Don't know if I've ever seen the skill trees for that build. Care to share what you're using?

Ya, confused me at first too. One of those bugs that BW hasn't squashed yet.

General thought: Defense is always going to be better than Shield and/or Absorption. When you "defend" an attack (technically, deflect/resist/etc.), you take zero damage. A shielded attack is still going to do some damage, in fact is still going to do most of its damage. No comparison. ON TOP OF THAT, I am pretty sure if the attack launched at you is a DoT, then the damage reduction from getting shielded only applies to the initial damage, not to the individual DoT components. Which means if it is an attack where nearly all the damage is via dots, then even if you shield the attack, it is doing virtually 100% of its normal damage to you. ON TOP OF THAT, if it is an attack that also places some sort of debuff on you, avoiding the attack completely (via Defense rating) means you avoid getting debuffed. Whereas if that attack is shielded, you may suffer less damage, but whatever negative debuff the attack places on the target is still going to be on you. End result: as a tanking Shadow, I am always going to take Defense over either Shield or Absorption. EDIT: I probably should add, obviously at some point diminishing returns starts to kick in and modifies the situation. At least in theory. I'm just not sure you can build levels high enough where it makes a significant impact, at least before hitting decked-out-endgame levels of gear.

Here's another vote for Shadow being more complex (higher learning curve) than Sage. Just the reality that Shadows are a melee/ranged hybrid class lends a level of complexity. You have a whole group of melee skills (4m range), a whole group of "shorter" ranged skills (10m range), and the a few "long range" skills (30m range). So there is a lot of positional adjustments during fights in order to make most effective use of these various ranges of skills. But a Sage, it is much simpler: engage an enemy from as far away as possible and try to nuke them down before they can get to you. (Maybe a slight oversimplification...but really, not that far off.) I have a Shadow that just dinged 50 and I love it, by far my favorite class in the game...but the learning curve isn't the easiest.

Ok that helps. Just a follow-up question, when you say "burn through the shield," you mean keep attacking the boss like you normally would, even though your attacks keep saying "absorb... absorb... absorb" and aren't physically doing damage to him? That the shield has a certain "hidden" amount of damage it can take, after which it is destroyed?

Hi all, Ran False Emperor last night (normal mode). Was a first time through for all 4 of us in the party, and most of us were pretty poorly geared, but after more than a few wipes we finally beat the whole thing. Looking back on it, the most confusing fight was Jindo Krey. It was never clear to me whether using the turrets was desirable...yes the ships lob missiles, but the missiles seem to damage the boss also so isn't that a good thing? Also, at some point the boss got this blue shield around him and was immune to damage. Is there some trick to dropping that? It eventually went off and we killed the boss, but even now I have no idea if it was a timed thing, or if there was some trigger that causes it to drop that we triggered without even realizing it, or what. Anyone know? Thanks in advance.

Gets you 2 extra attacks. That's it. Maybe, and I mean MAYBE, that would make a difference if you were a pure Infiltration spec and simply looking for a slightly longer period of burst as an opening in 1v1 PvP or something like that. But other than that, I don't know how much benefit you are really looking at. I don't know enough about Infil Shadows to say. What I do know at least a little about is Kinetic Combat Shadows. So let's analyze it from their perspective: Your base Force pool is 100. You regen at a rate of 10.4 Force/second (base of 8/s supplemented 30% due to 3/3 One with the Force), or 624/minute. Assuming you are getting constantly attacked and thus pretty regularly shielding, parrying, or deflecting attacks, that is an additional 2 Force/second thanks to 2/2 Double-Bladed Saber Mastery, or another 120 Force/minute. So let's say you are in a 5 minute boss fight. And due to bosses being kinda tough, let's take the assumption you are only shielding/deflecting one attack every-other-second. So over 5 minutes your Force is: * 100 initial pool * 624/minute from regen, or 3120 Force * 60 Force/minute from shields/deflects, or 300 Force. So over the 5 minutes, you have access to a total of 3520 Force. With the 4-piece set bonus you describe, you would instead have a total of... 3570 Force. So that's your big bonus... 3570 vs. 3520. Answer, at least for a tank in a PvE (group) environment: no, not worth it.

On a side note, assuming you are level 50 (which I suppose someone asking about hard modes is), you can pretty easily solo almost every normal mode FP in the game. I know as a level 46 player I solo'd up through Taral V without much problem. Struggled a bit with Maelstrom so dropped it, but am pretty sure as a lvl 50 that one would be no problem either. Collocoid might not be possible solo due to the turret encounters. Not sure. So that would leave only Red Reaper and Directive 7.

XP for any quests (regular, heroic, bonus, pvp, space, you name it) is based on the level of the quest as compared to your level. If you are doing quests that are rated "at" your level (or higher), you will get the full quest XP. As you start doing quests that are below your level, the amount of XP you get drops. Every quest in your quest tracker has the level rating listed next to it. Also, these ratings are color-coded: red are above you, yellow are (roughly) "at level," green are several levels below you, and grey are many levels below you. Once quests are grey to you, you will only get 5 XP for finishing them (so essentially worthless). Note that credits or other gear rewards for completing quests don't change. If a lvl 20 quest gives 500 credits reward, then you will get 500 credits from it whether you are a lvl 20 player or a level 50 player. But a level 20 player doing that quest might get 2,000 XP while a level 50 (or heck, for that matter, probably anyone level 25+) is going to get 5 XP.

Are you asking the question about right now... or about 6 months or a year or two years from now? (Honest question.) If there is one thing that BW has already indicated pretty strongly over these first couple of months of SWTOR, it's that professions that are seen as overpowered are going to be nerfed, and professions that are seen as underpowered are going to be buffed. Right now for a lvl 50 Investigation might seem underpowered. My guess is that at some point down the road, that will no longer be the case. And when that day comes, are you going to be fine with the fact you dropped it in order to pick whatever flavor-of-the-month you think is overpowered right now?

No doubt tanking Shadows are beasts currently. Never specced Infiltration so I can't comment on that. I am sure Infil still does more damage, but IMO KC Shadows do pretty obscene amounts of damage right now given their defensive abilities. Now, regarding talent points..it partially depends on what you want to do. The first 12-14 points should be put into KC no matter what. You want to build up to get Particular Acceleration (KC tier 3) as soon as possible, as well as (in the same tier) either Kinetic Ward (if you PvE exclusively) or Mind Over Matter (if you PvP exclusively), or both (if you do both PvE and PvP). So you will be level 22-24 or so. Once you've reached that point, then comes your time of decision. At this point, if you feel you want to increase your DPS (and mostly especially your burst DPS), sink your next 8 points into the Balance tree in order to build up to 3/3 Upheaval. For a tanking Shadow in the early/mid part of his career, PA-procced Projects, especially with a 2nd rock from Upheaval (and the bonus damage from Force Potency) is by far our biggest burst damage source. If you go this route, you may or may not want to put in the 2 more points into Psychokinesis-personally I think you have better options, but others might disagree. ON THE OTHER HAND, if you hit that lvl 22-24 range and decide your priority is sustaining DPS over long fights (which you need more Force tools to do) and/or improving your defenses, then it is best to keep adding points into KC instead. One with the Force (KC tier 4) makes such a huge difference in keeping your Force levels high over a long fight. Impact control provides a little defense. And that gets you to tier 5, which has what I call the "big 3" tanking talents of Bombardment, Stasis, and Force Pull. All 3 are just hugely helpful in PvE. Bombardment is maybe less so in PvP (though still great when combined with Particle Acceleration). Stasis has its greatest value after you are lvl 42 and can learn the Spinning Kick ability, but just the 20% extra armor provides big benefits in PvE immediately whether you are solo or group tanking. Force Pull is just hugely useful all the time, everywhere. So if you haven't already put your Balance points in before now, this would be another option to add them, after getting the big 3. Then again, Harnassed Shadows (tier 6) and Slow time (capstone) are awesome skills too. In the end, again it depends on what you want to do. If your shadow is mostly going to be a PvE tank, especially doing a lot of group stuff, I would suggest your first 31 points all go into KC. If your concern is mostly soloing or PvP, then there might be stronger arguments for interrupting your KC point allotment in order to get those points in Balance.

Interesting build. Seems like it sacrifices some of the straight DPS of a more traditional Balance build in order to gain mostly the Force regen benefits found in the first few tiers of the Infiltration tree. Seems like a pretty viable build to me. How does it play?

When can we expect there to be gear and/or other perks (titles, etc.) for playing as a completely "grey" (neutral) character? I don't mean lowbie stuff, but I mean someone who is level 50 and has ~ 5000 LS and ~ 5000 DS points?

As a Jedi Shadow (tank specced), the two classes that give me the most trouble: 1. Jedi Sentinels (or DPS Guardians) who don't wait for me to aggro a pack of mobs but go leaping in ahead of me, pulling all the aggro and (sometimes) ending up dead. 2. Troopers who don't wait for me to aggro a pack of mobs but open up a fight with a Mortar Volley, thus pulling all the aggro and (sometimes) ending up dead.

Yep, I hadn't considered that but it is definitely true. Again something I hadn't considered but also very true. Ahh yes, because each of the two blows has a chance to proc the effect, right? Which also means that, by extension, lowers still more if you are in a fight where you are using Whirling Blow a lot (which, honestly, very rarely happens for most of us). All three are good points. The third doesn't detract from the initial conclusion, especially since the first two support it even more. I think we can basically all agree that Rapid Recovery is still worth the points, even if the effect isn't entirely overwhelming.

Someone else raised this question recently but the thread got pissy so I figured I would try to frame the discussion in a more civilized manner. The following analysis is for Shadow tanks only, specced using the standard PvE 31/0/10 spec. With the changes to the way Combat Technique works in the latest patch, i.e. reducing how often it can proc (but doing more healing when it does), what does the math say about how useful Rapid Recovery is now with the new changes? Base value, CT gives a 50% chance on every attack to heal you and do some extra damage. Cannot occur more often than once every 4.5 seconds. Rapid recovery (2/2 points) increases this from 50% chance to a 65% chance. But the limitation (once every 4.5s) remains. So assuming you get 3 attacks off every 4.5 seconds, in its base state, CT should pop 87.5% of the time. If you invest 2 talent points into Rapid Recovery, CT should pop roughly 96% of the time. So that translates to a difference of 1 extra CT proc every 45 seconds of fighting (give or take). So on a per-minute basis, that averages out (at level 50) to approximately an extra 300 damage per minute (the CT damage component) and an extra 618 healing per minute (the CT healing component). Now, let's compare that to some other options for those 2 points. Let's say you put those 2 points into Expertise, figuring it would give you a small (but consistent) increase in your damage. How much damage? With one CT proc every 4.5 seconds, that's 13.3333 procs per minute. Each CT does 229 internal damage, or 3053 damage per minute. A 6% bonus to that is a whopping... 183 more damage per minute. So even on a pure damage basis, ignoring the healing part of CT entirely, you get more bonus damage per minute from 2/2 in Rapid Recovery than you do from putting those 2 talent points into Expertise. The only thing the Expertise gives you is damage that is more consistent (less spikey), which could be better or worse depending upon what you are looking for. Okay, so other than Expertise, what are your other options? Well you could put those 2 points into Mental Fortitude to increase your endurance. I'm not sure what kind of endurance numbers endgame-geared shadow tanks have, I know my lvl 48 (with ok but not great) gear has a little over 1000 endurance so I'll project a bit and let's say a lvl 50 shadow averages maybe 1200 endurance. A 2% bonus to that is an extra 24 endurance, or in other words, 240 health. Again, compared to an increased self-healing of an extra ~ 600 healing-per-minute, a baseline increase of 240 seems very underwhelming in comparison. In conclusion, even with the changes to the way Combat Technique procs work, Rapid Recovery is still a must-have skill that provides more bang-for-the buck for those two talent points than really any of the other options a Shadow Tank might consider as alternatives. I would welcome any discussion of this if people have other ideas.

Interesting build. Not all that different from the standard PvE 31/0/10 build. What most jumps out at me is the lack of points in Impact Control, with those points in Expertise instead. Do you find that small amount of extra damage serves you better than an instant 10% heal from Battle Readiness? Granted 10% isn't a lot, but then again, 6% damage added to the CT damage (which itself is pretty miniscule) seems even less beneficial, at least at first glance. I would think a 10% self-heal might be enough to keep you alive long enough for a healer to be able to land a heal on you. Dunno. Open to hearing your thoughts on that.

If you can get up to 31 points in the KC tree, then between Project and Slow Time you will be building full stacks every 10-12 seconds.

I realize this thread is now a couple of days old, but I wanted to ask a question about this piece of advice. I was under the impression that, while you CAN crouch in place with your little laser shield thingy, that you get more defensive help (damage reduction) when you are crouched behind environmental barriers. Is that not true?

My assessment of the consular story: Act I - pretty godaweful boring Act II - starting to get me increasingly interested Act III - completely engrossed and fascinated by it As always, YMMV, but that's my $0.02.

I'm sorry, I just had to LOL to this to myself... "WAAAAY back in 1999." I remember when 1999 seemed to far into the future you almost couldn't think about it. OMG...I am just...OLD!

1. Are you running in Force Technique? Or are you a Shadow running on Combat (or Shadow) Technique? 2. Are you melee attacking mobs that are currently ticking with a Force Breach DoT effect? As of yesterday, both #1 and #2 have to be true in order to get the Force Strike proc. Neither of those things had to be true before.

As someone who recently (i.e. last night) specced OUT of the 23/0/18 approach in order to try the 31/0/10, I understand where you are coming from. Back in beta the devs said that they "hoped" to add dual-speccing "soon after launch." Presuming they haven't changed their minds on that, once they put it in the game my other spec is definitely going to be a full-Balance shadow. I've never played around with that build but it sure looks like it is a lot of fun.

Yes, very viable. Now whether it is better than 31/0/10 as a solo spec is certainly a debatable point. In general people running a 27/0/14 are doing that in order to hold on to FiB in the Balance tree. But as a PvE soloing spec, there aren't all that many scenarios where you need that 30m range on FiB. And while it is a skill that does nice damage, it is not all that overpowering in its damage. With the 31/0/10 spec you lose FiB, but you gain slow time (which hits each target for less than FiB, but hits more targets and so if you are in a pack of mobs it is actually going to do more overall damage than FiB does), puts a 5% damage debuff on all the mobs (helps your survivability), and most important of all, gives a 100% chance to add a stack of Harnessed Shadows. And the skill has a relatively low Force cost and only a 7.5s cooldown. Which means in a 10s period, you can fire off 2 Slow Time's and have 2 other global cooldowns in between to use double strike. Presuming either of those proc HS, that means essentially every 10 seconds or so you now have a Tel Throw with 3 stacks of HS, which means it is doing massive damage (the most of any skill you have) and is healing you for a pretty decent amount. Sure you can build stacks of HS using only Projects in a 27/0/14 build, but is going to take you way longer to do it, and is going to cost you WAY more Force to do it. So while 27/0/14 is certainly viable, I think you lose more than you gain with that build as compared to the full 31/0/10 build.

Though not yet level 50 (dinged 48 tonight), I had been playing my Shadow building up to the 23/0/18 build. I switched to the full tank mode tonight (so currently 31/0/8) and I have to say, at least from the standpoint of being in a group...it is pretty incredible. * open with ST (start your "timer" now, so t=0) * use a DS (t = 1.5s) * if you get a PA proc, use Project (t = 3.0s) * if your first DS didn't proc PA, use another (if it did, insert any skill you want here) (t = 4.5s) * if your second DS procs PA, use Project (t = 6.0) (if it did, then again, use whatever) * use a second ST (t = 7.5s) * you now have 3 stacks of HS, so use Tele Throw (t = 9.0s plus channeling time) So basically it is pretty easy, in a time span of under 10 seconds, to have your 3 stacks of HS and be ready to use your TT, which now hits like a truck and is also healing you. For a bunch. I wasn't sure how I would like it, but after running one flashpoint as a main tank using this, I will never go back. I honestly feel "overpowered" with this build now. Haven't tried it soloing, so I can definitely see missing FiB more there...but still, I think the extra damage on the Tel Throws and the self-healing from them is going to more than makeup for any loss of DPS from losing FiB.