thanks for the video. i usually use thermal-override and power-surge with Fusion Missile to make an instant-noheat dot. Could you explain why maybe that is not an efficient use of those 2 abilities (if you think so).

the client / server synch issue is a PITA. Operations fights have been driving us crazy sometimes because positioning is important (stormcaller/firebrand) and we've had to actually try totally different strategies because 1 player thinks he is in the CORRECT position, but the server doesn't. Also, everyone in the raid sees a totally different location of the player. You summed it up very nicely and described the exact issue our raid was having. I won't even begin talking about how this probably affected the SoA fight that everyone had been complaining about. No wonder the lightning balls were killing people. They thought they were in a safe position and turns out they were not.

the offhand misses only equate to about 10dps over a 5 minute fight. so, you are not losing much unless you are missing on Mainhand hits.

the alacrity is for UNLOAD, not for Tracer. getting full unload out in 2.7-2.8 secs instead of 3.0 seconds is a viable reason to leverage the alacrity skills. not to mention, since we are moving frequently in Operation Boss fights a savings of .1-.3 seconds is the difference of getting off a Tracer or Unload before the target on the ground fires off and you losing 75% health.

don't just get 1 piece (boots lets say) and then assume that is the best piece for you. sometimes the medic boots are better than the dps set, etc. you need to check out all the mod options and switch everything around. is it costly? yes for min/maxers who cares? you can get Best in Slot through Black Hole gear and not necessarily through Campaign gear (not counting weapons). I always pick the armoring piece with the highest AIM (ie 68 aim or whatever). then slot in other mods to fill up your stats as you need.

Too bad advanced targetting isn't affecting Unload from what I can tell from my testing.

doesn't add anything to Unload as compared to Rail Shot as far as I can tell.

I analyzed my Boss fights pre-1.3 and post-1.3 damage for Unload is EXACTLY the same with a normal variance taken in to account. Alternatively, Rail Shot damage DOES increase with Advanced Targeting and I see an increase in the damage based on the 30% armor ignore. the same increase does not happen with Unload. If ignoring 30% armor then both Rail Shot and Unload should show the roughly same amount of damage increase. Unload is exactly the same as without Advanced Targeting. All analyzation was done against hard mode/nightmare Operation Bosses.

well, since Target Tracking seems to work for HSM it would seem a good starting place to fix the Unload issue would be to begin with the formula for HSM and compare that against the Unload formula. if they are exactly the same regarding applying Target Tracking then I could see that they might have a more difficult time fixing the issue. this stuff is obviously not tested and QA'd for each individual ability affected. If it was then this issue would not exist. maybe only HSM was tested and Unload was just assumed to work. tough to tell. thanks to everyone who took the time to find this issue, test it, and report it.

very nice. i like it a lot. how do you setup a guild operation or group? ie: we got 18 logs and we want to upload them all and have them listed together to show overall dps/hps across each fight. thanks!

Your app doesn't end fights at the "Event : ExitCombat" marker. Seems to keep it going for a few minutes after which skews the stats. I think you need to determine better when death occurs and when combat ends based on the event markers in the log.

they would be smart to do this. all 3 existing operations with new Nightmare difficulties which would be tuned to the new level cap, etc with different mechanics, etc.

can also RE the Black Hole ear pieces to learn the schematics if you so desire.

true ... what can we make? Earpieces? Hello, I can get the best with Black Hole coms and augment it myself Armor mods? Hello, much easier to get via Black Hole coms than attempt to get the mats for them Mods? I'll use my Black Hole coms. thanks. Ship Parts? I guess, but not many people do any ship combat Droid Parts? possibly

Thanks for testing this and bringing it to BWs attention.

simply put: since you can extract the mods from an offhand blaster and put them in your MAIN hand it would be unwise to allow a BlackHole offhand weapon since there then would be no need to attempt to do hardmode Explosive Conflict which is currently the only place to attain the highest level weapon mods in the game.

4 Piece set bonus for a free Rail Shot is kind of a must or helps quite a bit. Then make sure to utilize it when it pops off of cooldown and you have 5 stacks. Improved Vents is a must. Nothing wrong with actually USING Vent Heat

Too bad that on the PTS they TOTALLY F'd up and ALL your augments were thrown OUT of all your gear and the gear you had augment slots for were changed to NO AUG SLOTS. So, kind of hard to test this since they totally screwed up PTS anyways by removing all existing augment slots from all of our gear.

post a parse

The build I used on the PTS was the full arsenal tree with some alacrity and then the rest in the armor penetration and the vent heat and stuff. against Operations bosses on live I've gotten up to about 1200 but that is max for sure at this point. most bosses obviously require some running around and some leap/interrupt etc. 1.3 definitely gives a more consistent heat reduction where pre-1.3 I sometimes run in to a string of bad RNG where I don't crit on 3-4 Tracers and then my heat is F-ed. Not counting whatever stacking of class buffs occur or don't occur I still feel our individual DPS is higher and our armor penetration itself is better. Rail Shot now can hit for pretty f-ing big. Almost as big as a good Heatseeker.

25 seconds for a fight does not a parse make. on a 5 minute training dummy fight I can get around 1400 dps ... On bosses like Karagga (nightmare, not sure if DR changes on difficulty), etc I can get around 1100-1200 dps. On raid bosses i MAX crit roughly: Tracer 2700-3000 Heatseeker 4900-5400 Unload (mainhand) 2400-2700 Rail Shot 3500

I parsed 1541 on the training dummy with: 1. NO augments. (the 6 i had got removed on the PTS) 2. NO Operative buff 3. NO Sorc buff 4. Did have Exotech Reflex Stim and the sith warrior buff have full rakata with only pants BH mods and a BH implant compared to live which I parsed 1542 and had all my augments in and a sorc buff I would say 1.3 is easily a buff. Heat management seemed slightly better on PTS than live. PTS parse http://www.torparse.com/a/49700

armor mod schematics and mod schematics drop off of random trash mobs in EV and KP normal mode. actually had one drop for me the other day when we decided to goof off with an alt raid in EV. link to keen mod 24: http://i178.photobucket.com/albums/w242/the_duck71/keen_mod_24.jpg

in all honesty, many testers (including myself) have previously entered many issues and bugs while testing on the PTS. Unfortunately, it seems these bugs are either ignored and not fixed or deemed unnecessary to fix and still go on to the live servers. then you see miles of complaint threads about the same exact bugs that hit live that testers actually identified. the whole process is very frustrating for a tester since it seems like our time to test is not really valued or it is entirely ignored. if they were not ignored, then why wouldn't those bugs be on some public post identifying them as known issues?

I don't even log in anymore other than raid nights. Kind of sad really. I used to enjoy playing Merc Arsenal. Now it just seems crazy broken - "heavy" armor not being heavy, HSM not doing +10% damage as per 1.2 notes, PvP 1.2 changes, etc I used to PvP every day. I enjoyed it. Now I just don't bother playing really.