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Kitru

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    San Antonio, Texas
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    Game Design, Programming, Lore, SCIENCE
  1. To the Shadow community, I've cancelled my subscription and, as such, will be quitting the game. I actually found another that interests me as much as TOR *used* to, which I didn't really expect. I realize that I was elected class rep and came back for that, but the fact that we're having to wait another month to get any kind of answers means that I just don't care any more. The devs had a chance to do something to keep me around, and I gave them that chance. Of course, they completely and totally screwed it up, which doesn't really surprise me any more. This isn't a cry for attention so much as an announcement that I'm leaving the game, since, if I just left, people would likely start to wonder. I don't plan on hitting up the forums any more, and, as such, another Shadow rep is going to be needed. My personal recommendation is KBN, mainly because he would provide a PvE/tanking perspective that syncs up with Xinika's PvP/DPS perspective. Honestly, it doesn't matter to me any more though. Nothing that happens in this game does. The devs screwed up too much too many times and if they ever *do* do anything about it, it'll be too little too late. I'm sending something similar to Musco to let him know that a new Shadow Class Rep is needed, though, honestly, the questions for Shadows are relatively apparent now. If anyone wants to see me, I'll continue going by Kitru wherever I crop up on the interwebs. Hopefully, I'll continue to see some of you guys wherever I find myself.
  2. Check some paired healer parses for the relevant fights. Check the ratio of tank heals to non-tank heals. From there, you can extrapolate the amount of attention pulled away from the tank and create a construct for "distraction" (I'm thinking something like 1/X chance of being distracted for the relevant GCD) while tracking the baseline healing construct of the given class (i.e. X heal used this often, Y heal used this often, Z heal used this often), either from theory (operating under the assumption of perfect performance) or practice (looking at use rate averaged over the course of the fight). Conversely, you could just decide arbitrarily. As long as the healer construct is the same for all tanks, the histogram would create an appropriate distribution for comparison's sake.
  3. Right here, back in June. And I have no idea how you couldn't have seen this bug for over a year, unless you just don't spend any time on the class forums. Pretty much *any* time Resilience is brought up, the Resilience bug is pointed out and *has* been since it was first found in 1.4.
  4. Don't track remaining hp. Track the damage and then apply it for each AC with an agreed upon "standard healer".
  5. I'm curious how exactly one would "finesse" that situation. We're talking about a 43k hit on someone with 41k hp. The attack comes up more often than a DR CD or adrenal is available for it (it can still punch through Deflection) so it's not like you're able to click anything. You could argue that a Sage should throw a bubble up on you right as the cast is landing, but that's not really "finesse" since it's not the tank doing it at all. Maybe they're supposed to stop tanking and give threat to someone else? But, at that point, you're just telling them not to tank because they can't. Maybe you're supposed to have a Gunslinger put up his shield to keep you alive. Once again, that's not a tool in the *Shadow's* tool kit; that's the Gunslinger and, even if you're saying that Shadows should be *forced* to run with a Gunslinger or a Sage healer, your finesse argument still doesn't stand because that's not something that *you* have access to. That's having to rely upon someone else to do your own job for you, which is pretty much *the* definition of being incapable of doing your job. The entire argument is that you *cannot* finesse a Shadow tank in the spike damage situations that they are *forced* to go through as part of their job at tanking. Arguing that you *can* finesse a Shadow tank on fights like Ops Chief is simply laughable. You *can't* finesse it because it's entirely RNG based. There isn't anything in the tank's control that they can use to actually survive said bad RNG. Sure, you can use Battle Readiness to ensure survival on the first one, blow an Exotech Adrenal on the second, but, after those 2, you're going to be forced to use an RNG based mechanism: Deflection, use relic, etc. You can't argue "finesse" when there simply aren't the tools available to *allow* you to utilize skill to survive. Seriously, if we're playing it wrong, start telling us how to survive. If you have some super secret method for doing so that isn't just having the other tank do it, let us know. It's all well and good to say "l2play" but, unless you can actually *tell us* how to play, especially when we're saying that you *cannot* play it such that you will survive, your argument doesn't hold water. Also, as someone said before, anecdotal evidence, which is all you've got, isn't the same as the massive amount of actual *empirical* evidence that also supported by *****ton* of theory. We've got *craptons* of parses that show a Shadow tank taking 80+% of their total hp in less than 1 GCD. Hell, we've got parses that actually show Shadow tanks tanking more than their entire hp bar in less than 2 GCDs. And, even better, a lot of these parses just so happen to be from fights where the burst DPS *cannot* be predicted so, unless you can tell how the RNG is going to behave, you can't even pop a CD to avoid it. Basically, your argument is conjecture ("Shadows are finesse tanks and the only reason you're having problems is because you're not playing them right") and anecdote ("I do fine so obviously the class is awesome"); our argument, on the other hand, is logic ("Shadows are incapable of actually having a non-RNG based survivability mechanism for every instance of burst damage as well as having a chance if completely unsurvivable and unpredictable spikes"), sound theory ("We have put together 3 separate models available for public scrutiny that demonstrate that there are fundamental problems that prevent Shadows from being able to perform at or acceptably near the same level as the other tanks"), and empirical evidence ("we've actually got the parses to prove it"). So, yeah, *obviously* we're just whining and need to learn to play because the class isn't screwed up. It's not like we didn't look into the possibility that it might be an l2play issue before doing all of the math, data gathering, and information analysis that we've done. Of *course* we overlooked that most simple of solutions that doesn't even actually make sense under any kind of scrutiny. Seriously, you can talk as fancifully as you want (honestly, I didn't even think it was that impressive; I was writing like that in 4th grade, though, at that time, I at least had a grasp of basic logic which seems to escape you), but when your argument is completely vacuous, it doesn't matter *how* you dress it up: it's still just worthless rhetoric.
  6. First off, holy crap, you went more than a little overboard with the formatting. Seriously. You don't need to recolor and resize *everything*. Honestly, it only makes it more abrasive to read, which means that it's less likely to actually have an impact. Secondly, you're a little behind the times. It's actually been screwed up since 1.4. It's well known enough that it was widely known as the "Resilience bug". Nothing has changed since 2.0 to do anything about it. Third, the chance is explicitly a 5% chance for it to not work as intended. We known this because after more than a year of complaining about it, one of the devs went and told us that they found out why: for some reason, in 1.4, there was a 5% floor on the hit chance included that wasn't mentioned in the update. As such, anything that is supposed to provide a 100% miss chance actually only provides a 5% miss change. Interestingly, this means that Resilience *is* working exactly as intended. It provides a redundantly large amount of Resist chance and does the cleanse like it's supposed to. The problem is that the back end attack mechanics don't actually give a damn about the redundantly large Resist chance that it provides. And, of course, the devs have told us that it's too hard to fix even though they know what the problem is. But, you know, what can we expect from a dev team that doesn't care about Shadow/Sins at all? It's not like the *devs* play those ACs, so it's not like they actually have a *reason* to do anything about it. Well, you know, beyond actually keeping the game balanced and making sure that stuff actually works like it's supposed to. Oh well, I guess they need to fix the LS/DS requirements for cosmetic armor first. The number of people *that* affects is *way* larger than the entire population of Shadows and Assassins. Gogo proper prioritization!
  7. The "data" you refer to are individual data points of people that are only looking at the binary success/failure of single instance without any kind of non-cursory analysis. So, yeah, the "data" that says that Shadow tanks are fine are out there, but it's only because it's not actually paying attention to what we number crunchers are actually saying. No one has *ever* said that Shadows cannot clear content, which is the only thing that the contradictory evidence ever seems to be able to be paying attention to (e.g. "I clear content just fine on my Shadow tank so Shadows just dandy!", which ignore the fact that it's not the *Shadow* that is performing well but rather their healers; it's been proven numerous times that the performance of a Shadow tank in endgame content is *entirely* dependent upon the quality of the healer rather than the Shadow themself). We number crunchers have focused upon the trend in performance compared to the other tanks, specifically in reference to likelihood of a Shadow in what *should* be survivable circumstances (i.e. you shouldn't *have* to be constantly topped off in order to avoid getting killed in a single GCD for a mechanic that repeats itself more than 1-2 times per encounter while not being telegraphed thanks to the RNG based nature of it). We're dealing with statistical likelihood, not binary analysis of individual cases. Anyone that *does* look to the individual cases as anything other than evidence that it is *possible* to clear the content with a Shadow tank has no idea how screwed up extrapolation from a single data point is. If you only choose to look at those data points that say that Shadow tanks are fine, you're simply cherry-picking your data which means that you decided upon your answer before you even started looking into it. It's not even a question now of whether Shadow tanks are broken now. It's been pretty much *proven* beyond all reasonable doubt, mathematical or otherwise. The only people arguing that they're fine are simply people that joined in late and are too lazy to actually acquaint themselves with the actual discussion before popping up with assertions that have already been proven wrong several times over. They parrot the same thing over and over again without actually looking at *anything* other than their own experiences and the vague assertions of those that agree with them. There isn't a single iota of data that has actually been analyzed by *either* side of the argument that contradicts the assertion that Shadow tanks need to be fixed. All of the math points to it, and it's not like we even went at it from a single perspective. We've done simulations, analysis of comparative spikiness, and analysis of comparative likelihood to die from individual attacks (which is now being bolstered by the creation of a more complex histogram of tank hp so that the math doesn't operate under the assumption that all tank ACs share the same likelihood of being at the same hp, which is wrong just on the face of it). The argument that there is evidence that disproves the need for a Shadow tank fix is simply ignorant. If you honestly bring it up as if it were even remotely capable of being proven true, it doesn't do anything except prove that you don't know anything about what's being discussed (not that most of the people discussing this know more than a little; there is a tiny minority of people on the forums that have seen and actually understand the analysis since most people don't give a **** about the math but simply care about the conclusions drawn from it).
  8. It's like that to give people that tweak their mods an advantage for doing so. The devs specifically chose to itemize a lot of the end game gear in a sub-optimal manner (the non-token gear, especially so) for this purpose. In fact, the non-token gear is designed to be worse than the previous tier of actual token gear. It's why you'll see tank gear with alacrity, accuracy, and low mitigation/high endurance. Some of the stuff is *intended* to be thrown away.
  9. The BiS for all tanks now is double proc relic. The use relic was only there because you *couldn't* go with 2 proc relics. There are still some fights where it's better to have a use relic, specifically, those that have large amounts of tanks swapping with extended downtime (TWH and TfB are both excellent examples of this) but it's only marginally better than double proc relic for those situations while substantially worse in every other.
  10. NPCs don't have natural crit chances and the only ones that *do* have temporary crit chances are *exceptionally* few. The only time that crit taking priority over shield rating matters is in PvP when you're dealing with temporarily increased player crit chances that crank the living hell out of their chances (e.g. auto-crits, Battle Focus, or Force Potency) since you'll pretty much never find any other situation where Shield + Crit > 1.
  11. Are you sure about that? I know that, when you're on a new character, you won't see anything on your character sheet for crit, surge, defense, absorb, etc. rating. It's only when you actually *get* said ratings that they show up. Of course, it's been a very long time since I actually had a low level character so /shrug.
  12. It's actually pretty well recognized and used to be a something that was recognized as an acceptable compromise concerning Shadow tanks. The problem is that, thanks to the current content design, this trade off no longer exists. When you get good RNG, nothing really changes; healers already sit at max resources 90% of the time so not having to heal you for a few seconds doesn't really mean anything to them. When you get hit by bad RNG, on the other hand, a Shadow is going to die without having any ability to impact that on their own because the spikes are large enough that they can gib you fro what *should* be a reasonable level of hp. Furthermore, said spike damage is either entirely random (TWH and any number of high attack/sec bosses) or occurs more often than a CD is available (Ops Chief, Thrasher) so it's impossible to use CDs to mitigate them effectively, even *if* you play perfectly. Terminate hits hard enough on every difficultly that a Shadow tank at less than ~85% hp is going to get instantly killed by an unmitigated attack. The same is true for Thrasher and every other spike scenario in the game at the moment. Shadows *already* spend more time at lower hp ranges than the others tank thanks to their spiky incoming damage which is simply compounded by the fact that Shadows end up getting killed by said burst DPS at higher levels of hp. The problem isn't in how the Shadow plays themself. The ability to impact their own survivability in spike damage scenarios is outside of the control of the person playing the Shadow: there simply aren't enough tools available to actually cover every occurrence. The only way to actually keep a Shadow alive, reliably, is to dump massive amounts of healing into the Shadow to constantly keep them above their incredibly high RNG-death threshold (and, even then, on NiM, sometimes the RNG-death threshold is higher than a Shadow's max hp so they're still screwed). Basically, a Shadow is incapable of actually impacting their own survivability and relies *entirely* upon their healers doing their job *insanely* well and dumping an unholy amount of overhealing into the Shadow to keep the topped off. Because of this, anyone claiming "l2play" has no idea what they're talking about. If a Shadow is doing well in end game content, it's not because *they* are good. It's because their *healers* are good; good enough, in fact, that they could heal *either* of the other tanks with no effort whatsoever. No one is claiming that Shadows cannot clear content. It's a painfully common misconception about the argument. The debate here is one of comparative performance, not binary capability. Shadow survivability has been taken out of their own hands by the design of the content so that the only way for a Shadow to tank is to trust that their *healer* is absurdly good. On top of that, Shadows are, explicitly, the tanks that present the biggest liability thanks to their proclivity for dying to RNG. Those scenarios that they *do* excel at are situations where the other tanks are only put at a slight disadvantage; the scenarios that completely obliterate Shadows, on the other hand, barely phase the other tanks. Even if you *prefer* playing a Shadow, there are loads of *damned* compelling reasons to play either of the other tanks (especially Guardians who, quite literally, have no weak point *at all*). There are no substantive mechanical reasons to play a Shadow rather than a VG or Guardian and a whole *slew* of substantive mechanical reasons *not* to. Basically, the only reason to play a Shadow any more is that you enjoy playing a Shadow enough that you don't care that they're significantly inferior to the other options.
  13. The screencap shows that he has a generator equipped. I'm also pretty sure that, if you don't have a Shield equipped, it simply doesn't show your Shield chance whatsoever (not *entirely* sure about that since I'm not in game atm).
  14. If he's 33, it's entirely likely that he just doesn't have any gear with Shield Rating on it. Unless you actually have a bonus derived from a source, that source is not going to be listed. He said that his Shield chance was 24%, which is exactly what he would have with no Shield Rating whatsoever. As such, he's not seeing Shield Rating listed because he simply doesn't have any. When he *does* get some, it'll actually show up.
  15. If that's *honestly* what they respond with, they're even *less* intelligent than we already give them credit for. Yes, there are a small number of boss fights where Shadows have an advantage, but it's only due to a small number of mechanics that allow for cheesing with Force Cloak (TWH adds and a few things on DG; hell, Resilience doesn't even allow us to be useful for mechanic cheesing since Saber Reflect does it *better* in more cases than Resilience does) that aren't particularly disadvantageous towards the other tanks. They can be weathered just fine *without* a Shadow. The fights where Shadows are at a distinct *disadvantage*, on the other hand, are both more common (Thrasher, Operation's Chief, every fight on NiM thanks to the potential for spike damage) *and* place Shadows at a *massive* disadvantage for that fight. Any argument that the Shadow performance on the fights that they *are* good justifies their performance on the fights that they are absolutely *terrible* at is completely ignorant of actually balancing those advantages against each other. Sure, it's nice to be able to cheese some stuff with Force Cloak, but the things that you can cheese aren't liable to demolish one of the other tanks so it doesn't make up for the fact that a Shadow is going to get absolutely reamed by the stuff that they're *not* good at. The entire point of comparing Shadow performance to the other tanks, while bringing in the context of the existing content's design, is to demonstrate this fundamental point: Shadows *don't* have appreciable advantages but *do* have appreciable disadvantages. Comparing Shadow performance pre-2.0 to post-2.0 wouldn't even really apply since the content is so fundamentally different thanks to tank balance being so fundamentally modified to account for that. Shadows were fine pre-2.0 because the devs only play Guardian tanks, which meant that everything could be measured in how Guardians deviated from the other tanks; it worked well because Guardians were actually in between in all facets: midway between VG and Shadow spikiness, midway between VG and Shadow mitigation. With 2.0 landing, Shadows actually only got made *slightly* spikier. The problem was that the only tanks that the devs play got turned into an overpowered monstrosity that has the best of every world, with the biggest change being that Guardians got given an incoming damage profile so smooth that it's effectively identical to VGs. Since the devs only play Guardians and are only aware of *their* capabilities while designing content, damage became spikier because Guardians could now handle it and it got *loads* worse for Shadows because, not only were Shadows slightly spikier than before, but the amount of spikiness that the content that developers designed with in mind suddenly became what used to be exclusive to VGs. It was less about Shadows themselves changing than the window with which the devs view the game suddenly shifting so that Shadows no longer even exist in the periphery of their vision. It would be as if the developers refused to play any DPS except for Gunslingers and Sentinels and decided that ops content from them on would require substantial amounts of AoE and ST DPS in excess of 3.1k because that's what the ACs that they play are capable of. Not every DPS spec actually *has* significant AoE nor is every DPS actually capable of 3.1k ST DPS, but the devs would be designing with those capabilities in mind because that's the only thing that the devs play. The entire root of the problem isn't in the class balance, but in the complete and utter ignorance of the devs for any classes that the don't play heavily themselves, and, since they only play Guardian tanks, any deviation in capability from what a Guardian is capable of means that they have no idea how it will affect you; any sufficiently large amount of deviation means that you're screwed. Since Shadow now deviate so heavily from Guardians thanks to the massive changes/buffs that Guardians underwent, Shadows get ****ed not because our *class* got nerfed but because the devs haven't a clue about Shadows. The lack of developer experience with our AC is the entire root cause of our problems. The devs have only passing familiarity with the class and are only aware of their capabilities on a purely theoretical level. This is why the devs dismiss Shadow DPS by saying that it gets better during execute range so it's just fine (in reality, they drastically overestimate the performance of Shadow DPS in execute range) or claim that they made Balance simpler by removing one ability from the rotation (in reality, the reason that Balance is friggin' hard to get decent numbers out of is because it requires an *absurd* level of precision to reapply all of those DoTs that Sage Balance doesn't happen to share because their non-DoT DPS through TkT spam is nearly as good as their DPS *with* DoTs). They're so disconnected from Shadows that they don't have the slightest clue about what problems they have or *how* they actually play. It's like putting a janitor in charge of the programmers in the office where he works: he doesn't have the knowledge or experience to actually know what he's doing so he ends up completely screwing everything up. Sure, he can probably figure out who spends the most time in the office, but he doesn't have the ability to actually gauge performance or anything else that a boss *should* be able to do. He would likely base any executive decision based upon how clean someone kept their desk because all he knows is cleaning the office. Another great metaphor would be asking a deaf person to become a record producer: sure, they can feel the vibrations in the floor so that they know *something* of what's going on, but they're missing everything *except* what they can feel manually, which just so happens to be 90+% of what they're supposed to know about. Comparing Shadows now to Shadows then wouldn't do anything to assuage that since the developers don't have any real reference to either of those points. The only way for the comparison to actually make sense for the developers is to bring in something that they *do* know, which is the other ACs. Even then, it's doubtful that the developers would actually be capable of commenting on anything because the only thing in that comparison that they're actually familiar with is the thing we're comparing Shadows *to*. The best outcome of all of this would be for the devs to realize how little they actually know about Shadows and the commensurate admission that they can't balance a class effectively without actually playing and testing it so that they are forced to actually become *familiar* enough with Shadows to make intelligent decisions concerning their balance. Of course, considering everything that we've seen about these devs, I'm not holding my breath for anything resembling this outcome. The best we can reasonably hope for is the devs to not simply dismiss our concerns by saying that they don't show up in their metrics.
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