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.

I'm hoping it's a bug of some kind. It's not just hilts, I'm seeing it with dye modules and relics too.

Agreed. I actually pseudo-retired my sent main over the course of 3.0 because the spec felt just so awful in 3.0. With the changes they made in 4.0, the feel of the spec is much better, and I pulled my sent out of retirement. It takes a little bit of getting used to (the dulfy guide helps a lot), but once you do, you'll be seeing good numbers over longer fights. In most HM ops boss encounters, I'm consistently pulling top or second to top dps in my regular raid group, depending on the fight. There are still some boss fights that are just not watchman friendly.

Okay, when I posted that comment, you hadn't yet. After looking the changes you made to it over, it's a little bit better. I still think that Reckless Abandon is over powered, but I'd actually have to crunch some numbers to be totally sure of that, and I'm not really a math person, so maybe get someone else to run those? I'll gladly supply parse data if someone wants to do it. As for the other abilities that you put in route 1, I like pretty much all of them except Furious Annihilator. Centering (Fury) is built fairly quickly in this spec, and I suspect between the alacrity you're adding with Ferocious Onslaught, and doubling the rate at which Centering generates, highly skilled players will be able to keep Zen (Berserk) or your new ability running almost continuously. I still think that something that helps our burst at the very beginning of a fight is in order.

I'm going to necro this thread, because I really like the idea of it. I think more posting more of people doing things right in group content should be applauded rather than just treated to a casual "Thanks for the group" at the end of a FP. Maybe we can get people thinking that being decent humans in group content breeds more decent people in group content. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So, to set the scene; I decide to queue for a HM FP or two to finish out my weekly. I get a fellow guild member to come along. I'm on my main, a watchman sent, mix of 224 and 220, about as min-maxed as I can get atm. My guildie brings his scoundrel healer, which while not his main currently, was his main for the majority of 2.0 and 3.0. We queue up and eventually Lost Island pops. We get a shadow tank and guardian dps speced as vigilance. I figure this will either be a breeze, or a disaster. Let me state up front, that I greatly enjoy a new player that is willing to learn. As we start moving through the trash to the first boss, my guildie informs me via mumble that the tank is spiking in hp pretty badly. We figure it's his first time here since he doesn't seem to know any of the mob skips. We get the first boss down fairly easily, but we loose the tank. I figure that one might have been on me, I derped for a bit and forgot about the adds on the first boss. We rez and on to the second boss. Tank hp still spiking and we loose him on one of the trash packs. But we get to the second boss without major incident. By this point I've taken a look at his buff bar; nothing out of place there, right stance and everything. I don't really worry about the lack of a guard because of how much he's spiking anyways. I give a brief run down of the next boss and we get started. We one shot the boss, but things got a little hairy. Both the tank and the other dps go down as the lightening spheres weren't dropped in the best places. Rez and onward. After another few times of loosing the tank to trash, my guildie pulls out a repair droid and we quickly take a closer look at his gear. Mostly entry level pvp gear. I don't know the optimal stat balance for shadow tanks, but my guess is that he was off on something. And it being entry pvp in a HM FP didn't help either. Knowing what's further up the road, my guildie and I start wondering if we have a failing group on our hands. Now I know that at this point, it's starting to sound like this belongs in the other thread, or that I'm bragging about me and my guild mate carrying the group. I promise it gets better. Prior to the Hulk boss (I don't recall the name right now, the one that smashes, hence "Hulk".) I explain the fight. We wipe a few times, but now I'm starting to see some potential in this tank. After each attempt, and explaining why each attempt failed, I see this tank adjust. He stands closer to the boss for smash, he uses force speed to his pillar, he get the boss a little closer to the center for each smash. Stuff like that. After a handful of attempts, we get Hulk down. During the next one or two trash pulls, we see the tank breaking the cc that my guild mate is putting out prior to the pull, making things a little more interesting and getting the tank killed again. After rezing him again, we explain why we're ccing things and to not break them. Again, this tank adjusts. The rest of the trash gets cc'd and exploded properly for the most part, and the tank doesn't die again. We get to the final boss room and after the cutscene I explain the mechanics and the little side step move that saves the tank a lot of damage. We pull and wipe shortly after the second pod explodes. We rez, review somethings, and pull from a slightly different spot that puts us closer to the pods. This time we beat the boss without loosing anyone. The tank performed beautifully. He moved the boss out of slime, he side stepped the cone of doom, he helped dps on the pods, and managed to hold aggro for the most part during the final burn phase (During which I was burning full out to make sure we passed. Major props to his threat generation there.). We all said our thanks for the group and zoned out. My guild mate and I chatted for a bit longer about how much nice it is to have new players that are willing to learn and adjust instead of banging their heads into the wall. TL:DNR. New, slightly under geared shadow comes into HM Lost Island. Has a bit of a rocky start, but he learns and adjusts to advice that he is given, and emerges victorious on the other side of it.

You still haven't adjusted your "Reckless Abandon" ability, despite the fact that several people have expressed several very good reason why it's greatly flawed and will never happen.

As a long time watchman(anni) player (beta, with a brief hiatus to vigilance(veng) guardian when bw wrecked watchman during 3.0) , route 1 is never going to happen. For a couple of reasons. First and foremost, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, did I say way, way, way, too much of a dps increase. We're already near the top of the dps charts, topping the dps charts depending on the fight and who else you're playing with. Second, the counter action by increasing the damage received, while potentially balancing in a pvp view, doesn't really do anything for pve balance (I'm primarily a pve player, almost exclusively). A good watchman player will almost never draw aggro from a good tank. And even if we did draw aggro from using this ability, sents have a number of good dcd's to help us survive taking 2% more damage while the tank re-established proper aggro. So that doesn't really balance out the absolutely insane dps increase that ability allows. Because I staunchly believe in providing constructive criticism, here's what I would rather see for new ability for watchman. Something to help give us some opening burst. As it stands right now, our opening dps is kinda pathetic, and it's a fair bit of ramp time before we're killing the dps charts. Something that front loads our dps a little more but doesn't mess with the overall rotation and feel of the spec. Maybe something like a tweak to Merciless Slash (Annihilate). As a for instance; When we have no stacks of the Merciless buff, Merciless Slash does 10% more damage, or is an auto-crit. It doesn't break the sustained rotation, because using it on a shorter cd more than makes up the increased damage of no stacks, but this gives watchman a little more opening burst and should help with transitions that are long enough for Merciless to wear off. As for the other abilities, I don't play the other classes often enough to be able to offer very much on those. I'll elave that to the people that play those classes more.

Ah, thanks. I must have missed it the first and second time I looked through the patch notes.

I noticed something while running an operation with my guild that I hadn't before: GBTF no longer consumes HP, and the tooltip doesn't mention it consuming HP anymore. Not that I'm complaining at all, I love it. Now to be fair, I switched from a sent to guardian for pretty much all of 3.0, because watchman felt like ****, but outside of that I've played a sent, specifically watchman, since beta. But I can't find anything in the patch notes going all the way back to the launch of 3.0, and I don't see anything in the watchman discipline or any of the utilities that I usually run that mention any change that drastic to GTBF. So I'm wondering when this change happened.

As a big fan of watchman for PvE since launch, I greatly dislike the new changes. The spec just doesn't feel the same anymore. Abilities feel forced, the spec doesn't flow the way it used to. It used to be that you ran things more on a priority system, rather than a set rotation. Made the spec fun and dynamic. The new spec is apparently a set in stone rotation that I at least apparently can't seem to get to click. I want something more like my pre-3.0 watchman back. /signed

As a big fan of watchman for PvE since launch, I greatly dislike the new changes. The spec just doesn't feel the same anymore. Abilities feel forced, the spec doesn't flow the way it used to. It used to be that you ran things more on a priority system, rather than a set rotation. Made the spec fun and dynamic. The new spec is apparently a set in stone rotation that I at least apparently can't seem to get to click. I want something more like my pre-3.0 watchman back.