In all honesty making Vanguards/PTs truly ranged tanks would make them stupidly OP (as opposed to just simply OP); melee range brings danger, why would a guild choose an MT that can completely stay out of range of boss swipes/stomps, AoE, etc. They'd also need to be effective at 30m in everything; interupts, for example. They're a melee class with decent ranged capabilities, and they're still powerful as a result.

It would need considerable PvP balancing; i'm pretty sure Snipers wouldn't take kindly to having their hits returned to them by a defense stacking tank With good reason; there are many problems with simply deflecting damage back to the source.

Unlikely. Infact, i've just finished watching a PvP video with an assassin taking damage in Huttball fires with FS up; I take damage from the fires in Huttball, as do other Sins I know. I believe it's elemental damage (the easy way to test; run through once with Mark of Power up, and again without it; the difference should be 10% per tick if elemental damage).

Wither, no question. Now that it adds a Harnessed Darkness proc it's invaluable to getting FL up quickly. It also does more threat (threat being multiplicative) and applies a debuff. The range and control of Death Field is nice, but with Force Speed on a 20s CD and Wither being 10m you shouldn't have any problems.

To clarify; Assassins don't suck at tanking multiple mobs. Mitigation is lower, that doesn't make them bad at it; they have excellent AoE threat, a Knockback and some very strong CDs. Assassins can tank packs perfectly fine. But regardless, Assassins are excellent tanks. LOTs of Shielding, plenty of defense, solid DR and typically the highest health pools of all the tanks (I have about 1.5k more HP than our Juggernaut, for example). They're in a good place; play it and enjoy it.

Perhaps, but I get the sense that they want tanks to work at maintaining threat. The reality is that the way taunts are implemented right now makes threat trivial... and if this was their intention a more obvious implementation is to simply up the threat contributions from tank stances. It just feels a little broken to me, personally, and the tool tip doesn't give any indication at all of this behaviour. I managed perfectly fine before SW.com discovered these taunting mechanics... so if you can manage without them, and it's not a mechanic that is hinted at in any way through the UI, tooltips or class is it actually intentional? Tanks were doing fine without the need to mindlessly spam taunt. I kinda wish Georg would roll through and offer a little insight.

You're lucky. We still hit issues on all difficulties and all sizes. They bug out, still. We've been clearing 16 NMM for some time now, yet this encounter can still cause us problems. The other night we had our best yet on 16 NMM; the top row on the North Pylon was ALREADY solved; as soon as we completed the third row elites started spawning. We had to deliberately invalidate the top row just to solve it again; by that time we had 6 elites north. I'm sorry, but people saying "it's fixed!" are speaking purely for themselves; this encounter is still buggy, and worse, completely broken as a well designed, sign posted event. I have every faith that BW have learned from this, and i'm very tolerant of bugs in new games, especially in the first ever raid tier... but to still have these operation breaking issues three months after launch leaves a sour taste.

I'm trying not to get too comfortable with it; this must be unintentional because, quite frankly, it's boring. Mindlessly taunting to maintain the number one spot by piggybacking your own early threat lead feels broken. I wouldn't be surprised if taunts don't get a "has not effect if the enemy is already attacking you" condition.

If you don't have resources available to take advantage of abilities coming off CD you're gimping yourself in other unpredictable and frustrating ways. The Thrash-less rotation works absolutely fine for Tankasins, it pushes out a lot of threat. Thrash itself is pretty useless when saber strike can do comparable threat for no cost. So really the debate becomes; guaranteed resources to invoke the abilities that matter (FL on stack, Wither and Shock on the CD, etc) or fun procs for bigger numbers with unpredictable resource management. Taking the "We have a talent that can give us a proc! You're gimping yourself!" stance is short sighted. I've tried both approaches as MT in 16 NMM content. Both work fine.

Did it include a soundtrack owned by FOX?

You've got to love new MMOs; the community's understanding of mechanics can change so suddenly - a couple of days ago and we thought we knew this stuff very well indeed. Thanks for sharing and spreading the new information. I guess the bigger question around taunts adding to tank threat is whether it's intentional. It seems like a broken mechanic in many ways, and depending on the fight, not one you can rely on. In fact it completely trivialises threat on some encounters. Will we be seeing a condition added to taunts? (i.e. "has no effect if you're already targeted by the enemy").

Can you link a source?

Yeah man, it's not like they ever used animals in the movies... oh, wait. Animal mounts would be good. At the very least i'd like to see more animations on vehicle mounts; moving parts, engines, etc... they just feel static.

I think this is quite possibly the most pointless solution to the imbalance problem yet. Imbalance happens. On my old WoW realm it was 75% Alliance, 25% horde. PvP was fine, economy was fine. It's two months from launch; see what happens to imbalance.. there are people rerolling factions all the time. People are rolling alts all the time. It's too early to call for incentives, etc.

I'm loving these: http://www.torhead.com/item/69rRB5p/advanced-bastion-enhancement-25 (drops from HM+ Ops) At present I have 28% def, 54% shield (with DW up, obviously) and 40% absorb. I find myself using a lot of the columi mods with rakata armor for the DR. The amount of accuracy on our gear is just stupid and i'm dropping that as quickly as I can. The slight hit to endurance isn't a problem, we have plenty of health. The drop in Willpower is only an issue if you're really struggling for threat, which i'm not tbh.

You're really overthinking a problem that doesn't exist, and if it did it wouldn't be unique to Assassins. Assassins are excellent tanks. Assassins can do excellent DPS (don't believe the nay-sayers). Play what you want.

Indeed. There are ways of countering this but the reality is that most people don't know how to beat Tankasins/Kinetic Shadows... so they moan they're OP. If you see a Darkness Assassin become purple in appearance you're in for some lightning - stun/low slash/knockback/get to range and grapple/shroud it. Lock down harnessed darkness/shadows and the fight becomes much easier. As for me, Pyro doesn't bother me too much as a Darkness assassin; I often 1v1 against two different Pyro players in my guild, and certainly win more than I lose. It's often a close fight, but a win is a win. Honestly for me I struggle against Commandos/Mercs.

lol... just, yeah.

I love the game too... but it still has problems that extend way past "nooks and crannies" and it'd be foolish to ignore that. There are issues that are causing a large number of players a ton of problems (seriously need to fix some bugs in operations, it's just not fun to be wiped to invisible lightning, or have a boss despawn.. etc) that you, personally, might not be seeing. Game is good but buggy. End game is enjoyable but limited. Warzones are fun if a little shallow at times. Let's see what 1.2 brings.

No, When you have people coming out spontaneously with dev love to try and offset all the hate and rage of the player base as a whole, you know it's an MMO

Riftstalker Rogues in Rift... tank. Ninjas in FF... tank. Assassins in TOR now tank. Turns out the Sage isn't a herb I cook with. I hope Bioware fix this.

Adding to the noise here, but CROWD CONTROL. Too many tanks in this game expect to run in, lolAoe and move on to the next pack. The instance isn't hard; CC the screamers or chain stun + burn them. Make sure the Mercs are interrupted. etc. When killing the abominations make sure there's a kill order and move when they prepare to explode. Kaon is the first time i've been genuinely impressed with FPs in TOR... simply because it's the first instance that required a little thought.

Personal? No. You're taking text out of context and making it emotional. This isn't personal. You stated that Shadows cannot tank as, from your perspective, you've encountered a few low level Shadows that died all the time. That's not an opinion; that's knowledge gained from limited experience. Several people have already stated very clearly that at level 50, in gear, Shadows are excellent tanks. There's nothing to discuss really.

So they're doing it wrong and they're bad players. I've met bad Agents, it didn't lead me to the conclusion that Agents can't heal. Regardless; Shadow tanks get armor scaling, shields and defense. Shadows can tank, that's the headline.

Perhaps they're just bad players. Perhaps they're under geared. Perhaps they're doing it wrong. Perhaps they're not CC'ing when they should. Perhaps they're not keeping up their buffs and debuffs. Perhaps they're shacking the wrong stats. Perhaps you're not as good a healer as you think you are. Assassins, and Shadows as a result, are exceptional tanks. Take it from someone who plays one well in the hardest content this game has to offer. More than viable.