Interesting discussion, this is my dribble to keep this bumped: Spike damage is usually meant to be a "tank-buster" type effect to put healers and their resource pools under pressure. I think all tank classes should be able to avoid these kinds of attacks equally, or they should all be equally vulnerable to them. I'm not speaking from firsthand experience, as I only ever played PT tank and Jugg through launch until 4.0. Historically, assassins were often considered the most vulnerable to spike damage, so it's funny to see how things have changed over time.

Discounting real world balance, I really like these ideas to improve the spec flavour and fantasy of the BH/VG. 10m range on missiles would look a bit awkward though

Agreed. Good content that nobody is playing.

I feel that removing ultimates from boss drops in SM ops was a good change. It creates a clear gear progression path and places a greater emphasis on tokens. The rewards should reflect the gear needed to progress to the next tier, with ultimates giving you a sample of the gear from the next tier up. Commendations should be a carrot on a stick for the next tier, and allow you to fill in the gaps with temporary upgrades. This also keeps gear inflation down, and reduces the amount of double xp Kuat Drive yard ultimate comm heroes. The devs should rebalance some specific SM Ops bosses (regardless as to how people may feel about making SM easier, the last boss should at least be the hardest, not the easiest). HM flashpoints are a waste of time, and are far too hard for the target audience.

If you're using the Defence discipline, at level 20 you get "Lunge", which returns Riposte to how it used to be.

@Methoxa I know that we can measure spikiness, but is it possible to determine for sure whether a healer can tell the difference, and then be able to reliably attribute that difference to the change in stats? Ignoring boss damage and tank stat profile mismatches, can we determine whether a reduction in spikiness is perceptible enough to outweigh the increase in DTPS?

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=796919 A bit of back and forth here about an alternate way of gearing tanks. However, It's not directed specifically at reducing spikiness from what I can tell. One argument that sticks in my mind against gearing for shield to reduce spikiness, is that it's difficult to know for sure whether a healer would notice the difference between a mean mitigation build and a low spikiness build. I'm not certain if anyone has performed a double blind test, but many jugg tanks from progression guilds do use shield augments.

Yea it means the threat reduction and damage reduction that intercede applies on the friendly target is increased by 10% (threat reduction increased by 10%, damage reduction increased by 10%). Certainly not the only tooltip that is confusing.

Taunt generates very little threat early in the fight. Taunting immediately after crushing blow gives you about 1500 more threat than if you were to lead with taunt. For comparison, a single vicious slash is about 3500 threat. With the set bonus you can lock in the boss's attention from the start, and for enough time afterwards while you generate threat as normal. This allows dps to pre-cast and even initiate the fight, getting in some more dps.

The threat reduction would do nothing for a healer, spawning and untouched enemies would still go after the healer with a guard.

It could make sense to do that as part of a larger update that would revamp the classic planets. Streamlined quest layout (turning in more missions with holocom etc), an art pass (makeb water effects on all planets!) and a polish pass on cut-scenes. I would love to see them go back and polish up the older content.

I have mixed feelings about the new retaliation, and I don't mind the increased rage income in tank downtime but my main gripe is with aegis assault: Yep, it feels degenerate using our rage builder on cooldown.

The game isn't hard enough to demand the use of Treek or HK, so I don't see a problem. Play with whatever companion you like.

Most non-tank specs have far less than 10% defence/resist already, It would still be countered by cooldowns that bring players above normal levels of defence/resist, which is all the 3.0 change to taunts is meant to accomplish anyway.

/signed. Remove accuracy rating from gear and give everyone the tank treatment (10% flat accuracy boost, lower dps). Accuracy would still exist, just not on gear. One drawback is that WoW has more tertiary stats to choose from. It would be ideal if they replaced accuracy with another more interesting stat like multistrike.

Fair point. Losing the interactivity, even if it's sometimes an illusion is the main downside of this approach. I'm not one to space bar through dialogue, but I find sitting through awkward stitched together cut-scenes with talking heads tedious, especially when it's an inconsequential side quest. Maybe we could still have the dialogue wheel, but not pull the player into the cinematic camera.

As the side quests used to be implemented, they were mainly stitched together using stock vo class responses, with maybe 1 unique response per dialogue choice. All they have done is removed the cinematic camera and made the interaction between your character and the quest giver into ambient banter. It's a streamlining of side quests, and I personally think it improves the flow of game-play by not pulling you into the cinematic camera so often. I actually hope they go back and give the 1-50 planets a scrub over using this new approach. It also gives a greater emphasis to the class and planet quest arcs. As for daily quests, they really should put those onto a quest terminal once you've completed the quest from the npc at least once.

Aegis Assault putting up the damage reduction buff is all kinds of wrong. You get cornered into situations where you're rage capped and have to use it just to refresh the buff, which feels incredibly wasteful. A rage generator should just be there to generate rage, being dependant on it to refresh a rolling damage reduction buff defeats the purpose of it being an on demand rage generator.

No armor debuff to worry about, you can order your abilities by threat and then fall into keeping your Aegis Assault and Retaliation buffs up. With Retaliation on the gcd and our damage reduction buffs tied to our rage generator, you really have the watch your buffs, as they can easily drop off by pushing back aegis and ret with harder hitting abilities. This is going to mean you'll be constantly flooded with more rage than you can spend.

The combat system in swtor has the 1.5 gcd in its dna, it's a fundamental part of the combat system. The devs have even moved away from the idea of off-gcd attacks with the most recent patch. Combat in swtor has a rhythmic pace, and once you get used to it it's very hard adjusting to games which don't use it. They tend to feel spammy and chaotic in comparison. Still, I find the gcd limitation can break the flow of combat on some abilities. For example gap closing skills like force charge feel awkward with a gcd, as you'll often land and have to wait before you can use an ability, which can be the difference between the healer eating a ranged attack from a few enemies during that very short delay. If you're quick you can run straight into a group of mobs and use smash, which completely avoids this issue, as you're spending your first gcd on AoE damage instead of a gap closer. Also being a guardian, you will often leap into a pack and be immediately punted away and slowed, which can be avoided by not opening with force charge (frustratingly counter-intuitive).

I'm not particularly happy with the reasons either. Ideally all warriors should get force grip and immortals should get something else.

David went over this during the livestream http://www.twitch.tv/swtor/c/5542132 They wanted to keep the channel for flavour reasons, as it's rather iconic. He also mentioned that they will probably give immortal something better for the force grip talent at some point.

They also removed the rage cost of it completely for immortal, so they should make it cost rage again if they took it back off the gcd, otherwise it would be a completely brain dead ability with no consequence.

Some tick boxes across the top of the ability pane for filtering would be great. Filter out passive abilities, show only discipline abilities, show all abilities etc.

Extra flavour.