I'd like to start off by saying that I am mainly a Juggernaut tank, and I do play all 3 tanks on both factions. Tanking is what I do, and what I enjoy most out of most MMOs I have played. This post is mainly to throw some ideas out there to fix the spikiness of assassins. Here's two ideas I have myself. Just curious what other people's thoughts are.

 

1. When a damaging attack brings you below 30% of your maximum health, the cooldown on your Overcharged Saber ability is refreshed, and all damage taken is reduced by 25% for 8 sec. This effect cannot occur more than once every 45 seconds.

 

2. When a stack of Dark Ward is consumed you will be healed for 1% of your maximum health.

 

With the stacks being 15 stacks it will be 15% total health being generated. That in itself may be a bit too strong, but again it's just an idea. I'm hoping to come up with something that will make the assassin unique. Just adding damage reduction and calling it a day just seems dull in my opinion. Please share your ideas.

Edited August 31, 2013 by Dyronis

I'd like to start off by saying that I am mainly a Juggernaut tank, and I do play all 3 tanks on both factions. Tanking is what I do, and what I enjoy most out of most MMOs I have played. This post is mainly to throw some ideas out there to fix the spikiness of assassins. Here's two ideas I have myself. Just curious what other people's thoughts are.

 

1. When a damaging attack brings you below 30% of your maximum health, the cooldown on your Overcharged Saber ability is refreshed, and all damage taken is reduced by 25% for 8 sec. This effect cannot occur more than once every 45 seconds.

 

2. When a stack of Dark Ward is consumed you will be healed for 1% of your maximum health.

 

With the stacks being 15 stacks it will be 15% total health being generated. That in itself may be a bit too strong, but again it's just an idea. I'm hoping to come up with something that will make the assassin unique. Just adding damage reduction and calling it a day just seems dull in my opinion. Please share your ideas.

 

I doubt we will get any new abilities on our skill tree. A more simple approach would be to switch abilities. Maybe switch corrupted flesh and conspirator's cloak so that both trees could benefit

I'd like to start off by saying that I am mainly a Juggernaut tank, and I do play all 3 tanks on both factions. Tanking is what I do, and what I enjoy most out of most MMOs I have played. This post is mainly to throw some ideas out there to fix the spikiness of assassins. Here's two ideas I have myself. Just curious what other people's thoughts are.

 

1. When a damaging attack brings you below 30% of your maximum health, the cooldown on your Overcharged Saber ability is refreshed, and all damage taken is reduced by 25% for 8 sec. This effect cannot occur more than once every 45 seconds.

 

2. When a stack of Dark Ward is consumed you will be healed for 1% of your maximum health.

 

With the stacks being 15 stacks it will be 15% total health being generated. That in itself may be a bit too strong, but again it's just an idea. I'm hoping to come up with something that will make the assassin unique. Just adding damage reduction and calling it a day just seems dull in my opinion. Please share your ideas.

 

Would be nice. But the following patch we would get whacked with the nerf bat from the pvp community

However much I li ke the second idea, it wouldn't actually fix shadow spikyness more the opposite:

The problem is with nearly dieing if you don't shield, so adding a healing cd is pretty useless (often, not always) and adding a healing effect to KW is just making sure that if you get hardly any damage due to shielding you get extra healing??

Really nice try, but sorry, it doesn't fix problems in nim.

One option is to bring back the armour buff in martial prowess.

I'd like to start off by saying that I am mainly a Juggernaut tank, and I do play all 3 tanks on both factions. Tanking is what I do, and what I enjoy most out of most MMOs I have played. This post is mainly to throw some ideas out there to fix the spikiness of assassins. Here's two ideas I have myself. Just curious what other people's thoughts are.

 

1. When a damaging attack brings you below 30% of your maximum health, the cooldown on your Overcharged Saber ability is refreshed, and all damage taken is reduced by 25% for 8 sec. This effect cannot occur more than once every 45 seconds.

 

2. When a stack of Dark Ward is consumed you will be healed for 1% of your maximum health.

 

With the stacks being 15 stacks it will be 15% total health being generated. That in itself may be a bit too strong, but again it's just an idea. I'm hoping to come up with something that will make the assassin unique. Just adding damage reduction and calling it a day just seems dull in my opinion. Please share your ideas.

 

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.

I canned my Assassin Tank when 2.0 hit and made a Jugg instead, the extra damage mitigation from armor alone makes life so much less frustrating. I remember back in the day when Assassins had much higher armor rating, it was nerfed into the ground. Since the problem (IMO) is mainly deadly unpredictable spikes:

 

My simple suggestion is to make Insulation (30% armor rating) available to Darkness, self healing would probably have to be slightly reduced to balance it out.

While it's fun to dream up new abilities, I think the problem over at Bioware isn't that they are lacking ideas for how to buff Sin tanks; the problem is that they don't consider it to be an urgent issue.

Apparently a GM (I assume a dev...or someone in contact with them) has admitted to knowing the sin issue...and has commented that it was / is due to a lack of feedback on the pts (swear only me and 2 others said sins were in trouble) and lack of manpower.

 

They also said that they are working on the issue.

 

Though, I wish they'd -say- more on the subject here.

And I wish they wouldn't use only the PTS as a barometer for success. What percentage of the population actually plays on PTS? What percentage manage to try out stuff like ops in hard and nightmare, 8 and 16-man modes?

The problem is PVP, no matter what is decided to fix our spikiness can't affect PVP to much. If it does we are just begging to be put back in the same boat we where in pre-2.0 with all the nerfs we got back then.

Either a rolling 5% DR buff tied to force breach, or a buff to our armor rating, and sins would be fine. The shielded attacks are fine, the issue is the comparative damage we take on unshieldable attack vs juggs and VG's

 

Your first idea would be vastly OP in PVP, while your second does nothing to solve the spikiness issue, and instead only contributes to the problem. I can't heal myself when I get spiked to death...

Edited September 8, 2013 by Simmerr

Honestly I love my shadow to death, but you can't fix stupid. There are literally hundreds of threads on whats wrong with each tank and why guardians are the only tanks worth taking in both pvp and pve with numbers, videos, and even solutions on how to fix the issues. Dev's for whatever reason feel everything is fine which is why they are loosing more and more people as the weeks go by. Trust me, I applaud your attempt to reach out to the dev's like many before you, but I honestly doubt they even read the forums. I've just decided to roll 1 of each tank until Wildstar comes out.

Sin tank under normal circumstances are already the tank that requires the less healing due to having more self-heals than the others.

 

The issue comes, from what I understand it since I haven,t done that new content at that difficulty yet, 16m NiM boss that have some hard hitters that can ONESHOT the sin tank if the RNG doesnt like you.

 

Having a cooldown popping off as you die will not be a ton of help. You'd actually would need to have Overcharge saber on before the hit come.

 

Neither are MORE self-heals on shielding, since the issue happen when shielding/parrying fails. So you'd do pretty much an assassin shelter. By that I mean, break something, and in exchange give a boost somewhere that you were already more than fine.

 

I'm fine with assassin having less armor than other tanks. But when we have Arsenal Merc with the same reduction closer to us than we are to other tanks, I'm kinda wondering if an improvement to the armor rating wouldn't be justified. Even more, DECEPTION effective DR is roughly 6% under with entropic field stacks on (which is normally fast enough)

 

Overcharge saber gives a significant period where spikiness is extremely reduced. The availability of it could be looked at. Seeing as DPS sin are also having issues, maybe reducing the cooldown on the ability to 1 minute?

 

But more easily, simply aiming for an higher armor rating would fix a lot of the issues imo.

But more easily, simply aiming for an higher armor rating would fix a lot of the issues imo.

 

You're absolutely right. I recently did the math to prove that the Exotech Absorb adrenal (+Armor) is better than the Nano-Infused Adrenal (+Absorb/Shield) and found that the armor it adds is a whopping 12.43% DR. Thats just 1675 armor (Less than separates light from heavy armor) and it would take more than 1000 damage off of a 10k hit. Increasing their armor is a MUST.

The problem is PVP, no matter what is decided to fix our spikiness can't affect PVP to much. If it does we are just begging to be put back in the same boat we where in pre-2.0 with all the nerfs we got back then.

 

Too bad they didn't listen to people during beta, asking to separate PvP and PvE trees. They are both very different environments, it only makes sense having them apart. Now it's probably too late to such change.

And yeah, PvP will take precedence because, well, you don't have Kelsara, Kephess, etc complaining about being killed by X class or something.

And yeah, PvP will take precedence because,....words words words

 

Not likely. Granted I don't PvP, but it always seems like the threads I read have it to where what adjustments they actually DO make are PvE based and it always screws the PvP'ers. It always sounds like PvP gets no luv.

Edited September 20, 2013 by Grumpftard

Not likely. Granted I don't PvP, but it always seems like the threads I read have it to where what adjustments they actually DO make are PvE based and it always screws the PvP'ers. It always sounds like PvP gets no luv.

 

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).

Do you think giving a sin tank a "cheat death" mechanic would help? attacks that reduce the sin sin to below zero health instead leave it at 1% health and leave it immune to further damage for x secs. this effect can only occur once every 90 secs. Or an attack that lowers the sins health below zero doesnt immediately kill the sin, instead they get 5 secs to heal the damage/have it healed. something of this ilk. Would that help? and also be more fitting with our self healing mechanic.

Do you think giving a sin tank a "cheat death" mechanic would help? attacks that reduce the sin sin to below zero health instead leave it at 1% health and leave it immune to further damage for x secs. this effect can only occur once every 90 secs. Or an attack that lowers the sins health below zero doesnt immediately kill the sin, instead they get 5 secs to heal the damage/have it healed. something of this ilk. Would that help? and also be more fitting with our self healing mechanic.

 

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.

Edited September 21, 2013 by nagatamen

Here's an idea with the pvp problem with the armor buff for sin tanks... put it high enough in the Darkness tree that only tanks can really benefit from it and not pvp hybrid specs.

 

Take Hollow and switch it with tiers with mounting darkness.

Then have Hollow read as follows:

Increase your shield absorption by [2/4%]. In addition when Dark Charge is active increase armor rating by [10/20%], also when you activate Overcharge Saber while Dark Charge is active damage reduction is increase by [12.5/25%] for the duration.

 

This way we get that armor increase Sin/Shadow tank need so much to help lessen the damage we take from the spikiness. Now understandably the percent I put in for armor may need to lower or higher to help balance us out between Juggy and Powertech tanks

Edited September 22, 2013 by Amathal