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MantorokTwelve

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Everything posted by MantorokTwelve

  1. Sins have the best DCDs in the game. Period. Force shroud is a "screw this mechanic" cooldown, now with cleanse, and force speed is 60% absorb on a short cooldown. It's hard to remember to rotate force speed, but it's insane for mitigating burst.
  2. Overload is invaluable for assassin tanks. No upper target limit gives it some great utility in big mobs, I often use it to position groups for AOE or cliff kills. The (very hectic) trenchgutter phase of Nightmare EC Kephess almost demands that you use force shroud and overload to aggro and kite a big mob of adds away from an elite with a large reflect shield. The most important thing for assassin tanks now is doubling up on your set bonuses. The new set bonuses (69 and 72) do not stack with the old ones (63 and below), so you can get 2 pieces of 63 and 2 pieces of 69/72. This will give you + 25% shield chance whenever dark ward is up, which is huge. Make sure your 63s are in the gloves and feet slots, as they are the slots which will lose the least armor rating from having lower level armorings. Also, it is IMPERATIVE that you refresh dark ward ONLY when it falls off. Assassin tanks are certainly more active than juggernauts and powertechs. We have many short cooldowns, self heals, and lower natural mitigation than the other tanks. Know your encounters, know your cooldowns, and know when to use them. If a boss is heavy on melee/ranged attacks, use deflection. Use force shroud to avoid particularly nasty force/tech attacks (for example, the knock down from the bonus boss in hammer station, or if you miss an interrupt on incinerate on the droid in Lost Island). Overcharge is great for any time you fall below your range of comfort, or if a healer is preoccupied for some reason, or especially for burn phase. I would recommend you pick up biochem if you don't have it already. I keep a reusable resolve and fortitude stim, absorb adrenal, and medpack on me at all times. The absorb adrenal is a nice extra DR boost cooldown, and the medpack has kept me alive multiple times. Remember that you can use force cloak after using a medpack to exit combat and allow you to use another one when it comes off cooldown (just don't vanish when you're tanking the boss). I use the resolve stim most of the time for the threat boost, but the extra health and defense from the fortitude stim can be nice as well. If you don't want to get biochem on your assassin, then I suggest you stockpile a number of blue stims, adrenals, and medpacks. Wither is your highest threat attack. Cycle your taunts within your rotation as possible (open with force pull, wither, thrash, shock, taunt, then taunt as mechanics allow for the rest of the fight to keep threat high). Use assassinate on cooldown when available. Don't get conspirator's cloak, maul sucks for us and is still expensive. Your spec should look something like this. There's a reason for every point in there. Try to use phase walk proactively. Drop it where healers will stand to help the whole raid. If you're soloing, there is another sintank, or if your healers are stupid and don't know how to stand in the big pink circle, then drop it under your feet and enjoy the healing buff. Priority for recklessness is 3 stack HD lightning > energize shock > wither. Always use it on the lightning first, chain shock has a habit of eating both charges if you use shock first. Use recklessness on wither if you need the AOE, or if energize is refusing to proc and you're about to lose the proc. Overload, pull, and spike are your physics abilities, know them and use them wisely. Guard the highest THREAT in every encounter. 99% of the time this is a dps, look at the DPS you have with you to determine which is the greatest threat. In pug FPs, I generally just go by health; if I'm looking at 30k, 25k, and 28k, I will generally guard the 30k guy. In operations, it can vary by fight. In the first phase of terror from beyond, you will want to guard the highest DPS on your tentacle, in the second phase you will want to switch to the healers, since they are the only ones generating threat towards the boss (the DPS are aggroing the tentacles, and generating no threat on the boss proper). If you notice a player is pulling off of you often, consider switching guard to him. If you are then losing threat to the other player, I suggest L2P, gear up, and request that the DPS incorporate threat drops in their rotation. If this is necessary, if one of the DPS in question is a juggernaut, guard him. The juggernaut has the worst threat drop in the game, and they should not be expected to use it unless absolutely necessary. To maximize your threat while gearing, focus on obtaining your hilt and offhand armoring ASAP. I noticed a tremendous threat boost just jumping from a 63 to 66 hilt. Very useful when tanking with skilled, geared DPS.
  3. Unless you severely outclass the other tank, you should have no worries about stealing threat. Just take wither out of your rotation (unless you need to keep the debuff up for the raid, then use it only to refresh the debuff), and use thrash, shock, and force lightning as you would normally. Switching stances is wasteful as previously mentioned, just know your high threat moves and don't use them if you aren't tanking. Don't use your force cloak unless absolutely necessary, cloak is important for getting 2 medpacks out of a boss fight, getting a stealth rez in (only time I've pulled that off is TFB second phase), or saving money in case of a designed wipe. The way taunts work is they force the target to attack the taunter for 6 seconds, and they have a multiplier that generates threat based upon the previous threat the user has. So if you taunt right off the bat in an encounter, you aren't generating as much threat as you would if you used force pull, wither, shock, and then taunt. Cycle your taunts within your rotation as you are able, and the only time you will lose threat is when you are severely outgeared. Just make sure you have a taunt available for your switches in fights where it is necessary. One more nugget: focus on upgrading your hilt and shield armoring ASAP. The extra damage and force power you get from these mods are invaluable for threat generation.
  4. Your 9% power buff from heightened power/cascading power will benefit from as much power as possible. Might augments will give you a useful amount of crit with a negligible loss of power.
  5. Deception assassin is fairly low maintenance, you have volt slash (thrash), discharge, shock, maul, and assassinate. You use recklessness for discharge and voltage procced shock. As for utility, you have force speed on a low cooldown for positioning, stealth CC, blackout (25% damage reduction boost and force regen boost), force shroud, and deflection as defensive cooldowns. It's not the sturdiest of classes since it has light armor, but there is some good passive mitigation through blackout and entropic field. You only have 4 or 5 attacks you really need to worry about. The biggest challenge I see to maximizing your DPS as deception is to make full use of your force regen from dark embrace, and to utilize the cooldown resets that are built into the spec. It's a simple spec to pick up, it can be difficult to completely master. Procs to watch: -Duplicity: same picture as maul, use maul when you see it. Easy. - Static Charge: looks like surging charge, use discharge when it's at 3 stacks (recklessness automatically gives you 3 stacks) -Voltage: Each stack gives shock a 50% chance to trigger surging charge separate from the ICD of surging charge (allows to get more static charges) Use recklessness when you have 0 stacks of static charge, use the first hit on discharge, the second one on shock.
  6. Yeah, shroud. I always manage to mix those names up...
  7. If you catch the ball, you should be making good use of blackout, force cloak, and deflection to stay alive. If you don't have blackout because you're madness specced, then you shouldn't ever touch the ball.
  8. The only self heals the juggernaut has: Payback (CC break has a 50/100% chance to heal you for 10%) 2 Piece PVP Vindicator's set (Intercede heals for 8%) Enraged Defense (3% every second you're attacked for 10 seconds, lowers threat [bad for tanking]) Medpack I think I've heard of endure pain working as a heal if you lose less health than you gained , but I've never bothered to test it (haven't jugg tanked since probably last summer).
  9. If your energized shocks are hitting for 1700, your recklessness energized shocks will hit for 2550 (recklessness adds 50% surge to energized shocks). In PVE it's not about the measly additional 800 damage (if your raid needs tanks to help push DPS, you need better DPS), it's about getting extra threat on your high threat abilities. More damage on high threat abilities means more threat. More threat means your DPS don't get targeted and die.
  10. Priority: 1. Force Lightning (3 stacks HD) 2. Shock (energize) 3. Wither (multitarget threat)
  11. I didn't say I'm some kind of PVP genius. I'm saying you can't really complain if you don't have a use for a cooldown within 2 minutes, but you will between 2 and 2:45 minutes. 15 minute duration would be OP for raiding (and I would say warzones too), it would all but guarantee the healers get their healing buff for the whole fight.
  12. 2.0 did make it to where you don't automatically enter combat upon reviving, so you do have time to channel your recovery (assuming the raid can survive a few more seconds while you recover).
  13. Then don't let it go unused. Are you really going to go a two minute span without needing to LOS an opponent, avoid AOE, or circumvent terrain?
  14. An assassin in my guild does 2070.58 on Nightmare Kephess. It's the player, not the class that matters.
  15. They both only have one truly viable DPS spec right now: deception for the sin and lightning for the sorc. Deception is ridiculously simple, while lightning has quite a few abilities (and no mobility to speak of). It's really whether you want to be a melee class with a rotation of lightsaber buzzsaw, shock, discharge, and backstab, or a caster with 3-4 varieties of force lightning, two DOTs, and a shockwave attack.
  16. Who cares if you can do it IF you have a good pair of DPS and a good healer? There's no reason to screw around as a hybrid tank in PVE and gimp yourself. Hybrid might work in PVE and in soloing content, but a jack of all trades is a master of none in group PVE content. Queuing as a failtank is a good way to get kicked repeatedly. Of course, if you have the luxury of two good dps and a healer who will put up with the mediocrity of your spec, by all means, run with them all day.
  17. It's not the skill's fault if you aren't using it properly. Know the situation, and learn when and where you should place it. Never use it if you aren't going to need it within the next two minutes. If for some reason you screw up and place it, just click the icon on your buff bar to kill the mark and begin the cooldown.
  18. You are sacrificing your best AOE threat generator (and a good HS generator), as well as shadow's shelter, for a 25% DR cooldown and lowered AOE damage. It's an...interesting idea, but I don't know if it's worth losing slow time, shadow's shelter, and the 3 points for applied force, martial prowess, and/or rapid recovery. I think the reduced self healing will be more of a loss than the slight buff from blackout.
  19. Blaster rifles have less base damage than assault cannons, so that would be a bad idea. The vanguard/powertech is a melee class, nothing you can do about that. There is no ranged class that uses a blaster primarily (operatives are also melee, and snipers are gimped without sniper rifles).
  20. 3% accuracy is only useful to the point where your gear reaches 100% accuracy. I would aim for 99% accuracy through gear, put one point into accuracy and two into ravager (enraged sunder isn't that necessary, and there's really nothing you need in rage past 36 points). I've dabbled in rage before and since 2.0, and I've found that waiting on shockwave procs is never my limiting factor, and I don't even use the set bonus for the lowered cooldown on enrage. I would go for either the 2 piece marauder and 2 piece juggernaut (saber throw is extra rage building filler, does good damage, and it's good if you need to spec vengeance occasionally), or the 4 piece juggernaut (8% damage buff on your free screams). Both set bonuses are good, but I would venture to guess that the 2 and 2 is probably better for vengeance (more ravaging), and probably better for rage as well. I could be wrong though, vengeance has autocrit force screams.
  21. I think the issue with the spec is that it is a melee class with two ranged abilities and it is haphazardly trying to be a ranged class. I think we have enough DOTs in discharge, creeping terror, and crushing darkness, I just think we need a real deadly burst ability. It could be that maul/assassinate does 25% more crit damage for each DOT on a target, and consumption of a deathmark has x% chance to make maul/assassinate autocrit (on a low percentage proc rate or a fairly long cooldown, for balancing purposes). That would give madnessin a single target burst similar to rage smash, in addition to the burst of death field and the sustained DOTs.
  22. Guard is situational. You guard whoever will generate the greatest amount of threat. When running FPs, the lazy (but usually effective) thing to do is guard the guy with the highest HP. That being said, all classes are not created equally in terms of threat reduction. Every class can do meaningful DPS, but not every class has a meaningful threat drop ability. Juggernauts have the worst threat drop in enraged defenses (only one that costs resources), and powertechs don't even have a threat drop at all. Keep an eye on target-of-target, and if you notice a DPS is consistently pulling off of the same target, consider guarding him. Of course, the greatest way to prevent from losing threat is to manage threat on your own. If you use your high threat rotation properly (and cycle your taunts to boost threat), you shouldn't have any problems with threat, unless you are extremely outgeared by your DPS. I'm a sin tank, so I don't know the specific rotation for jugg tanks, but just know that you should NOT lead with a taunt. Cycle through your high threat abilities, and use taunt at the end of the rotation. Taunts include a threat multiplier based upon the threat you've previously accumulated. So if I use taunt as an assassin to initiate a fight, I'm not going to generate nearly as much threat as if I use force pull, wither, shock, discharge, and then taunt.
  23. Force Lightning doesn't count as a DOT, it's just a channeled instant damage attack. I think the problem with madness is that it's a shared tree, and there are no two advanced classes more divergent than the assassin and the sorcerer. Every other class has similar resources for both of its ACs, but not the inquisitor. It's difficult to make the mechanics for both ACs similiar imo, since they act so differently. All assassins spam short/melee range attacks, and if they run low on force, spam autoattack. All sorcerors spam ranged attacks, and throw in a consumption as necessary to ensure that they remain a functional mana battery. The basis for Madness sorc is spamming force lightning when death field is on CD and all DOTs are applied. This force lightning has a proc for crushing darkness AND lightning strike. Since assassins can't spam force lightning, we spam thrash/autoattack when death field is down and all DOTs are applied. The difference here is, the Assassin's "Raze" proc finishes the cooldown on crushing darkness and makes it instant cast for free. The Sorcerer's "Wrath" proc simply buffs the next crushing darkness OR lightning strike, and I think that is the distinction. If raze activates with perfect efficiency (once every 7.5 seconds), the cooldown of crushing darkness is effectively halved (duration is 6 seconds, so no worries of overlapping). With the sorcerer's wrath, crushing darkness just lasts 8 seconds, and any wrath procs earned during the cooldown can be used on lightning strike. I think raze needs to be replaced with wrath; make the proc buff crushing darkness, give us the 2 second crushing darkness duration buff in our tree that sorcerers get, and give us something to use our wrath procs on when crushing darkness is on cooldown. I think it could work if wrath made assassinate free and usable on a target of any health level (like the juggernaut's destroyer). Of course wrath would still be procced off of lightning charge discharges, so no worries of OP hybrid classes. Alternatively, I would like it if we just got a talent that did something like make maul have a secondary effect like cull while in lightning charge; do extra internal damage for every DOT on the target. As for fixing madness sorcerer (because they are getting destroyed by lightning), I think they just need a slight damage boost. The mobility and simplicity of madness compared to lightning is ridiculous, and I don't think they should be completely even given how much lightning has to pay attention to.
  24. A buff to madness to make it competitive with deception would be nice, but it's already a great ability. For tanks, it's great to throw down any time you can for healers, and even when you can't, it still has some use for buffing your self healing. For everyone else, it can be useful for any fights where you have to reposition. The last three raid intances (and Golden Fury) all have mechanics that often require you to move out quickly, and phase walk gives you a lot more flexibility. It's pretty obvious how invaluable it can be in PVP, jumping to nodes or power ups, jumping up ledges, using with pull to draw an enemy away, do a kamikaze jump and save yourself, there's a ton you can do.
  25. I just got back, so I'm only 51 and still in dread guard, but some of the new procs will take me a little bit to get used to. Being able to facestab is a welcome addition, but it's weird finding a key for it. I still don't know where maul fits into the priority. I would assume just below assassinate? I don't know the specifics of maintaining dark bulwark versus dark ward either. I would assume refresh DW whenever it falls off (but no sooner), 15% shield seems more useful to me than 1-8% absorb.
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