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PVE Balance Sage DPS in 3.0


Skiggity

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Ahoy fellow sages, curious how things are panning our for the Balance users out there in the 3.0 PVE world.

 

Just ran a couple of parses to baseline. Using a green Anodyne stim with a 192 offhand and otherwise 186s/180s. Mostly level 28 augments.

 

Pertinent stats: 3804 willpower, 1740 bonus damage, 109.97 accuracy, 24.95 crit chance, 67.33 crit multiplier. Did NOT use any attack adrenals.

 

On 2.9 without adrenals I'd parse around 3800 pretty reliably. had a best right near 4000 DPS.

 

Ran two parses: 3049 and 3052. So, that's a pretty tremendous hit. Going to run some Telekinetics parses this evening to compare, but at first blush it looks like Balance got devastated by 3.0 for the purposes of end-game PVE. Anyone else seeing similar results?

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Brief update: I spent about 5 minutes trying to learn a decent Telekinetics rotation, then parsed randomly for a few minutes. Saw about a 250 DPS increase with a certainly sloppy rotation compared to my second-nature Balance rotation.
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Haven't parsed yet but from looking at the changes, balance single target dps has seen a number of nerfs. On the other hand it is one of the best aoe specs in the game at the moment to the point of being OP for aoe. Given that BW said that sustained specs should parse higher than burst specs, balance should be buffed at some stage. How though is something that I have no clue given the direction with pestilence they have followed.
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To be similar to TK I would expect a buff to Disturbance and perhaps force in balance would be needed. At the moment it is more effective to just spam TKT than it is to use Disturbance off a proc, which makes no sense. It also fits into the rotation better, which is a separate problem (as it stands the rotation is pretty clunky and cooldowns don't line up with fillers, unless I'm missing something completely).
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I just parsed in fully auged, mostly optimized 186 and got 2.8k!!! I wasn't expecting 4.4k like in the guides or even to hit 4k but 2.8!!! Wow that is bad. I had no set bonus at all so that's gonna lose me maybe 200 dps but 3k would still be bad.

OK I just parsed lightning and also got 2.8k so maybe its just gear.

Edited by DarthZaul
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Due to how strong the AoE is, the only things I can think of to improve DPS are:

 

Disturbance

Force Serenity

 

And maybe resource management (AoE resource management is easy due to DoTs eating suppression charges giving you force but single target is force starved if you use disturbance or serenity)

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Im currently doing 3.9 with my sorc lightning and 3.2 with the same gear as madness.

 

 

The first time i saw the difference i thought it was the accuracy (i had 108%) but now that i have 109,9% accuracy and parsis 3.2 as madess and people are doing the same numbers...

Or we have the rotation wrong, REALLY WRONG. (we should avoid using disturbance or something like that now :S ) or the spec is nerfed to the limit. to the point of being useless in one-tarjet but high-movement fight,

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This is really unfortunate, I'm ok with not having world's best parses using Balance but compared to my guild mates my DPS has fallen by about 25 percent, where in a number of their cases the DPS has increased.

 

Is the Balance tree working as intended? I can understand if there are some tweaks to the rotation from what it used to be be with the new 2-second 4-stack TK throw, but it seems like Sage/Sorc DPS took a serious single-target hit compared to the other classes.

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i also parsed around 2,8k-2.9k with 186 full augmented gear ( new gear) , while i even parse 3,3k in brutalizer before ( since i do alot of pvp)

ifs it because now the stack move from 3 to 4 make us lost alot of dps

or is there something wrong here , i still do quite ok in pvp with madness in fact i do better dps in madness compare to lighting even now lighting is super mobile

 

so any input here for rotation would be appreciated if share

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As a PvP spec, I think balance still has some viability, although I'd be concerned it was just fluff damage. The power of our dots was decreased quite significantly. Whilst you now need 4 stacks, TKT is, I believe, more damaging than it used to be (comparatively, obviously the Base damage reduction is significant).

 

In PvE, it is probably the AoE king, provided that you can get ticks of your dots off. However, TK is no slouch - I was consistently pulling 8k+ in the Ravagers trash pulls last night through force quake and TK wave alone. Realistically I think there would need to be a significant buff to Disturbance and Serenity in order to get the single target dps back on track, although that still wouldn't smooth the rotation out.

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It is not simple to fix balance with how it is now.You can't increase dots and force in balance cause they scale linearly with the number of mobs. You can't touch tkt too much now cause it is a spammable 2 sec cast. Serenity has a healing component so if the damage was to be modified the healing should go done. You can increase disturbance but if it is done alone it will have to be so high that the spec becomes burst, plus it has to be done within the tree cause you can't have disturbance doing more damage than bolt. Then there is the mind crush replacement as another potential.

 

So basically increase the damage of mind crush replacement, serenity and disturbance. And? The signature of balance was dot damage which if it small in proportion (in single targets) then the spec loses its feeling. It was fine in 2.10 for both pve and pvp, it should have been left mainly untouched.

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Agreed with most of what is said here, balance was my main pve spec pre 3.0 for sage, and was very decent, could nearly keep up with my sentinel dps wise. Now however balance has had a serious nerf, and the rotation just doesnt work, also needing 4 stacks for the proc means ending tele throw early to maintain dots ect is no longer an option, and the new cast ability seem rather pointless unless you need a health fix, dps is higher leaving it completly out of the rotation. current balance dps is about 3.3k in 186 NiM gear with the new russun relics, while teli I can hit closer to 3.9k, compared to my sentinel however neither compare now.

 

With regards to ppl saying balance is now an aoe spec, teli aoe destroys it anyway, with 5 enemies I can maintain 8k in teli np.

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I agree with all of you. Before 3.0 I parsed around 4K in 186 gear and now even with 110% accuracy I can barely reach 3.1K.

That's a nerf of nearly 1K.

 

Even with the crappiest telekinetics rotation I'm at 3.3 k now. It's useless to me though since I have little to no experience using TK in boss fights.

 

I still remember the podcast when they introduced new Sage/Sorcerer specs. Everything was supposed to be so awesome. Apparently they forgot to mention the the 1K damage decrease back then.

 

It will probably take them month to acknowledge that balance was significantly nerfed and even longer before they fix it. Meanwhile the sage will be a lot less welcome in any raid group unless it's a healer or a TK sage.

 

Oh and yes, if you don't use disturbance on proc you'll increase your damage by 0,1k.

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I can parse 3.7 with it but its still in a terrible state. I'd suggest no one plays it over lighting currently guess the buff we saw in 2.8 was too much and clipping was bad.

 

Please clarify whats and how. The parses only mean so much to me as a PvP'er but the difference is enourmous compared to other attempts in this thread. Gear dependant?

 

DPS loss or gain to use PoM/Wrath procs on anything other than demolish?

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Please clarify whats and how. The parses only mean so much to me as a PvP'er but the difference is enourmous compared to other attempts in this thread. Gear dependant?

 

DPS loss or gain to use PoM/Wrath procs on anything other than demolish?

 

I'll go record a video and get it up since I have free time now

 

EDIT:

 

 

so it wasn't 3.7 was 3.6 .

 

http://gyazo.com/046994eb380b58d66b6a5266786bc602

http://gyazo.com/6c30947f5041f0b3de1ce9da8adea938

http://gyazo.com/052b053f2a25ed7e4b594ca6abc5bb9d

Edited by JDotter
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Indeed Madness got huge nerf. I used to parse around 4,3k, now around 3,6k, but Lightning in other hand now its superb spec to play - it has mobility, burst dmg and good energy management.

 

With 186 gear (from DF/ DP NiM) and 2 craftable relics im able to do 4,2+k, and since i was always fan of lightning - those changes are quite ok for me.

 

I think reason that madness is nerfed was pvp.

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I bet it was brought up in the beta.

And I highly doubt it was a design descision to nerf balance.

 

Seriously developers should easily be able to simulate the outcome of dps changes. It's all math and with the new skill system there isn't even any considerable variation in speccs any more. I really wonder how it is possible to fail that much.

 

Given that the design goal was sutained speccs to parse better than burst speccs to a certein degree, the actual outcome hints that noone actually did the math. TK seems to be the better sustained AND burst specc atm with also no disadvantage in mobility.

 

I also doubt that any of the developers has seen that disturbance will become pretty useless, even though it is quite obvious. It should do more damage than 3 ticks of TKT (1,5 secs) to be effective, shouldn't it?

 

I can only partly follow the argument that it would be problem to fix balance, because of damage increase being multiplied by additional AOE hits. TK is heavy in AOE and already parses a lot better single target.

AOE damage in over 90% of the cases apllies to mob groups wich don't even stand half of the 18 seconds the dots tick. Compare that to the effectiveness smashers or TK-sages. Burst AOE will still be king that discipline.

 

I bet in a matter of days we will see that not only sage/sorc has serious balance issues.

 

My personal conclusion: It's just sloppy work.

 

Same as all the revived bugs we see everytime they bring out new content (code management could do magic really), new bugs wich they just seem to ignore in beta and localization getting worse every new content (chunks of text simply missing, wrong values and desciptions in tooltips and so on).

 

What we se here is an aspect of the issues in quality management Bioware has.

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More closed test next time, and the situation with many things will be like it is now. Bugs, balance etc.

 

Funny thing is, they said in one of the livestreams that they want sustained specs to do more DPS than burst specs, which is clearly not the case.

Edited by Sindariel
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