Something for the team to consider philosophically: Set Bonuses granting DPS is fine, but I think what would improve the lives of the most players, while also increasing the replay-ability of the previous content, would be focusing the Set-Bonuses on raw utility and removing DPS from it at all as a consideration. Destroyer's Tactical Kit: 2pc Bonus: Critical hits from Blazing Bolts or Tracer Missile and Magshot or Thermal Detonator cripple your target by 50% for 4.5 seconds. 4pc Bonus: Slows, immobilizes and roots applied to you reduce the cooldown of Hydraulic Overrides by 3 seconds. This effect can occur once per five seconds. 6pc Bonus: Taking direct damage grants a single stack of Power Barrier which reduces damage taken by 1%, stacking up to five times. The effect can only occur once every one and half seconds. When you reach five stacks of Power Barrier, your next Tracer Missile or Powershot can be cast on the move. Casting Tracer Missile or Powershot on the move will remove all stacks of Power Barrier. It's better to stick all the damage perks onto the stats, and let players "choose" their utility. Maybe you'll see people running around with three different 2pc bonuses. Choice is good. Our set bonuses should be more horizontal and less vertical. If you /must/ assign a "damage bonus" then just grant a flat percentage at each tier. 1% at 2pc, 1% at 4pc, and 3% at 3pc. It's incredibly boring, but its easier to balance, and spend your team can spend time balancing the utility that can be granted instead. Always on, minor effects are in general better than effects you need to track over the course of more than 10 seconds. Until we have internal cooldown tracking, it's too difficult to make the choices you need to make to do that. Instead, we as players are going to wait until someone good at math tells us what rotation uses the bonus incidentally will cause us to do the most damage via charting the bonus proc's ICD. Giving us something interesting to consider is far better than locking something out to a 1 minute cooldown. Also, as a general rule, could you avoid making the proc icons for our set bonuses the same? The 2pc buff and the 6pc buff have identical icons at the current tier and having to hover over them to know which one is currently active is silly. Allowing us more variety in how we control our playstyle by giving us set-bonuses that instead change HOW we play instead of simply making us "stronger" is a step in the right direction.

This was a wild success. We basically lagged the **** out of the server on Yavin, and watched as a handful of brave Jeddit souls ventured into the Rakghoul tunnels and got dunked over and over again by the Imperials. This will become a monthly server-event. Expect this again next month. Post any requests for planetary locations here.

Fantastic! Any of the other guilds that you are friends with would be great to contact. Jeddit will definitely show up, as well as anyone that I can get a hold of here or in-game.

Tell all your friends and thanks! And the more guilds that people inform, the better the experience will be for everyone.

Come one, come all. PVE geared? Fully optimized Dark Reaver? Fully optimized Revanite? It doesn't matter. On this Saturday, I'd like to invite all the bored level 60 players to join Jeddit in a free-for-all on Yavin IV for some open world PVP. There are titles to be had, achievements to get, alcohol to drink, and nerds to dunk. Do your dailies with a bit more interesting twist. All you need to do is let your guild know about this event, and to get whoever you would like onto Yavin IV at 9:00 PM EST on April 4th and flip on your PVP flag. Do your dailies or whatever you want to in the mean time, and enjoy the mass chaos that is free-for-all PVP. You can expect guilds and squads of all shapes and sizes to be roaming. Jeddit will do the inital favor of flagging for everyone near the Revanite Training Grounds, to help start the fun. Expect some ebb and flow, and the more you get the word out, the more people to help you demolish the other faction. It's all in good fun, and variant on the turn out, this may turn into a monthly event that we run.

Negative. You fail to understand the role of this spec. This spec, and it's respective IA counterpart function based only on the following aspects: 1. Stealth. Not being aware of the presence of the character. 2. High front end damage. The spec lacks the energy and throughput to actually cause hurt to a target over an extended time frame. 3. Your stupidity. This spec rewarded you for being a hunter, and being very selective of your victims. See a healer forgetting to heal himself? Blow him to pieces at 50% or less. See a Sage chilling on ramp blowing away a team with AoEs? Demolish him for standing away from the rest of the team. What most other classes do in longer time, the scoundrel does quickly... Wait for the catch.... Once every two minutes. Assuming you blow everything to assure a kill, You are a TARGET until that time. With borked Stealth mechanics that leave you in combat for a short eternity if you hit someone who stays alive too long, You simply MUST hold your Vanish until a kill is placed, solely to escape. Stealth is NOT a gap closer. It's an initiation. Much like Force Leap (Assuming you could only use it once per fight. Twice if you used a two minute CD.) is for JKs. Imagine a JK who could only Leap you once in the fight, only from out of combat, and a second time if he blew a 2 minute CD. You're starting to breach the issues with the class. You simply can't close gaps with everyone wielding CC as a Smuggler. Tendon Blast is probably going to be on CD. You're stuck. Whenever you don't have a front-loaded damage dealer, you have either an executioner (Think of someone with lots of high damage, high cost, low CD skills.) or a sustained damage dealer. The Scrapper currently doesn't fill into any of those positions. The Dirty Fighting tree is almost comical. I'm not here to spread doom and gloom. I think things will work out in the end. I think with some attention to stealth bugs, and ranged UH generator, both of these specs can start to enjoy significant quality of life improvements. Ultimately: Front loaded damage for a Scoundrel means this: Never trinket the god-awful Cheap shot/K.O. It's really all you need to know to win. No class is going to kill you in 3 GCDs. I'm sorry. You're just not going to see it unless the deck was stacked against you in gear. (Guess what, This is the NATURE of these types of MMOs.) If you believe this MMO has skill based PVP, You are completely and utterly delusional. If this was a skill-based PVP system, You would see characters getting their key abilities sooner than 36. You would see SIGNIFICANTLY higher health bars. You would see significantly more balance in CC distribution. (Troopers/BHs would flat out just not have one, or solely a Snare.) The Casters would have some of the best hard CC, and no shield to save them. The rogue-esque classes would have the greatest control over the flow of battle through their CCs, while still being in near melee range. Kiting a rogue class should be somewhat difficult, because they are designed to control the flow of the engagement. If you so much as tap them, they lose this ability without wasting CDs due to stealth bugs. So no. Negative. You are missing the point.

My binds: (Inside these for my Sawbones) 1 Auto attack (Triage) 2 Defensive Screen 3 Tendon Blast 4 Pugnacity Q Vital Shot W Blaster Whip (Slow Release Med pack) R Back Blast (Underworld Medicine) T Dirty Kick G Thermal Grenade V Tranquilizer Dart A Stealth Shift + 1 Cool head Shift + 2 Escape Shift + 3 Dodge Shift + 4 Surrender Shift + Q Shoot First Shift + W Quick Shot (Blaster whip) Shift + R Sucker Punch (Emergency Medpack) Shift + T Distraction Shift + G Headshot Shift + V Flashbang Shift + A Disappearing Act I'm only 37, and I won't be wasting binds on Kolto Cloud, or Kolto Pack, until they give me a good reason to use it. I use ESDF to move, and I'll be adding in 5/C to my binds before long.

How would Open wounds ever be a DPS loss? You are given the opportunity to wait 3 seconds before you are forced to use energy to reapply a DoT. Even if it spread out the same damage over an additional 3 seconds (Which it does not.) you would have more opportunities to use different skills, and regenerate energy. Open Wounds is never a DPS loss.

I think it's best executed in Warzone groups, and groups with at least three targets. Getting Wounding Shots is a big deal in PVP, because burning off those UHs with ease (You can get close to an UH proc every few seconds with two HoTs rolling. And with a crit rate of 52% for DoTs (Assuming a 40% raw crit chance.) across three or more targets (Assuming you land a single sharp bomb on three targets, and Vital shot on two targets (I find it a pain to have the time to do much else and still get WSes woven into the rotation.) You should get the following: 52% chance to proc 2 energy per target, per 3 seconds, per Dot. 52% * 5 = 260% chance per three seconds to get energy back. [roughly 7 energy] Now, factor that with two Hots rolling, we have UH procing: 30% * 2 = 60% chance per 3 seconds for a free UH. It's safe to assume we get 60% more procs of UH than a standard DF build. (Ignoring UH granted from kills.) UH can be used in a few ways though. Every 20 seconds we can proc a bonus pugnacity from these extra UHs through Street Tough. So every 20 seconds we have a net 10 energy. The secret to this, is that this build will ride the line between fastest regeneration and second fastest regen. Each GCD costs us 1.5 seconds. If we go into a phase where we only burn a target with WSes, We would spend 2 UHs and 50 energy across 3 seconds. We get back 7 energy (approximately) from our 5 DoT ticks (Which is a slight gain of 1 energy on the Rough and Tumble talent.) and that places us, with natural regen, still in the highest regen tier. (6.5 energy per second under pugnacity + 7 = 26.5 energy intake during the three seconds.) Basically, We got to fire off a WS for effectively free. And we still have simple access to the UH proc, because we have HoTs rolling, and UM to give it to us. However, maintaining this situation is NON-TRIVIAL. And it's important to be aware of that. Set up time: 1.5 per HoT/DoT. We have 2 HoT casts, and 3 DoT casts [1 Sharp bomb to hit three targets, two targets get Vital shot.] Meaning we spend 7.5 seconds setting up this situation. If we can get away with the HoTs starting in advance, we have a setup at 4.5 seconds. Refreshing for HoTs will start being relevant 10 seconds after the set up. [Gives you 4.5 seconds to cast a pair of Hots. A 1.5 second tolerance.] In that delicate 10 seconds of up time, You need to get in as many WSes as possible, as well as refresh pugnacity, and DoTs (VS will fall off at 18 seconds.) In a 1v1, We have one hot, and 2 dots rolling. Energy regen from Street tough falls off dramatically to 101% per three seconds. Our UHs are coming in at 30% per three seconds. We simply don't have the "umph" that the other builds have. We'll be strained on energy intake to some extent. However, we can probably outlast most encounters, with Woozy bomb, and Tendon shot for melees, and LoS/HoTs for Ranged characters. We still need to be sneaky, and abuse Shoot First in a 1v1. Also, it's definitely worth saying, this build SHINES at 50, as opposed to leveling. However, I can see classical HoT and DoT leveling being effective as soon as 33: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#701Mfc0zZZhrbkM.1 The UH procs from SRMP shine the most when you have a good dump for them. And I think it should be taken near the end of the leveling section. I would personally finish out the DF tree first: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#701Mfc0zZZhrbkrrhz.1 Then work to the Sawbones tree to finish things up.

Creates a small heal, and allows triage to also purge negative mental effects on a target. Very important for a pure healer.

As a healer: I'm usually rolling 2xSRMP on three targets, occasionally on all four of us, slow rolling everyone but the tank, which I used a Fast roll. (Slow roll: Using a single cast, waiting until nearly depleted, then refreshing. Fast roll: Two back to back casts of SRMP, refreshing near the end of the second duration.) I will do my best to weave in EMP instead of using UM on targets taking damage (Exploiting the UHs I keep up from the large number of SRMPs.) and when I feel I have the time (I do ever so WISH I had better visual timers for my SRMP on a target) I will DS to just hit max energy. I'm only 34. I don't have Surge and I don't really stack crit. (I mostly stack Power.) This works great on most fights, but is VERY tough to keep up on certain boss fights.

Personally, the build I'm drifting toward now is as follows: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#701rfcMzhZZhrbkrrhz.1 The reasons I take what I did over yours: 1. I consider the HoT and DoT to be more focused on Damage than on healing. Especially once you get Medpac Mastery. Being able to generate seemingly limitless UH procs is something DF needs desperately. 2. By going straight to DF after getting Medpac Mastery, You can open up Black Market Equipment (Getting 12% chance to crit on dot ticks.) which has fantastic synergy with Fight Spirit (Gives you 2 Energy per dot tick Crit.) as well as giving you 30 seconds off of Cool Head. 3. The real kicker, is that you still get to take Wounding Shots. You're going to be able to pump out really good burst, with regular Medpac Mastery ticks keeping UH up very often, with Feelin' Woozy slowing anyone chasing you (wonderful in both PvE and PVP.), Fighting Spirit rolling in bonus energy like crazy with good crit, allowing you accept the loss of Rough and Tumble. You can absolutely burn through energy, and not stress, because of the lower CD on Cool Head as well. In PvE, I consider myself as the tank. I roll hots on my DPS companion, and myself. I burn through solo mobs quickly with Wounding shot spam. Groups are handled with Sharp bomb -> Vital Shot -> Thermal Det -> VS spam if I think the fight will be long, and WS Spam if I think I can burn them in 21-45 seconds. I only regret I can't weave in Browbeater from the Scrapper tree (18% bonus damage on Vital shot.) With high enough crit, You can sap points away from Black Market Equipment, and stick them in Browbeater.

I agree with you. Inadvertently, I think we will end up stacking Endurance as well as defensive stats in our gear naturally. However, I think that we will also have opportunities to choose how we want to fill out other slots in our gear. Maybe this will be similar in nature to Wow, where we see the real tweaks in our Relics/Trinkets/Implants/Enchants and what not. However, I don't see any "enchanting" style profession or modifications in the game as it stands, minus perhaps augments. Augment itemization may be where we start to see people itemization in some method they choose. Assuming that a player has 6 - 12 different "slots" with which to work, and they already have an acceptable HP level (My guess will be 12-14k HP for a tank.) and perhaps, 12-18% Defense/Shield/Absorb. From that point, I suspect there are two camps of tanks: The EHP tanks, and the Endurance tanks. The EHP tanks usually are more math heavy players, and will hunt down items that grant damage reduction, avoidance and the like. These are typically the players that I think have a "better idea" of what it means to tank: Mitigation of damage. The other camp is the one I have issues with: The Stack-Endurance-Because-More-Health-Means-I-Take-More-Hits camp. The issue with the "SEBMHMITMH" camp, is that they think they're doing the healers a favor, by giving them more "breathing room." This is a half-true statement. Yes, They are technically giving healers more space to work with, BUT, they are missing out on half their job: Reducing the overall damage they take in. If they reduce the damage they take, they simply don't need this "buffer." Secondly, they believe that this makes healers happy, to have more space to heal. This is actually a force/energy/mana sponge. This is just eating away at the healer's resource, because if they itemized differently, they would be able to turn a 4k damage attack into a 3.5k damage attack, which is 500 the healers don't EVER need to think about.

You're correct. Each tank will have built in avoidance. I also mention this in beginning. (This ties into the specs. We naturally gain avoidance through talents, and solely as characters at a certain level. I reduced the model to only account for the defense granted by external sources for that reason. I can remodel assuming that there's a tank with 20.5k HP and 24% avoidance, and a 14k HP tank with 48% avoidance to land the point if I must. But what I don't want to see are tanks that don't contribute more to their groups once they hit this ideal spot of Avoidance/Endurance, and just start stacking Endurance, ignoring things like Willpower, Accuracy, and the like, because they think that a good tank is defined by how huge their HP pool is. It's just not the case. Once you are no longer a strain on the healers, you need to contribute more DPS. Not keep it the same. That's the point in the threat set of gear for tanks. I've seen, in several past MMOs, where people never build this magical threat set, and instead, just continue stacking endurance and think they're doing it "right." I don't want to see that. Particularly with a class such as this, where there is a great opportunity to really exploit extra damage. And if I need to really show this, there's a reason why Wow added the Vengeance mechanic into their game. They let and almost encourage players to solely stack their defensive stats as a tank. While this does make it simple for the player, it does remove a layer of complexity to the role.

This is going to be the key. However, if you look back into the thread, you'll see several people claiming Endurance is the most important stat that the Shadow tank should be hunting down. This simply isn't the case. I'd argue that they "ought" to be looking for things like Armor, but we don't have much that we can do to control that statistic. I personally feel that threat sets are significantly more important than survival sets. (This is solely because they are often the most ignored set a tank owns.) I also dislike the habit games make in build "set bonuses" that strongly push you one way or the next into particular pieces of gear. Especially with SWTOR, where we have such a mod system, we should be looking into things that might allow us to do things such as "create set bonuses" much like rune combos in Diablo 2. My major point in the post should have been TL;DR'd: Once you have enough health that you aren't being 1-3 shotted by a boss, Get threat. It contributes more than stacking more health.

So, People are arguing Effective Health as a tank, long story short. Kit's mentality and priority structure is ideal (And even endorsed by one of the tanks that you Wow guys are taking your advice from: Ciderhelm, whether you're aware or not. See his EHP discussion on TankSpot.) for SWTOR tanking. Here's why: You cannot make the assumption that healers need to be doing other things that healing. Because should you make that assumption, then you're acknowledging one of Kit's points: You should do ANYTHING else once you have "enough" health to survive. When you're pushing content in any game, you need to have enough of your role in order to allow others to perform theirs, so you can continue contributing to the most important part of the content push: Killing the boss. Here's the issue with the discussion of the 10k Health tank, versus the 5k health tank that was mentioned earlier: You're assuming that by not directly attempting to stack Endurance, that the difference in EHP will be greater than the avoidance that will be granted by stacking similar Defensive stats. Guess what? They're not. Endurance grants you 10 HP per point. Flat. Let's look then at Defense: 57 points yields around 2.089% chance to avoid all damage. (We're also assuming level 50.) I have an understanding that around approximately 24% item-added defense (Which, I will high ball the approximation at 650 defense, assuming that DR starts kicking in hard at that point.) versus a flat 6500 Health addition. Now, we know that a good general, pool of HP with green gear at 50 may put you at 11k to 14k health, for people starting off. If you have 6500 additional health, you're looking at possibly pushing 20k health. We're going to EQUALLY assume that you talented the exact same as someone who is going for avoidance, to rule out the chance that spec plays a role in this exercise. The ONLY thing that matters in a tanking scenario, is that you don't get killed for the longest time span possible. This is pivotal. Trash is irrelevant, even in SWTOR. If you can't CC trash in your group, you don't need to consider this conversation, and do what you must. Therefore we have two tanks with the following HPs: 20.5k with 0 Additional avoidance. 14k with 24% avoidance. Assume the boss swings every 2.5 seconds. Assume the boss swings for 4k damage. Assume your healers can handle doing 3.5k heals per 2.5 seconds without running out of force. With 20.5k health, and 0 avoidance, you will survive for the following time: 41 swings @ 500 damage = 20.5k Health. 41 swings * 2.5 seconds = 102.5 seconds alive. With 14k health, and 24% avoidance, you can survive for the following time: Each swing has a 24% chance to miss. We reduce the boss damage from 4k to 3.04k (4000 * .76) You live indefinitely. The boss should never land enough blows to kill you on the average. Let's redefine how avoidance is modeled in that case, because that paints such a pretty picture for the avoidance tank: Let's assume the boss is paying Bioware to rig the RNG such that they will always get 1 swing to connect of every 4 that they throw at you. Lets assume that Bioware was nice, and decided to make those the final swings instead of the first swings. Now, the damage intake looks like the following: 12k *.76 = 9.12k + 4k = 13.12k per 10 seconds - 14k = -880 HPS?! The healers are Still ahead! Clearly, point for point, Defense is ahead of Endurance solely because 4k damage avoided is impressively important. The longer the fights go, the easier it shows why avoidance is king in that regard. Once you begin to factor in absorbs, and absorb rating, you see how you have significantly smaller hits that land. Defense is the first factor in determining if a hit lands. This model is extremely rough. I can't get definitive values for the Diminishing returns on Defense/Shield/Absorbs. I also, haven't factored in the healing output requirements discretely. There are CLEARLY times where an energy based healer will suffer because an avoidance based tank may catch an evil string of RNG, but it should be nothing that their CDs ****And yours***** cannot handle. Sage healers will have the least difficulty in handling the avoidance tank because they are effectively immune to the restraints of reduced regeneration over increased expenditure that Troopers and Smugglers suffer. Smugglers and troopers may prefer healing the higher endurance target, because they can budget their time on the tanks, but they aren't really helped in the long run because they should be able to maintain a reasonable HPS with respect to the DPS of the boss, or they shouldn't be healing it in the first place. Sorry if this has been done elsewhere. I just get tired of seeing people claiming stacking Endurance is the key. More effective health can be found in itemization of defensive sub stats. The balance of enough defensive stats, with Willpower, is the real mystery. TL;DR: Kit's concept of (Defense/Shield/Absorb)>stuff>Endurance is superior than Endurance>(Defense/Shield/Absorb) assuming damage is consistent, and heals are consistent.