I think your advice for healers is quite flawed, as is Goblin_Lackey's as it completly fails to take into account the fact that Static Barrier can't crit. It all comes down to how much you use said Static Barrier of course, thus it depends quite a lot on the fight, but when I pull our typical NM operation this is the numbers of our sorcerer's EHPS/APS : Zorn & Toth kill 1 6068 EHPS + 1762 APS : 7830 Total EHPS (22.5% abosrb) Zorn & Toth kill 2 5839 EHPS + 1566 APS : 7405 Total EHPS (21.1% absorb) Firebrand & Stormcall kill 1 6065 EHPS + 917 APS : 6982 (13.1% absorb) Firebrand & Stormcall kill 2 5411 EHPS + 864 APS : 6275 Total EHPS (13.8% absorb) Colonel Vorgath (doesn't mean much but meh) 3207 EHPS + 1174 APS : 4381 Total EHPS (26.8% absorb) Warlord Kephess 4965 EHPS + 880 APS : 5845 Total EHPS (15% absorb) Dread Master Styrak 4038 EHPS + 1181 APS : 5219 Total EHPS (22.6% absorb) I can probably pull out more logs if you're interested in Brontes NM or Council NM or even TFB NM, but as we can see here the typical "hard fight" requires a lot of shielding, as tanks now get spiked for quite a lot of damage. The way I see it Sage/sorc have around 18-22% APS on a given fight, which means that about 20% of their healing is not affected in the slightest way by critical rating. In my opinion you and Goblin_Lackey's theorical thinking just gets crushed by the wall that is the reality of a fight, with its up and down times and the spikes on tanks that require a lot of effort from a Sage/sorc to help mitigate. This is why the Sorcerers in our guild use around 1100/1200 crit and the rest in alacrity. Keep in mind that we don't have 224 gear tho, since we gave every 224 token to our DPS (because SWToR fights are all designed around DPS checks or understanding tactics checks) we're still using some 220 non token imps left and right. So that's about 1450+ alac I'd say (can't check out because of the patch being deployed). I think giving people the advice to go 5/5 alac/crit enhancements and 6/8 alac/crit augments is really not a good one. I'd even venture to say it's a bad advice, that's more the gear you'd be looking for on a Commando/Mercenary, but not on a Sage/Sorc. 1519 alac / 1183 crit makes way more sense to me. Obtained with 6/4 alac/crit enhancement and 7/7 alac/crit augments. I hope Orderken could come in with some real hard numbers to see if what I'm saying is the definite truth or not, but the data I have right now on "hard content", that is basicly the end bosses of NM operations, seems to go my way.

I have kinda the same reasoning but I just wanted to point out the fact that crit doesn't affect you static barrier (the shield bubble) so your stat distribution should also take into account your play style. Eg: if you never shield people, then crits weights higher than for someone whose shield hps is at 25% (those numbers are obviously made up, they're just here to explain, if you have 0% hps or 25% from shield you are probably doing something wrong)

In the beta the highlight NM dropped two 220 and one 224. The non-highlight NM dropped two 220 like on the live server, or so I've heard.

Just to be clear I am indeed talking about nightmare mode. I do understand that NM does not loot 224 but we were expecting some 224 on highlight NM. Also council dropped the wings of the architect, which is a loot from DF (just saying this before someone else comes in and tries to teach me how the game works again) I know that the mounts seem to drop in every mode now but DP's loot table looks pretty ****ed up.

This makes so much sense. Why should the Highlight operation in its hardest mode loot more than its easier counterpart? Hell, why not make it give even LESS loot?! I still believe there might have been some changes at release that were not scheduled, so it might not be a bug but still it could not be working as intended in the first place.

We killed some bosses in DP and the bosses do not have the Highlight buff/debuff and thus don't loot 224 items. There are just 2 220 token. Is this working as intended? I sure hope this is not the case and that it's just a bug, as we were expecting 2 220 loots and 1 224 loot.

Yes because nobody gives a c*** about them. If you rescale them and make them drop good gear people will have an incentive to actually go there. New youth for the operation + the new players have new content (since they never did it at level 50/55)

Yes but rescalling the thing correctly would make it interesting again, thus people would like to raid there and get gear too. You have to remember that most PvE players right now never played TFB and before with the "real" difficulty, or even not at all period.

The worst part in this in that the new expansion could satisfy a lot of people because there will be a LOT of content to do (even though we all cleaned all of it for years). But if the operations were tested and tuned properly there could be a huge curve going from SM EC/S&V/TFB (easyest and first tier of gear) to HM ToS/Rava NIM DF/DP (highest tier of gear/difficulty) It could go like this : Easy tier, ilevel 204 (or whatever) This is the entry point for pick up and average guilds, this is content for when you just dinged and have a bit of gear with your guild, or if you have Flashpoint gear in pick up SM Eternity Vault SM Karagga's Palace SM Explosive Conflict SM Terror From Beyond SM Scum and Villainy This can be done in pick up if everybody is fully geared in 198. This is easily done by average guild. Good and top guilds can do it in 16m while being 8 if they fancy it. Middle tier, ilevel 210 This is harder than the previous tier but you can do it quite easily provided you have the gear, this is the entry point for good and top guilds. By the time new content is out, everybody can farm it in pick up, even your unused alt are fully geared in 210 HM Eternity Vault HM Karagga's Palace HM Explosive Conflict HM Terror From Beyond HM Scum and Villainy SM Dread Fortress SM Dread Palace This can be done in pick up if everybody is fully geared in 210. This is easily done by average guild geared in 210. Good and top guilds can do it easily. Those guilds will probably go there 2 timers and then everybody will be fully geared Gear wise : EV/KP -> One toon fully geared, EC/TFB -> 2nd, S&V -> almost a 3rd (complete with HM Golden Fury/SM Monolith), DP/DF -> 4th toon geared. I know this breaks the historical SWTOR tiering but whatever if it's new it's new. Players who are playing for less than 2 years don't know half of this content anyway. Hard tier, ilevel 216 This content is where the bulk of the PvE guilds will be SM Ravager SM Temple of Sacrifice HM Dread Fortress HM Dread Palace NM Eternity Vault NM Karagga's Palace NM Explosive Conflict NM Terror From Beyond NM Scum and Villainy This can be partly done in pick up if everybody is fully geared in 210, but will be unlikely before month into the expansion. This is where average guilds do their progression. Good guilds can do it without too much problems as long as they come with a full 210 gear. Top guilds will advance here quickly, but it will depend on how farmed they are 210-wise. As long as gear goes : EV/KP -> One toon fully geared, EC/TFB -> same, S&V -> almost a 3rd (complete with HM Golden Fury/SM Monolith), DP/DF -> 4th toon geared, Ravager/ToS -> 5th toon geared. Nightmare tier, ilevel 222 This content is for people who like/want a real challenge HM Ravager HM Temple of Sacrifice NM Dread Fortress NM Dread Palace Pick up can't go there Average guild will clean it after nerf (which means when 228 gear is out) This is where good guilds with 216 gear will do their progression This can be attempted and will be challengeing for top guilds without optimal gear Gear wise : Just as today -> DF/DP will give all the gear for one toon and Rav/ToS will give all the gear for a second one. This would require to fine tune every single fight but their would no longer be any "thrash boss" like sparky. When you'd go to Ravager or ToS, every single boss would be hard. This way everybody would be able to do all the content, clear every operation while still having the game interesting for hardcore players. Top guilds progression would be something like this: 1 lockout easy/middle tier 1 to 2 lockouts hard tier 1 to 2 lockouts nightmare tier I'm talking about the top 5 to 10 guilds out there, which will do 6 or 7 nights of 4-5 hours of raiding. Good guilds would do something like this: 2 lockouts middle tier 2 lockouts hard tier 2 to 4 lockouts to reach the final bosses of nightmare tier 2 to 4 lockouts to kill all the final bosses Average guild would be around the end of the hard tier after 3 months, probably well into nightmare tier after 6 months. Pick up would be able to go as far as hard tier after 6 months. With a method like this I think everybody could be kept interested in the operations, and top guilds could feel like BW actually gives a damn about them. After 6 months they could just add a "nightmare buff" to a random operation from the nightmare pool, making it even harder, that would give a title and one mount to keep things interesting for big guilds. Anyway this, in my opinion, would not take thousand of hours of work, it mostly needs testing and adjusting numbers. BW could pick one or two guilds and give them a PTS access to help them fine tune it, this way it would not even cost a lot of money... :/

Hey, I used tracert to ping 195.2.27.86 and this is the result : 5: 198.32.160.112 1.434ms asymm 6 6: ae15-xcr1.lnd.cw.net 86.007ms asymm 10 7: ae15-xcr1.lns.cw.net 77.104ms asymm 6 8: ae4-xcr1.duc.cw.net 85.819ms asymm 7 9: bioware-gw1.duc.cw.net 82.939ms reached Resume: pmtu 1500 hops 9 back 8 Like Eolmira said it has been almost impossible for us french to run operations for quite some time (at least on Darth Nihilus). We lost a DF 8 NiM 1h timer last thursday for the same reason. At around 21:30 lag spiked like hell, several players got kicked from the game or experienced some 10k+ ms latency. We then wiped to Draxus because abilities would just not go off, then waited for like 20 minutes for the lag to calm down, it did not and we just stopped playing cause our timer was ruined anyaway. Then last Tuesday it was the EXACT same on our DP NiM 1h timer, we could not even kill bestia in 16 man since the lag was so intense. We had to pick 8 people who lagged a bit less than the others to go and finish the op. Needless to say the timer was already finished by the time we finished the operation. And then it happened AGAIN yesterday, and it started way earlier this time (at least for me). I was experiencing quick 1second lag spikes since like 18:00 and of course when we went in operation at 21h it was really a nightmare, which makes sense since we were actually doing nightmare content. (I'm so funny) In the end we lost our 1h timer without even being able to pull bestia more than once... At 22h30 we tried again and the lag had died down a bit but in my opinion it is more because the server were empty than because you fixed anything. In the end tonite we're gonna have to finish this NiM DP, I hope we'll be able to play without lag before 23h00 but I'm starting to doubt that...

So true ! I'm playing like I own 4 x 186 accuracy enhancement, living the big life and stuff but I obviously don't have any since I'm a healer Anyway I already swapped out some gear and tried a bit more before you answered and pulled almost 3.3k. Gotta try your rotation now. I'm already trying to "clip at 4 ticks" but I'm not sure I'm successful. Anyway it's 4 in the morning so I'll try that again tomorrow. I wish I had more dps gear so that I can give a bit more feedback but that'll have to do

First try is obviously me failing miserably and stopping. So I gave the spec a try and here are some parses. I was too lazy to use adrenals and it's on the 500k dummy because reasons. My stats are: 3607 willpower 1649 bonus damage 408 accuracy (109.67%) 241 crit (26.72%) 376 surge (70.54%) 204 alacrity (2.87%) That's pretty much dread forged (except for the ear) with 162's tokens and 2 x186 alacrity/crit enhancements Here are my results : http://www.torparse.com/a/734979 Second try is me using everyspell with poor rotation : 3166.09 dps 3rd try I only use WM / TK Wave / TKT and D : (opening with MC) 3004.43 dps Fourth try I add MC to the rotation : 3210.99 dps Fifth try I'm using everything in the rotation : 3233.52 dps With the same gear my usual dps is around 3550+ when I play balance : http://www.torparse.com/a/708490 I know my gear is probably not what it should be but my main spec is healer so I'm pretty much using what I can here. I guess I could swap out for 0 alacrity and less crit with my spare 180 enhancements if you want more data or something. Anyway it's fun to play and I guess it out damages full-TK for fights like Corruptor Zero, but unless I'm doing something wrong here (entirely possible tho) it's a bit too low to play it for real. Actually I'm dealing more damage as full-TK since I'm around 3400 dps with this spec. Hope I was helpful, thanks for your Vanguard guide, loved it, I'm already at 3k dps with a **** gear so I'm using this opportunity to give you my thanks =)

Hey I just saw your update on "Tips for certain bosses" and was thinking about what you said about us sages/sorc relying more on Static Barrier in NiM. Your tips emphasize your point quite well tbh, and I'll add another tip you might want to add to your guide. On Draxus NiM when your group deals with the Dismantler on phase 4 you can blanket it with Shields since you will only be able to heal your tank, your co-healer and yourself in the next phase. It really helps preventing your op from dipping too low as you will be able to blanket it again a few seconds later. Usually I'll go and blanket the raid with shields when one dismantler is left, when I'm done shielding I just have a few spare GCDs before I have to interrupt my corruptor (2nd interrupt, first one done by a dps here). On another note I wanted to ask you yet another question!! I talked a bit with a healer from another guild who told me they run double scoundrel for NiM Fortress, and I quote him as he said "Sages are not welcome in NiM since the fight mechanics don't allow efficient pool use". At first all I could tell him was "Well it's a good thing it's not our only healing spell then!" but then it got me thinking about what he said... I personnaly use very efficient Salvations on Nephra since we have only 2 classes who can dispel (my pool hits like 6 ppl, 8 when I hit the tanks too) On Draxus I use a pool to heal the raid on basically any phase where the damage dealers go and hit the boss, so I hit the tank and 3 melee dps. I also use pools on guardians phases and hit almost everybody Grob thok I use it sparingly depending on how the fight is going and how well I managed my force. On corruptor I use it to top off the raid everytime there's a laser and sometimes during missile salvo hitting 3-4 ppl. And on Brontes I still feel like it's a great tool in phase 2 and 3 (boss+kephess and fingers). On the last phase though I don't really know if I should use it since I quickly have force issues, and since we always wipe there I imagine I'm probably doing something wrong... Anyway lots of words... Do you believe what the other dude says is true? Is double scoundrel a superior line-up as say scoundrel-sage or scoundrel-commando? It is true that I sometimes feel a bit "disarmed" when I have to heal tank(s) as obviously healing trance isn't enough and those benevolences take forever to cast, often having to cast a long heal on a tank will just slow me down for like topping off a dude with a sphere or shielding someone who has the clone jumping on him. Sometimes I just wanna go Rejuv / Flash to buy me some time off but in the end it just messes up my force management (which is completely logical) and puts me back even more. Maybe I'm just undergeared for Brontes but I don't know, the other 4 bosses are pretty much easy to heal so I don't really get it. Just for the record my gear is BiS 180 with 3 186 crit/alac enhancement, and head token 186 and I use both medipacks and adrenals on a regular basis. I know it's not a really well constructed argument but I don't really know what's wrong and I thought you might help

Hey Orderken I have some more questions for you! First off thank you for the models for scoundrel and commando that's pretty cool About Sages now... My guild's been doing Nightmare for about a month now, and I'm having some issues with what to prioritize for my gear (and for the gear of my guildies since I'm more or less the one doing the TC for everybody). For now I've prioritzed 186 token for tanks (since Armor index is bound to the Armoring) and Implants and gloves and/or off-hands for our damage dealers. We have our damage dealers pick Accuracy implants,gloves and offhands (for those who can) so that they get 4 accuracy enhancement to reach their Precision cap which basicly frees them another surge enhancement. I know it's not directly sage related (we're getting there) but maybe you have some stuff to say about that I don't know Anyway that leaves me with basicly no 186 token gear and I have to find some unorthodox ways to enhance my gear. We're dropping a lot of Aim armor with crit mod and crit/alacrity enhancement and I'm wondering if those can be of some help. I know from your spreadsheet that 0 crit is optimal for us Sages but would you say that an Insight 36 is better than a Quick Savant 34 ? I'm trading 62 power for 68 crit and gaining 8 alacrity rating. My first guess would be it's not an improvement, but the way you have to gear yourself as a Sage healer puzzles me to say the least as there is crit on at least chest and legs. (I imagine that having maybe one Insight is less of a problem than having like 3 of them) Should I aim to get lots of gloves token to get optimal mods and enhancements and in the end work my way to get the armorings ? I might not have put enough work on what pieces I should aim for but I have to say I'm in need of some help. ^^ Anyway this post is getting long so I'll just leave it like that and continue toying with your spreadsheet, I'll update or post again when I have more information I guess EDIT : Ok I've tryed on the spreadsheet to simulate my having either no Insight enh. then 1 and then 2. On the "gear" tab here are my numbers Without any crit : EHPCT 112.278 HPS 112.439 1 Insight enhancement EHPCT 112.259 HPS 112.583 2 insight enhancement EHPCT 11.,206 HPS 112.683 So it indeed looks a bit better to get those Insight enhancements!

I'm not sure you understood what Midichlorian meant here. Here are my two cents Just to be sure APM means Actions Per Minute, and it is basicaly the number of spell you cast in one minute. Following that reasonning having a bit of haste (and actually using it) should improve your APM but mainly if you have low APM it means you're doing something wrong, like having some idle time in your cycle. This is very wrong. Like in a versus fighting game, if you're at +5 frames and you're too slow then it's like you're not having any advantage... You need to be casting AT ALL TIMES. Like if both your Mind Crush and your Turbulence are at 0.7 sec and you just casted a spell, then you should definitly not wait for them to go back up but cast a Disturbance instead. Your parse time is way too low. You attacked for 1'14", that is, in my opinion, too low to be able to draw any conclusion about your dps cycle as you only did like 3 cycles total. In my guild we ask people to parse for 3 minutes (or parse on the 1m hp / -20% armor operation dummy), you should try that. Another thing we could look at (since you didn't give your gear ) is look at your dps chart. We can see that there are dips and that's it's not very streamlined. I just did a small parse just to show you how it looks for me : http://www.torparse.com/a/668313 As you can see there is a spike at the beginning when I use my Mental Alacrity (spike should be higher but I'm not using any stim/adrenal here) and then the dps is very much equal for the rest of the fight. On your chart we can see that your spike is like 40 sec after the fight started (and it's not even the moment you chose to use Mental Alacrity) and that's not really normal I think. While I'm talking about Mental Alacrity, you used it 10 seconds after the fight started and only threw 7 spells while it was up: TK Wave Project Disturbance Turbulence TK Throw TK Wave Project In my parse you'll see that I use 12 spells and that I used NO PROJECT. Project as TK is a big NO. You don't want to use that in your cycle at all. You're wasting your dps casting that spell. When WM is up, both MC and Turbulence are on cooldown and you have no Tidal Force or Psychic Projection Proc up your filler is Disturbance. Now I'm not saying I'm the best DPS Sage out there, as my main spec is heal, but I currently stand at 3140 dps (5'16" to kill the op dummy) so I think that my cycle should be in the "decent" zone. Anyway we can see that I casted 143 spells and you casted 93, but my fight lasted 10 sec longer than yours so it means I would have casted about 126 spells if I had fought for the same time you did. That's quite an important difference and I don't think gear explains it. That being said I took a look at your Damage Dealt broken down by action and it's completly different from mine. We can see that Disturbance is very low (9%) in your priority order while in my parse it's almost 28% of my dps. Again your cycle here seems to be the problem. To address all this in only one thread I'll just give you this : http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=627405 That's what I read and currently use to guide me when I have to respec to dps, and I strongly advise you to take a look at it. Your dps is rather high for someone with a bad cycle so I think you will do a very decent dps when you have the right keys to do so. I hope my post helps you and if you have any question please ask. As I said I'm not the best sage out here so if someone sees any big mistake (I don't think there are any but heh) in what I said please tell me aswell. TL;DR : http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=627405 and learn the right cycle for TK

Another question here In PvE I'm currently using 4pc for the set bonus. They are composed of 162 Armoring with a mix of 168/180 mods/enhancements. Would you say it's better to use 2 set pc 162/168/168 and 3 non set 168/168/168 or 4pc 162/168/168 with one non set 168/168/168 ? I've seen in a recent argument you had with someone on the Sorc healing guide that even though the +50 force isn't awesome it has its use, what would you say is the threshold to use it or not ? Thanks in advance

Would you still say it's useful to play with the 2pc PvE set in PvP ? (I currently am using gloves and legs) I'm currently playing with full Obroan gear, full Overkill augments, Brutal Relic x2 and Brutal Saber. With bolster I'm at 2018 Expertise since I'm using the "old" 69/63/61 mods on my pve pieces. With the new item rating system my pve pieces are 162/150/146. Do you think it'd be a good idea to go for 162/162/162 or stick with what I have? Maybe should I pick only pvp gear, I don't know, but since I'm new to the game and didn't know about the 1500 RWZC crystal abuse I think I'm undergeared compared to most, so I'm trying to get back on par by some optimizations. Thanks for your answers from last time. I didn't send you any parse because currently it looks like our raid is just missing some DPS (like 2 or 3k of them...). We've been trying Toborro HM and as we saw we have no problem healing and tanking the stuff but we are just so low on DPS bosses just keep enraging and it's very frustrating. We are currently trying to address this problem (dummy fight night yay \o/) so that we can move forward in the content. I'll come back at you when I have some interesting parses of progress content that is challenging to heal

Hello Orderken, I have a few questions concerning both PvP and PvE: As for PvP I just got myself a Lightsaber of Eldritch Force It has a +41 power cristal Its mods are 46/46/46 Resolve Hilt 20, Aptitude Mod 20A, Barrage Enhancement 20. No augment. My old Lightsaber was a Conqueror Force-Master's Lightsaber. Classic Tier 1 piece, unchanged with no augment either. When I get into a Warzone, the 46/46/46 gives these stats: http://imgur.com/jUQLeHr,avqfct3,ycYuaUq#1 Whereas pvp Lightsaber gives me these: http://imgur.com/jUQLeHr,avqfct3,ycYuaUq#2 I think we can all agree that the pve 46/46/46 is better, yet here is what happens when I toy a bit with my focus / lightsaber. When I swap my Tier 1 focus for my 46/46/46 Focus or my Tier 1 lightsaber for my 46/46/46 one multiple times here is what happens: (46/46/46 lightsaber and focus, just like in the first screenshot) http://imgur.com/jUQLeHr,avqfct3,ycYuaUq#0 I just lost over a 100 Bonus Healing. So here is my question: Can we really trust what's written on the character sheet?? Is it just me, or is this a known bug that I was unaware of ? Does this change anything about the fact that 46/46/46 MH/OH is better than tier 1 conq? I have no idea what I could do to test it out, if you have ideas I'll be glad to try them Now on a PvE unrelated note. I often find myself having trouble with healing multiple targets when in ops (mostly 8-man). Should I be more focused on tanks (since I have Force Shelter) or is it better to have another class heal the tank specifically? I'm now using Parsec to track stuff I do and to try and improve myself but I have some trouble interpreting the data. I don't mean to cast stones at you (there's a very subtle joke here...) but do you plan on improving the Parsing part of your guide? Maybe throwing in some of your own parses on various bosses (both SM and HM would be appreciated) and commenting them, if that's not too much of a secret? I'm currently raiding 8-man ops, we just cleaned everything in 8 man and we'd like to start going Hard Mode, what do you think would be a good point to start? Scum and Villainy or Terror From Beyond? Or should we go Hard Mode Fortress right away? I know I'm asking a lot of annoying questions so feel free to ignore some of them, I won't get offended or anything Thanks a lot for your help in advance

Nice try but you are utterly wrong. The trinket slots in WoW correspond to the Relic slots in Star wars. Many Arena pvp boys in WoW prefered trinkets with a "Use" and not a "Proc" because it allows you to inflict maximum dps when needed, even though it's supposed to be a weaker choice with a Time on target around 100% (which obviously doesn't exist in pvp, especially in arena). You want to use these trinkets (=relics) in coordination with your big damage CDs in order to inflict a big burst, which is the way to go in arena, since basic dps won't be of much help, either on your current target or on a hard switch (for example on the healer, works wonder). EDIT : In WoW, the cooldown that frees you from cc's is a trinket, and not a built-in skill, so I guess your mistake came from that Nice guide by the way, a bit succint but I liked it. Do you think Cybertech is the best choice for Arenas/ZL then ?

Very nice guide, just dinged 55 myself and I've been looking for help since it's my first char on swtor. You're not covering Crew Skill in the guide, and I wondered if there were mandatory Crew Skills that a healing Sage (both PVP and PVE) should take. Thanks again for the guide.