They intended slash to be a dump but I feel like I'm robbing myself by using it due to its high cost over sunder. It feels easy to fall behind on focus generation when I'm trying to weave it into a rotation. Dropping the cost to two like a sent would really help.

8/15/18 or 2/21/18 are just obvious pvp builds. One of the first things I noticed when looking for burst in the sage trees after finding torhead while installing the game. Maybe they should remove the aoe on TK wave and make quake available at 20 for leveling but I don't think it should be decoupled from pom if they want sage to have damage specs available for pvp. Something unrelated to their utility from a balancing stand point with biowares posistion on dps specs.

Couple issues I have with the Guardian. A supposed master of the blade only has two attacks that actually do worthwhile damage baseline in sweep and bladestorm which are both on long cooldowns. I wouldn't even consider sweep to hit that hard without the 30% talent boosting it in the first place making it effectively a talent point tax. The snare sucks even with the small range component and should last at least 12 seconds. The interrupt sucks and the cooldown is too long. Seriously I like having to choose to eat a full unload or powershot so I can stop a missile or to have a sorc pump lightning into me then have to watch helplessly as he channels heals for six seconds. The stun and charge are anti kiting tools and shouldn't have to used to bandaid the crappy interrupt when every range has a stun on top of multiple kockbacks, roots, jedi sprint etc. Masterstike is supposed to be the Jedi's heavy hitter and its currently garbage in pvp. The last strike is usually lost out of range and my opponent is now out of melee and kiting. Only useful in zergs or on bads. Lastly and really to sum up my problem with this class in general is where is the payoff for being in melee 100% of the time. Guardians don't survive longer or do more damage then a vanguard much less a merc or sorc. The only time I've not been glad to see a geared jugg on the enemy side over a decked out 50 of another class is when its rage/focus spec. A spec btw that looks illconcieved with biowares vision of burst damage and prone to nerfbait. Another discussion but the way talents make the base abilities boost one another to create continuous high sustained damage with a rotationaly unattached burst ability in tier 7 in the vanguards shared line should be the model for focus. I digress the main point is pvp spec Knights lose the utility of ranged hybrid classes and lose the range and damage of ranged damage classes in return for what? In older MMO games melee attacks in themselves were inherently disruptive of casting. Now its evolved to the point with shield and knockbacks and cast bar pushback resistence with these weak interrupts that its not.

I can see how its more viable with the changes you mentioned. Otherwise it seems cost prohibitive for the effects with project being so force intensive.

Why 31/10 over 27/14?

I leveled almost every class sans scoundrel to 20 to get a feel for what I wanted to play. Vanguard/PT is easily my favorite AC. I was able to do 220k in a voidstar as pyro spec at lvl 27 today. I really think having range and almost all the attacks available to the class/spec ignore armor puts them over the top. My Shadow/assassin looks like its the ultimate late bloomer class with all the powerful damage adds tied into the higher spec talents. The range to melee ratio is basically reversed between the two classes and all the armor is tied into the tank stance leaving them very squishy in pvp damage specs. I'm not the power leveling type so the prospect of hitting 8000 armor Vanguards and Powertechs with weak double strike spam for 40 levels in warzones wasn't an appealing idea to me.

It certainly looks like they took all the CC and ultility of two different ACs a wizard and priest from beta and rolled them together. Could be a coincidence. Regardless lol at you people defending them. A sage has a far better toolkit then a sniper or a merc and doesn't have a deal with a crippling resource on top of it.

OPs are getting nerfed and probably the sweep crit combo as well. Seriously you can't believe that a 4x+ damage boost on an aoe ability is going to stay in when you can just look around at other top tier talents in damage trees and see Bioware made most them dot based to avoid burst stacking. I welcome it if it will remove the crutch so they have to fix the classes real issues. Also operatives aren't even worth discussing. WoW stunlocks in vanilla were OP but at least they took 30 seconds to pull off. Even playing a vanilla/tbc elemental shaman a class with zero hard CC I could win. I look at 50 OPs in this game like enviromental hazards. Hidden Blade is like knockback +stun in a fire pit. Try and avoid it or stun break and run away almost dead.

I've been doing warzones on a vanguard from 18-27 and on a Jedi Guardian from 18-25 to the point where I've got them both in full 20 pvp armor and banked the lvl 40 full set on them both. I'm pretty confident that the bolster system stinks as 50s with gear will just mash you in seconds like they are doing double damage instead of the 10% or less expertise is supposed to add. Anyone below 50 at this point I almost consider a joke challenge wise on those chars except for the occasional high 40s operative with the shoot first and flechette mirror abilities. On a side note hutball and the AoE the doors warzones are so melee unfriendly its made me pretty much shelve my jedi. Knockbacks and stuns from every class and getting focus fired I can deal with if there were some kind of pay off, but the damage she deals is pidly as sweep and bladestorm and masterstrike(lol) all have long cools and the class has to burn through a lot of focus and GCDs constantly applying the short duration snare. Also the interrupt is garbage as every class has multiple damage and heal spells.

Even with the easymode leveling in this game as compared to mmos past with central hubs, hand holds to the next area, plentiful gear, and extremely quick downtime they still found a way to cripple melees in solo play compared to casters. Really if melee wasn't inherently so much more fulfilling then the sorc I would have wrote it off entirely after the first hutball.

I'm not 50 but I've done enough warzone for like 6k comms so far. Sorc and operative are /sigh and wait for spawn. Sniper have some combo shot they pull after the KD root that seems like an insta kill. Some shadows can pull a combo that seems like it takes 60%+ life in one second but I feel like I have a chance at least. Everyone else doesn't seem so bad juggs are easily kited.

Sage is easy. So easy I quit playing it just for the lack of challenge and the boring animations. Seriously you can't see how much better they are than most everything with high damage, pbaoe knockback +5 sec root, instant ranged snare, instant ranged interrupt, jedi sprint, shield, mez, ranged pull, cleanse, instant ranged stun, instant ranged root, and channeled DD snare. I played an elemental shaman in pvp vanilla wow for gods sake. Sage made me lol at like lvl 20 with their available toolbox. Imagine the designer for the Knight was in the brainstorming meeting for this class and some dude was like time to make the sage. You what would be cool if they had spammable master strike, from range that did the same damage with a 50% snare, and 5 different forms of CC, and ranged snare, and interrupt, and shield, and sprint, and heals, and instant dots, and the best AoE.

Commando abilities do seem to fit better on the republic mirror then the BH at least for gunnery that is, but I'm not the one who made that awful tracer animation when missile blast is 100x cooler. Vibro trooper with a pistol would be great. Very warhammerish.

Melee in general in swtor is dragging along some relic mmo mechanics by habit seemingly. Back in pre toa daoc when I played I remember casters like the elementalist or cleric had all the buffs, CC, utility etc because they were perma interrupted in melee. Now in the post wow they put knock back resistence for all lines within the first two talent tiers. Armor is far weaker outside of the tank stance gimmick mechanic, and the ability interrupt is extremely weak. They also seem to have normalized hp numbers across all ACs. Most of the melee range disadvantages have been stripped from ranged classes, but swtor is still treating melee range as in inherent advantage. Melee classes can no longer overcome hp deficits caused by damage/healing at range or during crowd controls but melee classes themselves still lack those mechanics. A powertech loses far less of her effectiveness then a Jugg at range and has an Aoe damage advantage for no balance reason. A bandaid fix would be to copy the idea behind pyro powertech and shift a part of the juggs damage off of melee and onto ranged periodic damage force effects and direct damage saber throws.

That gets at the heart of the issue doesn't it. Bounty Hunters were designed first just as all of the other ACs that were designed as imperial then haphazardly ported into republic rip offs. Vanguard looks goofy and forced where everything from harpoon to storm to the lightning is wierd and doesn't match but its mirror fits perfectly into bountyhunter inconography.

They did a good job actually putting the damage increases to turn a tank class into a dps in the talent tree for Pyro, and I even like that you can give up 11 points in pyro to lose burst for sustained damage with a pyro/AP retractable blade hybrid. However AP on its own falls apart because so much of the damage is added through CGC and particle accelerator. I would never consider using HEGC or going above tier 5 of AP. Particle acclerator is so good that people even waste 3 points in superheated gas for it while running Jet Charge hybrids. Immolate should have like a very strong dot attached. Maybe double the base damage over 18-21 seconds or something. Jet Charge also seems to fit with the flavor of that tree better as its similar to a Juggernauts Vengeance tree.

The dual blaster officers are too hard to kill solo before level 10 when you get mortar volley. Even then you will die even with a medpac if you try either of the two pulls when MV is down as mob full auto does a ton of damage and the trooper has no interrupt at those levels.

Vanguard has good synergy. Ion pulse assures plasma cell procs and they can be spec'd to proc free stockstrikes both of which chain into free armor ignoring HIBs that gain auto crits from your two melee strikes. All while building damage bonus on Pulse cannon. They also have a lot of alternative %damage increases you can stack if ammo isn't an issue. Just looking over the Commando gunnery tree they seem to lack ammo management and have no periodic effects. Curtain of Fire is too high for them to make a similarly working Ionic accelerator hybrid. APC looks like it would be required for cell charger. I'm not sure about it getting blow away superheated plasma cell but I'm sure it was balanced around its base proc chance instead of being up most of the time with the Vanguards Ionized Ignition.

Its obviously Flechette round. Looking around at other Dps trees the tier 7 talents mostly look like sustained damage abilities or backloaded burst abilities. Adding a large passive damage buff on top of the already highest alpha strike burst chain in the game doesn't align with the design of other dps specs. Change it to something akin to plasma brand, moderate damage ability plus moderate duration dot + requires setup or like Demo round moderate damage plus percentage damage boost from setup conditions.