I've seen something like it happen before but not on this scale; I agree that it's very unlikely.

New "rotation"? There's nothing significantly new in the PTS guardians. They are the same guardians as what we have on live, minus many mostly non-dps abilities. The "rotations" aren't changing. If all you do is run planetary dailies or solo story content, you don't -need- most of what's on anyone's toolbar to survive (especially not if we had working companions). Heck, you don't even need to have picked an advanced class; I'm sure I could run those Onderon dailies with 4 or 5 buttons if not less. If I remotely suspected this was just a change to the classes, an "overhaul", where they gained some things and lost others and I had to learn new and different ways to function competitively, I would cheerfully currently be in the "wait and see" camp. I've changed specs for expacs before with a shrug. That's not what this is. The unavailability of abilities is deliberate; if we want to play a dps character that can blade blitz then, according to the documentation, we are supposed to have to respec and drop enure or something else. The guardian I have on live that can saber reflect, focused defense, blade blitz, guardian leap and enure all for one fight, sometimes multiple times each, in something like the Eternal Championship challenge, will be gone. My pvp game is gone no matter what spec I play using these "new" characters. It doesn't make me feel better knowing that every other AC is also going to get this. My game of checkers is being reduced to tic tac toe.

I have that TV on my living room wall, lol. But historically making this game stupid friendly has not retained customers. KotFE had a record subscriber bump thanks to The Force Awakens and the Blur trailer highlighted at E3 that year. People played the super simple game with its "tutorial keybind setup" and its simple combat for a month or two. And then they left.

Amazon's New World "closed beta" just started for people that preordered that. The login queue was 24 min a couple hours ago (I'm not in that big of a hurry to play that but I secured a character name). Interest in MMOs isn't dead.

A level 50 guardian on a classic server would have more abilities than a level 75+ guardian on the PTS right now.

Sorry to burst your fantasy but Steam gave swtor a bump for awhile. Steam numbers have dropped to ~1/3rd of what they were last July. As far as bloat goes, what are you referring to? Do new players at level 1 get given 50 populated hotkey buttons to manage? Which devs and what studies are you referring to other than the ones in your head? How many more buttons are being used now vs 10 years ago when the game launched?

It's possible we're being setup to give BW producers ammo against the execs in an argument. I hadn't considered that. But it would explain a lot.

I agree that BW gets credit/blame for swtor's lack of success. They even had a 2nd chance during the KotFE/TFA days with EA offering them more money to make a real expac that BW couldn't use because they were too busy making all of the wrong calls for their MMO all over again. Most of the people that made those bad calls (and there were several) are not with BW now, it's not worth getting into. But I don't blame EA for not giving BW much to work with at this stage of the game.

My test dps guardian has saber ward and enure. So really he's got 2 dcds. If your dps assassin gets more than that I'll cry "bloody murder"... but I can't imagine any class getting less than that ;>

[*]Does this feel like a Jedi Guardian? Please explain why or why not. Remember that scene in Empire when Han Solo picks up a light saber? [*]Is there anything that feels missing or out of place in the combat rotation? Guardians should be able to pull enemies to them. Like in the trailer for KotFE when Thexan stops Arcann from killing Valkorion. [*]What are your initial thoughts with the effectiveness of the Jedi Guardian against enemies? Doing Onderon dailies was a challenge. The dense folliage made it hard to see enemies, keep track of what I was fighting or find my companion's corpse. You'd think with all the artillery being used and lightsabers being swished around that there would be a fire. [*]How are you enjoying or not enjoying this class? It's good for comic relief I guess? Sometimes we all have to remember to laugh at our characters. [*]If you have feedback on the different disciplines and ability paths, please note your feedback accordingly so we can track it. It's time to play Defense. Tank shortage problems solved?

As a side note you can tell roughly when someone created an account by their member id #. If that number is smaller than a million, that account was one of the first million accounts created for this game service. Hover over their user name on the left to get their member id #. The game launched with a bit over two million accounts. Someone with a small number that says they're a founder almost certainly is one. Someone with a +10 million #? Not a new account but also not a founder, not with that id.

Dude, if it's not on my character sheet it doesn't matter to me if it's available to some other guardian. The point is that I won't be able to use it without hitting the respec button, which means it's gone when I need it unless I know ahead of time that I will need one ability and not another. My character right now has no such limitations. The character on test is heavily nerfed in comparison. If you can't see that you're being deliberately dumb. First, there's steam numbers. Apart from a bump in Jan, swtor numbers have been going down since it launched on steam a year ago. There have been a variety of ways of counting active players including logging onto servers and counting them. People have done this on Reddit in the past to figure out which server to play on (back when there were more than one or two per region). And right now, since there's only 2 servers in NA, it's very easy to count. 2nd, I was talking about PVP regs, not ranked. In regs I rarely see anyone without 306 gear (I look for sub 306's to target since they're more likely to be inexperienced) and most have at least a more-than-basic understanding of their buttons. It's true that every expac has points of contention. No expac has nerfed characters like this. This expac had people excited initially - the top comments on the reddit announcement are still positive ones. That lasted right up to the Guardian release on Test. Many expacs in the past, such as Shadow of Revan, had players excited until they got to play a laggy/buggy mess (Sor's launch was historically bad). This one went from mostly positive to mostly negative in record time.

Enure originally had a 90 second CD or it had that in 2012. On test the CD is one minute. Saber ward is 12 secs every 3 minutes (on test and in 2012). The game really hasn't evolved that much since launch in terms of number of abilities or cds on abilities. Most of our expacs have been stretching out things like utility choices (which have had a couple different menus over the last decade). I was never one of the ones complaining about those. But the changes for this xpac are much more extreme - my character is losing every ability this game's given him post launch and he's losing many more. These nerfs are completely unprecedented in the history of this game. Which part of that is confusing you? What you call "ultra elite" I call most of the players queueing regs in pvp right now. I couldn't care less about F2P players and BW has never catered to them. You do know that swtor has a fraction of the players it had in 2012 or 2015 or even 2017, right? I'm not predicting what their proposed changes are going to do to the existing player base but much smaller ability culls in this game have resulted in lost players and I can't imagine how this will improve player counts. But, in general, MMO players looking for something to try will respond to the "word on the street". There's a 0% chance the "word on the street" for this xpac is going to be good even if they reverse 80% of the nerfs they're currently proposing. The "word on the street" comes from your "ultra elites".

I seriously doubt there will be a separate test for Juggernauts although the next runs will probably be for multiple ACs (time is running out).

They aren't "just removing some defensives and stuns". Guardians are losing mobility, utility and attacks. Endgame raiding is going to take one of the bigger hits on this.

My dps guardian on test has lost all of the abilities that were added to the class (4 of them including force clarity) since launch. He's also lost saber throw and guardian leap and several others that he had since 1.0 (freezing force, awe, aoe taunt and probably something else that I'm forgetting off the top of my head). There's no way 7.0 is going to be "more fun" for me vs 6.0 and I was never a fan of the 6.0 gearing (but I never complained about that).

My response was rhetorical. Your quote: My response is that "my perception" is that the game doesn't need to be streamlined at all.

Why does the game need to be more streamlined than it already is? For solo story players it is very accessible, very very easy to play.

FFXIV is arguably on the way to dethroning Wow (but not "killing" it). The game that had a bad launch, the developer apologized for, then doubled down on... Swtor's still on the top MMOs lists but it's near the bottom of those, its $ shop saved it.

Yes, if you pick their words apart like a lawyer, they didn't flat out say: "advanced classes will have more weapon choices". They did say troopers will have more weapon choices and knights will maybe be able to shoot lightning. They did very arguably imply, accidentally or otherwise, that characters would have more style choices. And they didn't clarify when people started making hopeful guesses and asking questions. Considering that the advanced class terminology has been gone from the game for years (my character is a guardian or a sentinel, not really a jedi knight, unless you read the fine print on the character manager), I don't blame anyone that hasn't been following the forums or reddit for still being confused, especially not new players. Giving current ACs more weapon "style" choices would be a big addition to the game, worthy of a 10-year expac. Other games like CoH have done similar things in the past. Most mmos for that matter give characters choices with their weapons. And players have asked for choices to use some juggernaut animations on their guardians and vice versa in the past. Letting players play the "Knight" story as a Consular AC (and calling ACs a "style choice")? Not so much, not that I want to bash anyone over the head for giving us more character manager/respec choices.

They aren't offering different weapons to specs, that was an assumption BW let people run with based on their rushed and unnecessarily vague presentation. The are letting us switch certain advanced classes with our characters, possibly very easily. But guardian in 7.0 plays with the same weapons and animations and ability names that it has now.

Anyone thinking Summit should be able to play a max level character in this game remotely competetently (unless he's played this before). Or that the interface or number of buttons on a max level characters screen should be newbie friendly.

I'm just going to say: nobody, no matter how good they are at games in general, _should_, in any serious game, be able to hop on an endgame character cold and be able to play it as well as people that have spent dozens/hundreds/thousands of hours getting to know the character and the game.

I don't know of any example where a game developer dumbing things down resulted in good things happening to that game. I wouldn't be surprised if an example exists but I can't think of one. But I know of several where such efforts failed, some more spectacularly than others.

I appreciate the communication. I still disagree with the changes I've seen. DPS guardians are not currently one of the classes with super uptime in things like arenas and yet they're the first class you're hitting very hard; for me it's very disconcerting. That's all I can really say.