Commander Draxxus Soupdatazz - Lightning Sorcerer - Chosen - 2963 Bestia Soupdatazz - Lightning Sorcerer - Chosen - 3191

Guild is <Audacious> POT5

Soupdatazz - Lightning Sorc Bestia - 2917.5 Also, damn you paowee, beat me by 31 dps on Draxxus, posting it anyways . Draxxus - 2687.9 One of these days i'll upgrade my 72 MH

Its 8 man HM, but Grob'thok fight, 3615 parse sorc dps. Grob'thok, Who Feeds the Forge Soupdatazz - Sorcerer - Lightning - Audacious - 3615 http://www.torparse.com/a/518893/15/0/Overview Edit: formatting Edit2: I guess the Gate Commander Draxxus is also of note Gate Commander Draxxus Soupdatazz - Sorcerer - Lightning - Audacious - 2570 http://www.torparse.com/a/518893/10/0/Overview

Nibbon's heal theory crafting always included it as a guide at the bottom, and Nibbon's has been consistently the most popular in the official forums as far as I know. His quote at the bottom is: Excited to see what you put up on the site for sentinel/operative guides, outside of watchmen, those two classes lack much as far as guides go.

It's hard to say, but basically the FR isn't quite as good as it may appear although it still has a slight edge on the SA. The problem is that once you're in full 78s, the crit gained by WP actually starts hitting DR based on Orderken's healing calculations. In his calculations, the FR only showed up as 0.68% better than the SA relic, so its safe to just go with a SA for now although these numbers probably vary by spec. I'm personally holding off for now, because knowing bioware's track record, the relics may not be what they appear and I have an unassembled DF relic sitting in my inventory until then. For PVP relics, I think that they were unchanged though so the SA is probably the safest bet if you plan on running with an obroan. The DF relics are getting buffed though so there will be a larger gap between obroan and DF. If you want to see Orderken's work yourself, you can access it here. EDIT: Btw Paowee, if you ever want to add healing guides to your site, his would be an excellent reference for sorc heals. It must be a ton of work getting them formatted though and I'm sure you have your hands full already .

I think one really nice improvement to sorcs would be part of what AdrianDmitruk said to change some moves to not being on the GCD. If there was a place in the lightning and madness tree which changed your Unnatural Preservation, Static Barrier and/or cleanse to be instant, it would really help out sorcs in both PVE and PVP. The main problems with Lightning Pushback - currently lightning sorcs in PVE receive massive pushback dps loss from AoE damage, or in a fight where one of the bosses/adds has no aggro table and is attacking the player. Survivability - Currenty sorcs also have the worst survivability. Yes they can H2F, and LoS but as the community has shown, they do not see this as a solution for a class that already takes the most damage in game due to light armor. Madness has Defensive specs and self heals from DoTs but still isn't perfect. Must use a GCD to survive - outside of the above problems, the abilities we do have require a GCD providing a DPS loss, and while force barrier is extremely powerful, it also results in a DPS loss (as I believe it should) Possible Solution - Eliminating the GCD on self use heals Activating static barrier may increase your DPS when fighting anomolies in TFB, or during lightning adds on Draxus, but its effectiveness is greatly reduced by the fact that you have to waste a GCD to use it. The only time it is desirable to use is when you will be experiencing more than 1.5s total knockback from adds. Snipers have a higher reduced knockback from cover, and we have almost no instants. If sorcs are intended to be healing themselves during operations and in PVP, it is again a DpS loss for them to heal themselves with their self heal. Make us want to do that. If I had Static Barrier and Unnatural Preservation as abilities not on the GCD while DPSing it wouldn't break corruption, but make other trees have decent survivability. I also included our cleanse because it seems like it would fit in with the others, and benefit PVP players. We already have a cleanse, and it brings raid utility that snipers don't quite have since we can cleanse others giving us and mercs one advantage. However, it appears most DoTs in the new operations come out at specific times, and agents can cleanse every other one with evasion (while not using a GCD) and assassins can do the same with force shroud. It would again greatly boost our viability in Raids. Make the lack of GCD ONLY take effect while used on ourselves. If we could bubble every player in the raid on no GCD, it would allow us to provide way too much raid utility. While this may make our survivability too high, even just making Static Barrier avoid the GCD with a tallent in the top of lightning would be a welcomed change. Pushback is probably the most frustrating part of DPSing in operations and is extremely difficult to judge when it is useful to use your static barrier and when it will end up not gaining anything from wasting a GCD. Even worse is when you miss a Thundering blast from fitting in before affliction went away.

4 Piece set bonus would be a good idea, but some PVEers would still run it. If it was a reduced health cost and reduced it to 5 or 10% it would not be worth it to PVE players. While the gear disparity is huge, you still see MM snipers often running the 2-piece PVP set bonus to boost their orbital strike because the stat changes don't outweigh the extra tick of damage.

I like the video. I might change up my rotation a little bit to use Affliction to get 2x Thundering blast's. Lately with how many new ops have multiple targets I'll sometimes double dot and find myself getting more Force Lightning procs unless something had to be burnt down immediately. I'll direct a guildy who's been having trouble with the spec to the video though, it seems like the spec is becoming rather popular which is nice.

If you look at the DPS Leaderboards, Handcuff is top Sorc DPS submitted at 3200 and his gear is almost entirely 78's with some 75's mixed in. It is hard to believe that anyone can be much higher than that yet, although people will be in full 78's in a few weeks. I'm pretty sure Handcuff has been on leaderboards before and is an excellent player making the 3400 dps by sjerv very impressive but also lucky. What made Sjerv's parse so absurdly high though was the 50% crit chance on chain lightning as paowee stated. Thats incredible luck being 21% higher than his average which is skewed already by thundering blast being an auto crit. I don't think anyone is going to top that sorc parse very soon but we'll see, I highly doubt he was wearing enough crit to have a 32% crit chance, especially with Thundering blast hitting for over 10k with an adrenal up. Handcuff's Gear

I personally can't replicate that, but I can stick with a consistent 2670-2700 in lightning and maybe a little lower in madness against a dummy. I run full 72s except for an implant and an armoring with 75 bracers. It definitely takes practice, and I have been playing my sorc since launch (usually as heals until recently) and once you get it, you can definitely put up some decent numbers (obviously Nibbon is better than I am). When attempting NiM DG (for an actual application), I typically sit at ~2600-2700 DpS, sometimes dropping down to 2500 but some of this could come from Chain lightning hitting ciphas/kelsara during the heirad phase, and the aoe from adds in the 3rd phase.

In the OP, Nibbon has a few parses posted. He states he was able to hit ~2800 dps with a madness sorc against a dummy with 72's. Lightning he has a parse posted for 2978 but it wasn't his. (note: the parses are no longer in the torparse database). If you go to a DPS leaderboard, while its true that snipers and marauders can parse higher, sorcs can still keep up very well, and are still an excellent DpS class. If you want to compare the parses of others, Torparse Statistics will give you a very good idea of how they compare. Sage/Sorc doesn't dominate the top parses, but they can compete.

While I agree with your assessment of healing, and how to use your abilities, it actually reinforces the 0 crit policy. If you look at Orderken's model, he shows what your HPCT is for every ability and you can easily switch up gear to see how it varies. Force Armor can be calculated, and it can not crit, so it takes a huge hit every point of crit you invest into, while salvation I believe actually benefits the most from crit. At Kell Dragon level, if you put 2 pieces of crit (based on what I've played with in his model) then the healing done by salvation and resurgance slightly go up, while force armor and HT go down by a good amount. After 2 pieces however, EVERY ability you use will begin to depreciate in its average heals. Essentially what I'm getting at is that at current gear tiers, the crit chance can boost your salvation by a small amount, and even resurgance (maybe 5 healing on each) but your force armor will drop by 40-50 healing and your innervate/HT will drop by ~15 healing. I personally would rather have innervate/HT heal for more since I focus that on someone very hurt, while the salvation primarily goes to overheals regardless. I feel its a very fair model that both Nibbon and Orderken present although I typically prefer to look at the changes to each individual heal than the "rotation" that they may present. While a slightly higher crit chance can be nice, the 3% higher crit won't save you in an operation, and if every heal you put out is hitting for less on average then you are slightly gimping yourself. In a NiM raid there is constant damage you are trying to heal, so its not a "rely on this one heal on the tank to keep them up" situation where you need a desperate crit. Throughout the duration of a fight, say you use force armor 30 times, you are effectively reducing healing there directly by ~1200 healing throughout a fight which doesn't sound like much, but that's what min/maxing is. Having ~200 crit is by no means a bad thing, but I still do believe strongly that having full power is better, and while it is minor changes, it still will boost your overall healing in the end. Without math, it is pretty clear that force armor will benefit more from power, and HT as well (power boosts every tick, so it adds bonus healing 4x). Not to mention, while operatives and mercs get a 15% boost to surge for healing abilities, sorcs get a 6% boost to bonus healing. They benefit the least from crit out of the various healers, and they benefit the most from power. Even operatives and mercs with this high surge chance still tend to sit at ~300 crit, and thats on a class that benefits way more than us from it. Crit will become BiS in 2.4 most likely since the heals are getting bigger and it is a percentage increase, but the gear level isn't quite there yet. In 63s people would sit at high crit since it was the top level of vanilla gear, and just like dps it became more and more useful, but we aren't at the top tier yet, and probably have at least 3-4 tiers left to go. TL;DR If you like crit, it won't affect you much but you will be healing on average for slightly less. It won't be a game changer for getting through content, and it will get you fully geared much faster. I would recommend sitting ~200 or less from what I've seen on how it affects each individual ability.

They definitely benefit the most from power out of the three, or rather benefit the least from critical. Commando/Merc and Scoundrel/Operative both get boosts to surge, while the Sorc/Sage gets a boost to bonus healing. Not to mention innervate states "Heals for X 4 times" and each point of power increases each of those 4 ticks by the amount that other classes usually only get counted once, Static Barrier can't crit, and resurgance counts I believe ~2.5x as much as normal. Crit is definitely still "viable" in any end game content, but won't be the difference maker in force management, and whether RNG favors crit is up to RNG. The power will come out on top I think in FPs or 8 man Ops it will last much longer. Crit boosts revivification/overload much more than innervate/resurgance from my understanding, and it will take a lot before crit will help your ability to single target heal. Even in later gear tiers I foresee it coming down to "How many people are you hitting with your AOE" and "How much of that is actual heals as opposed to overheals". Since your single target healing will favor power for much much longer, I foresee power just being the way to go. Even in NMM your AOE will more often than not result in over heals on some of the DPS it hits.

When you read Nibbons post, he points out that some crit isn't going to hurt you much, 200 is minimal, 400 starts to add up. You are right that you can heal all current content with 30% crit, and it is definitely not going to necessarily be a "bad" build. However, it will always reduce your HPS by some amount. Crit IS a good stat, both Nibbon and Orderken openly admit that, but it is not as good as power, and it only becomes worse and worse the more you have. This is just entirely wrong, and you don't seem to understand how crit works. Power is a static upgrade at all times, crit is a percentage upgrade at all times. You have it completely backwards in this post, because at higher levels crit WILL become useful. You see DPS are starting to want 1 crit mod for BiS at Kell Dragon, and as the gear goes up it will become more and more useful. At 69s it is definite that you should have 0 crit though. As Nibbon states in his OP, 400 crit in 72s lowers effective HPS by .92% and in 75s by .76%. While gearing up it is ok to get some crit, I personally will take some crit alacrity or crit/surge enhancements as long as it keeps my crit rating below 100-150. They are way easier to get, and if you get a Kell Dragon, it will be an upgrade over a power 69 enhancement I would like to believe. It is not BiS, but with the difficulty of getting the 72 power enhancements it can be worthwhile. I would never recommend getting a crit mod since you can easily get them from the vendors for ultimate comms, but again, if you have a low amount it can be viable. One of the big things that sets sorcs apart from other healers, is you look at Merc, they get +15% surge to ALL heals. That makes crit way more useful, Ops get +15% surge to some of their most used heals. But the big thing that convinced me is if you read the tooltips on their spells. As far as I know, Merc/Commando have every heal say "Heals for X" or "Heals for X over Y", and its the same for ops except for Kolto infusion that states "Heals for X and then Z over Y". Sorcs on the other hand rely heavily on Innervate and Resurgance. These spells will ALWAYS benefit more from power than crit. So while your crit may benefit your Overload Heal or Revivification, the theory crafting that Orderken and Nibbon present shows that it does not make up to how it hurts Innervate and Resurgance. If you look at Innervate, it states "Heals for X, and then Heals for X 3 more times". This is a huge difference from "Heals for X over Y" because 1 point of power will boost "Heals for X over Y" 1 time, but it boosts innervate FOUR times. Resurgance is "Heals for X and then Z over Y seconds", and the time gets boosted in your spec, making it count 2-3 times as much as a basic heal. While again, crit may become useful in 78s, at all current tier levels you will be hurting innervate too much to justify the boost to your single heals. In addition, as Orderken stated earlier in the thread, the 5% crit is NOT going to change anything on getting force surge buffs. It is RNG, and 55% vs 50% is so minimal that while some fights it may help out some, most fights it will not help you at all. You will get unlucky sometimes with force surge, and if you find yourself getting unlucky you may prefer to spec into Reverse corruptions to lower the time of the debuff. Most fights have some down time, although rarely in NiM, and Force management should not be an issue that comes down to 55% vs 50%. If you are having issues with force management at 50%, you will also at 55%. One of my favorite little tips for that is I will never cast Revivification with 3 stacks unless I really need to. You lose HPS at 3 stacks over 1-2 because 1 stack is a 1.3s base, 2 stacks is .67s base cast, and 3 stacks is instant which jumps back up to 1.5s GCD. TLDR; I believe that while gearing it is acceptable to get some crit enhancements because of how much easier they can be to get, but you will always lose HPS from having the crit instead of power and you should eventually switch them out. Mods should be always power because they aren't difficult to get since they can be obtained easily with coms. 5% crit will not change force management, and many sorc healers can easily maintain their force with no crit on their build.

Just referring to the fact that the operative matrix cube has more mainstat and less crit than sorc matrix cube. Makes sense. I love pvping, but have never gotten anything but pugged rated teams unfortunately since my guild is almost entirely PvE. I still think I may try getting a set of parttisan stalker gear and worst case I can just send it to my assassin I'm leveling. The idea intrigues me since you are required to use heals such as dark heal and dark infusion much more than innervate, so if timed correctly, you could time some nice burst with 3 charges. The downside obviously is that resurgance consumes it. The cooldown reduction seems almost more useful, because I definitely find it to be one of my best survivability cooldowns. That being said, I see the bonus to the static barrier being a reduced lockout useful, but 1.5 seconds on a 20s lockout just doesn't seem like a huge difference (although every second can count in pvp). Part of what has made me reluctant to PvP too much since 2.0 is I haven't been sure how to gear, and have been using a 2 piece PVE which gets bolstered terribly. I've become so used to the innervate CD reduction however that I've been hesitant to lose it. It has been a while since I've visited your guide ordeken, but if I remember correctly you had posted two builds, one with the 2 set PvE and one with the 4 piece PvP last time I checked. As you stated, PvP is more skill than gear based, but gear nonetheless can help. Both of your guides are great, even if they have slight differences, and I always recommend any new sorc healers to look at both.

Obviously this post is much more PVE based than PVP, and I see you did do a PVP analysis where you would want 5 surge and 5 alacrity enhancements. I understand your backing on using more alacrity than surge to avoid interrupts, but was actually thinking it might be worthwhile to go the other way. I've seen some of the RWZ healers rocking the stalker set bonus (2 piece 5m extra range on force slow) (4 piece 15s CD reduction on Recklessness + an extra charge). And with that it might be worthwhile going a little more surge. In a regular warzone with no tanks, the alacrity will likely be much more useful, but if you're using recklessness a lot with good tanks keeping people off of you, the surge could be more useful to drop some strong self heals/dark infusions. The set bonus strikes me as more useful overall than reduce lockout on static barrier by 1.5s and consumption sucking up a little less health. For a long time I was using the 2 piece PVE, but the loss to expertise doesn't seem to be made up for very well. Just wanted to see your thoughts on this, I know you don't PVP too much, and I don't either but there seems to be extremely limited resources into it. I'd consider Operatives in a better place than sorcs right now in PVP for sure, but a duo of the two seems to be ideal. It also seems that the matrix cube is definitely better than an ephermeal mending relic even if it does have more crit on it than the operative's cube.

You do realize that two of the three classes you listed have specs that rely on executes in their rotation right? Carnage marauders and lethality snipers can use the executes at ANY amount of health when they get a class proc. Removing the executes would require a complete rework on their DpS in those specs. Not to mention, most classes have something related. Pyro powertechs do extra damage when at low health, lethality Dots do extra damage at low health, madness dots do extra damage at low health. Not all classes have them, but its a crucial mechanic in the game and removing it would not "fix" anything, but just create a multitude of balance issues. The execute abilities are not what makes marauders/snipers/shadows OP, its a balance of defensive cooldowns, cc abilities, and sustained single target DPS that work extremely well in PVP settings, and for Snipers/Marauders in PVE as well.

I would recommend checking out this thread by Orderken. Its more PVE based, but has excellent theory crafting, and explains many of its choices very well.

Not sure if its related, but with patch 1.7.2 my options in the preferences to "deselect target upon clicking terrain" was disabled for some reason and I had to re enable it. Have you checked your preferences to ensure that it wasn't just unchecked for w/e reason?

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=5987227#edit5987227 Looks like its getting changed. Happy to know that I can in fact still get it on the character I wanted. Kind of sucks for those that didn't save any components, but they did announce it would be a recurring event so one could infer that the gray helix components would buy new things in the future.

I don't think you read it then... The point is you can't get it unless you had saved components from before. I'm fine with the grind, but the character I want it on can't obtain it unless it was legacy bound before equipping it. As I stated in my post you can get a maximum of 46 helixes not 48. Its more of a disappointment that I didn't do any of the grind on that character while my main had 10 left over but I don't necessarily want the speeder on my main.

I also am a little disappointed by this. The character I want it on I did not participate in the first appearance of the event because she's an operative and I didn't like the blaster rifle. Yet now I feel gimped because I will be 2 short of getting enough components. Its disappointing that I'm going to be so close, but fall short regardless.

It would have been unobtainable the first time regardless because it requires legend standing which takes i think 4-5 weeks of max reputation. You had to have maxed out your reputation the first two weeks and had leftovers to use in between the event popping up to be able to get it either this week or next.

Yeah, I understand that, just a little disappointed i never ran the heroic or fought xeno on that character because its so close to being achievable