There's your problem: You're at L35. Doc's value takes a while make itself manifest, because of how TOR's zone design is. As a Watchman Sentinel, I had the sentiments you did after getting Doc. The character is supposed to completely change the leveling experience, making things ever-so-much better...and he doesn't really do that out of the box. Especially if you've been keeping Kira well-geared, things actually get markedly harder if you switch to Doc immediately after getting him. Things change when you get to Belsavis, as Chapter 3 welcomes you with a bear bug of spiked enemy HP and throughput combined with the fact that you'll not be able to throw a stone without hitting a Strong. That's when ol' Doc starts really earning his keep.

Was this on your Sentinel, OP? As mine ran into the exact same problem at one point. Turned out to be a piece of bugged headgear that I'd gotten which changed it: Did the problem turn up around the time you got a new hat? And even if not, try removing your current hat anyway and see if that clears it up.

I'm...not really understanding the point you're trying to make. We're in agreement that 20% of a total Endurance of 1000 is 200. The poster to whom I responded said the ability he'd like to see was, "'After killing an opponent that grants valor or experience, you gain 20% of your total Endurance.'" Using standard parsing, the only rational way to read that is to mean that, in the scenario contemplated, you should gain an amount of HP equal to 20% of your total Endurance, i.e. 200hp. If the poster to whom I responded had meant an amount equal to 20% of the amount of HP contributed to your HP pool by Endurance, or something along those lines, then surely such would been said.

What often gets obscured in these debates about "reclassing", for lack of a better term, is the context of the reclassing. I suspect you would get divergent answers if you asked a sample group of TOR players whether they supported reclassing at L50 and whether they supported reclassing from when you get your AC until the first time you leave Coruscant/Dromund Kaas in your own ship. My only comment on the subject is that the way AC selection is implemented at the moment is terrible in practice: Players are asked to make a determination as to how they'll spend the next hundred or hundred and fifty hours after having already logged anywhere between two and ten based on flavor text and a look at talent trees whose workings cannot be divined due to the fact that the player hasn't gotten the abilities which make the tree work. Some form of limited reclassing while still on Coruscant/Dromund Kaas seems a prudent idea, if only to avoid bitterness over the loss of sunken temporal costs. As would redesigning the L1-20 skill progression to provide more of a front-loading of core rotational abilities. (To flog my own hobby-horse, it's not like tanking Guardians/Juggernauts could possibly want any tanking tools when they step into their first flashpoint aboard the Esseles/Black Talon.... Baseline Taunt for JKs and SWs. At L10. Please?)

Also completely worthless. To keep the math easy, lets assume at level-cap you have 1000 Endurance. Dropping something would yield +200hp. Into an HP pool that is going to be at least 12000hp. "Drop in the bucket," doesn't really begin to describe it. (Individual Watchman crit ticks produce greater self-healing than that!) If you're going to go with passive, low-tick self-healing, then the way to go is to take Merciless Zeal and apply it to all critical hits, not just burns, so that it can become a talent dump for Combat and Focus Sentinels once they're hit the tops of their trees. Ideally you wouldn't tinker with the percentage healed, but given that PvP concerns are implicated, the percentage would invariably be adjusted downward in the name of balance. Or there's the bigger number route, a la Victory Rush, that procs when you kill something and heals 20%, 25%, 33%, or some other significant fraction of your total HP. I'm certainly not expecting Victory Rush and its glyphed self-healing, but given the cited survivability issues of JKs in PvE, some manner of large self-heal would be desirable.

Snark aside, I've had the same thought as the OP: That a baseline self-healing attack for a quarter or a third of your total HP that is triggered by your killing something would be a boon to both Guardians and Sentinels. I'm equally sure we won't be seeing something like Victory Rush for many, many moons, and that the reason will be that because PvP exists, PvE can't have anything nice.

The only thing you're liable to find consensus on with regard to Sentinels on these forums are that: 1) Sentinels have a high skill floor. 2) Sentinels suffer from at least some playability issues. 3) Sentinels are inordinately hurt by ability delay. Beyond that, as this thread attests, opinions widely differ as to the state of Sentinels. Once the combat log is implemented, at least, we'll be able to start improving the signal-to-noise ratio so that we can get a more objective assessment of the class.

The survivability of Jedi Sentinels is ground in an active mitigation of incoming damage, through the usage of a diverse portfolio of interrupts and powerful activated defensive abilities with medium-long cooldowns. This was certainly an interesting design choice, given the popular perception of the role of interrupting as shaped by That Other MMO Which Shall Not Be Named. (That it is something rarely done, usually in dungeons and raids, and only on gimmick encounters where it is mandated by the encounter's design.) In order for such a model of survivability to work, two things are absolutely required: 1) Sentinels must have the tools to maximally mitigate damage in every possible PvE scenario; and 2) When an ability is activated, it must go off smoothly and without incident. The problem, of course, is that neither of those two vital precursors to the viability of the Sentinel survivability model currently exist. 1) Sentinels don't have the tools to mitigate the damage they routinely have incoming. This is a rather fancy way of echoing the upthread sentiment that Sentinels are single-target DPSers in a world filled with multi-mob pulls. We have three mainstay interrupts: Force Kick, Force Statis, and Awe. Force Leap occupies an odd niche, as it is an interrupt, but generally speaking not an on-demand one. (Though it is for Watchmen.) Of them, the only one that's multi-target is Awe, and it's on onerous one-minute cooldown. That we are heavily reliant upon interrupting key mechanics -- such as the multiple channeled PBAoEs of the Sith Shadow Assassins in the final story dungeon -- but can only reliably do so on single targets, makes things exceptionally brutal, given the clunky of nature of target-switching in the game currently. While my complaint is aimed more at the problems with interrupting, I'd like to bring up Rebuke. Simply put, the internal cooldown on its damage-dealing is a problem. With the current survivability paradigm, we need every last iota of outgoing damage: Especially when it is procced by uninterruptable attacks of the sort that comprise a large chunk of incoming damage. We get maximum utility of Rebuke when facing a single target that is bound by the same GCD we are: The problem is when we have to face multiple foes in which damage comes in but no passive damage goes out due to the internal cooldown. Or, to put it another way, during 90% of the PvE experience. 2) Key activated defensive abilities don't go off when they should. The dreaded ability delay bug. Our abilities which are off of the GCD have a tendency to "snag" when they are activated: They'll flash on the quickbar as if they have, but will not actually activate until you've cycled through another GCD and tried activating the ability again. This is devastating for Sentinels, because it will mean missed deployments of Rebuke, Saber Ward, and Force Kick and more avoidable damage taken. Something has to give: Either this problem needs to be fixed soon or Sentinels need to be moved to a more passive survivability model. Something has to give: You cannot predicate a class's survival upon interrupting and cooldown management and then have doubt as to whether those interrupts and cooldowns will go off when needed. (A third option would be to loosen the encounter tuning in the story questing so that it is not absolutely essential that Sentinels interrupt and/or dampen every iota of incoming damage.) I ultimately think that moving towards a more passive survivability model would do the class worlds of good: It is currently a chore to play a Sentinel, due in no small part to having to constantly cycle defensive cooldowns and interrupts.

All of the snark is this thread has been enjoyable. What I find most ironic is that the OP chose to analogize Sentinels/Marauders to Arms Warriors, when the Combat/Carnage spec of the Sentinel/Marauder plays remarkably like a Fury Warrior. Precision Slash/Gore functions exactly like Colossus Smash, with Blade Rush/Massacre subbing for Bloodthirst and Blade Storm/Force Scream for Raging Blow, with Zen/Berserk as your Death Wish/Recklessness/other-throughput-cooldown cyclical DPS enhancer. Not a perfect comparison, of course, because Sentinels/Marauders have way more pigeonholed damage-dealing abilities and you'll see a much higher uptime on Zen/Berserk than Death Wish/Recklessness, but they're still close enough that one could make the leap from playing a level-capped Fury Warrior to a level-capped Combat/Carnage Sentinel/Marauder with minimal difficulties. But then, I suppose I've always liked irony a bit too much for my own good.

Very well said. Ultimately, the pro-Dungeon Finder group will win on this point, simply because of demographics. Unless Bioware can conjure a steady flow of new subscribers -- or folks rolling multiple alts -- to keep the pyramid-like level distribution of the launch, eventually you're going to have the torrent of warm bodies that allow the current "system" to operate cut off. When finding groups for Esseles/Black Talon, Hammer Station, and Athiss becomes half the chore it is to find them for Maelstrom Prison and Colicoid War Game, tunes will change with amazing speed. But I can certainly wait until then. Bioware's got a full plate at the moment and, so long as the new subscriber torrent continues, the facade of functionality in the group-finding system can vainly persist. But an automated, cross-server flashpoint grouping system is inevitable, and peace should be made with that fact sooner rather than later.

Congratulations on the kill: Succeeding while on the bleeding-edge of content is never easy, no matter how "easy" the content nominally is. I cannot help but echo the thoughts of the poster up-thread who made the point that problem might be that today's raiders are too good. Today's hardcore raiding guilds tend to seasoned groups with dozens of man-years invested into the enterprise, usually having raided together across several different games. And there's only so much you can do in the raiding space that's genuinely innovative: For every Alysrazor, there'll be a couple of Marrowgars and S.S. Loot Pinatas, to mangle my tiers from That Other MMO Which Shall Not Be Named. It seems that the combination of vast experience on one side and hard limits to what can be done on the other mean that, even in an ideal world, it would be quite difficult to give hardcore raiders the type of experience that would sate their nostalgic cravings. At least an experience that would be accessible beyond the small number of hardcore guilds craving such a throwback. Feedback from those at the bleeding edge of content, though, is an unmitigated good. One of the reasons why raiding remains vibrant in That Other MMO Which Shall Not Be Named is the cooperative and symbiotic relationship between the development team and the game's foremost raiders. I can only hope that the run-around TOR's raiding guilds have gotten is due to things being insane because of the sundry problems associated with launch, and not a decision by the Bioware powers-that-be to discount the raiding community's desires.

I admit I said that rather poorly. It's useless as a simulation, because you can't truly simulate anything with post-L41 Combat without making provision for Precise Slash. It's quite useful in the abstract for showing Riposte's modest DPS gain, though, which was my poorly worded point. (Also to rebuff the notion that it should not be discarded due to seeming failures to account for things like increased crit chances on Blade Storm, though your further postings have shown that was not the case.) The joys of theorycrafting when a class is in its infancy. I've been thoroughly spoiled when it comes to being a Sentinel: I rolled as a Fury warrior in That Other MMO Which Shall Not Be Named, and Combat basically looks and plays like Fury with the added benefit that none of its core rotational abilities are proc-based, so I've never really had to wade out into the fever swamps of experimentation. (Should've gone Marauder, though, just so that I could still have to build Rage.) I'll certainly agree that you get more mileage out of it based on your spec and your level: Riposte was my best friend on Tython. Alas, we parted company somewhere on Balmorra.

When EasymodeX said "simplified", he meant simplified. Really, his simulation is basically useless because it doesn't take into account Precise Slash: For better or worse, every Combat Sentinel should have that on cooldown. Everything beyond that is just gravy in terms of methodological problems. (Though, as a Focus-expender, Riposte would benefit from Combat Trance's damage boost too.) All of that said, as an abstract exercise on terms generally favorable to Riposte (because it was not competing with Precise Slash or Blade Rush's Zen uptime), the ability provides a ~4% throughput boost. Which, while not nothing, is sufficiently marginal that it could be lost due suboptimal play arising from player reaction time, the "snagging" of abilities off the GCD, or connectivity issues. Which leaves us back at Riposte being more or less a break-even choice for a high-level Combat Sentinel in terms of net DPS. You'll get more mileage out of Riposte the lower your level, where the throttle on your DPS is more GCDs than lack of Focus. (I think the prime example of this is the Flesh Raider Chieftain, the optional Elite in one of the JK story instances on Tython. Trying to beat him with and without Riposte is like the difference between night and day.)

Sentinels/Marauders should have the option of going saberstaff/focus instead of dual-wielding lightsabers. Raise your hand if you're a Sentinel who's tired of the expense of having to divert precious mods into a glorified stat stick that hits like a wet noodle! If we want to argue about lore, the original Sentinel was the double-bladed saber-toting Bastila. (Lets also ignore that TOR!Sentinels are absolutely nothing like the 3/4 BAB, d8 HD, 6sp/level Sentinels of KotOR1.) If we want to argue mechanics, most of the coding is already there from the Shadow, and a simple fix where the "off-hand" strike's damage is computed as a mirror of the main-hand saberstaff can be done so that no changes have to be made to existing Sentinel formulas or abilities. The biggest challenge, I would think, would be for the art team and doing new animations for all of the abilities using a saberstaff. Which...well, they have better things they can probably be working on.

The difficulty roller coaster at the end of Chapter 1 is certainly one hell of a ride. The worst time I've had throughout my playing experience -- and I'm a Combat Sentinel now onto Belsavis at L44 -- was with the trash at the end of Chapter 1. But then Darth Angral was a cakewalk who I one-shot. And then the difficulty curve shot up again with the Harrowers. If it's any consolation, things do get better once you get past the Harrowers. But the Chapter 2 trash/boss cycle is just as bad as the Chapter 1 one.

Take a sabbatical from your crew skills and make sure to do every quest you can find on Taris and Nar Shaddaa. (If you're Republic; I'm not sure what the Imperial equivalents are.) If you do so, it can be guaranteed that you'll have more than enough credits for your speeder training and the actual mount by the time you get to L25.

Well, there's the corner that you have to write yourself out of in case of the spoilers below the cut came to pass in your playthrough, but other than that? Yep, it'd be fun to see him again. Heck, Watcher One convinced me to roll an Imperial Agent, if only because he proved that "an Imperial nationalist who has deep reservations about the fact that the Sith tend to be Chaotic Insane" is a viable archetype.

You have demonstrated that reductio ad absurdum produces absurdities. Which, I am fairly sure, is a tautological statement. You've done nothing to prove that choice is not a good thing. Though I am curious: How, exactly, would allowing for changing Advanced Classes violate "lore, theme or common sense[,]" or is otherwise contrary to them? Every Advanced Class is framed as supplemental training to promote specialization: Retraining hardly seems beyond the pale, especially in a setting where we take space wizard-monks wielding laser swords for granted, don't bat an eye at there being a planet-destroying doomsday device buried somewhere in seemingly every zone, and would be crushed if there wasn't space combat that made no sense when objectively looked at. That succeeds in being even worse than forced rerolling, because at least when you reroll you have the opportunity to play around with character's visual aesthetics and how they interact with their story quest and/or companions.

Put me down as a full-throated supporter of the Dungeon Finder from That Other MMO Which Shall Not Be Named and for the eventual implementation of a comparable cross-server matchmaking service in TOR. The simple fact of the matter is that in any multimillion person population, there are going to be a not-insubstantial number of jerks and other social miscreants. Automated matchmaking services do nothing to empower them: There will always be the potential for loot drama and griefing whenever you get a random group of people together to go dungeoneering. All Dungeon Finder-type systems do is make it easier to get another run going if loot drama or griefing comes to pass. But to each his own. I'd still prefer to do a flashpoint after a short wait in the queue over spending half-an-hour spamming the Fleet General channel for warm bodies at off-peak hours, even if it meant the apocalyptic community sunderings predicted by those who do not desire a Dungeon Finder-like feature.

It's worth noting that in most of the threads I have seen fond remembrances for the days before the RDF, they're laced in comments about how back in the poster's day of TBC, you had to walk uphill in the snow both ways to get your raiding attunements and were damn grateful for the opportunity to make Tempest Keep merely a setback. In my experience, it usually has been gauzy-eyed nostalgia. But it's also entirely possible for someone to arrive at the conclusion that the RDF has been a net negative through other channels, something I readily admit. The idea that there were somehow negative consequences for being a jerk before the RDF, however, is absurd. At least from my experiences in the Vanilla edition of That Other MMO That Shall Not Be Named, I had more than my fair share of parties blow up due to loot drama or folks being asses. It was one of the major disincentives to dungeoneering, at least for me: It took hours to put together a group that could, at the drop of a hat, fall apart due to loot or folks being unable to execute against a boss. The single greatest innovation of the RDF was to remove the risks inherent in dungeoneering: It's not longer a time-sink, as the matchmaker does the grunt work, and if folks can't execute, they -- or I -- can leave and try to find another group with relative ease. A final note on "ninjaing loot": How, exactly, does that work with the Need or Greed system? And how does not having an RDF-type feature prevent such, given that flashpoints already use what is essentially a palette-swapped version of the same thing?

Truth! Though what's funniest about the Random Dungeon Finder in-particular is that I always thought that those who lamented its coming to That Other MMO That Shall Not Be Named were motivated in no small part by gauzy-eyed nostalgia for the bygone era of their gaming youths. In the case of those who don't want it in TOR, though...is it possible to have gauzy-eyed nostalgia for a game that doesn't launch until tomorrow?

To my knowledge, the queuing woes of Tomb of Freedon Nadd and Legions of Lettow are exceptional: While I haven't been following the clutsercrap all that closely, to my knowledge there's been a dust-up as four or five separate European states have claimed one or the other as their "unofficial" server and thus each has been bombarded with far more bodies than had been anticipated. I don't know the precise deal with Bloodworthy, but given that it's an English language EU PvP server, I'd wager it's in the same boat as Freedon Nadd and Legions of Lettow. Which brings me to the point I'd like to make: All three of the foregoing servers are Anglophonic EU PvP servers. They don't exactly constitute a representative sample of the player-base, either across the Atlantic or in general. Most of the queues, at worst, tend to be at the most two hours. (I've only ever run into fifteen minute queues, but that's because I'm on an RP-PvE server and am usually logged in before the peak influx begins.) What Tomb of Freedon Nadd, Legions of Lettow, and Bloodworthy tells us is only that Bioware needs more Anglophonic EU PvP servers if they are to cope with current demand by the European market for PvP'ing in English.

While it might be tangentially, I feel obliged to say this: Well said. At least TOR won't suffer from that particular problem, as if push comes to shove and you level-cap, you can always run around trying to max affection on your companions.

It's amazing how much crap the Random Dungeon Finder takes, only to be missed so when one plays a game other than That Other MMO That Shall Not Be Named. On a more serious note, it's taken That Other MMO That Shall Not Be Named seven years to achieve the amenities we take for granted, and TOR hasn't even launched yet. Give it time: I am sure Bioware is quite aware of the benefits an RDF-like matchmaking service would provide to its players. One bit of That Other MMO's functionality at a time, though: Support for macros and UI modding, I think, are more badly needed priority.

It's not just ten levels. It's ten levels to get the AC. Then it's another ten levels to actually get the cornerstone rotational abilities and for your chosen spec within the AC to start coming together, so you can make an informed choice as to whether it's enjoyable. (Assuming you're playing something that starts coming together before L30. As opposed to things like the Combat Sentinel/Marauder, which doesn't really come into its own until the late-L30s.) That's a sizable expenditure of time on something that was being rolled because you, for whatever reason, wanted to try something different from your first AC. "Think hard on which AC to pick," is piss-poor advice and cold comfort for those who've discovered, much to their horror, that as they've entered the mid-levels their AC just isn't fun for them. This can be laid rather squarely at the feet of the aforementioned late-blooming talent trees. No matter how hard you think about your AC, you have more or less zero chance of knowing how it'll actually play if you aren't the kind who goes reading class guides beforehand. Bioware essentially asks you to make the choice that defines your character after you've sunk 4-8 hours into the process based upon aesthetics and what role you might like to fill, rather than what kind of playstyle you find fun. This strikes me as a serious design flaw. Retooling the base classes so that you can, in your starting zone, dabble in the foundational work of each advanced class would go a long ways towards remedying that particular problem and cure a not-insubstantial amount of agitation for AC switching, as you'd have better sorting of playstyles and more rerolling at a point where's no real issue of sunk costs. To head off the complaints of, "well, in other MMOs, you choose your class the same way!", all me to concur. The key difference is that, because of the fact you're logging more than a couple of hours in your base class, the impact of discovering you don't like your "class" is fundamentally different. In That Other MMO That Shall Not Be Named, logging five hours will take you deep enough into your class for you to get your core rotational abilities and let you see if you like the way the class handles. In TOR, for that same five hours, you've now just gotten your AC and are staring at another three to five to get the building blocks of your rotation. (Disclaimer: My experience is only with the Jedi Knight, which gave Soresu/Juyo Form at L14.) While I love the TOR experience, the advanced class system gives me flashbacks to Ragnarok Online: Having to grind through essentially ten levels of mechanical filler just to get to my main class was stupid almost a decade, and it's still stupid today. Also: Why is suggesting changes a bad thing, exactly, Ekswing? Feedback from the player-base is important, and TOR's still a bit rough around the edges. Certainly can't hurt -- and is by no means "disgusting" -- to note areas where improvement could be made.