One day, we're going to see the real metrics for SWTOR. 10% of players have done operations. 5% of players play solo content for at least 3 hours a week. 84% of players have less than 3 hours total playtime on their account.

Dummy parses vs boss parses? Here's what I've personally experienced. I had a Vengeance Jugg in full min/maxed 198 gear that I brought to Revan. With essence corruption and malevolent force bond, my first phase DPS at best was probably 3.5k. In the single unluckiest pull I've ever had, I had four double stacks of essence corruption in a row (with a 1/65000 chance of that happening) in addition to subsequent single stacks and a force bond, bringing down my DPS to around 2k. My AP PT, a 50/50 mix of 192s/198s topped out at 4.2k, with some of my lowest pulls at around 3.2k if I had to Grapple a blade or two. Now how about Core phase? The highest I ever parsed on my AP PT was about 620k on the Machine Core. The highest I parsed on my Vengeance Jugg was about 480k, and that only happened because my entire team except for me and a sorc healer died to a heave (thank god for saber reflect) and I burned the final 60k or so alone. Had I been on my PT for that pull, we never would have even seen the heave that killed most of the group. So please, go ahead and tell me how a burst ranged spec (because anybody who tells you a PT is melee is only kidding themselves) with a rotation made up entirely of instants is balanced compared to the sustained melee spec with a 3 second self root every 11 or so seconds depending on how much alacrity you stack. These two toons essentially parsed the same on a dummy, with approximately 50-100 DPS higher on the PT at the time. In equal gear, the PT would have blown the jugg out of the water. Now in 4.0, the difference is even greater. These are the things that forced me to run AP PT for Revan pre nerf, and that will force me to run AP PT for future progression first kills.

You know, that's a really good question o.o Right now I'm sitting on enough money to buy a few years worth of ops passes and I haven't done ranked PVP since S3.

There was a time during 3.x where I raided six days a week across 4 groups doing TOS/Rav HM. Even after we cleared Revan HM, we raided almost every day doing sale runs on Jedi Covenant. Honestly, that era of raiding is probably over for good. There's a chance that we will never see content as interesting or as difficult as Revan again. It's certainly clear that all of the developers are being put to work on story content and subscriber rewards already. I raid, PVP, and GSF, but the only thing development time is being put into is story that essentially has no replayability. BioWare will just string us along until one day, they put us down and end our misery with the announcement that they are removing operations, warzones, and GSF from the game so that we will have all the more time to play class stories. Many of us came here because of the Star Wars IP, or story, but the main reason to stay was group content with the new friends that we made while raiding or PVPing. I still try to hold out hope for class balancing, new operations, and new warzones, but I get the sinking feeling that I will only be disappointed time and time again.

Guess I have to revise my estimate of a new operation to after August

I main jugg, but I only have one jugg :/ On the other hand, I have 2 PTs and 2 sorcs. One day I'll have a need for multiple juggs...

I could swear I just read the sentence Sustained specs and Burst specs should do the same Sustained dummy parse damage. Tell me I didn't just read that.

As much as I would love to see rankings like this, i.e. rankings that make sense, it will never happen in our lifetimes.

All HM ops can be done in full 198 set bonus gear from 3.0. Tell the guy he has no idea what he's talking about.

T blast, ambush, blazing bolts. Always pop it at the very end of the channel as smart players can cancel their channel if they see that you have Reflect up. A lot of sorcs will use Chain Lightning after Thundering Blast, so if they also add a Lightning Flash, they're basically globalling themselves. For madness, force lightning. For mercs, if you can predict a blazing bolts and heatseeker missiles will be close together, a 5 second saber reflect will reflect both.

Signed the thread, and completely agree with it. I foresee myself wearing my Stillunviable legacy name for the rest of the time this game exists though.

Essentially exactly what I did. Brought my AP PT for pre nerf Revan to ensure a kill, especially since we had a few roster changes up until the week before the nerf was going to be applied. Killed it with a raid team of 7 BHs, then went in after the nerf on my juggernaut DPS. We ended up being the 20th and final team to kill Revan pre-nerf, and I know that if I had run it on my jugg, it may very well have not been a kill. I like to think that as the last person alive on the core burn, I carried my team for my jugg kill, rather than the other way around Having been rejected from multiple raid teams for the sole reason that as a juggernaut DPS it was assumed I wouldn't be able to get the kind of uptime needed to pull my weight for strict DPS checks, it's rather disappointing that juggernauts are again in the very low end of the spectrum, and are in fact the lowest parsing Advanced Class in the game. For now, my raid team is happy to carry me on my jugg while I try to justify my existence with mechanic cheesing, but I'll probably get the first kill in the next tier of ops on my AP PT. /signed

If there is no set bonus, it doesn't matter which set you get. The only 208 level armor that has set bonuses is PVP gear.

This happens to me all the time, with a very specific point in my rotation where I need exactly 1 more rage for Shatter. I'd say about 30% of my parses also very obviously robbing me of rage, where I do saber thrown and force charge and immediately notice I only have 5 rage instead of 3+3=6.

200 DPS is probably a reasonable average increase in DPS from using a 224 vs a 220 MH. 500 shouldn't be happening unless you changed multiple other pieces or just have crazy RNG with crits.

How about instead of nerfing companions, you tune all content to be more difficult (especially HM and NIM operations)

That's why I said AC, not spec. You can always respec to the higher parsing spec. It would be like claiming PTs are the worst DPS in the game because they could spec pyro.

Cheese OP It's the only way I can justify bringing my Jugg into any ops. "No I understand my AC has the lowest sustained DPS in the game, but I can cheese an orb/fire device/heave/ciphas doom a minute"

Do SM ops, since you get bolstered. You can literally do the ops with just empty shells that don't have any armorings/mods/enhancements/hilts/barrels.

Yeah, it certainly sounds like a combination of Jugg tank/DPS sonic wall + sorc healer bubbles would allow entire raid groups to survive through a ridiculous number of stacks. 224 MH farming was just hilarious, we just went in with a healer, tank, and 3 DPS and got free 224 MHs for mains and 220 MHs for alts. Kind of ridiculous, considering that in min maxed gear for the time we only 7-manned Revan HM, while nobody even had full 216s for farming Soa HM this past week. Certainly seems like certain fights need to be tuned to be more difficult just from a DPS/healing check perspective. I'd imagine that when they highlight Ravagers, people will at least have a more difficult time farming MHs off of Coratanni. I asked the Lead Designer at a recent Cantina Tour if they would ever make fights as mechanically interesting/difficult as pre-nerf Revan and he said they might consider making fights even more difficult. One can only hope...

That's rather disappointing to hear. My raid team and I have been taking this expansion very slowly and cut down our raid days from 4 a week to 1 until new operations get released. We haven't bothered doing any NiM content yet, so we didn't know that there were so many easy bosses. Heave being irrelevant makes the core burn ridiculously easy until an enrage. It's sad that the only way BioWare can make content difficult right now is to overtune fights, instead of adding actually difficult mechanics.

Defence is the only tank spec for Guardians. Vigilance is (supposedly) the sustained DPS spec and Focus is the burst DPS spec. Defence is better for PVE, if only because more people would accept a Guardian tank than a Guardian DPS to a raid group, although this "current" content can be cleared by any class. Choose either Vigilance or Focus for PVP, but smart players who know the Focus rotation will be able to negate some of your damage based on where you are in your rotation. This guide is specifically for Vigilance/Vengeance DPS, although I'm sure you could find guides for the other specs on this forum.

That'd be rather interesting. Every gets full BiS gear and can then go into any op they want. Then we'll see who is really able to clear NiM content, unless they nerf the fights so much that just having BiS gear will allow someone to clear an instance. I wonder if it would still be around the 20 groups that were able to clear Revan pre-nerf.

Clearly because everyone prefers the Wings of the Architect Seriously though, for every Rancor we sold, there were 10 sets of Wings sold.

People want loot pinatas. It's why they put Colossal Monolith and 204 MHs into the game in the first place.