A) They're not that far behind. It's a ~50 DPS difference. B) The classes above melee are sustained classes. If burst always did more sustained damage than sustained classes, would you ever bring a sustained class? No, even if that meant bringing all melee, and all melee still isn't balanced. Yes, ranged do have an advantage where they take less damage, but sustained classes should always have some advantage over burst classes, or they'll become obsolete. I'm also of the opinion that melee should have better burst than ranged, but that's another discussion entirely.

Except I don't need to prove myself to someone who can't kill Gold Team in S&V HM with a healer who's solo healed Third Floor Revan on every healer. I'm done here. Also, l2read, I said Deception is my favorite.

Actually, I did talk about what you said: that was basically all I talked about. You're wrong in thinking people are stupid to say that sustained damage specs should do more damage, and I explained why it should be. In addition to all of that, if you look at ACs where the defensive measures of the class change by spec, the burst specs consistently have better defenses than the sustained specs as well. Sustained specs should do more damage, and for good reason. If you had the choice of picking one of two almost identical DPS for a raid spot, and one of them was better at target switching and had better burst, and the two did the same damage, which would you pick? It's obvious, and that's bad for balance, and a balanced game is a healthy game. Unfortunately, BioWare seems to struggle to balance classes, but that's a discussion for another time. Your "Fact" number 1: No, Deception, in the right hands, was incredibly competitive, and in the right hands, could beat most other classes out there. The real reason you didn't see any Assassins or Shadows dominating? The really good ones stopped playing PvE in any kind of competitive way. MKnightRider left ages ago, Tenebras has been in hiding, not making much of a public appearance (though I'd appreciate if he'd chime in with his thoughts here), Poptart/Wildberry has more or less given up on PvE, though he's much better at Serenity than Infiltration, and those are all the highest profile Assassins/Shadows we've had. Vescent and I have mostly given up on caring about being super high performers, and we certainly don't upload logs to parsely any more. This class has never been a very popular class because it was so bad for so long, and so we don't have people like Yolo putting significant time into the class (though he's pretty good at Hatred from his short time playing that). You called yourself one of the best. If you really were, you should have been crushing those leaderboard numbers. Not that most of those matter that much, since a lot of the highest numbers are up there because people padded their numbers. 7k on Warlords? 25% of total damage from Lacerate? Yeah, that's a great strategy, to group them up like that. As for your "fact" number 2, maybe you don't see Deception topping any leaderboards because a) few people upload boss fight parses to any leaderboard, b) even fewer people still do it as Deception, and c) most of the people who do for Deception are, and this isn't intended as a cheap shot, not spectacular at the class. On the Parsely 8 Man Hard Mode registers, for all of KP and EV, the top Deception DPS was ~4.7k: on the Annihilation Droid. There aren't even Deception parses for Fabricator or Karagga! There isn't even data on Deception for any fight in TFB, S&V, DP, ToS, or the last 4 fights of Ravagers, and only the first 2 fights in DF have even a single Deception parse in them! And let's not even talk about 16 man. Now there was a single fight with a decent amount of data for Deception, and that was actually, surprisingly, Warlord Kephess. The top DPS for that fight of all classes? Deception. Oh, and I didn't see you up there, so maybe you should upload your logs. As for my "baloney" opinions, I'm going to quote myself from ages ago as saying that they should fall into that distribution within 5% of each other. I'm going to further clarify that by saying yes, that should be on a boss fight, and a single target one at that. If you wanted to look at what I'd call a healthy profile, it would be something like this (spoiler tagged): That's what I'd be looking for, what's in those spoiler tags. Right now, Deception is still viable, you just have to play better to keep up. A lot of other classes had it a lot worse. I feel really bad for Engineering and Marksmanship, who ate it way harder than Deception did.

You have a 270 degree window to stand at to hit them. It's not a real positional requirement except in 2 fights or if your tanks are bad. In PvP, if you can't Maul someone, stop keyboard turning.

If you're that low on health, you'll probably die through Overcharge Saber anyway. If they were going to change the other tanks, I think it would be fine, but until then, I'll keep my 18 straight seconds of taunt.

That would be pretty sick as a tank. I mean, it's not like that's part of why a hybrid tank spec existed in PvE for a number of fights or anything. Oh wait. They didn't change it because of complaints: if they were going to do that, they would have nerfed it into the ground in 2.0 when it was the dominant PvP burst spec, post Smash nerf. No, they nerfed it for the simple reason that it was overperforming. Let's look at some facts here. Deception was, up until 4.0.3, in the top 3 DPS specs on the dummy in the game. It has very strong control over its (now significantly lower) burst, and previously had the option of losing dps in one phase to VASTLY increase DPS in another. 2 Deception Assassins could fairly easily drop a 100k health enemy in 5 seconds with no outside help, because they could sustain 10k dps for at least 9 seconds each with only a tiny bit of setup, and the tiniest bit of luck, because Recklessness and auto-crits from set bonus make for very steady burst. They could do this about once a minute, with the option for an 8k sustained burst every 30 seconds, roughly. Combine that with its very strong sustained damage when burst isn't needed, and you're looking at a pretty high powered DPS class. To take things a step further, Deception has the almighty, coveted 30% AoE DR. Combine this with their Entropic Field ability and the Insulation talent, and they're pushing passive DR at the levels of heavy armor classes, except that their DR also works against I/E attacks that are usually very troublesome for all involved. Deception is incredibly passively sturdy. It can basically wade through attacks that would kill other DPS classes. On top of all these defensive goodies it already has, it gets one of the cheesiest abilities in the game: Shroud. Shroud lets it literally ignore mechanics in favor of uptime on a boss, which other melee ACs simply can't do. With the talent for it, you can have that for 5 out of every 60 seconds, which is pretty incredible. Deception is very, very hardy, with no additional effort on the part of the player, in a way that most melee DPS simply can't match, and maintains incredible uptime to boot. Looking at the range Deception has on abilities, it looks pretty good. It has a 10 meter attack every 6 seconds, and another every ~8. Combine this with Force Speed and it's pretty easy to weave in and out of melee as the fight dictates, and use Shroud when you need to stay for just another few seconds. For a melee class, that's quite a bit of time they don't have to spend in melee range, and the best movement ability in the game to boot. So far, we have a class with high sustained, very nice, on-demand, controllable burst, strong passive defenses, and the ability to simply act like mechanics don't exist at times, and pretty decent range for a melee class. The downside? You bring little utility to the raid. For that cost, Deception was outstripping all but 2 other DPS specs at the time, while having better defenses than almost all of them. So: why didn't Deception need some kind of nerf, whether relative or absolute? As much as it may frustrate you that Deception got nerfed after finally being near the top of the pile for 2 months of its 4 year history, anyone who didn't see it coming was deluding themselves that Deception was balanced. In order, classes should deal damage at a rough equivalence of: Melee Sustained > Melee Burst ~ Ranged Sustained > Ranged Burst. Obviously adjustments should be made for ability to keep on target (which is why ranged is already adjusted down) and ability to mitigate incoming damage (another part of the reason ranged starts lower on the pole), but the rough pattern should be that. By some theorycrafting metrics that aren't too inaccurate, it's now slightly below the middle of the pack, which is right about where it should be. Except that they put it there in the wrong way. I dislike these nerfs as much as anyone else. Deception is my favorite spec in the game, and I would even play it in 2.9 from time to time, when I wasn't carrying the DPS. However, unlike most people, I don't dislike them because my favorite class got nerfed: I dislike them because they did a poor job of how they carried out the nerf. They're removing burst from the game at an alarming rate, mostly because critical is so out of hand in this expansion due to their new mechanics for how it works. Every burst spec, with the exception of Arsenal (lolwut, Arsenal is doing well? They're not nerfing it? That's new.), has lost most of the surge boosts they used to have. This is easily the most effective way to kill burst while still leaving you able to perform burst occasionally due to your set bonus auto crit. Unfortunately, this causes problems in how burst specs function, as their peaks are no longer as high, and in groups/fights where the burst was important (hardswap comps, NiM Raptus DPS challenge), this really hurts, as it's impossible to save your auto-crit without hamstringing your sustained DPS. That's what frustrates me about this change. Not that we're doing less damage: I'm quite okay with that, we were doing too much sustained damage before. It's that our peak burst, as a burst class with phenomenal control over that burst, has been seriously diminished, and trying to control our most extreme burst now results in us hindering ourselves immensely to do so. And yes, you're overreacting. It was a 5% nerf, we're now in the middle of the pack, and we are still capable of killing bosses, not that there's any point in killing Nightmare bosses right now. It's not the end of the world, nor is it the worst nerf any class has seen in the game. Also: Deception should not be able to put out more sustained damage than Hatred, and it was, and that's a balance problem.

You have full knowledge of a function of 8 paired linear and binomial distributions combined with the the triple layered stat formulas? That's incredible! Sarcasm aside, now that patch notes have been released, I'll summarize: Deception - Ball Lightning damage reduced by ~6% Deception - Voltaic Slash damage reduced by ~7.5% and Force cost reduced to 20, down from 25. Deception - Crackling Blasts now increases the critical strike damage dealt by Surging Charge's Discharge effect and Ball Lightning by 10%, down from 30%. All specs - Assassinate damage reduced by ~4.5% and Force cost reduced to 20, down from 25. All specs - Thrashing Blades no longer reduces the Force cost of Thrash, Lacerate, Voltaic Slash, or Leeching Strike. Those percentages are roughly correct, but it would be tedious to display each of the coefficient changes for all of those abilities, and most people wouldn't be able to see what that would do anyway, as I'd then have to at least somewhat explain how damage rolls work for those who don't know. Back on topic... Ball Lightning damage decrease also affects Twin Surge. Overall pure average percent DPS loss comes out to, with the surge nerf included: 11.83% loss on Ball Lightning, for roughly 2.55% overall DPS loss. Continuing on, we get: 1.04% from VS damage decrease, 1.99% DPS loss from Discharge, and a hilariously low 0.2545% loss on Assassinate. Sum it up, and it comes out to 5.8% DPS loss. Take off a full percent from the extra VS uses, and voila, you get 4.8%. What I haven't included yet is the change in how you use Phantom Stride. However, I'm willing to be real life money that the % damage boost from using it will remain the same, as you will simply delay it less as a result of smaller Discharge criticals. I have been known to be wrong on gut feelings on occasion, but that's what I'd bet on without yet doing the math.

If you're having significant downtime due to being a melee in these fights, you should learn how to reduce that. EV and KP don't even matter, EC has no enforced downtime, TFB only has enforced downtime if you run a bunch of melee who can't mitigate lightning storm, as you can keep up with Kelsara and Ciphas pretty easily, S&V is almost entirely melee friendly, the sole exception being where you need to leave a little earlier than the ranged DPS do on swagbot. DF has numerous mechanics that actually favor melee over ranged, though clock phase on Brontes can be frustrating for sure. DP also rewards you for having melee on quite a few fights, and rarely rewards having ranged, though it does reward a split in many fights, too. Once you get into the 3.0 Operations, you finally start seeing where being a melee might be a detriment... except that all the fights are significantly easier now than they were 2 months ago. Being a melee in this expansion isn't the same death-sentence it was 2 months ago. That said, I think you'll see even fewer Assassins running around on fleet, since our burst will now actually be pretty sad. 11k Average Discharges? I was seeing very consistent 13k+s tonight during raid time on boss targets, jumping all the way to 16k during execute phases, where I could have triple 16k Discharges all back to back. We're going to be back to having to pull more weight than most would like to show we can perform as well as other classes, with some levels of performance simply being out of reach, now. Hatred will likely take over as the go-to PvE spec. It's trivial compared to a Surge nerf alongside damage nerfs. It doesn't make up for the difference, not by a long shot, considering the Surge loss is a whopping 7x that size on its own. Within 1 SD? I'm not sure what logs you're looking at, but if you're pulling them from Parsely, I hardly believe they're within a standard deviation, and on top of that, I don't think you're accounting for variance in damage rolls as well as variance in relic proc timing. Pulling from logs is unreliable. With enough data, you can get a decent guess, but you'd have to pull enough logs to have over 200 uses of each ability for me to be confident that variance has worked itself out, along with knowing all the stats from the character that produced the data. Compared to working with the raw numbers, it simply takes a lot more work to get almost as reliable an answer. You asked me to show you the math, and so I showed what I could without posting any incriminating information.

Two things. First: Yes, the execute phase is worth more than 30% of your DPS. Did you also know that that means it lasts significantly less long than 30% of the time? Your DPS jumps roughly 14.7% in the execute phase, and so the time you spend in it is ~27% of the fight. On a 1.5 million damage dummy, you would last all of 58.33 seconds. That's 2 whole VS uses in the execute, woo! Second: Did you reduce Surge on what's losing it? That alone is worth more than 2.5%. In the execute phase, you also get 1 VS per ~21.55 seconds. Take into account the damage loss on it, and it's just not that impressive. I'm also losing 6.2% damage on Ball Lightning (from surge alone) and 7.2% from Discharge. That's ~3.4% of your damage right there. Knock off the appropriate percents from the others, account for the small amount of extra voltaic slashes, and you get that 4.8%. Also, as for doing the math on parses, that can be really flawed, considering they suffer badly from good/bad RNG.

People always overreact. PVE is too easy right now to kill any class, and Hatred will still be roughly average. You probably just aren't playing with really good Assassins, though.

I did the math, all I haven't accounted for yet is Phantom Stride usage. It's 4.8%, unless you can put down the numbers to convince me I'm wrong. EDIT: You also need to Saber Strike less once every 11 Voltaic Slashes pre-execute, so about once every 48 seconds you save a single Saber Strike. It gets to be more in the execute, but that's always short enough that Force management is really easy anyway.

4.8% for Deception. Way more than 1-2.

I don't think you understand how big a nerf that would be. That's big.

Well, PvE is really easy right now, comparatively, and most DPS checks aren't hard, so I don't think any class will die off in PvE. However, a 4.8% DPS loss in Deception is pretty rough. The 1.2% Hatred would have is far more palatable. I guess it's just going to be back to mediocrity again.

Yeah.

It's a gain as long as you don't delay it 30 or more seconds (AKA lose an entire use). Basically, forcing them to line up causes you to deal almost double damage with the Phantom Stride Discharge. It also forces many other uses to line up. The only time it's a loss is when you simply fail to get an extra use out of it by delaying longer than its cooldown.

Twin Surge will consume a stack, so it's less risky to do Breach > Stride + Breach > Psychokinetic Blast, even if your potential damage is lower. On average, you'll get much better results using PB last, whereas you're taking a big risk using PB first for only marginal gains. Not to mention that the delay in building your stacks of Breaching Shadows is also a dps loss.

Actually, you can safely delay Spinning Strike by 1 GCD after your first Crush Spirit in the execute phase and still not miss any of them. Just don't get into the habit of delaying it, because you literally only have that single GCD once every 15 seconds.

It might help a little, but it won't save you like picking up Endurance will, because you'll never get to 100% mitigation chance, because you'd have to get to 100% shield or defense to get there, and there would always be I/E damage, like Arcing Assault.

Look at the stats. Is there more Power + Main Stat on the PvP Mods? If not, then no, they're not better.

You'll be using lots of Force attacks. Deception is heavier on melee moves by a tiny bit, but still has lots of Force attacks. You're mostly out of luck if you want to play the specs as intended.

Well, considering your rotation fails an average of 50% of the time, I highly doubt you've never had any issues executing it. That said, do we play the same game? Have you ever fought a boss with a super low rate of attack? Have you done more than solo content? Did you know you can use Dark Ward off of the global cooldown, and don't need to hold a spot open in your rotation for it? Do you ever even use Discharge for the 5% accuracy debuff on up to 8 enemies, not to mention the ludicrous threat it now generates? Now maybe I've misinterpreted what you've said, but I don't think we play the same game.

You can NEVER have too much sarcasm.

Well. No. I'm not. Y'know. Considering a dead tank can't do his job. You can't tank a boss if you can't survive the spike. The only way to survive that spike is to stack HP in place of secondary stat. By the way, where did I say tertiary stat? Oh right, I didn't.

I'll remember that the next time I survive a 75k Driving Thrust because I took some extra hp.