Just to mention, Experimental explosives does NOT affect Corrosive Grenade. Explosive Engineering affects it, however.

Experimental Explosives does NOT affect Corrosive grenade. Explosive Engineering affects it, however.

You're not such a noob if you have the guts to call his build bad - which it is. You can hardly go wrong with pure MM but he has managed somehow ... 2/3 Lethality so you can take 3/3 Explosive Engineering ... I guess it's not as obvious as it should be if you did the math, whether you should take 5% dmg on 2 skills, one with 30sec and the other with 45sec cd or instead increase your total crit by 2%, without any DR in the mix. Also I disagree that 15sec off OS cd is worth over Sniper Volley, even considering SV is currently bugged and doesn't refresh at when it reaches 3 stacks (will be fixed soon hopefully). And the most obvious ... energy tanks over belt, yes! Increasing your energy by 4 (you can drop from 110 to 66 with ET) is still worth something, belt isn't.

You can safely drop all your accuracy. Alacrity too if you have any, that goes without saying. You need crit, but don't overdo it, ~40-41% buffed is fine, that makes your Cull 45% crit and DoTs 53% crit - should give you the energy regen from Lethal Purpose you need. Don't stack too much surge as the DR will kick you in the face - they already are. The way enhancements are designed does not allow you to drop surge in favour of power - enhancements have crit/surge or power/surge (or worse stats). But if you could get more power instead of surge do it. Once you get the ~40crit you should start favouring power over crit as well.

I just want to mention again that some ops groups (mine for example) don't have any armor debuffs on the boss. Furthermore, you are allowed to drop accuracy completely as Lethality/Engineering, whereas you need to stack accuracy for MM in order to avoid misses - this is a huge amount of stat budget down the drain. Offlinesys, when did you test your MM last? Before or after biochem nerf (i'm assuming you're biochem). I experienced a significant DPS decrease since the nerf (~50-60 average DPS, ~100 in top-of-the-curve DPS) so I just want to make sure you're testing both specs on equal footing. Even if you are, consider your stats - if you optimize them to fit Lethality you can squeeze even more dps from the spec. Are you certain about this? 12.5% chance for double tick even with 0/2 points? I haven't noticed any double ticks before I went Lethality (I was using Corrosive dart as MM in some situations, for example Malgus stun phase).

Took a look at the spreadsheet, they shouldn't have posted it locked, I cba to input all my stats item by item just to see how their formulas would trigger - they should've allowed for direct stat input and not item input only. Trusting my own calculations however, I am confident that even with Imperial Assassin's crit dmg bonus the conclusions are not correct (I play Lethality/Engineering so I haven't accounted for this talent), especially the "until 350 surge rating surge>power". Furthermore, when it comes to crit, surge and power, you cannot simply state "these are the caps, abide by them". It doesn't work like this. The value of each stat changes depending on the amount of the other stats you have. This is apparent in my model - I've designed it so when you input your character's stats it sets a "basis level" and then shows you the total net dps increase (in %) from adding any amount of either power, surge or crit. To simplify, power, for example, would provide a much greater benefit to a player with little Bonus Dmg. The more bonus dmg a player gets the more crit catches up with power in value and at some point crit starts being worth more. At the same time the more crit a player gets the more surge becomes valuable, but then again, surge diminishes fast so you shouldn't go past a certain amount (that amount DEPENDS on the CURRENT crit of the character in question and isn't some magical number). I hope the interconnection of the stats has been made apparent. You cannot state any "softcaps", they simply don't exist for power crit and surge.

I was considering taking experimental explosives but I read a thread by some guy who tested EE and it doesn't affect corrosive grenade. So basically in PvE EE would only affect Orbital and thats not a big enough dps increase imo, compared to the 6% from Steady Shots. Either way the difference would be very small and the spec/rotation is essentially the same.

That's cuz I've created it myself from scratch and it's not uploaded on the internetz!

You're kidding right? Playing without Gearhead is like playing without a sniper rifle.

Offlinesys, My current stats, self buffed and stimmed (with nerfed rakata stim): damage (pri) : 896-987 488.2 bonus damage, 1878 cunning, 394 power 91.05 accuracy (will elaborate on this below) 37.48% crit 92.51% critical multiplier First of all, I'm curious as to how you have 2007 cunning self-buffed after the stim nerf. I assume you have 2xRakata Medic implants, rakata ear and full rakata set/weapons, but it seems a bit much even with these. To reciprocate, my current gear is: Exceptional rakata bracers & belt, rakata boots, rakata enforcer's implant. Rest is columi, ear and 2nd implant are mastercrafts with power/crit. Matrix cube and power relic. You're probably wondering both how and why I have so little accuracy, the reason is that accuracy is worth 0 atm, until they change raid bosses and I haven't seen any talk about it yet. Raid bosses are lvl50 and have no extra defenses so your special attack will always hit them and you barely use rifle shot so a few misses of that are irrelevant. As to the "how" - I have changed the enhancements on all my gear to take accuracy away. I have chosen to put power/surge enhancements, that should explain my high surge, yes I am aware of the diminishing returns, but I'd rather have a highly diminishing stat than a worthless stat. I have tested for 1-2h post-nerf and my dps has truly dropped, I think 2/3 are attributable to the adrenal and 1/3 to the stim nerf. Atm the highest I can pull is ~1710 and my average is ~1670. I'm glad that the average hasn't suffered so much, it's mainly the adrenal and the burst 15sec at the beginning that have suffered. Obviously my highest dps before nerf was mainly due to luckier crits during those 15secs which skewed the curve up. Looking at your stats, you should have the potential to do more dmg than me, you have the same bonus dmg and almost 5% more crit, which is huge since your energy regen depends on that. I am actually regretting dropping my crit so low due to re-modding my gear, I used to have ~41%, but my excel spreadsheet still says that power is slightly more powerful even at this stat level. If you just switched to this build you'll need to practice more to learn the optimal rotation, then I expect to see you doing higher dps. Finally I feel like mentioning that there is 1 other build that I am yet to test, probably will in the next couple of days. It's basically a mirror of my current one, instead of 2/16/23 you go 23/16/2. I'm wondering whether to go 2/3 Lethality and 2/2 Recoil Control or 3/3 Lethality and 1/2 RC. Tibbel, Valid points, you cannot account for many things on a dummy boss, but you couldn't do that on WoW target dummies either and they were still useful. The goal of testing your dps in such a way is not to know your precise dps in a raid fight, you simply can't until we get recount or something equivalent. The goal is to test specs and rotations under similar conditions and discover, through empirical data, which specs, rotations and stats translate into higher dps. I also should mention that in my 8man ops group we hardly ever have an armor reduction debuff on the target, our tank is assassin and we don't have any dps juggernauts. I'm not sure if powertech have this debuff, but we have no powertech either. So in my particular scenario the test is even more valid . Edit: NotRonin, I had not considered the idea of MM/Lethality and now I can't imagine why I didn't, as I originally started experimenting with hybrid builds in order to maximize the energy regen. I'm gonna try putting some numbers behind this one, as well as MM/Engineering, in the next couple of days. Edit2: After some initial brainstorming the MM/Lethality build doesn't seem that strong, the gain from 16pts in MM is hardly worth the loss of interrogation probe and the other goodies in engineering. Furthermore Lethality and Engineering's talents have more synergy - Explosive engineering affects Corrosive Grenade (probably a bug), Lethal Dose should be affecting Interrogation probe (haven't tested, but the wording implies it). It's still worth testing tho, the added regen from Sniper's Nest might outweigh all the drawbacks. Edit3: You're missing some facts here - Cull crits from the poison component also restore energy. In fact Cull is your biggest energy restore. Corrosive Dart with Corrosive microbes ticks ~25times per minute Corrosive Grenade ticks 20 times per minute Lets assume 6 Culls per minute due to slightly imperfect rotation or energy management Assume 41% player crit, thats 53% on DoTs with Lethal Dose and 45% on Cull (45*0.53*2)+(6*3*2*2*0.45)+300=381 But wait! We haven't added Adrenaline probe yet ... + 0.67*50=33.5 But wait again ... what about Cluster bombs? 2*3*5=30 more Total ~445 energy per minute as Lethality/Engineering. Now if we took Sniper's Nest instead of Imperial Methodology we'd have ~475, which is perhaps the very maximum you can get with any spec.

Accuracy isn't worth anything atm. Do some research and you'll find out. As for the rest, I have an excel spreadsheet which measures the impact of crit, surge and power ... in a nutshell, unless you have very little crit or surge, power would always beat crit and surge both. Also consider for talent mechanics that rely on crit, like Lethal Purpose.

Reading this thread I can finally justify the need for recount - it seems people who skipped high-school math are incapable of even playing a game properly. Lets establish a few things before we continue: Reading talents and thinking "hey these talents are great" does not mean picking these talents would yield good raid dps. Doing some basic math and calculating DPE or figuring out the proper priority order of abilities does not mean you do good dps in raids. Doing a rotation where your energy does not drop below 60 does not mean you're doing the correct rotation. Roughly half of all talents in the 3 sniper trees are not worth taking for PvE. Unfortunately some must be taken to reach other talents. My current raid build: 2/16/23 PvE content cleared: ALL DPS on a single target raid boss (self buffed): ~1730 average, best attempts over 1800* The only way to know you are doing good dps is to test your dps. How to do it? Nar Shaddaa raid boss, stopwatch, dps for exactly 2mins using a sustainable rotation (you should be above 60 energy once the 2mins are up), stop dps and wait for any dots to run out, boss' max hp - current hp /120 = your dps I shall not even go to the trouble of answering anyone who's gonna quote me and say "but Nar Shaddaa boss is lvl32, this is not a valid target dummy because of how crit, hit and etc work ..." - you clearly don't understand how the game works, please scutter off. Once you've performed the test and found out how bad your current build** is, here's some more info on my build for those who want to replicate: Once again, 2/16/23 with Steady Shots, Imperial Methology, Efficient Engineering, Razor Rounds. The rest should be obvious, if it isn't you need to go back to your basics. You should have at least 35% crit self-buffed and stimmed, anything less and this build may not work as well for you, as your energy regen would depend on how much you crit. At the start of the fight: Explosive probe, Corrosive Dart, Interrogation Probe, Corrosive Grenade, Adrenal+Relic+Target Acquired, Cull, Series of Shots, Orbital Strike, Adrenaline Probe, Cull During the fight: Keep DoTs up, Explosive Probe***, Cull, Series of Shots. Use orbital strike either when AP is ready or when you need to dump energy cuz you messed in your rotation - if you don't mess you won't have energy to spare for Orbital unless AP is rdy. * This is pre-1.1.2 patch and rakata stim and adrenal nerfs, I need more data to calculate the exact dps loss post-patch. ** It may not be the build, it's probably a mix between your build, rotation and stat choice. *** The only time when you should not use Explosive Probe when it's ready is if you will be unable to trigger the cluster bombs. This could be the case if you use EP right before DoTs expire, then you need to refresh DoTs and by the time you have spare GCD to use Rifle Shot or energy for Cull/SoS cluster bombs may expire.

Rakata recipes DO NOT drop in hard mode nor nightmare operations. My guild has cleared Nightmare mode and the best recipes that drop are 136, columi. The loot in Hard and Nightmare mode is currently the same.

Could you be more specific - are all European servers located in the same country/city? If not, is there a way to determine which server is hosted where?

No, it certainly doesn't mean that.

If you want something, you'll be willing to wait on queue for it. That applies for all things in life. If something is worth wanting, others will want it too. If everyone could get it it wouldn't be so great anymore. There are queues on full servers because new people want to play on full servers. I'd rather wait 2 hours on queue every day for the duration of SWTOR than play on an empty server. If you lack my devotion, please reroll on quit the game.

I haven't gotten in yet, expect to today, I will make sure to roll on this awesome server. Thanks for the info.

Thanks for the tip, now I know where to make my char when I get in - Tomb of Freedon Nadd!

Which 3 instances? 3xBT or BT, HS and Athiss? I can tell you for a fact that in the former 2 there is plenty of non-inquisitor loot. Haven't done Athiss yet.

Challenge ACCEPTED!

I'd suggest making an in-game ticket. I doubt anyone on the forums can help you, unless it's a common bug (I don't think so). If the char is below lvl6, I'd remake it.

Quit whining, learn how to use proxies and beat the system. Or make friends from countries outside the Red Zone, send them money, they send you the code. Or order through a retailer and have the physical copy delivered to you by courier. Seriously, there are so many ways to beat the system if you can't think of one on your own you don't deserve the game.