You can use 23/1/17 for all FP/Ops except for EC HM, TFB HM, EC NiM with no problem. However for EC SM and TFB SM, it will largely depend on your healer.

Please don't jinx us! For WoW, with the implementation +10 levels in the Burning Crusade, they buffed everyone to nerf me.... I went from solo/dps king to free frag...

Kitru, why do you use the heal relic?

Oh Leafy, next time as a shadow tank, vanish and wear your DPS set (could be your PvP gear) when Kephess reaches around 15%. There isn't much need for 2 tanks in Phase 2 anyway. The 100K can easily be put out by you. For TFB HM, resilience the 7K slam thingy. Should be able to prevent 1 hit per rotation. What on earth are those damage taken spikes in the end? Actually, I haven't seen him do 3 slams in a row. Did he enrage?

@ 27K / 25 / 65 / 60, I actually found the HM tentacles to be quite easy! Like EC tanks, I actually think Shadows shine in these two boss fights. On the other hand, Toth / Kephess still pwn me. I swear I use resilience on jump / dual weapon swing, but the physical damage is just unbearable even with my rakata adrenals. Maybe I should switch to an active shield/absorb relic?

I have never tried tanking on a Guardian or Vanguard but our healers comment that I am more of a pain to heal due to the spikes. I could be taking almost no damage and suddenly be near dead and freak out the whole raid. Such is our coolness!

Aye. And as if the "gear imbalance" issue wasn't complained enough on in forums either. Many of us have full min-maxed WH set on 2+ toons, but many of us don't mind BW making the playing field even. Why? even though we won't be able to 1v2 or 1v3 as often, as long as more people are happy and willing to play, we encourage the population boost. Hardcore players who coordinate through vent/teamspeak/mumble will still reign. Perhaps joining one of those groups would be an option to achieve your new elite status. Times change. Adapt or die. Real life or virtual.

Welcome back. You just in time for EWH gear grind. Kitru and KeyboardNinja helped fill your spot as the gurus on the Shadow forum while you were gone.

Thanks KeyboardNinja! So you actually have 30% def? Isn't that a big buff? -,- Kitru, you are too much of a signature to not have an AMR profile!

This is something close to what Kitru and some of the others on this forum says. 30% / 65% / 60% / 24K hp http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/character/d840353d-f4b1-4d28-b462-6f76ba9818c4 Change anything and your stats dip below. Full 63s will give you more hp, but I have reservations on whether this will give another 3K-4K hp. I certainly like to see links from others. (pls update Keyboardninja!)

^ I think you are missing out on some augments? Buy augments and shuff them into your BM gear. You aren't supposed to trade in your BM gear for your WH gear anyway. Min-maxing starts from BM gear.

I think you are assuming healer's can't DPS? Welcome to F2P! Free WZ respecs.

You should do your BH and Illum dailies. That should provide you a solid 300K income per day.

Maybe he was talking about Force Push, Force Wave or equivalent knockbacks? The number of ways to "interrupt" ravage is quite high.

Well put. Oh, and I beat your 2 words with 1 word: "Resilience" buwahahaha

I haven't seen you kill anyone with leap > force choke > lolsmash yet. ;p ... and... I can't find your gear under all that fat! Sigh... should I go back to lolsmash? I don't like lolsmash.

Ha! I am glad someone is pushing this class to its full potential. Too bad I missed that stream. Can you please post your stats here so I can refer to when I finally get to tweak my Sentinel?

Umm... Force Potency makes Project an auto-crit most of the time. You don't really need PA, and the damage isn't bad either to gain initial aggro. Damage on force breach (and slow time) is a little questionable in use with PA, but unless we can reproc project right away our other damage abilities only tickle the enemy anyway. In tank rotation I usually, Force speed > Kinetic Ward > (Force pull) > Force Potency > Slow Time > Project > Force Breach > (Double slash) > Slow Time / Project > Telekinetics Throw > Standard cycle Standard cycle with 1 mob: Slow Time > Project > (Double slash) > Slow Time / Project > Telekinetics Throw > Kinetic Ward > repeat Standard cycle with multiple mobs: Slow Time > Force Breach > Project > (Double slash) > Slow Time / Project > Telekinetics Throw > Kinetic Ward > repeat (I stil don't get how this type of rotation is powerful in PvP, but that's for a new thread) As with the previous post, opening with Force Speed and Force Pull isn't so much for aggroing, but for positioning anyway.On bosses, you can't "pull" them anyway, so it's just additional aggro from afar before your standard rotation kicks in.

Well, there is another post a few posts above yours that wants instant TM. I like your idea of entrench ability. That would be similar to sniper cover's hunker down I assume. In that case there will be situations when you could and could not be shutdown. That's a fair tradeoff IMO. Burst DPS is a bit questionable though. My understanding is range burst is sniper > commando > sage. Have to see it to understand the mechanics. Trying to plead to become LOLSmashers is not really going to get you sympathy votes from BW. That's like saying, "I want to do uber damage like the top 3 out of 8 classes, and I want to do it from range!" (PTs got nerfed because of that)

We keep Zorn in soft enrage and kill Toth. As a result the tanks don't need to switch and DPS don't need to worry about fearful. That is the easiest tactic. (We don't enrage on Toth.) But 3 raids in a row our WIP healer simply couldn't heal me through the damage Toth was doing to me. (I use cooldowns on berserk, self-heal and refresh KW accordingly) But he was fine healing guardian / vanguard tanks with only Rakata gear. Yes, Zorn is super easy as Shadow, but it also isn't hard for the other two tanks.

I get hit for 4-5K all the time. A few solid consecutive hits means a rough time for the healer. Like I said, using the soft enrage tactic, me on Toth is alot worse than a guardian/vanguard tank on Toth. You only have 1 major cooldown to blow on Toth. +2 with biochem. Rakata Medpack and Absorb Adrenal. After those, it's a meat grind for the healer. Then there are moments when shield just doesn't proc and every roll ends up 1-35. Yeah you can say, "do the usual jumping mechanics". If so you're opting out the "easy" option for the hard one for the whole group because you can't tank the one mob. So guess what? I end up off-tanking zorn. I've learned to live with that, but doesn't mean I am going to argue that shadow tanks are "the best" like many of you so proclaim.

There are mercs in this thread alone who believe that having instant casts would make things overpowered. You sure they don't know what they are talking about? Your comparison to true DPS classes is probably versus assault vanguards and smash sentinels/guardians right? Do you really want to be on par with those classes right now to be satisfied? If you never get instant tracer missiles, what other option would you suggest? Or is that the dead-on solution you want?

We soft enrage Zorn. So Toth will beat on 1 tank non-stop the whole fight. If that's me, I get pwned. Deflection and Rakata Absorb cooldown is a bit long to save me. Wow, so much hate. I am going to reply kindly to the L2P comments that I do know what I am doing, most of the time. Let's focus the discussion on OP's statement. I completely agree that we take quite a bit more damage than other tank classes. I think it defines our class, but it's also a bit of nuiance that we need to just live with. To be honest, your HP regeneration over at least 5 global cooldowns may help a bit with overall healing, but that's not going to help much to save you from a series of bad rolls that go straight through your shields. Don't tell me there aren't moments when all your cooldowns are blown but somehow you get that unlucky streak of hits that go through your kinetic ward. You stare at your health as it dwindles down whilst the healer scrambles to rescue you. If you say you've never seen this happen before... well, count yourself lucky to have uber healers. As a shadow tank, I see that happen alot more often to me than other tanks because we take more damage in general. To avoid this, I chose the extra HP buffer. As soon as my cooldowns refresh my HP will go straight back up, but when they are down, sometimes I'd be losing more HP than my healer can heal. To that point, my performance is erractic, which makes me a liability. In the perfect world where you have 2 top healers covering your sorry behind, you will be fine. Unfortunately not all of us are so lucky.

Infiltration is undoubtedly the best DPS spec for shadows. But you will never be as powerful as a smasher or pewpew vanguard in straightup DPS. (although you will always win 1v1s if you use your CCs wisely). Infiltraiton is best played with strong support from healers/peelers. Hybrid is stronger at 1v1, 1v2 situations. i.e. stalling or ninja capping. Up to your play style really.

I have an opinion. Now, I don't play a commando/merc but I've seen some commandos and mercs doing fantastic DPS, if not top DPS, when left alone. i.e. if we make it so that commando/merc cannot be shutdown, their current DPS is overpowered. On the other hand, if a commando/merc is targeted by any member of the team (usually happens in RWZs), he/she becomes near useless and can only really contribute by pulling 1 member of enemy team out of main battle or do mediocre damage throughout the fight (which is unacceptable as a DPS class). Now, I have a suggestion. Since being interrupted is the issue (not escape as OP suggets), can't we just make tracer missile uninterruptable by "interrupts" but interruptable by CC like Master Strike / Ravage on Sentinels/Marauders? That case, you don't need to nerf damage but you also fix the problem of these guys being interrupted non-stop every time by everything.