No, it's not. Just because I pay a sub and you pay a sub don't give equal validation to our arguments. And no, the forums aren't filled with 'Hardcore dinosaurs". They are people who know the game intricately and play the game intricately at a high level. Hell, even just a competent level. They actually do the content where the abilities all become relevant. And let's not dodge accountability here. You've been caught saying you can't be bothered to learn the game because it's too complex and you don't understand what abilities do, but also haven't done the thing that teaches you to do this. That's like taking a job IRL, not going to the training for it, then complaining to your boss your job needs to be made simpler because you don't understand how to do it. That screams entitlement

Yes we should change the entire game based around someone who can't do the bare minimum to learn the game and calls it too hard. Opinions like this are valid. /S

Go read a single guide or read your skill tree and gain the requisite knowledge and at least try to figure the thing out before saying, 'too many buttons'. Read the thing. Use brain. You claim to be the type of person who wants less buttons because you dont know the thing but its very clear from reading is the problem was not in fact that the game had too many buttons but that you couldnt do the bare minimum to learn your class. Would reducing the amount of abilities even have helped? It's not the core of the problem so i dont think so. This is 100% why i say bioware lowering the bar will never solve the problem and that regardless of how low the bar goes, people will still ask for it to be lower. Because the root cause is at the players end of things, not biowares and at most the thing they propose we all must suffer through would not fix the problem but play the margins on those who are almost there but still cant be bothered to read a guide.

No, for feedback to be valid it needs to be objective, not subjective, reality based and meaningful

I'll respond more in depth later. But yes this does not sound like a real post from a real person. You claim to be a gamer and your complaint is its too boring to do a thing because it violates class fantasy... mkay. So freezing force isnt rotational. It's conditional. I dont even play jugg and understand how it works. It's an extra ability rhat helps mitigate distance from a kiting target and also to bridge gaps transitioning to a target. Its like that smaller screwdriver you keep in your toolbox. Sure you can say its unneccessary, and you can just use the bigger one. But the bigger one doesnt work as well and can strip the screw and wreck the project. This is how a lot of "superfluous" abilities are. It actually astounded me that they took saber throw away because you have to understand very little about the game to not realize a ranged attack on a melee is super important to maintaining uptime and getting to and from a target. This isnt balanceable, period, because for it not to be a problem all bosses would have to be completely stationary, all of the time. As for enure? That choice is astounding as well. It basically heals to full if under any kind of sustained damage. Its why the thing without good AOE dr has any shot of surviving most content. Like its a super critical ability and i know thia and i dont even play jugg, it's just because i understand how the game works. What they are doing to sentinel is equally as horrific to me as most people see it. These changes wont do anything but anger more people. And it wont help casuals, that's nonsense. Because the lower your bar for the game is, the lower the bar for people complaining also is. And if you allow that cycle to perpetuate, you literally just end up devolving your game to pong because the next casual will just say it's too hard.

Went onto the PTS. Took me a bit to get adjusted, chose between A or B did some remedial testing, came to conclusions. First i'll answer your questions. I am a Carnage/Combat main, I will be speaking from that perspective alone. Please answer the following questions: What abilities make the Sentinel unique to you? -Transcendence. This should not be a choice in the kit. This is one reason you bring maras/sentinels to raids. This is raid utility. -Raid buff. I have access to it, and I also have valorous call to thus use it without costing me anything. This is good. Do these ability paths feel effective against enemies? -This is a non sequitor. Adequate testing cannot be done. I need the availability to test sentinel in higher end content to even have a chance of telling you how it would work. I can only speculate. So I will speculate: 1.) Defensive roll should NOT be a choice. The built in 6% DR and defense chance built into my kit on live is fine. If you remove it, you're just going to make healers lives more difficult come 7.0. If AOE is not something you just have, no one will take it on a sentinel. Defensive roll is the difference between getting one shot or surviving in a lot of nightmare content. 1A .) You do not understand how the content works in this game if you make the DPS choose between defensive or offensive skills. I will not, under any circumstances choose a defensive passive over an offensive one, this is effectively NOT a choice. This should not be a choice and will just lead to more complaining by the playerbase that they get one shot or die too much. It's a really bad idea, stop it. 1B.) Grant Defensive roll and other defensive passives either in their own section where you choose between defensive in a vacuum, or not at all and give them to use by default. This is stacking a mistake if you also intend to remove DCD's. If your intent is to decrease the TTK in pvp, making us choose between defensive passives is a more viable option. 1C.) Lack of self cleanse. This is usually baked into the utilities we have now on live. This is really important for a lot of reasons. Self cleansing on zorn & toth. Your self cleanse in council. Why we don't have this baked into force camo is beyond me. 3.) Removing force clarity as a default option is also wrong. It will effectively nerf marauder unnecessary as the premier set bonus is where we derive 10% dps + use of force clarity. This alone makes restricts choice and makes taking that choice, not a choice. Again, this is really bad decision making and a lack of any form of awareness of how these classes and/or specs are played in the game. Either take the time to understand what you're doing or don't do it. In this choice alone, you take away the sentinels mobility, and damage because the only thing you'll be allowed to run is the descent of the fearless set bonus. You are literally failing to accomplish your mission. 4.) Removing force choke / Aoe soft stun/Obfuscate. I need this for specific raid mechanics. They both add things to the game. It adds another layer of interaction and shouldn't be removed. Examples: Soft/hardstunning graces at Tyth, TFB cores if one core is killed too soon, or if I want to push the phase faster. The droids in SNV at city boss if one is pulled. Obfuscate is missing. I need that to deal with Snipers at Thrasher. Fingers at brontes in p1 or six finger phase to reduce the incoming damage. There are so many more I can't even think off the top of my head. Edit: Forgot Trauma. All marauder specs and all classes in general need this. Example: nim brontes going into burn. This is on the exact same level of interrupt and CC break. You gave us those back, are you going to give us these other things back that we need? This is a mistake. You are removing a layer of interaction we currently have in the game. You may view them as unnecessary but they are anything but. And what are you removing it for? to take it away from us so newer players struggle to figure out how to use these abilities? Summary: Either do none of this, or take the time to sit down with someone who knows about the classes / specs who actually knows what they are doing or the goal you're shooting for won't just be unattainable, it'll be broken. The example with force clarity and descent of the fearless shows this very clearly. This isn't just an oversight, you just have no idea. Why give us something cool if we are never allowed to take it. If you want to make us less defensible and force us to make choices, that's fine. but segregate defensive choices and offensive choices so those things can occur away from each other. Because, like I said, those things are also not a choice, but a requirement to be competitive. I LOVE the direction you went for combat/combat with the emphasis on speed, damage and uptime. That's amazing. That's innovation, that's something I WANT to play with. I will never get to do this because of how the choices are presented to me. Sorry if this comes off harsh, but I'm just being honest about how I feel after sitting down and trying to understand what you're trying to present us with.

Okay a few things. People aren't concerned that guardian is "less defensive" people are infuriated you want to strip abilities from them. I'm not sure in what world where us taking issues with ability pruning somehow translates into us having issues with 'survivability'. Like juggernauts don't even survive that well in pvp or pve. Tank jugg in pvp because of grit teeth does, but that's about it. Just because you mess one thing up, doesn't mean we're mad at this other thing you did as a causality. We're upset because you're not doing what you said, which is giving us the choice to respec into anything force or tech respectively. That's what we want. Don't touch anything else, period. I seriously wonder if you even have the proper knowledge of how these classes you're wanting to immensely mess with play in higher end content. Because that's what matters and it's the only thing that matters. "jedi guardian can be effective in story" is an asinine statement. A NAKED character with HEROIC MOMENT is viable in story content. Of course the stripped down thing is going to be viable in story content. Anything is viable because story content is such a meme. Like I can't even comprehend how you guys don't have an idea of how these things work, other than you just don't play the game. I'm not even trying to be toxic, and I sincerely and whole-heartedly apologize if it seems that way, Jackieco, rather I am just genuinely trying to be honest about what's going on here. Just leave the things we've worked hard to learn, alone. It's not like it's somehow going to gatekeep new people more than doing very basic things like reading guides and reading skill trees does. You want to know what gatekeeps 'casual' people? It's that they can't even be bothered to take basic steps to learn about their class. That's why story is as dumbed down as it is, and somehow making it simpler is going to make it a more positive experience? I've said this before, stop trying to hammer a Screw in and pick up a drill and use the appropriate tool. As a matter of fact, give newer, more casual people better, more well designed tooltips and tutorials that teach people their class, because the solutions you're proposing aren't even addressing the root cause. You're addressing a symptom.

So this is an industry standard thing. As a game gets older very commonly developers dumb a game down to appeal to the more 'casual' audience. They also tried to do this in 4.0 when anthem came out. It had disastrous consequences. 3.0/4.0 largely annihilated the raiding community. It took the entirety of patch 5.0 to even get to where we are now. We're currently in a state where the size of the nightmare community is 3-4~ times the size of what it was in the prior patch. Ability pruning is likely to erase any gains made to this. And what is even the point? So newer players have an easier way of understanding their classes? Last time i checked, newer casual people can't even be bothered to read skill trees. So how is reducing the amount of nothing they read going to change much of anything? And one more thing. Lowering the bar of one thing in particular, lowers the bar of all things. What is considered casual today, will be the hardcore of tomorrow. And it's always like this, things continuously get dumbed down for no point, just to appeal to a more 'casual' audience, in a cyclic fashion. If you guys want to do something to 'help' more casual audience out. Make an actual tutorial where you explain to them the theme of their class and how certain basics of it work. Encourage them to actually read the skill tree and think. Don't encourage them to just button mash by making things simpler. The game as it is, is completely fine.

It's hard to say but you have to realize with parses, anything over 22-23k (prob closer to 21) is fraudulent because of the guild buffs. You have to check the APM and kinda figure that part out for yourself

So, I have some input on this as well. Back on the PTS, I had a couple of friends who did 'frame testing' and reported that there was some discrepancy between alacrity thresholds and partial thresholds. E.G. you don't need 3200 for 1.3 and it could be somewhere in-between. I'm not sure if this is the case or not 100% but it's been my belief that the GCD is effected how this thread states. Again, I'm not sure of it myself and more testing needs to be done. What doesn't sound right is that there shouldn't be a discrepancy between a merc bodyguard and pyro pt. Those classes have no passive alacrity buff and as far as I know, the game doesn't calculate them any differently from other classes without passive alacrity buffs so they should be the same. There's probably some error in testing methodology there. Might be lag or software related. If you want a for sure way to test, go grab a virulence sniper. They have lethal shot, which isn't channeled or an instant. It has a straight activation time that is effected by how much alacrity you have, independent of breakpoints. I have about 1.37 or something on it right now, and you could test with rifle shot to see if the amount of abilities in the same time frame lines up with the amount of LS's you can do.

Not sure how I want to start this post off, but I guess I can get straight to the point. Fanged god form is a broken tactical, it's currently bugged, and even if you can bypass the bugs I don't believe it functions properly. I've been doing some testing for how the rotation for carnage changes over the past week or so to see how this tactical can be utilized and i've discovered some things. Fanged god form is currently broken. Hyper stacks fall off if you use ANY ability. This makes it essentially non functional for anyone not at a very high end nim level in pve content. You can't use any dcd, a self cleanse, any dps buff (aside from clicky relics, adrenal) pred, rez, or any utility skill OR BERSERK AND THAT SKILL MATTERS without hyper stacks falling off. I believe this to be a bug. There seems to be about a 0.7 or 0.8 delay in hyper stacks being removed once an ability is activated. This essentially means, that even though hyper stacks fall off by any use of any ability, it's 'clippable' (memories of 4.0 carnage and early 5.3 carnage) meaning that if you're quick enough you can land GCD's inside the 'hyper window' to get it to use an ability. Gore seems to be the most consistent. As long as you hit ferocity and gore at the same time, gore will always land in the window. Devastating blast and vicious throw seem to, 80% of the time activate / consume respective slaughter/execute buffs after 1 or more hyper stacks falling off. VT seems more consistent in getting 2 or more, and DB seems pretty consistent in landing with one. A friend and I did some experimenting and we came to the conclusion that to get hyper to consume DB, only the activation matters and not the travel time of the ability. Before I move onto the next part, I want to say, if DB can be clipped inside It's the most optimal to do so because of the critical surge into the auto crit providing an extra 10-30% critical multiplier. What this tactical essentially makes you able to do is remove DST / Assault from your bar completely in operations or pvp. You didn't need those things before much because of the environment of those things and rage having passive build up / existence. The next main issue and I believe this needs to be fixed along with utility skills AND BERSERK consuming hyper stacks: Battering assault needs to no longer consume hyper stacks. I have tried to tear apart the carnage rotation and find some window to fit in hyper stacks, but the consistent issue I have ran into is that by the time ferocity comes off of CD, you still have to wait for battering assault, meaning your hyper stacks will fall off, meaning you have to massacre, and that's a dps loss. What is doable is about 2 hyper stacks inside of the main burst window and 1 hyper stack inside of the smaller ferocity window. While those stacks matter with respect to giving critical chance to gore / DB / VT, I believe the intended use for this tactical is to provide a much higher crit chance to your hardest hitting abilities at 3 stacks and it would seem, that even if you can bypass the bugginess of it, it still can't be utilized fully because of how the cooldown of battering assault is. What needs to happen, is that it needs to consume stacks of hyper on use of certain abilities like ferocity or furious power do. So no DST / Assault / BA consuming the stacks and instead only the important abilities. With those things being said and from the state of how the meta seems to be building itself right now, even without these proposed changes (which btw, put an immense skill ceiling on carnage, much worse than 4.0, 5.3 carnage) Carnage can actually be a viable spec. The dps increase from not having to use massacre, it critting more, ferocity consuming abilities having 10-30% higher crit chance probably makes carnage viable again. Anyway, I will be working in the coming days on more testing for this tactical and I will post my notes to this thread. Enjoy your day.

So i bothered reading all of your posts in this thread before I responded to this post. The first thing I guess I notice is that you're soloing FP's and you can't do that anymore and struggling with heroics. What exactly became hard about this content, because veteran FP's aren't harder than they were in 5.0. Your gear might be worse, but that's something you're going to have to grind. The only retuning I honestly see with FP's is that were closer to 244/248 gear than 258. Unless you're talking about soloing fp's on the PTS with level sync down to 55 which was clearly a bug and not designed that way on purpose, so you shouldn't have expected that to be the difficulty should that be the case. I think your main issue is that you're not level 75 with any sort of decent gear, so yeah, you're going to struggle, especially if your apm/gear/rotation/etc isn't on point. To say a veteran FP or a heroic is too hard is just nonsense. Neither one of those things represent any kind of difficulty. Veteran FP's are a joke man, and totally soloable. I was in a czerka labs the other day, two people quit because one player refused to help and wiped the group. We kicked him and took companions out and continued on. If I had done that with just myself and a companion there would have been very little difference. Sure, it was easy because I'm 306 w/ best in slot things, an optimal rotation and apm and etc, but I worked for all of those things. The thing here I want to say is that, this game isn't hard. Even at the top end with nightmare raiding or ranked or w/e, it's all doable; nothing is impossible, nothing takes ages and ages and ages to do at an acceptable level or anything of the sort. It's about the attitude of the player behind the keyboard. If you don't want to try to get better or improve at something, you don't deserve the right to complain about hard it is. For people like me, the stories/heroics/and etc are all ruined by people like you. Anything from before kotet/kotfe is such a joke, I am literally unable to enjoy it because it doesn't even feel like I'm playing a game, it feels like I'm watching a movie with pointless interaction.

in pvp its different and I can't speak to how good sorcs are. They do usually end up at the top of the dps chart and it can be a good class if you get good at it. It's just about knowing what dcd's they have running, what part of their rotation they are at and other things. Sorc in pvp also gets a LOT of DR and SELF HEALS. Try being a mara in pvp, that **** is brutal. Single target lighting sorcs arent terrible. They are kinda **** on a dummy, but so is carnage and I've mained that and succeeded very much so with it in every tier of gear. When I say I had a sorc main on my raid team, i meant things up to and including doing sales runs, nim gods and obviously all of the old nightmare stuff. in terms of parsing in raid sorcs tend to be who I think i will have to compete against the most and the only time i've legitimately seen them struggle is on brontes burn and even then they can still parse just fine.

It's not. Lighting has some of the best passive aoe and some of the best and most versatile AOE in the game. It's single target leaves a bit to be desired but the rest of it makes up for the spec a lot. I actually have by request a lighting sorc on my team. Both for its debuff and because it's actually good in a lot of circumstances. Where are you drawing your conclusions from that it's bad

I am so tired of these pathetic arguments. Noone wants level scaling and even those that say there won't be problems aren't even for it. So why the hell are you trying to debate ppl who have an issue with it? sheesh this is stupid. This ought to be a logical fallacy. Arguing against something you're not even for.