No. Absolutely not. Reducing damage to increase survivability will be the end of this Discipline in PvE. Hatred doesn't do nearly well enough in PvE to justify losing damage on anything, especially not after the recent nerfs that it didn't need.

For PvE, don't try to play tank and DPS with the same gear, it won't end well. You'll do little sustained damage in tank discipline, and take considerably more damage using DPS gear. That said, shoot for a rough approximation of the ratio of shield to absorb in those mitigation profiles and you should do fine as a tank, not that it matters much as you level up.

A buddy of mine was talking about 75k Driving Thrusts - in hard mode. On both the Sin and Jug tank. You can't shield everything, so gearing for the worst case scenario is what's safest.

He quit before the changes. With real life keeping him busy, he decided this game just wasn't fun enough to be worth the time investment. PvE is a joke, and PvP hasn't been competitive in ages.

...and? I play the game too. I've seen the difference. It's not the end of the world. Have you ever heard of rollbang? Dotsmash? TK/Balance hybrid? 1.0 Concealment? THOSE were nerfs: this just smarts a little. I played Deception AND Madness (before it was Hatred) through all the Nightmare content at level post 2.0. The 3.0 changes to Hatred were FAR more of a nerf than this. 3.0 made Maul, Discharge, and Shock (soon to be Ball Lightning) ALL do less damage. Deception has survived the life of this game, and so will it continue.

For PvE, they're really about where they were at the close of 3.0: at the rear end of average, and just behind Hatred. It's unpleasant, but these nerfs are hardly going to change the ability of any class to clear any HM stuff. If you can't clear HM content as Deception, you can't clear it with, at least, any melee (or you just really suck at Assassin). HM content is so mind-numbingly easy that you can take characters with Battlemaster relics, a level 55 implant/earpiece suite, and a level 60 right side, and solo heal some of the content. Taking that a step further, for Nightmare content, for whatever masochistic fool decides that worse loot than HM is the best form of loot: if you couldn't do it on Deception before, you can't now. If you could, you still can. It just wasn't a large enough nerf to change that. The margin is tighter, yes, but the margin is also tighter if you miss a GCD due to lag, so take that for what you will. (btw: 2 GCDs missed a minute (pre-alacrity) would cause the same damage loss before the nerf). As for the doom and gloom? It's mostly for show, Deception is still playable in all content, and bad in the content it used to be bad at before. If you read through enough of the forums, you'll see the big names in PvP saying that it still does what it did before the nerf: less burst damage than other burst classes, but with a borderline unfair control package (if we're to believe the people who have always complained about Deception).

Send me a pm with your email address and I can send you an updated guide.

So... Negating one of their most efficient moves doesn't count as effective? Okay, then. What you view as worthless is really more like: "underwhelming compared to a real healer or Enraged Defense". At ~1000 hps, it will take you between 11 and 20 seconds to heal off those hits. Consider that your healers will, if they are reasonably intelligent, fill you halfway back to full, and so you take roughly 5-10 seconds to heal. Considering you should be topping out at 2k dtps in HMs, that's actually perfectly sustainable. Those aren't the problem hits. It's the 40-60k hits you take on Master/Blaster where you start to suffer, because healers just can't let you stay at low health. It's Coratanni/Ruugar, where Ruugar jet charges you and one shots you that your heals mean nothing. People seem to poorly understand the scale of damage in this game. DPS that take 1500 dtps on your 2000 dtps fights require more healing than you if your healers are smart[\i]. 20k hits don't constitute burst damage in PvE. I've been a long time fan of reducing the spike risk in Hatred, so don't take this as me defending self healing. I'm just trying to point out that you aren't comparing things on the correct scale. And actually, 670 hps would heal that 16k rail shot in much more than 5 minutes (obviously). You can also pull closer to 1k hps in PvP with dotspread, and you're not supposed to be invincible with self-heals anyway. You're supposed to use them to decrease your effective dtps, especially by stunning enemies and keeping them from hitting you as much as possible while healing up a little bit at a time. Lastly: oops, didn't mean to count Demolish. General results remain the same, though: self healing is powerful in a non-burst environment.

Consider this: With a single target with all three dots applied with full uptime, you get 28 dot ticks every 18 seconds, or 1.56 ticks per second. Add 3 targets each with 2 dots applied to them, and you suddenly jump to 68 ticks every 18 seconds, or roughly 3.78 ticks per second. With base hits of ~130 (based on your numbers), you'd get roughly 670 hps off of 3 targets with Discharge + Creeping Terror, and another with both of those + Demolish. Toss in 10% from a Death Field target, and 100% of the damage from Leeching Strike every 12 seconds, and it really adds up. Now, none of that will save you from a bunch of burst damage, but it makes you laugh off any kind of sustained damage attempt from any single target.

No. Stick with the B mods, or if you get to Raptus, you will literally get one-shot. 75k hits from Driving Thrust are going to happen, and if you don't have significantly more health than that, your healers will need to literally keep you at full health just to survive. Hit points are the best defense against spike damage, don't drop them to try to reduce spikes, that is literally the opposite of what you want to do. If you're at 30% health, the spike damage in any operation is more than sufficient to kill you regardless of how you gear. If you're that low for more than a second or two, your healers need to prioritize healing you over whatever else they're, quite frankly, wasting their time on. Spike damage is really bad right now because we're a) early in the tier, which means health pools are at their smallest for a ridiculous amount of content and b) the content you're doing was classically pretty spiky. DP was an operation where you could go from full to 30% in the blink of an eye. All of the bosses had very spiky damage profiles, where you would suddenly go from being fine to not. Now that we're effectively 2 tiers of gear behind where we were when the hard modes first released, we're seeing it very clearly. That is if her stacks don't start at a funny time I've seriously seen her start stacking 10 seconds before she starts her attack, it's weird.

Until 4.0.3, Deception's burst was its strength in PvE. It could hold 9k DPS for 10 seconds, which was more than long enough to kill basically any set of adds or pass any burst phase. Your google-fu might need some work if you can't find a 4.0 Hatred guide.

You've read conflicting posts because you're reading PvE and PvP threads and assuming they should have the same answer.

That happens a lot more than just in the opener. If you have > 90 Force, use Voltaic Slash. If not, use Saber Strike. Your opener (with the full 6 piece set bonus) for PvE should be (pre-stack double Voltage via Lacerate) Recklessness + Discharge > Phantom Stride > Discharge > Ball Lightning > VS > Maul > VS > Ball Lightning > Discharge > Force Cloak + Recklessness + Discharge. There's a very similar one for opening with a pre-cast Crushing Darkness, but the one above is still pretty good. Note: you have to run a decent chunk of Alacrity for it to work out properly.

See, I was aiming for the mystical 20k Discharge. I'm not sure it was achievable, but with full 224 gear, it was a possibility. I saw a 17k without an adrenal, but I didn't (still don't either) have a 224 offhand and I'm quite a few other pieces short, so I was hoping to eventually see one. Now I'll have to settle for a 22k Maul.

Just because you can do it doesn't mean you shouldn't have taken Serenity.

It does.

People are overreacting. It was doing very well, and it's just below average right now. If you're doing Nightmare content, you'll likely want to take Serenity now, but Infiltration can still make DPS checks. If you were struggling with DPS checks before, you'll find them harder now, but there's little left in the game that requires incredible DPS.

Your google-fu might need some work: Dipstik's thread Bant's thread

Mostly. With such a high minimum defense, you basically take every ounce of defense out of your gear that you can. Shield isn't too far behind absorb, though, so don't let the gap get too crazy.

There was never a serious "need" to run multiple sets, it would just make it somewhat noticeably easier on your healers if you did. Not by a lot, but it should have been a little noticeable. You should laugh at that Shadow tank in your group though, and call a DPS spot so that he can't blame you when he squishes.

I find that dropping the third or fourth Lacerate in a row leaves you at a sustainable level of force. Besides, if you're going berserk AoE, you really need to have Recklessness up to ensure you have your +5% melee critical chance going the whole time. AoE phases in most boss fights don't last very long, unless you're deliberately stacking bosses up. I've rarely had that much trouble with force spamming Lacerate a bunch. Sure, if you don't plan ahead at all, you can drain your force pretty quick, but a little planning goes a long way.

Anyone can pull huge numbers in the trash before Bulo, though. And Deception actually has better AoE than people give it credit for. It's not old Smash or Orbital Strike levels of AoE (nothing ever will be again), but it's good. Deception can realistically sustain over 24k in that room until they run out of Force. Old Smash, on the other hand, would have seen a ~25k auto-crit, 8 target Smash. Even half of that would be pretty incredible, followed up by a couple Sweeping Slashes.

Burst specs on classes with a ton of DCDs they can use in PvE to survive. I'd also intend for them to reinstate some of the AoE they used to have, so they could tear it up on fights like Draxus again. Man, I miss old Smash on Draxus

Hmm. Fair enough. I see your more parses, and raise you "it makes little difference." The Assassins who I would expect to do really well are absent from there. Vescent has no parses up, Tenebras has none up. I see people on the leaderboards who I've regularly put the beatdown on. I'm hardly amazed, though. Considering that I don't upload any logs, I'm part of that particular problem, and I realize that, but honestly? This game is so non-competitive right now that it's hard to care about being well known or doing well. Not to mention the fact that there are always going to be people who fluff their numbers and take advantage of their group being willing to help them do so.

Ah, but you also have the incredibly cheesey ability to taunt AND stealth out. Very handy in some cases, as sometimes boss abilities will go on cooldown even if the channel doesn't finish.