Lachdonan Posted February 17, 2012 Share Posted February 17, 2012 (edited) ... Because it's ridiculous that they exist for guardian/juggernaut and vanguard/powertech tanks but not shadow/assassins. Edited February 17, 2012 by Lachdonan Corrected for Willpower (not Wisdom) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amadhi Posted February 24, 2012 Share Posted February 24, 2012 I wrote this up as a ticket and was told to buy the recipe from the crew skill vendor...right. They don't exist. It makes no sense to have no assassin tank shield recipes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AsheraII Posted February 24, 2012 Share Posted February 24, 2012 (edited) They exist, but there aren't many. There's a lvl 37 craftable from a dropped blueprint for example. And while it would be nice to see +willpower blueprints (since this game doesn't have a "wis" stat), you're actually not missing too much by not having them. The strength shields more than suffice, and the effect of using a willpower shield of the same level and quality would be marginal at best. We're talking about less than 5% of your total willpower here, which does not translate into 5% less DPS, nor 5% less aggro, and definitely not 5% less defense/mitigation. As a shadow tank, you generally combine melee attacks with some force attacks. Force attacks: Force Breach - 15 second cooldown Slow Time - 7.5 second cooldown Project - 6 second cooldown unless under Particle Accelleration, which requires you to use melee attacks Melee atacks: Saber Strike - global cooldown only Double Strike - global cooldown only Spinning Strike - 6 second cooldown Effectively, most of your attacks are melee based, especially Saber Strike and Double Strike are used constantly while waiting for other cooldowns to finish or Particle Acceleration to proc. Now for the interesting bit: Strength still improves your melee damage (same rate per point as willpower), and strength still improves your melee crit (and you won't hit your cap on this one as fast as you do on willpower). But note that the amount of melee crit you get per point of strength is slightly higher than the amount of melee crit you get per point of Willpower. Maybe not enough to completely offset the reduced damage from Force Attacks, but it certainly helps to even out the difference a little bit. And that's also as far as your aggro capabilities go: those are derived from your taunts and your DPS. Your taunts are unaffected by your Willpower, your DPS is, but only to a very small degree here. Willpower has NO EFFECT ON YOUR DEFENSE OR MITIGATION. So overall, it would be nice to have willpower shields, but we can do without. Having one item give strength instead of willpower really isn't an issue. But, if you really want to min/max, the news is that the developers are aware of the issue and did say they were planning to add +willpower shields. Edited February 24, 2012 by AsheraII Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dahnu Posted February 24, 2012 Share Posted February 24, 2012 (edited) As an assassin tank, I mostly use discharge, wither and force lightning and occasionally shock and saber strike (yes, dismissing double strike is viable).For threat, wither and discharge are the most important, thus should be supported by a huge load of willpower. Also, any class that stacks strength/willpower/aim/cunning without it beeing the class's primary atribute is doing something wrong. The gain just doesn't justify the loss. Assassins needed strength in the beta to bolster melee, but that has been changed. The lack of craftable +willpower shields is most likely a bug, just like the non-reverse engineerable foci. Edited February 24, 2012 by dahnu Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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