I went through your parses. Your rotation is far from optimal. Extremely high use of rapid shots, not heat ramping for Vent Heat/TSO. If you fix your rotation you'll gain another 300+ DPS.

Lol. Madness sorc was one of the highest damage specs at end of 2.x and dominated PvP through 3.0 as well. 3.0 Lightning sorc was broken everywhere but Revan (single target storm lul) 4.0-5.3 heal sorc was utterly dominant. Frankly it was great in 3.0 too it just didn't see as much play outside PvP because it was age of the Merc. Yeah sorc is in a rough spot now in all aspects, but don't pretend like they've had it rough forever. They've had peaks and valleys just like most every class has.

Snipers and Mercs are both hovering 9900-10000 on the top end on parsely. That's a roughly 600 dps drop for Merc, a far cry from 1k drop. Check your rotation, check your crits. IO is still perfectly viable if you play it well and it's sure as hell better than marksman or madness.

/signed

Yeah there's definitely something fishy going on there. Zero rifle shots, zero covered escape use.

Yeah for the most part. There remain some min/max questions regarding energy dumping for cool head and some sillier uses of roll that are not practical in raid but as a general rule yes, that is correct.

Speed Shot is now also a much higher priority as it's more energy efficient without sacrificing much damage, although that effect is somewhat lessened during sub30.

Can you link a parse that had such an instance?

A typical sequence will look something like Hemorrhaging Blast > Wounding Shots > Quickdraw > 3x Dirty Blast > Wounding shots Obviously adjusting for energy needs.

They did NOT eliminate it. Dirty Blast still triggers Hemorrhaging Blast ticks, what they did was lower the damage of DB by enough that even with the tick, you're still getting more damage out of a takedown (especially with the newly reduced cost). You still ideally want to fit as many dirty blasts into a HB window as energy allows, the only real difference is that takedown is higher priority at all times and speed shot is higher priority when HB is not active, unless dumping energy for cool head. But the core interaction of dirty blast procing HB is still very much present.

In addition to the energy return, I believe frag grenade benefits from the AOE crit bonus passive.

Just updating for 5.3, it seems that whether intentionally, or incidentally with the other changes, they have fixed the disparity between weakening blast and Hemorrhaging Blast. Yay Gunslingers

DF is still averaging significantly higher than sharpshooter, and very marginally behind sabateur. Given the ability to multi dot and a fairly easy rotation (it's actually less energy demanding now that speed shots is higher priority) DF is a solid choice. Sabateur may pull SLIGHTLY higher numbers in a vacuum but with boss movement, any loss in plasma probe uptime will kill the difference. At the moment, a player who wishes to make best use of their slinger would do well to learn all three specs and how to apply them to boss fights, as all three specs are now going to have particular fights/situations that will make them the ideal choice. Which, imo, is exactly how it should be. *Edited to translate imperial terminology back to pub lol*

They broke pyro a long time ago and it has been a dead, decrepit thing ever since. There's no synergy to the cooldowns in that rotation and the inexplicable removal of rail shot from the free flame burst proc list was absurd. Pyro is another class that needs an overhaul. But yes, to your point, it needs to be reasonable resource management.

Yeah, what I want for Madness is more in the realm of a rework than a balancing patch can be expected to address. I'd rather see the rotation go force neutral than continue the way it is I suppose, I just want to see a system implemented that rewards proper management rather than taking resource use out of the question altogether. It's uninteresting, lowers the skill cap, and is generally lazy design.

From what I gathered it's a matter of time. They don't have the resources to roll out all the balance changes yet, so they chose the most egregious offenders (in their eyes) and addressed those first. 5.3 can't really be called balancing because when you only do half the balancing you just skew things further. So yeah, we're in for a weird patch. Hopefully they don't have to wait til 5.4 to roll out the rest of it.

The problem is the other classes in the same tier (Merc, Sniper) getting nerfed will still outperform madness by a good margin, on top of having better defensive abilities. Madness is getting underbuffed pretty badly.

your gear is bad, plain and simple. as you increase your gear you will come closer to having those stat pools available. You are worrying about this way too early in the gearing cycle. Augments, higher item level will increase the pool of stat available to you by a lot. (Augments alone account for over 1300 stat).

I've been playing IO Merc since it was created in 3.0. I've cleared NiM with it as well as Revan 3.0. I know IO merc intimately. Reducing the heat requirement of the rotation and taking basic attacks out of it makes the spec dumber and less versatile. Your dps is not going to increase because the devs will hit their target number regardless. All it will do is take less thought and offer less versatility in pushing some extra damage. Making the rotation heat stable makes vent heat a less useful cooldown, you don't have the choice to dump heat for extra damage. Asking to remove basic attacks from the spec is asking to lower the skill cap and lower its versatility. You are actively trying to make the spec worse. Edit: I will allow the the dot spread rotation for IO is ridiculous in terms of heat required and benefit gained. Fusion Missile could stand to have its heat lowered maybe explosive dart as well. Of the classes capable of dot spread, IO's spread functionality is easily the worst. Not to mention they're nerfing raw dot damage, will will only mean even less reward for an already underwhelming dot spread.

A rotation that requires basic attacks is a GOOD THING. It gives you the flexibility to have targeted burst portion when you need it if a priority add needs extra damage. You have the option to sacrifice long term dps to meet a short term gain. This has use in several fights. Making the rotation heat stable with 0 basic attacks means you have less versatility

Yeah, like I said I think it's fair to say madness is being under buffed. Either that or they're low key retracting their quasi sustained meme... Lol a man can dream.

Yeah, at some point down the road you'll be able to compare. But the immediate post 5.3 balance will be off simply because not everything that needs nerfed will be. Also in terms of work required it's much quicker for them to simply change some numbers rather than adjusting the class function. Frankly madness needs an overhaul, the rotation is clunky with refreshes and CDs that don't line up properly and a force negative rotation that only marginally rewards the player for pushing their force. A force negative rotation is perfectly fine if the reward is significant for doing so. We don't need both specs of sorc with unlimited force, at that point you may as well just remove force altogether. Adding some management and decision making adds flavor to the spec But madness needs larger changes than we're likely to see outside of maybe the next xpac.

So here's the real issue. Nearly every spec is going to be rebalanced at some point. What this means is that none of the current numbers can be used for comparison against what classes should be parsing. There's going to be more imbalance post 5.3 where some got brought down and others didn't and the classes that stayed high will be over tuned. It's the problem with rolling out dps balancing in multiple stages. If you look at the nerfs to arsenal, to Virulence, it's somewhat consistent. Madness is still getting underbuffed most likely but comparing madness to IO 10k+ range is misleading. IO is most likely going to get nerfed as well, they just haven't released the notes for it yet. Same with engi sniper. Compare madness instead to say, viru sniper which will probably be in the 9.7k ballpark and while madness is still shy of that, it's not as far off as you'd first think. As for the other classes not being touched I think everyone knows Carnage is overperforming (when played right, which frankly, few people actually do) but we won't see that nerd until after this wave. Same with deception. Basically we're going to have to live with a strange balance phase until BioWare gets around to changing all the specs they intend to change. I think it's fair to say madness needs a stronger buff than it's getting but we all need to get used to the idea that global DPS averages are going to be coming down, so keep your sights set in a more realistic range.

Virulence performs well single target and could stand to come down 3 or 4 percent. But you are absolutely right. two problems, 1 the devs are actively aiming lower than they should with a bogus quasi sustained classification and 2 dummy damage (on single target) is not indicative of raid damage due to abuse of roll and the fact that a lot of classes are able to make use of things like reflect, pyro shield, cloak of pain, close and personal etc that can be used to add damage above what your rotation puts out. Virulence typically shines when you can AOE or multidot, and in those types of fights yes Virulence is going to be well represented in the top.and in fairness, virulence won't get hit as hard in those types of fights because dot damage and aoe potential are not being touched. But for a class that was already a liability in terms of snap damage to priority adds, losing even more of an already subpar aspect of the class is pretty lame.

You are correct that the rotation will change. Takedown and series of shots will now see increased usage. The issue is that using them is ALSO a DPS loss. It's a little less obvious to calculate the loss of the rotation change since we can't appropriately mirror the new rotation on live. But it will be a serious loss because in addition to core abilities being nerfed, we are also being pushed into a lower dps rotation. But you can't really say outright the different rotation will negate some of the calculated loss. No the calculated 8-9% loss with current rotation is not 100% accurate. But we don't know how significant a loss the new rotation is either so it's difficult to find the middle ground. (Another reason this really should have been put on PTS) However the new rotation poses other oddities. energy management will be smoother with takedown cost reduction accounting for the weakening blast increase and series of shots being energy efficient. This is also removing some of the difficulty factor of the rotation and reducing the reward for accurately being aggressive with lethal shot use. Which also removes our ability to squeeze out a bit more damage to meet an important check, at the expense of energy. Moving farther away from that already puzzling title of Quasi-sustained. So the nerfs are more than just a simple dps reduction. The skill requirement is coming down and the reward for playing at a high skill level coming down with it.