Well, I for one am glad he's gone, if for no other reason than that he was so openly antagonistic against theorycrafters, and so hubristically contemptuous of the possibility of good ideas or valid issues arising from the community rather than his dev team.

Have to keep in mind that that level 46 ability was for both Sorcs and Assassins. Whatever the ability is, it would need to work for both. That said, both an offensive CD or a defensive CD would make sense for both ACs.

Still unlikely I'll resub, but more likely than it was before I heard the news...

Unlikely, but more possible now than it used to be.

Zoeller no longer works for BW. /glee No seriously, doing a happy dance right now.

The reason we're not answering that question is that there isn't an answer. PvP can't be theorycrafted like PvE can. Expertise stops being the best stat for improving damage fairly early in the curve, but it also augments your defensive capabilities. You'll need to determine for yourself what your optimal balance is between raw damage output and reduction of incoming damage. That said, I do recommend you obtain at least 1100 or so Expertise before considering subbing in PvE items.

Well, keep in mind that this is unbuffed stats. Buffing is going to increase your crit chance by around 6-7%, as well as your base damage by a fair chunk. I would wager the trade-off was worth it, yes.

Story doesn't affect stats, and datacrons wouldn't be that much of an effect. The lack of Willpower augments might be part of the issue, that'll give you a solid 126 more Willpower. Otherwise, I'm honestly not sure how your WP is so low. It should be MUCH higher in full WH gear (assuming you're including non-set-items in the "full WH" qualification. If you've got fresh 50 green/blue accessories on, I'm less surprised by that total).

Removing the pieces that deal with cooldown usage (which are all honestly roughly the same complexity), Madness has the following action list: affliction,if=!ticking death_field,if=force>80 crushing_darkness,if=buff.wrath.react creeping_terror,if=!ticking force_lightning Lightning has: affliction,if=!ticking thundering_blast,if=dot.affliction.remains>cast_time force_lightning,if=buff.lightning_barrage.react chain_lightning,if=buff.lightning_storm.react crushing_darkness sequence,name=pewpew:force_lightning:lightning_strike Are you really going to try to maintain that the former, which uses 5 abilities and has only a single reaction conditional (that is up 99.99% of the time by the time its off cooldown), is more complex than the latter, which has 6 abilities, 2 reaction conditionals (both of which must be used within 10 seconds, but are lower priority than other spells), and a woven filler rotation? I think I'm going to have to agree with Aurojiin here. Troll confirmed. Then again, any time I see the phrase "I don't care what your program says", I take it as a given that I'm dealing with someone who is either incompetent, trolling, or so astoundingly hubristic that I just have to shake my head in awe a bit.

I just can't stand running a browser created by a company that A) has made its fortune via advertising (and thus fights against browser modules designed to block them), and B) has a long-standing track record of recording and storing WAY WAY too much data on its customers, including numerous incidents that border very strongly on criminal privacy violations.

295 Crit Rating gives 10.7654% crit. You get 5% baseline, and at least 1% from 1/3 Penetrating Darkness. To have 26.59% crit chance thereafter, you would need no more than 1463 Willpower, which is incredibly low for full WH. I suspect you're looking at the Melee tab. I would also strongly recommend swapping those augments for Willpower. As I've been saying for weeks, focus on the rating, not the percentage. It's largely irrelevant what your actually crit chance is, as long as your ratings are where they should be.

Ew....Internet Exploror... Stick to Firefox anyway, IE is like driving around in an armored car made of swish cheese.

Hindsight 20/20, but I'm less shocked by it than I originally way. A solid 21% of your damage as Lightning doesn't benefit at all from Crit Rating. This leaves only about 35% of your damage scaling with crit rating AND with the boosted crit multiplier, compared to the ~45% for Hybrid (plus the crit scaling for Barrage) and the ~55% for Madness. This reduction in Crit focus, and the vastly increased crit multiplier on your highest damage abilities due to skills, means that Surge's benefit drops a bit as well. Add to that that Alacrity's benefit increases significantly due to the much higher percentage of damage from casted effects, and the results aren't as surprising. What is surprising is that despite that, Lightning actually gets the best mileage out of Willpower, both in absolute scale (0.4141 DPS per point, compared to 0.4001 for Madness and 0.3989 for Hybrid), and compared to Power (it's nearly 15% better than Power for Lightning!). Considering the primary benefit of Willpower over Power is the crit chance, I wonder if there's something funky with Lightning's Damage Bonus contribution to damage done. I'll need to investigate this.

Whoops, just realized that the bottom still references "Sithwarrior.com", which was converted to mmo-mechanics.com months ago. I updated the link, but forgot to update the paragraph above it.

Er...completely backwards, in every respect. Telekinetics is significantly harder to play well in end-game PvE, due to increased rotational complexity, increased necessary awareness, and the increased necessary fight knowledge (to offset the increased movement vulnerability). However, a skilled TK will always beat a skilled Balance player, unless the fight significantly favors Balance. SimC is showing TK to be about 4% ahead of Balance on a sustained single-target Patchwerk fight.

Ya, I generally just use gender pronouns based on the avatar in question until told otherwise. I myself tend to use names that lean towards female-sounding (Daellia, for example), and I usually play female avatars in game as well (pretty *** > hairy ***), so I'm rather used to the confusion myself too. Honestly, English just needs a gender-neutral pronoun (that doesn't make English majors sputter in indignation, like a singular "they" does). English doesn't inherently gender its nouns, why the hell do we gender our pronouns?

Good god, that rumor is proving itself as insidious as the Accuracy = Armor Penetration rumor that I literally spent 3 months battling out here...

Note that the "250-350 crit rating" advice was an extrapolation based on previously optimized Rakata gear (which was only done for the then-dominant 0/13/28 Hybrid spec). I didn't expect there to be as large a difference as above in the value of crit rating among the specs. The above are the stat ratios to shoot for in at the campaign gear level for each respective spec. They supersede any previous advice I've given (I'm not perfect, after all, and I do make educated guesses from time to time, when definitive results are still being formulated).

According to SimC, Lightning is actually the only spec with a force-negative DPS cycle, at least on a Patchwerk fight (and I'll be honest, that surprises me too).

For those that have this thread bookmarked, Aurojiin has taken over maintenance of it in the new sticky. Also, she's posted a Sage version here (which still needs sticky requests, at the time of this posting). Note that I'll no longer be monitoring this thread. Please direct any further stat commentary/questions to Aurojiin's new thread(s), or PM/Post them on MMO-mechanics.com/swtor/forums.

We don't really make BIS lists for healers like we do DPS. To quote Aurojiin: Basically, as a healer you have a lot more flex in your gear than a DPSer does, a lot more options for tailoring your gear to your preferred healing style, rather than simply focusing on objective maximum output. This does, unfortunately, inhibit the production of BIS lists.

Parsing your combat log, honestly. MOX parser will do it live while you play (instead of after-the-fact via upload), so it can be used as a solid 3rd-party damage meter.

Several classes have either skills or abilities that make them immune to CC of varying types under certain circumstances. For example, Juggernauts can skill to become immune to CC and knockbacks for 4 seconds after using Force Charge, and Assassins can make themselves immune to all Force and Tech effects for a short duration on a moderate cooldown with Force Cloak (or is it Shroud? Always get those two mixed up). Snipers are innately immune to Interrupts while in cover, and can use a cooldown to become immune to knockbacks as well (and possible more). As for the augments, yes, Resolve augments are the only thing any Sorc should really be considering using.

I greatly appreciate the kind words, Ortherion-sama. Glad I've had a positive effect on your gaming. =)

Once these profiles have been included in the upcoming SimC release, there should be Light Movement and Helter-Skelter sims available for your perusal at Simulationcraft.org.