My Plasmatech skill is still in progress, but I'm getting about the same DPS as when I'm running Tactics, at least as I'm practicing on a 1mil dummy. Juggling two DoTs with all the other stuff is actually decently intensive over the span of ~5min and is not nearly as mindless as it is playing Tactics. If I can improve my rotation I see Plasmatech beat Tactics by a wide margin but the effort to do so is quite a bit more. I really like Plasmatech for all the fire but it's a ton more work...at least for me right now.

There's a utility coming in 3.0 that gives Smash/Force Sweep the Sunder effect as well (Crushing Fist/Purifying Sweep according to the current build out, you can see it on Dulfy's Disciplines Calculator). So basically you'll be able to apply it from the get-go, resolving that problem. You could technically just Smash once every 45 seconds to keep the buff up. edit: noticed that you know that. I think it's a sensible change. Doesn't change any functionality. A lot of other classes will now be getting the Sunder now as well (Tactics Vanguards/AP Powertechs, Gunnery Commando/Arsenal Merc who already had it, Infiltration Shadows/Deception Assassins, Combat Sentinels/Carnage Marauders will have it as well, I think Sharpshooter Gunslingers/Marksmanship Snipers would most logically get the Sunder too) who will all be able to apply it very early in the fight. So with that many specs that can Sunder, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Based on the utilities available in 3.0, PT/VG Tanks can get: +15% Base movement speed Snares on Flame Burst/Ion Pulse, Flame Sweep/Explosive Surge Range increase on Flame Burst/Ion Pulse, radius increase on Flame Sweep/Explosive Surge Grapple immobilize (was in tank tree, now a utility). Possible to reduce CD. Increased HO/HtL duration, also +45% speed boost for HO/HtL in another utility Sonic Rebounder, which is an AoE on Sonic Missile that gives friendly targets a single-target reflect on any attack (nice to turn the tables on Ravage/MS). Stun cleanse on Kolto Overload/Adrenaline Rush Increased stun duration on 4s Stun and 2.5s Carbonize/Neural Surge (so, up to 5s and 3.5s)! Shield/Guard Cannon available to all specs now. Other in-tree things: they get their Stockstrike/Rocket Punch resets back, the ability to inflict trauma. Not much else besides that, just some minor passive improvements. I'd say PT/VG tanks are in a pretty good spot. You can easily take the following utilities (PT terms): T1: Pneumatic Boots for speed increased +15%, Bracer Propellant for the +range on Flame Burst and the radius boost on Flame Sweep, and then take either Reflective Armor (reflects damage from AoEs triggering Close and Personal) or Suppressive Tools for the snares on Flame Burst and Flame Sweep. T2: No Escape for Grapple and Stealth Scan roots, Sonic Rebounder for reflect-y goodness. You could also take Torque Boosters for the HO +duration, which works well with Overdrive in the next tier. T3: Overdrive for +45% speed on HO, Enhanced Paralytics for the +1s stuns. You could take Automated Suit for the cleanse on Kolto Overload, or Shield Cannon for self-healing on Shoulder Cannon too. That would make you a pain in the rear. Exactly what you need to be doing as a PvP tank.

Captain Parmenas' current look: http://i.imgur.com/mdt9uPu.png, all pretty low-level stuff: - Deadeye's Prototype Jacket - Gunslinger's Headgear - Clan Varad Watcher's Gloves - RD-07A Spider Leggings and Boots - Show-Off's Casual Belt - Advanced Slicer bracers Basically stuff you get questing or low-level FPs. easy to put together, more of a casual Smuggler look which I think is nice. The weapon is the D-200 Military Enforcer, which is easily the priciest/hardest of the bunch to get. I used to have this Western look for him: http://i.imgur.com/o0GoyC0.png: - RD-07A Viper Leggings, Boots, Belt, Chest, Bracers - Bounty Tracker hat - Huttsbane gloves. I like this look a lot, I just got a bit tired of it and switched to something else. The weapon's the Sonic Needler, the A1 reward weapon.

Squishy? Yes. You're going to get obliterated if you try to sit there and facetank everything like a champ. Solution: don't facetank stuff. Sages have some pretty good kiting tools. And, if you roll Balance, you'll be able to pretty much kite indefinitely and win the majority of 1v1s. Here's the toolset for 7/3/36 Balance PvP: 1. Force Armor for additional toughness. 2. You can also spec for 30% reduced damage taken during stuns. Basically if you eat a stun you can just sit it out since you will take a great deal less damage. Another toughness addition. 3. Sever Force as a 2s root. This is on a hilariously low 9s cooldown. 4. Force Slow as a snare 5. Knockback. 6. Hard stun 7. 2s stun if you spec into it (which you should for PvP) 8. Egress (which you absolutely should spec into for PvP) cleanses snares/roots off of you and makes you immune to any they try to place on you during Force Speed. 9. Small but reasonably noticeable self-heals via DoTs and FiB, which helps you sustain.

24% Force in a button press seems a bit too much, especially with how fast you can build up Resplendence stacks. I think your idea of taking Cons/NS off of the GCD and giving it an ICD would be a good start though. It would allow Sages/Sorcs to maintain healing throughput while regenerating Force, while giving them the option to just stand there and regenerate Force if they want. I suppose the biggest changes I would hope for with Sage heals still to come are: 1. Salvation redesign. 6s AoE with a residual 6s HoT, to help address AoE healing on the run. 2. Cons/NS going off of the cooldown, give it an ICD=1.5s. 3. Healing Trance is straight up immune to interrupts. If JKs get an uninterruptable Master Strike, the least Sages could get is a heal immune to interrupts because they have currently have literally zero heals that can't be interrupted. 4. Attach a use for Benevolence on Resplendence stacks. Reduced cost (or free!) + Instant for a Resplendence stack. That, or eliminate the lockout on Force Armor for 2 Resplendence stacks. 5. Don't need the Mental Alacrity reset from Force Potency on Amnesty. It's ok, but I'd much much rather have Amnesty be halving the Cons/NS health cost instead. Sage/Sorc have pretty solid burst healing already, so I don't think giving a CD reset for extra burst heals is really necessary. I would say the minimum Sages should get is 1 and 3. 4 should happen since Benevolence is currently useless, and in either iteration would help Sage heals. Heck, I'd switch to Sage heals for the new content if some of these changes actually happened. *ahem BW we're trying to help*

Here's what I would do (it's a mix of KBN's ideas and some other bits): 1a. Resplendence stacks can now be used on Force Armor: "Force Armor: No longer causes Force-imbalance, and consumes 2 charges." OR 1b. Resplendence stacks can now be used on Benevolence: "Benevolence: Benevolence activates instantly, and its cost is reduced by 25 Force, consuming 1 charge." 2. Healing Trance is now uninterruptible as well as being immune to pushback. 3. Replace Amnesty with Strength of Will: You are immune to interrupts and pushback while Mental Alacrity is active. In addition, Force Barrier now purges Noble Sacrifice's Force-degeneration effects. 4. Salvation has been redesigned somewhat. Salvation still leaves an area of effect heal for players who stand in it. Now, Salvation additionally leaves a HoT on players when they leave the area of effect or when the effect ends, granting them a heal over time equal to standing in Salvation for 6s. Players can only attain this heal over time by leaving the area of effect once. Salvation's area of effect duration has been reduced to 6s. Salvation's healing has been adjusted downwards slightly (i.e. current 10s of Salvation now spreads its healing out over the 6 second area of effect component and the + 6s healing over time component). Points one, two, and three are supposed to address its PvP and on-the-move issues to a reasonable extent. 1a is likely stronger than 1b, so if 1a seems overpowered, 1b is a decent solution that actually makes Benevolence useful in PvP play (and in some PvE instances, even). 1a is, however, balanced by requiring two charges of Resplendence, which would create an interesting 1-2-3 mechanic (NS uses one, FA uses two, Salvation uses three charges). Point two is a long time coming, no explanation needed. Point three should be as well, no one in their right mind uses NS without Resplendence stacks. Amnesty in its current state a useless ability, and Strength of Will actually provides some PvP utility, combining burst heals with interrupt/pushback immunity that will allow Sages to stall opponents much better than previously (imagine Mental Alacrity into dropping Rejuvenate >>> Healing Trance >>> Salvation >>> Force Armor >>> Deliverance, and popping Force Barrier...lots of stall potential). The biggest thing is the redesign of Salvation. Since it will leave a HoT when you leave the effect, you can drop it on people on the run and still get a HoT out of it, making it useful in transitions and addressing a massive weakness of the Sage healing in the current content/meta. It also effectively increases the duration of it (12s out of 15s as opposed to 10s out of 15s), though to balance it, the healing per second would be tuned down a bit. I'm actually pretty happy with my redesign of idea of Salvation: it still makes the AoE relevant, but it also includes a HoT mechanic that helps address Sage weaknesses with movement and mobility.

Going to speak from a Sage DPS point of view: General Changes ---Remove Pushback from the game. Gunslingers currently get this with cover (along with immunity to interrupts) and it allows them to freecast and win duels that Sages can't win due to Pushback. No immunities to Interrupts are fine, I see requiring cover for abilities as a reasonable tradeoff. OR ---Force Armor grants the Sage immunity to Pushback. This is a reasonable compromise if you don't want to completely gut Pushback from the game. Still lets you get interrupted but you can still get casts off when someone's in your face, at least until Force Armor drops. This is obviously weaker than the first solution but it's a workaround that compromises on some level. Pushback is a major issue plaguing Sages (and Commandos, as well) that prevents them from being competitive with Gunslingers, especially with raid damage as prevalent as it is. Eliminate it or give Sages a tool to deal with it, at least partially. This helps immensely in PvP where Sages are regarded as easy food, and in PvE where Sages are taken behind Gunslingers in the RDPS department because of not only the utility (which would require massive overhauls to address) but because the lack of pushback allows them to maintain DPS (which is something that you can easily tweak to fix). Survivability Improvements 1. Make Egress baseline. Everyone's said this, I won't say more on it. 2. Make Force Barrier automatically reset the cooldown on Force Speed. This essentially makes the last half of Master Speed baseline. Additional survivability benefits, will help kiting a ton. If Force Push resets Force Leap for Guardians, I don't see why Sages shouldn't get a weaker effect that is only there to help them survive. 3. Take Force Mend and Force Armor off of the GCD. There is no reason why either of these abilities should respect the GCD. Force Mend is a very weak self-heal on a 30s timer, while Force Armor has not only a natural debuff built in, but costs enough for DPS specs that it cannot be abused. This will help Sage healers maintain their healing throughput by giving them more cooldowns to heal instead forcing them to blow extra GCDs with Noble Sacrifice-Force Mend loops. Adding all three of these things will greatly improve Sage utility and survivability. The most important are 1. and 3. in my opinion, but 2. would be a great touch, especially since Force Barrier's CD is so long it's not like you can abuse the mechanic. Balance Tree Improvements 1. Fix Force Gift in the Seer tree. Currently, it reduces the GCD, but does not increase the regen rate like it should. It hampers Balance force regeneration. Technically not a change in the Balance tree, but it affects Balance quite a bit. 2. Return the instant activation Force Lift in Containment, but nerf the stun to 0.75/1.5s. The removal of the instant-lift made it incredibly difficult to kite. Combined with the 2s stun it was a bit much, but the insta-lift was the more critical component. Return the instant Force Lift, but nerf the stun length to balance. 3. Metaphysical Alacrity is an out-of-place skill. The whole point of Mental Alacrity is to increase your alacrity such that you can free-cast more. Granting movement speed is contrary to the design of Mental Alacrity. Instead, replace it with [[[[ Breaking Point (1/1): Disturbance automatically crits on targets below 30% health. This effect cannot occur more than once every 6 seconds. ]]]] This gives Balance more offensive power (it is currently behind Telekinetics in DPS), while also providing an execute that Sages don't have without adding an execute ability. Also, attaching the free crit to Disturbance with an ICD prevents abuse of it through PoM procs. Overall, it isn't like you can spam DIsturbance for auto-crit thanks to the high cost (meaning you go Force-deficient rather quickly casting Disturbance on every PoM proc) and the ICD. These three changes help with the Force regen problem, a survivability upgrade that puts them on par with Telekinetics (insta-life vs. bubble-mez), and a minor DPS boost that should make it more competitive with Telekinetics. Telekinetics Tree Improvements None really. Telekinetics tree is in a pretty good spot. Pushback is a huge issue for the spec but my General Changes section pretty much fixes all of the problems for Telekinetics in raids and in PvP. It's incredibly Force-efficient and still deals great damage when not plagued by Pushback, so there's no real reason to tamper with it.

2/22/22 That being said, hybrid is awful in a PvP context. It has 0 of the utility and tankiness of Tactics while having weak burst in comparison to full Pyro. You're better off going with full Tactics (8/36/2) or full Pyro (4/6/36) builds, which both are serviceable in PvP environments (Tactics is miles better than Pyro in Arena and ranked environments), but fall behind the 2/22/22s in PvE DPS. There's also 11/35/0 (sometimes 12/32/2, or 13/32/1) Tactic tank builds (requiring a shield) that you can use in Arena for when you want 80-90% of the DPS but want the ability to Guard and some tankiness from Ion Cell. Your cell management is going to be hilariously bad but your combination of tankiness, utility, and damage output will help you win many an Arena when played properly.

Well, if you're only using it as an emergency when you're in execute range, you're not going to get the maximum effect. Given that it's an accuracy debuff, you're only going to realize the damage avoided over a period of time. They can hit 3/4 executes and still kill you if the 3 hits are the first 3. Personally, if I see a pack of Snipers/Mercs bunch up, I'll group taunt, run/jump in, drop a Riot Gas, and hope that my team gets the idea picks up the slack and dominates them since you're lowering their output by a huge, huge amount (30% from the taunt and then the -25% accuracy). Of course, if they're smart, they'll try to burn you down, but you can always just hit HtL and hightail it out of there and/or use Reactive Shield. It's easiest on Hypergates in mid, but you can do it if they clump up nicely on CW/NC. I don't see Riot Gas as something useful as a reactive tool. You have to be very very proactive with its usage.

They're GTN-only at this juncture. They'll be the Battlemaster Enforcer / Field Medic Helmets. They used to be the old Centurion/Champion/Battlemaster and Tionese/Columi/Rakata tiers of gear, but those are all discontinued/BoP, leaving the crafted Battlemaster ones as the last remnants of these tier sets. Which is a shame because I love these looks. Luckily, I bought two before they got too rare.

Observe the PvE DPS Rankings Leaderboard: The % means %DPS of current leader. Invinc - Operative/Scoundrel - 3248.72 DPS - 100% Evrydayimsmggln - Gunslinger/Sniper - 3238.05 DPS - 99.67% Noo'dles - Marauder/Sentinel - 3181.08 DPS - 97.92% Mruniverse - Vanguard/Powertech - 3138.83 DPS - 96.62% Pizza'dah'hutt - Mercenary/Commando - 3113.47 DPS - 95.84% Handcuffs - Sage/Sorcerer - 3019.50 DPS - 92.94% Loufucai - Juggernaut/Guardian - 2981.82 DPS - 91.78% Wild-berry - Shadow/Assassin - 2721.79 DPS - 83.78% Most classes parse well within each other. The general lesson is that except for Shadows, who fall horrendously behind at 83.78% of the highest DPS charted thus far. So, you take the player and not the class. Learn a class well as DPS and you'll be wanted. Some classes carry extra raid utility, like GS/Sniper or Mara/Sent. I wouldn't let that sway your decision more than general gameplay preferences because at this point both ACs are extremely common on each server, and stacking too many can potentially pose issues depending on the operation. So I would pick a class you like, play it well, and enjoy. Balance will change constantly, but at least right now 7/8 ACs parse at least 90% of the current leader, while 6/8 parse at 95% of the current leader, which is actually pretty good balance. edit: With regards to Tank balance, Guardians/Juggernauts are way ahead of Vanguards/Powertechs, who are way ahead of Shadows/Assassins. Guardians/Juggernauts got over-buffed in 2.0, and Shadows/Assassins got nerfbatted thanks to 2.0 content design. That being said, through HM Operations, the differences between tank classes tend to be minimal (the gaps widen for progression NiM Operations content). Take the player, not the class. With regards to Healer balance, they're all fine. They all bring different things to the healing table (i.e. strengths and weaknesses), so it's not really a matter of who pumps out the most HPS, so for raids you want a good mix though it's not necessary. AKA, take the player and not the class.

Either. They both parse well as DPS. Scoundrel gives you the option to heal, but is restricted to <10m combat as DPS (heals is fine <30m). Gunslinger maxes at 35m, though some specs (i.e. Saboteur vs bosses with extremely large hitboxes) may place you in closer quarters. Observe the Cross-Server DPS Leaderboards: Invinc - Operative - 3248.72 DPS - 100% (top Op/Sc parse) Roovin - Sniper - 3167.6 DPS - 97.50% (top Sn/GS parse) They both do fine. If you want to be able to respec to heals, go Scoundrel. If you prefer ranged engagements, go Gunslinger. Just pick the one that you prefer the playstyle of if you prefer DPS.

The Outlaw boots may fit the bill: http://tor-fashion.com/2013/02/02/outlaw/

But you're missing the point: passive mitigation is increased to make up for the reduced self-healing: the issue isn't that mean mitigation is low, but that the spikes effectively render the high mean mitigation useless since you're not alive long enough to use it. Increasing passive mitigation while reducing self heals maintains mean mitigation while shifting the mitigation from reactive self-heals to passive mitigation, which is not reactive. It's a straight buff, to be honest, since it reduces spikiness while maintaining mean mitigation. The self-heals in PvP are not reliable anyways: you're just as prone to get blown up in both PvP and PvE at the moment. The proposed changes will make you less likely to get blown up. HS-TkT is a reactive mitigation mechanism and does not necessarily prevent you from getting blown up (especially in a PvP setting), it delays it. Shifting the mitigation to be more passive will help you avoid the whole "getting blown up" bit. Plus, in PvP environments most people know to use KBs/stuns to stop HS-TkT, effectively limiting your self-healing. The changes will allow you to mitigate damage throughout those stuns and KBs.