Sentinels don't get hard stuns but they do get Force Stasis and some other ability that reduces a targets melee/ranged accuracy by 90 percent. They also get a 20 percent heal reduction debuff and very fast interrupts, and Force leap is a very good gap closer against any class except Sniper. So they ARE a good 1v1 class, but you just have to wait a bit before you get all the cool abilities. Just be patient, your Sentinel will be strong. A general rule of thumb to follow: Against melee classes, force leap to them immediately before they use their own gap closer on YOU, against ranged classes, just run up to them usinjg LoS for cover and start hitting them until they use their knockback. When they do knock you back, force leap back to them ASAP and start bashing them again. The reason you do this is that knockbacks usually have slows or roots coupled with them (except for inquisitor/consular knockback...but a smart sorc will slow you immediately after the knockback). So basically THATS when you need the instantaneous gap closer, not when you first walk up to them. You never want to be in a situation where you are slowed/rooted, 10+ meters away from a ranged class, and Force leap is on cooldown. In arenas, against ranged classes of any kind, always always always LoS and force them to come close to you. They WANT you to force leap to them from 30m range so they can just knock you back (possibly off a high platform!) and keep dpsing you. Don't let them do what they want and LoS all the time. In other game modes, hug pillars and walls. Force your enemies to come to you as much as possible. Despite being a brawny muscle sort of class that uses Strength as a primary attribute, playing a Sentinel right actually takes a lot of brains.

Madness sin is squishy and yes, it takes a lot of damage, but there are a LOT of ways to mitigate it if you are good. You have stealth, combat stealth, shroud, self-heals on crit and death field (you can dot/death field everyone quickly to up your healing in a pinch), force speed, pushback, slow (the previous two things will let you 1v1 pretty much any melee class and win fights starting with less health), 4 second hard stun (doesn't seem like much but guardian and marauder dont have it...so it is good), whirlwind for 1v2ing, a whopping 30 percent damage reduction while hard-CC'd, 30 percent damage reduction after mass taunt (yes you have to learn to mass taunt to master this class...sorry to people who don't use it), low cooldown interrupt for messing up rotations and activated heals, and of course, the advanced move that 99 percent of nubs don't know how to use, phase walk. Oh and Overcharge Saber They also parse higher than Madness sorcs. SO ultimately...Sin takes a lot of skill...because if you don't know how to use ALL the defensive stuff above, as well as the basic stuff like LoSing, kiting melee, and not jumping into 8 people at once before DoTing several of them first for self-heals, then you will suck hard period. A melee class MUST know how to defend itself in any situation. A melee class must also know how to position itself properly against ranged so that it is not affected too much by their knockbacks. It is much harder than playing a ranged class where you just trololol all day and LoS and kite everyone to death.You are probably better off playing a Sorc if you're not quick enough to handle an Assassin. But if you've got the skill, Assassin rewards you tremendously, and that's why you now see Sins rocking WZs and sometimes doing even better than the Sorcs who never put in the effort because Sorc is just plain Easy-mode. But...keep in mind, Assassin is not the hardest class in the game right now. That title would go to Marauder for sure.

I would say there is a very high chance she is. The only way I could see that happening is if she was Operative and just cast Corrosive dart on everyone in between Kolto Probes. That kind of HoT/DoT strategy only works against people who have no DPS and no focus. Oh, and no stuns.

Why are you comparing Telekinetic throw to Ravage? Telekinetic throw has zero cooldown in Balance spec and has 30 meters range. Ravage has a much longer cooldown and is much harder to land successfully, and a lot of the damage is loaded into the END of the channel, rather than being evenly spaced out like the damage of Telekinetic throw. Just because Marauders do slightly more damage with Ravage, doesn't mean that they will actually be able to pull it off in an ideal pvp situation. In fact, probably at least 9 times out of 10 they will get knocked back/stunned/interrupted in the middle of this. Sages can deal with this by running away, static shielding, kiting, and continue right back on the assault. It's literally pointless to compare the two abilities. Given a choice between Telekinetic Throw and Ravage in PVP, any smart player would pick Telekinetic Throw every time, even without the 0 cooldown talent from Balance tree.

Bioware, hire this guy please. And make him the executive of class balancing.

Uh...pretty much every serious PVPer has a UI with tons of crap around the middle of their screen. Granted, his could have been done cleaner, but you're not supposed to drag your eyes around looking for information in the middle of a fight.

I think a class outperforms other classes when two equally skilled players can play different classes, and one player can do consistently better than the other player simply because the mechanics and numbers of the class they're playing are simply more competitive.... But hey, I could be wrong, I have been known to make mistakes. We could very well go with your ridiculous assumption that a player outperforming other players equates to a class outperforming other classes.

So basically you are saying that you looked at the Season 2 leaderboards and nodded your head and said "Yup...everything looks balanced, skill is the only factor in determining whether or not a class is strong." Sounds legit. x) Btw, this is most likely a troll thread judging by the OP.

Full Annihilation, full Carnage, and full Rage are all better at handling kiters than your spec. Also, they all do more DPS.

Healers work much better with a complementary tank or cross-healer. If you don't have one of those, have fun getting focused, interrupted, and roflpwned in WZs cuz that's what you signed up for. If you want to solo queue brainlessly, roll DPS. Healers are good when your teammates actually put pressure on the people attacking you or help keep you alive. Don't expect too much of that in solo queue.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Gunslingers/Snipers are great at handling stealth and melee characters in general. Passive immunity to interrupts, abilty pushback, dashes, pulls while in cover. A sorc or merc can get grappled and roflpwned by any decent powertech, but that won't happen to a sniper with good reflexes and awareness. They also have the passive that increases their stealth detection range gradually, though it can be somewhat countered by Sneak/Blackout. They also have roots, slows, knockbacks, stuns, instant mezz, and at high levels, they have an instant distance creator in Covered Escape which is on a 20 second cooldown. Combine that with 20 seconds of Entrench on 1 minute cooldown, 16-20 second cooldown Shield Probe and a potential 30 second hard stun cooldown if you're in Lethality tree, and you've got one very tough class to take down. There's actually some defensive stuff I'm missing but you get the idea. Slingers and Snipers are a great 1v1 class and have the tools at their disposal to counter stealth/melee classes with great ease compared to Mercs and they're also a bit better than Sorcs in this regard. The thing is though...in most yolo queue games, you face people who aren't exactly the best. So with a Sorc or Merc you can still faceroll them and easily top the damage charts in warzones. But at the highest levels of play where people use all their CC, interrupts, and rotations effectively, a Sniper will very likely outshine them.

Commandos and Mercs are probably the weakest out of the 3 ranged DPS classes in terms of handling melee/stealth characters. The best ranged class to handle melee is probably Sniper. Sniper gets immunity to Powertech grapples and Warrior leaps, it also has a knockback tied to a root, and then another root on top of a short-CD stun, instant mezz, and instant repositioning. It also gets several defensive skills which make it pretty resilient to damage. Probably the biggest point is that they are immune to interrupts in cover...this alone makes them a bit better in PVP than Sorcs and Mercs who are channel/cast reliant no matter spec you play. One unfortunate thing about Snipers is that their stealth detection in cover is actually hard to use. Assassins have Blackout and Operatives have their Sneak so it's very easy for them to close the distance unseen unless the Sniper has been sitting there for a very long time. Still...they have great tools for handling melee and immunity to interrupts. They may not parse the highest damage, but against good players, they are probably the most effective ranged dps class. It's probably not what you want to hear. Is it fair that Mercs can't do what Snipers can? Probably not..but that's the sad truth of it until the developers fix the vulnerability of casting/channeling classes.

It's not really a matter of luck. If you are truly a good PVPer you will have higher than a 50 percent winrate even in yolo queues, which is all you need to rank up. It may take a while, there may be crushing losses, but still. Your skill, leadership, and objective control all comes into play. The only "luck" comes from crits.

Madness sorc is a currently overpowered spec on one of the easiest classes to play in the game. And I do play madness sorc, so inb4 "lol u mad cuz youre not sorc, but u dont know how hard it is". Nope, I play it. I understand how *********** easy it is. People are mad cuz a lot of melee classes (besides Powertech) need a slight buff to match the raw damage and utility of Madness sorc. That's probably why they get mad when you run. They probably get how easy it is to kite and slowly take someone down with an extremely predictable rotation that hardly requires any micro-management and still does a metric sh*tton of damage. Bottom line is, if you even have to ask why people are mad, try playing a Marauder sometime and see if you think DoT range classes with a billion ways to escape are truly balanced.

Stupidest idea I've ever heard, and I'm surprised so many people are going along with it. The game devs may be fairly incompetent but I doubt they are dumb enough to implement something that can so easily be abused.

Operatives are very good and valued members of PVP if you roll healer. It is easily the best healing class in the game due to how much super mobility you have as a healer. There is a reason why most 4-man groups run an operative/scoundrel healer rather than merc heals or sorc heals. And to the person that said their survivability sucks, you probably just need to get better at the game. >_> At 55 they can stall for ages and win most 1v1s against DPS classes. In Huttball, they are the best ball runners besides Juggernauts and can also protect the ball carrier very well if its someone else. In novare coast, they can super dash to the opposite corner of the map and interrupt cap and kill the guy, getting an easy east-west turret cap. In ancient hypergate, they can keep everyone alive making it very hard for the enemy team to get kills (and thus they deny them a massive amount of points). In voidstar, everybody knows momentum is the key due to the ridiculous respawn time. If you're on the defending team and you don't have heals, its only a matter of time before they dump everybody in your respawn point and lay a bomb. With a good healer, you can single-handedly change the game by keeping people alive and interrupting plants. In arena, they are the best healers due to stealth, mobility, and low maintenance HoTs. They are not super weak to interrupts and stuns like the other healing classes. If you want a class that makes everyone MVP you when you get good at it, pick Operative. DPS classes are a dime a dozen, strong healers that can also do decent DPS are much more valuable in PVP.

30 percent crit or more is perfectly viable for solo queue WZs. I'm really tired of people saying "you should have X amount of crit". Obviously we are not all ranked players like Wakalord with dedicated pro Operatives to heal us forever. So it's perfectly fine to sacrifice a bit of DPS for more consistent self-heals and survivability as a casual yolo queue player. You don't actually lose that much DPS from having more crit than power because the spec rewards you pretty heavily for critting due to the bonus damage talents. If you have a dedicated healer and you just want to maximize DPS, then yeah it may be best to run around 25 percent crit.

Well alright fair point. But this thread's title is 'PVP madness rotation' so isn't the PVE rotation irrelevant? I think the only time I would use a non-procced CrD in PVP is against a target that is mezzed (not stunned). And I rarely attack mezzed targets because why would I want to wake them up? Lol. Otherwise I would go for the procced activation every time.

Hard-casting CrD makes you miss out on the 35 percent damage boost from Wrath so that is pretty fail. You should NEVER hard-cast CrD with this class since proccing Wrath does not reset the CD. The second guy has pretty much the best rotation for sustained DPS right. Just remember that if a target is low health in PVP you should prioritize burst moves over your 18 second DoTs.

combat technique reduces your melee damage. o.o solution: dont play kinetic spec.

Considering a lot of damage you take in PVP is burst rather than DoT, I'd say go Sith Defiance over Corrupted Flesh for solo queue regs. Unless if you run into a 3 madness assassin team in arena, you will probably have no regrets. In order for Corrupted Flesh to be at least as good as Sith Defiance, at LEAST 13.333.. percent of the damage you are taking needs to be DoT damage. This is because 15 percent of of 13.3333... is 2. So if you take 100k points of damage, and about 13333 of that damage came from DoT, then Corrupted Flesh is at least as useful as Sith Defiance. If more DoT damage was taken, then Corrupted Flesh is more useful. If less, then you're better off with Sith Defiance.

Spending 3 talent points to increase the damage of a very small portion of your dps is not worth it at all IMO. Plus I thought you said you hated not having Torment on this spec?

Sorc heals and Merc heals need buffs (mainly Sorc). However, Operative heals might actually need a slight nerf because of how easy the playstyle is. Just tab target and lay down the HoTs and then focus heal whoever gets focused all the while staying mobile and never having to stay in one spot like Sorcs. Did I mention their resource management is insane? They can heal forever and never run out of juice. On The Ebon Hawk, I've seen an Operative get over 2 million in heals in a single Ancient Hypergate match....I've never seen anybody get 2 million DPS. That's not because of how hard it is to play DPS, it's because of how easy it is to play Operative healer.

Eh, if you have a choice, go with tank Vanguard or tank Guardian. Kinetic shadow depends a lot on shielding and shielding does not mitigate damage from Force/Tech attacks (which is a huge portion of the attacks used in pvp). Yeah you get increased armor, but a lot of popular DPS specs in 2.8 use a lot of internal/elemental damage, so don't expect to be invincible by any means. You're slow to take down, but not impossible. In terms of raw DPS and survivability, Balance Shadow performs better than Kinetic in both categories when played correctly. The only plausible reason to play Kinetic over Balance is Force Pull, Slow Time, and Guard...but guess what...tank Vanguard and tank Guardian can do the same thing or similar, and also do almost everything else better. The only thing you give up when using those classes instead, is your Stealth and Force Cloak...but if you're playing a tank spec you're not going to be using those much anyways considering your job is to draw attention and go in first.

Join any PVE server. Use only Impside toons (higher population on pretty much every server). You will get a lot more queues popping. Whatever you do, don't make pubside toons because you will have pretty much triple the queue time (no exaggeration). Also if someone declines when queue pops, your chances of getting a reinforcement to replace them is next to nil.