Because I have an opinion that everyone must hear, and then agree with.

You know it baby . I'll always be your alt's side toon

Hola, After a years hiatus I'm back and looking for a raid team, preferably one that is progressing through SM to HM. I can raid on any night. Heals or DPS, can also tank if need be. Website message or whisper/message Afieri in game. Cheers!

This is a helpful post, and it's annoying that we have gone through 12 pages without someone actually asking for each person's argument in a straight up fashion. That aside: I never really agreed on alacrity for deception, mainly because of the burst damage and the way that alacrity interacts with enemy DCD's. Sustained DPS isn't really a measure of effectiveness in PVP, just like how HPS isn't a useful metric anywhere. It gives you an idea of your ability to apply pressure, however you can hit 8 targets 1 time or 1 target 8 times and still do the same DPS, and they all have their places, but the situation won't be the same every time. Playing deception, it seems pretty clear that your ability set is not designed to be spreading out the damage, instead tunnelling a target with short, high impact combos. However, as Evo said, you cannot just continually repeat these combos one after the other with the same impact, you need to build stacks and prepare, meaning that you get your chance to burst once before requiring down time. Alacrity allows you to get an extra attack in before the 4.5s mark, but the point that Evo is making, is that once your burst combo is gone, the damage you output isn't going to kill anyone who has half a brain or a semi competent healer, if you are by yourself. So basically it doesn't matter if you can get an extra attack in 0.1 seconds before you normally would, neither scenario has you killing someone, so why not go for the higher damage from 3 abilities? Correct me if I'm wrong btw (As I'm sure you will ).

Evo, why do you only care about the first 3 globals? I can only assume that you don't actually stop hitting the target after 3 abilities if you're by yourself, because then that would lend credence to getting enough alacrity to fit a 4th attack into the 4.5s window, because that would undeniably be better damage. So could you explain exactly what you're thinking when it comes to opening? What happens after the first 3 GCDs? And what's so special about them?

Use this one, it is by far the best, most other openers have things like massacre after BA, which is bad because you lose out on the increased chance for Ataru hits on BA, or by prestacking dots like rupture before going into the solid opener (which leads to a decreased dps due to delaying your burst by a GCD). As a side note, the above opener will provide a more consistent burst, however if you have a low latency, hitting Gore at the appropriate time and VT comes up before Ravage ends, hit VT first, then Scream, as the attack animation for VT may cause it to fall outside the Gore window if you hit it too late, whereas Scream has a much shorter animation, (0.2s I think for the projectile). TL;DR, use Beast's opener, is the best out of the openers posted.

What about letting the guilds clear it in whatever composition they want, and recording the number of people inside that run that have already cleared it, and placing that next to their progression? Not an amazing collection of words so I will go with an example. Let's say that <Guild 1> has the first clear of the operation (I say clears because they are what people really care about usually, but it could be up to a certain percentage cleared) and everyone is happy for them, and then the people in <Guild 1> decide that they want to split up and help out other guilds, with 4 of them going to <Guild 2>. <Guild 2> then get a clear with the 4 members from <Guild 1> and next to <Guild 2>'s progression it has a (4/8), signifying the number of people that have already cleared the instance from another guild. So the list would look something like this: #1 <Guild 1> #2 <Guild 2> (4/8) It doesn't stop people from helping out other guilds because they like the game or whatever and it doesn't stop guilds posting progression, however it gives a roughly accurate representation of the team's skill level (for whatever purpose you want). All you have to do to police it is know who's alt is who's, which in all honesty shouldn't be hard for the first 3-4 guilds that clear the instance (which again, is all anyone really cares about in a race). Basically, you get groups killing the instances and reporting it, and as a measure of skill you basically look at the groups that have (0/8) next to their name, and those guys are the guilds that can show they have a good quality team. Anyways, just a thought.

I started this thread because borrrreeeeedddd but out of curiosity, seeing as 8 man mara stuff is actually quite viable, do people want to make a competition out of this? I'm not sure how you would do it, maybe clears for 8 people in each spec or some weird stuff like that? Anyways, seeing as 3.0 hasn't even been announced yet and it will be a fair while before it comes out, we got plenty of time to nut out the deets. Post opinions and more mara vids here!

Using higher crit rating is a very good idea, completely forgot about that. We only had 6 people on for all our runs up until OP IX when we had to gather reinforcements. Myself and another sent only had 97% acc because we switched from combat. Terror poses a few issues though, requires people to actually be on some sort of A game to notice the terror is hitting them and to bail off the platform, as well as not having consistent healing. Definitely doable, just requires more concentration than we put into this run .

16 man is easier because more sentinels for more healing, cool downs and bodies to soak damage. Oof, Terror sucked because we were pretty tired and couldn't coordinate our "tanks" to deal with the Terror hitting them. As we get more and more time to play around, hopefully moving to HM's and seeing how far we can go. Seeing as there is barely any challenging content out these days, may as well do something fun. Curious to know how you dealt with fall damage in EV? Split up and leap to power sources? We were pretty bad at mechanics so kinda just tried to brute force through everything with sheer dps, hence just the SM runs. SnV should be pretty straightforward apart from warlords we think.

New progression thread for 8 man operations using only Watchman Sents/Anni Maras. But not really, <The Ex-Dalborran Elitists> are tentatively claiming world first clears of 5/5 EC SM 8-man, 5/5 KP SM 8-man and 4/5 TFB SM using only watchman sentinels. Going for a 7/7 SnV SM tomorrow night. Pics to come after we recover. DP NiM? Pfft. Hateful Entity? Pfft. Trying to carry bads through GF OPs? Pfft., 8-man Watchman Sents/Anni Maras is where it's at. Show me what you got.

Did buen buen finally get his 100some offer from Tinder and now he has to go prepare for like at least a year?

Ok, so does that mean that this behaviour is to be expected or does OP need to find the log and upload it?

Bosses also have a chance to dodge or parry which runs off the player's Ranged/Melee acc. This was never actually nailed down to a hard value, but it was thought to be around 8% pre 2.0. When 2.0 dropped Champion and Boss mobs received an additional 10% Force/Tech Defence. But looking at the torhead page for Power Shot, it seems to imply that it is a Special White attack, therefore running off tech accuracy. So I'm at a loss as to why a mainhand attack is missing. OP linked the wrong log. Timestamps don't match.

Yeah just skimmed it, my bad there. Power Shot, from memory, uses ranged accuracy, not tech accuracy.

Offhand misses motherlicker.

I would just like to point out that snipers do not fail in single target dps. Once Pyro mercs get fixed, snipers will still be sitting around the top for single target dps. It's not like all of a sudden this nerf to OS has killed all sniper viability in raids and that they are not worth taking anymore, because they are definitely still worth taking. I want you to give me another Ranged AC that has specs available for nearly every type of boss encounter (mobility, turret, off GCD cleanse, immunity to damage for ~1GCD every 20 seconds) that puts out as much single target dps as a sniper during those encounters.

I can only assume you are talking about Rage spec, Engineering Snipers, Lightning Sorcs and AP PT's here. If I am wrong, please correct me . Basically Rage spec of either AC does not do as good Single Target damage as snipers in any spec; So Snipers win in AoE heavy fights and Single Target fights. Engineering Snipers are not meant to do as much damage as they do now, it has been stated by Eric Musco that roll banging was meant to be a fun way to destroy your chumps and used every now and then, so comparing the other sniper specs to Engi is not valid. Lightning Sorcs and AP PT's fall into the same category as Rage Spec, in which they do not do as much Single Target damage as the sniper specs. So basically, as plainly as I can put it, You cannot have your cake, and eat it too. OS was crazy because it made nearly any fight that has adds in it almost irrelevant if you stacked enough snipers because of the unlimited number of targets it could hit, the high damage numbers and the relatively short cool down on it. It also made burn phases a bit easier because most classes had to work on their AoE abilities within their rotation, Snipers did one pre cast that caused 10k of damage to happen to all enemies in a particular area for the cost of 1 - 1.5 GCDs, and then proceeded to be the highest Single Target parsing rdps AC. Another reason as to why the OS nerf isn't as bad people say it is, is because of the fact that the classes that are AoE heavy generally only have 1 hard hitting AoE ability, Rage = Smash, Lightning = Chain Lightning, AP = Flamethrower + DFA (DFA isn't really as powerful as OS because of the longer cool down amongst other things). But snipers have quite a few AoE abilities, MM has Frag grenade + OS + Sweeping Blasters, Engi has OS + Frag Grenade + Bombs + Sweeping, Leth and Hybrid have Frag Grenade + OS + Sweeping + Corrosive Grenade, plus each and every one of these specs has the ability to multi dot targets causing more AoE damage. So when you look at things from that perspective, snipers still aren't that bad from an AoE point of view, they were just slightly overpowered with regards to all damage requirements before this nerf, and now they are still very capable of dealing with lots of enemies just in a more proactive fashion as opposed to just sitting there using one ability and going off to smoke a pipe whilst rejecting Jessica Alba for being unattractive.

Another referral link.

The fact is that discharge pops a bit more threat on the table than thrash, which is fine, because maths doesn't actually lie, people just misinterpret it, and the logs look fairly straightforward, and very easy to replicate (assuming that Torparse and Parsec are doing their maths correctly). So that's pretty much sorted as you will never really know whether or not Torparse and Parsec are doing threat maths amazingly accurately because not many folk have the patience to sift through raw combat logs. Moral of the story is Discharge > Thrash if you assume non-crits and look at a single GCD only, and that's where the discussion really begins. Discharge only does good things for you with regards to threat for that GCD. After that GCD, you have to do something else, and Discharge has not set you up for any potential high threat abilities. Thrash on the other hand has a ~48% chance to finish the CD on Shock (which helps you build your stacks faster) as well as increasing the amount of threat that Shock does. Now, 48% is not exactly favourable, you wouldn't want to bet millions of dollars on that kind of a chance, but you have to look at the alternative, which is Discharge, and Discharge applies the accuracy debuff (which lasts 15 seconds), does about 3.5k threat (which is more threat than Thrash), and has a 0% chance of building your stacks faster or increasing the threat generated in the next GCD, and the question is which do you prefer? 3.4k threat guaranteed or a 48% chance to do ~1000 more threat and channel FL faster and a 52% chance of doing 3k threat with no extra benefits. 400 threat really is quite a bit of threat to be playing with in one GCD at the beginning of a fight, but when you look at the possibility of the extra threat from Shock and the decreased time to activate FL stemming from Thrash procs, the pros far outweigh the cons. So whilst Discharge does more threat than Thrash, it has less utility using it on cool down in the long run because Thrash has the chance to reset the cool down on Shock and allow FL to be used more often at 3 stacks. So yes, technically if you look at a single GCD, Discharge is better than Thrash in terms of threat generation, but looking at a 12 second period of time, using Thrash over Discharge will net a higher average threat generation as well as a higher average mitigation (which is kind of what tanking is all about after the first 20 - 30 seconds of most fights). Long story short, use Discharge to refresh your accuracy debuff if necessary otherwise Thrash away to get those procs.

Well funny that you mention that because I was actually toying with the idea of having a massive focus burning spree in shii-cho form before switching to juyo form and carrying on from there. Something like OS > Cauterize > Merciless > BS > Juyo > watchman rotation. I haven had a detailed look at it, only just recently toyed with the idea, but the pros are that you get a nice big focus burn at the beginning of your fight, losing out on some damage increase and crit increase percentage points but also delaying your application of overload saber dots which may actually increase the opening burst by a bit of dps. The main issue I have with it, is that changing stances costs you a GCD which may negate all benefits whatsoever, but when I'm bored I will have a play and get back to you

This discussion is moot. The fact is, the deva should have a proper bug testing procedure that does not include the public. Games like swtor and wow will have lots of bugs and I am sure that 90% of these get squashed during development, and the other 10% get through and just lie in wait for someone to come across them in game, but this is actually quite unacceptable really, you're paying money for these operations, why should you pay the money to have them developed and then have to test each and every one to ensure that when the progression race actually counts, that it is flawless? Am I alone with the desire to have things actually done properly once, and only released once? If you look at the whole progression race thing, you will always have those that have a timezone advantage and that will always be an issue for the race itself, but those that are serious enough will make the time and more power to them, so the race is fairly equal for those that deem it necessary. Essentially you can have a fairly equal race if you only release the content once, after you have actually tested it in the style of past days where you didn't release patches to fix your game because you did a decent job in making work in the first place. Swtor is so time driven as opposed to quality driven that we have bugs that have persisted since launch (Esseles is just a ctd party) because the devs are being forced to work on new content as opposed to fixing old content. Long story short, PTS shouldn't even exist, closed testing is great for new story lines and other non competitive aspects of the game, because if you don't want to do it, you don't have to and it doesn't affect the progression race at all. New content should be bug tested by the developers because let's face it, that is actually someone's job, someone is getting paid to actually test the content, not paying, getting paid. Do your jobs better devs and this discussion disappears

The Ex-Dalborran Elitists can help you out with this, we run APAC times for your convenience and make all your loot hoarding dreams come true. Swing a whisper/mail to erodoeht telling him that you would like loot and chickens and he will help hook you up.

If you look at these changes, you will see that merc healing is still lacking raid heals. Kolto Shell is a brilliant heal for tanks because they are taking constant damage, so every 1 second, they get a nice little heal that adds up to be fairly substantial after all the charges have been used. Allowing you to put it on 2 tanks is also lovely, because the other tank should be taking some damage as well. But having KS on two tanks does not solve any of the Merc's raid healing problems at all. Kolto missile is a lovely heal when you have a couple of people all stacked up nicely and won't move for a bit, but if you get 3 people taking damage and they are all spread outside of Kolto missile's range, you then have to cycle through some pretty expensive heals in order to make sure your fluffy little dps don't suddenly die. KS will not save them because KS relies upon being hit by damage to trigger and heals for a fairly weak amount, regardless of how much damage they took. So let's say you have a whole raid group that you have put KS on, and then suddenly they all take a 10k hit in one second, KS triggers because it knows that you have taken damage and is prepared to sacrifice one of its limited charges in order to save you, because it's so nice like that. And so the charge depletes by one on your entire raid and everyone gets healed for...... 600 - 1000 hp each. Leaving a minimum deficit of about 9k damage to be healed on every member of the raid (not entirely realistic of course, cooldowns and tanks taking less damage blah blah, just highlighting KS's weakness as a raid heal). But then to make matters worse, all those charges left on KS won't ever trigger again until the raider takes more damage, so using it as a recovery tool is just an awful idea. Merc's have never needed more preventative healing in pve. Ever. This buff is stupid for pve Merc's because they need raid recovery healing abilities. This is a pvp oriented buff more than a pve oriented buff which is fine, but it changes barely anything with regards to the latest content where there is a fair bit of AoE damage going out and raid recovery is necessary.

Noodles does contribute fairly heavily towards this guide as well as the carnage mara guide and I'm sure a few others as well. It's just carl and snowball that actually threw it all together into coherence as well as putting in some of their own thoughts.