You're in no position to complain about dishonest argumentation. Incidentally, since you seem to be taking a ProerThanThou approach to things, when exactly did you clear NiEC?

If you're farming dailies on two characters and running flashpoints on a third, your play is anything but casual.

Times are GMT, not PST. GMT is eight hours ahead of PST. A bit odd that times for an American west coast server would be listed in GMT, but whatever.

I'd be surprised, since that's no longer possible.

You understand correctly. DD is on a timer, DS is triggered by boss health. The health thresholds are 20%, and can be triggered by either boss.

The spear is hitting the group because Defensive Systems is activating while Double Destruction is being cast. This is happening because DPS is low. The best way to fix this is to coax more dps out of the players (including the tanks, probably). If your healers have spare energy and attention, keeping the tanks dotted for the duration of the fight will make a significant difference as well. If you're unable to eeke more damage out of your group, then you need to do uneven damage to the tanks in order to force the phase change before a second DD is cast. You'll probably run into the hard enrage, but you can cross that bridge when you come to it (and if SC is the only tank left alive, a hard enrage can be healed through for a while).

If your dps are in 61 and you're seeing two double destructions per phase, they're underperforming. Put everyone on MOX and see what needs to be improved. If they were doing slightly more damage you wouldn't see the second DD cast and the lightning spear wouldn't drop on the group.

Yeah, it might be the extra time walking without the shield, but I don't think it's ever been definitively established what the deal with cutter threat generation is, so grain of salt and all that. I just posted because "cutters immediately target healers" isn't actually what happens; it's what's happening with what your group is doing, but if another group wants to try a different strat and they assume that cutters will go hit healers it might cause them some problems. You're welcome to try the strat if you want, of course, but it's probably overly complicated for nightmare (it just addressed some issues we were having that were specific to our group) and is almost certainly overly complicated for HM.

Not necessarily. Trenchcutter threat generation is nonstandard, at least while they're under the shield (in Ni. I would guess in HM as well, but we never used a strat in HM that would have caused me to notice, so that's just an assumption). I've seen--several times, while we learning the fight--healer aggro pull a warrior out of a pack of cutters while the cutters continued on to the tank. Beyond that, my group's approach to the cutters goes like this: Tank guards other tank. Guarding tank and dps stand behind the walker. Guarded tank and healers move in front of the walker. Guarded tank and healers peel the warriors as they spawn. Cutters beeline to guarding tank. And we have never seen cutters change target to the healers before reaching the group behind the walker.

This is incorrect. Trenchcutters spawn with aggro on tanks, not healers.

Pity the poor Vanguards and their delayed taunts.

It may or may not be true that Guardian tanks can make good use of accuracy, but accuracy is the worst possible stat for Vanguard and Shadow tanks. High impact bolt misses once in a while, and that's about it. If for some reason you wanted to take dps stats instead of tanking stats you'd be much better off with crit, power, or surge.

Note that the Vanguard taunt has a delay. At close range the delay is maybe .2 seconds. If you're at max range, expect 1.5 seconds from the time you activate your taunt until it actually takes effect. If you activate storm immediately before activating the taunt, that drops down to about .2 seconds.

There's a gunslinger listed with 111 more dps than your listed amount. Is the OP out of date?

Had a couple helpful glitches in NiEC the past couple weeks. We downed Toth when Zorn was at 5% or so and Zorn, well, broke. If he did any damage before he died, we didn't notice it. When I was a fill-in DPS for a PUG, Z&T enraged. One tank died, Zorn died, then the other tank died. Toth came for me, hit me once for around three quarters of my health, and then didn't damage me again before he died.

My group regularly starts the burn phase before the third male appears. We may have wiped the first time (I don't really remember), but it hasn't been an issue since. Just kill the boss and then deal with the male. Things might get exciting if you swap tanks and spawn adds during the burn phase, so don't do that (although it sounds as though IamViolent's group did just that and got through it fine, so maybe do that if you like excitement). Z&T, yeah. But that's easily solved by having one person per side paying attention to the bosses and calling out when it's time to pause dps.

I'm pretty confident that any group with the dps to clear NiEC has the dps to start the burn phase before the third Male appears.

Close. We actually have the healers run around with the OT as well. Doing so means both warriors in the first pack can be picked up instantly (healer grabs one, tank the other). It ensures there's no risk of the OT outranging the healers. Finally, the warriors in packs two and three usually switch targets to the healers before they reach the group behind the walker (gutters do not switch to the healers, don't ask me why. An unlisted effect of the shields?), so if the OT ****s up and misses one of the warriors it's not the end of the world. I've seen reports claiming that if the tank picking up the warriors is a Shadow this won't work, because the healing threat they generate, even while guarded, will be sufficient to cause the gutters to switch targets. That's on 8-man. I've no idea how it would need to change for 16-man.

How much worse? I'm doing something like 100-150 less dps on my guardian than my vanguard. I'd been ascribing most of that difference to my being bad and having worse gear (van is full DG, guardian still has a columi weapon).

You can wait until after the eighth and final melee attack, although perhaps 300ms ping makes you not want to risk it?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the delay appears to increase with distance. Standing at 29.74 meters from dummy I got: 18:34:32.470 Verfolgerin activates Neural Jolt. 18:34:34.157 Verfolgerin's Neural Jolt adds effect Taunt to Combat Training Target. 18:34:34.767 Verfolgerin activates Sonic Round. 18:34:35.413 Verfolgerin's Sonic Round adds effect Taunt to Combat Training Target. 18:35:02.727 Verfolgerin activates Neural Jolt. 18:35:03.963 Verfolgerin's Neural Jolt adds effect Taunt to Combat Training Target.