Ah well. The 1.2 Patch changes will kill the hybrid spec, and make the darkness rotation a lot smoother on paper. We'll see how it goes.

Good lord. I'm not saying it's impossible. I did every h2 quests solo myself except one on balmorra. I just said that, to do it at lower levels, you sometimes have to kite the champion boss in the end. I'll stop replying in threads when people read half of the conversation. xD

@OP : why swelling shadows over haunted dreams in the hybrid spec? Haunted dreams will give you a 8 sec uninterruptible instant cc (the tooltip is lying, it doesn't break at all on damage and in fact does what the old darkness talent did in beta, ie non breaking but reduced damage on target). Seems much better than 15% more chance to get a small heal amount, especially considering our problems with multitanking.

The synergy from chain shock with energize will help your dps yes. And the hybrid spec is a good one for early tanking in flashpoints anyway (the instant whirlwind helps a lot). But it won't change a lot from what you have now ;-) You should use some dps stuff instead of only tank stuff, especially if you play with a healer. (Or just ditch your friend and do everything with stealth, it'll go so much faster )

I ... don't really see the point of 2 more levels (which I had) when facing champions as a solo tank with no healer pet in the h2+ quests of nar shadaa. They still do more damage and have more life than you do. Sharing aggro with khemval will only work to a point. I was just pointing out the blatant exageration of Cowflab about the lower levels (as he obviously didn't play darkness at these levels. ) Of course you should always have more levels than the planet. It evens out at later levels.

Why did you quote me? oO

Right So how do you do when the champion hits do the same damage as your own, and has more life than both you and your pet combined? Just to know how "good players" do it I mean. Obviously you forgot what it was when you were in nar shadaa. Or you just did your 2+ quests at those level with someone else (as intended). ;-)

She was asking about darkness. And when doing 2+ quests solo in nar shadda, yes, I had to kite some things, strangely. But if you could kill champions at lvl 20 without kiting and darkness specced, good for you

You'll get Talos, harnessed darkness, chain shock, some stuff, and it will change your life. At level 38 it's the worst tank levels : you're too far away from the level you got dark ward, you didn't get any more resistance, and not a lot of dps either. You'll get the resistance with stuff, and the dps with chain shock/energize/harnessed darkness. ;-) But still ... I found the leveling so easy in tank spec. O_O For the champions, it's normal : you have to kite them at lower levels, and some you can't so ... But the ones you can kite, just use Revel, and kite, taunt when he get's aggro back, shock, lightning to slow, knockback and use your slow, your speed, stun twice, etc. ;-)

For the OP: there's something called "sticky" in forums. Like ... I don't know but the "Darkness tanking compendium" seems to be a good start to answer your questions. @previous poster : I've posted the exact same thing a few days ago about the interface : "Oh, that's what the boss looked like"

Yeah, that's when you're guarding someone, you get stunned as well. Really frustrating.

Having tried the 1 strong + 2 normals on ilum, I end up with around 80% life. This is, however, when I don't use any of our cc (no spike, no stun, etc). It is probably just a stuff problem you have. I think you should try the 23/0/18 build first : the instant whirlwind will -definitely- change your life. Strongs do hit for a lot of damage when you just got 50 : they hit even harder than elites, and as a tank you don't have the burst to bring them down rapidly to compensate. And, as our defenses are random, sometimes you'll just get hit by almost everything, especially at first, whereas a dps will always hit harder. As you pointed out, you will definitely feel a lot tankier with the healer pet, because we are advantaged on long fights. That's however, quite frustrating sometimes : as you said, you will go a lot faster with a good dps spec. But in the end, with a dps pet and you with good stuff, it'll even out. Anyway, that's the key for strongs : cc them if you can, don't forget to assassinate when they're under 30%, don't refresh wither/discharge when he's the only one standing.

There's a post about this every day. Never had any problem with it myself, but it seems to be a problem for some people so ... there's a probably something there. ;-)

Hm. I'm sorry to ask but ... does it matter if we have less mitigation? Considering there is no difficult boss fight in the game except Soa, and Soa only hits with elemental damage, therefore making us the best tanks for the job? (and the fight isn't even remotely based on tanking abilities anyway ...) Even with hard mode Bulwark (a hard hitting physical boss, i don't know if you have directive 7 on republic side though), the difficulty doesn't come from the tank's tanking ability. We can tank everything in the game so ... honestly I think it would be more relevant to compare tank damage to see which one is the "best" tank to have in a raid/flashpoint ...

I don't know how you can end up with 50% life against a strong and two normals. There must be something you're doing wrong. However, I agree with you on the difficulty/reward ratio. The 23/0/18 is a bit more easy to play, but still, the cycles are just annoying. Always looking at the energize, the dark ward, etc, just isn't fun to play. The interface doesn't help as well, and we indeed end up playing the whole game looking at buff and debuff bars. "Oh, this is what this boss looked like."

Same as every other class : biochem. ;-) Artifice is bad : it'll give you 2 relics, you'll probably end up using only one of the 2. Synthweaving will give you a few nice rakata pieces, but when you'll have them, you'll switch to biochem. Biochem will give you a tank stim, an excellent medpack (8k instead of 3k), and a tank adrenal.