It is actually not the individual abilities output that I was worried about; it is the Relics and activated Buffs. I am currently able to say that these effect all abilities equally because given a long enough period of time they will occur at equal rates over the repeated rotation (only because they don't exactly align). With the shorter duration this is no longer that case; hence it would be easier to simulate and get a spread rather than always saying average. Though, there is nice side effect of it becoming possible to get the damage spread which is what my current analysis utterly lacks. I guess what I am trying to say is that I am too lazy to do this problem justice.

The main difficulty in translating the method I used is that I rely heavily on the law of averages to solve for an average dps. Once you define a time period, than you have to account for starting conditions and probability of certain events. This means that you could take the base level information gathering I did; but after that a whole new methodology would have to be used. Side note: there are even more ways to define burst than above and the complexity is orders of magnitude greater than what I put together. This is actually a case where a simulation that runs thousands of trials on a low HP number to get a damage spread would be the best method rather than trying to find an average result.

It is always good for people to check my work and make sure I am not just pulling numbers out of my ***. EVERYTHING BELOW IS NOT HOW I CALCULATED THE PERCENT CHANGES! What I actually did was record the all of the DPS numbers from 4.0.2 before I made any changes and compared them to the changed values. Marksmanship Changes Reminder: This is just a cursory look at the changes with back of the envlope math and ignores alot of smaller items. Changes: Bonus crit Damage is now 10% from 30% (effects Penetrating Blasts, Snipe, Followthrough, Ambush and Takedown) Pentrating Blasts now does reduced damage (-5.5%) Previous Percentages of Total DPS output: Penetrating Blasts (23%) Snipe (20.4%) Followthrough (26.1%) Ambush (18.8%) Takedown (2.4%) For ease of example; I will use 40% as the Base crit chance and 70% as the Bonus Crit (True Optimal is at 1214 Critical (5372 Mastery): 38.15% Critical Chance and 67.4% Critical Bonus, but round numbers are nice for examples) Average Damage increase from Critical chance = 1 + [Critical Bonus] * ( [Critical Chance] + [AutoCrit Percentage] ) Ignoring the Autocrit portion: Average Damage increase= 1 + [Critical Chance] * [Critical Bonus] Average Damage Bonuses: Old: Penetrating Blasts= 1 + [40% + 15% Critical Chance] * [70% + 30% Bonus Critical Damage] = 1.55 Old: Snipe = 1 + [40% + 19% Critical Chance] * [70% + 30% Bonus Critical Damage] = 1.59 Old: Followthrough = 1 + [40% + 4% Critical Chance] * [70% + 30% Bonus Critical Damage] = 1.44 Old: Ambush = 1 + [70% + 30% Bonus Critical Damage] * ( [40% Critical Chance] + [50% AutoCrit Percentage]) = 1.9 Old: Takedown = 1 + [40% + 15% Critical Chance] * [70% + 30% Bonus Critical Damage] = 1.55 New: Penetrating Blasts = 1 + [40% + 15% Critical Chance] * [70% + 10% Bonus Critical Damage] = 1.44 New: Snipe = 1 + [40% + 19% Critical Chance] * [70% + 10% Bonus Critical Damage] = 1.472 New: Followthrough = 1 + [40% + 4% Critical Chance] * [70% + 10% Bonus Critical Damage] = 1.352 New: Ambush = 1 + [70% + 10% Bonus Critical Damage] * ( [40% Critical Chance] + [50% AutoCrit Percentage]) = 1.72 New: Takedown = 1 + [40% + 15% Critical Chance] * [70% + 10% Bonus Critical Damage] = 1.44 So overall DPS changes: Penetrating Blasts = (100% Damage - 5.5% Damage Nerf) * (1.44/1.55 Crit Change) = 87.8% of previous damage Snipe = (1.472/1.59 Crit Change) = 92.5% of previous damage Followthrough = (1.472/1.59 Crit Change) = 93.9% of previous damage Ambush = (1.472/1.59 Crit Change) = 90.5% of previous damage Takedown = (1.44/1.55 Crit Change) = 92.9% of previous damage Taking into Account the previous percentages of total Damage: Total Lost DPS: 23%*(1-87.8%) + 20.4%*(1-92.5%) + 26.1%*(1-93.9%) + 18.8%*(1-90.5%) + 2.4%(1-92.9%) = 7.88% DPS Loss in 4.0.3 /end of Back of Envelope Math EVERYTHING ABOVE IS NOT HOW I CALCULATED THE PERCENT CHANGES! What I actually did was record the all of the DPS numbers from 4.0.2 before I made any changes and compared them to the changed values. This meant that I was using the optimal gearing for each version and it includes all the factors I have been using to calculate DPS.

Hmm, you are quite right on this; I did accidentally think of Force Leech as an instant cast (too much time on Assassins). This is the reason why I try to post everything I can so that other people can find my errors and oversights. After thinking about it further (and playing around with writing it out in Excel) I think the following changed rotation would work. It also keeps the same activation rate for abilities as my previous (impossible) rotation so there is no DPS change. There is now always 15s of time between Force Leech usages so this should keep the previous issues lower. Rotation: Death Field -> Affliction -> Demolish -> Creeping Terror -> Force Leech -> Full Force Lighting -> Full Force Lighting -> Full Force Lighting -> Clipped Force Lightning -> Death Field -> Clipped Force Lightning -> Demolish -> Affliction -> Force Leech -> Creeping Terror -> Full Force Lighting -> Full Force Lighting -> Full Force Lighting -> Death Field -> Clipped Force Lightning -> Demolish -> Clipped Force Lightning -> Force Leech -> Affliction -> Clipped Force Lightning -> Creeping Terror -> Lighting Strike -> Clipped Force Lightning -> Death Field -> Clipped Force Lightning -> Demolish -> Clipped Force Lightning -> Force Leech -> Clipped Force Lightning -> Lighting Strike -> Affliction -> Clipped Force Lightning -> Creeping Terror -> Death Field -> Clipped Force Lightning -> Demolish -> Clipped Force Lightning -> Force Leech -> Full Force Lighting -> Full Force Lighting -> Full Force Lighting -> Affliction -> Death Field -> Creeping Terror -> Demolish -> Clipped Force Lightning -> Force Leech -> Full Force Lighting -> Full Force Lighting -> Full Force Lighting -> Clipped Force Lightning -> Clipped Force Lightning = Clip at 1.5s The Basic idea for the rotation is: Death Field -> GCD -> Demolish -> GCD -> Force Leech -> GCD -> GCD -> GCD* -> GCD -> GCD With Affliction and Creeping Terror always spaced 1 GCD Apart (to allow for the 18s abilities to drift in between the 15s abilities) The GCD* is the GCD that if it has either Affliction or Creeping Terror it causes a 2 GCD gap that needs to be filled. 2 GCD gaps are tricky because Force Lighting can't clip Force Lightning. That is why a Lighting Strike is used in those situations. Do you think this would work?

Small changes in rotation can have large effects on DPS. The short answer is that I found a more optimal rotation based on the principle of always using death field, demolish, affliction and creeping terror exactly on cooldown while simultaneously replacing most of the lighting strikes with force lightning (which even while clipped, Force lighting does more damage; but you can't clip force lightning with itself). The new rotation can be found in the class notes section (post #5)

Update: 12/8/2015 4.0.3 Changes (See official patch notes for full list) Due to the 4.0.3 Ability cost changes for Assassins | Shadows, the ratio between Saber Strikes and Thrash / Double Strike / Voltaic Slash / Clairvoyant Strike has been adjusted for Deception | Infiltration and Hatred | Serenity. Corrosive Grenade | Shrap Bomb is now correctly classified as an AOE dot Fixed Cluster Bomb | Contingency Charge to benefit from the Auto-Crits granted by Laze Target | Smuggler’s Luck. Found unsolved Issue with Orbital Strike | XS Freighter Flyby doing double my predicted damage in game. Temporary fix added to match in game numbers stacks of Wrath | Presence of Mind now correctly grant the 25% value from the tooltip instead of the reduced 20% from 3.0 value. Redetermined a steady state rotation for Madness | Balance that uses all abilities except force leech | exactly on cooldown and uses as many clipped Force Lightnings | Telekinetic Throws as possible to replace Lightning Strikes | Disturbances (Thanks IkarusXY for bringing it to my attention and to Ceazare for confirming) Added the Force/Tech Resistance granted by Ravage | Blade Dance in addition to the defense bonuses Fixed Bug in my code for the Increased Health Tank option that accidentally included defense from on a DPS relic. (Thanks SchnellesWiesel) All Disciplines have been recalculated for 4.0.3 4.0.3 DPS changes (224 optimal gearing used) Imperial || Republic : 4.0.2 DPS -> 4.0.3 DPS (DPS Change = % DPS Change) Annihilation || Watchman : 6909 -> 6845 (-64 = -0.92%) Carnage || Combat : 6700 -> 6666 (-34 = -0.50%) Deception || Infiltration : 6808 -> 6475 (-333 = -4.89%) Hatred || Serenity : 6587 -> 6493 (-94 = -1.43%) Advanced Prototype || Tactics : 6785 -> 6378 (-407 = -6.00%) Marksman || Sharpshooter : 6705 -> 6179 (-526 = -7.85%) Engineering || Saboteur : 7250 -> 6712 (-538 = -7.42%) Virulence || Dirty Fighting : 6602 -> 6582 (-20 = -0.31%) Lethality || Ruffian : 6597 -> 6655 (-58 = -0.88%)

I am planning to keep this post and thread updated with what exists on the live servers. Until any patch actually exists and is playable I will not speculate on it. (Please don't link data-mined information for future patches in this thread) -sent via the Bantphone

I knew going in that the APM that I had on the Optimal stats page was going to be higher than possible. Mainly because I decided to deliberately ignore the any possibility of any delays due to input lag or time rounding. Because it affects everything equally and made my life easier, I kept it that way. But I love it when I find out more information about things I didn't know about. One thing you might want to think about including in the testing procedure is a time keeping ability. What I mean is that it would be interesting if the the ability action queue was compared against an in game ability that had a multiple parts that had a tick rate that was equivalent to the GCD. For example, using Weaken Mind once every ~18s instead of Disturbance because the Weaken Mind ticks should occur with the same spacing between them as two Disturbances. I have also been thinking about something similar to this in the back of my mind for a few weeks now as well. Mainly due to the question: Where does SWTOR round when it comes to Alacrity (or for things in general)? I have done some thought experiments to try and determine the best way to generate a dataset that would be useful in determining the answer to this problem. In the spoiler tag is the experiment procedure that I am thinking about using to test this: (Note: I haven't run this myself due to both time commitments and lack of motivation to sit around and test) (Note 2: the parts in italics are the explanations and logic behind each of the parts) I will eventually get around to testing this, but it will likely wait until I have nothing else to do.

I stay away from PVP gearing because ALL of the underlying assumptions for PVP are different. Including and in no way limited to the basic assumption for PVE that the goal is to maximize DPS.

Assassins have increased Endurance from two sources: Assassin Training: Increase total Endurance by 3% (Passive for all Assassins) Shroud of Darkness: Increase Endurance by 2% (Darkness Level 60) These bonuses are additive to the Bounty Hunter Endurance buff so assassins have +10% Endurance versus the +5% the other tanks have.

Some major things to keep in mind here: This is not a guide on how to play a class, instead this was a mathematical exercise designed to try and find what the optimal stat distribution would be for a particular set of circumstances The "Rotations" that were posted were meant as a method of showing my work. What they are is the base rotation I started with when I sat down to determine what the usage rate for any particular ability was. All I cared about was the time between ability activation in order to make sure that what was being done was even possible rather than blindly assuming that every ability was used on cooldown. Since the rotations are identical for Republic and Imperial, besides the names, there is zero benefit from double posting an identical list just with different names. (also because I was coming up against the character count for a single post) This is also the reason I did the rankings using the weapon set for Imperial toons. I am biased toward posting things in Imperial terms for no particular reason. I picked a direction and kept with it. As with the above, this steady state rotation listed here is only useful in that it helps guide me to the correct ability usage. But with that being said, When I write these out the only part of the rotation that is a priority list is the Filler section. I only put the moves that have to be used in certain places into the rotation format, the rest gets lumped into "Filler". I write it out GCD by GCD, making sure that there is never a wasted move. The Asterisks mean that the move consumes an extra GCD (Blazing Bolts has a 3s channel time) In this case; Arsenal actually has a set in stone rotation if it wants to do the following: Heartseeker Missile on Cooldown (15s) 5 stack Rail Shot on Cooldown (15s) [requires 3 Tracer Missiles during this time period] Priming Shot on Cooldown (18s) Proc Blazing Bolts on Cooldown (9s) [requires a Tracer Missile used on this GCD exactly] Use the proc'd Blazing Bolts within the Cooldown (9s) When I sat down to write this down I found that the rotation that does all of these things has a 90s duration with only 3 opportunities for filler moves that are not required to keep the previously stated moves on cooldown. One of which would always be Electronet. But this is a toy sustained rotation, meant for my own mathematical usage. For actual raids I would look towards an actual guide on the Mercenary / Commando class. I recommend Gyronamics's guides found here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=785291

Here is a closer look at the math behind the reason that I say that the tertiary stats are multiplicative while power is additive. DPS Calculation:

Powertech tanks have 27 different builds posted and I couldn't find anyone of them that had the error you mentioned. Each tank had one average damage profilein the full list and then had 4 damage profiles broken out each for maximizing mitigation and for maximizing mitigation while increasing health. I looked it over and couldn't find the single case where the situation you stated occured. All of the stat builds are automatically generated using the same script set because I don't trust myself not to make transcription errors.

I assumed that both of those abilities have no effect on the single target hit of Thermal Grenade. I felt safe assuming this because I was able to cross-reference some of the Ability Tags on jedipedia and found the tag the represents the flag for AOE ('5720). This tag is present for all AOE abilities and I believe it is what the AOE debuff looks for to apply its effect. In Thermal Grenade's case, this tag is only present on the AOE portion of the damage and not on the single target hit.

Where CC = Crit Chance and CD = Crit Damage bonus. Let me know if this is incorrect. Looks like you got it down. Since "autocrits" are a temporary plus 100% to critical hit chance, the 1 + Critical Chance makes alot of sense. Sorry about the confusion on my part; I had actually included the information you wanted in my first reply on this (it was in the code section, because formatting.) But, these numbers include all of the time weighted buffs. Because it is a non-trivial task for me to remove all of the time averaged buffs from my output I am leaving them in. Time Averaged Buffs: Optimizer Output (Stats I am using Included) Gunslinger - Sharpshooter Now to compare key areas: Average Damages: Trickshot: 7,094.18; (vs 6,909 for you) Penetrating Rounds: 15,649.4; (vs 15,256 for you) Charged Burst: 7,497.35; (vs 7,545 for you) Aimed Shot: 17,069.15; (vs 17,275 for you) Vital Shot: 9,788.49; (vs 9,593 for you) Quickdraw: 8,866.88; (vs 8,984 for you) Flurry of Bolts: 2,887.29; (vs 2,825 for you) These values are all appear close and don't appear to be responsible for the large differences in expected damage. I bet the differences we have will come down to ability usage. Ability Usage Rates: Trickshot: 4.55s (4.05s with all Alacrity) Penetrating Rounds: 11.38s (10.12s with all Alacrity) Charged Burst (Normal): 5.69s (5.06s with all Alacrity) Charged Burst (Execute): 7.58s (6.75s with all Alacrity) Aimed Shot: 15.17s (13.49s with all Alacrity) Vital Shot: 22.75s (20.24s with all Alacrity) Quickdraw (Execute): 18.2s (16.19s with all Alacrity) Flurry of Bolts (Normal): 22.75s (20.25s with all Alacrity) Flurry of Bolts (Execute): 30.33s (27s with all Alacrity) Using these ability rates I get the following Average DPS: Trickshot: 1,752.82 Penetrating Rounds: 1,546.65 Charged Burst: 1,372.42 Aimed Shot: 1,265.22 Vital Shot: 483.7 Quickdraw: 161.91 Flurry of Bolts: 132.13 Sum of all DPS: 6,715 Where my Ability Usage Rate comes from: Total Energy Regen: (i.e. sanity check) Is this what you were looking for?

I currently use Lightning Strike in the rotation I modeled (see post #5 in the Madness section). But I was curious about this as well so I did a quick comparison of the two moves. Please check my work to see if I made a silly assumption. Clipped Force Lightning vs Lightning Strike Information: Comparison Math: The answer appears to be that a Clipped Force Lightning will do more damage than a Lightning strike because of Lighting Burns. A few words of caution when looking at this: This doesn't take into acound the DPS loss from using Deathmark Stacks on Lighting Burns instead of the stronger DOTS Force Lightning can not be clipped by Force Lighting. Due to the 2s Channel time, this may cause rotational misalignment and thus a dps loss. (for example: delaying Death Field by 0.5s) This was just a quick glance at the abilities and I may have made a mistake somewhere Looks like I will have to take a harder look at Madness and its rotation to find out what is going on and what is possible.

Affliction: I also treat Affliction as a single tick ability as well because of the near unlimited length. But it does have a tick rate faster than 3s. This is because of the way the refresh mechanic works. Normally Affliction ticks every two GCDs. But when Refreshed it ticks immediately and the next tick occurs 2 GCDs (3s @ 0 Alcrity) after that point. This is true if it is refreshed 0.1 GCDs after the last tick or 1.9 GCDs. Because there are two moves that refresh the dot and they have unequal cooldowns, the tick rate can fluctuate over any given time period. I used the equation: "min(3,(1/(1/[Crushing Darkness CD] + 1/[Chain Lightning] + 1/[3])+.2))" because it allowed me to account for both the refreshes and for normal ticks. The 0.2 is the part that I arbitrarily added because it is a quick fix included because the original calculated tick rate there did not fully match the actual results for the number of ticks. I looked into the effect of alacrity on the initial dot application and you are right. Having the initial application take place under Polarity Shift is important because of the way the refresh mechanic works. The refresh action works by having the dot itself track the move used and casting a copy of itself on its target when the move used matches what it is looking for. This means that the Alacrity level matters when initially cast. Also, while this is very interesting, this trick only applies to Lightning | Telekinetics because they are the only class that has both a refresh-able DOT and an Alacrity Boosting move. It probably would only work for other classes (just AP-Powertechs) if a Mercenary is present for the raid-wide Alacrity buff. Alacrity: Time = [base Time]/(1 + [Alacrity]) Because of the way I initially built the sheets; I handle Alacrity in a not fully accurate way. This is because I have no access to the Alacrity from gear when looking at the Abilities page. This means that the Abilities page is unaffected by alacrity and just has a category in it that is added in at the end when calculating DPS. But the biggest difference that I included is that each Forked Lightning / Forked Darkness occurrence reduces the CD of Polarity Shift by 1 second. I simulated this by using the average hit rate of the Forked abilities to create a modified second duration for Polarity shift. This modifies the CD of Polarity Shift by converting the 90s into the new modified seconds duration.

Hi Frettz, The easiest place to determine and test the Supercrit formula: Annhilation | Watchman This is the best Discipline to see the way Supercrit works because they have multiple auto-crits on abilities thanks to Berserk. Even better, from a testing perspective, the abilities that are autocritting do not have any variance in damage and will always hit for the same amount (under identical conditions). In addition, it requires very little setup time to get to this point and the damage is internal so armor can be ignored. Expected damages for Marksman w/o time weighted buffs Explosive Probe:

Before any alacrity or off gcd moves are accounted for, the apm for IO should be 36. (9 moves in a 15s basic rotation) Once you add in supercharge, thermal sensor overide and vent heat this base apm goes up even higher. Then you factor in alacrity which is a direct apm increase. (Remember arsenal has some heavy alacrity boosts as well) It will always be a dps loss to do nothing even for energy regen. Rapid shots give much higher dps than thumb twiddling. Alacrity has not been an energy regen booster during Combat since 3.0, it is now exactly balancing against the speed of the rotation. -posted via the Bantphone

Because I am often wrong, I am always looking to improve the results. I will start off with what I have for my current State: Sorcerer - Lightning || Sage - Telekinetics I started off with just the theoretical dps calculations due to lack of data because of how early in 4.0 we were. I can't elimitate the possibility that I am incorrect (and nor should I ever eliminate that possibility). With that being said and without seeing your equation, these are the points that we likely differ on and where I think that my model might diverge from reality: To simulate the Priority list for the rotation, I used the following: [Ability Cooldown]*( 1 + (1/[Ability Cooldown for higher Priority move] ) ^ 2 ). In 3.0 this made Crushing darkness and Lightning Flash match the Parsely data. The number of Lightning Bolts used was the remainder of the GCDs after all of the other moves were accounted for (Filler) Recklessness is currently very poorly allocated in that I just assumed that it is used on Lightning Flash and Chain Lightning and a lightning Bolt every 90s. This does not always happen in reality. Affliction is handled strangely as well. The problem with Affliction is that it restarts and ticks every time Chain Lighting or Crushing Darkness hit the target. This causes the tick rate from Affliction to vary with the rotation. I am still using my 3.0 tick rate of Min(3s,(1/(1/[Crushing Darkness use rate]+1/[Chain Lightning use rate]+ 1/3s))+0.2s), where the 0.2s is an artificial time addition added to make it match the observed. I am giving Alacrity a 9.31% average boost on top of the gear. This is from the 5% stacking buff and using Polarity Shift on Cooldown. I time average everything because over a long enough time period everything gets applied pretty much equally. But Variable Alacrity always plays weird game with the remaining time period so it is a questionable ability to time average

Hi Frettz, Super Crit Logic: And here are my outputs for Snipers,Engineers and Virulence. I am using Imperial because of our rifle shot differences. I also haven't spent time to level up my sniper, so I haven't had a chance to confirm the coeffeicient differences you found. (though I did find at least one small error in my Virulence in that the Dot from Corrosive Grenade counts as an AOE and is buffed by the AOE debuff) Sniper - Marksman Sniper - Engineering Sniper - Virulence

Normally I try to stay away from PVP because of the basic assumptions problem (That and it is impossible to be right); but I have no qualms on appreciating other people's work. (Warning: I don't think I disagreed with you at all in this so I am not really advancing the conversation) This methodology matches very closely with the method I showed here: (and coincidentally also used concealment) http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=844210 Mine were for 220 geared PVE and thus I was starting with a higher stat budget and I used Alac100 (which in PVE is a true assumption). (That and I skipped distributing the enhancements due to space constraints) My conclusions in there about augments and crystals are likewise limited to PVE due entirely to the larger stat budgets and ability to use alacrity. PVP as always remains a different beast entirely (healers are likely the exception due to similar roles in both PVP and PVE). I like the graphs, but they are initially a bit tough to interpret. I ended up looking at the tables before I realized what you were trying to show. In the end, the only graph that really mattered was the highstat Marginal because all of the others are the starting steps. The main problem I have with graphing gearing is that there are usually more than two variables I would like to chart. (I miss making my Critical Rating vs DPS charts when it was a secondary stat) Skipping ahead to The bottom line: (with me just concurring with everything) Accuracy for the almost purely tech damage Scrapper | Concealment is near-worthless due to players only having Ranged/Melee defense Alacrity is tougher to assign a value to in PVP than it is in PVE. I like the work around of 50% effectiveness, but even that is hard to quantify because of the cooldown interactions. I think there might be a way to increase its value; but you have had more experience in modeling this scenario. I fully agree with Mastery and Power being near identical, I find Mastery a slim hair above Power due to Critical and the before mentioned 5% boost. But that lead is near enough to zero that the mere act of observing the phenomenon could change that answer. Critical is everywhere. When I force my optimizer to use no alacrity (in PVE), it stops using Critical after the enhancements and then augments for Mastery. But since I really really like Alacrity, I can never advise running no Alacrity. The key take away is that the answer for gearing is to balance the stats against each other and at each gearing choice take the stat that would give you the largest marginal boost and then redetermine that choice each time. It will never again be a case of stacking only a single stat type. I don't fully understand the 30% Critical damage bonus loss on Concealment | Scrapper either, most of the classes that also lost the 30% were targeted because they had rotational Autocrits. Scrapper, like Tatics Vanguards, does not have any of those and yet only one of these disciplines were targeted. I am actually waiting for the other shoe to drop and the devs to finish the job on changing all of the 30% boosts. (I doubt that they will revert it, more likely they will continue the pattern)

Two things: 1) There is a legend, just open the Full Stats spoiler for any of the gear levels and the first thing you will find is the Legend where: E = Enhancement or Implant or Earpiece A = Augment C = Crystal 2) B A N T , not bantle.

(Dr.) Alacrity Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Speed Boost. I'm going to take advantage of this to make and update a post that I almost posted 6 months ago, but never had a good opportunity. Alacrity is quite possibly the best stat in the game (and is my favorite). It is a damage multiply stat that has ZERO RNG and has a usefulness that is directly related to player skill. After 3.0, a small but major change to Alacrity made it become an amazing stat for all classes (excluding tanks). A Brief History of Alacrity: Launch to pre-3.0: When the game launched, Alacrity was not a very useful stat. Alacrity only affected the activation time of abilities and the GCD (Global Cool Down). The activation time only affected cast and channeled abilities were affected by the stat. Though it decreased the GCD time, there was no corresponding decrease in Ability Cooldown or Internal Cooldowns. This meant that having too much alacrity would actively ruin your rotation. In addition it shared an itemization slot with only Accuracy and with Surge. There were exceptions to this, for example healers are reactionary and non-rotational in nature along with needing no additional Accuracy meant that they could have alacrity and surge and benefit from the faster cast times. Operative healers benefited from this by allowing for an extra kolto probe to be used during the 18 second duration of the hot. Lightning Sorcs also benefited from a small amount of alacrity because it actually smoothed out their rotation. The king of Alacrity use was (and is) Carnage Marauders due to the 30% Alacrity buff they gained by using berserk that allowed for a 2.3 second ravage inside the tight gore window along with other moves. But excluding the exceptions, Alacrity was the useless stat and Surge was always better, even with Surge's relatively steep diminishing returns curve. Shadow of Revan, 3.0, December 2014: In 3.0, Alacrity got a huge buff. Alacrity was modified to reduce the Cooldowns, Internal Cooldown, DOT Tick rates and DOT durations. These changes along with the previous functionality of cast time reduction, channel time reduction, Energy Regen and GCD reduction meant that Alacrity would no longer modify rotations. Instead, Alacrity would smoothly increase the speed of a rotation (via Cooldown reductions) without modifying the resource requirements (due to the regen rate) or interfering with Procs (due to internal cool down and tick rates). DOTs and HOTs are affected by Alacrity and line up smoothly with the rotation (increased tick rate). There are two important things that Alacrity has no effect on: Defensive cooldowns (DCDs) and buffs. The cooldowns on DCDs are not affected by alacrity. This was done to prevent tanks from taking Alacrity as part of their gearing and being able to run DCDs back to back all fight long (Alacrity Immortal Juggernauts would have been fun). Buffs last their full stated duration. This is actually a major effect because Internal Cooldowns are still affected by alacrity. For example, The Focused Retribution relic (Mastery proc) has a 6 second duration with a 20 second internal cooldown. Normally the potential uptime would be 6s/20s = 30% uptime. With 10% Alacrity, the potential uptime jumps up to 6s / (20s/(110%)) = 33% uptime. While this doesn't seem like much, it is still a 10% uptime increase, over the course of a fight it all adds up. Note: I am not showing the trigger rate which is based on the spec's hit rate which is increased by Alacrity, so the effect is even larger than shown. This all means that a 1% increase Alacrity would increase the APM of the damage rotation by 1%. This 1% increase in APM translates directly to a 1% increase in DPS (DPS = Damage/Time and we are modifying the time with an APM increase). In practice, the DPS increase is slightly less than a 1% increase because you can't hold the other stats steady (Alacrity has to come from the Tertiary stat budget). All of the changes made the following statement to become true: "You will never have as much surge as you did right before 3.0." Alacrity was that good and the diminishing returns on surge means that it just isn’t worth putting points into it past a certain low point. In 3.x the optimal Surge range was around 300 with Alacrity being pushed to 600-800 for DPS and even higher for Healers. Knights of the Fallen Empire, 4.0, October 2015: While Alacrity did not change in 4.0, there was another major change that affected the stat distribution. That change was the removal of Surge and the replacement with a combined Critical stat that gave both critical chance and critical multiplier. This combined stat also brought new returns curves that had a much gentler returns slope than Surge had. This was compounded by the fact that Critical left the secondary slot and became a tertiary stat leaving Power as the only relevant secondary stat. New gear tiers have also pushed up the total stat budgets to new heights. Overly Simplified Math: The Goal is maximizing DPS. The traditional method is to increase DPS by increasing the amount of damage dealt. This is what Power, Mastery and Critical do. But that is not the only way to increase DPS. The other way is to decrease the Time it takes do that damage and that is where Alacrity plays its role. Mastery and Power give additive Increases to the amount of damage done. This added amount is constant due to the linear nature of bonus damage. Critical gives a multiplicative Increase to the amount of damage done. There will never be a (non-infinite) point where putting more Critical in will not increase the DPS. But each point of Critical makes next point slightly less effective (diminishing returns curve). Alacrity gives a multiplicative Decrease to the time that the abilities are used in. There will never be a (non-infinite) point where putting more Alacrity in will not increase APM and thus the speed of the rotation. But each point of Alacrity makes next point slightly less effective (diminishing returns curve). With some simplification and elimination of all of the constants can be eliminated and it leaves us with these equations. DPS = Damage per Second = Damage/Time Damage = ([base Damage] + [bonus Damage]) *[Critical Damage Boost] Critical Damage Boost = 1 + [Critical Chance] * [Critical Multiplier] Time = [base Time] / (1 +[Alacrity %]) Because of these relationships it is possible to find the points where the total DPS is maximized and what the relative values are for Critical, Alacrity and Power/Mastery. For the original post, I brute forced the solution for the stat relationship. I did this because itemization in SWTOR is discrete and doing so reduces the total number of calculations because the only choices in itemization in 4.0 is for the Tertiary stats and Augments. This limits the total number of gear combinations to a much smaller space and results in gearing suggestions that are actually possible. Boss Uptime: If there is downtime on the boss, Alacrity is actually the best stat to have. Alacrity is the only stat that actively benefits you during fight downtime (especially since every other stat is useless during that time period). During Downtime with Alacrity your offensive cooldowns and hard hitting abilities are ticking down faster than it would without alacrity. Also, if you are a non-warrior class, your energy regeneration is faster during this inactive period so you can push harder during non-downtime. There are very few bosses that you can't maintain 100% uptime on, even while moving. This does not mean turreting, this means being able to continue your rotation on the GCD for every GCD. The remaining bosses are ones that have scripted events that must be followed (such as cleansing the Dot on Coratanni). During the time period spent frozen, Alacrity is still working in your favor as dots tick faster and all of your moves are becoming ready faster for a nice boost when the downtime event happens. There are not any bosses with short time uptimes that would make Alacrity useless. The closest is Soa with his 15s of uptime versus 30s or more of downtime, but that boss is not a DPS check. Known Alacrity Issues: Variable Alacrity and clipping Variable Alacrity and channel clipping (while not use to the timings) are the two things that will mess up your rotation and the most likely the culprit behind the people claiming that Alacrity messes up your rotation. Variable Alacrity will not modify any cooldowns already active, instead it will just increase the speed of the cooldown time while the variable alacrity is active and then returning to the normal rate afterwards. This can cause procs and cooldowns to no longer line up. This can be most easily seen on a Sorc by using both Recklessness and Polarity Shift. Innovative ordinance Mercenaries and Arsenal Commandos also have a strange bug that affects them in the 600-800 range. This is a strange misalignment of a critically timed proc that sometimes doesn't go off (only in this range). This appears to be a result of alacrity rounding creating a double reduced GCD triggered by the instant Power Shot | Charged Bolt. It is an odd case. Serendipitous Assault Relic's ICD is not affected by Alacrity. Not sure why, but historically Serendipitous Assault has always been rather buggy (I remember the double procing and using multiples). I like Alacrity.

I stay away from PVP gearing because all of the underlying assumptions for PVP are different. Including and in no way limited to the basic assumption for PVE that the goal is to maximize DPS. Healers are probably the least different' because their target remains basically the same (don't let people die).