You can't switch between shadow and sage. If you like the rest of the shadow package, that's why you go shadow. Shadow exclusive abilities, the other talent trees, the fact that you're up in melee. If you like the sage alternatives on those, you go sage. I wouldn't look at it as choosing between balance sage and balance shadow, because it should really be simplified down to sage or shadow. That's a choice you made a while ago at level 10. Balance is just a tree that links the two types of consular together. It's meant to show how shadows and sages both came from the same base class of consular as opposed to, for example, the knights. Does that help?

I thought last night I'd try something different. I had been running an infiltration spec on my shadow and wanted to try out balance to see if it was any better for toe to toe fights. For whatever reason it just wasn't clicking with me. I died like 4-5 times attempting to do a class mission on Quesh. My general strategy as infiltration has been to use Tharan, mind maze one target from a group of enemies, and let Tharan gain healing aggro from the rest as I work my way through them one by one. Balance doesn't seem to allow me to do this as easily since Force in Balance is an AoE and if it doesn't outright break the mind maze, it usually hits at least one extra mob so I'm taking more hits than I'm used to. Using that strategy I felt like I could have been using a different companion if I'd been so inclined. With balance I feel like I'm stuck with Tharan because of the extra damage I'm taking. Does anyone have any helpful tips for playing balance that might not be readily obvious? I'd like to give it a little more time but infiltration had been picking up so much momentum in the 30's it was almost too easy. The only reason I switched was to help keep it fresh and learn more about my class.

The only thing I'm going to say to that, and then I'm going to drop it because it's just not worth continuing and I'm heading out for the weekend soon anyway, is that you and I both know better than to say healers are allowed to be perfectly efficient. I actually should correct myself from a few pages ago because I said something to the effect of "Healers are very efficient here" without the caveat that a small inefficiency can very quickly escalate to a large problem. I think both the Smuggler/Agent and Trooper/BH healers* have variable resource recovery rates such that the more they have currently the faster they'll recover. And that very heavily penalizes burst healing. *It could just be the commandos and mercenaries, I was rather putout by the cover system with smugglers and didn't get very far.

Blatantly false if there are quick, inefficient heals vs slow efficient heals at play. The tank with 5k HP needs to be healed before a second hit lands or he's dead. The tank with 20k can take 4 more and still be on his feet. I'm no expert on healing in SWTOR, but I do know that big and little heals exist, as do heal over time abilities. They probably do not share the same efficiency rates.

I hate getting too far off topic, but they actually found that the 200% modifier wasn't great enough and increased it to 500% as part of the last major patch. I think the main reason for it was the emerging gear disparity between starting tanks and raid geared DPS. It's actually not just possible, but common now for tanks in WoW to hit a hard cap on threat during long fights. I think it's because of the type of variable used to store the data and the number is around 20 million. Once you hit that point literally the only way to pull something off someone is to taunt it. Attacks will add 0 threat beyond the cap and new taunts will actually decrease the other tank's threat rather than increasing your own because it's the only way to facilitate an aggro transfer. I'm not sure if it's really relevant on the current tier because the only 10-15 minute fight is the very end boss which has many many adds and chances to reset threat. So yeah, by comparison... 50% bonus threat, even with a few moves getting a 15% additional modifier, is very weak.

Tank threat is weak. An accepted way to hold it at high end is seemingly to use taunt spam, at which point the actual tank output is meaningless aside from their diminished DPS contribution. From that, I can make my own observations that I dislike this style of gameplay. Taunts are really very useful for picking up mobs when things go wrong so saving them is somewhat instinctual. In theory it could also screw with boss mechanics where tanks are forced to pass the boss back and forth, but in reality if the tanks both know what they're doing it should just be double the threat for both. I don't even know if that kind of fight exists in SWTOR yet, but eventually it probably will if they want to keep developing a PvE game with any level of complexity. Finally, I can also observe that gearing in this game is little different from WoW, which I'm most familiar with. You don't hit end game and then suddenly have all the gear handed to you (typically, anyway). You have to gear up as you move through the content and once you're done with that, then the next difficulty level will have harder challenges and better gear. So gearing is a dynamic process and you'll never really sit in the best-in-slot gear when facing a new boss. What a lot of people on WoW considered to be level appropriate, I considered to be overgeared. Which means I will probably be best served by sticking with a heavier Endurance build.

I'd prefer to think of it as a ball on a playground with Lucas being the kid that stops the game and says "It's my ball and I'm going home!"

The horse was also dead before the thread started. We've just been beating it ever since. Someone should really call PETA on us. I also don't think I've had my mind changed by anything posted here, just had some suspicions somewhat confirmed regarding tank threat/dps.

I beat her as an infiltration shadow using Tharan at level 30. I had some pretty good gear since I'd been working on it, used my 20 minute cooldown, a medpac, and interrupted her stuff as much as I could. Lots of stuns and rotating cooldowns as much as possible. I couldn't tell exactly which abilities needed interrupting most. I basically one shot her because I didn't even really try the first time. I just let myself die so I could start from stealth instead. I know she was healing, though, and getting an interrupt on that to end the fight more quickly was almost as valuable as stopping her damage, if not more so. She was, in fact, harder than the chapter end boss. I can definitely say that without question.

...were you confusing me and Myk because we have the same forum Avatar? Whether you agree with me or not, everything I've said has been pretty reasoned and I don't think I ever even mentioned the prequels.

For what it's worth, I'm with ya. But that was kind of a wall of text. I'll forgo my own analogies and comparisons to other contemporary authors who've built and destroyed their fan bases in the interest of helping you out. Would it be fair to say... When something becomes bigger than just one man, that man must consider the whole rather than just himself.

Anyone else falling to their deaths every time they go through the elevator in Nar Shadda during the Honor Regained quest? For whatever reason every time I click the elevator button I load dead on the other side.

I feel like you're missing the point by putting the artistry up on a pedestal. We're not talking about some guy on a street corner painting a picture. We're talking about someone who's made a multimillion dollar franchise and licensed countless products and put his name on everything. Each and every time he did that he took responsibility for the result. Thus the franchise as a whole became more than his sole works and belongs, at least in part, to everyone who has contributed to it.

Can we please stop trying to name builds? I feel like the people trying to put names on talent builds are forgetting that it was the game designers who made the talents and designed the trees, not them. Not to mention some of these builds are kinda intuitive and could easily be arrived at independently by multiple sources.

Under 20 or so most specs don't really have a ton of talents regardless. Infiltration spends a lot on just improving their stealth, some of which is the rather intangible stealth detection radius and movement speed. It also relies on being behind the target, which is harder to do solo unless Qyzen is tanking for you. The other specs might not be -as- good under 20, but those are quick levels anyway and shouldn't be a huge deterrent if you want to play the other specs.

I'm not sure who made that up. Fighting with a double bladed lightsaber is pretty similar to fighting with a staff, which has a pretty defensive feel if you've ever tried it.

I read the article through the first 3 pages and then skimmed the rest. I'm convinced he just doesn't get it. It would have been more acceptable for him to do a remake with an entirely new cast and crew and subtle story variations than it was for him to go back and edit the original movies. Accept the fact that the original movies are going to be dated and tell a new story.

If you look at the far right tree closely, the main difference in talents from Mercenary to Powertech (or in this case Commando to Powertech) is the talents that support Rocket Punch and Flame Burst are changed to support Power Shot and Unload. So I would imagine the trees are going to have pretty similar resource management despite being from different base classes. I've also just heard the Pyrotechs say that they can sometimes hit an unlucky streak without railshot procs and it can be disappointing. If you didn't like assault as a commando I don't think it's likely you'll enjoy pyrotech as a Powertech. But who knows? I can't bring myself to make a Vanguard because I enjoy the Powertech animations way too much.

My question is almost moot given that from your position tank DPS actually matters, but would the tank that sacrifices the estimated 200 willpower for endurance begin to have threat problems or is the above statement saying that neither one should be having trouble given that they both otherwise know what they're doing? Forgive me if it's been answered before, but I see people having trouble with threat rather often both in game and on the forums. It's sort of a "learning to walk before you can run" type question.

I'm going to nitpick, and I call it nitpicking because I think you know the difference, but the way this is worded is a bit misleading. You're not really mitigating the damage. You're recovering from it. Which is part of the entire tanking package, to be sure, but easily bypassed if those abilities are on cooldown or unable to be activated. It can also easily go to waste if the healers keeping you up don't allow for it. So for that reason self healing tends to be more of an afterthought. It's also worth noting that Powertechs/Vanguards also have a self healing cooldown which scales off of max health. I could not find one for Guardians/Juggernauts.

I can't pretend I understand the entirety of the past 20 some pages of discussion in this thread, but I want to throw out this nugget of wisdom. Before you start with the math, tanking is a basic order of operations logic problem. 1) Are you holding adequate threat to hold the boss off DPS who are doing enough damage to beat the boss in a timely manner? If yes, then proceed to step two, otherwise improve threat through the most efficient means. You cannot tank something that won't attack you at all. 2) Are you able to reliably withstand the worst hits the boss throws your way? If yes, then proceed to step three. If no, again, improve this through the most efficient means possible. This includes revising tactics so you're not doing something stupid and taking bigger hits than you ought to. 3) Are you mitigating the most damage possible? Chances are, until you get the best possible gear, then the answer to this will be no. A large part of the confusion people face when discussing tanking stats would be solved simply by understanding that these different goals need to be met, and met in this order. People coming from WoW understand steps 1 and 2 to have been taken care of by the game designers so that the only thing they're worried about most of the time is step three. Here on SWTOR it sounds like step 1 is a problem but step 2 not so much. I may be misunderstanding what was going on, but it looks like there was some discussion here on the notion of killing the boss faster to save the healers resources. While this is a concern in some games, it isn't really a matter here. Healer resource pools are static in SWTOR and will replenish at set rates depending on how much they're being used at any given point. If they want they can blow through their pool in seconds and then have it back soon after. If they can actually handle the damage then shaving 10-15 seconds off a fight won't make or break them.

The silence speaks for itself. Thanks guys, I guess I won't look back on this one and just enjoy the Shadow and play the Powertech on the side.

I found with my tank my overall questing speed went up when I set my companion to be DPS. The way I look at it, each spec provides a "unit" of survivability through tanking, control, or healing or a unit of damage. You have about 3 "units" worth between you and your companion. As long as at least one of them is a survivability measure you'll be alright. Threat also seems to be a major concern for tanks. The modifier for tank threat over DPS threat is low (1.5x) so if you're only doing 75% of the damage a DPSer is doing you're just barely holding onto threat by doing 112.5% threat compared to them. There don't seem to be a whole lot of high bonus threat abilities or if there are, they aren't identified. Why is this relevant? Adding in damage stats as a tank might actually be a good idea in a real tank set. So give yourself that extra willpower, you're probably not gimping yourself doing that.

I'll play with it when I get the chance to do more flashpoints, then. The emote thing I mentioned earlier as well. There was a bug (feature?) on WoW where emoting at certain bosses would pull them from across the room. It was a non-issue because it was so easily avoidable. I'm pretty sure where I thought I encountered it here was on the Esseles. It'll be interesting to see if it's a real, separate issue or just a coincidence. What can I say? I like to give them a /wave while we're sitting around buffing. "I do not think you would accept my help since I am only waiting around to kill you. But, I promise, I will not kill you until you reach the top."

My first character I made was a bounty hunter powertech. The playstyle was awesome, very intuitive and natural to me. The aesthetics were wonderful, too. Fire everywhere! Only one problem. My friends wanted to play Republic. So, I've already seen some of the basics from trying out a commando as DPS. I'm not overly enamored with the idea of a "swiss army gun" where the one gun fires all my different attacks. With bounty hunters it works because the missiles and fire come from the offhand part of the armor, not the gun. Stockstrike is visually boring during levels 1-10, but I did notice with the commando once I got the assault cannon the animation changed. So, there's a couple attacks from vanguard I haven't seen. Those are the analogues to flame burst and flame sweep. Am I correct in assuming those are going to be visually similar to the big cone attack troopers get early on? Also, is the stockstrike animation for vanguards going to be the same as the basic trooper animation since they're still using blaster rifles? I feel silly admitting how much this matters, but I have a Shadow at level 27 already as well for the Republic characters. I'd rather not lose more time making a new alt only to confirm I don't really like the way it looks. Edit- One thing I forgot to mention. I'd specifically be looking to tank with this character.