THIS bug I can explain. :-) It happens when you try to activate a rapid movement ability (not a speed boost) while undergoing a physics effect of some sort. Happened all the time to tanks transitioning to the back hand before the mid burn in NiM Brontes, where you would get slammed as you phase walked/charged/stormed and ultimately just wouldn't go anywhere (while the ability would be on cooldown). Same thing happens in Master-Blaster. Maybe it has something to do with the silence? Very weird.

Deleted for reading comprehension. I've never seen that bug. I've seen the inverse a lot (goes on cooldown with no movement), but never what you describe.

Have a video: I wasn't there for the kill we recorded (we had a couple subs, actually), and I think this may have been the first time we did it (hence some of the discombobulation). We never did it in Nightmare Mode, but this was our Hard Mode strat for quite a long while. Having a Focus Sentinel helped with the whole "hit them all at once" bit. :-) Unfortunately, when Nightmare Mode dropped, this got "nerfed". The reason being that the first week kills of NiM Cartel Warlords were all using a variation of this strat (kill Horic, then kill the remaining three at once) in order to bypass the late-fight mechanics. Bioware implemented a catch which heals all the bosses back up to full if two or more of them are below a threshold, preventing simul-kills. We also tried this with the Dread Guard, but unfortunately they have a very similar mechanic and have had it since launch. We also tried killing the Dread Guard backwards (kel'sara first), but again, the auto-heal mechanic kicked in and we couldn't down them. We theorized that with an absolutely inconceivable amount of burst, we might be able to get them past the trigger point (since, with the Dread Guard anyway, the trigger is at 25% but gets delayed by their rotation), but we were never able to hit that mark.

Sure, but the HK phase would be a heck of a lot easier to solo heal if we didn't have to worry about killshot (auto-kill) or stacking grenades (effective auto-kill due to max HP). It would basically be like a slightly more single-target oriented malaphar, which is easy to solo heal and you can achieve well over the requisite 8k eHPS. Yes, but at some point, you still need to keep all roles engaged in the content, otherwise the DPS turn into dummy parsers, or the tanks AFK with a penny on their taunt button. One-shot mechanics, much like the edge of a fight platform or (more simply) a wall, provide the structure which enforce an upper bound on how easy things can be for any given role. You should probably think a little more deeply before you accuse me of lack of creativity. It would need to be one HECK of a damage debuff to outweigh the positional penalties of having to face the aberrations. Also, again, there are ways to shift that responsibility. I actually have no idea what you're saying here regarding Raptus's curse. Not at all. The variety of mechanics comes from what you must do to handle them. Both Deathmark in Hateful Entity and the heartbeat in HM Revan are auto-kill mechanics, but you need to manage them in 100% different ways. I believe I explicitly specified pre-nerf, pre-204 MH for the Zorz 7 manning stuff. No overgearing there. Several times a week, actually. We do it because it's fun, not only to fight the boss but also to spend time with friends. And the number of hardcore raiders that are still around is irrelevant. You're talking about specifically and only that subset of the population whenever you're talking about Nightmare Mode anything. Unless you are advocating to straight-up nerf all the content, Nightmare Mode (or ideally Hard Mode going forward) is going to remain a very exclusive purview.

Alright, let's try to make an actual list for you here: Drouks close together isn't technically a one-shot, but since you can't damage them while they're fully stacked and their damage eventually scales to above max HP, I think they qualify. Taking a second double-destruction is a one-shot in the purest sense: you're stunned… and then auto-killed. Positioning wrong on the minefield is an auto-kill from the knockback Taking too long to sprint from the tower on the minefield is an auto-kill Solving the minefield puzzle wrong is an auto-kill by elimination (in several exciting ways) The droids were not killable at 8 stacks on tier (pre-2.0 Warstalker here); the DR used to be over 100%. They've been nerfed I guess being stacked in melee range of the pulsar droids isn't technically an auto-kill. It just did damage exceeding maximum health in under a GCD. So… almost-auto-kill? Kephess's jump in nightmare mode on tier did more than max health worth of damage to any non-tank. Gift of the Masters is the definition of an auto-kill. You take damage with it, you die with a zero damage hit. Kephess's auto-enrage with 2 raid members down also isn't technically an auto-kill, but like the pulsar droids, it exceeded max health almost instantly. All of these mechanics are either pure auto-kills, or do so much damage and/or are so constraining that they are functionally auto-kills (like Kephess's "2 down" enrage). Ask any serious progression raider (in other words, the target audience for Nightmare Mode). Gear/decos/mounts/titles simply aren't enough reward for what we do. (gear especially; I basically don't care about it at all beyond the ability to do harder content) We do it for the same reason that you climb a mountain: it's there and it looks hard.

There seem to be a fairly large set of one-shots in EC NiM. Kwerty listed most of them, but there are several others that he missed (including positioning on the droid in Minefield, holding the Drouks together, getting the Kephess droids to 8 stacks, having everyone in melee on the second set of droids, etc). Except rewards aren't even in the equation for why I run ops. HM Revan drops literally nothing that I can use (even the deco). Doesn't even slightly reduce my enjoyment of the boss. (for that matter, basically this entire tier is like that now; I can't get anything useful or any vanity item that I don't already have, but I still raid)

Prefixing… Let's tone down the "didn't do nightmare content when it was relevant" rhetoric. I understand what y'all are trying to say, but I think we can shoot down the points without resorting to an appeal to authority (where by "authority" I mean on-tier NiM experience). There is a limit to what can be solo healed. As I said, I haven't done the Master-Blaster soft enrage, and I honestly don't believe that I can. I've also never solo healed HM Revan's first floor, and I am relatively certain that it is actually numerically impossible (you would need to sustain over 8k effective HPS during the HK phase, which lasts about 90 seconds with good DPS). One of the things to keep in mind is that there is always a tension, with any mechanic, of where in the group you want to place the burden of that mechanic. Is there some complicated positioning you can use to reduce incoming damage? Great! But can you just heal through that damage and hence increase your DPS uptime? Different groups with different strengths will handle those things in different ways. One of the primary ways that DPS are challenged in this game is forcing them to deal with mechanics, notably positioning, within a hard time limit. Revan's Core burn is an excellent example of this, where you need to deal with the heartbeat and the aberrations while keeping your DPS high enough to beat the soft enrage. Imagine if, instead of knocking you off the platform, the aberrations just did a crudton of damage to any player who wasn't facing them directly. I can guarantee that the primary strat for dealing with the Core burn would be to just heal through that damage (as long as it didn't exceed ~60 stack HP). Would there be groups that killed it by doing the mechanic? Sure. But the world first clears would have come through just healing the damage. This is partially due to the skill gap between the world's best healers and those who are merely adequate, but it's also due to the difficulty of the other mechanics in the fight when held up in comparison to what you would be asking the healers to do. One shot mechanics not only serve as a level of difficult in and of themselves, but they magnify the difficulty of every other mechanic! This is their purpose. The reaches in NiM Dread Masters aren't really that hard… unless you're pushing hard to beat the second phase DPS check. Doom in NiM Dread Guard isn't really that problematic unless you're coming up tight against that third phase enrage. Dropping to the floor in NiM Raptus barely even qualifies as "trivial"… except for the extra damage you take as a consequence (pushing load to the healers) and the fact that it can take a healer out of the fight for a time. Heave isn't difficult to heal in HM Revan (even during the Core burn)… until you have to heal it while simultaneously managing the aberration facing. All mechanics accentuate each other, but one-shot mechanics provide an absolute baseline floor to a fight. They provide a mechanic that you can't "shift" to another area of your raid group. You're forced to deal with it, and thus they provide the literal structure that the rest of the difficulty builds upon. With 204 main hands, 10/10 can be three DPSed. Even pre-nerf and pre-204, Zorz came very close to 7 manning 10/10 (as in, they needed about 25k more damage total on the Core… they cleared 9/10 with no problem). Is that a problem of class design too? A good assassin tank can reduce their damage on almost any fight relative to a poor assassin tank (assuming both are baseline executing all mechanics) by 40-50%. Is that bad class design? Or is it just skill ceiling? Clearly there is a balance here. You don't want the best players in the world to be untouchable gods who can solo any content. But at the same time, you need every class and role to have room to improve and grow. Things to strive for. Challenges to achieve. This is very complex to achieve, and I think Bioware has struck a good balance. One-shot mechanics are an important part of that balance. You're talking about Nightmare Mode. This is already less than 1% of the playerbase. Most of the one-shot mechanics are confined to the hardest bosses of each tier, which shrink down to the 1% of the 1%. If you're going to talk about content which is definitionally restricted to that kind of world-leading subset (at least on tier), then you absolutely need to consider their skill ceiling.

No, it just means that healers have skill variance just like every other role. What you're proposing is literally equivalent to saying that the lowest skill healers should have the same output as the highest skill healers, which is another way of saying that there is no benefit to becoming more skilled in the role. For many, many people, that would make healing extremely boring. If there is no gap between the lowest skill healers and the highest skill healers, then the role is boring and stupid. If there is a gap (as there is today), then you fall back into the quandary regarding non-one-shot mechanics that I mentioned. My point is that, as a general rule, non-one-shot mechanics are often ignored by groups with good healers simply because it's easier. It doesn't matter if you make it more difficult to avoid the damage on the hypothetical non-one-shot reaches, because the point I was making is that groups with good healers wouldn't even try to avoid it! They would just group up (probably with a loose formation which avoids taking too much splash while enabling AoE healing) and HPS machine through the damage. Maybe you could prevent this by having the reaches apply a debuff which reduces damage dealt by some absurd level, but that's not a solution which is applicable everywhere. Also it leaves the healers free to turret if they want to, whereas right now EVERYONE has to move. This is the "reduce the gap between low- and high-skill healers" suggestion in disguise. I'm not trying to be elitist here, but that gap exists for a reason. It makes the game interesting because it gives players something to strive for, something to work on, and an avenue for improvement. You can't improve if "entry level" is the same as "max level". One shot mechanics are, as a general rule, used as a way to force movement and positioning. Movement and positioning add challenge to all roles, but most notably DPS. Think about Doom in Nightmare Dread Guard, where you have to give up a lot of DPS uptime in order to deal with the mechanic, which in turn makes the enrage that much more meaningful. The second phase of NiM Dread Guard was pretty easy to heal even pre-pre-nerf on tier, and I guarantee that every group that even sniffed the third phase would trade off almost any amount of extra second-phase damage for more DPS uptime. Movement mechanics are very important because they make the DPS's job more interesting than just dummy parsing, and to a lesser extent the same with tanks and healers (tanks already have significant movement mechanics, and healers can cheat in all cases). I think that if one-shot mechanics ever become more than just forcing movement/positioning/tanking (the third is exemplified by HM/NiM EC Kephess), then we probably have a problem. As it stands though, that's all they do, and they do that job far better than any form of damage or debuff mechanic could. Just look at how much people cheat with Master-Blaster's non-one-shot mechanics to see an example of this. Probably far less than 5% of the population. However, I can tell you straight up that the number of people who have cleared any Nightmare Mode bosses is probably less than 1% of the population, and the percentage of people who have cleared entire Nightmare Mode instances is less than 1% of that 1%. We're already in extremely exclusive territory. With the elimination of Nightmare Mode from future content, it's sort of an open question how much Bioware cares about that segment of the player base, but going on the hypothesis that they do care about skill floor/ceiling gaps, one-shot mechanics need to remain.

It's not as simple as that, unfortunately. It's basically impossible to implement a mechanic which challenges healers at the highest level of skill without being impossible for lower skill healers. Serious face here, there are healers in this game who can solo heal about 2/3rds of HM Revan (and I know another healer who is trying hardcore to solo heal the remaining third, though I doubt it's possible). I'm not the best healer in the game by any stretch of the imagination, and even I've done this! I've lost count of the healers in my guild who are capable of solo healing 7/10 HM. I've solo healed all of Master-Blaster without cheese except the soft enrage (which includes several non-one-shot mechanics specifically designed as heal checks). Imagine if the reaches phase of NiM Dread Masters were just a lot of damage and not an auto kill. I guarantee you that the most popular strat for the highest tier groups would be to just heal through the damage and burn the phase to an end as fast as possible. There isn't even a question. Because the reaches auto-kill, they take that option completely off the table and force the entire raid to execute. Basically, high skill healers make most of the "heal checks" look like a joke. So how do you make mechanics that are threatening for high skill healers and not impossible for lower skill (but still nightmare-tier) healers? The answer is that you can't. This is why one-shot mechanics exist. You want to force the group to deal with the mechanic and not just H2F. One-shot mechanics affect the highest and the lowest skill healers exactly equally. They scale perfectly, not only to skill but also to gear and class differences. So that's why they exist.

Revan: no one shots… in the first few seconds! Actually I take it back: the first one-shot happens before the second GCD if your tank pulls wrong. Impel is a one shot if you do it wrong. Trail and Heave aren't one shots, but if you handle them both incorrectly they will be. Falling off the lamp on the stairs will one shot you. The heartbeat will instantly kill anyone out of position once every 15 seconds. Failing the platforming Mario climb is a one shot for the player that fails, and shortly thereafter, for the entire raid. And then floor 3… Basically every mechanic auto kills you if you make a single mistake. Have fun!

Clearly I need to L2read… :-) I generally don't watch videos in forum threads, mostly because they're often enormously long (thank you, twitch streaming, for easy and ubiquitous multi-hour videos) and because they're often enormously long. Yours was worth watching though.

Nemesis has been one of the more stable guilds, to be sure. I actually wasn't sure what the current status was, since I hadn't seen many around and everyone seems to be raiding with Shadow Council these days, so I didn't list it in my first post. I thought of it before I thought of RHG or even Aisthesis for that listing though.

Commandos are very difficult to use to their maximum potential. You can play them at a "viable" level without that much trouble, but their skill floor is higher than the other two healers. At the absolute apex of play, they most certainly hold their own with the other two healers, and they fill a unique niche (burst healing) that the other two healers can't match even in the best hands, but it's not easy. Scoundrel healers have a much lower skill floor, and honestly probably the lowest of the three healers. The energy is a lot easier to manage than Commandos or Sages, the rotation is relatively formulaic, and due to the lower magnitude and lower cooldowns on most of your abilities, poor decision making has a lower impact than it does with sages or (especially) commandos. That's not to say that they're boring or "easy mode" healers in any sense of the words! Scoundrels have plenty of complex things they can juggle to achieve the absolute apex of performance, and their results are phenomenal in the right hands, but I believe they are the accessible healer by far. (I have pretty solid data to back this up, too, so it's not just a feeling) Sages are probably the strongest all-around healers at present. They have solid single-target and multi-target burst. Not as good as commandos, but still solid. They also have solid sustained healing and unparalleled versatility. They also have the best "sustained burst" of the three healers, due to their energy mechanic. They have a higher skill floor than most people give them credit for though. I think it's probably easier to get started with a Sage healer than a Commando, but it's just as hard to reach your ceiling as it is with a Commando. The results are outstanding, but not easy to achieve. In general, I would take a look at the three healers and see which one appeals to you more. Or roll all three and pick between them at level 60! Play the healer you like the most. You'll do better on a healer you enjoy than you would on a healer that you hate. Don't worry too much about the meta. If you're a good healer, you'll be in demand regardless of your class.

Generally speaking, the economy here is very strong to the point of actually being somewhat inflated. There is a somewhat smaller population (relatively speaking) of top-tier raiders and a much higher population (relatively) of flashpointers/RPers/casual-PvPers. No aspersions against that demographic at all, but the consequence of this is you have relatively more people doing dailies at a higher rate and spending their time on very economically-efficient activities (like RP, PvP and flashpoints). The result is that credits are introduced into the economy at a higher rate and taken out of the economy (via repair bills) at a much lower rate. So almost everything is more expensive here, simply because the player base as an average is richer because there is simply more money floating around. This means that, if you're a crafter, you can make hilarious amounts of money in short order on TEH. If you're not a crafter… uh, you might run into some trouble. You can make really good money off of Cartel Market resales, since people are always around to buy high-priced items (30-50 million credit sales really aren't that uncommon here). However, Cartel Market items are price fixed by Bioware (due to the various unlocks which can be had for either coins or credits), and so the prices aren't that different from other servers at release (it's just that old items climb to higher prices). If you're not a crafter or a cartel market reseller, you're going to find the economy here to be much more unfavorable, because you'll have to do more dailies on average than on other servers in order to maintain the same "quality of life" as you might be used to on other servers. Basically, TEH is like the Manhattan of servers. Everything is very expensive, but people also make a lot of money, so it sort of evens out when you live there. If you're coming in from the outside, there's a bit of sticker shock for a while. Aside from the economy… Guilds here come in both "unstable" and "amazingly stable" flavors. Republic Honor Guard has been here since launch, and remains strong today. They aren't the only remaining launch guild either. There are plenty of guilds spanning PvE, PvP and RP that have been around for years. Aisthesis was formed in July (maybe June?) of 2012, and we're still sitting at the guild cap with nearly a dozen progression raid groups. On the flip side though, there have been some very short-lived guilds. Some guilds have sprung up, cleared a few bosses or dominated ranked PvP for a while, then evaporated. Proper Villains is a good example here, in that they were dominant in PvE and very strong in PvP (together with Underworld Alliance) for the NiM DF/DP era after being significantly behind the curve previously (and non-existent prior to NiM TfB), and now they're gone. Based on what I know of other servers, I would actually say that guilds are on average much more stable on TEH than elsewhere, but we certainly have our share of "flash in the pan". TEH is certainly not worse than other servers in this area. People on this server are generally awesome. I mean, we have our share of trolls that have been better or worse at various stages in the game. As a whole though, you can ask anyone who has multi-servered: the players here are simply nicer than on basically any other server. As a general rule, the "skill level" of players here is probably somewhat lower than on other servers, at least as a rough average. We have some amazing players here, but the general average that you're going to hit (e.g. in a PuG group or a warzone) just isn't that high. You're not going to clear 8/10 HM with a PuG group, much less 9/10 or 10/10. However, you'll find that the group members are significantly more pleasant while you wipe! Ebon Hawk, where the people are nice and the pugs are derpy. It's a good server, in general.

If all health bars are at the same percentage (usually 100%), the droids go to the player who has done the most damage to Ruugar since the start of the phase. Note that this is damage not threat, since the latter would have made this very easy to deal with. This mechanic is made very annoying due to the fact that sorcs can burst very, VERY hard in their opener. So while a well-played merc is going to outrun them at least by the midpoint of the phase, a well-played lightning sorc is going to hold their lead for quite a while and at least will be top of the stack for the first few droids. It's very, very important that your healers allow someone else to be lower on the health table. If you have a sniper, treat them as if their health bar stops at 85% and make sure they're positioned more than 20 meters from the tanks (to avoid "bouncy" heals catching them by mistake). Mercs are the next best targets for the droids. Give your sorc highest heal priority (other than a tank who is just about to die) and be ready with your high burst heals between droids if they do catch them. Regarding stealth rezing in p2…* Pearl has a strange mechanic where she reaches out and manipulates the threat tables of specific people in the raid during Walkabout. It sucks, and it will pull you into combat unless you're lucky enough to not be one of those people (it's literally a coin flip in an 8 man group, since she's going to do it to three people guaranteed and none of them can be the main tank). Your best bet for stealth rezing, assuming your tank has eyes and is facing the bird appropriately, is immediately after the walkabout buff falls off. You can usually get two people in this interval, and if they chain rez, you're in a situation where you can get three people almost guaranteed, and more if depending on your luck with the walkabout coin toss. Things to keep in mind while stealth rezing: Healing someone (e.g. with a latent HoT) will pull you back into combat Dealing damage (e.g. with a latent DoT) will pull you back into combat Someone else healing you will NOT pull you back into combat Someone using a "bouncy" heal (Wandering Mend is the worst here, but Successive Treatment can also qualify sometimes) that hits you will pull you into combat Someone using Force Armor on you will generally pull you into combat If you're a shadow, someone else stepping into your Phase Walk will pull you into combat If your guard target takes damage or deals damage, you will be pulled back into combat AoEs will pull you into combat (duh) Bizarre, invisible, debuff-changing effects (like Walkabout) will often pull you into combat Applying raid buffs will generally pull you into combat, though not always New NPCs entering the fight will pull you into combat (note that many mechanics that don't look like NPCs are actually counted as such invisibly by the game) Dealing damage by reflect (basically, the Vanguard AoE taunt utility) will pull you back into combat Sometimes, the mere application of the reflect by your friendly neighborhood vanguard will pull you back into combat So obviously stealth rezing is somewhat about team coordination, very much about preparation, but mostly about fight knowledge. You need to know where in the fight you have a 6 second lull where no NPCs spawn, no AoEs go out and no invisible mechanics trigger (e.g. immediately following Walkabout). You need to prepare by having your HoTs down, your Guard off and your Phase Walk clicked off. Your team needs to coordinate by avoiding applying raid buffs or using bouncy heals. And of course, you need to have your out of combat rez on your bar, because nothing is worse than doing all of the above and then failing to click on the body on the ground. For the love of god, use the raid frame and click the power directly.

Looks all normal to me. Healers didn't complain of extra damage, and I didn't notice anything either. Logs at the end say 1420 DtPS (I was on Unit 1). I screwed up my stacks once or twice because I wasn't paying attention (also our bomb runner was slow twice). I also gave up on optimizing defensive CDs toward the end because I wanted to use them for damage to finish the fight. If I played optimally throughout, I probably would have had around 1350 DtPS, perhaps even 1300. Now, this is with completely BiS gear and a very experienced group, so your results may vary a bit. It doesn't seem like the fight is broken though.

If he was only doing 90-100k on the core, then no you would not. Remember, Bounty Hunters get Hydraulics in the base class! It's relatively reasonable to assume that they get the commensurate higher uptime during the burn phase. Other base classes would have lower Core damage, even though the other base classes have generally better baseline abilities. Even with four BHs, 400k damage isn't even a quarter of the damage that needs to be dealt by the DPS corps in an 8 man group. Even two AC-less players would probably be too much of a load (though I would be very impressed to be proven wrong). I mean, groups with sorc healers have gone above 100 stacks, which gives you quite a bit of leeway, but even if your other two DPS and your tanks are all Powertechs, I'm not sure that 100 stacks is enough time to negate the effect of two 100k damage dealers. You're talking about 700k damage on the core which needs to be picked up by the other two DPS and the tanks, and that's just… a lot. I guess maybe your tanks can take on another 100k a piece (it's relatively easy to pick up 50k) if they're really pro, which leaves 250k for each DPS. So you're talking about two DPS doing 700k+ to the core (each), two tanks doing 250k a piece, the healers getting about 70-80k each (maybe more, since it's a long burn), and then your two AC-less players doing 200k between them. I guess that's not impossible, it's just really bloody difficult.

Oh, sorry I don't remember patch dates. :-) I'll probably tank the boss tonight, and we run a scoundrel+commando healer pair. I'll report back if I see anything strange.

I actually thought through that for a while, and it's literally impossible. Not like, a significant challenge, but actually impossible. If no one has an advanced class, then you have no healers. You also have no taunts. You also have no healers. :-) The lack of cleanses alone would mean death within the first 30-40 seconds.

Hmm… I shadow tanked HM Walkers last week and didn't notice anything. I also solo healed it on my commando (with a shadow tank on unit 1) and everything seemed pretty normal. He took slightly higher DtPS than he should have, but he's less experienced on his shadow than his vanguard (and he had a very dirty left side). It certainly wasn't dramatic. It seems like the most plausible thing is that you're either experiencing a bit of lag (graphical or network), and just not reacting as fast to Rapid Fire and/or Ground Burst Missile.

:-) I didn't take offense at any of it. I've been called enough names on the forums over the years that it takes a fair bit now to get me truly upset. I think the discussion (re: relics) is very worthwhile, because the value of the Reactive Warding relic is counter-intuitive and probably always will be.

#outdamagedbytanks #revertunload #plzbuff :-D Welcome back! (I know you've been back for a while, but still, welcome)

Here's a random boss kill shot that shows my UI: http://s3.mmoguildsites.com/s3/gallery_images/839223/original.jpg?1436232406 The list of keybinds: 1 - Strike 2 - Thrash 3 - Assassinate 4 - Maul 5 - Wither Shift-F - Spike F - Overload Alt-1 - Shock Alt-2 - Depredating Volts Alt-3 - Electrocute Alt-4 - Discharge Alt-5 - Lacerate Alt-6 - Crushing Darkness (it's back on my bar, just not in this image) Shift-S - Force Slow Shift-Q - Adrenal Shift-B - Medpack G - Guard Shift-` - Deflection Shift-1 - Shroud Shift-2 - Force Speed Shift-3 - Dark Ward Shift-4 - Recklessness Shift-5 - Overcharge Saber Ctrl-1 - Single Taunt Ctrl-2 - AoE Taunt Ctrl-3 - Force Pull Ctrl-4 - Whirlwind Shift-W - Phase Walk X - Stealth Shift-X - Force Cloak ` - Interrupt T - Stun Break Shift-E - Stealth Mez E - Blackout I could have optimized these keybinds better, but the problem is that I've been playing with this keybind set for four years now, so I probably won't change even if other configurations are objectively better. :-)

Most FP issues as a tank are adds/trash related. Flashpoint adds hit a lot harder than the bosses, for the most part, and this is especially problematic as a shadow tank (since Kinetic Ward charges just… evaporate). Also, trash is simply harder to tank than bosses due to threat control challenges, outside of some very specific and weird bosses (nothing in a flashpoint). I mean, there's always a chance that your group is simply handling the boss mechanics wrong, but I would guess that you're getting pummeled by the adds and your healer isn't keeping up. Try to help them out with cooldowns and even control abilities (i.e. stuns) on the adds. Watch your positioning, and of course make sure that the adds are mauling your face rather than your healer's (or DPS's).

And I have! For progression where DPS is just really really tight and tank damage doesn't matter as much (e.g. NiM TfB Terror on tier, or HM Styrak on tier), I have been known to wear DPS relics and/or crystals. It does make a measurable difference in your DtPS, but it's not the end of the world. I want to reemphasize the point that you're radically overestimating the amount of damage that bosses do, and therefore overestimating the amount of damage that is absorbed by percentage mitigation like shield or defense. Absolute mitigation mechanisms like Reactive Warding, Shoulder Cannon (self-heal), Into the Fray (again self-heal), or the old-style assassin healing don't scale with incoming damage, and so at lower damage levels they absolutely outshine the relative mitigation mechanics. Reactive Warding doesn't seem like much, but it is actually contributing more to your mitigation than either of the other relics (in other words, it's better than the Fortunate Redoubt!). In fact, the Reactive Warding relic contributes more to your survivability than many of your other gear pieces (individually). Can you replace the Reactive Warding with the SA and still do things? Yes, absolutely. The difference is marginal; measurable, but marginal. Can you replace the Reactive Warding with a DPS relic and still do things? Yes, absolutely. The difference is more measurable and less marginal, but it's still small enough that you'll survive. It's just a question of how much you care about min-maxing. At the end of the day, a well-played tank with commendation gear will clear things that a poorly-played tank with perfectly optimized gear will fail at. Tank execution >>> tank gear. Also, healers >>>> tank execution, but that's a discussion for another day. One thing worth noting… A vanguard tank in my guild was recently working on Revan HM. He's cleared Revan before with an optimized Powertech tank, and he noted that his DtPS was almost exactly 100 higher than it should have been. The difference between his Powertech and his Vanguard? A Ruusan relic, a Resurrected Ear and Implant. That's it. Does 100 DtPS make a difference on Revan HM? Arguably no, not when everything is going as it should be, but if you're in a group that is still progressing towards a kill, everything isn't always as it should be. You want to give your group the best margins that you can. Little things add up into big things, and big things add up to wipes rather than kills. Min-maxing has an effect, as small as it may be, and it's worth spending the time to get it right. The Reactive Warding is BiS, and the comparison isn't even close. You don't have to use it, but if you don't you are consciously making the margins in your group just a little bit tighter for no reason other than personal taste in relics.