. Have to admit I've never tried that particular hybrid. Maybe i'll parse it with simcraft and see how it does.

Did a bit of a test with last week and this weeks HM EC/ NiPil runs. Here is gear for last weeks run as TK: http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/character/a8d0091d-ed24-4602-a6a1-f6bd358b1168 . For this weeks run as Balance I swapped an Apitude for a Battle Mod and 1 quick savant for a Adept making it near optimal for balance (i should have had switched 2 savants for adepts but didn't have one). This weeks run was a bit rough for some reason (only 1 wipe last week, but 3 wipes this week and a very ugly kephess fight. I've summarized the boss damage (kill pulls only) for ease of viewing. .....................Balance.................TK Pilgrim: .............1378.................1233 ZW EC HM........1209.................1235 Z/T.....................1140.................1176 F/S.....................1300.................1298 Vorgath..............1281.................1206 Kephess.............1213.................1350 I died early on Kephess (TK) . However, I do usually parse ~1400 on that fight. TK parse: http://www.torparse.com/a/19682 Balance parse: http://www.torparse.com/a/19597 NOTE: the numbers listed above will be slightly differant then on the linked parses because I used ACT to make this post. A few notes NiPil: TK parse I died at 35% on pilgrim. . T/Z: I tried my damnest to keep dots on both Z/T but only succeeded in getting Fearless twice so I abandoned doing that. S/F: Was on the ground dancing script for both fights. Had some force issues towards the end of fight with balance because of double dotting and curing. Keph: Did more damage on walker with balance probably because you can precast 3 dots on him just before he crouches. Also balance did much better on Bomber phases. TK owned the aoe phase and did better on Kephess himself. Total damages on balance parse are higher because we only had 15 people to start and there was alot of deaths. Also on TK parse I died shortly after kephess spawned so I had to alter log file to make complete fight show (there is a gap of ~26s while I was dead. Still think TK/lightning has an edge. It's certainly more fun to play in pve. I dont do TK/lightning perfectly but I think I do well enough. I thought TK would come out much farther ahead than it did.

I hope you are kidding. Overload is worthless as dps, knocks the trash out of range of your groups/companions aoe, and increases the gap between you and them. As for a purely defensive tank spec burning down trash.... I'm always out of force and a force-free hard hard hitting melee skill is a blessing. For deception / madness you may be right in regards to 'rotation' and having some better to cast.

I'm a bit irritated by the nerf on the ranged stun. That stun is essential for killing scoundrels (not to mention other healing classes and mara/sents) when they get <25%. Mixed feelings about the force wave changes. Will reserve my opinion till I try it. I suspect it will be a great for 1v1 / offensive but a considerable nerf for the seers. I had hoped for a gunslinger type kb. The slinger one is just awesome compared to the force wave we currently have. The uninterruptible buff will be non contributory in any regard. Tk will still not be viable in pvp. Run speed buff is nice buff but I didn't really think mobility was our weakness. Would have rather seen an increase on project's damage to make it worth casting in pve and give us some burst in pvp. Or a buff to MC or FiB. Or a surge bonus with force potency.

I find it great as a darkness spec for grinding dailies and on trash in flashpoints. It's force efficient, hits hard, great animation and when combined with shock will two shot most weak mobs. However, on my sage who never does anything but ops and warzones it's off my hotbar :/ My gunslinger used his for dailies as well. When my heal comp has a weak mob stunned u can usually one shot with headshot or whatever it's called. Never found it practical in flashpoint though.

Your self portrait isn't big enough. Please make bigger and put in the exact middle of your screen for your next vid. Maybe that's why you missed that pass in huttball @ 03:48. Looked like you had a clear pass to the goal line after a leap to that sorc. But i'm sure they appreciated your help in the middle on that 3v2. Good think you killed those two @ 4:40 or so on the bridge when they had the next door open. They get to respawn at full health in the next room while you med back your health for 10s. At 9:40 you finally kill somone that is actually carrying the ball. Almost every fightin CW, VS, and NC is a 3-5 vs 1 zerg. So basically if you want to get some high hits... go kill nigtmare pilgrim, get the buff, ignore all objectives and find some 14k scoundrels to murder with a premade vs. pug pvp match Nice pvp'ing! You're like the Viserys of House Targaryen. Do have to wait for another NiPil kill before we see more vids?

With proper gear/stat optimization DF/Lethality > MM/SS > hybrid http://simulationcraft.org/swtor/130/Sniper_Raid_Campaign_BiS.html

You can't replace it with crit. it only competes with surge. Stacking surge is only useful to a point. Would help to know your spec etc

Well if i can critic your lightening parse... You have only half the alacrity you should to optimize the build. You should have alacrity of 342 vs. surge of 228 (or at least a similar ratio). You have 171 alacrity and 399 surge which favors the madness spec. In fact, for BIS for madness you should ditch some surge for alacrity (BIS ~ 228 alacrity to 342 surge). Also your power: crit ratio is off... A lightning spec is dependant on really high power and low crit ratio (crit shoudl be as low as 164 crit rating). I'm assuming 'shocked' is force lightening (i only have a sage so i'm assuming that's how it shows up on swtor log parser.) You didn't use force lightning near enough. It's better dps then just spamming LS. U should be casting the two at a 2: 1 ratio of LS: FL. This ensure max dps while doing enough LS to proc CL / concentrations. You only cast FL 16 times (4 per cast = 64) but LS 110 times. An ideal parse with have about equal contribution to dps from LS/ TB/ FL. Take a look at this site.. it has proper activation priorities and respective dps sources. http://www.simulationcraft.org/swtor/130/Sorcerer_Raid_Campaign_BiS.html TL:dr you dont know how to play 3/31/7

This is a pve discussion. But madness/balance is the pvp spec mostly for mobilty reasons. I love to kill Lightning/ TK specs during pvp as that's usually a sign of a terrible pvp'er. Anyways for PVE, madness/balance will do better on heavy movement fights but with proper gear optimization, not generic imported campaign gear, the difference is neglible: http://mmo-mechanics.com/swtor/forums/thread-826-page-18.html People get a bad impression of lightning because it's harder to play. They take their low power, high crit, low alacrity madness/balance gear, parse the dummy a few times and give up. You need different gear optimization and do enough parses to get the rotation down. As for double dotting, it helps TK/lightning just as much as it helps balance/madness. Keeping 2-3 afflication/weaken mind up ensures more pp/lb procs. With 1-2 more pp/lb procs per minute (not to mentionthe 2 extra dist/LS casts, the tremors/conduction buffage, and the TW/CL procs) lightning will gain just as much dps if not more than having a second dot. As for double dotting toth/zorn, as madness/balance it seems like a good way to get fearful. As for movement with practice you can negate alot of it's affects. During SC/FB for example, where sages are often on the ground dancing the script, there is a certain rhythm to the fight that enables you to maintain dps without much loss. you can see the domes coming from sc ~2 s in advance. A 1.5s GCD is more than enough time to get out of the way. I usually parse > 1200 on sc/fb dancing the script with lightning and parse ahead of balance spec sage standing on the turret (by about the same I outparsed him on other fights). Our trooper dancing on the ground parses about the sames as me but the trooper on the turret parses 1400. I've done it on my gunslinger with little/no dps loss as well (on SM anyways as a GS can't cure for the HM fight). During toth/zorn cast TB/turb after you move out of a red circle... it will be 3-4 s before you have to move again. With practice/learning the fights/ repetition the effect of movement is really quite small. As for the last two bosses in EC HM the burst/aoe of lightning/TK is great. I've used both specs extensively and settled on lightning. Even if the two specs are more or less equivalent for dps lightning/TK is definately more fun. It's a challenge to keep 3 tremors/conductions up while maintaining optimal FL/LS or TT/Dist ratio, anticipating movement so you dont interupt turbulence, using alacrity buff/adrenals/recklessness/force potency optimally to ensure max dps. What's the challenge with balance/madness? not clipping your dots? Learn to spec for lightning, learn to play lightning, have more fun, do more dps. But as for PVP: balance/madness with stalker set bonus all the way.