Completed my 248 set without playing a single ranked match, what you're saying is wrong. Who cares? The rest of your team does. There are plenty of other ways to get your gear without ruining the games to other players, there's no need to be that selfish.

Ok, following your post I moved to imp side, 1250 with the first 10 matches. Fine. But why? I mean, I even performed worse than rep side as I miss the whole left part of gear, so why is my solo rating lower on the side which I performed the best? That's one of the points of my thread: I want to be rewarded based on how I play, not based on how 3 random strangers do.

Given that I always got gold with my blood and sweat, here are 2 screenshots of what's been happening in the last weeks. Tell me again how they're not ruining my rating. http://imgur.com/a/WpC2C Please beware that these are just 2 of the most recent cases, but it has been going like this for the past two weeks (if screenshot feature didn't fail that much, I could've uploaded an album full of examples). I understand about knowing when to queue, but unless you dedicate your life to this game you can only play when you have time, so you can't really plan things and queue dodge those people. The sad thing is that this happens because EVERYONE can join a ranked, and they're encouraged to as the daily gives better rewards than the non-ranked one. I can deal with lack of skill, but I don't understand why BW encourages people to play in a competitive game mode when they're clearly not ready to do it. Ranked PVP should not be a way to get gear, this is plain wrong.

Trying to reply to everyone but this forum lacks a multi-quote option, sorry if I missed any of you and thanks for your replies! Well, I'd rather have one winning arena each 30 mins than 2 losing ones every 15min That's the reason why I started too late to get some rating, I didn't want to join with less than optimal gear and now I'm the one with ruined rating -.- Well, group ranked means team coordination and other things. You need to build a team and do a lot of training together to avoid being smashed by people that are already used to play as a team. Of course you need a lot of free time too, which is a luxury that I don't have now. I don't agree on this. Helping the team helps you winning, which is the final goal. Personal performance should be only evaluated in case of a loss, and should take into account everything that your class is capable off. For example, I usually end up as top dps and top healer because, while doing damage, I try to keep my mates alive. Still, I lose my 14 points as the dummy guy that stands still while being killed. So, using personal performance in case of loss may help the ones that really played to win, punishing only who delivered sub-optimal performances. From OP (I'm not playing merc or sniper, I'm not a fotm re-roller): Also, it the same game I did >1M healing, despite we had a healer. I know, but unless you stopped having a life, getting to full 248 gear requires too much time to start playing before the end of the season. I played like 5 hours a week since they released GC, still I had to BUY (using unassambled, to buy 230, 242 and finally 248) my last set piece just last week. I got my 248 offhand quite early, since that day I collected more than 10 244 offhands and countless other duplicates, while not getting that last needed piece. And this happens because GC looks like it's rigged to let you grind more, as instead of getting the only piece that I needed I spent two months getting a lot of useless duplicates.

This is something like a rant, so feel free to move over. Today I lost 70+ rating due to how Ranked works, and this is the last time that this happens as I won't renew my subscription for a very long time, even if it's sad as I've been a loyal sub since 2.0. The amount of cr@p that we have to deal with in solo ranked is way too much for something that should be fun, and it's all related to your bad choices. First of all, you allow every undergeared and unexperienced player to join a Ranked arena because the entry requirement is a joke, plus, you give them a daily quest that they will try to complete to get gear. The result is that we get players without bonus set, stim and augments playing in the same arena with someone with min/maxed gear that is struggling to get a little bit of points just to get into T3 (after being T1 for 4 seasons in a row). This leads basically to 4vs3 games, but you'll still lose rating as in a normal 4vs4 because the 4th useless player is there. When politely asked why is he playing in a competitive game mode without the appropriate gear and skill, that 4th useless player usually replies that he needs to complete the daily if he wants to get gear, and this is the direct consequence of how you implemented Galactic Command. I also saw people kicking "noobs" from a Ranked arena so that they couldn't complete their daily, and the reasoning behind this is that if you let me lose rating because of your daily, I'll try to stop you from completing it. Do you want to encourage this behavior? Talking about gear again, is it hard to require a minimum gear rating of 246 to join the Ranked queue during an active season? I don't mind about preseason, but you can't let people do dailies while I'm grinding for 7 points (yeah, 7 if you win and -14 if you lose, as always..). If not undergeared or unexperienced, some of them are either trolls or wintraders (you know, the only way of getting 4k rating on 2 characters), or, in the best case, they're just bad. So, why all the team must be punished because of them? I know, it's a recurrent subject, but what did you do to tackle this issue? Yeah, Ranked tokens, meaning that skilled players that have less free time will get less rewards than mindless drones farming arenas 24/7. ELO is a rating system born for 1vs1 games, it doesn't fit SWTOR. What about, after a loss, only who performed below losing team's average gets his rating reduced? I can't lose 14 points if, as a DPS player, I do more damage than my whole team combined. It's just not fair. Last week I lost 14 ELO despite doing about 5k dps, while arena's average was around 2600. I know, it's not about the raw numbers, but you have to trust me when I say that I was attacking the correct target and it wasn't some random damage just to boost numbers. Finally, why arenas don't have an exhaustion zone as in 8v8 ones? Thanks for reading and sorry for the rant.

Same issue here, setting video quality preset to High or below solved the problem. Let's wait for a fix or something.

This is only true in the opener, during the rotation WM is always on when I use FS Basically the two dots have a 98% uptime, so they're only missing during the first part of the opener. This call's correct, that's why I use it before the opener and then only before the FS+FiB+Vanquish combo since FS is the only thing which I don't want to be interrupted! I'd really like to see what the average kill time can be with your build/rotation and mine, because I think there's stil a little room for improvement (considering that we're talking about a sustained spec!)

Feels like we're coming to the ultimate Madness form Did you check my previous post with the 5993 parse? I'm curious to see what you think about it and if you have some suggestions on what gear to change to go up 6k while keeping a 25k burst. BTW your 93% crit on Death Field is quite amazing

Crit Highlight from 5845 parse (hoping that I got it right ) I feel like a complete idiot, I always parsed for PvE and totally forgot about it. But....Balance - 5993 - 39.6 APM Burst seems stable to previous values and...no Force Empowerment! (Cutting at 1:30 as you did leads to 6181) This needs more details tho. I swapped one Alacrity Augment for an Overkill one and I changed my rotation to something like a priority system. I'll try to explain what I mean but I'm not good in explanations (and I'm not a native English speaker ) Opener: Mental Alacrity Vanquish (Hard Cast) Force Serenity + Force in Balance Severe Force Weaken Mind TK Throw (3 or 4 times until you can do FS+FiB in the same GCD) Now here's where things get a bit "messy". After doing the 3 or 4 Tk Throw you go back to FS+FiB but you'll not reapply the two dots. What I did, instead, was to cast another (or 2 more based on the previous number of Tk Throws) Tk Throw to wait until the dots wear off to apply them again from scratch. This basically translates to something like this (after the opener): Force Serenity + Force in Balance Vanquish TK Throw (1 or 2 times until SF & WM wear off, you may need more based on Alacrity) Severe Force Weaken Mind TK Throw (2 or 3 times until you can do FS+FiB in the same GCD) Start again Why can't I just provied a working "plug & play" rotation? Because I wasn't able to determine the correct number of TK Throws. Sometimes I needed just one, sometimes even 5 because I used MA after applying dots. I can summarize the main rotation like this: Force Serenity + Force in Balance Vanquish TK Throw until SF & WM wear off Severe Force Weaken Mind TK Throw until you can do FS+FiB in the same GCD Start again Which eventually will converge to the standard Balance rotation that everyone used pre 4.0 based on OCD usage. I'd say go for the opener, it has helped in the parse I've added up in this post. Without MA I struggled to time up FS and FiB, using it before starting the opener made everything go smoother. Also, in a typical Ranekd situation, if you want to open with Vanquish you need to be fast or someone will interrupt you, so you either use MA+Vanquish or MA+TK Throw to get a fast instant Vanquish. So the final answer, at least IMO, is to use MA as first ability. Please note that I'm not nearly as experience as you and that I always blindly followed guides (and yours too), now I'm just challenging myself in contributing to the discussion so I may be completely wrong I'm curious too. I've got the Crit relic because I focused on Alacrity augments and some more Crit may be useful during the fight, and proc seems quite regular from my parses so it may be worth it. TL;DR: check the red bold text and sorry for the wall of text

Quick update with more burst but less DPS, gear is still the same (I'll stop here for today because my arm hurts for spamming TK Throw ) Balance - 5711 - 39 APM Before writing the rotation, please keep in mind that I have issues when changing my rotation so I ended up skipping some dots once in a while. So, with a little bit of more training and maybe replacing one Alacrity augment with an Overkill one, I'm sure I can get back to 5800+ while keeping the added burst. Here's the "new" rotation (basically I've taken something from the various rotations posted here): TK Throw Mental Alacrity Force Empowerment Sever Force Weaken Mind Force Potency Force Serenity + Force In Balance (just start spamming FiB as soon as FS channel starts) Vanquish TK Throw (4.5 times, until Severe Force wears off) Go to 4 and repeat Both Mental Alacrity and Force Empowerment were used on CD but never before Severe Force and Weaken Mind because I thought that using them before the FS+FiB+Vanquish combo could increase burst. As a side note, I think this rotation will lead to Force management issues, as I had some moments in which my force was under 50, and considering that in Ranked you may need some self healing, I'm not 100% sure that this can be viable. I still think it may work because in Ranked you'll not be able to spam abilties like I did on Dummy, so maybe Force won't be an issue but I needed to point it out.

If you're ralking about the Armor Reduction one, it can't be used on the Warzone Dummy 3x Advanced Alacrity Augment 40 3x Advanced Overkill Augment 40 6x Advanced Critical Augment 40 2x Advanced Versatile Augment 40 Running with 10.57% Alacrity Actually I'm at 35.10% Crit Chance 65.23% Crit Multiplier But the big difference may come from the Crit Relic instead of the Power one (sorry, I don't remember the names!).

Hi there and thanks for your guide! I'm a T1 Sage but I don't think I'm an expert at all, still I wanted to try some of your suggestion mixing them with things from different sources and experiences. This is my last parse (cut at 4:30 because I stopped after that but I still was in fight): Balance - 5844 - 39 APM To be honest I was surprised that I pulled higher numbers than yours, because I always sucked with dummy parsing. I've never checked how long a Ranked round lasts, but if I cut the parse at around 1:30 I'm at 6k DPS. Here are my stats (with Advanced Anodyne Versatile Stim, all class buffs and all datacrons): Mastery: 4744 Endurance: 5446 Power: 2588 Critical: 986 Alacrity: 1041 Rotation was quite simple. I used the #3 rotation from the OP as opener, then I followed this kind of guideline: Tk Throw (until dots wear off, clipping around 4th execution) Sever Force Weaken Mind Force In Balance Vanquish Force Serenity I tried to avoid applying dots before they ran out, so I used more fillers instead of reapplying them. Damage distribution I've not tried with your gearing suggestions because I'm out of commendations and I don't have enough time to get them now, but I wanted to share my results to see if I'm on the right track or if it was just a matter of luck and my build won't work in a real fight.

Stim's already on, as well as Anodyne adrenal. I'm at 4/5 TOS HM so I'm not a "noob", still I struggle to get high numbers and I fail to understand why.

I know that there are a lot of topics like this one, but I thought that it would've been better to start a new one to post my parse and get advices based on how I play. The situation is quite easy: I'm around 4200 DPS with Balance (without adrenal) but I can't do more than 4300 with TK (with adrenal), which sounds strange to me since TK should perform way better than Balance. Before linking the parse, here are my gear and stats: As you can see, gear's still not optimal (very far from it actually), still this doesn't mean that it's ok to make more damage with Balance. Plus, I was around 4500 DPS before the Forcequake nerf and with far worse gear. 4262 parse To be honest, I had some lag spikes and lag was around 450ms for the whole parse, but the Balance parse was done under the same conditions. Can you please give me some advices and help on how to deal with this situation? I'm quite sure that I have to do higher numbers, but I can't seem to do better than this (this one's the best parse of the 7 done today, so I'm actually trying.) Thanks in advance

Thanks for the reply. Do you know what's the average level of ranked players? I mean, you said that I may end up with people with no PvP gear at all, but is this a common situation or just something that happens randomly? Because I'm really competitive and I hate losing a match because of that kind of people I also don't see a lot of players in the Ranked leaderboards, is this because RE is like some kind of "lower league"?