Endurance v. Willpower (Shadow Tanking)

[isast]

Arb, you've done some decent work here, but I think a lot of it is focused on the wrong things.

I know where you're coming from, you REALLY want tanks to have to put ALL of their stat allotments into "tank" stats. I get that.

Unfortunately, repeatedly making comments like "it is the DPS's job to make enrage timers and no one else's" doesn't help you in your arguments.

I could make a very similarly erroneous statement like "it's the healers job to keep the tank alive" so why does the tank have mitigation stats or self-heals? It's not his job to keep himself alive, right?

The fact is, the only job that matters is getting the bosses down. If your healers have poor reaction times, you may need to "stack" a little more end. If your DPS aren't pulling the greatest numbers, you may need to "stack" a little more will. It's your raid group, do what makes it more successful.

The fact still remains that neither camp is stacking (nor is it possible) to the point where they have a very low health pool, or a very low wp. The math i've seen on actual damage increases / health pool increases from the "adjustments" of end to will or vice versa is always extremely small. No one is arguing that you shouldn't take defense/shield/absorb over willpower. No one. In the few places that you have the strict option of wp/end, in the end it is not even close enough to make or break you.

[Arbegla]

Arb, you've done some decent work here, but I think a lot of it is focused on the wrong things.

I know where you're coming from, you REALLY want tanks to have to put ALL of their stat allotments into "tank" stats. I get that.

Unfortunately, repeatedly making comments like "it is the DPS's job to make enrage timers and no one else's" doesn't help you in your arguments.

I could make a very similarly erroneous statement like "it's the healers job to keep the tank alive" so why does the tank have mitigation stats or self-heals? It's not his job to keep himself alive, right?

The fact is, the only job that matters is getting the bosses down. If your healers have poor reaction times, you may need to "stack" a little more end. If your DPS aren't pulling the greatest numbers, you may need to "stack" a little more will. It's your raid group, do what makes it more successful.

The fact still remains that neither camp is stacking (nor is it possible) to the point where they have a very low health pool, or a very low wp. The math i've seen on actual damage increases / health pool increases from the "adjustments" of end to will or vice versa is always extremely small. No one is arguing that you shouldn't take defense/shield/absorb over willpower. No one. In the few places that you have the strict option of wp/end, in the end it is not even close enough to make or break you.

 

The gains either way for willpower or endurance basically boil down to what do you want to increase, survival or DPS, and then once you figure out which you want to improve, as long as you understand that it isn't much of an improvement either way, then its all player choice.

 

That is what I'm mainly getting at. Its player choice.

 

In most 'role' based games, its the tanks job to keep the healer alive (by holding threat, and being able to take a hit), its the healer job to keep the tank alive (by healing up damage that wouldn't be mitigated by the tank) and its the DPS job to kill the boss (by controlling their own threat, while also pushing themselves to meet enrage timers)

 

So basically, the tank needs as much mitigation as possible in order to allow the healer plenty of time to react, the healer needs to understand their rotations and resource management enough so they don't go OOM or waste time on abilities that do nothing, and the DPS are expected to pull the heavy lifting on any damage done.

 

Forcing a tank to try to pick up the slack of the DPS not just hurts the overall group dynamic by encouraging lazy DPSers (if the tank can do it, why do I need to push myself?) it is also encouraging the tank to have a dual role. Which while the tank is already doing some damage, to hold threat, letting them do more isn't entirely a bad thing, as long as your DPS is doing everything in their power to overcome the tank.

 

When I used to play WoW, I played a fire mage. And on the raids I did, I made it a game to see just how far I could push my threat before the tank had to pull it off me. We had a tank that thought DPS gear, and stats were the best way to hold threat, and every single fight I proved him otherwise by requiring him to use taunt, and by pushing myself as far as I could, and he had a higher gear score then I did. As a DPS, I was unable to do my job correctly, which was to push myself to the limit of my gear and skill to beat enrage timers, because the tank thought his way was best, and our raid leader was naive enough to believe him. Thus after every encounter, regardless if we won or not, I got scolded for 'pulling threat' even though I was doing my job correctly, and the tank wasn't.

 

I don't want a similar situation to happen here, where DPS is being told to 'scale back' because the tank stacked willpower over anything else, but doesn't know his rotation well enough to put any of that willpower to good use. Thus he is still unable to hold threat, and the healer is in a panic trying to cover up not just the tanks inability to hold the bosses attention, but also trying to keep the tank alive when he does have the attention of the boss, as the player in question really has no idea what to do, and just read on the forums that stacking willpower would fix any and all threat issues he's having.

 

Stacking DPS stats for the sake of just stacking DPS stats is not a viable way to do things. On the flip side, stacking more hit points, just for the sake of stacking more hit points is also not a viable way to do things. But, if you understand exactly what kind of benefits your getting, and what you're giving up for them, then you can stack whatever you want.

 

Figuring out your rotations, and what powers to use when, and how BEST to improve those powers to meet your overall goal (tanks need to hold threat and take a hit, healers need to keep up with incoming damage, and DPS need to beat enrage timers) is always better then mindlessly stacking stats because it looks good on paper.

 

I've broken down endurance benefits every which way I could, and while we do have some understanding of what willpower will provide, its basically incomplete information. Until we know for sure exactly what kind of a benefit both stats provide, its all up to the player and how they want to stack the different stats.

[Ahrounmoon]

What suspicions if i may ask?

 

Tank threat is weak. An accepted way to hold it at high end is seemingly to use taunt spam, at which point the actual tank output is meaningless aside from their diminished DPS contribution.

 

From that, I can make my own observations that I dislike this style of gameplay. Taunts are really very useful for picking up mobs when things go wrong so saving them is somewhat instinctual. In theory it could also screw with boss mechanics where tanks are forced to pass the boss back and forth, but in reality if the tanks both know what they're doing it should just be double the threat for both. I don't even know if that kind of fight exists in SWTOR yet, but eventually it probably will if they want to keep developing a PvE game with any level of complexity.

 

Finally, I can also observe that gearing in this game is little different from WoW, which I'm most familiar with. You don't hit end game and then suddenly have all the gear handed to you (typically, anyway). You have to gear up as you move through the content and once you're done with that, then the next difficulty level will have harder challenges and better gear. So gearing is a dynamic process and you'll never really sit in the best-in-slot gear when facing a new boss. What a lot of people on WoW considered to be level appropriate, I considered to be overgeared. Which means I will probably be best served by sticking with a heavier Endurance build.

[Arbegla]

Tank threat is weak. An accepted way to hold it at high end is seemingly to use taunt spam, at which point the actual tank output is meaningless aside from their diminished DPS contribution.

 

From that, I can make my own observations that I dislike this style of gameplay. Taunts are really very useful for picking up mobs when things go wrong so saving them is somewhat instinctual. In theory it could also screw with boss mechanics where tanks are forced to pass the boss back and forth, but in reality if the tanks both know what they're doing it should just be double the threat for both. I don't even know if that kind of fight exists in SWTOR yet, but eventually it probably will if they want to keep developing a PvE game with any level of complexity.

 

With a built in 1.5x multiplier on tank stances, and multiple attacks that build even more threat (project, force pull, slow time) I'm not sure that Taunt spam will be the most effective way. Granted, until we have a threat monitoring system, or even a DPS monitoring system it might be hard to prove.

Finally, I can also observe that gearing in this game is little different from WoW, which I'm most familiar with. You don't hit end game and then suddenly have all the gear handed to you (typically, anyway). You have to gear up as you move through the content and once you're done with that, then the next difficulty level will have harder challenges and better gear. So gearing is a dynamic process and you'll never really sit in the best-in-slot gear when facing a new boss. What a lot of people on WoW considered to be level appropriate, I considered to be overgeared. Which means I will probably be best served by sticking with a heavier Endurance build.

 

This I will agree with you. Gear seems MUCH harder to obtain then in WoW (crafted gear for example, is extremely useless at higher levels, and its the easiest to obtain) so you're almost always under geared for the encounter, just because you need to run the encounter to get the gear to make you better at it. Wanna try hard more? You get to run it with daily gear, wanna try nightmare? You get to run it with hard mode gear (if your lucky enough to get the drops)

 

WoW allowed you to build up emblems and merits and such off basic gear (dungeons and such) that allowed you to almost jump straight into the highest tier of raiding. SWTOR isn't to that point, and I really hope they never get to that point.

[isast]

/Snip. rant about WoW fire mage "doing his job pulliing threat"

 

Once upon a time, it wasn't impossible to pull threat off of a decent tank in WoW. I was wincing while reading about you saying you were doing your job correctly by trying to pull threat off the tank. That's the epitome of doing it wrong : /

Furthermore, to try to blame the tank's lack of threat on dps-gear-stacking is astoundingly silly. Later you say he didn't have his rotations down. I will buy that, but you should really not even bring up him stacking dps gear and that not cutting it in an argument that I assumed up until that point was pro-hp stacking.

I am glad, though, that we are finally on the same page as far as what you stack being preference, and it not really effecting anything at all because of how little the numerical difference is. Proud of you You just should have stopped after that first paragraph haha.

[Arbegla]

Once upon a time, it wasn't impossible to pull threat off of a decent tank in WoW. I was wincing while reading about you saying you were doing your job correctly by trying to pull threat off the tank. That's the epitome of doing it wrong : /

Furthermore, to try to blame the tank's lack of threat on dps-gear-stacking is astoundingly silly. Later you say he didn't have his rotations down. I will buy that, but you should really not even bring up him stacking dps gear and that not cutting it in an argument that I assumed up until that point was pro-hp stacking.

I am glad, though, that we are finally on the same page as far as what you stack being preference, and it not really effecting anything at all because of how little the numerical difference is. Proud of you You just should have stopped after that first paragraph haha.

 

Eh, that experience (in BC, which then pushed into lich king) left a VERY bad taste in my mouth about tanks and stacking DPS stats.

 

Yea, it was basically his lack of Rotation, but he defended it by saying 'After I become uncritable, I stacked DPS stats, so my DPS and thus threat should be higher regardless.'

 

And while it came across as me basically 'DPSing until I pulled threat' it was literally 'I pulled threat by wanding' because the tank had absolutely no idea what he was doing, and used his DPS gear as a means to try to say he knew what was going on.

 

Anyways, at the end of the day, the differences aren't enough of a big deal to make or break any raid encounter, so its entirely up to the player. The 10hp/second boost is a pretty accurate measurement, but the 70DPS increase just plain isn't due to the way it was figured out, so pick whichever you want to benefit.

Edited January 26, 2012 by Arbegla

[oddmyth]

Tank threat is weak. An accepted way to hold it at high end is seemingly to use taunt spam, at which point the actual tank output is meaningless aside from their diminished DPS contribution.

 

False assumption, tank threat for Shadows is not weak in the least. Not if you understand how to use your force and you play with an organized group.

 

Tank threat in SWTOR is not the sticky glue that it is in WoW. It is however quite substantial and quite easy to maintain. Taunt spam is unnecessary, even in a END stacking build and the only time taunts are used are when the bosses detaunt you and you must regain threat, usually after a knockback or other related mechanism (Jarg & Sorno getting carbonized, Annihilator knockback etc. etc.)

 

From that, I can make my own observations that I dislike this style of gameplay. Taunts are really very useful for picking up mobs when things go wrong so saving them is somewhat instinctual. In theory it could also screw with boss mechanics where tanks are forced to pass the boss back and forth, but in reality if the tanks both know what they're doing it should just be double the threat for both. I don't even know if that kind of fight exists in SWTOR yet, but eventually it probably will if they want to keep developing a PvE game with any level of complexity.

 

See above, irrelevant, and yes you can tank swap we do this on a few fights.

 

Finally, I can also observe that gearing in this game is little different from WoW, which I'm most familiar with. You don't hit end game and then suddenly have all the gear handed to you (typically, anyway). You have to gear up as you move through the content and once you're done with that, then the next difficulty level will have harder challenges and better gear. So gearing is a dynamic process and you'll never really sit in the best-in-slot gear when facing a new boss. What a lot of people on WoW considered to be level appropriate, I considered to be overgeared. Which means I will probably be best served by sticking with a heavier Endurance build.

 

Doesn't happen in WoW either. The issue is that WoW has been around for several generations of gamer and has 3-4 tiers of end game for any single expansion. As players burn out from the top end of the game (which happens quite quickly because really once you have the best gear there isn't much else to do) you don't have the ability to replace them with somewhat decently geared players quick enough to continue to gear on the content you are running. Thus they instituted commendations to buy lower tier gear.

 

The same system exists here, you can use HM FP commendations to buy Tionese gear and then run Ops to get Columi and HM Ops for Rakata. Its exactly the same system as WoW with the exception of crafting and dailies in which you can get the current top tier gear, they don't do this in WoW. In WoW you are given the ability to get the last tier of gear, not the current tier through commendations. So if you are facing current content then you will never be overgeared, however you will be overgeared for past content, which is what they want. They want you to see the content, whether you faceroll through it or actually compete in it, they still want you to see it. That's the point of that system, and its the point of the system in SWTOR as well. Normal mode Ops are faceroll and any PUG with half a brain can steamroll most of the fights. BW wants you to at least see the content, even if you aren't coordinated enough to beat it at the highest level. This was a pretty early lesson learned in MMO history.

[TrevNYC]

The gains either way for willpower or endurance basically boil down to what do you want to increase, survival or DPS, and then once you figure out which you want to improve, as long as you understand that it isn't much of an improvement either way, then its all player choice.

 

This is where the two camps keep arguing past each other though. The opposing camp isn't even saying that it's a choice between dps/threat or survival. They are saying that it's a choice between dps/threat or nothing, because we are talking about the point where adding health doesn't actually increase survival anymore.

 

That's the disconnect. If you're actually choosing between dps and survival, even Kitru would say to choose survival. The argument, which repeatedly gets misstated, is that you go way past the threshold where adding more health doesn't appreciably increase survival really early in this game, so that you don't need to go out of your way to stack it. Because you've passed that mark, willpower is preferable not because it is somehow better than endurance, or that the margin is large, but because it's the only stat that does anything at all at that point.

 

It's more of an argument about tuning than anything else. Kitru's hypothesis is that the game is "tuned" to be handled easily even in "resolve" gear, and that the point of "force wielder" gear isn't to be what tanks exclusively use, (I'm lumping variants into these two camps for simplicity) but rather to help give some options when some items may be lagging behind others.

 

Put simply, no one's trying to counter the idea that endurance is generally better for a tank. They are only trying to counter the "conventional" wisdom that endurance is always better for a tank, such that you always go for more of it. The "you can never have too much health" mantra is simply incorrect, or so the argument goes.

 

It's pretty easy to see at extremes of course. Your chances of surviving at level 50 against a level 20 'boss' will be 100% if you have a healer (they probably are 100% if you don't, but that's another story). Adding more endurance to this tank does nothing at all to survival. You aren't going to get killed by it, unless everyone goes afk for an extended period of time.

 

The point, then, is that still happens somewhere even when you aren't at the extremes. While it may be difficult to tell where that is, it still happens. Again, Kitru's approach has been to go out and actually tank stuff wearing the 'willpower' gear, and the results have been that whatever that point actually is, it's well below what you get wearing willpower-slanted gear -- the caveat is of course that it's still tank gear and not dps gear and that you're in the right tier for what you are doing.

 

When I used to play WoW, I played a fire mage. And on the raids I did, I made it a game to see just how far I could push my threat before the tank had to pull it off me. We had a tank that thought DPS gear, and stats were the best way to hold threat, and every single fight I proved him otherwise by requiring him to use taunt, and by pushing myself as far as I could, and he had a higher gear score then I did. As a DPS, I was unable to do my job correctly, which was to push myself to the limit of my gear and skill to beat enrage timers, because the tank thought his way was best, and our raid leader was naive enough to believe him. Thus after every encounter, regardless if we won or not, I got scolded for 'pulling threat' even though I was doing my job correctly, and the tank wasn't.

 

It seems as though you played WoW a long time ago, then. I'll get to that in a second, but first I'll point out that I'm completely unclear on how you proved the tank wrong about dps gear being relevant to threat. You just proved that he couldn't generate enough threat to hold aggro from you. If the tank had stacked health even more, then he would have had an even harder time keeping you from pulling threat. You'd only prove his approach wrong if he somehow died more than was necessary, which you didn't mention was the case.

 

WoW of course is different for a lot of reasons. Most dps classes had ways to actively lower threat, which they were expected to use back when threat mattered (that's foreshadowing). The reason your raid leader isn't as naive as you claim, is that not every boss was tauntable in WoW. It's literally impossible for the tank to do anything about fire mages who don't believe it's their job to manage threat in those cases. Moreover, taunts have cooldowns (and they even could miss, which tanks hated because they wouldn't stack hit), which meant that even if the tank taunted off of you, some other dps who was going all out could take it right back shortly after.

 

I could go on, but the bottom line is that you weren't actually doing your job correctly if you weren't managing your threat. Again, in a system where threat is supposed to matter, then that means the tank has to be concerned with generating enough of it, and the dps have to be concerned with not generating too much of it. The alternative is to opt out of the system and make threat a non-issue.

 

Interestingly enough, WoW essentially gave up the fight and did exactly that. They realized that it was too difficult to get tanks to care about threat stats, but as long as they didn't, then dps classes would cause threat problems because they would stack dps stats to their heart's content and totally outscale the tank's threat, even with large threat modifiers. WoW solved the problem by turning health into a threat stat -- every tank had an ability that gave them attack power based on how much damage they took, up to a certain percentage of health. This allowed tanks to increase their threat generation by increasing their health pools, which they all liked to do. WoW also uses a much larger threat modifier for tanks -- 200%, compared to 50% here in SWTOR.

 

SWTOR didn't copy that from WoW, so here and now threat still matters. Expecting the tank to rely on taunt spam has the same drawbacks. Mind Control has a CD, and there's more than one DPS to worry about, so somewhere between 7-14 seconds there's a window for someone else to gank aggro without the tank being able to get it back.

 

If tanks go out of their way not to increase threat, even after they have more than enough health to comfortably tank the content, then they are just capping the raid's dps for no good reason. If you do 1000 dps, then everyone else can do 1500. If you do 1100 dps, everyone else can do 1650 (yes, I know there are other modifiers).

Edited January 26, 2012 by TrevNYC

[Bilirubin]

Fair enough, just trying to give people an idea of what to expect for end game raiding.

 

I know personally that we output a TON of DPS. So I just wan't people to have a more specific idea of what to look for.

 

Not everyone is going to want to read the wall of texts in this thread and a lot of them are just useless theory. Just making sure people have some hard info.

 

Thanks, I appreciate this point.

[Ahrounmoon]

WoW also uses a much larger threat modifier for tanks -- 200%, compared to 50% here in SWTOR.

 

I hate getting too far off topic, but they actually found that the 200% modifier wasn't great enough and increased it to 500% as part of the last major patch. I think the main reason for it was the emerging gear disparity between starting tanks and raid geared DPS.

 

It's actually not just possible, but common now for tanks in WoW to hit a hard cap on threat during long fights. I think it's because of the type of variable used to store the data and the number is around 20 million. Once you hit that point literally the only way to pull something off someone is to taunt it. Attacks will add 0 threat beyond the cap and new taunts will actually decrease the other tank's threat rather than increasing your own because it's the only way to facilitate an aggro transfer. I'm not sure if it's really relevant on the current tier because the only 10-15 minute fight is the very end boss which has many many adds and chances to reset threat.

 

So yeah, by comparison... 50% bonus threat, even with a few moves getting a 15% additional modifier, is very weak.

[TrevNYC]

I hate getting too far off topic, but they actually found that the 200% modifier wasn't great enough and increased it to 500% as part of the last major patch. I think the main reason for it was the emerging gear disparity between starting tanks and raid geared DPS.

 

[snip]

 

So yeah, by comparison... 50% bonus threat, even with a few moves getting a 15% additional modifier, is very weak.

 

Yeah, I forgot that they boosted it even more in WoW. It reinforces my point. If the model is one where people aren't supposed to be concerned about threat, yet the threat mechanic exists, you see HUGE threat modifiers, so that tank dps is irrelevant.

 

On the other hand, where the modifiers are more modest, yet there still exists a threat system, that suggests that tank dps actually matters, as it serves as a dps bottleneck. SWTOR tanks also seem more "dps-y" in that they have talents that do nothing but boost damage abilities and they seem to rely on more damage skills than some tanks might be used to in other games. People think "tank dps doesn't matter" because in other games, it was a non-factor by design.

 

That's less so here, because for example, in non raid content you don't have the luxury of having as many dedicated dps. In WoW, the standard setup is 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps -- with healer dps taking a smaller role (compared to swtor) and ditto with the tank (although those roles have seen dps increases somewhat recently). Here, we have only 2 dedicated dps, and both the tank and healer have a host of dps abilities that they might be called upon to use. That suggests that the design is for everyone's dps to "matter" more.

 

Note that this crosses over into other areas too. DPS and healing specs get defensive cooldowns, and everyone gets access to short-CD medpacks, which suggests that the "job" of keeping alive doesn't fall solely on the healer, either. It seems that they are trying to innovate at least a little bit (although not so far as to eliminate dedicated roles like some games aspire to do) by blurring traditional lines and making people more responsible for things outside of their comfort zone.

[Arbegla]

This is where the two camps keep arguing past each other though. The opposing camp isn't even saying that it's a choice between dps/threat or survival. They are saying that it's a choice between dps/threat or nothing, because we are talking about the point where adding health doesn't actually increase survival anymore.

 

And here we go again. I've proved (as have others) that endurance DOES add something past the point where your healers can keep you alive. Yes, its not very much, its explained in great detail exactly what endurance will give you.

 

Kitru flat out refused to break willpower down the same way i broke down endurance, and wanted to use his numbers (which 1) doesn't even follow the proper tank rotation and 2) are padded by PA and HS, which affect base damage as well) and then say 'Yeah, its DPS vs nothing, because my numbers show that endurance will give you next to nothing, when you compare them together.

 

Except that just simply isn't true. The benefits either way are extremely minor, and because Kitru never PUGs, and runs with the same group of people time and time again, he has no real experience to back up his claim that stacking willpower will matter. In his, very limited, situation it seems like its working, but there are still far too many variables to work over.

That's the disconnect. If you're actually choosing between dps and survival, even Kitru would say to choose survival. The argument, which repeatedly gets misstated, is that you go way past the threshold where adding more health doesn't appreciably increase survival really early in this game, so that you don't need to go out of your way to stack it. Because you've passed that mark, willpower is preferable not because it is somehow better than endurance, or that the margin is large, but because it's the only stat that does anything at all at that point.

 

But no where at all does Kitru say where that point is, or even how to figure it out on paper. He's just saying 'Yea, take out all your endurance mods, swap them in for willpower mods, and try to tank stuff. If you win, then the willpower mods is the reason, if you lose, then you need more endurance.'

 

This serious issue with that, is there are SO many other variables then just adding more DPS to a tank that could result in a win or a lose. If your DPS is using the incorrect rotation, or your using the incorrect rotation, then that would have a MUCH greater affect on the overall fight, then ~200 willpower would.

It's more of an argument about tuning than anything else. Kitru's hypothesis is that the game is "tuned" to be handled easily even in "resolve" gear, and that the point of "force wielder" gear isn't to be what tanks exclusively use, (I'm lumping variants into these two camps for simplicity) but rather to help give some options when some items may be lagging behind others.

 

Put simply, no one's trying to counter the idea that endurance is generally better for a tank. They are only trying to counter the "conventional" wisdom that endurance is always better for a tank, such that you always go for more of it. The "you can never have too much health" mantra is simply incorrect, or so the argument goes.

 

Hard mode flashpoints, and even hard mode operations are tuned that way, as a means to basically allow ANYONE to see the content. But as it has already been brought up, Nightmare operations simply don't work that way. The highest tier of raiding is too difficult to be able to easily assume Willpower will fix all your issues (be them threat, or enrage timers) and the additional hit points (and mitigation) from self healing will benefit you far more. Especially when your healers are disabled.

It's pretty easy to see at extremes of course. Your chances of surviving at level 50 against a level 20 'boss' will be 100% if you have a healer (they probably are 100% if you don't, but that's another story). Adding more endurance to this tank does nothing at all to survival. You aren't going to get killed by it, unless everyone goes afk for an extended period of time.

 

The point, then, is that still happens somewhere even when you aren't at the extremes. While it may be difficult to tell where that is, it still happens. Again, Kitru's approach has been to go out and actually tank stuff wearing the 'willpower' gear, and the results have been that whatever that point actually is, it's well below what you get wearing willpower-slanted gear -- the caveat is of course that it's still tank gear and not dps gear and that you're in the right tier for what you are doing.

 

Using your extreme example, of a level 20 mob attacking a level 50 mob, and having more endurance and thus needing less mitigation, let me explain how wrong that example actually is.

 

A NAKED sage would be able to tank a level 20 mob at level 50, because of the simple fact that the mob is 30 levels lower, and once you get to a certain point (i think its 5 levels difference) mobs just stop being able to hit you at all.

 

Again, Kitru isn't saying where that point actually is, just that he hasn't hit it yet, in his limited circle of friends. He's numbers, and opinion is extremely biased due to the fact that he simply doesn't PUG. He doesn't group with anyone but his guild, and doesn't ever have to deal with the uncertainty of knowing if his healer can keep him alive. And he is crediting his success to his slotting of willpower, without considering the MANY different variables that are present in every single fight he does.

 

It seems as though you played WoW a long time ago, then. I'll get to that in a second, but first I'll point out that I'm completely unclear on how you proved the tank wrong about dps gear being relevant to threat. You just proved that he couldn't generate enough threat to hold aggro from you. If the tank had stacked health even more, then he would have had an even harder time keeping you from pulling threat. You'd only prove his approach wrong if he somehow died more than was necessary, which you didn't mention was the case.

 

I was using my WoW experience as a means to better explain why i feel DPS gear (and thus willpower) have no place on a tank, or at least no place where they need to be stacked up over survival gear (like endurance) The tank was squishy, the healer had a very hard time keeping the tank alive, and there were many times where the 'off-tank' had to take over on a simple tank and spank fight, because the main tank just dropped like a rock.

WoW of course is different for a lot of reasons. Most dps classes had ways to actively lower threat, which they were expected to use back when threat mattered (that's foreshadowing). The reason your raid leader isn't as naive as you claim, is that not every boss was tauntable in WoW. It's literally impossible for the tank to do anything about fire mages who don't believe it's their job to manage threat in those cases. Moreover, taunts have cooldowns (and they even could miss, which tanks hated because they wouldn't stack hit), which meant that even if the tank taunted off of you, some other dps who was going all out could take it right back shortly after.

 

I could go on, but the bottom line is that you weren't actually doing your job correctly if you weren't managing your threat. Again, in a system where threat is supposed to matter, then that means the tank has to be concerned with generating enough of it, and the dps have to be concerned with not generating too much of it. The alternative is to opt out of the system and make threat a non-issue.

 

I used Mirror image (masked my threat for 30 seconds) then invis (resets my threat to 0) and even Ice block (allows the tank time to taunt back the boss, and sets my DPS at 0, allowing him time to build threat) Multiple times throughout the encounter. The bottom line was this tank read in a guide that once you hit a certain mitigation point (being uncritable) that you stack as much DPS gear as possible, and that will allow you to hold threat on anything. The rest of the guide also said to make sure you follow your correct rotation, but the tank never did that. He just saw how to gear up, and expected to be able to just mash buttons and be able to hold threat.

 

That is what i don't want to happen here. That people will come along, see that willpower > endurance, without knowing why, and just assume that willpower will fix all of their issues no matter how bad they are (be it threat, or enrage timers) and stop short of reading the clause that says 'As long as you follow this rotation.' Especially when the math supporting willpower doesn't even follow the rotation is needs to.

 

The math doesn't support the rotation, yet that math shows willpower > endurance and thus entry level tanks will read it as 'Stack willpower and Just make sure your using X power Y% of the time, and you'll be golden' without understanding what that means.

SWTOR didn't copy that from WoW, so here and now threat still matters. Expecting the tank to rely on taunt spam has the same drawbacks. Mind Control has a CD, and there's more than one DPS to worry about, so somewhere between 7-14 seconds there's a window for someone else to gank aggro without the tank being able to get it back.

 

If tanks go out of their way not to increase threat, even after they have more than enough health to comfortably tank the content, then they are just capping the raid's dps for no good reason. If you do 1000 dps, then everyone else can do 1500. If you do 1100 dps, everyone else can do 1650 (yes, I know there are other modifiers).

 

Kitru has already explained, time and time again, that threat is a non-issue for Shadow tanks. Even without taunt spam, threat just isn't a factor. So the only benefit to boosting willpower is a straight DPS increase (as the added threat wouldn't matter anyways). Now this could just be because in the circle that Kitru plays in, threat isn't an issue for HIM, and he feels that somehow adding 200 willpower is enough of a DPS boost to make or break boss encounters.

 

The base modifiers are 50%, but a shadow tank uses at least 2 powers with higher threat modifiers (slow time has an extra 50% threat boost, and Project has 15% extra threat boost) so the overall threat modifier of a shadow tank is MUCH higher then just 50%. Especially when you consider that Project is being used ONLY with PA, so its going to crit for at least 150% damage every time it is used.

[Arbegla]

That's less so here, because for example, in non raid content you don't have the luxury of having as many dedicated dps. In WoW, the standard setup is 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps -- with healer dps taking a smaller role (compared to swtor) and ditto with the tank (although those roles have seen dps increases somewhat recently). Here, we have only 2 dedicated dps, and both the tank and healer have a host of dps abilities that they might be called upon to use. That suggests that the design is for everyone's dps to "matter" more.

 

Note that this crosses over into other areas too. DPS and healing specs get defensive cooldowns, and everyone gets access to short-CD medpacks, which suggests that the "job" of keeping alive doesn't fall solely on the healer, either. It seems that they are trying to innovate at least a little bit (although not so far as to eliminate dedicated roles like some games aspire to do) by blurring traditional lines and making people more responsible for things outside of their comfort zone.

 

This is hitting another one of my points that no one seems to want to even consider. What if the additional endurance you put on your tank, allows your healer to DPS more? Wouldn't you then have to compare your healers DPS increase (via your endurance stacking) to the personal DPS increase (via willpower stacking) to be able to accurately compare the different boosts?

 

Adding 200 endurance to a tank with 16,000 hit points gives the healers almost a full second more time to react to incoming damage. If they don't need that extra time, then couldn't they DPS during it? If the tank is durable enough to handle the boss by himself for longer, and the healer is good enough to heal the tank from 1 - 100% faster, then wouldn't that give the healer more time to DPS?

 

If you have a tank that stacked endurance and he is able to successfully survive against a boss for 10 seconds on his own, and you also have a healer that can heal that same tank from 1% hit points to full in 6 seconds, wouldn't that give the healer 4 seconds to DPS in between having to heal? As long as the healer was able to keep the tank alive either way, wouldn't you then have to compare the added DPS gain on the healer, vs the added DPS gain on the tank?

Edited January 27, 2012 by Arbegla
Mis typed.

[BroadStreetBully]

Adding 200 endurance to a tank with 16,000 hit points gives the healers almost a full second more time to react to incoming damage. If they don't need that extra time, then couldn't they DPS during it? If the tank is durable enough to handle the boss by himself for longer, and the healer is good enough to heal the tank from 1 - 100% faster, then wouldn't that give the healer more time to DPS?

 

If you have a tank that stacked endurance and he is able to successfully survive against a boss for 10 seconds on his own, and you also have a healer that can heal that same tank from 1% hit points to full in 6 seconds, wouldn't that give the healer 4 seconds to DPS in between having to heal? As long as the healer was able to keep the tank alive either way, wouldn't you then have to compare the added DPS gain on the healer, vs the added DPS gain on the tank?

 

This is true, however, many of your arguments revolved around poor partners for a raid. Using this assumption, I would rather add the extra DPS to the tank, since the tank should be attacking an enemy all of the time. Let the healer focus on healing. If you have a bad group, it is easier for a healer to get caught DPSing and let the tank die.

 

Ultimately, TrevNYC broke this whole issue down perfectly.

[Arbegla]

This is true, however, many of your arguments revolved around poor partners for a raid. Using this assumption, I would rather add the extra DPS to the tank, since the tank should be attacking an enemy all of the time. Let the healer focus on healing. If you have a bad group, it is easier for a healer to get caught DPSing and let the tank die.

 

So, in a good group, would it then be better to stack endurance, and thus allow your healer better time to DPS, which could amount to more DPS gain then what willpower would give you? For example, in Kitru's situation of limiting his grouping to only guild mates, if the healer is good enough to have a dual role, wouldn't it be better for Kitru to stack endurance so that his healer can DPS MORE then he would by increasing his willpower?

 

In a bad group, I'd rather have more endurance myself, to give the healer plenty of time to catch up. And if they don't need that time, then they could DPS, as both a scoundrel and trooper have basic ranged attacks that would amount to more then 70DPS if used throughout a fight, and the sage could just throw a DoT or two on the boss in between healer. This is assuming they are both comfortable doing so, and they have the allotted time.

 

It seems that either way, endurance would be the better bet, due to having the potential to increase DPS by a much larger value then willpower would via increasing the healers reaction time, and giving them time to DPS themselves.

[Kitru]

This is true.

 

It's not as true as you might think. First off, the problem with the "healer can DPS" argument is that it forgets that tanks do not magically stop taking damage when they are getting healed nor does a tank's max hp have anything to do with how easy they are to heal. It is not a matter of a healer getting 4 seconds out of every 10 second window to DPS; it is a matter of a healer being able to offset 1.67 seconds of incoming damage with a single second of healing (which has nothing to do with the tank's hit points and everything to do with the tank's mitigation coupled with the healer's throughput). It wouldn't matter if the tank had 20k or 120k hp: the healer would still have the same ratio of uptime-to-downtime (since healer DPS is best defined as optimally used downtime) to keep the tank at full health (which the healer should be doing since letting the tank stay low is pretty much the definition of bad healing). Damage and healing are not alternating intervals; they are both continuous processes and treating that as if they *were* alternating processes (which the TtD metric constantly assumes in order to generate the "healer can DPS" argument in such a way that it is exclusive to higher hp values rather than superior healing and mitigation capabilities) is simply ignorant and *completely* illogical. The fact that Arbegla is still making this argument is simply further proof of why he shouldn't even be in the argument in the first place.

 

As I have said time and time again, the TtD metric is completely disconnected from *actual* average survivability which is *completely* determined by mitigation and incoming healing, neither of which are appreciably affected by increased Endurance.

[Arbegla]

As I have said time and time again, the TtD metric is completely disconnected from *actual* average survivability which is *completely* determined by mitigation and incoming healing, neither of which are appreciably affected by increased Endurance.

 

You obviously have never honestly theory crafted for a tank before. Because a TtD metric, is really the only thing that matters. You compare your TtD metric to a healers TtR (time to reaction) and thus you know how long you can survive by yourself.

 

TtD is a measure of average survivability, which is your effective hit points, which is exactly what your mitigation and hit point pool has.

 

All you have said is that healers will keep you at 100% hit points, so any amount of hit points you have won't matter because a healer will keep you at 100% hit points regardless. Which while it MAY be true in your inner circle of guild mates, its simply not true in the real game. Unless you want to top the 'over healing' charts, and waste resources, there is really no reason to keep a self healing tank at 100% hit points at all time. 80%? Sure, 70%? That would be ok too, and then whenever the tank gets to 100% hit points (via your over healing, or their self healing) you have time to DPS until they hit 70%.

 

trying to play whack a mole with a tanks hit points isn't the best way to do things, and would clearly be a form of bad healing in and of itself.

[Calimwulf]

Health does not directly contribute to your survivability within Flashpoints or Operations. While solo, it has some utility if you are not at a point where the use of your own abilities and a healer companion allow you to overcome any incoming damage, even from champions.

 

Stacking Endurance is not an appreciable expenditure of gearing largely because its only contribution to tank survivability is to increase the amount of damage you can take without receiving any heals before you die. Since default hp is so high compared to incoming damage, stacking additional endurance has little to no comparative contribution to your survivability in legitimate tanking situations. Willpower, on the other hand, increases your damage output (which is *excellent* even when compared to pure DPS) and threat, making your allies less likely to die and allowing them to DPS harder without risk of pulling off of you.

 

As a tank, you should prioritize as follows: (Defense>Shield>Absorb)>Willpower>Endurance. Endurance just doesn't do enough to make it worthwhile to stack to any appreciable extent.

Ouch. While I agree that endurance does not directly influence the threat that you do, It does you absolutely no good to run the healer bone dry during encounters. Not only will that wipe the group, but it will significantly increase healer threat generation if he is spamming heals.

 

It seems that what you are recommending is to run in a DPS stat stack. No way that will work.

[Kitru]

Ouch. While I agree that endurance does not directly influence the threat that you do, It does you absolutely no good to run the healer bone dry during encounters. Not only will that wipe the group, but it will significantly increase healer threat generation if he is spamming heals.

 

You, along with a *huge* number of people, are operating under the false assumption that Endurance is somehow making healing more efficient. It doesn't. If someone with 5k hp and someone else with 20k hp both take 4k damage, a healer will *still* have to spend the same resources to refill that 4k hp deficit. The fact that it is 80% compared to 25% of the tank's total hp has no impact on how much healing the healer has to provide; the additional hp simply determines how long the tank can survive before the healer has to spend the same ratio of time making up for the not-healing-the-tank time deficit. Endurance has *nothing* to do with healing efficiency.

 

It seems that what you are recommending is to run in a DPS stat stack. No way that will work.

 

Did you read the post you quoted *at all*? You came out with the exact *opposite* conclusion that the post you quoted arrived at. The conclusion was that you should stack mitigation stats beyond anything else (since, you know, it actually *reduces* incoming damage), then Willpower (since it is actually a useful stat), and then *finally* Endurance (since stacking it doesn't actually do anything useful for a tank). Other DPS stats (Power, Surge, Crit) should be functionally ignored since they are directly competing with the all important mitigation stats.

 

Seriously, reading comprehension is important. It's getting really tiring constantly correcting people that misread a clearly written statement because they're either too obtuse or too lazy to consider the data for themselves and draw logical conclusions.

[Ahrounmoon]

You, along with a *huge* number of people, are operating under the false assumption that Endurance is somehow making healing more efficient. It doesn't. If someone with 5k hp and someone else with 20k hp both take 4k damage, a healer will *still* have to spend the same resources to refill that 4k hp deficit. The fact that it is 80% compared to 25% of the tank's total hp has no impact on how much healing the healer has to provide; the additional hp simply determines how long the tank can survive before the healer has to spend the same ratio of time making up for the not-healing-the-tank time deficit. Endurance has *nothing* to do with healing efficiency.

 

 

Blatantly false if there are quick, inefficient heals vs slow efficient heals at play. The tank with 5k HP needs to be healed before a second hit lands or he's dead. The tank with 20k can take 4 more and still be on his feet. I'm no expert on healing in SWTOR, but I do know that big and little heals exist, as do heal over time abilities. They probably do not share the same efficiency rates.

[TrevNYC]

And here we go again. I've proved (as have others) that endurance DOES add something past the point where your healers can keep you alive. Yes, its not very much, its explained in great detail exactly what endurance will give you.

 

You've proven that it increases time to live, which no one has contested. You haven't proven that the added time to live actually matters to a healer beyond a certain point, because you aren't factoring how healers actually heal people. When I'm healing, I don't react to how much actual health the tank has left. I react to the rate at which the tank takes damage. Healing becomes hard when I have to use my resources inefficiently to keep up. Health doesn't factor into this, except to the extent that the tank doesn't have enough health to stay alive while I use my most efficient healing rotation, or even my "oh snap!" highly inefficient emergency rotation.

 

Kitru flat out refused to break willpower down the same way i broke down endurance

 

There were a lot of words in those posts so I might have missed something, but my sense of them was that he wasn't breaking them down because you two weren't on the same page about the argument. You don't need to quantify the value of something compared to another thing if your argument is that the second thing (endurance) isn't making any contribution. Instead, you only need to establish that the first thing (willpower) still makes contributions.

 

But no where at all does Kitru say where that point is, or even how to figure it out on paper. He's just saying 'Yea, take out all your endurance mods, swap them in for willpower mods, and try to tank stuff. If you win, then the willpower mods is the reason, if you lose, then you need more endurance.'

 

I don't know of any other way to answer this besides that's not what I read at all. But then again, I'm not vested in the Interweb rivalry you two seem to have started so I might not have the right perspective.

 

Hard mode flashpoints, and even hard mode operations are tuned that way, as a means to basically allow ANYONE to see the content. But as it has already been brought up, Nightmare operations simply don't work that way. The highest tier of raiding is too difficult to be able to easily assume Willpower will fix all your issues (be them threat, or enrage timers) and the additional hit points (and mitigation) from self healing will benefit you far more. Especially when your healers are disabled.

 

This is where I really get confused. When people ask the question of "what should I be stacking as a tank?" do you really think they are automatically asking about the highest tier of raiding? What exactly is wrong with advising people who ask the generic question about whether they need to stack endurance that they don't need to stack it, if that happens to be true for all but the most difficult content in the game? Would they even be asking the question if that was the level at which they were operating?

 

Moreover, that still doesn't disprove the premise, which is that stacking endurance is pointless once you are past the effective health needed to make your healers comfortable in the level of content you are trying. This doesn't become untrue just because you establish (purportedly) that Kitru or whomever else won't reach that point while using "resolve-type" mods in appropriate gear. They still will reach a point eventually where endurance stops making meaningful contributions.

 

Mind you, I think the jury is out on whether even nightmare modes require endurance stacking even when decked out in appropriate hard mode gear, but I'm willing to defer on this question.

 

Using your extreme example, of a level 20 mob attacking a level 50 mob, and having more endurance and thus needing less mitigation, let me explain how wrong that example actually is.

 

Let me stop you right here. The point of using an extreme example is to illustrate a concept. I had to pick a level at which you can't quibble with the numbers by saying, "oh, but adding x health would have added y time to live and bought the healer z more time to make Hot Pockets before the tank died."

 

Considering the only thing that I was trying to do is get people to understand that the old adage of "you can never have too much health as a tank" is wrong, I picked an example where it was pretty much impossible for the tank to die, because that. is. the. point. Once you get to the point where there is no realistic chance for you do die without some sort of extreme outside intervention, then adding health won't help. It might even hurt.

 

Again, Kitru isn't saying where that point actually is, just that he hasn't hit it yet, in his limited circle of friends. He's numbers, and opinion is extremely biased due to the fact that he simply doesn't PUG. He doesn't group with anyone but his guild, and doesn't ever have to deal with the uncertainty of knowing if his healer can keep him alive.

 

I guess I'm not sure why you seem to think this invalidates this as a data point. I don't know anything about Kitru's healers, which means I don't know if they are better at healing than my healers or anyone else's. The fact that he's friends with them is irrelevant. I have friends and guildmates that aren't the best at their jobs, although most of them do just fine. I've pugged with people who are better (and worse).

 

As a tank, you'll get a feel for how hard something is for you to tank. If you successfully tank something in your gear a bunch of times, and then wipe one day, you probably won't think, "I guess I should've stacked more health for that one." Odds are, someone did something stupid or got disconnected or someone was way undergeared. That's what Kitru was getting at -- you'll develop an expectation for what a "reasonable" healer can keep up with, so that failure is unlikely to be attributable to "need moar health" when it happens.

 

And he is crediting his success to his slotting of willpower, without considering the MANY different variables that are present in every single fight he does.

 

No, he's saying that he succeeded even without stacking endurance, not that he's succeeding because of willpower. There's a big difference. If anything, he credits defense/shield/absorb for his tanking success more than anything else. His point has never been that willpower is awesome (he ranks it 4th out of 5 stats to care about!), so much as the fact that endurance becomes near-useless at a certain point to where you might as well pick something else that isn't that useless.

 

Kitru has already explained, time and time again, that threat is a non-issue for Shadow tanks. Even without taunt spam, threat just isn't a factor. So the only benefit to boosting willpower is a straight DPS increase (as the added threat wouldn't matter anyways).

 

It seems odd how you're willing to accept Kitru's word on threat being meaningless as gospel but fight tooth and nail over less controversial subjects like, "you don't need to stack endurance to the hilt to complete HM flashpoints and OPs."

 

Suffice it to say, that not everyone shares that experience (I've pulled threat from shadow tanks as balance, which may have been rotation issues or something else, but it happened) and that when you do the math, you'll see that the DPS'ers will scale threat at a much faster rate than the tank, particularly if the tank always chooses to upgrade END over WP.

Edited January 27, 2012 by TrevNYC

[TrevNYC]

Blatantly false if there are quick, inefficient heals vs slow efficient heals at play. The tank with 5k HP needs to be healed before a second hit lands or he's dead. The tank with 20k can take 4 more and still be on his feet. I'm no expert on healing in SWTOR, but I do know that big and little heals exist, as do heal over time abilities. They probably do not share the same efficiency rates.

 

His example said the tank took 4k damage, not 4k damage in one hit. It makes sense to assume (since this is just an illustration, and because Kitru's advice only applies when a tank has "enough" health to allow an efficient rotation from the healer) that the rate of damge would allow the slow, efficient heal to be enough to bring the 5k tank up without dying.

[TrevNYC]

You obviously have never honestly theory crafted for a tank before. Because a TtD metric, is really the only thing that matters. You compare your TtD metric to a healers TtR (time to reaction) and thus you know how long you can survive by yourself.

 

Why are you responding to a point someone is making about practice by saying how it doesn't match the theory's approach? Observation trumps theory.

 

But that's a bit of an aside. Let's stick with the approach you're using. The end result, as you pointed out, is a number that indicates how long you can survive by yourself. The question is how do we use that number? We'll call it TbM (time by myself).

 

TbM only matters in situations where you actually will be by yourself. This should always have some value, as a healer can't envelop you in perpetual heals. The catch is, once your TbM exceeds your healer's worst case TtR, then increasing the value any further doesn't do anything.

 

That's the long way to the shorthand that Kitru has been using for 30+ pages. If my healer, in a worst case scenario (assuming incapacitation, etc.), will heal back incoming damage in 5 seconds, then the healer won't notice a difference if my TbM is 10 seconds versus 15 seconds. In other words, a theoretical increase in survivability doesn't translate to an actual difference in survivability.

 

Moreover, in cases where the healer's TtR swings wildly, Kitru's argument is that it's most likely because an encounter mechanic got botched, and fixing the mistake will make more of a difference than stacking more health.

[Ahrounmoon]

His example said the tank took 4k damage, not 4k damage in one hit. It makes sense to assume (since this is just an illustration, and because Kitru's advice only applies when a tank has "enough" health to allow an efficient rotation from the healer) that the rate of damge would allow the slow, efficient heal to be enough to bring the 5k tank up without dying.

 

The only thing I'm going to say to that, and then I'm going to drop it because it's just not worth continuing and I'm heading out for the weekend soon anyway, is that you and I both know better than to say healers are allowed to be perfectly efficient. I actually should correct myself from a few pages ago because I said something to the effect of "Healers are very efficient here" without the caveat that a small inefficiency can very quickly escalate to a large problem. I think both the Smuggler/Agent and Trooper/BH healers* have variable resource recovery rates such that the more they have currently the faster they'll recover. And that very heavily penalizes burst healing.

 

*It could just be the commandos and mercenaries, I was rather putout by the cover system with smugglers and didn't get very far.

[Arbegla]

Why are you responding to a point someone is making about practice by saying how it doesn't match the theory's approach? Observation trumps theory.

 

Except the observation matches the theory spot on. The theory is that once the healers TtR is equal to a tanks TtD (the TbM) then the healer is able to keep up with healing without draining their resources, but unable to do much else. Its matching almost exactly what Kitru has said.

But that's a bit of an aside. Let's stick with the approach you're using. The end result, as you pointed out, is a number that indicates how long you can survive by yourself. The question is how do we use that number? We'll call it TbM (time by myself).

 

TbM only matters in situations where you actually will be by yourself. This should always have some value, as a healer can't envelop you in perpetual heals. The catch is, once your TbM exceeds your healer's worst case TtR, then increasing the value any further doesn't do anything.

 

That's the long way to the shorthand that Kitru has been using for 30+ pages. If my healer, in a worst case scenario (assuming incapacitation, etc.), will heal back incoming damage in 5 seconds, then the healer won't notice a difference if my TbM is 10 seconds versus 15 seconds. In other words, a theoretical increase in survivability doesn't translate to an actual difference in survivability.

 

But, during those 5 extra seconds you have of TbM, your healer could be doing other things (namely DPSing) and thus boost your overall GROUP DPS by a large amount then having equal TtR and TbM, and having the tank pull more personal DPS.

 

That is my main argument. That once you reach a point where your healer can keep you alive (whatever that point may be) you might as well increase your overall endurance, and thus increase that TbM so that your healer can do other things during that time.

 

Yes, your healer will still have to spend the same ratio of time healing you, but they will also have time to do other things in between healing you.

Moreover, in cases where the healer's TtR swings wildly, Kitru's argument is that it's most likely because an encounter mechanic got botched, and fixing the mistake will make more of a difference than stacking more health.

 

And the same could be said for DPS. If your constantly hitting enrage timers, then maybe its a problem of your DPS not pushing hard enough, and fixing that mistake will make more of a difference then stacking more willpower.