I don't see any discussion ... You should know that one can activate abilitys before you actually do them. There's no human reaction time in it, because you can click on your next ability before the 1,5 gcd (you can change this latency in your swtor settings.... )It's easy to do an ability about every 1,5 seconds and neither human reaction time nor latency are providing an additional threshold for doing so (so you are the liar). Little counterexample: my sniper dummy log on the leaderboards list: http://www.torparse.com/a/534783 03:35:11.792 Zah'ik activates Rifle Shot 03:35:13.264 Zah'ik activates Corrosive Grenade =1,472 seconds (between 2 instant casts), as i had 2% alacrity the gcd is 1,47 seconds. Tell me how i am able to have a human reaction time of 0,002 seconds then (actually that's the combat logs detection time as the maximum speed of the combat log writing data is about 2 milliseconds). Oh and my latency ingame is atleast 50 milliseconds. How can i activate an ability within 2 milliseconds then? Can my human reaction time go into the past? Oh and the fastest Rotation is: shock > wither > thrash > shock > Force Lightning means 6 seconds spare (12 seconds - 4 gcd = 6 seconds) if you don't get procs that would be shock > wither > thrash > thrash > shock > Force Lightning that's 4,5 seconds then. If we assume a continuios rotation you still have 1 gcd after you channeled force Lightning until shock comes off cooldown. That would be something like: discharge > shock > Wither > thrash > thrash > shock > Force Lightning (= 3 seconds spare time, or 4,5 seconds depending on procs). Ergo: 3-6 seconds spare time. What?! You tell me now that assassins with a 20% more armor talent get now bigger spikes! That is utterly incorrect, because there were zero changes of shield chance, defense chance or any other Talent that reduces the probablity of gettings Spikes. It's the complete other way around. Because of more passive damage reduction the damage and especially the spike damage got reduced by a large amound. You are always getting hit for 6-12% less damage, every possible spike is always reduced now. Saying that healers have now a more difficult time to deal with spike damage (when they actually have to heal a lot less spike damage) is utterly wong. (How can anyone even have the idea to say that a tank with more damage reduction is more difficult to heal?!) You have to ackknowledge first, that the Rotation is a lot less tigther. A delay of one second was never permissible before 2.5. Now you can have 6 seconds of delay. The gap between 12 and 13 seconds doesn't matter (as i have shown already), when you are comparing 2.4 Rotation with 2.5 Rotation. You can say that it's harsher to get the buff back up between 15 and 16 seconds (don't forget FL). But you can not say that the 2.5 Rotation is more difficult then the 2.4 Rotation (cause that is incorrect). They are all casual pvp or casual pve (no operations) Player. Were do they say that assassins got nerfed for operations? No you didn't disprove anything. Every Player did get a buff for Rotation, no matter when he casts it: when you cast it every 13 seconds you got a buff When you cast it every 18 seconds you got a buff when you cast it every 25 seconds you got a buff I will just Quote myself now: Ok in your mind i am just viable then, we i can get a Cup of coffee while doing nim?! Yes you could use all these abilitys. Let's have a small look at the abilitys there. There's one precious ability called saber strike . It has absolutely no use in this rotation and therefore it can be easily replaced by any of the named abilitys. You are deluding yourself if you say you can't instert Force Breach or Spinning Strike instead of Saber Strike. If you were playing a suboptimal spec and therefore having a suboptimal Rotation (with less Force Lightnings) you got a lot more disadvantages then with 2.5 (as shown above, less tight Rotation + more passive bonuses).

Look in this section: http://www.swtor.com/community/forumdisplay.php?f=73 There are atleast a dozen threads out there, feel free to look at them. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=616779 http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=686677 and many many more.... I talk to people like they behave and you simply lied over a dozen times in 2 single posts. I don't talk nice to liers. And especially not to people who additionally create huge wall of text without any correct content at all. Alone in this thread i refuted half a dozens of these wrong statements and now you wanna tell me that you were not smart enough to find correct Information? I suggest you should read this thread (and many others) then, before you start posting. Show me my incorrect statements then, if you think i deceive anyone here. Your post just contains random attacks against me, after i refuted all your points one by one. Shows a lot about your character in my opinion. OT:

Yes you don't understand the logic. The optimal rotation was to cast a complete Force Lightning rotation within 9-12 seconds (depending on procs). Now the optimal rotation is 15 seconds. So you already won 3-6 seconds of slack compared to 2.4. I will make a very very simple example now: Our "slacker" is just able to cast Force Lightning every 18 seconds. Before 2.5 (with 2.4) he lost 6-9 seconds of value, that means his self heals did heal him for 33-50% less then optimal. With 2.5 he gets 12 seconds of the full value, 3 seconds were he builds up his stack and 3 seconds were he doesn't have the stacks. That means he loses(1- 13,5/18) =25% of the optimal value. The same is true when you just cast Force Lightning every 30 seconds, or every Minute.... KBN already proved you wrong. That doesn't need to be refuted, you are simply not understanding that self healing had to be applied a lot tighter then Dark Protection. When you recast Dark Protection every 15 seconds (which is now the optimal rotation), you were already slacking pre 2.5 by 3-6 seconds. That was the context out of this sentence (which you simply just took out of context), which you again are not understanding. The stacks are a lot better then selfs. Learn to read the changelog, assassins got a 20% passive armor debuff. And a suboptimal playing of self healing was never an option, when you faced difficult content (sv and tfb nim).

Lie 1. There is a disparity issue between shield and Absorption rating between tank classes. Tank Tyrans/Dread Guards.. with a Juggernaut and then with an Assassin. The Rotation got easier and 12% damage reduction is not "squishy as we were before". Passive DR (i suppose you meant armor) has a very small Impact on incoming damage as that just affects a minority of all incoming attacks. Ergo Lie 2 and 3. The Rotation was an absolute dictation before even more, if you wanted to be able to heal yourself for enough to additional damage you got. Lie number 5. Ok now you tell us that the Rotation got easier for assassin tanks. Shield and Absorption doesn't account for internal/elemental damage (Lie number 6.). Other tanks have a lot more merciless buffs they have to keep up (kbn's Juggernaut mitigation is a lot stricter to maintain, then the assassin Rotation) Side note: Assassin Tanks have by far the highest damage reduction of internal/elemental damage not even accounting stuff like Force Shroud. There's a lot more room in the rotation then before 2.5 (hello 9 second Force Lightning Rotation) and there's always wiggle in the Rotation (Lie number 7). If Juggernauts and Powertechs are superior why do all the recent world firsts kills (from dp hm to tfb nim) have an assassin tank in their lineup? (lie 8) You are just asking for destroying the class i love to play. KBN is one of the best assassin tanks in the world. He was the only assassin tank in the world maintanking Kephess in tfb nim back in 72 gear. So, for you moving at the right time and preparing for knockback etc.. is just luck and not skill? Sorry,but i completely disagree with that Statement. It requires skill to not screw up your Rotation while moving, getting knockbacked... You don't need to really channel to reapply stacks (assuming they didnt run out).. You can mess up for 3-6 seconds every Force Lightning rotation. So ergo for you is a 50% mess up of abilitys, slighlty? For me that's not slightly, for me that's huge. No it doesn't. It means that 50% of the incoming attacks (i assume f/t e/k for simplicity) are shielded and their damage is reduced by 40%. Which attack deals 30000 damage? Most of the bosses and pvp attacks are splitted into small parts. Normal tanks are attacked multiple times per second, the large number of incoming attacks simply eats up the rng. 3-6 second window =tiny? So for juggernauts and powertechs there's no human fallibilityy then. (lie 9) They can't forget to recast their Force Screams? Which they added with 2.5. Before 2.5 you would be correct, self heals didn't have a wiggle room. Nowadays tough with a 3-6 second wiggle room every Force Lightning Rotation. Ok your fun =/= my fun. Powertech tanks are by far the least played tank class in this game. I would suggest you look at the line-ups of the best guilds in the world. I will just repost my post already in this thread, which you haven't answered so far (and which simply refutes your Argument):

@Uruare: Completely away from the Topic. When you don't understand that tanks have a lot more abilitys (shield Rating, absorb, i/e...), then just there passive armor, you simply can't talk about tank balance. Every tank has to sustain his passive dr (force scream and heat blast it is for the other 2 tank classes). Your also seem to lack the understanding of passive damage reduction. Every additional armor stuff does not provide damage reduction! Armor provides an increase in damage reduction! For PvE all Tank classes are fine and balanced against each other. In my opinion we now have a Level of Balance for tanks we never had before since this game started.

He starts the combat log with Force Charge. Well crit percentages are crit percentages. Looks edited, seems like he added a critted mainhand hit. About the dummy killing stuff, i just repost what i already posted in the thread: Edit: Actually you refer to the leaves combat before kill. That's also happening quite a lot and happened to multiple people in this thread. The game seems to recognize the death of the dummy before you actually make your last hit. Therefore parses must be cropped from the time you enter combat to the actually death of the dummy. Just look at my parse on the Leaderboard for example. Sorry that i had to edit your post, but it was not possible to allign it with my posting format. Edit: You are correct with your post. Seems i should read all that stuff more precisely.

Mainly hybrid snipers are not really affected by it because they can instead cast their series of shot ambush instead of an orbital for almost the same energy cost, while marksmann doesn't have these possibilities.

If the changes i have read so far (only the corrosive dart changes were posted by the devs) are correct, following things should happen: Singe target (dummy) Rotation: -MM: Most popular spec (36/4/6) gets a 12,5% damage increase to corrosive darts, which is around a total damage increase of 1% (as corrosive dart deals about 8% of our damage). The 60 additional cunning from the 4 set Bonus is probably 0,5-1% more damage (i am actually not really sure about that). Orbital is a standard part of our rotation, previously it dealt about 11% of our damage with 4,5% of our global cooldowns (judging from my own parses). A quick calculation indicates that 3 ticks from Orbital Strike will be a bit over 5000 damage on average in full 78 gear. That should be more then Explosive Probe for example (4,8k) or Snipe while costing less energy, but for pure single target it will then just be a filler. Now, there are different Scenarios, but most likely you will still cast orbital strike for pure single target dps as a filler cause the standard mm rotation needs a few filler especially before execute: If we still cast it slighlty faster, so that we have the same gcd for orbital (8 OS for 24 ticks every ~35 seconds), we will 62% of its damage which means we lose 7% of our dps. As the energy costs are a lot lower now for OS, i think it's save to say that you can squeeze in a few more explosive probes for rifle shots (previously i did ~5 RS and ~5 EP in marksmann parses). Let's say we are very good and are able to get 2 more EP instead of Rifle Shots (from Orbital Strikes we get about 100 additional energy). That would be about 6k more dps is ~0,6% more dps. Summing all this up, marksmann snipers lose about 4,4% of their single target dps. Thats roughly 160 dps, which will put marksmann snipers behind a lot of spec in terms of dummy dps (still mm snipers got a lot more utiliy, that they bring to a raid...). -Hybrid Orbital Strike is casted instead of a series of shot + ambush most of the time. Currently i don't see any possible way of including OS anymore into the Hybrid Rotation in terms of single target dps.With a 2 seconds cast time it's not worth it, cause you would have to cast it with ambush to not make it 2 gcd, which is not possible. For the precast Orbital Strike, you lose about 14k dps. For the rest of the Orbital Strikes you lose about 5k dps. Alltogether thats 111 less dps. For the hybrid the 4 set Bonus is actually more viable then for marksmann due to energy Problems while casting takedown sub 30%, so i will count that with 2% (1% for cunning, 1% for a takedown instead of a rifle shot, probably it's more). Altogether thats 35 dps less, that's less then 1% less damage. Actually my calculations show me that it's in the current game already the best way to just precast orbital and go for 4 set Bonus as a hybrid sniper and never cast orbital again in single target rotation. 1 single additional takedown is enough. :eek: I didn't even count in the Corrosive Dart buffs, if you are able to get them hybrid snipers might be completely unaffected in terms of pure single target dps.

No the Saber Ward f/t reduction is like Invincible. Therefore the 50% defense addition is something like 8 times more valuable then the 25% f/t reduction on average(the vast majority of damage in operations is defendable ).

I just wanted to point that out, atleast for me it's something quite important. Technically Saber Ward, followed by Deflection and then Energy Shield provide the best damage reduction, but Overcharge Saber additionally heals for more then 8k health which more then makes up for very slightly less damage reduction . Yes, but your calculations forgets that assassins get more damage from an unmitigated hit. Basically without cooldowns it's 44% vs 50%+ armor for unmitigated attacks. With cooldowns as you see, there's not a 6%+ difference anymore. OT: Yes, increased damage reduction is better then damage reduction (that sounds weird i know ). Because of the 2.5 changes the defensive cooldowns of assassins got a quite substantial buff (in my opinion they now have the best cooldowns of all tanking classes). I didn't make any calculations for Powertech tanks cooldowns so far, but Energy Shield is also giving a 25% increase in damage reduction. Discharge: Yes, i think i just misunderstood the guide there Spines are doing m/r damage and give a i/e dot. I couldn't think of any good example to test a lot of constant high incoming damage in raid setttings (atleast not in current hms), to see a difference between defensive cooldowns. I see that it's probably difficult to test it there, because assassins got a substantial buff for i/e damage with 2.5 now. For me that looked like a priority list . The main difference is, that when you don't get a proc from thrash, you will lose gcd for your first force lightning. According to my experience you want to cast that first 3 HD Recklessness FL as fast as possible, so i proritize shock > wither and then the rest, so i am not depend on any procs in my Rotation and can get the maximum threat the first 10 seconds. Casting Discharge or Wither 1 gcd doesn't matter at the start of any fight (the healers will anyway dps ). Didn't read that discussion about KBN's numbers. Well the threads name is Endgame PvE and dulfy states that "these guides are here to improve PvE endgame experience" and i based my judgement of this guide around that. In my opinion the guide is a pure class guide, it describes all the abilities, Rotation, of the assassin tank..., but there's nothing about strategys for tanks (like using Force Shroud for Thundering Blast or so...) for the current endgame operations.

Ok, hmm i will bring some criticism then for the assassin guide: The main talent build is 37/5/4. Mainly, because a lot of unexpected things can happen and a raid can easily wipe because you were not fast enough at some point to tank something. I personally never take Thrashing Blades over Avoidance, cause the slight damage increase is normally just unimportant. Avoidance on the other Hand can have a really big Impact. 1.3 Thrash has a 51% Chance to proc Energize, Maul and Assassinate have a 30% Chance. 1.4 Defensive Cooldowns: You forgot to add the armor adrenal (the rakata or exotech one), due to the larger armor bonuses assassins have they get a very large bonus out of this adrenal. (it's also not in the other tanking guides) For the other cooldowns, Overcharge Saber is the best cooldown in the whole game, and Deflection is about as good as Saber Ward. Also you don't seem to know that Overcharge Saber provides a 25% increase in damage reduction and not a flat damage reduction. Basically, Overcharge Saber provides more mitigation the better your gear is. I've written a little comparision between Juggernaut and Assassin cooldowns at some point in the forums: I suggest tanking SV NiM Styrak and let an assassin take the spines with Overcharge Saber, and then let a Juggernaut tank take the spines with Invincible. You will see a difference. 1.6 From the first ability priority it looks like you want to use discharge always over thrash (probably i just read that wrong). There's no ability prioriy for assassin tanks for defensive cooldowns. According to the fight you should use the proper cooldown for the situation. 1.7 The Opening Threat Rotation is wrong. Shock - Wither - Discharge - Thrash - Shock - 3HD Force Lightning, is superior as it provides your first Force Lightning faster and generates more threat, while maintaining the same surviveabiltiy. 1.9 You shouldn't let Phase Walk run out. You can also click the Phase Walk debuff on yourself away at any point. Then you can instantly reapply it any time in this fight, you don't need to wait until it runs out. My summary: To be honest i don't get out much from this guide, it's mainly just rewriting the tooltips + adding KBN's numbers. Most of the Information that goes beyond that is unfortunately not correct (apart from the Force Cloak section + some of the tips and tricks). As you state in your post, this is guide for pve endgame tanking, but proper explanations for tanking for pve endgame content (how to use cooldowns on different fights for example...) are completely missing.

The relic has a 20 second cooldown! It will just activate ones per 20 seconds at max (not every 4,5 seconds). And it's not 0,06 but 0,12: Dark Protection + armor buff give you about 12% damage reduction.

I didn't say your hp is wrong (although when you assume 80k solely coming from stance that is also wrong as proven already in this thread), i say your dps assumption is wrong cause 100k would be 50% of the damage output of a whole dps.

A 6-7% increase in damage reduction is a 12% damage reduction. An average of 200k damage per Player per warzone? You wanna tell us that your passive heal and medpacs heal you for 50% of a complete enemy dps deals in a warzone?!

I wanted to point out, that strange things happen at the end when you kill the dummy, cause of Bioware dubious implementation of the killing dummy and respawning dummy sequence. He definitly edited the debuffs out (as rules do forbid).

We were talking about the offhand hit (0,6 seconds afterwards) and prior to that offhand hit he already did 1000300 damage. The dummy died with 1 Million damage as the 4,9k dispatch was at that excact same time. http://www.torparse.com/a/539823/time/1388842821/1388843087/0/Overview @Garglouik: I don't speak french very well, but the first ability he uses is: saut de force, which as far as i know means force jump/force Charge. He did edit his debuffs out. @Bulmyni: You also did less then 1 Million damage to the dummy

Not always. I have seen similar issues, sometimes when i kill the dummy, the respawning seems to not work 100% properly, e.g. the dummy respawns, despawns, respawns... Edit: Looking through my combat log files with Parsec i did find something: Hitting the Dummy with Rifle Shot without reentering combat 0,3 seconds after i killed the dummy.

I don't know anything about marauders, but every fente impitoyable offhand hit in his logs hits about 2 seconds later then the mainhand hit. Also every activation of fente impitoyable is 1 second before the mainhand actually hits the dummy. 14:44:45.850 Mayoo activates Fente impitoyable. 14:44:46.642 Mayoo's Fente impitoyable hits Mannequin d'entraînement des opérations for 4953 énergétiques damage, causing 4953 threat. 14:44:48.892 Mayoo's Fente impitoyable hits Mannequin d'entraînement des opérations for 610 énergétiques damage, causing 610 threat. And that's the same for every other Fente impitoyable hit in his logs. The dummy could easily have respawned and getting the last offhand hit and then despawning again. For me atleast whenever i try to use armor debuff again on the dummy after a parse he despawns, instantly respawns again and i can put the armor debuff on a second time.

@Falver: for me that log from your post above me is over 1 million damage: http://www.torparse.com/a/539823/time/1388842821/1388843087/0/Overview That his last hit hits 0,001 seconds later then the actual kill of the dummy, happens with normal game latency. The log he did upload did put him out of combat before the last 3 attacks for 992000 damage, and torparse is not showing all the damage you do after you "left combat". If you add the next 2 attacks he comes over 1 Million damage.

Yes, the RW is in theory (and in practise) better. For the arkanian relic: You have to count in the downtime between procs (i count with 3 seconds, which seemed to be ok on average according to my combat logs) which gives us 740/23 =32,17 for the arkanian relic and 1360/43 = 31,62 for the dread forged relic. That more or less eliminates the difference between these relics, although the arkanian relic is still very slighlty (1-2%) ahead.

I entirely understand if people prefer the hybrid for the aoe reduction instead of the normal build (i refer to 27-17-2 here, with some twists). But that was viable before 2.5. (compared to the Standard tank build) . And especially because you die (so much) additional mitigation is a lot better then self heal in pvp. Therefore the 2.5 changes were a straight buff compared to the self heal build. Spike damage is a lot higher in pvp. Don't wanna bring the old sentence, but: When you die you can't heal yourself

Force Lightning was always giving the most healing by far, unless someone uses a Shadow/Assassin Rotation without harnessed Darkness. The new RW relic is better then the healing relic was, so even if we still would have self healing there would be no Point in taking the self healing relic. A 350 heal every 8 seconds, is nothing compared to a 3000+ heal from Force Lightning and a lot worse then any armor buff we got. It's inside our calculations, but i don't think you can argument with it for anything. Yes, pre 2.5 you should have taken that 15% talent always (although is was probably the worst talent that you had to take ). 100000 heal with 350 every 8 seconds and 505 every 23 seconds? That would mean you fought straight for 1522 seconds (thats over 22 minutes), without dieing a single time and with constantly attacking every single second of the warzone, without a single missed gcd.... If the proc heals was 90% of your total healing an assassin would've never been able to come even Close to 100k healing in warzones.

Explain how a char without Slow Time is supposed to heal himself constantly. My quote was about a shadow Player who wanted to have the same Value out of Force Lightning if he just is able to cast it every 30 seconds instead of every 9 seconds. Don't spread misinformation when taking a single sentence out of the context. "Skilled" Player already got the huge nerf, that they don't need to Force Lightning every 9 seconds. Shadow Protection already got dumbed down from an optimal 6-9 seconds Rotation to a 12 seconds Rotation. The max rotation got already dumbed down by 3-6 seconds, as i calculated before that means that lower "skilled" Player get an advantage from Dark Protection compared to self heal before. You are just repeating your previous "Argument" in this paragraph. Here is my quote again, but as you are not responding to it (probably because you fear serious discussion), it's probably senseless to repeat it: The Addition is also entirely wrong as that was the same with self heal. Why should it be providing the buff for everyone all the time? Bioware choose that time for a reason and i bet because they didn't want to simplify assassins/shadows by a large amount (although the class got simplified a bit with 2.5). They wanted to get the value of self heal into the same value of damage reduction depending on how often you cast Force Lightning. I always say 6-7% or something similar (Depending if People speak about passive armor, Dark Protection or both or pvp and to provide a spectrum of armor levels). It may be, that i forget it sometimes. We use other numbers, because we have other numbers. The 4% is totally totally inaccurate. The 4% would be accurate if you have 0% armor, no damage reduction at all. The 6-7% are correct for every normal assassin tank armor level. And i rant on about it, because stuff like this causes so much misinformation in this forum. I bet the majority of the forum belives that for example Invincible provides more Damage Reduction then Overcharge Saber, although in reality Overcharge Saber provides the same damage reduction (+ a heal).

21:45:39.976 Vîsas loses Dark Protection. Edit: Leafy also lost Shadow Protection when he got hit by Rising Slash, but he had a bubble which reduced his rising slash by 4k.

Why do you want to heal the tank for 30k in that time?