Finally got to the new content but I don't like sentinel.

[pahbi]

I started playing Onslaught about after release, and created a new sentinel.

Its taken all this time to play through all the quests to get to onslaught, at 1-2 hours a night doing quests.

Its definitely been a trip down memory lane and a ton of fun, but at level 80, I just don't really like sentinel melee combat. I'm doing the dot sentinel that has all kinds of burn dot attacks. It works well enough for quests which is what I've mostly played, but I think I'd rather go back to ranged dps.

One thought might be to switch to sage, since I'm level 80 and in green gear, it should be trivial to swap over, but I've read that sages dps is fairly average.

The other option would be to level up my level 70 commando. I could switch to vanguard plasmatech, but apparently they always have to be within 10m of the target, which feels like playing a semi-melee.

In groups or raids, is there a significant difference in sage vs plasmatech dps to matter? What about group utility?

What I've read says sages are great at aoe and fairly mobile, but suffer in single target. While plasmatechs have reasonable aoe decent single target but suffer when switching targets.

EDIT:

I loaded up SWTOR and went to the class mission on my commando and I've been given the option of every gun class in the game including imp stuff like powertech.

Can anyone just play any class now?

[Biomega]

Can anyone just play any class now?

It's not quite like that.

What they effectively did is separate the story from the class - you can play a particular story, but choose to play as a different class than was originally tied to that story. The only restriction is that you can't mix Tech and Force; so you can play the Trooper story as a Smuggler (and vice versa) but not as any of the Jedi. And, conversely, you can play the Jedi Consular story as a Jedi Knight (or the other way round) but you can't play any Jedi story as a non-Jedi. Same is true for the Imperial side of things, of course.

As for DPS performance, it really mostly matters if you're playing high-end group content. If your goal is Master Mode operations and you really want to optimize, there's decisions to be made depending on what you're most likely to be used for. But if all you're doing is the Story Mode solo content and maybe a group every now and then for weeklies or a couple of Veteran Mode flashpoints here and there, then you probably don't need to worry much about performance and can focus entirely on enjoyment.

I don't know the current state of the game that well (7.0 kinda killed it for me) but at least just before the expansion DPS performance was actually fairly well balanced. Differences mostly come up on very long or very short fights - a burst-heavy class/spec will do a lot better in solo content for example where things die in seconds; while a DoT-heavy class/spec will do better in operations when things live for many minutes. Same with AoE capability: more important in dungeons and solo, and for certain operations bosses.

Give that you can switch fairly freely now, there's many options to pick from. If DPS is your goal, having one burst spec and one DoT spec to switch between as needed would seem like a possibly good compromise. That way, you can play solo as a more bursty spec, and when you're going into a big-boss ops you can take the DoT spec instead.

Which ones you want to pick is largely preference at this point, I'd say. You can have a look at some parsing data at, say, Parsely and compare. But the usual caveats apply: this is a very select kind of data collection subject to specific biases, and may not reflect your own preferences. But it gives a rough idea about relative spec performance - and also shows you that most are reasonably close to each other.

In terms of utility, I don't know how things have changed. Bounty Hunter/Trooper used to be very in-demand because they had stuff like grapple to position targets and some nice cooldowns; but I don't know if that's still as needed as it used to be. Most specs have some kind of utility that may be wanted depending on content.

For solo consideration, I've always liked having the option to use stealth - it makes heroic missions significantly faster to complete. If you don't do those a lot, it might not be that important for you, but for me personally I found it the biggest QoL improvement (but I'm a sucker for heroics).

[pahbi]

It's not quite like that.

What they effectively did is separate the story from the class - you can play a particular story, but choose to play as a different class than was originally tied to that story. The only restriction is that you can't mix Tech and Force; so you can play the Trooper story as a Smuggler (and vice versa) but not as any of the Jedi. And, conversely, you can play the Jedi Consular story as a Jedi Knight (or the other way round) but you can't play any Jedi story as a non-Jedi. Same is true for the Imperial side of things, of course.

As for DPS performance, it really mostly matters if you're playing high-end group content. If your goal is Master Mode operations and you really want to optimize, there's decisions to be made depending on what you're most likely to be used for. But if all you're doing is the Story Mode solo content and maybe a group every now and then for weeklies or a couple of Veteran Mode flashpoints here and there, then you probably don't need to worry much about performance and can focus entirely on enjoyment.

I don't know the current state of the game that well (7.0 kinda killed it for me) but at least just before the expansion DPS performance was actually fairly well balanced. Differences mostly come up on very long or very short fights - a burst-heavy class/spec will do a lot better in solo content for example where things die in seconds; while a DoT-heavy class/spec will do better in operations when things live for many minutes. Same with AoE capability: more important in dungeons and solo, and for certain operations bosses.

Give that you can switch fairly freely now, there's many options to pick from. If DPS is your goal, having one burst spec and one DoT spec to switch between as needed would seem like a possibly good compromise. That way, you can play solo as a more bursty spec, and when you're going into a big-boss ops you can take the DoT spec instead.

Which ones you want to pick is largely preference at this point, I'd say. You can have a look at some parsing data at, say, Parsely and compare. But the usual caveats apply: this is a very select kind of data collection subject to specific biases, and may not reflect your own preferences. But it gives a rough idea about relative spec performance - and also shows you that most are reasonably close to each other.

In terms of utility, I don't know how things have changed. Bounty Hunter/Trooper used to be very in-demand because they had stuff like grapple to position targets and some nice cooldowns; but I don't know if that's still as needed as it used to be. Most specs have some kind of utility that may be wanted depending on content.

For solo consideration, I've always liked having the option to use stealth - it makes heroic missions significantly faster to complete. If you don't do those a lot, it might not be that important for you, but for me personally I found it the biggest QoL improvement (but I'm a sucker for heroics).

I definitely like plasamatech more than sentinel.

Plasmatech feels kinda like playing a hunter, its a semi-melee class, where sentinel has all these long animations, plasmatech just insta-shoots something and I can keep on moving.

It makes staying out of stuff a ton easier.

[Biomega]

Trooper definitely has that going for it. Plasma is the DoT spec, but it also has good burst so it'll be a fine fit for most jobs. And I'm sure grappling stuff will pretty much always be in demand in raids. Plasma used to be one of the best overall specs before the expansion, I'm sure it's still up there.

[pahbi]

I just can't get the motivation to get the last 8 levels to 80.

It took me like 2 months to level a sentinel from 1 to 80 (yeah I'm super slow) and now I'm limping along trying to get this trooper to 80.