Not necessarily weak period, but Sentinel is probably the weakest soloer in the game. The only real advice here is to stay entirely on top of your gear upgrades and keep stims/me's packs handy (this was the mistake I made at first, since on my Op I only upgraded gear every couple planets or so and only used consumables when soloing heroics... which the Sent generally can't do.) For tough enemies, I like to start with aggro on myself and manually have T7 taunt off of me partway through the fight. It extends our overall killing power (by increasing the amount of time I have T7 shooting ) and means I can often get a second Rebuke and Medpac in there ( blade ward too if I pop heroic moment after T7 taunts ). As for spec. I prefer watchman or focus for leveling, as both tend to have better sustainability and survivability compared to Combat (IMO combat's single target kill power doesn't make up for focus' AoE and tankiness or Watchman's almost as good single target and self healing )

Oh I know. I just wish it could be used better as a gap closer. I remember the first time I got it I used it on a running target and ended up pretty much the same distance from the target as when I started.....

Opportune and Pommel are used rarely and I never use Juyo (as combat or focus. Shii-Cho has a few niche uses on huge AoE groups for the Zen if you aren't focus). Other than that, everything has at least some use. As for getting used to it. It's only intimidating if you try to take it all in at once. Go slow, get a new skill and work out a keybind for it. Doing it piecemeal will make it come more naturally (IMO)

Yeah, Slash should be your main filler focus dump, and it does pretty good damage with all of the talents to buff it. I love the spec. Between perma-transcendence, beefy sweeps, decent survivability compared to the other two, and everything else it's a lot of fun and better than people get it credit for. Only real complaint I have is how ridiculously slow Zealous Leap's travel time is.

That's a horrible way to go about playing Rage. No wonder people think it's terrible...

JK was fun, with the exception being that a lot of your planet-specific enemies ( especially in act 1 ) feel way too much like throwaway characters... I mean, they are throwaway characters, but they don't have to make it so damn obvious that they're a joke. IA was really fun, but the way the class quests and planet quests clash with each other on a few planets ( especially in act 2 ) is slightly immersion breaking. It's understandable from a non-lore perspective because otherwise they'd have to devote a lot of resources to cater to the unique situation your IA is in, but it still makes things feel off. SI, especially act 1, felt really redundant to me, and didn't really match my expectations of what a SI should be like at all. Trooper is pretty good, though several parts of it ( large chunks of act 1 in particular ) feel too personal and small scale.

The OP loses me at the point where he appears to take offense OOC for the way the RP went, to the point of wanting to actively avoid or outright ignore the players because the characters aren't bending to his will. ProfessorWalsh needs to learn to have a bit of detachment here. I'm not sure how you can talk about 'verisimilitude' when you're taking such a metagame-y approach to the scene. The argument shifts later in the thread to start talking about whether or not he had "permission" to do what he did, but I don't think that's the major issue. Attempting to unilaterally control the way the scene goes OOC and getting personally offended at IC interactions is the problem here. A bit late to the thread, but.. yeah.

Star wars... Hyperdrive gives you much more flexibility in space travel than mass relays ever could (though mass relays might be faster, it's not entirely clear). Star Wars ships are generally much larger in scale too. Hard to compare a blaster to mass effect's weird way of doing guns though.

Wrong tree? Since when? Focus is gdlk

Not just with the JK granted, I've noticed this with my Smuggler and Bounty Hunter too. Specifically with the JK though, I find myself encountering a relatively engaging yet still human villain on Taris, only for him to be removed at the end of the planet and ending up dealing with entirely worthless, one dimensional throw away sith for the rest of the act. =/

Hats off to OP. He's really good at writing these rants, even if he's usually wrong.. though I agree the SI's writing is pretty silly.. and it gets even sillier the further along you go. Though honestly I was pissed off from the SI from the very start. The game advertised to me a "master of scheming politics" and was given an extremely half assed series of faux Indiana Jones adventures.

Primarily because it's a zoning tool (For PvP) that isn't threatening enough to actually be effective for zoning. I think in Bioware's mind, they had the idea of you dropping a plasma probe and the enemy player forcing them to decide if they'd rather risk eating Plasma Probe ticks in order to get to you faster, or take the long way around. As it stands though, the ability just really doesn't threaten enough to make that even register, and it doesn't help too much that the other high tier engineering talents aren't anything particularly jaw dropping. For the moment, but eventually they'll get around to fixing Experimental Explosives. Hopefully... Maybe.

Just curious, I got in an argument with a guildmate over the subject earlier today and wondered what other people thought. The example here would be say, rolling on a moddable aim heavy armor piece as a guardian with the intent of replacing the mods while grouped with a trooper who'd consider the piece an upgrade? Or should the trooper get priority? Sorcerer rolling on a str lightsaber ( or vice versa for a guard/sent) if you'd prefer.

I like the noise. Commandos get shafted with their boring beam.

misread the post, apologies. Among people who feel that way that's going to be the case regardless. Certainly LFD facilitates it to an extent, but the behavior is still there, even in TOR. Even right now.

No, I'm asserting that the argument that Blizzard began nerfing content on behalf of LFD is tenuous at best because they were already in the process of nerfing content long before it was implemented. Again, that was largely a non-serious comment, meant to poke fun at the absurdity of your own point. You are correct. But this isn't an issue of averages.

Windy say nothing? The point is pretty clear, but I'll try to make it more concise: Your argument = Dungeonfinder led to ezmode content in WoW and therefore it would do the same in TOR Reality = Blizzard began nerfing content and releasing easier instances more than a year ( several years if you really want to look back at the strings of content nerfs and gear giveaways they've done ) before the tool was implemented. AND: That irrespective of the above, the two points are entirely unique subjects and should be treated as such. The argument that people who don't want the most difficult and time consuming portion of a flashpoint to be forming the group also ubiquitously want the content to be piss easy is utter nonsense. What about someone who wants to join a group, but doesn't want to sit in the fleet? I'd love to do Cademimu right now, but I'm busy finishing the Nar Shaddaa bonus series, and therefore cannot see who is in the fleet asking for people for Cademimu, nor ask in the fleet myself. Isn't it? People are asking for tools to make it more reasonable to find groups for flashpoints without having to sit in the fleet for a potentially protracted period of time. You say that this would ruin the game. It's not really that much of a stretch, it's simply rephrasing your statement.

He's trying to be sarcastic, even though he's supporting a position of keeping it prohibitive to do group content.

Your premise is that automatic dungeon queue ruined content difficulty because the company nerfs the content to accommodate the unwashed masses ( I guess these people were generated spontaneously when the LFD was released ). I'm pointing out that assumption is incorrect, because the process of making the content quicker and easier began significantly in advance of the release of said tool ( a full year if you just look back to 3.0, longer if you go back over the trend of content nerfing in the late 2.x or even 1.x cycles ) The second part is pointing out that under your assumption that correlation = causation ( even though we have the very curious instance of a cause not existing until long after the effects have been felt) one can make an (equally dubious) assertion that the exact opposite is true, because the only 5-man content of merit in the expansion cycle was released in tandem with the tool that supposedly eliminated the existence of difficult content. Mind you, this isn't an actual point, more a way of showing how absurd your own is by applying the same logic to another circumstance.

faster animation on sweep would be nice.... Zealous leap really needs to be sped up too.

The easy content that everyone (primarily) raged about was released along with the 3.0 patch update (though even then not really, since they started reducing the difficulty of content late in the 2.x expansion cycle) The automatic, teleporting dungeonqueue you've been complaining about wasn't released until 3.3. If you're now complaining about the rudimentary LFG system that was already in place, well then we're already screwed since TOR currently has a really crappy LFG system too. The larger point here though is that all of this is irrelevant. As the two are entirely different concepts, regardless of any tenuous correlations we can make. But hell, if we're going to grasp at straws here, the 'hardest' 5-man dungeons of the expansion were released alongside the automatic dungeon finder, which naturally would be irrefutable proof that releasing an automatic dungeonfinder makes content significantly harder, not easier.

Except WoW released the easy content first. You're wrong on the second count too. Only one of the two addresses the issue of access to content. The ability to complete said content is entirely separate.

Can you name one that has? Nevermind that the point is still utterly irrelevant, as difficulty of content and difficulty of preparing for content are mutually exclusive concepts (though one could argue that it's a bit screwed up when getting a group together for a flashpoint can be more difficult and time consuming than actually running the flashpoint)

Except no one is asking for the game to be easy or effortless. No one in this thread asking for LFD has even mentioned making the content easier, as that has nothing to do with this thread. faster enough. LFD does nothing to fix disproportionality of tank/healer/dps balance, but it does help increase the pool of players from which to draw from.

I saw a "nerf snipers" thread in the marauder forums once.