I wanted to quickly add some response to the 2nd and 4th bullet points based on some personal pts testing for Annihilation. After my initial read through of the Annihilation changes, I thought the changes were very interesting. I agree with the direction you guys are going, but I don't believe the numbers are ironed out properly. You guys are very clearly trying to return Annihilation to its dot-oriented damage output. Currently on live, Annihilation feels very bursty at times with draining center mod choice. You can set up your dots properly on the target, then hit Rend under berserk straight into Annihilate, each doing roughly 50k damage, then Dual Saber Throw and Slash after (or Vicious Throw sub 30%) for the autocrit with Dispatcher implant. These 4 gcds together, along with dot ticks, is more than most burst specs in a consecutive train of abilities. It's fun, but it makes Annihilation do a bit more burst than it should in my opinion. The changes to the spec on pts turns a bit of that down, but in return, we get a ton of extra damage on dots to "make up" for that burst. I agree with the idea you guys are going for, but as I said, the numbers aren't ironed out in my opinion. With the change to Draining Center, after testing, I have to say that the mod choice isn't very useful anymore. You lose out on the ability to hit Berserk right before Rend if you want to hit Rend off cooldown as you should because of the lack of Fury generation within the allotted timeframe between Rends, and the change to make it only do x2 damage from consuming a Berserk stack instead of x4 does not make up for delaying Rend. Juyo Rend change is encouraged strongly because of this change, which is fine because it turns down the burst Annihilation can have with Draining Center on live. I found in my pts testing that there are 2 ways you can play Annihilation with the changes to the mod choices. At level 43, you can take Bleeding Center or Bloodfury, and both will parse similarly with Juyo Rend. If you take Bleeding Center, as much of a meme as this is, your rotation is oriented around hitting Berserk whenever it's available, which is much more often than before. With the addition of the 4 rage built with this mod choice, I found myself almost never needing Battering Assault, and I never hit Ravage anymore. It pretty much turns Annihilation into what Carnage was last tier with Massacre spam, except now it's Vicious Slash. It's fun, it's memey, but it also works and keeps up compared to your other option--Bloodfury. With Juyo Rend and Bloodfury, the spec plays exactly the same as it does on live. Set up dots properly, hit Berserk before Rend, get as many Bloodfury ticks as you can with remaining Berserk stacks. Not much to say about this other than you lose out on x4 rend initial tick that's on live. Ultimately, I like the changes to the mods to be more competitive with each other in terms of damage output. The idea of changing Annihilation back to more dot oriented damage than burst is also a good idea, but the numbers aren't quite right. You guys definitely had the right idea, but I don't think the current pts changes make up for the damage change to Draining Center. I was noticing with either build above that I was running, it was about a 2k dps loss from what's on live. Personally, I think Annihilation didn't need a nerf to overall dps. I though that its place on the damage charts on live was a very appropriate spot for the spec. With that being said, I think that the buffs that you guys did make for dots need to be tweaked slightly to make up for the damage loss you have with the spec on pts. A lot of people are claiming that Annihilation doesn't work anymore, or that the dps loss is too great, but I don't agree. As I said, the only thing that needs to change is slight tweaks to the changes already made to make up for the damage loss. You guys had the right idea, just need to make it slightly...better, for the lack of a better term. I didn't mention this, but the change to Pulverize is perfection. I love it. It feels smooth, it feels right, and it's a very good change. It follows the idea of smoothing out the rotation that you guys are going for. The change to Swift Demise is another good change. I honestly prefer the extra 10% damage on Vicious Throw vs a chance at an extra 5% on Slash or Throw. Obviously, you don't get any benefit from it until the target is sub 30%, but it makes the spec have slightly more power in execute. Overall, good direction with changes, but more tweaking is necessary to make it work the way you guys want it to work.

I'm not sure if this qualifies as a "bug report," but I am noticing some differences in an ability mod for Annihilation Marauder and Watchman Sentinel after yesterday's patch (7.0.2), as well as a passive not working the way it did before 7.0 for Lightning Sorcerer and Telekinetics Sage. Conduction/Tremors passive in the Lightning Sorcerer and Telekinetics Sage reads "Each Forked Lightning (Telekinetic Momentum) and Forked Darkness (Mental Momentum) reduces the active cooldown of Polarity Shift (Mental Alacrity) by 1 second. In addition, being interrupted grants Unshakable for 4 seconds. This can only occur once every 15 seconds." The way this passive worked before the 7.0 expansion is that EVERY Fork proc would reduce Polarity Shift's cooldown by 1 second, and the second part of the passive is the only thing that has the rate limit. It seems now after 7.0 that the rate limit applies to the reduction in Polarity cooldown. Is this an intended change for the effect or a bug? The discrepancy in Annihilation/Watchman has to do with the Blood Fury/Burning Zen ability mod. Before yesterday's patch, Blood Fury's rate limit was broken to where it could trigger more than once every second, but Burning Zen's was not. Before the patch, Blood Fury did not consume Berserk stacks when its damage was triggered, but Burning Zen did. Now after the patch, they will both consume Berserk/Zen and have the rate limit of once per second working, however, there's still a problem. Burning Zen damage autocrits when it consumes Zen stacks, but Blood Fury does not autocrit when it consumes Berserk stacks. With this being said, I'm still confused on the actual intended way the ability mod is supposed to work. Is it supposed to consume Berserk/Zen stacks? Is it supposed to automatically crit when consuming Berserk/Zen stacks?

One thing to note about the character copy thing that Jackie forgot to mention in this post: Character copying DOES transfer stuff like character unlocks, datacrons, companion buffs, etc. The only things that are missing are actual achievements. Most people are thinking that they’ll have to level a ton of things on the pts to get the stats and buffs they need to test things properly, but that’s simply not the case. Just transfer a character from live and you’ll be good to go.

They are sure to go through numerous changes from now, absolutely. The issue I have isn’t with the scaling, that is just bound to be wack for a while. What the issue is is the gear not providing enough tertiary stat. It’s something that double screws us currently. We have very wack scaling (which is bound to change and fix as time goes on in the xpack), but we also have gear that doesn’t provide enough tertiary stats to be useful for us to deal the damage or heal or even tank to the level we need those stats to be to successfully complete content.

I understand it’s tailoring to newer players. The problem is, the new players or conquest heroes will not be happy when they can’t even kill SM ops without enraging because the stats they have from the gear the game gives them isn’t effective enough. Obviously I’m a veteran player that actually cares what the stats do, and there are those that don’t, but the problem comes when even the people that don’t necessarily care what stats they have can’t do what they want to do either. SM difficulty is supposed to be completed in 318 gear. Someone I talked to recently tried a SM TC on the PTS. It has a 9min enrage timer, and it was killed in 11min 30s. That was with nim raiders that know what’s going on already. If you can’t even kill story mode ops without enraging, there’s a problem. I’m certain that if that’s the case, people will struggle significantly with certain flashpoints, too. They will struggle more with dailies. They will struggle more with everything. This doesn’t just apply to ops.

*cracks knuckles* Oh boy, where do I start… As someone that’s deeply invested in stat optimization in this game, I’ve reached a point of concern with gear in 7.0. I’m not complaining about anything regarding acquiring the pieces, just the stats in the pieces themselves. The main concern here is that the gear we will be provided in 7.0, both easily available on the PTS as well as datamined pieces, will not provide enough relevant stats to optimize our gear in the new expansion. I’m going to use dps classes as an example. If people don’t know, this is an example of what a full 330 set of Rakata gear will provide us stat wise (using Force-Lord as an example): Head: 554 Alacrity Chest: 500 Crit Gloves: 554 Accuracy Pants: 500 Crit Boots: 554 Accuracy Implants/Earpiece: 554 fill-in-the-blank tertiary stat. The Devs already confirmed to us that there will be no new augments or stims introduced in the new expansion initially, if at all. So we can assume our 300 augments with 130 tertiary in them and our accuracy stims with 264 accuracy and 109 Crit will just be what we get for a while. This gives us a total tertiary stat pool (including stim and crystals) of 7707 for 330 gear. I have derived the stat formulas for level 80 myself, although I’m sure it was figured out by other theorycrafters as well. We will need 2694 of that 7707 stat *just* for Accuracy alone to do raid content. That leaves us with 5013 tertiary stat remaining for Crit and alacrity assuming we can get to the exact point we need with accuracy without wasting any stats (which we can’t). I’m not going to dive into the massive rabbit hole of discussing Alacrity and how people optimize it because I know I’ll start a massive fight for no reason. What I will say, however, is that there is certain amounts of that stat you will want in your gear, and the various options for optimization in the current expansion and the last will no longer be achievable in any way with the way the stat formulas are for level 80 and the stats provided in level 80 gear. Without having any alacrity whatsoever in your gear minus the 2 given shells that have them no matter what, you end up essentially wasting the value of 1100 stat. Now, if you put more alacrity in your gear, you lose the value of crit, which at the point we have in the stat pool, is much more worth it over the alacrity (again, AT THAT POINT, not in general). I put together a set of 318 gear on the PTS and transferred a ton of 300 augments over for testing. What I found is that if you want to make alacrity even semi-useful, and assuming you have to have that 100% accuracy for raid content, you end up with 30% crit, and that’s counting in the bonus from mastery. That’s ridiculous. It’s simply not enough stat for the formulas. I understand that the intent is to raise gear with big updates, and obviously that helps this situation a little bit, but it’s not enough. Even when they introduce 334 gear with the new operation, and even 340 gear with NiM of the new operation, we won’t have enough stats. 340 gear has 614 stat in each piece minus the 2 “low” pieces that give us 554. That ends up giving us a 8295 tertiary stat pool assuming we don’t get any new augments or any new stims. Remember, almost 2700 of that you put directly into accuracy for raid content. Then to hit 1.4 gcd+ you need roughly 2100 or more alacrity. That’s almost 5k of your 8.3k stat pool just to take care of those 2 stats. With the Crit formula also changing along with the other 2 stats, that leaves us with exceptionally low crit. I haven’t even talked about tank stats and how they are basically getting screwed entirely out of absorb if they want shield chance that matters. That’s a whole other example, but this post is probably long enough with what I’ve said already. I’m not here just to complain about this issue, however. I want to offer a few possible solutions. 1. Leave the stat formulas as they are, where only the level divisor increases from 75 to 80. This solution will make gearing with 7.0 feel like 5.0 again, where we are actually allowed to have the stats we need to optimize alacrity, but still have Crit to spare. You wouldn’t have to touch the stuff you have already set for stats on pieces with 7.0 gear if you did this. 330 gear will feel like what 242 gear did for us in 5.0. 334 feeling like 248. 340 feeling like 258. You get the idea. 2. Increase the amount of tertiary stats in the 7.0 gear to compensate for the stat formulas. This solution is pretty unlikely because of the work the devs already put into setting up the pieces and the stat distribution. Changing every single piece would take a lot of time which at this point is something they don’t have. 3. Remove accuracy as a requirement for gearing dps. This solution could be gone about in a few ways. One way is removing the defense chance legendary/gold/silver mobs have so that accuracy isn’t needed at all. Another way is simply giving players a buff when they enter a raid instance that increases their accuracy by 10% to compensate for the 10% defense chance legendary mobs have. A long term solution, though it would take a while to implement, is to remove accuracy entirely from the game and rework defense. No matter what the devs end up doing, I really hope they end up fixing what I’m seeing here as an issue before 7.0 goes live. I just don’t think the math adds up as they intended, and I hope this at least brings that to their attention before they have a mass of players complaining.

Personally, I don't feel like player stats need to change for MM ops. What needs to be changed is the damage profile on certain fights. Some things hit a lot harder than they should and make it more difficult than it should be in that regard. Basic attacks from bosses or adds doing 50k+ per hit is what makes NiM..interesting now. The DPS checks and healing is otherwise more than fine with the removal of stacks, providing a challenge while also not being impossible. Some people also struggle with certain specs in NiM because of the damage scaling based on damage type. I'm not sure if there's anything you can do about it without reworking damage types, but that's really the only thing that needs to change for the players.