I could swear as well that the dev's said that white was going away for sure but the others were going to be craftable via Artifice.

If they were to make it work like that, I'd imagine it would become the new must have talent.

In regards to taunt, it should be simple enough to test. Start by having some one build threat on a mob. Taunt to gain aggro. Make sure the other person is no longer building any threat at all. Proceed to taunt a few times. If taunt does not generate any threat, at that point the two of you should be at exactly the same threat, only you have aggro. Now make sure they're at melee range (110% to gain aggro) and do a few attacks. If you've not built any threat, they will pull aggro. If taunt truly does build threat, you will hold aggro. The key is in the numbers. Let's say your friend has built 3000 threat. If you taunt and do nothing but retain aggro, you've been set to 3900 (assuming they're at range when you taunt). Otherwise the mob would turn back to your friend as soon as the taunt duration is finished. If it turns back immediately after the duration, you can assume you were set to 3000. Now, if you retain aggro, you can assume you're at even threat. Taunt a few times in a row but do nothing else. Let's say 3x. That would set you at 6591 threat if you're at range and it works like sithwarrior.com describes. If it doesn't, you'll still be at 3900. Here's the catch, if taunt doesn't build threat, your friend will have to get to 5070 threat to pull aggro, 6591 otherwise. If you can survive long enough without healing, you can do a ton more taunts, like, 6 or 7 to make it much easier to determine. At 7x taunt, they'd have to do 24.4k threat to pull if it works like SW has advertised. I may very well test this out tonight if I get the chance.

Just to clarify some things on taunting. The fine folks at sithwarrior.com have done some empirical testing and have found that taunting in SWTOR works a bit odd compared to other games. Before anyone asks, at least in WOW, taunting does in fact build threat. It works exactly as you have described it in SWTOR, it takes whomever has aggro and sets your current threat equal to there's. However, there is a massive difference in SWTOR. In SWTOR, taunt gives you enough threat to maintain threat. That is to say, it will give you the threat of whomever has aggro plus the modifier required to hold threat off them should they completely stop generating threat. For example, if you simply made your threat equal to the current aggro target, once the taunt was over it would flip back. This is because in order to gain aggro, you must exceed someone by 10% in melee or 30% in ranged. What is unusual is that at least in WOW, this threat generation doesn't work if the taunter is the current aggro target. In SWTOR, it DOES work. This means that even if you have aggro, if you use taunt at semi-range, you actually increase your current threat by 30%. Also, melee range isn't what you think it is. The linked thread explains that better. Anyhow, I could see this as a reason why the AOE taunt CDR is important in Ops, the AOE packs can typically live long enough for a second AOE taunt. However in FPs, I don't see it as making any sort of difference, I don't think most AOE packs remain sizeable long enough for a second AOE taunt. I'm guessing by the time 45s (or 1m) go by, that pack of 5 is now a pack of 2 or even completely dead and holding AOE threat is a non issue. See the linked thread for more information: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=341126 As for my 2 cents on the changes, I do not want to see Vig/Def hybrid lose viability for one simple reason, I absolutely will not tank a FP without Unremitting. I find it insanely obnoxious to be CCed on the pull so much. In my perfect world instead of giving us the Clap for free, they'd give us Unremitting for free and put Force Clap in where Unremitting is in case anyone truly wanted to spec in to it.

Dispatch can definitely crit. I'm not sure how the person linked in those movies gets to 5k though, with something like 77% surge and 1300 ish STR on a fully sundered target I can only get to the 3k-ish region. But then again, my gear isn't that hot and I'm not using any buffs other than self-buff.

Ok, just looked up the values on TORHead. It looks like 4 ACs get Execute, Gunslingers, Guardians, Sentinels and Shadows. Gunslingers - 30m, 30%, 12s, 1200ish but fires both guns Shadow - 4m, 30%, 6s, 3000ish Knights - 10m, 20%, 6s, 2800ish All use 25% of a character's resources (25 Energy, 25 Force, 3 Focus). Gunslinger's CD seems off unless there's some sort of talent in their trees to drop the CD to 6s. Damage is roughly comparable between Shadow and Knights. What confuses me is that while it is ok for it to be worse for a Guardian, Sentinel's share it. So I sort of expected it to be the same based on that aspect. The 10m vs 4m is fairly insubstantial given that Knights always want to be in 4m anyhow. The only thing I was thinking is maybe there's a talent that Sentinel's get to increase it's limit to 30%? It's possible that Sentinel DPS is overall higher in order to compensate but I doubt it.

Has anyone done the math on it's damage? I know on my Shadow I just got their form of Execute and it's 30%. Maybe though Dispatch hits harder to make up for the fact it can only be used under 20%? What about cost/CD? Are those comparable? I haven't done the math or anything, but I was thinking if one were to solve the riddle of the disparity that's where you'd start. I hope someone is willing to do the math because otherwise the cynic in me will just lean towards some silly conspiracy that Bioware truly does hate Knights.

I'm not sure I understand this "unique snowflake" argument. Ok, you feel that your playstyle will be criticized if there are combat logs. My question is this, in every encounter that's resolved by combat (which is to say basically all of them save a puzzle boss or two), winning is binary, there is no grey. At the end of the fight, one side is left standing and that's the winner. All combat is resolved in one simple way, whichever side has their HP fully depleted first loses. This is also simple fact. Now, let's say you win. Great, no one looks at combat logs when you win. Some might but basically no one is criticized if you win. So really the only scenario you'd be concerned about is if you lost. The argument boils down to this, "I have my preferred method of play style and just because some cookie cutter min/maxer says it's not optimal then I will get unfairly discriminated against." My answer is simply this, if your way is better, the numbers will undeniably justify it. If the min/maxer approach says you should produce X and your "special" way produces X - Y, then clearly your way is not better. We're a group, I don't care if you want to be a special snowflake, if your play style means we lose every time, then simply put I don't want you in my group. This is not discrimination. This is simple reality. I'm not going to go in to group combat knowing I can not win. The flip side is this will give you great validation if you're right. If your way is superior and us min / maxers are truly just trying to pigeon hole you, step up and prove it. Numbers do not lie. Of course anything taken to the extreme usually ends up in misfortune, however that's just human nature. Dismiss the outliers and run with like minded groups.

The last thing you want to do is try to add any sort of physics to this. Just stick solely to game play mechanics otherwise you'll have to answer how a lightsaber doesn't instantly cut you in half when you're hit. Avoid lore too. There are just as many holes in that as well. I don't quite get everyone saying melee has more closers than ranged, they don't. If we save our closer for your knockback, we have to eat ranged damage getting close, wait for your knockback, then eat more damage as all your stupid kb's have roots attached to them, then finally, assuming we're not dead, we get to force leap to you. At this point we now have to chew through the bubble to finally get to you. That's of course assuming we're not stunned at this point because snares/slows DO NOT COUNT TOWARDS RESOLVE (which only works in ranged favor). Easiest way to fix all this is to make snares/slows count towards resolve. However you're also only looking at one aspect, PVP. How about you explain why melee is heavily penalized in PVE with mobs doing PBAOE but ranged gets to sit pretty and in safety? Remember, ranged can always get close and lose nothing but melee loses everything when avoiding that stuff. It's pretty heavily skewed, but then again, this is not new, every single MMO ever seems to love punishing melee and let ranged have it easy.

I'm not the best at math but 20% of 22.5 would be in the realm of 4.5 instead of 2.5.

Probably pretty good considering you're getting those DS points by doing some fairly evil things. They'd have to be pretty dense to not figure you're evil when you start everyday with drowning a bag of puppies and kicking old folks down the stairs.

It is sort of odd that a Dark V Consular would still use rocks / objects and a Light V Inquisitor would use Lightning. I mean, what exactly does Dark / Light mean then? Is it implied that Light V Sith is still more evil than Dark V Jedi?

I guess my point on Opportune Strike was that it seems inconsistent in what counts and what does not. You know, I never tried Force Exhaustion + Opportune Strike. If Freezing Force works, then Force Exhaustion should. Anyone happen to know?

One thing I don't quite understand, why is the comparison to a mature MMORPG invalid? I've seen a lot of people say "Yeah, but WOW was horribly buggy at launch as well" or the like. I do agree, it was, I was there. However, they're not releasing SWTOR 8 years ago during the WOW launch, they're releasing it now. The competition is what we have now. If Toyota released a new car that had it's wheels fall off every 20 miles and sometimes the engine exploded, would you expect a defense of "Well, the Model T had issues when it was first released, so why should you expect this to be better?". That's just the business reality. You release a product right now, you face the competition which is several mature products with a lot more stability. It is 100% valid to compare because those are our CURRENT choices. We don't have a wayback machine to use so that we can choose between SWTOR or launch day Rift / WOW / Guild Wars / etc. So I'd think Bioware would take claims of "This game is too buggy, I'd rather play XYZ other MMO" or "All the other MMOs have XYZ feature, I'd rather play them instead" seriously if they wish to keep customers and you know, keep the game alive.

I'd be most thrilled if they just had the patch notes be: Guardian Bug Fixes --- List of 30+ bugs fixed ---