Yeah I did not even bother to explain the basics I know, as I am to tired of this crappy design to discuss with people who does not understand math. Trust me though, they are pretty spot on for a close to fully geared tank and since this game is getting old it feels kinda booring to repeat the basics as if you do not understand even that then perhaps your not the person to even have oppinions about changes. But I will humour you and anyone else who cares with some rough numbers: Mean mitigation for an assassin tank will land around 70%. That mean that you take 30% of the damage in health loss. This mean that 10k in now will be on average 3k lost health. If you reduce mean mitigation with an armour reduction of a couple percent you will take more damage. Some people say then say that it is no biggie as it will only be a few % less mean mitigation. Let look at what for example 3% mean in reality... so what health loss would you get from 67% mean mitigation... well you would look at 3.3k. That is a 10% increase in damage. NOT 3%! Basic math just like everything else here... so now people keep discussing what set number (self healing) will match a lower mean mitigation which is a percentage, when the incomming damage varies alot. Together with BW you will probably be able to believe you solved this mathematically unsolvable issue... *shrug* Yeah please say some rubbish like aiming for some survivability targets now. I dare BW to explain how that design can even have those target when incomming damage varies like it does between 1on1 pvp vs 16 man hm ec. They will not even touch that subject.

Heh, yeah. Most people do this so we balance it so it work with that! Instead of just making a scaling self heal that work as mitigation no matter what incomming damage... We want a different passive mitigation mechanic but we have no clue how to design and code one. Not impressive for a senior designers cv.

Yeah really interesting to listen to someone who builds a set healing mechanic and then call it mitigation talk about survivability targets... then they balance this with *drum roll* changing the set values to something else as that will fix anything. Ehrm... yeah at some specific incomming damage it will work and be "on target". How about all other ones? ps Oh and I mean no disrespect to you JeramieCrowe. Thanks for the link.

Well that is truly napkin math. A set heal can never be % mitigation across the boards because damage scale tremendously betwen a h4, 4 man flashpoint and 16 hm ec. The self healing however does not. Even with that positive view of yours I hope you see that that you now take around 20% more damage than before. To take 3000 damage (70% mean mitigation) or 3600 from 10k raw damage makes a tremendous differense on healer pressure in a 5-10 min fight. Also what you say is that everyone is getting a huge buff but an assassin will stay the same. It is kinda the consensus as well. You can still do it. You can still tank. Just do not compare yourself to other tanks as then you kinda suck.

Pretty much this. I just shake my head whenever I see all the posts "I am OP now so thanks for nerfning me". I tank HM EC and I am a tad more geared than everyone in the raid and I think the only thing healers like me for is that I cleanse myself on Zorn, oh and my nice personality.

No I missed nothing. I replied to: ...and then I invalidated the entire discussion because of self healing beeing close to static so at some levels it is OP and on some it sucks depending on incomming damage which is in the case of petty dailies are minimal ie making it completely irrelevant in the case of end game tanking which is the area most of us objecting to the changes are refering to.

You fail to see the reason for this is a basically set self-healing that is OP in low incomming damage situations. But I will give you that your narrow sight in shouting for OP shadows because of this is making you pretty much BW staff material. How about how considering how this pans out in a extremely high incomming damage situation like a 16 man hm kephess? Ponder a permanent damage shield that removes lets say 300 from each hit. It would make you almost invulnerable in wimpy daily cases but when things start to hit for 5k and then 10k etc it looses its shine and eventually it can no longer make up for even a single % defense in terms of mean mitigation. The design sucks and changing the values for self healing will not change that. This company have no clue on how to scale abilities to content as they are obviously still stuck in their box doing single player games where you released a new one if you wanted to upp the content. This is a big reason to why this class is OP in some situations. Another is their fail in howto up tank spec dps. Autocrit for once... I wonder if that will be exploited by people using the spec in dps gear...

Depends on if BW continue to be clueless or not with stuff like the set self healing for example. It shines through that they have no idea how to scale in tiers and handling balance across different areas like pvp and pve. It was a long shot to buy a mmo from them and sadly their skill is limited to single player environment with a at the design set end and powerlevel. I would never roll an Assassin now tbh. But if you like pvp alot and want to play a sturdy mdps you are not wrong in rolling a Sin, spec tank, get dps gear. Tank builds have some abilities that goes ballistic with dps gear and the set healing will be tuned to "low damage" pvp so even with the nerf this will still be viable. If you want to pve then roll something else. Also BW hate mdps there in general. A rdps can do whatever a mdps can do but it is not the other way around. It is ofc still doable and not at all impossible or anything. But my bet is that you will not be that happy down the road with your choice.

Nice when people with knowledge post. OP? Do you mean in general? Do you mean a tank spec with tank gear or with dps gear? Pvp or pve? Non scaling healing do suck yes because it was OP in low incomming damage situations. This is a no brainer that when raw damage (before any defence) in is like 2k dps, a hps of 200+ ups mean mitigation numbers by over 10%! That will offset the Assassins current few % less mean mitigation by far. Now it will be tuned towards those situations and what that will do to high incomming damage situations like 16 man raids is a joke. Unnerfed it was already mathematically starting to hurt our mean mitigation when discussing the later. The only way this will ever be balanced between pvp and pve, different tiers, 4 man, 8 man, 16 man etc is to totally scrap it in its current form and make a self heal that scale with raw incomming damage. Autocrits in tank tree and such is also a fail design as they will be a way to up low tank damage when in full tank gear but become a OP joke with dps gear ie when adding power and surge.

Pretty much all of the above. If I were in charge I would do this btw: 1) Remove Energize as it is a no brainer to realize that this will benifit trunkloads from dps gear and it is therefor a bad way to up tank damage as it will be used best by people in dps gear with surge and power and not by tanks in tank gear. 2) Nerf Harness Darkness damage part to roughly 15% per stack as it is to much right now and remove the entire healing part as it is the work of *some insult* mind as it will never be balanced for both 1on1 pvp fights and 16 man operations. The same goes for other self healing. Scrap it. 3) Add something to offset the slight mean mitigation difference. It also have to scale with incomming damage ofc as mean mitigation scales down to the number. So a nice balance (and still have it a little different and base it on self healing) in all situations would be to scrap all current self healing and add to Dark Charge a pool used for self healing. This pool would be added to by taking ALL raw incomming damage before defense, armour etc and divide it by for example 50 to get 2% "mean mitigation". Then just passivly heal from this pool with 1/5th of the value each second, rounding up and doing nothing if 0 ofc. This makes is flush out in 5 seconds. This mechanic would scale perfectly in both pvp and pve end game raiding. There would be some "wasted mitigation" healing at the end of each combat if no new one started after but it would be quite cool as well to have some extra points trickle in after the fight even though they are wasted mitigation. So for the darkness tree do nothing but put in the stacks force lightning ability in the energize slot and put the scaling reactive healing in the harness darkness slot with 1% mean mitigation healing per point. Done. For the dps geared tank problem in pvp I would then parse the changes above and if it was still to high in damage I would slap on some crit/surge/power reduction when using tank stance. ps BW, I do give this perfectly scaling mean mitigation healing mechanic away for free if you want to use it.

Well you kinda nailed it there. I also believe that this nerf will put "tanks" in dps gear in a good spot still for pvp. You will still do the damage and will still be kinda tough. I did however think that they would nerfed the damage portion of this tank "exploit" that makes them do dps like damage while still in tank stance. They did not so people like you will still be okey doing what you did. Those who wanted to be pve raid main tank kinda guys are now however officially screwed. ps I do not however for the world understand how they could have failed to see things like autocrit talents in a tank tree would not be "abused" by stacking surge and power or how set self healing would become in 1on1 like situations.

Well a rdps can do anything a mdps can do but not the other way around. But most guilds are not THAT picky I mean you take the guys who are reliable, friendly, good players. So I kinda agree to the quit guild.

*laugh* You mean that you listen to the developers and when they say something that is correct? Let's look at targets shall we? What metrics are we talking about? 1on1 in pvp were your close to fixed healing is awesome and makes you a god? Or 16 man hm Kephess where that same healing can no longer even before nerf offset a slightly lower mitigation? Yeah go and listen to inept people and take that as the truth if you like. Also easier than intended... well I have to use two abilities already to be on par with the passive mitigation of the other tanks doing nothing and in the other sense; sure I believe that as they are clearly not comfortable themself with the late addition of having assassins as main tank types. The self healing in its current form is an abomination and a really really stupid idea that can never be balanced at all. Now they choose to make it be balanced towards low damage situations which will make it be even more worthless in high damage situations. Slap on a armor nerf on top and the pve assassin tank is reduced to a charity case. So as many say "you will still be able to tank, you will just require more healing". For me that is a deal breaker same as I would still be able to tank even if they gave PT's a free 10k self heal ever sec. It would just not be fun as pve raiding is alot of number crunching and optimization. Some people have the time to re-roll, I unfortunatly do not. In short a nice toon for pvp. Tanks spec, grab dps gear to maximize the "tank abilities" energize and truck hitting harness darkness. Both which for some reason were not touched (apart from hd healing which is a fail design anyway) and imho was the only problem what so ever with this class to begin with.

I know you reverted the decision now that these classes should be full blown tanks, but since they still have a tank stance it should be fixed. Seriously just do it.

*Yawn* Do the math and come back here. Comparing mean mitigation between tank classes is old news. Been there, done that. Now lets all get dps gear and play pvp and enjoy beeing a sturdy dps.

Well since the self heal was supposed to make up for roughly 5% less mean mitigation (just look it up as before the nerf were posted for some reason this were true based on the mean mitigation formula) than a PT I would say nerfed into the ground is quite correct. But now for some reason trunk loads of people are screaming about that math is wrong and that Sins have MORE mean mitigation and needs to be nerfed and so on. I blame all this on pvp as that is the only reason why people should be trying so hard with lies to get some other class reduced in capacity. Our role now is to be carried as a tank. This is definatly possible, just a little sad. Ps Yes I know I have 2 dps **** abilities in my tanking tree that will go ballistic if I ever invest in dps gear but here I do not care about that as I play a tank and I do btw wonder why the h¤% they do not just remove energize and harness darkness to begin with.

Oh they changed system so that the normal mean mitigation formula does not work? 1-(1-A)(1-D)(B*(1-C)+(1-B)) = Mean Mitigation A=Avoidance, B=Shield Chance, C=Shield Absorption, D=MBADR If not then you are just wrong and well that is that as this formula clearly shows that Sins are taking a few percent (almost 5 compared to a PT) more damage than all tanks before any nerf. So the healing before nerf have to make up for 5% incomming damage which is not doable with how damage scales up in 16 man raids. Then add a mitigation nerf to that.... *sigh*

Yes you are. We are discussing pve tank balance. If they upp PT with 200k hp and 30% more mean mitigation we would also still be able to tank. I will not play a game for sure that makes my main into a charity case that is to be carried as he is sub par in his role which for me is pve raid tank. I do not object to nerf the hell out of areas were we outperform. That is not 16 man hm denova tanking however. Not really important here but you are for the record wrong as Assassins does not have more than other tanks in avoidance. Jugger have a tiny bit more infact. How about the facts. Mean mitigation is this: 1-(1-A)(1-D)(B*(1-C)+(1-B)) = Mean Mitigation A=Avoidance, B=Shield Chance, C=Shield Absorption, D=MBADR This is easily calculated and BEFORE this 1.3 nerf crap came everyone and their mother knew and agreed that Assassins/Shadows TANKS were a few percent behind in this "passive" mitigation but we were so close that it was still possible to tank. Then we have self healing which hardly scales at all which now makes it OP in 1-on-1 and sucks in a 16 man operation. No matter what number they set on the self healing in the current design will not work. Now they decided to tune it even harder towards pvp amount of incomming damage which makes us ever worse in end game pve as damage scales upwards alot. An assassin tank have a mean mitigation of roughly 5% less than a PT (before any nerf) and this is supposed to be put on par with self healing. Anyone with half a brain will see that the current self healing system will never be able to make up for drastically increased damage as it will then have to scale ALOT and now it scales with health which in itself is closely static from columi to campaign. But SM SOA and HM Kephess are not even in the same ballpark and if it could make up 5% on 16 man HM Kephess hits it would become a complete joke in pvp. All this equals fail. But I suppose it will make the assassin "tanks" in dps gear less tough when they do 500k damage in pvp, something which I never ever even touched half of as a tank in tank gear. How about solving that issue instead? It is so bloody easy to see the problem! Take all current nerfs, flush them and do this: 1) Energize. Scrap it. Becomes OP with dps gear. 2) Harness Darkness. Scrap it. To much dps and the healing design of it does not work as it can never be balanced because of difference in incomming damage. 3) Add something to make up for our few % less mean mitigation. Be creative and surprise me. Try use some math here BW and hit some real targets and surprise me even more.

Well according to the previously sticky posts (now ofc removed) in the tanking section Sins had the lowest mean mitigation of all tanks. Not by much though. Self healing also do not scale so that is becomming worse and worse. Anyone who claim it can make up for a percent of anything simply have no clue what so ever how damage scales from 1 on 1 up to a 16 hm denova raid. A hint: damage scales alot more than your self healing will ever do which in effect makes it a total design fail in the first place. Yes so it sounds about right to nerf the tanking (mitigation) part of this class... anyone who finished school can calculate that a Sin is not a single % higher in mitigation than a PT against a 16 hm Kephess or something like that. So I am basically waiting for the first word from them on the PTS "testing" and then I kinda assume I am gone as I will not become a charity case that is to be carried by healers, re-roll, or get dps gear and start to pvp as a sturdy dps. Also I spent alot of time "beta testing" buggy crap code (aka Operations) while paying so this is not helping. But we will see, perhaps they manage to get their head out of there and managed to do some parses on their own so they can see for themself that in a 16 hm raid Sins actually needs some fix as the self healing is starting to suck more and more and cannot even count as passive defense because the damage scales alot faster which makes it impossible for it to compansate for a couple of % less in mean mitigation ever.

You backed up nothing. Your claimed in a forum that you together with 15 other guys managed to do something which you do not need to know any theorycrafting to do. I am sorry that you took it so hard that two straight posts and some other odd ones slammed your "views" as it seems to have gotten to you. How can they do this when you are world 13th! Wrong is wrong even if its from the president.

Yeah they just have no clue what so ever. Sins are good keeping threat but everyone will be that after this patch. Then those lazy people do not even fix the things that needs to be fixed! Noone who is not a school dropout can come up with any math that shows Assassins to have higher mitigation in a 16 man denova, with or without that for raiding pathetic self-healing. So mitigation nerf... yeah well done, that will really not ruin the pve tanking balance... but now we have a sturdy dps build to fall back on for pvp! Nice, I wanted that and was just confused when I thought I rolled a tank for pve tanking purposes.

Good for you! I absolutely think that everyone here is actually talking about if healers can overcome the deficiency of some tank classes or not. We are not at all talking about the balance in mitigation which is already slightly in favour to other tank classes in pve which ALL math show. But again, now we took a big step towards knowing that it is no problem to cut for example marauders dps in half as long as others can do enough damage. Thumbs up from me.

Now we all know why they did not even bother to give us one when they reworked it so Assassins should be able to have a "tank" role. They just wanted us to be able to have a sturdy dps spec for pvp because their targets are obviously lower than: http://www.swtor.com/community/showpost.php?p=4568972&postcount=24, which is in other words a statement that we are not supposed to be even on par with other tanks in mitigation because that is above their targets. The only other conclusion is that they are just inept and have no clue about what they are doing and this is just a side effect of their best effort try to fix "tanks" in dps gear doing pvp which then unfortunatly affects alot of other things as well and they are so clueless that they did not even think of this.

Yes Assassin/Shadow tanks in dps gear have been doing dps like damage and then they have an almost non scaling self healing mechanic that in its current form will either be to good (low damage setting like pvp) or be worthless (16 man OP). BW's solution is for this to take the tank class with the lowest mitigation already (only slighly though) and make it into a semi durable, almost dps. Many people who really play tanks with tank gear and raid are upset about this as we were and want to continue to be tanks. Before we were already slighly behind in this as anyone who knows their mitigation math already knows. Now it becomes like this: http://www.swtor.com/community/showpost.php?p=4568972&postcount=24. BW should try and be competent here for once and adress the actual problems without introducing new ones. Assassins/Shadows are not a single % better in pve tanking than anyone, quite the opposite. So stop being incompetent here and fix what is broken and that is not tank in tank gear mitigation.

Yeah sure whatever. Kings for sure. I wonder why the removed a couple of sticky posts here though that with math showed Assassins pre nerf were already sub-par to all other tanks when it comes to mitigation. This does not even have to be discussed as anyone with any knowledge of tanking and mitigation in this game already know the facts about the current state. That is that Assassins mitigation is a tiny bit worse than Jugg and PT, but "we" kinda agreed that the difference was so small that is was neglectable. So starting from that they nerf the mitigation of the tank with the lowest mitigation?! Yeah great way to handle problems with pvp "tanks" in dps gear doing sick amount of damage while still beeing sturdy... It will not even solve that problem! Also that BW guy refering to self healing as passive mitigation beeing to strong should perhaps try doing some math even though he is a BW employee and they do not seem to like to do that. Also he states that we had equal armour and self healing. This time he is just completely wrong. Take a tank with less mean mitigation by a few percent (proved so many times with math). Then add healing that hardly scale at all and parse how that turns out when going from 1 on 1 pvp, 4 man FP, 8 man Op to 16 man OP. You will see that what is good in 1 on 1 is worth next to NOTHING in a 16 man OP. The sad thing about all this is that is just proves that BW simply do not understand even the basics of MMO tiered mechanics.