I've played Vigilance and Vengeance since a few months after launch, I love it so much I made a Jugg and a Guardian just to play it both sides. I've joined the testing late, so I wasn't here for most of it, but I'm pleased to see that Intercede/Guardian Leap wasn't taken away from us after all. It's a very effective mobility tool and I use it often in both PvE and PvP, I even use it to get around in my own ship and in FPs when I'm lagging behind. I use it more for mundane utility than its actual intended purpose. It may not be a rotational ability, nor will it ever be, but it's an ability I have a special hotkey for just so I can reach it when I need it, and I often do need it. I'll get to my criticism down below, but first, to answer your questions: 1) Does this feel like a Jedi Guardian? I'll be honest, it feels far less like a Guardian. Why did I make a Guardian? To be a big tough bruiser of a woman with a laser sword. I consider our rugged survivability to be core to our class identity, and an extreme part of that is how good and numerous the DCDs are. Even though I play Vigilance DPS almost exclusively, none of the cool stuff there potentially is makes up for the fact that we're gonna have to pick between Saber Reflect, Enure, and Blade Rush. Mainly, I hate having to choose between Enure and Saber Reflect, but given some of the changes make Blade Rush more useful for positioning, I actually do miss Blade Rush too. 2) Is there anything that feels missing or out of place in the combat rotation? Oh yes! I wanted to try Blade Burst but every time I get into a big fight with a lot of weak enemies, I feel like using Cyclone Slash, so I reach for it... and it's gone! I keep making this mistake and I'm very upset that I have to spec into it because it's such a boring choice but such a needed one. For another thing, the lack of Enure really hurts when I'm low and I'm waiting for Focused Defense to recharge. For yet another thing, Blade Rush would sure be useful to get in position quickly for Blade Burst, but I'm not giving up Saber Reflect for that. The choice that makes Focused Defense generate no Focus unless you crit a Burn doesn't do NEARLY as much as you'd think since let's say it does even out somehow. When I'm using Combat Focus, I need Focus now, and giving that up causes more of a DPS loss than whatever I gain from critting my dots. And for yet another thing, I'm sick to death of not being able to get Riposte off my hotbar because in the 1% of the time it's usable, it's better than using Slash, but I don't want to delay any of my abilities to use it, so I use them... and then its window closes and it's gone again. Please just merge it with Slash for DPS players, turn it into a timed buff that changes Slash's animation, because these abilities both serve the same niche for both Vigilance and Focus. 3) What are your initial thoughts with the effectiveness of the Jedi Guardian against enemies? The lack of Enure and Awe makes it more likely I'm going to die in situations where I'd have been fine before -- surprise adds, more Elite enemies than I was expecting -- because I had all those tools at my disposal at the same time and needed them. This means making boring choices because they're practical even if they're not iconic. Several times, the lack of Cyclone Slash actually made a fight drag on too long because I was out of AoE abilities and needed to go around autoattacking everything that was at 1hp. Please don't make Cyclone Slash an optional ability. 4) How are you enjoying or not enjoying this class? If this goes live as is, I'm dreading this patch and I might quit again over these changes until our stuff gets put back. 6.0 felt so good, if a little too bloated with having to use Force Clarity to do proper DPS, and now it feels like we're taking major steps backward. 5) If you have feedback on the different disciplines and ability paths, please note your feedback accordingly so we can track it. Gladly. Now on to the current elephant in the room: the fact that we have to choose if we want to keep many of our our old Defense Cooldowns (DCDs). I'm a Vigilance/Vengeance spec primarily, and I have both Sith and Jedi versions. I have been playing since launch, though I left in 2015 and came back about a month ago. 6.0 has been the happiest I've ever been with regards to mechanics and spec options. The only things I haven't gotten used to yet are using Blade Rush and Force Clarity, which I always forget I have, and I kinda wish we just got Unremitting/Unstoppable by default instead of having to pick it, but that's about it. However, these new changes prune some healthy stuff from our builds that we use and need regularly and then make us forego some fun-looking things to get them back, which just feels like our old abilities are being held hostage and the only way to get them back is to give up the fun new things. I'm kinda glad that Force Clarity is gone since it was an ability I would always forget about. It wasn't even cool enough to make me want more. But where did it go? Is it part of our base damage now? Either way, I'd rather leave this ability gone. It wasn't cool, it wasn't something you felt, it was just an obligation. - The class buff becoming passive is slightly a bummer because I liked hitting newbies with it, but eh, I can live with everything being a passive now. Less likely to forget it. - I'm so glad Freezing Force is gone. I hated that ability and I don't know a single person who liked it, it deserved to die... - ...but I'm UNBEARABLY UPSET that Cyclone Slash is now a choice, because I keep reaching for it in every fight I get into against groups of enemies and it's GONE unless I picked it over Blade Burst. So if we want either of the other two cool NEW things, we need to give up our basic AoE Filler ability, and no, there's nothing that can do its job when it's what you need, not even Blade Burst or Branding Burst or Burning Focus, because those are all on cooldown abilities. No other reason needed. You can spec into all the AoE options you want, eventually you're going to need something low-cost to use for a bunch of 1hp adds that need to die this second while other things are on cooldown, especially when you're not in an optimized team, so this is a problem mainly for the majority of players. Are there Boss Fights where I don't need Cyclone Slash? I can't say, because if I'm taking Blade Burst, I probably would also like to have Cyclone Slash. Please don't make this basic class ability something you have to spec into. There is really nothing I would love to do more than use Blade Burst to set everything on fire while I approach to get in position to do Vigilant Thrust and finish them all off with Cyclone Slash, but that's literally been made impossible. Now if you make that a choice between the other things and the damage buff Cyclone Slash got, that's one thing. That I would prefer. I don't really expect Cyclone Slash to hit hard, it just needs to do its one job. In Vigilance especially, Cyclone Slash is useful for more things than Slash and Riposte put together, and it sounds VICIOUS when it hits a big group. Why would you take away one of my children? If we have to prune something, I would much rather give up Riposte or turn Riposte into a timed buff/animation change for Slash, since Riposte for tanks is off the GCD the way it was for all at launch, and that was a good use of it back in the day. It was extra DPS that didn't screw your rotation. Now though, the DPS specs see it as mainly just Slash But Better, it's a filler ability only used when nothing else would do, so it would just be a QoL change to join them into one ability. I only still have Riposte on my hotbar because it is technically better than Slash when you get to use it, rarely. - Being forced to choose between having Saber Reflect, Enure, or Blade Rush feels like a huge nerf. That's two major DCDs of our choice we no longer have, and that does not feel very Guardian-like. Saber Reflect is a big part of our class identity. It's our Mace Windu vs Palpatine, it's our Obi Wan vs Dooku, it's been in all our cutscenes since before we even had the dang thing! It's iconic and you can't make me get rid of it! So that means I'm getting rid of Enure even though I also love it and also believe it's part of our class identity. Our DCDs in my eyes are the very thing we gave up dual wielding and doublesabers for, and I miss them when I play other classes. Enure is a part of our identity just like Saber Reflect. Now I won't get them at all! I can only pick one to keep at high level (when Enure used to be a low level ability!) If this was a choice between Enure and Blade Rush, there that's an easy choice: I'll pick Enure because I like cheating death and I hate how Blade Rush locks me into a straight line and only protects me for 1 global. I pretty much have to have it on my middle click because otherwise I can't turn the right way before I use it. Even so, I like having it on live because it'll get me out of a pinch when that's needed, so it'll still hurt. I can understand needing to make space on our hotbars, bc we DO need that, but removing major and important abilities is not how to do it, especially since the three are used for entirely different things, all of which can come up in the same fight, and there's no way to predict which one you'll need more when the need arises, but of the three, Saber Reflect might actually be the weakest, and that means we'd have to give up an iconic ability for practicality. It would be much better if we got to keep all three of them but choose which one gets buffed. Rather than picking Enure at all, it would be the Enure Cleanse. Rather than picking Saber Reflect, it would be making Saber Reflect last longer. Rather than picking Blade Rush, it would be "usable while immobilized and 10 sec shorter cooldown." Making a hard choice between which of your children you get to keep means I'm gonna take a third option and play the other games I've got on my to-do list until it gets reverted. If you would rather clear up hotbar space though, you could merge Enure's effects with Focused Defense. That's less control over when I get to pop the temp health, but it would not feel like a nerf, in fact it would feel like a buff to both abilities, and it clears up both of their biggest downsides, since FD is useless if you get killed by the next hit, and Enure will make you drop to 1 hp after the time's up unless the healers topped you off. FD might have twice the cooldown so that might seem like a nerf on paper, but Enure isn't really used on cooldown, it's used during the same moments that Focused Defense is: when you're low on HP and need a quick boost, and it would also mean less of FD's healing gets wasted by overheal, and you'd be tougher because of the damage reduction to boot. I'm sure this would step on some players' toes too, but it's better than losing the ability unless you give up Saber Reflect. - Awe being turned into a pick power alongside DPS increasing abilities is also really tough. Awe is actually very useful in PvE as well as PvP, even if not Operations, and it might a be niche power that newer players forget they have, but if you're a skilled player, you know that a well-timed Awe can save you in a Heroic or a FP and it DOES feel great to use it during those clutch moments. That means you're gonna have to give up some nice options just because you need to keep Awe, and that sucks bc that's the only option that doesn't clear up hotbar space, and that one space has held the AoE stuns on all my classes' hotbars since I made these hotkeys. But heck, I'll do it! I'll give up those options to keep my AoE stun, I don't care. The other options are meh at best for me outside of the hardest content where Awe isn't useful anyway. Focus spec, though... they have to take the one option to put Singularity back on Combat Focus. Poor Focus. That's just a kick in the shins they didn't need. Singularity on CF should not be optional, it's key to their already-worse damage. - Blade Burst (BB) is REALLY effective... but it doesn't feel cool. I'm sure the Sith scream option does feel marginally more cool, but BB doesn't even feel as cool as Cyclone Slash (CS) despite the former hitting MUCH harder, because Blade Storm has weak-sounding VFX in the first place, and there's no VFX to show you how or where it begins or ends, it's just "more numbers appear." However! I do know that Storm looks really cool as it travels, so just if you made that travel the whole length and width of the cone, it would not only look cooler, it would help us get used to the idea of how long its range is, bc I can't tell. It doesn't say, or indicate anything. Since it's a cone though, it's clunky and awkward to position for, bc to use it as part of an AoE rotation you'd have to position yourself in the opposite side as what you'd do for VT and CS, since VT and CS need you in the middle, and BB needs you on the far end, making it unreliable and not always possible to use it to maximum effectiveness, although BB wouldn't be as useful if it wasn't like that... and since it's SO STRONG, positioning for it is not optional in an AoE setting. That's going to require a movement speed buff or something else. Ironically, that would be a great offensive use for Blade Rush! Even more reason not to make that a pick-one choice. - The level 50 choice is the kind of choices we should get. All of those are nice to have, but you can't really prove which one would be more useful. Battlefield Command is probably the strongest option in more situations, but I wouldn't miss the other two to take it. - The level 80 choice on the other hand is not a choice. You have to take Purifying Sweep. Defense might consider Purifying Sweep optional bc all they get out of it is a Slow, but Vigilance and Focus will always need to take it. And where did Guardianship go? It just disappeared and isn't an option for any spec anymore. If you ask me, that should be one of the choices instead. The other two options are "nice to have but unreliable" - and having an AoE armor debuff on Sweep/Thrust is not optional, it should honestly be added to the ability by default in both DPS specs or else that's the only option you'll be allowed to have in any tier it's in. Overall, the major problems with all this is that we're losing really good and fun abilities we've had since launch, and if the goal is to clean up the hotbars, there are better obvious choices to be made that don't have to result in the outright removal of those things from the game if you want to experience any of the new cool things. Not to mention, some of these choices are hampered by one "not fun, but required" choice and two other "I would love it, but I can't get consistent results with that." The level 80 choice is one of these. The most infuriating thing is, I used to be able to pick all three of those, so now we're back to the 1.0 problem where we have all these fun choices you can't make because you can't give up something that's always useful. I don't play Focus anymore but I played it during 1.0 for a spell, and it was so much mindless monkey brain fun even if it was sub-optimal in single target. I came back in 6.0 and tried to play it and went "oh... wow... this sucks." Now it's just annoying and unsatisfying and feels like it's lost its identity and it has too many buttons to push for all the weak stuff it does. If this spec needs anything, I'd say merge Riposte and Slash like the suggestion above, and/or get rid of Focused Burst and pack its damage back into Smash/Sweep again, and put the crazy fun sound effects and animation back when you hit one of those with all the buffs up. Right now it feels like a fully-powered crit Focus Sweep doesn't even hit as hard as baseline Vigilant Thrust, and that's just sad. I don't even have to do anything for VT to hit that hard, and it still gets to crit. I see more things trying to put the AoE back in Focus with Focus Blast and at that point, why use two separate abilities that share a cooldown? We've come full circle. I'm kinda sad that of all the things to get a Smash/Sweep replacement way back when, the thing that got it wasn't Focus. It really feels like Vigilance is better at everything Focus used to be good at and it's better at its own things because Focus has no identity. This has been that way for a while. Focus' rotation is too confusing and has too many moving parts and buffs to keep track of or you screw the whole thing up, and yet, it's also the spec that uses the most filler spam. I have no suggestions but "put the big Smash back" but I'd at least like this spec to be that much silly fun again, however that happens.

The same thing happened to me - the unique rock formation was already activated and not clickable, plus the light that was shining at the anchored rock was getting cut off halfway, so the anchored rock wasn't clickable either. Very frustrating.

I was trying a new PvP build today, and one of the utilities I took was Through Power, which makes endure pain into a speed boost and slow/root immunity. However, even though the buff icon appears, it does not break slows or roots, make me move any faster, or give any immunity. Not PvE or PvP. Anyone else notice this?

Precisely. What about multiple strongholds per legacy, too? We're just supposed to pick which stronghold gets it? The idols aren't even very big, and sometimes just placing two of them is necessary for symmetry. Meanwhile, the Revan statues are massive and we can get 10 of them, which I'm pretty sure is more than we can even use right now.

Item Type: Implant Item Name: Dread Forged Weaponmaster's MK-V Package Name of Crafter: Wrector (easiest to get ahold of me via ingame mail) Faction: Imperial Guild: Emperor's Hammer

OP, the spec is spelled Anni-hi-la-tion. Not anal-li-ation. You complain about trolls but you are walking right into those, lol. To better answer your question, I actually have had more success with annihilation than carnage, but the last time I played my sent was before 2.10. You'd be surprised how long you can keep your stacks up with a good healer. I wouldn't play Carnage even if it is buffed now, I prefer the smoothness and vengeance-style flow of annihilation. Carnage has too much **** to keep track of in a rapidly changing battle. I need to know if I'm ready for my next move without gluing my eyes to my buff bar. Ultimately, my point is that a spec doesn't make you work, you make a spec work. Will Carnage/Annihilation help you kill Juggs? Not if you suck.

Juggernaut's better in PvP as of right now, especially as Vengeance. Both are evenly matched in other areas of the game. I find Jugg more fun, as well.

RDPS have to walk just as much in most content, and for many of them, they can't keep DPSing at peak while they do. Fingers of Brontes requires people to stand next to them, draxus has bulwarks that reflect damage from outside, Council has shields too, Grobthok doesn't walk fast enough or often enough to screw up melee DPS, Simplification affects ranged just as bad as melee, Raptus teleports ranged way more often than melee, and Jugg/Guard are easily the best at coming back from a teleport thanks to intercede and charge. Bestia's tentacles require someone standing next to them, and so on. My experience with progression brings me to very different conclusions than everyone else here. Sometimes I feel like when all this QQ about melee DPS shows up, whether people are actually playing the game, or are just playing the game on paper.

All right. Are you fricking kidding me? On most fights if I don't out-parse our Marauders, I'm neck and neck with them. I regularly out-DPS our Powertech and our Mercs, especially on Draxus, because the current top parsing specs for all the other classes do absolutely horrible on Draxus, while Rage/Focus is practically cheating with how easy you can laugh your way to the top. Off-taunt is necessary during Nightmare Draxus because of Dismantlers. It can also allow you to cheese someone else's orb on Brontes with Saber Reflect. PS, Saber Reflect is super useful. So is Enraged Defense -- many dots are not cleanse-able on Nightmare, even with Evasion, so if you get one, you can pop ED to eat it. You're seriously under-selling Jugg/Guardian if you think we don't have enough utility. We have boatloads more utility than the vast majority of classes in this game. While it is true that if all things were equal, adding more snipers would be ideal, my guild actually tried this, and it didn't work, because we couldn't find more than one sniper who could pull higher numbers than me, and that one sniper was already on our team to begin with, so I was never in danger of losing my place to him. If anything, the fact that I can pull such impressive numbers with under-optimized gear (I still have 162 armorings in some of my gear!) has more than cemented my position in the roster. You keep acting like your guild wants to spam more Marauders and Snipers, but honestly, if you're good enough, your guild won't have to. Not only is this fear unfounded, but not all snipers and marauders are nightmare-worthy. It takes much longer to gear up a new sniper and teach him the mechanics than it does to bring your Jugg who knows the fights and does great DPS (even if he's not able to bring 100% in all fights). 0) I have never had issues with mobility, ever, in Nightmare content. Once or twice I had problems with not being where I was supposed to be, but that's my own fault and nothing to do with me being a Jugg. My guild likes to run 2 MDPS / 2RDPS, and our melees are experts at positioning, so we almost never lose DPS to having to run around. 1) We don't need more DPS. Dummy parses might show us behind Marauders, but Vengeance is by far the best at converting Dummy Parse DPS to actual raid DPS. I've pulled Dummy Parse DPS in actual raid settings. If you're having problems with DPS, it's not the class, it's you. 2) More Dots would be nice, but I reiterate that Veng/Vig is pretty much where it needs to be. 3) Veng can actually pull surprisingly high AoE with Sweeping Slash spam, and if you need way more AoE, just spec rage for one fight. I feel I should point out that this makes us way better at AoE than any of the top parsers, especially annihilation and madness. Honestly, I'm curious now, what fights are causing you to lose so much DPS? Grob'thok and Council (I'm on Calphayus duty) don't even give me trouble. Maybe every so often I might lose 0.1 second of uptime on Calphayus, but last HM Council run I did, I was only 2 DPS behind our Marauder, who was our top DPS. A whopping two. What's your guild doing that causes such a disparity between our experiences?

In his bum. If you could buy set bonus gear with Elite Comms, I might actually have a use for them, haha.

I don't think you understand the game mechanics. Look on your character sheet, under Melee (which should be visible on the bottom left by default). There should be a number called Accuracy. Accuracy Rating affects both melee AND force accuracy -- willpower has nothing to do with it. That'd be like saying Strength gave you melee accuracy (which it doesn't). Force Accuracy is always 10% higher than melee accuracy, so getting 100% melee accuracy will give you 110% force accuracy. Since your Force accuracy is 102%, that means your melee accuracy must be 92%, which is way too low. From this, we can deduce that you are not putting 3/3 points into the Accuracy talent, which is very bad, because even if you had 0 accuracy rating, you should have at least 94. Maxing out companion affection and finishing all their conversations will increase some of your stats by 1%, one of these includes Accuracy. Get them all done ASAP, they are important. This is the build you should use for Vengeance in PvE, no exceptions: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#101MMZcGMRMosRrfczZf00z.3 As for rotation, read Vesev's guide here, and take its lessons to heart. It's pretty fantastic. If it's too difficult to read at first, go read Dulfy's guide, which is also great. 2500 on a dummy is absurdly low even for 162-168s, and looking at your gear, it's not hard to see why. Your gear has ALACRITY for pete's sake. No Vengeance Jugg worth a damn should ever equip even 1 point of Alacrity. It is a garbage stat that reduces your DPS. Get rid of it even if you have to buy Accuracy/Power enhancements from the damn PvP vendor. Since you say you PvP, replace your relics ASAP with Obroan Serendipitous Assault & Focused Retribution relics. Those are BiS until you can get your hands on freaking Dread Forged relics. I cannot overstate how important those are for your sustained DPS -- they are the single most important pieces to upgrade. Going from dual Obroan to dual Dread Forged was a 200 DPS increase for me, and the gap between Obroan and Dread Forged is way less than the gap between Arkanian and Obroan. The only reason you should ever equip a "use" relic is if you need more burst. Vengeance is not a burst spec, it is entirely a sustained spec, so you're much better off with proc relics. Learn this lesson well: Ravage will be your most powerful move, but that doesn't make it the end-all-be-all. In fact, because you can reset it at virtually any time, it should never be used while Impale, Shatter, or Force Scream are ready to use. The only reason you won't use Impale > Shatter > Force Scream > Ravage in your opener is because you need to put Ravage on cooldown after the first Impale or Shatter so that you don't waste a Rampage proc. The trick to mastering Vengeance is to master the timing of all your abilities so that Impale/Shatter/Force Scream are always being used on cooldown, and you are never using Ravage when any of those abilities only has 1.5 seconds left on their cooldown. This way, Ravage acts as a powerful filler to keep your DPS nice and high while you wait for your big 3 to come off cooldown. With your level of gear and no set bonus, you should be pulling at least 3000 with Might stim. Try to aim for at most 1-2 pieces of Critical Rating gear -- crit rating takes the place of Power in your stat budget, and Power is the one stat that is always useful.

Exact same thing happened to my group. We reset the fight 3 times and each time, same result.

4/10 Kain seems like such a stereotypical name for a dark, quiet guy who wants to appear edgy. Dathka's all right I guess. My name is Darth Wrector Hellmont (Juggernaut)

^^^^^^^^ This. No one will ever know what happened there but you, the Emperor, and your handler, because the only people you did nasty things to were likely Sith anyway. Yep. Even Makeb can be done before finishing the class story, though I highly recommend finishing the Knight story. Don't get hung up on this one mission just because you apparently did some nasty things to some people who had it coming anyway -- there's a great deal more to the story, and the fact that you break free puts you in the perfect position to rescue the others who didn't. The Knight story after chapter 2 is SO GOOD. Don't rob yourself of the conclusion. The silly things you can do to your handler while he still thinks you're mind controlled is also hilarious.

That's what I did. Juggernaut is my main and Sentinel is my highest Republic alt. It certainly gave me a great deal of perspective and insight into each class' strengths and weaknesses.