As far as I can tell, most of the high end raiding community is leaving due to lack of content. Also the constant nerfs to the difficulty reduces the satisfaction out of running operations for the higher end players. I understand, from a business position, that Bioware cannot give the 1% of the community what they want. The cost would outweigh the amount of revenue they get from the raiding community. Therefore, opening the content to more casual players to enjoy, is a smart move. IE: nerf the content and make it easier so less skilled players can enjoy it, thus play more, and potentially give the company more money. My suggestion, sort of a compromise, is that we get a terminal at the beginning of all operations, that gives a choice of buff. Sort of like a bolster, or that GSI terminal on Makeb, or that nim schematic we can craft that buffs our endurance, heals, and dps. However make it a tier, from like 1 - 10, where 1 gives you a 1% increase to all stat. Then 10 could increase it by like 30%. You could even go negative, like the level sync, and reduce our stats to make the op more difficult. Titles could be added to the harder levels, like if we clear NiM DP with a -5 level buff that reduces our stats by 5%, and for clearing it we get a legacy title like "God Amongst Men". Basically, allow the raid team to choose a buff type that either increases or decreases our stats to change the difficult of the operation. Make achievements and titles for different difficult levels. It would be a combination of Group Finder Bolster and Level Sync, however basically allow the raid group to choose a particular level. Kinda like the Star Fortresses, where we can choose to buff ourselves or not, and give us a title, which was "The One and Only" for clearing it without buffs. Please comment and +1 if you like the idea. PS. Blizzard did something similar in WoW with the Icecrown Citadel. Where the raid leader could set the difficulty of the phase.

If you lauched the KotFE quest chain, at the beginning once you are on darth marr's ship, there was a social notification asking if you'd like to turn the tutorial on. If you clicked yes, it would explain why you've lost your abilities. The tutorial basically hides your abilities and they will be unlocked to you as your progress through the first chapter. You can exit the tutorial by clicking ESC, then there should be an option at the top of the box that pops up that says something on the lines of "end the tutorial" etc. If that doesn't do it for you, then I'd send in a ticket. Good luck

Hello Juzzyx, Judging from the info you've given from your gear arrangement, your stats seem like they're on the right track. However you're APMs are a tad low, which could be the product of a number of reasons. You could be experiencing lag, you're waiting between abilities, or you're not making the most use out of mental alacrity/recklessness. Besides that, I'd say stick to the Mastery/Power relics, however if you wish to experiment, I'd say go for it. I'd think the crit relic with the mastery might be a good choice, my friends and I have seen a slight increase, but that could be from a number of reasons and not because its just better. Changes that would benefit you the most, would probably be rotational. Opener Sage Pre-cast Force Speed + Pre-cast Mind Crush > Weaken Mind > Empowerment + Mental Alacrity + Adrenal + Turbulence > Telekinetic Burst > Force Potency + Telekinetic Gust > Telekinetic Wave > Telekinetic Burst ~ [Follow Priority] Sorcerer Pre-cast Force Speed + Pre-cast Crushing Darkness > Affliction > Unlimited Power + Polarity Shift + Adrenal + Thundering Blast > Lightning Bolt > Recklessness + Lightning Flash > Chain Lightning > Lightning Bolt (spam) ~ [Follow Priority] Priority List Turbulence / Thundering Blast Mind Crush / Crushing Darkness (With the Force Gust / Force Flash Proc) Telekinetic Gust / Lightning Flash (Above MC / CD without the Proc) Telekinetic Wave / Chain Lightning Telekinetic Burst / Lightning Bolt Force Quake / Force Storm (Only if there are multiple adds around the boss) I hope this helps. Below is a link for a gearing post for Sages and Sorcerers that I encourage, also a link to a youtube video of a Telekinetics Parse I made during 3.0, the rotation hasn't changed thus far. Gearing - http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=846135 Youtube Sage Parse - (Skip to like 0:30 to pass the gear)

I haven't done any tests to see whether or not more power increases the amount absorbed by the static barrier. I don't believe it does. However, I'd highly encourage you to test your theory with more power out. In fact I believe I mentioned in a post about doing that, somewhere... [update Edit] - A friend of mine says that power does increase the amount shielded by static barrier/force armor. Having higher than 11% alacrity doesn't make much sense to me either, however, I believe putting the points into alacrity is a better choice than into power. Your way of healing is probably very different from the way I heal, so I guess I can only say, try out both ways, and see which benefits you the most. Good luck with your test, and I'd love to hear what your results come up with

Thanks for posting these numbers and thoughts about sage/sorc healing. I'm more than happy to accept that I might be wrong with gearing for sage healing. However please don't misunderstand me as someone who crunches numbers and doesn't have any real experience in NiM content. On the contrary, I've healed NiM content quite a lot across all the healing classes. I've enjoyed the sage the most. I wanted to share my thoughts about gearing for players to view and test. Do I feel that my way of gearing is correct? Sure, as would anyone that posts on forums. Will it be the "be all end all"? I doubt it, as for the fact that I cannot test it because I'm not sage healing for any NiM team in this content. Therefore I cannot be certain one way or another. In fact, all my knowledge comes from previous content and testing different ratios in game. Personally I felt that having higher alacrity didn't improve my ability to heal in NiM content. I also saw diminishing returns with having alacrity higher than 1100. Alacrity is supposed to decrease the GCD, as well as your cooldown and activations, however, to clarify about diminishing returns in my testing, I didn't see either of those improving past a certain amount of alacrity. That might be in due part that I follow different rotations for healing for different circumstances. As you state in your post, I also only use Static Barrier to block dmg from DoTs and any huge hit that I feel incoming. Also does higher alacrity mean you'lI have more abs at the end of the parse. From my knowledge, the debuff isn't effected, therefore no matter the amount of alacrity your static barrier's ability to absorb dmg is constant, unless you use it more on different players, however taking the scenario that you only use it on tanks; More alacrity won't make you any better past a certain point in my mind. I also don't use it as liberally as other sage healers, is that worse or better, that's anybody's guess. If I may make a point. You're stating that the way your sorc healers are gearing is far better than the way I'm suggesting. If I may ask, have they tried my way of gearing? If not, are we not making the same argument towards each other? Please don't mistake my post as malicious, or rather an attempt to lead others astray, that wasn't my intent. I simply had an idea about sage healing, and wanted to share it with others to test. Much like your post inclines as well. I will admit, that your post has some great points, and I'll go a step further and add your numbers in a separate section for others to test out, with your permission? I certainly don't want my way of gearing to misguide others from a better way. I also doubt that some readers delve this far into the thread, and mainly read the original post. It's also hard, in my mind, to state which way of gearing is best for healing, considering the many different ways players heal. My way might very well be better for others, and your healer's way might be better for some as well. Thanks again for your post, I think pooling knowledge from other's ideas collectively, is always beneficial for the whole. Goodluck with NiM content for your teams.

I updated the original post to better acknowledge that I feel players should gear in a similar manner for each tier. Thank you for bringing it up.

Hello Kalezo, I'd highly recommend using crit and alacrity augments in this expansion due to the amount of stat you can dump into both, and should. Your augments should basically just "augment" , no pun intended, your crit and alacrity stats to boost them on top of what you already have. I would shoot for around 1300 - 1400 crit rating and 700 - 800 alacrity rating. If you would like, I have another thread topic describing exact number of enhancements and augments to reach these numbers well. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=846135 Hope this helps, rose

Thanks for the positive feedback. I updated the post to include a priority list.

Yes, all my values were taken from BiS 224 Ultimate Exarch gear you get from operations tokens. However, the ratio's from Defiant to Ultimate Exarch should remain the same. Basically just keep upgrading. The only difference with Defiant and Exarch gear, is that you'll drop an augment of crit or alacrity for an accuracy, until you get your 4 accuracy 224 enhancements. For dps at least. For healing, I'd say follow the same path for Defiant gear and Exarch gear, as I have outlined for Ultimate Exarch.

I think using a crit relic in place the the power or mastery relic, is definitely worth a try for both dps and heals. However, since your crit, with my method of gearing, is going to be close to serious diminishing returns, having the power/mastery relics, probably will provide more benefit. That would be the only thing I could think of, that would make the mastery/power relics more beneficial. When I'm able to test this idea, I'll update this thread.

Thanks for the post, I will agree with you about the SF before WM. It was how I was ordering my dots, however, I decided to get away from my norm and test reversing the order to WM > SF. I found that on avg, I got higher dps. To be honest, I have no clue as to why. I'm still parsing to find out, however you're right, SF does more dmg, as was my reasoning as well for applying it first. Also Force Serenity does more dmg when used on a target suffering from WM. With my rotation, there does come a time when you use FS without WM on the target, because of the order of dots. However I stand by my rotation, as it was the highest dps I could get out of different theories and arrangements. About your second topic, FS's cool down is succinct with FiB, if you use it after FiB, it'll always just be coming off cool down. However if you use it before, than the cool downs become mixed, and eventually, you'll be using FS behind FiB anyways, I believe it comes about 1:45 into a parse or so. FiB has a 14.5 second cool down, and serenity is an 11.5, however serenity has a 1.5 second cool down. Therefore if you use FiB, then channel serenity, when serenity finished channeling and goes off, the cool downs of FiB and Serenity are the same, therefore, imo, there isn't a dps loss using it this way, nor do I feel is there any negative theory around it. There is only a positive aspect to doing it this way, because FS will refund force, each time.

Tooltip for Potency/Recklessness reads as, "Grants 2 charges of Potency/Recklessness, which increases the Force critical chance of your direct attacks and heals by 60%...... Each time a direct Force ability critically hits or each time a channeled Force ability is activated, 1 charge is consumed..." Force Storm and Force Quake only consume 1, because they are channeled abilities. FiB and DF are both direct attacks, so every hit is considered 1 direct attack. This is why, FiB and DF consume all the charges of Potency / Recklessness. I will admit, I've seen FiB and DF consume a charge of Potency / recklessness and crit hit across 5-8 targets. However, taking crit chance into effect, try taking off all your gear, then try the same experiment, and you'll notice that it will not crit across everything as often. Tk Wave and Chain Lightning follow the same mentality, they are direct dmg abilities, and will consume all the charges of Potency / Recklessness, as long as there is multiple crits. With the amount of crit chance we get now, that'll always be the case.

Are you talking about an aoe rotation? I find that if you use Force Serenity before FiB, the cooldowns don't match up as well. Also there will be times when you use Force Serenity when the Force Suppression debuff isn't on the target. For those that don't know, using FS on a Force Suppressed target will refund 15 force. In my parsing, I find that I slowly bleed force, to the point where I need to contemplate using Vindicate to regen, if I use FS before FiB in the rotation. Also, to reiterate, the cooldown on FS is shorter than FiB, so each cycle, you'll be using FS sooner and sooner, to the point where, you'll use it behind FiB anyway. Also, I understand the thought behind it, and agree that FiB consumes all the FP stacks, and it would be beneficial having other abilities consume some first. However, I think that regardless of what consumes the stacks, you'll get more crits either way. If you consume all the charges of FP on FiB, it still means more of the FiB hits will crit. Using FiB with 1 stack of FP, doesn't necessarily guarantee that each hit will crit. It only guarantees 1, the rest is up to chance. Even then, it doesn't fully guarantee a critical hit. Honestly, the best use would be to use it with a channeled ability, such as Tk Throw, or Force quake. However, the cooldown time, lines up perfectly, with FiB and Force Serenity, and ideally, you want to use FP on cooldown, so as to get more crits earlier, and thus start FP on its cooldown once again. Sorry, I had to play devil's advocate, FP is a strange cooldown in any case. Thank you for the "10/10" compliment, good luck with 4.0 NiM progression, if we can even call redoing old ops progression lol.

Hello Everyone, Intro I wanted to share my thoughts on the Balance Rotation. I'll also point out, that Balance for this expansion got a noticeable buff from 3.0. As such, it's a great spec to use in operations, especially boss fights that allow you to have optimal up time on the boss themself. With that being said, I would recommend using Telekinetics for Burst phase fights such as Revan, or high target swapping fights like Revanite Commanders. However any fight that allows maximum uptime on the boss, or has adds, Balance will be the superior spec. So lets get into it.... Rotation Discussion For most DoT specs the idea is to have max up time on your dots then filler abilities. With balance, I typically let the dots fall off before I reapply so as to let the dot consume every tick. If you reapply early, you'll lose some dmg because it isn't allowed to tick for the full duration. The DoT does dmg over time, however if that time is cut off, say half way, then it would have been more beneficial to use a burst dmg ability rather than waste the gcd on a reapplication. Annecdote: If the boss is about to die, and you need to reapply dots, its better to just use Tk throw and disturbance to kill the target, because the dot would deal only a small portion of the dmg. Continue: Think about, all the dmg the dot deals, within a single gcd, IE the application. If you're reapplying it early, then you essentially cut off some of the dmg from the previous application. Example [Letting the dot fall off before application] Example [Reapplying early to have 100% uptime] Basically, you end up using more applications at the end of your fight with reapplying early to have 100% uptime. Letting it falloff, then reapply, minimizes this, and allows you to use more filler abilities. You should though, reapply immediate after they fall off. My rotation below follows this mentality, and I tested both ways to be sure, and saw a considerable increase in my dps doing it the latter, rather than reapply early. [*#] - Will mark Force Potency Stacks Opener Normal Rotation (Updated 2015.11.02) Where to use Force Potency Where to use Mental Alacrity Priority List Utility Discussion I would suggest always using Force Mobility as one of your Heroic Utilities. Otherwise, take a moment before the fight and think about what would be best. Typically for Skillful Utilities I'd use Pain Bearer and Jedi Resistence. If the fight requires mobility bring the Upheaval utility. If there is more adds, then use Tectonic Mastery. The two masterful utilties and the final heroic will be up to you, and they, at least for me, change per fight. Skillful Utilities Masterful Utilities Heroic Utilities Hope this helps you learn a bit about balance, and perhaps increase your dps. Good luck P.S. I'll update this post with more information as I remember it, and as patches possibly change dot timers or whatever. (Updated 2015.11.02) Added Color to make it easier to read and point out abilities. Also added more to the rotation and highlighted, when and where to use mental alacrity and force potency. Added a priority list to help get players back on track without panicking about what to do.

Not necessarily. I don't believe alacrity has a diminishing return in the sense that there would come a point when having more is a bad thing. The reason why I said yes when in the dps case, is because you'd be sacrificing other important stats. Also, the fact that healers don't need accuracy so therefore we get 672 points back to allocate. I personally am putting those points into alacrity. In the theory I outlined for healing above, we get a good amount of crit and I didn't feel the need to have anymore. Each point of crit from 0 to 300 gives like a 0.016% boost. From 1400 - 1700 it gives a 0.013% boost. Alacrity's value changes similarly to crit, however getting alacrity to the same stat points as crit, is impossible, if you give crit 1400+ points. Therefore, there is greater benefit for healers to go with higher alacrity, for the sake of, they have the stat allocation to do so. However, if you'd wish to try running an experiment, you could replace the alacrity augments for power augments. You'd get around 840 alacrity rating, which would be 9% ish, and you'd get a bonus of 438 power. Both theories could work. You could also replace the alacrity augments with more crit augments, and see if that is more beneficial as well. In the end, gear is only a stepping stone, how you apply yourself in combat will dictate how well you do. The success of a healer is incredibly hard to determine, considering in a progression standpoint, the healing portion gets easier over time as team members get more comfortable with the fight and take less dmg. If you want to determine if a new set of gear is better or worse, I'd suggest making a healing rotation then parse for a minute or so and see how much HPS you can pump out. In conclusion, no, I don't believe alacrity has a diminishing return for healers. Once you get your crit multiplier back near 70% dump everything else into alacrity.

Power will always grant you higher bonus dmg, mastery gives a increase to bonus dmg as well as crit chance. Mastery Force Dmg Bonus per Point - 0.2 Power Force Dmg Bonus per Point - 0.23 There isn't much of a difference but it's there. However, if you're not at your limit for crit chance, then mastery will benefit you more. In you're case however, you're adding much more power over mastery, so it would therefore increase your dmg more to go for the power. Hope this helps

To anticipate the possible question of rotation, I've made some videos of myself parsing on a 1 mill dummy. Links are below. The videos were made during 3.0. However, the rotations thus far have not changed. You can skip the first 30 seconds of the video to get to the parsing.

With this way of gearing, I'll be using power crystals.

As requested, here's my thoughts for pvp gearing stats. To start off, I'm not the most avid pvper, so forgive me if I make a amateur mistake with my theory. DPS PvP Gearing - [Telekinetics/Balance & Lightning/Madness] Total Stat Allocation - 2392 points [10 enhancements @ 137 and 14 augments @ 73] Crit Rating valued at 1500: Will require 8/10 enhancements with 6 augments for a total of 1534 rating - This will get you between 40 and 41% crit chance - This will get you between 70 and 71% crit multiplier Alacrity valued at 800: Will require 2/10 enhancements with 8 augments for a total of 858 rating - This will get you between 8 and 9% alacrity From my knowledge, accuracy doesn't have a beneficial aspect for pvp. Therefore, we can use all our stat allocation towards crit rating or alacrity rating. The struggle is finding the right balance between the two. From my past parsing experiments with alacrity, I found that anything above 700 didn't drastically improve my overall dps. In fact it diminished because, I presume, I had to sacrifice too much from other stats, which was power at the time. The pvp gear at the Exemplar level gives a total of 2392 stat. We get 137 points per enhancement and 73 per augment. Now, using the idea that alacrity has a diminishing return at 700 ish, and also that previously, in my opinion, 70% crit multiplier was the dr cap for surge, my math involves keeping a ratio near those stat values. From my theory, Alacrity will need 2 enhancements and 8 augments; Crit Rating will need 8 enhancements and 6 augments. The pvp gear, unfortunately gives us 3 accuracy enhancements; chest, mainhand, gloves. Luckily though, we can just buy enhancements strait out. Nevertheless, the first priority is getting the armorings for the set bonus. I suggest getting crit rating implants and earpiece. From there you'll need to replace the 3 accuracy enhancements and buy 3 crit rating enhancements from the vendor. Then you should be pretty much set. Power will come from your enhancements and mods. If you want to experiment with power augments, I'd suggest taking equally from alacrity and crit. IE: take two from alacrity and two from crit, then add four power. Final notes: There is a totally different aspect to dpsing in pvp than in pve. The idea for pve is to increase your sustained dmg to dwindle a large health bar over time. In pvp, it seems to favor getting more dmg out in the short term to overwhelm you target and kill them fast. With that mentality, I'm sure a lot of people might think to just stack everything into crit, so as to get a huge amount of dmg, then add full power augments to get your dmg numbers larger. That might be all well in good, however I feel that giving yourself more sustained dmg, could overwhelm or exhaust the capabilities of the enemy healers. Basically you need more dps than the enemy hps. Having higher crit multiplier numbers might seem like a good idea, however I feel that getting slightly lower dmg numbers out faster is far better. In my experience attack speed always grants higher dps rather than crit chance or crit dmg multipliers in most games. That's the mentality towards why I'd rather use a crit/alacrity build rather than a strait crit/power build. Hope this helps Lhancelot P.S. - I know the idea of dps vs. hps is in a perfect world, and that in pvp that is never so ideal because stuns, interrupts and LoSing is a thing. Nevertheless, I wanted to argue in a perfect environment for dps sake.

Hey everyone, Rose here, I wanted to quickly share my thoughts on the best way to gear, for this current tier of content for Sage dps and healing. Keep in mind, I'm making these values based on my past experience and some brief limit experiments with gear. All values are taken at the Ultimate Exarch Level [Rating 224]. All of this is meant to be a starting point, not the be all end all for gearing. I highly encourage anyone with the drive and determination to test my theories out, then tweek them slightly and parse to determine if there is better stat allocations. I'd personally love to hear what you find. With that said, I think this will get close to the be all end all. DPS PvE Gearing - [Telekinetics/Balance & Lightning/Madness] Total Stat Allocation - 2702 points [10 enhans @ 168, 14 augs @ 73, 2 Crystals @ 41] Crit Rating: Will require 4/10 enhans, 8 augs, and 2 crystals for a total of 1338 rating - This will get you between 38 and 39% crit chance - This will get you between 67 and 68% crit multiplier Alacrity: Will require 2/10 enhancements with 6 augments for a total of 774 rating - This will get you between 7.5 and 8% alacrity Accuracy: Will require 4/10 enhancements with 0 augments for a total of 672 rating - This will get you between 109.8 and 110% accuracy How you will do this is basically just take the gear you get from the token and use it directly. You will get 3 crit rating enhancements, 3 accuracy enhancements, and 1 alacrity enhancement from the Head, Chest, Gloves, Pants, Boots, Mainhand, and Offhand token pieces. From there you will get a Implant/Ear peice for each stat IE: 1 Implant of Alacrity, 1 Implant of Crit, and an Accuracy Earpiece. Annecdote: This arrangement ratio I've set up, should work for each tier of gear. Basically how I've suggested with the Ultimate Exarch gear, do the same for the Defiant and Exarch. The only difference, is that for the Defiant and Exarch gear, you will need to use 1 augment of accuracy, just remove a alacrity augment and add an accuracy, until you get your Ultimate Exarch accuracy pieces. You'll get 2850 power rating racially from the mods and enhancements and 3816 bonus mastery from the gear, I felt this is enough to increase your bonus dmg. However, if you'd wish to get more power out of this arrangement, I'd suggest dropping the alacrity augments and swapping them for power. Though, I personally will stick to the alacrity augments. In conclusion, take what you get and use it directly. You'll end up with; 4 pieces of crit with 8 augments and 2 crystals; 2 pieces of alacrity with 6 augments; 4 pieces of accuracy with 0 augments. Out of the three, 2 implants and 1 ear, make sure each one uses a different stat of the three: alacrity, accuracy, and crit. Use the Focused Retribution and Serendipitous Assault relics. If you're going to swap a relic out for the Boundless Ages, swap the SA, because the FR procs more often, and I found I got a higher avg parse doing it that way. Healer PvE Gearing 1 - [seer/Corruption] Total Stat Allocation - 2702 points [10 enhancements @ 168 and 14 augments @ 73] Crit Rating: Will require 5/10 enhancements with 8 augments for a total of 1424 rating - This will get you between 41 and 42% crit chance - This will get you between 69 and 70% crit multiplier Alacrity: Will require 5/10 enhancements with 6 augments for a total of 1278 rating - This will get you between ~ 13 and 14% alacrity To do this, again, basically just take whatever you get from the ops tokens, and place it in your gear. For your implants and ear piece, make them all alacrity. Then you'll need 8 crit augments and 6 alacrity augments. However, you could also drop the 6 alacrity augments for 6 power augments, that would give you a bonus 438 power, and leave you with 840 alacrity rating, which should put you between 9 and 10%, I think. I apologize for my crude estimations. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Any comments or if anyone picks up on a mistake in my post go ahead and point it out, I'll watch this thread and update it with more information as I get it Hope this helps and that RNG is kind to you P.S. - When I say 10 enhancements I mean the 7 enhancements you get from the gear, and the 2 implants and 1 earpiece. I just consider those last three, enhancements as well. Also, I'd recommend using this "template" for all dps classes and healer classes. (Updated 2015.11.04) Changed the dps arrangement to allocate more stat into alacrity. Used crit crystals to augment more stat into crit rating.

Still searching for players to fill spots.

Still looking for experienced NiM raiders to fill spots on a progression team for 4.0 content. We need 1 Tank [any class], we need 1 DPS [Preferably Commando or Gunslinger]. Msg me on Forums or in game if you're interested in trying out.

Filled Team Composition Tanks: [Vanguard / Powertech] 1 [shadow / Assasin] 2 Damage: [Vanguard / Powertech] 1 [sentinel / Marauder] 2 [Commando / Mercenary] 3 [sage / Sorcerer] 4 Healers: [Commando / Mercenary] 1 [sage / Sorcerer] 2

Still actively seeking raiders, PST me if you're interested in learning more!