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JackieKo

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I agree that choice should be a thing, but it should be to the benefit of the player and the class. I think the issue at the moment is the choice that Bioware is offering is between abilities that are class defining at worst, and game breaking at best.

 

Choosing between Guarded by the Force, Force Camo, or Blade Blitz is absurd. It would be more beneficial if Bioware created new abilities or augmented abilities that could be selected in lieu of current abilities. That is assuming that choice / player agency is something that they care about.

 

Many things I've seen to several classes so far, aren't things people want. I mean Force Camo didn't even last very long but it allowed Sentinel to get out, or around a slightly sticky situation; yet taking that away or having to only choose 1... ...well if they think that's going to encourage more to subscribe, clearly they aren't thinking. I mean it's not every Class so far, that's been hit hard, yet a few have been. One commended they made another class mostly choose between 3 abilities nobody ever used or cared for, and I think we all know who they are.

 

While I agree it wouldn't be bad, if Bioware created new abilities to replace some of those difficult choices lost--yet currently they mostly haven't--I think that's honestly the real sad part! Also those difficult choices, often used to DEFINE the class as a whole. And all this just so maybe we can use a dual saber, the benefit's are mostly well quite sad at best. So far I'm mostly mixed between a strong thumbs down, and two thumbs down so far! :(

 

I'm trying to feel optimistic about my Sentinel, yet don't like the choices I'm going to have to choose from. I also greatly MISS the old interface, even if they made the skills appear a bit smaller.

 

https://i.imgur.com/Vq1gaqL.png

Edited by Strathkin
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With Sin and Sorc being out and getting a better idea for how classes across the board look, I have to say this class really doesn't feel like a Sentinel.

 

Not having a stun or mez does takes away from the utility of the class, which could be good and interesting if Sentinels still had say, pacify to peel and were baseline very tanky. But they have to choose between their best way to escape being focused (Camo) and their best way to survive focus (Guarded by the Force), on top of losing pacify and so Ruthless Aggressor, which was their best way to survive yellow damage (even if it is bugged and doesn't consistently give the reduction it should and gets away from the point of the ability, peeling).

 

A lot of this could be fixed by giving some pruned things back as choices and making some choices baseline. Like baseline Transcendence and putting Pacify in its stead, or making guarded/camo baseline and putting Inspiration or Awe there. The 3 most iconic sentinel defensives are easily, Guarded, Camo, and Rebuke, and choosing between 2 of the 3 isn't very fun.

 

Also, for PvP the class feels even more pigeon holed into playing Concentration at all times. Conc and Combat do single target burst damage, so the CC immunity means you just play Conc all the time. While the AOE on Focused Burst means Conc now does aoe pressure better than Watchman, on top of watchman's new damage passives being terrible.

 

Speaking of Watchman, the 30 tier feels terrible. Flaming Wave gives you the damage of 1 cyclone slash, and you target who you want to die the least to make it work the best. In other words, you get an overly complicated Cyclone Slash replacement, an ability people rarely used anyway. Cauterizing Focus might as well only give trauma (which tanks do already). The only thing to give something useful is Force Lash, but it takes away your main dot for dot spreading (when aoe pressure is the one thing dot specs excel at), and always conflicts with Zealous Strike and Merciless Slash. I don't know what to take here because I don't want to take anything. If Spiteful Saber replaced Force Lash, and Malmourral Mask replaced Flaming Wave (detonating off Cauterize instead of Melt) I don't think anyone would have any issues with that.

 

Melting Center works well enough when paired with Burning Center, usually getting Zen off every Force Melt. Burning Zen would be cool, if those tiny hits didn't consume Zen charges.

Edited by Cavtarus
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Before I write out my thoughts on all the passives and how the disciplines perform, the Sentinel still feels like it has been overpruned. The Sentinel has some 16 abilities baseline, 17 with the level 70 choice from what I can tell. There is no reason why something like force camouflage should not be a baseline ability when it is one of the most well known sentinel/marauder abilities and what helps set it apart from the guardian and juggernaut.

 

Just like with my latest bit of testing on the Guardian, I tested combat capabilities on Onderon at level 80 with 328 gear and no tacticals. I also fought against the champion Imperial Guard enemies due to their higher health (3 million vs 50k of normal mobs) and damage allowing me to test sustained damage, rotations and defensive capabilities.

 

I'm skipping the universal/ general passives because there isn't really much to say beyond transcendence and force camouflage should be baseline abilities. Sentinel has 4 or so less abilities than everyone else and has no self healing. It needs something.

 

Watchman

 

 

Watchman's current rotation is dependent on spiteful saber refreshing cauterize and descent of the fearless granting more frequent uses of force clarity. I'm not testing with tacticals and we don't known what the new set bonuses will be, but, since spiteful saber and descent are both just "more damage" sets, I can still use the standard rotation without issue - I just have to refresh cauterize in a space where I'd normally use a filler.

 

That being said, depending on ability morphs taken, lengthy rotations feel a lot more enjoyable. I still dislike just how RNG dependent focus management is for watchman with passives granting a 20% chance to build focus when a burn deals damage and crit attacks building focus vs burning targets. This means that I either have an abundance of focus, or run out and need to use a saber strike or two. I would like if this could be altered to be less RNG dependent, perhaps burns granting one focus on a rate limit every couple seconds rather than the 20% chance for all burns to build focus.

 

Level 15:

  • Critical melt - more burn crits are always nice
  • Juyo melt - force melt instantly builds max juyo stacks and deals more damage per stack. The damage increase doesn't feel worth it and building juyo stacks is far easier than say, building merciless stacks.
  • Melting center - this is by far my favourite passive in this level. Force melt building 10 centering and dealing 4 times its damage allows for a much more fluid rotation where you can sync up Zen windows with every use of force melt. This not only increases your sustained damage through more burn crits, but also provides larger burst windows. Very fun.

 

Juyo melt doesn't do enough damage to matter and critical melt competes with melting center for more frequent burn crits. If I had to keep juyo melt, I'd also have it grant max stacks of merciless. Critical melt likely needs a little more oomf as right now, melting center is the best sustain and burst option here (not saying it should be nerfed, I think the others just aren't good enough yet).

 

Level 30:

  • Force Lash - replaces cauterize with an ability that deals damage for each DoT on the target. Sounds great in theory, but you just lost one of your DoTs so the maximum amount of damage this can possibly do at level 80 is....less than slash. Not only does this prevent you from using the best in slot tactical (if it's still around), but it also does worse damage than the abilities its supposed to be replacing in your rotation. Needs substantial buffs.
  • Flaming Wave - dealing damage with cauterize causes damage to other nearby burning targets. Again, sounds good in theory but in practice it only seems to deal damage with the initial cauterize hit, making it practically worthless compared to spamming cyclone slash - which does more damage.
  • Cauterizing Focus - cauterize refunds its focus cost when used with Zen and applies trauma. You don't reapply cauterize with spiteful saber so this is useless if that tactical stays. Further, this means you have to try and sync up cauterize with your zen window to get any use out of it, but you're going to be trying to sync up your Zen window with force melt for extra damage.

 

Sadly, none of these options are good. Force lash is far too weak to be considered over cauterize. Flaming wave is worse than using your normal AoE rotation because it doesn't proc every time cauterize deals damage - just the initial hit. Cauterizing focus should instead generate 1 focus every time cauterize deals damage or something similar. Fun ideas, but they're not strong enough to be considered over the baseline alternatives.

 

Level 35:

  • Force clarity - surprised it's still in the game. Needs to have the descent of the fearless charge regen baseline or a lower base cooldown.
  • Burning Center - crit hitting with burns builds 2 centering once every 2 seconds even during zen. Very nice for granting more frequent zen windows.
  • Burning Zen - melee attacks deal more damage during zen once per second. The amount of damage this deals at level 80 is about 1,300 damage, strike (the basic filler attack) deals around 8,000 damage. I don't think this is good enough to warrant taking over burning center.

 

Obvious choice here is burning center for me. Burning zen results in less frequent zen windows, and adds around 1,300 damage at level 80 to 2 or 3 melee attacks depending on how many you can fit in before all 6 charges are eaten up by your 3 ticking dots. That's not great. Force clarity is quite literally the definition of a "do more damage" button and yet it is still in the game. I know a lot of people already forget that it exists or don't bother using it, and without descent of the fearless it's not going to be worth taking imo.

 

 

Combat

 

 

Combat has been treated like a joke since 6.0 came out and the only thing keeping it alive from my understanding has been fanged god form - a tactical that completely redefines the rotation by allowing over half your rotation to be comprised of blade rush with no need for other energy building fillers. This is great - but it also requires that you use the tactical. This is one of the tacticals that absolutely should be baked into blade rush through a new Combat specific passive. Chris Schmidt said that approximately 10% of set bonuses and tacticals would be rolled into combat styles and I have no idea why this one hasn't.

 

Currently on the PTS, Combat feels really really fun to play - but it's because of a bug. Swiftness, the level 35 passive, is supposed to grant up to 25% bonus crit and movement speed but right now, it appears to grant double that. Because of the passive movement increase however, Combat feels like a Sentinel, though still a Sentinel missing the majority of its dueling tricks. Sentinels don't have full heals like Guardians, off heals like a Sage, stealth like a Shadow etc. They rely on their tricksy dcds to stay in the fight - but half of them are gone. Rebuke was enough to get me through fights vs PvE mobs and champion opponents, but getting out of a fight is a lot harder now.

 

Level 15:

  • Puncture - lance deals damage in a line behind the target. This is very tricky to use and I thought conal attacks were the worst AoE attacks in the game.
  • Zen Lance - using lance during zen resets the cooldown. Can result in big burst, but needs a tonne of focus to pull off and combat is already fairly focus starved.
  • Driving lance - turns lance into a leap that deals more damage based on current movement speed. Combined with swiftness and transcendence, this could be a lot of fun when it actually works (currently is in dev).

 

Puncture feels horrible to use due to how short and thin the AoE is. I have an idea how another passive could be redesigned so that it fits better with Zen Lance as right now, it's too focus hungry.

 

Level 30:

  • Defensive flourish - blade rush gives up to 6% bonus damage reduction. Combines with saber screen to give a 12% damage reduction increase. Not much compared to the 32% bonus damage resistance a sorcerer can now pull off with lightning spec - and a sorcerer also has off heals...
  • Rush down - blade rush deals more damage the faster you are moving. This is yet ANOTHER reason why transcendence should be baseline. It clearly wants you to have transcendence to make it work properly and if slows negate the bonus damage, this will be worthless in PvP.
  • Valor Blade - my favourite pick here so far. 20% bonus crit chance for blade rush and each use reduces the cooldown of valorous call by 2 seconds. I rarely ever use valorous call on live because of how long the cooldown is, but this will help me make more use of it. Bonus crit chance is always great.

 

Defensive flourish seems too weak compared to what other combat styles are receiving. Rush down requires transcendence and results in a damage loss if in PvP where slows are everywhere. Valor Blade is excellent.

 

Level 35:

  • Force clarity - said my piece
  • Swiftness - critically hitting increases crit chance by 5% and speed by 5% for 3 seconds stacking 5 times. Currently it appears to grant up to 50% crit rather than 25% which is bonkers good.
  • Quickness - critically hitting with a force based energy attack reduces the cooldown of focus spending attacks by 1 second. This is terrible as I think clashing blast is the only force based energy attack that combat has. if it were reworked such that critically hitting causes the next x attacks to require 1 less focus it would be more interesting. This would allow it to be used with zen lance to provide a much more consistent burst window where you initiate with an auto crit clashing blast before beginning lance spam with a slightly lower focus cost.

 

Swiftness is excellent, quickness is currently terrible as it is triggered by one ability once per 8 seconds.

 

 

Concentration

 

Concentration is capable of some ridiculously high burst windows. Right now it is straight up a better version of the guardian's focus. You can deal over 100k damage in 2gcds every rotation cycle with auto critting concentrated slice and focused burst. I made a comment in my Guardian post saying that granting an auto crit for concentrated slice might be a bit much - yet here I am consistently getting auto crit concentrated slices on Concentration - which has been considered the better version of Focus for over a year now. Concentration did at least feel less survivable than combat and watchman in testing, which made up for part of the damage disparity.

 

Level 15:

  • Unstable focus - focused burst AoE, same as guardian - too small a radius
  • Focusing strike - 15% more damage and trauma effect. Nothing to write home about
  • Zenith - 20% higher crit chance for 6 seconds after it is used. Fine on its own, ridiculously powerful when combined with Criticality at level 35.

 

Focused burst AoE could be bigger, focusing strike could be reworked to be a DoT to provide more sustain. Zenith is the best for single target due to a stack 45% crit chance buff in Zen windows.

 

Level 30:

  • Zealous annihilation - same as guardian, could do with making your next zealous leap free.
  • Zealous defense - same as guardian - the mini ward is too small.
  • Zealous discovery - zealous leap generates 10 centering. Very very good. Makes up for situations where you aren't getting hit and aren't proccing stoic passive/utility for extra centering.

 

Zealous discovery is the best here due to how much it contributes towards building your zen windows.

 

Level 35:

  • Force clarity - it exists
  • Focused meditation - dealing damage with a force based kinetic attack generates 1 focus. Only really useful with level 20's kinetic barrage and you aren't really starved for focus anyway due to how Zen works in this discipline.
  • Criticality - 25% higher crit chance during zen. This is extremely strong.

 

Force Clarity and focused meditation have nothing on criticality. Criticality allows you to:

1) activate zen causing your next attack to auto crit and boosts crit by 25%,

2) auto crit with concentrated slice causing your next focus burst to deal more damage,

3) auto crit with focused burst and with zenith you now have a 20% higher crit chance for 6 seconds,

4) assuming end game tertiary stats will be near enough the same as in 6.0 your next few attacks will have around a 90% crit hit chance.

 

Meanwhile, Combat gets a whole one auto crit. Focus also gets one. Yeah this doesn't seem fair, parsing and PvP will be the deciding factors though.

 

 

Now for something that affects how much I enjoy playing Concentration and how it could be resolved.

Concentration on live is actually my least favourite discipline to play because out of the three Sentinel disciplines, it is the most dependent on having 30 stacks of centering before a fight. Due to this, and how annoying it is for all the disciplines to sit and build centering stacks between fights, I propose that Valorous Call have its cooldown reset after a fight. This means that instead of being forced to wait between fights, you can just force leap + valorous call + zen every time. This is akin to how all Guardians now have the cooldown of force leap, saber throw and combat focus reset after every fight and follows the same reasoning. This would be a big quality of life improvement and would absolutely result in me playing the combat style more.

For group and ops content, you'd still be able to build centering before a fight as normal so that you can pop both inspiration and zen in a row. But, for solo content, players would be free to jump from target to target without extended periods of downtime between fights.

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I am sorry that I didn't make it as clear as I wanted it to be. But I had no intentions of them being completely similar and you really stuck onto that instead of seeing the bigger picture. There are specific things that other trees are getting that are - from a PvP standpoint, too good to not let all three have it. Which would always leave a rather big difference in varying levels of PvP. While there should be differences in their different specs, I do not feel any of the specs should suffer because of ones the superior by far. For example, look at fury/Concentration in PvP right now compared to the other two. I do PvE but I am mainly only focused on PvP, I have played all three specs extensively and have done so for a long time.

 

If you look back at previous expansions marauder/sentinel has had an auto critical on Annihilate/Merciless slash with 6.0 launch it was gone.

I think criticality should either come to all three or become a baseline thing to zen/berserk. Not having something in your kit reliably hit anything at all really increases the RNG of the spec, not just for PvP but also for parsing and raid boss encounters.

If you look at our counterpart of pure DPS classes, they have an ability that gives them auto criticals on their main abilities in all three specs. Including an accuracy buff button, we do not. So not only do we deal with missing our biggest abilities often in PvP we don't even have an option to auto crit them.

 

There are plenty of ways for the devs to make impactful and good but balanced options, having one or two that are the same when it comes to pre-existing things. Well, I don't feel like that's a bad thing as it's generic in option already.

Force camouflage being redesigned would be cool...

 

As for the inspiration thing, I get it. But, there are times you do not need it, sure in operations you do but in Arena? You can't even use it. There are things that you could give up to have your raid buff that I do not feel would break the class in any way. While I view from a PvP perspective where this ability alone, is lesser used I am still trying to keep PvE in mind, to me, it sounds like you want to make less impactful decisions as a whole for PvE.

 

As for the spec being a single target, there are AoE options and spiteful saber does a good job at making the spec feel more fluid on a single target. However, a spiteful saber with just the slightest change of allowing sweeping slash to also refresh rupture instead of just slash would have made it an AoE monster. For all three specs, this is definitely the heavier AoE focused. While what I said isn't out of context I sort of didn't think it out much for labeling's sake.

 

My favorite version of annihilation/watchman was 2.0. Force rend in my opinion has always made the rotation slightly off, which is part of why I like spiteful saber as much as I do. It really reminds me of the old annihilation/watchman flow minus 0meter leap, which I miss a lot.

 

But thank you so much for actually reading it. I spent a lot of time on it and testing on PTS, I consider it a win at least someone has read it. I do make some content so if you want to see what kind of player I am those video links I initially added explaining accuracy in PvP is my channel.

 

 

Absolutely! You're welcome!

 

I agree with your general overview in stating that you miss 2.0 Watchman Sentinel/Annihilation Marauder. That was my favorite as well. It was when it truly shined. Where you stated that I want to make less impactful decisions to PvE, you are incorrect. You stated yourself that you are more of a PvP oriented player. While I have done both for the amount of time that this game has existed. In Arena, Bloodlust/Inspiration works really well and keeps your team alive those extra couple ticks so you can defeat the enemy team. Self-healing applied with DoT's is the most single most important piece of the Watchman/Annihilation framework. Whereas the other two Sentinel/Marauder Combat styles do not have this capability and shouldn't.

 

However, I'm starting to notice a trend in this forum of a lot of people wanting Annihilation/Watchman to work similarly to the other two Sentinel Combat Styles. Since Beta and even after, any time a change was made to the Sentinel class, one of two things would happen. Either one, Watchman/Annihilation would be OP or the other two combat styles would be OP while Watchman Annihilation suffered. Each time, people in each camp would freak out until eventually there stopped being people in the Watchman/Annihilation camp. I stayed in the Watchman camp because I have always enjoyed this particular Combat Style the most out of any other. What I'm proposing is to specifically manipulate the Combat Style specific abilities, instead of manipulating every ability across the board. If we are pruning abilities, then we should start by getting rid of basic abilities and keeping abilities that are Combat Style specific. I stated in my last post as well that each and every combat style should be mutually specific and not rely on each other in a positive or negative way.

 

Again. Watchman/Annihilation Combat styles should NOT feel bursty, they shouldn't feel like the other Sentinel/Marauder Combat Styles. When you play Watchman/Annihilation, it should feel like a finesse dual one on one like Count Dooku or Ventress. Picking your openings and wittling down your opponent until they are down. It should feel like you can stay alive in the fray because of your self-healing capabilities. This a DoT/self-healing specialization and should feel like that. The other two combat styles are burst, therefore the 3 styles should not be handled in the same way.

 

Please refer to my other posts in regards to this Combat Style. Thank you for your time and thank you to the Devs for caring about this game as much as we do!

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  • 4 weeks later...

So with Fanged God Form gone, is there any chance we might see some iteration on Combat Sentinels specifically to alleviate the focus issues they have without that tactical? Maybe just make the hyper stacks minus the crit buff (which is essentially replaced by one of the new passives in the tree, Swiftness) baseline to Blade Rush? Add it to the passive that increases Blade Rush's crit rate?

 

The focus issues Combat has make some of the passives in its tree a lot less appealing. Zen Lance, for instance, doesn't really work if using Precision + Lance on its own costs almost half of your overall max focus, assuming you were even at max focus. Quickness lowers the cooldown of your focus-spending attacks by 1 second when you critically hit with a force-based energy attack (so, just Clashing Blast), but that cooldown reduction doesn't help if you don't have the focus to use them when their reduced cooldown ends.

 

This is the kinda thing that would have made having more insights on gearing helpful months ago, because Combat is gonna be a bad spot if they don't get some major help on focus generation before this goes live, but we couldn't know that for sure a few months ago because nobody knew if Fanged God Form would be removed or reworked.

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Good News everyone, Force Camouflage is back at the trainer !

 

Bad news Everyone, Force Stasis took the place of Force camouflage in the ability tree.

 

Why do i feel it is always one step forcard, three steps backward...

 

I honestly wished they limited it to 2 of the former 3 class abilities, based on Discipline or Combat Style chosen.

 

Still don't like we going to get the ability to potentially play any other Force User Discipline, don't think they should do that. I mean Combat Styles used to differentiate the class, but we also had Combat Proficiencies too. Is everything going to be virtually the same, with far fewer options to customize in only one default build?

 

Kind of sad.

Edited by Strathkin
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