Kitru's point about the healing is that not all of the healing is being provided by the healers. Your self healing gets added into that figure, which is part of your 'mitigation profile.' In short, some of the mitigation is not in preventing damage, but rather in recovering from said damage after the fact. The way the class is designed, self healing is considered a mitigation, and thus contributes to the mean mitigation. In addition, you are expected to take more damage, part of which is offset by self heals after the fact, so you expect to see 2 things based on the design of the class. Firstly, more damage. Secondly, more healing, but in the end the two should still be equivalent just as they would be with any other tank. The big part of where the difference sets in for shadows is that due to their spikiness, healers have to routinely overheal to ensure you are always topped off before the next big spike. That is a legitimate problem.

I will speak for the silent. Pre 2.0 at end game PvP, my recruit gear was grossly inadequate. War Hero geared people steam rolled me. I didn't whine. I didn't suck it up and grind for 'a week, 2 tops.' I quit. That's it. I silently quit trying. If that is the mark of a system that is working as intended, then it was poorly designed. Granted that I'm not great, but not terrible. With the game as it is now, I win more fights than I lose, so there was more to the issue than "learn to play." Bolster drops queue times for warzones, and that is good for everybody, right?

I use HK both as a healing Sorc and a healing Scoundrel. He is well worth it. Just be sure that if you disable his aggro dump. It is better if the mob hits HK than you. I am still leveling my sorc, but when I leveled my scoundrel, HK was hands down the best option I had. Great DPS AND the same DR as any of the 'tank' options. He even holds aggro better than they do on single targets. Add in Assassinate (automatically kills a silver and lower mob) and the scale tips in his favor without question.

I second this. In my opinion, self heals are unreliable due to stuns, knockbacks, and interrupts. Mitigation for the win. Self heals should be a pretty minor part of our 'mitigation.' Especially in light of the fact that you can't heal if you are dead.

I'm glad it is being investigated and that we know they are aware of the concern. I pray the 'investigation' is done quickly and that we get a fix on the way soon. I love my Shadow. I don't want him to retire. Hopefully they won't be giving a timeline because we're up for a hotfix? 2.3? Please not 2.4. If it is that long, my shadow will be retired.

For a gunslinger, I'd say Sharpshooter for pretty much whatever. The sustained damage is good, the burst is unrivaled. You defensive attributes are the best of all of the trees in the class. I've heard that Dirty Fighting parses slightly higher on sustained, but PvP is all about the burst. If it takes more than 10 seconds to kill somebody, you've already lost.

The reason I'd rather see it done that way isn't because it falls off too soon. Rather, it is the variability of Bulwark that is my perceived problem. Sometimes you have no stacks, sometimes you have 8 stacks, and a tank of any skill level has no control over where in that range it stands at any given moment.

I might agree with you, Hak, except that reliance on those variable abilities exacerbate our squishy, spikey nature. At the peril of 'dumbing down' the class, I think I'd rather see a static 20% shield boost and a flat 4% higher Absorb chance, at the very least. Still spikier than a flat 1-2% DR buff, but also slightly less variable.

I have already made the mistake, but the answer is maybe. I did end up overcompensating for Defense slightly (I have 1060 Defense with a 1970 budget), so the remaining slots will all be Absorb. I think Shield is a nonissue since it is on absolutely every piece of gear you will ever use.

Done. On an tangentially related note, will I be using the Veracity pieces long enough to be worth augmenting them or will I be replacing them in the same tier I'm working on now? Thanks for the help.

Roughly half augmented. I haven't augmented the slots that I expect to replace, such as implants, relay, and relics. All of my augments so far are Redoubt.

I was gearing my Guardian. She is in a mix of 66 and 69 gear. Her enhancements are pretty well optimized with crafted 66 purples (stacking mostly defense). She has no set bonus, since her equipment is mostly from HM FPs and crafted 66s. Below are the stats she has. HP 30600 DR 45.3 Defense 19.5 Shield 36.54 Absorb 22.37 Relic slots are: Arkanian Relic of Fortunate Redoubt, Battlemaster Relic of Imperiling Serenity Is she ready for HM Ops, and if not, what needs to be improved?

I hope it doesn't fall on deaf ears. Nowadays, when I look at my shadow, shake my head, and play another toon. I can't stand to so much as log in as my shadow anymore for end game PvE content. I just don't want to deal with it. Shadow is by far my favorite class, so it is disheartening to see it this way, but I do. I can't help it. On the flip side, my Guardian and Sage have been getting out more.

I haven't tested this, but I would expect that you would benefit from maxing the rating of your main/off hands, even at the expense of 100 points of expertise. This would be done by replacing the hilt/barrel/armoring in those two slots only. I make no representation of warranty on this claim, but to the avid PvPer, it justifies a trial.

The short version is Kinetic Combat (36/6/4). Your rotation is basically to spam Project and Slow time so you can get stacks of Harnessed Shadows as fast as possible. Besides that, be sure to apply Breach periodically so that the mob stays debuffed. Try to keep 100% up-time on Kinetic Ward. The rest is reactive.

Good luck. I hope to see a report on how it goes.

The biggest thing I have against this whole thing is the disturbing idea that nobody among the devs and internal QA play tanking shadows. I wonder if they play a shadow at all. The shadow tank's spikiness isn't exactly a secret. If they are testing the 55 FPs and ops, it should have been painfully obvious.

I think that largely depends on which tree you are in. Early on, as an infiltration you'll want Qyzen for taunts. After all, it is hard to backstab if you are tanking. Balance will favor Tharan. Infiltration will too, once it gets Low Slash, but that is around 30 or so, I think.

It isn't coming out. Ever. They'll just make unhooded adaptables and post them on the Cartel Market and/or roll packs. End of story. Have a nice day.

Sages are high performers all around, in my opinion, especially in end game. They are sort of 'slow and steady' healers, and they have the best AoE heals in the game.

Thanks for the feedback, Kitru. Those things had crossed my mind as being concerns, too. As you said, tweaking the self heals is a fine way to balance the slightly over-tuned mitigation. In the case of the second problem, the Force regen, while I had considered it, I failed to recognize it as a problem. The reason is because as a Shadow Tank, I am pretty much never Force starved, so the implications of having too much regeneration are minimal given that it already has practically no affect on my game play. Assuming the above is correct, the Devs (with all due respect) have a responsibility to find something to fix this problem. This is a simple hotfix type of fix and "we just don't want to" isn't going to make many people happy, and giving us access to Masked Assault is a better fix than simply giving us a talent that boosts our armor rating all of the time.

I would still like to discuss how moving Masked Assault into Tier 2 would affect things. I haven't seen any feedback, good or bad, since I mentioned it.

If you are doing well as Balance but not as Kinetic, then it seems to me that your biggest issue is either your play style, or that you didn't equip a shield generator when you went into Combat Technique stance. Kinetic is a solid tree from start to finish, but most especially from level 14+ (when you get Combat Technique). You should all but invincible with Tharan at your side.

Tharan is not in any way a DPS character. He is a healer, and nothing but. Back in they day, I leveled a shadow and life was good as a Kinetic spec with Tharan at my side. Of course, that was before the shadow's armor was doubly nerfed, so I can't really say much on that note, I'm afraid.

As an avid roleplayer and a preorder subscriber, I can testify to the frustration of lost names. A simple fix is to do like some other games have done and make names unique to the account, using the @username as an identifier to differentiate like named characters. One of the greatest selling points for a preorder, in my case at least, was early access. Frankly, the point of this wasn't to be level 20 on the first day of official release. It was to reserve the names I wanted for my characters, which I did. Eventually most of them were lost to server merges. True to the above idea of using account handles to differentiate like named toons, I started using -legacyname as a suffix for a lot of my chraracters if the name I wanted wasn't available. This isn't optimal since the name isn't recognized as case sensitive, but it works. In short, though, I think a change in the naming system would be better than purges.