The difference is that the biggest slice of single target dps in both rotations is DS + Project combo. Hybrid gets more damage and damage per force out of that combo because of Adjudication. A math-optimized gearset will have ~33%-34% crit chance and it makes a difference. Also, the Find Weakness procs do add up with another big damage per force move. And even PvE bosses have 35% armor, so FiB being internal damage makes a big difference against a lot of real world targets, too. 31 KC has it's upside too with efficient 3-stack channels and Slow Time isn't bad dps against non-tank targets. But like I already said, there's been other people that did much, much more thorough math on the total damage and found that the two specs are comparable single target damage and then backed it up with combat logs that showed the same thing. Claiming that 31 KC is significantly higher single target damage just isn't factual. As for WZ flow... A person probably can't fully appreciate the difference until they spend a lot of time playing both specs against top level competition. For 31 KC, it's a complete non-issue in PvE. You stand in one spot and play your spec just pushing buttons right on schedule and everything works perfectly. It's not all that much worse in most WZ's either because opposing players are either outright bad or focused on pushing their own correct buttons. They just don't move all that much or intelligently and have very little reaction to things you are doing to them. Against an entire team of high level players, it's a completely different story. There are no easy targets and everyone is constantly bouncing around like jackrabbits regardless of whether they are actually trying to go somewhere or necessarily even respond to what you're doing. They are also putting out extreme amounts of pressure on your team and forcing you to constantly react to what they are doing. The result is that there's no possible way you can push all your buttons on schedule as the spec dictates. You generally have to get in position just to channel TKT because if you don't start from pretty much point blank 4m range, they will probably outrange the final tick or two just from their normal movement let alone actually trying to stop your channel - which they will frequently do. And you also can't do things on schedule and position offensively on schedule because you're having to move around and disrupt according to what they are doing while working within a 15m window around your guarded teammate - which is changing around continually because you're having to swap guards to keep your team alive. When you put 31 KC in this type of setting, all the stack management and channel management gets extremely clunky and you end up having to play the spec in sub-optimal fashions in order to instead play the warzone in optimal fashion which is drastically more important. With hybrid spec, there is no stack management, everything is instant, you never have to stop moving and can always continue heading towards optimal positions and quite frankly the spec has less to think about which leaves a players brain free to entertain much more important warzone related functions.

In terms of just straight single target damage, Full 31 KC can technically keep up with 23/1/17 and do pretty much the same sustained damage. The delivery is not as bursty, though. The problem is that getting it to "keep up" requires extremely tight rotations mostly centered around managing harnessed shadows stacks. You have to do things according to abilities and procs instead of what necessarily makes sense in the context of the warzone. And like you say, against good teams it's a big problem. They don't just let you turret channel at them any time it suits you, and then in the end damage suffers as well as self healing. To adapt, you end up having to just rely on aoe spam a lot more in an attempt to produce damage, but it's less useful damage. Against bad pugs....not really an issue. 23/1/17 has a lot simpler and smoother delivery, and it adapts into high level play against high level opponents much better. It better allows you to play the warzone instead of play the spec.

Once you get Circling Shadows (lvl 24 or so) it starts to function pretty well, yeah. I'm not sure about best spec below 30, though... I'd probably have to give that to Assault Specialist Vanguard. Once they start picking up points in Ionic Accelerator (27+) they start pumping out tons of damage without having to expose themselves in melee nearly as much.

Well, giving Infiltration some front loading doesn't make them as good at front loading as Scrappers. It's just a problem to pretty much literally have zero front loading as a stealth class with paper thin defense. Their opener is huge... It does: Big damage Stun Generate Upper Hand Grant armor pen We get the Stun, and that's it. We could get half of what they do and still be miles better off than we are now, and they would still be the clear front load specialists.

Well, when you put all three specs against each other, the overall damage isn't much different between any of the three. They are all within a few % of each other. That mostly just leaves utility. One has slow time's snare and damage debuff. One has instant Lift ending in a stun when broken and a 30m cap breaker. The other has...just a 30m cap breaker. All three of the specs function and work, but it just seems to me that two of these are clearly better than the other. Not by a huge amount, but just having something the others don't.

Main stat is still better for them too, especially if they go for the strength boosting talent. The overall numbers just come out better. The power folks are grounded more on placebo effect than real and thorough numbers.

It is a pretty funny troll on someone... Although it's predicated on them assuming you're too smart to use tkt without 3 stacks. If they ever realize what you're doing, they'll stop worrying about it knowing that you're just hitting them with mediocre damage and doing zero healing.

Even in the case of lucky procs, Slow Time spec is still faster at stacks... It's pretty much impossible by definition to ever consider non-ST spec as ever being faster at building stacks. Take your example, but add Slow Time to it. Project -> ST ->DS -> Project. 3 stacks and only one lucky proc instead of two and one less GCD and 34 less force. Way easier and faster to pull off. There's no situation where not having Slow Time is better; it can only be equal at best and not usually even that.

Folks have run these two specs for single target damage already both with more in-depth theory crafting and live using dps meters. Everything tended to show that both specs are extremely close in single target damage capability, at least in terms of being able to kill a target dummy. The anecdotal 700k thing mentioned means nothing. Both specs can put up similarly big numbers in a warzone that supports big scoreboards. If anything, the Slow Time spec is technically possible of slightly more (on scoreboard) because it has higher max possible aoe damage. The big numbers are more a function of the warzone than the spec, and it's actually an indication of being a bad team. If you're winning decisively, it's impossible for anyone to get numbers like that. The only way to get those type of numbers is literally and continually failing to kill the other team. It's not impressive nor a badge of honor; it's just standing around a node throwing numbers back and forth. If anything, it shows that you're not doing enough dps. There is a difference of how effective the damage is though, and do I think the hybrid spec has an advantage here. To start with, in PvP standing still to channel a 10m ability is not a good thing. It used to be the self healing at least gave a big payoff when you could complete the channel, but not so much anymore. It really hurts when people interrupt the channel (sometimes even inadvertently with aoe abilities) or even just out-range the cast. You miss out on damage and healing but still lose all the force and stacks and frequently get left out of position compared to if you could have kept moving. 31/0/10 is also not very bursty and mostly just deals steady damage and is more likely to spread it out to more targets. 23/1/17 in comparison is more bursty, a little more target focused, can keep moving, and less likely to be denied damage.

IMO, a waste of stacks to burn them early. The damage isn't that great without stacks and there's zero healing out of it without all 3 stacks. Damage per force is decent, but it's a channel... You can't compare it to 1 ability. You have to compare it to ability combinations, including with Saber Strike. There's a reason the other specs don't use the ability. There's no way you can kite a marauder with it, or any other melee for that matter. You're standing still to channel it. Even if they are slowed, they are still closing 10m down to 4m before the channel is over. You can help someone else kite, but you can't kite anything for yourself with it. Even an Infiltration Shadow could kite better with 100% uptime on Force Slow - and they don't have to stand still. You'd be better off running with Slow Time and actually getting plenty of stacks quickly.

I would just point out that most of those special high crit chance cases involve yellow attacks (tech/force) that don't even roll against shields in the first place. For example, Particle Acceleration and Force Potency give us high crit chance, but the attacks are all yellow. Even so, it is kinda cruddy that since it's a single roll system, a shield will never give any benefit when you need it most, which is when you take a critical hit. If someone has 50% shield chance with 50% absorb, they like to think that shield is reducing overall damage taken by 25%. (0.5*0.5=0.25) But, not even half of overall damage is shieldable in PvP. Lets generously assume 40%. (0.25*0.4=0.10) And guard damage is bugged to never shield or dodge for the tank...if you're a good tank, roughly half of your incoming damage is guard redirect if not more. (0.10*0.5=0.05) And then because of how the hit table works, the shield isn't even reducing overall damage by that much because a disproportionate amount of overall damage taken is crits, and shields only convert non-crits into shielded attacks. So, even with really good shield stats, equipping a shield generator in pvp only reduces overall damage taken by less than 5%. And in reality, a pvp player usually doesn't have good shield stats. They're usually closer to 20% chance with 20% absorb. When you have shield stats like that, equipping a shield generator reduces overall damage by less than 1%.

If you really want that, just spec your guardian defense/vigilance hybrid (16/23/2 or similar) and you'll be drastically more durable than a Shadow ever could be.

Stalker gear just gives Kinetic more total PvP value. Current info points that guard damage completely bypasses tank stats on Survivor gear even for attack types that the devs intend for it to work on. If you're doing your job well, most of your damage taken will often be guard damage instead of direct attacks. It is worthwhile to gear somewhat endurance heavy if you want to be more durable. If you're mostly just solo queuing, there's no reason not to gear straight for dps because you can't rely on other people to kill stuff or healers to keep you alive. So, my advice would be get stalker gear first. Get 4pc Survivor bonus from armorings only if you want it and play with teams/groups. Then start tweaking mods/enhancements from there for ideal stats - of which probably none will have any tank stats like defense, absorb, etc.

The value of Harnessed Shadows in general took a big hit with the recent Shadow healing nerfs, and the talent really just isn't very good without Slow Time to feed it charges. It's a lot of work to try to eek healing out of it and I found that the higher up you get into skilled/rated PvP, the less likely it is that you'll actually be allowed to even complete the channels. A lot of the high end meta game is shifting to continual use of AoE CC's with things like Guardians using Awe on 45s cooldown. They break a lot of channels without even trying, and more when they do try. And you also have to waste yet another skill point on terrible Kinetic tree filler just to reach it. Getting Containment (imp Lift), 2/2 Adjudication, and a point in Infiltration Tactics is just much better value and more effective. If you want to play with Harnessed Shadows, go with 31/0/10. It works a lot better.

I've had it happen a few times. I suspect its an extreme form of server desync sometimes, but it's hard to tell. People need some better interwebs. (Note Resilience is supposed to stop most roots too because they are generally force/tech abilities.)

Yeah, unfortunately there are a lot of very poor filler talents in the Kinetic tree. And if Nerve Wracking is a preferred low value filler talent for you, that's fine. It's just better to see it as "I have to put a point somewhere" than as some sort of great underdog talent. Personally, if I'm having to take low value, I go for the stuff that has continual effect. So yeah, I'd go for slightly smaller health pool and tiny bit bigger self heals every time just because it's always there and accumulating. Realistically, a lot of these talents are so bad it hardly matters which one you take as long as you aren't passing over one of the decent ones.

Something I would encourage you to do with Nerve Wracking is just start trying to put numbers to it in terms of average damaged gained overall and such - even taking credit for teammate's increased damage. How much % of time do your targets spend in stuns affected by it? Remember that you can't attack for the first 1.5s of each stun yourself. How much extra damage do you do in that time? On average, how many teammate attacks occur in those times? (You might be just peeling for a healer or something most of the time you use stuns.) Even where you have to make assumptions, just make reasonable realistic ones and go with it until you end up with some numbers. Even if the numbers are wrong (surely will be to at least some extent) they will at least put you in a ballpark value. (I have done this before myself.) Sure, those special situations you describe can occur occasionally...but you're probably lucky if they happen to an extent that Nerve Wracking actually makes the difference once every 10 matches or so. And you can make the same case for lots of other talents....does 400 extra hp help you score the huttball where you would have died? Or a lucky parry from double-bladed saber defense? Or one extra combat tech heal from rapid recovery? You can make that case for pretty much anything. What I think you'll find is that Nerve Wracking provides extremely low overall value. Sure, every once in a while you might win the lottery with it, but normally it does very little or nothing at all.

It's a matter of force management. If you keep spamming abilities, eventually your force bar runs out and you can only use abilities as new force regens in. Ideally, you want to keep enough force in your bar (about half a bar) so then when the good abilities come available like Project w/ PA proc, FiB, and SS w/ FW you can use them right away or when most useful instead of being forced to wait for force regen. The tricky part in pvp is occasionally you need to use force while you have uptime - a target in range to hit. Either way, you have to conserve force at some point by using Saber Strike. You can either use it before you run completely out of force or after. Or you can just go off-target, which sometimes makes sense in PvP to LoS or go save a healer or something.

If you're trying to burst someone, you can use Project anytime it's available like that and what you have there is good. Obviously add Spinning Strike when their health gets low enough. If you're trying to produce maximum sustained damage, then you would only use Project with PA procs.

15m is pretty nice even though the cooldown is lackluster. And even though Vanguard has much shorter cooldown on interrupts, theirs is 4m on a class that likes to float in and out of 10m range to avoid damage. Realistically in a WZ, I tend to get more useful interrupts on my Shadow than on my Vanguard. The two classes almost ought to swap each other for interrupts. Sentinels are the real interrupt kings, though.

I agree that 23/1/17 is still the best all around... I want it not to be, but it just is and plays smoothly. I'm running it right now, even. Although, I have to say that thinking it even keeps up with Balance or Infiltration on damage must be a perception thing or scoreboard-itis. That combat tech proc clearly is during Battle Readiness....for which I've had Shadow Tech procs hit right at 3k with it increasing the damage 100%. And I imagine that Project was with PA proc + Force Potency. So, that same sequence is substantially more impressive in Infiltration with Project hitting harder (2x CS buff), Breach instead of FiB hitting for about 1k+ more and the tech proc hitting for 1k more. And Balance still has a ton more sustained damage if you can maintain the uptime. (Pretty big "if" in WZ's...) The biggest thing is...okay, so maybe you do ~15-20% more damage in the other specs, but the survivability is WAY more than 15-20% better with Kinetic hybrid - and the other team knows it so they usually don't try to kill you over a healer or real dps. They don't even CC or taunt you as much. That means you're alive and in the middle of everything while less encumbered, constantly attacking and getting aoe out of FiB and FB. If you focus on attacking, the accumulated numbers at the end of a match can be pretty crazy. I just wish this spec had maintainable 50% snare. They ought to make 2/2 Subduing Techniques baseline for all Shadows. It's not like it's a free snare - it costs a gcd and force.

It's just cheap damage is pretty much all it is. For Infiltration, it's one of my most likely abilities to crit for over 5k, and the damage is pretty reliable with all the heavy armor targets running around in PvP and having partial arp. Although, for Balance and Kinetic it's not going to crit as hard not having the +30% on crit multiplier. But it's at least comfortably ahead of double strike on average damage per force. But, I agree with you; it feels like it should do something extra. We go to the effort of baby-sitting a buff proc and executing a positional and all we get is some reasonably cheap damage? Pretty underwhelming. It seems like there should be some sort of secondary reward on it. Some enhanced force regen, free exit strategy procs, temporary arp buff, shortens force cloak and blackout cooldowns, free snare or root, bypasses guard & taunt...something cool that makes it clearly worth the effort.

I actually prefer 23/1/17 for solo node defense, but full Kinetic is fine, too. 30m cap breaker and instant force lift being the reasons why. If you're playing against someone good who's sending things like concealment ops against you, it's not safe to stay stealthed near the node because they will find you in stealth before you find them because they have better stealth talents and you don't know when they're coming to cover it with blackout like you might when attacking. So, the safest thing is to actually stay VERY FAR from the node somewhere that they won't be able to find you stealthed. They'll even waste a ton of time just trying to find you. Then when they finally give up and start trying to cap, you have two good 30m options. And there's always folks that like to pull a defender off a node and stuff. And it is enough time, but it's contingent on teammates being good and playing team defense. I've been on the other side of the coin where I'm attacking a solo defender Assassin or whatever and he's more than enough of a quality player individually but his team is too busy trying to fight the 5 or so of us still at the main node to realize that we peeled off to take the off node and the don't react until the Assassin defender starts getting blasted. With me and a Scrapper finding him in stealth...Darkness tank gets nuked and CC'd so hard it's not even funny. Do the same thing on one of those hybrid Jugg tanks and they give their team almost double the time to respond once the call for help goes out on voice comm. Essentially, I agree that the hybrid shadow is generally better, but when everything happens to go wrong the shadow won't give as much time as a guardian. Shadow is more of a gamble, essentially. And then when the enemy team decides to fight on that off-node, the guardian really pulls ahead on value. I really like Shadows, but if I'm completely honest a best possible rated comp doesn't have a single Shadow anywhere on it.

What you're saying is that people can swap out those things to tune surge values to where they want it instead of gearing like a moron and augmenting surge; thereby "gaining" power or willpower. That's not "gaining" anything; that's just not being a moron.

If you do that and and use War Hero items...sure, you can get rid of all your Accuracy. But you have 530 Surge, which is completely wasteful considering the DR curve. You can also get rid of your Surge, but you'd have 530 Accuracy and that's wasteful too. You can't trade these stats for power or crit below 530 total points using only war hero pieces. (Unless you gear something really silly like alacrity or something.)