I'm not in game right now, but Devour supposedly increases the amount Parasitism and Death Field heal you rather than improving their damage, according to Torhead. I'll double check it when I get ingame. Edit: You must actually be talking about Lingering Nightmares. The only way to actually know if it adds ticks without impairing its dps is to observe the damage per tick and count the ticks before and after taking the points in that talent, probably in a duel or something so it's a completely controlled environment. If Lingering Nightmares only divides the same amount of damage across more ticks, then it's not a DPS increase and should be passed over, as bare minimum you're going to break even and Crushing Darkness' duration isn't anywhere near its cooldown, so it'd be a waste of points all things considered. This really needs to be tested.

Pretty much gut feelings. How fast stuff dies. You can do a loose parse on elite mobs, burn them down as fast as you can, make mental note. Without a combat log there's no real means of parsing the data. Total damage in PVP is calculated differently, mostly because in PVP you seek to move as much as possible, and dots by design have really high DPE, which is where Madness shines. By nature it has a lot more opportunities to do damage. PVE isn't like that. You're not penalized by standing, so you'll have a lot of opportunities to achieve max dps as Lightning. As for Lightning being the PVP tree, that's just kinda wrong.

On top of the post itself being badly written, I just kinda disagree, and I'm saying this as an (intended) madness sorcerer (even though I spent 6 points in Lightning). You can't read that much into tooltips. And PVP isn't an indication of DPS. FFS man, learn to MMO. I don't mean this criticism to be flaming or anything like that, and as harsh as it sounds, I just think you should actually know what you're talking about before you start talking. Until we devise a way to parse PVE dps, there's no reason to have this discussion. Go with whichever tree gels with you the most, but for the love of all that is DAWERK SAHDID, don't deign to write an argumentative post under the guise of helping the community, writing it literally as poorly as is possible for anyone with all ten fingers and an eighth grade education, and expect it to function as intended. Sorry.

IMO any arguments pertaining to the necessity of this feature are outside the scope of this thread/topic. It's a good feature, and the option to use it (with a togglable check square in the interface options) should be in the game, period, regardless of how you feel about addons or macros. Having it in won't matter to the people that don't use it, but it certainly will to those of us that do.

You should probably respec and grab the five points in lightning to reduce skill costs and give you an extra 100 force power. Those are significant in terms of sustained DPS and healing especially when trying to solo champions and the like.