I left playstyle up to the players. However, breaking 1900 DPS for Balance on a sustained duration fight that matches the sim conditions (single target, no movement, full raid buffs and a single armor debuff) should be impossible. If you've got a parse to prove otherwise, I'd love to see it. Click on the AMR links, they have the skill trees included.

Excellent, sticky requested as well. By the way, there are still a lot of incidences of "Sorcerer" in there.

Actually, on that note, feel free to transfer this to the Sage forum, too. I didn't really start actively monitoring that forum section until about 2 weeks ago, so I never really bothered to transfer it over there.

If you're looking at the "DPS" section on the Melee or Ranged page, yes, it's going to be quite low, as Sorcs are unique among the ACs in that their primary stat gives no benefit to Melee or Ranged damage (every other AC gets benefit to either Melee or Ranged damage from their primary stat, including Assassins). This is because we use only Force attacks, and therefore have no need of enhanced Melee abilities (it's also to make sure the Sorcs version of a Blapper, a melee caster, didn't become dominant). That field actually has no effect at all on your actual DPS output, because none of our abilities scale with weapon damage.

And sticky request made =) Thanks for taking over the reins, Aurojiin.

The really fun part is, we were scanning the game files every update build for changes, and making insane amounts of test runs on the PTS to double-check the math. We knew within about 8 hours of him saying that that he was completely full of fecal matter. We demonstrated, mathematically, what the issues were. Zoeller, unfortunately, just seems to have this mental hook that NOTHING the community can come up with could possibly be valuable, because how could they, knowing only "some" of the mechanics, possibly come up with something useful that his team, who knew the engine inside an out (at least in theory...), didn't come up with first? So ya, Zoeller was a massive portion of the reason I left SWTOR. I'm not going to support a company that keeps a guy like that on their development staff period, much less as the head of game development.

First off, you're buffings two competing filler abilities. Either you're going to be using FL as your filler, in which case many of the LS-buffing skills are wasted, or you're going to be using LS as your filler, in which case most of the FL-buffing skills are wasted. Even the common idea of using LS on Wrath procs isn't worthwhile, as simply continuing to spam FL is actually higher DPS. Even the chance of a CL proc can't offset that damage loss. SimC pegs that build at 12-18% worse than Lightning, depending on the ability priority list you use.

Accuracy has literally nothing to do with how hard it is for others to hit you. Agents, Warriors, and BHs (and their republic counterparts) have 5% base defense, while Inquisitors (and Consulars) have 10%. Unless you have Defense Rating on your gear, or have additional defense from a buff or skill, that's all you get. Thus against the former 3, 5% accuracy will hit any that aren't tank-geared or speced, and 10% will hit Inqs (except tank-spec Assassins). I generally regard stacking more than 5% accuracy in PvP as rather foolhardy, as you'll almost always get more out of other stats, on average. The only exception is if you're gearing specifically to kill tanks in PvP, in which case you'll want more. That said, keep in mind that Accuracy only affects Melee and Ranged attacks, not Force or Tech. Sorcs have literally no use for Accuracy at all (unless you're beating stuff up with your saber, in which case you've got other issues). Concealment Operatives similarly have little use for it, as the majority of their damage is Tech. Other ACs and specs have varying ratios of Melee/Ranged to Force/Tech.

I suspect they already have, to be frank. It's a bit late to tempt back the Sorcs, 1.2 has been out for a couple months now. Beyond that, it wasn't just the Wrath-CL nerf that pissed me off. I actually prefer Lightning spec anyway. I just couldn't stand the open hostility to us theorycrafters, and the knee-jerk reactions, the lack of testing, the massive layered changes without considering repercussions, and the ridiculous hedging that the devs do in every commentary. They consider players to be money machines, nothing more. I've found that I prefer smaller companies like CCP and En Masse to massive bloated publishing-house-backed bureaucracies. The smaller companies actually listen, for one.

That ^^

That ^^

I cancelled but sub about 2 weeks after 1.2, wasn't happy with the direction they were taking the game, the design decisions they were making, and the openly hostile attitude they were taking towards theorycrafting. Also, TERA came out at that point, and after playing the open beta and headstart on it, I don't think I could actually even tolerate going back to a standard target-and-click style RPG. However, I had just applied a 2-month gamecard about 2 weeks prior, plus the free month that BW gave us, so it's taken this long for my sub to actually expire. Worry not, Aurojiin shows great promise in taking over my role out here (already has started to, in fact), and will also be taking over my Stats sticky. I know she (he?) frequents MMO-Mechanics.com regularly, where I'll still be doing SWTOR work, so that information will still be disseminated. If you have any super pressing concerned that you just really want my input on, feel free to PM me out on that site, my ID out there is Kaedis.

Just double-checked, both in-game and in the game files. Neither Expertise nor Accuracy have changed. Expertise is still very much on a DR. I checked every data point between 0 and 800 expertise, equipping Recruit gear piece-by-piece. Every single one lined up perfectly with the current DR curve listed. Accuracy shows no changes in the game files, and adding 3 Accuracy augments to my gear matched perfectly with the current curve at each point. Unless you have some further evidence that these stats have changed, I'm going to call foul.

Accuracy's equations haven't changed at all, and I have them notated in that thread as not useful to Sorcs anyway. If there's been another change to accuracy, I've heard nothing of it. And where did you see that Expertise is linear?

Oh, I realize it was out of context, it was mainly a barb being thrown back at him than anything else (note that I did not, in fact, put it in my sig). Also note that the overwhelming majority of this thread has been about PvE performance, and whether CD is optimally used in a PvE Lightning rotation. PvP has a lot more variables, and I tend to steer clear of discussions in that direction when possible.

It changes pretty radically over the gearing curve. Initially, Power and Crit are relatively even in value, and Surge is significantly superior to Alacrity. As you start gearing up, Power starts exceeding crit in value and Surge and Alacrity start equalizing. You can see the optimal stat distributions for each of the 3 DPS specs at the Campaign gear level in this thread.

Er, pretty much that ^^ I've not really looked into ideal purchase order efficiency, to be honest. After all, I haven't logged into SWTOR in over a month, I'm just continuing to help out around here until my sub runs out.

I believe the SimC profile parsers considers that legal, actually. I'm pretty sure carriage returns are automatically ignored, it looks for the key symbols rather than simply new lines. I may be wrong, however. Either way, the SimC lists were really just included as a reference guide to DPS rotation. These lists should be included by default in the next SimC release.

Resolve is superior for healing output (and DPS output, for that matter).

Baseline stats on the sets are rather whacked. You'll need to fiddle with the mods and enhancements to get them optimal, unfortunately. At that level, grabbing the Columi agent (Enforcer set) gloves and helm is solid for enhancements, as they are a solid source of grade 24 Power/Surge enhancements.

PvP is a lot tougher to theorycraft, unfortunately. The 2/2 Masters/Mystic bonus is definitely superior for survivability, but the Assassin bonus definitely has the burst advantage. For Madness, I would tend to lean towards the 2/2 Masters/Mystic bonus, as burst isn't really your forte to start with, but it's really a playstyle decision more than anything.

I was getting a Power-normalized weight for crit of around 1.003, so that shouldn't be the case (might be statistical variance, depending on the amount of iterations you used, though). That said, these are with the latest 1.3 release build.

It actually does. You gain more HPS, point for point, from Willpower than you do Power, period. Doesn't matter what your crit chance is (since that's mostly based on your crit rating, not your Willpower). More crit = more healing, and the crit contribution from Willpower doesn't DR on the same scales as crit rating, so while your crit rating may be worth crap for you because you have tons of it, Willpower will still be just as potent. To boil this down to the absolute simplest I can possibly boil it down to, Power provides just a smidgen more Bonus Damage and Bonus Healing than Willpower (3.6% more Damage and 9.4% more healing), but the additional crit chance outweighs this, regardless of what your current crit chance is. It is always better. Check the math posts I linked above if you want the nitty-gritty of it.

DR for crit from Crit Rating is SEPARATE from the DR for crit from Willpower, or did you miss that part? How much crit rating you have has almost ZERO effect on the benefit of Willpower. It's really simple. There's no sudden cap on crit chance, where getting more is "useless". Every bit improves your damage, and the rate at which you get it from Willpower, added to the very nearly identical Damage Bonus from it compared to Power, means it's flat superior to Power for DPS. It has absolutely nothing to do with if you "need to get your crit up" (which is based on the concept that you should keep your crit chance near X%, which is a ridiculous oversimplification of the DR system to the point of horrendous inaccuracy). Willpower is simply better for DPS, period. If you'd like direct math on the subject, Post #120 through Post #126, in particular Post #122 and my response to it in Post #123.

If you disagree, do you have any justification for it? Power grants ~3.6% more Bonus Damage per point, but the crit from Willpower (which is on a separate DR curve from Crit Rating) outweighs that benefit by a long shot. I can link you directly to the SimC reports showing precisely this effect, if you'd like. Mathematically, Willpower is just flat superior, period.