You said 10 months, twice. It is over one year now, factually. You were off by two months. Anyway, this is of little relevance. Concerns here are not about who has been waiting for longer or about who has the right to complain. Concerns are about a full context where the viability or continuity of PVE group content is being put into question altogether: 1. BW releasing what now seems misleading information when they announced what 4.0 would not bring at launch; 2. Senior Designer for group content left, recently; 3. BW intends that endgame group content drops lesser rewards than lower content, as recently announced; 4. BW now announces that has nothing to present or talk about for pve group content. No plans, basically. Somehow, you decided to turn this into a fight between pvp'ers and pvp'ers or who has the right to complain. And not only this is the wrong way to put it, you brought the wrong figures, which obviously doesn't help. Regardless of the complains that PVPers may have, PVEers have their own set of reasons to complain and have been presenting their concerns. Many already decided to leave given the context presented above. Did the PVPers waited for longer for new content, so far? Yes. Did BW announced that they intended that Ranked PVP had lesser rewards than Regular PVP? No. Different set of concerns. It's not even a fight between the two...

The message is clear: right now, they don't even have plans for group content. They can't really give timeline/ETA's on something that isn't even planned yet... The question now is not "when" anymore... but if at all. Ever.

My sub expires at the end of this month and I'm not extending it. There's nothing left for me on this game that is worth paying. I understand that, with the movies coming up and all, that the people in charge would focus on a different demographic. More than understanding, I was seeing that coming and expecting it. What I wasn't expecting and still fail to see why this must happen is that BW would be actively commited to shut down the MMO aspect of the game. Like others, back then when BW announced no new group content on 4.0 and many of my mates and friends left, I gave them the benefit of the doubt. And kept giving it and supporting the game. Fool that I was... As a long time subscriber, I invested far more on this game already than what I would pay for any good single player game. Although I appreciate the story and all, that's the fluff, not what made me commit and invest in the game. We may be a relatively small parcel of the whole player base. But almost all of us are actually subscribers and that tend to subscribe for long periods of time due to the heavy commitment with the game. Very few dedicated raiders aren't subscribers. We are also the kind of player that support the game in other ways than money, by word of mouth, by helping other players with the ingame know-how, by creating guides for classes and content, by helping others in game with information about the classes, the stats, rotations, mechanics of the fights and so on and so on. We are also the kind of player that participate on the PTS cycles, that give feedback to the devs - feedback that they actively have been looking for since they need it - that help them to model the game properly. Many of those also invest on other areas of the game which help indirectly the more casual player. Many of us are heavy crafters, providing in game goods for other players that don't have the time or dedication to manage to get them by their own means, for example. These may not be the majority of the players or represent the majority of the game income, an argument that was put forward many times already. Ok. It's still a relevant part of the players base that for a long time, literally years, helped to keep the ingame environment lively, supported it, sustained it. And now, on a disloyal move towards this relevant part of the player base, BW is basically saying "there is nothing new here for you and what is left, we are commited to strip it down, it's not a bug, it's by design". Ok, I undestand the message. Got it. A bit too late....

I don't think that putting a lesser reward on harder content accounts for a fix. It will be still broken by then. If you account for the fact that in 2 months the 224 gear will be fairly irrelevant - meanwhile continues to be farmed to exhaustion on HHM ops - then it will be as broken as it is now. Who will care about a chance of 224 in two months? It's not like you can gear up companions nowadays...

I didn't go think about your questions, there's nothing to think about since it fails short of any logic throughout it. I did go out cause I have a life, which you don't respect cause either you don't have one or cause you are here simply for the purpose of trolling the topic, or both. Interestingly enough, such sock puppet like post with pure dumbing down trolling only pop'ed up when I mentioned WoW.

Downloading WoW stage. It's actually a painful stage since I grew to love this game. But bits by bits they have been removing the game I loved and what's is left is scarse and starting to be way too dumb to stand... I mean, a game where everyone farms trivial content to exhaustion to gather the BiS gear that can be easily be done undermaned by any competent group even and that demotivates any attempt on going on challenging content to the point you struggle to find others still interested in going on challenging stuff for little to no reward is not fun anymore, if anything is starting to be depressing cause what I see is a dumb shadow of what was there in the past. This is one more decision on a long chain of them but there's some piece of news here. BW is starting, albeit with huge delay, to be quite open with this, stating that this is intended! It's intended that people farm the best gear in the game on trivial content. That is what they want! Obviously, they don't want people to engage on hard content since they keep removing incentives to go there. And at some point, the only bit of hard content may be removed entirely from the game cause at that point they can argue that "virtually no one does it" (shock!). And that revamping old content and put new BiS gear on trivial content that can be farmed to exhaustion by virtually anyone is a huge sucess. And we can wonder aswell if there will be any new Ops... ever! Accordingly to the last official stream, the feedback is so positive, it literally fills pages. And they care about what we think and they listen to our feedback. Right...

The gear was part of that fluff. Not necessarily cause you strictly needed it to kill the stuff but cause you could get it cause you were able to kill the stuff. You may remember how of an exclusive item was Kell Dragon gear back in the days of the first round of NiMs. It was nice not cause you needed Kell Dragon to kill NiM but cause you could only wear Kell Dragon if you could beat NiM. Still the highest tier of gear dropping on the highest tier of content still makes sense for other reasons other than gear is fluff by itself: can help you killing the last and usually hardest bosses of that tier (within NiM, difficulty varies a lot), the next tier of Operations at launch or to put NiM on farm after you beat it the first times so you get other vanity stuff (timed runs titles, exclusive mounts, etc) after that. The number of players that still go do progression for little to no reward (on gear or whatever) are very restricted, even amongst seasoned and dedicated raiders very few will still go do really challenge for no reward. No exclusive gear adds up to the fact that the Operations are old themselves and that many dedicated raiders already have the titles and the achievments and the mounts from previous interations of the game. So to this they are stating and adding that it is intended the gear incentive not to be there either.

Obviously they will never say "we want to kill endgame content" or "we don't want you around" since it makes no sense to do it whatsoever from the RP standpoint. It's just about managing expectations and reactions in little bits and huge delays so the players that are (were) focused on that aspect of the game don't leave all at a sudden. We are part of the paying customers afterall and from their point of view, the longer we stick around, the better. Now, having said that, it's pretty clear and they don't even have to say it anymore after such a long chain of decisions, they are not investing anything on a community of players that was highly invested in the game and supported it for long in so many ways. It's another type of player/customer that they are highly invested in pleasing and keeping entertained. We are out of their picture but the longer we stick around paying some, the better, it's the bottom line.

NiM Ops should drop 228 at the very least. Given that 224 is dropping on extremely easy bosses that can be cleared severly undermaned, it makes no sense that NiM would drop 224 at all, to begin with, let alone to drop less than the so called "hard mode" ops. Obviously, this is all part of a plan. And as the op shows, clearly intended...

It's not a joke. Instead, the message shouts all over the place "WORKING AS INTENDED FELLOWS" as I mention on my message above. It's all part of a plan of shifting the game focus and sadly we are out of the picture on the new plan.

This is the only relevant part of the post, the rest is a distraction. The "chance" of a drop hardly changes anything when you can get the best gear in the game doing extremely easy content. And that is what most HM bosses are, they are SM like and only HM in name. So this whole message only means "working as intended fellows". I'm very sad right now and the last couple of weeks finally made me realize that this game is now heavily investing on a DLC model, with little to no hope or care for stuff with replay value, oriented for casual players many of which (will all due respect) never care to explore/learn their classes and never invest themselves deeply in the game. It's a spit in the face to those that for long time (literally years) supported this game in so many ways: - With their activity within the game making it lively (participating in Ops, FPs, PVP, keeping GTN going and on and on). Without all those players the game would be a desert and much less appealing to the casual player that logs now and then or subs for short periods of time; - Economically/financially by subbing non stop for long periods of time (that's what the highly invested in the game players do, the vast majority of them... well, at least until BW started to shove them off). - By promoting the game elsewhere, participating on other sites that orbit the game (with guides, news, discussion about the game, etc) which ultimately bring other people to the game or help them to stay in some or other way (teaching, informing, etc). Best of luck with the on and off sub / DLC model you are creating/promoting I guess. Very sad with the lack of gratitude and respect for a very important part of the community though...

The major role of the bubble is absortion/mitigation. There is nothing wrong at all in pre-casting it, you can still perfectly well start the fight full force. The bubbles will mitigate damage further along once the fight starts (basically, it will "heal" later) so it's not a waste, even if you start the fight a bit shy of full force. It's not really necessary to bubble everyone though and there's little gain on most targets. But pre-cast it on a few targets and do some offdps on the initial phases of the fight are actually good practices (that are somewhat interconnected on a sage).

The bubble "heals" (absorbs/mitigates damage) for roughly 10k each for an end game toon, if you want a ballpark number. It does show up on parsers. On the defunt parsec it was showing as an estimate (as long as you entered the parameters for it), on starparse it shows as actually absorbed damage on the raid tab (and its accounted for on the raid healing chart aswell, added up to EHPS) as long as the other players are in the raid group. The bubble is still quite an important ability for the sage, but lost some importance on recent times. Not wanting to overstate this since its still a pretty important/significant, effective and cheap "heal", new abilities coming in, others being buffed/improved and yet the very recent crit mechanics change, altogether has been favouring more other abilities than bubble. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the current Sage, it's a very rich class in the sense that it has many alternatives and good heals for different situations/setups which, arguably, makes it less boring than the other two classes. You can even adopt different styles and rely on a different setup of heals without hurting much the end result.

PVE wise, Deliverance under auto-crit is both time efficient and force efficient. Also, not counting with Force Mend (quite situational) it's the second best use for Force Potency, behind Healing Trance and slightly ahead of Wandering Mend. With mixed sets and force potencty at the same time you can more than triple its base heal, at which point it kicks for 30k+ heal points on a single hit, the highest single targeted HPS a sage can get. Even with only one set, it kicks for over 20k, still amongst the best single target HPS a sage can manage. Overall, its importance on a fight is on par with the "free and instant" Benevolence. Basically, you can live without them, but definitely you can do better using those tools, they are advantageous under correct usage.

I would like to chime in just to say that numbers, both from dummy parses and ops fights, back this up. Sages and scoundrels, with these being amongst the most unpopular dps classes to begin with, fill the bottom of the barrel while vanguards and slingers shine with their uber dps. We are talking here of over 15% differences, which is huge in the context of this game. With that kind of poor performance that scoundrels are left with, the very few people that still bother to explore the class will get angry and either leave the game or will abandon it for some favoured dps class.

The stats pool is smaller under pvp gear, the advantage of those stats is even more pronounced if anything at that level of stats pool. And there's nothing on pvp mechanics favouring power/mastery either (haste/burst is the major factor on pvp, not long term output... in anycase, critical/alacrity favours both things (burst and long term output) at the same time so certainly its what you want to give priority to, both for pvp and pve).

Power and mastery are almost a match, SA and FR relics are basically the same and you should equip one of each. As for the stats priority, currently critical and alacrity surpasses power/mastery by a fair margin so you should equip critical on crystals and a mix of alacrity/critical on enhs and augments.

Mainstat or power augments are no goes, both alacrity and critical surpasses either mastery or power by a fair margin. Critical - which changed a lot on 4.0 - is safe even at ~1500 rating, with diminishing returns not enough to bring mastery up to par even at these levels. As for alacrity a healer should look for 1000+ numbers aswell (wouldnt go much higher than that cause the way the stat works and how is tied to latency and downtimes, isn't always a safe gain and in any case, returns are fairly close to critical). Power is the worst stat of all the 4 relevant for healers now. One should only bring the mandatory power from mods/enhs and nothing else, with mainhand and offhand crystals switching to crit aswell.

We are recruiting having mainly 4.0 progression in mind. It requires skill, experience, dedication and maturity. Healer is the most required role at the time of this post, any role is under consideration though. Guild website: http://darklight-redeclipse.enjin.com Application form: http://www.darklight-redeclipse.enjin.com/recruitment

Just an update, the above mentioned spot is taken as of now. In spite of this, the guild is recruiting experienced/mature players in preparation for 4.0, reminding that the guild is an active one, endgame raiding oriented, maintaining at least two progression groups on the hardest content and doing alt runs where players not in the fixed teams have a chance to do HM and/or try out, given that the guild still has space for backups or potential replacement players. Guild website: http://darklight-redeclipse.enjin.com/

We are recruiting a Tank for HM progression on Ravagers/Temple of Sacrifice for one of our teams (group progression 8/10HM). Requirements: M&B HM onwards experience. Preference: Vanguard, but any skilled tank will do. Raiding days: Wedn/Mond at 19.30 onwards (with possible extra/optional days). Contact Hant* ingame.