Bring back self-heals

[KeyboardNinja]

I have to agree with this. If you're a min/maxing, endgame-raider, this change is probably positive. Otherwise, you're screwed. The class is less fun to play, with a tighter and far more boring rotation, and the overall effectiveness for players below the skill cap has been butchered.

 

I hate to break it to you, but the rotation is *less* tight and punishing of mistakes as it was before. Honestly. You have three more seconds (out of 12!) than you used to. The only reason that the rotation feels tighter is there is now a visible buff which tells you when you're doing something wrong. Even if you're not keeping the buff up 100%, your effectiveness in terms of mitigation is the same or better than what it was before in the same situation given the same level of execution.

 

I really hate to say it, but the problem here is that nearly everyone overestimated their effectiveness in managing their self-healing pre-2.5. That overestimation leads them to feel that they have been nerfed, since the post-2.5 buff isn't up as often as it should be. Nothing has changed for these people, only the perception of the rotation. I'm sure that doesn't do anything to reduce the frustration you now feel, but it does explain why so many of us our adamant that there is no problem with the class, while numerous others feel like they are no longer able to perform to a sufficient level.

[Rebel_Guy]

I have to agree with this. If you're a min/maxing, endgame-raider, this change is probably positive. Otherwise, you're screwed. The class is less fun to play, with a tighter and far more boring rotation, and the overall effectiveness for players below the skill cap has been butchered

 

I don't understand... the rotation is exactly the same, and the skill floor is lowered with higher damage reduction making the class more forgiving not the other way around.

[lordbadtamaru]

I hate to break it to you, but the rotation is *less* tight and punishing of mistakes as it was before. Honestly. You have three more seconds (out of 12!) than you used to. The only reason that the rotation feels tighter is there is now a visible buff which tells you when you're doing something wrong. Even if you're not keeping the buff up 100%, your effectiveness in terms of mitigation is the same or better than what it was before in the same situation given the same level of execution.

 

I really hate to say it, but the problem here is that nearly everyone overestimated their effectiveness in managing their self-healing pre-2.5. That overestimation leads them to feel that they have been nerfed, since the post-2.5 buff isn't up as often as it should be. Nothing has changed for these people, only the perception of the rotation. I'm sure that doesn't do anything to reduce the frustration you now feel, but it does explain why so many of us our adamant that there is no problem with the class, while numerous others feel like they are no longer able to perform to a sufficient level.

 

Agree. I really don't get it. Why do people think a reactive heal is better than proactive mitigation? It trumps it in almost every situation besides dailies and leveling, but who the **** cares since people have done **** like that without an advanced class!

 

IMHO the Shadow Protection buff is alright, I wouldn't lengthen it, maybe instead make it so knockbacks/stuns add 5 seconds on top the buff or refresh it? Maybe that would be OP.

 

But seriously taking the *********** damage of a DPS as a tank cause you weren't lucky for that megahard hitting *********** burst hit straight to your face is not fun, and the armor rating and DR solved that.

 

And Kaos, I see you complaining about RNG for vig all the time. Well guess what? Shadow tanks had it similar only they don't bleed dps, they wipe groups cause the *********** things get shot to pieces.

 

This change was needed. Was it the absolute best way they could have implemented it? Probably not. But saying it didn't help is foolish and a lie.

 

The skill cap didn't change at all imho, all it was is that tanks are now forced to be competent versus recommended, since the self heals look "nice." Having the DR buff means that tanks actually need to focus on a rotation and not just rest on your laurels..

[TheSupaCoopa]

Powertechs and Vanguards also get a heal from Shoulder Cannon.

 

Oh. Forgot about that. However, it has s 1.5m CD

[Uruare]

Balance. That's where the issue is.

 

Self-heals pose problems even above and beyond the spikiness issue. In fact, the most often cited issue with self-heals is not the spike issue but the problems with scaling. At low damage levels, self-heals are enormously more powerful than straight DR. This is why most 1v1 situations, dailies and some low-damage bosses have seemed harder on shadows after the DR change. We are quite literally worse in those situations than we used to be, because we used to be overpowered! Unfortunately, at high damage levels, self-heals lack of scaling becomes a bane rather than a boon, resulting in less survivability than straight DR.

 

Getting rid of self-heals allows bioware to balance the tanks in terms of relative survivability much more tightly than before, simply because they no longer have a tank where almost a quarter of their mitigation is radically underpowered on some content and overpowered on others. It wasn't just an "easy way out" or a bid to "appease the NiM raiding crowd", as is often claimed. As a change, it makes tremendous sense, and there's really no getting away from that.

 

The flaw in your suggestion lies in the assumption that the self-healing and the DR provided the same benefits, but in different ways. They didn't. They couldn't. And for those reasons, we can't just have a toggle which allows us to swap between the two modes of operation. I miss the self heals too on a subjective level, but there is simply no way that they can come back.

 

For the TL;DR crowd - Balance = Equally Mediocre, not Equally Interesting.

 

MMOification at its finest. Now, Shadow tanks are more work for generally less reliability than any other tank, without even a curio for an attempted offset.

 

Apologetics is a wonderful art. Its the soothing whisper offered to the victim being garroted by something; the promise of pain stopping when they simply let go.

 

Here's the real problem: they tried to make a light armor tank with a gimmick that made it viable with heavy armor tanks and, because they didn't understand the differences fundamentally incumbent to reactive healing vs active mitigation as forms of overall damage mitigation, they screwed up when they made the clothie tanks.

 

Their attempts at fixing it ever since have been half-hearted whimpers made in irrelevant directions because they have not, and likely will never, address the actual problem; there's only one right way to tank in this game, because the numbers do not care. 50% DR > 40% DR, story over. Passive 50% DR > 38% DR with a tightly active ability to generate another +12%.

 

There is no other story to tell. There is no alternative view point. No other tank has to sustain its passive DR as part of its stand-still-and-always-hit-things rotation. The tanks that can run all over and have ~50% DR without having to give a sniff about maintaining stacks lest they be DPS-level squishy are better tanks than the tank that is getting their passive DR tailpiped for having to, oh...move courtesy of common mechanics, or because everything and its mother has knockback anymore.

 

There is no other story to tell, because the numbers do not care about your stories. 50% all the time is better than 50% if you do everything right and the stars align and Zeus blesses you and Shiva stands on his right big toe. It is not better sometimes; it is better all the time. It is not 'more interesting' for the shadow/sin tanks now; its just more of a PITA.

 

More interesting would be if they'd just ramp a shadow/sin's tank stance's armor bonus up to make our passive DR equal to the other tanks', then distinguish the class by its powers. They will never 'balance' inferior passive DR against superior passive DR, so they shouldn't even bother trying. Not on that front. Its a lost cause that leads to the sentiments expressed in threads just like this one.

 

Me, I don't have any clean-cut answer for them, because there isn't one. They've painted themselves into a funny corner with shadow/sin tanks and, frankly, if it were up to me, I'd gut the whole farking class and rebuild it from the ground up to function at parity in all core mechanisms with other tanks (differentiate by aesthetic and graphics 'cause you can't with the numbers without making one sort of tank better or worse than the others, as we're seeing here yet again), then theme them up with the peripheral abilities.

 

The direction all this has been going in, however? Its pitiful. Moreover, its a debacle that's been hashed over and beaten to death in other games. In a crunchy-bits environment of this variety, reactive healing is never on even keel with passive mitigations. Its either too good on the weaker end of things and too irrelevant at the factored endgame end of things, or occasionally its too exploitable where such mechanics exist (not here). Here, the former was always obvious. The very way the mechanics felt to have worked made it obvious that shadow/sin reactive healing was way OP in earlier times, then too irrelevant when tankiness was needed after the 2.0 blundering.

 

The blundering's been non-stop though. This turd's gonna bea turd no matter if you bake it from here or put salsa on it. Washing it didn't help because it was a turd to begin with.

 

The problem that needs correcting has yet to be addressed. And this discussion will never end until and unless that core disparity gets resolved somehow.

[THoK-Zeus]

@Uruare: Completely away from the Topic.

When you don't understand that tanks have a lot more abilitys (shield Rating, absorb, i/e...), then just there passive armor, you simply can't talk about tank balance.

 

Every tank has to sustain his passive dr (force scream and heat blast it is for the other 2 tank classes).

 

Your also seem to lack the understanding of passive damage reduction.

 

Every additional armor stuff does not provide damage reduction! Armor provides an increase in damage reduction!

 

For PvE all Tank classes are fine and balanced against each other. In my opinion we now have a Level of Balance for tanks we never had before since this game started.

Edited January 12, 2014 by THoK-Zeus

[Uruare]

@Uruare: Completely away from the Topic.

When you don't understand that tanks have a lot more abilitys (shield Rating, absorb, i/e...), then just there passive armor, you simply can't talk about tank balance.

 

Every tank has to sustain his passive dr (force scream and heat blast it is for the other 2 tank classes).

 

Your also seem to lack the understanding of passive damage reduction.

 

Every additional armor stuff does not provide damage reduction! Armor provides an increase in damage reduction!

 

For PvE all Tank classes are fine and balanced against each other. In my opinion we now have a Level of Balance for tanks we never had before since this game started.

 

Yeah, actually, I do understand all of that. I understand it very well, in fact. What I did not do was expound into a numerical treatise upon my functionally self-obviating point, however.

 

Here it is for you, in plain English.

 

Shadow/Sin was designed in its numerical forms and functions with the balancing concept in mind that it would be a reactive healing tank. This is a familiar enough concept that's encountered identical problems in similar mathematical environments before, and often to the same tangents of half-baked resolution.

 

The reactive healing element has been removed. The rest of the Shadow/Sin tanking schemata has been altered only with minimal invasion into the code structures actually comprising the framework of the class.

 

To understand my point, you must first understand that there is no such thing as a class; there is only a complex aggregation of algorithms and interdependent numbers. Strip all notions of 'Shadow' and 'Assassin' from your mind; strip all notions of 'tank' as a role away period. What you're dealing with here is an aggregate equation that was initially designed from the ground up to integrate with a conceptual form of numerical interactions that are no longer occurring at all.

 

That which we call reactive healing? Its gone. Buhbye. That whole segment of the equation, erased.

The rest of the equation has been minimally modified to attempt to make up for it, and the slapdash piece-of-crap job done on it is adequate enough...if you don't care about things like quality or whether or not your thing is annoying at the user end compared to what it used to be.

 

Fact: Guard/Jugg and Trooper/BH tanks do not have the same active requirements to sustain their passive mitigations. Do they have active components for various elements of their functions? Oh yes. Yes, they certainly do have.

 

But it comes right back to what I said above; a passive damage reduction of 50% is superior to 38% plus up to 12% if you dance the hula with a chicken on your head at the right time, and if nothing bump interrupts you from completing your chicken hula to generate that up-to-12%.

 

COULD IT BE DONE in such a manner as that it would actually be more fun and engaging rather than just punishingly tedious? Yes. Was this done? No. The patch job done on the complex series of equations that a class truly is had a vital component of its initial cohesion hatcheted away and patched over with the sort of Band-Aid job I'd have expected from something like Cryptic patching something on Champions Online, not fricken BIOWARE.

 

Its shoddy. It feels shoddy. I can practically taste the clunky spot-welded math rattling around under my shadow and sin tanks' hoods now, and it was bad enough after 2.0. Reactive healing tanks classes NEVER balance well with damage reduction tanks in environments like this.

 

You'd think someone'd have paid attention to WoW while they were building a WoW spinoff and maybe learned something from Blood DK problems in that department, but hey, who actually pays attention to those silly maths anyway?

 

Apparently, not Bioware. If they actually cared to make Shadow/Sin numerically viable as well as engaging to play, they'd do something alike to what I suggested above; raise its armor buff in tank form to achieve damage reduction parity between it and the other tank classes, variegate thereafter by peripherary functions. Forms of CC, gap closures, assortments of team buffs/cleansing effects, so on.

 

There's a lot of room in the peripherary to make things all unique-looking. When you're playing with a one-combat-equation algorithm, however...I'm sorry, but they're just going to keep chasing themselves from one corner to the next if they keep trying to merely tweak numbers in the existing formulae. What it needs is for the equations to be reworked if they want reactive healing gone for good, and that's totally fine.

 

Reactive healing tank was a bad idea everywhere else too.

 

But they should actually finish what they start. Just juggling a few numbers and turning the rotation into this lock-stepped crock its become has made it functionally punitive for a shadow/sin tank to do anything but sustain their rotation. You move, you're losing stacks, you're the weak link. Every time you don't have stacks up, every other tank in the game would be better in your spot. Every time your pebbles/lightning get interrupted by everyone's mothers knockback, you're deficient for several GCD where no other tank would be in that or any such circumstance.

 

Shadow/Sin has been rendered a PITA to tank with. Not impossible, but not more interesting either; just more of an annoying, punitive PITA. And you may as well forget about stacking your defensive benefits with nearly the same ease as any other tank. A juggernaut/guard off force scream/sweep doesn't rely on the talented damage shield for much, and not having it up is not even remotely equal to a shadow/sin tank not having their stacks up now.

 

Shadow/Sin are not in a good place, even for a 'skill tank'. They're in that annoying place a class should not be left in; that place where a slapdash and chintzed job of band-aiding a problem has left something technically functionally but functionally not worth caring about.

 

Shadow/Sin tanks, at this time, are neither necessary nor, I'd posit, particularly desirable if their stealth or humanoid CC isn't specifically required. Does it require more skill to play one as effectively as a jug or powertech tank? Yes.

 

For all the wrong reasons that do nothing to make it more interesting and do everything to simply render it inferior across the boards to other varieties of tank. If you or Bioware would like to see an active, light-armored tank done well and balanced around its own premise, look over at WoW's monk tank.

 

They didn't have much shame about copying a lot else from WoW. They damn well ought to copy that and actually solve their problem rather than wasting all of our time with these non-fixes.

[KeyboardNinja]

First off, again with the passive DR! Damage reduction isn't everything. It isn't even the majority of things. If you stop focusing on just the DR aspect, things look a lot more appealing.

 

Moving on… Shadows do not have trouble moving out of things or kiting or doing tank like things during fights. That's a myth. It is a myth that is related to the myth that the shadow rotation has become harder or more constrained than it was before. We use telekinetic throw *exactly* as often at a minimum as we used to! In fact, the fact that the stacks don't degrade over time makes it so that we can cheat a bit and not use Telekinetic Throw quite as often as we had to during the self heal era, delaying it to squeeze in an extra GCD before the channel. In other words, you clearly weren't playing the class correctly before if you're complaining about rotation "changes" and trouble with mechanics as a result. Nothing has changed, you're just being rewarded differently.

 

Shadows will never, ever have it as easy as the other tanks in terms of mitigation. That's the whole point to the class. If you want an easy-mode mitigation class, roll one of the other tanks. They're perfectly viable. The fact that shadows have to work harder though doesn't make them unbalanced or less powerful, it just means that the player has to be more engaged with their mitigation and maintain a tighter and more attentive rotation. The reward for this is fun. That's basically it. Shadows are slightly (and I do mean *slightly*) better off than the other tanks on nearly every fight due to a combination of cooldowns and extremely high shield chance, but the difference is extremely marginal. Really, the skill cap is its own reward. If that isn't good enough, then you should probably play a different class.

 

Ultimately, there is nothing wrong with the concept of a light armor class, even as bioware has implemented it. Shadows get weak base armor, but in compensation they are given what is (by far) the best mitigation paired with the strongest active DR mechanic in the game. They are the only tank with both tanking debuffs, and they have a suite of cooldowns which stands toe-to-toe with guardians while soaring miles above what vanguards can match. They are most certainly balanced, and a skilled shadow will be able to meet or exceed the performance of any other tank class, but balanced does not mean "just as easy". Putting more effort into something to achieve the same level of performance does not make that thing underpowered, it just makes it difficult and (in this case) interesting.

Edited January 12, 2014 by KeyboardNinja

[Prototypemind]

 

Shadow/Sin has been rendered a PITA to tank with. Not impossible, but not more interesting either; just more of an annoying, punitive PITA. And you may as well forget about stacking your defensive benefits with nearly the same ease as any other tank. A juggernaut/guard off force scream/sweep doesn't rely on the talented damage shield for much, and not having it up is not even remotely equal to a shadow/sin tank not having their stacks up now.

 

Shadow/Sin are not in a good place, even for a 'skill tank'. They're in that annoying place a class should not be left in; that place where a slapdash and chintzed job of band-aiding a problem has left something technically functionally but functionally not worth caring about.

 

Shadow/Sin tanks, at this time, are neither necessary nor, I'd posit, particularly desirable if their stealth or humanoid CC isn't specifically required. Does it require more skill to play one as effectively as a jug or powertech tank? Yes.

 

For all the wrong reasons that do nothing to make it more interesting and do everything to simply render it inferior across the boards to other varieties of tank. If you or Bioware would like to see an active, light-armored tank done well and balanced around its own premise, look over at WoW's monk tank.

 

They didn't have much shame about copying a lot else from WoW. They damn well ought to copy that and actually solve their problem rather than wasting all of our time with these non-fixes.

I'm just not sure where you're coming from. If Shadows/Sins are a PITA for you now, then they were before as well. The enjoyment most get from the class is that you have to pay attention to your rotation to get the benefits of the class.

 

Let's review: We get better overall mitigation than any other class. We provide a debuff that reduces damage raid-wide. We hold aggro the most easily of any tank class. We can completely ignore certain attack types due to Force Shroud. We're able to provide a 5% boost to heals in situations in which healers can maintain position over Phase Walk. We're able to stealth rez. We get double-bladed lightsabers =p

 

Quite seriously though, our viability as tanks has increased, and the only loss we suffered was that PvE solo content may require a pause. For Force Lighting/TKT to get the full benefit before we had to get the entire channel off. Now you can be interrupted in some way and still receive damage reduction that lasts long enough for you to get your rotation back in place.

 

I'm fine with you disliking the change for feel reasons, but the numbers do not in any way support your idea that this class has gotten worse from the changes.

[alexzk]

First off, again with the passive DR! Damage reduction isn't everything. It isn't even the majority of things. If you stop focusing on just the DR aspect, things look a lot more appealing.

 

Moving on… Shadows do not have trouble moving out of things or kiting or doing tank like things during fights. That's a myth. It is a myth that is related to the myth that the shadow rotation has become harder or more constrained than it was before. We use telekinetic throw *exactly* as often at a minimum as we used to! In fact, the fact that the stacks don't degrade over time makes it so that we can cheat a bit and not use Telekinetic Throw quite as often as we had to during the self heal era, delaying it to squeeze in an extra GCD before the channel. In other words, you clearly weren't playing the class correctly before if you're complaining about rotation "changes" and trouble with mechanics as a result. Nothing has changed, you're just being rewarded differently.

 

Why did u stuck at TT again? As I said couple days ago, for example in pvp it was lesser heal amount among all heal abilities, simply because it was hard to use too as now, but we had heal procks which could activate heal relic in addition.

 

Now that's almost (like for 90%) is replaced by reactive warding relict, but, that does not look as good idea. I got this relict for my sent too to try and guess what? Much more skills can be used before death now which means....relict will be stripped down :/ I's obviously was not supposed to be used by not tanks (it has absorb stat).

[alexzk]

The reactive healing element has been removed. The rest of the Shadow/Sin tanking schemata has been altered only with minimal invasion into the code structures actually comprising the framework of the class.

 

 

It was not really minimal touch, maximum shields are 32% about and defense 20% about using gear now, while it was 45% and 25%. Having that numbers it was already hard to play and they removed heals in addition.

 

When I completed my EWH set I could have 65% chance of shield with ward and 63% absorb when relict procks, now ...not sure if I can get those numbers. 60+ allowed to kill 2 snipers at once for example, currently it is hard to go and kill 1.

Edited January 12, 2014 by alexzk

[KeyboardNinja]

Why did u stuck at TT again? As I said couple days ago, for example in pvp it was lesser heal amount among all heal abilities, simply because it was hard to use too as now, but we had heal procks which could activate heal relic in addition.

 

Now that's almost (like for 90%) is replaced by reactive warding relict, but, that does not look as good idea. I got this relict for my sent too to try and guess what? Much more skills can be used before death now which means....relict will be stripped down :/ I's obviously was not supposed to be used by not tanks (it has absorb stat).

 

If you don't use telekinetic throw, then you should be even happier with the changes, since you are now taking less damage than you were before on net. In other words, the damage you took before minus the self-heal was worse than the damage you take now.

[alexzk]

If you don't use telekinetic throw, then you should be even happier with the changes, since you are now taking less damage than you were before on net. In other words, the damage you took before minus the self-heal was worse than the damage you take now.

 

 

Oh ye, 150% reducted to 115% and upped to 130% makes me really happy

 

And I always used TT as "emergency heal" or vs warriors. It just was not so often like each 12s as now.

 

It was plenty of topics on forums that shadows are most and other tanks are less un-killable .. so they reduced shadows to 115% ... next they reduced shields for all but gave force shielding(ok, that maybe fair), and now they removed heals, but as mentioned above - it was small changes without taking in account initial formula, so right now all together makes shadow broken, comparing to 2 years ago.

 

Instead breaking shadows they could fix others, for example later they eventually fixed acid sniper, so it can kill any tank now even older 150% but nobody bothered to restore tank.

Edited January 12, 2014 by alexzk

[Uruare]

First off, again with the passive DR! Damage reduction isn't everything. It isn't even the majority of things. If you stop focusing on just the DR aspect, things look a lot more appealing.

 

No, DR is 'everything' because DR is where the chief disparity exist. There is no disparity issue with shield or absorption rates between tank classes; those are the RNG mitigation mechanics. Shadows/sins have somewhat higher Shield chance if they keep their bubble up, which is the right sort of active for an active defense to be as its not wretchedly punitive to maintain while, at the same time, rewarding us for taking a certain degree of risk in re-upping it only at the very last second rather than every time we can click it.

 

Shadow and Sin tanks flat-out have less passive DR, however, and the slapped-in mechanism that's arguably supposed to pull them even with the other tanks on that front is a sham of artificial difficulty by way of circle-jogging activity. That has a much bigger impact on damage intake than the somewhat superior RNG mitigation could account for before or now. We're still RNG tanks, only now we're tied to an unforgiving all-or-nothing rotation that, if we can't get that all important channel off every time, we're almost as squishy as we were before, except now we don't even get any tick heals to even pretend to make up for anything.

 

Moving on… Shadows do not have trouble moving out of things or kiting or doing tank like things during fights. That's a myth. It is a myth that is related to the myth that the shadow rotation has become harder or more constrained than it was before.

 

No, it is not a myth. The rotation is now an absolute dictation; you do it or you fail absolutely. Before, it mattered less because we weren't and couldn't rely on reactive healing for anything meaningful anyway (a broken state), so you're not even making a representative comparison of the two baseline mitigations in your declaration of mythological status on anything. You follow the rotation dogmatically now, and that's got nothing to do with skill.

 

Any idiot that could play the same five notes on a piano could now tank half the bosses in this game. Difficult? No. Interesting because you HAVE to click the same tiny array of buttons over and over? No, I (and apparently not just I alone) don't think so. At least when the worthless-against-spike-damage reactive healing was in effect, we had the wiggle room of also not needing it for much once upon a time. Then they nerfed the healing and the passive mitigation of tank forms into the floor.

 

Now they've removed reactive healing altogether, nominally increased the armor buff and gated the rest of parity achievement behind a merciless stack decay timer. You maintain those stacks for your passive DR to be on par with that of other tanks. Shield and absorp are now generally more effective for ALL TANKS since they now account for internal/elemental damage as well, but those aren't, weren't and have not become the problem between tank types.

 

Passive DR and ability to maintain it is, plain and simple.

 

We use telekinetic throw *exactly* as often at a minimum as we used to! In fact, the fact that the stacks don't degrade over time makes it so that we can cheat a bit and not use Telekinetic Throw quite as often as we had to during the self heal era, delaying it to squeeze in an extra GCD before the channel. In other words, you clearly weren't playing the class correctly before if you're complaining about rotation "changes" and trouble with mechanics as a result. Nothing has changed, you're just being rewarded differently.

 

Are...we talking about the same class here? Because the stacks of passive DR buff a shadow/sin generate by use of pebbles/lightning after generating three stacks of song-and-dance do, in fact, decay very swiftly. VERY. SWIFTLY.

 

To the point of there being exactly no wiggle room in the rotation. You follow that rotation and maintain those stacks, the end. There is no 'the rest of the story'; that is what you do, or you may as well just run around in circles and rely on wishful thinking to mitigate damage for you.

 

 

Shadows will never, ever have it as easy as the other tanks in terms of mitigation. That's the whole point to the class. If you want an easy-mode mitigation class, roll one of the other tanks. They're perfectly viable.

 

Nobody reasonable is asking for E-Z Mode shadow/sin tanking. I, for one, would settle for an actual quality revision of the class since they hacked the concept it was built around out altogether out. Reactive healing needed to go, but this which they seem to think is an amazing and wonderful fix...is crap. This is just garbage, and other tanks aren't merely 'perfectly viable', they're inherently superior because their passive DR isn't chained to an easily interrupted, circumstance-dependent rotation.

 

The fact that shadows have to work harder though doesn't make them unbalanced or less powerful, it just means that the player has to be more engaged with their mitigation and maintain a tighter and more attentive rotation. The reward for this is fun. That's basically it.

 

You're the authority on what fun is for all and everyone then? Most and many perhaps? Again, nobody reasonable is asking for E-Z Mode shadow/sin tanking, so your fundamental refutation is aimed at a strawman way off on the corner of Irrelevant and Pompous.

 

 

Shadows are slightly (and I do mean *slightly*) better off than the other tanks on nearly every fight due to a combination of cooldowns and extremely high shield chance, but the difference is extremely marginal. Really, the skill cap is its own reward. If that isn't good enough, then you should probably play a different class.

 

You have to depart the spreadsheet and actually play one to understand why circumstances and punitive decay rates versus time-to-generate stacks make your statements both tragically misinformed as well as simply incorrect.

 

The 'skill cap' has largely been removed. It doesn't take any special degree of skill to not be a victim of arbitrary knockback mechanics; that takes luck. Exactly 0 (zero) people playing shadow/sin tanks can pop a full channel of pebbles/lightning while dodging boss mechanics. Oh, you had to move? Your passive DR is in the toilet until you can stand still and get that channel off, and that's not a debate. That's not a circumstantial mechanic.

 

You channel the power, you get your stacks. If you cannot, for any reason, channel the power completely? You do not get your stacks, your passive DR suffers. You are interrupted? You do not get any or all of your stacks, your passive DR suffers. You mess up even slightly on your rotation for any reason at all? Your passive DR suffers for several GCD.

 

Before, at least the reactive heals off tank form cycled on their own timer that had nothing to do with GCD. They did -SOMETHING-, even if it was useless most of the time in anything resembling a modern-era boss fight, and that something was more than the EXACTLY NOTHING you get if ANY of the above If/Then circumstances befall you.

 

And no amount of skill will prevent all of those from happening. You will have to move, and sometimes pretty often; no channeling for you, thus no stacks, thus crappier armor, thus crappier DR. You will be subjected to knockback in all its many beautiful forms; there's basically nothing you or anyone can do about that, period. You're a human player with fallible fingers; you WILL mess up your rotation sometimes, no matter how pro you think you are or actually even may be.

 

All of these are punitive detractions from the class being able to function at parity with the other tank classes. Superior shield chance doesn't make up for it and will never make up for it. Why?

 

Because on paper, a 50% shield chance with 40% absorp looks like it should average out to being an overall 20% damage reduction, and that's where assumptions like yours misunderstand how reality actually interacts with the math.

 

You might shield against a piffling 1000 dmg attack and miss your shield chance on the alpha strike to follow, shielding 0% of the 30,000 damage rolling in. If the stars have aligned and everything's allowed you to have your stacks up, your passive DR will eat more of all the damage, all the time.

 

If you had to move to dodge something or a key on your keyboard got stuck for a second and you missed your tiny window to refresh your stacks or you got interrupted by some add spamming knockback your way? You're barely better off than you were before these 'fixes'.

 

Skill will save you from nothing. The rotation isn't difficult; its brainlessly easy, if you can pull it off consistently in realtime application. Pulling it off as often as you need it will never be possible courtesy of how other mechanics work, however, and there is no room for error for any of that, let alone for the ever present undefinable factor of human fallibility.

 

Most sane developers of a class function will plan for a certain amount of wiggle room in such considerations so as to improve the overall experience of playing a given class.

 

Because it is NOT fun to have to work twice as hard to only maybe be at the same level as the other tanks in every relevant gameworld application there is. Though I'm sure it looks good on paper.

 

It was clearly designed on paper by someone that only understood what the paper was saying about anything at all.

 

Ultimately, there is nothing wrong with the concept of a light armor class, even as bioware has implemented it. Shadows get weak base armor, but in compensation they are given what is (by far) the best mitigation paired with the strongest active DR mechanic in the game. They are the only tank with both tanking debuffs, and they have a suite of cooldowns which stands toe-to-toe with guardians while soaring miles above what vanguards can match. They are most certainly balanced, and a skilled shadow will be able to meet or exceed the performance of any other tank class, but balanced does not mean "just as easy". Putting more effort into something to achieve the same level of performance does not make that thing underpowered, it just makes it difficult and (in this case) interesting.

 

And yet, guardian/jug tanks are generally more desirable than shadow/sin tanks just as much now as ever. Their players can focus more on avoiding boss mechanics and being less of a wildcard keeping the healers guessing for a big chunk of why. Vanguards/Powertechs? Did you seriously just declare shadows/sins to be 'soaring miles above' what they can do? The same vanguards and powertech tanks that can sustain agro while kiting god and errbody around like a loltrain? The same vanguards and powertechs that have just as good AoE damage agro made better still because of their generally superior range?

 

Shield/absorp are the RNG mitigations. They're great when they proc and they don't even factor when they don't. Shadows/sins are still RNG tanks, not skill tanks. We're a long way from skill being a dominantly relevant force in this equation, and if you think playing one is 'skill tanking', your idea of a skill requirement makes me wonder if you think shoelaces are the hardmode of footwear.

Edited January 13, 2014 by Uruare

[alexzk]

Wanna add some:

 

>>You might shield against a piffling 1000 dmg attack and miss your shield chance on the alpha strike to follow, >>shielding 0% of the 30,000 damage rolling in. If the stars have aligned and everything's allowed you to have your >>stacks up, your passive DR will eat more of all the damage, all the time.

 

That's old pvp trick, because of RND is really pseudo-randoms on sever side events are related in terms of math. So there is "shield-punching" in most of games (including swtor) - u do series of fast small/no energy shots, and next alpha-shot - most likelly tank is done after that. For example me If i see incoming targeter for small fast shots from sniper - I do stealth immediately, because i'm dead otherwise.

[SkybladeDarkstar]

I don't understand... the rotation is exactly the same, and the skill floor is lowered with higher damage reduction making the class more forgiving not the other way around.

 

The rotation is tighter because the new mechanics punish you much more severely if you can't hit the timing. If you missed the timing on the self heals, your healing was only delayed by the time you missed. If you miss the timing on the buff, your damage mitigation is reduced by an extra three seconds, because you have to build the buff back up from nothing over the course of the channel. It's more punishing to lower skilled players, and if you can't keep the buff up consistently, the incoming damage hits you for higher spike damage (since you suddenly wind up taking significantly more per hit when the buff wears off), making you harder to heal.

 

The rotation is a lot less forgiving, and a lot more fixed in terms of what you can do. Half of my abilities are now completely pointless, because there is no point where I can use them anymore. I have to hit Project, Slow Time, Project, Telekinetic Throw, and maybe Force Breach if I can get lucky. I never have time to run my saber strikes anymore, I can't even keep Force Breach up consistently because it doesn't fit in with the rotation. I can't use Force Stun or Spinning Kick, because doing so takes time that I need to keep the buff up. I have four abilities that I can use, instead of the dozen or more that were part of my valid rotation before the patch.

 

Oh, and even then, if the first tick is resisted, I'll lose the buff anyway (or if it glitches and just doesn't apply even when damage does, which I have noted multiple times).

Edited January 13, 2014 by SkybladeDarkstar

[THoK-Zeus]

No, DR is 'everything' because DR is where the chief disparity exist. There is no disparity issue with shield or absorption rates between tank classes; those are the RNG mitigation mechanics. Shadows/sins have somewhat higher Shield chance if they keep their bubble up, which is the right sort of active for an active defense to be as its not wretchedly punitive to maintain while, at the same time, rewarding us for taking a certain degree of risk in re-upping it only at the very last second rather than every time we can click it.

Lie 1. There is a disparity issue between shield and Absorption rating between tank classes. Tank Tyrans/Dread Guards.. with a Juggernaut and then with an Assassin.

 

 

Shadow and Sin tanks flat-out have less passive DR, however, and the slapped-in mechanism that's arguably supposed to pull them even with the other tanks on that front is a sham of artificial difficulty by way of circle-jogging activity. That has a much bigger impact on damage intake than the somewhat superior RNG mitigation could account for before or now. We're still RNG tanks, only now we're tied to an unforgiving all-or-nothing rotation that, if we can't get that all important channel off every time, we're almost as squishy as we were before, except now we don't even get any tick heals to even pretend to make up for anything.

The Rotation got easier and 12% damage reduction is not "squishy as we were before". Passive DR (i suppose you meant armor) has a very small Impact on incoming damage as that just affects a minority of all incoming attacks. Ergo Lie 2 and 3.

 

 

No, it is not a myth. The rotation is now an absolute dictation; you do it or you fail absolutely. Before, it mattered less because we weren't and couldn't rely on reactive healing for anything meaningful anyway (a broken state), so you're not even making a representative comparison of the two baseline mitigations in your declaration of mythological status on anything. You follow the rotation dogmatically now, and that's got nothing to do with skill.

The Rotation was an absolute dictation before even more, if you wanted to be able to heal yourself for enough to additional damage you got. Lie number 5.

 

 

Any idiot that could play the same five notes on a piano could now tank half the bosses in this game. Difficult? No. Interesting because you HAVE to click the same tiny array of buttons over and over? No, I (and apparently not just I alone) don't think so. At least when the worthless-against-spike-damage reactive healing was in effect, we had the wiggle room of also not needing it for much once upon a time. Then they nerfed the healing and the passive mitigation of tank forms into the floor.

Ok now you tell us that the Rotation got easier for assassin tanks.

 

 

Now they've removed reactive healing altogether, nominally increased the armor buff and gated the rest of parity achievement behind a merciless stack decay timer. You maintain those stacks for your passive DR to be on par with that of other tanks. Shield and absorp are now generally more effective for ALL TANKS since they now account for internal/elemental damage as well, but those aren't, weren't and have not become the problem between tank types.

 

Passive DR and ability to maintain it is, plain and simple.

Shield and Absorption doesn't account for internal/elemental damage (Lie number 6.).

Other tanks have a lot more merciless buffs they have to keep up (kbn's Juggernaut mitigation is a lot stricter to maintain, then the assassin Rotation)

 

Side note: Assassin Tanks have by far the highest damage reduction of internal/elemental damage not even accounting stuff like Force Shroud.

 

 

Are...we talking about the same class here? Because the stacks of passive DR buff a shadow/sin generate by use of pebbles/lightning after generating three stacks of song-and-dance do, in fact, decay very swiftly. VERY. SWIFTLY.

 

To the point of there being exactly no wiggle room in the rotation. You follow that rotation and maintain those stacks, the end. There is no 'the rest of the story'; that is what you do, or you may as well just run around in circles and rely on wishful thinking to mitigate damage for you.

There's a lot more room in the rotation then before 2.5 (hello 9 second Force Lightning Rotation) and there's always wiggle in the Rotation (Lie number 7).

 

 

Nobody reasonable is asking for E-Z Mode shadow/sin tanking. I, for one, would settle for an actual quality revision of the class since they hacked the concept it was built around out altogether out. Reactive healing needed to go, but this which they seem to think is an amazing and wonderful fix...is crap. This is just garbage, and other tanks aren't merely 'perfectly viable', they're inherently superior because their passive DR isn't chained to an easily interrupted, circumstance-dependent rotation.

If Juggernauts and Powertechs are superior why do all the recent world firsts kills (from dp hm to tfb nim) have an assassin tank in their lineup? (lie 8)

 

You're the authority on what fun is for all and everyone then? Most and many perhaps? Again, nobody reasonable is asking for E-Z Mode shadow/sin tanking, so your fundamental refutation is aimed at a strawman way off on the corner of Irrelevant and Pompous.

You are just asking for destroying the class i love to play.

 

 

You have to depart the spreadsheet and actually play one to understand why circumstances and punitive decay rates versus time-to-generate stacks make your statements both tragically misinformed as well as simply incorrect.

KBN is one of the best assassin tanks in the world. He was the only assassin tank in the world maintanking Kephess in tfb nim back in 72 gear.

 

 

The 'skill cap' has largely been removed. It doesn't take any special degree of skill to not be a victim of arbitrary knockback mechanics; that takes luck. Exactly 0 (zero) people playing shadow/sin tanks can pop a full channel of pebbles/lightning while dodging boss mechanics. Oh, you had to move? Your passive DR is in the toilet until you can stand still and get that channel off, and that's not a debate. That's not a circumstantial mechanic.

 

You channel the power, you get your stacks. If you cannot, for any reason, channel the power completely? You do not get your stacks, your passive DR suffers. You are interrupted? You do not get any or all of your stacks, your passive DR suffers. You mess up even slightly on your rotation for any reason at all? Your passive DR suffers for several GCD.

 

Before, at least the reactive heals off tank form cycled on their own timer that had nothing to do with GCD. They did -SOMETHING-, even if it was useless most of the time in anything resembling a modern-era boss fight, and that something was more than the EXACTLY NOTHING you get if ANY of the above If/Then circumstances befall you.

 

And no amount of skill will prevent all of those from happening. You will have to move, and sometimes pretty often; no channeling for you, thus no stacks, thus crappier armor, thus crappier DR. You will be subjected to knockback in all its many beautiful forms; there's basically nothing you or anyone can do about that, period. You're a human player with fallible fingers; you WILL mess up your rotation sometimes, no matter how pro you think you are or actually even may be.

So, for you moving at the right time and preparing for knockback etc.. is just luck and not skill?

Sorry,but i completely disagree with that Statement. It requires skill to not screw up your Rotation while moving, getting knockbacked...

You don't need to really channel to reapply stacks (assuming they didnt run out)..

 

You can mess up for 3-6 seconds every Force Lightning rotation.

So ergo for you is a 50% mess up of abilitys, slighlty? For me that's not slightly, for me that's huge.

 

 

All of these are punitive detractions from the class being able to function at parity with the other tank classes. Superior shield chance doesn't make up for it and will never make up for it. Why?

 

Because on paper, a 50% shield chance with 40% absorp looks like it should average out to being an overall 20% damage reduction, and that's where assumptions like yours misunderstand how reality actually interacts with the math.

No it doesn't. It means that 50% of the incoming attacks (i assume f/t e/k for simplicity) are shielded and their damage is reduced by 40%.

 

 

You might shield against a piffling 1000 dmg attack and miss your shield chance on the alpha strike to follow, shielding 0% of the 30,000 damage rolling in. If the stars have aligned and everything's allowed you to have your stacks up, your passive DR will eat more of all the damage, all the time.

Which attack deals 30000 damage? Most of the bosses and pvp attacks are splitted into small parts. Normal tanks are attacked multiple times per second, the large number of incoming attacks simply eats up the rng.

 

 

 

If you had to move to dodge something or a key on your keyboard got stuck for a second and you missed your tiny window to refresh your stacks or you got interrupted by some add spamming knockback your way? You're barely better off than you were before these 'fixes'.

3-6 second window =tiny?

 

Skill will save you from nothing. The rotation isn't difficult; its brainlessly easy, if you can pull it off consistently in realtime application. Pulling it off as often as you need it will never be possible courtesy of how other mechanics work, however, and there is no room for error for any of that, let alone for the ever present undefinable factor of human fallibility.

So for juggernauts and powertechs there's no human fallibilityy then. (lie 9) They can't forget to recast their Force Screams?

 

Most sane developers of a class function will plan for a certain amount of wiggle room in such considerations so as to improve the overall experience of playing a given class.

Which they added with 2.5. Before 2.5 you would be correct, self heals didn't have a wiggle room. Nowadays tough with a 3-6 second wiggle room every Force Lightning Rotation.

 

Because it is NOT fun to have to work twice as hard to only maybe be at the same level as the other tanks in every relevant gameworld application there is. Though I'm sure it looks good on paper.

 

It was clearly designed on paper by someone that only understood what the paper was saying about anything at all.

Ok your fun =/= my fun.

 

 

And yet, guardian/jug tanks are generally more desirable than shadow/sin tanks just as much now as ever. Their players can focus more on avoiding boss mechanics and being less of a wildcard keeping the healers guessing for a big chunk of why. Vanguards/Powertechs? Did you seriously just declare shadows/sins to be 'soaring miles above' what they can do? The same vanguards and powertech tanks that can sustain agro while kiting god and errbody around like a loltrain? The same vanguards and powertechs that have just as good AoE damage agro made better still because of their generally superior range?

Powertech tanks are by far the least played tank class in this game.

 

Shield/absorp are the RNG mitigations. They're great when they proc and they don't even factor when they don't. Shadows/sins are still RNG tanks, not skill tanks. We're a long way from skill being a dominantly relevant force in this equation, and if you think playing one is 'skill tanking', your idea of a skill requirement makes me wonder if you think shoelaces are the hardmode of footwear.

 

I would suggest you look at the line-ups of the best guilds in the world.

 

The rotation is tighter because the new mechanics punish you much more severely if you can't hit the timing. If you missed the timing on the self heals, your healing was only delayed by the time you missed. If you miss the timing on the buff, your damage mitigation is reduced by an extra three seconds, because you have to build the buff back up from nothing over the course of the channel. It's more punishing to lower skilled players, and if you can't keep the buff up consistently, the incoming damage hits you for higher spike damage (since you suddenly wind up taking significantly more per hit when the buff wears off), making you harder to heal.

 

The rotation is a lot less forgiving, and a lot more fixed in terms of what you can do. Half of my abilities are now completely pointless, because there is no point where I can use them anymore. I have to hit Project, Slow Time, Project, Telekinetic Throw, and maybe Force Breach if I can get lucky. I never have time to run my saber strikes anymore, I can't even keep Force Breach up consistently because it doesn't fit in with the rotation. I can't use Force Stun or Spinning Kick, because doing so takes time that I need to keep the buff up. I have four abilities that I can use, instead of the dozen or more that were part of my valid rotation before the patch.

 

Oh, and even then, if the first tick is resisted, I'll lose the buff anyway (or if it glitches and just doesn't apply even when damage does, which I have noted multiple times).

 

I will just repost my post already in this thread, which you haven't answered so far (and which simply refutes your Argument):

 

The conclusion is not true. A delay of 1 second excactly 15 seconds after you did start casting your previous Force Lightning will result in that 15% less value out of a 15 second Force Lightning (it's 15% less value and not 4/15 cause you build 1-4 stacks). You compare it to one excact Point in the Rotation, but you have to see the whole spectrum of possibilites.

 

For example a delay of 1 second excactly 14 seconds after you did start casting your previous Force Lightning result in 0% less value.

 

Basically the moment you lose 0,1 seconds in your global Rotation self heal gets less value. Without any energize procs you can cast a Force Lightning every 9 seconds, with typical energize procs you can reduce that by 2 gcd to 6 seconds (49% Chance) or by 1gcd (49% out of the 49%) to 7,5 seconds.

 

So if you count all that together... basically self heal gets already a 4,5 seconds delay while your Dark Protection still does have a 0 second delay.

Then comes the ramp-up-time and after that there comes the point were you get less and less self-heals/protection (which makes the ramp-up-time more and more unimportant) and the 5-6% additional damage reduction from the armor buffs with 2.5 are the only thing that matters.

Edited January 13, 2014 by THoK-Zeus

[lordbadtamaru]

All this change actually did was give you a buff that said you played optimally. If you delayed the heal before, you were not playing optimally due to threat generation created and healing received.

 

Like it or not, BEFORE we had to do the rotation every 12 seconds or even less to be playing optimally. If you don't like having a little tiny bar saying "YOUR NOT TKTHROWING ENOUGH TO BE PLAYING OPTIMALLY," fine.

 

This change was made because some tanks who would like to see shadows viable in higher tiers of content in PVE and PVP were sick of taking incredible spike damage. Heals react to damage, Damage Reduction proactively protects from damage. Its the difference between curing a disease and taking a vaccine beforehand so you don't get sick from it in the first place.

 

And its honestly far better in PVP imho. All that was hurt was 1v1 viability. If self heals were the end all be all of shadow tanking Watchman sentinels would be the king of pvp.

 

Shadows were crazy faceroll to level and do dailies with, now they are just like any other class, and frankly WHO THE **** cares about dailies? Sure! Fix the content that's actually hard to do at the MINOR expense of faceroll easy content!

[Uruare]

Lots of ignorable babble.

 

First off, you've conflated lying (deliberate attempt to mislead) with potentially being incorrect. Very different things, and you're the one that's incorrect on several points moreover.

 

Firstly, thus -- http://taugrim.com/2012/01/19/understanding-swtors-avoidance-and-mitigation-mechanics-for-tanks-in-pvp/

 

Secondly, thus -- http://projectmayhem.com.au/swtor/2012/01/27/attack-types-damage-types-avoidance-and-mitigation-in-swtor/

 

Nutshell synopsis, pulled from second link --

 

The Four Attack Types:

1.Melee

2.Ranged

3.Tech

4.Force

 

 

 

The Four Damage Types:

1.Kinetic

2.Energy

3.Internal

4.Elemental

 

 

 

Avoidable Attack Types:

1.Melee

2.Ranged

 

Note: Defence does not give avoidance for Tech and Force attacks.

 

-- Note also that Defense is marginalized by Accuracy rating. Accuracy over 100% directly reduces the efficacy of this stat.

 

Attack Types that can be Shielded

1.Melee

2.Ranged

 

Note: Tech and Force attacks cannot be shielded.

 

This is a big, big reduction of shield/absorp's value, because while something like 50% shield and 40% absorp defaults to '50% of the time, you take 40% less damage' as a general (and misleading) understanding, THE REALITY is that an awful lot of the damage TYPES that get thrown around in manymanymany fights... are tech or force attacks. Internal and Elemental damage from other sources, or even from unspecified sources that aren't specifically flagged to ignore all mitigations (looking at you huttball acid pool/other environmental-type sources), are NOW (but weren't some time ago, it was added into shield functionality some while back. I'll look when exactly up if I have to.) mitigated by shielding...but not (still) if they're Tech or Force typed in the first place.

 

 

 

Damage Types Mitigated by Armor:

1.Kinetic

2.Energy

 

Note: Internal and Elemental damage is not mitigated by armor.

 

So, with the above being true, here's the breakdown for why armor-based passive damage reduction is MUCH more important in general than it overtly seems.

 

Kinetic and Energy are the most common damage types. Force and Tech are the common sources of special attack forms (read: powerful attacks). Armor rating's granted passive defense is effective against Melee and Ranged deliveries of Force and Tech sourced Kinetic and Energy damage make Armor Rating (and consequently, anything that improves Damage Reduction) A LOT more valuable in general than any other mitigation form.

 

Why? Because it works against probably 80-90% of what you're going to be getting hit with in most every encounter, from world trash to ops boss attacks. Its also why debuffs that damage your armor rating are more deadly than they might, to some, seem.

 

Shield/Absorp are still valuable, but (and this is a big, hairy BUT), they don't work against Force and Tech sourced anything. Defense and Armor Rating's damage reduction do, but not shield/absorp.

 

Basically, that means that shield/absorp might as well not even exist for anything that's Melee-Force, Melee-Tech, Ranged-Force or Ranged-Tech. Completely skipped over, not even checked against; a zeroed out mechanic in those contexts.

 

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that...if all the tank class mechanics deal with that reasonably.

 

But wait, what's this you tell me? Shadow and Sin tanks have drastically lower passive Damage Reduction from both Armor and other sources than any other tank type? But surely you can just keep your stacks up now and be at DR parity, right?

 

Only if you can always channel pebbles/lightning when you need to, never need to do anything but sustain the rotation (and no, it hasn't changed much, but our absolute need to sustain it has), never get a stuck key, cold fingers, sleepy fingers or any amount of human error at all and so forth.

 

If all of that is always true, Shadow/Sin tanks come out a tiny bit better than other tanks for having a generally 15% higher shield chance while their shield buff's going.

 

The reality is that those things will not always be true, and whenever they're not true, shadow/sin tanks don't really have much middle ground to tread there. They're either able to maintain their stacks and have passive mitigation on par with other equally geared tanks, or they're not and they don't have anything of the sort.

 

The math doesn't care about anybody's stories; shadow/sin tanks are still broken. This latest round of 'fixes' didn't fix anything, because the combat algorithm still works exactly as it does, passive damage reduction is still king of the hill out of all forms of achievable damage mitigations and shadow/sin tanks cannot reliably sustain parity of passive damage reduction with other tanks to be realistically considered as equally viable.

 

You're deluding yourself and simply don't understand the math involved if you think they're equally viable. Do they work at all? Yes, of course they do, but they're still the special-needs variety of tank. They need some charitable understanding from your teammates, particularly the healers, that will need to pick up that much more slack whenever a Shadow or Assassin are tanking. Everyone else's job is made somewhat more difficult because NO MATTER HOW SKILLED YOU ARE, shield/absorp does not work at all, not even sometimes, against the deadliest and sometimes most common sources of damage in the game.

 

Shadow and Sin tanks rely predominantly on three things to tank; judicious and skillful use of the perfectly snazzy cooldowns (not my total lack of complaining about CD's? They're fine, leave them alone), knowledge of the fights in question for PvE and understanding of what opponents can and thus probably will do in most circumstances in PvP (which mechanics can neither grant a player nor make up for when such is lacking) and...just as importantly...

 

The ability to soak damage well enough to perform a tank role.

 

Shadows/Sins cannot soak damage as well as other tanks. This is not up for debate, unless someone would like to posit that Shadows and Sins get their own special combat algorithm that somehow factors their shield/absorp more valuably than it does for other tanks, 'cause if that is not the case (Spoiler: It is not the case), then the lower passive mitigation plus the unnecessary difficulty of sustaining equal passive mitigation via easily interrupted/thwarted means makes the Shadow and Assassin tank, at this time, flat-out inferior to other tank classes.

 

And that's the reality because of how those numbers that balance so prettily on the spreadsheets bear out when they start moving in realtime application. That's the reality because lag exists, because stuck keys exist, because human error exists, because X and Y and Z are all unnecessary factors that other tank classes do not have to worry about nearly so much to perform their basic function of tanking.

 

I would love to see Shadow and Assassin tanks be skill tanks. Truly, I would. I would love to see our abilities retooled and redesigned, this time around the same core principle as the other tanks (not reactive healing) so that there is no actual disparity in performance between any equally geared tank, but HOW they tank and how active they have to be and what utility they bring are wonderful vectors for variegation.

 

We could totally have that. But right now, all we have is a gimped tank class that has to work twice as hard to be as good as the other tanks maybe half the time. Maybe you like that; personally, I think its throwing good time after a bad idea, and nobody wanting to tank should, at this time, even look at shadow/sin tanking if they even halfway care about effectiveness and not being an unnecessary drag on their team.

Edited January 13, 2014 by Uruare

[alexzk]

A

 

Shadows were crazy faceroll to level and do dailies with, now they are just like any other class, and frankly WHO THE **** cares about dailies? Sure! Fix the content that's actually hard to do at the MINOR expense of faceroll easy content!

 

Lies, always been tank starting from level 11 at about 20 I figured out what is what in this game (1st char) and since than NO ONCE I had a group for anything except flashpoints (H2,H4,dailies etc).

 

Currently H4 55s are hard for shadows, actually, I still can't do it with full tank, with optimal rotation etc. I do by hybrids.

[KeyboardNinja]

Uruare, I find it slightly odd that you're accusing Thok and I of not understanding the math which underlies tank balance when we are the ones who are doing most of that math! Backing up though, since I see no value in arguing by authority.

 

Taugrim's information was mostly accurate in its day, but the game has been rebalanced since then. Specifically, shield now works against all kinetic/energy damage. In other words, a force/tech attack which does kinetic/energy damage is subject to shield unless it is a critical hit. Bosses cannot crit, so in PvE this is a non issue. If you look at the methodology we use to measure relative tank balance and mitigation potentials, you'll see that we account for the limited applicability of defense (and to a lesser extent, shield) in our calculations. It's all there in the open, you just have to read what we did.

 

Backing up even further, I assure you that we have in fact accounted for different damage and attack types when we have measured tank performance. We wouldn't be very good theory crafters if we ignored something so fundamental. We have exact damage ratios for every boss in the game, along with damage output and type broken down by ability. In short, I can tell you exactly how each tank will perform on any boss, together with a fairly decent projection of what their HP will look like over the course of the fight as they spike up and down with various attacks. I'm well aware of the RNG nature of both shield and defense; don't you think I would have accounted for such things mathematically before making strong statements about tank balance?

 

Shadows are fine. Really and truly fine. My healers are lolDPSing these days because it is so much easier to keep me up than it used to be, as the spikes are all but gone and the RNG factor to the mitigation is no longer a strong concern.

 

As for the rotation being a skill factor, I really don't know how exactly to describe this to you in a way doesn't sound incredibly elitist, so I'm just going to go ahead with it anyway and hope that you trust that I'm not trying to sound irretrievably arrogant. You describe the shadow rotation as one where the slightest movement or mechanics checking results in an inevitable loss of stacks. You talk about needing to get your full channel every time to rebuild your stacks. None of this lines up with the experience of best shadow tanks out there. I can give you a video of tanking Tyrans without losing my stacks even once, even while dropping infernos away from the melee platform and using resilience on every thundering blast for which it was up. I wouldn't consider that fight to be mechanically empty or devoid of movement. I can give you similar videos for Brontes (and I tank the adds with a swap at each arcing assault), though it is true that my stacks are non-existent in the final phase (to be fair, so are my cotank's Energy Blast stacks).

 

My point is simply this: if there is no skill in the rotation, then why is it that some shadow tanks can do it while you seem unable? Why is your experience so vastly different from ours? We are tanking the same bosses with the same constraints and likely very similar strategies, so what is going on? The only real difference here is skill. Now, I don't pretend to be an optimal shadow tank just yet. Tanking the dread masters, for example, I generally lose my stacks a fair bit in the first phase (though not any of the others). I still have things that I need to work on, as it sounds like you do as well.

 

In any case, Thok answered all of your earlier points, so I'm going to simply hat-tip to him and leave it at that. In conclusion to the above, give us a little credit for knowing what we are talking about, or if you disbelieve, do the research to verify that we are in fact wrong before you make accusations or reference outdated information. And if you're going to completely dismiss a skill element as being trivial and simultaneously unsustainable in the face of real mechanics, try to make sure that your experience actually reflects optimal play.

 

Oh, and regarding the other poster describing shield breaking with lots of little hits, I really have no words other than "that's not how random works". Even in a computer. I suggest you read up a bit on high entropy deterministic random bit generators. Also, consider the topic of "computable randomness". Just because a random number generator is based on deterministic principles does not mean it is feasible to predict its output in a vacuum, particularly not within a framework as noisy and minimally-sampled as a video game.

[alexzk]

...you're speaking about "bosses" all the time. They're so predictable, as If I spend 6 months being 50 I could tank FPs completely drunk out of my mind, when I remember nothing in the morning. But I tanked it right.

 

PVP is completely different story. Currently you're going to be "predicted boss". Now If I see full tank and he tries to channel, he gets low slash/resilence/stealth from me. I met like 20 times them yet at 55...and no once they won.

 

From other side, let's say you just started channeling on sork into bubble (he refreshed buble/got tanking relict procked which absorbs dmg, etc...) ->> absorbed = buf is not refreshed yet. Sork starts to channel Thundering blast. Are you going to wait with your channeling and eat blast or stop it and interrupt sork ? And it is just 1 situation which may happen.

 

You can't relay in pvp on skill which is channeled AND must be prepared before channeling. It could be acceptable in either case:

1. Immedial cast - no channel

2. No preparations - "harnessed" is always active.

 

Before all those patches heal from TT was "a maybe", now it is "a must". That's the trick.

 

P.S. ...oh yes...all those new relics which absorb dmg = no refresh Do Bosses use it?

Edited January 13, 2014 by alexzk

[Prototypemind]

...you're speaking about "bosses" all the time. They're so predictable, as If I spend 6 months being 50 I could tank FPs completely drunk out of my mind, when I remember nothing in the morning. But I tanked it right.

 

PVP is completely different story. Currently you're going to be "predicted boss". Now If I see full tank and he tries to channel, he gets low slash/resilence/stealth from me. I met like 20 times them yet at 55...and no once they won.

 

From other side, let's say you just started channeling on sork into bubble (he refreshed buble/got tanking relict procked which absorbs dmg, etc...) ->> absorbed = buf is not refreshed yet. Sork starts to channel Thundering blast. Are you going to wait with your channeling and eat blast or stop it and interrupt sork ? And it is just 1 situation which may happen.

 

You can't relay in pvp on skill which is channeled AND must be prepared before channeling. It could be acceptable in either case:

1. Immedial cast - no channel

2. No preparations - "harnessed" is always active.

 

Before all those patches heal from TT was "a maybe", now it is "a must". That's the trick.

 

P.S. ...oh yes...all those new relics which absorb dmg = no refresh Do Bosses use it?

Again, this has already been addressed. Before you needed the full channel for the heals to be viable in any way. Now you can get off a partial channel and still get the benefit of the increased DR. Sin tanks are more than viable in PvP.

[alexzk]

Again, this has already been addressed. Before you needed the full channel for the heals to be viable in any way. Now you can get off a partial channel and still get the benefit of the increased DR. Sin tanks are more than viable in PvP.

 

You forgot heals about each 8s guaranteed from Combat Technique which are cut off as well. And which could trigger heal relict. Well, now you're forced to use absorb relict (reactive shield) which is covering that heal in long term mostly. However, it has 40s cd, so if just killed enemy got lucky and respawned immediately, he runs back while you have like 20-30s on relic of CD yet(operative can return less than 10s). Especially that can be seen getting enemy point on NC, 2nd fight is always lost to the same respawned enemy, bcs of CDs.

 

So basically this relict helps for fast fights with like 1 minute between. Not all WZs' maps are good with that. Heal we had was smooth over time and fine for all wzs.

Edited January 13, 2014 by alexzk

[SkybladeDarkstar]

The conclusion is not true. A delay of 1 second excactly 15 seconds after you did start casting your previous Force Lightning will result in that 15% less value out of a 15 second Force Lightning (it's 15% less value and not 4/15 cause you build 1-4 stacks). You compare it to one excact Point in the Rotation, but you have to see the whole spectrum of possibilites.

 

For example a delay of 1 second excactly 14 seconds after you did start casting your previous Force Lightning result in 0% less value.

 

I do not understand the logic in this at all.

 

The buff lasts 12 seconds. If you cast Force Lightning within that time period, you receive the full value of the buff. Anything less than this, and the value drops off. The longer you wait, the less value you get from it. Waiting an extra second after 14 seconds does result in less value, because that's another second without the buff, just as it meant an extra second without the self heals. I'm not seeing any point to arguing about a time period so far outside the time window.

 

Although, actually, it's worth pointing out that the self heals still had more forgiveness built in than the buff did, since you didn't lose any value from delaying the self heals if you had more health than it heals, while any period of time without the buff is time when you're taking extra damage.

 

Basically the moment you lose 0,1 seconds in your global Rotation self heal gets less value. Without any energize procs you can cast a Force Lightning every 9 seconds, with typical energize procs you can reduce that by 2 gcd to 6 seconds (49% Chance) or by 1gcd (49% out of the 49%) to 7,5 seconds.

 

The "every nine seconds" is false. Even doing it on a training dummy, which is the absolute most ideal, least disruptive situation I can get, I'm only hitting it every ten seconds, tops. Add in a single knockback, stun or interrupt, and I will be delayed long enough to lose the buff. Or, for that matter, a single GCD from a different ability being used, which is why the rotation is so much tighter. When a spare ability being used means that the GCD can cancel your buff, you essentially can't afford to use any ability not directly tied to the rotation. I've gotten to where I don't even use Double Strike anymore because if I don't time it perfectly, the GCD will delay Project enough that I can't get Telekinetic Throw off and keep up the buff.

 

So if you count all that together... basically self heal gets already a 4,5 seconds delay while your Dark Protection still does have a 0 second delay.

 

There is no "delay" with the self heals. There is a period during which you are healing. But during that time, you start healing immediately, and you always heal for exactly the same amount, no matter when the heals are implemented. It's part of the fairly fundamental differences to how the heal works versus the buff. They aren't the same mechanic, and doing direct comparisons isn't going to work out.

 

The buff suffers from reduced value when it is delayed. The heals are not. When you start healing, you heal for exactly the same amount, no matter when you activate it. With the buff, you lose the effect of the buff if it is delayed past the duration (which, with a less than two second "grace period" is extremely likely to happen), and have to reapply it. The MECHANICS OF THE BUFF ITSELF CHANGES DEPENDING ON WHEN YOU CAST IT, AND THIS WAS NEVER TRUE OF THE SELF HEAL. Refute that, please.

 

And, frankly, I'm not begging for the self-heals to come back, I'm just asking them to be replaced by a mechanic that doesn't cripple our class. I would like the self-heals back, since they were fun, unique, interesting, and had no reason to be changed unless you were in a position as one of the top-tier tanks (about whom I don't care, since I am not among their number). But largely, I just want an ability in its place that will provide us with reasonable comparable mechanics, without completely butchering our viability and play style. And the buffs do both.

 

Then comes the ramp-up-time and after that there comes the point were you get less and less self-heals/protection (which makes the ramp-up-time more and more unimportant) and the 5-6% additional damage reduction from the armor buffs with 2.5 are the only thing that matters.

 

This statement makes no sense to me whatsoever, so I'd appreciate your explaining it in a bit more detail and clarity.