That's actually literally the way the game works right now, except that expertise also reduces damage taken (does not increase DR!) and increases healing done, all only in regard to other players being on the other end of the formula. Or did you mean that you think they should make damage to other players purely a function of expertise, and not any of their other gear? Because they'd have to rewrite either how expertise works or how every damaging ability in the game functions.

That would require some pretty intensive data analysis and a keen eye for detail, two things about which most people don't have a lot of faith in the developers. Words are hard.

While this would be spectacularly powerful in PvE, in PvP, you probably won't even notice it. You actually get ~80 attacks in 2 minutes if you have a 12 second DV period and use Force Breach once per cycle. Throw in a use of overload every 20, slow every 15, stuns (including Spike), and you can get some pretty high numbers, nearly 100 Force damage ticks in 2 minutes. It would end up closer to ~315 hps at above 35% and 950 hps if you can stay under 35%. The 950 is fairly significant, but you probably won't notice the 315 that much. But it would be more than enough to wildly tip the PvE scales in favor of Assassin tanks. % of health self heals on Force Lightning also went away for a reason, too. You mean make them the hands-down sturdiest tanks in the game? 30% incoming damage reduction for even just 2 seconds on a 45 second cooldown (which is closer to a 25 second cooldown when getting actively attacked if there's a CDR like you suggest) is bonkers. Adding any amount of healing to that, even under a threshold, further compounds the problem. Implement both the suggestions and we're back to where we were back in 2.3, except we would also have the DR we originally traded that healing for.

The single player content in this game is insultingly easy enough that your companion can solo it without you at the keyboard, if you can manage to keep running to the next place you need to go to. You can honestly play whatever you'd like and do just fine. Alternatively, level up the fast way by getting into a story mode Dread Fortress group and gain about 6 levels in 45 minutes with an okay group, or 20 minutes with a group doing speedruns to level.

http://dulfy.net/2015/10/29/swtor-4-0-hatred-assassin-pvp-guide-by-krea/

It took them 19 major game updates and almost 3 years to make Telekinetic Throw less boring for Shadow tanks, I don't think replacing an animation that is less than 6 months old will happen any time soon.

Go do the math yourself. Figure out how hard your Maul hits for with and without relic procs. Figure out how much of a percentage boost your auto-crit is. Then you can see just how much more damage you do by opening correctly. I'm not going to hold your hand through it, it's pretty easy to do.

I want to see Recklessness make your next X direct damage Force moves automatically critically hit. I also said I think that letting that affect supercrits would be obnoxiously strong, and that it might be better not to do that. Here's the problem with a Crushing Darkness proc that makes it instant and free: what are you going to replace? If you're talking about replacing a Saber Strike, you will net lose 3 Force using a free ability. If you're talking about replacing a Voltaic Slash, you reduce your chance to trigger Surging Charge (unless you're very good at tracking that ICD), and you don't get as much of a damage tradeoff. You also lose out on a 6 Force cost reduction on Ball Lightning. While much harder to evaluate, without a damage buff from the proc, the net dps change replacing a Voltaic Slash, depending on the imposed rate limit of the new proc, could be negative, rather than positive. Two additional points to be made here: [*]Adding a move into Deception's rotation that doesn't generate a stack of Voltage AND doesn't GENERATE Force is a little clunky and not very good for our Force. [*]Throwing out dots makes escaping in PvP through stealth much more difficult. It will also immediately re-trigger any solo PvE fights you are part of, because they dot will bring you right back into combat (which is the problem with PvP, as you move slower in combat and cannot use certain abilities in combat. No, what you aren't comprehending is that it doesn't actually get you any more uses of Recklessness unless you reduce the cooldown by an absurd amount. See spoiler for details. It doesn't really need any clarification. It literally says "changing from [X] to [Y]". There also isn't a single other melee class that has a gap closer that triggers another ability without spending a utility point to pick it up. So I have no idea what you're talking about when you say "how bioware traditional does the closer mechanic." I remember when Operatives could literally 3 shot you, with their first hit stunning you for their second hit, and you just had to prey that they dropped you into execute range rather than hardstun you with that second attack so that they could get a 4th move in uninterrupted. I remember the Deception glory days of 2.X, and I've been around for literally every single class balance change, so I do remember times that adding burst has worked out for other classes, and it hasn't always been bad. Remember the release of 2.0? Deception's burst went through the roof, and they didn't change that until 3.0, and we saw it coming from a mile away. Also, this whole nightmare "burst from stealth" thing you're talking about hasn't existed anywhere in the game since 1.2. Sure, you could lose a lot of health in 2.X when someone playing Concealment or Deception got the drop on you, but you would also survive if you weren't outnumbered. The relative burst has dropped significantly for all classes (have you seen the 4.0 health pools?), and so what wasn't much of a problem in 3.X basically doesn't exist any more.

Your first statement is marginally true by virtue of the fact that you compounded statements. Decreasing the cooldown on Recklessness WILL NOT increase our DPS. Increasing its critical chance boost from 60% to 100%, however, would have a very noticeable effect on our DPS. Your second statement didn't say nearly enough to analyze properly. Is there a cost reduction? Damage increase? Does it make it true instant, or a 1.5 second cast? Honestly, without BOTH a damage increase AND a Force cost reduction, it would still not really have a noticeable effect on our DPS. Secondly: No. I said nothing about Marauders. The sentence immediately before this one is the first time I've even typed out the name of that AC. Iona_Var made the Marauder comment. ...what? Insulting? I'm stating facts. If you find facts insulting, I think you need to stop imagining the slights against you. I have never once claimed to be better than you at the class, just at understanding Deception based on the analyses and work I've done to model the rotation combined with the fact that you've typed out a small number of thoughts that show a less-than-thorough understanding of how Force Cloak and Recklessness interact. First, here are the bullet points you seem to think qualify ideas: Does allowing Discharge to build stacks of Voltage decrease the amount of Force you spend in your rotation? Yes, which lets you use more Voltaic Slashes instead of Saber Strikes, which improves DPS. Does changing from using Phantom Stride every 30 seconds to allowing Ball Lightning to build 3 stacks of Static Charge once every 30 seconds significantly alter the rotation or DPS? No, but it allows us to use Phantom Stride as a gap closer, which is what it's supposed to be. Now, because proof is the only thing that really disproves hypotheses, I can go into exactly why reducing the Recklessness cooldown won't increase DPS for Deception and why even a free Crushing Darkness would further tax Deception's already broken energy regeneration system. Not to mention that free and instant Crushing Darkness (Demolish, even) is kinda Hatred's shtick, and it bothers me on a conceptual level as much as it does from a mathematical standpoint. If you don't believe me, I will, despite you misquoting me and calling me an elitist, post a link to the math that backs up what I'm saying. And while simple ideas can certainly work, ideas that are backed up by thorough, accurate modeling are less likely to need to be rebalanced in the future. Just sayin'.

I guess if you spread both it's not too bad. It's just also not a very large difference. It mostly ends up being a wash, unless you get really good with your timing and spread just over 3 seconds before he throws the shield up. Healers ought to be able to heal through the "passive" damage from the bosses. When I've healed it I've mostly fallen asleep on that fight until I had to stop healing the tank. As said above, you just don't actually take all that much from the bosses if you stand where you should and your tanks aren't jerks. I guess I should have read the tooltip, but your math is a little off. Thrash is 2 hits, Lacerate is 3. You regain, on average, 5 Force on Thrash and 7.5 on Lacerate. It would take 3.5, still, because the cost goes from 20 to 23 when you factor in the fact that each Saber Strike hit recovers 1 Force. Take into account the fact that Saber Strike also triggers Lightning Charge, and you end up with it taking you 23/(2.5) = ~10 Lacerates on 3 targets instead of Thrashes to get an extra Lacerate. Considering Thrash deals (simplifying this a bit) about twice as much damage per use against a single target, and only one of your targets counts for damage at a time, it's not worth it to spam Lacerate. The math will never add up so long as your damage against the other targets gets healed off. Yes, that's a better use for it, however it's not really on topic per the thread title Pretty much the only time it's even mildly useful is to tag Ciphas shortly before he throws up the shield on Heirad. Everything else is pretty much a waste of time.

Because it's not. You would have to kill them out of the intended order to see them get damage buffs. However, yes, the damage is superfluous. The loss in damage on the Heirad more or less makes up for a single global saved on Ciphas when the shield goes up. You shouldn't have long enough for Creeping Terror to do substantial useful damage but you still want to be able to trigger Demolish. In all, it's mostly a wash. You heal based on raw damage done. Also, you take a laughable amount of damage in this fight if you're playing correctly as a Hatred Assassin on NiM. The problem is what you would use that Force regeneration for. You need to save up 23 (I think that's what it costs after the change, I forget the exact number) Force, including the loss of a Saber Strike, to be able to throw down an extra Thrash (or Lacerate). You, without Overcharge Saber running, have a 25% chance of triggering the effect. So, if you hit all 3 targets, you would recover an average of 3.75 Force per Activation. After the 7th Lacerate, you'd have enough Force saved to activate another Lacerate instead of a Saber Strike. The damage you gain is not worth the damage lost not using Thrash, not by a long shot, because the bosses heal to full whenever another dies, and so AoE damage is worthless. Kinda fringe case. You can equally as easily, without costing yourself DPS, pop Phantom Stride to do that for every other one, though, as there's not much use for it on this fight. Again, if you didn't lose damage on the primary target doing so, or if there were a point to hit secondary targets, I'd say go for it, but as it is, it's not very useful to dotspread for that in this fight.

Let's take a look at those numbers I spouted off when it's two people who get to beat on the stun locked player. Also, we have to increase the GCD count to 9, to account for the fact that only one person is using any stuns. 2.6k DPS per person for 3 Assassin stuns, 3k for 3 Assassin stuns and no Crushing Darkness, and 4.7k each with only 2 stuns and no Crushing Darkness. Add another burst class and that's actually really easy. Trying to say that that's a problem is literally saying a 2 v 1 where the 1 can't fight back should be fair or even recoverable. Let's now look at the "front loading" issue you don't understand. If you take away the extra Discharge from Phantom Stride and make Ball Lightning generate 2 extra stacks of Static Charge every 30 seconds, you go from: Discharge > Ball Lightning > Discharge > continue as normal. You get 2% extra damage on 1 Discharge, with the same number of critical hits (on average). That's not what I'd call front loading all that much. Please enlighten me as to how that is significantly more burst than what we have now. Now, if it was the 100% crit chance on recklessness you thought was a good idea, too, I qualified that with a "doesn't need to add to supercrit if it would be crazy." Except there's no way to tune it up. I also still don't see how taking a move out of the rotation and letting it be used for mobility is any kind of a serious redesign. It's really just not that complicated. Or my idea, either, for that matter. Do you understand how the Recklessness reset works? It doesn't seem like it. You don't achieve the same thing by reducing the cooldown because you would need the cooldown to be 24 seconds shorter to get 3 activations within the 102 second Force Cloak window. If you wanted to to be able to match the use of 3 Phantom Strides in that window, you would have to decrease it EVEN FURTHER, by a total of a whopping 41 seconds! That even takes the liberty of assuming the 15 second reduction from the 4 piece set bonus. If you're not having issues you're literally not playing the spec as well as you could be. You should be teetering on the edge of not having enough Force at the end of the Force Cloak rotation. Even just trying to get 2 Voltage per Ball Lightning is a Force negative rotation. Now, is this a bad thing? No, it mostly just bothers me that the rotation is fundamentally trying to meet conflicting goals. Don't believe me? Go do the math. And I think you don't understand Deception nearly as well as you think you do. If you think my feedback is useless, I suggest you study up on the rotation and then look again. Also, short team? Don't make excuses for them. With all the listening they do to the good suggestions, I expect it wouldn't be implemented before the servers get shut down. They've had a lot of chances to make good changes, and they've blown a lot of them, too. Ever heard of the Class Representative initiative? For all the effort it took them (make a voting thread and let the community do the rest, and answer 3 questions per AC over the course of 3 months), very little came of it.

Tie what to Recklessness? I said nothing about tying anything to Recklessness. Increasing the Recklessness crit chance to 100%? No, that's not really that terrible. Heck, you could even make the passive that increases Force critical hit chance by an additional 40% NOT count towards super-crits, which would be lame, but wouldn't actually add any burst, just stabilize it. I really fail to see how this would cause a massive problem. I'm also still failing to see where I suggested anything at all be tied into Recklessness. Now, about stunlocking? The amount you would have to increase Deception's burst by to kill someone while they're stunlocked is INSANE. You get, at absolute best, 4 GCDs, plus a Crushing Darkness if you're clever, and even a 6th if you use a utility on insta-lift. In 6 GCDs, you need to deal 70k damage. Assuming 70k health, you need to hold 7.8k DPS for 6 GCDs, or 9.4k DPS for 5 GCDs, or a ridiculous 11.7k DPS for 4 GCDs. There's no way to keep someone stunlocked and still line up a triple Critical Discharge, Ball Lightning, Maul lineup. That would be tough even with all 3 stacks of Recklessness going to Force moves, but you can't do that and actually keep them stunlocked for 5 GCDs of damage. The damage increase to be able to kill someone before they can actually react like that is so far out of Deception's reach right now that it's a complete non-issue. Except that doesn't flow with the rest of the rotation at all. In order of why it's bad, with more important points later: Crushing Darkness costs 40 Force. That's way too much. Before you suggest it be free, I suggest you read on. Adding another Force move when you need to be trying to hit 2 VS/Maul/Assassinates in 3 GCDs (and sometimes just 2) is taxing on the rotation and your Force regeneration, even if it were free. Saber Strike recovers 3 Force per use, and it's still not helping us go Force positive, losing even more Force will make it worse. We're a burst class. Our burst is currently less than impressive. Mind Crush is NOT a bursty move. This change would make no improvement on what people most want and/or need. In fact, this change would eliminate our ability to Low Slash -> Mind Crush for a little extra damage stacking, which ends up appearing like burst. Lastly, we are not Hatred. We do not need an instant-cast Mind Crush, even if it were free. No, it's not overly complex. Not at all. You have a rate limit on Ball Lightning which happens to be the exact same limit as the current cooldown on Phantom Stride. What's complex about that? Every so often instead of building 1 stack of Static Charge, Ball Lightning would build 3. There is literally nothing complex about that. I mean, it's not even my own suggestion, but it's pretty reasonable. In addition, reducing the cooldown on Recklessness by any reasonable amount wouldn't be all that beneficial. Outside of the opener, we already can't shave off a full 60 seconds of cooldown on Recklessness due to our 102 second rotation on Force Cloak. Reducing the cooldown on Recklessness would just push the 4th Recklessness up a few spots in our opener, and would in no way actually increase the damage we deal. You would have to decrease the cooldown of Recklessness by 24 seconds to see any difference in Deception, and that's just ridiculous. Deception's rotation is currently slightly overtuned, trying to tune it up any more isn't going to help the Discipline. You know what would be a great sustained boost if you really wanted to see a sustained boost? Make Discharge build stacks of Voltage. All of a sudden, the tight Force issues go away or you can trade just about 3 Saber Strikes for Voltaic Slashes per Force Cloak rotation. Unfortunately, that also makes the spec a little boring to play, as you would end up spamming Voltaic Slash pretty hard, and reducing the cost by 1 or 2 per use would be a better fix.

I like the idea of giving Recklessness a 100% critical hit chance (ffs the game has been out for more than 4 years and it's been a constant complaint), even if it's just an Assassin passive that does it so that they don't have to worry about the impact to Sorcerers. It would give us a hearty burst increase during Recklessness windows without screwing up anything else. It'll be a very large increase, but there are ways to balance it out that wouldn't screw us. I'm also a big fan of tying the stack generation mechanic into Ball Lightning instead of Phantom Stride. It's less efficient, in that you'll waste more stacks (and it makes modeling it significantly more difficult), but I'm okay with that if it means I get to keep my gap closer that was supposed to compensate for an increased Force Speed CD. I just don't think that it should automatically crit. Now, if they gave it a critical hit boost that didn't stack for supercrits, then I think it would be fine, but the thought of a Discharge with a 140% damage increase is pretty terrifying. Then again, that opening burst would be pretty sick if you can prestack Voltage...

Megapost incoming:

Those crystals are half the reason that there are almost no hardcore players left. The other half being that PvE has been a joke for the last almost year. Now, inflated sense of entitlement and demands? Is it so crazy to ask that the developers of a game that you pay a monthly subscription to care about what you have to say? Is wanting to see some balance in your favorite game mode being entitled? No, and you're being a jerk about it. So what that they're passionate about wanting the developers to give two ***** about what used to literally be 75%+ of the population of this game? There's nothing wrong with that. I would be disappointed if no one thought it was a travesty that the squishiest, least survivable sustained melee class (read: half-suicidal to play on most fights) is worse than more than half the field at dealing damage. That's horrifically unbalanced and throwing items at a problem that trivialize content doesn't make that problem go away. It's a travesty, and there's no changing that, and I'm honestly happy to see someone else so upset by the fact, and by the fact that the developers just don't seem to care that it's so poorly balanced. And if you don't think Deception Assassins get excluded from groups based on being a weak class, you obviously haven't played with people who can make a completely unbiased choice. Honestly? It hardly matters. PvE content is a joke now, strategies have been around for the hardest fights in the game for over a year, approaching a year and a half. The DPS checks have gone, relatively, down in most fights and they've nerfed several mechanics. You can run your less-than-optimal alacrity, especially if you simply can't hit the buttons fast enough to get full use out of it (980 is pretty rough to actually keep up with on a boss fight). As for me? Considering Bant and I performed our math separately and arrived at the same results, I do, in fact, run very close to the recommended amounts of stats. I just swap 1 enhancement of Alacrity for Critical, though, so that I don't have to try as hard at a game that's gotten so depressingly boring and easy.

Except when you look at those parses, you're looking at outliers, at lucky parses. You're not looking at averages, which are what he calculates. Now, if you show me a 5+ parse streak where they pull between 6800 and 7200 a parse, maybe I'll believe you. But I don't care about 1-offs. They're pretty worthless for determining any kind of useful information. Do you understand that no amount of Alacrity will ever get you more than 3 uses of Ball Lightning? You could literally have infinite Alacrity and, not only be capped at 30%, but STILL not fit a fourth move in between uses of Ball Lightning. The cooldown on Ball Lightning is reduced by exactly the same amount of time you save on the three intervening moves, and so no amount of Alacrity will ever let you fit another attack in, unlike in 2.X. Do you know what the difference is in your average DPS if you were to switch one of those Mastery augments to a Power/Crit/literally any other stat other than accuracy augment? It's on the order of 0.5 to 1 DPS. Out of ~6500. Literally a 0.015% DPS loss. Are you going to tell me, then, that you can notice those DPS changes through the variability on parses? Because there's no way you can tell with any certainty that you're right, unless you want to try on the order of 100+ fights with every set of gear you want to look at. I don't think you've done that, and I think you either don't understand how statistics and random deviations work, or you're pulling numbers out of your ***.

Even then, it's not really a problem, because you and a ranged burst DPS can just nuke that finger and then you get to roam freely. It was great when I got to nuke my finger before it did its first knockback because our MM Sniper and I went to town on it. But there are literally 0 other bosses where the positional requirement hurts you significantly.

That's a terrible way to tank that boss. The correct way to tank that particular boss is for the tank to grab Dash'roode, put Dash'roode's back towards the rock and then place their own back against the otherwise-useless pylon at each stop on your path. That way, melee can stand behind the boss and not take the cleave, positional requirements are met, and nobody gets unduly knocked back unless a melee goes after the Xuvas. But hey, that's what we have Phase Walk for.

It's pretty nearly impossible, but if you can pull it off, your best burst will look like: hardcast Vanquish > FB > (Potency) FiB > DS > Spinning Strike > Serenity Strike > Vanquish > Sever Force (because your burst is over). If you can manage it, that's numerically the best you're going to get, though it relies on you starting combat fresh and not needing to stun the enemy. But hey, you didn't ask for realistic, you asked for "highest burst in the shortest amount of time."

This is a pretty hard to refute point. Well, set of points. Sure, Deception's been in a worse place in PvE before, but at least we wrecked it in PvP to compensate. Oh, and 12/18 is, by definition, not middle of the pack, unless you're trying to tell me that being the end of the middle third of the spread counts as being in the middle of the pack. Why do you care about trying to damage it then? It takes massively reduced damage, your time is better spent recovering Force so you can go nuts when it's not spinning to win. Though it is, by and far, the smallest issue Deception has, why not pick a fight the facing issue is actually a problem on, like Brontes NiM? Not that there's even another fight that matters where you really have a problem. Let's not get carried away. This latest nerf was because of how we were performing in PvE, not in PvP. It's really pointless to cast blame like this. It happens in both directions, so it would be really cool if people stopped throwing the blame like one camp owns it all.

So, rather than looking at the raw code, it's helpful if you use a parser to break it down for you. By and far parsely.io is the best (and only one I know of that is still active) parser for this game. Upload it there and then share the link it gives you with us. Oh, and don't bother with Crushing Darkness if you can't precast it. Precasting it is good because you get to use time from outside the fight to do damage in the fight, mid-fight, unless you time it so that it's functioning like a pre-cast (Brontes burn phase, for example), it's just not good.

Actually, yes, tossing out the outliers does make the data pretty good. 3.81% of 6612 DPS is 252 DPS. Except for the outliers of Annihilation and Marksmanship, all 16 other DPS disciplines fall within 252 DPS of the average. That's, for all of the variables that go into determining the damage of each of the Disciplines, surprisingly well balanced, and far better than things have been balanced in the past, especially if you consider the relative time since the last expansion. You're right. There's a ton wrong that needs to be fixed (Melee burst as #2? Ranged Sustained as #3?), but, ignoring all other factors, the DPS between Disciplines is surprisingly well balanced. That's the only point I care about really making, because I could go (and have gone) on for hours about how many things are poorly balanced in this game. It would help if they brought in experts in each class to beta test the expansions as they go, but hey, everybody understands the class as well as everyone else, right?

It's much better than you make it out to be. Looking at leaderboards for dummy parses will show you the luckiest, not most representative results of killing a dummy. The only fair way to compare the Disciplines is to look at them from a purely analytical point of view where you can factor out luck. Or make people post an average of 10+ fights for a spot on a leaderboard. Now, if you take Bant's calculations and fix the outliers (Anni and Marksman), everything is within +/- 3.7%, which is pretty decent. Now, I'm not saying the balance is good: low defense, melee, sustained specs shouldn't be behind 2/3 of the field, but that's another story. I just want to make it clear that outliers are bad data points and that any parse from any leaderboard is going to be an outlier.

A better rotation would be to start by pre-stacking two stacks of Induction via Lacerate, stealthing out, and then pre-casting Crushing Darkness into: Recklessness + Adrenal + Discharge > Phantom Stride + Discharge > Ball Lightning > Blackout + Voltaic Slash > Maul > Voltaic Slash > Ball Lightning > Force Cloak + Discharge > Maul > Voltaic Slash > Recklessness + Discharge > Blackout + Ball Lightning > regular priority. The priority is to maximize your Static Charge stacks without wasting them and proactively use Saber Strike to help you do so. You, ideally, execute a 102 second Force Cloak rotation to maximize Force regen, but that goes out the window in a boss fight to maximize your damage against the boss and benefit from the few globals you can't be on boss for. Towards the end of the cycle, try to use Maul when you have to use Ball Lightning 3 globals after a Discharge (e.g BL > Discharge > X > Y > BL) to squeeze out just a little more from your Forcebar. There are lots of little tricks you can learn, but a look at your logs would be very helpful.