No, grabbing everything isn't the correct technique. If you try to do that you will simply set your group up to fail. For one thing, many large trash pulls are too big for the tank to take all of the damage. Also, if the DPS burn down the small targets and then go help the tank, more mobs will die quickly so the whole pull will die quicker and the group will take less total damage which eases the burden of the healer.

As a tank in this game, your responsibility is not to grab everything but to grab the strongest enemies while DPS burns down the smaller items. On my DPS alt, I expect that I should be able to handle silver and normal mobs. Any golds and elites should either be CCed or tanked. If you run with some less talented or less informed DPS and healers, they may expect that you should aggro everything since that is how it was in other games. As a tank on my main character, I unfortunately still run into this incorrect attitude while pugging. Also when approaching a pull, you should be deciding who you are attacking first and the DPS should pick up the others instead of the DPS attacking stuff and you aggroing the others. If they fail to do this, you need to stop and explain to them what they should be doing.

This is incorrect. You primary stat has .2 coefficient to damage. Power has a .23 coefficient. So Power is better for adding a little extra damage. Your primary stat is valuable in that it adds damage and crit chance. However, you have to look at how much crit you currently have. Ultimately you need to find the break even point where the extra crit chance from your main stats becomes so minimal that the extra damage from Power becomes better.

Your numbers have one huge flaw. Tanking stance increases threat by 100%. That turns 900dps as a tank to 1800 threat. This was one of the big changes in 1.3. Also, the taunting mechanic is nice because after a while, it allows the tank to focus on contributing more damage without worrying about keeping pace with a DPS. So I generally disagree with a majority of the posts in this thread.

Also be aware that there are bugs in the tool that will sometimes queue a player for a role they did not choose. One of my guildies is a DPS sage. He selected only DPS everytime we queue and yet he always gets selected as a healer. Luckily for us we had a sage healer in the guild who was running with healer checked. The game grabbed him as a DPS. So in the end we got what we need, but it incorrect assigned the roles of both of them.

I haven't seen anyone answer this yet, but I noticed yesterday that after I got my 5 tokens for running a HM flashpoint, the 5 token reward was still listed as available for SM Ops while the HM FPs reward was listed as having already been collected. Has anyone tried to see if you can get both rewards in a day?

Because the LFG tool will never group you with someone on your ignore list. It is one of the stated features of the tool.

I am very pleased with this patch. If you like this game, I don't see how you couldn't like this patch. If you are one of those people who expect 10 new FPs with all new fight mechanics every week, then yes you would be disappointed, but I would also contend that your are not a fan of this game.

None of that was intended for this 1.3 release. That was announced at E3 as features coming later this year but not in 1.3.

Wow, what are you wasting all of you time on? When you finish a channel on TK throw, you throw a project, use Slow Time, and then attack with double strike until you proc particle acceleration and then use project again. With this scenario you can usually get a TK throw off every 6-9 seconds if you go for speed. If you want to maintain energy, then I would say 12 seconds is about right. Also, knockbacks only affect the TK throw portion of the rotation. I can throw my projects, slow time, and double strike on the move. Also, 709 per tick discounts any crits. So you should be able to get at least ~2800 (709 x 4) and get it in half the time you list. so in 20 seconds, you should be healing closer to ~5600.

22% defense is much too low and that will kill the overall damage mitigation. Higher shields will smooth out the rate of damage received, but the defense stat is where you get your big mitigation.

Come on now, LagunaD. You are just embarrassing yourself. This change is not the end of the world, but rather a case of balance. Please don't keep spreading this false doom and gloom.

Thank you for this detailed breakdown! It's nice to see some calm analysis of the data rather than doom and gloom.

As a shadow tank, I can live with these changes. I wish I could keep my old stats but I can't. I know this is done to bring shadow tanks back on par with Vanguard and Guardians since Shadows have been so far ahead of them up until this point. It will require smarter play but that is fine. Now tanks can choose the spec they enjoy most and feel competitive rather than have to roll a shadow to be the best.

1. Selkath 2. Nautolan 3. Gand

I logged in around 1pm central time and there were already a couple of the PvE servers that had jumped up to standard. Considering these were released during a weekday, i would expect the numbers to take a huge jump tonight when everyone gets home from work.

Your shadow is far from a paper tank. If played properly, it was easily better than either of the other tanks. This nerf to shadows only brings them back in line with the others. As a shadow maintank, I am not too concerned about these changes. As for your trooper problems, maybe you need to see if you can get one or two of them to switch to assault. Most of their attacks bypass armor anyways since they are elemental burns. You could keep the one gunnery trooper around to provide the armor debuff for the group then.

But with all of the threat numbers for tank abilities being doubled in most cases, it still is unlikely that threat will be much of an issue.

I've noticed on my Scoundrel compared to my Commando, that I have a lot more mobility. I can cast more items on the run. Also, I can better stay in my target regen area and recover better from overspending. I also love how Emergency medpac will refund a stack of upper hand if your target is below 30% health. This allows you to continuously heal a target that is really low without running out of your healing procs. My only problem with this class so far is the leveling. I am consistently 4-5 levels below the content making leveling hard. I am at a loss too because I haven't been skipping content. I have had to resort to doing space missions to try to boost my XP levels.

That is not true. A good shadow tank will take less damage than the other tank classes. They will take less predictable damage than a Guardian. The Guardian has lower mitigation stats than the other tanks, but they use heavy armor to reduce the damage. The reliance on armor for a straight damage reduction leads to smooth damage. The shadow has the best combined mitigation stats for Defense/Shield/Absorb. To even the playing field a little they had lower armor. This means that they may take spikes of damage at times, but then they can go long times with taking very little damage. Add to the fact that a Shadow tank can heal themselves for 12% of their health roughly every 15 seconds, that leads to a very overpowered tank. As a shadow tank, I can live with these nerfs because I know I've had it way easier than other tanks up until this point. Now, I will have to put in the same effort as the other classes, but I will still be completely viable.

I will continue to be a main tank in PvE. Instead of being a ways ahead of the other tank classes, I will now simply be on par with them. I have expected this for a while based on how well shadow tanks have performed.

This is a nerd ragequit threat. Back to the point though. Shadows are currently better tanks than any other class. They have good defense, great shields, and decent absorb. Guardians have high defense but low shield and absorb, and vanguards have low defense and high shield/absorb. So while shadows had less armor, they were getting good returns from all three mitigation stats instead of just 1 or 2. They paid for this with the fact that they had less damage reduction from armor. They also had high self-healing. After this nerf, they still will do decent self-healing. If you somehow thought these classes were all magically balanced right now, then you have bigger issues than this nerf.

This game is a PvE focused game that also has PvP in it. Bioware made these changes to increase the damage output for commandos and they are good changes. They have to be careful adding lots of PvP quality changes, because they can break the PvE balance very easily.

You don't have to worry about the number of charged barrel stacks. If you play your rotation the same way you did in 1.2, you will do more damage in 1.3 now simply because by doing what you already do, you will have more charged barrel stacks. For instance, if you use your 3 grav rounds to get 5 gavity vortices for your demo round, you currently will have 3 charged barrel stacks. In 1.3, you will have a full 5 stacks at this point. So you can fire off HiB like normal and get 12% additional damage. Following your opening when you are simply maintaining gravity vortices, you likely won't have a full stack of charged barrel. However, everytime you refresh gravity vortices, you will get 2 charged barrel stacks. For gunnery, this really shouldn't affect your rotation much, instead it should just be a mechanism that is likely giving you an extra 6% to 12% damage on HiB every time you use it.

Defense is anything but useless. It is incredibly useful. And if you want to talk about Force/Tech damage, then shadow already is better than the other specs, so I still don't see what your point is.