We got multiple mines on 8-man. The people ran to other corners and dodged around them instead of with the group. 1 person died to stupid, but up to 4 mines can go out before someone truly has to eat a laser blast. In any case, we risk derailing the thread. There's a discussion of this fight elsewhere.

Assuming you have people call 'move' if needed when they see where the boss lands, then there are 4 different places someone can stand and still have to move at the same time as everyone else. We got it on our second try. One person died to idiocy, the others dealt with it. The fight is more irritating, but still completely doable.

My god, you're still talking about a Jugg in tank stance. It's like talking to a brick. There are only so many times it can be said that the discussion regards PvE DPS for both classes before I'd hope the message would sink in, but apparently not. If you haven't gotten it by now, you never will. I only hope that people looking for good information in this thread will be smart enough not to be mislead by your rambling. DPS Juggernauts are fine for most content. I've even taken them to NiM Ops. You will get groups. That said, marauders do more DPS and are more survivable in most cases. The DPS Jug who did NiM S&V/TFB with me rolled a marauder and had a much easier time of it.

While they can't damage him as much as some ranged classes, if you to kite Raptus they can do pretty much whatever they want and still not get caught. Damnable scamper!

This has been said before, but you seem to be struggling with reading comprehension so I'll give it one more whirl. A Carnage Marauder has an additional 6% flat damage reduction and an additional 6% defense chance. End result? My marauder has 30% damage reduction, which is within a few points of a vengeance juggernaut, but it also has 11% defense. Against melee and ranged, that actually ends up yielding more mean mitigation. Add in the 30% AOE damage reduction, which will affect most of what you take as a DPS, and juggernaut is blown out of the water. Since all of that has been said before and you missed it, please take a moment to re-read and digest the information. Thank you. Ok, I accept your challenge. - Here is a video of my sentinel soloing the Corellia Heroic 4 at level 50 in Rakata gear. - Here is a video of my sentinel soloing Hard-Mode Maelstrom Prison at level 50. I apologize for the aspect ratio. I played on 3 monitors. Now here is a raid story: one night while doing Hard-Mod Dash'roode, back before NiM when we didn't over-gear it, both tanks died with the boss at 30%. My sentinel stood in front and tanked him. Given that defense works on his attacks and his cleave ran into my AOE damage reduction, I was able to tank him from 30% to dead without losing any DPS. By contrast, a juggernaut switching into tank stance would lose significant damage. That final point is key. If you are doing content where DPS doesn't matter then you shouldn't be in that emergency situation unless your group is bad. Otherwise, having your Juggernaut switch stances for your quoted 'more than 30 seconds' is likely a deal breaker anyway. Your scenario is pointless.

In comparison to: - 20% damage reduction once a minute, lasting up to 30 seconds if damage keeps coming. - 30% AOE damage reduction always (one spec, and another can take it at a loss of only about 50 DPS) - 99% damage reduction for 4 seconds (health cost, but to be used when low anyway) - 50% damage reduction for 4.5 seconds every 45 seconds as well as a target-drop due to stealth - A 90% accuracy debuff on a 45-second or 1-minute cooldown (doesn't work on bosses but does on most adds) - Damage reduction at most 10% less (Watchman) or as little as 3% less (Combat, yes 3%). A juggernaut's: - 15% damage reduction at a cost of shredded DPS every 45 seconds - 20% less damage for 4 seconds after Force Charge - Reflect single target (as a DPS, how much of your incoming damage is single-target anyway?) ranged/force/tech for 3 seconds, once a minute. ...seems rather weak. Absolutely DPS jugs to not have the survivability that marauders do. But wait! They have Blade Turning! For a few seconds every three minutes on a cooldown that Marauders have too.

Never Tell Us the Odds got The Dread Masters.

Never Tell Us the Odds got The Dread Masters

Never Tell Us the Odds finally got Brontes. We were 33k away from getting it pre-nerf but alas, it was not to be

Never Tell Us the Odds got Brontes. We were 33k away from getting it pre-nerf but alas, it was not to be

Never Tell Us the Odds got Raptus

Never Tell Us the Odds got Palace 4 tonight.

Not really focused on competition and didn't care about maintaining the order of the operations, but none the less here are our kills so far: Never Tell Us the Odds The Bastion Republic Dread Fortress Boss 1 Boss 2 Boss 3 Boss 4 Dread Palace Boss 1 Boss 2 Boss 3

Not really focused on competition and didn't care about maintaining the order of the operations, but none the less here are our kills so far: Never Tell Us the Odds The Bastion Republic Dread Fortress Boss 1 Boss 2 Boss 3 Boss 4 Dread Palace Boss 1 Boss 2 Boss 3

This is silly. I've been farming this in an alt group over the last few days. The tank was an un-geared, un-augmented shadow alt and the healer was a poorly geared sage alt in DPS gear. We didn't even notice this mechanic. Maybe your problem was that you were on a shadow...oh no, so was our tank. It wasn't a matter of burning it quickly either, seeing how our DPS were equally under-built. Stun the reds. They're more irritating than the boss.

I was in this group. I concur. We 1-shotted every boss. We had no idea how to do the last one, did not freeze the adds, let them AOE us as much as they wanted, and didn't have a death. During the Electrified Plating boss, I stood in the water and continued to DPS when I got pulled it, popping one sentinel cooldown each time as needed. I never got even remotely low. For the boss that teleports, the grace period to get out of the circles is absurdly long. In the other FP, we forced our way through most of the spore boss before finally getting the mushrooms right. Was there even an enrage? You'd think we might have hit it seeing how we spent a large part of that fight without debuffing the boss. In short, they are farcically easy, just like the others and a huge disappointment.

I tanked the last 30% of Dashroode HM on my sentinel once when both tanks were dead. Sentinels must be better tanks than shadows! Nerf them too!

Never Tell Us the Odds The Bastion, Republic Titan 6 Here is a screenshot. I forgot to show the operations challenge mode, so here is a second one showing the achievement as well as the UTC clock.

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Dash'Roode and his Voracious Vuvuzelas. Never Tell Us the Odds The Bastion Republic side Screenshot Our Website

I found a way. It works every time. It is called a stopwatch.

Before anything else, I want to say that I appreciate you trying to get a clear and consistent picture of all the specs. That said, I see a lot of problems with how you went about it and there is a lot of missing information in your post. I will start with a quibble. More than just 'some' say Combat is just as good. Look on torparse. Almost all of the highest parsing sentinels on both the dummy and real operations fights are running combat. The fact that you express doubt in your post implies that you have not spent very much time looking at what other people are parsing, something that you should clearly do if you want to understand how the specs compare. There are several problems with this. The first is very simply that you did not give the DPS that you parsed with each spec. Without that (and your gear level), we cannot see how you compare to others. Clearly this is important. The notion that you can switch into every spec and perform just as well as people who spend a large majority of their time in that spec is highly unlikely. Post your numbers, or preferably your logs, so people can get a better idea of how valid your comparison is. You are also comparing the specs based on a 6-minute parse. You can expect a variance of (very) roughly 50 to 100 DPS over a parse of that length just based on luck with crits, random procs and offhand misses. You can easily see a variation of up to 5% just based on luck. You need to either a) do more parses with each or b) analyze how lucky or unlucky you got with the random elements in each of your parses. Once again, it would be much easier if you shared them. You also do not give information on how you executed the various specs. You seem to imply that Focus is your primary spec (forgive me if I am wrong) so I will address the other two. An Example of Useful Watchman information: - Are you 36/8/2 or 36/7/2 or something terribly wrong? - Do you use Zen exclusively on Overload Saber, or on 2 Overload Saber ticks and 4 Cauterize ticks, or foolishly whenever it is off cooldown? - Do you count your GCD's to keep track of when the Cauterize reset proc is on cooldown? - Do you use Master Strike intelligently when it won't push back the Cauterize reset? - What set bonuses do you have? The new one is extremely good for sentinels. An Example of Useful Vigilance Information: - Which set bonuses are you using? This can have a huge impact on Vigilance. - When do you back out to use Force Leap to build more focus? Or do you even do so? - Given that Dispatch is proc-limited rather than cooldown-limited, how do you prioritize it? - How do you prioritize Master Strike? Not wanting to derail this into a thread about optimal Watchman or Vigilance, the point is that you provide no evidence that you have spent a sufficiently long time working with either spec to be an example of top DPS. Once more, sharing your logs would help. Finally, did you even bother to account for the presence of an armor rend on the guardian parses, and the lack of one on the sentinel parses? Remember that an armor rend will increase sentinel focus and sentinel watchman by different amounts. Did you estimate those amounts and include them in your comparison? Since you admit your measured difference is under 5% from top to bottom, this matters. In conclusion, your entire post gives essentially no useful information at all. You did not parse for nearly enough time, account for luck with crits and procs, or discuss the effects of an armor rend on the sentinel parses, the sum of which is much larger than the variance you found (5%). In other words, your imprecision is larger than your measurement! That is the definition of a useless result. You also did not provide enough information on how well you executed the different specs or compare yourself to the dozens of others that can be found by perusing torparse for only a few minutes.

You're right, I forgot it. Added & ty Surprisingly, Blade Storm + Blade Rushx2 is actually more damage than Master Strike > Blade Rush, so I put it as option #5. That said, it's a moot point because if you're choosing between the two, it means you can use Master Strike > Blade Storm anyway lol.

All excellent points. With regard to a few of them: There is definitely some tension there, but I don't ignore the timing on the Precision Slash proc completely either. For one thing, every use of the Precision slash buff includes at least one Blade Rush and most include several, which makes it very likely that the reset will proc by itself. If it doesn't, I spend a few GCD's doing Blade Rushes to try to get the reset, but if it takes too long then I return to the priority system to get my focus back up for when Precision Slash comes off cooldown naturally. In other words, your rotation and my priorities end up having a similar result. Remember that after you consume your second Precision Slash, it *cannot* be reset immediately. Assuming 1 GCD of delay after it resets, you have 10 GCD's after consuming it where you know you won't get the proc, so no tension exists. Generally speaking, you don't have to worry about proc'ing the reset until Precision Slash comes off cooldown again. Until then the priority system is everything. There's no question that Combat is a lot more complicated than it use to be. No longer is it the simple spec with a nicely timed rotation. I think it's nice to have at least one of the specs have high depth. A lot of performance will just come down to endless repetition and building muscle memory. I try to keep track of common groups of skills, or ways that I often spend a set of several GCD's at different points. Even so, all my parses have multiple mistakes by way of the priorities I outlined, and that's not likely to change soon lol. And yes, everything is keybound. All motion is on the mouse and then I treat my skills like keys on an organ keyboard, with two rows, both of which can be modified by the 'Alt' key. EDIT: I must have been tweaking when I first wrote this. Yes, Blade Rush is slightly more damage (and I mean slightly - see my chart from before). But as you pointed out, Twin Saber Throw is more efficient on focus, being free. Therefore, as you see in my above priority system, I prioritize Blade Rush higher during a Precision Slash burn (want to maximize DPS under the buf), but I'll use Twin Saber Throw first during my filler when both Precision Slash and the reset proc are on cooldown. I don't think you have to rethink your strategy. Just remember that the Precision Slash reset will almost always be on its internal cooldown. After you reset it and use it, for about 15 seconds the proc isn't a concern anymore and Cauterize is a fantastic skill. Thank you for the discussion. It's great to bounce ideas back and forth. Your thoughts on maximizing the Precision Slash reset were great and definitely improved my DPS. You're very right about the range of DPS people will see with the spec. That's fair. Then again, remember armor rends. At these DPS levels a rend will be worth 1-200 DPS. Have to take that into account when looking at Jug, Merc and Sniper parses. Combat strikes me as a big investment, big reward spec.

EDIT: I looked at skills more carefully today and also folded in the information in the thread that you linked, with this result. In that parse, I got lucky with Dispatch crits and an average would probably be slightly lower, but then again crits on the rest of the skills were generally a bit low, so it's hard to be sure. Otherwise it seems like a pretty good representation. Here is the system I used: I broke the combat rotation down into 4 sections: Precision Slash + Zen, Precision Slash, Zen, Nothing. In each of those cases, the ideal actions are different. I then made this diagram. In it you can see the relative Damage-per-Second and Damage-per-Focus of my skills. I included critical hits, misses, defenses, mitigation and Ataru Form hits and calculated the average expected hit size. Specific values will vary based on gear, but I wouldn't expect the relative values to vary much. Note that Twin Saber Throw and Master Strike don't have a Damage-per-Focus value because they are free. Based on the chart, I used the following method: When spending the Precision Slash buff, I use the Damage-per-Second values rather than Damage-per-Focus to assign priorities. This is the burst phase. I can make up the focus later. I spend the buff with the following priority systems based on whether I have Zen or not: Zen is up: 1) Blade Storm, Dispatch, Blade Rush x2 (order flexible) 2) Blade Storm, Blade Rush x3 (order flexible) 3) Dispatch, Blade Rush x3 (order flexible) 4) Blade Rush x4 * Substitute Twin Saber Throw for Blade Rush if out of focus. Zen is not up: 1) Blade Storm, Dispatch, Blade Rush (order flexible) 2) Master Strike > Blade Storm 3) Master Strike > Dispatch 4) Blade Storm, Blade Rush x2 (order flexible) 5) Master Strike > Blade Rush 6) Dispatch, Blade Rush x2 (order flexible) 7) Blade Rush x3 * Substitute Twin Saber Throw for Blade Rush if out of focus There are enough Blade Rush uses in the above that I will usually have proc'ed the reset at this point. If not, I'll throw out another few Blade Rushes. When I reset Precision Slash, I repeat the above. Between the rounds of Precision Slash, the goal is to recover the focus spent and be sure there is enough for the next round. I interleave focus spenders and builders with the general goal of being over ~7 focus when Precision Slash is back (more if I won't have Master Strike for either use of the buff). I spend more if Zealous Strike is about to come up. For skill priorities, I use the Damage-per-Focus numbers, yielding the following priority systems: Zen is not up: - Blade Storm (more than 1 GCD left on Precision Slash's cooldown) - Dispatch - Cauterize - Master Strike (more than 2 GCD's left on Precision Slash's cooldown) - Blade Rush - Twin Saber Throw Zen is up: - Blade Storm (more than 1 GCD left on Precision Slash's cooldown) - Dispatch - Cauterize - Blade Rush - Twin Saber Throw General points: - I don't delay Blade Storm by more than 1 GCD. If it doesn't line up with the first Precision Slash, it will line up with the second one when I proc the reset. - I don't delay Master Strike more than 2 GCD's for the same reason. Delaying it to line up with a current Precision Slash changes the timing of all future uses which may not line up with their own Precision Slashes anymore, and given the chaotic nature of the reset proc it is hard to predict accurately. All I end up doing by delaying is reducing the total number of skill uses. - I don't time Zen around heavy hitters. I want to use it as frequently as possible. If I end up using it to spam focus builders right before Precision Slash comes up, so be it. That just means I was able to spend more time prior using focus spenders. I use it as often as possible. This will be even more important with the 4/4 set bonus. Because it no longer reduces your focus costs, it becomes less of a burst DPS skill and more of a way to increase your overall actions per minute. When it lines up with Precision Slash, great. When it doesn't, just use it. Misusing Zen as a strictly DPS skill is one reason why some people have so much trouble with focus management. - For my opener, I use Force Leap > Zealous Strike > Precision Slash + Zen > Blade Rush spam (+ Blade Storm if I get the proc) > Precision Slash > Master Strike > Dispatch/Blade Storm (based on Blade Storm's cooldown & autocrit proc). If you aren't worried about the tank ripping out your throat, instead of just Zen use Relic+Adrenal+Zen+Valorous Call+Inspiration. The above is the result of another day of tweaking my spec. Discussion is still welcome. I'm sure more can be squeezed out of Combat with further work!