Did anyone manage to kill HM Cora/Revan with Balance/Madness?

[IkarusXY]

Just curious if it is possible at all.

Of course i mean without getting hard carried by 3 min-maxed aim toons.

 

I miss the spec and would love to use it a bit for progression, even if it is not the highest parsing of all.

[akisgood]

I've done hm revan in lightning with a 192 MH since the lightning nerf but I'm not sure I'd be able to justify choosing madness instead for that fight, not least because of its optimality relying on alacrity stacking which is poorly suited to short burn windows...

 

...Ruugar is another matter though and I'm sure you could easily do it with madness if you wanted, your main issue being avoiding death to mouse droids rather than your damage output (suppression is your friend), since the dps checks in the game at the moment aren't tight at all, but a sorc in general is a little fragile on that fight.

 

I guess the question would be whether you and your team are okay with it, since you mention that you're progressing, and some would advocate using the strongest class and spec that you can play to give your team the highest chance of success

Edited May 13, 2015 by akisgood

[myragoeshappy]

as a madness sorc @ cora you're nearly everytime full bc. of your selfheal. this is one of the fights where madness is atm much stronger than lightning, just bc of the selfheal wich help the healers to keep yourself full. since i haven't seen the last phase of revan, i can't speak about the differents between lightning and madness but for my playstyle madness will be the right choice even for revan

[akisgood]

as a madness sorc @ cora you're nearly everytime full bc. of your selfheal. this is one of the fights where madness is atm much stronger than lightning, just bc of the selfheal wich help the healers to keep yourself full. since i haven't seen the last phase of revan, i can't speak about the differents between lightning and madness but for my playstyle madness will be the right choice even for revan

I should probably elaborate here. Aside from what I said above about madness on revan, I think one of the issues that you might have on the core, aside from lower burst, is that your dots won't deal damage when you're not in melee range inside the inner ring. Even if you do a good job of maximising uptime I feel like you're going to miss out on a significant chunk of their ticks, the saving grace perhaps being that you can use death field despite abberations if you target it on yourself.

 

.. Just my opinions and i'm certainly no expert (my sorc is my 4th or 5th alt) but I'd love to hear about it if anyone hits high numbers on the machine core as MADNESS (500k+) because that would be very impressive indeed.

Edited May 14, 2015 by akisgood

[myragoeshappy]

I should probably elaborate here. Aside from what I said above about madness on revan, I think one of the issues that you might have on the core, aside from lower burst, is that your dots won't deal damage when you're not in melee range inside the inner ring. Even if you do a good job of maximising uptime I feel like you're going to miss out on a significant chunk of their ticks, the saving grace perhaps being that you can use death field despite abberations if you target it on yourself.

 

.. Just my opinions and i'm certainly no expert (my sorc is my 4th or 5th alt) but I'd love to hear about it if anyone hits high numbers on the machine core as madness (500k+) because that would be very impressive indeed.

 

at the time you're not near the core, you still can up your dots on it. you don't do more dps as lightning when you need to stand away from the core. ofc he will start with its burst, but the madness sorc will also start with the dmg when he comes back to the core. he wont need to refresh the dots while he is near the core bc. you can do it a little earlier

 

To play Madness for progress things, you need to think much more than as lightning to do the same amount of dmg like the others #Kappa

[TheDuge]

I played sage for our main progression on Revan and just got the first kill a week ago after countless hours of wiping. I experimented with both specs, I'll try to summarize my experiences.

 

For floors 1-2 anything is okay, you can put decent numbers with both specs.

 

For the core burn you need to go away from the core a lot, because we don't have a hold the line/hunker down like ability to save our asses from the pull/push, so you'll be doing short or semi short windows of dps on the core. This screams for lightning/telekinetics, which works really well here. On our kill I got carried a bit, I had only around 330k dmg, but on previous tries there were pulls where I was above 450k, so I'd say 500k may be possible as lightning (all this with 192 MH). The huge disadvantage for me on lightning was that you pretty much can't do anything while turning to the aberrations, so I always stopped dps completely thinking survival>squeezing in a bit more dps. With the recent nerfs (and with 204 MHs) this is fine, but I imagine this would be a big deal in previous versions of the game. Of course if you want to be high on dps you can try to squeeze in one GCD between the aberration explosions, but I'd rather not risk it.

 

Now balance is a different story. It has its advantages over lightning: you can do DF/FiB while turning to aberrations, and your dots will also tick during this, which is a dps gain.

Unfortunately it also has many disadvantages, which imo make it inferior to lightning for the core burn. Your dots will not only not damage the core while you are outside of its range, but they will be reflected to you and you'll receive some extra damage. Also, in my experience you can NOT put dots on the core while you are outside. The shield around the core seems to work differently, because you can definitely dot for example HK when his shield is up, or that revanite commander whose name i can't remember with the shield, Calphayus on the council fight etc.

 

Of course lightning being superior for core doesn't mean that balance is not be viable, it is just quite hard to put decent numbers. It also depends a bit on luck, if you have many 12 o'clock (or near that) aberrations then you will be able to continuously dps during the explosions and have higher numbers.

 

Everything what I said so far is with considering having a 192 MH. If you have a 204 or 198 MH, then everything is viable.

 

Now about Cora+Ruugar HM, balance is definitely okay there. On the cora+bird phase it's even better because of the self heals and the ability to dotspread. For the other parts of the fight lightning is possibly better, but balance is still perfectly viable.

[akisgood]

at the time you're not near the core, you still can up your dots on it. you don't do more dps as lightning when you need to stand away from the core. ofc he will start with its burst, but the madness sorc will also start with the dmg when he comes back to the core. he wont need to refresh the dots while he is near the core bc. you can do it a little earlier

 

To play Madness for progress things, you need to think much more than as lightning to do the same amount of dmg like the others #Kappa

 

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but you can't apply your dots on the core unless you're close to it. I'm not saying you can't do this fight as madness, especially now that it's been nerfed and is super easy in general, but as I said before I don't think somebody with a 192 MH could do 500-600k on the core as madness spec very easily.

 

@theDuge 500-600k is certainly possible as lightning, especially pre nerf. I used my sorc on it a while ago with 192 MH and was in the low 500s, but it depends how much you strafe around the core to hold your uptime, and how late you leave moving out for pull ins. Don't forget to use a grenade as well.

 

A lot of what you said was already covered in my post but I do agree with the bit about 204 MH making most things obsolete, especially after all the nerfs.

 

I guess the real question for the original poster is, since HM ToS and Rav basically finished in 3.2 when they were nerfed, will madness be a good choice when there is content to do? Personally I hope it gets a 5-10% boost in sustained damage while we wait for operations to be released.

[TheDuge]

Don't forget to use a grenade as well.

 

Which grenades do you recommend?

 

I guess the real question for the original poster is, since HM ToS and Rav basically finished in 3.2 when they were nerfed, will madness be a good choice when there is content to do? Personally I hope it gets a 5-10% boost in sustained damage while we wait for operations to be released.

 

Totally agreed. Balance, as a ranged dot spec needs some buff.

[myragoeshappy]

...I don't think somebody with a 192 MH could do 500-600k on the core as madness spec very easily...

 

Like i said, i wasn't in the last phase of revan so far, but i will try to prove you wrong. i don't know wich dps you need to do to get 500k-600k @ the core, maybe you got me some numbers? everything is a challeng, even to try "impossible" things

 

I prefer worser classes over a good one. It's more challenging and more fun to out dps your teammates

[akisgood]

Which grenades do you recommend?

Prototype farium pyro mate (or the artifact equivalent for cybertechs), you can use it while looking at an abberation if you target it on yourself, but it'll only be up once in the last phase so it's not a massive thing. It was more useful pre nerf when it was hard to dps while looking at the abberations

 

Like i said, i wasn't in the last phase of revan so far, but i will try to prove you wrong. i don't know wich dps you need to do to get 500k-600k @ the core, maybe you got me some numbers?

 

Well I hope you have fun with that . The easiest way to see how much damage you've done to the core is to download Starparse , click on the damage dealt tab and look at the number next to 'machine core'. It will be some number of hundreds of thousands.

Edited May 14, 2015 by akisgood

[myragoeshappy]

The easiest way to see how much damage you've done to the core is to download Starparse , click on the damage dealt tab and look at the number next to 'machine core'. It will be some number of hundreds of thousands.

 

I know :/ but you know some numbers for this phase to get ~500-600k

[akisgood]

Afraid not, all I used to look at on revan was how much damage was dealt to the core . I guess that burn is a bit less than 2 minutes or so long, or at least it was pre-nerf, so I guess you could work it out from that, although it'd depend on the group. As a side note, don't forget to use lots of lovely cooldowns before the higher stack heaves, or you will melt into a sorcerer colored vegetable...

[IkarusXY]

Allright, thanks guys. Yes i'm still sitting on the 192MH,

will definitely try balance on Coratanni.