A Few Questions About Sentinel

[oflow]

I'm currently leveling a sentinel and its actually my first melee dps class in TOR.

 

I played ranged classes and healers mostly in the beta.

 

I've been doing a lot of reading and figured out a lot of my issues with the class are from not understanding a lot of the mechanics, but now that I actually do understand some of them, I'm finding that some of my issues arent my lack of skill/ability its the class over all and how it interacts with the combat mechanics of the game.

 

 

I recently read that the way abilities work in TOR is not like other games. In most other recent popular MMOs (WoW, Rift, WAR) when you use an ability, the ability fires first and then you see the animation.

 

From what I understand in TOR abilities dont actually fire until after their animation completes. This is actually fine for other classes, but the melee heavy classes that rely on a lot animations seem to be getting penalized by this mechanic.

 

Sentinel has a lot of melee moves that stun on hit, which therefore are supposed to give you time to fire off your other abilities. But in practice, many of the long animations dont complete in pvp because they get interrupted by knockbacks or can just be 'juked'.

 

For instance, take Master Strike. Its a channeled ability with a long animation. Its supposed to stun people during the channel, but I've noticed in pvp enemies almost always see the channel charging up on your cast bar and interrupt it, or simply take a few steps back and it interrupts the channel.

 

Once the ability is interrupted, you still lose the focus but do no damage, which often leaves the class starving for focus. I know this probably gets better at higher level, but still in the 10-20 bracket its kinda painful.

 

 

Anyway, my questions are:

 

1. Why does it take so long for our instant abilities to actually go off like shields and instant attacks? Some of the animations seem ridiculously long. I have 30MB internet and usually 50ms latency pretty sure its not my connection it seems almost like server side lag or something.

 

2. Whats the best way to optimize building focus? I'm currently leveling a Focus build.

Edited December 23, 2011 by oflow

[Edmorte]

Take note, master strike only stuns normal mobs. If you're talking about the skill to stop them moving, then idk never used.

 

But yes, this class suffer from animations, my force stasis fails a lot.

Edited December 23, 2011 by Edmorte