Had forgotten about that, this opens up possibilities when rerolling

Pretty much, they'll balance sin/shadows spikiness someday but since it's unknown when that'll happen the best plan is to have a jugg and a sin so you can use either depending on balance after a major patch. Reasons to have sins/shadows would have to be efficiency and tank-dps reasons, neither of them are very convincing yet since I highly doubt that NiM S&V will put out so much damage that you *need* at least 1 sin/shadow so you have enough hps for the rest of the raid, not to mention the spike damage will mostly be on the tanks and the effective difference in hps needed between sin and jugg is debatable due to overhealing and difference in healers.

This may be wrong since I haven't tanked a The End in ages (we switched to tutchuk last since you can delay Fixate enough to tank Sunder with single target taunts only with dps never taking more than 1 hit) but you can only shield it, use Resilience or temporary increase your health/armor to survive. The health option was taken from us when Bioware nerfed the rakata medpacks, but you still have sage bubbles as a buffer if needed. Armor options are consumables and Resilience may bug and not resist it, also make sure it doesn't run off before the physical wave hits you. This is what I recall since I'm almost certain that you can't defend it.

While I am no expert on VG/PT for the tentacles you can improve your threat by going to 4 meters or farther from the center of them and taunting. Other things you can do is delay your first ST taunt as long as possible without losing aggro, which will give you more threat if it builds on the dps threat instead of yours.

Oh.. ok. I thought Resilience looked at I/E type of attacks since "melee attacks" like the damage part of the knockback on EC Kephess also gets resisted, but I guess it's a Tech attack then, same for Terminate. Saber Reflect I got the Ranged part wrong ^^ What about the travel time theory? If the mob finishes the cast then its attack has been "assigned" to the person it was targeting at the start of the cast. Once the attack hits it is determined what happens to it. At least it seems like that on Sunder.

The equally important part is that healers should not constantly heal during the pulling phase or adds far away and those that spawn from elevators etc.. will go to the healer and at least get their alpha strike in, which can rarely be lethal or worse, have the healer start healing himself and forget about the tank who just pulled them right back to him, resulting in a dead tank. Kolto shell is fine, spamming heals on a tank at full health while pulling is not fine, kolto missle/ revivification is situational but usually ok as well. Best example for this type of mistakes is the pack with 5 dogs before the dog boss in mandalorian, 4 dogs jumping to healer = healer usually dead or healing himself and not tank who just aoe taunted.

Just to rule out the most simple and formerly overlooked cause. Did your friend account for the travel time of the ability? If Saber Reflect runs out before the "damage wave" gets to you but after the cast is finished you'll take damage, at least it happened to me once with Force Shroud and I've avoided it ever after. Oh and just to repeat what everyone has been saying in vain for a dev to notice: Resilience/Force Shroud is bugged and sometimes does not work, might be due to ability, client or specific bosses. Although only the first two are likely. It's unlikely that the Force Shroud/Resilience bug has "infected" Saber Reflect since whether they work or not is determined by different parameters. Resilience looks at damage type (K/E vs I/E) and Saber Reflect looks at attack type (singular vs aoe, T/F only though). Unless it's the client lagging, or experiencing package loss.

That's just shadows having access to more means to cheese than others. Whether or not it's intented. A forced exit combat and a buff with a 100% resists chance will do that. And they can counter the Force Cloak like on Stormcaller. Guardians/VG's get access to a jump, a pull and the reflect. Loved those threads speculating that Saber Reflect + damage increase from Zorn debuff = dead Zorn when reflecting the instant kill. The damage increase buff you see first on the boss after snipers spawn, he also does not do aoe frontal attack during this period, and when he knocks the tank it seems to transfer to the maintank only (melee dps going up do not get it) supposedly so you can tank the snipers and maintain easier aggro on them. I have not tested if it actually increases your damage, it might be a damage taken debuff. I'm not sure if the mechanic can be ignore by shadows as well, technically it should be cause the conclusion is that it's broken if it does not kill or even endanger the other two tanks. And it should behave the same for shadows. I'm pretty sure that it's not this specific mechanic making the fight substantially more difficult for healers to heal for 1/3 of the tanks.

I'd like to add that "Don't tank the boss" is not a solution to "How should I tank this boss as a shadow/assassin?" Currently there is no way for the tank to make this fight easier for the healers, Swipe frequency is too high for cooldowns and only our 25% DR cooldown works against it, 50% defence is not an appropriate cooldown to try and survive Swipe and the chain afterwards. Is it fair that shadows/assassins require healers to work more or coordinate better for this fight? Probably not but thats how it is. Haven't died on this guy due to Swipe on 16 hard in the past three weeks so yes, it is possible but there's little you can do as a tank, it's down to the healers. Fixing the difference in ease of healing between all three, or rather the two and the shadow/assassins tanks on this boss will have to come from the developer side. Whether that's making Swipe Internal damage, splitting it into multiple components to reduce frequency of a full hit, "fixing" shadow spikiness or changing the damage profile of Thrasher entirely is up to the devs. It's doubtful that it'll ever happen though, as explained by Kitru.

He probably has, oh well back on topic. Gear doesn't really matter, your stats are fine although you want to lower your defence based on the % you gave, and lower it some more since you're using the defence proc relic. Biggest spikes you will see is 13k -> 24k -> 13k, it's basically a fight for the healers if shadows are tanking it. You want to make sure that it's clear who's tanking and that healers rotate cooldowns and don't overheal too much, if raid healers can help with a bubble then tell them to. If you want usage of cooldowns I'm keeping deflection (50% defence) and overcharge saber (25% DR) for the sniper adds and rotate those two whenever I go up. Use everything else on Thrasher if you think you will die, if you can't help yourself using cooldowns you shouldn't then just don't look at your health, burning cooldowns at the start of the fight is NOT how you will succeed. There is a delay between the Swipe and the next attack and it's enough to heal you up as long as you were at full health before the Swipe. Not sure what the minimum health pool is to survive this, but don't go stacking endurance cause that's the bad way to "solve" the problem. Make sure to use Phase Walk to help the healers a bit and that's it. It's a shame that a lot of overhealing can happen here, and since the healing output of the healers is far greater than what's needed to survive the easy option is to put a Guardian/VG on the boss and the shadow on add duty.

Back to generating threat for tanks. Is it possible for a tank to always hold aggro on two seperate mobs (adds on Golden Fury) when each is targeted by a 72 geared dps? Even with double guards it was close and sometimes one of the adds would slip away. And no, burning one add and then the second one is easy to manage with threat, I'm talking about a challenge for tanks. Aoe taunt had to be used later in the rotation, which means you have to spam a targeted aoe attack at the start so they start doing their cast on you. Anyway, it seemed doable but I have to refine my rotation (as an Assassin), and you have double the chance to screw up due to misses or strings of crits.

Some time ago I switched from a double 2-set bonus to the UW 4 set. I traded 5% shield for 2% DR, which is about equal damage reduction. Would a similar talent work? Right now I'm sitting at 56.70% shield chance, with about 50 less shield rating compared to the "BiS", 5% absorb will equal 2.835% DR, what about a talent reducing the base absorbtion (or shield chance) of our generators to increase armor rating or just flat damage reduction, while keeping average mitigation the same. Although this will get skewed if more gear rating is introduced, like the Kell Dragon tier. A talent will give people the option whether they want to go for it or not, I realise that this might put people in trouble on deciding what to take or not, and you would need to couple it to something minor, like the 3% endurance bonus, which is one of the only things we can miss, along with the frontal Maul attack talent. The easiest option remains to split high damage attacks into multiple hits, give Thrasher 5 hits of 5k, or 8 hits of 3k etc... Even if this makes dark ward run out as fast as on the TFB tentacles.

Good job actually helping him... not. Ok, what you can do is having your dps on orange stand in middle and the tank on button. Split the Regulators on yellow phase between both tanks, have a dps on button/middle during yellow if you want, make sure no adds from purple are up. On storymode you cannot do a double phase, on hardmode you can. If you need to kill adds from orange then kill those then start purple -> let purple expire -> kill all adds with Rectifier first -> complete purple with 0 adds left -> go to yellow. And be careful on the operator as Black Obtuse had a damage increase, hope it helps.

The gain is in reduced overall damage taken and more cooldowns resulting in a longer uptime on cooldowns. Right now, the healing output of healers vastly outnumbers the average damage taken and wipes can only occur due to spike damage, which automatically results in shadows being the *worst* tanks since they simply are the only tanks capable of dying in a group doing a fight properly with end game gear. I'll say that shadows will pick up on nightmare modes if the total damage taken, raidwise, gets closer or goes over the optimal healing output. Kephess in EC comes to mind. If we have to, we'll be offtanks only to be used with cooldowns up in order to free up healing for other raid members. The fact remains that shadows are amazingly good if you tailor your cooldowns around boss abilities and they get better with an increase in damage output of bosses. Except for the self-healing component, which was and is a problem, since 2.0 acts only as a band-aid for self heals falling behind. The functional disadvantage of shadows is debatable per ops group. If most of the overhealing can be avoided then shadows perform a lot better, as this is the main counterargument to shadows being good. How that happens is up to you, whether by healing assignments or cooldown usage, we're rotating 3 assassins and 1 jugg for 16 man and the only problem was the first kill on HM Thrasher, which even now remains the only *fun* fight, healers being used to assassins actually prefer to heal us over other tanks. And I know that we're far from being perfect so it can get even better. This is part of the *skill* requirement, no? As long as shadows are not consistenly dying due to bad luck and they get an advantage over the other tanks they remain the *skill* tanks. I will agree that such an advantage is hard to measure and quantify. And juggs/PT's will just give you an easier time. An interesting thing would be to see how much mitigation we can sacrifice for more endurance in order to reduce overhealing, as there is less incencitive to quickly heal someone if they cannot be 1-shotted at 70-80% of their health. I'll try this out someday by switching from crafted implants/ear to UW once I have them. And maybe enhancements, although I don't think the trade on high vs low endurance 72 enhancements is worth it.

I'll try not to get into an argument about which is the most complex class, and I don't own a jugg nor do I have a reliable comparison since nobody plays a "perfect" jugg, or any tanking class for that matter and all we can do is approximate the perfect tanking setups. Assassins have to watch for 2 procs: shock and maul, the accuracy debuf and the time left on dark ward. The accuracy debuff is almost impossible to follow on 16 man so it's usually better to time it and just expect it to hit instead of looking at the boss for it. The main argument in this thread is that assassins have to work harder and be more aware of all the fight mechanics in order to reach the survivability of juggs and PT's, and that it doesn't seem like we can go much higher than them. In addition, our spikiness negates any positive effects of reduced damage taken because healers have to be ready to heal a string of unmitigated attacks which threatens to kill us, where the same string of attacks would not threaten juggs and PT's. I disagree that it's this bad, although less spikiness would be nice. As for suggestions, what about some form of kolto overload coupled with an armor increase if we take more than 50-70% of our health in 1 hit? With an internal cooldown of course.

I don't think that the spikiness on assassins is a game breaking concern. Yes, we can take enormous amounts of damage if we do not mitigate it, and I would like Thrasher to have his attacks split into multiple components, or just the Swipe. But that's part of the challenge and it can be overcome by cooldowns on both the tank and healer side. You mention Terminate in particular, but I cannot see how assassins have problems there, with or without the best gear. You have 4 cooldowns to use: Rakata Medpack (15% health), Rakata Absorb Adrenal (10% DR), Force Shroud (100% DR) but it can bug and not resist and Overcharge Saber (25% DR), between those 4, possible armor increase from Mercenary Healers, possible Bubble from Sorcerers and the natural tank switch for every 2nd flashbang cc on tank, you should not die, even with 30k health. Flashpoints, well, pushing an extra button isn't game breaking and I'd rather have this than how lvl 50 FP's were with Dreadguard gear. The only problems which can occur in the future is if "harder" content will be based on increasing the damage which tanks take on single hits rather than increasing raid damage or the difficulty on current or new mechanics. But we'll see on the nightmare versions. We're not in an optimal situation but it's also not impossible to run two assassin tanks, every second you spend not tanking the major damage dealer makes your cooldowns worth more, this does lead to a lot of tank switching which the other two classes can ignore. Phase Walk should be used before a major damage phase, examples are Titan VI soft enrage, Thrasher at any health % and the resurrected Kell Dragon on Styrak, it does not have a very big uptime and its use must be planned before since you need two things: 1) Being in a position to move where your raid will stand for the burn phase and 2) the burn phase must start within 120 seconds after you put it down, if it ends within those 120 seconds it's even better but it's not required.

Fair enough, thanks

For using Freightter Flyby you use this: SS -> TS -> BV -> XS -> SS -> TS. Wouldnt this: SS -> TS -> BV -> SS -> BV -> any instant cast or nothing -> XS -> CB -> CB -> TS Give you more dps since you get in more SS?

One thing about Terminate, I'm almost certain that you can shield/defend it and cannot use Force Shroud/Resilience. I can't see how someone in the group can add accuracy to a boss, unless our 5% accuracy debuff actually adds 5% accuracy, giving bosses a 5% extra chance to hit. But as far as I know Force Shroud/Resilience increases resist chance by a couple of 100 percent, maybe 200 or 300%. There could be a difference in Force Shroud and Resilience, but again they both succesfully failed to resist Huge Grenade so it's unlikely.

Bump /5char

Hard to say, juggs got a lot better and seem on par with assassins, Force Shroud/Resilience got de-emphasized in S&V compared to earlier operations. I don't know if one or the other has a clear advantage in hnps (healing needed per second). Maybe go for practicality and if verpine bulwark drops they won't be a waste if you're a jugg. And a jugg will be easier to heal as there is spike damage which sometimes drops an assassin to very low health.

Aha! I remember this happening, good thing torparse remembers your own logs cause I wouldn't have bothered going through 50+ documents to try and find the S&V ones. I knew I wasn't crazy when I thought the nade hit through shroud. Same fight, working this time. And managed to find another fight with the damage taken bug. Link to first fight with bug: http://www.torparse.com/a/199503/6/0/Log Link to second fight with bug: http://www.torparse.com/a/201569/11/0/Log So fix this, and I guess we should use rakata medpack/overcharge saber or simply be topped off by the healers before it lands and/or sorc bubble. Also, this only happened 3 out of the 30-40 or so force shroud/huge grenade sequences I looked at, could just be a random error.

A thing that works for me (as an assassin tank) incase I get a bad healer is to use force shroud to resist the damage on the leap of the dogs (especially 5-6 of them can do up to 20-25k damage instantly) or stealth and begin combat next to them so they won't jump at all, or hard cc them I guess. I wouldn't say that assassins are completely worse off that other tanks at the 55 FP's dogs.. If you have to, use overload (although they might jump back) etc.

Lvl 50 FP's give 15 basic commendations for the first completion (10 from GF + 5 from the daily mission) per day, these are used to purchase Arkanian relics and schematics for items which are better than their Black Market equivalent. Running a 50 FP with a 55 dps with Arkanian gear results in a run of 10-15 min, far better than doing 15 Makeb dailies for the same reward.

One more thing, I assume that swing timers are the same on both 8 and 16 man so when I compare the increase in ability damage Thrasher did about 60-65% more damage on 16 than on 8 on the main tank. Which brings its dps to about 10.5k pre mitigation, manually making the dps from my logs brought it to 11-12k but that's with taking the bits and pieces where I was tanking it (since we were tank switching). I'd say that for tanking SV 16 man you don't need more than 35-36k health, even as shadows/assassins, so go full mitigation where you can. Although exchanging tank stats for endurance is viable at the 1:2.5 ratio. And for most fights it's viable at 1:2.