That pretty much did it for me... and our whole team. WE had just put together a great Progression team as part of Torva Nex, and now this. I've been here since launch, 4+ years... had a great time, incredible memories. But our UN-SUB is finally here. This is a really sad day but this is evidence that BW has abandon a huge portion of loyal subscribers, geared towards end game content. Trust me... this announcement is the beginning of the end for this game.

My two cents: It would be nice if the set bonus could ease the strain of energy management... thanks.

It is interesting to see these parses for Vira coming out of the woodwork... good work. All though I may not have much to add to the theory crafting at the moment... I still had question on this. I noticed you are using the new 6 piece... and you're 3 culling. How are you not focus starving with your takedowns? Do you find some of your parses focus starving and hence just have to start over? Reason I ask is because I am looking for the raid viability of doing a high alacrity parse with the new 6 piece.

Hey Yolo, great video! One other question on that... did you run that with the "new" 6 piece set, or "old" 4 piece set? Thanks man!

Big time... I really appreciate it. I'm gonna give this a shot tonight and see how it turns out. That's one of the things I am working on right now is how to think ahead and plan for what's coming, where I'm placing things, and how to keep the phases rolling and do my part... so thanks man, good to see some Engineers runnin on bosses like this.

Been talking this over with guildies... and here is one thing that people are sort of overlooking is that we still have great survivability utilities, not just in the shield but for ourselves. I can negate some of the heaviest hitting damage in the game, by myself. Put the pieces together... we know that for instance Mercs are soon to get a nerf bat, so their currently op damage will be relative to what ours currently is, but without that same survivability utility. The difference will be that when they get hit, they demand almost full attention from the healers... wheras we will not. From a healer perspective we are a huge godsend to the raid group so they can focus on tanks, and overall situations and have one less DPS to really have to keep an eye on. From a healer perspective, ask them... who would you rather have in the raid? Point is, don't rule us out simply because shield is the only "group wide" utility that benefits the raid (which in itself is huge), but out personal utility is pretty amazing. Edit: My fault, everything I said here is basically a repeat of what Whojoo said... nicely put on the specifics.

Good to find someone running Sab successfully on the boards... if I may ask, what are you doing to efficiently place your AOE's? My assumption is that you position with your mouse a plasma probe, and then supressive fire between two of the adds? Or do you tab target and then do something else? I seem to struggle with those details on placement and positioning and could use the insights of someone else who is doing this well. Thanks for the insights!

Hey guys, Just wanted to thank those who wrote the guides for Virulance/Dirty Fighting... man, it's been an immense help. Cloake, Shulk, Yolo... really, really nice guides. One thing I have been noticing (again for Virulance/Dirty Fighting) is that the one parsing is going in and out of cover. Is that a deliberate part of the rotation? And if so... why? I have been working really hard on this rotation... I am a defecting Sentinel (which I have played since launch), it just seems like the current content really favors ranged so yeah... with all the Sentinel woes at the moment this just felt like a good decision and so far I am really enjoying it. Anyway, thanks for your input!

I'm glad we got a response... but I already switched out my main so I hope it's not too late. I know many other classes have gone through a lot longer delays to learn when their class would see improvements... and I can (and always could) live with the fact that it might take a while to get some fixes, but it was a let down to not receive at least an "acknowledgment" for 6+ weeks. That's not exactly in keeping with the mentality of being open and engaged with the community. I appreciate we are getting looked at, but it has lessened my confidence in Bioware for sure.

I know it's the Holidays and all... but a simple "we hear you guys, give us a chance to look it over" would go miles here. It leaves a very bad taste in my mouth when overwhelming dissatisfaction with a set of changes is met with silence. /Signed (again)

In raids... we have a sent and Guardian. Granted, he's one of the better Guardians in the game but pre-3.0 we were always neck and neck with each other. Since 3.0, me having better gear... he's typically about 2-300 DPS ahead of me (occasionally I can close the gap but not by much). And I know a lot of that has to do with the idea that the Operations favors his class abilities more, but it definitely shows the in-balance that was created since 3.0 in my opinion.

I appreciate this Dulfy... One side comment, while I am grateful we have some putting the time and effort into these specs... this is probably the least viable spec of the three at the moment. Granted, we will be hard pressed to think there won't be corrective changes soon to the Watchman spec (respectively), but it would probably be ideal to have a guide on the more stable Concentration spec at the moment. Has anyone stepped up to help write that one?

Oh, I forgot to add... I COMPLETELY agree with you on the Force Rend piece (same with the other suggestions, but especially that). The deal breaking conclusion for me that I have come to is that having to WATCH and MANAGE my three dots via the debuff bar, makes it very, very difficult for me to watch my feet in what has become a very melee unfriendly set of operations. It's very sad, because I love the iconic appeal of the Jedi Sentinel... it's why I play Star Wars the Old Republic, because of the flashy lightsabers that I love so much from the movies... but I simply cannot watch my feet in raids because of this. They either need to absorb the Force Rend damage into some other skill to give us just two dots, or put something back on the GCD so we can manage it from the toolbar instead. It's just too overwhelming for "me personally". SO I am probably switching to my Slinger for raids as result until they make a change here.

Ok, I have been trying this for a few days... I have to say, I really like the speed in the rotation. I think having 900-800 Alacrity is a bit high personally, it just goes waaay too fast for me to control it properly (just personally preference, I know a lot of traditional combat sents will love this loadout). Plus I think you may have just slightly better gear then what I have... but I really was only able to top out around 4100-4200 with this... consequently, it was about what I'm able to do with full str or power augements. But it's unforgiving, if you miss a beat with this rotation, everything collapses it seems like. I mean I had eratic spikes from like 3800 back up to 4100, then to 3900, and back up to 4100. That's just my personal experience. I am curious, can you provide as close to a detailed description of your rotation that you can? And I mean, you're opener... as well as your 36second rotation (or whatever it is since Alacrity cuts the time down). I am really curious to see how yours differs from Ardonell's, because my personal rotation may actually be a part of the problem and could be unrelated to the Alacrity.

That's actually... darn near insane lol... not just the fact that you're rolling killer alacrity, but your crit was great on that parse, congratulations. Out of curiosity, are you using the 36second rotation that Ardo outlined in this thread? Or are you doing something different? The other thing I noticed in your graph on torparse, you're DPS does not drop at around the typical 12 GCD mark (like mine and some others seem to experience)... what are you doing to maintain those numbers throughout your parse? You got me so curious, I am going to give this a go and see what happens... very nice man.

That right there... that's EXACTLY what this forum needs. As of today, we got our BS *** OMG BBQ posts out on the table... we got our petition, we got our "bioware please listen", we got all of that out there. When I look on the forums right now, we are sorely lacking what many of the other class forums are doing... which is "here are the tests I have run, and here are the results". THIS thread (Ardo's opening post) is actually THEE most important thing on this whole forum really worth while at the moment (at least for arguably the most important spec in our class, Watchman), and we really need to build on it. So that's where I would like to try to make my own personal contributions as well. The other thing... we have the best Guardian in the game in our guild (Vesev), and he does something really interesting on those forums... other top Guardians (and those willing to contribute) actually get together and collaboratively share theory craft, raid experiences, and even WRITE guides together. We could really use that sort of collaborative spirit here in the Sentinel space as well. Now don't get me wrong, Vulkk from the Red Eclipse is great, but I just don't feel it should be a one man show or that he should be left alone to write guides etc. If we had his experiences, along with experiences from yourself, Ardo, whoever other top Sentinel (even Yolo, I even think KBN runs a Sentinel main (or is it Offalong lol)... then the whole is greater then the sum of it's parts. Guides written by those who are the best in the game have MUCH greater validity then those who really only sort of in the low to mediocre range in terms of pushing the class (no offense to those who have wrote guides thus far). But for instance, Ardo... you have probably the best parse in the world at the moment for a Sentinel that I am aware of... you have GREAT freedom of speech when it comes to a guide, or having the final word on the best way to do things. If Excypher had the best parse, then the areas he did to push it that much further would in my mind probably have more weight over your own theories, etc. Just makes sense to me personally. Anyway, we'll see where it goes... but I would really like to see as many of us as possible start to pull together and dive DEEP into this spec to see what else we can do it, with true testing, and true sharing. Even occasionally meeting on mumble to have substantive discussions about what we can do collectively to theory test/craft etc. Just a thought, but we have such potential here... why not.

Holy wow! THAT is quite the experiment! Would either of you care to share what your gear is so far? i.e. 192 vs. 198, implants, ear, relic etc? And thanks for posting Excypher... good to see you active here among us

Oh wow... yeah, oops... I must have totally glossed over that hah. If you don't mind, what sort of gear loadout are you using at the moment? And wishing you and your family nothing but the best, hope you have had a great day so far across the big pond! Cheers

Hey Ardo, how has your own parsing been going btw? Has your rotation changed at all since you wrote this mini guide? Personally still working on mine, best I got so far was 4275... but I am seeing some out there breaking some crazy numbers, especialy Excypher with his 4700+... what the heck are those guys doing to break those numbers!

Whoa... interesting nugget of info. Have you ran it in raids? Which boss and how did you fare compared to the other classes in your group? Just curious.

I'm curious to know what has been working for the Sent/Mara community in terms of AOE. It feels (compared to Sage/Sorc, Merc/Mando, even Guardian/Jugg) that our AOE is like... at the bottom of the barrel. Reason I bring this up... in the new ops, some fights are clearly AOE fights (Bulo, maybe Underlurker because of the Lurkerling adds?, Commanders for sure etc), and it just feels like we really don't have a competitive AOE spec in Concentration to be able to contribute effectively... am I wrong about that? I mean, it could be that I just don't have a strong feel for Concentration yet, and we haven't got any good guides on how to play it yet... but still, just really curious to see how everyone else is fairing comparatively speaking. Are we really limited to just throwing up a dot, and force sweeping along with a couple cyclone slashes? really? Been doing that in raids and it's kinda pathetic compared to the other classes in the raid. The other thing that bugs me a little about Concentration... I was hearing that Concentration is really capable of some incredible DPS, somewhere in the range of 4700-4800 (on the dummy) even in maybe 198 gear (but still), I just can't see the true potential of the spec yet.

That's actually a pretty good guide to be honest... hey, you can never go wrong with people making a contribution to the community, so hats off to you man! Very nice work

What he said...

Congrats on your fresh level 60! So, couple things you mentioned... we have conclusive run downs of the rotation, and raid tested evidence that shows that what has been said isn't just "complaining"... sure some haven't gone the distance to explain their opinions but it's mostly because the explanations have been pretty exhausted at the moment... you really need to read the posts a bit more to see it. Just a couple as an example: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=781563 http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=783526 Just a cursory glance at those posts really kinda shows you probably haven't taken the time to see the positive things we have been doing to improve the class, but perhaps you're going in with a critical eye and only looking for the complaints. Not trying to be facetious here but I question the validity of your opinions here greatly.

Agreed.