newbie with shadow needs help

[wrathofkhan]

Hi,

Ive got to lvl 22 & i am trying to understand how my shadow works with regarding:-

 

Sometimes I find that when fighting a boss my health bar stays pretty much full,,, other times it goes down pretty quick.

I have tried to understand what is affecting my health but am lost.

 

I have put skill points in the following

3 = infiltration tactics

2 = shadows respite

3 = force energy

2 = jedi restance

1 = double handed sabre

2 = technique mastery

 

Your help very greatly appreciated

[Skolops]

It's probably simply that sometimes the boss is attacking you and other times he is attacking your companion.

[Kitru]

Well, your first problem arises from the fact that, rather than specializing in your respective skill tree, you're overgeneralizing which is going to hurt your performance a lot. On easy elites, you'll do fine, but on the harder ones, you're going to get your face beaten in. As such, you should figure out which relevant spec you're interested in (Infil, KC, or Balance) and find a decent spec to run with. In my experience, KC is the best leveling spec since you do respectable damage while maintaining excellent survivability and the capability to solo pretty much anything you stumble upon in the course of leveling. It doesn't really matter since they all work to get you there though.

 

In addition to this, your spec only counts for a part of your effectiveness because what abilities your using and in what conditions matters as well. If you're spamming Project and Shadow Strike, you're not going to be doing much since both of those abilities are functionally worthless except in a small number of circumstances. The general recommendation for how to play a Shadow (in PvE) is to ignore every ability except for Double Strike, Force Breach and Saber Strike (which you should use constantly) unless you have a specific talent that either grants the relevant ability or provides a specific condition in which to *use* the relevant ability. To clarify, you should never touch Shadow Strike (since it costs too much Force and does only marginally more damage than Double Strike) unless you have Infiltration Tactics *and* the buff that provides it is active (which means you'll only use it once every 12 seconds or so). The same applies with Project except that you're "allowed" to use it if you have Particle Acceleration (from KC) and the buff is present or you have Circling Shadows (from Infil) and you have 2 stacks of the buff (which you get from Double Strike). Without many of the buffs provided by the relevant specs, most of the attacks available to Shadows are fundamentally worthless. It makes it so that playing a Shadow effectively at low level is a painfully boring procedure (you really just spam FB, DS, and SS), but it leads into how the Shadow is designed to play at high level.

 

Beyond spec and playstyle, your companion also has an impact on your general survivability. Unless you're in Combat Technique (as a KC Shadow), you're going to get hit really hard by any enemy that's watching you. As such, it behooves you to have either a heal companion (Tharan Cedrax, who you get on Nar Shad, which should be soon for you) or a tank companion (Qyzen and Iresso; make sure they're in their tank stance and not in their DPS or outside of a stance or else they're fundamentally worthless).

[MangoRice]

The post above me pretty much covers it all, but I want to add one thing.

 

Hover over the boss' active effects and look to see if he has a buff that makes him/her uninterruptable.

If the boss lacks that buff, then that usually means 2 things:

 

1) You can use Mind Snap on the boss (the class interrupt).

2) He/She has an ability that you should interrupt to prevent a certain event from happening.

 

While you did say you were lvl 22, the only example of this that I can think of is the last quest in the Consular storyline. Without dropping any spoilers, there is an attack that the boss does called "Collapse Cave" that, if not interrupted, leads to insta-death no matter how much hp you have.

 

In a nutshell, if you can interrupt a boss, run the fight a few times to see what ability he does that hurts you the most and use Mind Snap every time he begins to use said ability.

 

Good Luck!

[wrathofkhan]

I would like to thank you both for your very helpful advice , especially to kitru for a very thoughtful lengthy explanation & the time it took you.

I am seriously deciding to go the KC skill route and Kitru, could you please explain a little more about the tank stance for my comps. I intend to guard Qyzen but is there something else that I should do.

 

I love the shadow & the trouble I find when guarding others (healers) is that i always seem to get a healer that doesn't perform well. My other toon is a sage so I know about healing & what I do.

In some ways I find that I am able to keep my sage alive through things that the shadow cant do. It is the sage ability to heal that increases survivabilty. Thats why I put in my original question, I was trying to find out how to increase survival.

 

Thanks all

[Skolops]

I would like to thank you both for your very helpful advice , especially to kitru for a very thoughtful lengthy explanation & the time it took you.

I am seriously deciding to go the KC skill route and Kitru, could you please explain a little more about the tank stance for my comps. I intend to guard Qyzen but is there something else that I should do.

 

I love the shadow & the trouble I find when guarding others (healers) is that i always seem to get a healer that doesn't perform well. My other toon is a sage so I know about healing & what I do.

In some ways I find that I am able to keep my sage alive through things that the shadow cant do. It is the sage ability to heal that increases survivabilty. Thats why I put in my original question, I was trying to find out how to increase survival.

 

Thanks all

 

Don't guard Qyzen. Just because you're in tank stance, it doesn't mean you need to be guarding something, especially while leveling or when that other something is a tank himself.

 

I always found Infiltration to be the best leveling spec, but that's just me. Anyone who wants to do otherwise is perfectly welcome to do so. I would, however, suggest that you may run into some trouble until you get Tharan Cedrax, your healer, if you're not careful with your guard stance. The thing is that most classes get a tank as their first companion: Consulars, Knights, Smugglers, Agents, and Inquisitors all do, and it makes it much easier to level. The only class I've done that doesn't get a tank first (apart from my BH, which gets a healer first and is easy given that) is the trooper, which I found to be more challenging than the other classes I've played. The reason is that I had to face aggro a lot.

 

When you do have a tank as an early companion, it allows you to take minimal damage, leaving your tank to take the brunt of it. This helps because of your lack of many or any defensive cooldowns and even just a strong damage rotation early on. That's what Qyzen is for: to take aggro for you. If you go into Combat Stance, there's a good chance you'll be stealing aggro from him and taking the beating yourself, and you would have to see how your survivability did in that scenario, even with the increased defenses from your tank stance. You can always put Qyzen into his offensive stance and try to be the tank while he does the damage, but I don't know if he would put out enough damage to down the heavier mobs before they downed you. I'm not saying he wouldn't, but I've never even thought about using any of the tank companions in their DPS stances so I don't know how well they do.

 

Something to consider.

[DashHorizonis]

I was gonna post basically the something as the poster above. I'm currently leveling kenetic too and I let fess tank till I got the healer companion. Then I started to take over. Just be sure to upgrade and possibly even spend some money on the companion and his heals will be plenty. I finish most fights, even those against elites with 90% health left. He's the first healing pet (Other than mako) that I felt does a good job of healing.

[Lorica]

I am using balanced spec'd Shadow and loving it.

[Kitru]

I am seriously deciding to go the KC skill route and Kitru, could you please explain a little more about the tank stance for my comps. I intend to guard Qyzen but is there something else that I should do.

 

If you're going KC, the first thing you're gonna wanna do is go to the Repub fleet and hit up the skill mentor to reset your skill points (SE-most section of the Combat Training Quarter) and then switch over to a spec that looks like this that moves into something like this this as you level (go fill KC before putting points in Balance).

 

Now, on to companions. Each companion has 2 stances which you can see at the bottom of their companion skill bars (default key is ` which is the one left of your 1 key and just below esc). Tank companions have a Guard stance (generally called "Guard Stance" but Qyzen is unique and instead has "Trandoshan Regeneration") and a DPS stance (generally called "Combat Stance"). Tank comp Guard stances increase threat generation and shield chance (neither of which is particularly potent since 100% threat gen of less than half of what a player can put out is still low enough that you'll be pulling threat off of him purely by accident and the shield chance is terrible since he doesn't get any talents that augment it so he's going purely off of his gear) while their Combat stances increase damage and decrease threat generated (once again largely pointless since the 5% damage increase means that instead, of doing roughly half of a player char, he's doing 52.5% and 25% less threat means that he's even *less* likely to pull threat off of you even though he barely deals any damage). The only reason tank companions are even *remotely* effective at actually getting aggro is because they all spam their taunts like no one's business (taunts generate enough aggro to force the target to attack the taunter). Their damage is such that, honestly, they're not even worth using as DPS comps since their gear is rarely itemized for it properly and they sacrifice most of their abilities for tank-style abilities (companions operate on a cooldown-centric attack model so, in a vast oversimplification, the number of their total skills that are focused on a specific role determines how functional they are at the given role).

 

In short, if you're playing a tank, don't bring Qyzen (or any other tank comp) if you have any other options: his damage is anemic and you don't need the additional functionality of his occasional taunts. The better comp to use is a healer comp (Tharan Cedrax, who you'll be getting *really* soon) or a dps comp (Nadia or Zenith) since they're actually focused on roles that you aren't entirely redundant. I personally err on the side of the healer comp because I like being able to obliterate random champs while solo, but the dps comp will help you kill pretty much anything else you might stumble upon faster.