I've enjoyed playing this game off and on for the last nine years, and in those nine years Watchman Sentinel was my favorite class/spec to play out of all the classes and specs in the game. That being said, one thing that disappoints me to this day was the decision to remove the passive ability Close Quarters which allowed Watchman Sentinels to leap from 0 meters instead of having to be 10 meters away to do so (and paired with that was Watchman's reduced cooldown for Force leap and force kick vs. other specs). In a PVP setting this gave the class an answer to ranged classes and kiters, allowing us to be sticky and also extremely annoying, which I think is a good tradeoff for the lack of burst damage, high ramp up time, and lack of crowd control immunity (like the concentration spec). I know the Watchman class has since been streamlined with the addition of Force Melt as a focus builder, but I feel the spec has lost it's uniqueness and coolness (seeing your character perform leaps as part of the rotation was super fun to watch, and those force kicks were fun to watch too). Is there any way we can see the old Watchman playstyle return? Could Close Quarters even be an optional utility skill, tactical, set bonus, or worked back into the spec somehow in a balanced way? In my opinion the addition of force melt as a replacement to Close Quarters ruined the flavor of Watchman sentinel (which was, like combat, a lightsaber focused spec as opposed to concentration). Thanks for reading!

I guess you are right in that we do have stealth and a purge, but utlimatley sages and commandos still have better survivabiltiy when being focused. Commandos get immunity to movement impairing effects, and coupled with the fact that they attack from range, essentially gives them a great escape tool from crowds. Don't even get me started on sages, despite the talk of survivability issues, well played sages can stay alive longer than a scoundrel any day. In addition flash grenade is only useful as a healing tool on the occasion where no DoTs are ticking on the opponent/they don't have a healer cleanse them/they don't break the mez themselves. Not only that but if we don't have upper hand the only heal we can use is underworld medicine which takes 1/4 of our total energy and has a cast time of 2.5 seconds. 1.5 seconds for the first global cooldown and by the time you are done casting your first underworld medicince you are 4 seconds into the mez and possibly being targeted by other enemies. Anyway I know I sound like I am QQing and not appreciating our abilities to purge and stealth but a minor offheal buff would in no way make us invincible.

I know I wasn't really going to get people to agree with me and all, but still instead of BioWare dumbing down specs they should give us more options to increase our damage, rather than just flat out increasing the amount we hit for. There needs to be rewards for mastery. I guess it might be easier to fit riposte into the PVP rotation now with the lower focus demand on the spec...

(This post is from a PVP standpoint, of course it may be applicable to PVE in some cases) I'm not here to say that Scoundrel DPS is severley underpowered in regards to survivability, we are very capable of staying alive in 1v1 duels and honestly I can hold of 2 long enough to for back up to arrive if need be. Still I feel that the offhealing capability of scoundrel DPS is lacking in comparision to its sister healing/dps classes the sage and the commando. Both classes have halfway decent LoS healing capabilities, however the scoundrel does not unless it uses talent points in the actual healing tree, something sages I know do not have to do, in fact gunnery commandos' grav round eventually gives them an instant emergency heal+ their aoe heal missle thing. In addition both classes have access to short activation time heals while scoundrels' most accesible heal has an activation time of 2.5 seconds untalented. If BioWare won't give us any more defensive cooldowns they should at least give us this, we need to be able to heal when we run away from fights like the commando and sage are able to. They already have the advantage being in range and having knockbacks to keep enemies away when they need to escape, we don't have that and we have worse offheals.

This my come as bit of a suprise but I am somewhat put off by the new Watchmen buffs. Now while I primarily PVP in SWTOR, that is not the whole game, but this buff shows that BioWare is only listening to the complaints of PVPers when buffing certain specs. I am no expert or theorycrafter but for the most part I believe that it was agreed upon that Watchmen was one of the most viable DPS specs in PVE, despite its weaknesses. The new buffs first are an uneeded addition in the PVE sphere, and while many say that no spec is "hard to play", ultimatley kills any challange of playing Watchmen once you get the hang of it. The lower cost of Merciless Slash and higher damage is clearly a PVP buff, meant for ranked warzones, and while I do like that BioWare is trying to make all specs viable for PVP, there are better ways to do so then to reduce Watchmen to an "easy spec' (again I am not saying that Watchmen was ever super hard or anything). In all honestly I had great success before the patch playing as a Watchmen and uncleansable DoTs are really the only thing we needed. I liked the challange of playing the "underdog spec" and honestly one of the reasons for my success was that people countered Sentinels as if they played Combat. Perhaps they could have added to our PVP burst by adding some sort of proc that would add to the challange of playing a Watchmen rather than taking the easy way out and just reducing the cost of abilities and the amount of damage the spec does. So while I appreciate the buffs I feel as if it isn't catering to those Sentinel players that chose the class because of the higher skill cap needed to play. Some good ways to add to our damage while giving our rotation more abilites (not new abilites, just ones that are already there like dispatch/masterstrike/bladestorm)/challange, rather than giving us a flat damage increase, would be to do things like _Give us a talent similar to keening, with maybe a lower chance to proc than vigilance to avoid imbalance _Add bladestorm to our rotation by giving it a proc/utility like for example, dealing damage with merc slash has a 100% and slash has a 50% chance to allow your next bladestorm to be free of cost (or something) and apply one stack of overload saber to the target (must be active of course) and be deal all its damage immediatley rather then as a DoT, so essentially it would be a burst attack, give it a cooldown of course, like proc can only occur when overload saber is active, or maybe make it like a version of wounding shots that does high damage when more dots are active _give us our 2% heal back! at least for non zen crits (I will say I do like the new higher chance to get a critical burn) _maybe some masterstrike utility, like, masterstrike applies an independent dot _give force sweep some sort of supression charges like hemorrhaging blast or force in balance Of course these are just examples of ways that could make the spec more fun, interesting and challanging, and of course not all suggestions would be used in fear of making the spec OP. Of course BioWare could implement changes like this and avoid making them OP or something. Now again I am no theorycrafter and please don't start insulting me. I guess what I am trying to say is that BioWare should start becoming more creative with its buffs rather than creating specs that may need to be nerfed in the future due to being OP in either the PVE or PVP sphere. I know scrapper is one of the specs that has suffered somewhat because BioWare nerfs/buffs it according to PVP complaints rather than both PVE and PVP ones. I am mostly mad about the fact that they reduced the focus cost of merc slash and increased its damage, it's like they're insulting our intelligence and focus management skills!