https://discord.gg/swtor

https://i.imgur.com/UPLY6tW.png

I have a fair amount of experience with Hatred Sin, though I wouldn't consider myself a PvP genius, so perhaps take my advice with a grain of salt. Hatred is a pretty squishy spec. To give you an exact reason as to why people say that it melts in PvP, Hatred has roughly 24% less Damage Reduction than Deception, due to a lack of Entropic field (9% DR) and Dark Embrace (15% DR after using Maul). So right out the gate, you're going to be taking 24% more damage than your Deception counterparts from any given attack. Additionally, Hatred lacks Low Slash, which is a tool which allows you to not just control enemy players, but mitigate damage by locking out an enemy DPS 4 times per minute, for a total of 16 seconds of Mezz for every minute that the match goes on. If you just assume that an enemy DPS does about 5k damage per second, Low Slashing an enemy DPS on cooldown will prevent an incoming 80k Damage per minute. So already, you can see how the damage is racking up against you as a Hatred player. Layering onto this, Hatred's damage mainly comes from being able to cleave it's DoTs onto other players. Sometimes the queue makes realizing this goal rather difficult. Basically, the main reason to bring Hatred over Deception is the ability to pressure an enemy team with DoTs, but if the queue isn't mostly melee, you won't even have that going for you, which means you're effectively a worse version of Deception, lacking the tools to control enemy players as well as lacking the raw Damage Reduction to keep yourself up in the fight. Hatred requires a lot of nuance in learning when to Line of Sight and kite (yes, you kite a ton as a melee dps in this spec), and learning when to sit in the middle of the fight and AoE things. That being said, if you still want to queue Hatred, I highly recommend the Quick Escalation build. You run 45% crit chance so that all QE procs after the initial one have a 100% crit chance, and you will basically just be spamming Leeching Strike to mitigate damage by healing back most of the damage that you take. It's fun to pull off but pretty difficult when played at maximum efficiency, since that would require you to manually right click off the QE buff after 3 stacks in order to prevent Leeching Strike from going on cooldown, allowing you to continue spamming Leeching Strike for more healing. Overall though, I wouldn't recommend taking Hatred into Ranked, mostly for the reasons I've stated above, and also because it has a steep learning curve and even after thousands of hours of gameplay, people won't approve of your decision.

If you guys really wana see how bad hatred is, go ahead and queue up now in the preaseason, since there's no drawbacks to doing so. The moment that people find out you are hatred, you will immediately be the target of the entire enemy team and will be squished flat, almost immediately. The spec takes a bit more than 25% more damage than it's Deception counter part due to a lack of certain DR passives, as it is. It's just a terrible mess of a spec defensively and only excels when you aren't being focused.

I wasn't gonna say this, since it felt subjective instead of objective, but I personally feel like there is a much larger discrepancy between how Teamwork is viewed on DM compared to NA. When I would Queue on NA, there was a lot of arguments in /2 (pvp) channel about who wasn't doing enough DPS or healing or anything scoreboard related. Often times, plays that heavily favor the team at the expense of personal stats on the scoreboard were often overlooked and just not recognized. There was a lot more number farming and less strategic knockdowns. There was much less peeling. Cross guard was almost very rarely a thing and specifically only a thing when very specific above average players were in the queue. Meanwhile, on DM, I literally don't even have to ask for a guard when I'm low, I just receive one. And on top of that, I don't have to click off my team-mates's guard in order to guard them, they will instinctively drop guard so that they can be guarded, when necessary. There have been so many times when a team mate will go out of their way to help you when on NA it would rarely happen. I've been knocked down on Mandalorian battle ring by the enemy and had a Sorc pull me back up specifically at a strategic time, when multiple enemy dps jumped down to chase me. I've had hard stuns and mezzes get cleansed by friendly sorcs/operatives, which is incredibly rare on NA. I'm not talking about healers cleansing, I'm talking DPS players who are cleansing stuns/mezzes, which is insane. The level of cooperation is just miles higher, and you don't even need to ask for these things to happen via typing in /ops chat, it's just expected that people will behave this way. Trying to get people to do these things on NA would be like pulling teeth and would only occur when a specific set of high skilled players on are in, which coincidentally, happen to be the same players who play on DM as well, they will simply queue NA if there is a streamer streaming NA matches, since they have toons on multiple servers. Overall, I would say this: It's preseason, there's no elo at stake and the queues are popping literally all day at any time on DM. If any of you haven't tried it, now is the best time to do it. Just server xfer over and if you don't like it, move back. The experience is leagues better than what happens on NA and it would be awesome if NA even had a crumb of similarity, because then I could queue with a ping of 20 again instead of 150+, lol.

The issue with defensive amps is that there isn't "one size fits all" amp, so to speak. For example, if you use Reinforced Armor, that's not gonna help you at all vs force/tech damage. Likewise, if you use Tech Aegis, that does nothing vs white damage or force damage. In PvP, the comp of the enemy team changes every game, so it's impossible to have the correct defensive amps at any given time. The only amp that works vs ALL damage types is En Garde, but that only works in the first 10 seconds of combat, which is why it's only good on classes like Sin/Mara which can reliably break combat multiple times, or Powertech/Jugg, who die so fast that the 10 seconds that En Garde provides is legitamtely worth it for the 20% damage reduction in the opener of the match, which is when they will take the most burst damage.

Ranged/Melee works the same, there would only be a difference when you take into account certain passives that allow Ranged defense to be greater than Melee defense. Off the top of my head, Predation gives increased ranged defence, as does that one utility for Snipers, which gives increased ranged defense by 20%.

Yes, the lag is considerably greater. I myself have gone from 20 ping on NA servers to 150-250 ping on EU servers. It's worth it for the constant solo ranked activity though.

For context, I was on an Assassin, using Maul on a Powertech and then on an Operative. Myself and two other players, named Shinra and Furkai, tested this back in November. Our methodology was using full 1.2% Weapon expertise amps, and then maul 10 or 20 times on the PT and then later Operative (heavy and medium armor users. After doing a sample size of about 20 mauls, we would then divide by 20 to get the "average" maul hit. After we got our average hit, we would replace 1 Weapon expertise amp for one 2.5% Armor Pen amp, and replicate this test over and over until all of the amps were eventually Armor pen. What we found was that as we replaced Weapon Expertise amps with Armor pen amps, maul damage went up on both the PT and Operative, up until about the 3rd amp. After that, each Weapon Expertise amp that was replaced with an Armor Pen caused maul damage to start going down. The "sweet spot" so to speak was 3 Armor pen amps and the rest being Weapon Expertise for maximum damage mauls. This test can be replicated for similar results, for anyone wanting to try it out. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ We also did a test on Alacrity to see if it was possible to fit 3 GCDs into a simple 4 second Hardstun. This was important to figure out because at the time, it was the difference between fitting a triple maul into a single hardstun or only fitting 2 mauls in a stun before the target could recover and use a DCD. There was some really crazy results with that test, which to this day are still unexplained. But the tl;dr of that test is that alacrity appears to not work in thresholds but instead has a weird effect where it seems to work and not work as you gain more and more rating. I really want to get back to testing Alacrity, but have also been asking the devs to just release their combat formulae since that would make theorycrafting easier and it wouldn't require as much 'feet on the ground' work, so to speak.

Idk, I think the EU ranked population is overall larger than the NA population, especially when you consider that many previously NA only players are now also playing on EU servers.

I use 105%. You will be hard pressed to find anyone using 110%. The stat pool budget is pretty large atm so you could definitely get to 110% and have a decent amount of stats left over for 1213 alacrity (1.4 GCD) and the rest to be dumped into crit, but to me it kind of feels like a waste to add a ton of extra accuracy rating just to specifically never miss white damage on Inquisitor classes.

So, with ArPen it's not good to go full ArPen over weapon expertise usually, but there is a sweet spot where you want 2-3 ArPen amps and the rest wep exp, that will usually deal more overall DPS than full wep exp or full arm pen. I have yet to understand why this is, but based on testing that's what myself and others yielded.

I have yet to see anyone here explain this, so I figure I'll throw this out there. But the reason 105% accuracy is recommended is because of the base defense chance of all non-inquisitor classes is 5%. The base defense chance of inquisitor classes is 10%. Example non-inquisitor: https://i.imgur.com/LXn0Y4w.png Example Inquisitor: https://i.imgur.com/880G7rb.png That is why it's recommended to go 105%. Because when you add 5% accuracy to your base, you will never have your ranged attacks defelcted or your melee attacks parried on any non-inquisitor class, which is majority of players. When you gear for 110%, you are specifically adding accuracy only for the sake of not missing white damage on Assassins and Sorcerers. Which could be considered a waste.

Well even for DoT specs, periodic intensity will out-do force sensitivity or tech wizardry almost every time, even on players. So the spreadsheet is still correct for those as well. Defensive amps are trash unless you are using En Garde and are specifically an Assassin or a Powertech/Marauder.

The BiS amps for PvE is mostly the same for PvP, just use the spreadsheet for picking BiS amps for pvp.