Bah! You complain about your class gear not being cool enough in one way or another. I have a more pressing concern. My name gear is both ugly and crappy to say the least. I have my complete name set, Nerf Herder, and it has no mod slots, no set bonuses and the stats are a tad low. They don't even look cool. I have only found one "green" quality piece and you almost never find one at an auction. One would think that the second hand or hand me down style of this set would lend it self to a good turn around on the auction house but alas, it does not. If I didn't know better I would take it as a personal insult. :-) I am actually looking forward to the class sets at lvl 50, it has been a hassle to level up with my name set. Nerf Herder (My last name being my Legacy of course.) If you want to be able to say you have been Nerfed to death, just give me a tell. I also provide stealth Nerfing if that is your thing. :-) Fear the Nerf!

---- Found the answer ----- The shared Health is only for PvP, so it has no function in an PvE situation. -------------------------------------

*bump*

Aledgedly CT is not good enough for the PvE DPS rotation. Sure it is a so and so ability over all since it is a good root, got some extra self healing through parasitism, good range, etc. But for pure PvE damage it is not good enough to be included in the standard rotation, and in most situations where it could be of use there are still other abilities that get priority. I would go so far as to say it is in the wrong tree. A 31-point ability in the PvE DPS tree should be a great DPS abilitiy, and not a good PvP abitlity and a mediocre DPS ability. If you decide to go x/x/30, you might as well include CT because 1 point in the other trees won't do much difference and most of us will do some PvP now and then. But this post is about PvE DPS and to some extent PvE survivability since it kind of indirectly increses DPS. Common sense also tells me that an ability that roots, increases healing, got extreme range, insta cast, etc will not also be the most efficient dps wise. The same goes for Electrocute that do some damage, but it is mostly used for it's stun. Force Lightning looks like a pure DPS ability, but it is not, you have skill points in the Darkness tree that makes it uninterruptable and gives it self healing to boot. So that skill will probably not be DPS efficient either. And it isn't according to the theorycraft testing. I also used shock alot because it is nice burst damage and I don't have to run up to the target and I got so many procs and damage increses from it. But this is actually an illusion. Normally we are still better off just spamming trash, discharge and Maul. This is for the same reason that we don't use Force Lightning. It just isn't good enough compared to our rotation. Each time we spend a GCD on something else beside the basic rotation we really need to be sure it is worth it. And the DPS calculators has shown that it is not worth it to include Shock in the rotation (and that includes all the secondary effects and damage buffs to melee). And if it is not included in the rotation we shouldn't spend our skill points on talents that mainly increses Shock. If we had a surplus of Force and never risked running out and our CDs were longer on other abilities we would run out of things to do in our rotation and then we would include an extra DoT like CT or a Force dump like Shock, since they are both better than a standard attack. But this is not the case. We still have plenty to do and Force is still a limited resource. Being mobile is a good argument for using a build like 2/8/31 or something like that. When we lower Madness to 16 we do loose some interesting DPS talents that really help our DoTs work, so we really need to find something that makes up for that. Extra force is one such thing and there are a few other usefull skill in the Deception tree aswell, but none of them compares to +30% Force regen. I would probably consider this spec even if all I got from the Darkness tree was the Force Regen for 18 points. I suspect that it is that good. Now you still get some good skills lower down in the Darkness tree that are usually included in a 7/3/31 spec or derivations of that. So we actually pay about 10 point extra for +30 regen. I can't find the equal to that in the Deception tree. You need to go higher in the Deception tree to get a pay-off like that. But if I could I would take +15% movement speed over lower CD on Force speed any day, but there isn't much else in the Darkness tree that interest me, so the point has to go some where. :-) I know this is a different spec based on some outlandish counter intuitive premises, but maybe we can brain storm and come up with something that could be the base for actual testing in a raid environment and in theory crafting. Where should the points go? The only set points as far as I am concerned are Blood of Sith (Darkness 18 points), Death Field and most likely Raze (Madness 16 points) and Duplicity (Deception 3 points) and Lightning Charge. IF you base a spec on that and removes Shock skills, then most of the rest just falls into place, but I am sure there are better variations than my suggestion.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interesting I just posted a similar build (18/7/16, how does it work out for you leveling wise? How great is the difference if you go with Lightning Charge and discharge every MOB at the start of the fight? I see you don't have that skill in your Madness tree but have you tried it? Do you use Shock as part of your rotation or not?

Drop the Hybrid... That would be my gut feeling too, of course, but since there has been alot of theory crafting on this subject and they have shown that Creeping Terror should not be part of the the top DPS rotations. And neither should Shock according to some well informed posts lately. Deception isn't even close to being a top PvE DPS spec so I won't even go there. One might discuss putting the extra points from Madness into Deception for the extra Force that can be found there, but it's hard to beat +30% regen. This means that going full Madness according to the usual specs like 7/3/31 is very much up for debate. The cookie cutter build would of course claim that 1 point for a great PvP ability even if it is situational in PvE is a no brainer, but I don't agree. It is more than 1 point and either it is part of the rotation or it is not. Adding 10 more abilities that are slightly worse than those we already have wouldn't change a thing and neither does CT for PvE, if I have understood the number crunchers correctly. Sure most of that debate has been if it is worth it to put that extra point somewhere else and go x/x/30 for PvE DPS. but even that has been put to the test and there are a few post with +30 Force regen skill in the spec but not because it is a Hybrid wanna be, but because it actually strenghtens the Madness spec. My suggestions is just one of many possibilities and it might be that I am going too far, but still I see it as a Madness DPS spec, pure and simple. It just happens to have more actual points in Darkness. Those extra points gives some survivability, some utility and Force Regen that will be used with the normal Madness rotation abilities mainly and Lightning Charge. IF Creeping Terror is not up to snuff and if Shock is sub par for its cost? Then we have a lot of skill points to buy other stuff for, just saying. And I would also like to add, "Constructive" to the title. Telling me something is bad, might be helpful, but why it is bad will be even more helpful. :-)

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#200MIMso0cZG0bZfMbkr0z.1 Hi, First post on this forum and I have been trying to read up a little on the current PvE DPS discussion and I am currently leveling a Madness Assassin. First things first I do believe in the people claiming that Creeping Terror is not up to snuff when it comes to PvE. It is great in PvP of course but very situational in PvE. Usually you can do other more efficient things when range is a problem, like closing in with Force Speed, Death Field, Drive-by Lightning Charge a random MOB, etc. Next big issue is the Shock debate. I choose to believe it has some uses, but even with all the skill points placed, including Energize it still isn't great enough according to the numbers. It might be used for tanking, burst in PvP and against trash to save a little running time, but all in all there are better things still in the rotation that cost less and even though this build uses a lot of melee over all I'll let it go. It will not be easy, I have been a Shock addict so far. During leveling the stun effect is kind of nice too. So what more can we let go? Heals are great of course, but so is more endurance, and damage mitigation is even better. I also let go of the extra force from the top tiers in madness, since I am aiming for Blood of Sith in the Darkness tree. I am not the first to do this, so I am quite confident that it's not all bad DPS wise. Extra Force over all is never a bad idea. So what else is there? I have Avoidance for the improvement to Jolt, since it is such a great defensive ability. I have the Maul/trash combo so my extra Force regen won't go to waste. I have most of the survival skills, since a dead DPS tend to under perform. I have some tanking skills, Dark Ward and Insulation that can be used in a pinch to stay alive after a taunt while the tank get's back on his feet or to off-tank a little. I got a good twice improved Force Speed to get back into the fight. And Raze of course so I don't have to hard cast Crushing Darkness. My rotation will be something like: Assassinate Maul (with Exploit Weakness on CD) Crush of Darkness (with Raze on CD) Field of Death on CD Discharge (on all FD targets) Trash Maul (without EW) Hopefully this means I will have FD dot and Discharge on multipple targets, CoD on main target and then Assassinate/Maul/Trash on main target with almost nothing else in the rotation. Not too many different abilities to mess up things, Discharge early when everything is on CD and the rotation fails. There will be only two icons on my self and one on the opponents to keep an eye on. Am I missing something obvious, or is this a decent dps spec with lot's of Force regen and some survivability even in Lightning Charge stance? My hope is that decent DPS + survivability = more DPS in real situations. I have no tanking experience so I will not try to tank anything serious with this build, just a taunt+defense from time to time if the real tank have trouble health wise or off tank a DPS target. Nerf Herder (The name is Nerf and the Legacy is Herder.)