It absolutely applies to healers and DPS. Expert Arch Savant Boots are vastly superior to Recruit Force Master's Boots. Under no circumstances in PvE would you want Recruit Eliminator's Belt over Expert Military War Belt. Unless there are recruit relics (not 100% sure about this) I would be surprised if there's a single piece of Recruit gear that's actually, objectively better for PvE than a crafted alternative. Crafted gear has always been the best "Operation starter" gear. In nearly all cases, it's better than Tionese gear, and occasionally matches well against Columi when it's augmented. The introduction of the Recruit gear hasn't changed this, it's just made an inferior alternative more immediately available.

It just a matter of optimization. For a main tank, this spec does less damage/threat and absorbs less damage, in a spikier fashion. If you want to be the best tank that you can be, go full shield tech. More damage, better mitigation. Personally, I would encourage anyone who wants to be an actual tank to focus on full Shield Tech spec, since that's what they should be practicing to be the best tank possible. It's a pretty decent hybrid if you want to do more damage while not tanking, while retaining decent tankiness when you are tanking. So it may have value for people who want to off-tank in Operations. But I would never want someone main tanking with a spec like this, since they're basically deliberately gimping themselves for that role.

I did read your post, and again, my point is not that you're wrong, but that you haven't proven that you're actually right. Using Operations, flash points, or PvP logs won't give you meaningful results, there's too many conflating variables in a group dynamic. Perform a methodical, repeatable test, that eliminates all variables but the one you want to test. That information would provide some useful data to the developers, and might actually clearly reveal the problem that you're claiming exists. You need indisputable proof, and right now, you haven't shown that you have it.

It's sad seeing the OP and the responses in this thread spouting off about how terrible this is for crafters without sparing even a cursory amount of time to realize that Recruit gear is significantly worse that crafted gear for PvE. If I had a tank in my guild wearing Recruit Supercommando's Bracers to an Operation, I would smack them, and make them sit out while I made them a pair of Veracity Enforcer's Bracers. Not to mention how flabbergasted I would be if someone was foolish enough to be tanking in Recruit Supercommando's Helmet, when they could be wearing Veracity TT-17A Elite Vanguard Helmet. 8 Mando Iron isn't even all that expensive these days. There's not even a tradeoff here. Crafted gear is significantly better for PvE, hands down.

I hate to break it to you, but those numbers you're quoting only show that you haven't acquired an adequate sample size. If you're attacking an operations target dummy, than the difference in damage between with Heat Signature and without Heat Signature is about +6%. Unfortunately, the damage range of your Tracer Missile (the difference between the low and high end damage) is wide enough that a 6% increase does not ensure that the minimum damage with Heat Signature would be higher than the Maximum damage without Heat Signature. One string, or even several strings of occurences where you perceive TM's damage to be lower than you think it should are easily explained as confirmation bias and bad luck. If you really want to verify if Heat Signature is working or not, I suggest the following pattern: - Spend 20 minutes hitting a target dummy with nothing but Rapid Shots. This ensures no interactions with other damage increasing skills or abilities. Parse that, and see what the average damage of your rapid shots is per hit. - Repeat the same scenario, only this time, start by stacking Heat Signature to 5 before using Rapid Shots. Refresh Heat Signature so it never falls off. Parse that, and see if your average damage on rapid shots is slightly higher. That should give you a sample size of around 2000 individual hits with Rapid Shots, which may or may not be sufficient for the level of accuracy we need, but should at least provide useful data.

So, there's a longer explanation for this, but I'll stick with the short one. Tier 2 Reverse Engineered End game items are always better than Tionese gear. Tier 2 Reverse Engineered and Augmented End game items are usually on par with Columi gear, and may be preferable to Columi/Rakata in certain situations where the itemization favors it. In all cases, Crafted items will have significantly less primary Stats (Aim, Willpower, Cunning, Strength, Endurance), and significantly higher secondary stats (Accuracy, Alacrity, Shield, Surge, Defense, Power, Critical). You can look up the items you're curious about on Ask Mr. Robot's item database. I can assure you that their RE tables are actually accurate (I worked out all the End Game RE stat values a couple months ago). Veracity Beskar'Gam Gloves Veracity Carbon Fiber Gloves Veracity Primeval Paragon's Headgear You can see that, obviously, the Beskar'Gam Gloves are better than the Carbon Fiber Gloves. This is because, if the final item rating is the same, Prototype base items always yield better T2 RE items than Premium base items. How do they compare to other gear? Well: Tionese War Leader's Gloves Tionese War Leader's Headgear It's obviously no contest against Tionese. The Tionese gear has slightly more Strength and Endurance (and in the case of the helm, a few points more armor), but crafted gear has signficantly more Defense and Shield. How about Columi? Columi War Leader's Gloves Columi War Leader's Headgear It's a tougher call. The crafted gear still has significantly more Shield and Defense, but now you're losing a lot more in terms of Strength, Endurance, and Armor. An augment slot on the crafted gear can help offset this loss, however, adding +18 to any defensive stat and +12 power. My personal advice? In all things moderation. A proper mix of Crafted gear and Set gear will give you the best results, allowing you to balance your health pool with your need for mitigation stats. Here's a couple of ideas: - Earpieces, and Implants are great places to go crafted. Because they have no armor, it's a pure stat/stat comparison, which puts the Reverse Engineered piece on par with Columi. Consider for example, Columi War Leader's Package vs. the Veracity Nano-Optic Reaction Implant. The gain in Shield and Defense going with the crafted piece is huge. - Bracers and belts are great things to have crafted. The augment slot is proportionally more powerful due to the lower item budget on those items, and you lose less armor using lower rating crafted pieces. Bracers, in particular, since you can get something like Veracity Beskar'Gam Armguards which hold up quite well against Columi War Leader's Armguards, even without the augment slot. - Don't discount crafted items because their item rating appears low. Particularly Rating 124 items. Because of the way RE adds stats, these items can still be quite powerful. As a Powertech tank, I wore a Veracity TT-17A Elite Vanguard Helmet [Augmented], clearing 8-man Hard Mode ops regularly, until I finally replaced by stripping the mods from a Rakata Helm into an augmented Orange helmet.

Out of curiousity, is there a reason why the Dalarian and Exo recipes aren't listed on that infographic? For that matter, why include sub-140 rating crafted items, but make no mention of the cheaper, and generally superior (to pre-Rakata level gear) Reverse Engineered items?

Um, no, you're kind of combining some mechanics here, and mistaking how they work. There are four types of attacks. Melee Ranged Force Tech Now, of the 4 types of attacks, Melee and Ranged attacks are subject to Defense and Shield mechanics. Force and Tech attacks are subject to Force and Tech Resist mechanics respectively. However, they bypass Defense and Shield mechanics. Now, there are also 4 types of damage. Kinetic Energy Elemental Internal Kinetic and Energy damage are reduced by armor. Elemental and Internal damage are reduced by Elemental and Internal Resistance, respectively, but they bypass armor. Now, any of the 4 types of attacks can deal any of the 4 types of damage. Whether the attack can be shielded or not depends not on the damage type, but on how it's delivered. For example, Soa's basic attack is a Tech attack that deals Energy damage. It can be resisted with Tech Resistance, but it bypasses Defense and Shield mechanics. However, it deals Energy Damage so it's damage is reduced by your armor. Conversely, if someone hit you with a Melee attack, that dealt Elemental damage, you would be able to shield the attack and reduce the damage, but it would not be affected by armor. You can refresh yourself on how all this stuff works by reviewing mechanics page on Sithwarrior.com in short, because of the significant loss of Shield and Absorb with this spec, if your opponent is primarily attacking you with ranged or melee attacks, regardless of damage type, you're losing damage mitigation. If you're taking primarily Force and Tech attacks, you might get a small boost in overall mitigation, assuming the fight mechanics allow you to maximize your use of energy shield.

If you check all the parses I linked and my comments, you'll see that, after my first, pretty poor showing with the Bubble, I threw in all the Heat Cooldowns I could muster. I omitted the heat cooldowns on the first two runs, because I was looking to establish a benchmark for sustainable DPS without external factors (like cooldowns). So, the first run was a full Shieldtech played with no cooldowns, hitting about 650 DPS. But since Bubble wasn't doing so good, I added in Cooldowns just to see what it could do, and tweaked the rotation I was using as best I could. The last one I linked was a Bubble spec, hitting every cooldown I had, and still only hitting about 550. I find dropping DFA's targeting reticule in a fight to be kind of a hassle. That combined with the fact that it's less DPS per GCD on single targets than anything in your rotation except Flame Burst (which this parse you linked demonstrates nicely) means I don't really bother with it. For such a marginal gain (you might gain about 10 DPS every minute, if you don't prioritize it over Flame Thrower, Rocket Punch or Rail Shot), it's more of a nuisance to use than it's worth. Full ST spec had these results: http://www.torparse.com/a/20421/1 Remember though, the only scenario where this might have more damage mitigation is a scenario where you're taking only Force/Tech attacks (Soa for example). And then, you're actually still taking more 2% more damage all the time, because you lost power armor. It might be good in scenarios with predictable damage spikes, where the primary incoming damage is Force/Tech attacks...

So, I'm a sucker for playing around with the target dummies these days, so I respecced to this build, threw on my tanking gear and decided to give it a try. My theory, based on how many DPS talents you're losing from a standard shield tech, and the more difficult heat dispersion due to losing Heat Blast and having to keep up Incendiary Missile, is that the Threat output will be significantly lower. Now, for clarification, hitting a training dummy is not a proper gauge of true threat output while tanking. In a live fire scenario, heat dispersion will be better (due to Shield Vents) and threat generation will be better (due to Flame Shield). However, since both of these builds have those talents, we can assume that any increases in threat generation for either of them will be roughly equal. Technically, the Shield Tech will gain slightly more, because their Rocket Punches do more damage, but for the sake of equity and simplicity we'll ignore that. So, how'd I do? Well for starters, here's a parse of me beating the crap out of a training dummy in full tank gear, with a full Shield Tech Spec for about 6 minutes. I do pretty well, and I really hit my stride maintaining about 650 DPS. A couple of important things to note here: - I'm not using any Heat Management cooldowns. I never engage TSO or Vent Heat. - I'm not using any Damage increasing cooldowns. No relics/adrenals/Explosive Fuel. - No buffs. So then, I switched to the Bubble spec and tried again. Well, my first try didn't go so wel. Using the same restrictions, I managed to hit about 510 DPS once I really got a hang of it. The heat management was more rough than ST, and I stopped using Flame Thrower because I had trouble cooling down enough to use it. So I decided, hey, let's give it another shot, but bring on the Heat Cooldowns! Vent Heat is supposed to help. Better, but not much. I manage to spike close to 600, but my average remains around 530. So, one more go, but this time, I'll use heat cooldowns, and prioritize cooling down to use Flame Thrower more often. It's a bit better. I manage to lock in around 550. So, overall, damage/threat seems to be significantly less than full ST. That's not really surprising, considering how many damage/threat talents this gives up for Incendiary Missile. Threat output in live scenarios will probably be sufficient for maintaining threat against average DPS, but you'll be shorting your team some DPS.

Actually, that sounds kinda fun. Though I think you don't actually know what your odds of winning the lottery are. Odds of never hitting "1" on a random number generator with range 1-5 in 70 successive attempts ~.0000164% or, 1 in 6,097,561. Odds of getting struck by lightning in a given year. 1 in 775,000 Odds of winning the California SuperLotto: 1 in 18,009,460 Odds of winning the California SuperLotto twice in a row and then being struck by lightning in a given year, assuming the events are somehow sequential: 1 in 251,364,003,355,990,000,000 Which, you may notice, is significantly worse than your odds of failing to RE something after 70 attempts. Now, I'm not saying that it's not possible that there is some bug in the RE system. However, without any proof beyond a statistically unlikely, though not impossible, chain of RE attempts, it's still within the realm of possibility that you've simply been very unlucky. I would recommend continuing to investigate, and, should you find a set of conditions that reproduces your unlucky streak consistently, let the devs know about it with a bug report.

If you're going to estimate the performance of this Bubble concept by assuming ES is used on cooldown, then the only reasonable way to compare it to a full Shield Tech is to also assume ES is used on cooldown, which is what I did above. As someone else already pointed out, unless you're in a fight where you know you need ES at some point in the future to deal with a boss mechanic, it's generally better to just cycle it, and proactively help your healers.

Don't forget though, you have to look at the actual average mitigation gain from the shorter cooldown on Energy Shield. Assuming a 5-minute fight, with a standard tank spec and gear, you'll pop Energy Shield 3 times. That's 45 seconds of ES uptime for 300 seconds of fight, or 15% uptime, for an average damage reduction of 3.75%. So, in that scenario, you're only gaining 4.5% Damage mitigation over the course of the fight with the Bubble setup. Additionally: Gaining 2% melee ranged defense from Infrared sensors. You're losing 2% Damage mitigation from Power Armor. Losing 2% Defense/Resist from the 4-piece SC bonus. Losing 6% Shield and 8% absorb (which, according my math is about ~6% damage mitigation against melee/ranged attacks). So, assuming you're taking mostly melee/ranged attacks (like most boss fights), it's going to be a net damage mitigation loss, though not by too much. On a pure Force/Tech fight (Soa) you'll take a little less damage on average (2.5% more mitigation), but you'll also resist 2% less often. So, kind of a wash. Threat generation will definitely be worse for this build. The only Pyro DPS talents that do anything while you're tanking are incendiary missile and Supercharged Rail. Your Rail Shots will cost only 8 heat, but PPA will not proc while running IGC, so they're still a 15-second cooldown. You also lose 30% armor pen on Rail Shot (since you're not specced for Puncture). You lose the 6% crit to Flame Burst/Flame Thrower, 30% Crit damage to Rocket Punch (which is a big loss since Rocket Punch crits a lot thanks to Flame Shield), The loss of IGC uptime may be negated by the addition of incendiary missile, but maintaining incendiary missile will cost significantly more heat that IGC. And since you don't have Heat Blast for additional threat/heat dispersion, heat will be more of a hassle to deal with. So, basically, as a tank, you'll be significantly worse than a full Shield Tech. Your healers may be able to keep you up, but you will take more damage, and you'll deal less damage. Switching to CGC to DPS, I would imagine that you'll probably do significantly more damage than a full ST tank would do though, because of all the CGC talents in Pyro. So really, that's the tradeoff from speccing hybrid like this. Your tanking will be worse, but your DPS when not tanking will probably be better.

I understand how the Priority Rotation works, it’s just not the same as the Static Rotation that I’m suggesting, and attempting to model the Static Rotation with a Priority system misses some important points. For example, with Heat limits, if I wanted to describe the heat limit that the Static Rotation uses, it would look something like this: If Heat>31, RP (Free) – Rapid Shots If 32>Heat>23, Immolate – RP (Free) – Rapid Shots If Heat>10 AND Flame Thrower Cooldown<1.5, RP (Free) – Rapid Shots. Which is pretty convoluted, and unnecessary, since the Static Rotation is functionally heat neutral. Additionally, I could say something like: Follow this priority rotation: FT – RB – RP (free) – Immo – RS(Crit) – Flame Burst – Rapid BUT, Try to group your Flame Bursts together in between your Immolates to avoid losing Flame Barrage procs if Rocket Punch will be up soon. Always make sure to hit your 15-second cooldowns on cooldown, but you should also thread heat venting abilities every two abilities to ensure you get the most possible Rocket Punches, regardless of what the heat limit is telling you to do. I feel like listing the rotation is a much simpler, more effective, and more easily understood way of communicating these concepts. Retractable Blade FILLER 1 [Flame Burst (heat permitting) OR Rocket Punch (if FREE) OR Rapid Shots] Flame Burst Flame Burst FILLER 2 [Flame Burst (heat permitting) OR Rocket Punch (if FREE) OR Rapid Shots] Rail Shot (if Charged Gauntlets up) OR Flame Burst Immolate FILLER 3 [Flame Burst (heat permitting) OR Rocket Punch (if FREE) OR Rapid Shots] Flame Thrower <repeat> Now, certainly, you can modify this, and achieve the same result. Just don’t pair Immolate with a Flame Burst before a filler, because it reduces the amount of free rocket punches you’ll get to use by 3%. Also, only use Flame Thrower after a filler (or Immolate), or you’ll overheat slightly faster. For example, this accomplishes the same thing: Flame Thrower Immolate FILLER 1 [Flame Burst (heat permitting) OR Rocket Punch (if FREE) OR Rapid Shots] Retractable Blade Rail Shot (if Charged Gauntlets up) OR Flame Burst FILLER 2 [Flame Burst (heat permitting) OR Rocket Punch (if FREE) OR Rapid Shots] Flame Burst Flame Burst FILLER 3 [Flame Burst (heat permitting) OR Rocket Punch (if FREE) OR Rapid Shots] <repeat> While this reduces your Free Rocket Punches by 3% and causes more overheating problems. Flame Thrower FILLER 1 [Flame Burst (heat permitting) OR Rocket Punch (if FREE) OR Rapid Shots] Immolate Flame Burst FILLER 2 [Flame Burst (heat permitting) OR Rocket Punch (if FREE) OR Rapid Shots] Rail Shot (if Charged Gauntlets up) OR Flame Burst Flame Burst FILLER 3 [Flame Burst (heat permitting) OR Rocket Punch (if FREE) OR Rapid Shots] Retractable Blade <repeat> Now, I’ll freely admit that there’s another discussion that needs to be had about what a practical rotation ought to be. Since our heat generation (i.e. how fast we push our buttons) is subject to slight ability lag, while our heat dissipation (which is completely passive) is not, it remains to be seen whether that imbalance will favor something else. I suspect it would just mean using Flame Burst for filler more, since the rotation becomes heat negative with at least 10% ability delay.

The comments you make about heat management and fight variety actually sort of bring this back to the point I was originally trying to make by posting this. Playing AP as a priority system is kind of a beast. You’ve got three 15-second cooldowns, one 9-second cooldown, a 15-second DoT, and 3-self buffs that you have to keep track of in order to ensure that you’re using the right skill at the right time. In addition to tracking your heat and ensuring you don’t overheat yourself. It’s fairly overwhelming, at least it was for me when I was new to the spec. Playing AP as a true rotation eliminates 90% of that headache, and as we’ve just spent the last page discussing, maintains the same theoretical DPS. Instead of having to track all the cooldowns and buffs, and make quick decisions on what to use as priorities come into conflict, you can execute all high priority moves in a mathematically optimal, and simple to learn, rotation. There’re really only two required conflict decisions. The first is at Filler 2 where you have to determine if Flame Barrage is up and Rocket Punch is (or will be) off-cooldown. The second is at Rail Shot where you have to verify that Charged Gauntlets is up (which it will be ~88% of the time). The methodical rotation, combined with minimal conflict resolution, makes it easier to watch the heat bar, and apply additional conflict resolutions to judiciously convert fillers into Flame Bursts (thus further increasing DPS). Based on my own experiences, I feel like it would be very valuable for players new to the AP spec, to be educated that, rather than trying to master AP’s priority system, they could simply learn to execute this ability rotation and do just as well. Retractable Blade FILLER 1 [Flame Burst (heat permitting) OR Rocket Punch (if FREE) OR Rapid Shots] Flame Burst Flame Burst FILLER 2 [Flame Burst (heat permitting) OR Rocket Punch (if FREE) OR Rapid Shots] Rail Shot (if Charged Gauntlets up) OR Flame Burst Immolate FILLER 3 [Flame Burst (heat permitting) OR Rocket Punch (if FREE) OR Rapid Shots] Flame Thrower <repeat> Of course, you can lead into the rotation however you like. I’m rather fond of: Flame Burst Immolate Flame Burst TSO Flame Thrower Or if TSO isn’t available: Flame Burst Immolate Rocket Punch (FREE) Flame Thrower Or if you have time to wind up PFT stacks with Flame Sweep and get back to 0 heat before the pull, just lead off with Flame Thrower .