Oh about energy - Cull will use energy gradually which is huge buff to energy management. In addition more energy will be refunded on poison hits and poison hits will be more frequent. 2nd thing - 3 Cull rotation energy wise uses more energy than 2 Cull in form I proposed them. About 10 energy more every 54 seconds. 2 Lethal Shots (total 30 energy) vs. Corrosive Grenade and Corrosive dart (total 20 energy).

Lingering version of Corrosive Dart and Corrosive Grenade will only deal damage if target is damaged by Cull. I think there's misunderstanding here. What above statement means is when Cull is hits a target with lingering version both Corrosive Grenade and Corrosive Dart will tick per each Cull hit. That means Cull will deal weapon damage 3 times, and Corrosive Grenade and Corrosive Dart will tick 3 times each. It won't cause any more damage from CG and CD just those 3 ticks. When you use Cull on a target with Corrosive Dart and Corrosive Grenade ticking dot, you also do 3 times weapon Cull damage, 3 times CG and CD ticks + during duration of channel Corrosive Grenade and Corrosive Dart will tick once (damage ticks on both abilities happen every 3 seconds). Compared to live 3.0 lingering toxins are actually weaker. So your rotation is just allowing CD and CG fall of for 3 seconds meaning that compared to usual/old rotation (in which CD and CG are constantly ticking) you loose 1 tick of CD and CG each 27 seconds. Additionally in 54 second period you would activate CG 2 times, instead 3 times in old rotation. Because Corrosive Grenade deals damage on impact, it means 1 tick less. So in span of 54 seconds you would loose 3 CG ticks and 2 CD ticks. You would gain 2 GCD to use Lethal Shots (if energy allows). It's hard to calculate without 3.0 released which is better but my gut tells me it's pretty close. Anyway what I said above means that if 3 cull rotation will be a thing, you don't have to use CD and CG just before Cull, because on 3rd Cull lingering toxins won't do additional damage. My 3 Cull rotation would look like that (ignoring opener as well): Cull -> Takedown -> Corrosive Dart -> Weakening Blast -> Lethal Shot Cull -> Takedown -> Corrosive Grenade -> SoS -> Cull -> Takedown -> Lethal Shot -> Weakening Blast -> Lethal Shot Cull -> Takedown -> ... Or simplified: Cull -> Takedown -> Corrosive Dart/Corrosive Grenade/Lethal Shot -> (WB -> Lethal Shot) / Series of Shots -> ... Putting Corrosive Dart before Weakening Blast to get more ticks during WB buff. Other problem with this rotation is loosing at least 1 tick that could benefit from WB buff. There will be always one dot that will run out during the buff. 2 Cull (usual) rotation would look like that (ignoring opener): CD -> Takedown -> Weakening Blast -> CG -> Cull -> Takedown -> Lethal Shot -> Series of Shots -> Cull (you could argue about my placement of CD and CG but I think that way most ticks will happen during Weakening Blast) I suspect that 2-Cull will better 3-Cull rotation, due to more ticks happening during Weakening Blast buff, but we'll see when 3.0 hits live.

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Juggernaut Rage discipline will be one of disciplines that provides armor debuff to operation bosses. To do it you need to use Sundering Assault. Considering how much of a damage increase Sundering Assault is to other group members it is imperative for Rage to put an armor debuff asap. Problem is that doing so would break rotation. That is because Rage discipline uses Enrage as soon as possible to get shockwave stacks for Raging Burst and provide enough rage to be able to use hard hitters during Cascading Power buff. So to put Sundering Assault before Raging Burst we can do 2 things: 1) use both Sundering Assault and Enrage making us waste a lot of rage and forcing us to use lackluster rage builders to get Rage we need for 2nd Raging Burst cycle. [Force Charge -> Enrage + Sundering Assault {12 rage} -> Raging Burst -> ....] 2) use Force Crush and Sundering assault and leave Enrage for 2nd Raging Burst cycle, which delays burst significantly and puts Force Crush out of Cascading Power buff. [Force Charge -> Force Crush -> Sundering Assault -> Raging Burst -> ....] The other possibility would be if Smash would deal enough damage in 3.0 to be included in rotation. Then we could grab Crushing Fist utility. But as far as I can tell, it seemed from stream that in single target rotation Rage shouldn't be using Smash. This situation is not game breaking, but it's just unnecessary. Other juggernaut dps discipline does not suffer from similar problem, due to Sunder Armor on Saber Throw. Additionally it would change an optimal rotation for Rage depending on if there are other dps with armor debuff and would set apart single target dummy rotation, that would appear on leaderboards, from single target raid rotation. The best solution to this problem would be adding Raging Burst to Smash and Vengeful Slam in Crushing First utility. PS. I hope it makes sense.

Clipping an ability does not really take a lot of skill. Cull, Ravage, FL etc. clipping are just mundane chores. And with changes to alacrity, new challange will be to keep putting your dots during the effect of Polarity Shift. That will be real gap between good and average dps. With PS dot duration would be 13.5-14.4 (depending on alac on gear and from skills [assuming 5% max so 25% total]), so it will require clipping your dots at right times to get the most dot ticks possible in shortest time. PS.1 Imho it just makes Madness as boring as it was in terms of pve rotation. PS.2 Spread is not refresh. Affliction in lightning is refreshed, in madness DF spreads DoTs on targets that are not affected by them. You can see how they behave in stream if you look very closely.

Seeing all you people rage now, when at least month ago we saw changes on PTS and almost half a year ago the devs mentioned it is funny. I main my sniper in pve and I don't want old Orbital back, raiding is more fun and challenging now.

I just did 30 min parse, my crit on Takedown was 28.4% with 194 hits of it. My ranged crit is 28%, 29,5% with mainstat proc. So it all seems normal. Takedown has least hits and no crit talent, so it's most likely to undercrit in lethality rotation. http://www.torparse.com/a/585818 Sorry for stupid thread. I feel ashamed now

I was talking with a friend about lethality snipers and we were comparing parses and stuff like that. What we saw is that in each parse Takedown was critting much lower than expected. I did few parses today and I never broke 25% of crit, while my ranged crit is about 27%. I will try to make very long lethality parse to check it, but I also checked few leaderboards lethality parses and Takedown crits is below 20% on few of them. Around 25% should be ranged critical chance for full power build 78 sniper. Just checking if other people are experiencing that, or if I am missing something.

I think that change will be a welcome one. I think it would greatly improve overall spec balance for snipers/gunslingers, thus making our AC even more interesting and fun to play. I play currently as MM sniper on progression raids, because it's a super easy spec to play and has almost no drawbacks. There is no fight in this game that could force me to spec into engineering or lethality/hybrid. Marksmanship should be a burst dps spec, best for multitarget, short add swap (but not aoe) fights. Currently it's almost all around spec, cause 4-tick Orbital gives also awesome aoe and buffs sustained damage by a mile. Same goes for a hybrid. This shouldn't be the case. As a pure dps AC we have 3 different specs and I actually want to pick a spec depending on a fight. Currently there is no reason to switch specs cause marksmanship and hybrid are more than good enough for every fight. Engineering has better aoe than both of them, but you loose a great advantage of being ranged + you're aoe is often just overkill. It's mainly for people with ambitions of beating torparse dmg records or just for raids without other aoe capable ACs. Full lethality is not broken but it's harder to farm gear to play it, and it's damage is not as rewarding as other specs. It's a shame cause it's really well designed tree, and also fun to play. Nerfing Orbital so it won't be useful on ST would certainly reduce damage of Hybrid which could probably make full lethality a desired spec which is imo a fair thing to do, since BW has nerfed almost all other AC hybrids. MM would need to be bit buffed is orbital wouldn't be used. Either by straight upping damage of abilities or redesigning how Sniper Volley works (that high energy recovery wouldn't be needed anymore). I presume engineering will still use OS, they just need to add proper talents to keep OS damage high enough. For those who are worried that we won't be OP class anymore: Snipers don't need to dea; more damage than any melee class, cause range itself is a huge buff in current desing. We should compare our damage and defense to sorcs and mercs. Even if sorcs or mercs would do same damage as snipers on a dummy they still would suffer due to less utility. Those classes offer only combar rez and offheals (mainly bubble for sorc and kolto missile for merc). Sniper offers shield on fairly low cd which properly used contributes a lot more than offheals to raid survivablity. Also we have a cover which is not trivial (ever tried to used crushing darkness as lighting sorc while being damaged?). Not to mention being able to use 3 damaging spec depending which works best for a fight. I also think that Orbital nerf is also good for healer balance. As healing in this game is pretty well balanced, some RL might pick operatives over merc or sorcs, just for orbital damage, which in some fights is not trivial.

1. Snipe does less damage than CD if you take armor reduction into account. Orbital Strike is big chunk of our damage so you should use spec posted by person above me. 2. Usually I use CD while moving. 2nd reason to use it is as filler ability. Standard MM rotation last 11,1 seconds (SoS, FT, 2xSnipe, FT, Amb, FT) and cooldown of both SoS and Ambush lasts 12 seconds. So there is a place for one filler ability. Usually Shatter Shot, if noone provides a debuff. EP is next when it's off cooldown and I'm above 80% energy or so. CD is next in line. That's theory. In raids I find myself using CD very rarely when not moving. Those 0,9 seconds are usually eaten by movement, lag or EP.

First off all I'd like to say that I support idea of itemization being harder and more time consuming than pre-2.0. However there are some issues for non-hardcore raiding guilds. By non-hardcore guilds I mainly mean those who raid 8-man raids, and aim to progress through whole content, but at slower pace than typical hardcore guilds. My guild is perfect example of that. We are bunch of players not focused on clearing content as soon as possible and we are largely limited by not having enough time to play, having loose approach in choosing players we take on raids, etc. We also try to raid same content twice a week, 2nd raids for alts and ppl that are more weekend players, etc. Currently we had one TFB HM raid with success on 4 out of 5 bosses (adds on TFB 2nd phase are a pain). We getting there 2nd time today, and we have huge chances of clearing it. As we don't have enough time during the week to raid SM raids and additionally we would like to focus on HM raids, we will have problems in getting Arkanian tokens. And because we are not able to aquire them doing HM only will slow down our itemization process (only Arkanian Tokens have set-bonuses armorings, low endurance enhancements with needed stats, hilts and barrels, etc.) Even with bit organized token distribution in guild, we will face a situation when people that do have Arkanian 4-set bonus need still to roll for arkanian tokens to get best itemized 69 enhancements and mods (especially as juggernaut and powetech tanks). Some may say that you can clear all content in roughly itemized gear with 66 enhancements and without set-bonuses. However itemization and gearing overall is a significant part of PvE fun factor. Becoming more and more effective in damage dealing, healing and increasing survivability is something most of us gain "pleasure" from. So as it stands by doing HM raids only thing we gain (except few Underworld tokens and badly itemized Verpine pieces) is some Mass Manipulators which we could use to craft 69 stuff. However there is not enough of them, more about that you can discuss in this thread. Well my suggestion how to alter the gearing process for raiders like us, is to make HM raids drop Arkanian Tokens, in similar fashion it was with KP/EV HM. For one underworld token dropped, you also get arkanian token that would drop in other raid on SM difficulty. That would make itemization process bit quicker for 69 quality gear, while keeping BiS hard to acquire. Other thing would be allowing to buy some Arkanian tokens for Ultimate Comms. I like above solution better than this one, but that might work too. Sorry for any mistakes I might have made.

Not true. You would waste possibility for rampage proc, only if you used overhead slash or plasma brand 9 seconds after you procced rampage and still had ravage off cd. Read talent trees before giving advise.

It surely is. Basically high numbers parsed by Okuy are result of using Shatter, Force Scream and Impale in 9 second period. Shatter becomes static on beginning of every 9 sec period and Force Scream and Impale move around, because of usage of Ravage on every CD and force generating. On parse you can see that he only skipped one Force Scream and one Impale throughout whole parse - that basically means that he delayed usage of this abilities no more than 1 GCD after they were off cd every 18 seconds. Too use Impale, Shatter and Force Scream without Battle Cry you need to generate 10 rage. And you have just 3 gcd to generate that ammount if Ravage is not off cd, If you use Ravage it gets even more complicated. So basically for this rotation we need as much rage as possible, and Battle Cry is necessity. It reduces rage needed to 6, which is quite easy to get. I still don't get how he manges to do what he does and there must be a way to make rage generation easier. But hopefully we can all get there by just working on dummy. And for crit required, just ask Okuy if he's full DG, if yes just use min damage done by Force Scream, and with assumption that he has 78% crit multiplier, just count how much power he has. With that information you can basically get his crit rating.

I was thinking about one thing when I was tanking on my assassin. Does my self-healing account to threat I produce? And if yes is it multiplied by stance? I usually parse about 250 HPS so if it was transferred to threat produced it would mean 125 TPS more if not multiplied by stance and 250 HPS otherwise. Anyone can clarify it?

Well first off all, thx Maull. I was quite bored with my Vengeance spec since I made my rotation quite automatic and I was sitting at comfy 1600. Now just looking at your parse and your rotation I started to change it a bit to make it similar to urs, but it's complete madness. It's more challenging and today I spent some hours just and the best I could do was this parse http://www.torparse.com/a/92836 - 1763 when I stopped. It's far from urs and hitting right buttons at right times still needs some practice, but at least you gave me things to do. If you have any advice about timing things (like when to force jump etc) I would be grateful. My gear is half DG/Campaign with 34% crit, 78,5 surge and 800 power.