Sure, Rishi looks great in its perpetual sunset, but imagine if it had a true day-night cycle. Night-time parties might be a lot of fun! Even planets like Coruscant would be pretty cinematic at different times of day. It's probably too much work for too little gain at this point, but it's something to consider.

this guy makes some amazing threads doesn't he

lolol

Why not turn it into a legacy currency with a cap of 500k, 1m, or something similar? This would be a fairly significant QOL increase and free up a fair amount of space in our legacy holds.

I've run 110 accuracy on everything with at least 40 percent white damage since 5.0. There are quite a few utilities and tank debuffs that increase defense chance or reduce accuracy by several percent, so 110 percent feels like a nice sweet spot. Plus you don't have to swap out anything for pve content.

at least it's not an udder disaster last thing we need is the milk spraying everywhere

If you are using elemental convection, you basically need to have a cleave mindset: your job is to do as much cleave damage as possible by maximizing your use of Chain Lightning and refreshed Afflictions while looking for opportunities to burn people down with your single target moves. TL;DR: Apply affliction on anyone in the stack who is going to live for a while, and use a volt rush in the block between your Thundering Blasts to get a second chain lightning proc. For instance: Affliction + Thundering Blast + Instant Chain Lightning + Volt Rush + Chain Lightning + Lightning Flash/Crushing Darkness/Filler until Thundering Blast is back up, then rinse and repeat. This keeps you a four-GCD proc sequence that is neat and tidy and gives you space between for your other moves. One of the secrets to doing 20k+ as lightning, and something I employed in about 90 percent of the warzones in which I reached 20k+, is a triple chain lightning rotation for cleave. Hardcast chain lightning + Thundering Blast (or half channel of Force Storm) + Instant Chain Lightning + Volt Rush + Instant Chain Lightning + filler until regular cooldown of Chain Lightning is done, then rinse and repeat. Really, though, you can only do that if you are freecasting and if there's consistent stacking. It's also a pretty significant sacrifice of your single target DPS. One of the best uses of your filler slots is to apply affliction to targets in the cleave that are going to survive for a little while. Affliction gets reset whenever the target is hit by Chain Lightning, so you'll ideally have Affliction rolling on multiple people in the stack. Use force speed on Chain Lightning for maximum overall damage, or on Thundering Blast for maximum single target burst. For Recklessness, don't use Chain Lightning until it's time to burn the second charge; it'll consume both charges otherwise. Use your first charge on Thundering Blast or a channel of Force Storm. Force Speed with a Recklessness Chain Lightning is brutal cleave damage.

Once you get the hang of it, you'll be able to kill the 6.5 million dummy with only 4 rapid shots and 2 grapples (and, tbh, I think 3 rapid shots and 3 grapples, or 3 rapid shots and 2 grapples, is certainly possible depending on your APM).

Felt like justifying the 3-4 hours I spent on the dummy this weekend, so hopefully this helps: (Small hiccup between second and third explosive fuels; it's easy to keep it to 4 rapid shots consistently). (I've made a couple small adjustments since recording this: now I usually avoid back to back energy bursts to maximize uptime of the energy burst dot).

Yeah I should've clarified since you and the other guy were talkin' 4's anyway. Heck, I'll piggyback on what you said and mention that cleaving in all dps solo ranked matches can literally cost the team the match if the sorc is breaking mezzes.

I was referring strictly to regs as per the OP's request. And no, I haven't touched solos on sorc since S4. In those kinds of all-dps matches you mention, I'd switch to Stormwatch at points - and I'd probably experiment with EH in situations where I was the kill target. In 4's, there's a chance I'd switch to Stormwatch with certain comps.

I recommend putting copies of all of your cooldowns onto a separate bar at the middle of your screen - snipers have a lot of cooldowns to manage, and doing this will allow you to keep track of everything easily and plan out your kiting/dcd cycling. I did this back when I played sniper for a bit and it was very helpful. Eventually the cooldowns will become second nature and you can get rid of the bar. You want to avoid overlapping your dcds as much as possible. Things like rolling while your evasion is active, or placing your diversion while your evasion is active, can be really inefficient and costly. Make sure to reset ballistic dampers as much as possible and get in the habit of being able to do so VERY quickly to avoid getting caught out of cover with your pants down. If you want to diversion another sniper, bait the roll with suppressive fire beforehand. They might think it's the diversion reticle and roll instinctively.

Don't waste your time with lowbie/midbie PvP. Everyone goes into those brackets to "get away" for a while and to joke around. There's nothing really to gain unless you're a seasoned player looking for memes, or to mess around with the people who stay in those brackets due to some inferiority complex or whatever (the latter can be very amusing).

Yes, healers should totally become Just Another Pretty Face in wzs. Totes.

It's all about finding maximum synergy between tacticals, set bonuses, and utilities. In the case of Gathering Storm, it pairs exceptionally well with the Surging Speed utility. Surging Speed reduces the cooldown of Force Speed by 5 seconds and even resets it after Force Barrier. You're basically getting an extra Force Speed every minute thanks to this utility. Elemental Convection is undeniably the best utility for Lightning in (edit: Regs) in almost all situations. Stormwatch only provides a 2k dps increase on a single target, and that's if you get to cast perfectly. Meanwhile, EC provides a ton of extra splash damage, additional roots, far more mobility, and far more instant attacks. The only time you'll do more damage with Stormwatch is if nobody is stacking at all and nobody is interrupting/LOSing you. I'd say Elemental Convection is objectively better more than 80 percent of the time. Also, people don't realize that every time you refresh Affliction, you're forcing that first tick immediately - even if Affliction just ticked on the target. Over the course of a long battle, this adds up to a lot of extra dot ticks. Thanks to Elemental Convection, Lightning's probably the third or fourth easiest spec to hit 20k with in a PvP situation (behind Lethality, Pyro, and maybe Veng/Hatred).

Supercharge Gas (SCG) is one of the most well-designed and synergistic offensive abilities in SWTOR; it should be keybound and used on cooldown. Its benefits are manifold: (1) Activating SCG while wearing the 6-piece Concentrated Fire set bonus will cause your next Rail Shot to critically hit ("autocrit"). A 5-stack autocrit Rail Shot will inflict upwards of 50k damage. Pair that with a 60k Priming Shot from the Burning Bright tactical and you'll have the potential to kill someone from 40% HP in just 1.5 seconds. (2) SCG vents 10 heat per use. You'll get about 3 uses of SCG per minute; most of your abilities cost 15 heat, so you're basically getting two free abilities per minute (on average). (3) It triggers the effects of two utilities: Supercharge Defense and Tag and Bag. The former makes you uninterruptible and harder to hit during SCG; the latter decreases the cooldown of Kolto Overload each time you use SCG. (4) The Concentrated Fire set bonus will add extra stacks of Supercharge throughout the fight. If you use SCG on cooldown and have a reasonably high APM, you'll have a SCG uptime of more than 30%. (5) The armor penetration and alacrity bonuses while under the effects of Supercharge provide a small DPS boost. This is really just icing on the cake, but you'll receive a ~5-7% increase in DPS during SCG.

Thank you for listening to us and setting a great precedent.

Looks like Sorcs on the PTS are struggling to hit 22k with these changes, as expected. The buffs to AP are still a little underwhelming as well.

Edit: Oh, you already posted what I said lol.

The sorc changes are half-baked; more adjustments need to be made to prevent the class from getting neutered to a ridiculous extent. I agree that current Polarity Shift uptime is excessive for PvP, mainly because it provides massive boosts to kiting, burst, and interrupt prevention. But keep in mind that 6.0 Sorc DPS is actually pretty low without Polarity Shift--especially in PvE--and the Gathering Storm set bonus helps players compensate for this issue. Plus, Madness is currently under-performing even with the overpowered Polarity Shifts. If the developers are going to (rightfully) nerf Gathering Storm, then they need to compensate by buffing certain abilities and passives; otherwise, both specs will struggle to hit 22k dps while all other ranged DPS specs are eclipsing 23k. I suggest the following changes, in addition to the set bonus nerf, to help balance things properly: Sorcerer: (1) Increase the damage of Affliction by 20 percent. (This will negate about half of the dps loss from the Gathering Storm nerf, while also giving healers a much-needed boost to their off-DPS in PvE.) Lightning: (1) Decrease the damage of Chain Lightning by 10 percent. (Thanks to Elemental Convection, Lightning Sorcs have insane output during cleave situations in PvP; this nerf will help take the edge off. Chain Lightning will still be more damaging than a Lightning Bolt, so the rotation will be unaffected.) (2) Chain Lightning's root and snare effects can only occur once every 9 seconds. (The root spam caused by Elemental Convection is an absolute killer for melee at the moment.) (3) Increase the Shock bonus perk to 85 percent, up from 35 percent. (This will compensate for the nerfs to Gathering Storm and Chain Lightning. When paired with Recklessness, Shock will complement Thundering Blast nicely. Plus, the move isn't reliant on the RNG nature of Forked Lightning procs, which is part of what makes Polarity Shift so strong for Lightning in the first place.) Madness: (1) Increase the damage of Force Leech and Force Lightning by 10 percent. (This will help to further negate the Gathering Storm nerfs while also giving Madness a much-needed boost to its single-target DPS.) Changes like these will help Sorcs absorb the massive DPS loss caused by the changes to Gathering Storm, while also mitigating the excessive cleave of Lightning and buffing the lackluster single target DPS of madness.

The gap is about 10 percent, which is where it should be.

I remember when my positioning was my biggest asset. Then 4.0 (and later 5.0) rolled around and pvp became so lazy and livelord-esque. Now everyone just runs around like a maniac trying to dummy parse off dcds...when people aren't desyncing that is.

Hey now, show some respect for them. The farmers harvest the wheat so all you Early Morning Pvpers can Get This Bread.

Veng is one of the easiest specs in the game and is one of the highest parsing in pvp. People have been doing 8k+ as veng in warzones since early 5.0. Hell, I can push 8k as Arsenal sometimes, and 10k as Hatred is pretty easy to attain in matches with sustained stacking and minimal tanks. It's what happens when you get a bunch of healers stacking at mid.

oh do we get a better mainhand if we win the epeen contest