The evidence doesnt really support this claim. Gunslingers seem to be the ones who love power the most. Telekinetcs (middle tree) likes a lot of power, but optimal is not 0 crit. Balance (right tree) wants quite a bit of crit, as in everyone I know who does nightmare has between 350 and 550 crit. Remember, as your bonus damage goes higher, your benefit from each crit goes up as well. So the higher your bonus damage, the more crit you want to have. Which is why your gearing strategy in arkanian is not the same as it is now in dread master.

Treek will do more damage, take about the same, but also heals in tank stance. Qyzen also uses a techblade which is harder to upgrade, unless you craft them. Her abilities are just better than Qyzen's, so if you have equal access to both, go with Treek.

44k means they are stacking too much endurance. Also, the scaling isnt 100% with bonus damage/healing. You have to account for the static number as well. Example: your 500 bonus heals = 3810 Bubble in healer spec My 1308 bonus heals = 6712 Bubble in same spec

Well the thing that not everyone realizes is that the stat curves are different for each level. So by changing to level 60, they will be inherently different. When we went from 50-55 when the patch came out my stats were the same... until I hit level 51, and it gradually changed to the "new" formulas by the time I hit 55. Also, most of my abilities had a new rank between 50 and 55, which also meant, new numbers to run since now base damage and bonus damage multipliers were different. Since those affect what you get out of power and crit, those will be important things for people to consider before declaring a new stat priority as the best. I am under the assumption that each spec will get at least one new ability. Since we really have no real info about theses abilities, we cannot get accurate calculations. I also assume that new ranks of abilities will show up for class abilities, and that abilities granted in the tree (like sever force (creeping darkness) and turbulence (thundering blast) will have their numbers adjusted to simulate a new rank. The formulas for stats like crit, surge, accuracy, alacrity, shield, defense, absorbtion, and the crit from mainstat will probably all be slightly adjusted to account for the higher level gear having a higher expected amount of stats. I hope this makes sense. =þ

Each discipline? No one really knows since no one knows how skills, abilities, and stats will be tweaked with the level increase. Currently: Healers want a bit of crit in their gear, but much more power. Optimally keep crit around 100-200ish, but remember, more stat, is better than less of the optimal stat. 0 Crit is no longer optimal in the higher gear like it was in arkanian. You do want at least as much alacrity as surge at a minimum. Most people have 6 alacrity pieces to 4 surge pieces. Some run 7a/3s and some run 5a/5s. Use the ratio that feels right for you. Similarly middle tree wants a bit of crit to optimize the crit/power tradeoff. Similar numbers to healing around 100-200ish crit should be good. Right tree wants more crit since there is no auto crit and the tree gets bonuses to surge values. There is nothing wrong with having 400 crit in this spec. And no one should have less than 200. Also note that swapping a piece of power to crit when optimized might be something like a 10DPS (or hps) loss. But if that piece is higher level and has more stats on it, you end up getting more DPS from the stat boost than you lose from the switch to the less optimal stat.

The surely you are going to say the same thing about disturbance for telekinetics. The truth is balance is a sustained damage spec and TK is burst. If the fight is a long one, balance will win. As TK you have to kill the balance guy fast, interrupt his TK Throw, and possibly purge his dots. The specs are fairly well balanced for PVE. PVP is just a separate can of worms. Taking something away for the sake of PVP is not going to work unless you can counteract it by also giving them something in return to maintain PVE balance.

All the mobs? Are we talking about healing during trash mob pulls? This was in reference to boss fights where you cannot knock back a boss. Not using force wave is just playing the class wrong. It is needed if you are going to do the high end content. Im not talking about sm that any competent healer can solo heal, I mean the nightmare stuff. Im not going to speak about PVP since Im not an expert on it. No one on the server is going to out heal my scoundrel in 8m content. Scoundrels are just that much better. But when it comes to 16m, you will be hard pressed to find a fight where my sage doesnt out heal said scoundrel. On top of that, the sage will spread the healing around more consistently instead of the group that the scoundrel is rolling hots on. The biggest disadvantage with scoundrel is they do not prevent any damage with armor buffs so they have to heal for more. The do a bit more healing that is really required to close that gap however, making them top for content with 8 or less players. But scoundrel is also the one class you can double heal with and do well. Commando double heal sucks because of trauma probe, and sage double heal sucks because of force armor.

That's an ok guide for basics if you dont know anything, but it isnt the best guide out there. I would prolly go with orderken's guide, or you can read both (or all three if you want to check out my old outta date guide) and see what works for you. Since I dont care what the imp names are, ill call them by description. Use the small instant with a hot to start, follow it up with the channel, you can do an instant noble sac/consume thing at the end with it being off cooldown (basically do this EVERYTIME). And use bubble as filler until your next instant hot so you can use the buff on your ground aoe heal. Then when position makes sense, use your aoe knockback that heals ON COOLDOWN since it heal for 0 force meaning you have a net positive when you cast it. Also you can use force mend whenever you want now since it is kinda off the global cool down. Keep using your bubble as the main filler heal on tanks between your good abilities. And also try an alternate which tank is getting your small instant hot so that they both keep the armor buff. The short cast time, now sometimes instant heal is a little more tolerable to use since you can kinda get force back off the GCD . I still dont use it a lot, and the super slow heal almost never gets used now. (unless you use mental alacrity and your crit bonus to the next two abilities ability). A well played sage is the best 16m healer around, and I would rather have one than a commando in 8m assuming the same ability level on both healers.

Are we saying they did maths right ? Inconceivable !!! - I do not think that word means what I think it means.

I dont particularly feel like checking the math, but if they went the opposite way, ie made the bonus to cooldowns match the bonus to resource gen by making it slightly lower, then that works just as well. Currently in game they are not he same. 10% more resource is not the same as 10% less time.

My wish list huh ? Well since they are changing a lot, who knows how things will really stack up compared to the changes in 3.0. That said: Force Potency - 60% was great when i had ~40% crit on my healer pre 2.0, now it is just annoying. Make this 100% so it can be a reliable offensive cooldown. Lightning - remove the pushbacks. Balance - Im not unhappy with it now. Id rather see how the changes with balance play with everything else first. Seer - Make the noble sacrifice mechanic work the way it should have worked. Meaning, it is off the GCD while you have resplendence stacks. Keep the 1.5s ability cooldown (which needs to scale with alacrity - see below). Do something about salvation. Something. Either people who walk into it get a hot applied to them equal to how long salvation still has to be on he ground, or allow it to be cast on a person (like yourself) so you can move that thing around. Global - Make alacrity work as if I had designed it. Meaning the maths would be better. So yes casts are faster, as well as the GCD like now. Also, it would extend to ability cooldowns, and dot/hot ticking speed, and correctly apply to resource regen. Meaning you would get 1/(1-alacrity%) bonus to resource regen. So say I have a 8.67% modest Alacrity on my scoundrel. Instead of 6 * 1.0867 = 6.5202 resource regen, I would get 6 * (1 / (1 - .0867)) = 6.5696. The difference is not much, but you will see that Alacrity just makes things faster this way, without making things wonky and breaking sustainable regens. It also makes alacrity not broken for classes that have to build resources up (knights). We are expanding to level 60, which means they will have a new formula for each stat at that level anyway, so you can make Alacrity be a little bit less per point than planned so it doesnt become a super stat.

I didnt mean to imply you dont play balance, just you are more of a TK guy. I was always a a balance guy, thats probably due to it being more accessible to someone who is still a healer at heart. Im better at both sage healing and scoundrel healing than balance dps. Ive honestly never put points in alacrity since the 2.6 changes. I did better with the crit. As far as concentration being a waste compared to clamoring force, that is probably true. But I am not ever last, and I am occasionally tops in DPS. The spec I use lets me kill all the bosses, so I am good with it. If I get stuck DPSing after this next xpac, Ill prolly do what I do to healing and actually try and maximize it, but I was under the assumption that I was dpsing because I was the best DPS of the healers and we needed a DPS. Ive never come close to running out in my spec. Not even multi dotting and bubbling when needed. I can see how another spec would be better dps most of the time tho. Are you saying 2(crit)/8(2 in clamoring force/1 concentration) is what you are using? Im sure it is not 100% (what mechanic in this game works as intended 100%?) but the first challenge is almost always me 50%ish or the balance shadow (30%ish) with the other two being about 1 in 5 combined. If I dont get it the first time, I am almost guaranteed the second one. Maybe 10% of the time do I not get either challenge. Maybe its not based on threat, but it has to be based on something. Or we have the strangest RNG ive ever seen.

I agree with most of the stuff Ive read in the thread. I just thought I would point out the two minor inconsistencies I see since I am currently maining a balance sage (I cant believe Im not healing) while I know you run Telekinetics (or the imperial equivalent: Lightning). I do not run out of force on my sage. It just doesnt happen. I run 3/7/36, the two points that increase your force regen rate with a cast of disturbance (lightning strike?) make a positive difference with force, and the DPS hit is not worth respeccing for (since I have enough DPS anyways for every fight) Raptus is merely a case of not wasting everything on the wrong add. I almost always have the most damage total between the two adds in the challenge, and I do not even hit both adds with FIB when i enter. I almost always only have one challenge since it seems like the person held out of the challenge is based on threat. But even if I have to do both, I dont have a problem. I always get my three stacks for mind crush by attacking spinning raptus. Then I cast instant MC, (adrenal, MA, FP which I saved for the challenge), FIB, TKT (he is dead) then both dots while other guy is shielded, then tkt, 1xdist, then tkt until i can FIB a second time before the challenge ends (but he is usually dead before then). The only fails are when someone messes up their rotation. This is most likely not ideal, but it gets the job done.

This may seem like a silly question, but are you using your companion? A healing or tanking companion helps a lot if you are having survival issues. Also make sure that companion is in the right stance. And you can also use your crowd control abilities like force lift (whirlwind for sorcs I think) to keep one tough baddie out of the fight until you finish off the easier guys. Also force mend is a force less heal you can use off the global cooldown to heal yourself

It depends on what the developers want to do. If they do not like that implementation (no animations or visible hanging hood) then they probably still wont do it. It doesnt make what I wrote wrong however. I did not imply they were stupid. It is possible that they have not considered that as a makeshift solution that would make some people (possibly even most) happy. I honestly do not see how "the world's problems" can be equated to a hood toggle in a video game. I dont think implementing a UI checkbox, giving it a boolean variable, and adding it as an or to the logic that already exists in the game is equivalent to determining the outcome of an undefined program with undefined input. As a whole, I seem to be getting negative responses from people about trying to be helpful. I know everyone likes beating up on the guy who looks like he is attacking the devs, but that's just not the case.