At 28, you do basically are crippled as carnage (no massacre, or gore), you are just starting to get into anni, and have 100% of the abilites you need to rage. So I would say, rage is the most fully fleshed out of the specs. A decent 28 build is something like this: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#100ZZfMrkbr.3. The tier 2 talent Cloak of Rage or Strangulate is completely up to you. I would go with cloak of rage if you are soloing more, and Strangulate for dpsing in FPs. You CAN go anni at this point, but you miss out on pulverize, so you don't really get the feel of being the "dot" spec, as your dots have long cd's and frankly while soloing, you're better off spaming vicious slash. HOWEVER, anni does have the 2 most useful tier 1 talents, Short Fuse and Enraged Slash. So, you will end up just spamming vicious slash a lot and using your berserk. Up to you, but I would hold off on anni till 32 when you can fully spec Pulverize. Carnage is great, and a great soloing spec...but doesn't get ANY useful abilities until 30. After you get gore, knock yourself out with carnage, but realize also that you won't have Execute running nearly as often as you like until you finally get Massacre at 45. What I would do (well, what I actually did) is, 10-31 : Rage 32-44 : Annihilate 45+ : Whatever you want, though I would stick with Anni until 50 and you get the 2 anni Tier 1's, then you can use whichever spec you'd like.

With the changes to Juyo form and annihilate, anni spec has much less chance of dropping stacks, making it a very consistent spec and very good for disconnects (as bleeds still tick), as long as the the disconnects are not too frequent in number. Lowered cd on charge also makes it extremely mobile, and it has few rage problems. Its raid utility should also not be underestimated, as 1% of the raid team's health per bleed crit (esp given your extremely fast building berserk autocrits), given that you're taking raid damage, does add up over time. Carnage is still the go to for burst, but its dps is basically ENTIRELY based on procs lining up and your correct usage of gore and your berserk. I would say this is the spec that requires the most preparation and is the most luck based spec. This is why you see carnage as top dps on a lot of dummy parses, because it has much higher variation in damage. Rage is, well, I personally enjoy rage very much, esp if you also like to run around auto critting for pvp, but it has a fairly vanilla rotation compared to the other two, with the fact that (almost) all your abilities lower oblit/smash, you have to set aside a lot of rage for those two abilities, making the majority of your attacks autoattacks. Having such a tight rotation also makes it (well, like the other two) hard to channel force choke and ravage at times. I would say they are all fairly close, though depending on the fight (unless there is tons of aoe involved) I would say anni and carnage take the lead. To be frank though, the dps of all 3 specs depends entirely on how comfortable with the playstyle, and they should all be within 5-8% of each other theory wise.

Anni is...well its much better now with the Juyo stack increased significantly. Once you get rolling, its very, very nice for chain pulling with extremely high soloing ability from your self heals (they nerfed that too T.T, but it is still nice and very noticeable whenever you berserk, for guaranteed 12% healing, generally closer to 15% over the 20 seconds till next berserk). You'll have trouble with trash mobs, since your aoe is godawful, and interestingly enough go Toe to Toe with golds and diamonds more easily than you can deal with packs of silvers. Anni is all about bleeds, and thankfully its procs are very forgiving (unlike gore burst windows). You don't even have to worry about pulverize clipping Rupture, because its got a 6 second ICD (same as rupture duration), so the only possible time you can clip it is if you delay rupture or on the very first proc. Deadly sabers is your other big DoT (off GCD too, and counts as a rage spender for fury), and between that and the fact you are churning out rage from your bleeds, you'll find very few instances where you're rage starved. In that sense it is very different from the "save up till burst" playstyle of Carnage. You are also churning out fury stacks, which berserk gives you 100% crit chance for your next 6 DoT ticks. This procs your self heal too, which means even without Quinn you solo no sweat. Your other big attack is Annihilate, which doesn't replace vicious slash but does massive damage. Its cooldown gets lower and lower the more stacks you have. As long as you are chain pulling, saving bleeds for at least silvers (if not golds), and annihilate on the rest, once you get stacked up anni does very nice dps with great sustain. As a very last bonus your charge also has 0 minimum range, and lowered cd, and higher rage gen, so charge around all day chain pulling =) In PvP the lack of burst means you'll have a hard time with healing teams, so I don't think I would recommend it. Also your bleeds are all clenseable, which not only means your damage is nonexistent but also means you are rage starved. Furthermore any sort of cc and you start running in danger of losing your juyo and annihilate stacks, and good luck getting 45 seconds into a fight to get everything stacked up.

Hi all, I had an idea about how to make the specs much more interesting at low levels. I'm not sure if this has been posted before, but after going through my altmania I found it getting extremely tedious to run around having only 2 abilities for 30 levels. The basic complaint is simple...it takes quite some investment to get any feel for any spec. You don't really get the skills you need for even your basic rotation to function until late 20's for most classes, or even 35-40 to get your main procs. WoW (please don't hate) had a great idea of "speccing" into a tree early on, as soon as you hit level 10. This lets you get the "signature" abilities of that tree, without it being any overpowered because all the skills scale with level. To give an example, say you just went marauder. As an annihilation marauder, you don't even get juyo form until 14, you don't get deadly sabers till 20, and you don't get pulverize till 30ish. Whats the point of all your filler bleed talents if you only have one bleed on a long cooldown? Same with carnage. You don't get ANY idea what the spec is about until 30, when you finally get some force scream talents. That includes ataru form, because its just a passive "here's some damage" until you actually get some interaction with it. Heck, you can say you don't even get a feel for the rotation until level 45, when you finally get massacre, so that you can force ataru procs so you can actually capitalize on your scream talents. Rage gets off a bit easier, because its the "shared" jugg/marauder spec, and so they mostly work off base warrior skills like ravage and smash. What I'm getting at is, I don't learn how to play a spec, and I don't get a feel for the spec, and I don't get any rage gen, any sense of difference until like 30 something for many classes. This is exacerbated by the fact that there are several "key" talents (i'm looking at you, the talent that makes your filler refund 1 rage, and the +2 fury gain talent) that everyone takes but you don't even get until you're level 50 on a non-annihilation spec. You can't tell whether you like a spec or not, until wayyy wayy down the line. I feel it would be much better if you got the skills early, not all the procs associated, but the skills themselves, so you can feel like you're actually a specialization, instead of just being "marauder" until level 30. A rage starved marauder with 3 spammable buttons, that is. As an example, for marauder, Annihilation should get either Deadly Sabers or Pulverize immediately. Carnage should get the Force Scream lowered CD talent, and Ataru form immediately. Rage should get Oblit immediately. For snipers, it could look something like. Marksman gets Followthrough immediately. Engineering gets Interrogation Probe immediately Lethality gets Cull immediately. For ops, Concealment gets Followthrough (seriously, you don't even get a TA consumer until like 20) immediately. Medicine gets Kolto Probe immediately (they're adorable anyway). Any ideas? I also think the talent trees have too much fluff. Too many "here's some 1% increase" talents that could easily just be baked into the skill itself.

You know thats not how energy works right? Its been 2 years people. Energy regens "fast" only from 60-100 energy, and slows down SIGNIFICANTLY from 40-60, 20-40, and 0-20. You have to choose between sustain dps and burst. This is also how ammo and heat work (heat is backwards, 0-40 heat is fast), except heat/ammo regen slower baseline than energy does.

You're right, but um, does this still place us behind juggs and BH? I ask because I'm not sure. They've gutted our entire niche, so we're just a mitigation tank like everyone else now. And how is the tank dps? I've gotta be honest, my dps feels terrible.

If they made it 18 seconds as promised instead of the 12 second crap, it would be much better. As is, yea, any CC and you lose it (which, sadly, is when you need it most, when you get CC'd). Any movement and you lose it as well. I propose one of these following changes... 18 second duration Drops off 1 stack at a time instead of 4 at a time Auto refresh on Dark Ward rather than on Stealth Letting it stack at 1-2 stacks of harnessed darkness

Right, but this is a ~7% damage taken decrease. Think of it this way. A boss melees you, naked, for 10k With 40% armor, you take 6k. With 44% armor, you take 5.6k. 5.6/6 = ~93%. You took 7% less damage than before. An extreme case is, going from 99% armor to 100% armor. 1% more armor, sure, but you take 100% less damage. EDIT: Oh! I might've misunderstood your post. If you're talking about the new harnessed darkness buff, then this is -good- news...unless we're taking a lot of internal damage, in which case...crap.

Keep in mind also that a reduction of 35% to 39% is not a 4% damage taken decrease. Its actually a 0.04/0.65 = 6.1% damage taken decrease. It also makes it interesting how harnessed darkness (whatever the new buff is called) works. If it is a 4% reduction on top of that, thats kinda boring. But if its a 4% on top of base armor (aka going from 39% to 44%), its another 6-7% damage taken decrease rather than merely 4%. I am unsure if we have greater EHP over time, however, after losing our self healing. But it is definitely greater EHP for surviving spike.

My problem with the group finder is that it allows people that are WAY overleveled to join. Hammer station with level 22's. Athiss with level 26's. I wouldn't mind a quick run, except that...with the xp penalty, I get 0 experience. I'm better off questing. Also: the sentinels who roll on heavy str armor. Kinda makes you want to stop tanking.

Well this thread kinda depressed me. It seems that like in most games, straight up mitigation is much preferable to the kinda hybrid heals/active tanking model that assassins bring. Have any of you looked into logs as to assassin tank damage though? While we all strive for maximum mitigation there is no point to tanking in a vacuum; the point is to bring down the boss, -with- the entire raid in mind, and so if you can live (maybe taking a bit more damage) but dps faster, it might be worthwhile. Shrug. I've been out of the loop too long. (Also I'm back =D...but playing a sage for now ._.)

I like to use resolve instead of force wielder. However, the answer will really depend on the weaknesses in your raid. If your raid's dps is low, get resolve. If you're dying a lot, get force wielder. However I haven't done NM raids, having no time at all to devote to this game (i've logged on...once in the past 2 weeks lol, and that was on my operative >.>). I'll noted in the first post that darkness/madness is no longer viable. I will remove it now that the patch is released.

The one thing orbital strike is good for is lagging out your tank >.>

Our single target threat is very high, but it is also very dependent on energize procs and thrash crits. Our aoe rotation is a lot better now than it used to be (esp with buffed wither) but it is still no death from above, obv. You will need a couple seconds to get aoe threat, and our problem is lacerate costs so much force that it is barely worth using. It might be better to tab target thrash, idk >.>

Shock is part of your rotation, and you tend to use it whenever you have 2 stack voltaic/induction. Point for point, it is a fairly decent dps increase. And yes, because it has the possibility (or guarantee, if you have any amount of crit 40%+) of eating recklessness, you save recklessness for a 5 stack discharge, then go into shock. Do not think of it as "oh man its a crappy second shock". Think of it instead to read "per point, increases shock damage by ~5-10%". Then it seems to be quite a bit better, eh? =) Also cheer up: as deception, chain shock is better for your spec than any other spec (yes, that includes darkness, and yes, that includes madness too), because you tend to shock more often, and have more dps stats which boost it rather than a tank. Furthermore, induction makes it very, very mana efficient, point for point.

This is like the biggest part of the class. It is hilarious and I approve.

The operative dps "nerf" was directed purely at pvp...hidden strike is nowhere in your rotation except as a possible opener in pve and as a terrible "dps cooldown" if you vanish.

Nonono, you've got it backwards. Discharge lowers enemy accuracy. This means you have a higher chance to defend vs them. This is damage mitigation. Increasing your accuracy lowers the chance you will be defended (we will count "miss" as a valid defense), and lowers the chance force attacks will be resisted. This results in increased damage for you. Nowhere does debuffing enemy accuracy increase your dps, nor does increasing your accuracy increase your defense by any significant amount* *We will not count the 0.00000001% increase to healing from slightly increased dark charge healing from more accuracy.

Yea TORHead (and most of the other item db sites) are awfully, awfully out of date. For example, as far as I can tell they still do not have many of the crafted items, and certainly none of the prefix'd crafted epics.

There are multiple sets. Look for the ones focused on accuracy and endurance.

They actually should've made it like stance dancing for warriors...but thats what warriors (hey remember that class?) do already, lol. What I mean is, have 0 force cost, but drops your force to 0. That way you can actually dance, instead of...ionno, not doing anything atm.

I wanted to try a cloth tank (always wanted to play one in WoW lol...priest tank build spec please!). Also my guild had people rolling all the other classes, so... I certainly don't regret the decision. I didn't come into it with any kind of prejudices so I wasn't disappointed by anything that didn't fit one archetype or another. I also wasn't swayed by the "oo assassin" kind of name either. Its just meh for me.

I think in 1.3 you will have more freedom to move stats around. That being said, some of the craftable mods/enhancements are better itemized than raid drops. Depending on whether you need more survivability, they are viable replacements, if you don't want the accuracy. I have mixed feelings about accuracy. I do not think you should ever stat for it, but like the posts above said, you generally will be rolling in it, and so I will put it in the "don't worry about it" section.

So the main thing here is that there are so many ways to gear your character, that it is hard to find a "correct" BiS list. I currrently don't have too much time ingame (plus I started playing as dps, so derp derp) to figure out all our options. The list is not technically incorrect; there are inconsistencies with total values (sorry, I will remove that, actually), but the suggested things are most likely the best items you can buy (and most of them are on par with or better than tionese/columni gear). With the changes to raid gear, and crafting, these buyable/craftable pieces are probably the best for an entry level raider, and will be useful all the way through hard mode raiding. With that said, I know my list of augments is horribly wrong (because the totals are wrong, and also because the number of augment slots on your gear is variable), so I will tweak that list to only show recommended augments. You should be consulting the def totals table for tweaking your own gear...it will give you the best possible results, if you approximate your individual totals with the recommended ones. I am in the process of simulating the 4pc, I haven't forgotten! But I haven't had too much time lately, sorry.

Yep, every bit of strength helps a tiny amount.