I went through your parses. Your rotation is far from optimal. Extremely high use of rapid shots, not heat ramping for Vent Heat/TSO. If you fix your rotation you'll gain another 300+ DPS.

Lol. Madness sorc was one of the highest damage specs at end of 2.x and dominated PvP through 3.0 as well. 3.0 Lightning sorc was broken everywhere but Revan (single target storm lul) 4.0-5.3 heal sorc was utterly dominant. Frankly it was great in 3.0 too it just didn't see as much play outside PvP because it was age of the Merc. Yeah sorc is in a rough spot now in all aspects, but don't pretend like they've had it rough forever. They've had peaks and valleys just like most every class has.

Snipers and Mercs are both hovering 9900-10000 on the top end on parsely. That's a roughly 600 dps drop for Merc, a far cry from 1k drop. Check your rotation, check your crits. IO is still perfectly viable if you play it well and it's sure as hell better than marksman or madness.

/signed

Yeah there's definitely something fishy going on there. Zero rifle shots, zero covered escape use.

Yeah for the most part. There remain some min/max questions regarding energy dumping for cool head and some sillier uses of roll that are not practical in raid but as a general rule yes, that is correct.

Speed Shot is now also a much higher priority as it's more energy efficient without sacrificing much damage, although that effect is somewhat lessened during sub30.

Can you link a parse that had such an instance?

A typical sequence will look something like Hemorrhaging Blast > Wounding Shots > Quickdraw > 3x Dirty Blast > Wounding shots Obviously adjusting for energy needs.

They did NOT eliminate it. Dirty Blast still triggers Hemorrhaging Blast ticks, what they did was lower the damage of DB by enough that even with the tick, you're still getting more damage out of a takedown (especially with the newly reduced cost). You still ideally want to fit as many dirty blasts into a HB window as energy allows, the only real difference is that takedown is higher priority at all times and speed shot is higher priority when HB is not active, unless dumping energy for cool head. But the core interaction of dirty blast procing HB is still very much present.

In addition to the energy return, I believe frag grenade benefits from the AOE crit bonus passive.

Just updating for 5.3, it seems that whether intentionally, or incidentally with the other changes, they have fixed the disparity between weakening blast and Hemorrhaging Blast. Yay Gunslingers

DF is still averaging significantly higher than sharpshooter, and very marginally behind sabateur. Given the ability to multi dot and a fairly easy rotation (it's actually less energy demanding now that speed shots is higher priority) DF is a solid choice. Sabateur may pull SLIGHTLY higher numbers in a vacuum but with boss movement, any loss in plasma probe uptime will kill the difference. At the moment, a player who wishes to make best use of their slinger would do well to learn all three specs and how to apply them to boss fights, as all three specs are now going to have particular fights/situations that will make them the ideal choice. Which, imo, is exactly how it should be. *Edited to translate imperial terminology back to pub lol*

They broke pyro a long time ago and it has been a dead, decrepit thing ever since. There's no synergy to the cooldowns in that rotation and the inexplicable removal of rail shot from the free flame burst proc list was absurd. Pyro is another class that needs an overhaul. But yes, to your point, it needs to be reasonable resource management.

Yeah, what I want for Madness is more in the realm of a rework than a balancing patch can be expected to address. I'd rather see the rotation go force neutral than continue the way it is I suppose, I just want to see a system implemented that rewards proper management rather than taking resource use out of the question altogether. It's uninteresting, lowers the skill cap, and is generally lazy design.