I want to see if I understand the proposed Tank changes correctly. What I am taking away from the Tank part is they are removing all our passive self-healing and giving us more armor and damage reduction. So they are turning us into something comparable with all other tanks? I haven't read the other questions yet, but if so I'm pretty bummed. I appreciate the answers, but I'm bummed that this is the path they're choosing.

That is a very good point that I didn't think of. I think it would be in poor taste for them to do that, and if the answers came out as L2P the negative reaction would dwarf the first L2P response since would it would be viewed as underhanded too. The biggest benefit would be that it would slow/delay negative reactions for a bit.

If tomorrow is 2.4 patch day I wouldn't assume we'll see it until next week. Assuming it is tomorrow they'll spend today doing last minute prep work, tomorrow watching for major crashes and Wednesday through Friday hotfixing everything they broke with the patch. Then next week will be less urgent fixes and balance fixing for the Ops. I'm probably being pessimistic, but I'm betting next Wednesday or Thursday (9th or 10th) as they've not demonstrated this being a priority and their long history of breaking stuff with major and minor patches. I hope I'm wrong, but we'll see.

I think that would help a lot, but I don't trust Bioware to program it right and expect it to fail fairly often given their history with Resilience. From my opinion on a lore stance, I think an ability like Monks have in WoW would be appropriate. For those of you not familiar with it, when Monks take damage they don't take all of the damage right away. Instead depending on their stats they take a portion of the damage immediately and then the rest is turned into a DoT. As they keep taking damage the DoT gets bigger and bigger so they have ways to reset it (I think Resilience, Battle Readiness or even a new CD could do that). Reasoning behind the Lore connection would be that Shadows/Assassins infuse themselves with the Force and it gives them greater stamina (or something along those lines). But as I mentioned before I don't know if I trust Bioware to program it correctly, so an armor boost (only have to change 1-2 variables, can't mess up that much in the process) would probably be the safest bet.

I see where you're coming from, but I think that the "reroll recommendation" is the second most viable way to get the point across as the Dev's will be forced to ask and answer the question "where are all the shadows in PvE and PvP content?" The most viable way to get the point across is to unsub and leave a comment when unsubbing that it was due to "class imbalance, primarily with Shadows/Assassins" which not only forces them to acknowledge the issue but fix it before their jobs are terminated. A subbed player is more likely to purchase stuff off the Cartel Market than a non-subbed player as they are more committed to the game, a subbed player leaving takes the predictable monthly fee and bonus supplementary purchases completely away. Since Bioware's abandoned their horribly implemented PR stunt to keep players from leaving the game, I'd like to say Thank You again to KeyboardNinja and Xinika for all their hard work. I'm sorry you two didn't get to finish what you were working on with that second set of questions.

I'm going to have to disagree with you Grumpf, from what I remember of the patch history from 1.0 to 2.0 we received armor debuffs after major bouts of qq about Combat Stance/Dark Charge players wearing DPS PvP gear in a DPS spec (may have gotten the exact combo wrong) on the PvP forums. We were very powerful in PvE at that time too, but it was the PvP crowd that got the changes pushed through at the speed they did. If it was merely a PvE balancing issue they'd have pretty stable damage output numbers to predict and test with only needing to make one change, PvP on the other hand can vary by a lot making it harder to guage thus requiring multiple smaller changes (like we received).

Personally I welcome Bioware to announce that Infiltration is a "PvP Spec," because at that point the amount of crap that will fly at them over that will bury all their offices. Stating that one of our 3 specs is only not viable for anything but PvP is a huge class balance issue. Also on a personal note, wanted to say thank you to all the people more active than I was in getting these ready. I truly appreciate all the hard work you all have done and hope that it's rewarded appropriately with good responses.

Out of curiosity, has anyone been trying Shadow Tanks on the new Operations on the PTS? I'm curious if they've remedied their reliance on big damage spikes to make content more difficult.

Just a couple notes, the "Total Force/Tech Immunity and full cleanse" has a 5% failure rate which will always fail you when you need it most (happened on two seperate Huge Grenades on a single Titan 6 HM attempt the other night) and it cleanses less stuff than you'd imagine it would from the description. Overall the ability is good, but it has enough inconsistencies that I still clench my sphincter every time I use it. Can you specify what the "Rough Defense Boost" is from? I'm not disagreeing with you, just trying to get some clarity for myself. The "Stance boost that also heals and provides DR (I may be misremembering this, the servers are down so can't check)" is referring to Battle Readiness/Overcharge Saber I assume? If that is correct the DR boost is only if you spec deep into the Tanking tree which means only tanks and some form of hybrid (don't know if there is a currently used hybrid spec) to get all of that.

This has all of the question deadline dates. My understanding is that they are supposed to post their answers one week later but they've changed that to the Monday after the one week period. What that boils down to is our questions have to be submitted to them on Friday September 13th (anyone superstitious?) and we should get an answer on Monday September 23rd.

I don't play an Assassin or Juggernaut (I just haven't finished leveling them yet, but I do play the Jedi equivalents). Assassins/Shadows have a very distinct coolness factor to their gear, weapons and abilities whereas Juggernauts/Guardians tend to be a lot of variations on hitting things with lightsabers (and a couple "yelling" abilities) and have Darth Vader-esque themes. As of right now Assassins have some issues in Endgame PvE stuff (they are susceptible to damage spikes which seem to be the predominant way of making Hard and Nightmare modes challenging), they are not un-usable so don't interpret it that way, but they definitely require more attention from the player controlling the tank and the tank's healers. Assassins are also very gear dependent when compared to Juggernauts, meaning that a Juggernaut can usually tank harder content with lower level gear but an Assassin can't. From my experience Juggernauts have a much easier and forgiving learning curve than Assassins do, Assassins are more difficult to master and will require either lots of attempts on Flashpoints/Operations or an experienced mentor to teach you the ropes. As for stealth, in PvP I'm sure it's useful, but I rarely pvp so I can't comment on the full benefit of it. In Endgame PvE it depends on where you are as there are a decent number of stealth detecting mobs spread through the current Operations and it's pretty useless for a Tank on bosses. Where stealth truly shines is in leveling, as it lets you skip annoying mobs when you don't feel like fighting them. Overall what I'm trying to say is this: Do you want hit things with your lightsaber or with the Force (either lightning, rocks, the Force itself, etc...)? Do you want to look Darth Maul or like Darth Vader? Do you want leap into the fray or sneak and/or run in? The choice is ultimately yours and I would probably recommend leveling both (when you have the time) and find which you like more (you can get a good feel for the class by about level 30ish if you want to save some time). One personal note, if you use the Cartel Market the Cathar Warstaff is insanely cool for Assassins.

Thank you for writing these up, I think they're pretty good. I think we need to keep the references to the math and would suggest taking it a step further. Sorry to ask for more work out of you KBN but I think that after your first post we should have another "optional" post with links to the stuff you mention in the first post. To be more specific links to the threads with the math, the un-followed up spikiness thread, the dps leaderboards, etc... that way if we get a response of "it's just perceived" or something along that line we can break civility and follow up with a jerkish response of "nice to see you actually read what we wrote." The extra work might be going to waste if they're somehow aware of all we mention, but given their lack of interaction on the Tanking, Shadow and Assassin forums (don't read the DPS forum so can't comment on that one) we should assume they are ignorant of it all.

First off thanks for taking a swing at the issues, it's more communication than we Shadows/Assassins have gotten from the Devs (if you're reading this Devs, please just tell us that you're working on it and throw us some of your ideas if possible). I see some issues, but I'm not necessarily the most proficient at understanding all the inner workings of everything so feel free to correct me everyone. #1 - The idea sounds really good, but it is very very powerful if it were implemented as you stated. Just quick glance at what you're saying brings up two possible implementations in my head, first the 45s cooldown starts as soon as the ability is used (meaning in all likelihood we're probably looking at usage in the 50-60 second range) or secondly the 45 second cooldown starts after the 8 seconds (at which we're probably looking at about 60-70 seconds between usage). Those are numbers off the top of my head, but it roughly cuts the cooldown in half, which as much as I'd like it to be that way, is overpowered. It would kind of turn it into a "use when ready" type cooldown instead of a "major amount of damage about to hit" cooldown. I can't speak for better geared tanks, but in full 72's that bumps my DR up to 60.53% which is higher than a Guardian or Vanguard's DR, but it also increases our self-healing. When you add all that together the 2 minute cooldown roughly makes sense (I think it needs to be shortened a little bit, maybe 15 seconds or so, given the strengths of some other tank class cooldowns). #2 - The self-heals generated by that are good, but as others have mentioned it wouldn't do much for when we die to spikiness (ie shields and defense didn't proc so we take a big hit). In addition self-heals are a pretty good sized chunk of our Mitigation budget (I think I heard somewhere in the neighborhood of 25%), increasing the amount of self-heals would force the Devs to take away from the other aspects of our Mitigation budget (ie shields, defense and DR) to keep things "balanced." Most of the well-known Shadow/Assassin theorycrafters that I've seen have been asking for a self-healing reduction in favor of other forms of mitigation that prevent damage instead of react to it. How to fix them (from my perspective) #1 - Instead of resetting the cooldown, what about granting a buff that gives us a chunk of DR that fades with time? To expand what if we got a 10 stack buff that granted 1% DR per stack and have the stacks fall off every 1-2 seconds? This would of course need some kind of internal cooldown (45ish seconds?), but it still is reactive instead of preventative, but the extra DR would make us a bit less spikey between these low health times. I will admit that I don't understand the full implications of what I'm describing in the PVP realm of the game, but I think it sounds like a good starting point. #2 - I honestly don't have any suggestions on how to make the Dark Ward stacks viable as healing. About all I can come up with is a "bubble" type mechanism instead of healing, but that still doesn't help much on the no shield/defense spikes that are the major concern.

Just a thought out of the blue, but it sounds like we're asking for a bit more sustainability and/or control in our burst. Attempting to clarify that, we're looking for a way to keep our bursts happening when RNG fails us or when the rotation gets thrown out the window temporarily? If that's the case what about giving Phase Walk a buff upon usage that increases damage, crit, something, etc... to help with that? It would be a short cd (45 seconds plus the 1.5 second cast time) and would be controllable by us?

If I'm reading you right, you're saying that the higher stat budgets are helping our dps to catch up? If that is the case then it sounds like a balancing issue that will get us overpowered if the newer sets keep growing.