Firstly, wow I was right! Secondly, I tried out the Guardian again and it's nice to see that every path has focused defence and dispatch base. That's a good step back in the right direction (even if it was a bug/oversight causing them to be missing). It was also nice to see that one of the things I thought was a bug (combat focus causing a force sweep effect) is now noted as an actual passive and there are TO DOs for the things that aren't currently working. I'd still like to see Saber Throw come back as a base ability and if tanks can no longer gain all the abilities needed to mitigate tank busting damage (big boss attacks that one shot or near one shot), those types of boss attacks should be completely removed from the game.

Thanks for the tip! I'll see if that works tomorrow. Thankfully some of the passives don't really matter as they affect abilities I didn't have and even if a passive duplicates its effect, this is a high level look, not a balance pass.

To me, the Sentinel is all about speed. You move fast, you press buttons fast. You also have some incredible utility abilities that define the class. I'm not going to include the rotational damage abilities as part of this because it's clear that these changes are not intended to take away from current rotations on live. Transcendence is by far one of my most favourite abilities for the Sentinel. It defines the feeling of the class for me. Force Camouflage is another ability that defines the sentinel. No other class has in combat stealth like this. While the Guardian is this lumbering juggernaut (mirror class pun intended), the Sentinel is an agile mix between assassin and fighter. The Sentinel should move in and out of fights with high speed, overwhelming their opponent. Currently on PTS, only the Combat Sentinel feels like this when it has 2 force charge charges, blade blitz, force camouflage and that cool new passive which increases movement speed when you crit. Without transcendence and at least force camouflage baseline, Sentinel does not feel like the Sentinel on live to me. Sure the damage is there, better even, especially with the Combat spec, but the lack of mobility baseline really hurts. During dailies I kept getting slowed by enemies and was getting frustrated not being able to pop any of the above movement tools - because I didn't have them. So to sum up the first question, what abilities make the Sentinel unique to me, it's the mobility and raid wide speed buffs. Transcendence and Force Camouflage should not be a choice. I'm more ok with the Sentinel choosing between defensives than I was with the Guardian, but don't remove their speed. For the next question, do these ability paths feel effective against enemies, this is harder to answer. As stated above, Watchman's damage was perfectly fine, but the mobility was sorely lacking and made it frustrating to play. If I were in a pvp match, I would have not enjoyed being kited forever, forced to rely on my once per 15 seconds force charge. Same goes for Concentration. The damage is fine, but the mobility is lacking. Combat on the other hand, Combat felt fun. More fun than live. Combining all the buffs to blade rush and passive movement boosts while critting really brought out the true nature of Combat. Hit hard, hit fast. High speed gameplay at its finest, the way Sentinel is meant to be played. My only issue is once again, gaining force camouflage and blade blitz back meant I couldn't get a cool passive and again, I didn't have trascendence. On live servers, I enjoy soloing master mode Red Reaper as a Sentinel or Marauder. So, to really test if I can do the same things I do on live, I'd need to be able to play flashpoints and heroics at the current level cap. I don't think any class would struggle with dailies even without defensives, it's just more frustrating without movement tools. A real test of the classes power lies in their ability to solo the game's harder content. Another thing is that the Sentinel has no stuns anymore - I don't know if this is intentional or not but both force stasis and awe are gone. It makes sense for damage classes to not have the same amount of stuns as a tank hybrid like the Guardian, but not when there is no compensation in other places. If the Sentinel loses its stuns, it absolutely should prove group buffs and speed boosts as baseline abilities, not ABC options. For feedback on the different disciplines though I've mostly covered it already: Watchman: Damage is good. I don't fully understand Force Lash however. It replaces Cauterise and only does the same amount of damage as slash for one less focus cost if you have the other two dots ticking. This also means your aoe is worse as you can't spread all your dots. I'm guessing the synergy is supposed to come from the fact that it does extra force energy damage, but it also makes the current best in slot single target tactical useless as it procs cauterise extra times. Utility is almost completely gone from the class outside the raid buff. Defensives aren't terrible but mobility is atrocious. Concentration: Honestly about the same as watchman. Damage and rotation feels the same as live. Utilities are lacking, defensives aren't as bad as the Guardian's were. Mobility could be better. Combat: This spec feels the best out of all of them with the buffs to blade rush, combined with twin fanged form - which honestly should be a base passive for the spec it's so fun - and the movement speed boost when you crit a target. Mobility is much better than the other specs, though I'd still like for camouflage and transcendence to be baseline so I can keep my speed while also trying the new passives. Utility is also really bad due to no obfuscate, stuns or transcendence - same as the other two specs. Overall, if these changes went live tomorrow, I wouldn't touch Watchman or Concentration. I'd go full in on Combat because it retains the feeling of Sentinel the most to me. It's actually an improvement on Combat if you excuse the ability pruning. I really really really hope that at the very least, Transcendence (0 Centering cost version) and Force Camouflage become baseline abilities and not ABC options. Being forced to choose between those and passives really sucks. I'm glad that rebuke and saber ward are staying as base abilities. Once again, choosing between passives is great fun! It enables new ways to play with the abilities you love. Being forced to choose between those same abilities and new passives is not fun. Instead, keep ability choices to a minimum in the new system and focus on the passives - that is where the fun lies. Consider this, if I lose half my abilities but have to switch loadouts every fight, is the game really being streamlined? Thanks for the updates and fingers crossed for the future.

Having played a bit of all the specs, first of all, it is extremely buggy right now as switching specs doesn't remove abilities and passives correctly. I'll post general thoughts here then go to the other thread to answer the specific questions. After playing watchman, I switched to concentration and combat and found that I still had a whole host of passives and force lash for some reason. This made testing somewhat futile as I have no idea what passives are intended - especially as a bunch of old utilities are now baked into certain specs (which hasn't been documented anywhere so we don't know if that's intended or not). Just as an example, as a concentration sentinel I have: Force lash, juyo melt, melting center etc. I also had some passives buffing lance - the concentration ability. At least the speeders are faster and companions feel more like they are on live. As a very high level look, I'll give some high level feedback here: Watchman and Concentration play about the same in terms of doing damage. The lack of mobility, stuns and missing defensives stings. I got slowed as a Watchman by a normal enemy and because I didn't have Transcendence, Force Camouflage or Blade Blitz, I had to walk at them. Slowly. As a melee class. This is not the Sentinel I know. I think Sentinel, I think raw speed. That brings me to Combat - Combat feels amazing. Even without all the utilities and movement tools, the sheer amount of synergies with blade rush and increased movement from critting feels really fun. This spec goes fast and hits hard - exactly how sentinel should feel. It's still missing a lot and the Sentinel feels like it had its kneecaps shattered, but the Combat passives are great. So, once again. I love choosing passives, I hate choosing between abilities and passives. Give us more of these interesting passives instead of forcing us to choose between abilities ( like transcendence) that make the Sentinel what it is on live. For me, Transcendence is to the Sentinel as Saber Throw is to the Guardian. It's a key ability of the class and should be baseline. I saw someone talking about having a button that switches between story and hard mode. Story mode would give you the basic things you need to complete story, while hard mode would unlock all your abilities you have on live so you can do harder content. There is time to change things, but it's running out. Please don't over-prune, it will push away veteran and hardcore players while reducing the skill ceiling overall. If you want to reduce the amount of defensive abilities, fine, have one single ABC choice be about defensives, but don't force us to choose between cool new passives and the abilities we already have.

Thanks for the update and improved formatting for the ABC options. Initial impressions are that the Sentinel will retain more of its survivability than the Guardian but is losing a lot of personal and raid utility + movement. Once again, the passives look fun but abilities should not be a choice. Now, time to do some in depth testing! Also, it was mentioned that the Guardian had some balance changes, is there a post about that? (I'll hop back on the Guardian too to see what's changed regardless.)

I was just playing heroics earlier on my new Guardian, specifically Search and Rescue on Tatooine - a heroic where to reach the objective you have to fight through groups of up to 4 elites and a few strong enemies. I needed to use my defensives to survive even with a healing companion, I even had to use awe at one point to allow time to heal. As I was playing through the first part of the heroic I was thinking that it would be great to be able to try out this heroic on the PTS to see if it's even possible to complete. Hopefully level scaling gets turned back on and companions are fixed so we can try out the actual difficult content in the game. Doing dailies is ok for finding bugs (such as blade storm aoe hitting everything in a 100m cone or combat focus causing a second force sweep and draining all your focus) but to properly test rotations and survivability outside of dummies, we need flashpoints and heroics with proper scaling. The point about all melee DPS in flashpoints is actually a very important one. Most of the time when you enter a flashpoint these days, you have an unbalanced group composition - no tanks, no healers, 3 of one class etc. This makes it even more important that we can test flashpoints with unbalanced group comps as if we can't comfortably complete hammer station with no healers or tanks, the amount of people playing flashpoints will decrease. Further, melee classes in general already suffer in all forms of group content over their ranged counterparts. A ranged class can sit outside aoe and keep doing damage or heals, while a melee class is forced to either tank unnecessary damage - now with less defensives - or simply not do damage at all (especially if things like saber throw are removed and placed into ABC). It would be really nice if during the NPC rebalancing, melee classes are considered and fights are properly balanced around both melee and ranged classes.

We hope that they use it for something, but only the devs know what that is.

Where has it been said that it's on Friday?

Considering how focused defence also wasn't on Vigilance at all, but didn't appear as an ABC choice and had passives that affect it, I would not be surprised at all if they just forgot about Force Clarity and we see it on the Sentinel this week. On the other hand, out of all the excess button abilities the devs are wanting to remove, it would be the one to remove and replace with a passive( if at all).

Yup, the pinned threads and dev tracker exist for a reason. That being said it would be nice if the PTS status thread shows a rough estimate for when the next PTS cycle will go up. Currently that thread only says what's ready on the PTS right now.

This is a good point and what I HOPE is going on based on what Jackie has said in the pinned threads. From a user experience perspective, you want to gather feedback at every step during prototyping and production so that you don't spend hundreds of work hours on something that the customer (us) doesn't want. By throwing out a very high level look at what's going on they can gather constructive feedback before fully developing ABC options for 24 disciplines, build a UI, potentially make new animations and rebalance the entire PVE side of the game. If nothing changes with the Sentinel (coming next week) and we get two classes on the PTS per month, they won't have any time to make changes before the expansion launches. Best we can do is be vocal but constructive with feedback on the pinned threads and vote with our wallets if nothing changes.

I did ask if we'd see the Guardian go back onto the PTS later but no response on that front. The devs are also only really posting on the main pinned threads so it does seem like there's even less communication. From the looks of it, they're aware of our concerns and supposedly making notes about feedback but we'll just have to wait to see if anything does change :/

Sentinel is going to be on the PTS to test next week.

I'd guess it'd be more like, pick between mad dash, undying rage and force camouflage. My reasoning being that mad dash fits the same slot for the jugg, undying rage gets the same couple second duration boost as saber reflect (though at 3x the cooldown) and force camouflage has a utility that allows it to cleanse - the same as enure. Hopefully as more classes come out we get a better idea of how the game as a whole will look and maybe even get to test out some of the supposed NPC fight rebalancing. All I want in my life is another reason to run Hammer Station 30 times on the PTS (not even joking, give us Hammer Station with rebalanced NPCs!!!).

Thanks for the update! Will mirror classes also appear on the PTS or are we only going to be testing things from a Republic perspective? Also, will we see the Guardian return on the PTS at a later stage if and when feedback is taken into consideration?

I'd personally rather they don't remove anything and leave us with all the tools. Wouldn't be so bad if PVP and PVE were balanced separately so stealthers can't be completely invisible within 10m - a change that only happened because the PVE blackout skills got merged into base stealth and PVP wasn't altered separately to compensate. Without blade blitz, guardian leap and freezing force ( + slow and movement speed buff utilities) juggs and guardians will lose by default to any ranged class in PVP. One change I saw that I really liked was merging guardian leap and force leap into one ability with two charges that could target enemies and allies. This is a merge that makes a tonne of sense as they're practically the same ability anyway, just one targets an ally and the other targets an enemy. Keep the friendly damage reduction by giving it to tank specs only through a passive.

I imagine the fact that FF14 sold out of digital copies and doesn't have the server capacity because so many people are playing it isn't helping...EA execs are probably all like "Why can't you be more like those guys!!?! Also we're cutting funding and removing another few devs to put on Anthem 2.0 or whatever" Seriously, keep main abilities baseline and give us ability morph passives in the ABC skill tree slots where you'd choose those abilities instead. Merge a couple things here and there like freezing force, guard for tank spec only. Adjust dcds on a class by class basis, not choose one out of the three you currently have... (Also I was really hoping for a PTS update post today seeing as how it's now been two weeks since it came out :/ )

Sadly I never had the chance to play SWG, by the time I knew about it it was about to be dead, but I've heard the horror tales and seen a lot of posts comparing what is happening in SWTOR to what happened with SWG and while I'm still hopeful and crossing my fingers the devs listen to our suggestions and feedback, the expansion launches in less than half a year which leaves very little time to test and alter every class.

To be fair, enure has half the cooldown of overcharge saber, cleanses on pts and gives double the amount that overcharge heals in temp health, but I get your point haha PTS guardian feels like a glass cannon without the special powder.

I have multiple of every advanced class in the game and rotate what class I play depending on how I feel - most at max level (at least one of each at max). I personally don't have an issue switching from class to class and spec to spec on a very regular basis. I know all the classes to at least a competent level and have no trouble with the amount of abilities currently in the game. If anything, I love when we get new ones. I also know for a fact that some players remove abilities from their hotbar because they don't see any use in them while others, such as myself, do find use in them. I shouldn't be kicked in the face for using an ability because some other player choses not to. Throwing out 8-9 or so years of experience in favour of dumbing the game down doesn't sit right with me. Guardian doesn't feel more streamlined on the PTS, it feels like it's lacking options and utility. How am I supposed to interact with the game and engage with it when I can't mad dash to the next group of targets, saber throw a far away target to pull aggro, use my defensives to counter incoming attacks? I've made a few posts about it but I really do think removing abilities from the ABC system and going fully into the passive choices is the way to go. Ability morphs vs choosing whether to have an ability or not is much more interesting and engaging. Give me Awe by default but at level x let me choose to make it slow after it ends, become a shorter duration hard stun or give a shield to allies for e.g. Don't make me choose between a passive rotational damage increase and getting Awe / saber throw / dispatch... Time to kill is high in PVP but the solution has been there since the launch of this game. Separate PVP and PVE balance. It works in other MMOs and it would work in this one.

I'm levelling a guardian on live because doing testing on the PTS made me feel like making another one, and at level 28 I just got my second defensive skill in enure. Then I looked at a trainer and realised that 7 out of my next 9 new abilities would be locked behind ABC choices or gone entirely. My quickbar at level 28 looks near enough the same as it does on the PTS and that scares me. I cannot imagine doing group content or surviving in PVP between levels 1-70 with just saber ward and maybe focused defence depending on whether that's removed too or not. I haven't yet gained saber throw on live and I am very much looking forward to getting it at level 36 because it's one of the classic guardian abilities that gives you a small amount of ranged threat. The only abilities I have never used in PVE content are guard and freezing force. Guard because I'm not a tank and freezing force because the npcs don't run away. In PVP I have used every single ability except for guard and cyclone slash. Guard because I'm not a tank and cyclone slash because it's much easier focusing one target than trying to hit a few potentially desyncing players for marginal dps gains. Just thought it was interesting comparing experiences between levelling on live and the PTS with the knowledge of what's coming.

You agreed that the devs have the ability to turn off certain abilities in places and prevent you from doing certain things so I don't know how it's a jump to assume that they can do the same thing but with other clickable things on your hotbar. Open world PVP is another question entirely, should it be balanced around warzone PVP or what you have access to in PVE? If it should be balanced around warzone PVP, then being flagged as a PVP player should switch you to your PVP loadout - and we know for a fact that the devs are making a loadout system and have the capability to on the fly switch from one set of abilities to another. With the knowledge we currently have about what is in the game and is being worked on, it is a step and not a huge jump imo.

These are two really good questions that should be answered as it would completely solve the issue of PVP balance negatively affecting PVE (as it has since launch). I cannot imagine why the devs would be unable to offer separate abilities between PVE and PVP when: a) The devs are creating a loadout system and b) There are already PVP zones that prevent abilities being used because you're in a PVP area - so most of the tech is already in the game.

Having played FFXIV to max level, the level 1-50 progression is horrific. You really are spamming the same 3 skills over and over and over and over, no room for skill expression. Even worse is the fact that the global cooldown is a second longer than in SWTOR. What makes SWTOR great is that you level so fast and gain a large amount of abilities relatively quickly, ensuring that you always have the tools to do what you need to do at each stage of the game while also having room to experiment and try different things. In my opinion the main draw of FFXIV is the large quantity of story and group content that's added more frequently than any other large MMO. For your second point, once again, if you don't want the ability you have the freedom to remove it and not use it. If I want to use the ability and it has been removed, you don't notice a change but I do. I can't choose to regain all the abilities and use them. There is a choice on live to use or not use an ability, there is not a choice on the PTS and that is why it is bad.

As someone who mained assassin for a few months after getting back into the game last, I am seriously worried for their survivability if they lose dcds. Their dcds are already some of the worst in the game outside of force shroud. I don't see a situation in which the devs could argue that assassins should only get to choose one between phantom stride, saber ward and overcharge saber (for e.g.) like guardian has had to. Fingers crossed their defensives actually get buffs...