I don't know if it's a bug so much as it is poor programming. I'm willing to bet that if I scour my logs looking for places it happened, it would display that Shadow Technique does its damage before the 3 stacks are consumed, and so refresh the stacks' duration right before they get used AKA: Working as (stupidly/ignorantly) intended.

Thanks I've got around 6 hours of parses logged over the last 2 days, as I kept making attempts. To show how inconsistent the spec is, my previous run I only pulled 2800. In that one, I wasn't critting on almost any SS or FBs, and I kept proccing shadow technique on FB, which doesn't build a stack. It was very frustrating.

Infiltration isn't bursty, I don't know what you mean

Finally got my lucky parse I'm pretty sure it puts me in at number 5 on the boards, just 1.7 dps behind Jaberse. I wouldn't normally have clipped it, except that I was so ready to hit it one last time that I hit the dummy at full health with no armor debuff and no health debuff. Oops. TORParse link AMR

Ellendra - Shadow - Infiltration - 5/36/5 - 5'09.144 seconds TORParse link AMR Profile EDIT: Did some quick math, and Jaberse beat me by only 1.7 dps. That's a difference of a single crit on any of our moves. Second Edit: Edited to comply with new format rules. Also noted that the fact that I continued the fight into a new dummy doesn't matter! Woot!

By your damage reduction, it looks like you don't have the 4 piece set bonus armorings, which are a big help. Having the 4 piece bonus in 69 armorings is better than having 4 78 non-set-bonus armorings in their place, by damage reduction alone. Not only does the set bonus provide more damage reduction to Kinetic and Energy, but it also provides the 2% reduction to Internal and Elemental damage, as well, which is really nice. As for your augments, though, it's looking like you want something of a mix. You're running a lot of really high endurance stuff, and not as high mitigation, judging by your percents, and assuming you take all of the defensive stat boosting talents. As best I can tell, your stats are around 272 defense, 428 shield, and 422 absorb, for a total of 1122 mitigation stats. Since your augments are all fortitude augments, you'll get another 448 mitigation stat points from switching, putting you at a total of 1570. For my gear, I go by KBN's values for an average on Dread Fortress and Dread Palace, which conveniently just about averages Scum and Villainy and Terror from Beyond. I take the values he has for each 100 points of stat gearing, and I've linearly interpolated for values between those points (though I suppose quadratic would be more accurate), to try to find my 'optimal' numbers for gear. I did the same for your total of 1570 stat budget, and while you, predictably, can't hit the numbers precisely, you get pretty close. Without changing any of your gear at all, I would use 5 defense augments, 1 shield augment, and 8 absorb augments. This, of course, will all change as you continue to gear up, getting more and more mitigation budget to work with. For example, I'm at a 2435 budget right now (just a little bit above Best in Slot Underworld), with 43k health, 39.99% Damage Reduction (7872 Armor Rating, 2 72 armorings (boots and legs), and 5 78 armorings), 22.72% Defense Chance (494 rating), 36.40% Shield Chance (56.40% with Kinetic Ward going, 844 rating), and 47.10% Absorb Percent (55.10% with 8 stacks of Kinetic Bulwark, 1097 rating). As my gear stands now, I literally cannot swap any pieces of gear without deviating further from my ideal values of 509, 826, and 1100. Of course, these numbers change every time I get a new piece of gear, but I enjoy doing the math, so I don't see it as a problem. My biggest piece of advice to you right now: start tanking 16 person story mode versions of the new operations, and hope to get lucky in winning Underworld tokens. Especially try to win the pieces that don't give Alacrity or Accuracy, as they have no place in tanking gear. Also, if you have any of those enhancements, I strongly suggest you get rid of them in favor of literally any other tanking stat. And with that, I end my long walls of text.

These are kinda the conclusions I had drawn. I was doing amazing in that parse, hitting crits at a very good rate while my relics were going, especially on Shadow Strike and Force Breach. I was sitting at 3150 going into the execute phase, and then my luck just turned against me, and I didn't crit on almost any FBs or SSs when it would have been best to crit. Overall, I can say that the 'increase' in damage has been close to negligible, and aside from MKnightrider, no Infiltration Shadow/Deception Assassin can seem to get much above 3250, even in amazing gear. I'd love to see them change 3 stacks of Breaching Shadows so that, rather than each stack boosting damage, each stack adding 20/25% crit chance to your next Force Breach, and maybe reducing the damage a bit. That, or see Shadow Technique's proc rate increased to 50%, and reduce damage a little. Either of these changes, I feel, would be a great fix to our sustained damage issue. It's ridiculous that Hybrid Balance specs can do better damage than Infiltration, even without the 30% Surge bonus to DoTs :/

So, Jolly.... Here's the best I've done with a few minor upgrades. I'm going to try to upgrade my 3 subpar 72 and below enhancements, and see where that gets me, but for the time being, this mostly represents a small increase in power and willpower, and the switch from that crit proc relic to the main stat proc: http://www.torparse.com/a/521040/10/0/Overview Also, it clipped a lot of my damage off of that one :/ But if you look at the right time period, or just calculate it by TTK, it hits about 3120.

I know it's not ranked pvp, so it doesn't mean quite as much, but I was able to hold out against a full 8 man team in a Civil War, and I have no doubt that it was partially thanks to my extra DR, considering I spent the first full 8 seconds of the fight stun-locked. I feel like I also don't get wrecked as hard by Smash, and that makes me really happy. Smash used to devastate my hitpoints, now it seems more like a mild inconvenience. As for PVE, my co-tank and I mostly laughed off Nefra HM, when our healers were targetted by literally every single kamikaze droid. Our heals incoming were quite low that attempt, but we still didn't really feel all that worried that we'd go squish. Against Draxus, we had a similar experience. Overall, I feel like I need to be babysat less, and that the healers have to worry a little bit less, now that 2.5 has hit.

Here's the guide: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=704248 And what I'm saying is that you'd need a lot bigger stat increase to make such a trade worthwhile. The 4 piece set bonus, like I said, is worth almost 2.5% extra dps. That's a huge increase, and far more than 24 extra strength from increasing the armoring, and still way more than 48 if you swap two armorings out for coms armorings. The sentinel set bonuses are really strong, for all specs, especially watchmen, who get a 4% buff to their burns which gets further multiplied through the 6 auto-crits from Zen. So don't trade up. It's not worth it.

I had some odd problems tonight. During the weekly fight with Grob'thok, I was losing out on Shadow Protection. I'd channel a full TKT at 3 stacks of Harnessed Darkness, but I wouldn't get a single stack (or refresh) of Shadow Protection. Admittedly, I get to tank the adds on that fight, and so I don't put as much importance on keeping up stacks as keeping away from the adds, but even when I'd stop and channel a full TKT against the boss, I'd finish with 0 stacks. I watched the damage tick off, so I know it wasn't all resisted (not to mention the chance of having a full TKT resisted being pretty slim). Any ideas as to what happened?

The thought pattern behind this is spot on. I think you've got the numbers correct, too, but I wouldn't trust my memory today, it's been a REALLY long day of driving for me. As for my own dps, that 3090 was quite a lucky run. Not a total fluke, as I've come close to it a couple times (oddly enough all those attempts were back to back, I should have kept parsing that night ). And my gear has quite a ways to go before I'm nearly caught up with you. You have 100-150 more Willpower, Power, Crit and Surge than I do, so I've got plenty of places to improve. Like my 69/bad 78 enhancements that really need to go. I've also come to the conclusion that I'm really sad I picked the crit proc relic, as while in 2.4, it was probably a bit better than the main stat relic, in 2.5 it's not even a contest. Too many times I've had the crit relic proc and fail to crit, and the last thing Infiltration spec needs is more reliance on RNG. Now, he opens up without, and never uses, spinning kick? Weird. I'd think that placing our single hardest hitting move into the rotation more would increase dps. I don't think he'd even save that much more force, either. I guess it could come from the fact that spinning kick might not do enough damage for the shadow strike to be worth it. Yeah, 10k crits are awesome, but if it doesn't crit, it barely deals 5k total damage, whereas 2x CS probably hits for around 6k. He could be onto something. Only thing is that this is bust if the shadow strike crits, because then it does ludicrous damage. Hmm. Maybe if they changed it so that Infiltration tactics caused it to crit instead of dealing 30% extra damage.... that would be neat. It would smooth out our spikiness and increase overall damage. But there I go rambling, too.

I don't have exact numbers on how much dps each point of main stat gives you, but I highly doubt that it would be worth the ~2.5% damage buff from the 4 piece set bonus. Assuming ~24 seconds to build up to Zen each time, according to Macedonicus' new guide, that's a 5/8 uptime. I think you'd need a pretty significant amount of strength to overcome that, considering you could probably hit 3200 dps easily in your current gear, under the assumption that you're a mix of 72/75/78 gear. I'm pretty sure that the strength increase is enough to account for a 78 dps loss from losing the set bonus.

And those numbers are why his parses are so much better than mine Man I wish my gear was that good.

I'm pretty sure his intention wasn't to "'weed out' the bads," so much as it was to reward those people who could play the class to its fullest, and encourage everyone else to get better. Overall, I expect the average skill of Sin/Shadow tanks to increase with this change, because it's so much easier to see its effects. And don't kid yourself: it wasn't just NiM bosses where it was a problem. In some unlucky cases in 16 man HM and even SM, I took some devastating hits that killed me with no time to react. Back when I had 34k health, I took a 30k Terminate to the face, and then the explosive probe killed me. Even just a few weeks ago, tanking against Tyrans, I took a 26k Thundering Blast and then a 10k shock back to back within 0.3 seconds. There was a serious problem, and these changes helped to fix that.

Ellendra - Shadow - TTK 5'23.87 Clipped to killing blow - 3096.19 Clipped to 'exit combat' - 3085.64 AMR Profile Not sure if you want to clip to the killing blow or not, so I listed both numbers for the fight. And here's a fight clipped to show when I added the modules to the dummy. I added the modules a long time before the fight, just to be overly sure my proc relics had their ICD finished. And yes, I did sap the training dummy, just for fun. Edited for TTK.

For transition phases, I don't think it's really a problem to save up a 3x stack of Harnessed and just channel TKT as soon as you can. Sure, it's not maximum uptime of Shadow Protection, but if it means 3 or so seconds of not having it before the phase change and slightly less than 3 afterwards, I think that's better than it dropping off during the phase change, and having to build it over the next 9-12 seconds. It will just take a judgement call, and isn't that something we already have to do a ton of as tanks? Especially as Shadow tanks? What I would like to see changed, though, is how stack application is determined. I felt cheated when I was tanking a 16 HM Toborro's Courtyard, when I had to swap in for when the main tank died (PUGs aren't always the most successful). There were numerous times where I'd get my first, sometimes even first two, ticks of TKT resisted, and lost all my stacks, even though I executed my rotation just fine. And after earlier laser phases, when I had to lose stacks, and he'd resist a tick of TKT, I had to sit at less than full stacks because of poor RNG. Harnessed Shadows stacks build even if the abilities do no damage, why not Shadow Protection stacks?

I think you mean everyone except the vast majority of Shadows. There are 2 Shadow parses on the dummy I've ever seen with higher than 3.3k dps, and one of those two is just a smidge under 5 minutes long. I'm sure I could include Focus/Rage Sentinels/Marauders and Scrapper/Concealment Scoundrels/Operatives, but the point stands: some classes/specs struggle to hit 3.3k, that number is not an accurate measure for all classes.

I think you're absolutely right, 7 minutes is in no way too long to be parsing for. I would, at times, accidentally parse for half an hour while trying to figure out how to prioritize abilities. I once even logged a 43 minute long fight against the dummy on my Sentinel. I don't think that's very typical, though.

Hard Mode flashpoints are a poor choice for balance point in design. Back in 2.3, I would regularly, for kicks and giggles, use only taunts to hold aggro against bosses in the Czerka flashpoints, and run around like an idiot, not using my rotation, just to annoy my guild's healers. They had no trouble keeping me alive at all. Saying that Shadow Protection needs to have a longer duration because of fights like this is like saying that Deflection needs to last longer because trash can outlive its duration. Shadow Protection is overkill in these flashpoints, and we certainly don't need it to survive.

With regards to the 'not as much damage as the dummy has health' part: In all of my logs, TORParse cut out the final hit that killed the dummy, resulting in anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand less damage done on the final hit, thus robbing me of a few dps. Not a killer issue, and everyone seems to suffer it, but something that might be worth mentioning. It might be prudent to clip the parses from the start of combat to the time the dummy dies, since the dummy dies in the logs before you deal the damage.

Did another couple attempts on the 1 million: Ellendra - Shadow - 3135.75 Torparse link: http://www.torparse.com/a/511283/time/1386132148/1386132448/0/Damage+Dealt AMR Profile: http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/character/e051456e-5603-45b0-8c51-889f78b4b54c If you look at the whole fight, it goes down to 3096 dps by the end. Torparse seems to clip the final attack when it calculates your dps, for some reason, so I usually include just use a custom time to capture the hit.

Hit the training dummies. You can practice all you want without being interrupted or stunned, and without killing them, unless you want to be able to.

Honestly, it's not hard to keep it the stacks up with a little care. With a 6 second cooldown on Project and a 9 second cooldown on Slow Time, you can get a combination of 3 of them in simply by using them on cooldown. Yes, half of the moves you perform in each TKT window are devoted to maintaining your stacks, but that's not so different from what we did pre 2.5.

The armor buff is exactly what the tooltip says it is: 20% extra from Elusivenes, 15% more than 2.4 from Combat Stance. With the stacking 4% DR buff constantly up, it's around a 7.5% increase in damage reduction from kinetic/energy attacks. That's a pretty serious jump in damage reduction. I'll have to test it out during my raid tomorrow night, but I predict good things. As for the changes to the dps specs, I haven't tested them out without the new dummy items, so I can't say anything for sure. Force management does feel a tiny bit easier in Infiltration, though.