Alright, So I posted something like this before and I had some ideas and it turns out no one liked them. Which is fine, that's what forums are for are they not? There were a few things that I learned from that last post keeping in mind that everything that I'm saying is in reference to PvP. I don't really PvE much and I've been lead to believe that in terms of PvE Vigilance/Vengeance is considered to be acceptable as it stands. 1) keep it simple. Having played a couple other DPS classes Vengeance does actually have what I think is currently one of the most complex DPS rotations currently. It seems like a reasonable thing to add extra damage potential to a DPS class by adding extra abilities to proc but then that's just taking an already complicated rotation and muddying it up even more. At which point even if you are increasing the damage output what would be the motivation of playing this skill tree if you can get the same damage easier on another one?! 2) Don't change the play style. People who stick with playing vigilance/vengeance in 1.4 have stuck with it because they really like the play style and if you change that then you're really turning those people off because you're taking something they like and making it different. Again, the point isn't to change Vigilance/Vengeance but to make it better. Point taken. 3) Kiting I've been playing Focus/Rage on my Guardian for about the past month and while I'm still more prone to get CC'ed and a little squishier than I used to be I definitely feel like it's easier to kite a Vigilance/Vengeance player. When I feel like someone is kiting me in Focus/Rage I just hit them with Force Exhaustion/Force Crush and that brings them right back to me. Granted all 3 skill trees have Freezing Force/Chilling Scream but it's cheaper to use when you're using Rage/Focus and you've got a 10 meter range snare. So this is also something that needs to be taken into consideration. So with these things I learned having been taken into consideration I propose 3 simple changes that would fix the Vigilance/Vengeance skill tree and make it a lot more competitive in PvP. 1. Pooled Hatred/Gather Strength - Put it back! I don't necessarily want it buffed. I could see how under the right circumstances this ability could be incredibly powerful. But for the love of God why did they nerf it?! Just put it back the way it was and that would make a lot of people happy. This also goes along with my don't change the play style philosophy. 2. Remove Narrowed Focus/Deadly Reprisal and introduce a 1 point ability that gives a 15% in combat speed boost. Which is pretty much just like the middle skill tree for some other DPS classes. Except for sentinels/marauders I'm pretty sure it's 2 points and not 1. This seemed to be the most asked for change by everyone who responded to my original post. I agree. This change falls right in line with both "Keep it simple" and "Kiting" and it doesn't change the play style either. It just makes it easier for you to keep up with your target. 3. This is the biggest change. It's actually a buff really but I think that ti's appropriate. I've come up with 2 very similar ideas and I'll let you guys decide which works best. 3a) Make it so that Force Rush/Savagery applies it's buff to Master Strike/Ravage. I think this is perfectly reasonable. Considering that something as simple as force leap/charge gives Force Sweep/Smash a 100% critical hit chance and with that being an AoE and all I see no reason for Master Strike/Ravage to not be able to get a 90 - 95% critical hit chance by getting a Force Rush proc. However, if you think that's too powerful then... 3b) When you proc Zen Strike/Rampage then Force Rush/Savagery will apply its buff to Master Strike/Ravage. It's essentially the same thing but it makes it slightly less common. Some people would cry OP at my proposed final change but I don't. When you have Focus Guardians who can hit in an AoE for 7-8k (I'm not exaggerating, I've done it. Literally earlier today) and Vanguards who just plain ignore your armor (Either through elemental damage or HIB flat out ignoring 90% of your armor) I don't think this last change is really that big of a deal. Tell me what you guys think?

Alright, So I posted something like this before and I had some ideas and it turns out no one liked them. Which is fine, that's what forums are for are they not? There were a few things that I learned from that last post keeping in mind that everything that I'm saying is in reference to PvP. I don't really PvE much and I've been lead to believe that in terms of PvE Vigilance/Vengeance is considered to be acceptable as it stands. 1) keep it simple. Having played a couple other DPS classes Vengeance does actually have what I think is currently one of the most complex DPS rotations currently. It seems like a reasonable thing to add extra damage potential to a DPS class by adding extra abilities to proc but then that's just taking an already complicated rotation and muddying it up even more. At which point even if you are increasing the damage output what would be the motivation of playing this skill tree if you can get the same damage easier on another one?! 2) Don't change the play style. People who stick with playing vigilance/vengeance in 1.4 have stuck with it because they really like the play style and if you change that then you're really turning those people off because you're taking something they like and making it different. Again, the point isn't to change Vigilance/Vengeance but to make it better. Point taken. 3) Kiting I've been playing Focus/Rage on my Guardian for about the past month and while I'm still more prone to get CC'ed and a little squishier than I used to be I definitely feel like it's easier to kite a Vigilance/Vengeance player. When I feel like someone is kiting me in Focus/Rage I just hit them with Force Exhaustion/Force Crush and that brings them right back to me. Granted all 3 skill trees have Freezing Force/Chilling Scream but it's cheaper to use when you're using Rage/Focus and you've got a 10 meter range snare. So this is also something that needs to be taken into consideration. So with these things I learned having been taken into consideration I propose 3 simple changes that would fix the Vigilance/Vengeance skill tree and make it a lot more competitive in PvP. 1. Pooled Hatred/Gather Strength - Put it back! I don't necessarily want it buffed. I could see how under the right circumstances this ability could be incredibly powerful. But for the love of God why did they nerf it?! Just put it back the way it was and that would make a lot of people happy. This also goes along with my don't change the play style philosophy. 2. Remove Narrowed Focus/Deadly Reprisal and introduce a 1 point ability that gives a 15% in combat speed boost. Which is pretty much just like the middle skill tree for some other DPS classes. Except for sentinels/marauders I'm pretty sure it's 2 points and not 1. This seemed to be the most asked for change by everyone who responded to my original post. I agree. This change falls right in line with both "Keep it simple" and "Kiting" and it doesn't change the play style either. It just makes it easier for you to keep up with your target. 3. This is the biggest change. It's actually a buff really but I think that ti's appropriate. I've come up with 2 very similar ideas and I'll let you guys decide which works best. 3a) Make it so that Force Rush/Savagery applies it's buff to Master Strike/Ravage. I think this is perfectly reasonable. Considering that something as simple as force leap/charge gives Force Sweep/Smash a 100% critical hit chance and with that being an AoE and all I see no reason for Master Strike/Ravage to not be able to get a 90 - 95% critical hit chance by getting a Force Rush proc. However, if you think that's too powerful then... 3b) When you proc Zen Strike/Rampage then Force Rush/Savagery will apply its buff to Master Strike/Ravage. It's essentially the same thing but it makes it slightly less common. Some people would cry OP at my proposed final change but I don't. When you have Focus Guardians who can hit in an AoE for 7-8k (I'm not exaggerating, I've done it. Literally earlier today) and Vanguards who just plain ignore your armor (Either through elemental damage or HIB flat out ignoring 90% of your armor) I don't think this last change is really that big of a deal. Tell me what you guys think?

Also make sure that you get the elite war hero offhand and the hilt from the elite war hero mainhand. that will also give you a significant bump in damage. I have the offhand and I'm consistently hitting for 7k in war zones.

It might make more sense but at this point if they took the ability out of the Vigilance skill tree and put it into the Defense Skill tree that would be one less reason to play Vigilance at all. It's one of the few perks the skill tree has left. It's a lot of fun being kind of tanky with reasonable DPS. Honestly, Unremitting belongs int he Defense skill tree as well. But again, if you move that over to Defense then there would actually be no reason whatsoever to play Vigilance at all. Personally I think that it would actually make Defense Guardians completely awesome if they moved those abilities out of Vigilance and put them in the Defense tree. The Defense tree would be pretty insanely strong at that point and I might actually play it again. As for Vigilance it would be kind of cool if they made it kind of like the Sentinel Watchman spec where your damage over time abilities also have a self heal associated with them. That woud be pretty amazing. Maybe if they did something like that. But currently you'd just be breaking one skill tree to over power the other.

haha... Well if it makes you feel any better you guys won the war zone. I was actually a little frustrated with you because I'm not used to people knowing how to play Vengeance. You did a good job of controlling my Focus Guardian and focus firing me. You've got solid skills.

So I bumped into you in a war zone on my main. You put up a good fight, but how come you had 0 protection? You're not cycling your taunts? That's bad business bro. It's free medals and it helps your team!

Don't know what to tell you ace. I have an Imperial and Republic character on Pot5 and I get consistent queue pops within minutes any time from around noon eastern standard time until around 3 in the morning eastern standard time. I mean, I'm never really concerned about the number of people on the fleet. I only really care whether I can get a war zone. That hasn't been an issue for me during the last 2 server merges.

Yeah, the guy who said all that ridiculous crap about making master strike instant was trollin' hard. Better to ignore that stuff. I think that the devs misunderstood what people were saying when they read the class feedback on the forums. A lot of Guardians complained that we're percieved as being a weaker DPS class than others. So in their infinite wisdom they took our best DPS class and buffed it up to insanity. Now honestly, I don't really hate them too much for doing that. I just switched my Guardian to Focus skill tree and went on with my life. What actually makes me angry about the whole thing is that they nerfed Gather Strength. It was one of the most inconsistent abilities in the game and it was only very rarely that you got that big hit on your opponents that allowed you to really do some unbelievable damage to targets and for some reason or another they thought it was too powerful? No one was complaining about it and no one ever paid any attention to it. It's actually insane.

There's some bad ones but there's also some REALLY good ones. There's at least 7 or 8 really excellent Focus Guardians in my republic guild. The other day we ran a Rated War Zone group of 6 Focus Jedi Knights (Guardians and Sentinels) and we dominated people. I think some of the teams we were going up against were just random pick up groups but we were really unstoppable. But yeah, my Vengeance Juggernaut is about to hit 50 soon. I've got the War Hero gear already made for him and it's just waiting for him to hit 50. I've also got 3100 Ranked War Zone comms saved up and I should probably hit the full 3500 tonight. By the time I hit 50 I'll be able to get my War Hero offhand and main hand and I'll have full war hero armor including custom belts and bracers. I'm looking forward impaling people right along with you!

1) because it IS nerf. they took an ability and made it worse than it previously was. That's the definition of a nerf. 2) Actually a lot of people used it. Generally with the amount of slows and snares there are in the game it was easy to build up at least a couple of stacks here and there. On the rare occasions you had all 5 stacks you could nuke your opponents with 6k single hits. It was a pretty handy talent. Now it's hot garbage.

Nice video! You're on Prophecy of the Five right?

So yeah... Vigilance is not as good as Focus. They nerfed it for no reason and they made Focus a bajillion times better. I'm hoping that they have enough developers left working on the game to actually balance out the classes and if they do then maybe one of them will actually read this and benefit from this and maybe improve the game experience for a lot of people out there. Now of course when you change one skill tree it does affect what happens to other skill trees. So while I was planning the changes that I think should be worked into the game I wanted to make sure that I wasn't ruining any builds from other skill trees. Basically don't buff anything at the bottom of the Vigilance tree too much because you'll end up buffing the Focus skill tree and if I have to move something up don't move it too high up because you'll end up nerfing the Vigilance/Defense hybrid which is actually very popular and a perfectly viable option for PvP and PvE. With that all said here's the basis of my proposed change. Essentially Vigilance becomes the "Master Strike Bomb" spec. It currently kind of is that but it's really not nearly as powerful as it should be. I think with some relatively minor changes they could make it a truly competitive skill tree. In any case here's my proposed changes. 1) Slash: This may not make too much sense as the first point but it's one of the more important ones. Essentially reduce the focus cost of Slash down to 2 focus. This would be good because currently it just plain costs too much focus for being not that great of an ability. Also, for the Vigilance Guardian it would be particularly good because in Shien form Slash would only cost 1 focus. Which would make it a truly spammable melee attack. Which is something that Guardians lack currently. 2) Perseverance: This ability should change in 2 ways. First it needs to be 4% strength increase per point. This would give Vigilance Guardians a very small flat damage increase. This would be good due to the fact that so much of their damage is melee and there's so many ways to mitigate melee damage in PvP that a small damage increase is warranted in this case. Additionally I think that this ability should trade places in the Vigilance skill tree with Gather Strength. This would serve the purpose of making it essentially unavailable to Focus Guardians. Focus Guardians absolutely do not need this ability. So damage buff to Vigilance Guardians and a Damage Nerve to Focus Guardians. Seems like a good idea right? 3) Gather Strength: Here's the big big change. Here's how it works. Stacks of Gather Strength are built by using Slash. It stays a 2 point talent and each stack gives a 10% damage buff to Master Strike and it stacks 3 times. So basically when you have 3 stacks of Gather Strength you get a 30% buff to Master Strike. So this, in addition to the 6% melee damage you get from Single Saber Mastery, the 6% damage buff that you get from Shien form and the 8% damage that you get from Master Focus in the Focus skill tree you can do a huge amount of damage in a single Master Strike especially if you get a critical hit! 4) Zen Strike: Zen Strike gives you 15% chance per point for Master Strike to reset. So instead of stopping at 30% when you have all 3 points it ends up being 45% when you have all 3 points in the ability. This is going to allow you to use your buffed Master Strike more frequently. It also has the added benefits of giving you more Focus because of the 2 Focus that you get refunded to you when Zen Strike procs. All of which is beneficial. 5) Plasma Brand: Lastly they should make 2 changes to Plasma Brand. The first change should be the Damage overtime ability should be shortened but also deal the same amount of damage. That would increase the DPS of the ability. Additionally, Plasma Brand should apply a 30% snare. Anyway, I think that these changes are decent. It doesn't affect the vigilance Defense hybrid at all and actually gives it minor buffs depending on how you spec. It also nerfs Focus by taking away the strength buff that you get from the Vigilance tree because it's too high up for them to get the ability without losing abilities at the top of their own skill tree. What do you guys think?

You're on the same server as me! I have a Focus Guardian named Marqas. I have fully optimized war hero gear and I do pretty well for myself. When you get fully geared I look forward to seeing you in some war zones. We can duel!

As of Patch 1.4 Vicious Slash and Vicious throw are both affected by Brutality. Additionally Saber Strength applies it's benefit to Vicious Throw as well as Slash and Saber Strength. Now, as interesting as that is to pick up Brutality in the Rage tree I kind of feel like it's a little bit of an overkill. I guess it would be nice to have that flat 45% critical hit chance on Dispatch but personally I like to have the DOT's instead. A lot of people dont like to get the DOT's in the Vengeance tree but the damage does add up when you're trying to take down a single target. I've seen plasma single ticks of Shatter go for about 500 damage while Draining Scream and Eviscerate are going it's a lot of elemental damage. Feel free to give it a try and let me know ho it goes. I may give it a try myself with one of my free respecs that I get.

Exactly right sir. I've been playing this skill tree for a while and the extra 15% damage reduction is a life saver. Particularly when I'm carrying the ball in huttball and I've switched to Soresu form. At that point I'll have 67% damage reduction and a 3% self heal. If I max out my Endurance this could make me pretty darn tanky in addition to putting out solid damage.

Dispatch/Vicious Throw is NOT a force attack. It's a melee attack. If you'll notice the damage from the ability that shows up is white. Force/Tech damage is yellow. Now, about having a 100% critical hit chance on Vicious Throw I would say that it's not worth it. I tried it and it worked ok but honestly having a 90 - 95% critical hit chance on the ability is enough. For Vengeance/Vigilance a critical hit chance of 25% - 30% is more than sufficient. When you get the smuggler buff your crit chance should be about 30 - 35%. The amount of stats you have to drop to get the extra 5% critical hit chance to put you up to 100% is too much considering the diminishing returns on crit.

ftw

So yeah, I'm well aware of the fact that as it regards DPS Rage is just plain superior in PvP. It's always been better for DPS but before there was some sort of parity. Rage did more damage but Vengeance had a decent balance of damage and utility that was pretty sweet if you knew what you were doing. Well... Rage may have gotten insanely better but Vengeance, excluding the nerf to pooled hatred, pretty much stayed the same. So... I mean, Vengeance is still able to put out the same amount of damage and utility that it was pretty much always able to do so while my Focus(Rage) Guardian is pretty my competitive main toon that I've almost completely optimized for Focus(Rage) I decided that my Juggernaut that I'm leveling for fun will be my fully optimized Vengeance Juggernaut. Which is actually interesting... because I'm wondering what's actually the best way to do that. Right now, I've actually got damn near a full set of war hero gear for my juggernaut except for the chest which is and all this gear will pretty much be ready for him by the time he hits 50. The thing that I'm doing a little differently this time around is I'm going to make sure that I'm stacking the highest possible amount of Strength on everything. With the 6% Strength increase in, the Sage buff, a Rakata Might stim and all the datacrons and fully augment my gear I would doing the math and the total Strength for my Juggernaut would be hovering somewhere around just shy of 2000 Strength. Probably a little less maybe but still quite a bit. Additionally what I've done is gather up a bunch of the enhancements that have 45 endurance as well. So I'm sacrificing a little bit of Crit or Power depending on the Enhancement but I'm gaining myself a significant deal more endurance per Enhancement. The reasoning for stacking up Endurance on the Enhancements is because of Enraged Defense and the 3% self heal. The more health you have in your pool the better it will be right? I won't have to worry too much about losing a little bit of Crit/Power here and there because of the amount of strength I'll have to make up the difference in damage/critical hit chance. I do still want to have some Crit/Surge and I don't have to worry about too much power because the War Hero relics will actually provide a huge boost in power and damage output. Anyway, I pretty much have all the gear ready but it's going to take me a couple weeks to finish everything up because I'm not trying to hit 50 on this character until I have 3500 ranked warzone comms and 2000 regular war zone comms. With that completely full I'll be able to buy my War Hero offhand and mainhand as soon as I hit level 50. In any case, this is mostly just me musing. I think that it's going to be pretty beastly though when I actually get it all up and running. I'll keep you posted and possibly throw up some screen shots once I have all the war hero gear.

Respec Focus... as of today...

In short, yes. I actually made a thread about it. It's actually worse than we thought honestly. I have no idea why but they nerfed Viglance/Vengeance as well. Pooled Hatred is now only 4% per stack. That was one of the many changes that went through but weren't listed in the PTS patch updates. I have no idea why the would have made that change. Vigilance was viable in PvP but by no means overpowered. If it needed any changes it needed buffs not nerfs. But yeah, the buffed Focus through the roof and it's too good to pass up.

I did not know that they nerfed Gather Strength. What the hell were they thinking?! As the previous poster stated that talent needed to be buffed. It should have been increased to 10% per stack per point and should have capped at 3 stacks. That way with 2 points in the talent you would get a 20% damage buff per stack and it would cap at 60%. Which is the exact same buff that they gave to Pulse Generator in the Tactics skill tree for Vanguards. The difference there being that 1) it's an AoE ability 2) it's elemental damage as vs melee damage and the most important difference is that Vigilance Guardians can't control when they do and don't get stacks of Gather Strength. It's completely dependent on the enemy attacking you. I mean, as awesome as the ability is when you get 5 full stacks it super sucks that you can never depend on it when you need it. I think that the Vigilance Skill tree would be an extremely competitive PvP spec if they gave Gather Strength the above mentioned buff where it's basically a 20% bonus per stack but additionally changed it so that Vigilance Guardians had osme type of control over the way the ability stacks. Perhaps make it so that everytime you use Slash it will build a stack of Gather Strength instead of having to wait until you get snared. So it would be just the same as when Vanguards build stacks of Pulse Generator by spamming Ion Pulse. That would make the Vigilance Skill tree extremely dangerous in PvP and it would also give us a reason to diversify our rotation and actually use Slash. As it stands right now I'm Force Sweeping people for 6k and I'm doing it every 8 - 9 seconds and I'm getting critical hits on Dispatch for anywhere from 4 - 5k. I did 3 war zones this morning and I broke 300k damage without even thinking about it in all of them. I'm running around with a full focus bar all war zone and I never have to stop attacking because all my abilities are on such short cool downs so often as not I don't know what to do with all this focus I have left over. At this point it's actually extremely viable to run Focus skill tree in Soresu form. You can absorb quite a bit of damage, you can still guard and then you can dish out a pretty significant amount of damage. I think that we're going to see a lot more Guardians playing Focus in Soresu form.

Yeah, I don't know if I made that clear in my original post. Pre 1.4 I was playing full Vigilance in 1.3 and before and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I used to take Vigilance all the way up to Plasma Brand but now there's absolutely no way that a full Vigilance Guardian can match the DPS of a Focus Guardian in PvP specifically. I can't say for PvE but for PvP Focus is the only skill tree worth using after 1.4. Some people are saying before 1.4 Vigilance wasn't all that great for PvP, but the damage was good and it was great to be so survivable. But now that's right out the window. If you PvP as a Guardian you need to either be Focus spec or a Vigilance/Defense hybrid.

Now I know that generally speaking the first suggestion for anyone leveling a commando for PvP is "STOP!", especially if they're leveling gunnery, but honestly I'm just using this guy for fun and actually I'm really enjoying myself. I've gotten to level 25 and I've had Grav Round for a few levels and it seems to be the core of the gunnery commando's skills. So I pretty much have that much of an understanding so far. At which point I want to ask some other questions regarding some of the peripheral skills that commandos get. 1) Hail of bolts. It seems to be a handy AoE ability that does a good job of interrupting people from capturing an objective but other than that it's not that great. Does this ability ever get any better or is that all it's good for? It's not a bad ability. 30 meter range, no cool down and it's an AoE again it's great for interrupting. But it doesn't do too much damage. 2) Plasma Grenade. Is this ability as horrible and useless as it seems or is it just me? I removed it from my tool bar already. It uses WAY too much ammo and does so little damage it's laughable. It's on a 30 second cool down for some reason as well so it's not even a good ability to use in conjunction with Sticky bombs. Does this ability get better anywhere along the lines or am I right leaving this one off my toolbar? 3) Ammo management. Any suggestions for ammo management? It seems like a lot of the skill to manage ammo come in later levels. Right now I find myself running low on ammo in war zones and it's kind of obnoxious. But looking at the skill trees it seems like there willa ctually be abilities later. Or maybe it's something I'm doing. All I'm really doing in war zones is spamming Grav Rounds, high impact bolt and full auto. Occasionally I drop a sticky bomb as well. I seem to be running out of ammo pretty consistently. I may think of some more questions later but for now these were my big things. Any help would be great. And any other suggestions would also be great. I've actually already got his war hero gear by playing on my Guardian So right now it's just a matter of getting enough money to swap out all the mods. But my character won't be 50 until well after 1.4 launches sot he price on swapping mods will go down. Thanks for the help in advance.

Well there's this, and then also there is the fact that while Grav Round is a tech attack Charged Bolts is a ranged attack. This can be useful in the current metagame with the huge number of shadow tanks out there. When they pop their resilience defensive cool down your Grav Round becomes completely useless for the next 5 seconds. On the other hand Charged Bolts ignores this defensive cool down entirely because resilience only works against Force and Tech. I don't know if you PvP but I just hit level 20 on my commando and while generally I don't use Charged Bolts nearly as often as Grav Round I keep it on my tool bar just for such an occasion.

Good info... but what?