SWTOR Jedi Knight Guide

In this SWTOR Jedi Knight guide, I will be going over everything we know about the Jedi Knight class in Star Wars: The Old Republic, including its roles and advanced classes.

Once the game is available for play, I will be adding specific articles to this SWTOR Jedi Knight guide for each advanced class, including builds, talents, and abilities, so be sure to check back often.

SWTOR Jedi Knight Guide – Class Role

The Jedi Knight is a melee-oriented Jedi class available to the Galactic Republic. Its Empire counterpart is the Sith Warrior.

This class primarily uses melee attacks (with some force-related abilities) and can fill the role of both a melee DPS and a tank, depending on which advanced class you pick. This class has no healing abilities in either specialization.

The Jedi Knight can progress into two separate classes: the Guardian and the Sentinel. Note that right now there appears to be no way to change your advanced class in SWTOR.

This means that you do not want to make your decision lightly. You will be able to move your talents around pretty easily within your advanced class, but changing your advanced class is not something you can currently do. Perhaps they will add in a way for max-level players to change later, but even if they do, it has been specifically said that it will not be easy, so think hard before you pick your class.

The Guardian

The Guardian is a tanking-oriented advanced class of the Jedi Knight. It uses a single lightsaber and wears heavy armor. Depending on which talent points you pick, it can both be a tank and or a DPS class.

We will have to see just how effective the DPS is for this class. I do not think you should pick this advanced Jedi Knight class if you want to do damage. Since this class wears heavy armor, it will likely do less damage than a Sentinel, which only wears medium armor. Additionally, you will have less ways to deal damage.

Its “Defense” talent tree is dedicated towards tanking, whereas its Vigilance talent tree allows it to deal damage. The talent options here are straight-forward. You can reset your talents at the cost of a small amount of credits at the trainer, and I will be surprised if there is not some sort of dual spec system so you can swap back and forth between a PvE tanking build and a PvP or farming build.

However, if you want to tank, this is a great class. It will probably be the standard melee tank from previous MMORPG titles.

The Sentinel

The Sentinel appears to be one of the top DPS classes in SWTOR, and likely to be the top melee DPS class in SWTOR, at least on the Republic side.

The Sentinel dual-wields lightsabers (i.e. holds one in each hand) and specializes in dealing damage. The Sentinel is the only Galactic Republic advanced class which has only one ability: to deal damage.

Since the Sentinel can only deal damage, its various specializations differ in terms of playstyle. Its two talent trees, Watchman and Combat, offer a unique playstyle experience and each one has their strengths and weaknesses.

The Watchman talent tree features a lot of abilities (all talent trees in SWTOR seem to give each class a significant number of abilities) which feature damage over time (DoT) effects, in the form ‘”burn damage”. Naturally, this means that you will do less up-front damage as a Watchman and instead do more damage over time.

Watchman also get access to some healing abilities, which seem to work together with the burn effects. For example, you can a talent which significantly increases the critical hit rate of your burn effects, and another talent which heals you every time you get a critical hit, and furthermore an on-use ability (Zen) which lets all your burn effects heal you for a short while. This all adds up to a significant amount of self-healing, which can help with soloing tough enemies.

The Combat talent tree on the other hand seems to do more damage up-front. Its abilities often involve striking with both Lightsabers at once. This burst damage lends itself to combat where you do not have a lot of time to stay on a single target. This includes PvP (though in PvP you get a lot of bonus HP which increases the length of battles) or if you have really good gear and want to farm.

What I mean by the “farming” bit is imagine if you are raiding and getting crafted gear and still fighting the same level 50 max-level enemies. After awhile, they would get really weak to you, to the point where even open-world elites can be taken down pretty easily. You do not have time in this situation to rack up all kinds of DoTs but rather you will want to spike enemies down and just blow through them.

Regardless, you are free to try out both talent trees as you can easily respec between the two for the cost of some credits.

Just remember, the advantage of the Sentinel is that it is likely to do the most damage in SWTOR as it is the only pure DPS class. The primary disadvantage of this class is that it has no flexibility; it cannot heal or tank.

SWTOR Jedi Knight Guide Conclusion

The Jedi Knight is your top choice if you want to play a melee class for the Galactic Republic. It has two specializations: The Sentinel, which excels at dealing damage, and the Guardian, which excels at tanking, but also has a damage-dealing off-spec.

Also, do not forget that even as a Sentinel or Guardian, you can always select a healing-oriented companion when playing solo! This takes awhile to unlock, but you get one eventually.

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