As awesome as this would be (and let's be honest, it would be awesome, and I would be stoked if they did.), it's never, ever going to happen. For one reason. It's too much work for the animators. Let's just take one class. I'm going to use sentinels as an example, since that's what I play the most and know best. By my count, with sentinels there's 14 animations, minimum, that would need to be replaced/updated (Merciless Slash & Overload sabers for Watchman, Lance & Precision for Combat, Concentrated Slice for Concentration, Zealous Slash, Slash, Strike, Blade Storm, Dispatch, Blade Barrage, Blade Blitz, running animation, and idle animation) just to add one cosmetic style to how they hold/wield their saber. And that's just one class and one style. Double that to add the same style for guardians. Double it again for two new styles. Double it a third time for the opposite faction. 112 new animations for those that don't want to math right now. More if you want more than 3 styles to choose from (what's currently in the game now, plus two new styles), or if I've forgotten abilities that use the saber. I have no realistic idea how many animations would have to be changed for sages and shadows. That's a lot of new animations. Looking at the last time they added new animations to the game (when they added some new abilities when 5.0 went live), Bioware added just 22 animations. And that was across multiple classes and advanced classes. As amazing as it would be to have different styles to choose from, Bioware has better things to do, like animations for new chapter cutscenes, animations for new ops or flashpoints or uprisings.

Okay, Bioware, I know the chances of someone on the dev team actually reading this is basically nill, but posting this might make me feel a little better as I'm adding my voice to the complaints. RNG loot systems. They're bad. Like, really, terribly, awfully bad. You guys realized this back in the early days of the game when you had RNG loot for PvP (this was back in early 1.x days for those who weren't playing that far back). You realized that it was a bad idea and got rid of it. You implemented a system that allowed PvP players to get gear in a consistent, predictable way. I could play a match, get a hand full of PvP coms, when I had enough, turn into gear. Later, turn that gear, plus some more coms into super shinny gear. Still grindy, but you could figure roughly when you might be able to finish gearing out a character, and more importantly, you got rid of RNG gearing. Now, years later, you have, for reason I can't grasp, have brought RNG gearing back. This time in PvE. RNG gearing was a terrible idea back when the game launched, and it's still a terrible idea now. Get rid of RNG gearing. Now, I understand that you want to slow down the rate that players can get gear, in an attempt to keep them playing (and subscribed) for longer. That makes more money for you. I get that. I understand that reasoning. RNG is not the way to go about it. It's not "exciting" to hope that you might get a piece of gear you can actually use out of a chest that you had to grind time and energy into. It feels like a slap in the face. And any short jubilation that there might be at finally getting a piece is quickly drowned under the realization of "****, I opened X-number of crates for one piece of gear. How many more before I get another one?" It is NOT exciting, it's frustrating. Not only is this current GC gearing system highly dependent on RNGesus smiling on you, it's also insanely complicated. I recently returned to the game after close to a year away. I got my main up to 70 and went to see if I could get any cheap lvl 70 gear to get back into HM FP, maybe even some story OPs if I felt like it. I took a look at the vendors and promptly realized that I had no idea who to go to get stuff or what currency they even wanted for their wears. I looked online for information. Thus armed and informed, I went back to the vendors. Not only could I not get anything, I realized that I was hours and hours of grinding, + being blessed by RNG, + 3 vendors away from being able to get 1 (one, singular) piece of gear. TL-DNR - Dear Bioware, the GC is a ******, RNG way to get gear. Please make it not RNG. Thanks

Personally I've played watchman from early access up to just after the launch of 3.0. During the duration of 3.x I played my vig guardian. I just couldn't get a good bead on the 3.x play style for watchman and I didn't enjoy it. 4.0 brought my watchman back out of retirement and back to his main status. While it's not exactly like it was in 2.x (the best time for watchman imo), it's similar enough to me that I can make sense of the priority/rotation again, and I find it enjoyable to play. All of that being said, when my sub runs out at the end of May, I'm probably out. But that has more to do with a lack of content and the rate of bug fixes rather than the feel of the class that I have enjoyed the most for both gameplay reasons and lore reasons. Unless BW does a near 180 flip with their direction for the game in the coming months.

Happy to provide something that was sort of useful in the interim.

In general I agree with you Strref. One thing that I would note about Rebuke though, and this is from an almost purely pve perspective; you can trigger it off any tick of damage that you take. This includes DoTs. So if you know that you don't need the defensive ability of Rebuke for a little while and you have a DoT ticking on you, even if your not being attacked directly, you can still pop Rebuke and get some good out of it. You increase your out going dps and you take a little bit less damage from the DoTs, making things a little easier on your healers. Is it a lot in either case? No, not really. But when you're trying to beat an enrage, every bit of dps/damage reduction helps. So a lot of the Rebuke utilities are useful to some degree in pve. All of that being said, I wouldn't mind if some of the lackluster/never taken utilities were re-worked, combined with other utilities or flat out removed to make way for some new ones

Here's a translation for your imperial scum Jedi Enforcer = Cloak of Carnage Debilitation = Overwhelm Jedi Crusader = Cloak of Rage Adamant = Inexorable Stoic = Brazen Trailblazer = Path Carver Reining Reach = Maiming Reach Unwavering Resolve = Unflinching Determination Incisor = Interceptor Ardor = Relentless Defensive Roll = Defensive Roll Watchguard = Subjugation Pulse = Strangulate Displacement = Displacement Force Fade = Phantom Inspired Focus = Thirst for Rage Fleet-footed = Unbound Expunging Camouflage = Expunging Camouflage Jedi Promulgator = Cloak of Annihilation Jedi Pursuit = Inescapable Enduring = Undying Zealous Ward = Blood Ward Contemplation = Brooding Cut Loose = Through Victory Rebuke = Cloak of Pain Pacify = Obfuscate Inspiration = Bloodthirst Centering = Fury I think I got all of the important ones. Let me know if I missed anything

I like this a lot better than your first idea (the super super buff ability). While I'm not sure quite how it would fit in to the current watchman feel, this doesn't feel like an OP ability. In it's present iteration, I don't see much use for this ability in pve (which is primarily the lens that I look through since I hardly pvp at all), outside of a few trash packs. It might have a little more use in pvp because of the slow, but I'll let someone with a little more watchman pvp experience weigh in on that aspect.

I don't have a definite time in terms of hours played (just haven't bothered to /played in ages and I'm not in a spot where I can do it right this second), but I started playing during the final beta weekend and pre-release early access. And I've been playing pretty much ever since then with no lapses in my sub. I may not play every day because of, well, life, but I usually get several hours a week in. Sometimes it's more, like 4-5 hours, 3-4 days a week. Sometimes it's just the hour or two that my raid group runs that week.

Or had the patch up on the PTS and allowed players to have a look at it before it ever went live. I'm seeing more and more stuff get into the live game that could have been dealt with before going live by letting people have some kind of PTS access. While to a degree I can understand not wanting to use a PTS due to cost or not wanting players to get too much of a preview of upcoming changes, at this point I would start wondering if having a week PTS period before major patches go live would be well worth it. Most all of the bugs in the 4.0 update were discovered by players within 24-48 hours of the servers coming back up. Even a week of lead time might be useful. And as others have said, players are more willing to deal with bugs in a PTS scene because, well, it's a "test" server. I remember when the game launched, the PTS was online somewhat regularly. I never really used it, but it was there. Now a days, I don't even bother checking the PTS status because 99.99(add in about ... ... ... a bazillion more 9s)% of the time it's offline. When this game launched, it was widely considered to be one of the most bug free mmo launches to date. Now, it's just full of bugs, some fairly minor, others down right awful. Seriously Eric (and any other EA/BW people who might happen to look in on the forums), please please please please pleasepleasepleaseplease, put the test server up more often. The player base will catch things that the QA team clearly doesn't know how/where to look for, and your players will be less angry at you because your game work better on the live servers.

I'm not opposed to this idea, but it's a little much to ask the devs to completely re-work all of the animations to account for a reverse grip. It would require a lot of time and effort that quite frankly I'm not sure the devs have right now. And as a fun bit of trivia, Ashoka actually practiced form v shien rather than form iv ataru.

This is a customer service and PR disaster of an announcement Eric. Not one, but two major patches to fix a major problem with the game? While I know that internally, the game is still functioning (My guild and I successfully did a TFB HM last night and the tenticals in the first phase of the last boss, and TWH never turned to face the tanks, but they only hit the tanks as they should. Disconcerting, but we made it work), it's still a pretty major bug and not every group will be able to adapt. And from what I've been reading, some fights are not doable with the telegraphs not facing the right way. While I can understand that sometimes your dev team might get overloaded with things that need to be done, there are times in customer service industries (and make no mistake, running this game is a big customer service gig) that you need to drop everything else and correct something to make the customer happy and want to continue spending money with you. This is one of those times. You need to the 15 and counting pages of customer feed back you're getting after your post, take it to your dev team, and have them correct the issue ASAP. Not in April with 4.3, not in 3 weeks with 4.2. As soon as humanly possible. I've been following this game since before it was in beta, I've been a subscriber since the very beginning and I've never let it laps. But here I am considering canceling my sub and moving on to play other games after nearly 5 years. In the beginning I played for the story, and when I finished that I played for the people that I met in my guild running ops. But lately, I've been seeing less and less for my money and I'm starting to doubt that it's worth it. There has been no new ops content in ages, after the dev team claimed that they would never again allow a long stretch between endgame content again. The new KOTFE story is somewhat interesting, but chapter x to me less than an hour and a half on my main character. And that was with allowing the cut-scenes to play and taking the time to read each choice I was given and give it a second or two of consideration. That is simply not enough content.

You forgot gunslingers.

I'll grant you that it's an amusing idea, but I doubt it's going to get you any real class balance. Just saying.

Because while a lot of us are interested in the results, not all of us have super great awesome math skills, or the time to work through the calculations.

Hopefully the fix that they're putting out tomorrow to address the other crafting issues corrects this issue as well. I kinda doubt it, but one can hope.