The problem is not that fights cannot be done with melee dps in place of ranged, the problem is that it is much more difficult. There are no fights that are made more difficult by having an abundance of ranged dps and there are no fights where I NEED even one melee dps. This is made more problematic by the abundance of melee dps classes in the game. Melee: Operative, Marauder, Juggernaut, Powertech, Assassin Ranged: Inq, Merc, Sniper. If you take into account that you need 4 healers and that 2 of the 3 ranged dps acs also heal, this imbalance is further exacerbated. This is bad game design to begin with that is further intensified by the fact that the most limited resource pool (ranged dps) is also the most necessary. What we need are fights that require melee dps. I simply cannot accept the argument that "melee are always at a disadvantage in mmos'" argument. The heart of the problem is that ranged is effective anywhere within 30m of the boss, while melee is only effective within 4m or so of the boss. It is easy to design abilities that mandate the use of ranged dps, however it is much harder to design mechanics that mandate that a MELEE dps be in melee range. I think the solution to lies in talents or abilities that mitigate a percentage of aoe damage. Just once I want to say 'Where the hell is the melee dps?' and actually care that they aren't there. To illustrate my earlier point, lets look at the new raid content not with an eye to "can it be done by melee" but "does melee make X fight harder or easier." Toth and Zorn: The typical strategy employed on this fight is to have Melee on Toth and Ranged on Zorn. In this fight, Zorn puts a rather nasty debuff on anyone within 25 meters of him. Ranged can dps him from outside of this debuff radius. So, while it is certainly possible to have melee dps attack Zorn and then move for the debuff, or switch targets, its makes the fight more difficult. On the other hand, I can easily substitute a ranged a dps for a melee dps on Toth. Ranged can stand in the melee stack and take advantage of aoe heals, and they can continue to dps from range during his berserk phase while range cannot. In summation, it is much easier and more beneficial to have 4 or 10 ranged dps depending than it would be to have 4 or 10 melee dps. Firebrand Stormcaller: In this fight melee dps simply stand on the tank and dps their target. Ranged can easily do the same thing. You need to have a few ranged dps off of the tanks in order to drop the aoe away from the melee stack. Again, I can easily do this fight with 4 or 10 ranged dps and ranged dps can easily fill melee dps' role. Colonel Vorgath: In this fight the ranged win again! The mechanics of this fight entail multiple mobs moving toward a stationary raid group. The ranged dps can burn these targets before they get to the group, but melee cannot. Without any ranged dps you would probably die to the slow moving but hard hitting droids that approach the group, and ranged makes downing the big floaty droids much easier as they can begin to damage them before they have arrive at the melee stack. I can do this fight with 4 or 10 ranged, I cannot do it with 4 or 10 melee. General Kephess: Melee is not nearly as big of a hinderance in this fight. The only advantage range has here is that they can continue to dps targets who are dropping their own aoe, or standing in the bosses. The two pulse droids can be damaged from outside of their large blue aoe by ranged and bombardiers who are in the purple rocket barrage can also be hit by range. I can do this fight with 4 or 10 ranged and I can do this fight with 4 or 10 melee.

whoops.

So for Toth and Zorn, the Sin tank started on Toth and we move targets between the tanks. I'm more concerned with that fight than the stormcaller firebrand as we continuously messed the second fight up. I cannot understand how he is taking 35% damage to 25% damage, thats not even freaking close.

While I tend to agree, my question here is not "what do you think is a better tanking class," its "please take a look at this log, a set of real time data, and analyze any lack of effects" The shear amount of damage across the board on every fight is somewhere around 20-30% more damage. Not overall damage taken,but the difference.

Get better at threat. Our threat is through the dang roof these days!

Stats are something in this neighborhood Defense: 22% Absorb: 45% Shield: 45% Buffed health is like 23 to 24k

Base stats are better across the board than the Jugg stats. Higher shield, higher absorb, higher defense, higher health.

Please take a look at the attached log. Trying to find out why the Sin tank is taking so much more damage http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/combatlog/3e6a456a-8183-4ed3-9b53-4a4f621fabbc#d=2

All, Trying to get some help for our EC work. I've attached a log for 16 man story, obviously not everyone has uploaded but our main problemo is tank damage. Trying to see why we're taking so much.http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/combatlog/3e6a456a-8183-4ed3-9b53-4a4f621fabbc#d=2

I'm interested if anyone has any insight into the design of Bionalysis and Biochem regarding the grade 5 (l300) bioanalysis missions. The majority of the trainable end-game Bionalysis adrenals and stims use grade 5 materials instead of grade 6. Only the tank stim and the tank /healer adrenal use grade 6. The majority of grade 5 bioanalysis missions, however, do NOT yield any usable materials. They provide Hypo Syringe, First Aid Kits, and Advanced Power Implant Processors. You can buy these materials from vendors for 400 credits. The end result of this is that Grade 5 materials have a MUCH greater worth than grade 6, as they are harder to get and used in more recipes. I know that economies vary from server to server, but as an example, Quick Growth Agent and Psychoactive Compound (both grade 5 materials) sell for anywhere from 3k-5k per item. Compare that to Mutagenic Paste or Immunity Cell Cultures (both grade 6 materials), which go for about 1k or less per item. None of the grade 6 bioanalysis missions yield worthless crap, so they are less expensive. Why does so much of the biochem stuff use grade 5 materials instead of grade 6, and why in the heck are there so many worthless bioanalysis missions?

First, hybrid veng/immortal specs should not be more viable than full immortal because full immortal should have more TANK abilities than "reduces the rage cost of X" abilities. My point is that the penalty on Soresu rage regeneration is ridiculously high, and necessitates the myriad of boring talents in our Immortal tree just to offset the Soresu penalty. 6 talents aimed towards buffing your resource mechanic means your resource mechanic is broken. That is 6 talents that are in no way interesting, they simply make your resource mechanic work. That is bad design .

Be quiet please. This thread is not about aoe threat. This thread is about rage starvation and the fact that Immortal specced juggs spend a ton of talent points just to not be rage starved, which is incredibly boring, broken, lazy design.

It comes from the attitude that the game is not going to be balanced around flashpoints. We are not a strong aoe threat tank. You can deal with this by healing. You should not die to trash because you lose a few mobs, just keep the big boys on you. Again, most balancing is done around operation pve and pvp.

I hear what you're saying but the regular taunt has a 15 second CD, you can use this all of the time and single target threat just isn't a problem regardless of your aoe taunt.

If we just removed the aspect of Soresu form that causes "all assault abilities generate 1 less rage" our rage problems would be solved. Just get rid of that, boom, we can have exciting and interesting talents!

What he said. This is strictly a PVP change to a PVP talent. Why would you care about an AOE taunt in the first place? You are only using it once per pull even if its talented. Trash just doesn't matter. Bioware will actually be the kind of crazy you all are ranting about when they start tuning talent trees based on trash threat.

Enraged Sunder, Battle Cry, Lash Out, Revenge, Sweeping Fury, Intimidation ALL reduce rage costs. That is a ridiculous amount of incredibly boring talents. Does anyone have a rational explanation as to why this tree is designed with so much bloat dedicated to resource regeneration? I can understand 1 or two, with interesting mechanics like Revenge, but the rest of this stuff is just bloated boredom.

Can you explain how the 1.2 changes to the tank Advanced Classes were arrived at? Just on a cursory analysis: Assassin/Shadow received no changes; Bounty Hunter/Trooper a slight reduction in absorbtion through the Ablative Upgrades change but gained greater absorb through the new talent Heat Screen; and Juggernauts/Guardians gained more threat. What sort of metrics are you using to determine damage, mitigation and avoidance across the tank advanced classes?

OP paraphrased: I used to think AC respecs should not be allowed, but now I want to do it, so it should be.

I have a piece of advice that helped our guild out a lot. First, make sure all of your members are watching their chat window, the red warnings that pop up mid screen don't last very long. Second, use the mini map! The location of the ball spawns will show on the minimap. We typically call them out over (insert voice chat option). Also, if you aren't melee heavy its nice to let melee stay on the boss and have range burn the mind traps. This helps out a ton when ball lightning spawns next to/on the mind trap. I have my camera zoomed out pretty far and call melee off the mind traps if ball lightning is spawning in the vicinity. Again, they will show up on the mini map BEFORE they actually spawn. This helped us a ton.

This is an incredible idea. I doubt we will see it in this iteration of the guild bank, but i'm all for it from a functionality standpoint!

Exactly. The only time it is an issue is in the first few seconds of a fight as there is so little threat developed that a big huge crit can be large enough to pull threat. If you are using both taunts, threat should not be a problem.

This is actually incorrect (not being a jerk just wanted to clarify for you). In your example, highest dps has 100,000 threat/damage (or say you have highest threat, again, at 100,000), the taunt will take you to 130% of the highest threat player, so you would actually be at 130,000 threat after the taunt and dps not standing up his butt would need 169,000 threat to pull off of you.

Basically, taunt sets your aggro at 130% of your own aggro, so you jump 30% with every taunt. This isnt a great deal at the beginning of the fight, as its 30% of a low number. This is why snap threat is important and the 14/27 build just has more of it. Backhand has an additional threat modifier of 50%, but does relatively low damage in comparison to other abilities.

From Sithwarrior.com forums: Tested using a Sith Inquisitor and Sith Warrior on the Tatooine world boss. The tank would build up roughly 100k threat, stop attacking, taunt, and the threat required to pull argo was measured. Every test was consistent with a threshold of 169% threat required to pull argo after the taunt (1.3*1.3) – that is Taunt appears to set the player's threat level to 130% of the current target. Additional tests were performed using a Sith Inquisitor and Khem in a mid level dungeon. Khem would build up roughly 15k threat, stop attacking, and taunt three times (all abilities turned off and manually activated). 298% of Khem's original threat was required to pull argo consistent with Taunt functioning as listed above regardless of the mob's current target (1.3*1.3*1.3 = 219.7% original threat after the last taunt with 1.3^4 = 285.61% threat required to pull). Additional tests will be performed at a later time to validate this result.