I ran a test on it on the ship dummy and found it to do ~2300 DPS (no chance to resist, though i had 216 accuracy). It runs into force issues very quickly because of disturbance. That could change if you are smart about alternating tk throw and disturbance. TK wave also seems like its not worth it because it is not buffed by some talents further up in the TK tree. For a reference, I was getting ~2600-2700 on the same dummy with TK and ~2500-2600 with balance and hybrid. Again, this is a lvl 50 dummy with a lower armor value and a no resists, meaning that these numbers are inflated. EDIT: TK Log - ~2400, with armor debuff, screwed up a little bit near the end, otherwise it was holding up at about 2500. Stats: 1230 Bonus Damage, 106.15% accuracy, 22.58% crit chance, ~69 crit multiplier, 5% Alacrity. Server Lag: 23 ms. No augments. TK Log 2 ~2400 Armor Debuff for beginning and end. Stats: 1218.7 Bonus Damage, 108.06 Accuracy, 23.30% crit, 66.92% crit mult, 4.06% Alacrity. TK Log 3 - taking miss out of the equation ~2600. This test was with 0% added accuracy. Stats were: 1217.5 bonus damage, 23.37% crit, 69.49% Multiplier, 7.76% Alacrity. Done on the lvl 50 ship operations dummy. The purpose of this test was to test how the spec will scale with alacrity. I don't know if this distrubution is attainable, but if it is, the spec can easily push 2700. I think it will scale alot better once we can get more alacrity in the mix. One concern with the spec: The initial burst with cooldowns is really really high. I am afraid sages can rip aggro off of tanks even if they give the tanks a head start.

I think I could add a few things to the theorycraft. 1) Disturbance should be a net positive for procs and might also be worthwhile in the beginning of the fight when popping cooldowns. A disturbance hit (~2200) is greater than 2 TK throw hits and a crit (~3500) is greater than 2 TK throw crits (same cast time). This also builds up your alacrity stacks instantly and has a higher chance to proc your free dot (extra damage). I think disturbance might also have a role as a filler when weaken mind has 1.5 seconds left in order to maximize DoT uptime, replacing project's role. 2) TK buffs are huge. Force management was never an issue. The rotation is slightly easier because of not needing to limit when to use tk wave. Stat priorities might value a little more crit and surge because alacrity hits such a quick cap. Accuracy cap is probably most important here. TK can put out an obscene amount of damage in a short amount of time now, which i can see as more of a PVP focused buff rather than PVE. 3) While force management issues in balance were not really fixed, the spec seems to play better. Surge should still be a priority because of the amount of damage that relys on DoTs. 15 ticks instead of also helps in the long run. Overall there are some really nice buffs and I wouldn't be surprised to see sages topping meters. Sages scale the best with alacrity because we were the only ones that really benefited from the stat before. Obviously the accuracy cap is annoying but it will probably end up balancing out. I will get a parse of TK up later. -Onomoro

The real secret to beating kephess - ops group full of type 4 males.

Might have implied this earlier, but <Stoic> will be participating.

Thanks for doing this. Because NiM shares a timer with HM, what about guilds that decide to kill the first two bosses in HM and then switch it to NiM for Vorgath and get a kill. Does that kill count for Vorgath's points? I personally think a guild should not be allowed to claim a kill on a later boss if they have not killed the boss before - especially when the tanks are much harder than Vorgath. NiM Progression should be linear, "hey we skipped to Vorgath and killed him!!!! We are 1337!!!!!!1111!!" , but Let me know what you think, Derkae. Also - if you need help keeping the spreadsheet up to date, PM me - I would be happy to help.

While I appreciate the credit for 16(we'll get it soon), we did KTU on 8 man. I don't know how you want to handle this because we did all of the other bosses on 16 man, but I just wanted to clarify that we have NOT killed Kephess on 16 man. Monday is not our usual night - we just got 8 people together to learn the mechanics so we could translate that into 16 man success.

<Stoic> from The Shadowlands is currently 2/5 in 16m HM TfB The Writhing Horror : 01:40:00 GMT (21:37:00 EST) - Technically 9/27 2012 http://files.enjin.com.s3.amazonaws.com/196331/module_gallery/original/823480.jpg The Dread Council: 03:48:00 GMT (23:48:00 EST) - 9/27 2012 http://files.enjin.com.s3.amazonaws.com/196331/module_gallery/original/823482.jpg Thanks for doing this thread.

We did the first 2 bosses on 8m in the PTS. We were severely handicapped in those attempts as we were stuck with rakata. We did not get any special treatment. No transfers, no augments (we had to put together resources to augment our gear), and no extra commendations. There were plenty of streams and videos available for other guilds to watch and learn strategies. Adapting our strategies to 16m was also difficult as some mechanics, especially on the second boss, were much more unforgiving. I would also like to add that we did not get past the second boss on the PTS, mainly because of gear. So to answer your question - yes it should count. Without any asterisk.