Just a quick post to say g'bye, as sub is out in a couple of days and won't be able to respond to questions. Good luck, have fun, and keep making those poncy magic space-ninja-wizards whine into their blue milk.

Did a post on this a month or so ago, it's slipped to the third page so I might give it a semi-naked bump. It's based on analysis of combat logs and combat mechanics, so it's pretty sound. One caveat would be that it's only definitely applicable to PvP Scrapper/Concealment, I'd expect it still to hold for PvE, but won't say it's definitely best for Sawbones or Ruffian. But who cares about those losers anyway? The upshot: Augs: Mastery, though Power's very close so don't feel you have to switch from the latter to the former unless you have money to waste on fractions of a percent,. Enhs: Crit, maybe an Alacrity if you like to beat the guys without any to the punch at the cost of slightly smaller numbers flashing up. You go for the max-damage-stat versions, of course. And /farewell to Snave and the rest of you again, my sub runs out in a couple of days and I don't think I'm going to get drunk enough to re-up it for the foreseeable. Though I may check out this rumoured new wz on a freebie, that means no posting rights.

Sorry to say, but the first part of this is strictly incorrect, and the second could be deceptive. 1) Mastery and Crit both provide crit chance, but they are on *separate* DR curves (Mastery capping at 20, Crit at 30). How much crit chance you get from one has no effect on the other. 2) You get a flat bonus damage increase from Power, but its% benefit declines the more you stack, so in real DPS terms it functions much like other stats. Example: you have 10 Power, you add 10, that's a 100% increase. But if you start with 100 Power, the flat increase of 10 more Power is only a 10% boost. And if you've already stacked Power to 1000, the flat increase of 10 Power only represents a 1% increase on what you have. Point being, don't let the fact Power has a flat absolute increase seduce you into ignoring the fact it has diminishing % benefit the more you stack it. Which stat is best for you depends on a) your spec; b) what stats you're starting from; c) personal playstyle, in that order. I'm Scrapper. This means I go Crit enhancements and Mastery augs. A spec with more autocrits could prefer Power augs, maybe Alac for a dot spec, even Acc if lots of white damage. I don't know Merc/Commando well enough and haven't modelled it to say for sure, but I suspect you should get to 105% Acc most efficiently from your stat budget, then Crit enhancements and put the rest in Power. TL;DR to OP: you want a simple answer to a complex problem. There isn't one.

Be careful what you ask for. 4.04 - Traumatised Sunrider: -80% to all healing, both done and received. To OP: thought about Trauma changes myself, but the objection already raised is correct: the problem isn't so much healing, as one overpowered healing spec. Nerf that.

Pardon the question - but is the charity max level? Scrapper gets that from FF at 20, while Dulfy says Ruffian gets at 24 from Brutal Shots. If not that, it may be you're hitting the 10s internal cd on UH regrant, or as mentioned you're dropping combat, perhaps due to companion. Bleeds do work on dummies.

Hmmm. That's not on the tooltips I'm reading (I did go check my Shadow, Marauder, Guardian and Gunslinger to be sure I wasn't forgetting), and there's no sign of it in the damage logs. I really don't think the execute abilities have a chance to take all the remaining HP of your target however much that may be, though if you can show me where it is I'm always glad to be corrected.

Thanks (and for the props above in first reply). The data is direct from my combat logs, it's what I took. It may be your experience is different, I can see specs with other roles having a somewhat different profile. Or if you play Sage/Sorc, you might not feel how much damage they collectively put out. Snipe is in there - it just doesn't hit so hard, or land on me often enough, to do much total damage. It *would* be interesting to see the difference between single target and spread dots, the problem is that the combat logs don't differentiate between them so you'd have to try and manipulate the numbers somehow (value boundaries? Dodgy with guard) to separate them. Separately from all this I did something similar with my Merc to tie together his main/off rail shots by timestamp to get a "damage by activation". Edit: hmm, is there some cross-thread reference here that I've missed?

That will be the answer, thank you very much. The proc to cast Vicious Throw at any time had slipped my mind, and I was only on my Carnage Mara a couple of weeks ago. An "execute" is just a definitive term in games: a damaging ability that can only be used on low-health opponents, with the objective of finishing them off. You could argue that the Warrior/Knight proc means Vicious Throw no longer meets this definition - but only if you really like hair-splitting arguments. I think it's enough to note that the proc you pointed out explains the lower kill-rate.

For those who would like some actual data on the damage abilities do in 4.0, or just fancy a break from from complaints about OP classes (or perhaps would like some evidence for their claims). I've done some stats reviews in the past. This time I recorded the incoming damage on me (65 Scrapper, 2018 expertise) in a month's worth of regular warzones on TRE. In all, I took over 115,000,000 damage from over 55,000 attacks and died 601 times. All the damage is done in actual warzones on a single target (me), so we don't have to worry about figures being based on hitting varied or undergeared characters, they're all comparable. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that different specs will be vulnerable in different degrees to different abilities (e.g. heavy armour classes taking less from energy or kinetic damage). I've saved an Excel sheet summary here, but I've done a few pretty highlight charts to make it more accessible for people too. For convenience, I'll refer to abilities by their Imp names, but the figures group Rep mirror abilities with them and the spreadsheet includes Rep mirror names. 1) Which are the hardest-hitting attacks in 4.0? Average crits chart These are the abilities whose crits hit me for the most, on average. And there was a huge intake of breath when it was revealed that the biggest hitter was... Ambush! I cut off at the point after which I felt the average crit from abilities was getting less brutal, but it's an arbitrary point. Behind Ambush, there are three other abilities that stand out as the next tier doing the most hurt: Heatseeker Missiles, Energy Burst and Explosive Probe, in that order. Behind them there is a gap before the next tier (in yellow) of abilities that still hit hard but don't compare to the most dangerous ones. Finally the green tier that mgiht still cause single-hit problems, but lag behind in power. Also have to note that Rail Shot is a bit undervalued here, as Mercs' offhand hits lowered its average. I also included the crit rate for each of these, which helps determine how dangerous they are. Raging Burst for example, not only crits for 11k average, but crits almost every time it was used on me (94.4%). A crit from Thermal Detonator is not only lower at 10k, but only critted 45.2% of the time, so TD is less of a threat on its own. Note that I excluded misses, dodges and resists, something had to hit before being counted. 2) Which abiliites did the most damage altogether? Total Damage by Ability. You know all those dots like Affliction and all that buggering Force Lightning? Turns out that being constantly electrocuted hurts. Four out of the top five abilities are Inquisitors', and two of those are dots. The non-sorc one is Rail Shot, which I understand may be used by Powertechs and the occasional Merc. Most of the big-hit abilities aren't the ones that do the most overall damage to you. Also worth noting how high Fire Trap Burn is (sixth) - Scoundrel roll doesn't mean you get to ignore obstacles in Huttball, you still get crisped up nicely. 3) What Kills Me the Most? Deadliest Abilities in SWTOR Sins don't get complained about as much anymore what with our new (OK, not that new) Sorc / PT Overlords, but suitably Assassinate was the single abiltiy that... errr.. assassinated me the most. The % label is the proportion of hits by the ability were killing blows. Assassinate and Takedown both top 20%, as you'd expect for executes - but Vicious Throw only comes in at 6.4% (though it still killed me plenty). My guess is that I'm less likely to have warning an Assassinate or Takedown is coming, so I'm less likely to have tried to mitigate or avoid it.* Also, while Force Lightning only kills me 1% of the time, the fact I'm constantly getting hit by it means it still killed me 25 times, second only to Assassinate. One's an execute, the other is just constant, both kill a lot. Lastly, I'm glad Acid Trap Burn was only number ten. *edit: as Ld-Siris points out below, Vicous Throw can be cast even when the target's not below 30% with a (common) proc, which explains why its kill-rate is lower - I get hit by lots of Vicious Throws when I'm not low enough to be killed by them, so the average kill rate is lower. 4) Who Smacked Me Hardest? All hits on me over 18k in November Dominated by Ambushes, but the single highest was an Energy Burst at just under 23k. You only really see Ambush, Heatseeker or Energy Burst until you get down to around 19k. There's one Impale in there, but that's some sort of freak - I don't think the next was more than around 14k. This confirms a few things: Ambush is the single hardest hitter; Heatseekers and Energy Burst can hit closest to it; someone in proper medium armour PvP gear isn't going to be hit for much more than 23k at the extreme - back of an envelope calculation says this means 24.5k for clothies. Lastly, if you've landed a ridiculous crit on me on TRE lately, you might get a mention on the chart. 5) Attack Types and Damage Types Type of damage breakdown For those who want to know how much incoming damage is yellow or white, or affected by armour. Two things here: remember I'm a Scrapper with Dodge, so I may take less white damage than the average (and more yellow than a Sin with Force Shroud); and note that over a third of the incoming damage is white - people sometimes act like white damage doesn't exist. It's in the spreadsheet rather than here, but white damage was also more likely to kill me than you'd expect from the proportion of total damage. Probably because lots of those execute moves are white, and other big hits, while dots tend to be yellow. 6) Breakdown of Ability hits over 16k, 19k and 20k. Last little breakdwon - just confirms how the abilities that can hit the top numbers narrow down. 55,237 total hits. The main summary and data again. Hope that is of some interest to you, maybe even of use. Questions welcome if you have them.

Above 190 Bolster starts removing expertise to balance the superior PvE stats, and Expertise is the best stat in PvP so you don't want that.

There is no PvP gear before level 65. There is some stuff on vendors that calls itself PvP gear, but that's only because Bioware have left it on them from years ago while the game mechanics changed in the meantime. Trying to use it will make you worse. If it's moddable and you like the look, maybe you could rip all the components out or costume to use it, but that's the limit. There is a system called Bolster that will boost your stats so long as your gear is under level 190. Higher level players in warzones before 65 will still have their extra abilities, but shouldn't out-stat you horribly. TL;DR: Do not think about buying PvP gear before level 65. Save up your warzone comms and buy a set once you hit 65.

I posted info on Concealment in PvP here http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=852882 TL;DR: Crit on enhancements (maybe a little Alacrity); Mastery or Power augs (Mastery to crit more, Power for bigger hits).

Dear OP, Welcome to the PvP forum. I see you have already grasped the essence of this long-running performance, "Waiting for Dev", where a bunch of raddled ne'er-do-wells hang around arguing without conclusion while they await the arrival of their never-seen friend Dev. The wait is enlivened by banter and the presence of running jokes such as "There are Hax everywhere!!!11?¿"; "Everyone else but me is terribad" and "Nerf Operatives". Please enjoy your stay. You may pass out, but you'll never leave.

Too kind. No really, too kind. I'll be sure to try and winkle one of your snipers out so you regret me being there, next time I see them. At least you don't have electronet.

Meh. My anecdotal evidence: I did my Weekly in 2 1/2 hours on Tuesday night on TRE, Rep side. Solo pugging. There are a greater proportion of novice players about, but 90% of this "Rep is terrible" is people looking for an excuse outside themselves for why they lost. Most of people's problems with losing in PvP would go away if they got better. edit: apologies if that comes across brusque, I've been at the single malt. There are a greater proportion of players making novice errors, or badly geared, or just aren't that good at the minute. In a way that's good, if it gets new people into PvP, but it means there are lots of examples of poor play to blame losses on. My own experience playing on both sides means I don't buy that there's massive faction imbalance against Rep, at least on TRE.

I concur. It made no sense to nerf Scrapper / Conc Ops burst, while leaving Van / PT alone. Yes, it buggers our ability to burst people, which is our whole raison d'etre. But no, I do not expect Bioware to do anything about it (either returning us to 30%, or reducing the OP specs to 10% to align them). Because past experience teaches us that Bioware break PvP and leave it like that for months until the next expansion. I don't like to be negative, but four years of SWTOR conbat mechanics and boneheaded dev choices about them leaves me no other realistic option.

This is really looking at once you're at the stat limit and deciding how to distribute your budget, so you're right that it doesn't provide hard rules for while you're still gearing up. Whittling down the best combination can wait until you've all the 208 PvP gear - though at that point I'd make my guess for the maximum damage choices as described above (and then, as you say, healing or survivability choices may affect this).

No, and that's a fair point. I take the 6% damage reduction too, reckon you have to in PvP. Back when I started thrashing it out PvP Scrapper didn't have a rolling hot, just a piddly defence screen, and anyone trying to run a hybrid heals/scrapper was simply plain doing it wrong so I stuck to worrying about deeps. Now I'm wondering how Alacrity will interact with the hot. Faster healing, sure - but does that mean you have to blow a GCD earlier to keep it up, affecting damage output? Hmm, maybe someone with more healing experience could help. I've always shunned green goo myself. Crit will improve the hot much as DPS I'd imagine. First: I always hate stat targets in SWTOR, particularly for crit chance. People want them because they're easy to understand, but that's simply not how the gane works (and that makes it more interesting to model, if I'm honest). Which stat is best to add to all depends on the rest of your stat levels, and crit chance's moving parts depend upon two separate unrelated numbers in Mastery and Crit. Nevertheless, stimmed but unbolstered with a couple of Alacrity enhancements, I'm at 37.41% crit chance and 66.32% crit bonus, 15.32% of those from 1096 Crit. However, it's likely I'll trade one of those enhancements back to Crit - that good old personal preference.

Thanks for the informed replies, I took a look at your post and will come back to it to maybe comment intelligently once I've had less wine. I won't criticise someone for saying I'm right. Or wrong for that matter, because it means I can be even righter afterwards. Have to admit I understand what you mean. I'm trying to get a not-immediately-obvious numerical idea across as a picture, because doing it in words is possibly even less accessible. For anyone else looking at the graphs, try this: think of a horizontal line across the graph - where each stat crosses this is the level at which they add an equal amount of DPS (i.e. they're balanced, min-maxed, however you wish to put it). They're inevitably only approximations. The act of adding to one stat from the base will immediately move the curves on others due to the interactions between stats. But the fact that (for the highstat version in particular) each tertiary stat starts from zero, and the very shallow DR curve on Mastery/Power once you have a chunky base to start from, means I feel it's still useful. As you say, the two earlier versions are mainly demonstrative (though midstat might be useful as a basis before doing mods/enhs). Yep. Hence why I included the Alac100 to show the theoretical maximum it can'tbe better than, and a guess at a middling "real" value. As I've said previously, people tend to undervalue Alacrity because it doesn't make big numbers flash up on their screen (until the scoreboard). But it's a pain to value in PvP, never mind the first-mover aspect. So I settled for trying to show people the range where it could lie. That's what I was getting once I downgraded Alacrity from 100%. Crit on the enhancements, augment Mastery (or Power if you have some unnatural fondness for that). Q&BFT *Sigh* You're probably right. But I've chased enough 4.0 healing sorcs to really wish I had that little bit more oomph to finish them before they can heal right back up again.

Heya. Anyone who's been lurking around this forum too long knows I like playing with numbers and seeing what they tell me in SWTOR. I'd packed it in, but relentless unfounded flattery from Snave (and that fresh new PvE content I hadn't done 12 times already) persuaded me to come back and see what was up for us in 4.0. I've seen a few valiant stabs at working out the stat order, but most tend to say "all crit" or maybe "all power". Neither is true, at least for us, and the claim's usually made without reference to how class abilities make this or that stat more valuable and often forgetting Mastery gets a 5% boost for any half-decent player who has the Sage/Sorc class buff. Anyway, I adapted my 3.0 spreadsheet that models our classes abilities and their use in actual PvP to the new Accuracy and Crit equations; Surge off Crit stat; Crit past 100% adding to Surge; class ability changes (poor little Underdog, why did they do it to you?) and other combat changes (100% base accuracy all around, etc.). First thing to dismiss is Accuracy. You only face other players in PvP, and Accuracy will not help your yellow attacks (circa 98% of our damage) for the few occasions they have some DCD up. If you have Accuracy on your gear, then it's an opportunity to swap it for something more useful. Next, Alacrity. This is a hard stat to model. The temptation is to ignore it, or assume you're hitting a target dummy that won't do anything to mess your smooth, efficient, Alacrity-friendly rotation up. Only you're not, you're facing other humans (mostly), who'll do their damnedest to mess it up. So for the charts below I've included two Accuracy values: Alac100 to show its maximum under combat-dummy conditions, and Alac50 that assumes PvP conditions (stuns, movement, etc) and reduces its value to 50% of the maximum. So Alac100 is the best maximal benefit Alacrity can reach, and Alac50 is a more realistic, but arbitrary, estimate of its actual value (you may feel it should be some other ratio between zero and Alac100). Second point on Alacrity is that this ignores the potentially crucial advantage it could give you of moving first (or rather, getting your second action in first). With its GCD reduction, having better Alacrity than your opponent means you could get that stun or second hit off before them, and that could win the fight - but it won't show up in these numbers or any dummy parse. So keep that in mind. One thing I hope people see from the charts is that Mastery, Power and Crit trade off against each other. The more Power and Mastery you get, the more valuable Crit (and the crit chance component of Mastery) become. So stacking lots of Power makes Crit (and Mastery) better. The last major point that will help people decide on stats is to realise it's not which stat gives the most benefit from stacking 1000 of it that is best, but the marginal benefit you get from adding a little of any stat, given your current base numbers. OK, I promised some nice charts. These are a set of marginal DPS benefit graphs, to show the benefit of adding more of a stat for any likely value. I've done three sets, x-axis along the bottom is adding that much of each stat in 100 point increments, y-axis is DPS gain in 1/1000 of 1% (i.e., 1000 means 100 more of the stat will boost your DPS by 1% at that level). zerostats The base has Tech Power set to 3012 (bolstered weapons, and weapon damage will affect Ranged abilities), while everything else is zero. This is to show what you see if you imagine you're starting from none of any stat. From the marginal graph, you can see that adding just 100 of Mastery or Power will boost your DPS by over 2%, with adding 100 Crit only becoming a sensible option once you're up to about 2400 of either Power or Mastery where any gives a boost of about 1.4%. Looking at this, you'd think Power or Mastery all the way. This would be wrong, because you will always get a load of both these stats on your gear - you don't start at zero. And having this base chunk of bonus damage will boost Crit as well as making these stats less useful. So; midstats: Base 3012 Tech Power, but Mastery = 3000 and Power = 2000. Maybe the minimum where you can start juggling stats from. Given this base, you can see Crit is a lot more viable - in fact it's the best stat until about 500, when you might think about Alacrity (if you believe PvP is like facing a combat dummy and you'll get 100% of the theoretical benefit), and up to about 800 before adding another 100 Mastery or Power matches it. highstats: About where you'll be when fully geared. Power and Mastery are virtually identical (hence the Mastery line being hidden behind Power). At this point, you'd have to go up to 1000 Crit before thinking about more Mastery or Power. You also need to take a decision on where you think Alacrity's value to you will lie - remember it can't be more than Alac100, so even on a best-case combat dummy there is no point from a DPS view of adding any Alacrity until your Crit is past about 500. But if you think Alac50 is a fair guess, you'd need to get Crit up to about 1600 before Adding Alacrity makes sense (from a pure DPS view, ignoring first-mover aspect). Values and graphs here. Note: You can sum the marginal values to a level in a stat to get the total DPS boost to that point: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-FiHf9mqJhSclNiMmJMejFhM2M/view?usp=sharing The Bottom Line Accuracy is near-worthless. Alacrity could compete in a PvE environment, but PvP's breaks in play mean you're left with the decision of whether the first-mover advantage is enough of an advantage. Going for lots will probably gimp you appreciably compared to what you'd get from another choice. Power and Mastery are near dead-equal. Mastery's lower bonus damage is made up for by its crit-chance. Getting lots of Power will put Mastery a hair ahead due to its crit-chance component. Crit is really good at low values, once you account for the base of bonus damage you'll have. However, given that your choice on enhancements is this, Accuracy or Alacrity, you'll have covered it past the point where it outscores Power/Mastery. Meaning: Augments: Mastery or Power. Mastery to crit more, Power to crit bigger. DPS effect between them is a wash. Enhancements: Crit, with the option of a little Alacrity if you feel it helps your reaction time. I hope all that helps my fellow PvP sneaks fight the good fight agains the forcemonkeys. Comments welcome. Oh, and if you want to ask for one single buff: ask the devs to put Underdog back to 30%. There was no reason to lower it, and loads of other classes have 30% surge buffs. It was puppy-kicking cruel to nerf it.

You're not very good at this thinking lark are you? Yes there is - it's us, because we don't have loads of AoE. There, that wasn't too hard was it? Neither does being a (primarily) single-target class mean you must be the best at single target damage in all circumstances when there are 24 different specs. You had trouble with some PvE mechanic. Never mind whether you should have been able to manage it without AoEing everything in a city block down - you let your OP KotFE companion do it for you, so it wasn't actually a problem. To repeat: if you want to AoE trash down, it makes a pile more sense to roll a class that does that instead of insisting the basis of Scrapper/Conc Ops be messed up and all classes play the same. Sounds like you should be playing that Sin.

Same as in 3.0. No hard cap on amount of Crit, more will always provide some benefit - the question is always whether a different stat would give you more. For critical chance: 10% Base 5% Scoundrel / Op class buff 1% companion buff from 10k affection (I still have this, assume can still earn it before starting KotFE) Then from stats: Up to 20% at infinite Mastery Up to 30% at infinite Critical You may not be able to reach infinite Critical or Mastery within your avaliable state budget. So: 10 + 5 + 1 +20 + 30 = 66% critical chance cap, before worrying about individual disciplines or abilities. Practically, you won't be able to get far over 40%, even if you thought that was a good idea. Personally, I don't believe going all Crit all the time is likely a good idea, even for Deception Sins - though I haven't looked at them in detail.

NO THEY DON'T. You're confusing what you want with need. Stuff goes down fine, there is no "need" at all. In this case "an AoE class" would be one of those classes you think has great AoE, obviously. Please stop whining, this is an inconsequential gap in Scoundrels armoury, and invites Bioware to mess the class up all over again when it's just about manageable (how I miss you old Underdog). Game's more fun when classes actually play differently, and big AoE is not a necessity, so I'm content without it.

It is a single-target melee class. It's not an AoE class. Your demand for further AoE abilities makes no sense. Get over it and reroll to something that is an AoE class, if AoEing trash is so important to you.

Full pvp set means you have 2018 expertise. If you aren't at 2018, something is wrong. It's worth finding out what because you're effectively undergeared until you can ferret it out and fix it. Doesn't cover the difference, but got crystals?