Defensive Cooldown for Sorcerer/Sage

Balance is an issue of mean and median ability, not of an outlier.

Why is that such a difficult concept for people to grasp? The ability of an individual to play an AC to its maximal potential has no bearing whatsoever on the overall balance of the class in relation to the other 7 or to what can be reasonably expected of a player.

I can kite through Warzones with no deaths for 15-minutes spamming Affliction and Crushing Darkness while dropping Death Field and the occasional Chain Lightning and top a DPS chart as well. Who cares?

The Skill Curve to effectively maximize play as a Madness or Hybrid-DPS build is intense.
31-Point Madness lacks the CC abilities of the 1/12/28 Hybrid (no Stun Bubble, no Root) while the Hybrid lacks the extra DoT (Creeping Terror) and must rely almost entirely on channeling Force Lightning (as in, not moving) to maximize DPS and Resource management.

There are slightly different play-styles for the two builds.
However, the one constant is that the primary defense of a Sorc/Sage is to avoid mDPS and LOS rDPS at all cost.

In short; Run.

Our much talked of self-heal will reliably restore 2.5-3.5K Hit-Points.

How long does it take a Marauder to do 3.5k damage?

This is PVP; the myth that the Damage #s on the Scoreboard actually mean anything is a farcical concept.

What matters is TTK, and therefore Burst potential.

Sorcerers in PVP have the weakest burst combined with the weakest survivability and a demanding mobile defensive play-style that is incongruent with our principle stationary channeled DPS source.

And Lightning in PVP is worthless.

The only individuals who think this AC is balanced either do not play it, enjoy destroying it, or seem to think outliers are proof positive that everyone else needs to L2PNewb.

Madness needs a ~5% front-loaded DPS buff to allow it to burst.
Lightning needs a similar damage increase and a defensive re-design.
Backlash needs to be on Caster Only and on Damage Break only.

And the AC in general could use a single defensive cool down.

incorrect, i do it quite right

any sorc with 1/3 of a brain can top dmg charts however we have the least threatening single target dmg in the game, if u argue that then u probably dont playa sorc

I am a min max tk sage and we do not need any defensive cooldown s, what we need is dmg. We do not have any ability that hits over 5 k, 4.2k max.

My sniper hits for 4.4k in battle master/wh gear. We don't hit often so we need to hit harder. 1.8 -1.5 sec to get off our hardest hitting ability. My 1 attack for 4k vs their 2 attacks in the same time math does add up plain and simple

fotm bad needs to chime in

go away with your entire quickbar full of cooldowns please

So you dont play a sage but you are telling people that do play it in ranked what they are doing wrong?

You got unnatural preservation. What more do you want?

You can hit over 4.2k mate.

4.4k to 4.8k on fob is pretty common if you spec right.

5k hits are possible against undergeared people also.

Add this and prepare to see forums full of "Sages are OP" and "Nerf sages" threads. Giving hybrid's utility to madness... hmm... plus buffs like these. You try to balance pvp for sagev3 encounters, apparently

This is a very interesting post, however, i disagree with this;

One of the biggest challenges for a developer is to balance both the average performance as well as the top end. As an extreme example, lets say spec A and spec B both do X median damage, but the top 0.01 % of super skilled players can do 3X with spec A and 10X with spec B. This would be a very imbalanced situation because most of the top players will now play spec B. The competitive part of the game would essentialy require you to play spec B now, so if you want any chance of ever playing on the top you'd be forced to go with spec B.

If you follow Starcraft 2 a bit you can see how over the years, blizzard has been constantly struggling with this very problem. Overall they are doing a decent job of it, but still they never got it perfectly right.

And no mentioning about predation? How cute