Yeah. Don't get me started. This is a bigger deal than the defense thing.

The defense minima on the new gear virtually eliminates gear customization, since there are relatively few effects which have a significant impact on the relative value of shield and absorb (due to the way that they trade off against each other). So it doesn't surprise me that the numbers are fairly constant. It is worth noting that my (very preliminary!) work produces slightly different results for shadows (lowMR followed by highMR): {{defense -> 2931, shield -> 1207, absorb -> 1495}, {defense -> 2931, shield -> 1202, absorb -> 1500}} These results don't take into account the new Kinetic Ward or the extra Kinetic Bulwark stacks, which obviously has an impact on things. EDIT Actually, an even bigger omission from my calculations is the fact that I'm using unlettered mods for both stat budget and defense min. There's literally no question that B mods will be BiS by a mile, so I need to make that adjustment.

Eric, do you think we could get Tait to record a pronunciation guide for "Ptach"? Asking for a friend...

In case you missed it: To say I'm excited would be an understatement. Shadow/Assassin tanks will no longer have a marked weakness on trash packs or bosses with high attack speeds (think: Tu'chuk). Kinetic Ward/Dark Ward management is going to be a lot more dynamic than it has ever been, given the higher Kinetic Bulwark/Dark Bulwark stack limit and the RNG-dependent duration extension.

Both Vanguards/Powertechs and Shadows/Assassins have procs which work on both shielding and defense. Shadows/Assassins have actually always been like this (literally since 1.0), since they are reliant on both defense and shield as general mechanisms. Vanguards/Powertechs were the last of the three tanks to get diversity in their proc generators. So, resources shouldn't be a problem in general. Defense does provide a lower percentage return per point than shield does, so that will impact resource generation slightly, but it shouldn't be noticeable. Well, any and all PTS stuff would be under NDA. So aside from what the devs have said, or data mined information (which is against the forums ToS), we don't really know anything. With that said, the information we have been given from the devs does confirm that the only tanking mods will be mastery+endurance+defense. There will be no shield or absorb mods.

It helps to have help. Find a guild with strong players of your class who are analytically-minded and willing to help. I think this is probably the most important service that serious raiding guilds offer to their members: help improving with their spec of choice from world-tier players. Find people who are willing to look at parses (if you're a DPS or healer) and/or videos and give you itemized, clear feedback. Follow their advice, repeat. This is how improvement happens. When I logged into the game, a few minutes after the servers turned on for early access, I was logging into my first ever MMO. I got my shadow tank to 50 relatively quickly with few (if any) designs on endgame content. I wanted to see EV, because it looked cool and I loved the story of the Rakata, but I didn't plan on doing much beyond that. I wasn't spec'd into Particle Acceleration or Harnessed Shadows (because I thought procs were useless). My rotation was built around the devastating Mind Crush/Crushing Darkness > Force Stun/Electrocute combo. I thought Project/Shock was mostly useful for the stun, and I only used Slow Time/Wither when I wanted to look cool (granted, that spell was pretty useless pre-1.1). I'm not exaggerating any of this btw! I was terrible. All y'all out there who feel bad because you wipe in HM Blood Hunt or because you can't parse a 5k, you ain't got NOTHING on my first few months in game. Then several things happened. First, I decided that I wanted to improve, because I caught the raiding bug and caught it bad. After a marathon 8 hour SM EV run which featured a) a tank who thought they were a DPS, b) enraging Infernal Council for about 3 hours straight, c) infinite personal turnover, and d) more Soa bugs than anyone has a right to see, I realized that this raiding thing was pretty cool. Second, there was a huge contingent of forum-goers (many of them quite accomplished in the raid scene) loudly proclaiming shadow tanks useless and under powered relative to vanguards and guardians (who really sucked pre-2.0, btw), which strongly motivated me to learn theory crafting. But most importantly, I met some people who were willing to work with me. Players who had significant raiding experience in other games, who didn't mind running with me even in my n00bish state, and who believed in me and always had constructive criticism to offer. I listened to them. I built mathematical models to analyze my play, my gear, the game in general. I watched videos of other people playing my class (e.g. I learned a lot from Methodical, which seems hilarious in hindsight given how poorly their tanks played). I made a fool of myself on the forums tossing around bad ideas, and I actually listened to the people who bluntly pointed out what was wrong with me. Before the end of the year, I was tanking in a group that was getting top ten 8 man NiM clears worldwide. Improvement takes work. It takes peer review, feedback, study, analysis, and meaningful practice. Identify the things about your class and role that need to be rote, and turn those things into pure muscle memory (e.g. I had to learn how to monitor and manage Kinetic Ward/Dark Ward). It doesn't take a huge amount of time (while all of this was going on, I was finishing up my undergraduate degree, working full time and speaking at over a dozen conferences in venues around the world). If I can do it, anyone can.

Rule number one of gearing: make the numbers bigger. More defense > anything-not-mitigation. As a min-maxer, I like to delude myself that the things I do make a huge difference. They don't. Min-maxing has, at most, a 10-15% impact on the performance of your gear. Getting a larger stat budget has a much, much, MUCH more significant impact. Defense is over-statted in this expansion, yes, but it's still going to be better than non-mitigation stats. With that said, I don't think there's any question that B mods will be BiS by a mile.

It's hard to say. Without actually, you know, running the math… That's almost a 2:1 ratio of defense-to-anything-else, which is probably not good. Fine for Guardians, since you're kinda stuck with that much defense regardless of what you do, but not great for the others. With that said, defense minima should be, relatively speaking, fairly close to shield minima in the current gear system (modulo the fact that stims give defense). So we're not talking about a 2:1 ratio or anything close to it. It's probably more like 1:1 or even 1:1.5, which is a lot more reasonable. tl;dr: I suspect that a 2:1 ratio, as you describe, would be noticeably problematic. 1:1 or 1:1.5 should not be, and while the mean mitigation will be down and the spikiness (as described by every objective metric) will be up, the more moderate ratios shouldn't prove actively problematic. tl;dr 2.0: I'm not a fan of Bioware "forcing" defense at us in this manner. I would rather they took steps to adjust the content, adjust the classes, or tweak the effect of the stat (e.g. make it affect resist, or perhaps give dodge a stacking effect which increases dodge probability after a successful dodge). Something. Adjusting the itemization in this way just removes the option of running a low defense build, and also basically eliminates meaningful customization of gear sets (since shield and absorb are going to be at a basically-constant ratio, regardless of the content). I don't think it's the end of the world mitigation-wise, but that doesn't mean I'm in favor of the change. It's impossible to say without seeing the final version of the class changes, the exact gear itemization, and even the exact scaling of the content up to level 65. In general, I have a lot of faith that the combat team was able to keep the TTK and mean mitigation of each tank balanced, simply because they've proven extremely adept at tank balance in the last few years (basically since 2.0).

Your theory is 100% sound, but you're exaggerating the practical effect of a high defense build. Both in the math and in practice, high defense builds make relatively little difference in the spikiness of the tank. To be clear, if you go far enough in the direction of high defense, sure, things will look really spiky, but part of that will simply be taking more damage due to not having as much force/tech mitigation. Amping up the defense by a far more reasonable amount (which is what 4.0 is doing) makes things spikier, but only in a barely perceptible way. Again, this comes down to bosses doing quite a bit less damage than we intuitively believe (see also: relic, reactive warding).

So I've heard! Haven't tried concealment myself, simply because I like lethality better. The instants, the roll (for squeezing in an extra GCD or two before the pull in), the crispness of the animations (for safer GCDs between aberrations), basically everything about that class lends itself well to the core. I think if AP didn't exist, we would have seen a fair bit of operative stacking in the early days (at least once groups realized that the first phase doesn't matter). Agree 100% on Hatred, Lethality and also Madness being significantly below reasonable targets. Madness should be above IO and Virulence, IMO, and Hatred should be higher still (with Lethality falling somewhere between the two). Clearly that's not even remotely the case today. Certainly all three are usable, and they can carry their weight relative to the damage checks in the content, but

Ah, sorry! The low/mid/high/average distinction seems unclear. The magnitudes that I'm referencing are the relative amount of M/R damage. See the Ideal Tank Stats post for a more precise definition (basically, I'm splitting bosses into three buckets based on percentage of M/R damage vs F/T). That's why the values are different, since you're actually looking at very different mitigation profiles and probabilities. In any case, you're right about the "shadows being the smoothest" conclusion from the PMF, which is part of why dipstik and I were digging deeper, ultimately settling on the discrete approach. The problem with the PMF is that it doesn't match the intuition that healers get when healing a shadow tank vs a vanguard tank. I don't think that particular intuition is invalid in any way, so the goal was to quantify it and identify exactly what in the class design and itemization was making shadows feel spiky, even when the math says that, statistically, they aren't. I mean, we already had PK (probability-of-kill), but that particular regression is a little too ad hoc to be useful in these sorts of measures, and it also ignores important attributes like mean mitigation. Hence, the discrete plots. Incidentally, the polynomial fitting just makes the plot a little easier to consume, visually. It does imply some falsehoods, notably stemming from the fact that there is no "in between" data in a truly discrete plot. I still like it though because it reflects quite directly what healers do during a boss: namely, incrementally interpolate false states and probabilities from discrete events. As your eyes follow each individual curve, think about the way in which you might be interpolating between discrete mitigation events during a boss fight, landing at each point along the curve. The fact that the vanguard curve has the least inflection makes it feel more consistent, despite the fact that it is strictly worse in almost any objective metric. The shadow and guardian graphs have significant inflection (it might actually be useful to formalize the derivative of the fit function, to reduce this inflection to a single value) – especially shadows – and that inflection mirrors the intuition when healing a shadow that they are "spiky". They're not really spiky, they're just inconsistent in their magnitude of goodness.

Probability is the common sense of probability. As in, a higher value of P indicates that the case in question is more probable. All data points should sum to 1 (for this reason, the interpolation is slightly deceptive). The mitigation percentages are as you said, mitigation in that expected case. For example, you'll notice that there are 100% mitigation cases, and they have a non-zero probability, since defense and resist are a thing. You'll also notice that even the lowest mitigation cases are better than 0%, since we have armor and internal resistance. Finally, the low/mid/high/average labels indicate the damage profile used to weight the probabilities. Obviously, a dodge (100% mitigation) is a more probable case when a large percentage of the incoming damage is M/R, etc.

Something to think about here… There's currently a lot of "prejudice" in the meta caused by many, many high skill players simply not playing certain specs. Most of the unfavored specs are in a better place than most people believe. Marksmanship, for example, is actually competitive with Virulence when correctly played! It's just that very few people play it optimally (most use a rotation which either doesn't use enough Snipe, delays Ambush, delays Sniper Volley, or some combination of the above). Moving outside snipers to other ranged specs, I've gotten some awesome numbers out of Lightning (beats snipers on just about anything 8/10, though obviously trash for both apex bosses). Operatives have basically all glommed onto Concealment as the one true spec, but Lethality actually bests it on a huge percentage of the fights in the right hands (e.g. mid-500s on Core burn). Powertechs go all AP-happy, forgetting that Pyro actually does much higher sustained damage. Looping back to Virulence, I really don't think it's over-performing. It seems like it is, because most of the really insanely good snipers out there are playing Virulence. In general though, due to the immobility, the rigidity of the rotation and the low burst, I feel like Virulence needs to be ahead of IO and only slightly behind Madness (if Madness were correctly balanced). By that metric, it's doing just fine.

Well, it's a little more complicated than that. Remember that we have to be very careful about how we define "spikiness", since shadows actually have the lowest damage variance in the statistical sense. Dipstik and I had a really great discussion about this a few months ago, part of which is here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showpost.php?p=8138867&postcount=43 Basically, this graph gives a general intuition for what healers "feel" about the various tanks, whereas this is the statistical variance on mitigation. Note that, in the statistical sense, shadows have the highest peak and also the narrowest density, which means better averages and less variance within those averages (in other words, the exact opposite of the stereotype). This is different from the mitigation cases graph (the first one), which shows how the really great mitigation cases which shadows bring (much better than vanguards) lull healers into a false sense of security, broken by infrequent awful cases that are not much worse than vanguards and far less frequent, but more startling. Defense is certainly a spikier stat, and its spikiness would show up quite starkly in the mitigation cases graph if I replotted in terms of what we know about 4.0 (probably not worth doing yet since we don't know full stat distributions and mod ratios). However, shadow spikiness is so minimal right now that I don't think it'll be an issue, even with the marginal increase in spikiness coming from lower shield/absorb totals. In 4.0, healing a shadow tank without losing your mind is going to come down to the same things it always has: trust in their mitigation and confidence that, as bad as things look now and again, the probabilities are low and the averages are spectacular. Relative to the other tanks…* Shadows have DR which just barely falls behind guardians for practical cases, though is well behind Vanguards. It's their total mitigation package which is so much better though. Shadow defense, even with high shield/absorb builds, is generally within spitting distance of a guardian, while their shield/absorb is generally better than even a vanguard (whereas vanguards have awful defense, and guardians have awful shield/absorb). So, it's not so much that shadows rely on shield/absorb as they rely on their full mitigation package, including defense. If you stripped their defense bonuses away, shadows would be like a variant of vanguard that has 10% less DR, which is not a good situation to be in. Having "excess" defense (which is what 4.0 is going to give us) isn't going to hurt us that badly. Vanguards, yes. Shadows, no.

Technically, this affects vanguards more than shadows. Shadows have some nice properties in their mitigation (especially Kinetic Bulwark) that push-pull against defense in a rather unique way. High defense builds aren't the end of the world for them. Here's the more salient point though: ToS/Rav have been the highest F/T damage PvE content since NiM EV. Seriously. Everything prior to this point has been significantly richer in the M/R damage, especially the really hard fights in S&V and TfB. This implies in and of itself that we would already be running much more defense-heavy builds than we currently do on live, assuming that Bioware doesn't alter the damage distributions in scaling the content to 65 (they altered TfB's distribution going from 50 to 55 in 2.0, so I wouldn't hold my breath). In general, this is an indirect nerf. We certainly won't be augmenting defense anymore, and I'd be surprised if the Fortunate Redoubt relic remained BiS. The sky isn't falling for PvE though. PvPers are really the ones who are being screwed here. Defense is far from useless in PvP, but I tend to agree with those who are planning on stacking DPS mods/enhs on their shadow tanks.

That's an interesting point, kwerty, but it is slightly counter-balanced in the slinger case by the fact that >100% accuracy (basically an inevitability due to quantized gear) and, more significantly, Illegal Mods substantially favor gunslingers over snipers. I doubt it's as much as the 204 vs 198 differences in the basic attack scaling, but it's there. On even gear footing, gunslingers should always out-parse snipers on average over time.

It most definitely works just fine in PvE, but this makes sense since all PvE force/tech attacks are exclusively derived from base damage (of the boss). A good example of where Evasion is heavily used to dramatic effect is in Ruugar, specifically on the mouse droids when you don't have Entrench up. If Evasion weren't working there, we would most definitely know it.

I know for a fact that curse continues to go out with 6 or less people. I'm not sure why your experiences would be different there… I'm not going to rule out faction-specific bugs, though I've also seen a curse with 6 or fewer players up on Imp side, so IDK.

On the one hand, the mitigation added by the tanking relics (especially the SA and FR) is enormously small, and so you aren't gaining all that much from having a mitigation token in that slot. On the other hand, the DPS increase that tanks see from a power/mainstat relic really isn't all that much either, and it's even less for mainstat stims or power crystals. Basically, there's not a lot of significant benefits either way. Sometimes though, it's worth it. Everyone I know who tanked Terror from Beyond NiM at tier used DPS relics, crystals, stims, hilts and adrenals, and some people even went further and traded out more mitigation from other pieces. Styrak HM in the very first week (when we were all in Dread Guard gear) was a murderous DPS check. My group, as with many others, had their tanks wear partial DPS gear, and the difference was noticeable over the length of the fight. Pre-pre-nerf Nightmare Dread Guard is another example, though the tank damage on that fight was also enough to notice the loss of mitigation, so you were literally trading off healer off-DPS for better tank DPS. On the flip side of the spectrum, NiM EC Kephess at level wasn't too much of a DPS check in 8 man, but it was by far the hardest (in terms of unforgiving) tank check the game has ever seen, especially on a shadow tank. I actually took the trouble to run a special set of gear and relics specifically for this boss, which is something I've never done since. Even the paltry mitigation from the Shield Amplification relic was noticeable at level on Nightmare Cartel Warlords (if tanking Tu'chuk). So you pick and choose. I don't think there is any blanket advice that I can give here, other than not to listen to blanket advice. You're not going to make that much of a difference, one way or another, on this one. So think about where your group needs more help. Is your DPS slow, even by just a tiny bit? Maybe pop a mainstat stim and put on some DPS relics. Is your DPS ample? Stick with the mitigation, because despite the tiny nature of the margins it provides, it's still a useful margin.

This is one of those things that I'd like to be able to easily calculate and show alongside the stats. Generally speaking, tank itemization can make a difference of about five-ish percent on average content, and 7-8% on more extreme damage profiles. This is multiplicative with the post-mitigation DtPS (i.e. what you see in your logs if your group doesn't have a sorc healer). So, for example, going completely counter to the recommended numbers on Torque should yield a DtPS increase of about 150. Noticeable, but not earth shattering.

Had you previously wiped and reset inside? Something may have gotten stuck in the mappings of who was and wasn't alive. I've seen this in the past with other fights. Obviously it happens consistently with Coratanni (even to the point of Pearl's rotation getting offset by an inside-reset), but I've also seen it on Revan. That's my best guess. To my knowledge, the game requires a minimum of five players to be "eligible" for curse. It hard-defaults away from healers, and biases away from melee and just-cursed individuals, but that's basically it. As soon as you drop below five eligible players (e.g. if two DPS are dead), the healers get put on the table for curse. With more dead, the weighting against the healers drops. If the eligibility table got screwed up between pulls, that might explain it.

Nope! Main hand (and off hand) scale force/tech power the same as they scale base white damage. Ability coefficients and classes in general are VERY carefully tuned such that the main hand is a roughly equivalent upgrade for basically everyone. Now, it is true that force/tech-heavy classes get more out of the off hand than white damage dealers, but it's not a particularly significant amount.

I did the math on it a few months ago, and I don't think it's quite that much. It varies from group to group, but the specific composition was: io merc x2, fury marauder, sniper. Assuming dummy DPS output from everyone, the difference in debuffs for the whole group between virulence and marksmanship was just over 500 DPS (in favor of Marksmanship). So this takes into account the fact that Marksmanship benefits more from the armor debuff than Virulence does.

Mid-4k first and second phases, assuming clean tanking and cleansing. Third phase mid-high 3ks with a DPS stop, 4k without. Third floor push… uh, irrelevantly short? Core damage: about 400k. The amount of sheer suck for sorcs on the Core is hard to overstate, especially when the PTs are lol-hydraulicsing the pulls and maintaining their rotation cleanly even through the aberrations. :-( So, obviously those numbers are viable. And even adjusting down, pretending I have a 192 main hand (this is with a 204), they would have been viable pre-nerf. But the aim classes are just miles beyond, and the raw unpleasantness of the third (and really second floor) as a sorc cannot be ignored. Honestly, the only legitimately nice thing the class brings is the ability to delete the 64 stack Heave.

I'll list in expected raid DPS order across the tier (e.g. lightning sorcs > all on Underlurker, but they're weak on the rest of the tier), since dummy parses, while interesting, are ultimately useless. Doing this from memory, so maybe flipped one or two: Advanced Prototype (powertech) Innovative Ordinance (merc) Virulence (sniper) Pyro (powertech) Lightning (sorc) Marksmanship (sniper) Carnage (marauder) Concealment (operative) Lethality (operative) Vengeance (juggernaut) Annihilation (marauder) Fury (marauder) Deception (assassin) Arsenal (merc) Hatred (assassin) Engineering (sniper) Madness (sorc) Rage (juggernaut) If you want to weight the results more heavily by the apex bosses (Revan and Cora), Lightning drops to maybe fourth from the bottom, while Carnage, Fury and Concealment move up quite a bit, Pyro and Virulence drop somewhat. As a quick disclaimer on a couple of the placements that some people probably disagree with… Marksmanship is in a much better place than most people think. I've seen parses from it that rival Virulence even on a dummy, and on a boss a well-played Marksmanship will be able to hold their own and at least remain within spitting distance. The armor debuff is really underrated in this tier, and since most groups are running their mercs in IO and might not have an AP powertech or Carnage marauder, it falls to the sniper to maintain the debuff. For reference, if your sniper is your only armor debuff, they would need to parse roughly 500 DPS better in Virulence than they do in Marksmanship in order to make it worthwhile to give up that debuff. No one has that kind of differential. Lightning is similarly much better off than most people believe, though it suffers from death issues on Ruugar and absolute torment on third floor Revan (8 usable GCDs every 30 seconds; hurray!). In terms of DPS though, the numbers it can put up are surprisingly high for such a high burst, high AoE, high mobility ranged class. Lethality is a similarly underrated discipline. Its DPS is too low right now to be really competitive with Concealment, but it does have its moments, and in the right hands it can be almost as viable as Concealment. Lethality will out-DPS almost every other spec on floor one Revan (Lightning takes the crown here), even if you only have one melee.