Sad when a melee strike is more effective than a ranged attack from a ranged dps class (Balanced Sage). I concur with the original poster in that we have no true burst (unless you want to go Lighting for a more burst feel but similar dps outcomes. I have to punch 5 buttons to unload my strikes and any one of them can be interrupted thus affecting my rotation and thus mucking up my crits which crit badly. I have been hit with 29K crit hits from Mercs. Some can come in over 30K and the best crit h it I can muster is 13K and that is if I line it up right. Our defensive cool downs are a joke as we are glass cannons. I can be globalled in seconds via chain stuns. Resolve is a joke too. I am a snack for a good sin as the Sage class is like designed to die to a Sin.

Here is a pro tip. Keep your 204 pvp bonus set, (better if you have the 208s) and just swap out the mods and enhancements to make the gear better while keeping the bonus the set grants. Do not remove ARMORING! The bonus is tied to having the correct armoring and if you remove it for a better piece of armoring, you lose the bonus. By doing this, it will tie you over until you get better gear. If you can make mods and enhancements or if guild members can, all the better for you.

If you are healing in war zones while wearing an old 204 pvp bonus set, you will have your *** handed to you so many times you will just quit. Gearing is EVERYTHING in PVP. Even if you wore the better 208 set, you will go down hard. You need a full set of 230s minimum and if the enemy team is in better gear (234s, 236s, 240s, 242s), you will have a hard time staying alive based on how much better the enemy is geared. As for those healing Sages who seem immortal in war zones, not only are they well geared and know how to play the class, but I would suspect they also have help from a tank.

I play a Balanced Sage and hitting 1M dps is easy in an 8 person arena (and possible in a 4 person arena if you don't get too focused.) I have hit 2M and 3M dps as well. But this all depends on how much the other team allows me to free cast.and if I am getting healed through the damage I am taking. Much of that dps will be from the 2 AOEs that Sages can cast. We are a support role for true DPS classes in that we can put pressure on the entire time and force the enemy healer to work harder. People often say Sorc DPS is fluff damage but what that really means is that players do not understand the role of a Sage/Sorc in war zones. War zones are about teamwork and using your different roles for the win. If I am paired with a Guardian, the Guardian will keep the target focused and I can dps, throw a bubble on the Guardian, cleanse him, even off heal him if needed and of course buff him.

I play a Balanced Sage and hitting 1M dps is easy in an 8 person arena (and possible in a 4 person arena if you don't get too focused.) I have hit 2M and 3M dps as well. But this all depends on how much the other team allows me to free cast.and if I am getting healed through the damage I am taking. Much of that dps will be from the 2 AOEs that Sages can cast. We are a support role for true DPS classes in that we can put pressure on the entire time and force the enemy healer to work harder. People often say Sorc DPS is fluff damage but what that really means is that players do not understand the role of a Sage/Sorc in war zones. War zones are about teamwork and using your different roles for the win. If I am paired with a Guardian, the Guardian will keep the target focused and I can dps, throw a bubble on the Guardian, cleanse him, even off heal him if needed and of course buff him.

As you will get focused as a healer, I would take utilities that help with your survival.

SNIP ... Ops are by far one of the most useless classes in 8 v 8 if both teams are competent. Unless you have more than one op their utility as dps is almost no existant in team play. Ops can hold a node as fine as any other. They have two 8 seconds stuns (if you break the first, you get a 2nd stun). If your DCDs are shot, then an Op can stun a person for 16 long seconds, long enough for help to arrive at the node. Given that, Ops can roll off damage, stealth out and although their DPS is dot spec and not bursty, an operative in the hands of a good pvp player is downright deadly for DPS (for me as a Sage at least). In Voidstar, a good Operative will get the doors down via stealth and speed. After the 1st door goes down, an Op will be at the bridge ASAP and get it down before the enemy arrives and then will speed away to the next door and get it down before the enemy has even passed over the bridge. In Huttball, by far, Operatives are the best class for ball running. Yes, a good PT tank or tank can do it but Operatives have all the necessary tools to run the ball effectively since most players will be death matching. In Alderaan, nodes are usually guarded by one person and since Ops are designed for 1 v 1, capturing a node is what the Op should be doing. The real question here is not the class itself but how the class is played by the person playing it. I have seen incredible operatives prevent node captures for what seems like forever due to their extreme high mobility, seemingly infinite interrupts and the ability to roll off damage is amazing. The mobility of an Operative is truly OP.

You missed my entire point. I can do 40 war zones in a day and more depending on how fast they pop. I expect to win some and lose some. But when I experience a 20 war zone losing streak and every team has three people with Expertise at or below 1800 (cannon fodder no less) so its really 5 on 8, I tear my hair out. I am not an elite player but I am not horrible either with my DPS almost always placing in the top 4 slots and I often come in 1st or send. It takes a team to win a game. We can carry a scrub or 2 and maybe a bad player but when half the team is exploding on contact in every war zone, I am at a loss.

When the weekend comes, I can spend upwards of eight or more hours doing PVP non-stop. I play Republic Side, full 208, augmented gear. This weekend set a new record low for how bad Pubs were in war zones. It seems there is a new influx of players new to PVP who are not geared. This has been hurting war zones. Two scrubs can barely be carried by a competent team, add a 3rd and its almost guaranteed we will be curb stomped. Even when we had good DPS and dominated the board with it, we still lost. I played dozens and dozens of war zones back to back and being able to win was truly looking for a pin in a haystack. It was like this weekend was Curb Stomp the Pub weekend or something and sure enough, that is what happened in too many war zones. Even pubs in full pvp gear, were under performing their Imp counterparts. Imperial snipers and Mercs easily hit 1M dps or more while Republic slingers and Commandos could barely break 400K. The disparity was shocking when the scoreboard came up. Is all that is left on the Pub side are the bench warmers?

As regards sap capping, stealth don't even need to walk back to the node/pylon, they can use phase walk to instantly return. Players who panic on the first 8 second stun will break it immediately only to be followed by a 2nd 8 second stun. The only time you break the stun is if they start to cap the node/pylon. A good stealth will drop the 1st 8 second stun to see if the player breaks it. If so, he drops the second and boom, you lose the pylon. Sages have two breakers and then we're vulnerable if we are guarding. I usually have someone replace me as guard when that happens until my breakers are off cool down.

The issue I have with dummy parsing is that it does not reflect PVP reality. In war zones, Sages get focused and you have to deal with the many stuns, grenade stuns, interrupts, time out for self healing and waiting to re-enter the war zone after you are killed. All of this will affect your DPS score when the wz is over. I can hit 2M dps if and only if, I am allowed to free cast and a healer is backing me up. But that rarely happens. Usually I am focused down like a boss or I am on a scrub pub team and my DPS will range from 300K to 1M depending on the situation. Scrub pub teams (toons having less than 1900 expertise) means I die often because the scrubs are cannon fodder and so my DPS will be low as I, too, will be dying too much.

I main a Balanced Sage on the Harbinger server. I have the full 208, augmented PVP set and I am a pure PVP player. High DPS numbers are achieved via your two AOEs: Force in Balance and Force Quake. Particularly in Voidstar, where most of the enemy will be grouped near a door, before dropping the two AOEs, pop Force Potency (60% crit bonus) and Mental Alacrity (prevents interrupts and push backs and improves channel times via a boost to Alacrity). Presuming your augmented gear is spec'd toward Crit/Power, this will give you big numbers. Mind you, you are putting pressure on the enemy and forcing enemy healers to work harder. On top of the AOE, also use your lighting and Vanguish for additional DPS. A Balanced Sage can put high pressure on a single target and can also effectively distribute damage to a team. Some will say this is fluff DPS but keep in mind the AOE is a team pressure spell and you are helping your teammates to kill the enemy via your contribution to the DPS on multiple targets. You can spam Force Quake (especially in Voidstar) to stop door bombing and caps from multiple enemies. However, this will eat into your Force Points and you will need to recharged them. You real dps will come from your rotation.

My post refers to unranked war zones. I don't play ranked since the que times are terrible. It used to be, until a recent patch, that earning a full pvp gear set took FOREVER! I remember because I did it. Perhaps I do not realize just how quickly a person can get a pvp gear set now. If it takes 2 weeks of dedicated playing, that is not enough time to build up your skill at PVP! There is massive miss-matching in war zones and if we don't have a healer and they do, it can be extremely rough. (Try to get a Pub team to focus down a Healer. The running joke is Pubs will not focus healers.) But when I see the enemy putting up numbers that are twice as much as the players on our side are doing I have to wonder what the members of the pub team are doing. As for respectable DPS, in the 8 person arenas, if you are doing DPS, (tanks are exceptions as they have a different role to play; ditto for healers), you should be able to do more than 500K total in DPS and yet I see Pubs coming in at 400K, 300K, 200K, for true DPS classes. The assumption here is that the entire round is played out. For Voidstar, a good team with stealth classes, can make it all the way to the finish in 3 mins or less forcing the other team to play against the clock in the 2nd round.

A bad day is when you are on a team with scrubs who decided to start their PVP career at level 65 and who don't use the not so great Bolster Buff (as bad as it is, it is better than the PVE gear you are wearing in war zones) or, those scrubs who are doing the war zone missions and are really PVE players. A really bad day is when you are on a team of folks who are in fully geared PVP armor (204 or 208 augmented) and after a crushing loss, you look at he scoreboard in horror as these folks could not DPS for their life and occupy the bottom half of the scoreboard (with me being in 1st or 2nd place for DPS on the team and usually by 10 miles.) The two common excuses are: no heals (heals are nice but you need to perform in their absence) and the other excuse is: you are a DOT spec'd Sage so of course your DPS will be high. What I can't understand is how these folks, who took the time and effort to earn the commendations to get the best PVP gear money can buy, under perform in war zones. I would hope that by the time you have your fully augmented 208 PVP gear set, you would have your rotation down and know how to react in war zones and yet I see quite a few players under performing on a routine basis . I am not talking about elite status playing. I am talking about respectable performance for the class being played.

I main a Sage on the Harbinger server, Republic side and I almost always guard a node or pylon because Pubs utterly refuse to guard and have 100 reasons why their class should not be guarding. It is rare to see a Shadow or Scoundrel guard a node and I agree, they excel at it. Worse still, when I am guarding and we have a Shadow or Scoundrel on our team, I think, they are now free to ninja the enemy's node. Sadly, they don't even try. Yet, when I go to the enemy's node, I am often met by a Sin or Op. The concept of Sap Capping is lost on most Republic players who main a Scoundrel or Shadow. Force the enemy to blow his cc breakers to get the node or, at least get them blown so that in the next round. if the same guy is guarding, he will have no breakers to counter your stuns and you can take the node. But no.