I don't see anything wrong with using guardian set bonus, it just brings our gear in line with the types of set bonuses everyone else has... imo you don't try to balance a class by giving it *******r gear, you adjust the abilities so it can be in line with gear equal to everyone else's. imo the expertise change was also good in making things scale better but they needed to rebalance damage a bit so people dont die so fast. before when most people had ~10% damage boost and mitigation it ment everyone was effectively taking~ 110%*90%=99% of original damage now everyone geared takes 100% combined with heal nerfs and damage buffs has made it hard for people to live.

which is how I've been crushing the new wave of combat players with my watchman. watchman doesn't rely on a combo and dots keep ticking while stunned. you guys say how combat should win in high lvl play but the best can completely ruin most of combat's damage and don't even need one of the few classes with a cleanse to help them, everyone has a stun.

to maximize damage you need crit surge and power, working out the very best set is non-trivial but I'd say you probably want at least a 75% crit multiplier and crit rate over 30% and then as much power as you can get. working out how crit/surge effects average damage is easy but power improves different abilities at different rates (although at least they are all linear) . crit and surge are both subject to diminishing returns which is why i just suggest certain amounts to aim for and then max power.

I also often find i pull agro just before force camo is rdy again, my guild just makes sure I'm guarded and I try to position where its not a big deal if i pull agro. we have better defensive cool downs than most tanks so we can easily tank a few seconds if needed.

yes, at 50 you get valorous call to instantly get 30 stacks also points in valor and defensive forms will help you get centering super fast

Transcendence 50% speed boost for your entire ops, 80% in combat spec. should be used often regardless of spec

post 1.2 operative is only beating me if they have the jump on me, have all cool downs and i have no cool downs rdy. even then it takes them too long to count on you not getting helped. dps operatives need to stop getting nerfed, I honestly don't see the point in playing one anymore. tank-sin yes these will beat us most of the time, dueling the best one in my guild he beat me 8/9 times both of us using all cds but he never beat me with more than 10% health left (he choose not to use the stealth sap heal trick) these are long fights where you can call out for help and usually get it in time. the duels were pre 1.2 but watchman sentinel changes shouldn't really do much to this match up. sniper/gunslinger I've never really seen any good enough to do more than annoy me with roots/punts. I agree in theory they should destroy me even a bad one locking me down with roots/punts can make me an easy kill/keep me off my targets. roots are sentinel's greatest weakness, an organized team could theoretically keep me rooted in place indefinitely, with only my stealth to reposition with. vigilance guardian i never noticed as an issue. last time i dueled one he raged for a few days so not sure where the issue is here. sentinel is too strong, it was pre 1.2, still is post 1.2 what makes this worse is how they've nerfed the mercs and sorcs which were already too weak and easily destroyed by any decent sentinel. most of 1.2 was quality of life changes for sentinel but that they went ahead and increased master strike damage was completely uncalled for, in return for the quality of life buffs they should have slightly lowered damage of a few abilities

because the BM set doesn't have the set bonus attached to the armoring. the BM set still has it attached to the shell. what you propose would just give you weaponmaster set bonus with vindicator stats.

nah its a bit simpler 1) get medium armor oranges, preferably with augment slots 2) get BM vindicator set, can put into oranges and equip. (keep shells) you will have no set bonuses but augments slots are better than our set bonuses imo. 3) get warhero vindicator set put into oranges, enjoy +10% damage 4) consider adjusting mods/enhancements with pieces from other sets, ideal mods/enhancements would probably vary some with spec but none will increase your damage even close to 10%

keep in mind those are kills total, due to watchman healing they arent even all his kills, he gets credit for everyone's kills, for example in the one i posted i had 45 kills, the other team combined for 46 deaths. I should not have credit for all those kills, my team wasn't THAT worthless (although they did manage to let them ninja a door despite having 2 people guarding it). but since I'm watchman I heal my group so I pretty much end up getting credit for everyone's kills. This makes kills stat really worthless for looking at a watchman sentinel. That said if you do most of the damage and the other team is dieing then good job, doesn't really matter if you get the kills or not, you're putting pressure on the healers so others might die.

thank god. I'm really starting to question our education system.

you can do more damage than that, here's a 750k voidstar from yesterday http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj264/ffxijakey/Untitled.jpg anyways this is what happens when you have a healer heavy enemy team. being able to just unload on squishy healers while they are healed by 4 other people gets you some nice numbers. we lost cause guarding the other door weren't paying attention. honestly was more impressed by my 6.4k merciless slash crit I had yesterday against an undergeared sorc.

well you have two options... you can work out the formulas for each ability and make some theoretical rotations (depending on build) then plug in stats and see which has highest average taking into account crit rates and possible differences in mitigation abilities run into. or now that its post 1.2 if you have both items you could parse and see the difference but would have a very hard time noticing a difference and have it outside of margin of error. pre 1.2 I did work out the formulas for several abilities and have just been basing it off of them, at some point maybe I will be bored enough to work out a more complete program but maxing merciless slash, slash, and overload saber has me content for now.

I hit 5k merciless slash against a full BM sage today, against under geared my current merciless slash pvp record is 6198. combine that with overload saber and cauterize ticking away. even if combat can compete with burst it relies on precision slash for that burst, a stun/pacify/stealth easily negates this burst while in watchman dots keep ticking and can simply wait for the stun to end and pick up where you left off while combat has precision slash on a 15 sec cool down. in other words a well timed stun does a lot more to shut down combat burst than it does to shut down watchman burst. that said watchman burst can be hurt by good application of cleanses but not all classes have access to these while just about everyone has access to a stun. the better speed boost and roots certainly does help your group mates and easily makes it easily the preferred spec in huttball.

41 power actually wins most of the time by a decent margin... expertise of course helps your defense in addition to your damage but for max damage power is definitely better. The expertise changes just drastically cut the diminishing returns but even at low expertise before 1.2 you were better off with power crystal, this remains the same.

they have nice plots here http://www.jedilace.com/2012/02/03/calculating-critical-hit-chance/

so armorings aren't restricted according to heavy/medium/light armor, they take on the armor type of the orange they are put into so take the vindicator (guardian dps set) armoring and put them in medium oranges so you can use them as a sentinel.

yes the crit rate from strength has diminishing returns but you wont ever really have enough strength for that to change much of anything, you can match it pretty close to a linear fit for under 2k strength.

it really depends what stats you already have and what spec you are running... str and power do not have diminishing returns, and since columni level gear is high enough to pretty much get crit and surge well into diminishing returns I highly recommend choosing between str and power. Str adds a little bit less bonus damage but adds a small amount to crit. I find the str usually wins out due to the crit rate boost as a watchman since most of my damage doesn't come from abilities already forced to crit. I don't think you can really go wrong with str or power though. if I ran focus I would lean more towards power for extra strong sweeps.

so I looked at the vindicator set and it looks like it comes with more endurance heavy enhancements so I guess to really max out I'll have to get both sets do I can get set bonus from vindicator and enhancements from our normal set... at least I wont run out of stuff to do on my sentinel anytime soon.

thats actually not a bad idea, ugh I don't want to grind out another BM set

force crit, if the number shows up as yellow that means force if you are a force user, tech if not a force user. Force/tech also means it bypasses defense chance and shield, also since our dots are elemental they bypass armor.

I play sentinel and i was of the opinion that healers could have used minor buffs pre 1.2... I could kill non-mercenary healers too easily and quickly on my own, mercenary healers I could completely lock down. the problem is if 1 dps can kill a healer them self, sometimes through guard, then what is the point of a healer? The game turns into a bunch of 1v1s since no focus fire is every required to kill anyone. BW choice to nerf these healers and buff dps especially for sentinel who did not need any damage buff. was a terrible mistake. I do not understand all these people who say it was out of control, I remember wrecking wzs with 5 enemy healers. we can argue how devastating the changes really are but for me the problem is they seem to all be in the wrong direction.

power is still better for damage in pvp

you must be doing something wrong, I get those numbers all the time on my watchman as well (although its not guaranteed that merciless slash will crit) they are numbers with relic/adrenal buffs up, as the focus numbers clearly are as well. if you do it against someone with no expertise merciless slash can crit closer to 6k.