My guess has always been that the odd itemization serves as a soft-cap for 2nd tier gear stats. It's expected that players will simply pick up all the BM gear piecemeal in whatever order, leaving them ultimately a full set with a ton of (essentially dead stat) accuracy. The jump to WH, by itself only a move from 58 to 61, is emphasized by trading a lot of the dead stat for DPS stats.

From parses, I find that roughly 45% of my damage dealt in a WZ comes from DoTs. It's definitely worth considering if you have some variable points in your build. Common wisdom in Sent speccing was to take the 30% mitigation of AoE damage to combat the (now impossible) Sage hybrid spec and Guardian Smash spec. Only channeled abilities are Master Strike and Force Choke. I'd say post-1.2 Master Strike is heavily used. I pop it whenever it makes sense to (target is slowed or stunned, has AFAIK used his CCs/knockback, or is just generally positioned in a corner, so as to be unable to adequately escape its last tick). Among our abilities, it got the biggest buff in 1.2, and you'd really be surprised how often players allow you to get it off or simply cannot help but let you get it off. I swear, the range for its last tick has to be at least 6m. From what I can tell, both based upon my own play and (very frequently) fighting Marauders, I'd have to disagree and say that Master Strike/Ravage is not uncommon. A growing number of us are actually speccing into the middle tree, which adds a root to Master Strike.

No worries. I feel for you guys. Sents are bloody annoying, Another bit worth mentioning is our infamous Force Camo. This likely contributes to our being annoying, because it usually keeps us from being killed and so being defeated in the more traditional sense. (Has to be frustrating to 'win' and not have a corpse in front of you, but don't worry, you've still taken us out of the fight and cost us a CD.) It lasts between 4-6s depending upon talents and grants us a speed boost likewise between 30-50%. This is enough for us to escape a losing fight and (1) find a place to hide and heal up or (2) scurry to the health pot, as well as (3) try to sneakily close in upon an objective. If, on Alderaan, you don't see us pop out of stealth, don't think that we've left and you're safe. There are plenty of places to hide near the node. A common tactic I use is to harass a side-node when the rest of my team is hitting mid, stealth out behind the wall, wait for the 2nd defender to leave the node to help mid, and then almost instantly leap back in on the lone defender, often allowing me to win the duel and cap. Anyways, I know it's often unavoidable, especially in PUG situations, but it is also worth asking yourself whether as a Sage you should ever try to be in a situation to 1v1 a Sent. It's frankly where we excel; all things being equal (skill & gear), the Sent is likely to win. I would however say the exact same thing about a Pyrotech vs. a Sage. In any group fight of 3 or more, however, there is really nothing more useful than a Sage, IMO. So it's perhaps a more abstract point, but your first piece of advice is in the end, I think, the best taken.

I'm a bit busy and will revisit this thread when I have more time to post. A few short corrections: for a Watchman/Anni specced Sent/Mara, Force Leap is on a 12s CD and Force Kick is on a 6s CD; for those of us in BM gear, Guarded by the Force is on a 75s CD and Dispatch has a 15m range. Force Choke is also very good. Eat the mezz -- always use your CC breaker on Force Choke when fighting a Sent. Our damage is by and large done by our short term DoTs. I can put on two sets of DoTs (from Overcharge Saber and Cauterize), pop Zen for 100% crit rate on my DoTs, and then Force Choke you. During the Force Choke I will gain at least 3 Focus, allowing me to often hit you right afterwards with our big weapons damage attack, Merciless Slash. It will hurt. Two pieces of advice that come immediately to mind: always use a CC if you cannot get away in time from the last tick of our Master Strike (our tree-defining ability, Cauterize, has a 50% slow attached to it -- often you cannot get out of range even if you try), and, most importantly, try to cleanse our DoTs.

ITT: ranged class considers himself elite, loses duels, complains that a melee dueling class can now do more than just interrupt him, makes up some numbers about his friend's damage output, & calls for a nerf. I.e., QQ. I expect BW to adjust classes according to the data that they constantly collect. If it's actually needed, our nerf will come, regardless of your and my forum activity.

You've likely read that you should ideally pop Zen after putting three stacks of OS on your target. This would mean popping it after you start your burns.

Looking through a parser, it is clear that OH damage does scale with the ability. I wonder if you have ready access to the ability coefficients here? Oddly enough, with Swift Slash, just over 15% of my total damage is coming from Slash, using Merciless, Master Strike, OS, C, ZS, essentially whenever they're off CD and can reasonably be cast (e.g., C not significantly overwriting itself, Merciless typically being cast after C, etc.). It's hard for me to imagine that that 10%+ is due to my critting on Slash, so perhaps we're doing something different after all. About 12.5% is coming from Master Strike, here being cast under ideal conditions (i.e., against a dummy that does not move). Makes me question Master Focus a bit. I'd be interested in peeking at your build, if you'd care to share it.

Yea, opening up a parser would certainly be the way to do it. I try to avoid using Slash as much as possible, but I'm quite surprised that its overall DPS totals less than 5% for you. As WM mechanics are generally the same, I imagine a sober look at the numbers would show me something similar. Now, as far as DWM and OH mechanics go -- I've been away from the game for a little bit, but when I left the consensus (on these forums) was that OH attacks did not scale with the ability used. To quote myself from another thread: "Your offhand weapon does (assuming it has the same hilt as your mainhand), without Dual Wield Mastery, 30% of your /base/ mainhand damage (i.e. no bonus from stats) at a base 57-63% accuracy. So, with Dual Wield Mastery, you're doing on average 66%*60% (let's say) = 39.6% of your mainhand's base damage range in offhand extra damage per strike that uses the second saber. This is 21.6% more than it would be untalented. Each talent point in Dual Wield Mastery thus buys an extra 7.2% of your base weapons damage (Strength or Power bonuses not being applicable) to the attacks that use the offhand. "To put this into perspective, the damage range of a Champion saber is 302-453, avg 378. With one point in Dual Wield Mastery, as many builds call for, you're looking at a +27.2 dmg increase. With three points, you'd get a +81.6 dmg increase. Mind you, this is with T2 gear. +81.6 extra /weapons/ damage at that point, although I suppose it'll add up over large sequences, is really not that much." Is this confirmed not to be the case? If OH damage scales with the ability used, the points will go most assuredly into DWM. I didn't care much for Defensive Roll pre-1.2, as some AoEs could be avoided altogether, but now that Sages can no longer use TWave off of PoM procs, it seems even more useless to me. No complaints with Force Fade, just haven't got around to trying it out yet.

Pre 1.2, I found it necessary to pick up Focused Leap from the Combat tree in order to ensure that I could reliably cast a 50% slow with Leg Slash and/or interrupt my target. Now that slowing and interrupting are essentially Focus-free, it seems to me that Focused Leap may no longer be necessary. Our standard opening without Focused Leap would be Leap (3) -> OS (0) -> ZS (6) -> C (4[+1 via Burning Focus=5]) -> MS (1). The likelihood that Burning Focus will proc us that key +1 Focus is 30% per DoT tick; OS will tick twice and C will tick once, giving us a 90% likelihood to proc it. (Not really worth anything, but, out of 40 trials, I got it 30 times. Looking for yellow damage, it at least appears that three ticks come off before I would hit MS.) If what I've said so far is correct, then putting two points into Focused Leap for the sake of our opening is basically a very expensive way to change a 90% gamble into an 100% guarantee. If you, like me, would put your house on a 90% gamble, the next question is where else to put those two talent points. For reference, I'm 33/3/5 (http://db.darthhater.com/skill_calc/jedi_knight/sentinel/#::f5ef6df7e5fe11f10e2f7: ) currently. (So as to dissuade off-topic spec talk: unless they ever make it so that offhand damage scales with the ability, the math proves DWM to be very negligible; given that Crusader can proc only once every 3s, a 50% chance every 1.5s is fine with me; now that Sorcs can no longer hybrid into 0/13/28, the most prevalent instant AoE attack is out of the game; and I generally favor Transcendence over Zen.) If I were to untalent Focused Leap, I think I would honestly consider Swift Slash. With about a 30% melee crit chance from gear, 5% from buff, and 15% from Swift Slash, I would be critting 50% of the time with Slash. Now, I don't exactly like to use Slash, but I find I still regularly do. Turning it into a 2k damage nuke is for better or worse attractive to me -- unless one of you reasons otherwise?

I play a 50 Powertech, Sage, and Sentinel. The Powertech is by far the easiest. The Sage requires a good bit of awareness, but its mechanic is not difficult. The Sentinel is comparatively hard.

You pay 2 pts for the slow on Cauterize, not for Leg Slash. Leg Slash is given to you by default. If you are slowed while attempting to slow someone, as will happen very often in PvP, you will notice very quickly that the a 30% slow is less than the slow put on you. Even with Inflammation, you will thus have to use the 50% slow on Leg Slash. 'Losing' one GCD is insignificant when compared to losing 3+s getting kited by your opponent.

Not really "one of the few." We have (comparatively at least) one of the simplest, and hence aesthetically most easily acceptable looking PvP sets.

Right, the one extra Focus every 12s does make it seem rather insignificant. It's really only a guarantee to be able to use a certain opening without either relying upon a RNG Focus from a DoT or using strike. I'm going to spec out of it, surely. I have seen some streamers taking up Defensive Roll. I question though what the actual value of the AoE damage reduction would be. On Void, sure, it'd be quite significant. But otherwise I imagine (really rough estimate here) that as a rather mobile sentinel maybe 10% of the overall damage I would take would come from AoEs. In which case it's two points for a 3% overall damage reduction as opposed to two points for a 4% increased crit chance. This itself doesn't decide anything but does call into question just how valuable the damage reduction is.

Telling sentinels to use one saber and to learn their class? This post is so ridiculous it has to be an attempt at trolling.

I pretty much exclusively use it on baddies who insist on standing still and eating the damage.