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Consular PvE low DPS and other issues?


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Who here thinks the Shadow is nothing more than a merger DPS character? To me it's DPS is very much lacking in PvE. People claim it's burst DPS is so great and yet with all the stuns and knock backs you rarely get a full DPS burst on anything but a weak NPC. So what does the consular need? Shorter cool downs on sprint burst and force cloak? A low leveled, under geared, Scoundrel can do more DPS than my L50 Shadow can do. The scoundrel can do 4000+ damage and that's not even crit damage, where as I'm doing the same with crits and 60% black hole gear.

 

Now I'm talking to those shadows that PvE. Not PvP players owning nubs with high level PvP gear. So how does BW fix this class that's been so neglected for so long? I'm talking about mediocre DPS, ugly gear looks, we are required to spend twice as much to get the correct black hole stats and etc. Why are we so hated by BW and why has nothing been done? Rise up fellow shadows! Say something.

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First off, if you're gonna start a thread about Shadows, it might be more appropriate to start the thread in the Shadow sub-forum and properly label the title (Shadows are not the only Consulars).

 

As to your claim, I would really have to agree. Infiltration does remarkably anemic damage, both in sustained and burst situations, and the highest I've seen Balance push is 1.6-1.7k DPS in full campaign (most Inf claims I've seen place it in the 1.1-1.3k range while a single claim has said he can reliably pull 1.4-1.5k). Balance is decent but noticeably below the top tier DPS I've seen pulled by Sentinels and Gunslingers (more than the 5% margin of performance the developers claim to have), but Infiltration, at its *best*, is still worse than it has any right to be considering the developers' claims.

 

As for PvP, I find it strange that the developers haven't noticed that neither Balance nor Infiltration are considered particularly good specs. The most prevalent PvP specs I see are full tank and tank hybrid specs, though I've heard of some people using a Balance hybrid as well. I'd be curious whether the developers have done any datamining concerning PvP spec choice (check the specs on Shadows currently with Expertise over a given quantity and over a given Valor rank and just look at the most prevalent specs; have 'em check the Power too to see how many of those same tankish-spec'd Shadows are actually wearing DPS gear to show that it's not simply a preponderance of tanks). It might be a little jarring for them to see exactly how little attention Infiltration and Balance get.

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Balance Shadows put out the highest DPS of any of the AC's that have been tested in SimC. Devs addressed infiltration in a Q&A a few weeks back. It's designed to be a hit and run spec. If you want sustained DPS, spec balance and learn to play.
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  • 1 month later...

I'm finding the shadow to be massively dissapointing. I'm sticking with it for now but it's really becoming tedious. Infiltrator is unbelievably bad, even the fix hasn't helped. shadow is basically a sub-par smuggler/IA, with no heals, no real benefits and all of the downsides, worsened. Oh and a nonsensical combination of weapon philosophy. Seriously, why is Shadow built around project? It makes no sense at all.

Force Pull is the skill that shadows should have but it's stuck high up only on the tanking tree. Speaking of skill trees, half of the shadows skills are lifted directly from the smuggler/IA central tree for melee damage but then spread out among all three Shadow skill trees? Why? If you're going to just copy paste you may as well leave it intact, in the middle tree where it works. Compare the Shadow to the Imperial Agent Operative. Playing operative you can readily switch roles mid battle. It's a versatile class with a wide array of skills that can be switched in anytime to turn the tide of battle for you and your team. The specc you choose gives you greater advantage in that area but doesn't cripple you from taking over other roles as necessary.

A shadow in comparison is worthless. Stuck in their role, with barely enough force recouperation to cover the role they're playing, never mind switching.

Go infiltration and entirely sacrifice whaty tiny amount of healing is available to the shadow, and say goodbye to tanking. Go balance or kinetic and stealth becomes virtually pointless. on the upside you can get rid of the bloody awful tharan cedrax, possibly the most hateful, unsuitable terrible, annoying companion in the game. which is saying something. Then of course you're not only stuck with having to use the bizarre and ludicrous Project, but you'll have to juggle about ten extra skills including the usually dreadful TT.

 

Shadow is the patchwork class. It's a hodge-podge failure of last-minute decisions and left-over ideas that weren't necessary for other classes but the devs felt they wanted to squeeze them in somewhere. So they squeezed them into the Shadow. Never mind that half of them don't work well together either technically, resource wise or even in the style of the archetype.

Even the consular gear is terrible, looking more often than not like it's been puked together. The arms don't match the torso, the legs to match the groin or waist and more often than not the textures seem low-quality compared to gear of other classes.

 

Since the patch there's just so many more problems, Shadow Strike doesn't work half the time (and yes for all the jerks, I am positioned behind the enemy), it just doesn't complete it's animation, no position warning so it doesn't seem like lag. Infiltration seems to run out force far quicker than before the patch too. I'd defintely say this class has issues. I just wish that my IA could defect to the republic. I don't want to have to play empire but I cant stand the smuggler companions or general design. That leaves me with the Shadow as my Republic Stealth class and if the miserable, tedious waste of time that was Quesh is anything to go by, it's only getting worse.

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Who here thinks the Shadow is nothing more than a merger DPS character? To me it's DPS is very much lacking in PvE. People claim it's burst DPS is so great and yet with all the stuns and knock backs you rarely get a full DPS burst on anything but a weak NPC. So what does the consular need? Shorter cool downs on sprint burst and force cloak? A low leveled, under geared, Scoundrel can do more DPS than my L50 Shadow can do. The scoundrel can do 4000+ damage and that's not even crit damage, where as I'm doing the same with crits and 60% black hole gear.

 

Now I'm talking to those shadows that PvE. Not PvP players owning nubs with high level PvP gear. So how does BW fix this class that's been so neglected for so long? I'm talking about mediocre DPS, ugly gear looks, we are required to spend twice as much to get the correct black hole stats and etc. Why are we so hated by BW and why has nothing been done? Rise up fellow shadows! Say something.

 

eeeerrrrr scoundrels hitting 4k? u mean fully geared gunslingers with adrenals + on use relic.

 

I'm happy with the damage I do on my shadow. Was running through some dailies the other day and was seeing frequent 6k shadow strikes, highest that i was paying attention too was a 6.9k on strong mob.

My project crits for 4-6k, with the "offhand " rock critting for upto 3k

Normal force breaches are between 4-6k crits.

Spammable 3-3.5k CS.

And spinning strike hitting upto 5.9k (weird our finisher does less than shadow strike) isn't shabby either.

 

Have yet to test out my damage in the new operation but i know for a fact that my dps will have gone up signifcantly..Those numbers wont really change much maybe lessen alittle, but my outliers will go up due to actually bothering to use my adrenal on CD.

 

With the changes that came in 1.4 our rotation is so much smoother, we ahve more force to spend and I very rarely find myself tapping out completely as the break stealth-->blackout-->vanish---> blackout gives me 24 secs of almost unlimited force.

 

Our gear is trashy looking but thats why theres modifiable gear.

Every class needs to spend alot more BH comms, I dont think a single spec gets 100% itemised gear. Ive spent about 400 BH comms on my JK,yeap thats right 8 pairs of boots!

 

So please check your facts before making a troll post like this please.

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You are doing it wrong.

 

Thanks for this ever so insightful and helpful post. This is exactly the kind of learned discourse that really helps the community to grow.

[/sarcasm]

 

If I'm doing it worng, that suggests there's something very wrong with the game mechanics. There should never be a predfined set way to play in an mmo like this, there's even less excuse when the player is bombarded with so many skills. Seriously this is the worst game I've ever seen for excess skill baggage.

 

Rather than just spouting unhelpful, arrogant garbage, perhaps you could instead perhaps point out what rotatations in a prolonged fight might better handle resources?

Unfortunately the only guides that are availble are somewhat out of date.

Edited by wolfyrik
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Just for some clarification, there shouldn't be only one way to play a class, but there does have to be right and wrong ways to play a class. There needs to be a way to epic fail, otherwise there's no way to tell yourself that you figured out how to succeed.
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Thanks for this ever so insightful and helpful post. This is exactly the kind of learned discourse that really helps the community to grow.

[/sarcasm]

 

If I'm doing it worng, that suggests there's something very wrong with the game mechanics. There should never be a predfined set way to play in an mmo like this, there's even less excuse when the player is bombarded with so many skills. Seriously this is the worst game I've ever seen for excess skill baggage.

 

Rather than just spouting unhelpful, arrogant garbage, perhaps you could instead perhaps point out what rotatations in a prolonged fight might better handle resources?

Unfortunately the only guides that are availble are somewhat out of date.

 

Did you do some looking and thinking about how the patch notes interact with how things have changed? i'm guessing not.

 

We get an extra use of black out on combat start and an extra use of black out every 90 seconds. black out --->vanish---> blackout

 

Yes theres plenty of skills to use but most of them really have no place on a pver's bar except in specific circumstances. Ie no need for tumult,force wave TK throw on a DPS shadows bar.

I have my standard 6 buttons bound for core rotations, My F keys bound for CD's and some Ctrl keys bound for other stuff, I suck at key binding and don't use a fancy mouse yet i manage.

 

Theres nothing wrong with having a optimal way to play a toon, nobody is forcing you to play badly, there needs to be a way to seperate good players from bad.If it didn't matter what skills I used or how i used them there would be nothing pushing me to improve.

 

 

How was my post arrogant? blunt and straight to the point sure. I see alot of people blaming their laziness on "way to build a community" when they're the ones that could be doing something themselves to solve their issues.

Building a community has nothing to do with force feeding the lazy.

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I don't rely on simcraft. Its not a real measure of classes DPS when actually incombat with a raid boss.

It is a nice tool for gauging approx dps a class is pulling it is by no means law.

 

And thats old news that madness/balance is a top parsing spec btw, It hasn't been updated to acoomadate the 1.4 changes. If you look at that listing it also doesn't have sents/mara's on it which is a pretty glaring oversight

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If I'm doing it worng, that suggests there's something very wrong with the game mechanics. There should never be a predfined set way to play in an mmo like this, there's even less excuse when the player is bombarded with so many skills.

The other day, I was learning to tank by queueing up for some HMs, and there was a Shadow using a single-bladed saber not using any melee attacks basically using only Project and TK Throw.

 

There most certainly is a way to do it wrong.

 

I wouldn't mind seeing Infiltration get some DPS love, mainly because of how incredibly difficult Balance is to play. I put in much more work to play and put up less numbers than the Watchman Sentinels; very unrewarding.

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Did you do some looking and thinking about how the patch notes interact with how things have changed? i'm guessing not.

 

We get an extra use of black out on combat start and an extra use of black out every 90 seconds. black out --->vanish---> blackout

 

Yes theres plenty of skills to use but most of them really have no place on a pver's bar except in specific circumstances. Ie no need for tumult,force wave TK throw on a DPS shadows bar.

I have my standard 6 buttons bound for core rotations, My F keys bound for CD's and some Ctrl keys bound for other stuff, I suck at key binding and don't use a fancy mouse yet i manage.

 

Theres nothing wrong with having a optimal way to play a toon, nobody is forcing you to play badly, there needs to be a way to seperate good players from bad.If it didn't matter what skills I used or how i used them there would be nothing pushing me to improve.

 

 

How was my post arrogant? blunt and straight to the point sure. I see alot of people blaming their laziness on "way to build a community" when they're the ones that could be doing something themselves to solve their issues.

Building a community has nothing to do with force feeding the lazy.

 

No the problem is that by having an "optimal way to play" players are made bad, not by being bad players but because they don't want to use the same 6 skills out of twenty, as everyone else.

If creativity leads only to a weaker outcome be it DPS loss or resource loss, that's a flaw in game mechanics. Afterall, if it was the design that every player of a specific class and tree use exactly the same moves, they shouldn'ty have written so many skills and hotbars, instead adopting a more focused approach akin to DCUO or Guild Wars 1/2.

 

Sure those games have more optimal builds but overall, choice of skills that weren't the opitmal could still be made to work very well by a decent enough player. It's not a matter of skill to know which 6 skills in which order to press, any chimp can learn to press 6 buttons in a sequence. Player skill derives from speed, accuracy (ok not accuracy so much in a game like this), reaction, adaptive behaviour and creativity. Swtor seem to severely punish creativty. Probably because most talent trees only affect two or three skills rather than overall gameplay.

 

You may find satisfaction in finding the optimal build and skill rotation for pure dps, but not all of us are pure number crunchers, I'd prefer to have the option to play how I want to play, use the skills I want to use and still be capable of producing a good outcome by playing well. For example, I really, realy hate project. It's an ugly *** skill which severly breaks the flow of combat and has no place in a melee build. Except that for some bizarre reason half of the main shadow talents are built around it. For Pete's sake why? Why just that one skill? Why not Low Slash which would be a great skill for all shadow trees, or Force pull, which would also be great for all shadow trees? Why not shadow strike since that's already available to all shadows or Whirling Blow which is basically useless and defintely needs improvement?

Even WoW, hateful as it is, allowed for player creativity.....or at least it used to. The latest version looks terrible.

 

Your original post was arrogant by it's intonation. May not have been intended but that's the problem with text, especially in short sentences. Oh and I did look at the patch notes thank you, another arrogant assumption on your part, but even with the changes taken into account, energy comsumption seems worse to me.

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This is how MMO's are played (and even how KoToR is played)

Good rotations get used, and some skills collect dust, it happens, those other skills are only useful for certain things that don't normally apply.

 

You can get by quests with basically whatever rotation you want so long as your companion is geared up nicely so they can help were your lacking. But the game mechanics are fine (could use some tweaking but that's also MMO nature they NEVER stop tweaking lol). At least in this game you don't have to worry about attacks per second...PWI I can't say I miss you...at all...not even a little bit...SO glad for the GCD lol.

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You may find satisfaction in finding the optimal build and skill rotation for pure dps, but not all of us are pure number crunchers, I'd prefer to have the option to play how I want to play, use the skills I want to use and still be capable of producing a good outcome by playing well. For example, I really, realy hate project. It's an ugly *** skill which severly breaks the flow of combat and has no place in a melee build. Except that for some bizarre reason half of the main shadow talents are built around it. For Pete's sake why? Why just that one skill? Why not Low Slash which would be a great skill for all shadow trees, or Force pull, which would also be great for all shadow trees? Why not shadow strike since that's already available to all shadows or Whirling Blow which is basically useless and defintely needs improvement?

Even WoW, hateful as it is, allowed for player creativity.....or at least it used to. The latest version looks terrible.

So... let me get this straight: you're expecting to be able to do whatever you want and get comparable numbers with someone who optimizes?

 

Do you not understand how absurd that is?

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Did you do some looking and thinking about how the patch notes interact with how things have changed? i'm guessing not.

 

We get an extra use of black out on combat start and an extra use of black out every 90 seconds. black out --->vanish---> blackout

 

Yes theres plenty of skills to use but most of them really have no place on a pver's bar except in specific circumstances. Ie no need for tumult,force wave TK throw on a DPS shadows bar.

I have my standard 6 buttons bound for core rotations, My F keys bound for CD's and some Ctrl keys bound for other stuff, I suck at key binding and don't use a fancy mouse yet i manage.

 

Theres nothing wrong with having a optimal way to play a toon, nobody is forcing you to play badly, there needs to be a way to seperate good players from bad.If it didn't matter what skills I used or how i used them there would be nothing pushing me to improve.

 

 

How was my post arrogant? blunt and straight to the point sure. I see alot of people blaming their laziness on "way to build a community" when they're the ones that could be doing something themselves to solve their issues.

Building a community has nothing to do with force feeding the lazy.

 

No the problem is that by having an "optimal way to play" players are made bad, not by being bad players but because they don't want to use the same 6 skills out of twenty, as everyone else.

If creativity leads only to a weaker outcome be it DPS loss or resource loss, that's a flaw in game mechanics. Afterall, if it was the design that every player of a specific class and tree use exactly the same moves, they shouldn'ty have written so many skills and hotbars, instead adopting a more focused approach akin to DCUO or Guild Wars 1/2.

 

Sure those games have more optimal builds but overall, choice of skills that weren't the opitmal could still be made to work very well by a decent enough player. It's not a matter of skill to know which 6 skills in which order to press, any chimp can learn to press 6 buttons in a sequence. Player skill derives from speed, accuracy (ok not accuracy so much in a game like this), reaction, adaptive behaviour and creativity. Swtor seem to severely punish creativty. Probably because most talent trees only affect two or three skills rather than overall gameplay.

 

You may find satisfaction in finding the optimal build and skill rotation for pure dps, but not all of us are pure number crunchers, I'd prefer to have the option to play how I want to play, use the skills I want to use and still be capable of producing a good outcome by playing well. For example, I really, realy hate project. It's an ugly *** skill which severly breaks the flow of combat and has no place in a melee build. Except that for some bizarre reason half of the main shadow talents are built around it. For Pete's sake why? Why just that one skill? Why not Low Slash which would be a great skill for all shadow trees, or Force pull, which would also be great for all shadow trees? Why not shadow strike since that's already available to all shadows or Whirling Blow which is basically useless and defintely needs improvement?

Even WoW, hateful as it is, allowed for player creativity.....or at least it used to. The latest version looks terrible.

 

Your original post was arrogant by it's intonation. May not have been intended but that's the problem with text, especially in short sentences. Oh and I did look at the patch notes thank you, another arrogant assumption on your part, but even with the changes taken into account, energy comsumption seems worse to me.

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Ok, first of all, SimC does point out we are the highest dps class, but it is not possible to get near it, it is a guide only.

 

Secondly, our dps is not that bad. I am generally equalling my raids sentinel and commando dps, even with slightly less gear. You have to run Balance or Madness spec if you want the best dps. I tried to stay with infiltration at first, but balance is much better. The main reason we can't get near our SimC results is because the amount of proc and dot watching is quite difficult. We have one of the hardest rotations of DPS classes force management wise so it will take a lot of work to match that of the other classes.

 

Basically, keep working at it, spec balance tree and you will not be saying you are underpowered. Also, one thing to note, you will not get as high a dps parse on the dummies as you hope due to SimC as balance as you have no armour reduction, infiltration has this, but as balance get a group with a guardian or gunslinger or someone else with armour reduction buffs and then hit up the dummy.

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I dunno, one our dps is a Madness Sin, and he gets 1850 or so on a dummy, and parses even with the sniper and the mara in actual Ops.

 

Hey Teioh_White, could you provide the character name of your madness sin friend? Wouldn't mind seeing if they have some logs on torparse or somewhere to get some ideas for increasing dps.

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So... let me get this straight: you're expecting to be able to do whatever you want and get comparable numbers with someone who optimizes?

 

Do you not understand how absurd that is?

 

Do you realise how absurd your post is? That's not what I said at all, I pointed out several times that I didn't expect the high numbers. The point is that there should be a third option between a build being optimal or weak. Game mechanics should allow for builds that under agood play can still get results, obviously not quite as well as the optimal build, but still decent. I was a very successful Druid player on WoW back before, never once used the favored speccs. Because I used the skills well, I saved many a raid. My KoToR builds similarly chosen. Not optimal but very effective for my style of play. Even my agent and smuggler on this are not optimal builds but are damned effective. The problem seems to be with Shadow mostly but to be fair I have only tried 5 classes. It's just too many conflicting design ideas mashed together and it just doesn't seem to allow for variation.

 

I think shadows problem is that the skills you need to make the infil. builds work, don't come until very high high levels and talent points, so until you get there it starts off slowly, becomes a slog then starts to ease off a bit towards the end. It's a bit *** backwards really, starting off with all the skills you don't need then working up to the core skills, rather than getting the skills you need first then building up on extras to define your own variations.

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Commando DPS caps out at around 1400 or so, so your sentinels are probably pretty bad.

Silly rabbit.

 

I easily pull more than that on my Commando during HM EC, and I'm not wearing BiS nor am I the best Commando player in my group.

 

If you think Commando dps "caps out" at 1400 you should probably meet some that don't suck.

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Silly rabbit.

 

I easily pull more than that on my Commando during HM EC, and I'm not wearing BiS nor am I the best Commando player in my group.

 

If you think Commando dps "caps out" at 1400 you should probably meet some that don't suck.

Please link me to some logs on boss fights where you pull sustained DPS over 1400.

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