Disappointing that there was no specific mention of dotsmash...

EDIT: Actually, I find all of the answers disappointing. The Carnage response is working as intended, and the future of Marauders in PvP is no clearer.

However, we did not plan to make Gore/Precision Slash harder to use by resetting its cooldown, because the Slaughter/Hand of Justice skill was primarily focused on resetting Vicious Throw’s/Dispatch’s cooldown rather than Gore’s/Precision Slash’s cooldown.

The answer felt incomplete, do the DEVs have any plans to fix the unintended gore CD reset ? Or are they satisfied with it ?

We do intend to make some changes to Annihilation/Watchman in order to improve its performance in both PvE and PvP, but we are not ready to discuss any of the specifics.

Can we at least get some sort of a idea when these changes will be proposed ?

Finally can we get a comment on dotsmash ?

All in all the answers are disappointing.

Answers seem very vague and not much detail was put into them. A lot of "we may" do this.

That's sort of disappointing.

Seems like a whole lot of talking around the true thing: No we won´t buff you because we don´t play Sents/Maraus and we hate your star players because they kill us.

Lots of might and maybes, screw you Bioware you just gave the Gunslinger a 100% DMG Reduction for 3s on a 60s CD for 2.7........yeah right we know what you play. Its not a Sent, just say you want to kill the class, because you hate them:mad:

ANGER! / he smiles / towering in / shiny metallic purple armor /

queen jealousy Envy / waits behind him /

her fiery green gown / stares at the grassy ground /

- J. Hendrix (check it out kids)

Some upset peepoles in here, but I can understand. Instant satisfaction is in demand, and hell, "isn't this a paid for service after all? Or not any more if I don't get what I want?" Ok fair enough if people feel that way...

But I've got to hand it to the team for even crossing this bridge, knowing that its not going to be a crowd-pleaser. Most importantly though is that they are listening to our constructive feedback!

We want changes in our favor and we want them now! But realize that changes in complex, interdependent systems takes careful thought, planning, and implementation. Producers of public materials *want to satisfy* their constituents. Dissatisfaction assuredly stings. But overall you've got to have a game that doesn't give undo advantage to a minority. (Yes, there will never be true balance, and I don't even wish for such utopia.)

Request to Devs: is there a discussion or explanation of what data you mine/analyze to make determinations such those surrounding the changes made or being proposed in this thread. How much does QQ actually play into your planning and decision making? [EDIT: to clarify, this is not a veiled accusation, but an opportunity for the Dev team to respond to a genuine question.]

The gore question was answered very well. As someone who plays combat sentinel asking for better burst on gore/precision slash is silly. Not to mention, that most marauders in ranked grouped arenas play carnage and the results put marauder is number 1 dps currently in group ranked.

Annihilation answer was lacking in detail. But it is good they admit the spec is not working well.

"Even with the changes in Game Update 2.7, Rage/Focus looks to remain the burst damage leader among the Marauder/Sentinel specializations." Is that for real? This is 100% incorrect. In terms of burst carnage is light years ahead of rage. All what rage does is aoe pressure. In 2.7 there will be absolutely no reason the play rage what so ever.

Last "The changes made to Undying Rage/Guarded by the Force were necessary to bring Marauders/Sentinels down a notch and give other classes and enemy NPCs a fighting chance against a Marauder/Sentinel that is being backed by a healer." Let me get this straight, *** does NPC fighting chance mean? I am not against the nerf to UR in 2.5, but giving it to snipers on lower CD, with 100% immunity and no drawbacks contradicts every statement you ever made regarding UR and makes no sense for balance.

If carnage's burst is just trailing behind rage's burst and has more sustained damage to provide pressure between said burst periods, why in the hell would I pick rage over carnage?

Rage provided more pressure with it's focus going into smash. However, this did cause a lot of problems in WZs when there happened to be 3+ rage warriors on one team. So, I definitely agree with the AoE damage rage could do being nerfed, I don't agree with the fact it's not getting increased single target damage to compensate. Quite frankly, the rage tree is still broken and has now had it's viability reduced. Even more so when we have the option to just run carnage.

Carnage shouldn't be just falling behind rage in terms of burst, there should be a noticeable difference in the burst rage can do over carnage.

The undying rage change no longer makes sense with the changes given to snipers...Evasion for 2.7 will **** all over undying rage and snipers tend to not be in the heat of the action like marauders are. It's more, sit back and pick off warriors or any stealth that dares come out of hiding. Especially while they are pre-occupied trying to kill the healer who needs to die before they can even bother with a sniper.

Happy they are going to show some love to annihilation...But I'm just seeing logic fail in these answers that completely forget about what they are giving other classes or what other classes currently have...

As for the difficulties presented by various forms of crowd control, that is intended. We will continue to keep our eyes on Marauder/Sentinel and how their overall performance is in PvP. If we feel that they are being outperformed by many of the other classes, we might consider having Gore/Precision Slash grant a few charges with a longer duration that get consumed when damage is dealt to help Marauders/Sentinels use Gore/Precision Slash to its full effect.

You know, you could always give carnage those charges at the cost of armour penetration. At least, against human players if it all possible.

Another suggestion...Go play the live game with a bloody marauder...Internal testing is too controlled and lacks the variables needed to get a real sense of how the class plays. Also, just looking at data will never give one the true experience needed to make class adjustments.

FYI, marauders and juggs tend to be the first one's with stuns thrown up their asses until the cows come home...Especially considering stuns can only be used from 10m now...

They are working with sorcerers more due to the black lack that came with the first set of sorcerer questions. This means we need a parody music video as well if they are to listen and work with us.

from what i can gleen from previous responces: they use scripts, where they rate abilities and analyze various modes (burst, sustain,ed time to kill, time to die etc.)

they also use metrics from pve and pvp (which classes lose the most, win the most, by how much etc etc.)

ANGER! / he smiles / towering in / shiny metallic purple armor /

queen jealousy Envy / waits behind him /

her fiery green gown / stares at the grassy ground /

- J. Hendrix (check it out kids)

 

Some upset peepoles in here, but I can understand. Instant satisfaction is in demand, and hell, "isn't this a paid for service after all? Or not any more if I don't get what I want?" Ok fair enough if people feel that way...

 

But I've got to hand it to the team for even crossing this bridge, knowing that its not going to be a crowd-pleaser. Most importantly though is that they are listening to our constructive feedback!

We want changes in our favor and we want them now! But realize that changes in complex, interdependent systems takes careful thought, planning, and implementation. Producers of public materials *want to satisfy* their constituents. Dissatisfaction assuredly stings. But overall you've got to have a game that doesn't give undo advantage to a minority. (Yes, there will never be true balance, and I don't even wish for such utopia.)

 

Request to Devs: is there a discussion or explanation of what data you mine/analyze to make determinations such those surrounding the changes made or being proposed in this thread. How much does QQ actually play into your planning and decision making? [EDIT: to clarify, this is not a veiled accusation, but an opportunity for the Dev team to respond to a genuine question.]

This has nothing to do with wanting buffs right now. The answers feels lacking, for example:

The slaughter part of the carnage answer is truncated, and fixing it is not an actual buff it is more of QoL issue (well it is a buff, but not 10% more dps buff).

Annihilation answer lacks a timeline, I don't mind they are not giving us details on how they are going to buff it. They already did a lot to class balance in 2.7 and I really appreciate it. But a timeline on when the changes will take effect will at least put things in perspective for us.

PvP answer is a "I really don't want to answer this question" type of answers. Again it is not about the buffs, it is about communication.

Everyone is confused why Rage is getting nerfed in PvP.. 2 Smash monkeys smashing a whole team for 10k+ each while the healer and tank hide in the corner is not fair or competitive. It causes all other specs to be useless in Arena. They nerfed it because it was dumb. Good for BW on this one.

Everyone is also confused about the future of Marauder PvP. To me they clearly stated it, they see Annihilation is underperforming and are working to fix it. Relax. They are also working on a way to make Carnage slightly less RNG. again, settle down.

When the Slaughter/Hand of Justice skill was first designed, it did not originally reset the cooldown on Gore/Precision Slash. After some play-testing, the thought was that players would just sit on their free Vicious Throw/Dispatch until Gore/Precision Slash was available, so we made the skill reset the cooldown of Gore/Precision Slash as well (to keep players from feeling like they needed to hold off on using Vicious Throw/Dispatch until their Gore/Precision Slash buff was active). The Gore/Precision Slash cooldown resets triggered by unplanned Ataru Form strikes was not thoughtfully intended, but rather, it is a byproduct of making sure Marauders/Sentinels do not have to hold off on using Vicious Throw/Dispatch until their Gore/Precision Slash comes off cooldown. However, we did not plan to make Gore/Precision Slash harder to use by resetting its cooldown, because the Slaughter/Hand of Justice skill was primarily focused on resetting Vicious Throw’s/Dispatch’s cooldown rather than Gore’s/Precision Slash’s cooldown.

Before I was born, my parents thought I would be a girl.

In that conviction, when deiciding a name, they decided it would be "Jenny".

Fortunately, they didn't do a BioWare, and after birth, when they realised I was a boy, they changed their decision.

In other words, you noticed that without said prec/gore reset, carnage/combat dps would be poopoo. Therefore you gave a prec/gore reset. However, it's not reliable and thus it causes our dps to still be poopoo at times.

With that said, you only poked half of the issue - carnage/combat has 2 procs, both are very important, both are "if Jesus feels like it" based.

As for the difficulties presented by various forms of crowd control, that is intended. We will continue to keep our eyes on Marauder/Sentinel and how their overall performance is in PvP. If we feel that they are being outperformed by many of the other classes, we might consider having Gore/Precision Slash grant a few charges with a longer duration that get consumed when damage is dealt to help Marauders/Sentinels use Gore/Precision Slash to its full effect.

Carnage/Combat:

Godly dps during prec/gore

Tickles outside of said prec/gore

Also, this is the only spec which suffers an overall damage loss because of a cc. With pretty much anything else, unless you get cc'd at the very end duration of a proc, your overall damage will be unchanged.

Hence the (multiple) suggestions to make prec/gore a stackable-deadly saber-like ability. Not to make the spec an opfotm but rather to even it out with everything else. With stackable gore/prec, ccing the sent/mara would still lower the burst, spreading it more over time (so you can heal to full ), but would keep the overall damage in place.

We are not completely satisfied with how Annihilation/Watchman performs. In a vacuum, where no movement is required and the stars align, Annihilation/Watchman is capable of dishing out some massive sustained damage, but that is not the world in which SWTOR gets played. We do intend to make some changes to Annihilation/Watchman in order to improve its performance in both PvE and PvP, but we are not ready to discuss any of the specifics. As we work to improve the performance of Annihilation, we will definitely consider the suggestions made in your question!

This feels like a deja vu...Oh, that's because you said pretty much the same thing in the last Funniest 3.

Something about "giving us a way to reduce the retardedly long ramp-up, but it wouldn't happen anytime soon".

Well, thanks for...taking the 5 minutes to write the same thing in different words...I guess

Now here comes the best part:

Even with the changes in Game Update 2.7, Rage/Focus looks to remain the burst damage leader among the Marauder/Sentinel specializations

There are 2 possible explonations for this:

1. You're smoking some heavy stuff

2. We're talking about 2 completely unrelated games

How is a single 8k hit the burst damage leader?

How is a single 5-6k hit (aoe reduction) even considered a burst?

and in PvE, the AoE damage remains unchanged

The only real use for this spec in PvE is running dailies.

Meanwhile, Carnage/Combat doesn’t trail too far behind Rage/Focus in the burst damage department, while also providing more sustained damage

Wait...wat?

Carnage/Combat with it's own issues, is light years ahead of rage/focus in every aspect (considering the upcoming nerf)

Hell, even aoe damage is better with carnage - gored dual saber throw crits for about 6-7k, gored smash crits for 5k, without the bottom talent for 20% base damage increase.

Again, I'm having doubts we're playing the same game.

Annihilation/Watchman is meant to provide pressure with its sustained damage

Look at the parses, think about how wrong this is, re-write the post.

Anni can only compete with carnage at full stacks, getting to full stacks in pvp is even more of a pain than in pve. Stuns, deaths, running out of targets due to faceroll etc. etc.

Oh, and anni is only barely ahead of carnage atm, and that is only because of the broken relics (I hope you know what I mean )

For example, we might consider giving Annihilation/Watchman the same kind of periodic damage protection we gave to Madness/Balance Assassins/Shadows and Sorcerers/Sages.

Awwwww, our BioGenious is at work!

Didn't think you'd ever make it that far, but you managed to conclude that after giving DoT protection to a spec, which dots can only be cleansed by 1 class in the game, you might as well give it to a spec which dots can be cleansed by 3/3 classes with a cleanse! Bravo!

Did I say it was the best part? Nope. This is the best part:

The changes made to Undying Rage/Guarded by the Force were necessary to bring Marauders/Sentinels down a notch and give other classes and enemy NPCs a fighting chance against a Marauder/Sentinel that is being backed by a healer. The negative impact these changes have had on Annihilation/Watchman self-healing is an unfortunate side effect. We might consider making a change to allow Annihilation/Watchman healing to thrive while Undying Rage/Guarded by the Force is active, but due to engine limitations it would probably not be possible to have it work as described in your question.

Normally I would present some arguments to why what you said makes absolutely no sense. But the thing is, I don't have to. Not with Guarded By The Doge™/Undying Doge™ on the horizon, which basically invalidates everything you just said.

With that in mind, the only thing I can do at this moment is point out that your mother is most likely severly overweight, which drastically reduces the visibility of her natural beauty, therefore making any sexual interaction very not likely to happen.

Oh wait, actually there is something else that can be done here:

and enemy NPCs a fighting chance

Good to know where you're taking your metrics from

Marauder/Sentinel that is being backed by a healer

Good thing no slinger/sniper will ever be healed (to full) with Guarded By The Doge™/Undying Doge™ up.

but due to engine limitations

Obviously, there's no good BioWare post without mentioning how bad the engine is. At least we now know that it even prevents abilities from working in a certain way

This has nothing to do with wanting buffs right now. The answers feels lacking, for example:

The slaughter part of the carnage answer is truncated, and fixing it is not an actual buff it is more of QoL issue (well it is a buff, but not 10% more dps buff).

Annihilation answer lacks a timeline, I don't mind they are not giving us details on how they are going to buff it. They already did a lot to class balance in 2.7 and I really appreciate it. But a timeline on when the changes will take effect will at least put things in perspective for us.

PvP answer is a "I really don't want to answer this question" type of answers. Again it is not about the buffs, it is about communication.

And you are never going to get those kind of answers from SWTOR devs unless the answer is practically carved in stone, because this is probably the whiniest MMO community ever, and anyone who has played MMOs knows that is saying something, so you are always going to get "safe" answers unless something is at the stage they are ready to announce it. They aren't going to give a timeline, because if it slips they get called liars. They aren't going to talk about class changes they aren't at least testing, because if they don't work out on their end and get canned, they will be called liars, or as a tool in this thread has already done, will be accused of hating the class/spec and trying to kill it.

I wonder how long this program will last when anything short of "we are giving you these buffs in the next patch" answers are treated like useless crap.

These are good answers to the questions that were asked, they acknowledge the issues, and commit to evaluate the issues, and in one answer they even pledged to consider the suggested fixes.

And you are never going to get those kind of answers from SWTOR devs unless the answer is practically carved in stone

Except they are already making this sort of communication with the community, these answers should not be an exception.

They aren't going to give a timeline, because if it slips they get called liars. They aren't going to talk about class changes they aren't at least testing, because if they don't work out on their end and get canned, they will be called liars, or as a tool in this thread has already done, will be accused of hating the class/spec and trying to kill it.

Except the million other times where they said: "We will try to make X in time for patch Y, however this is not guaranteed".

These are good answers to the questions that were asked, they acknowledge the issues, and commit to evaluate the issues, and in one answer they even pledged to consider the suggested fixes.

You seem to be misunderstanding me, I am glad that they are acknowledging many of the issues (because that is something we can build on). However, the problem is this:

When the Slaughter/Hand of Justice skill was first designed, it did not originally reset the cooldown on Gore/Precision Slash. After some play-testing, the thought was that players would just sit on their free Vicious Throw/Dispatch until Gore/Precision Slash was available, so we made the skill reset the cooldown of Gore/Precision Slash as well (to keep players from feeling like they needed to hold off on using Vicious Throw/Dispatch until their Gore/Precision Slash buff was active). The Gore/Precision Slash cooldown resets triggered by unplanned Ataru Form strikes was not thoughtfully intended, but rather, it is a byproduct of making sure Marauders/Sentinels do not have to hold off on using Vicious Throw/Dispatch until their Gore/Precision Slash comes off cooldown. However, we did not plan to make Gore/Precision Slash harder to use by resetting its cooldown, because the Slaughter/Hand of Justice skill was primarily focused on resetting Vicious Throw’s/Dispatch’s cooldown rather than Gore’s/Precision Slash’s cooldown.

 

This is a full paragraph, 171 words. Great explanation, great flow of ideas, but you reach the end and you have no idea if they are satisfied with how slaughter is right now (even with how things are) or if they plan on changing it. The whole thing is cut abruptly and then they move into an entirely different issue. Do you see the problem with that?

In general I think the questions didn't turn out that bad. The point of them is to ask the Devs opinion on things and see what their plans may be. We shouldn't go in expecting them to agree with everything and tell us when what we want done will be implemented. So I want to thank Gudarzz for getting this organized and done, it probably wasn't what you were expecting, but you did a good job imo.

We are not completely satisfied with how Annihilation/Watchman performs. In a vacuum, where no movement is required and the stars align, Annihilation/Watchman is capable of dishing out some massive sustained damage, but that is not the world in which SWTOR gets played. We do intend to make some changes to Annihilation/Watchman in order to improve its performance in both PvE and PvP, but we are not ready to discuss any of the specifics. As we work to improve the performance of Annihilation, we will definitely consider the suggestions made in your question!

While some more detail would be appreciated, it is good to know in general what the Dev Teams plans are. And as long as you are considering taking suggestions...

In the Sentinel Questions the Dev Team said they were considering reducing Annihilation/Watchman buildup. One of the problems that no one would doubt for Annihilation/Watchman is the long time ramp up it takes to get Damage going. As I explained more in depth here, the ramp up is necessary for the specs's core rotation (which the Community, in general, is happy with). So a solution that simply removes Annihilator/Merciless stacks would make the opening rotation very clunky. The one method I have found that keeps the same sensible rotation while reducing buildup is to have Annihilate have a 12, then 9, then 6 second CD. Rage management is harder, but very doable. This has the effect of keeping the significant buildup nature of the spec, while making it much quicker to get to the spec's fully ramped up damage.

This is a full paragraph, 171 words. Great explanation, great flow of ideas, but you reach the end and you have no idea if they are satisfied with how slaughter is right now (even with how things are) or if they plan on changing it. The whole thing is cut abruptly and then they move into an entirely different issue. Do you see the problem with that?

They did explain it. Slaughter is not meant as a way to reliably proc an extra Gore (so they don't see it as that important), it is meant to proc Vicious Throw with Gore there to allow you to then use that Vicious Throw. So the issue that the Slaughter Gore doesn't always match up with the cooldown Gore isn't an issue in their eyes since it is not meant to be an integral part of the spec.

Well time to hang up the sabers and get the guns ready for inc trench warfare style war zones, with all ranged and a huge dead man's land in the middle.

Obvious observations

In what world does rage post 2.7 have better burst than carnage?

Sniper buffs to evasion invalidate every line of reasoning you are using for undying rage and make you look extremely hypocritical.

I'm looking forward to seeing nothing but double madness comps in 4s btw. If you spent 1/4 of the time on these questions as you did on sorc/sage pts QQ about thier Buffs you might have done a better job.

Terrible

I'm glad they aren't removing the RNG aspect of carnage or dumbing down the spec.

Boosts to annihilation are long overdue provided they don't overbuff it's burst capabilities.

They did explain it. Slaughter is not meant as a way to reliably proc an extra Gore (so they don't see it as that important), it is meant to proc Vicious Throw with Gore there to allow you to then use that Vicious Throw. So the issue that the Slaughter Gore doesn't always match up with the cooldown Gore isn't an issue in their eyes since it is not meant to be an integral part of the spec.

You are actually correct, if you look at the top carnage parses it seems that slaughter proc contributes between two and 4 extra gore windows per parse. Which is strange, I always assumed it would give gore a much smaller effective CD.

To answer the question, yes and no.

 

When the Slaughter/Hand of Justice skill was first designed, it did not originally reset the cooldown on Gore/Precision Slash. After some play-testing, the thought was that players would just sit on their free Vicious Throw/Dispatch until Gore/Precision Slash was available, so we made the skill reset the cooldown of Gore/Precision Slash as well (to keep players from feeling like they needed to hold off on using Vicious Throw/Dispatch until their Gore/Precision Slash buff was active). The Gore/Precision Slash cooldown resets triggered by unplanned Ataru Form strikes was not thoughtfully intended, but rather, it is a byproduct of making sure Marauders/Sentinels do not have to hold off on using Vicious Throw/Dispatch until their Gore/Precision Slash comes off cooldown. However, we did not plan to make Gore/Precision Slash harder to use by resetting its cooldown, because the Slaughter/Hand of Justice skill was primarily focused on resetting Vicious Throw’s/Dispatch’s cooldown rather than Gore’s/Precision Slash’s cooldown.

This seems silly that we can't have some form of protection for the gore reset. An unintentional reset of gore is a massive loss of damage in both PvP and PvE, so for something that is purely luck based to penalize us so much seem rather unfair to me. I understand that the gore reset apparently isn't the main focus of the ability, but if we only had one gore every 15 seconds like originally intended I'm guessing that our sustained dps would be one of the lowest parsing in the game. The main thing that keeps us on par with other specs is a second gore, and missing that lowers our dps quite a lot, so having some protection for that would be quite helpful to the spec, especially for something that we cannot control.

As for the difficulties presented by various forms of crowd control, that is intended. We will continue to keep our eyes on Marauder/Sentinel and how their overall performance is in PvP. If we feel that they are being outperformed by many of the other classes, we might consider having Gore/Precision Slash grant a few charges with a longer duration that get consumed when damage is dealt to help Marauders/Sentinels use Gore/Precision Slash to its full effect.

I agree that the spec should be susceptible to CC. If we weren't then we would murder everything in our path. A small form of protection as suggested in our question (the static gore buff) would be helpful because some protection against random CCs would be great, but I'm not upset that we aren't getting it. I would find it rather silly if we got charges for gore. Charges would basically make our gores undefendable which would easily make us overpowered.

We are not completely satisfied with how Annihilation/Watchman performs. In a vacuum, where no movement is required and the stars align, Annihilation/Watchman is capable of dishing out some massive sustained damage, but that is not the world in which SWTOR gets played. We do intend to make some changes to Annihilation/Watchman in order to improve its performance in both PvE and PvP, but we are not ready to discuss any of the specifics. As we work to improve the performance of Annihilation, we will definitely consider the suggestions made in your question!

It's good to know that annihilation is going to be getting some love and while it would be nice to know what the plans are, I understand that you guys can't reveal everything so that is fine. What I would like to know is will we be getting to work rather closely with the devs on these changes similarly to how the sorcs are with regards to the wrath proc? That seems like the most effective way of making balance changes so I feel it would be good for a spec that the community feels needs a good bit of attention.

Even with the changes in Game Update 2.7, Rage/Focus looks to remain the burst damage leader among the Marauder/Sentinel specializations (and in PvE, the AoE damage remains unchanged). Meanwhile, Carnage/Combat doesn’t trail too far behind Rage/Focus in the burst damage department, while also providing more sustained damage – assuming the Marauder/Sentinel is able to stick to his/her enemy target long enough to get the job done. Annihilation/Watchman is meant to provide pressure with its sustained damage, but it might require a boost to get this job done properly. For example, we might consider giving Annihilation/Watchman the same kind of periodic damage protection we gave to Madness/Balance Assassins/Shadows and Sorcerers/Sages.

I would argue that Carnage is the burst leader for Marauders. Carnage marauders can kill a person (100 % to 0 %) within 4.5 seconds while a Rage marauder cannot (again I'm talking 100% to 0%). The main differences between the 2 specs were that Rage was AoE, Carnage was single target, and Rage was unable to be stopped (easilly) while Carnage can be stopped quite easily by a well timed (or lucky) CC. Those were the major differences, but now that the AoE is gone from rage, there will be no point in bringing rage because carnage can do everything rage will be able to do, but better.

In response to the uncleansable DoTs for annihilation, similarly with carnage I feel that this isn't the best way to go. Adding another DoT on to annihilate (or some other ability in the spec) would satisfy most of the problems that the community has with the spec. Making things uncleansable dumbs down the level of play, while adding a dot would still allow healers who are skilled to throw in a cleanse that would hurt, but not destroy the damage of an annihilation marauder.

The changes made to Undying Rage/Guarded by the Force were necessary to bring Marauders/Sentinels down a notch and give other classes and enemy NPCs a fighting chance against a Marauder/Sentinel that is being backed by a healer. The negative impact these changes have had on Annihilation/Watchman self-healing is an unfortunate side effect. We might consider making a change to allow Annihilation/Watchman healing to thrive while Undying Rage/Guarded by the Force is active, but due to engine limitations it would probably not be possible to have it work as described in your question.

My biggest problem is with the answer to this question. How is it that undying rage synergizes too well with healing, but the sorcs have an immunity bubble, and snipers will be getting, basically, 100 % damage immunity for 3-4 seconds on a shorter cool down than undying rage and it will have no penalty to it? The sorc one I am a little more ok with than I am the sniper change that is coming in 2.7. Snipers will basically have undying rage on a shorter cool down with no penalty, so how does that not work too well when being backed by a healer but ours does?

Rage/Focus looks to remain the burst damage leader among the Marauder/Sentinel specializations (and in PvE, the AoE damage remains unchanged). Meanwhile, Carnage/Combat doesn’t trail too far behind Rage/Focus in the burst damage department

Lolwut, do you even play your game? How could you think that rage's single target burst is better than carnage's? Without strong AoE, there will be no reason to play rage. The autocrit OR singularity/shockwave should be removed from secondary targets (not both). Would also have liked some more specificity to the anni answer. Hopefully they don't think dot protection is the main thing it needs in PvP.

And yes, the undying range response is extremely inconsistent with their upcoming evasion buff for snipers lol.

Snipers will basically have undying rage on a shorter cool down with no penalty, so how does that not work too well when being backed by a healer but ours does?

It comes down to survivability for a turret-based cast AC. Snipers are focused first in arenas, no exception. And they go down like a sack of potatoes. Under focus, they roll away, pop their lol-shieldprobe which absorbs like 4k, and then die. Buffing their Evasion will bring them in line with the other Arena classes in terms of survivability. As we know, most solo Q arenas are 4 DPS vs 4 DPS, so there is no healing going on. It's literally, which team survives the best. A dead sniper who was too busy popping his DCDs to do any dmg does nothing for his team. Which leads to the question....

Why are snipers the first target to focus in arenas? Because you don't focus the sorcerer with big initial burst because of the bubble + barrier. You don't focus Maras/Juggs first because of their Saber Ward and other powerful DCDs. You don't focus Assassins first because they are in stealth and will pop out a couple seconds after engagement. You don't focus Powertechs (AP at least), because of AOE & Stun dmg reduction, energy shield, heavy armor, and hold the line.

So where does that leave the sniper? Just ahead of poor Mercs in terms of primary target to focus. I've Mained a Mara since launch, and while I hate these multiple nerfs, I can see why Evasion got buffed for Snipers.