How is it a nerf for dailies? It feels like a buff to me. Between the passive armor buff and the free four stacks of Shadow Protection that we get when we attack from stealth, I take a lot less damage while out dallying. Sure, I can't self-heal, but it's not like self-heal ever healed me to full after taking trash damage. I also no longer have to bother with setting up a three-stack TkT in order to attempt to eek out some health. TkT has an opportunity cost: if you're channeling, you're not AoEing and AoE is the fastest way to get dailies done. Unless I'm fighting gold stars, dailies are now all AoE all the time. The damage I take is trivial if I can burn down the group I'm attacking before Shadow Protection drops.

Jesse Sky may well have told you that, but I suspect the encounter developers took Shadows' cooldowns into consideration when copy/pasting hard-hitting space dogs all over the new HM FPs. Those encounters are far from impossible for us. We can pop CDs, CC them, kite them, or whatever. My point remains that those gnarly dog packs aren't a general indicator of Shadow tank inferiority vs. Guardians and Vanguards, certainly not of the same severity as Shadows getting 1-shot by Terminate. Excellent explanation. Thanks! Yeah, that is perplexing. Hopefully, they come around. And I still think that even if they admit there's a problem, the fix will be that they retune the encounter. I don't think they'll change Shadows' mitigation fundamentals. The TOR devs seem a lot more reluctant to fiddle with class balance and mechanics than the WoW devs are. Your AV is a Miraluka. How does that even work?

YOUR survivability calculations may depend on that. I'm not at all sure the designers' do. My point was that problems with HM FP dog packs aren't really indicative of Shadow tanks' Op viability and therefore aren't a serious problem. In any situation where a Shadow has to has to take damage from many hard-hitting mobs simultaneously, Kinetic Ward's charge count is going to be a survivability issue. That's sort of intrinsic to the Shadow tank class as we know it, and isn't the root the spiky damage problem that's actually a danger to our Ops-worthiness. I mean... I'd love for Kinetic Ward to be a perma-buff, too, but... not going to happen. Until it does, our solution is to pop a CD on the dog pulls in HM Mando Raiders and complain in Group Chat about how Saber Reflect is OP. This is the real problem, and it is a big deal. Shadow tanks will get left behind because of this. Though... I suspect that they'll fix it by changing the damage type of Terminate rather embarking on any sort of overhaul of the way Shadows mitigate damage.

I'll state up front that I don't actually disagree with you about the whole issue of Shadows' spiky mitigation, but this a pretty silly example to use in support of your point. The HM FP dog pack pulls are hard for Shadows because of the mechanics of Kinectic Ward: a bunch of hard-hitting mobs burn off all the charges before Kinetic Ward's CD resets. A Shadow tank therefore spends some fraction of 15 secs being extra squishy. Working as intended, imo. If we're the "skill" tank, we need to be skillful enough to be aware of our Kinetic Ward charge count. It's sort of a class design irony that adds flavor to the game. Shadow tanks are great at pulling and maintaining more AoE aggro than Kinetic Ward can mitigate. The huge hits from Terminate seems like a much worse problem. Any sort of Op boss mechanic that reduces Shadows' viability relative to other tank classes is VERY BAD NEWS for Shadows tanks as a class. Shadow tanks will be excluded from content if we're a liability on even one Op boss.