Quote Hey folks,



I wanted to share our thoughts regarding some of the questions and feedback that we have seen in the thread.



Playstyle of Annihilation / Watchman

As many of you know, there were changes made to the playstyle of Annihilation and Watchman in 3.0. This definitely seems to be a contentious change for some Marauder/Sentinel players. The last thing we want to do is to put a Discipline’s playstyle in a place that makes its players unhappy. We will keep an eye on this and look into possible playstyle changes in the future. We don’t want you to think that this is feedback that we are ignoring; it is just not something we will change in the short term.



PvP Data

Our intent behind exposing win rates for Carnage/Combat and Annihilation/Watchman was not to suggest that they are our only data point for decision making. The goal was to express that, by looking at average win rates and overall performance, those Disciplines can be viable. Understanding, however, that in some of those cases it reflects only the best players in that class. Still, it does show that they can play at the top levels.



Now, you all brought up a really interesting fact, which is how frequently you see Marauders/Sentinels in the top of all overall ratings. It is true, in looking at that data point, that Marauders/Sentinels are definitely under-represented, we agree! However, we think the most important part of that data is not who is missing from the top, but who makes up the top. Looking at the top spread of players, almost all of them are spread across only three Advanced Classes: Powertech/Vanguard, Sorcerer/Sage, and Assassin/Shadow. That is the real problem that we are working on addressing right now. With those three Advanced Classes over-performing, all other Advanced Classes (including Marauders/Sentinels) are being pushed into a bad place. This is why you will see that we are actively working on toning down those classes specifically (like we did yesterday in 3.1.2).



We do want to avoid just buffing other classes up, and instead need to focus on bringing down the over-performing classes. If we concentrated on buffing all other classes to the status of over-performing classes, we would create a power bloat that would make PvE decisively too easy and PvP time-to-kill too short.



To reiterate what we said in the last post: We do acknowledge that there are issues with Marauders/Sentinels, especially around Utility and mobility, and we will be working to address these issues in future patches.



I do hope that this gives a little bit of perspective into our thoughts around Marauder/Sentinel balance and how it relates to other classes.



Thanks!



-eric Eric Musco | Community Manager

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