I really hope that 146 is a typo. That's not a good trade. 5% shield is great and all, but that's a ton of DR to lose, and in a meta where the most deadly stuff is spike damage, trading DR for shield isn't a good idea.

Hmm. They aren't awful, and I wouldn't actually trade much (if any) shield away with that balance. I would, however work on upgrading your gear, as there seems to be a little room for improvement.

The enhancements are unobtainable. As for the relics, crafted vs. non-crafted, if you need the extra hit points, I suppose there are worse trades, but just remember that you're now trading away shield rating on the operation token relics.

If you can, trade some defense for some absorb. If you can't, trade a little shield into absorb. Shield and absorb make each other more valuable, so evening them out a little more is good, and defense and the pair make each other worse. The only problem now is that the minimum amount of defense you can run is quite high. For future reference, ratings are often easier to work with, as they better show the balance of the stats you have in your gear.

So there are 2 consequences of using Kinetic Combat as a DPS spec in PvE. You're going to terrorize your tanks hardcore. That's a lot of amplified-threat damage. It's a lot of damage for a tank, but junk DPS for a DPS. Playing a tank as a DPS means you're not getting hit to regenerate resources, in addition to the fact that it's simply not designed to do a lot of damage. Those aside, why would you gear for accuracy if you were going to do this? Simply being in Combat Technique grants 101% accuracy since 3.0, so it's not like it's even a new mechanic.

Parses like that are why I stopped trying to do competitive parsing.

Well, you don't maintain a strict rotation in PvP (and it's more of a priority system in PvE anyway), and a rotation implies continuous uptime, not sitting around not being able to do damage to a boss. Even then, I cannot think of a single time I use it in the middle of a boss fight unless there's downtime and a well timed end to said downtime. I never use it while I can attack normally: which is absolutely what I very obviously meant.

Are you talking PvE or PvP? For PvP, you'd probably want Power, since you're going to be running no accuracy and a ton of Critical (and maybe some Alacrity). For PvE? You run a mix of Alacrity, Accuracy, and Critical, to get very close to an ideal set of stats (or actually there, as some people list actually attainable stats). You have 14 augments. As a tank, they're going to be split between shield and absorb, with no defense augments at all. MIx it up to aim for the stats in the very same thread as the one above.

The heals are small, but they come up very often, so when you have a ton of little heals that only affect yourself, it can actually be quite beneficial for survivability. I don't think there's any situation in PvP where the relic would come into play for a tank class, is too random for a healer, and doesn't increase DPS, so I can't really see a use for PvP. So in PvP, that's arguably correct, but there are spots in PvE where it's actually quite good on a PT tank, for much the same reason that the Reactive Warding relic is, hands down, the best relic for tanks. As for the original question about the relic, though: no, it isn't useful for a Shadow tank. At absolute best, you can trigger the relic every 38 seconds with the new Assassin's Shelter, at which point the heals you can get from it are in the 10s of points per second, and it's not like it's an extraordinary amount of healing when you get it either, so if you're taking a big spike of burst damage, it still won't save you. It used to be best in slot pre 2.4, but when the self healing was changed to extra DR, we no longer got the same benefit from it.

Shadow/Assassin, though they say the same stuff for gearing.

Don't save Force Cloak for that. You're sacrificing a HUGE amount of damage to do so. You're losing about 0.85 Force per second of extra regeneration you could have going, not to mention the extra Recklessness uses you're missing out on. Unless you're doing Nightmare (or HM ToS/Rav), if people are dying, you need to tell them to do mechanics better, or tell your healers to stop slacking, because nothing in HM (except, again, Tos/Rav) is challenging or even really dangerous. Besides, you're a DPS, it's not your job to save people who've died. You should always be able to fit 3 GCDs between each Ball Lightning. If you were only getting 2 before, then you weren't using the full benefit your alacrity was giving you. No matter how much alacrity you have, the cooldown on Ball Lightning will be reduced such that it takes 3 GCDs (which are all shorter thanks to Alacrity) for it to come off cooldown again, so that your rotation remains as it should.

How did I only just read this? Y'know, maybe if they made a class for this sort of idea, the class that runs alacrity even when it tanks. Do a Healer/Tank/DPS base class like the Inquisitor or Bounty Hunter for whom all of their abilities become exponentially better when they overlap, and so you need to try to at least hit a critical mass of alacrity in your build before it becomes potentially very strong. I think it would probably become the most skill based class in the game. Unfortunately, I also think we'll never see it, because we're now over 4 years into the game with no indication of a new class coming any time soon But if they did do a new class, I think an Echani trained melee combatant or maybe a tech-savant/mechanic sorta deal would both be neat (though the first would also probably require the introduction of the Echani into the game).

I didn't check your Shadow's Respite uptime, so I'm going to do that and then edit this post. But what I really needed to say was: ABSOLUTELY. DO. NOT. ADD. MIND. CRUSH. TO. YOUR. ROTATION. As a pre-cast for your opener, okay, sure, go for it, though the difference in DPS is going to be within your typical DPS deviation between parses. But definitely don't use it once the fight is going.

Have you finished Chapter 3 of your class story, done Ilum, Makeb, and Oricon, finished Shadow of Revan, including the prelude, and also finished the Ziost story line? If you've missed any of them, it'll give you the warning. It might also give you the warning anyway, but hey, better safe than sorry, right?

1) The cost reduction there would be a miniscule DPS increase. You'd get an extra Thrash every 132 seconds, so just a little over once every 2 minutes. You probably wouldn't even notice the difference in Force regeneration. It was taken off of Dreadful Nightmares because it caused too much healing, and I think it would as quickly be nerfed again if they tried putting it back on. 2) Do not reduce the rate limit on bloodletting, it will literally destroy the execute phase. Now, if you simply made the chance of activation higher, you could probably handle it in the execute, but it wouldn't be much of a DPS increase at that point. 3) Ages ago (back before the gutting of Hatred's range in 3.1.2), I brought up the idea of bringing back Lightning Burns. With the currently lower costs on everything, you'd only really notice the Force difference in the execute, but the damage boost could be fairly substantial, without the abuse for dotspreading or any kind of real burst being added. Well, the number of real DPS checks in the game right now is pretty small, so I'm not surprised that I haven't heard any PvE complaints about the squishiest class in the game doing the least of any melee sustained class.

Check a post up. Not as clear as I remember saying it, but yeah, I say to taunt. Now, since it makes no sense at all for me to say "you should off-tank all the time in PvP," I think it's a relatively easy logical baby-step to understand I meant that you should taunt the time. But hey, if you wanna keep going, let's, because I can misconstrue things, too.

Uhh. Well. If you read what I said again, I said you should be taunting all the time in PvP. But hey, sure, go ahead and dps in tank stance if you want. I won't stop you. That, and, y'know, simply saying things makes them true. Definitely.

As long as you don't think OC should have a shorter cooldown. I mean, as much as I'd love +25% DR every 60 seconds as a tank, I don't think that would really be very fair.

That's really weird. Your ability usage looks okay (try not to delay PB as much, though), and yet that buggy bit remains. Clairvoyance never clears, and you obviously had it up for a huge portion of the fight, as your Shadow Technique triggered roughly every 3.7 seconds (just a little slow, but tighten up that PB usage and it'll improve), which is less time than the natural ICD, so you're obviously triggering it off of PBs. Looking at your ability activations, I think you might need to work on getting closer to using your abilities as each previous GCD ends. There's ability queuing somewhere in the preferences menu, so that you can hit abilities before the previous GCD ends and have them activate immediately, which is a huge help for a lot of people. I'm not sure how much alacrity you're running, but your average time between ability use is just a bit too high for any reasonable amount you're running. And if you're not running any, run some, it really helps. One thing a lot of people will do on that fight is to get into the pack of mouse droids as it spawns and hit them all with an AoE move, and rack up a bunch of extra damage. One last thing that could be affecting your DPS is your group comp. You are missing, from all the available damage debuffs, the Melee and Internal debuffs on the boss if you were the lone DPS, and so if your teammates aren't providing both of those, your DPS will suffer a little bit. Granted, it's not usually worth building your team around maximizing one person's damage, but I will say that Watchman Sentinel and Infiltration Shadow compliment each other literally perfectly.

You'd have to link some logs, but are you using Shadow Stride? That was a pretty big change.

You can't guard outside of Dark Charge/Combat Technique, so you can't do it unless you're playing a "hybrid" and being a DPS in tank spec. Which you shouldn't do in PvE because the damage is mediocre and you absolutely *will* pull off the tanks. And then you'll die because you're a fake tank For PvP, though, it's totally valid, and you should definitely be doing it all the time. No. You will die. Heroic 2s, you can do with a healer, but you will probably still come really close to dying. Hatred squishes hard.

There's a third option: it's utility in both PvE and PvP. Being able to tank single adds Is invaluable in certain circumstances, and in PvP it's free DR for your team. As for "off tanking": No. Don't do it. Deception needs to be behind the target to do maximum damage, and Hatred will simply die tanking anything of any real importance. The taunt, in PvE, is really only useful to separate enemies or intercept attacks (like Strong Swipe or Mass Affliction (which you can break the cast of by stealthing out). As actual off-tanks, Assassins are probably the weakest.

That was a 2.X thing, where it was bad to delay Crushing Darkness for any amount of time, since the difference between the duration and CD was less than a single GCD. They got rid of that with 3.0, which helped make the rotation fall together really nicely, though it didn't matter very much in PvP, since Hatred got dotspread, and no longer cared about losing duration on a dot..

No, the ICD on Raze is 9 seconds, the duration of Demolish is 6 seconds. Gives you 2 globals of breathing room to delay it so you can use Death Field when it comes around.

DCDs are immune to the effects of Alacrity, so no, it wouldn't. The only "DCD" not affected as such is Recklessness, because it's not initially a DCD for the class.