ssfish
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Posts posted by ssfish
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The desire to discuss ideas and concerns, is what matters the most. Being creative and listening to others is important too. I'm trying to be the guy who's throwing out ideas, asking questions, trying to find the merits of our class. I'm also the guy that some people love to hate. I take the punches head on. I don't have a hope in hell of securing the position, I'd rather direct and influence someone who has a clean reputation. I want results, I don't need drum-rolls and trumpets to announce and proclaim my authority here. I'm a simple man who loves to play his jug.
Hunger has a way to tame a man's pride. Stay hungry my friend.
At the time of the last run, I had high hopes for the program, and I would have loved to be at the center of the discussion at that time. Once the time comes for Juggernauts to pose questions again, I plan on getting back into the conversation.
Our community pre-2.0 was, in my mind, a great group... small, but full of great people. The Class Rep program brought us a number of good people to improve the discussion, but it also brought a fair number of people who had no business opening their mouth. I see that trend has continued since. A lot of work needs to be done to get a consensus on the biggest issues for our class. Root on Ravage is a joke when looked at in light of the questions we posed and answers we got, and the excuse given for the lack of more comprehensive changes was simply disappointing.
In other words: Keep doing what you're doing. Same goes to Marb and the other folks that are leading the discussion (whether I agree with the arguments presented or not)
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I appreciate being remembered and considered; but the fact is, I only play SWTOR for the occasional space PvP match anymore. I've done exactly one boss in the newest PvE raids, and haven't stepped foot in a PvP match since the 4v4 arenas were implemented.
The class hasn't changed since the last go-around, and I haven't instantly become ignorant of the issues, but I am not active enough with SWTOR any longer to seriously consider/be considered for this job. Besides, after watching how the last round of Jugg questions went, where a player who hadn't' played the class post-2.0 was allowed to come in and swing his name around to influence the Rep and his questions, I have zero desire to participate in the joke that this endeavor was proven to be.
Marb would be my suggestion, based on his activity during the last round, but I'm too out of touch to be considered seriously.
(I'm not ashamed to admit that the whole Class Representative fiasco was no small factor in my decision to distance myself from SWTOR.)
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I'm trying to understand this. This must have been changed in some patch because I can't find a Two piece bonus that gives a damage buff to force scream, it's a 4 piece set and its the Operation gear vendor. I can find the 2 piece that gives Ravage 8%. The two piece for the Jugg is Intercede healing for 8%/ Am I missing something or did this actually get fixed? Because if not i'm totally cashing in on this. Also if this is allowed, you will be missing out on the Expertise mods, has anyone played around with what kind of damage this would put out?
The Juggernaut 2-piece PvE bonus is zero range on Saber Throw. This is a must have. The next two pieces can give you either the 8% bonus to Scream (if you get two more pieces from the Jugg set) or 8% bonus to Ravage, if you take the Marauder set pieces. The intercede healing bonus is from the PvP set, I do believe.
I'm guessing, given the topic, that the discussion was initially about PvE. For some reason, people redirected it to Ravage in PvP.
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I see I'm finally about to be bumped. I'll have to try and rectify that here soon.
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A few weeks ago we pugged HM KP. My wife and I were the tanks. On arrival at the puzzle no one would admit knowing how to do it. I know the theory, but have never actually done it. The dps and healers argued over who should be moving the puzzle. I even heard one person insist the tanks should do it, which I had never read, seen, or watched before. There was a few minutes of practice before someone got bored and started the fight. There were many mistakes in solving the puzzle. Much swearing from the DPS and healers as to whose fault it was. We spent a considerable amount of time smacking the boss and doing virtually no damage.
We still beat the enrage timer. Or at least the boss died with none of us dying. I'm not really sure which, my wife and I were laughing to hard at the conversations to notice the boss (there were a couple of incredible characters in this group) and trying to remember to tank swap occasionally.
Oh right. A point. Skipping KP because of the puzzle is pointless. Unless the group is under-geared 50s I suppose.
2 Juggernaut tanks Interceding to each other at the first panel for tank swap is the only proper way to handle the puzzle.
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Oh right, the guy who had no involvement in this process for Juggs until two days before final questions were due.
In all honesty, I expect that, after the fallout of the last batch of answers, we could have given them a question like:
"Juggernauts suck. Why do you hate us?"
and we would get, at the very least, a courteous answer with some effort behind it. So I think there is still hope for decent responses from the combat team.
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PvE and General are not his questions, he decided to go with questions that Aren and I were doing back and forth on in the draft thread. We are not in any way affiliated with the rep.
We didn't mean to harm the quality of the eventual questions, and it wasn't our intention to do the reps job for him.
That is not the same PvE question that had been being worked on before I stepped away from the forums. So either the quality of what you guys were doing went to hell in the past few days, or the Rep did a terrible job. Not sure which it is, nor do I really care since it doesn't stop these questions from being horrible.
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Wow, and I thought the Vanguard questions were poorly done. That PvP question.... you are trying to bait a "heal to full" quality response, I assume.
Oh, and in a "literal sense" we do have an offensive cooldown, which you referenced in the question. Methinks "literal" is not the word you intended to use. Visceral, maybe?
And of course, we've seen how "feel" works out for questions. The only hope for decent answers out of these is assuming that whoever wrote up the Sorc/Van answers got a tongue lashing and they decide to answer more than was actually asked.
Oh well; too little, too late. Here's to hoping that the combat team pulls something out of somewhere to salvage some kind of response to these questions.
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I wrote this up on the Guardian forums the other day, which expresses my biggest PvE concern with Jugg/Guardian:
Right now, Vigilance spec is in a unique place. On one hand, we are a DoT-class. Our primary abilities all apply burns. Those burns account for between 18% and 22% of our total damage, meaning without them running their full course on a target, we lose significant DPS.
On the other hand, we have several hard hitting abilities in Overhead Slash (tops out around 7k in current tier gear), Blade Storm (tops out around 5.5k in current tier gear), Master Strike (tops out at around 9k on the third tick, or 17k over the full 3 seconds with 3 crits), and Dispatch (7.5k). With that many hard hitting abilities that have the potential to be chained together one after the next, we look like a burst damage class.
However, when RNG doesn't favor us with crits and Rampage procs, that line of abilities quickly becomes hashed. On a fight like Styrak or Olok, we are unable to get even close to full uptime on our bleeds, removing a good chunk of our damage. On a fight like the Cartel Warlords (Sunder phase) where there is a lot of movement, or a fight like Dash'roode where there are fairly regular knockbacks, we are unable to run through our full rotation of damage abilities, namely Master Strike, which then causes adjustments to be made to the rotation, which leads to wasted Rampage procs, which continues on down to sub-par DPS.
In general, there are few fights that allow us to use our full arsenal of abilities as they should be used. That means inefficiency and lost DPS. On a personal level, I like the uniqueness of Vigilance in that it is somewhere in between. From the perspective of an end-game raider trying to be as competitive as possible, I dislike the inconsistency that comes along with that in Vigilance.
Basically, we need both sides of the coin to land heads up in order for us to have the chance to compete for a raid spot*. Under ideal circumstances, once you factor in the sub-30% Dispatches, our overall DPS is very nearly on par with the top-tier classes. The problem is two-fold. One: We vary rarely encounter fights that have those "ideal circumstances," and Two: Even when we do have those "ideal circumstances," we have to pray to the dice gods that we get good rolls for Rampage procs.
Emphasis added for Boarder's sake. Oh, and due to fight mechanics in raids, Rage actually tends to win in the Single Target DPS.
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For raid utility question, i don't do raids much but they will most likely say that internal metrics show us juggernauts are on par (in fact they look like they are close to 5% range with commandos and sages in http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=664980 and they have said 'working as intended for far worse AC's *cough*assassins*cough*)
Dummy parses don't tell the whole story, because they do not account for raid mechanics. There isn't a single end-game fight where we get to just go to town like we do on a dummy. Mercs and Sorcs are both ranged classes, which are not punished at all in raids, whereas Juggernauts are a melee class and have to deal with the majority of raid mechanics; and this is only compounded when there are other melee in the group for fights where stacking is bad.
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I'm not talking about offensive utility in the question I wrote. I'm talking about raid utility. This can come in a number of forms (sniper shield being an obvious non-offensive raid utility). Off-tanking, as was pointed out in the question, is not encouraged at all in end-game PvE content. If you want an example of a mechanic that encourages (which isn't the same as "requires") off-taunts, look at the tank fight in EC.
There are a number of places where they could have made DPS taunts a great utility, such as the white spheres on Kephess. But they actually went the other direction in further limiting it's use by DPS (Dash'roode adds cannot be taunted in NiM). They actively removed mechanics that provided a use for DPS classes with taunts. If they then throw it back in our face like that is supposed to be our utility, then I just don't know what to say.
And again, emergency tanking can be done. The fights are not designed to encourage it, so the classes should not be balanced with it in mind.
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Guardian questions don't come due until the end of October. Don't worry about it for now. Just continue the discussions, and if Andrew is MIA come October, then we can start to consider having someone else take over.
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I'm just going to say it again:
Emergency Tanking - If they are making balance decisions that are predicated on someone (in this case the tanks) failing to do their job, then there is something wrong with their thought process.
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While not "encouraged", even more so than off-healing, emergency tanking is a doable thing. Of course for a very limited time, perhaps just enough time for the tank to be resurrected and topped off, which is less than the 12 seconds of saber ward, a well placed saber reflect and endure pain. All during which there's no need to interrupt whatever it is you're doing as dps in most encounters. At most the waste is 2 gcds to switch to soresu and back to shien or shi-cho.
Because of this, just like sorcs can heal2full as dps spec and need to l2p, juggs can funnywordsthatinvolvetanking as dps... I'm afraid that just as they stated that sorcs are working as intended, the same will go for juggs, especially considering that damage output is about the same.
First, damage output is not "about the same." Sorcs, when played properly/well, far outstrip the Juggernaut in most fights, due in large part to their ranged nature.
Second, emergency tanking is doable, and should probably be differentiated in the question. But, Saber Reflect is not effective in every fight, Saber Ward is not always up, and the waste in switching stances is not just 2 GCDs, it's also the Rage dump involved.
Besides, balancing the classes around people failing at their job (hence emergency tanking) is a horrible design decision, and if they decide to give us that answer, then that says all I need to hear.
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I'm not really happy with the line:
"Similarly, abilities such as Enraged Defense and Intercede, will providing increased survivability, detract from our primary function as damage dealers (Intercede for using a global to do something other than damage and ED for the Rage cost), causing our already unimpressive damage potential to dip even further; they are also completely unneeded in end-game PvE."
I threw it in there as a preemptive against the Intercede argument, but my thought is that we shouldn't need to go down that road. If they use Intercede as an argument for our utility, then I think that says all that they really need to say.
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I know we've been using Andrew's State of the Guardian thread to discuss the questions, but it's gotten a bit bogged down, so I figured I'd put this out there fresh. Admittedly, I haven't stayed on top of the Guardian side of things, since Juggernaut questions come due first, so if this overlaps or goes over anyone else's previous suggestions, sorry.
(Note: This topic may be applicable to the general question, as it would have PvP implications as well)
(Note #2: I may slip into Juggernaut terminology, as I'm just more comfortable with it.)
Vigilance/Vengeance Concern
Right now, Vigilance spec is in a unique place. On one hand, we are a DoT-class. Our primary abilities all apply burns. Those burns account for between 18% and 22% of our total damage, meaning without them running their full course on a target, we lose significant DPS.
On the other hand, we have several hard hitting abilities in Overhead Slash (tops out around 7k in current tier gear), Blade Storm (tops out around 5.5k in current tier gear), Master Strike (tops out at around 9k on the third tick, or 17k over the full 3 seconds with 3 crits), and Dispatch (7.5k). With that many hard hitting abilities that have the potential to be chained together one after the next, we look like a burst damage class.
However, when RNG doesn't favor us with crits and Rampage procs, that line of abilities quickly becomes hashed. On a fight like Styrak or Olok, we are unable to get even close to full uptime on our bleeds, removing a good chunk of our damage. On a fight like the Cartel Warlords (Sunder phase) where there is a lot of movement, or a fight like Dash'roode where there are fairly regular knockbacks, we are unable to run through our full rotation of damage abilities, namely Master Strike, which then causes adjustments to be made to the rotation, which leads to wasted Rampage procs, which continues on down to sub-par DPS.
In general, there are few fights that allow us to use our full arsenal of abilities as they should be used. That means inefficiency and lost DPS. On a personal level, I like the uniqueness of Vigilance in that it is somewhere in between. From the perspective of an end-game raider trying to be as competitive as possible, I dislike the inconsistency that comes along with that in Vigilance.
Basically, we need both sides of the coin to land heads up in order for us to have the chance to compete for a raid spot*. Under ideal circumstances, once you factor in the sub-30% Dispatches, our overall DPS is very nearly on par with the top-tier classes. The problem is two-fold. One: We vary rarely encounter fights that have those "ideal circumstances," and Two: Even when we do have those "ideal circumstances," we have to pray to the dice gods that we get good rolls for Rampage procs.
We would be well served asking a question pointing to this duality and addressing the concern that because we are in the middle, if we aren't able to achieve both, we suffer substantially.
I am working on condensing my concerns into a viable question, but I wanted to put this out there and see if others were of similar minds on this before I carried on.
*I've said this many times, but I'll reiterate here: We get raid spots now because of the player at the keyboard, not because we play a desirable class
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Yea, it looked a bit overdone after I typed it, but I figured I'd throw it out there.
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Probably not needed (I hope), but It would be sad/amazing if "you have intercede" became our equivalent of "you can heal to full".
I think our equivalent will be "swap stances."
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True, though now i think they will just feel the need to remind us of all the amazing things dps juggernauts can do in ops, like intercede! Now I'm just being negative.
Outside of an armor debuff, which can be applied by multiple other classes/role assignments, Juggernaut DPS has very limited group utility. Off-tanking or emergency tanking is not encouraged by any mechanics at end-game, and is not practical without sacrificing competency in our primary role as damage dealers. Similarly, abilities such as Enraged Defense and Intercede, will providing increased survivability, detract from our primary function as damage dealers (Intercede for using a global to do something other than damage and ED for the Rage cost), causing our already unimpressive damage potential to dip even further; they are also completely unneeded in end-game PvE. With the current state of affairs with regards to class balance, a group would be better served bringing a Juggernaut tank, a Sniper, or a Mercenary for their armor debuff, due to other benefits provided by those classes/roles in addition to the armor debuff. This leaves Juggernaut DPS players without something that they can offer a group as far as utility abilities are concerned. Further, Juggernaut DPS is woefully lacking with the exception of one specific spec in one specific fight in the current tier of content.
Is it intended that Juggernauts' damage output and group utility while using either of the DPS trees be sub-par due to the fact that we have the option of fulfilling the tank role?
Think that would cover it? Or am I falling into the realm of "too whiny" at that point?
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I am going to be posting the questions I have in mind tonight and pretty much have the PvP question complete. But with regards to the PvE question I am thinking about using Marb's question or Uncle Ost's. I would like the community to help with deciding which question would be better or if any alterations are needed before I post it.
I provided my amended vision of Marb's PvE question already. I think it is more to the point while still encompassing his primary points.
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I'm curious, and honestly not motivated enough to do the math, but how much of a gain would we see if our 6% strength talent was moved to 9% like other classes get? That's roughly another 100 strength at current tier, and could easily be worked into something with the Accuracy talent, since they share a tier on the tree (Accuracy goes to a 2 point talent while the Strength goes to 3.).
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You cleaned that up nicely. I almost feel like we should mention how few raid want another melee over a ranged given the headaches melee can sometimes bring, course that may just make the question more complex. I'm of two minds on it.
My original draft touched upon that a bit more when touching on Snipers and Mercs for armor debuff, but I decided to condense it to the line "...due to other benefits provided by those classes/roles in addition to the armor debuff." It shouldn't need to be spelled out what those other benefits are, but of course, it easily could be expounded upon at greater length.
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Learn and run both. Some fights are better suited for one spec over the other.
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My thoughts on wording of the PvE question:
Outside of an armor debuff, which can be applied by multiple other classes/role assignments, Juggernaut DPS has very limited group utility. Off-tanking or emergency tanking is not encouraged by any mechanics at end-game, and is not practical without sacrificing competency in our primary role as damage dealers. With the current state of affairs with regards to class balance, a group would be better served bringing a Juggernaut tank, a Sniper, or a Mercenary for their armor debuff, due to other benefits provided by those classes/roles in addition to the armor debuff. This leaves Juggernaut DPS players without something that they can offer a group as far as utility abilities are concerned. Further, Juggernaut DPS is woefully lacking with the exception of one specific spec in one specific fight in the current tier of content.
Is it intended that Juggernauts' damage output and group utility while using either of the DPS trees be sub-par due to the fact that we have the option of fulfilling the tank role?
I think I kept the intent of what you were driving at while also specifying it towards our class.
The REAL juggernaut concerns thread.
in Guardian / Juggernaut
Posted · Edited by ssfish
It's kind of silly that the spec line Vengeance makes no effective use of a reactionary ability titled Retaliation. The two words are close enough to be synonymous. Making Retal a worthwhile PvE ability could be difficult, but it should have some kind of added effect in PvP at the very least.
Refreshing DoTs would be pointless, as those are simply a byproduct of our main abilities - they should be getting refreshed essentially on cooldown anyways. Give Vengeance an Auto-Crit, or Rage cost reduction on it, or give it a chance to proc Rampage... something to breathe some life into the ability.
Alternately, to keep in line with your DoT idea, and to combine it with a thought I tossed about during the first go at Class Rep questions: Make it apply a Deathfield / Weakening Blast type debuff on your target, making your next XX DoT ticks hit for extra damage.