I decided to hop on the PTS again to try some things out and while doing so, made a list of the numbers of abilities that classes have on the PTS vs what they have on live (by my count at least - sentinel number may be off by 1)

Sniper - 20 abilities before disciplines are applied excluding class buff and out of combat recover. (Down from 27 on live)

• Engineer - 24 (4 new)
  
• Virulence - 23 (3 new, 1 replacement)
  
• Marksman - 23 (3 new, 1 replacement)
  

Operative - 22 abilities before disciplines are applied excluding class buff and out of combat recover. (Down from 31 abilities on live)

• Medicine - 26 (4 new)
  
• Concealment - 25 (3 new, 1 replacement)
  
• Lethality- 25 (3 new, 1 replacement)
  

Guardian- 20 abilities before disciplines are applied excluding class buff and out of combat recover. (Down from 28 on live)

• Defense - 25 (5 new including guard)
  
• Vigilance - 22 (2 new, 2 replacements)
  
• Focus - 24 (4 new)
  

Sentinel - 18 abilities before disciplines are applied excluding class buff and out of combat recover. (Down from 27 on live)

• Watchman - 22 (4 new)
  
• Combat - 20 (2 new, 2 replacements)
  
• Concentration - 22 (2 new, 2 replacements)
  

Each class has a total of 2 fully optional abilities which are not included in the total, and a choice between 3 abilities. For the latter, since you must always pick 1 of the 3, that ability is counted in the total.

From this preliminary look, it appears that classes are being pruned disproportionally. The Guardian and Sentinel could both do with gaining back a couple abilities (up to 4 for the Sentinel). Having listed out the amount of abilities and compared them to live and each other, I see no reason why Sentinel shouldn't be gaining something like transcendence and force camouflage baseline, or why the Guardian shouldn't have cyclone slash base.

Jackie's original posts for Guardian and Sentinel include 2-3 of these at different levels:

• 
  
• New ability granted but there is no choice to be made and it is not discipline specific
  

Now that we aren't using the predetermined ABC choices on the PTS, we have no idea if these are going to be brand new abilities that we haven't seen yet or if these "new" ability grants are abilities from live that are already on the PTS. If they are brand new abilities, this would lessen the gap between combat styles currently on the PTS. If these are not new abilities, Guardian and Sentinel need a bit of love - especially the Sentinel. (BTW, loving that transcendence doesn't cost centering anymore.)

(BTW, loving that transcendence doesn't cost centering anymore.)

Just to be clear, there's a utility on the live server that removes the centering cost for Transcendence and puts it on a 30s cooldown similar to what's on PTS currently. That's why there was an uproar when it initially cost centering on the PTS with no way to change that, since it's one of the better utilities in its tier on the live server and is, thus, pretty much a no brainer for any Sentinel build. Not having that would have been a straight nerf to the ability even though it wasn't baseline, because the utility was so universally used.

I apologize if you were aware of this already, but I've seen this sentiment several times as if it's a new thing to the PTS so I wanted to make sure it's understood that it's not, it's just baseline to the ability now at the cost of having to spec into the ability as a whole.

Anyway, I appreciate the effort on going through with the ability count, this kinda confirms what I'd already guessed with Sentinels in particular that they seem to have less abilities, especially Combat. The fact that the class is also the only one without any kind of access to a hard stun is furthering the disparity in my opinion. No hard stun whatsoever, all of our movement abilities outside of Force Leap have to be specced into, and just less abilities overall compared to other classes. It would really be nice if Bioware would explain some of these disparities and their reasons for leaving the classes uneven like this. But we've gotten nothing in that regard. We can't even get a straight answer half the time. Jackie said clearly the hard stun was intended to be available for Sentinels, but then when it wasn't after the patch, that suddenly changed and we got zero explanation for why.

This whole process has been fairly frustrating for me. I get they can't respond to every piece of feedback, but they haven't been responding to anything recently. If we're supposed to be giving them actual useful feedback, we need to know why they're making some of these decisions and what their visions and expectations are for these classes. As it stands, with some of these disparities between classes with no defined explanations for why they exist, I'm extremely concerned about class balance once this update goes live.

I apologize if you were aware of this already, but I've seen this sentiment several times as if it's a new thing to the PTS so I wanted to make sure it's understood that it's not, it's just baseline to the ability now at the cost of having to spec into the ability as a whole.

As someone who takes the utility to make transcendence free 100% of the time, I was one of the people in uproar about it costing centering on the PTS so yes I was aware of it haha. Useful to clarify for those who didn't know though.

This whole process has been fairly frustrating for me. I get they can't respond to every piece of feedback, but they haven't been responding to anything recently. If we're supposed to be giving them actual useful feedback, we need to know why they're making some of these decisions and what their visions and expectations are for these classes. As it stands, with some of these disparities between classes with no defined explanations for why they exist, I'm extremely concerned about class balance once this update goes live.

From my understand we are still in the "high level" view of what is happening with classes - at least when going off Jackie's posts. We have no idea if and how classes will change when we get into the "deep dive" which we have been told will come "later". This, combined with the knowledge that all set bonuses and some tacticals (don't know which ones) are going to be baked into classes or straight up removed, does mean that it is a lot harder to not only test things, but know what to test. When I went onto the PTS last night, I deliberately did not use any tacticals - what's the point in testing Sentinel's Combat discipline with twin fanged form, a tactical necessary to make the discipline viable, when I don't know if it'll be around in 7.0?

I understand the dev's philosophy to reduce the number of abilities and remove dcds + ccs to create a larger divide between roles and combat styles. The fact that the devs want less has been made clear. However, it is clear that not every combat style has been treated the same way - unless the devs have further changes and plans for those combat styles like Sentinel. We do need to know if the devs are targeting a certain number of abilities in general, or for each role, and why some combat styles have way less than others. If Sentinel has up to 4 less abilities now, when it comes time to add new abilities, Sentinel may need to receive more to be brought in line with other combat styles - potentially resulting in another arms race. Better to establish a baseline amount for all combat styles now while everyone is getting rebalanced.

I was talking about these changes with someone on discord and they said oh but Sentinel is only a damage role. Well, Sentinel has even less abilities than the Sniper, which is also a purely damage combat style that can't spec into tank or healer - and Engineering still needs takedown to be baseline again for its rotation!. (Not that I want Sniper to have less abilities, all specs need at least one more imo)

Devs, please help us to help you better! Even just a message clarifying the type of feedback that is needed in each PTS stage would be incredibly helpful. I know that Jackie posts a few questions at the start of each feedback thread, but we could do with knowing a little bit more about the dev's thinking for certain things. I think that with each combat style that gets put on the PTS, there should also be a couple paragraphs detailing why some of the changes have been made and what the goal for that combat style is. From a UX standpoint, yes this could influence player feedback because players would be answering the gameplay and the dev's thoughts rather than just the gameplay. On the other hand, the gameplay is resultant from the dev's thoughts, and if the gameplay doesn't match up with those thoughts, the players can figure that out and help the devs get back on track.