Hi there,

 

I'm a Shadow tank and I'm in a situation where my guildmaster doesn't agree on my stats.

I fully geared myself in favor of stats (this being Defense, Shield and Absorb), and not endurance.

 

Hence, being BIS (pre 1.4) I had these stats:

 

31% Defense chance

65% Shield Chance (WITH kinetic Ward and Rakata boost), 45% without both. But since i keep both up, its 65%.

60% Absorb Chance.

WITH Exotech might stim: 25956 hp.

 

Now the guildmaster tells me i have too low hp and should ditch stats for hp. I personally don't agree.

Healers have been telling me since forever that I'm a breeze to heal since I get hit for such low numbers.

 

What's your opinion?

now here is a perfect example. this is an extremely poor conception alot of people have. endurance meens NOTHING in tanking. expecialy shadow tanking. the more you mitigate the better because mitigation makes it easiest on your healers. stacking endurance is a foolish waste of resources, and will practicaly doom your group if you dont have a healer that can keep up. even if you do have a healer that can keep your squishy *** up he will not have the time to focus on the other members of the group. ALWAYS choose higher mitigation over HP. ALWAYS

Just curious, what role does your guildmaster play?

Just curious, what role does your guildmaster play?

 

Thank you haksilence, good to have someone on my team.

 

 

and sgtklavier, he's a Guardian

do u mind posting ur stat numbers not the % with KW and rakata stim or post a link of ur gear if u can

 

Armor Rating

Damage Reduction

Defense Chance

Shield Chance

Shield Absorption

 

Thank you

Edited October 1, 2012 by alkhattabi

Guardian dps or tank? Might just be my personal experience, but I've noticed a higher portion of Guardian (Jugg) tanks that stack endurance; not sure why this is the case, but it doesn't make sense. 25k is plenty.

do u mind posting ur stat numbers not the % with KW and rakata stim or post a link of ur gear if u can

 

Armor Rating

Damage Reduction

Defense Chance

Shield Chance

Shield Absorption

 

Thank you

 

I must say this first, since the 1.4 patch my Armor rating has gone down about 600, and my defense % and Damage Reduction about 2%.... and I can NOT find out why.

 

5618 Armor Rating

38.22 Damage Reduction

593 Defense Rating

554 Shield Rating

586 Absorb rating

Your stats are fine, if not excellent. 31/65/60 is an excellent distribution for Shadow tanks and, honestly, the direct survivability value of increased HP is questionable at best (the only contribution is the 8% of your hp you get back when using HSx3 TkT and the direct healing provided when using Battle Readiness).

 

Unless your guild leader is a healer (which he's not), I wouldn't give a damn about what he says about your HP. If your healers are complaining about the size of your hp pool, I'd look into increasing it but 26k is more than enough (my Shadow tank actually has only 25k and I have yet to get a single complaint).

 

From what I can tell, your guild leader is likely an hp stacking tank. You, on the other hand, are a mitigation stacking tank. You belong to, largely, completely different schools of tank stat allotment.

 

The mitigation stacking school (which is the same school of thought that I belong to about this) would rather take less damage than be able to take more damage. The fact that all of the current content emphasizes a largely consistent blend of Force/Tech and melee/ranged attacks (such that you're capable of mitigating a substantial majority of the damage via mitigation stats in any specific fight) means that, over time, a mitigation stacked tank will take less damage and need to be healed less than an hp stacked tank.

 

The hp stacking school would rather be able to take more damage than take less damage. The general focus of this school of thought is to build yourself to most effectively deal with the rare cases wherein you take a large amount of damage completely unmitigated (such as a string of attacks that you don't dodge, parry, or deflect or a series of high damage Force/Tech attacks). Since the focus of the school of thought is the specific times wherein the only stat that matters is Endurance, it becomes the only stat worth stacking to any appreciable extent. Of course, the problem with this school of though is that, by sacrificing mitigation stats, they end up making the rare cases more common (lower shield and defense chance increase the likelihood of an attack getting through completely unmitigated) as well as outright increasing your incoming damage overall (lower absorb chance means even those attacks you mitigate, you don't mitigate as much). The end effect is a conceptualization that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein they build for those rare cases and end up causes more of those rare cases to occur. It also has the problem of shifting more of the burden of survivability onto the healers since, as you'll be taking more damage, it will require them to spend more time healing you (and more of the resources to boot).

 

The HP stacking school had some reasonably decent points when KP and EV were the top tier content: the damage weighted ratio of F/T to m/r attacks in those instances was much heavier on the F/T side of things, meaning that the value of mitigation stats was substantially reduced. The newer content (EC and TfB) has been designed to have a ratio that favors mitigation more than the previous content. As such, most tanks that actually know what they're doing have shifted from Endurance stacking to mitigation stacking (that is, if they were ever Endurance stackers).

 

One of my biggest problems with Endurance stacking is the comparative improvements: by stacking Endurance and only Endurance, you'll manage to get an extra 5k hp (30k hp total or thereabouts), which seems like a lot until you realize that it's only 20% more hp at the cost of roughly 25-33% of your total mitigation budget (~360 rating equates to ~4600 hp which, with raid buffs and talents, equates to 5k hp). 20% more hp isn't that big of a deal, as I see it, and, even with DR, that big of a chunk of your total mitigation budget is going to make you take more than 20% more comparative incoming damage (70% total mitigation compared to 75% total mitigation is a 20% difference in incoming damage and that's gonna be a fair deal more than that).

 

This isn't to say that Endurance stacking is just for baddies. It's not. It's a valid choice for how to gear your tank, but it's not the only choice, nor is it the best. It's effective and has been shown to clear content just as well as mitigation stacking. It's just not what I would even remotely claim as the best way to gear yourself for clearing content (unless you plan on taking a lot of damage that you should really not be taking).

Edited October 1, 2012 by Kitru

I'm a Shadow tank and I'm in a situation where my guildmaster doesn't agree on my stats. I fully geared myself in favor of stats (this being Defense, Shield and Absorb), and not endurance.

 

What's your opinion?

 

Wow, Kitru. Wonder if shield procs on incoming walls of text?

 

My opinion is, your guild leader is off his nut. Your stats are fine, more than fine, for any content in the game currently. HP tanking has been shown time and time again to be inferior to stacking defense stats.

Wow, Kitru. Wonder if shield procs on incoming walls of text?

 

It says it right there in my sig: I loves me some walls of text.

I'm curious about this topic from a Tankassin point of view, since I'm trying to help my brother build out his Assassin for tanking. I find it a lot of fun to tank, and I'm trying to let him see it for himself.

 

However, I play an Immortal Juggernaut. I'm in essentially full Columi gear, and I've been targeting the following stats. I like mitigation, as it feels quite epic to simply walk into a room full of mobs and shrug off their damage.

 

HP - As many as I get from full Guardian armorings and Elusive mods.

Defense chance - 30%

Damage Resistance - 40%

Shield - 50%

Absorb - 50%

 

Now, I'm not an expert, but this is where my stats are as of now. (Fudging a little because I'm not in game atm and MrRobot doesn't have the new moddable offhands yet)

HP - ~21,000 Unstimmed.

Armor - ~7200

Damage Reduction - ~45.7%

Defense chance - ~27.3%

Shield - ~48.1%

Absorb - 45.1%

 

What is everyone's opinion of those stats? I'm sincerely curious, I want to know what I should focus on as I get my Rakata / BH / Campaign set filled out. Every healer I've grouped with says I'm a great tank and easy to heal for. (I love how Juggs have like... 5 defensive cooldowns)

 

I definitely need new implants... Too much accuracy on the ones I have.

Your guild leader is wrong.

 

Put simply, a larger health pool with less mitigation just means you are putting more pressure on your healers. You will take more damage and count on your larger hp pool to soak it up, but that will require your healers to work harder.

 

Endurance stacking is foolish.

Kitru said it all. The only slight clarification I will add is that endurance *is* a survivability stat for shadow tanks, and it has a value that can be measured in terms of survivability added. At the fully augmented, min-maxed campaign gear level on a mitigation-stacking tank, endurance is worth about half the value of the same points in defense, shield or absorb. That's a lot more than most people would think though, and since endurance has other benefits, I *do* dip into my mitigation budget a bit to push up my hit points, but not far.

 

I'm right now (post off-hand itemization) sitting at 26.5k HP stimmed. I would probably bring this down a bit, save for the fact that the itemization of mods STRONGLY pushes you toward endurance stacking. The problem is that the mods which are endurance-heavy have a larger stat budget (by quite a bit) than the ones which are not endurance heavy. Thus, as a shadow/assassin tank, swapping 26 mods for 26B mods loses mitigation, but actually *increases* survivability (21 pts of Endurance vs 9 pts of <mitigation>). Much to my annoyance…

 

Anyway, I absolutely subscribe to Kitru's philosophy that average survivability is preferable to effective HP (worst-case survivability) in this game. It just seems that for shadows/assassins, optimizing survivability does not necessarily mean optimizing mitigation. It's a hard line to play though, because the differences between the stat allocations are so tiny. If in doubt, just shoot for 30/65/60 on your mitigation. If you want to play cute tricks with endurance as a survivability stat, make sure you do so with spreadsheet in hand.