LoL hey mate. who knows how long for this time. I'm just getting back into it but it seems the balance has changed a lot. I'm in 3 different guilds and all have vigilance / vengeance spec in their DPS line ups not watchman. Maybe its just me but the battle cry used to be why cant we do what Sentinals do. my sage has inspiration.

I wrote a guild for Vigilance back in 1.2 because the class was so poor. They asked the community for feedback at around 1.4 and I described the class basically as it is now and said it would never happen it would be way to OP. however I have not played for a year partly because my favourite spec was broken in HN and NIM content and logging back in I find its been developed a LOT. yes it still has MS but it now procs every PB. they have increased the amount our dots crit. They have let us stack alacrity to shorten our MS if we like. they have done a pretty good job of fixing the class its playable now. Fights like underlurker that are hard on Melee DPS classes I can still do like 75% of my max DPS. So I think well done bio ware.

Yes MOOOOR deeps. It would be pretty easy to quantify the how much damage the extra armour mitigated. After encounter check out the damage received screen on Tor parse (or what ever you use) and calculate the extra damage more armour would have saved you.

yes that's how I would do it. TBH I expect the 1 point in swelling winds produces more DPS than the point in swift slash. If your the kind of DPS that is slow to get out of the AOE damage the extra 15% armour rating probably will produce more dps than the other skills (time spent in the AOE dps-ing); but it is bad form to be slow to get out of the AOE damage. Personally I prefer to try to top the DPS charts and like to have good form regarding avoiding damage rather than making the healers heal me. However I don't think there is too much DPS loss in the high armour build so I think its viable. If you have good form and the 15% armour your healers will appreciate you. someone could produce a some of 5 min parses - say 5 in each build so we could get accurate about the actual DPS loss.

Absolutely mate good idea. Actually I almost did not update this because your guide is good and pretty complete from my point of view. But I decided I didn't want an out of date thing floating around.

Guide Updated for 2.6

Yea agree mate. stacking Alacrity is pointless. both GTN and resource gen don't help us - it makes it about 1/3rd as useful for us as other classes. The only ability we get a benefit on is Master Strike and that is a bit less than twice as frequent as it was before 2.6...

Good to know it works on Master Strike. The issues has always been that Alacrity increases resources generation for most classes, for us it does not. However its true that if surge is hard into diminishing returns we might as well use it. Does anyone know if it shortens the length of time it takes abilities to cool down? a 10 second cool down on Plasma Brand would be worth while.

Don't go to too much trouble. it got discussed on page 4 in this thread. if it hasn't changed it will be the same.

have they change Alacrity so that it shortens the channel time on Ravage? it did not used to.

That makes a lot of sense actually because the dots don't level hardly at all with gear the only real way to get more damage from your dots is to stack crit. Crit also improves all your other stuff so at a some point its going to be better to have more crit. Are we getting into diminishing returns with power now? that was not on the horizon back in the day.

Thx man this is really clear, you guys have worked out the details. Ran a raid last night and found myself using: Throw - Leap - Shatter - Ravage - Impale - Ravage - Scream - Vicious Throw - As an opener, when I did the math this morning I noticed that scream is better DPS than ravage by about 400 so probably using it before the second ravage is better. You still got Vicious Throw to clip the second ravage. Not sure I agree about Impale over Shatter for short bursts. I think it depends on how many of the Shatter Dots you get. Once you get 3 Dot you get 6493 over 9 sec or 721 DPS while Impale is 5231 over 9 sec this works out at 581 DPS. (still just using averages from my parse yesterday). If you get just 2 ticks from shatter in 9 sec (have not tested this recently) then that's 5342 and at that point its pretty much the same either way. It would be good to know how people figured out to use more crit and what changed. The dots are the same as when I stopped playing but I get that people are parsing higher with more crit now - so i'm wondering what the developers did. One thing is for sure the fix to Ravage made sense for a long time i'm glad they finally did it. It does mean there is less to work out about our rotations now - we got much easier to play. I'm hating playing at 155 lag, rotations are so much harder to maintain smoothly in raid conditions, so that will take some working out.

If you look at Shatter another way its helpful I think: The up front damage from my prase today is 3058 for shatter while Impale averages 3965. With impale the ticks are small there are 6 of them 1 per second for 6 seconds so if you delay Impale you effectively delay the whole amount of damage which on my parse is 211x6 =1266+3965 = 5231 However with shatter the ticks are big and they happen 4 times in 12 seconds so thats one every 3 seconds (I think from memory the 4th tick happens after 11 seconds but I would have to check this). Its helpful to think about these ticks as background damage. So long as you use Shatter closeish to 12 seconds you have a continuous tick pretty much every 3 seconds maybe sometimes 4 seconds but that gap of a second or 2 does not affect the total damage over a whole fight from ticks very much. For this reason when you delay Shatter you are only really delaying the upfront damage of 3058+maybe half of one tick (1142/2) 600ish... if you follow this reasoning then it favours prioritizing Impale by 1600/delay in sec (since we are measuring damage per second). This also support the thing people have noticed that Shatter up front after leap is worth while - as getting those big ticks rolling straight away behind ravage makes a big difference to total DPS while Impale before ravage not quite so much. Of course this might be a little academic because what I got from the response to my parse today was that if I Lurn To Play I will be able to use both abilities and ravage on cool-down. However when they both cool down at the same time Impale>Shatter>Ravage

Thx mate appreciate it. I decided because the bleed on Shatter ticks 4 times over 12 seconds that's the ability to use second rather than impale that hits bigger up front - if i'm half a second out it does not affect Shatter damage as much overall. Great to know Uracles is still playing

OK can you guys take a look at this parse http://www.torparse.com/a/596683 what can I do better? Take a look at the bottom one its the most stable. I gotta tell ya im at 155 lag - used to be 56 consistently before our oceanic servers got shut down. I'm in a mix of 68 & 72 gear so not worried about the DPS but more the rotation. cheers

good to hear from you guys nice vids too

Hi Guys IM BACK I've logged into and had a look at the new 2.6 spec. How cool that they finally fixed our RNG issues. I did over 3k in 8 month old gear which seems like a decent improvement. can you guys update me on the rotation - it looks like Overhead Slash - Plasma Brand - Master Strike - Dispatch - rinse and repeat.... is it that simple? Lyrik (lost my old name) - now I'm Mogel on Harbinger arh hate it.

Hi there Guys I have decided to hang up my boots. The South Pacific servers are being shut down and my lag on Harbinger is quite high. its been a blast. Im sure this thread will remain a place to support each other in the quest for MOAR DPS. heres the leader board for 2.0 expansion some of you can prolly do more that the 2950 thats currently top http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=6305959#post6305959 Catch you around Lyrik

Its the same Gear - i use two toon the same and build up 1 gear set using full gree set + Saber. in terms of my crappy saber duno ask my raid groups - i got bad luck with rolls this expansion I did finally get my 4pc bonus last night and re parsed - it makes about 100+ DPS difference. http://www.torparse.com/a/259283/time/1369860632/1369860932/0/Damage+Dealt So with main hand and relic to go and maybe 6 or 8 69 mod still to change - should hit 2900 - 3000 depending on the differnece they make. One thing i have reslised as a result of testing is that guardians are not very gear dependent - we dont scale so well with gear - or conversly you could say we are not too gear dependent. i think its because we get 20% of our damage from bleeds which dont improve much with gear.

Actually opening with your bleeds is better DPS faster. you risk more chance to pull the boss while the tank is establishing agro - if i start this way i generally pull even when guarded. what you lose is 2x 30% chances to proc Master Strike - the problem comes later - once you go PB - OS - BS - Dispatch - MS you are 9 seconds into the fight but OS is still 1.5 sec from cooling down and PB 3 seconds. If you go OS - PB - BS - Dispatch - MS - OS now you have a smooth transition back to OS and since you used dispatch you can now hit BS - Sunder - PB (now you hope that the second use of PB and OS has procced MS). I quite often start this way you start faster and dont really lose much in terms of MS procs - the down side is if the fight continues on and the second uses of OS & PB dont proc a MS you get into spamming stike more often that when starting with MS.... so when the second uses of PB and OS do proc an MS its the top DPS start..... but its more about what creates a smooth rotation and avoiding a flat patch.

^^ this. I play 2 Vigilance guardins one imps side one pub side. Imp side i top my raid group on dps by about 10% consistantly 15% if i concentrate. Pub side i top my group regularly but by 1% - 5% the sentianl also has his share of tops. since he got his 72 hilt its harder to beat him with my 66 hilt. But time on target (player skill) is far mor important than what ever margin seperates these classes.

Guide updated: I have added a section on Crit, a section on Agument maths and a section describing the keys to maintain high DPS during a Boss fight.

I agree with what the guy above said regarding the matrix cube and set bonus. also though your rotation needs some work. in this parse http://www.torparse.com/a/256328/time/1369818171/1369818351/0/Damage+Dealt i look at the first 5 min you have only 18.7% Master strike which is just luck but your combind bleeds are just over 17%... when MS is low bleeds should be 21+% because you will find it easier to keep bleeeds up when less space is taken up with Mastrer Strike. Try taking slash off your bar - in the first 5 min you use slash 8 times and strike 8 times - i bet you find you sometimes use slash then have to use strike to get enough focus to hit your bleeds abilities. put your first MS infront of the bleed abilities after leap and then hit Overhead strike before Plasam Brand - you will probably find you slip more easily into a rythem with things comming off cool down in sequence and little down time on abilities - but yes the zero range saber throw helps a lot in establishing an easy rythem. 66 strength on the Matrix cube = 14.52 bonus damage while the Elite War Hero relic with 120 power = 27.6 bonus damage (& EWH was not even bis in last expansion). its just not even close.

Heres Mogal http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/7397/mogalgear.png http://www.torparse.com/a/257495/time/1369779641/1369779941/0/Damage+Dealt 2620 DPS He has the 550 power prco relic from HM TFB - 2 pc bonus (saber throw) - 66 main hand & 69 off hand - nano sitm and adrenal. Heres Lyrik http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/560/lyrikgear.png/ http://www.torparse.com/a/257584/time/1369782405/1369782824/0/Damage+Dealt 2547 DPS He has Dread Guard Relics - 2 pc bonus (saber throw) - 66 main hand & 72 offhand - nano stim. He has 58 more bonus damage than mogal because he has the 72 ear and implants. So it seems that the power proc relic + Adrenal together are better than 58 bonus damage & 72 off hand by 50+dps. Although Mogals Parse has 23% Master Strike damage so thats another significant variable. The operator is the same APM Lyrik i hit 36 APM Mogal i hit 36.36 APM Bleeds Lyrik 20.57 Mogal 19.53 (more Ravage makes it harder to keep bleeds up)

ahh that explains why your accuracy and surge stats dont match your bonus power. better to augment for strength and balance with other mods.