There's no excuse for DPS to wait even 1 GCD before going balls-out unless they drastically outstrip the "main" tank's gear level. In equivalent gear, there really isn't a DPS spec in the game with enough burst to reliably pull off a tank's properly executed opener. The ones most likely to do so (e.g. Carnage Mara) are also the most likely to be guarded, which invalidates that concern entirely. RIP Orbital Strike. Snipers were the one AC that could really make a tank work to establish threat, and it's just joke status now.

Queue for a WZ, you'll get in contact quickly enough. Joking aside, normal contact methods for Empire or PV are probably easiest, this was a little exercise to enkindle some inter-guild goodwill and increase the number of brohugs in the Imp community on TEH.

Agreed. Pull (while running in) > Shock > Wither > Discharge > Thrash > Shock (with or without Energize) > Recklessness + Force Lightning > Wither > Shock > Thrash > .... Taunts spaced in as needed. I try to delay as close to the beginning of FL as possible, but I'll hit the first taunt the instant my target-of-target changes if necessary. I don't know that I agree with KBN's position that there exists any opener which is a 100% threat lock against equally geared DPS. I'm one relic and possibly a bit of stat redistribution away from BiS on my Assassin, but hilt and Willpower are basically at their max-attainable levels (assuming unlettered mods and Force Wielder hilt and non-set bonus armorings). A full-78 unguarded Sniper or Marauder who executes their opening properly will virtually always strip threat at the 4th or 5th GCD, and threat isn't a lock until the full ST > AoE > ST taunt cycle has been established. All that said, I will readily admit that my own play still needs significant clean-up. I'm playing SWTOR and FFXIV simultaneously and tanking in both, so my brain is always a little bit split, and the demands of tanking in both are very different.

Thanks. :-)

Since Sin tanking in PVP was already in such a good state... Oh wait... Quite the whiny post and I can't say I agree with any of it, really. I quit SWTOR months ago when I was fed up with the lack of useful balance changes. I've been having a surprisingly fun time tanking in ARR, but it's a new MMO with all the usual launch content gaps (see also: SWTOR). Some friends talked me into coming back to tank a couple nights a week. Sure, fine, whatever. I'm pretty much the definition of rusty. I re-subbed maybe 3 weeks ago and in that time have run 1 8 man S&V HM (to pick up the 72 hilt I never got), 2 16 man DF SMs, and 1 8 man DP SM. That's it. In the last 3 months+. Then last night I ran DP HM, 8 man, after maybe 30 minutes of fiddling with the class doing dailies just to get a sense of the changes. Were there gaps when stacks would fall? Yes. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, mistakes happen when you're rusty. I'm also not going to pretend that there was any underlying cause beyond my lack of content knowledge and incomplete readjustment to the differences in gameplay between ARR and SWTOR. However, with or without Energize procs, maintaining stacks was never a problem with proper action queueing (when I wasn't blatantly *********** up), and the fact that a single (non-resisted) tick will refresh Dark Protection means quite a lot of wiggle room. Gameplay is actually substantially simpler when a full-channel Force Lightning isn't an essential component of optimal play. PVE was already about maximizing the value of self-healing, so gameplay hasn't really changed in any meaningful way. Like KBN said... Dark Protection stacks falling off is just a new visual indicator of sub-optimal play. The FL mechanic itself is more forgiving now, and that was always the hardest part and most fight-knowledge-intensive part to optimize. Sin is substantially less spiky, and significantly easier to heal. That's a huge net win. If the only real downside is a reduction in soloing efficiency, I'm okay with that. Sin was an exceptionally powerful solo class, to the point of absurdity. Group performance has improved, and solo efficiency is still above Juggy or PT. PVP... I haven't played Arena PVP, really, but overall Sin's been dead as a tank in PVP for a very long time. Juggy and PT are simply better suited to the role, and Sin's always been better as a node guard/delayer/ganker. It's not like full-channel FLs were a thing before, so it's not like the 2.5 change has a major impact. If anything, Sin tank got a buff (though not enough of one) through the boost in armor rating and ability to gain DP stacks out of stealth. I wouldn't be against a QoL change of an increased duration of Dark Protection stacks, but quite honestly I'm happy. Assassin is finally worthy of being called a "skill tank" again. It is explicitly better if played optimally, explicitly worse if played poorly, and extremely execution-dependent. It's freakin' great.

I'll tell you how I feel... This is the straw that broke the camel's back. I haven't been playing much for the last month, for a variety of reasons, but I kept my sub active in the hopes that 2.4 would include significant and worthwhile class balance changes to the game. Those hopes are dashed, and my interest in giving EA/BioWare my money has dropped to precisely zero. Good *********** riddance. Luckily FFXIV:ARR is right around the corner and while it's not a perfect game, it seems to be treated with far more respect by its development team.

Always 5 minutes before or after you log, I'm pretty sure.

For CD usage, you might actually be best served by Outlaw's Den or some other dueling site for starters. There are plenty of classes with attacks or attack patterns that do a ton of damage left to their own devices. Can probably identify either set attacks or set attack strings that can be used to train reactive CD use. The advantage of using PVP is that you can pre-define the attacks and the timing, and work up from easier reactions (popping Saber Reflect mid-Ambush) to significantly harder (popping Saber Reflect right after a SS GS pops into cover to catch an insta-snipe, or something).

No one's ever on when I log in.

Tell Jar to stop being a n00b and telling people the wrong days you guys run on! With a kid due in a few weeks I can't commit to anything full-time, but Az, Jar, and some of the other folks know I'm more than happy to lend a hand if you're ever short people. Edit: I should finish gearing up my Merc so that Az doesn't have to whine about wimpy Assassins and how he has to do all the work.

Any comment is better than no comment, for sure. I suppose it's extra disheartening because the content team had a pretty good answer in EC with Kephess. They ignored that answer for their 2.0 content and the horrific spike-damage-related imbalance is the result.

Enrage is a BS mechanic to start with. Any fight where the enrage timer is the deciding factor isn't really worthy of the title "Nightmare". If they want to keep time a component, add more complex mechanics based on the fight timer so that a sufficiently insane guild can still win, but make them so unforgiving that 99.9% of attempts fail if you're too slow. Not that it matters, since BioWare is committed to lazy game design, but there's so much they could be doing besides just adding the "you lose" button.

Not 2.3, that's for sure. Patch notes are live on PTS and there are no class changes at all. 2.4 is a PVP patch, so I doubt any class balance changes are going to be positive PVE changes. That's not happening until October. Major class overhauls don't usually happen on maintenance releases (2.2x, 2.3x, etc.), so I'd be shocked to see any PVE balance fixes prior to 2.5. So, unless BioWare does something totally unexpected and unprecedented... you're looking at the holidays of 2013 at the earliest.

No, no we really aren't. We're too spiky, our "guaranteed" CDs aren't (by the devs' own admission), and the devs have changed NiM mechanics to be more Juggy/Guardian friendly. Whether through incompetence or class favoritism, we'll likely never know. For example... in S&V HM, Huge Grenade from Titan 6 is a Tech attack. In NiM, it's a Ranged attack. So Juggy can just pop Saber Ward and take 0 damage. Can't Shroud it in NiM. They changed it to "increase the challenge" (even though 2 Juggies can literally zero every single one by trading Saber Wards back and forth).

Was going to say... shameless self-promotion has never been a hallmark of Squad Six/Game Genie, but the dude who was talking all the smack basically admitted he was just trolling. There was certainly a lot of butthurt on The Ebon Hawk about them, but frankly they're just competitive people who were the biggest fish in a smallish pond. I wish them the best and I hope they are successful on POT5. I hope they make you up your game, and I hope you make them up theirs.

This is the most important part. It's not going to do ANYTHING to make the fight harder. It's just going to change who can cheese the mechanic from the tank that is struggling to justify a place in a group to the tank that already does everything better than everyone else.

Pretty much the nail in the coffin, IMO. The devs all but admitting that they don't know what they're doing and that we should all just roll Juggies/Guardians if we want to play optimally. Especially since the whole 5% thing is neatly sideslipped by Saber Reflect, as nothing about it prevents a hit from occurring, it just outright negates the damage and turns some back on the attacker. I wish I could spin or white knight or something to find a positive in this, but there really is none. Saber Reflect already made a mockery of Sin/Shadow CDs, and now this crap is just icing on the cake. I quite literally can think of zero rationale for why one attempting Nightmare Mode content would be better served with an Assassin/Shadow in place of a Juggy/Guardian. Or even a VG/PT for that matter due to their lack of CDs or appreciable advantages over Juggy/PT.

Sorry, but this is just farcical. Right now, thanks to the obscene spikiness of Shadow/Assassin, there are basically 2 reasons to even consider one as a tank for a progression raiding group: Force Shroud and stealth (for sapping targets, combat stealth + rezz in combat, etc.). Stealth is a mediocre justification for bringing a Shadow/Assassin, as Scoundrels/Operatives are very potent healers and can do all of the same things. So basically, that list gets cut down to Force Shroud. Now you're telling us that the supposedly-virtually-100%-reliable CD which is currently the ONLY differentiating advantage of the class isn't actually 100% reliable, and there's a gamble each time it's used that basically nothing happens. Wonder-***********-ful. Oh, and thanks to the inclusion of Saber Reflect (which has its own limitations but, quite honestly, is FAR stronger overall than Force Shroud), the only times that Shadow/Assassin even have an advantage with their most differentiating ability is on AoE F/T attacks. Oh, and thanks to changing what is by far the most noteworthy AoE F/T attack in the game to M/R in NiM, you've completely cut that advantage away. By all accounts, you've completely written the class out of PVE. Both DPS specs are near the back of the pack in terms of outright DPS potential, and are limited by being melees that have very little additional benefit to the group. The tanking spec is the hardest to heal (even if it theoretically requires the least healing), it has the most mechanical disadvantages (heavy reliance on active mitigation mechanisms, situational-type CDs, and a frankly broken self-heal mechanic that cannot possibly scale in a balanced way), and now new content is being designed to bypass any advantages the class actually had. Just go ahead and say it David... the development team just wants everyone to roll Juggernauts and Guardians and get it over with. The changes to all 3 tanking ACs in 2.0, the design of content in S&V, and now the design of content in both TFB and S&V NiM say that quite clearly. VGs/PTs don't have the CDs to be as useful in the hands of a skilled player (anyone doing NiM content) as a Juggy/Guardian. They have no other differentiating advantages to bring to the table besides simplicity and smooth damage-taken profile. Only problem? Juggy/Guardian is now simple, with basically an equally smooth damage-taken profile, but also have fantastic CDs on top of that. Shadows/Sins are spiky and are heavily dependent on hard-to-balance active mitigation mechanisms. They are the "skill" tanks by BioWare's own admission, but the ability to leverage the skillful elements of the class to gain commensurate benefits have been slammed into the ground by a combination of changes to core mechanics, content design, and rebalancing efforts in the other tanking ACs. I hate to be crass, but this situation is straight-up ******** and it's completely unacceptable that BioWare sees no problem with it. You have rendered 2 out of 8 ACs basically moot in PVE endgame now, as neither Assassin/Shadow nor PT/VG are desirable as DPS classes, neither is on equal footing as tank classes, and now content is being designed in ways that further reduce any advantages they might have retained. Outstanding individuals can certainly make any class *viable*, but those same outstanding individuals, if so able, would be congregating on a handful out of the available options (Sniper/Gunslinger + Trooper/Commando DPS, with the occasional Sentinel/Marauder for their raid buffs, Juggy/Guardian tanks, and some combination of a Sage/Sorc healer + any other healing AC). This is NOT okay.

All of Sunder's damage is Force/Tech. Deflection doesn't do squat. You can survive The End with Overcharge Saber but you have to pop it early. If you wait until the last second, the buff tends not to resolve for some reason and you take the full hit. Six of one, half dozen of the other. If you have a PT, you can't really leave Sunder for last, but you can easily blank 2/3 of "The End"s with Force Shroud or Saber Reflect with any combination of Juggies and Sins. That leaves plenty of wiggle room between Overcharge Saber and Saber Ward/Invinicible to laugh off any that slip through. Otherwise, Sunder does 0 damage if kited, for all intents and purposes, so your DPS can just plink away with impunity while your healers go make sandwiches.

The nerfs to tone down PT Pyro in PVP gutted Merc Pyro as well. GCG does pitiful damage. TD is no longer useful at all. Rail Shot and Unload just don't hit hard enough. Arsenal's mobility was drastically improved. Still have to cast to get PPA procs, and only Unload will grant a proc if interrupted. So basically, Pyro has mediocre sustained damage, mediocre burst, and no mobility advantage.

Meh, the only 54 purps I wear in PVP are the tank ears/implants I crafted for PVE weeks before anyone realized there was a problem with bolster. I wear tank gear for Huttball, and only Huttball. I don't really do much in Huttball besides try to advance the ball or guard someone else who is advancing the ball. <30k damage dealt is not an uncommon occurrence. In fact, >100k damage dealt *is* an uncommon occurrence (I'm not killing anyone as a tanksin hybrid and only Wither and Discharge have useful effects, so positioning, movement, guards, taunts, etc. are all way more important). A few extra points of Shield/Absorb/Defense make pathetically little difference. When it gets nerfed, I'll bother to buy PVP tank ear/implants. Until then, it's just not worth worrying about when the advantage provided is minuscule and I can use the 1650 WZ comms for something else. If that makes me a terrible person, I can't say I much care. With or without the 54 purps, it's not going to change how I play Huttball or my success/failure in the WZ, and I'm lazy, not malicious.

Deception Assassins are much like Concealment Operatives, in that we have to attack from an advantageous position to start or our likelihood of winning drops significantly. You basically can't avoid being opened on by a competent Assassin, so you're just going to have to plan on being down 5-12k of your HP before you're really able to react (Spike > Maul > Recklessness + Discharge). However, after that "alpha strike" there's only one more near-guaranteed hard-hitter for the next 7 or so seconds (the Recklessness'd Shock that immediately follows Discharge). After that, the Assassin is proc-hunting. Your main goal is to mitigate as much of the opening burst as you can and exploit the squishiness of the Assassin after that. There is no "magic bullet" to beat the single burstiest spec in the game currently, and quite possibly the strongest 1v1 class, but there are some things you can do to help your odds. 1) Saber Ward. Mauls will wiff, and the rest of the burst is Force damage that you can straight cut 25% off. Unless the Assassin breaks off the flight and flees, they can't stand up to sustained DPS applied to them. The whole goal of Assassin is to murder your target before your squishiness gets you killed. Saber Ward is a major monkey wrench in that plan. Pop it as soon as you stand up from Spike. 2) Don't waste your CC breaker on Spike or Low Slash. Spike only lasts 2 seconds, and Low Slash breaks on damage. Low Slash is generally used less as a CC than as a free Duplicity proc and then an opportunity to line up a Maul without interference. Even if you break Low Slash, the Assassin can likely circle dance to land the Maul anyway. 3) Don't drag out the fight. There are no channels or short-duration buffs to interrupt that you can CC your way out of, and the longer a fight drags on, the more opportunities an Assassin has to proc Duplicity. CC only if you need breathing room. Also, Assassin's CDs recycle quicker than yours, don't give them a chance to take advantage of that. Plus, there's a lull in Assassin burst and a significant drop in sustained DPS after the opener, but the longer the fight goes on, the more of that alpha-strike capability returns. 4) Abuse predictability. Usually a Force Charge or Obliterate precedes a Smash, and Smash is the most dangerous thing you can do to an Assassin. Most Assassins will pop Force Shroud immediately after you gap close to blank off the Smash. Delay the Smash so that Force Shroud is wasted. If possible, try to avoid using Force Crush until after the Assassin uses Shroud as well, as that's another obvious target. 5) Laugh if they don't crit. Recklessness is not 100% crit chance. Mauls generally crit <25% of the time. If the Assassin gets an unlucky string of non-crits, expect them to flee, because they aren't winning that fight. Assassins wilt under pressure, so you have to pressure them. Countering that, Assassins have 2 powerful escape mechanisms that are very difficult to counter. Phase Walk can be used while stunned and basically guarantees that they get beyond 30m to flee a fight if losing. An Assassin fleeing is a win for you, even if you don't get a kill. It buys you time to heal up and get your CDs back. Combat stealth is difficult to counter as Rage due to lack of DOTs. Combat stealth can be used to flee or to "reset" the conditions back to an advantageous state for the Assassin (they can re-open on you with impunity if Spike is off CD, they can CC you and out-of-combat heal). The best thing you can do is AoE taunt the instant the Assassin vanishes, as it will force them back into combat if they're within 15m of you. They can still open on you, but they can't sap you or run away at out-of-combat speeds. To sum up, recognize that Assassin tactics are simple - burst down the target before being flimsy gets you killed. Your job as a Juggy is to mitigate as much of the burst as you can and hit back quickly. Assassins can't do much about Smash once Force Shroud is gone, so make them waste it early and then waste them. To put it plainly - the odds on killing an Assassin in a 1v1 are not good. If you get the upper hand, they can leave, and you can't stop them. However, living through the initial burst and making them flee IS a win for you. It gives you time to get help, get your CDs back, etc. Oh, and one last thing, planting the marker for Phase Walk is bizarrely loud, so if you hear it and an Assassin on your team isn't nearby, you can expect to be opened on in the near future. It's not 100% reliable, but it does help prevent being caught flat-footed.

That will never change, regardless of how you set up your mods, enhancements, and augments. There is no gear setup which dramatically reduces the spikiness of Assassin, you just have to know what the riskiest attacks are and plan (as a group) appropriately. Dropping the ~500 Defense the math says is optimal in 69ish level gear will cut your chance to evade melee/ranged attacks by about 7%. The things most likely to kill you are attacks from multiple trash mobs (mostly M/R), Thrasher in general (mostly M/R), and Terminate (ranged). You simply can't gain enough Shield (from rejiggered augments) to offset the loss of 7% evade chance. Yes, you will be less spiky, but you'll be harder to heal because you're going to take more damage and take damage more regularly.

The reason it's a secret no one wants to share is because it's not in any way backed up by the math. And no, the math *isn't* wrong. We know the formulae used to calculate damage. We know (from parse logs) what kind of damage bosses do. The only oversimplification is not breaking out damage done via big spikes versus the overall damage split. The big spikes are dealt in different ways on a fight-by-fight basis, so there's no real way to address that other than having fight-by-fight optimal gear (if you want to let 2 tanks bogart that many BiS drops, power to you). Also, the "dirty secret" no one really talks about is how all the shuffling around of mitigation stats makes a relatively modest difference, at best. You're talking a handful of percentage points of difference in damage taken by swapping around values of Defense, Shield, and Absorb. No gearing strategy is going to address Assassin's spikiness or vulnerability to RNG, but the ideal numbers simply indicate the balance which yields the lowest damage taken total over time. Smart healers and intelligent use of CDs are the difference-makers, not where mitigation points are allocated. That said, intentionally skewing one way or another from what the math says is optimal is still not a recommended idea, because there is not a sufficient commensurate gain in any "real life" raid situation. Specific to The Writhing Horror in TFB, yes, Nasty Bite is F/T E/K, so yes, you will see a reduction in big damage spikes by dropping defense in favor of shield/absorb. Somewhere around 60% of the damage in that fight is still M/R, however, so shifting all that mitigation over to help with Nasty Bite will leave you requiring more steady-state healing which will pressure the healers throughout the fight. Keep in mind, even if you dumped practically every point in defense into shield (via changing mods, enhancements, and augments) you'd pick up perhaps 5% shield chance, which isn't exactly earth-shattering if the goal is to mitigate Nasty Bite. Instead of 45% of them going unmitigated, 40% will. That is a reduction in spiky damage taken, but not a very big one. That reduction comes at the cost of taking higher DTPS on anything with significant melee/ranged attack percentage (which is just about everything).

I think that's a fair way of handling it. It would be impossible to police the decision to bypass the DG fight, and anyone who considers it obviously isn't concerned enough about any censure that might occur to continue banging their heads against DG ad nauseam. If people are able to kill later bosses, that's great, and once doing so makes DG more reasonable, they can get credit very quickly.