If you are testing 36 sec blocks, you need to do 10+ tests of each type, and then use the averages from that. Otherwise you are not getting the full picture as the RNG will skew your results greatly. Not to mention proper testing of cool down effects becomes more difficult also. THAT is why 5 min is the common benchmark for testing things. It's long enough that you can cycle through your cool downs several times and it's always equal for the different tests.

And stacking endurance augments is just a terrible use of the slot imo. Mitigation stats > endurance. As long as you are 35K+ HP you are fine. Hell you can really drop it down to 32K+ if your ops group heals well enough and you properly control the encounter. Stacking endurance augments to get closer to 40K HP is just going to make you a bigger waste of healer resources as you are eating that much more damage that you could of been mitigating. Stacking END augments causes you to lose 448 mitigation points. That's a huge amount. I'm stacking shield higher than defense, and a minimal amount of absorb. With stim I'm at ~21% Def. ~42% shield, and ~32 absorb. with over 50% energy/kin 19% int/ele armor DR and just over 35K HP. Still lacking 72 armor mods in most gear, so numbers will go up a bit more. I keep my Heat Blast absorb bonus up more than 50% of the time so I'm usually >60% absorb. I plan to bump my absorb up a bit more as I optimize my gear.

I dunno, but I had Mako kill something for 399689 the other day. Maybe she used her knife? :D http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/558722001482732766/D80CE65085B20B7363BC8BB757A1CE05659DF17D/

Again that's debatable. The DR curve is STILL harder on Defense than it is on Shield. PTs can boost their own absorb more with a more than 50% up time if played/geared right. That makes shield a viable stat to boost. With how hard they toned down shield, defense also needs to be kept up though and cannot be ignored.

I'm still gearing out, and no where near optimized yet. But I plan to swing the extremes heavy Shield - low Def, then heavy Def - low Shield. Parse both and see how they line up globally over a few runs. Get feed back from my healers etc etc. Then figure out what works best for me. With how bad they hammered down shield in 2.0, I expect a more balanced distribution to be optimal with a lean towards shield. I'm not a big number cruncher either, but my thinking is to take advantage out of the things we CAN do. With Heat Blast/Screen and Absorb proc relic we can keep our Absorb high most times. More damage types can be shielded than effected by defense. But to take advantage of that we need a higher shield level otherwise it's just not as effective. The 'point to %' curve for shield is STILL better than defense. It's just not as good as it used to be. That may be a fools task (me being the fool), but I just cannot get my head wrapped around the heavy defense stacking until I see it for my self.

Except you jumped into a rant in reply to his questions on survivability and threat saying there is no reason to take a PT, everyone is better, and spreading mis-information on shields DR curve. Hence your "tone" was commented on. I do agree with you that PTs do not have any edge over the other tanks, currently. Hopefully that will be addressed soon.... sigh...who am I kidding. We are likely SOL until the next big "revamp". But the differences are not so large that anyone should be shelving their PT unless they were a crap tank to begin with. For relics I think the current consensus is on-use shield+absorb relic, and absorb proc relic. See the last post in this thread for infoz.. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=567164&page=12 (odd, look how that supports my view of stacking shield ) Also keep in mind that high defense stack consensus was based on the damage types from NiM EC. Recalculations are going to apply soon for HM SnV data, so the numbers may skew a bit more, or remain the same for "optimal" mitigation.

Where I take issue is the tone that PTs are no longer viable, which is completely untrue. Just as before, when Juggs were "the worst" take of the 3, they were still completely viable. And lets be honest here, SWOTR raiding is NOT that difficult, even at the top end. In 2.0 any of the 3 tanks remain viable when properly geared. It is not as skewed as many people keep crying about. So keep raiding with your friends with the classes they enjoy playing. The "sky is falling" people are over reacting a bit. I've been following that thread you linked from the day it was posted. Great in concept, questionable in execution. I'll be playing with numbers on my tank for a while still to smooth out what works best with my healing crew. I expect it to skew slightly away from "the optimal" stats lists in that post. I'll mostly be stacking high Shield, and medium defense I expect. Stacking much absorb doesn't make sense for a PT though, as with heat screen/blat and relic proc you are sitting high in absorb more often than not anyways as those are flat % boosts And the DR curve is not that bad for shield. It's just that shield got nerfed down for everyone to try and make defense viable. You can no longer ignore defense and ONLY stack shield. See DR graph below. And formulas below that. http://i.imgur.com/3RX4AfY.png http://mmo-mechanics.com/swtor/forums/thread-1190.html

Every tank is taking more burst damage. My main is a PT and I alt an Op healer. I STILL prefer to heal PowerTechs as they seem to be smoother on incoming damage over the fight. Spikes hurt healer resource management the most, PTs are still the least spikey from what I have seen. On the tanking side, we had it really easy before. Now we need to rotate in the few cool downs we have to keep pace. Nothing wrong with that. I'm sitting around 32K HP, 16%D, 37% SC, and 33% ABS. and I find I am tanking just fine on bosses. Trash seems tougher than some of the bosses lol.. I plan to stack lots more shield, and a little more defense as with heat screen, heat blast, and relic proc, my ABS is getting boosted fine. I also am going to look at using a clicky shield/abs relic over an older static Defense boost just to rotate in and out with other cool downs and see how well it works. Just consider ALL of your cool down options and rotate them, even on trash pulls to make things easier on your healers. This is a new concept to many PT's, but the other tanks have ALWAYS had to do this. Oil Slick (60 sec cool down) Energy Shield (120 sec) Shoulder Cannon (90 sec) (fast dumped 20% heal is nice to assist the healers) Click Relics (120 seconds) Absorb Adrenals (180 sec) (see threads on Shield vs Armor versions) Rotating through all those options as able will greatly help your healers out. Almost every pull or tank swap you should have 1-2 of those abilities available for use in Ops, trash or boss. And if you don't there is usually another tank there to rotate with. Kolto Overload I save for boss fights, and only trigger it if I drop below 50% or I know the raid will likely take some large damage that the healers will have to heal everyone on. As for Threat every tank has to work harder on it with trash. Everyone is putting up bigger numbers, so we need to make sure we are on top of it. With tanks taking more damage, healers are having to put out more heals, so they are more likely to snap off you early. I personally have had very little problems adapting to this. But I also tend to run with guildmates on all content and I made sure they all understand the game mechanics. Tanks should always jump in first for Alpha threat. CC's land on any elites (golds) shortly after I engage. If there are a bunch of strongs (silvers) beating on me I'll pop a cool down, usually oil slick, to help lower the damage early in the fight before I take much damage to help keep the heals I need low. I rarely need to use my AE taunt, and if any mob loses interest in me it's usually only one mob that heads towards one of the heavy hitting DPS. And at that point it's about dead so I don't even worry about it. One of the biggest things for me when I run a PUG is proper DPS kill order. It's key to keeping incoming damage low, and to help you control the mobs. DPS should be killing small to big. Kill ranged / non-stacking mobs first as you can usually keep their attention long enough with some rapid shots and a single taunt, between your AEs on the stacked mobs, for the DPS to pop them down. Many times I've had to stop pulls in a PUG and explain what I wanted from the DPS, after that it was a breeze. And skip all Alacrity as a PT. It's not worth it. Hell, it's not worth it for most classes, but that's another debate.

All 3 tanks are Viable. Play what you like. Assassin gets the edge in some boss fights because of a higher passive elemental/internal resistance and some nifty cool downs, but they are damage-spikey as all hell if not played well. Powertechs are face roll tanks (my main class btw) Damn near a completely passive tank. Usually don't have to worry about cool down rotation or anything. I like this as it allows me to see what is going on, and control the field better to mitigate any DERP that are occurring. ( Gives me more time to see someone screwing up and yell at them in vent ) Juggs are good solid tanks too, hurt a bit on threat generation, but meh nothing major. All 3 tank classes are solid and viable for ANY content when properly geared. If some tank class looks to be sucking, it's the person playing it and not the class.

Check your log file, or upload it to a parser site and analyze it there. Last I looked, Grapple did like 2500 threat. while assassin force pull did around 5000. My numbers may be off, it's been a while since I looked.

Confirmed to still be an issue last night in NM KP. Killed the first boss, wiped on the 2nd, come back in and all the trash is up between bosses 1 and 2. Wipe again, and no respawned trash. Even their bugs are inconsistent.

I only use it when I need to to regen power faster and the power probe is on cool down. I got it channeling at about 1.7 seconds or so. It's fairly fast and not a huge issue to weave it into rotation of bigger heals/probes. I'm only in Columi geared items and I'm getting it to crit for all 3 ticks fairly often at 325 per. So that's just under 1K of free healing that brings back some power.

I'm stacking all green shield augments just for giggles to see if it has much impact. Only have like 4 or 5 parts augmented so far and sitting at 54.29% shield. Going to parse the effect on an Op or two. Then switch to all green defense, and parse that. See what helps me the most, then go purples on that as Neural Augments are too crazy expensive to test with. Un-augmented I was at 51.6 shield, 51.4 absorb. Relics, I'll stick with my Absorb proc. I might drop my shield/absorb click for a defense or something though.

Not so much a tanking guide as a general Power Tech guide. http://taugrim.com/2012/01/04/guide-to-bounty-hunter-powertech-trooper-vanguard-mechanics-and-pvp/ The only "wrong" thing he has listed for the tanking is stat priority. Shield and Absorb > Endurance > Aim > * is the way it should be for a starting PT. Once you get really good gear you will start to look at defense and other stats. Leveling up the gear will flip stats around on you every tier. So no point to focus on much util you get to 50. Accuracy is a useless stat for PT tanks (imo) as it only effects 3 abilities, only two of which generate heat, and only one of which you will actually use often. (Rail Shot) With 1.3 linking some of our AE threat to Rail Shot, it has become more important, but I still wouldn't bother with Accuracy. The only thing not really covered in the link above is Taunts. Use the single taunt, and user it often. Even if you are top threat, you still get a 110%-130% boost on your aggro. Save the AE taunt for the "oh ****" moments, or when you need to snap some things back to you and single taunt is on cool down.

While heat blast doesn't do crazy damage. It's off the GCD. It's bonus damage that also helps control your heat. Would it be nice to do more damage? sure! Is it needed? Not at all (even less so now with 1.3 for PvE tanking) If you were struggling with aggro in 1.2, 1.3 should fix it for you. But I suggest that if you were struggling with 1.2, you learn how to get a proper skill rotation going and learn how Taunts work. Outside the first 10 seconds of a fight I never lose aggro unless there is a mechanic involved where I am supposed to. 1.3 should be even more easy mode aggro. TL : DR L2P Heat Blast is fine, and if have 30 points in Shield tree, get it for one point. No use for PvE? Do you even tank in this game? Distance closing, jump in and AE before everyone else does. With 1.3, it will be even more useful as an opener. Again. L2P. Oil Slick is a great PvE tool (PvP also vs some classes). Almost all mobs in PvE are effected by it if they are in range when you drop it. Every 60 seconds you get hit 20% less. The reason Juggs and Sorc get different options is because they tanjk differently and NEED those skills to even be comparable. Oil Slick is a great tool. More L2P. As a fairly well geared Power Tech tank, I too say you are wrong.