Actually madness spec will probably have the most to gain from the adrenal/stim changes than any other class spec. We have very little burst, but we do have great constant dps. Therefore, with the longer duration, I would not be surprised if we see an increase in dps as a result of this change. With a 31 madness sorc, you would gain benefit to Crushing Darkness, Affliction, Creeping Terror, and Force Lightning all at the same time with little to no drop from cast time; not to mention the increase to Death Field. However, your more traditional burst classes will have one or two abilities affected with little to no damage occurring during their cast time. So they may gain 1-2k in that time while we gain 3-4k because of the constant damage occurring. (Numbers are purely hypothetical) This, of course, will be entirely reliant on the actual difference in numbers, but I think this should not be viewed as a nerf to madness sorcs until we see the actual changes.

My guild just ran some content with myself and another campaign/black hole sorc comparing dps. I went full lightning while he went madness. Keep in mind that these numbers are only one run and that I am more familiar with madness playstyle. World boss in Northern Hoth = Madness - 2093.8 dps / Lightning - 2077.1 dps. For Nightmare Pilgrim = Madness 1295.2 dps / Lightning - 1292.3 dps Kephess = Madness - 1068.8 / Lightning - 1118.1 dps (Messy run teaching new members) Taking into account that I am not as skilled at lightning as I am at madness, my dps would probably go up 100 dps or so with more practice. However, the point is that with both specs we are always in the top 3 with our sniper dps usually the top two. Therefore, both specs seem to do very well if the user is skilled with lightning spec having potential for higher dps but also with more potential for mistakes that will drastically lower your dps (I.E missed procs or clipping dots).

Still broken as of 5 min ago.

I think that is actually a lot of the "problems" with SWTOR. It did a lot of things well and others not as well, but their innovation was all spent on the 1-49 leveling game. I know that I loved leveling the first time through. However, as you stated, the content at 50 is rather generic. Raid encounters don't really give that epic feeling beyond the first kill and even then some of them don't even give that. PvP can feel awesome when you get those evenly matched teams but the likelihood of that is few and far between. I think the idea of sandboxing some aspects of the game would be fantastic. Imagine a crafting system that required actual work from the crafter beyond just having the materials. Imagine building up your home on the capital planet or modifying your personal ship for missions not related only to the war effort but to more mundane things like smuggling or luxury. Imagine having the chance to play in the political field of a planet or system where the type of battle changes every day. I just think that they need to add some innovation to the end-game content that can not be "finished" in such short periods.

Definitely XD. We are running it this coming Monday, so I will post a boss by boss comparison after we finish.

Ah that makes sense. In that case, I will give it a run in NiM KP and run parser against my madness raid-mate. Thank you for the explanation.

Would your spec be the 0/30/11 or the 3/31/7 build? I tried using the 3/31/7 spec rotation last night for a few hours and could not get above 1250 dps self buffed with rakata stim/adrenal. It might just be that I am missing something since I am usually madness or is the spec I am testing the wrong one?

Would that be 1400 on boss fights or the raids as a whole? I would be interested in how you are pulling that high of DPS with lightning spec. I have very similar gear with only slightly higher crit, but I have not been able to get higher than 1070 dps on dummies with lightning spec, self-buffed. Even with madness spec, myself and the other sorc in our raid group usually sit in the 1200-1300 range on bosses and we are each half black hole/campaign . Any info you could provide to clarify how you are pulling that high?

Lol the problem is only in 8-man not in 16-man from what I have heard. Grats on the kill btw.

With my current health I heal about 375 each time these skills proc. During the last few runs of HM EC, I healed myself for roughly 30-40k according to parser just from these effects, so I would say that they are definitely great for survivability during long encounters.

I do not PvP much so I can't help you much there but for PvE, lightning still loses to madness. As stated above lightning has great burst potential, but over any sort of duration, it loses out to madness. This happens largely because of the amount of movement required through most raid encounters. Lightning relies on procs which in turn require complete casts of LS. Also the long cool down on TB causes you to lose out on using your big nuke often. It is a viable spec for dungeons and even for story mode raids, but for hard modes and nightmare, I would suggest madness to ensure that your group has a greater chance of beating enrage timers.

I would actually suggest getting the (not sure if the number is right but the lower of the two choices) 186 internal damage relic. The elemental damage proc is affected by resistance stats while the internal is not. As far as which one is better on dps, the clickable is better for short fights, I.E. 1-2 min. However, for most boss fights the proc is a better choice because of the near constant 20 second proc over the longer duration.

I agree with this post as well. It is rather sad that to get the PvP gear look you can simply buy it. However, the Rakata and below gear are not craft-able and the Campaign requires the crafter to waste perfectly good top end gear. Perhaps it would be good to even make other gear RE-able as well such as the social or mission reward gear.