Because it is touted everywhere on the forums as the best sustained DPS spec? And maybe it even is? This reasoning is age old, wide spread, and ... false! A little thought experiment, if you please. Let us assume for a second that those 18 second DoTs Leth/Eng has were no DoTs but instead direct damage abilities that delivered all their damage up front but had an 18 second cooldown. (And Cull was somehow adjusted to deliver the same damage under these changed circumstances) The DPS in Tank and Spank would be the same. The DPS in movement fights would be the same, although Leth/Eng would now also do no damage while moving. That would not matter, the damage was already done. Literally. The reason DoTs usually are so great for sustained DPS is not the fact that the damage is doled out over time, to the contrary that is a disadvantage. The only reason things are as they are and that the existing DoTs are so good for sustained DPS is that game designers (justified) compensate for that disadvantage by tuning the damage numbers on DoTs upwards such that they usually have the best damage-per-cast-time ratio of all available abilities.

Plus Gus has some rather amusing quotes. In my opinion at least.

Disclaimer: I am rather new to this class and its Endgame applications. On the other hand that should make me the target audience for this sort of guide, so please bear with me if one question or the other may seem a bit on the silly/stupid side. Mostly what I am curious are the rotations you mentioned: Thing is, they somehow don't add up. Each DoT has a duration of at least 18 seconds, and Cull has a cooldown of 9 seconds, so: using only SoS and one other ability (like in the first rotation example) won't be able to bridge the gap between the two Culls, assuming the first rotation is an endless loop (until OS/EP come off CD) there is not enough time between the second cull of the first iteration and the first cull of the second iteration. in total the first rotation takes significantly shorter than 18 seconds to execute. Unless some of your notation implies 'use this ability many times over'. Clarification would definitely be helpful here. Some more about the DoTs, then. Interrogation Probe and Corrosive Dart both last 18 seconds, while Corrosive Grenade lasts 21. The two alternatives I see here are to either refresh each once it has worn off, leading to Corrosive Grenade 'wandering' through the rotation, or refresh all three en bloc, i.e. every 18 seconds, thereby clipping one tick of Corrosive Grenade. Apparently the latter is the current mode of choice, likely for better tracking. Again, a bit of elaboration would be nice. Speaking of tracking, how do you do that? Especially if there happens to be a second Hybrid Sniper in the group. Sticking to a fixed rotation may work as long as you can sit still and keep pushing your buttons, but once there are interruptions - like you have to move for a bit - how do you know when to put up the DoTs again?

@Keyboradninja That post of yours was very informative indeed. What I would like to know now, though, was how well that "all specs are within 3% of each other" holds up for different specs of the same class, say for example a sharpshooter gunslinger compared to a hybrid one. Did Bioware manage good balancing here as well, or are the gaps bigger?

Maybe you could give an example on how to 'abuse' Deflection, seeing as it is a 2 Minute CD still? Say for EC Kephess. Sadly, while that primer IS informative, it does not address the one issue I was curious about: How to deal with those situations where Kinetic Ward is stripped off early. It only mentiones that this is when Shadows are in trouble.

What is your Shadow Tank doing differently, then? The way it was explained to me was that Shadows compensate their lower (even with Combat Technique) armor with the increased shield chance granted by Kinetic barrier. In encounters where those charges are eaten up too quickly though (basically any boss that has frequent hitting melee attacks, like EC Kephess and supposedly Zorn) that defense crumbles, and the Shadow is at a severe disadvatage compared to the other tanks. What am I missing? --- Also, on another note, what is the official word on the 2.0 changes? I have read the patch notes, but of course I am not sure I evaluated them correctly. The way I understood for example the Shadow changes was that it's mitigation actually got worse (the 20% armor buff is removed, and Kinetic Barrier got a longer cooldown), but in turn she got other gimmicks like increase to the healing recieved and an encounter specific way to buff the healing output in general. Which seems to put the Shadow even further into the 'tricky and gimmicky' direction compared to the 'I just shrug it off' attitude of Guardian and Vanguard.

As the thread title already may indicate, I am at the moment seriously considering to create my third "real" SWTOR character, and this one shall be a tank. Which leaves me the tough decision to pick between Guardian, Shadow and Vanguard. Since my focus will be group PvE it would of course be good to know in advance what I am getting myself into with each class. I.e. what the strengths and weaknesses of each are in comparison to the other. Sadly the replies of my guild mates have not been overly helpful and the best summary Google could find for me is this one which is only a single opinion, and from 1.3. to boot. Instead of spamming three different class forums with threads I'd rather ask on this one, then. Would you be so kind and give me a short rundown for endgame PvE about which tank class excels at mitigation (different kinds, if worth distinguishing), single target/multi target threat and whatever else you deem relevant. For example I remember one of my Denova HM tries, where on the final boss Kephess our Shadow tank complained how unsuited he was to take those heavy hits. So I have something other than flavor to base my decision on.