SWTOR 7.0 Juggernaut Changes Preview and Analysis (PTS)

Latest SWTOR 7.0 PTS build offers a look at Juggernaut Combat Styles. This article details all the ability pruning and discipline changes!

Ability Pruning

Furious Power / Force Clarity

I’m really sad to see this ability go. Juggernauts / Guardians lacked a real offensive cooldown (OCD) prior to 6.0 and Furious Power / Force Clarity was pretty unique in terms of how it worked. The ability was quite versatile since you could use it more precisely to increase your sustained DPS by only buffing your strongest moves, but also save them up without losing DPS if you needed more burst.

The biggest problems were really caused by the Descent of the Fearless set bonus, not the ability itself. The set bonus made Furious Power / Force Clarity more rotational (and therefore harder to use) since it could grant additional charges and the inconsistent benefit between specs is also largely linked to how the extra charges and damage boost were granted. Every single Warrior / Knight discipline is able to fully utilize the base form of Furious Power / Force Clarity. There’s no need to take it away. The set bonus just needs to be different.

Chilling Scream / Freezing Force

This ability makes a bit more sense to lose. It was useful in specific PvP situations when you had a bunch of people close to each other, like in the halls between points in Voidstar or near the Huttball, but outside of that, it wasn’t super useful unless you took the utility that made it stronger than Sweeping / Cyclone Slash in some cases, but really that’s pretty weird when you think about it. Furthermore, there isn’t much of a lore basis for the Force inflicting coldness like this. It would make more sense to have some sort of passive called Terrifying / Inspiring Presence that just slows you if you’re within 8m, like how people would react when nearby Luke or Vader. Maybe it could be active during a DCD or something. Regardless, Chilling Scream did not need to stick around.

Guard

This ability has become tank-only, though it is less clear that this is happening than it was in previous PTS updates. I agree with this idea. BioWare was clearly moving in that direction when they made it so DPS dealt 50% less damage while guarding earlier in 6.0. Guarding is just too large of a part of what makes tanks unique in PvP and with the ability for DPS to do it as well, it made guarding far too ubiquitous.

Level 70 Choice

At level 70, Juggernauts / Guardians have to choose 1 of 3 abilities. The options are slightly different between tank and DPS specs.

Saber Reflect (lasts 5 seconds, includes threat generation increase for tanks)
Mad Dash / Blade Blitz (35s cooldown and higher damage, but not root break)
Endure Pain / Enure (with cleanse) for DPS or Intimidating Roar / Awe for Tanks

This is a pretty huge choice. DPS have to choose between better sustained survivability with Endure Pain / Enure or having access to a single cheese. Tanks at least get Endure Pain / Enure as a baseline, but they’re still giving up 2 of their DCDs any way you slice it. I don’t really understand why this choice exists. Juggs are primarily strong in unranked because of Enraged / Focused Defense, though it doesn’t help them as much in ranked. As tanks in PvE, they’re losing a whole lot more than either of the other tank disciplines.

I think it would be more appropriate if Enraged / Focused Defense was nerfed slightly; Enraged Defense / Enure given for free to all disciplines, Intimidating Roar / Awe given to tanks so the choice for everyone just becomes Mad Dash / Blade Blitz vs Saber Reflect.

Level 35 Choice

At level 35, the DPS specs have the option to take Intimidating Roar / Awe or 1 of 2 discipline-specific passives. Tanks used to have to choose between Intercede / Guardian Leap or 1 of 2 passives, but now that has been changed since that ability has been given back to all Juggernauts / Guardians. I’ll cover the discipline-specific choices later on.

Level 20 Choice

At level 20, Juggernauts / Guardians have a choice between 1 ability or 1 of 2 passives:

Sweeping / Cyclone Slash ability
A passive that makes Ravage / Blade Barrage root the target for 3 seconds and generate 1 Rage / Focus.
A passive that makes Force Scream / Blade Storm deals damage in a cone and applies a 50% slow that lasts 6 seconds.

This choice basically lets you pick what kind of AoE you have, either something weaker, but spammable, or something stronger with a cooldown, or if you want the Overwhelm / Debilitate utility for PvP.

I dislike that there isn’t a single-target option here and it doesn’t seem like Sweeping / Cyclone Slash would end up getting picked very much since all 3 specs use Force Scream / Blade Storm rotationally and don’t necessarily have a whole lot of room in their rotation for spamming anyway before they run out of Rage / Focus. I would prefer if Sweeping / Cyclone Slash were just removed entirely in favor of a single-target passive.

Universal Passive Choices

Juggernauts / Guardians have 3 choices available to them where they pick between 1 of 3 passives, all of the options have the effects of current utilities.

Level 80 Choice

Pooled Hatred / Gather Strength utility effect
Crushing Fist / Purifying Sweep utility effect
Through Passion / Peace utility effect

I like this choice. All of the options feel pretty balanced compared to each other and there’s always something useful to take. I think the biggest frustration will be in PvP since players will have to choose between dealing more damage or having improved survivability, especially considering Pooled Hatred / Gather Strength is most consistently useful in PvP, though at least in unranked this will be a good thing.

Level 60 Choice

War Bringer / Ardent Advocate + Unstoppable / Unremitting utility effects
Hardened / Stalwart Defense utility effect
Payback / Second Wind utility effect

This choice could use a bit more refining. Payback / Second Wind will never get taken, it doesn’t even get taken now. It would be interesting to see how high BioWare could push the healing effect so that it makes players think twice about stunning a Juggernaut / Guardian at all. For PvP, I think the other two options are pretty interesting, I’d probably always pick the one that buffs Force Charge / Leap though. It might be a bit more of a competitive option in PvP if they added Sonic Wall / Guardianship as well.

In PvE, this isn’t much of a choice at all for DPS since they’ll always need to take the AoE DR. I hope that the Rage / Focus discipline gets an additional passive that increases the damage dealt by Force Charge / Leap since War Bringer / Ardent Advocate currently fulfills that role, but they won’t be able to take that anymore in PvP.

This seems like it will be most interesting for tanks. They can take stun DR when they need it and otherwise have access to a DPS increase and Unstoppable / Unremitting. The big thing really is just buffing Payback / Second Wind to where it will be considered. Would you use it if you got a 30% heal? How about 50%? 75%? I bet it would definitely be worth considering if it healed you to full.

Level 50 Choice

Extending Roar / Unyielding Justice utility effect
Warmonger / Battlefield Command utility effect
Unyielding / Defiance utility effect

The first two choices seem interesting. Extending Roar / Unyielding Justice is nice, but the DPS increase is very minor for Vengeance / Vigilance and the range increase on Force Scream / Blade Storm is hard to make use of. Meanwhile, the cooldown reduction on Force Charge / Leap is super handy.

I’d like to see Unyielding / Defiance combined with Deadly Reprisal / Narrowed Focus so that it is actually consistently useful in PvE and remains a proper alternative choice to the other two options. Without that, this is basically just a choice between 2 options, not 3 since no one will ever pick Unyielding / Defiance on its own.

Discipline-Specific Changes

Each discipline has 2 choices that each buff a discipline-specific ability in 1 of 3 ways and 1 choice where 2 of the options buff Enrage / Combat Focus in a unique way since that ability now has discipline-specific effects.

Immortal and Defense

Aegis Assault / Warding Strike

Dealing damage with Aegis Assault / Warding Strike increases your damage reduction by an additional 2%.
Aegis Assault / Warding Strike deals 20% more damage to taunted targets.
Increases the damage, critical chance, and threat generation of Aegis Assault / Warding strike by 20%.

So the taunted targets damage increase is just strictly inferior to the other option for some reason. 2% DR is almost nothing, so it seems like you’d always want to pick the third option. I’d really like to see an off-tank build be possible that deals higher damage but has reduced threat generation and mitigation. Perhaps the third option could be tweaked to fulfil this role where it has the following effect “Increases the base damage, critical chance, and critical damage of Aegis Assault / Warding Strike by 20%, but it no longer increases your damage reduction and shield absorption and generates 170% less threat.”

The DR one could be increased to something like 5% and also increase shield chance and absorption by the same amount. The taunt damage increase option could also refresh the duration of the taunt on the target.

Crushing Blow / Guardian Slash

Dealing damage with Crushing Blow / Guardian Slash while the mitigation from Aegis Assault / Warding Strike is active grants a barrier of protection to all allies within 10m for 6 seconds.
The critical chance and threat generation of Crushing Blow / Guardian Slash is increased by 20% and its cooldown is reduced by 1 second each time it critically hits.
Crushing Blow / Guardian Slash deals 50% more damage to taunted targets.

I don’t entirely understand how the cooldown reduction on the second effect is supposed to work, it doesn’t seem to be functional right now. I imagine it is probably meant to be used in an AoE setting so you get to spam it when there are a bunch of adds around. Overall, these choices are interesting, though I’d like to see an off-tank option here.

Perhaps the shield could be combined with the taunted one where the shield applies if it hits a taunted target. Maybe the damage increase could be a little lower, but instead it refreshes the duration of taunts just like my idea for Aegis Assault / Warding Strike. If having 100% uptime on taunts is too much, maybe each could just increase the duration by a set amount instead or perhaps the Crushing Blow / Guardian Slash one could instead reduce the cooldown of the AoE taunt.

The off-tank option for Crushing Blow / Guardian Slash could be quite similar to what I was suggesting for Aegis Assault / Warding Strike: “Increases the base damage, critical chance, and critical damage dealt by Crushing Blow / Guardian Slash and reduces its Rage / Focus cost by 3, but it generates 170% less threat”. I think the requirement that you have the Aegis Assault proc in order to deal AoE damage could be removed, it just adds unnecessary complexity and would make it so you couldn’t deal AoE damage with Crushing Blow / Guardian Slash when both passives are taken.

Enrage / Combat Focus Choice

Enrage / Combat Focus now has a unique effect for each discipline. For Immortal / Defense, the ability is called Threatening Rage and its effect is “Instantly generates 6 Rage / Focus, reduces the cooldown of your taunts by 5 seconds, and damages all taunted targets around you. The choices available at level 35 are the following:

Critically hitting with a direct attack reduces the cooldown of Threatening Rage by 1 second. Threatening Rage purges movement-impairing effects when activated.
Dealing direct damage to taunted targets generates 1 Rage / Focus. This cannot occur more than once per second.
Reckoning utility effect

This choice is decent, though I’m not sure why they specify direct attack when Juggernaut / Guardian tanks literally only deal direct damage. I would also switch around the trigger effects so that we have a clear option for the off-tank build and the pure tank-build where the effects would be “Dealing damage to taunted dargets reduces the cooldown of Threatening Rage by 1 second and Threatening Rage purges movement-impairing effects when activated.” and “Dealing critical damage generates 1 Rage / Focus.” Maybe also throw in that it makes Threatening Rage grant 12 rage as opposed to 6.

Regarding Tank Gearing

I’d also like to see something added to all tank disciplines where damage mitigation (including on tank-only DCDs), and perhaps damage output as well, scales with your mitigation stats such that proper tank gear means you’re as tanky as normal, but if you choose to go for DPS gear, you don’t get any of that tank-only mitigation. In addition, I think that shield and defense chance should be tweaked to be more universally useful. Perhaps tanks get a passive that makes it so defense rating also applies to Force / Tech damage and shields in general could be changed to work against internal / elemental damage as well, but not work against periodic damage instead.

By making tank mitigation more consistently effective and required in order to benefit from tank-specific mitigation, there is less of a need for hybrid builds like skank tanks. Tanks shouldn’t have to do any more gearing than DPS and healers need to do.

PTS Immortal UI - SWTOR 7.0 Juggernaut Changes Preview

Vengeance and Vigilance

Shatter / Plasma Brand

While Shatter / Plasma Brand is active, the crit chance of all of your bleed / burn effects is increased by 10% on that target.
Shatter / Plasma Brand deals more initial direct damage and its cooldown is reduced by 2 seconds.
Killing a target with direct (???) bleed / burn damage while affected by Shatter / Plasma Brand causes it to explode, damaging nearby targets.

Okay I have no idea what’s going on with the third effect. All of the bleed / burn damage is considered (or should be considered) periodic damage, not direct damage. Also, the condition is way, way too specific. I like the idea of having an on-kill effect for solo content, but it needs to be worded better and apply more consistently. Here’s an idea for a similar effect “ When an enemy is killed that is currently affected by Shatter / Plasma Brand, it triggers a blood / fire explosion, dealing damage to nearby targets.”

The other two effects seem fine, there’s a versatile effect more focused on sustained damage and another that’s more focused on burst, though I’m not sure if it could be strong enough to be worth taking. It would be preferable to change the effect to “Shatter / Plasma brand now deals all of its damage as direct damage and applies a debuff called “Dried Blood / Burn Marks” that increases the target’s damage taken by your bleed effects by 5%” to compensate for the loss of 5% of the damage from Bloodmaster / Burnmaster since you’d only have 2 bleeds / burns up at a time.

Impale / Overhead Slash

Impale / Overhead Slash deals 10% additional damage and generates 1 Rage / Focus for each of your bleed / burn effects on the target.
Impale / Overhead Slash deals X additional critical bleed damage when it hits and the critical hit chance of Impale / Overhead Slash is increased by 20%
Increases the range of Impale / Overhead Slash by 6m. Impale / Overhead Slash also now immobilizes the target for 3 seconds.

The second option is worded very strangely. It seems to work like the Force Lash passive for the Rage / Focus discipline where it just does an extra tick of bleed / burn damage when you use Impale. I think it would be more appropriate to just have it extend the duration of the Eviscerate / Burning Purpose DoT that Impale / Overhead Slash applies by 1 second instead so it synergizes better with Bloodmaster / Burnmaster and Hemophilic Slash.

The other options seem okay. I don’t see the point of the Rage / Focus generation for the first option though since Vengeance / Vigilance doesn’t need any extra Rage / Focus. Perhaps it makes the Eviscerate / Burning Purpose DoT have a chance to tick twice or something instead.

I’m super excited about the 10m range option. I hope it looks something like Yoda’s saber throw in Episode 3, even though Yoda used Ataru, not Shien form.

Enrage / Combat Focus Choice

Vengeance’s version of Enrage / Combat Focus is called Bloodrage and has the following effect: “Explodes your bleeds / burns on all targets within 10m of you, dealing a significant amount of damage and generating 6 Rage / Focus.” I’m really gonna miss the movement speed boost from the Unshackling Rage / Focused Freedom utility, though I guess we’ll need to use this ability on cooldown now, so it wouldn’t have been all that useful anyway. The choices are:

Critically hitting with a bleed / burn effect reduces the cooldown of Bloodrage by 1 second. In addition, Bloodrage purges movement impairing effects.
Bloodrage no longer generates Rage / Focus. Instead, activating Bloodrage grants Blood Rites, which increases the critical hit chance of all your internal bleed / (elemental?) burn effects by 10% and generates 1 Rage / Focus each time you critically hit with an internal bleed / (elemental?) burn effect for 10 seconds.
Intimidating Roar / Awe ability

I don’t know how I feel about these options. Currently, Enrage / Combat Focus is used mostly as a speed boost and only for the Rage / Focus generation when combat starts or when you’re running low because you just used Hew / Whirling Blade without the proc. I imagine we’ll have enough Rage / Focus with either option sub-30, though if we don’t get movement speed, it would be nice if the base damage of Force Charge / Leap could be increased so we aren’t losing DPS.

I’m also not sure which passive is better at a glance and I imagine that the Blood Rites one will end up being stronger, so the cooldown reduction one might also need to increase damage dealt by Bloodrage so that it’s more about burst vs sustained.

PTS Vengeance UI - SWTOR 7.0 Juggernaut Changes Preview

The new in-depth 7.0 Vengeance Juggernaut PvE Guide is now available!

Rage and Focus

Raging Burst / Focused Burst

Dealing damage with Raging / Focused Burst or Smash / Force Sweep increases your critical chance by 20% for 6 seconds.
Raging / Focused Burst also deals damage to nearby enemies.
Raging / Focused Burst deals 15% more damage and applies Trauma.

I really like these options. The crit chance pairs really nicely with the flat +10% crit multiplier that the discipline receives. There’s also a clear option for AoE and PvP that seem pretty helpful. The AoE one does kind of make Smash / Force Sweep obsolete though, so maybe it would be better if the effect instead just increased the damage dealt by Smash / Force Sweep to match that of Raging / Focused Burst. Also, the crit chance for 6 seconds needs to have an 8 second rate limit applied to it just like Cascading / Heightened Power does so we don’t have any shenanigans involving using both Raging / Focused Burst and Smash / Force Sweep in the same rotation cycle to get higher uptime. Maybe it would be better if using one just put both of them on cooldown.

Also I hope the animation for Raging / Focused Burst gets changed. It sounds neat and looks okay, but it doesn’t feel very Star-Warsy. I’d prefer maybe a little burst of lightning for Rage and something that looks closer to a Force push or something from Telekinetics for Focus.

Obliterate / Zealous Leap

Please BioWare, make this ability not do a leap if you’re already in melee range! You’ve already shown this is possible with Low Slash for Assassins / Shadows. The rotational self-root is a huge reason for why nobody plays this spec!

Activating Obliterate / Zealous Leap reduces the cooldown of Enrage / Combat Focus by 5 seconds.
Activating Obliterate / Zealous Leap puts a mini ward on yourself which absorbs a small amount of damage and lasts up to 10 seconds.
Killing an enemy within 3 seconds of dealing damage with Obliterate / Zealous Leap resets its cooldown and increases its damage by 50%.

I’m not sure what to think of these options. On the surface, they seem absolutely terrible. The first one is gonna destabilize the rotation since you need to alternate using Enrage / Combat Focus and Force Crush / Force Exhaustion every other cycle for the Shockwave / Singularity proc unless this enables you to just use Enrage / Combat Focus in every cycle, then it’s fine.

The second one is just super lame, but I guess isn’t necessarily bad. I think it would be more interesting if it increased defense chance or something instead so it would have a destabilizing effect on rotations.

The third one is super specific and inconsistent. I think if you want to lean into what Deception / Infiltration Assassin / Shadows can do, the effect needs to be “Killing an enemy within 3 seconds of dealing damage with Obliterate / Zealous Leap resets the cooldowns on Obliterate / Zealous Leap, Raging / Focused Burst, and Furious Strike / Concentrated Slice and grants Shockwave / Singularity. This will let players in solo content jump around to each target, whacking them with their three strongest abilities and then move onto the next target to do it again.

Maybe these will be a bit better if the rotation is changed though.

Enrage / Combat Focus Choice

There isn’t some fancy new name for Enrage / Combat Focus in this discipline, though it does have a more exciting effect: “Instantly maxes out your Rage / Focus and increases your movement speed by 50% for 10 seconds. If you already have 12 Rage / Focus when activating this ability, all of your Rage is consumed and a burst of energy is released, dealing kinetic damage to nearby enemies.”

This effect is very different from what we have now and I’m not entirely sure how it’s supposed to work rotationally. Like right now you need this ability to generate 6 Rage / Focus immediately and another 6 over time in order for the rotation to work. You can’t give up all that Rage / Focus for a bit of extra damage because you won’t be able to do your rotation. Perhaps they’re making bigger changes to the discipline that they haven’t released yet. Here are the current choices:

Critically hitting with an attack that deals Force kinetic or energy damage reduces the cooldown of Enrage / Combat Focus by 1 second. In addition, Enrage / Combat Focus purges movement-impairing effects and triggers Dominate / Felling Blow (autocrit proc).
Each time you deal Force kinetic / energy damage, you generate 1 Rage / Focus.
Intimidating Roar / Awe ability.

It’s really hard to tell how good these passives are gonna be since it seems like the rotation might be changing a lot. Also I’m not sure why the trigger is so complicated, there isn’t any internal / elemental damage, so it just needs to say Force damage unless they don’t want it to trigger off of Force Lash. Just like for Vengeance / Vigilance, it also seems unclear as to which is better in which situation.

UPDATE: The complete SWTOR Rage Juggernaut Guide for PvE and the Best Builds for this Discipline is now available for everyone who wants to learn this spec or improve their skills with it.

Concluding Thoughts

Even though we now have a clearer picture of what overall balance could be like for 7.0, including nerfs across all Combat Styles, it still seems like Juggernauts / Guardians are getting hit particularly hard. They’re losing out on a lot of defensive capabilities, while a lot of other Combat Styles aren’t aren’t having to give up on much defensively at all. This is even more problematic for PvE where most classes still have access to almost all of their pure DCDs.

As I mentioned before, I think the big issue is that Juggernauts / Guardians have a bit too much survivability in unranked thanks to Enraged / Focused Defense but it doesn’t transfer nearly as well to ranked where they’re almost always one of the first to get focused down. There’s still a lot of time for refinement though, so hopefully we’ll see some improvements for 7.0 that address the discrepancy in performance.

The other choices mostly seem pretty interesting. A lot of the options are more exciting than what some of the other Combat Styles have gotten, though some refinement is definitely still needed. I’m also not sure what is happening with Rage / Focus, a lot of the choices seem to indicate that the rotation is being changed or no one at BioWare actually knows the rotation. I think it would be a lot more popular if Obliterate / Zealous Leap being a self-root wasn’t such a liability. Its burst is far superior to Vengeance / Vigilance and sustained DPS-wise, at least in 6.0, its damage output was pretty comparable too.

Finally, I hope that BioWare decides to return Furious Power / Force Clarity, it was a fantastic addition to the Combat Style. All of the issues with it were caused by the set bonus, not the base ability.

If you think you may have missed something from this SWTOR PTS cycle previewing the 7.0 Combat Styles and class changes, be sure to check out the SWTOR archives. I’ve covered all!

Ability Pruning

Furious Power / Force Clarity