You mean these (I apologize for potato quality)? I'll admit though, I'm pretty ignorant of Butterfly swords (I had to look them up). Regarding Sai, they're used in a completely different style than swords, or even long knives. They were primarily a defensive weapon used for wresting control of swords away from Samurai (in addition to their role as a farming tool). That defensive mindset is not in line with the Sentinel/Marauder class, and the primary advantages of them are negated with lightsabers in that with a sai, if you take a blow to one in a defensive manner, the lightsaber blade comes back at you and slices through your arm. If you attack in that manner, the same thing also happens. Lightsabers also, being more or less smooth hilts, don't have the crossbar guard that makes grip flipping (for lack of a better term) so easy. And further, from a character design point, the sai (or equivalent) just flat doesn't fit. The Sai was a defensive weapon; giving them to Sentinels/Marauders is a complete 180 from the class design. It doesn't fit.

This. If I weren't going to try to get my 3 Jedi in decent shape money and comms wise for SoR, I'd start leveling a commando or a smuggler.

I feel the same on pretty much every point, except I think I may check out Concentration if Combat does wind up being as poor as I hold out hope it won't be in PvP. As far as PvE I don't think much has really changed, other than losing cauterize, but we'll have to see what the utilities wind up doing, as well as final numbers.

Enh Shaman is closer to Sentinel than anything, imo.

He should have been using precision slash in PvE, at least I hope he was.

This keeps getting better and better.

The Gore/PS duration hasn't effectively changed until we see just how much bonus we get from alacrity. Going from a 4.5 sec duration with a trigger off the GCD to a 6 second duration with a trigger that is affected by the GCD is just as much effective time up. It may be a bit more linear now, that's true, but the window's duration hasn't really changed.

My "Simple fix" for this. Companions start with a set of Orange (maybe yellow, new gear category?) gear that automatically adapts to the level of the player's character up to a point (this companion gear can't exceed 156 rating, just as an example). For the players who care only about cosmetics, you can buy different types of this gear type, along with customizations to have your companion look the way you want him/her to, but not have to worry about keeping their stat levels high. However, you can still equip non-Companion gear if you want. This lets the players out there who want to spend the time and effort on their favorite companion(s) to have companion characters who are above and beyond what those who just use the automatic gear. This allows for both play styles to have their proverbial cake and eat it too. The players who invest the time and effort into getting their companions stupidly well geared will have companions who can faceroll over mobs, whereas those players who don't really give half a damn about their companions (like me, for example) don't have to worry about managing 6-7 sets of gear.

Crippling throw should reduce the heals received by a target (including self heals) by 95%, and hit for around 5k (non crit) with talents that also root the target for 30 seconds and increase the healing debuff to 100%. Cooldown should be 6 seconds, and focus cost should be 2. That'd fix pvp, BIOWARE GIEV PLOX!

Simply put, because there is a larger expenditure of time and resources when you get a team together. Your question is like asking "Why can't I get 186 gear from running Oricon dailies all the time?!?!"

At attention sir.

I leveled my shadow in just over a days worth of game time, but a lot of that was spent PvPing around lvl 35 or so with some guildies, and doing some side quests. I'm leveling a sage now and aiming to beat that mark pretty substantially.

Wanna know how to kill a sentinel? Focus them with 4 dps, make them pop this, apply dots, change targets. Losing half your remaining hp when this ends means it's genuine last ditch effort to try to stay alive for a few more seconds so your healer can key turn his *** around to you and click a few heals.

Nah, Combat sents need at least 5...

I'll take obvious statements for $400, Alex.

Hopefully.

I'll pass, thanks There's a reason people who fight with blades don't use backhanded grips often, except in movies, and that reason is they're more impractical and weaker than the alternative. I don't imagine a character like a Sentinel or a Marauder, who supposedly is an expert in saber combat, would use an inferior grip just because it looks cool.

Obligatory

Ergo, my point has been proved. /mic drop

I think my additional analogy has driven home the point that analogies can be used to represent a number of different things within even the same analogy, including both the obvious usefulness of analogies, as well as the apparent ability they have to obfuscate the original point and drive discussion off-topic by launching into a tangentially related discussion as to whether or not analogies are useful in expressing one's point with regard to the original topic at hand, which naturally would then only need to an orthogonally related discussion to the already tangential discussion about the validity of analogies in discussing and demonstrating points originally discussed.

Let's go back to the Hamburger analogy for a second. Everyone's saying you don't have to eat a new McDonald's burger to know you won't like it because you don't like McDonald's burgers. Fine, fair enough, but that's not at all what this is like. It's like saying you won't eat an In and Out hamburger, or a Five Guys hamburger because McDonald's burgers are nasty. It doesn't make a lick of sense.

Yea man, because dropping 3 points into something 3 levels in a row, only to drop another 2 into another talent, then 2 in 2 more, then 3 in one, then another 2, then FINALLY get to the next level of talents is so very rewarding.

There was a REALLY entertaining night of fleet chat about a month ago. Other than that it's usually pretty calm.

Nope, not a single person will be left when SoR hits.

Marauders/Sentinels are "a little squishy" like caterpillars are "a little squishy".