I wouldn't do this for one simple reason: if you're putting the 10 points into Kinetic, you should be putting the next 5 into Kinetic as well simply because those next 5 points are *amazing* (especially One With The Force), at which point you then have to compared the next 5 points to what you would get with the next 5 of another tree, which is questionable at best (Bombardment is amazing, Stasis is great, Force Pull is awesome; the early Balance tree... not so much). If you're going to level as a tank, just go straight up Kinetic. Once you push through those first 10 talent points, you want to just keep dumping point in because that's where the talents that are simply *amazing* lie. If you're going with Force in Balance, you'd want to use 23/0/18, since FiB on its own doesn't really make itself useful. It needs other talents to support it to a functional capacity and the free Mind Crush offsets the lack of the higher tier Kinetic losses. Slow Time is better than Force in Balance for a number of reasons: Force in Balance is only 3 targets. Slow Time is 5. Their threat gen is identical, so, as a tank, there is no benefit beyond slightly higher damage. Slow Time reduces incoming damage by 5%, which makes it a debuff you want to keep up at all times. Force in Balance's heal is barely noticeable (like Combat Technique's). Slow Time is on a 7.5 second CD as compared to Force in Balance's 15 second CD.

Health does not directly contribute to your survivability within Flashpoints or Operations. While solo, it has some utility if you are not at a point where the use of your own abilities and a healer companion allow you to overcome any incoming damage, even from champions. Stacking Endurance is not an appreciable expenditure of gearing largely because its only contribution to tank survivability is to increase the amount of damage you can take without receiving any heals before you die. Since default hp is so high compared to incoming damage, stacking additional endurance has little to no comparative contribution to your survivability in legitimate tanking situations. Willpower, on the other hand, increases your damage output (which is *excellent* even when compared to pure DPS) and threat, making your allies less likely to die and allowing them to DPS harder without risk of pulling off of you. As a tank, you should prioritize as follows: (Defense>Shield>Absorb)>Willpower>Endurance. Endurance just doesn't do enough to make it worthwhile to stack to any appreciable extent.

Infil is only positional for a single attack that it shouldn't even use all that often. Saying Infil is a "positional dps spec" is like claiming that Shadows are a "ranged class".

If I'm worried about spending 23 Force for a Double Strike to take out a weak or standard, there is something *definitely* wrong with the situation I'm in. Tumult is only useful on mobs that an attack that hard is largely redundant for in the first place. It's massively conditional since it only apply to weak targets you've incapacitated *and* it's not even a reliable finish since it's on a 45 sec CD. There is so little need for an attack like it that I don't even have it on my bars because they're already full enough with everything else I actually use all the time. Spinning Strike, the other massively conditional power we get by default, is at least useful on hard targets. Granting players a big attack on a long CD that can only target weak enemies that have been set up by *another* one of your powers is just asinine.

That's a terrible reason, and I'm not even sure your logic is internally consistent. You're claiming that you should use Shadow Strike to break CC because it deals a lot of damage (with Upheaval and no buffs, Project does roughly the same damage as Shadow Strike for less Force, so your situation doesn't even logically apply) and then claim you'll have time to regen the force before attacking. If you want to poke holes in what I'm now calling the "Shadow Strike rule", try to actually find something that makes sense and is internally consistent. Try doing some math. Shotgun attempts to poke holes in what has become a very well founded rule are not gonna work.

Shadow Technique *will* proc it. All of the technique procs are considered to be Force attacks for the purposes of the game. Something to realize about how the game handles damage types is that they only determine what damage resistance applies to the given ability. Both Double Strike and Project deal kinetic damage so they are both resisted by armor, but, since Project is a Force attack, it is not able to be blocked and has a higher base accuracy (though a lower crit and AP contribution because, unlike melee, it doesn't get to feed off of Str *and* WP). The damage of powers are dependent on 3 factors: your level, the rank of the power in question, and any specific talent you take that augments the given power. However many points you have in a tree has no effect on the given technique or any other attribute of your character. The talents you take are the entire extent of the benefits extended by your talent trees.

This would largely be true, except that, in the case of late stage WotLK raiding, bosses were designed to reduce tanks to such low levels of hp with a single attack that they would die unless they were immediately healed to full. This created a state where hit points were largely binary: you were either at full health or dead. In situations like this, hit points *are* more important because you need to increase the size of your survivability cushion in order to prevent being one shot and give healers a larger margin of healing. The only bosses in TOR that operate like this are those bosses with mechanics that you are intended to avoid completely in some manner, such as not standing in bad **** or breaking LoS. Outside of these situations where better play and knowledge of the encounter would actually be the optimal solution, additional hit points are next to worthless since your healer should be able to maintain your health with relative ease, especially when bolstered by your own self-healing and compared to the advantages of additional threat and faster kill speeds.

First off, if you are Balance spec, you shouldn't be touching Shadow Strike *at all*. Shadow Strike is only used by Infiltration spec and should only be used while the Find Weakness buff is active for them. For all other specs and situations, Shadow Strike costs too much force to do too little damage. To answer your question, however, no, it won't. Shadow Strike, Double Strike, and all of your other saber attacks will not proc Force Synergy. Force attacks refer specifically to your Force attacks (i.e. those that use your Force attack stats rather than melee attack stats). If you're ever curious about whether it is a Force attack or not, simply check to see if you hit the target with your saber or not. If you do, it's a melee attack. If you don't it's a Force attack (yes, this means that Spinning Kick is a Force power). There is one minor exception to this: Force Technique procs *can* activate Force Synergy. Whenever you make an attack against a target, your techniques have a chance to proc for additional damage or healing. This damage or healing can itself crit and, if it does so, will count as a Force power critical for the purposes of Force Synergy. If you ever notice Force Synergy proc when you just used a melee attack, this is the reason why.

By "primary stat", that guide refers to the fact that the stat that augments crit and damage of all powers is Willpower, just like Aim is the primary for the Trooper, Cunning for the Smuggler, and Strength for the Knight. As to why you shouldn't stack Endurance, it's because it does nothing for your survivability. Additional hit points do nothing to decrease your damage taken. They do nothing to increase your healing received. They do not make you appreciably harder to kill other than increasing the limit of damage you can withstand without receiving any heals. Assuming you plan on running with a group, all this amounts to is preventing you from being killed within a single GCD, something that isn't appreciably likely to happen. Willpower, on the other hand, actively makes you a better tank because it lets you generate more threat as well as finish fights faster (if you don't think tank damage is going to increase kill speed, you're incredibly wrong). I have been demolishing all content I have encountered and my stat prioritization has been (Defense>Shield>Absorb)>Willpower>Strength. In essence, all this really does is mean I use Resolve Armoring and Hilts rather than Force Wielder Armoring and Hilts. I have been scolding by many other tanks that I have grouped with for having low health, but then, when we actually engage, I perform *better* than the lack-wits that view hit points as the only metric by which to judge a tank. Here's something to think about: the only hit point that matters is the last one. All of the other ones are redundant. Why bother stacking more hit points if you never drop below 25%? It's better to stack more Willpower so that you actually get something appreciable out of those stats.

All 3 Shadow specs are most closely likened to Enhancement Shaman play: it's all about using melee abilities to proc ranged attacks into usefulness. Even Infil plays like this because Shadow Strike is *not* something you want to use without the Infil Find Weakness buff (only Infil uses it and it only uses it once every 12 secs or so). As to the OP, I've noticed that, thanks to the playability of tanks in general, tanks are actually relatively common as you level, about as common as DPS. Personally, I would level as Kinetic because it gives you amazing solo capability and your damage isn't too shabby either (I ran a number of FPs and H4s with a second Kinetic Tank filling in for a DPS slot while staying in Combat Technique and we killed things *amazingly* fast). The only problem is that it is going to be a horrible experience until about level 30, wherein WP shields start becoming more common (I found 3 *total* from levels 10-28) and you finally have the talents to make attacks other than Double Strike worthwhile. Balance, from what I have heard from reliable sources, makes for excellent leveling. Inf is decent at low levels, but its lack of survivability really hurts you for soloing beyond level 30. Unless you plan on regularly PvPing as you level, Balance is probably the better choice with its exceptional damage, self healing, and range viability. Either way, Balance and Kinetic are both excellent choices. Personally, I like soloing champions (enemies intended for 4 man groups) so I went Kinetic.

None of the abilities that a Shadow uses provide a net gain in Force so there's no threat of Force capping if you use the abilities as I said. If anything, using the Force cap defense is completely innane since no Shadow should ever play anywhere near full Force except at the start of a fight. It's for this exact reason that Vigor is functionally worthless. The blanket rule is applied simply because *it's true*. There may, on occasion, be a situation that merits using Shadow Strike without Find Weakness, but, in a *vast* majority of the times, it's only useful to use it with Find Weakness. If anyone is confusing people, it's individuals like you that insist that Shadow Strike is useful outside of Find Weakness, citing groundless points and rare occurrences, when the entire point of the blanket rule is to give people a standard by which to operate. If there are exceptions, you don't need to include them because anyone capable of seeing said exception wouldn't need to be told a blanket rule in the first place. And example of this would be the blanket rule for Kinetic Combat: Don't use Project without Particle Acceleration. There is very little reason to use Project as a Kinetic outside of Particle Acceleration so I'm not going to tell people that there are *some* exceptions and then expect them to remember them when they need to be told that Project is inefficient and terrible without the proc in question. Personally, I do, on occasion, use it outside of PA explicitly to save Harnessed Shadows stacks when I go through a PA proc dry spell. This is an exception. Never using Project outside of PA is the rule. They are not incompatible.

When people refer to procs they can refer to either instantaneous procs (such as those provided by your Techniques) or effect procs (such as Find Weakness). Instantaneous procs (generally pure damage) will simply appear as additional damage. Effect procs will either appear on the target or on yourself, and you will be able to see the effect in question above your hp bar in the UI (for effects on yourself) and above the hp bar of your target (for effects on the target).

30% armor is a relatively tiny amount of damage reduction and it only affects weapon attacks. It does nothing to mitigate the substantially more common internal, kinetic, and elemental damage that players cause so most players find it a better expenditure to place those 2 points in somewhere more useful.

First off, as a 3 min CD, I expect Force Cloak to be harder to render redundant than the simple application of a DoT. It would be like Saber Ward having no effect against targets behind you. Long CDs should be potent. Force Cloak is too easy to render useless. Secondly, it's not just DoTs. Since attacks don't damage you until the animation lands, you can use Force Cloak to vanish out and be immediately pulled out because an attack that was in the middle of its animation deals damage to you. Once again, that's just bad. It's supposed to be used to get you out of combat and yet, thanks to an accident of animation speed, you can get thrown right back at no fault of your own. There is a reason that WoW gave Rogue Vanish a 3 second immunity to being knocked out of stealth: because, without that, it's a largely worthless disengagement talent.

First things first, I think you're operating under the flawed assumption that Tank dps is bad. It isn't. I'd run a number of FPs with a second Shadow tank filling in for a second dps. I made him stay in CT the entire time because I knew, otherwise, his damage would tank. I still kept threat off of him easily and he did only marginally less damage than the dedicated DPS Balance Sage we had. Secondly, I'm gonna have to qualify what the previous poster said. Focused Insight and Force Focus are definitely not going to be worth it. You're not going to be spending time in Force Technique (Particle Acceleration *more* than makes up for the loss of damage) so Force Focus isn't going to be doing you any good, which means you're missing out on half of the DoTs that Balance uses. You also aren't getting the higher tier Balance talents that make all of your DoTs heal for more and crit for more. Second Sight is definitely going to be useful if you plan on any kind of tanking because it reduces all damage taken by 2% (I checked the in-game info; it also augments your elemental and internal resist). The stealth aspect is pretty meh, but less damage taken is always nice. Expertise is also a completely worthless talent. The amount of damage your Techniques provide is incredibly small. You must realize that by "Techniques" the talent refers exclusively to Combat Technique, Shadow Technique, and Force Technique. 9% more from those is essentially nothing. The only spec I'd consider taking it with would be Infiltration. Honestly, I think you'd just be happier going as a pure Kinetic build. You still hit plenty hard and you can tank to your heart's content. Splitting into multiple foci just doesn't work out well in the way the game was designed. If you design something to do both, you'll simply end up sucking at both.

You have clue how many times I've had to tell this to people screaming about how weak they feel as Shadows. A lot of the fault, imo, has to be with the developers frontloading the class with the skills that "make" a class a rogue-like: a backstab (albeit with terrible cost:damage ratio) and stealth. If Shadow Strike and Stealth were delayed for a few levels so that you get used to the melee/force fusion of Shadows before getting access to the rogue-like skills, I doubt fewer people would have the problems you see so often. It would require some reworking of the early Infiltration tree, but it would make the class *much* easier for the random person to understand.

When I hit a standard with Project, it's already pretty much dead. I just finish it off with a Double Strike or Spinning Strike.

I agree wholeheartedly, especially when you're having to track your 2 debuffs (Slow Time, Force Breach), 3 procs (Particle Acceleration, Force Synergy, Harnessed Shadows), and use your relics and other long CDs. You can learn to push it with regularity, but, even then, you miss using it a lot. The presumed reason I've read for Kinetic Ward's current state is to force a maximum contribution with a minimum and maximum cost associated with it. Since you should be using it once every 12-20 seconds (min CD or max duration), it amounts to .5-.83 Force sec, which is a remarkably small amount. Extending the duration would remove the maximum cost associated with the power, functionally making it 10 Force every 8 blocks or 12 seconds, which in theory ends up much the same (for ST fights, the 12 blocks occur pretty much in line with 20 seconds and, in AoE fights, the charges don't last 12 seconds), and it's something I could see happening. My personal preference, however, would be to turn Kinetic Ward into a toggled power that reduces your Force regen by .75 (slightly higher than average to make up for the ease of use), and provides 1 charge every 1.5 seconds up to a maximum of 4. The regularly generated charges would be in line with the rate with which Kinetic Ward provides them, and the decreased number of max charges would be to make up for the constant rather than burst generation of charges (you start a fight with 8 charges as we stand now and the suggested toggle breaks even in 6 seconds, with a 6 second advantage in charge generation from that point on amounting to 4 more charges over time). It would also provide ease of use because, instead of having one more button to click constantly in the chaotic environment we already live in, we just turn it on and run with it.

Some of the random blue and green world drops have non-tank stats on them. Your best bet would be to look on the Galactic Market.

I think too many people expect them to be rogue-like and play them as such, blaming their lack of performance on a fault of design rather than an inability to distinguish reality from their expectations.

Shadows are not the "rogue-like" of TOR. Scoundrels are. Shadows simply have stealth as a utility functionality. They only have a single stealth opener and Kinetic Combat gets to use it outside of stealth as well (and it's not even that good of a stealth opener since it's only a little damage and a 2 sec KD). If you're looking for a melee class that mixes it up with Force powers, Shadow is the class for you. You're going to have a couple ranged abilities, but you'll spend a vast majority of your time in the thick of melee using all of those ranged powers at point blank range. For DPS specs, Infiltration is going to be more saber focused and Balance is going to be more force power focused. Both of them are melee and neither of them is stealth focused. Infil gets a couple talents that increase the utility of Stealth, but they are not appreciable benefits and the previously mentioned additional regen out of stealth is only present to make a later talent logical and useful.

At 24, you get Particle Acceleration and Kinetic Ward, and are close to getting One with the Force, so you're beyond the worst of the hump levels and close to the promised land. I think the answer to your first question depends on how much fun you have tanking and taking the "slow and steady" approach to leveling. I would change now rather than later, however, because you're getting to the range wherein gear becomes defined by its role, either DPS or Tank, and switching can be problematic. To answer your second question, Tharan pretty much all the way. A pocket healer for a tank is amazing, especially with Tharan's CC. My only problem with him is that his personality doesn't mesh with how I like to play my Jedi (he doesn't like any reference to the Force or belief in mysticism, which seems *really strange* for a guy that chose to hang with not 1 but 2 different Jedi "leaders" over the course of his adventures). He's also a complete man-whore, which makes his constant demands for romantic attention and flirtation very annoying to a Jedi uninterested in such attachments.

Considering how worthless it was for PvE, I always assumed it was used for PvP, but now that I know it isn't, it's entirely worthless. Jeebus.

Since those abilities only have a 10m range as opposed to a 4m (melee) range and they both have delays in dealing damage and generating threat, at the levels given, it would be more efficient to run over and hit Double Strike quickly since 6m is a remarkably small distance to move since the only time you can't move after hitting an ability is after using TK Throw (which you shouldn't be using outside of the HS buff).

Yes, I'd much rather it was a toggle that either provided a constant benefit or generated charges slowly throughout the course of a fight at a minimal reduction in Force Regen (as opposed to a cost, which means that, in the many times that a Shadow runs out of force, it could be turned off). It would serve the same purpose and be much more playable for more people. Hell, they could even cap the number of "charges" at a low number (like 4) to "weaken" it in exchange for this functionality.