Yeah, once your DPS gets high enough it can affect the strat. There are three places where stopping DPS might be necessary. On 16-man at least, two of these DPS stops can be avoided. (1) You don't want to push Zorn/Toth below 70% / 30% before the Baradium Heave has gone out. You can avoid having to stop DPS here by having all DPS switch to Toth at the 90% / 50% leaps and burn him down to 80% / 40%. Then all DPS switch to Zorn once Toth Berserks and DPS him all the way down to nearly 70% / 30%. The Baradium Heave happens and all DPS switch back to Toth and push him to 70% / 30% and enter the next phase. Then go back to split DPS. (2) If you push a phase too quickly, a tank can still have Fearful when the next leap goes out. On 16-man, we use three tanks now to compensate for this problem. The tanks just cycle through a rotation of Zorn -> melee DPS -> Toth -> Zorn -> melee DPS -> Toth, etc. This ensures that the tank picking up Zorn never has Fearful and results in an overall DPS gain despite using an extra tank. (3) At 10%, you need to stop DPS to give the tanks time to re-separate Toth and Zorn following the leap and to give healers a chance to top off the raid before the intense sub-5% damage goes out. If you push too quickly to 5% following the leap you can end up with Toth and Zorn rooted right next to one another, and/or your raid may still be low from the previous Ground Shatter phase. Just stop DPS at 10% and wait until the raid is ready for the final burn!

So the primary way that WoW stretches out a tier of raid content, making it last long enough to keep hardcore raiders entertained, is that they make the final boss of an Operation a huge step up compared to all the previous bosses. Raid groups spend weeks and weeks trying to down that last boss to complete the tier. I don't know if Bioware has a similar goal in mind for Kephess, but I thought I would provide some suggestions as to how to make the fight brutal enough to really test the skill of a raid and keep us all entertained until the next Operation comes out. First off, I would set the overall Hard Enrage timer to not be too difficult to meet as long as every single raid member is alive. The goal of a well-designed Nightmare Mode fight should be that if you lose enough DPS, you won't be able to complete the fight. Most wipes while learning should not be to Hard Enrage. They should be wipes called by the raid leader as a result of losing too many DPS in earlier phases. My goal here isn't to create a Heroic Ragnaros level fight or anything. I think 150 attempts or so should be expected for a guild that knows what they are doing. (I'm hoping for between 50-75 attempts for the other three bosses.) The Imperial Siege Droids I would slow down the Calibrating Shot cast time to 2 seconds and have it do a huge AOE splash to anyone within 100m if it gets off. Basically make it so that failing to interrupt one results in brutal raidwide damage that will likely kill anyone who isn't topped off. If two get off close together, many raid members should die. The idea is to turn this phase into an interrupt coordination check. On 8-man you should only require one interrupt per droid. One 16-man you should require two per droid. Make this phase more challenging for healers by having each droid do a low-grade raidwide damage pulse. Make the Bomber spawn after a fixed amount of time. Don't wait for all three droids to die. This will create a DPS check in that you have to get the adds down in time or you won't be prepared for the Bomber. Baradium Bombers Make the bomber Rocket Blast hit so hard that it will kill anyone but a tank. Add slightly more wiggle room before the first Rocket Blast goes off to give the tanks time to taunt and grip the bomber into position. Reduce the time allowed before the Bomber blows up slightly compared to Hard Mode so that it is challenging to get the bomber down in time. Make chain stunning be required or risk a tank death. Warriors and Trenchgutters You don't have to change much here. Just make it a tough DPS check. Raids should wipe here from getting overwhelmed if they don't have sufficient DPS to get the adds down in time. Losing people in P1 or to the first bomber should result in being overwhelmed during this phase. Try to tune it so the whole raid needs to be alive during this phase. Pulsar Droids This phase is way too easy in Hard Mode. This is a good place to actually add a mechanic. Make the Channeled Pulse snare people and hit way harder. I would consider actually adding new mobs to DPS during this phase... maybe adds that try to get to the walker to heal it that have to be stopped before they reach the walker. There are lots of things you could change here, but I would definitely add something to make this phase more of a coordination and DPS check than it is currently. Give the 2nd tank and healers something to do! Kephess from 100-60% Make Kephess hit really hard. Make the Savage Wounding DoT tick for even more. Beef up Arcing Slash considerably so that positioning mistakes will actually risk killing melee. I don't think you need to add any new mechanic during this phase, since getting the Bomber down is challenging enough already in conjunction with healing through the Kephess damage. Gift of the Masters Make Gift of the Masters snare so that you take some unavoidable damage running out. Make it hit slightly harder. This should be an intense healing and cooldown check for the raid. Kephess 60%-0. I don't think you need to add any mechanics here other than to make the phase take a long time so that the room fills up with purple circles. First kills will ideally involve a room full of purple circles and half the raid dead. Anyone else have any interesting ideas for how to make Kephess a truly brutal encounter on Nightmare Mode?

A sample strat that works with all melee DPS: (1) Start with your DPS split between Toth and Zorn. Have the DPS on Zorn switch to Toth before the first leap happens to avoid Fearful. Toth will be at 90% and Zorn will be at ~93% when this leap happens. (2) Continue with all your DPS on Toth. Push him to 80%. Toth goes Berserk. (3) Have all your DPS switch to Zorn. DPS him all the way until the Baradium Heave. You will catch him up to Toth by the time the Heave happens. (4) As the Heave is casting, have all your DPS go back to Toth. Zorn Shrieks and applies debuffs right after the Heave. Push Toth to 70% and the next leap will happen. (5) Split your DPS again between Toth and Zorn. Push to 60%. Toth starts casting Ground Shatter and Zorn roots and casts Sonic Paralysis. (6) Continue with split DPS until Zorn is nearing the end of his Sonic Paralysis cast. He will Shriek and apply debuffs after that cast. Have all your DPS switch to Toth as that cast is ending to avoid getting hit by the debuffs. If your DPS is high and you push to 50% before the cast ends, melee should also get out before 50% is hit. Repeat steps (2)-(6). At sub 10% have everyone burn Toth first. This is the most conservative example of how you can kill the bosses with all melee and avoid all double damage Smashes, all Fearfuls and all Mental Anguish/Weakened debuffs. There are plenty of ways to take these bosses down. People who think this encounter is "anti-melee" DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE FIGHT.

The leaps happen at fixed percentages, i.e., when the lower health of the two bosses falls below 90%, 70%, 50%, 30%, and 10%. I play a Shadow tank, and I have never had to think about when to Project. You might want to check logs and figure out if Project is really the issue. I'm highly skeptical that it is causing your tank to die. Make sure your Shadow tank knows to use Resilience to cleanse the Mental Anguish and Weakened debuffs from himself. A Shadow tank can instantly cleanse those debuffs the minute they go out. This will also render you immune to reflected Fearful damage. Toth and Zorn is not much of a gear check as far as the enrage timer. Concentrate on surviving over everything else. If you keep the raid alive, then you will kill them in time. Toth and Zorn can be done with all melee. You just need to think strategically regarding how to move your DPS around. Know when Zorn is safe to hit. Know when Toth should be avoided. For example, when Toth is berserk, you can move all your DPS to Zorn. All he is doing is throwing rocks, and so he hits like a kitten. He can't Shriek and apply debuffs while he's throwing rocks. Everyone can get out during the Baradium Heave and avoid the Shriek that follows. Similarly while Zorn is casting Sonic Paralysis and Toth is ground shattering, Zorn can't Shriek, so he's safe to hit as long as that channel is still going. This is a fight that can be done many different ways, and you need to figure out what works for you. Don't pretend there is no strategy involved. You can absolutely trivialize this fight if you have a thorough understanding of how both bosses work. You just need to tailor your approach to your Operation's composition. Also, regarding tank 1-shots, I don't know how your DPS is, but if you're ever pushing a phase too fast, the previous tank can still have Fearful when picking up Zorn again. You have to use a cooldown then or use a 3-tank rotation to avoid this. Do I believe this boss is overtuned? Not really. In terms of difficulty, I think Firebrand and Stormcaller are actually harder than Toth and Zorn. Overall I'd say the instance has the following difficulty order on 16-man HM: Kephess > Firebrand and Stormcaller > Toth and Zorn > Vorgath

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that the ability should be taken away from Gunslingers. I'm arguing for more such abilities to be added to the game and given to healers.

I wanted to start a thread to provide constructive feedback regarding the state of Operations in SWTOR. In general, I think Explosive Conflict was a giant leap forward for the SWTOR PvE endgame. I love the instance. You produced four very fun fights, and tuned them very nicely for each difficulty mode. As far as I'm concerned, you hit a home run with this Operation. Here are my top problems with Operations right now: (1) Stacking Buffs and Debuffs The stacking buffs and debuffs problem needs to be addressed. The week that Kephess' Gift was bugged on 16-man, we put up multiple Gunslinger bubbles and when I reviewed logs I was shocked to discover not only that they stacked with one another but that they stacked additively. You could bring 5 Gunslingers to an Operation in 16-man and completely negate all damage done. I'm not sure what the current state of armor debuffs is in the game, but my understanding is that unique class debuffs may actually stack right now (SimluationCraft still seems to think so at any rate)? If so, then again, 16-man gets a huge advantage over 8-man, especially on 2-boss fights like Toth/Zorn and Firebrand/Stormcaller where you could distribute your gunslingers, troopers and guardians evenly between the two bosses to ensure the maximum amount of armor is taken off each one. I think it's very important both for balance and for Nightmare Modes that stacking buffs and debuffs get addressed across the board. Same types (gunslinger bubble, sentinel speed boost, sentinel inspiration) should never stack, so that you're not encouraged to bring a zillion of one class just to cheese something. Also, even different debuffs and buffs that do the same thing should never stack. If two people bring an Accuracy-reducing debuff for -5%, then they should not stack. I think this should be a top technical priority before producing really difficult content, since you're just too open to exploits and cheesing of fights if this isn't addressed across the board. Although it's less important if you eliminate same-buff/debuff stacking completely, I think multiplicative stacking is superior to additive stacking. In general, for example, WoW stacks damage reduction cooldowns multiplicatively. This means you hit diminishing returns and can't really get to 100% DR for example. It just makes more sense to me logically. Overall, though, I'd be content if you just prevent stacking of similar buffs/debuffs in general. (2) Tank Threat It has been stated that this is being looked at in 1.3. I've written other posts on this subject, so I'll just link to that instead of rehashing it all here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showpost.php?p=4469933&postcount=5 I suspect that this problem might be exacerbated on 16-man by the inability to guard all melee and the fact that 16-man may be benefiting from more stacking debuffs. I feel like some minor quality of life improvements in this area would go a long way. (3) The Unreliable Narrator We still have a problem where graphical effects simply don't show up for people. This is - to me - the single biggest problem with Operations right now. I imagine this must be a difficult problem at the engine level, but you've just got to find it and fix it. Players need to be fighting the encounter and not bugs. For example on Firebrand/Stormcaller, more than half our raid simply can't see the red circles on the ground at the start of the fight. The game engine itself is unreliable in its communication of where bad stuff is, and this has a dramatic effect on Operations. It also enables players to use the bug as an excuse even when they did see the void zone. Basically when you have this uncertainty regarding where the circles of death are, or where the Soa pillar is actually going to fall, or where Bonethrasher is actually facing, it makes hard content very difficult to design. A game engine just has to be rock-solid reliable as far as communicating the facing of bosses, the positions of void zones, and the placement of obstacles that could kill someone. This also leads to players being put in less critical roles or potentially even being benched just because they are experiencing a bug, and that's no fun. (4) The Lackluster Healer Toolbox From an encounter design perspective, you have made healers so weak that you have severely limited what you can do with encounters. I've covered these issues before in posts on the Healing forums, but I'll recap them briefly: (a) Emergency Single Target Burst You need to give healers emergency single target burst tools. For example, you could give Scoundrels a 3min CD ability that makes an Underworld Medicine cast instant and incur no GCD. Consider giving a healer class a long CD for a full heal for example, e.g., like Lay on Hands in WoW. Note I'm not just talking about a slightly more bursty rotation that drains you of resources. You need to give healers actual instants they can use if they see someone about to die. Then you can make encounters where that reactivity can shine and healers can really get that great feeling of saving someone at the last second. (b) Tank Cooldowns Consider giving healers actual tank survivability cooldowns that provide the tank with damage reduction. If skilled tanks can call for external CDs from their healers, that would let you up the difficulty level and put in some heavy tank damage phases that last longer than a single tank's CDs. © Emergency AOE Burst and Raid Cooldowns. Healers need long CD AOE tools like Druid Tranquility from WoW. You could produce an Aura Mastery equivalent by giving someone the ability to increase Resistances by 50% for the whole Operation for a few seconds. Basically look into giving healers tools to catch up if they fall behind on AOE. Look at what happens sub-10% on 16-man Toth and Zorn right now when that double damage Ground Shatter starts. Healers just can't keep up. Right now Gunslingers have the best tool for mitigating AOE damage, and healers have nothing. My opinion is that it should be healers that bring these tools. Again, I look at the bugged Kephess' Gift and ask myself why healers aren't the ones saving raid there instead of Gunslingers? (d) Remove the cooldown from dispels/cleanses It's harder to create interesting cleansing fights when you have a cooldown on cleansing. Consider removing this restriction. It helps greatly with healer assignments if you let one person be "in charge" of this sort of thing. The reason I am harping on the healer toolbox is that I feel that for encounters to truly challenge healers, you've got to be able to amp up the damage output considerably, but if you do that right now, healers just won't have anything they can do. For Nightmare Mode raids, you need to be able to challenge the healers in a fair and fun way, and you can't do that if their toolboxes remain as limited as they are right now. (5) Operations Frames and Buffs/Debuffs The UI improvements in 1.2 were simply wonderful. There are two areas that could still use improvement however. The first is buffs/debuffs on raid frames. Give people the ability to only show debuffs on the Operations frames for example and make them big enough to be visible, and that would go a long way. Having a visible time remaining number showable on buffs and debuffs would be helpful also. For player and target frames it would be great if you could position buffs/debuffs independently of those frames. It would be nice if you could then filter them to only show your buffs/debuffs, to only show buffs and not debuffs, etc. With more precise control over buffs and debuffs, you could up the difficulty of encounters knowing that players have the tools to more easily spot debuffs. (6) Percentage-Based Health Transitions Toth and Zorn is a great fight. The biggest issue we've found with the fight has to do with the fact that phase pushes are tied to the health of bosses. As our DPS has gone up, we find ourselves facing issues that seem somewhat silly. Here are some of the problems created by having DPS that is too high: (a) Fearful is still on the previous tank when a swap happens. You need to make all Fearfuls get wiped away before putting out the new Fearfuls. We find ourselves using 3 tanks on this fight on 16-man now, just because it ensures nobody is tanking Zorn with Fearful, and it keeps us from having to stop DPS. (b) The Baradium Heave won't happen if Zorn is pushed out of his rock throwing phase. You need to ensure that Zorn is always willing to cast Baradium Heave no matter what the stage of the fight is. We have to stand around waiting on the Heave before continuing to DPS. © Rooting problems. If you push the bosses too quickly, they will root following a leap. Once rooted you can't move them. Examples include Zorn's Sonic Paralysis and Toth's Ground Shatter. With really high DPS, they root so soon after the leap that you don't necessarily have the bosses back in position yet. In general, I think there is an overuse of boss health percentage-based phase transitions in SWTOR. Percentage-based transitions create a lot of design problems in fights unless they happen at very clean phase breaks. For example they're fine on Kephess because you're just moving to an entirely new stage of the fight at 60%. You should really consider using fixed timers more often. Just as an example, the rooting problems could have been avoided if you'd made only the leaps percentage based but had the rock phases, ground shatter phases, etc. happen on a fixed timer following the leaps instead of also being tied to percentages. Going forward, I would encourage you to create a debug mode where everyone does 25% more DPS and test the fights in that mode to make sure they don't break down just because everyone is doing higher DPS. Firebrand and Stormcaller are similar to Toth and Zorn. Percentage-based transitions make it such that slightly higher DPS dramatically reduces the difficulty level of the fight. In particular, with high enough DPS, you beat the second Double Destruction. With super high DPS, you beat the hit following Incinerate Armor. I look at this fight and find myself scratching my head as to why it had to be tied to percentage health. I think this fight is a good example of one that should have just been on a fixed timer. I think it's actually *more interesting* as a fight if the phase was a fixed length, and you had to deal with a 2nd Double Destruction while running to the shields. In general with these percentage health pushes, you create situations where higher DPS trivializes the encounter and where lower DPS can even be good (e.g., if you don't push to Defensive Systems until after the 2nd Double is falling off). While I am not averse to fights that involve good DPS control, i feel in this case a fixed timing on all phases of the fight would actually make for a more interesting encounter, and it wouldn't allow people to bypass the mechanics of the fight. That about sums it up. I know this is wall of text that is asking for a lot of improvements without providing a lot of compliments, so I'll just re-iterate that I love raiding in SWTOR, and I think you did a great job with the new Operation. I am looking forward to seeing Nightmare Mode Denova and finding out what fiendish things you've dreamed up to make these fights crazier than they already are.

One thing to keep in mind is that with three tanks you aren't under any time pressure really. This allows you to drop your circles further away and take your time coming back. It also means you have time to perfectly position yourself for your Kephess taunt. In other words, you basically already have yourself in a place where it will be safe to get knocked back because you have all that extra time to get into a good position before picking Kephess up.

Torparse is showing damage you actually took after Defense, Shield/Absorb Rating, and Armor are taken into account. If you avoid a hit because of Defense, then that will show up as an attack that does 0 damage in Torparse (you can look at attacks broken down by time to see examples of this). It will be excluded from average damage per hit calculations. If you Shield an attack, then Torparse will treat this as a reduced size hit, and it will be factored into average damage per hit calculations. If you want to understand what the original unabsorbed hit would have been, that is pretty difficult to determine (since the tank may be wearing trinkets that changed his Absorb rating dynamically for example). Shields (counter-intuitively) are not the same thing as Absorbed in the combat logs. Shielded attacks use the term "glancing." If you look at the log view in Torparse instead of the analytical view, you can spot these hits by looking for the word "glances". Absorbed damage, e.g., via a sage bubble, is excluded from DPS and average damage per hit calculations, so the actual damage a tank takes is much smaller than what is reported by Torparse as a result. These show up as absorbs in the combat log (and should not be confused with tank shielding). If hits are armor mitigated, then you won't know what the original unmitigated hit would have been without doing math, since that mitigation is already factored in to the damage shown in a combat log. Damage type is included, however, so you can tell whether or not an attack was mitigated by armor or not. Finally, tanks may have popped cooldowns that affect the size of the hits, and those will of course reduce the DPS and average damage per hit of a boss as well. So to sum up, in order to get all the way back to the original hits before any mitigation at all, you would want to look at the attacks a boss did broken down by time in torparse's analytical Damage Dealt view. Then you would need to determine which attacks were shielded by looking for glances in torparse's raw log view. You would then need to inflate the glancing damage numbers back to their original values based off the tank's Absorb Rating at the time the attacks landed. You could then compute an average damage per hit for each unique ability. You would then need to look at how often the attack happens (e.g., the boss "swing timer" for that ability) and assume no avoidance. So for example if the average unshielded hit is 5k and it happens every second, then the boss worst case will do 5k DPS with that attack. If the attack does damage that is mitigated by armor, you could then do the math to compute the original unmitigated value only for those attacks.

That's a neat trick. Thanks for sharing that. Maybe this is just a 16-man cat-herding issue, but we would just have random people eat Rail Shots even when clumped up. It might be they were just far out enough (> 4m) to get hit or something. We ended up just making a tank stay out and eat them, since it doesn't hit very hard anyway, and it gives healers something to do. Yeah, we have done this before as well, especially when Gift was bugged. I imagine for Nightmare Mode we'll bring back the bubbles. It's really not a big deal if the raid gets low though, since nobody but the tanks should be taking damage in the final phase.

I put together a video that shows Methodical's Warlord Kephess 16-man Hard Mode strategy for those who have an interest in learning more about the fight on that level of difficulty. If you have any questions about the fight, we're happy to answer them. You can leave comments on YouTube or in this forum thread. Enjoy!

Minor quibble with point 1. It should match the current aggro target's threat, not the highest threat. In other words if the current tank is at 100% and a DPS is at 115%, at range, and hasn't ripped yet, taunting shouldn't put you at 115%. It should put you at 100%, matching the current tank's aggro. Yeah, to me it doesn't even seem deliberate. It seems like someone just coded the "target switching" as an aggro rip, which is why you only get 110% if you're hugging the boss and 130% if you're out a bit from the boss. That said, I don't think it destroys the fun in tanking. This game uses a percentage-based ripping system (just like WoW), so threat becomes pretty trivial the further you get into the fight anyway. You may at least still have to attack though, but eventually the end result is the same... that you could just stop DPSing and it would take a long time for someone to rip off you. Taunt boosting is even kind of fun, in the same way that abusing Vengeance in WoW is fun. When off-tanking in WoW, you look for fire to deliberately stand in so that you can keep your Vengeance going for more DPS. Or you stand in lava before pulls so your Vengeance is already at 100% when you start the fight, etc. In other words, it's actually kind of fun knowing about the taunt trick and abusing it. I just think it provides a big advantage that only people who read forums will discover. When taunts have to happen as part of the encounter design, you don't really notice the taunt boosting issue as much, because the tanks are going to "do the right thing" anyway and taunt when expected to.

No, it absolutely is applied. Here is a Firebrand taunt for reference. Look at the threat graph for the Firebrand/Stormcaller fight from 21:07-21:12 on each log. Uriad's Log: http://www.torparse.com/a/40543 VonRipley's Log: http://www.torparse.com/a/40548 Uriad tanks first. If you mouse over the threat graph you can see his current threat at each second mark. The first taunt occurs 32 seconds in. At that point in time, Uriad has 45k threat. Now go look at the spike in VonRipley's threat graph at the 32 second mark. She jumps from 22k total threat at 31 seconds to 59k at 32 seconds following a taunt. The taunt "threat boosted" her over Uriad by the amount needed to simulate a rip, and because she did it from far enough away, it provided a 30% boost. 1.3 * 45 = 59. This is why any setup where you can taunt from range is really great. We set up swaps on Toth and Zorn so that both bosses get taunted from range, etc. We make sure to taunt Vorgath droids from range after letting our DPS go all out on them, etc. This is the mechanic that I'm saying needs to go, and once it does, I believe you'll find that single target threat will be a bit more difficult to hold. Keep in mind we also run with the NIghtmare Pilgrim buff when we're in EC, so that just makes things even worse. Also, just to be clear, we don't have any threat issues on any of these fights because we make liberal use of taunts to stay ahead of DPS. As long as taunts are threat boosted, there aren't any single target threat issues. I just think single target threat will become an issue if taunt boosting is removed (and am advocating for its removal). My guess is they will leave taunt boosting alone in this 1.3 balancing pass and just concentrate on AOE threat, but we'll see.

You have to separate encounter design from raw numbers when you make a statement like this. Many encounters, especially the ones in EC, force you to taunt, and so you are benefiting from taunt boosting whether you wanted to or not. Therefore stating that you can hold over any DPS without taunts is something you have to examine carefully. For example, on Toth and Zorn, you only have to hold aggro over DPS until the first leap. At that point you will end up taunting (from range if you're smart) and then you have a 30% threat boost on top of whatever the tank had on the other target. People shouldn't rip off you here because all your burst threat tools are available at the start of the fight, and then you benefit from a taunt boost after the first leap. In other words, whether you could really hold Toth or Zorn against DPS is never really tested. I don't know how you do Firebrand and Stormcaller, but on 16-man it's pretty standard to not have a taunt swap, so the tank on Stormcaller isn't trading off with any other tank. On top of that DPS tend to be wearing on-use trinkets so they don't accidentally damage the shields. I can tell you right now that I cannot hold aggro on Stormcaller without relying on taunt boosting, because those DPS go all out in order to beat the 2nd Double Destruction. (Double Destruciton is so trivial on 8-man it doesn't even matter whether you beat it or not. That whole fight is way easier on 8-man.) The Vorgath droids you benefit from taunt boosting, since your ranged will open up on the droid as it's brought in, and then you taunt off, so they don't provide a good test. Vorgath drops targets frequently forcing you to taunt, so you get boosted there as well. Kephess doesn't really provide any test. since people are on the bomber instead before they will rip. You taunt on the Savage Wound application after the Mighty Leap threat drop, so you get a boost there as well. The bombers stay stunned so who cares if you have aggro on them or not. In the final phase there is tons of taunting, so aggro isn't an issue, etc. Also consider whether or not your DPS really are going all out or not on a pull. My assumption that the threat modifier should be boosted a bit is based off the idea that DPS shouldn't really ever have to throttle. It's no fun for people to have to put off popping all their CDs because they have to worry about the tank. It might just be that your DPS are "well-behaved" and not popping everything right off the bat. Anyway, the intent wasn't really to suggest substantial changes to single target threat. I am advocating a slight boost (e.g., 10-25%), not a major one. Just enough to cover the effects of taunt boosting being removed. If taunt boosting *isn't* removed, then nothing really needs to be done to single target threat, but tanks "in the know" will do better than tanks who don't know the secret. That's what rubs me the wrong way about the way things stand right now.

I don't agree with this priority order. You'll do more damage, threat and self-healing with an order like this: 1. Telekinetic Throw (with 3 stacks of Harnessed Shadows) 2. Project 3. Slow Time 4. Double Strike only if you have lots of Force, since it's a threat and DPS loss to fish with Double Strike otherwise. 5. Saber Strike It's incorrect to only refresh Slow Time every 15 seconds. You want to be using it to help you build the 3-stack of Harnessed Shadows faster. Also, if survivability is not a huge concern, you should avoid using Force Breach initially, since it's just a TPS/DPS loss. Obviously you should still put it up if you are concerned with survivability on the pull. You should rarely Double Strike except maybe on the pull. It's a complete waste of Force and not worth it most of the time. You need to be flush with Force in order to even consider using it.

Maybe you're not having to hold aggro over unguarded folks in Black Hole/Campaign gear. It's very hard to hold aggro over those folks without the aid of taunt right now. As people begin acquiring Nightmare Denova gear, it's going to get even worse. I raid 16-man, so I may have a different impression than most, since we can't guard all our melee DPS. Right now my shadow tank wearing an on-use Power trinket and really going all out can burst with nearly 2k threat in the first 20 seconds. However once the trinkets/adrenals/etc. are done, that threat in Explosive Conflict falls to more like 1100-1200 TPS. With really good DPS doing 1500+ TPS, the 110% threshold can still get reached without taunt boosting being used. At least among the tanks in our guild, I put out the highest threat too. The Vanguard does similar DPS, but I don't think his baked in threat modifiers on some abilities are as good, so his TPS is a bit lower. The Guardian lags both of us significantly. I just don't agree that single target threat is ok (at the high end) unless you factor in taunt boosting. My assumption that single target threat needs a small bump is based off the idea that they would remove taunt boosting. Obviously if they leave that in, then yeah, they don't need to adjust single target threat. If not, though, then I think a small adjustment is required.

Threat generation in SWTOR suffers from a number of problems, and it's good to hear they are addressing it. In no particular order they are: (1) Single target tank threat is not scaling well enough (especially once you're in Black Hole/Campaign gear) to outpace DPS without the aid of taunts. This scaling problem will just become worse and worse as better gear is produced, since tank gear basically only boosts a primary stat while DPS are being boosted by Accuracy, Crit, Surge, Alacrity, and Power in addition to their primary stat. WoW's solution to this problem (before they just completely gave up and went to 500%) was Vengeance. So far SWTOR's solution has been to force tanks to rely on taunt by building a threat boost into taunt itself, which brings me to... (2) Taunts in SWTOR actually simulate an aggro rip, meaning that they put you at 110% (if in melee) or 130% (if at range). In effect taunt becomes a tank's number one threat move. This is true even for taunting off yourself, so a tank's normal single target rotation ends up including taunts even when nobody has ripped off of you. This behavior also leads to weird situations where it's better for the tank to run away when a mob is stationary, taunt it from range, and then come back in. It also encourages tanks to taunt off one another. In addition it encourages DPS to taunt off the tanks just to help them get a further threat boost. The taunt boost also has the effect of utterly trivializing threat generation after the first minute of the fight. The threat generated from taunt becomes so gargantuan that you end up boosting your total threat done into the millions by the end of boss fights. (3) The AOE damage that DPS do far outweighs the AOE TPS tanks can do. You have no hope of holding AOE threat in this game right now without the AOE taunt. (4) Guardians/Juggernauts are lagging on threat generation, and need to be less dependent on whether or not a boss hits with avoidable attacks (Zorn/Stormcaller for example). I agree that threat should matter, and I think the devs think so as well. Right now the system in place is too taunt-dependent, and it only creates a situation where threat is iffy on the pull. After that (barring bosses that contain threat drops), holding threat is trivialized by taunt. Therefore my suggestions for what they need to do to fix it are: (1) Raise the threat modifier slightly. They need to raise the modifier enough so that a good tank's TPS will keep up with a good DPSers TPS. This should be possible without requiring taunts. The number will have to be tuned so that it works at the gear high end, which also has the positive effect of making aggro easier to hold when first gearing up at 50 over DPS who are also gearing up. (2) Bake higher threat modifiers into tank AOE abilities or allow those ablitiies to do more DPS. I don't think it would be all that unreasonable to allow the ratio of a tank's AOE vs. a DPSer's AOE to be the same as the single target ratio. In other words if a tank does 50% of the damage of a DPS on single target, let him do 50% of the damage of a DPS when using AOE. Don't make that number much lower as it is today. (3) Nerf taunt to just put you at 100% aggro and not 110/130. This gets rid of an inscrutable hidden mechanic that tanks only learn after studying logs or theorycrafting forums. It also prevents threat from being trivialized so quickly after the fight begins. (It will still get very hard to rip off a tank later on in the fight because ripping is percentage based but at least it won't be trivialized immediately). (4) Add the equivalent of Misdirect/Tricks, e.g., give DPS Scoundrels the ability to redirect their DPS threat to a tank. This will help with the pull and could be used to give some classes some much needed utility. (5) Buff Guardian/Juggernaut DPS. Further down the road they should consider implementing a scaling system like Vengeance, since that will help them avoid having to constantly tweak the threat modifiers, but for now I think some patches to the existing threat modifiers along with a taunt nerf will be good enough.

Yeah, I agree with your numbers. In my experience as long as DPS don't go completely crazy, if you can do 30k+ TPS in the first 20 seconds, you tend to be fine. If they do go completely crazy, you need to do more like 40k+ TPS. What's annoying about pulling 2k TPS is that it involves doing things that a tank just shouldn't have to do. Just as an example, you already mentioned having to wear a DPS trinket. On top of that tanks can feel compelled to pop DPS adrenals and DPS stims. 2k TPS also typically involves at least one taunt boost in those first 20 seconds. I know I taunt boost on Toth for example if I start on him. You're also encouraged to do things that compromise your survivability. In the case of an Assassin tank, for example, you might end up not wasting force on Discharge or Dark Ward so that you can focus more on building maximum threat. It's frustrating that a tank should feel like he has to compromise his optimal survivability rotation for the sake of burst TPS on the pull, and yet that's what is happening now. Juggernauts/Guardians lag well behind the other two classes as far as DPS/TPS also (especially on ones they can't avoid like Zorn/Stormcaller), and so that needs to be addressed.

The tank on Jarg will get a debuff that causes him to take extra damage from fire. Once that debuff is on the Jarg tank, he should make sure to stay out of the flame whirls that Jarg does. If the Jarg tank gets the Burning debuff while also afflicted with the extra fire damage debuff, then that adds up to a lot of damage too I think. So you need to make sure to be cleansing Burning off of the Jarg tank especially. The Sorno tank needs to interrupt the cast that builds up stacks (Unload I think it's called?), as that will cause the Sorno tank to take way more damage if that isn't controlled. Even if you play properly, the tank damage on this fight is pretty heavy. It's more of a healer test than anything else, but at least make sure your tanks are avoiding damage when possible.

Source?

It's really just threat generation on the pull that is very frustrating. I tank EC Hard Modes wearing an on-use Power trinket, and I end up popping a Power Adrenal and that trinket on the pull just to try to stay ahead of DPS. Even doing all of that, I still have to pre-emptively chain taunts in order to avoid rips on the pull. People who say "threat is fine" probably don't have really well-geared ilvl 146 DPS going all-out on the pull. On fights like Toth and Zorn where you are taunt-constrained because you have to save your taunt for the swap, rips are a very real concern. Telling DPS to throttle isn't fun for them or the tank. Similarly, with the current state of threat, incorporating global threat drops into fights is no fun either. The red circle phase of Kephess is a great example. The global threat drops there aren't fun for anybody. Threat dropping on just one tank, e.g., Breath of the Masters, is fine, but the global threat drops that in effect kill both of the tanks' threat lead and create a "pull situation" all over again need to be re-evaluated. They're no fun for anyone. What bothers me the most about current threat generation is that your most effective threat move is to taunt off yourself. This is counter-intuitive and makes no sense. It's essentially a "hidden game mechanic" that you'd only know about from reading theorycrafting forums, etc. The fact that AOE taunt is used as a single target threat move shows how broken taunting off yourself is. Even if they nerfed taunting off yourself to not boost your threat (and to just apply the fixate), you'd still see people playing taunt ping-pong games using the other tank or using DPS with taunts. Therefore taunt in general just needs to be fixed to match the primary target's aggro and not exceed it. We even play silly games sometimes like having a DPS deliberately taunt so that the tank can taunt back, since we know that creates a nice big threat boost. The fact that taunting from range is a 30% boost vs. a 10% boost when taunting from melee means tanks who know better always make sure to taunt from range. This is all just very counter-intuitive and silly. It leads to situations like taunting Zorn or Toth from range or holding Karagga taunts until the fire oil goes down and you've backed up and he hasn't come forward yet. Here are some suggestions for the devs. You don't need to do all of these things. These are just some ideas: (1) Up the baseline threat modifier slightly. I would suggest raising it to 75%. (2) Nerf taunts so that they just put you at 100% and not 110% (melee) / 130% (range). Although this is a fun little meta-game for those in the know, it's just too obscure for normal tanks who won't know any better. (3) Consider adding Misdirect or Tricks capabilities to certain classes to redirect that person's DPS threat to the tank. WoW gave this ability to two different classes (hunters and rogues). I think reasonable recipients for these abilities would be DPS Scoundrels/Operatives and DPS Vanguards/Powertechs. (4) Improve Guardian/Juggernaut DPS so that it is more in line with Shadows/Assassins and Vanguards/Powertechs. Right now the DPS #s for Shadows and Vanguards are IMO where tanks should be baseline, but Guardians are lagging behind. Be careful about linking too much of a tank's threat to reactive moves. Since you have a habit of creating bosses that spend most of their time not hitting the tank with avoidable stuff (e.g., Zorn, Stormcaller), you want to make sure you aren't hurting one tank's TPS as a result of that decision.

You also get slowed after you get the debuff, so it's important for other people to be aware of where you are and to not turn Bonethrasher into you.

That's correct. The person with the debuff just needs to get away and wait for it to expire.

Yup, that's why my first question in the thread was if he checked raw logs or not, since the death overview lies and blames Savage Arcing Slash, but the raw logs correctly show what attack really got ya.

The original poster says that he died to "Arcing Slash." I am assuming he looked at logs to acquire that information. If the logs truly do say he died to "Arcing Slash", then I'm inclined to believe them. You are certainly right that it could just be visual lag, but I don't think the poster would have mentioned a specific attack unless he checked logs. Anyway, my original point remains that it is best to use 3 tanks on 16-man so that you guarantee that the Breath tank can be far away and that the taunting tank will never have Touch of the Masters. This is true regardless of what he died to.

"Arcing Slash" should not be confused with "Savage Arcing Slash." They are two different abilities. The former is just an attack that cleaves. The latter is a cleave that also knocks the tank back and applies Touch of the Masters. I don't agree with your assessment that he took a tick of purple circle damage either. He's clearly well out of the circle when he dies. Did you get a log, Tidus? If so, we could see what really got you for sure. Last week I fell over dead on one pull while dropping purple circles. I died to the other tank's Savage Arcing Slash. I was far away from Kephess (between 20-30m) when this happened and still died to it. The log clearly showed that I died to the other tank's slash, and that I even shielded the hit (which would be impossible if it was a purple circle fail). It generally seems like the Breath tank can eat cleaves when within 30m of Kephess. The best way we've found to deal with the issue on 16-man is to use 3 tanks and make sure that the tank dropping the Breath is > 30m away from Kephess. With 3 tanks we can do that. I suppose it's possible that they truly intend for the frontal range of Savage Arcing Slash to be something huge (like 20+ m), in which case it's not a bug, but then you run into issues with the game not understanding where bosses are facing (I'm looking at you, Bonethrasher). The safest way to handle it as the Breath tank is to simply not be anywhere close when the slash happens.