Agreed vigilance is a great spec for leveling, focus isn't bad either. I would just avoid defense unless you like spending a long time killing stuff. Even in dps gear defense is pretty slow.

So I used to play this game a lot up till about a year ago when RL stuff came up. Anyhow thought I would give it a try after being given a week of sub status. Gota say I really did not like the new skill system. very little variety, no real hybrid or ability to customize skill setups. Frankly it made the skill system boring. Non ranked PVP was painful. combining high level characters with low lvl chars is just a bad idea. sure you can boost stats, but that does not make up for lack of class skills due to lvl. new FPs seem like rehashes of the old ones. Granted I did not play the newest expansion, I was going to purchase it, but after the leveling experience (took a guardian to lvl 55) it just did not seem worth investing more in the game. Honestly I was pretty sad, used to love knocking around in pvp while leveling and mixing things up with the skill system. Now the game just feels overly simplified.

not sure if hes trolling or serious. If hes serious how would you like it if in a few months most of the F2Pers who would have become subs or pref status and continued the games existence quit due to a poorly balanced pvp experience and your server is dead with FP/WZ ques a mile long? Its happened before...

cool thanks for that, had no idea about the 110%-130% difference between melee and ranged, il play around with torparse or w/e and pay attention to my agro. MOX didn't seem to pick up when i used surrender which is one of the reasons i thought id check the swtor player base^^

sigh people getting hung up on unimportant details. there took it out, the post was about surrender I could care less if people think the dps numbers i throw up are lagit.

is there any way to tell how much agro surrender drops? from what iv seen its VERY little. with most pug tanks i have to literally stop dpsing fairly early in the fight. guild tanks are a bit better but il still pull agro quit a bit if i go full throttle. Sure you could say the tanks need to guard me but tanks only have so many guards to pass around and there are often other people that need guard as well so im curious is there some trick to using surrender? i normally pop it after my initial burst of 2x CB > TS >AS >TS and then on CD. otherwise maybe the devs could look into increasing the amount of agro dropped by surrender.

I would say go for the power proc relics... they seem to be the best by a good bit. the PVP power procs can stack from what iv seen too (have yet to test this but will in the next day or two).

yea its dps improved... at least the marksman spec that i normally play improved a good bit. Almost everything procs trick shot now so its a very steady stream of dps with some nice armor debuffs and decent party support skills. Energy management is great too. not sure whats the top dps tree, iv seen some hybrid builds really crank it out while the full trees are very effective as well.

Yea my Shadow in mostly 69s with 2 piece of 66 gear has 37k HP. so i could see 40K + being doable with all 69s and a few endurance augments + datacrons (fleet and maceb too). Also including the large increase in endurance stims got going from exotec to nano, its entirely doable.

yea it definitely drops... just had my shadow tank shield and chest piece drop from bonus and last boss in HM Athiss.

ahh yea makes sense either way though il be sticking with the old absorb adrenals for now.

Yea i have to agree... with the rakata i get an almost streight up 9% additional damage reduction compared to 5-6% shield/absorb from the adrenal. This is with a mix of Artifact and black market gear. I think the issue is that absorb and shield hit their diminishing returns very quickly in the 650-700 range. I don't even have the new absorb augments in either which will be another 300-400 absorb rating on top of that which means even lower % due to the diminishing returns. I would have to double check this but i assume armor rating has diminishing returns on the damage reduction. perhaps since shadows have such low armor rating they benefit most from the old absorb adrenal since diminishing returns isnt kicking in much at all for them.

Yea i pretty much just gave up trying to find nodes... best way to farm the high level mats is to find a group of strong+ mobs that respawn quickly and farm em. the 55 HM FPs are actually decent for high level materials as well although it does slow the group down a little.

quite a few of these drop from the purple grade [Mission discovery: slicing] items, iv even had 2-3 from some of them.

the math is interesting but how does it actually apply to tanking? with endurance is easy to calculate but with absorb/shield its different because its not straight up mitigation since its a % chance that mitigation will occur. So you would have to calculate in your %shield chance (54% with ward up) vs your absorb chance (37%) in order to see the direct effect of 1 point of mitigation. currently my HP is at 34.5k buffed as a shadow tank which seems to be enough to cover the 55 HM FPs (not sure about ops) so il probably use absorb augments and see how things go. Also on mando raiders your supposed to keep the hounds out of the bosses red circle... other wise ya they get crazy buffed lol.