HELP JUGG Tanks are under attack!!!

[KeyboardNinja]

Following the advice of people like KeyboardNinja and Kitru for Shadow/Assassins is part of why they and those who follow have so many issues surviving the NiM content. Other Shadow/Assassins who have posted and disagree with their approach seem to be doing better overall. Anyone trying to beat Nightmare content should be thinking for themselves and figuring out what works best for their team (and healers especially) as opposed to mindlessly following some numbers. Personally, I have no use for his numbers whatsoever and I am only interested in discussion involving why they picked them in the first place.

 

I picked the numbers because they are mathematically optimal at the damage ratios I saw in HM SV. The ratios in TfB are most definitely different, which is why there is some value in choosing other stat allotments, even when you're tanking both ops. Most of the shadow/assassins who have posted in dissent have done so essentially with no evidence other than "it feels good". The primary counter example to this is Thok, who spent time working out partial damage ratios for TfB and determining an optimal set of stat allocations for that op.

 

The issues I have surviving nightmare content are unrelated to my stat allocation, I assure you. When Kel'sara is able to hit me for 7.5k internal damage followed by 16.9k force+kinetic damage in less than the span of a GCD, no amount of semantic splitting of defense vs absorb is going to make things better.

[Vaidinah]

Second, Leafy_Bug is overreacting. The whole "NERF Guardian Tanks" is a rather extremist battle cry born primarily of extreme frustration with how Bioware seems to have abandoned and ignored our class. I'm sure you're sympathetic to how that feels, given how terrible the threat issues for juggernauts were pre-2.0. Now imagine that instead of having terrible threat, you simply died. Threat is important but workable thanks to taunt fluffing. Death is non-negotiable. So, you maybe can understand how Leafy (and really the entire assassin tank community) feels a little bitter on this topic. Still, doesn't justify the extremist overreaction.

 

Yes, death is non-negotiable. I'd rather have an Assassin who could die on very rare occasions due to no fault of his own (after 2.0) than a Juggernaught who wipes their entire team because they got terribly unlucky with misses since they were most reliant on gaining threat on K/E attacks or made a small mistake in their opening rotation (pre-2.0). Both situations are mostly avoidable by playing correctly, but one kills one player while the other generally wipes the entire team. The tank bosses in NiM EC were a great example of this issue, but there were others as well where it was still quite bad. May Bioware may mercy on your soul if you ever ran double Juggernaught pre-2.0 on the harder content (and I did for a long while until I rolled an Assassin tank to make everyone's life easier).

 

So to summarize the above, shadows/assassins are broken right now both on paper and in the game, and wipes are being caused that strictly stem from the content and class balance. Juggernauts don't need to be nerfed to the extent that some of the more frustrated members of the community are claiming. Oh, and Juggernauts *were* broken pre-2.0 w.r.t. threat, though it certainly wasn't enough breakage to make them non-viable for content.

 

Juggernaughts were definitely viable for pre-2.0 content (though again, good luck with double Juggernaught) and Assassins are completely viable for current content. The fact that Assassin tanks have been used to beat current content and at World 1st and World 2nd teams prove that without a doubt. My only concern here is with 16 man content, but only a small number of teams have beaten the content so far and most of them don't use Shadows/Assassins from what I've seen.

 

So, pre-2.0, the tanks were balanced such that the class with the lowest skill floor (powertechs) had the weakest results for mean mitigation, but the best results for ease of healing; while the class with the highest skill floor (assassins) had the best results for mean mitigation, but the worst results for ease of healing; and the remaining tank class fell exactly in the middle. Threat was not balanced and needed serious adjustment. Cooldowns were extremely well balanced, with assassins getting highly-specialized, powerful but short-duration cooldowns on short timers, juggernauts getting generalized, powerful and long-duration cooldowns on long timers, and powertechs getting…very little at all. :-)

 

This is very wrong. Assassins had an very low skill floor while Juggernaughts had a high skill floor. Pre-2.0, you could effectively play an Assassin tank by using Shock, Wither, and Discharge on cooldown, use Force Lightning at 3 HS stacks immediately, and maintain Dark Ward. From there, you Saber Striked to fill in the gaps and used defensive cooldowns appropriately. I have learned many specs in this game and the one for Assassin tanking was by far the easiest for me to learn and to teach others. While not an optimal rotation (though disturbingly close), this was all you had to do to be know as an Assassin. The rotation for playing a Juggernaught, especially a hybrid, was far, far more difficult and involved a great deal of resource management that simply did not exist for Assassin tanking.

 

Post-2.0, things are a mess, and this is where the whole "nerf" concept has come into the fore. Mean mitigation is much tighter between the three tanks, so there isn't much advantage to taking a "high skill" tank over a "low skill" tank. Powertechs are still the smoothest by a decent margin, and their mean mitigation is still the lowest but only by a small amount. Assassins are spikier than ever, and the content emphasizes this weakness in a way that it never did before. They have the best mean mitigation, but not by a lot, and a large component of their mitigation fails to scale with damage, so they aren't really any better than powertechs on extremely high damage fights (like Thrasher). Juggernauts have been buffed dramatically in terms of smoothness due to the 3% DR buff from the apex talent. They're now nearly as smooth as powertechs, with mean mitigation that rivals assassins on low-damage content. Juggernaut mean mitigation exceeds both powertechs and assassins on high damage content, while being nearly as smooth as a powertech and significantly smoother than an assassin.

 

I am very curious to see you prove that Assassins best mean mitigation is "not by a lot" and that Juggernaughts are nearly as smooth as Powertechs. I'd also like to see how you prove your last line here because I can see no possible way it could be true.

 

Low damage content is irrelevant because survivability is not a concern so I'm not sure why you brought that up at all.

 

Cooldown timers have been reduced by 16% for juggernauts such that their powerful and long-duration cooldowns are now on timers nearly as short as an assassin's. Additionally, they have received a new cooldown which is slightly more general than Force Shroud with the same duration and timer. Powertechs have received…nothing (effectively). Assassins have received a new cooldown on a moderate timer with a long duration and a general application, but this cooldown is 37.5% less powerful than the equivalent juggernaut cooldown which is only on a 25% longer timer. Thus, whereas an argument could be made pre-2.0 that juggernaut and assassin cooldowns were approximately balanced (one with short timers, short duration and highly specialized; the other with long timers, long durations and generalized), juggernaut cooldowns are now unambiguously superior. If you add Blade Turning into the mix (which is currently bugged, so I'm not counting it), things get even crazier in terms of balance.

 

Much of this is incorrect. Endure Pain's cooldown was not lowered so the 16% reduction only applies to the "big" cooldowns of Saber Ward and Invincible. Saber Reflect has a 1 minute cooldown as opposed to Force Shroud, which has a functionally 45-50 second cooldown.

 

As for the Assassin cooldown of Overcharge Saber, it is definitely better than the equivalent Jugg cooldown of Invincible and has a lower cooldown by 30 seconds. Invincible is significantly worse as the damage reduction is multiplicative while the Assassin one is additive (same with the Powertech one) and heals you for 15% as well.

 

Despite all this, I agree that Juggernaught tanking cooldowns are slightly better overall.

 

Skill ceilings have been changed dramatically. Assassins have been given an additional active mitigation component, and their rotation has been made significantly more complex by an additional proc and a cost rebalance which emphasizes an old proc which was previously ignored. Powertechs have been granted a new active mitigation component, and thus have a slightly higher skill ceiling than before. Juggernauts have had a significant overhaul to their rotation, and now all of their ability CDs and procs align quite precisely (12 seconds ftw). The ideal rotation on a juggernaut is now largely a matter of just hitting the abilities as they come off CD and not Vicious Slashing yourself out of rage. Juggernauts have been given an additional active mitigation component, but this component (like the other two) is achieved simply by using abilities on CD. Thus, the assassin skill ceiling has been increased by a large amount, the powertech skill ceiling has been increased by a small amount, and the juggernaut skill ceiling has been decreased by a moderate-to-large amount (depending on perspective).

 

The additional active mitigation component does not really increase the difficulty as you were supposed to not re-active Dark Ward too soon pre-2.0 as well. Pre-2.0, you wasted 10 energy if you just spammed Dark Ward on cooldown and currently, you lose out on the bonus absorption. I guess this is more punishing to new Assassin players or when you make a mistake, but to anyone with experience, it doesn't change your behavior.

 

Looking for a single proc has added some difficulty to the Assassin rotation, but it's a pretty minor addition and it's easy to use given that it lights up on your bar. I know you can't always rely on that, but it works the large majority of time and rest you can look for the proc and use in place of Thrash. The Assassin tank rotation went from being ridiculously simple (4 button rotation with 1-3 fillers) to be slightly more difficult. It's still among the easiest rotations in the game and definitely the easiest I've ever played. The main difference in difficulty is the new content in S & V and Bioware's love for numerous stuns/knockbacks on tanks, which makes getting off a full Force Lightning at 3 HS stacks much more skill-based.

 

Your "ideal" rotation for Juggernaughts is not even close to ideal. That's an easy, effective rotation that works, but is only used by players who don't know better or who are being lazy. The current Juggernaught rotation is definitely easier than pre-2.0, but still contains a great deal of depth to play optimally.

 

By using your 12 second skills on cooldown, you waste a great deal of possible Rage to be used for Vicious Slashs/Throws by not fully utilizing your Revenge stacks, you lose out on Retaliations (which is generally your highest DPS skill) by using Guardian Slash on cooldown (you can afford to wait 1-2 GCDs if Retaliation is already procced), and you lose out in general on Rage by wasting your Sundering Assault when you are above 4-5 Rage.

 

Before 2.0, the skill floor for Juggernaughts was far above Assassins and the skill ceiling was much higher as well. After 2.0, the skill ceiling for Juggernaughts is still above Assassins while the skill floor for Assassins is now above Juggernaughts. The skill floor was raised mostly by the design of new content having tons of stuns/knockbacks, high spikiness, and the lack of scaling on some of the Assassin's abilities (like Dark Charge's heal).

 

So in summary. Powertechs have had a slight increase to their skill ceiling paired with a moderate buff to their mean mitigation and a moderate nerf to their spikiness, but are largely unchanged. Assassins have had a large increase to their skill ceiling paired with a massive nerf to their spikiness and a slight buff to their cooldowns. Juggernauts have had a moderate decrease to their skill ceiling paired with a moderate buff to their mean mitigation, a moderate buff to their spikiness and a large buff to their cooldowns.

 

Do you now see why the theory crafting community considers juggernauts to be over-powered at the moment?

 

I know why you and some other people view Juggernaughts as being overpowered, but a great deal of your basis for thinking so is based on bad assumptions, incorrect info, and lack of understanding on what it means to be a good Juggernaught both before and after 2.0. I have played both classes as well as I can to come to this conclusion. I have yet to meet any good Guardians who were once Assassin main tanks, but the opposite happened more than a few times thanks to how OP Assassin tanks were pre-2.0 and for so long.

 

Anyways, the rest of your post involved explaining how to fix these "issues", but since I don't agree these are issues in the first place based on all my arguments in this post, there's no point in going over them. I appreciate the fact that you clearly put a lot of time and thought into this piece, but I must disagree.

 

I don't know how good Powertechs are in general since my experience with them is very limited so I can't say anything there.

 

Assassins only need Force Shroud fixed and maybe some actual scaling on their Dark Charge heals. If I had to change anything, I'd remove the Dark Charge heal in place of some sort of mitigation. I wouldn't change anything about Juggernaughts beyond fixing Blade Turning and possibly changing the 3% damage reduction from Crushing Blow into a less stable, but better mean mitigation.

Edited August 14, 2013 by Vaidinah

[KeyboardNinja]

Yes, death is non-negotiable. I'd rather have an Assassin who could die on very rare occasions due to no fault of his own (after 2.0) than a Juggernaught who wipes their entire team because they got terribly unlucky with misses since they were most reliant on gaining threat on K/E attacks or made a small mistake in their opening rotation (pre-2.0). Both situations are mostly avoidable by playing correctly, but one kills one player while the other generally wipes the entire team. The tank bosses in NiM EC were a great example of this issue, but there were others as well where it was still quite bad. May Bioware may mercy on your soul if you ever ran double Juggernaught pre-2.0 on the harder content (and I did for a long while until I rolled an Assassin tank to make everyone's life easier).

 

And yet, many guilds did. I would absolutely not contend that juggernauts were in a good place pre-2.0. However, with some very few exceptions, losing threat in the opener did not wipe the group. The tanks in EC and Writhing Horror are the only examples of a boss which are so punishing in the opener. Everything else is highly negotiable and absolutely will not yield a wipe (unless your healers are AFK when you pulled). The tanks are pretty easily averted with careful timing on agro dumps and taunting. It was absolutely super-hard to do, and you could consider this to be a high skill ceiling, but the fact remains that numerous guilds cleared EC NiM with Juggernaut/Guardian tanks. The server first clear on my server used a Juggernaut on Stormcaller!

 

This is different from how assassins are now. Tank death isn't as easy as just "battle rez and move on". If a tank dies on Writhing Horror, adds come out unexpectedly, and depending on where things are, it may cause a wipe. If a tank dies on Nightmare Dread Guard, the second tank gets both bosses and is almost certain to die (though not always). Tank death in Operator IX at any point where tanks can die is a very swift wipe. Very few bosses can absorb tank death, and then only at specific points. Assassins die and have no way to avert the consequences (through skill or otherwise). At least pre-2.0 juggernauts could play more tightly or gear slightly differently to help avoid the issues.

 

Juggernaughts were definitely viable for pre-2.0 content (though again, good luck with double Juggernaught) and Assassins are completely viable for current content. The fact that Assassin tanks have been used to beat current content and at World 1st and World 2nd teams prove that without a doubt. My only concern here is with 16 man content, but only a small number of teams have beaten the content so far and most of them don't use Shadows/Assassins from what I've seen.

 

There's a difference between "capable of doing the content" and "viable". Relative to the other options (powertech and juggernaut), assassins are a terrible choice simply due to their spikiness. The rest of the tanking AC is in a very acceptable place. Anecdote time… My guild uses a shadow tank and a vanguard tank. We do clear nightmare content, but even on bosses that we've been farming for a while, we still sometimes have RNG-based wipes due to mitigation failure. That's the problem with assassin tanks.

 

This is very wrong. Assassins had an very low skill floor while Juggernaughts had a high skill floor. Pre-2.0, you could effectively play an Assassin tank by using Shock, Wither, and Discharge on cooldown, use Force Lightning at 3 HS stacks immediately, and maintain Dark Ward. From there, you Saber Striked to fill in the gaps and used defensive cooldowns appropriately. I have learned many specs in this game and the one for Assassin tanking was by far the easiest for me to learn and to teach others. While not an optimal rotation (though disturbingly close), this was all you had to do to be know as an Assassin. The rotation for playing a Juggernaught, especially a hybrid, was far, far more difficult and involved a great deal of resource management that simply did not exist for Assassin tanking.

 

Juggernauts tanks judge tank difficulty by looking at the rotation. Assassin tanks judge difficulty by looking at active mitigation and cooldowns. Neither is a particularly complete view, but it underscores precisely why every juggernaut/guardian I've ever talked to seems to think that assassins are easy-mode tanking.

 

Threat is easy-mode, yes. Active mitigation is unbelievably easy to screw up, as demonstrated by the utter rarity of an assassin tank (even pre-2.0) who was in any way competent. You describe the rotation as if it really is that simple, and maybe it is on paper, but very few people succeeded in achieving it.

 

Furthermore, you left out cooldowns entirely (aside from waving them off as "use appropriately"). Due to the highly specialized nature of assassin cooldowns (especially pre-2.0), optimal use (and thus, optimal mitigation management) required understanding burst moments in the fight and an intimate knowledge of attack types at all points. I used to spend a fair amount of time studying combat logs to figure out where I could better place my cooldowns. I still do. Juggernaut cooldowns are extremely generalized. While there is certainly benefit to popping them judiciously w.r.t. attack types, the benefits are not as pronounced as with assassins (where popping the wrong cooldown is a 100% waste).

 

I do not dispute that juggernauts required a significant amount of effort and management to hold threat pre-2.0, and perhaps I downplayed that too much. I tend to get annoyed when that factor is brought up, simply because it was the consequence of broken class design. The fact remains that it was present though, so I'll concede there.

 

I am very curious to see you prove that Assassins best mean mitigation is "not by a lot" and that Juggernaughts are nearly as smooth as Powertechs. I'd also like to see how you prove your last line here because I can see no possible way it could be true.

 

I'll dig out my mitigation comparison notes. Even on average damage content (the HMs), Juggernauts are very very close to Assassins in terms of mean survivability including self-heals. Once you go up to high damage content, Juggernauts blow Assassins completely out of the water since their mitigation mechanisms scale significantly better (almost 25% of an assassin's survivability is non-scaling). This is why I say that Juggernauts have better survivability than Assassins for high damage content, together with a smoothness that nearly rivals a Powertech.

 

Much of this is incorrect. Endure Pain's cooldown was not lowered so the 16% reduction only applies to the "big" cooldowns of Saber Ward and Invincible. Saber Reflect has a 1 minute cooldown as opposed to Force Shroud, which has a functionally 45-50 second cooldown.

 

Endure Pain is so situational that I'm not sure it matters that the cooldown wasn't lowered. Saber Ward and Invincible are the interesting ones, and lowering them to a CD of 2:30 is a huge buff. It changes them from emergency buttons to situational utility powers. Arguably, this is what cooldowns *should* be, but the fact remains that it increased the utility and potential mitigation ceiling on juggernauts by a significant margin.

 

As for the Assassin cooldown of Overcharge Saber, it is definitely better than the equivalent Jugg cooldown of Invincible and has a lower cooldown by 30 seconds. Invincible is significantly worse as the damage reduction is multiplicative while the Assassin one is additive (same with the Powertech one) and heals you for 15% as well.

 

This isn't quite correct. Both cooldowns are additive. However, Overcharge Saber affects Damage Reduction (which is rolled last), while Invincible affects Damage Received (which is rolled first). The only difference here is how the value of Overcharge Saber is affected by shield absorb. For an assassin, it's an increase of about 25%, which gives Overcharge Saber a value of 31.25%. That's still not as good as Invincible's 40%. Invincible also benefits significantly from being rolled separately from DR, since the two of them multiply, which for a Juggernaut is going to result in a much more significant benefit than simply adding them together. This means that you need to cheat up the value of Invincible just a bit, though certainly not as much as we increased the value of Overcharge Saber due to the SA application.

 

The additional active mitigation component does not really increase the difficulty as you were supposed to not re-active Dark Ward too soon pre-2.0 as well. Pre-2.0, you wasted 10 energy if you just spammed Dark Ward on cooldown and currently, you lose out on the bonus absorption. I guess this is more punishing to new Assassin players or when you make a mistake, but to anyone with experience, it doesn't change your behavior.

 

Wasting energy wasn't a big deal pre-2.0. I used to try to time it out correct, but when things got real and I had to worry about other stuff, I just mashed it on cooldown. There was no real penalty for this pre-2.0 aside from lower threat, which as I said, was already ample. Post-2.0, mashing it early sacrifices a very significant amount of mitigation. It's precisely the opposite of how things were pre-2.0, where you could deprioritize Dark Ward timing whenever things became frenetic. Now, you have to highly prioritize correct management of Dark Ward in high-damage situations, which adds a significant mental component which just didn't exist. I'm a very experienced assassin tank (I've been tanking in progression content since launch week), and I assure you, it has most definitely modified my behavior.

 

Looking for a single proc has added some difficulty to the Assassin rotation, but it's a pretty minor addition and it's easy to use given that it lights up on your bar. I know you can't always rely on that, but it works the large majority of time and rest you can look for the proc and use in place of Thrash. The Assassin tank rotation went from being ridiculously simple (4 button rotation with 1-3 fillers) to be slightly more difficult. It's still among the easiest rotations in the game and definitely the easiest I've ever played. The main difference in difficulty is the new content in S & V and Bioware's love for numerous stuns/knockbacks on tanks, which makes getting off a full Force Lightning at 3 HS stacks much more skill-based.

 

As I said, 2.0 added two procs to the assassin rotation: one new one (Maul) and one which was already there but entirely ignored (Energize). This results in a rotation with some fixed markers (Wither) but where the primary cyclic terminus (Force Lightning) drifts around relative to Assassinate, Maul and Wither due to the affects of RNG on the Energize and Maul procs. It makes for a very attention-intensive rotation, and I say this as someone who has a Carnage Marauder (RNG-city), a Lethality Operative (which is in some ways worse), a Hybrid Sniper (the only class in the game to use more buttons), and a Lightning Sorc (can you spell "proc"?). I find that optimal execution of my shadow's rotation is generally harder to achieve than optimal execution on any of these classes.

 

Your "ideal" rotation for Juggernaughts is not even close to ideal. That's an easy, effective rotation that works, but is only used by players who don't know better or who are being lazy. The current Juggernaught rotation is definitely easier than pre-2.0, but still contains a great deal of depth to play optimally.

 

By using your 12 second skills on cooldown, you waste a great deal of possible Rage to be used for Vicious Slashs/Throws by not fully utilizing your Revenge stacks, you lose out on Retaliations (which is generally your highest DPS skill) by using Guardian Slash on cooldown (you can afford to wait 1-2 GCDs if Retaliation is already procced), and you lose out in general on Rage by wasting your Sundering Assault when you are above 4-5 Rage.

 

If Retaliation is already proc'd, why on earth haven't you used it yet? It's off the GCD. Unless it means interrupting a Ravage, just mash the button. The Revenge stacks are a good point, though practically speaking they're going to be up most of the time when you come around to Smash. Sundering Assault is also a fair point, but because the Rage burn in Immortal spec is fairly predictable on an individual boss basis, so it should settle into a fairly natural quadrant of your rotation.

 

The threat difference between VS and Assault is very, very marginal. Yes, it is more ideal to use Assault when you have the Rage for it, but the difference is analogous to ignoring Thrash in the pre-2.0 Assassin rotation.

 

The real point is that a skill difference in a Juggernaut is going to affect sustained threat and damage over time, which is a meaningless metric since threat is easy-mode for all tanks (even pre-2.0) after the first 30 seconds. A skill difference in an Assassin makes a noticeable difference in requisite HPS. At the end of the day, all of the things that improve your survivability and keep the boss focused on you can be achieved without much subtlety. Thus, the skill floor is extremely low. The skill ceiling may be higher than I give it credit for, but the results achieved by reaching that skill ceiling are simply…more threat and damage. Those are good things, but they aren't 100% vital.

 

Before 2.0, the skill floor for Juggernaughts was far above Assassins and the skill ceiling was much higher as well.

 

The skill floor may have been higher due to the threat issues. I wouldn't say that the ceiling was higher though. You seem largely unaware of the results that a skilled assassin could achieve. This is really why assassin tanks had a reputation of being OP pre-2.0. It's not that the class was particularly over-powered, it's just that the results that could be achieved by the top 1% of players were really, really spectacular.

 

After 2.0, the skill ceiling for Juggernaughts is still above Assassins while the skill floor for Assassins is now above Juggernaughts. The skill floor was raised mostly by the design of new content having tons of stuns/knockbacks, high spikiness, and the lack of scaling on some of the Assassin's abilities (like Dark Charge's heal).

 

Spikiness isn't something that can be factored into any skill metric, which is the whole point. There's nothing I can do to fix RNG issues, so it's not really a skill factor on my part (it is for the healers). The lack of scaling is also not a skill factor that I can do anything about, it's just bad class design. Getting off a full stack of Force Lightning does take a fair bit of skill and timing, but that has always been the case. I don't find it any harder now than it was before. The higher variance in rotation, the more punishing active mitigation mechanics and the highly specialized cooldowns *are* a high skill factor, and not one that should be under-estimated.

 

I know why you and some other people view Juggernaughts as being overpowered, but a great deal of your basis for thinking so is based on bad assumptions, incorrect info, and lack of understanding on what it means to be a good Juggernaught both before and after 2.0. I have played both classes as well as I can to come to this conclusion. I have yet to meet any good Guardians who were once Assassin main tanks, but the opposite happened more than a few times thanks to how OP Assassin tanks were pre-2.0 and for so long.

 

I actually know quite a few good guardians who were once shadows. They're rerolling by the droves these days. The fact that they are able to achieve better results on their guardians than they were able to on their shadows (despite a year and a half of practice in progression) says volumes. Maybe their results on their Guardians aren't optimal, I can't say for sure, but that possibility is even more terrifying.

 

Anyways, the rest of your post involved explaining how to fix these "issues", but since I don't agree these are issues in the first place based on all my arguments in this post, there's no point in going over them. I appreciate the fact that you clearly put a lot of time and thought into this piece, but I must disagree.

 

I don't know how good Powertechs are in general since my experience with them is very limited so I can't say anything there.

 

Assassins only need Force Shroud fixed and maybe some actual scaling on their Dark Charge heals. If I had to change anything, I'd remove the Dark Charge heal in place of some sort of mitigation. I wouldn't change anything about Juggernaughts beyond fixing Blade Turning and possibly changing the 3% damage reduction from Crushing Blow into a less stable, but better mean mitigation.

 

My problems with juggernauts at a fundamental level boil down to two things:

 

• More general (and more numerically powerful) cooldowns on nearly equal timers
  
• Superior mean mitigation *and* smoothness on high level content
  

 

I honestly believe that without addressing these factors, juggernauts will simply remain over-powered even at a base level of skill. I don't have a problem if juggernauts required an extremely high amount of skill to achieve the results I listed, but all of the mitigation and smoothness is up front in the rotation and absolutely trivial to achieve. Cooldowns are a skill factor for all tanks, but juggernauts are much easier to apply since they affect absolutely everything (I don't dispute that *optimal* usage requires significant skill).

 

Thus, juggernauts are essentially a class that achieves results that are superior to both tanks out of the box, while assassins require significant skill just to take a tenuous second place (third, if you care about being actually healable).

 

Changing the Crushing Blow DR to a less stable mitigation would be a good change, and I think that would be a step in the right direction. The mitigation that can be achieved still concerns me though, even if assassins had better scaling on *their* mitigation, simply because this change would keep juggernaut mitigation very close to assassins on serious content while remaining dramatically less spiky. I want there to always be a compelling reason to take one tank over another, and frankly there just wouldn't be a compelling reason to take an assassin over a juggernaut. It would be a significant step in the right direction though, and if that's all we can get, I would certainly take it.

Edited August 14, 2013 by KeyboardNinja

[KeyboardNinja]

Update: There was a typo in the math I used to generate these numbers, which led to the erroneous conclusion that Juggernauts have higher mean mitigation than Assassins. I have posted the corrected numbers here and left this original reply in tact to ensure that the thread makes sense (and also so people know that I do in fact make mistakes).

 

II am very curious to see you prove that Assassins best mean mitigation is "not by a lot" and that Juggernaughts are nearly as smooth as Powertechs. I'd also like to see how you prove your last line here because I can see no possible way it could be true.

 

In hard mode, pre-mitigation DtPS is about 4000. Assuming a 90/10 split on mitigable damage (valid for S&V, though somewhat inaccurate for TfB), full 72 armorings and a perfectly optimal stat allocation from a stat budget of 2600, we have the post-mitigation and self-heal DtPS values (assuming 300 HPS from the shadow and 116 HPS from the guardian):

 

• Shadow: 1662.8
  
• Guardian: 1689.42
  

 

Note that some bosses do significantly higher damage, even in hard mode. Thrasher, for example, does over 6.3k pre-mitigation. Also note that this does not include the value of CDs or consumables, which together will generally conspire to make your combat logs look a lot lower than this.

 

I don't have full definitive numbers for Nightmare Mode, but it looks like the damage has been increased by 20-30%, which puts the average DtPS around 5200 pre-mitigation. When we plug this in, we see the following:

 

• Shadow: 2251.64
  
• Guardian: 2231.25
  

 

Specifically, the threshold at which Guardian survivability exceeds Shadow's is precisely 4680 DtPS (pre-mitigation), which means that even some Hard Mode bosses are above this level. The smoothness and death probability arguments can be seen here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=650473

 

Thus, Guardians/Juggernauts have superior survivability to Shadows/Assassins on content where it actually matters, as well as a significant advantage in spikiness (measured by both standard deviation and "probability of death" metrics). In other words, Guardians/Juggernauts are not only easier to heal by a wide margin (and not in danger of being one-shot from abilities like Terminate), but they are also more efficient to heal (though by a narrower margin). They have somewhat better cooldowns than Shadows/Assassins, put up just as much threat and damage, and bring more applicable raid utilities (Phase Walk is largely unusable except on certain bosses, as is stealth rez) – or at the very least, raid utilities that are just as good. Something has to give somewhere, because Guardians/Juggernauts are clearly either dead-even or strictly superior to Shadows/Assassins in literally every way.

 

Shadows/Assassins are supposed to be the spikiest tanks, and as long as that spikiness does not translate into RNG death (as it does today), I'm totally fine with that design. However, they need to have something in their mitigation which compensates for this. Pre-2.0, the compensation was higher mean mitigation. So, we could fix the relative balance of Shadows/Assassins and Guardians/Juggernauts by pushing up the Shadow/Assassin mean mitigation in whatever changes are made to reign in their spikiness just a bit (while still keeping them substantially spikier than Guardians/Juggernauts). Unfortunately, buffing Shadow/Assassin mitigation would push them radically ahead of Vanguards/Powertechs. Shadows/Assassins and Guardians/Juggernauts would be relatively balanced to their own mean, but Vanguards/Powertechs would be a significant outlier. Thus, to keep the mean balanced, rather than buffing Shadows/Assassins in the area of mean mitigation, Guardians/Juggernauts need a slight nerf to put them behind Shadows/Assassins, but still ahead of Vanguards/Powertechs. Shadows/Assassins would still remain the spikiest tanks and the hardest to heal, and so there would be a viable argument for bringing a Guardian/Juggernaut despite the slightly lower mean mitigation, just as there would be an argument for bringing a Vanguard/Powertech.

Edited August 19, 2013 by KeyboardNinja

[Vaidinah]

And yet, many guilds did. I would absolutely not contend that juggernauts were in a good place pre-2.0. However, with some very few exceptions, losing threat in the opener did not wipe the group. The tanks in EC and Writhing Horror are the only examples of a boss which are so punishing in the opener. Everything else is highly negotiable and absolutely will not yield a wipe (unless your healers are AFK when you pulled). The tanks are pretty easily averted with careful timing on agro dumps and taunting. It was absolutely super-hard to do, and you could consider this to be a high skill ceiling, but the fact remains that numerous guilds cleared EC NiM with Juggernaut/Guardian tanks. The server first clear on my server used a Juggernaut on Stormcaller!

 

This is different from how assassins are now. Tank death isn't as easy as just "battle rez and move on". If a tank dies on Writhing Horror, adds come out unexpectedly, and depending on where things are, it may cause a wipe. If a tank dies on Nightmare Dread Guard, the second tank gets both bosses and is almost certain to die (though not always). Tank death in Operator IX at any point where tanks can die is a very swift wipe. Very few bosses can absorb tank death, and then only at specific points. Assassins die and have no way to avert the consequences (through skill or otherwise). At least pre-2.0 juggernauts could play more tightly or gear slightly differently to help avoid the issues.

 

Tanks pre-2.0 generally needed to be more self-reliant pre-2.0 since all the difficult content (NiM EC) required 2 tanks to be split almost all the time. This favored Assassins greatly due to their superior mean mitigation, defensive cooldowns, utility, damage, and threat. Juggernaughts also only ever had an Accuracy debuff and not both types like the other two tanks. If your tank lost aggro for any significant period of time or simply at the wrong time, you'd auto-wipe. In NiM EC, that would be the first three bosses and during the Trandoshan pulls on Kephess. HM TFB also had the Withering Horror fight as you have noted.

 

Post-2.0, this isn't an issue for the most part since HM TFB only had one especially bad fight for Juggernaughts and Scum and Villainy is similarly designed for tanks with Thrasher and Cartel Warlords being the only fights where two tanks get split up. Thus, one of the reasons Juggernaughts are far better off now is due to design alone and current tank deaths aren't nearly as bad as they would have pre-2.0. You can definitely recover from a tank death in almost every fight (I see this all the time as 16 man is truly spiky) with the exceptions being Withering Horror, Operator IX (only during phase 1), and Cartel Warlords (until Tu'chuk is dead).

 

There's a difference between "capable of doing the content" and "viable". Relative to the other options (powertech and juggernaut), assassins are a terrible choice simply due to their spikiness. The rest of the tanking AC is in a very acceptable place. Anecdote time… My guild uses a shadow tank and a vanguard tank. We do clear nightmare content, but even on bosses that we've been farming for a while, we still sometimes have RNG-based wipes due to mitigation failure. That's the problem with assassin tanks.

 

By the definition of the word "viable", Assassins are viable. You can see that here with 3c being the clearest example.

 

c (1) : having a reasonable chance of succeeding

 

Also, RNG deaths are an inevitability in general. The team I play with on 16 NiM has a Vanguard who literally dies every single week on trash. It's pretty safe to say we have the trash on farm. The outgoing damage in current content is just very high compared to what it used to be.

 

Juggernauts tanks judge tank difficulty by looking at the rotation. Assassin tanks judge difficulty by looking at active mitigation and cooldowns. Neither is a particularly complete view, but it underscores precisely why every juggernaut/guardian I've ever talked to seems to think that assassins are easy-mode tanking.

 

Threat is easy-mode, yes. Active mitigation is unbelievably easy to screw up, as demonstrated by the utter rarity of an assassin tank (even pre-2.0) who was in any way competent. You describe the rotation as if it really is that simple, and maybe it is on paper, but very few people succeeded in achieving it.

 

Furthermore, you left out cooldowns entirely (aside from waving them off as "use appropriately"). Due to the highly specialized nature of assassin cooldowns (especially pre-2.0), optimal use (and thus, optimal mitigation management) required understanding burst moments in the fight and an intimate knowledge of attack types at all points. I used to spend a fair amount of time studying combat logs to figure out where I could better place my cooldowns. I still do. Juggernaut cooldowns are extremely generalized. While there is certainly benefit to popping them judiciously w.r.t. attack types, the benefits are not as pronounced as with assassins (where popping the wrong cooldown is a 100% waste).

 

I judge difficulty by looking at all the factors, especially defensive cooldowns; I can't speak for anyone else. While I'm sure many people have screwed up the active mitigation aspect of Assassins, I saw many Juggernaughts who played about the same, but performed far worse because their class punished them hard for their mistakes. I've met a very small number of actually good Juggernaughts and met a much higher portion of effective Assassins who didn't play very well, but still got great results. My own experiences with going from Juggernaught to Assassin confirm that there was remarkable little to learn that was specific to Assassin tanking. Learning how to use Force Shroud was just a matter of mashing it wherever I went to see where it worked and reading combat logs. The most difficult aspect of Assassin tanking is just knowing how to use stealth to res in combat.

 

When it comes to active mitigation pre-2.0 for Assassins, you could literally use 4 buttons on cooldown (Shock, Wither, Discharge, and Dark Ward) and use Force Lightning immediately after getting 3 stacks to have higher effective mitigation. You could completely ignore every other damaging ability on your bar, including Saber Strike and your execute, and it wouldn't affect your mitigation significantly. You could completely mess up your rotation and be perfectly fine several seconds later due to the fact that energy regenerated easily and without any effort.

 

While there are players who still managed to fail in such an incredibly easy rotation, I'm not sure we need to discuss them if they are that bad. There were a great deal more average Assassin tanks who got great results with poor micro than you'd have ever seen with Juggernaughts and the reason is simple. Pre-2.0, Assassin tanking was very forgiving of mistakes while Juggernaught was the exact opposite.

 

When it comes to defensive cooldowns, I don't believe generality of use has much significance in determining the level of skill needed for using an ability. Timing is far more important when using defensive cooldowns. Even so, I've compared the defensive cooldowns for both Assassins and Juggernaughts elsewhere and found that the Juggernaught ones takes equivalent or more skill to use optimally.

 

Saber Ward requires more skill than Deflection to use properly due to Blade Turning and having a higher cooldown. The benefit of 25% reduced Force/Tech attacks is typically insignificant in any good use of Saber Ward with the exception of the Soa and Kephess the Undying fights.

 

Invincible is about the same skill level as Overcharge Saber as it has a longer cooldown and while it is slightly stronger damage reduction, Overcharge Saber also provides a 15% heal.

 

Saber Reflect takes about the same skill defensively as Force Shroud (although what constitutes an AoE attack is very wonky) and has a higher cooldown.

 

Endure Pain is roughly equivalent skill-wise to just using multiple medpacs thanks to Force Cloak.

 

Then we have an odd skill like Enraged Defense, which is significantly useful for certain fights and of which there is no equivalent for Assassins. This skill takes a high amount of skill to use properly.

 

Thus, most defensive cooldowns are roughly equivalent in skill with Saber Ward, Saber Reflect, and Enraged Defense taking more skill while Juggernaught cooldowns are generally longer (exception being Endure Pain).

 

Wasting energy wasn't a big deal pre-2.0. I used to try to time it out correct, but when things got real and I had to worry about other stuff, I just mashed it on cooldown. There was no real penalty for this pre-2.0 aside from lower threat, which as I said, was already ample. Post-2.0, mashing it early sacrifices a very significant amount of mitigation. It's precisely the opposite of how things were pre-2.0, where you could deprioritize Dark Ward timing whenever things became frenetic. Now, you have to highly prioritize correct management of Dark Ward in high-damage situations, which adds a significant mental component which just didn't exist. I'm a very experienced assassin tank (I've been tanking in progression content since launch week), and I assure you, it has most definitely modified my behavior.

 

This is a very odd admission from you. I guess coming from the highly unforgiving hybrid Jugg tank, I rarely had issues forgetting to wait until Dark Ward had expired before renewing it. Thus, the change after 2.0 didn't affect me significantly as it's what I'd be doing all along and I'd assumed it was the same for most other experienced players.

 

As I said, 2.0 added two procs to the assassin rotation: one new one (Maul) and one which was already there but entirely ignored (Energize). This results in a rotation with some fixed markers (Wither) but where the primary cyclic terminus (Force Lightning) drifts around relative to Assassinate, Maul and Wither due to the affects of RNG on the Energize and Maul procs. It makes for a very attention-intensive rotation, and I say this as someone who has a Carnage Marauder (RNG-city), a Lethality Operative (which is in some ways worse), a Hybrid Sniper (the only class in the game to use more buttons), and a Lightning Sorc (can you spell "proc"?). I find that optimal execution of my shadow's rotation is generally harder to achieve than optimal execution on any of these classes.

 

The 2nd proc doesn't really change the rotation, though, and the first one just replaces a Thrash with Maul. When Energize procs, you simply use Shock immediately and it only should be proccing when Shock + Wither are already down so it could only possibly interfere with Discharge needing to be refreshed.

 

As for the rest, it's kind of an e-peen contest, but I suppose any discussion involving difficulty will end up being one. Anyways, I was able to do 1893 DPS on both my pre-2.0 Vengeance Juggernaught and Concealment Operative over a 5 minute or longer parse without even being min-maxed (still had several 61s and lacked PvP set bonuses for Vengeance). You can see my parses here on the 3rd post as Vaidin and Cercerea, respectively. Both of these specs were very difficult and after looking up other parses from all the boards, I found I was literally in the top 5-10 across all the servers and factions on those specs back then.

 

The optimal skill priority queue for Vengeance required very high micro of the character as not only did you have to deal with a highly RNG-dependant spec, you had to continually run 10+ meters away to Saber Throw and jump back in without losing any GCDs. It was also a spec that relied heavily on 3 second melee-range channel with the highest damage coming at the end of it, making positioning very important. As for Concealment, this also relied heavily on positioning due to the need to be in melee range at almost all times, be behind the opponent every 12 seconds, and had a highly unforgiving rotation that wrecked your DPS if you went below 60 energy.

 

Currently, I mainly run both my tanks and a Gunslinger who plays Sharpshooter (easy to play well, somewhat difficult to master) and Saboteur (hard to play well, very difficult to master especially without rolling) and have the highest parse in the world on Torparse's dummy (Aeralos). I sincerely doubt there is a spec that is more complicated and uses as many buttons in the current game than Saboteur, even if that's mostly due to its awkwardness. I mention these parses only to show that I don't just play the specs, I have essentially mastered them with very few players who have done likewise and posted on Torparse. I don't know at what level you play your specs or how difficult they are as I play none of the same DPS specs that you do.

 

Regardless, based on a large assortment of factors, I feel like I can safely say the Shadow tank rotation was and is by far the easiest. To be fair, almost all the specs I learned were far more difficult than the average spec in general. While the Shadow tank rotation is less forgiving than before, it ends up very similar to how it was used pre-2.0. My guess is that your claim for their difficulty in playing them optimally in a real situation has much less to do with the rotation and more to do with dealing with the heavy responsibilities that tanks (and especially raid leaders) bear during raids.

 

If Retaliation is already proc'd, why on earth haven't you used it yet? It's off the GCD. Unless it means interrupting a Ravage, just mash the button. The Revenge stacks are a good point, though practically speaking they're going to be up most of the time when you come around to Smash. Sundering Assault is also a fair point, but because the Rage burn in Immortal spec is fairly predictable on an individual boss basis, so it should settle into a fairly natural quadrant of your rotation.

 

The threat difference between VS and Assault is very, very marginal. Yes, it is more ideal to use Assault when you have the Rage for it, but the difference is analogous to ignoring Thrash in the pre-2.0 Assassin rotation.

 

The real point is that a skill difference in a Juggernaut is going to affect sustained threat and damage over time, which is a meaningless metric since threat is easy-mode for all tanks (even pre-2.0) after the first 30 seconds. A skill difference in an Assassin makes a noticeable difference in requisite HPS. At the end of the day, all of the things that improve your survivability and keep the boss focused on you can be achieved without much subtlety. Thus, the skill floor is extremely low. The skill ceiling may be higher than I give it credit for, but the results achieved by reaching that skill ceiling are simply…more threat and damage. Those are good things, but they aren't 100% vital.

 

Retaliation has a 4.5 second internal cooldown so if it is procced early (and this happens a lot), it can't actually be used until the 4.5 seconds is up from the last time it was used. Thus, if you use a Crushing Blow when it is already procced but unable to be used, you have wasted that Retaliation.

 

The Revenge stacks will be up for Smash, but since you are using all your 12 second skills in order for your rotation, you will likely have none for the Force Scream. That alone is worth a Vicious Slash on many fights.

 

The threat and damage difference is about 700 for Vicious Slash over Assault so it's not a lot, but it adds up damage-wise over the course of an entire fight. When I'm not being lazy, I can dish out a great deal more Vicious Slashs/Throws, which improves my DPS considerably. While it is similar to ignoring Thrash pre-2.0 in terms of the idea, you can get roughly 1 more Vicious Slash out every 12-15 seconds now if you are trying to playing optimally while before you would get about 1 Thrash a minute or two on most fights.

 

The skill floor may have been higher due to the threat issues. I wouldn't say that the ceiling was higher though. You seem largely unaware of the results that a skilled assassin could achieve. This is really why assassin tanks had a reputation of being OP pre-2.0. It's not that the class was particularly over-powered, it's just that the results that could be achieved by the top 1% of players were really, really spectacular.

 

Unfortunately, I am very aware what a skilled assassin could achieve as I got to that point very quickly after rolling it and have played with numerous ones. To be perfectly blunt, there wasn't much to learn after learning hybrid Jugg tank. After learning when to use Force Shroud and how to make use of stealth, there wasn't really much else due to the rotation being so easy and the other defensive cooldowns being very similar to Juggernaught ones.

 

Spikiness isn't something that can be factored into any skill metric, which is the whole point. There's nothing I can do to fix RNG issues, so it's not really a skill factor on my part (it is for the healers). The lack of scaling is also not a skill factor that I can do anything about, it's just bad class design. Getting off a full stack of Force Lightning does take a fair bit of skill and timing, but that has always been the case. I don't find it any harder now than it was before. The higher variance in rotation, the more punishing active mitigation mechanics and the highly specialized cooldowns *are* a high skill factor, and not one that should be under-estimated.

 

I would disagree because not putting yourself into a situation where a high damage spike that goes completely unmitigated can kill you is a skill in itself. If your healers don't know when the spikes are, you can simply tell them.

 

You are right about the lack of scaling not being a skill factor, though. That's just a design issue.

 

I actually know quite a few good guardians who were once shadows. They're rerolling by the droves these days. The fact that they are able to achieve better results on their guardians than they were able to on their shadows (despite a year and a half of practice in progression) says volumes. Maybe their results on their Guardians aren't optimal, I can't say for sure, but that possibility is even more terrifying.

 

No offense, but I would really question how good they are. If you consider someone like Kitru to be good at playing a Guardian, then our definitions of "good" are drastically different. To make it easy, I'll just go with "optimal".

 

My problems with juggernauts at a fundamental level boil down to two things:

 

• More general (and more numerically powerful) cooldowns on nearly equal timers
  
• Superior mean mitigation *and* smoothness on high level content
  

 

I honestly believe that without addressing these factors, juggernauts will simply remain over-powered even at a base level of skill. I don't have a problem if juggernauts required an extremely high amount of skill to achieve the results I listed, but all of the mitigation and smoothness is up front in the rotation and absolutely trivial to achieve. Cooldowns are a skill factor for all tanks, but juggernauts are much easier to apply since they affect absolutely everything (I don't dispute that *optimal* usage requires significant skill).

 

I strongly disagree with your conclusion about cooldowns as I noted above, but I'll go without comment for today about the superior mean mitigation. I don't have time to read your next post right now, but I'll come back tomorrow and go over it. If it is true that Juggernaughts have superior or even equal mean mitigation to Assassins on high damage content, that should definitely be fixed. Mean mitigation without considering defensive cooldowns should definitely be the Assassin's biggest advantage in terms of survivability IMO.

Edited August 15, 2013 by Vaidinah

[KeyboardNinja]

The most difficult aspect of Assassin tanking is just knowing how to use stealth to res in combat.

 

Considering how easy this is to pull off when it can be done, and how impossible it is to pull off when it cannot, I'm not sure how you would consider this to be the highest skill factor in assassin tanking.

 

In any case, neither of us are going to convince the other at this point. It's not really necessary anyway. Juggernauts are ahead just in purely numeric terms.

 

This is a very odd admission from you. I guess coming from the highly unforgiving hybrid Jugg tank, I rarely had issues forgetting to wait until Dark Ward had expired before renewing it. Thus, the change after 2.0 didn't affect me significantly as it's what I'd be doing all along and I'd assumed it was the same for most other experienced players.

 

Maybe you found it easy. I can't say. What I can say is I only knew one other assassin on my entire server who managed Dark Ward correctly. One. If it was such a faceroll easy class, I would have expected to see more people achieving good results. They weren't though. We had guilds who were doing serious PvE progression and pulling up there with the world progression guilds (our server had the fourth or fifth clear of NiM EC), and our second and third clears came very quickly after the first. So, it's not like our server was just coincidentally overrun with terrible assassin tanks. Even in these guilds, I watched assassins play and make a terrible mess of things. I talked to their healers and listened to them complain about how much extra healing was required.

 

I don't know how productive a skill-floor question is going to be, but the fact that comparatively few people were able to get optimal results with the class alone indicates that you're missing something when you dismiss it as being an easy tanking class.

 

I sincerely doubt there is a spec that is more complicated and uses as many buttons in the current game than Saboteur, even if that's mostly due to its awkwardness. I mention these parses only to show that I don't just play the specs, I have essentially mastered them with very few players who have done likewise and posted on Torparse. I don't know at what level you play your specs or how difficult they are as I play none of the same DPS specs that you do.

 

I parse a 3k on my sentinel (with a war hero relic, three 69 enhs and two 69 mods). I parse a 2.8 on my scoundrel with mostly 66 enhancements and Dread Guard relics. I have parsed a 2.8 on a hybrid gunslinger (which I did for testing because my sniper isn't 55 yet) that was in nearly full 69 mods/enhs. All of these are fairly deep classes. The proc chains on a combat sentinel aren't exactly complex, but they do require extremely split-second reaction times (you often have less than 500 milliseconds in which to make a decision about your next GCD). The rotation is definitely quite finicky. As for buttons…

 

Hybrid sniper uses: Interrogation Probe, Explosive Probe, Shatter Shot, Corrosive Grenade, Corrosive Dart, Orbital Strike, Rifle Shot, Cull, Series of Shots, Laze Target, Snipe, Ambush, Target Acquired and Adrenaline Probe. And that's without counting Thermal Grenade, which is used on every trash pull or add pack. It's the only spec where I have to stretch a bit to get all my keybinds in. :-)

 

In any case, way off topic.

 

My guess is that your claim for their difficulty in playing them optimally in a real situation has much less to do with the rotation and more to do with dealing with the heavy responsibilities that tanks (and especially raid leaders) bear during raids.

 

If that were true, then all of the tanks would be more or less the same difficulty. Regardless of how we feel about assassin vs jugg tanking difficulty, I think we can both agree that powertech tanking is truly faceroll. :-)

 

Unfortunately, I am very aware what a skilled assassin could achieve as I got to that point very quickly after rolling it and have played with numerous ones. To be perfectly blunt, there wasn't much to learn after learning hybrid Jugg tank. After learning when to use Force Shroud and how to make use of stealth, there wasn't really much else due to the rotation being so easy and the other defensive cooldowns being very similar to Juggernaught ones.

 

Maximize damage and healing (look at the torparse leaderboards for shadow HPS to get an idea of how most assassins fall well short of the optimum on this one). Precise and proactive use of cooldowns (this is more applicable for assassins than juggs due to the lower CDs). Improving Force Lightning delay and timing to ensure all three ticks go off. Dark Ward timing. Open a fight and hold agro without a guard. Also, learning to use Phase Walk can sort of be counted as a skill factor because the ability is so awful, but I won't count that one.

 

After that, it's just random tank-generic stuff like guard swapping, positioning and facing, utility, etc.

 

I would disagree because not putting yourself into a situation where a high damage spike that goes completely unmitigated can kill you is a skill in itself. If your healers don't know when the spikes are, you can simply tell them.

 

You are right about the lack of scaling not being a skill factor, though. That's just a design issue.

 

I'm tanking the boss. That's why I'm getting spiked. I can (and do) roll cooldowns during discrete spike phases, but remember that I only have one guaranteed cooldown, and the other cooldowns are damage-specialized, so I still get spiked pretty hard as long as I'm holding the boss with high spike attacks. This is usually made survivable by the healers knowing where the spikes are, but that's not something I can influence beyond telling them. When I'm doing everything in my power to eke out the last ounce of survivability and mitigation from my class, and I'm coaching my healers on how best to work with me, and I still die from spike damage, you can't really call that a skill failure anymore.

 

No offense, but I would really question how good they are. If you consider someone like Kitru to be good at playing a Guardian, then our definitions of "good" are drastically different. To make it easy, I'll just go with "optimal".

 

I have no idea how well Kitru plays his Guardian. We don't play on the same server.

 

In any case, this sub-thread has turned into skill e-peening and silliness. I think the mean mitigation arguments are more interesting, since they're quite objective.

Edited August 15, 2013 by KeyboardNinja

[wadecounty]

First let me say, I've agreed with Kitru and Tam about the mean mitigation arguments before (although not the defensive cooldowns), so want to get that out there to begin with (btw, this is Kandel/Leife from Ebon Hawk).

 

That said, incoming rant about pre 2.0.

 

While most of this discussion tends to center around how these tanks fare in progression content, and rightfully so imo, people forget that for EVERY OTHER ASPECT OF THE GAME, Jugg tanks were inferior to Assassin tanks pre 2.0, save for MAYBE PvP tanking with regards to being in charge of guarding teammates and Huttball (and even those 2 situations were debatable.

 

Let's take a look at all the problems with Jugg tanks pre 2.0....

 

Solo gameplay: Awful damage compared to the other tanks, no CC/stealth, almost exclusively melee damage, overall Juggs were unarguably the worst at playing solo, whether it be attempting to solo a heroic, running dailies, doing the class story, you name it.

 

Flashpoints/Heroics: Terrible threat but especially AOE threat which meant tanking trash ranged from difficult to impossible for some pulls, no CC, no stealth, poor damage... just a whole lot of bad in there. More importantly, Flashpoints/Heroics are often where you meet other people you would like to group with, and so generally people would get a poorer first impression of a Jugg tank than the other two because of all these issues.

 

PvP tanking: A great niche in Huttball (only if you spec'd hybrid though) and the best tank at guarding teammates (again, only if spec'd hybrid). For all other general purposes, Assassins were clearly superior and Powertechs were comparable. I'll say Juggs were middle of the road here if only because of the hybrid spec.

 

So yeah, the 95% of the game's content other than progression level raids, Juggs were also inferior in those areas pre 2.0. While the Assassins are only dealing with their issue at the very top of progression level content, which I once again agree is an important part of the game to be balanced (vital even), but nevertheless.

 

The argument of which tank had it worse specifically in regards to Nightmare mode operations, I can give to Shadows/Assassins now, I don't mind. But the argument of which tank had a worse experience in the game as a whole, is CLEARLY, CLEARLY, Jugg/Guardians.

 

So if you're curious where some of the hostility is coming from with regards to Juggs/Guardians being called for nerfs by Shadows/Assassins, its from people who don't only worry about clearing Nightmare mode ops, which is actually the majority who play this game.

 

Again though, all that said, Tam is a great poster and player who knows what he's talking about. He's mostly right about the balance issues, although I think he, Kitru and others don't properly understand the frustration Guardian and Juggernaut tanks have dealth with before 2.0. One is a class that isn't optimal in operations now, the other is a class that wasn't optimal in operations before (even if slightly more workable), and sub-optimal for almost all other facets of gameplay as well.

[KeyboardNinja]

While most of this discussion tends to center around how these tanks fare in progression content, and rightfully so imo, people forget that for EVERY OTHER ASPECT OF THE GAME, Jugg tanks were inferior to Assassin tanks pre 2.0, save for MAYBE PvP tanking with regards to being in charge of guarding teammates and Huttball (and even those 2 situations were debatable.

 

Remember that assassins had extremely low damage reduction (even pre-2.0) and relied on shield and defense, which didn't work on force/tech damage. Player damage is heavily biased toward force/tech, which meant that assassins had extremely poor mitigation in PvP post-1.3 (which is when DR was nerfed). Even pre-1.3, it was pretty annoying. This is really the driving factor that pushed all of the assassin tanks into DPS gear, since the difference in mitigation between DPS gear and tank gear was comparatively marginal.

 

I honestly didn't even consider assassin tanks to be tanks in PvP. They were annoyance DPS. Powertechs and Juggernauts ruled the roost in terms of protection and control. With that said, I do think that assassin hybrid tanks in PvP were probably one of the strongest PvP specs. Whether they were stronger than juggernauts is hard to say because they filled a very different role (that's like asking if a juggernaut DPS is superior to an operative healer).

 

Solo gameplay: Awful damage compared to the other tanks, no CC/stealth, almost exclusively melee damage, overall Juggs were unarguably the worst at playing solo, whether it be attempting to solo a heroic, running dailies, doing the class story, you name it.

 

No question there. Every decent guardian tank that I knew would respec Focus for solo play.

 

Flashpoints/Heroics: Terrible threat but especially AOE threat which meant tanking trash ranged from difficult to impossible for some pulls, no CC, no stealth, poor damage... just a whole lot of bad in there. More importantly, Flashpoints/Heroics are often where you meet other people you would like to group with, and so generally people would get a poorer first impression of a Jugg tank than the other two because of all these issues.

 

Actually, as a healer, I vastly preferred to see a guardian tank over a shadow tank when I GF randomed flashpoints, even though I knew I would be healing the DPS and myself a lot more. I knew that the healing was going to be a lot more predictable. Shadow tanks are the only tanks that I have ever lost as a healer in pre-2.0 flashpoint content. Even with the threat issues (which were severe), Guardians were just easier on me as another support class.

 

As a DPS, I preferred Shadows and Vanguards, of course, but the tanks you meet in random flashpoints are usually so terrible at holding threat anyway that it didn't seem to matter all that much.

 

PvP tanking: A great niche in Huttball (only if you spec'd hybrid though) and the best tank at guarding teammates (again, only if spec'd hybrid). For all other general purposes, Assassins were clearly superior and Powertechs were comparable. I'll say Juggs were middle of the road here if only because of the hybrid spec.

 

I think assassins were superior in their role, which was annoyance and utility. Juggernauts were (and still are) the lords of Huttball, and used to be one of the best tanks for guarding teammates in a scrum. Definitely inferior node guarders.

 

So yeah, the 95% of the game's content other than progression level raids, Juggs were also inferior in those areas pre 2.0. While the Assassins are only dealing with their issue at the very top of progression level content, which I once again agree is an important part of the game to be balanced (vital even), but nevertheless.

 

The argument of which tank had it worse specifically in regards to Nightmare mode operations, I can give to Shadows/Assassins now, I don't mind. But the argument of which tank had a worse experience in the game as a whole, is CLEARLY, CLEARLY, Jugg/Guardians.

 

So if you're curious where some of the hostility is coming from with regards to Juggs/Guardians being called for nerfs by Shadows/Assassins, its from people who don't only worry about clearing Nightmare mode ops, which is actually the majority who play this game.

 

I think that's a fair point. Honestly, the last thing in the world I want is for Juggernauts to be broken (again). I just want everything to be evenly balanced. Nightmare content and competitive PvP are really important realms for testing that balance, since it's where microscopic differences in class balance translate very directly into "boss is dead" vs "raid is dead". Quality of Life is important though. Every class should be playable.

 

I think that, to an extent, assassins are going to remain the best tanks for soloing content simply due to the self-heal (the non-scaling nature of self-healing turns to a significant advantage in solo content) and stealth. Juggernauts should remain playable in solo content though, at the very least to the extent that Powertechs are. Really, all tanks should be viable in all content. If nerfs (or buffs) to any class disrupt that, then those nerfs/buffs were unjustifiable (case and point: the changes to Juggernauts in 1.2 that broke the class in the first place).

[UncleOst]

The fickle position for shadow/sins is none of our concern. The changes you present, while well written, are consumed with main tank/elite boss resolution. Balance in THIS sense, would totally misconstrue the roles vs. class abilities, in all other aspects of game, and henceforth cause irreparable damage.

 

...live with your sins(pun intended).

 

I must say I've enjoyed the last pages of this discussion. Ultimately, shall we concede that perhaps in the current state of pve main tanking, there are certain classes that should tackle certain parts of NiM progression? There are many abilities that shadow/assassins posses, that should command their roles within said group. The same applies to the other classes. Is this the developer's intended description as to how they see the game? If it were not for the important differences within the class abilities respectively, we would all share the exact same tools, and our sabres would simply look different. We don't want that. With 2.4 on the way, we'll see how their new "vision" unfolds.

[Vaidinah]

I'm going to skip most of this since it doesn't help the discussion, but it's clear that our very different experiences on different servers makes up a good deal of the disagreement.

 

Hybrid sniper uses: Interrogation Probe, Explosive Probe, Shatter Shot, Corrosive Grenade, Corrosive Dart, Orbital Strike, Rifle Shot, Cull, Series of Shots, Laze Target, Snipe, Ambush, Target Acquired and Adrenaline Probe. And that's without counting Thermal Grenade, which is used on every trash pull or add pack. It's the only spec where I have to stretch a bit to get all my keybinds in. :-)

.

 

That's 15 total if you include Thermal Grenade.

 

Saboteur gunslingers use the following: Flurry of Bolts, Charged Burst, Incendiary Grenade, Sabotage Charge, Speed Shot, Shock Grenade, Vital Shot, XS Freighter Flyby, Aimed Shot, Flourish Shot, Thermal Grenade, Quick Shot (we get a bonus to use it for free 4 times every 20 seconds), Covered Escape (rolling for Scatter Bombs), Sabotage (to reset the roll and other skills), Illegal Mods, Smugger's Luck, and Cool Head.

 

This is 17 and Saboteur has to be in melee range every 20 seconds to roll! Sorry, had to throw one last e-peen shot out there due in part because many people (not you) think Saboteur is just about rolling into a wall. Anyways, onto your numbers post about mean mitigation.

Edited August 16, 2013 by Vaidinah

[Vaidinah]

In hard mode, pre-mitigation DtPS is about 4000. Assuming a 90/10 split on mitigable damage (valid for S&V, though somewhat inaccurate for TfB), full 72 armorings and a perfectly optimal stat allocation from a stat budget of 2600, we have the post-mitigation and self-heal DtPS values (assuming 300 HPS from the shadow and 116 HPS from the guardian):

 

When looking at your numbers, I have a couple questions that I would ask to see how you are determining them. The differences between Juggernaught and Assassin mean mitigation as you have them are very small, but if they are completely accurate, would show that Juggernaughts would need their mean mitigation brought down.

 

For now, my questions are as follows:

1) Do your numbers assume that the Juggernaught's target has a damage debuff on them at all times? If so, this will skew the numbers to make them look better as Juggernaughts do not have a damage debuff in their kit. They can get one from an Assassin tank, Powertech tank, or Annihilation Marauder. There are many times where the Juggernaught tank will not benefit from his co-tank's debuffs, which happens in most fights either at some point or for all of that battle. As for Annihilation Marauders, they've become pretty rare so I definitely wouldn't account on having one for a team. If you run two Juggernaughts, then you don't get it at all, which is one of the biggest reasons double Jugg tanks is not a good idea.

 

2) Do your numbers account for the use of Phase Walk? Based on the quote below and the numbers themselves, they do not appear to, which strikes me a significant error in the calculations. I realize you and many people do not value Phase Walk and I would highly disagree with them as I find I can use for it repeatedly on almost every fight. At the very least, though, we should be able to agree that Phase Walk should be usable for the first couple minutes of pretty much every fight.

 

Thus, Guardians/Juggernauts have superior survivability to Shadows/Assassins on content where it actually matters, as well as a significant advantage in spikiness (measured by both standard deviation and "probability of death" metrics). In other words, Guardians/Juggernauts are not only easier to heal by a wide margin (and not in danger of being one-shot from abilities like Terminate), but they are also more efficient to heal (though by a narrower margin). They have somewhat better cooldowns than Shadows/Assassins, put up just as much threat and damage, and bring more applicable raid utilities (Phase Walk is largely unusable except on certain bosses, as is stealth rez) – or at the very least, raid utilities that are just as good. Something has to give somewhere, because Guardians/Juggernauts are clearly either dead-even or strictly superior to Shadows/Assassins in literally every way.

Edited August 16, 2013 by Vaidinah

[KeyboardNinja]

1) Do your numbers assume that the Juggernaught's target has a damage debuff on them at all times? If so, this will skew the numbers to make them look better as Juggernaughts do not have a damage debuff in their kit. They can get one from an Assassin tank, Powertech tank, or Annihilation Marauder. There are many times where the Juggernaught tank will not benefit from his co-tank's debuffs, which happens in most fights either at some point or for all of that battle. As for Annihilation Marauders, they've become pretty rare so I definitely wouldn't account on having one for a team. If you run two Juggernaughts, then you don't get it at all, which is one of the biggest reasons double Jugg tanks is not a good idea.

 

I actually didn't assume that either of them had a damage debuff, since that is figured into the DtPS pre-mitigation. I can add it in for assassins, but it doesn't make that much of a difference. If you're running tanks of two classes (which nearly everyone does), the damage debuff benefits both tanks. Standard tank theory crafting practice is to assume this in all calculations. I don't really have a problem with juggernauts having lower-than-intended mean mitigation by a small amount when doubling up, just like I don't have a problem with powertechs getting a lower-than-intended defense chance when doubling. The ability of assassins to double without suffering a debuff penalty is somewhat irksome, and I would honestly rather their accuracy debuff be removed to keep things balanced (this is, in fact, one of the suggestions to fix spikiness).

 

2) Do your numbers account for the use of Phase Walk? Based on the quote below and the numbers themselves, they do not appear to, which strikes me a significant error in the calculations. I realize you and many people do not value Phase Walk and I would highly disagree with them as I find I can use for it repeatedly on almost every fight. At the very least, though, we should be able to agree that Phase Walk should be usable for the first couple minutes of pretty much every fight.

 

Phase Walk has almost no appreciable effect on our mean survivability. The uptime is fairly shoddy: just 72%, even assuming you can use it exactly on CD (impossible on nearly all fights). The buff is to healing done, which requires the healers stand in it, which is not possible on a large number of useful fights (e.g. Cartel Warlords, Dread Guard, Styrak in Nightmare Mode, Kephess, etc). Basically, it's just not something that can be factored into mean mitigation.

 

The other option is to put down Phase Walk and stand in it yourself. This does buff your self-healing, but the buff is so small that it's almost imperceptible, even in the math. If you're doing a static tank-n-spank fight (basically, just Thrasher), then it's worth doing. Otherwise, the benefits are marginal at best.

 

Even if it were something that could be factored into mitigation, this is functionally a raid-wide buff, and so it affects the other tank just as much as it affects the assassin. See my argument about damage debuffs. :-)

Edited August 16, 2013 by KeyboardNinja

[Vaidinah]

I actually didn't assume that either of them had a damage debuff, since that is figured into the DtPS pre-mitigation. I can add it in for assassins, but it doesn't make that much of a difference. If you're running tanks of two classes (which nearly everyone does), the damage debuff benefits both tanks. Standard tank theory crafting practice is to assume this in all calculations. I don't really have a problem with juggernauts having lower-than-intended mean mitigation by a small amount when doubling up, just like I don't have a problem with powertechs getting a lower-than-intended defense chance when doubling. The ability of assassins to double without suffering a debuff penalty is somewhat irksome, and I would honestly rather their accuracy debuff be removed to keep things balanced (this is, in fact, one of the suggestions to fix spikiness).

 

Well, I'm glad that this is explained at least. People have to make many assumptions when theory crafting and it's best that readers are made aware to understand the context surrounding them. These kind of factors are significant, but extraordinarily difficult to take into account when generating numbers, which is one of the reasons I take any theory crafting with many grains of salt and not as the ultimate truth.

 

Phase Walk has almost no appreciable effect on our mean survivability. The uptime is fairly shoddy: just 72%, even assuming you can use it exactly on CD (impossible on nearly all fights). The buff is to healing done, which requires the healers stand in it, which is not possible on a large number of useful fights (e.g. Cartel Warlords, Dread Guard, Styrak in Nightmare Mode, Kephess, etc). Basically, it's just not something that can be factored into mean mitigation.

 

Even if it were something that could be factored into mitigation, this is functionally a raid-wide buff, and so it affects the other tank just as much as it affects the assassin. See my argument about damage debuffs. :-)

 

It's true that the bonus would also be given to the other tank, but most important, it helps everyone on the team as it makes healing more efficient. The Juggernaught tank's raid wide utility is also very good, but cannot effect himself, which is why I'm not taking it into account for the sake of this discussion. Just to run some numbers, though, let's assume a 8 man group with 2 healers putting out 3000 effective HPS each (above-average players) and running Phase Walk only part of the time. If we assume a 6 minute fight (fairly average IMO) and Phase Walk is only used 1 time (2 minute duration) in the entire fight, this is an uptime of 33%.

 

Now, this means we have 6000 effective HPS increased by 5%, which is 300 HPS. Multiplying that by 33% to the total uptime, gives us 100 HPS total. This one use of Phase Walk would increase the natural self-healing of the Assassin by roughly 33% more than what it was before (going from 300 to 400). Any other uses would of course increase this further.

 

From reading people's thoughts on the possible change to Phase Walk on the PTS, this would make Phase Walk much easier to use and increase the uptime considerably if people choose to take advantage of it. Personally, I make use of it a great deal as it is now and this encourages it even further.

 

After going through all this, I have to conclude that the Assassin's mean mitigation is significantly better than it initially appeared and only needs some form of scaling and/or improvement to Dark Charge's healing. Whether that is to a % health scale or a re-balance into a form of mitigation (armor of course is what you guys prefer) doesn't matter to me. I like the idea of the Assassin being the most self-reliant tank around, but other than this, I'd love if Bioware just fixed Force Shroud to never fail again.

[Marb]

The mean mitigation for shadows has always been deceptive, because even though it is traditionally higher when accounting for self healing, self healing itself is reactive and does nothing to soften incoming damage initially. To really take advantage of an assassins strength, you needed a healer who understood how the assassin takes damage.

 

Assassins are problematic now, but I have pretty strong memories pre 2.0 of our assassin tank being reliably shredded by trenchcutters and gibbed by kephess on the third swap in nightmare ec, issues that didn't occur for jugg or powetech tanks. Was that a sign of things to come?

Edited August 18, 2013 by Marb

[KeyboardNinja]

Now, this means we have 6000 effective HPS increased by 5%, which is 300 HPS. Multiplying that by 33% to the total uptime, gives us 100 HPS total. This one use of Phase Walk would increase the natural self-healing of the Assassin by roughly 33% more than what it was before (going from 300 to 400). Any other uses would of course increase this further.

 

You're either confusing your terms or including raid healing in an assassin's self-heal. I'm not sure which.

 

Assuming you use your Phase Walk on the healers, you are giving them a 5% buff with 33% uptime (per your assumptions). This is a stochastic 1.65% buff to healing done. Which is to say, a multiplicative increase to general mitigation by that same factor. This reduces the effective external healing required (adjusting pre-buff) to 2209.54 at 5200 DtPS, which is less than a juggernaut.

 

However, I would challenge the 33% uptime. On most fights that matter, Phase Walk is simply unusable for the healing buff. Allow me to enumerate:

 

• Dread Guard (no time to refresh it and too much pushback)
  
• Kephess (too much movement and too large of an arena)
  
• TfB 1st phase (can be used in the second, but the uptime is far less than even 33% due to phase timing)
  
• Titan VI (needed as a teleport; also too much movement)
  
• Thrasher (no time to refresh it)
  
• Cartel Warlords (Spray 'n Pray; also large arena)
  

 

Note that the three bosses which represent the most serious heal check are included on this list. I was also tempted to include Writhing Horror as the tanking phases make it extremely difficult to achieve significant uptime on Phase Walk (I've tried), even with two assassins. I'm not sure it's fair to count Phase Walk as part of an assassin's mitigation when it isn't available on the hardest content in the game.

 

Additionally, please keep in mind that Phase Walk affects both tanks. In other words, juggernaut mitigation is improved by 1.65% whenever an assassin is using Phase Walk. This is a theme that is shared with the damage debuff from Wither, which is precisely why theory crafters do not include such buffs/debuffs when talking about tank balance, because they stack in such a way that all tanks benefit.

 

From reading people's thoughts on the possible change to Phase Walk on the PTS, this would make Phase Walk much easier to use and increase the uptime considerably if people choose to take advantage of it. Personally, I make use of it a great deal as it is now and this encourages it even further.

 

Yes and no. This is going to make it easier to achieve maximal uptime on bosses where you can refresh it, but it won't do anything for bosses where you cannot. Everything on my list above is unaffected by the change.

 

After going through all this, I have to conclude that the Assassin's mean mitigation is significantly better than it initially appeared and only needs some form of scaling and/or improvement to Dark Charge's healing. Whether that is to a % health scale or a re-balance into a form of mitigation (armor of course is what you guys prefer) doesn't matter to me. I like the idea of the Assassin being the most self-reliant tank around, but other than this, I'd love if Bioware just fixed Force Shroud to never fail again.

 

You're welcome to think that the mean mitigation is balanced, but you haven't really refuted the numbers. The fact is that assassins take more damage and are not able to heal that damage back effectively on hard content. If the self-heal scaled to hard content as well as it scales to easy content, then we'd be in good shape. The fact is that about 25% of our survivability is tuned for average Hard Mode level bosses, and significantly under-tuned for Nightmare level bosses. Juggernauts are already starting from an extremely high level of mitigation (especially relative to their spikiness, which is exceptionally low). They're simply leaps and bounds ahead of assassins on content that matters, both in terms of mitigation and spikiness.

 

I should dig out my powertech numbers to see where their mitigation is relative to these two tanks. If powertechs are even with juggernauts on Nightmare bosses, then I would absolutely be in favor of a significant buff to assassins rather than a spikiness adjustment coupled with a nerf to juggernauts. I just want to make sure that fixing assassins such that they're equally attractive as a juggernaut tank doesn't unbalance the mean.

[Ottoattack]

I have experience in both PvP jugg and sin tank, not extensive enough, but I am highly familiar wiht the differences. To make it simple, sin tanks can do quite some damage playing full tank and are the only tank that can tank wearing dps gear, thanks to dark ward. Outside of that jugg tank is significantly superior in every aspect with a huge margin. Better mean mitigation and more importantly in PvP stronger defensive cool downs, also better ways to mitigate damage for allies (intercede, sonic barrier or aoe taunt, force push) the margin is not close by any means.

 

I am also my guild strongest healer. My guild sucks, but we do HM content. Juggs are way much easier to heal due to the over abundance of CDs compared to the other tanks. Not to mention consistency of damage received. SIns specifically suffer from huge RNG issues. If you are unlucky enough that a few hits are not shielded you are screwed. Juggs do not have any issues with consistency, cool downs or mean mitigation. They are almost superior to the other two tanks in every aspect.

 

Now, do juggs tanks need to be nerfed. I don't think so, because I feel they are quite balanced for NiM PvE content. PvP is just chaos after removing healing debuff so you can't tell, but sins simply can't be the tank protecting the healer. They die way too quick.

 

To conclude, the only situation that tank sins are more effective is solo defending nodes in PvP and solo PvP encounters. For anything else jugg is better.

Edited August 19, 2013 by Ottoattack

[KeyboardNinja]

You're welcome to think that the mean mitigation is balanced, but you haven't really refuted the numbers. The fact is that assassins take more damage and are not able to heal that damage back effectively on hard content. If the self-heal scaled to hard content as well as it scales to easy content, then we'd be in good shape. The fact is that about 25% of our survivability is tuned for average Hard Mode level bosses, and significantly under-tuned for Nightmare level bosses. Juggernauts are already starting from an extremely high level of mitigation (especially relative to their spikiness, which is exceptionally low). They're simply leaps and bounds ahead of assassins on content that matters, both in terms of mitigation and spikiness.

 

I'm going to have to come in here and eat crow, because I made a typo in my original math, giving Guardians higher base mitigation (specifically shield) than they actually have. Correcting this gives me adjusted numbers:

 

• Shadow: 50.93%
  
• Guardian: 52.85%
  
• Vanguard: 55.33%
  

 

With these corrected numbers, we have some very different results. Specifically, Assassins do have better mean mitigation than Juggernauts. On a boss which does 5200 DtPS pre-mitigation, assassins will take 3.5% less damage than an equivalently geared juggernaut (2251.64 vs 2335.3) and 3% less damage than a Vanguard.

 

The level of pre-mitigation damage required to make an assassin take more damage than a juggernaut is 9564 DtPS, while the level of damage required to make an assassin take more damage than a powertech is 6814 DtPS. There are no bosses which do 9564 DtPS. There are, however, a number of bosses which do more than 6814.

 

This also doesn't strike me as particularly balanced, since I would really rather see a Juggernaut with better mean mitigation than a Powertech to compensate for their slightly higher spikiness. The issue here, of course, is the non-scaling nature of the Juggernaut self-heal.

 

So anyway, I retract what I said earlier about Juggernauts exceeding Assassin mean mitigation. Corrected math shows that there is no current content where this is true.

Edited August 19, 2013 by KeyboardNinja

[leto_cleon]

I'm going to have to come in here and eat crow, because I made a typo in my original math, giving Guardians higher base mitigation (specifically shield) than they actually have. Correcting this gives me adjusted numbers:

 

• Shadow: 50.93%
  
• Guardian: 52.85%
  
• Vanguard: 55.33%
  

 

::Gives KBN cookies::

 

So for base mitigation its PT > Jugg > Sin? What about the post mitigation numbers for where Sins are having trouble like Thrasher and Operations Chief?

[MGNMTTRN]

Wasting energy wasn't a big deal pre-2.0. I used to try to time it out correct, but when things got real and I had to worry about other stuff, I just mashed it on cooldown. There was no real penalty for this pre-2.0 aside from lower threat, which as I said, was already ample. Post-2.0, mashing it early sacrifices a very significant amount of mitigation. It's precisely the opposite of how things were pre-2.0, where you could deprioritize Dark Ward timing whenever things became frenetic. Now, you have to highly prioritize correct management of Dark Ward in high-damage situations, which adds a significant mental component which just didn't exist. I'm a very experienced assassin tank (I've been tanking in progression content since launch week), and I assure you, it has most definitely modified my behavior.

I don't play my Shadow tank much, but... Kinetic Ward cooldown is 15 seconds. Kinetic Ward lasts 20 seconds. Assuming bosses are not consuming all your Kinetic Ward stacks in 15 seconds, there is a simple heuristic you can use to get very close to perfect Kinetic Ward usage. Once Kinetic Ward comes off cooldown, wait 4.5 seconds before refreshing it. 15 sec cd + 4.5 sec = 19.5 sec, which is close enough to the 20 sec cooldown, and protects you from potential latency/animation problems. 4.5 seconds happens to be exactly 3 Global Cooldowns.

 

So after using this heuristic to get near-perfect KW usage, I'm not sure why second-to-second Shadow tank ability maintenance is considered hard. Counting to 3 should not be overly taxing. If Kinetic Ward were actually being depleted this would be a problem, and I don't bring my Shadow deep into TFB/SNV NIM/HM so I can't know for sure, but I assume that 100% uptime on Kinetic Ward is possible in bossfights with few adds.

You're welcome to think that the mean mitigation is balanced, but you haven't really refuted the numbers.

Maybe I skimmed the last 2 pages of this thread too quickly, but it looked like you posted a result based upon your personal notes, and then you linked to your p(death) thread. If you make a claim, the onus is on you to demonstrate its truth.

 

I picked the numbers because they are mathematically optimal at the damage ratios I saw in HM SV. The ratios in TfB are most definitely different, which is why there is some value in choosing other stat allotments, even when you're tanking both ops. Most of the shadow/assassins who have posted in dissent have done so essentially with no evidence other than "it feels good".

As far as I know, you optimized something that looked kind of like 'sum over i of p(attack type i) * mitigation(attack type i) * damage(attack type i)'. On a naive first look, I'd agree that it looks like it would be most efficient for healing over time. But in the short run it has a higher chance of 1) dodge-or-die problems 2) apart from outright death, spikiness that requires intense burst healing to recover from a series of failed defense rolls, which in turn pushes healers into resource degeneration, which in turn lowers efficiency.

 

Moving points from your efficient defense builds into absorb and trading mitigation for endurance is useful in some cases, because long-term healing efficiency isn't always the problem; sometimes, surviving is.

[KeyboardNinja]

::Gives KBN cookies::

 

So for base mitigation its PT > Jugg > Sin? What about the post mitigation numbers for where Sins are having trouble like Thrasher and Operations Chief?

 

Base mitigation is tricky to talk about due to the self-heal mechanics. PT > Jugg > Sin definitely, but sins have better self-heals than juggs who have better self-heals than PTs. This makes the balance fairly clearly Sin > Jugg > PT in terms of least healing required in HM content, but it skews things a bit in NiM switching to Sin > PT > Jugg on most bosses and PT > Sin > Jugg on some (like Thrasher).

 

Sins are having trouble on Operations Chief not because his damage is all that high, but rather because Terminate hits for something around 40-42k if it isn't shielded (it's a lot less on a Jugg/PT due to heavy armor). This basically puts Assassins into a "shield/defend or die" situation, which is to say, RNG death. Thrasher is similar with a couple of his attacks, but nothing that hits even remotely as hard as Terminate. Thrasher is hard to a large extent due to the extremely high damage level (somewhere in the vicinity of 7800 DtPS pre-mitigation) and the periodic high spikes that all of the Nightmare Mode bosses have. Unlike Op Chief though, it's at least not necessarily an unhealable coin flip.

 

I don't play my Shadow tank much, but... Kinetic Ward cooldown is 15 seconds. Kinetic Ward lasts 20 seconds. Assuming bosses are not consuming all your Kinetic Ward stacks in 15 seconds, there is a simple heuristic you can use to get very close to perfect Kinetic Ward usage. Once Kinetic Ward comes off cooldown, wait 4.5 seconds before refreshing it. 15 sec cd + 4.5 sec = 19.5 sec, which is close enough to the 20 sec cooldown, and protects you from potential latency/animation problems. 4.5 seconds happens to be exactly 3 Global Cooldowns.

 

I use exactly this heuristic, but you have to remember that the boss may have depleted your stacks early. Also, there's a lot of other things going on in every fight, and sometimes you're not even hitting the boss consistently (e.g. refreshing your stacks while cleansing Lightning on Kephess).

 

So after using this heuristic to get near-perfect KW usage, I'm not sure why second-to-second Shadow tank ability maintenance is considered hard. Counting to 3 should not be overly taxing. If Kinetic Ward were actually being depleted this would be a problem, and I don't bring my Shadow deep into TFB/SNV NIM/HM so I can't know for sure, but I assume that 100% uptime on Kinetic Ward is possible in bossfights with few adds.

 

It varies a lot. TfB depletes stacks really fast. Dread Guard can as well, depending on the exact phase and your positioning. You can't really rely on a specific number of stacks being available when the CD rolls over. The best way is to really glance at your bar as soon as you see the CD is up and check the number. If that number is 4 or higher, I'll generally wait the full 3 seconds. If it's less than 4, I might refresh right away if I'm in a hurry, or I'll stare at my bar and wait for it to hit 1 if I have the cycles to do so. The trouble with perfect KW usage is not the counting bit, it's the distraction of finding the buff on your bar and processing that number. Shadows already have an obscene number of buffs which appear and disappear, and that's not even counting friendly buffs (e.g. HoTs, bubbles, etc). It'd be nice if KW were in a consistent spot (e.g. on the ability itself). Oh well…

 

Maybe I skimmed the last 2 pages of this thread too quickly, but it looked like you posted a result based upon your personal notes, and then you linked to your p(death) thread. If you make a claim, the onus is on you to demonstrate its truth.

 

Read the last few replies. I found a typo in my notes which led to an inaccurate result. There is a damage level at which Jugg mitigation exceeds Assassin, but it is so far not observed in game on any boss. PTs exceed Juggs at NiM damage levels, which strikes me as broken, and then again PTs exceed Assassins on several Nightmare Mode fights (e.g. Thrasher). So, mitigation balance is super-broken at present, but it's not really Juggs that have to be nerfed. Bioware could be basing this balance off of CD contribution to mitigation, I'm not sure, but it still seems very wrong.

 

As far as I know, you optimized something that looked kind of like 'sum over i of p(attack type i) * mitigation(attack type i) * damage(attack type i)'. On a naive first look, I'd agree that it looks like it would be most efficient for healing over time. But in the short run it has a higher chance of 1) dodge-or-die problems 2) apart from outright death, spikiness that requires intense burst healing to recover from a series of failed defense rolls, which in turn pushes healers into resource degeneration, which in turn lowers efficiency.

 

Moving points from your efficient defense builds into absorb and trading mitigation for endurance is useful in some cases, because long-term healing efficiency isn't always the problem; sometimes, surviving is.

 

Trading defense for absorb increases your odds of getting spiked, since you have decreased your net mitigation chance (absorb does not increase the probability of shielding an attack in the first place). Picking up Endurance is an idea that we've been playing with as a theory crafting community, which is why you should read my P(death) post. :-)

[leto_cleon]

Sins are having trouble on Operations Chief not because his damage is all that high, but rather because Terminate hits for something around 40-42k if it isn't shielded (it's a lot less on a Jugg/PT due to heavy armor). This basically puts Assassins into a "shield/defend or die" situation, which is to say, RNG death.

 

Hmm... so its just only really Operations Chief where RNG death is an issue? I remember Dread Guards and Thrasher being mentioned as well, but they weren't as bad.

 

Actually, the very first thought that came to mind when I read about this sometime back was actually "oh so you can't bring 2 Assassin tanks". This was of course without thinking about HP. Mechanic-wise, I personally feel that there should be at least one fight in an Operation where having two different tanks is better than having 2 of the same tanks. Dynamic mechanics that change according to the tank that's tanking at the time would be pretty interesting. This is of course assuming that they don't bug.

 

It looks like 2.3.1 makes a change to Operations Chief's Terminate and I wonder if it would make thing better for Shadow tanks.

[KeyboardNinja]

Hmm... so its just only really Operations Chief where RNG death is an issue? I remember Dread Guards and Thrasher being mentioned as well, but they weren't as bad.

 

Well, they are very bad, and RNG death does happen on those bosses. A good example of this is when tanking Kel'sara on the third phase. She has a combination of abilities which can hit for 16k, 7.5k and then 15k in about 5 seconds (there's another 16k not long after). The 16k hit can be shielded, while the 15k hit can be shielded and defended, so the odds of this exact string occurring isn't particularly high. However, when it happens, it's pretty devastating. It literally evaporates a tank down. At my current HP level (37400), if I don't get a heal somewhere in this string, it will kill me from full health. Now, you can consider this a form of heal check, and that's somewhat fair, but bear in mind that a guardian or a vanguard wouldn't have this issue to the same extent, since the damage values would be closer to 12k, 7.5k and 10k. Still serious, but no longer 100% to 0%. This is better than Terminate, which was an RNG one-shot, but it's still clearly bad design.

 

Most of the Nightmare mode bosses have attacks like this, or nearly on this order of magnitude. Off the top of my head: Writhing Horror (right after burrowing), Dread Guard (aforementioned), Operator IX (Disinfection), Kephess (Wrist Laser into Power Punch), Thrasher (Swipe, Aimed Shot), Operations Chief (Terminate*), Styrak (Impale I think). There's some bad, bad stuff for shadows/assassins in the highest tier of content. I don't consider this a problem per se, since spike damage is part of what makes content hard to heal, but because of the way the tanks are designed, two of the tanks are dramatically easier to heal in the face of these spikes than the third tank, often to the point of raising the requisite healer skill beyond what can be feasibly expected. That's why things are imbalanced.

 

Actually, the very first thought that came to mind when I read about this sometime back was actually "oh so you can't bring 2 Assassin tanks". This was of course without thinking about HP. Mechanic-wise, I personally feel that there should be at least one fight in an Operation where having two different tanks is better than having 2 of the same tanks. Dynamic mechanics that change according to the tank that's tanking at the time would be pretty interesting. This is of course assuming that they don't bug.

 

Oh, I'm all in favor of having two different tank types! My favorite combo is shadow/guardian, and it always has been. Shadow/vanguard is pretty good too, and it's what my guild is currently running (we're no longer using double shadows). I ran shadow/guardian whenever I could even pre-2.0, back when guardians had severe threat and damage issues, simply because I think the strengths and relative weaknesses of the classes complement each other quite nicely. That's still true, though significantly exasperated by the spikiness disparity.

 

It looks like 2.3.1 makes a change to Operations Chief's Terminate and I wonder if it would make thing better for Shadow tanks.

 

I hope so. The best thing they could do here is split Terminate into multiple hidden attacks, similar to Huge Grenade (which is ironically much easier to deal with in Nightmare Mode than it is in Hard Mode, at least for a shadow/assassin). We'll have to see the exact details of the change.

[leto_cleon]

Well, they are very bad, and RNG death does happen on those bosses. A good example of this is when tanking Kel'sara on the third phase. She has a combination of abilities which can hit for 16k, 7.5k and then 15k in about 5 seconds (there's another 16k not long after). The 16k hit can be shielded, while the 15k hit can be shielded and defended, so the odds of this exact string occurring isn't particularly high. However, when it happens, it's pretty devastating. It literally evaporates a tank down. At my current HP level (37400), if I don't get a heal somewhere in this string, it will kill me from full health. Now, you can consider this a form of heal check, and that's somewhat fair, but bear in mind that a guardian or a vanguard wouldn't have this issue to the same extent, since the damage values would be closer to 12k, 7.5k and 10k. Still serious, but no longer 100% to 0%. This is better than Terminate, which was an RNG one-shot, but it's still clearly bad design.

 

Most of the Nightmare mode bosses have attacks like this, or nearly on this order of magnitude. Off the top of my head: Writhing Horror (right after burrowing), Dread Guard (aforementioned), Operator IX (Disinfection), Kephess (Wrist Laser into Power Punch), Thrasher (Swipe, Aimed Shot), Operations Chief (Terminate*), Styrak (Impale I think). There's some bad, bad stuff for shadows/assassins in the highest tier of content. I don't consider this a problem per se, since spike damage is part of what makes content hard to heal, but because of the way the tanks are designed, two of the tanks are dramatically easier to heal in the face of these spikes than the third tank, often to the point of raising the requisite healer skill beyond what can be feasibly expected. That's why things are imbalanced.

 

Thanks for the listing the fights and abilities So far I've only gotten experience healing Shadow tanks in HM16 Golden Fury and HM8 Writhing Horror and HM8 Dread Guards. Yeah I don't get to heal very often, but as I am familiar with the damage dealt from tanking it, I usually make sure the HoTs are up and cast(s) is/are almost finished just before the big hit. Sometime coupled with self-heals, it looks like the Shadow tank is not taking any damage.

 

The armour and self-heals that Assassins got from Dark Charge unfortunately unbalanced things quite a bit for pvp. Playing my Balance Shadow, I would just switch to tank stance in Huttball and have so much more survivability and utility at the spawn point or when carrying the ball. More often than not I would also be doing a lot more damage in the tank stance than in a dps stance.

 

Hmm... and off the top of my head the problem with a big K/E hit that adversely affects Assassins can pretty much be resolved by splitting the hit into having a K/E component and a I/E component. The damage overall would be the same but the I/E component could even out the damage that each tank actually takes from it. So for example, Assassins would take more damage from the K/E component and less of the I/E component, while Powertechs would take less damage from the K/E component but more from the I/E component. Juggernauts should fall somewhere in the middle.

Edited August 21, 2013 by leto_cleon

[Prototypemind]

Amazing to see how civil this thread has become from the way it started, very nice. The thread was worth the read though, as I didn't realize that part of the imbalance is simply that much of the testing is done with Juggs/Guardians and once it's fine for them, that's that.

 

Lots of worthwhile ideas in here for improving things without nerfing Juggs, including more thorough testing with other tanking classes which will result in more balanced damage type distribution. I know that it was quite normal for me to run my 55 Jugg with almost no augments, no set bonuses, and previously a big mix of 66/69 gearing through HM FPs and do as well if not better than my 55 Sin with his set bonuses and full augment allotment, and with far less work.

 

I still prefer my Sin to my Jugg as a whole, but it's impossible to argue with the numbers or actual playing experience and pretend like there isn't a noticeable difference in survivability for Juggs/Guardians vs Sins/Shadows.

 

That said, there's also a difference between Sin DPS and all other classes, but it doesn't seem to have turned into a war like this did. Hope things stay civil as it makes for much better discussion.

[leto_cleon]

Amazing to see how civil this thread has become from the way it started, very nice.

Strangely enough some good came out of that silly nerf thread on the tanking forums.

 

 

Trading defense for absorb increases your odds of getting spiked, since you have decreased your net mitigation chance (absorb does not increase the probability of shielding an attack in the first place). Picking up Endurance is an idea that we've been playing with as a theory crafting community, which is why you should read my P(death) post. :-)

 

Hmm... this did get me thinking about the way the recommended way of stacking stats. I'm not sure if the comparison that I'm making below is valid but here goes.

 

If stacking Absorb rating results in a lower net mitigation chance, comparing the defence/shield budget to the absorb budget would give how much the stats contribute toward a higher net mitigation chance.

 

So for Assassins, at a stat budget of 2400, 59.46% is spent net mitigation chance. At 2500, its 58.04% and at 2600 its at 57.88%.

{2400,{defense->522,shield->875,absorb->1002}}

{2500,{defense->539,shield->912,absorb->1049}}

{2600,{defense->557,shield->948,absorb->1095}}

 

 

For Juggernauts, at a stat budget of 2400, 79.54% is spent on net mitigation chance. At 2500, its 78.48% and at 2600 its at 77.46%.

{2400,{defense->1034,shield->875,absorb->491}}

{2500,{defense->1050,shield->912,absorb->539}}

{2600,{defense->1066,shield->948,absorb->586}}

 

 

For Powertechs at a stat budget of 2400, 77.96% is spent on net mitigation chance. At 2500, its 76.72% and at 2600 its at 75.69%

{2400,{defense->993,shield->878,absorb->530}}

{2500,{defense->989,shield->929,absorb->582}}

{2600,{defense->984,shield->984,absorb->633}}

 

 

There seems to be a ~20% gap between how much Juggernauts spend on stat mitigation chance compared to how much Assassins spend. Comparing it with Powertech this difference 17-19%. I'm not sure about the differences between the the base+active mitigation chance of the 3 tanks, but a 20% gap seems pretty large.

 

So I wonder if Assasins would lower their spike RNG death chances by shifting points from absorb into either shield or defence.

Edited August 22, 2013 by leto_cleon