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kerplunkcatt

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  1. Cool, thanks for the reply. (Didn't mean to steer this thread back onto topic and stop the 3 or 4 people fighting about marauders.) That sounds really dumb, if I'm being honest. It just seems fully disconnected. From what I can tell, PVPers hate Madness because of its self healing and raiders hate it because it doesn't bring a lot in the way of utility or DPS when compared to sniper. There just seems to be some arbitrary metric used to determine that sorcs should do less damage than snipers. The issue I have with that line of reasoning is exclusively from a PVE mindset, but as I couldn't care less about PVP, that's the only mindset I have. If you give a DPS off-heals and nerf their DPS by 10% under a class without off-heals, PVE players will just play the higher DPS option. There's no strat that employs "And during this phase, our DPS sorcs will spam dark heal at the tank, and we'll win for sure" so I don't know why so much value is ascribed to their off-heals. In summation, I think this change is only going to make more people angry. It increases PVP viability through off-healing, and decreases PVE viability by a damage nerf when they weren't overperforming. Like, seriously, who in the PVE crowd was complaining about Madness DPS? Near as I can tell I'm the only serious player that runs the spec regularly, so did I say something to piss off the devs? lol. Either way, thanks for the response.
  2. First, sorry if this has been answered before now, hard to effectively parse through 34 pages of posts. For the Disintegration change, would that life steal be in addition to what Disintegration already does? IE: Crit increase for Lightning Strike and Force Leach as well as increasing periodic damage by 15%. Secondly, for the Force Horrors change, I'm not sure what Force Horrors is... Is that a sage ability? It's either pretty good if it's increasing the Disintegration damage boost from 15% to 20% or slightly good if it's increasing the execute range damage increase. All that said, while I understand the direction, Madness was underperforming as a DPS spec while their tac was broken. I realize that they have quite a bit more survivability in their kit than most classes, but that means nothing when DPS checks are as steep as they are in PVE content. I'm afraid that this is just going to push more of us (Me) away from sorc entirely into playing Viru which has much more raid utility and does more damage despite having the complexity of a four-piece puzzle. My thoughts are that I think this change is going in the very wrong direction. If the worry is for their efficacy in PVP, giving FL lifesteal is only going to further annoy the PVP crowd while not really doing anything for the PVE crowd, meanwhile the nerfs to the damage are just going to lead to folks quitting the sorc entirely, or swapping to Ling which is getting even steeper nerfs here. I'm honestly not a fan of that mentality as 7.0 was the first time in a long, long time that Madness was playable in PVE content, and Ling was also doing well for itself, but I felt they were both within reason, if anything Madness was underperforming for its lack of practical ability to get the raid buff, as well as have any utility beyond being something the healers don't have to heal. I'd be interested in hearing the dev team's mentality on this. Is it the expectation that sorc be the weakest (or near to it, hard to tell) of the ranged DPS classes, and if so why? Beyond that, even if it was slated to be the weakest by some metric I don't know, does it have to be the weakest by such a degree as to turn off serious players from using the class?
  3. To address a few of the things that have cropped up, on both computers (the one underperforming and the one doing just fine) nameplates are on, but I have tried without them on. Seemingly no difference. I will change out the thermal paste when I get home, but it's never been higher than 50 c (that being an outlier usually it idles around 37-40 c while playing). I have an open frame case and the cpu is liquid cooled.
  4. I've gone into BIOS, but I've never messed around with changing the speeds and what not. When I was in there right before making this post, the channels were reading at 2666 MHz and 2400 MHz for slots A2 and B2 respectively, despite me having 3k MHz ram. Really bizarre
  5. Apologies for these sporadic posts, but I am doing tests as I go along as well. So the interesting thing is that PC2 (The one that runs the game perfectly) is only registering the very same ram at about 1000 MHz, whereas PC1 (The inferior one) is registering it 300 MHz higher, at 1300 MHz, using the same software. I know that PC 2 has a better processor though, because according to CPU-Z, it is clocking at nearly 4200 MHz to PC1's 3400 MHz. Neither have been overclocked.
  6. Also worth noting that despite these issues that I am having, I am fairly computer literate. I built both PCs in question and have been building them for years. I am reaching out because I just don't know what this could be. So in case anyone was shying away from asking something or suggesting something that falls under advanced troubleshooting, I am more than capable to do it.
  7. Okay, so a few things: My Ram is all DDR 4, same as the other PC with which I did the testing. My CPU is clocking at about 3.4 GHz, so I don't think the problem is there. The reason I didn't include Ram speed is because both PCs use the same exact ram, so the speed seem irrelevant because one was running the game better. However, both are 16 GBs of 3000 MHz ram (DDR 4). What I found interesting, however, is that the Ram is only clocking at 1332.5 MHz according to CPU-Z; confusing as the Ram is much better than that. They are properly slotted, in slots A2 and B2.
  8. So I've been playing this game since launch and I've literally never had good FPS during any raid or PVP content. This is despite the graphics settings, other settings, hardware upgrades and so on. Now that my thesis is out there, lemme get into specs. The following specs are not only my PC (PC 1) but also the specs of my girlfriend's PC (PC 2). It's worth noting that her pc (PC 2) runs the game on ultra in PVP at upwards of 80 FPS. PC 1 (My PC) CPU: Ryzen 5 1600 6-core Motherboard: MSI Gaming Pro x370 carbon Graphics card: Radeon RX Vega 64 (MSI) with 8gb of VRAM Ram: 16 GB Vengence Drive: It's running on a Samsung SSD, though I can't remember the speed. PC 2 (GF's PC) CPU: Ryzen 5 2600 6-core Motherboard: Asus B450-F GPU: Radeon VII (Asrock) Ram: 16 GM Corsair Vengence Drive: Running on a 7200 RPM HDD and not an SSD. Now to more thoroughly explain the problem. I have done all of the troubleshooting steps that are recommended on this website before. I've played this game through 4 different motherboards, CPUs, GPUs, and two different hard drives. During which time I have always had to deal with a stuttering as a constant. I just thought that's how the game looked. Fast forward to the other night. My PC was going to be out of commission and so I had to raid on my GF's PC. It ran beautifully. Hardly a dropped frame, all of her settings on ultra, max view distance, and a much higher res because she has a better monitor than I do. Now, I know that her computer is objectively better than mine, a side effect of her building it after mine and investing more money; but I don't think any of my hardware falls short of this 10 year old game. I tested this much more today and while she is getting upwards of 60-80 FPS in PVP on a few maps, I am lucky to see 60 in the staging area and during combat this falls sometimes as low as 20 FPS. Obviously this is really frustrating, and there's obviously something that I am doing wrong, as I seem to be the only one among my friends that's experiencing this issue. Troubleshooting I've tried: Reinstalled the game a few times Turned each graphics setting to nil, even going so far as setting res to 800X600, running all the settings on the lowest that they can go, and I am still setting poor FPS in raid and PVP. I have tested this while closing every other non-essential program on my PC, usually SWTOR will cap out at using 40% of CPU and something like that of the RAM, but just to be sure. Tried it with Vsync on, off, every iteration of graphics settings that you can try. I've raided in windowed, full, full (windowed), on the second monitor, etc. What's really frustrating about this is that I can run other games perfectly fine. I can Stream playing Diablo 3, Smite, Anthem, and several other games that I run in my off time without issue and the CPU and GPU barely break a sweat. I know that the game is poorly optimized, a quick google search was enough to know that. The part that really bothers me is that my GF's PC without being overwhelmingly better than mine is running the game perfectly with no stuttering. After conferring with a few of my friends, they aren't experiencing this at all either. Thanks to anyone that made it to the end of this post. I will be monitoring this constantly for help, and can answer any questions that people have about the build or things that I have or haven't tried. Thanks so much for any replies! Edit 1* I've updating my drivers, rolled them back, and updated C++, so on. I am convinced this isn't a driver issue.
  9. That's so bizarre. If we operate under the assumption that this is a PVE nerf only, that means that BW thinks Sorcs are doing too much DPS in a raid setting. But they are by no means the top class. All this is going to do is shift the DPS players off of Sorc as a viable DPS onto Sniper, IO Merc, Etc. That doesn't solve any issues, just spites Sorc players that were happy having a class that performed at, or, a little-below-par of the other two ranged classes.
  10. Oh well, fellow Sorcs. We had a good run while it lasted (all 3 months). Back to middle-of-the-pack PVE DPS so that PVP can be a little more balanced. Honestly, say what you will, but aside from Stormwatch I would say that the sorc was right where it should have been. Bring SW down a little, and viola, perfectly balanced in my opinion. It really sucks that this is going to further reinforce the already-true idea that Lightning and, moreover, SW is the only spec/tac worth using for a sorc DPS, especially in PVE. All the while, this doesn't make any of the other set bonuses worth taking for any reason. This just nerfs the BIS Set for DPS sorcs, and it remains BIS, thus it's just a straight nerf. The thing that really irks me about this is that I feel the sorc is where it should have been. Snipers are still parsing higher in Vir than sorcs using SW; moreover half of their rotation consists of Lethal Shot, but the sorc must have been hitting harder in PVP, so here comes the nerf bat. It is really disheartening to just know that anytime the sorc steps a little above mediocrity, about 3 months goes by before they are smacked right back into the middle-of-the-road. Last time this happened was 3.0 with the (Admittedly ridiculous) Force Storm spam, now this. It is really frustrating that I've been a sorc player for a little over 7 years, and I am constantly hardcapped in my PVE content (DPS-wise) because of the performance in PVP. I thought that was one such discrepancy that the Tactical/ Set Bonus Choices were meant to solve; to make it easier to balance each PVP and PVE on their own terms without affecting the other in overt, game-changing ways. Thanks for anyone that managed to make it to the end of my whining.
  11. Same guild here, but I would just like to corroborate these findings. Even in my ventures outside of running on our raid nights, I am finding more substantial drops from doing SM ops throughout the week than I was from TFB HM and Dxun SM. Through the entire TFB HM we saw one set bonus piece that dropped off of the final boss, and, if memory serves it wasn't even worth equipping by any of us. Then we did EV HM, and all 5 bosses dropped a set bonus piece, and everyone reported getting actual gear level increases from each boss. As stated by the original post, it isn't a huge sample size, and so it could just be that we were weirdly unlucky, but that does seem odd that HM wouldn't have a consistent amount of gear dropping throughout all of the ops. If anyone has similar findings, please post here. Even more helpful, potentially, if anyone has opposite findings, please post here. I would love to know if this is wide-spread, or just us whinging for bad luck:D
  12. So, last night my group and I headed onto the PTS in the interest of doing the new op. We zoned in, and went at it; streaming for our own sake more than anything else. Well before we got too far, a few of us noticed that there was a little robot named Matt Pucevich running around. Long story short, Matt was in there with us, talking to us, watching the stream, helping us along in a few places and I know that meant a lot to us. One of the most notable examples of this was during the 4 Trandosian fight it is apparently bugged so that you can't come back into the room once you've wiped. Well, Matt spent a good few minutes rezzing us so that we could wipe and figure the fight out. Sure, these bugs are in the game, and it is their fault, be it from lack of time or because this is the first test; but it really meant a lot to us to see a Dev in there, helping us through them and rezzing us. It's really easy to give all of the devs flak on these forums, as evidenced by the number of times that it's done per day on here, haha:D But, credit where it's due, Thanks, Matt. It really did mean a lot to us to have you playing Guardian Angel to our mostly-drunk raid group.
  13. Hello everyone, My post here is going to be a little harsh, but I am a smidge frustrated, so here goes. I am finding that testing this content without much communication or feedback to be, shall we say, challenging. The PTS patch today kind of sent me into a tizzy, and I am struggling to conduct testing like this. First and foremost, I have no idea where the baseline is. I have no idea where things should be performing, and so I am left to assume that, for example, Stormwatch is either super strong, or Ticking Force Bomb is super weak. I don't know which it is, or if they are both meant to be somewhere in between those. This was most notable with the set bonuses, that, albeit are fixed now, were still goofy for a long while. Berserker's was horrifically strong comparatively, and I was left to wonder if the other set bonuses should be buffed, that should be nerfed, or again something between those two values. Because of this lack of a baseline it's really hard for me to say how things are performing. Is every sniper rotation meant to be some ballet of energy management that you sometimes lose due to the lack of Target Acquired energy? Is Laze Target meant to only recharge one charge per cooldown? Is Volt Rush meant to be used at all? (Conflicting reports to that last all over the Sorc forums). I just don't know the answer to any of this, and so testing it feels like we are just assuming for a lot of variables, and, for someone that does math for fun, that seems like a fault of logic. Either these things are fixed, and then we must test them all again, or they aren't and they are working as intended. The answer to that doesn't really matter so long as we know so that we can conduct the tests. Point is, some feedback would really help this along. That leads me to why the Patch today frustrated me. There were no patch notes (at time of writing this) and to just stealth change a number of things on an actual test server seems just silly. Without going to each set bonus, item, etc, there is no way to confirm the changes; and without running all of my tests again there is no way to work out if things are now working that weren't before. We kind of need to know what you guys change so that we can figure out if it's working or not. I know this post come across as annoyed, that's because I am a little annoyed. I want to do all this testing, I really enjoy it and this game. I just don't want to do it if it's going to be a non-communicative mess the whole way through. Conclusion: Please start by giving us patch notes for what you're changing and fixing. Then please give us a baseline of what you intend for things as you add them. Not for each individual item, but just after a phase it would have been nice to see, "The Berserker's set bonus is performing far outside of what is intended. It is going to be brought in line with the other set bonuses.". Those are my gripes, and thanks for reading. Hope this doesn't fall on deaf ears.
  14. Alright, here goes. During this phase of the PTS, as per BW recommendation, I was able to do an Eternity Vault, Karaga's Palace, and Hammer Station. Here are my thoughts on all of those. Eternity Vault: Admittedly I was only able to do this one on SM, but I feel that is an adequate gauge on where that mode is now. Since the PTS, I've done this twice, once with a PUG on fleet which went about as well as live. The content was easy, I was never at risk of dying, etc. Per Eric's post I think this is the intention. For people that haven't seen the content before to be challenged a little while also not being an hours-long grind. The issue is with the other time that I did it. A few members of my guild and I went in there with the intention of testing a few of the tacticles and what not to fight the first boss. What's interesting about this is the fact that there were only four of us, 1 tank and 3 DPS and we were still able to kill the first boss with basically no off-healing. I know that we want this content to be accessible by nearly everyone, but this feels as though it has gone way too far in that direction. There is almost no difficulty for that first boss. Granted, I don't think we could have done the entire op like that, but I think it a fair indictment on the difficulty that we were able to do the first boss in an operation with half the requisite people, and with no dedicated healer. This sentiment carries over to KP, but I was unable to test this with the guild. My only experience in there was with a PUG that was able to clear it in just under 40 minutes. I will say that this is slightly biased because the folks that are hopping on to test are likely to be folks that have done/seen all the content before, so it may play over differently given enough people of casual interest, but my point stands. I feel it is a bit easy on that front. Hammer Station: Now, in light of the operations that I ran we were looking to really push this, so we set it on Master mode...... With just two of us. Myself on a sniper running Engineering, and a guildmate on a Jugg Tank, as well as two level 1 2V-R8 companions set to heal. We then proceeded to roll through the entire flashpoint with really no difficulty at all except for the last boss, and that's just because companions stood in stupid and died very quickly due to their HP being so low. Per Eric's post, this is meant to be content intended for a group of coordinated, skilled players. Now, unless 2V is holding out on me for being in a Nightmare progression team, I don't think this was the case. I know that this was only a FP, but this was the second bit of content on the PTS that we were able to accomplish with half the number of people than are recommended, not to mention set to the hardest difficulty that we could set it to. In conclusion, I think the difficulty of each mode needs to go up, though, to be fair, I didn't get a chance to do HM ops, and didn't test the HM Hammer Station. Thanks for reading this, and I do think that changing scaling is a great idea for future content. Just giving my honest feedback. Disclaimer: These tests were all done prior to the patch on 8/2/19. Disregard if things have been fixed.
  15. Hi everyone, I was lucky enough to have the day off when the PTS went live, so I spent the majority of the day online just playing around with the various specs, set bonuses, and what not. Here are my findings: Disclaimer: I know that per the Devs the numbers themselves are far from finalized, and that this was meant as more of a way to test all of the specs how they would play more than how the damage would play into it just yet, so I will do my best to avoid talking about that while I can. Also, there are a medley of technical bugs in the game currently that are standard for anything that is in testing, so if I don't mention those, that's because that's not what this forum is for. Also, I am a PVE player, so that's where my focus will be for this post. Set Bonuses: To start it off, I tested quite a few of the DPS set bonuses and how they would work in conjunction with the Tac slots. My eye was immediately caught by the Berserker's set bonus, and in its current state (confirmed through several tests) this is by far best in slot. The fact that it is only a 4 piece allowed me to pick up a sorc 2 piece, and with Relic procs and adrenals up I was well north of 20k power. Due to how good this is I have to expect there to be a substantial nerf, so I won't spend much time talking about this. My thoughts on it were: "Big, shiny numbers make boom-boom real nice!", and that was that. Moving on, the next set bonus that caught my eye was The Gathering Storm. I think that this added a few tweaks to the all-too-standard Madness rotation, and if it were to be brought up a little in some way I really think it has potential to be the one that I would use. I had a lot of fun trying to find ways to use this with the Mystic's Ruthless Blade Tac and get 5 Force Leaches into one opening. Pros: Adds interesting ideas to current Madness (and to a smaller degree, lightning) Meta, while not fundamentally changing the way that the specs interact with Polarity Shift. Cons: There is starting to be an over-reliance (especially in Lightning) of using Force Speed as an offensive CD. The issue that I have with this is the prevalence of fights that require me to chose between using it to re-position or using it to increase DPS. At this point, delaying Force Speed during any part of the fight is a DPS loss, just because of how big of a deal all the things that it will do for you are; potentially stopping the thing FS was designed to do in the first place. Currently those were the only two sets that I had any interest in using, and I have no interest in putting force slow back on my bar. Aside from attempting to divine a new opening for Madness, I must admit the majority of my time was spent over in Berserker's. Tac Items: I ran quite a few different tests with each of the Tac items and I intend on running more in the coming days, but these are my findings so far. Stormwatch: This is two-fold. Let me begin by saying that this is obviously over-performing and needs to be brought down at least a little. Now that I have gotten the disclaimer out of the way, WOW is it fun to just blast things with a true cascade of lightning. I've played Lightning off and on since launch and this is the first time that I've ever physically smiled at the amount of seizure-inducing light/sound show that this Tac provides. While it is currently too strong, as I stated earlier, this is the most fun that I had testing all day today. Just the visceral feel of lightning coming from every angle to strike the training dummy or my Juggernaut friend when he wanted to test his new defensives. I've never felt burstier than calling down lightning from Zeus and from my fingers at the same time. I know that this has to be brought down a little, but I really do hope that the feel of this is retained, if that makes any sense. Ticking Force Bomb Honestly, a little boring. in opposition to Stormwatch, this really gives no indication that anything has changed. You just run the regular lightning rotation and occasionally Crushing Darkness makes an additional noise. Mystic's Ruthless Strike This one was, as I mentioned in my set bonus review, the most fun I had while trying to figure out Madness. It was really interesting to try and fit as many Demolish casts into a Polarity Shift window as possible for constant leeching. I parsed on this likely less than I should have, but the low DPS numbers kind of turned me off to it. Tempest of Rho This one really has potential. Alas, the RNG really makes it the Devil's play-thing. I was finding that compared to the steady Damage that MRS provided, this would usually underperform or perform at level depending on procs. I like the addition of lightning strike procing it as well, but I feel this still has a ways to go before it is viable. Much like Ticking Force Bomb though, this one really doesn't change much about the spec. Now you're just a slightly higher DPS Madness Sorc. Volt Rush Right off the bat I want to say that I know it will likely be changed, but the point of this PTS is to get constructive criticism on the changes, so criticize I shall. I hate just about everything about this ability. I love the sorc, and I found a lot of these changes were really nice and a lot of fun to play around with, but that was after I had dragged Volt Rush off of my bar. Currently, Volt rush in Madness is woefully force negative, does less damage-per-activation than Lightning Strike (And vastly less than Force Lightning) and feels awfully clunky to put anywhere near the rotation. In lightning it is even worse because a spammed Lightning Bolt was out-DPSing it, costs less force, procs Forked Lightning, and gives a ton of other buffs to the class. Also, and this is the last on the list for a reason, but the fact that it sounds so quiet just adds to the feel that I am using a Force-Joy-Buzzer. To go from the booming of Thundering Blast and Crushing Darkness and the cracking of Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning to this piddly bzz noise is disheartening. Here comes the constructive part: How does Kerplunk suggest we fix it? Here goes. Take it off the GCD. Done. Next problem? For real though, take it off the GCD, and vastly increase the Force cost (something like 70 per tick) so that it is a choice. Sure, it is a DPS gain to throw that sucker in on CD and even more if you're at 3 Stacks, but can your Force handle that constantly? Absolutely not. Make it something to the effect of Shoulder Cannon on the PT where it has a GCD, just a separate one from other abilities. That way you can't just throw out all three in an eye-blink, but it also doesn't ruin your rotation. Most importantly for this ability is the way that it feels to use it rotationally. For me, even if it was doing monstrous damage, I would still be quite disappointed with how it doesn't synergize well with either spec, and just breaks up the action. Overall, this testing has already given me a lot of excitement for 6.0, and I hope that this doesn't come across as too negative. I just want this to launch in its best possible way and these are thoughts from someone with over 200 days played on the Sorc. I love the Sorc, and the game and just want the best for them both Thanks for reading all of this.
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