So I was tanking 8M HM DF last night (we progressed past Draxus the previous night and wanted to keep clearing bosses), and while Grobthok was a joke, we started banging our head against Corruptor Zero. We didn't get him down that night, but we're still working on strategy, and had only done it once, maybe twice on SM before going into HM, so our tactics were likely bad. I realize that Heavy Slash's DoT ticked on me through it's full duration most of the time, and I know there are some other rather dumb things that were done, but that's not the point of this, though suggestions would be appreciated The purpose of this post, though, is to try to clarify my confusion on something. In the other times we fought him, whenever I got hit by Fully Powered Blast, it hit me for some decent damage, but nothing that couldn't be healed through. The last hit in this fight in the linked log shows that it hit me for 44762 damage, which would have killed me from full health. I suspect it only hit so hard because of the stacking debuff I had at the time, but how could we avoid having this happen in the future? This particular attempt was going fairly well until I got caught in an Anti-Gravity field and then got wrecked by that one hit. EDIT: Here's the log http://www.torparse.com/a/466030/26/0/Damage+Taken

Let me elaborate, then. 2 out of 6 Consular Advance Class specs don't heal themselves as part of their normal rotation, since casting heals is obviously something Telekinetics Sages should be doing. Instead of, you know, hitting things.

They have mentioned that we may get a "panic button heal" ability. They also mentioned they may make Battle Readiness have a heal over time effect. Not quite the same as constantly healing ourselves, but 2/6 Consular Advanced Class specs already don't have self heals, so there's that to think about, too.

I know a few threads are out there where some people asked for a little help with their dps, so I was wondering if I could get some suggestions. Gear: http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/character/0308fd14-8580-43e5-8dfd-3c28af1f690e Parse: http://www.torparse.com/a/464076/time/1382287996/1382288580/0/Damage+Dealt There are a few delays between abilities where there shouldn't be, once or twice because the ability didn't go off, and once or twice because I messed up the rotation. My biggest questions, though, are: 1) If I have 3 stacks of overload saber applied, but can't proc cauterize, and have zen up, do I use Zen? I'd imagine so, but at what point do I wait to try to get Cauterize off CD? 2) Leap/Overload Saber and Merciless Slash come off CD at the same time (with 4 stacks of Merciless): which do I use first? What if Cauterize just came off cooldown instead of Merciless Slash? 3) If I decide to stick with a power click relic, do I wait until I use Inspiration to use it, or do I use it immediately at the start of a fight? For this reason, I'm thinking of switching to a damage proc relic, unless there's a better suggestion. As for my gear, I realize I should be using purple augments, but I haven't been able to bring myself to spend that much money on a character I play so casually. I also realize my pvp relic is kinda bad, and now that I remembered that I'm using the pvp version, that's going to be my next piece to replace, but then what should I aim for? I know the set bonus is worth way more than improving the armorings to 72s, so I'll replace the one armoring I can, but I don't know what to try to do after that. I also won't be using ultimate coms on this guy until I can't gear out my main any more with them (another 2 weeks or so). EDIT: So, I managed to accidentally delete that parse from TORParse, so I'll have to upload one with a new gear profile in the near future. Answers to those questions would still be helpful, though.

When my guild did it, we had 2 Shadow tanks (myself being one), and we struggled at bit, but we eventually hit our stride and nailed it with only a small glitch causing some trouble. We both stacked our phase walks between the 2 pillars we'd switch between for bombs, back where the healers could stand. My Co-tank then guarded me so I took a bit less damage, and we rotated through cooldowns to make it easier on the healers. Each 20 seconds, one of us would use a cooldown, and 20 seconds later, the other would use the same cooldown. When we got targeted with a bomb, we would let the red circle appear, then force speed over to the other pillar, and the placement of our phase walks meant the healers didn't even need to move, so they could keep healing us. We also resilienced every other Voice of the Masters, and 3 of our dps could cleanse themselves, which was a very big relief to the healers.

There's a lot of truth to the idea that Shadows lose a ton of DPS on the dummy. I struggle to break 2300 on the dummy, but have pulled over 2500 on boss fights where I have really good uptime, and that was with a 69 main and offhand in Infiltration. I would take your logs from a level 55 Ops boss such as Thrasher, the Ops Chief or the Cartel Warlords, since their armor, and thus DR, doesn't change from SM to HM, and just pick a parse where you don't end up getting a firebug on Thrasher. You've got 100% uptime on these fights (or nearly so), and you'll get to see the effect of the execute phase, which is a non-insignificant increase in damage (and you'll get 4 execute phases on the Warlords, which is really helpful). You'll also be able to stealth out of combat to refresh blackout and potency, which helps your dps a lot as well. The only problem is that you only really get 1 shot per week per fight. Playing a Shadow dps can be really frustrating. I've been working on my dps set for a few weeks now, and while it's getting better, I can take my Sage or my Sentinel into a dummy fight and pull much higher numbers with a lot less effort. Hopefully their proposed changes for 2.5 work, and our sustained damage increases without gimping our already rough force regeneration.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=6801908#post6801908 Answers went out on Tuesday.

With the new changes in armor ratings, this difference is going to go from being somewhat noticeable from 61s to 72s, to fairly insignificant, and it'll be outright worse to keep the 4 piece 61s in favor of the 2 piece and otherwise 78 armorings. But 2.5 is a ways off, and you should be able to start to rack up some 69 and 72 set bonus pieces before then.

Unfortunately, both the increase to medium armor and the +1% armor per stack of Kinetic Ward would be a really heavy handed change to balance. Both of those options would give Shadows so much mitigation that it would more than make up for the spikiness, and make them outright better than the other tanks. Shadows have low armor rating because they heal off the damage they take or resist it in other ways. We already need 5% less healing on average, so upping our armor rating by anything as extreme as these two options would give us a damage profile almost as smooth as a Vanguard in addition to all the other ways Shadows prevent or heal damage.

For a fresh 55, yeah, that sounds about right, though you will definitely want to pick up the 4 piece set bonus, as it's better to have a 4 piece 61 set bonus than the 2 piece and otherwise all 72 armorings (not sure about 78 armorings, haven't seen the armor difference in the pieces yet). The 4 piece set bonus for Shadows is a huge DR jump, so you'll want to work your way towards picking that up. Aside from that, it sounds like you had a really lazy/bad healer, who was either doing damage when he "should have been" healing, or he was asleep. Either way, when I run my shadow through it (mostly 72s with a few 69 armorings and enhancements left), I'll occasionally see my health bar spike downwards, but most of the time my self heals take care of trash. Seeing as I'm at 2320 defensive stats, it's a clear difference, but you shouldn't have that much trouble with it at any point. At 51-54 in similar gear to what you have (though admittedly much less optimized, nice job on that one), I was breezing through it as well. If I were in your position, I'd grind out some dailies to get some more coms, and pick up a little more gear, then start running the HM 55 flashpoints. The trash hits pretty hard, but it's nothing you can't survive with careful planning and somewhat generous use of defensive abilities. As you get more geared, it gets significantly easier, especially as a Shadow, and once you're no longer in danger of dying on poorly executed pulls, you're more than ready for TFB and S&V story mode. Unfortunately, as a Shadow tank, I'm going to have to suggest you be sitting in close to full 69s before moving onto hard mode. Of course, today's patch likely throws all my advice out the window, so take this with a grain of salt

I can show you gobs and gobs of times that resilience has failed, very specifically against the huge grenade. Between my co-tank and I, it'll fail at least twice to three times a night, sometimes resulting in some spectacular, if failed, heroics by our healers to try to make us survive.

If the last set of answers is anything to judge by, I'd say that if we don't have them by 19:00 GMT, then we're going to wait until tomorrow or next week, the latter being the more likely.

It was a mix of that, and the dreadful feeling that I can totally see them giving that answer .

I think I just died a bit on the inside.

Thok, a Guardian's cooldowns are typically less spike intensive than a Shadow's. Warding Call is roughly equivalent in effect to Battle Readiness, but then Saber Ward reduces force and tech damage in addition to Deflection's effect, AND it prevents all melee and ranged damage for the first 2 or 3 seconds. Saber Reflect and Resilience are roughly equivalent as well ,minus the fail rate on Resilience and the larger pool of attacks Saber Reflect works against. Then Guardians get Enure and Focused Defense, though the latter is very, very dangerous as a tank. I'd say the Guardian gets the less-spiky cooldowns.

This is the talent layout that I use in PVP, but I also don't pvp seriously, so take that with a grain of salt. I should probably use Shadow Wrap, but I've found that I have so little killing power anyway that adding it hasn't helped me kill people. http://goo.gl/Du1Lfw As for stats, obviously stack Expertise as best you can. After that, I wouldn't really know where to start. A lot of the really high damage you'll take will come in the form of auto-crits, against which you can't really do anything other than use a cooldown and pray. P.S. I swear that link is safe

I'm sure he had his logs enabled that night, so I'll see if I can't get those from him. Also, the 35k may have been closer to 30k, but it's just about as deadly on that fight.

I'm just going to go and beat a dead horse here. When our Guardian took a 16 man Nightmare Gutwrenching Kick to his unshielded face, he laughed from just under half health via Mumble at our Shadow, who lost 35k of his 40k hp to the same attack just moments previously. Thankfully I had my Underworld Medicine halfway cast already, and our other healers are freakin' amazing, or else that Shadow would have been very dead. And I don't wanna hear anything about 'knowing when to blow cooldowns' as making the spikiness situation okay. Later that night, I watched our Shadow die to a Huge Grenade from well over half health WHILE using Battle Readiness. By the way, that's a Shadow's only cooldown that works on that, so when he, on a later pull, got targeted by the second random bomb, that went over really well. TL;DR Don't say Shadows/Assassins are fine and dandy for NiM content. They really, really aren't.

I'm honestly a little scared about the answers. I'm really worried they're going to be "L2P, H2F."

As an update, and a bump, this is still bugged. I now have the codex entry on all 4 of my level 55 republic characters, but still haven't gotten the achievement, despite killing the boss solo 5 times, and with other people 4 other times. It's standing just between me and the 'Big Game Hunter' title.

If it's anything like the last set of answers, we'll get them on Tuesday, maybe Wednesday.