Just illustrating how dramatically certain fights have changed with this patch, nothing more.

Just gonna pop these up, for devs as much as anybody. This is a fight with tons of short-lived adds, so forcequake used to be lovely. Overpowered even. But now it's just....well... Before 3.1.2: http://i.imgur.com/e4Iy4CD.jpg After 3.1.2, with better gear: http://i.imgur.com/tFRSPs7.jpg

Prior to the April 7 Nerfbat, Forcequake was worth a considerable amount of very useful DPS on the HM Torque fight in Ravagers. Consistently above 2000 DPS for the Forcequake ability alone with the packed turrets, fire devices, etc. This made the sage an extremely useful thing to have in that fight. My best clear had a total DPS of over 4500 with 2250 of that being Forcequake. Tonight, same fight, better gear, and I was lucky to see 1000 DPS out of forcequake. Our group has 2 DPS sages, and we didn't get a clear. This was super-frustrating because it WOULD have been a clear two days ago. Combined with the other nerfs, my best DPS in the evening was in the mid 3000s on a long pull. I appreciate that the Devs have adopted a "DPS is too high, let's reel it in" stance, but nudging in the right direction would generate far less animosity than these broad, hamfisted nerfs that swing abilities from one extreme to the other. Also, the Devs are flat out wrong in this DPS cutting approach. People pay money and invest time over weeks and months, honing skills and gathering gear to improve their characters. There are metrics to measure this. When the nerfbat comes and completely devastates a class, the population that spent time growing that character and learning their craft suddenly feels cheated. DPS too high? Raise the health of enemies. For PVP, make tanks more effective, improve the PVP armor stats. If the stick is too sharp, harden the target. Don't snatch up the stick, break it over your knee and hand it back to the person who spent a long time whittling it. This is a broken policy that will drive players from this truly excellent game in droves.

Thanks for chiming in KTap; and even if it were the SAME dps i'd think the combat team would be a bit embarrassed that their new set wasn't any improvement at all despite the inherent mainstat bump on the 192/198 gear. We need to get some sentinels over here to whine about it so they pay attention!

Agreed, would love Devs to acknowledge this issue, pretty lame for those of us on the Pub side. Based on kTap's BiS testing, the Old 4-piece is worth about 200 DPS more than the New 6-piece. That seems A) Kinda busted, 186 gear outperforming 198 gear, and B) Extra lame since Sages can't reap the benefits that our Sorc cousins currently enjoy.

Interesting, thanks for investigating this case of the missing DOT ticks. Hopefully the Devs will take notice/chime in. Submit as a bug if you discover the same thing! As for the Sage Force-Master Alacrity set bonus, I received a reply to my ticket that said simply, "you were right to submit a bug report." Hopefully they're looking into it, although at this point I've moved on to the new 6-piece bonus.

Can confirm this is just a problem on the Republic side, I used legacy gear to move my set bonus to an Imp Sorc and got the Force-Master's Alacrity buff instantly. It hasn't appeared on my Sage since the 3.0 patch.

Fantastic, thank you for the quick replies; trying to figure out why I'm having such a brutal time breaking 4k in TK with what should be fairly decent gear. I'll be very interested to see what you hammer out of the Balance/Madness spec.

Any chance of finding out the specific Willpower / Power / Force Power figures for the 4299 parse he posted at the end? I'm trying to figure out how his auto-crit Turbulence is hitting so hard. My gear isn't 3.0 optimized but it's not shabby either. With 4107 Willpower (full Resolve augs save one accuracy), 1501 Power and 2547 Force Power my Turbulence hits for an average of 8787 versus the author's 9634. Much appreciation for posting a guide in BOTH Sorc and Sage terminology, good stuff.

Got another thread about this and can confirm my Sage doesn't get the alacrity buff, I spent 5 minutes casting weaken mind and didn't get the icon or the buff.

Yeah, most of my guildies in similar gear (old set 180s and Nightmare 186s, the occasional 192 piece) are already in the 4100-4300 range with classes ranging from guardian and sentinel to commando. There was talk that the goal was to have classes parsing similar to their previous max in optimized level 60 gear, but it seems like the Balance/Madness tree was the only one that really got nailed by the 3.0 nerf super-hard.

Agreed, removing disturbance from the rotation was a 100 DPS increase for me as well. That's gotta be busted, the rotation now is TK throw until FiB/dots need refreshing.

Agreed, it's super busted.

It's been a while since I saw my little Force-Master's alacrity buff icon show up. Anyone else with 180/186 set gear notice this?

This is really unfortunate, I'm ok with not having world's best parses using Balance but compared to my guild mates my DPS has fallen by about 25 percent, where in a number of their cases the DPS has increased. Is the Balance tree working as intended? I can understand if there are some tweaks to the rotation from what it used to be be with the new 2-second 4-stack TK throw, but it seems like Sage/Sorc DPS took a serious single-target hit compared to the other classes.