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KBN's Stress-Free Guide to the Tank Rotation


KeyboardNinja

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What happened to the set bonus providing 4 stacks upon using Force Pull? Stacks still don't fall off, but it'd make me feel a bit better about pulling with Crushing Darkness. :)

 

This is why you don't trust data mining. :-) In any case, CD does less damage than Project. It's not worth using at all as a tank, even in the opener. Pull does far, far more threat, and opening with pull from stealth guarantees you don't lose your stacks in the opener.

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CD now has a 30 metre range, making it useful for some pulls.
Still not. Force Pull giving much more threat. Before 3.0 it gave more that 8k threat (in 1 GCD), CD will give less and it wont be per 1 GCD = more chances to loose aggro to some dps. Ofc if you're tanking with pugs-dps who doesnt know how to play his spec correctly or heavy undergeared - then doesnt matter how u'll start fight but in normal group you have to start from Force Pull. Edited by archieTevidor
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This is why you don't trust data mining. :-) In any case, CD does less damage than Project. It's not worth using at all as a tank, even in the opener. Pull does far, far more threat, and opening with pull from stealth guarantees you don't lose your stacks in the opener.

 

including the dot portion of CD it's more damage than a non-crit project. i don't understand why you are comparing the damage of the two, CD doesn't hinder you from using project after force pull.

 

when opening CD -> force pull -> project -> slow time ... you are not loosing the stacks as long as you make it into 10 meter range within the GCD of force pull, even if no particle acceleration procs before the first cascading debris. at least in a perfect world without knockbacks or stuns.

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Still not. Force Pull giving much more threat. Before 3.0 it gave more that 8k threat (in 1 GCD), CD will give less and it wont be per 1 GCD = more chances to loose aggro to some dps. Ofc if you're tanking with pugs-dps who doesnt know how to play his spec correctly or heavy undergeared - then doesnt matter how u'll start fight but in normal group you have to start from Force Pull.

 

You're confused. I'm talking about using Crushing Darkness before Force Pull, not in place of it. The cast time of Crushing Darkness means it hits at the same time as Force Pull.

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You're confused. I'm talking about using Crushing Darkness before Force Pull, not in place of it. The cast time of Crushing Darkness means it hits at the same time as Force Pull.

 

Hmm, for whatever reason, I didn't consider that. I have two minor-ish concerns about this opener.

 

First, Shadow Protection stacks. The duration on the stacks opening from stealth is 12 seconds, we need 9 seconds to proc into our first Cascading Debris opening with just Force Pull, so adding a 2 second Mind Crush cast pushes that up to 11 seconds. Doable, but without a margin for error. Tank openers don't have a margin for error anyway, so…meh? Probably a non-issue.

 

My second concern is that 40 force is a LOT of force, especially if you're dealing with a boss that doesn't hit very rapidly or very early. We regenerate 15.6 of that cost over the Force Pull GCD (assuming a melee boss), so we're hitting the boss at a deficit of 24.4, or almost exactly a quarter of our pool. That's not too bad, honestly. It certainly leaves us with enough force to complete our opener and get to our second taunt. I think that, depending on the boss, we might run into trouble getting to the third taunt though.

 

Overall, I think it's a good idea, and probably applicable to most bosses. I'm going to start playing with it to see how it treats me. Timing with precast openers and things might get slightly tricky, but it shouldn't be any harder than timing a precast opener across classes. It's basically more free threat in the opener with very little downside.

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There was never any doubt on whether the Sins/ shadows have enough time to refresh the stacks. The case we seem to be making and you keep ignoring is that in most fights where the tank has more to do then stand in one spot and refresh his DR buff, the 12 seconds stack timer is a bit tight. There should be either a longer counter or something we can do to one punch reset the timer or 4%. Discharge would probably work well for that sort of idea.

Possibly even have the first tick of Force lightning build the entire 4%.

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On the subject of Dark Protection stack maintenance, I have some questions for the any Assassin/Shadow tank:

 

What is your uptime on Dark Protection during the Sword Squadron fight?

How does this uptime compare to the rotation acquired buffs of other tanking classes during that fight?

 

 

My experience is that I have no issues gaining Dark Protection when I am on Unit 2, but when I switch to Unit 1 the stacks usually fall off while I am kiting Rapid Fire circles on the ground. However, my cotank is a Jug; 2 out of 3 of his rotational buff moves require 4 meter range, so he can't use them at all while kiting. Therefore, I don't feel that my Assassin tank is at a disadvantage considering the problems that other tanks would have maintaining their buffs in the same fight. if you have numbers to show this is not the case, I would love to see them.

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There was never any doubt on whether the Sins/ shadows have enough time to refresh the stacks. The case we seem to be making and you keep ignoring is that in most fights where the tank has more to do then stand in one spot and refresh his DR buff, the 12 seconds stack timer is a bit tight. There should be either a longer counter or something we can do to one punch reset the timer or 4%. Discharge would probably work well for that sort of idea.

Possibly even have the first tick of Force lightning build the entire 4%.

 

It's called Force Cloak, which doesn't even reduce your healing now.

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There was never any doubt on whether the Sins/ shadows have enough time to refresh the stacks. The case we seem to be making and you keep ignoring is that in most fights where the tank has more to do then stand in one spot and refresh his DR buff, the 12 seconds stack timer is a bit tight.

 

I'm not ignoring that case. What I'm saying is that it isn't applicable. Do shadows/assassins need to think a bit more about the timing of their rotation with respect to mechanics and various swing timers? Yes, absolutely. If you don't like this fact, play a different class. It's far from impossible though, and once you get the timing of a particular fight, it's not even that hard.

 

There should be either a longer counter or something we can do to one punch reset the timer or 4%. Discharge would probably work well for that sort of idea.

 

So…Force Cloak?

 

Possibly even have the first tick of Force lightning build the entire 4%.

 

It does unless you've allowed your stacks to fall off. Because of this fact, it's possible to maintain your stacks even on the most mobile of fights, since you can always safely break your channel.

 

What is your uptime on Dark Protection during the Sword Squadron fight?

 

Fairly good. I would have to break out StarParse to give you an exact number, but in general I only lose my stacks when swapping at an inopportune time or when I have to adjust to give someone a bit more space on Grav Missile.

 

How does this uptime compare to the rotation acquired buffs of other tanking classes during that fight?

 

Vanguards have better uptime (surprise)! Guardians have worse, since the amount of time you can spend just hanging out in melee range is surprisingly low.

 

My experience is that I have no issues gaining Dark Protection when I am on Unit 2, but when I switch to Unit 1 the stacks usually fall off while I am kiting Rapid Fire circles on the ground. However, my cotank is a Jug; 2 out of 3 of his rotational buff moves require 4 meter range, so he can't use them at all while kiting. Therefore, I don't feel that my Assassin tank is at a disadvantage considering the problems that other tanks would have maintaining their buffs in the same fight. if you have numbers to show this is not the case, I would love to see them.

 

I primarily tank Unit 1, and while Rapid Fire can be annoying, it's not actually a major issue. I forget the exact duration of the channel, but I think it's right around 5 seconds. If you time it out right, it's actually not that hard to keep up your stacks despite the run 'round. The important thing is to be able to loop back into range for Project/Shock so that you can use it on CD.

 

The biggest problem with shadows/assassins in this fight, honestly, is the fact that once Unit 1's shield goes up, you can't build Shadow Protection anymore. This results in a LOT of lost mitigation. But of course, this has nothing to do with movement, it's just a poorly designed mechanic.

Edited by KeyboardNinja
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Yep great idea, force cloak, lets drop all our threat to maintain the 4%. Oh my you guys are soooo smart. And your idea about timing, the problem is that the extra 2 seconds we have from maintaining our rotation for the 4% doesn't give us any options. When its time to move and it gets us at just the right moment, we lose the 4% of dr that is supposed to parallel us with the other tanks in armor rating.

You keep yammering about the same crap KBN, but yet never offer any alternatives. All you seem capable of doing is shouting down everyone.

Either give an idea on how to better play (something other than play better), or something BW can do to help us out a little. Or better yet shut up!

Ranting over and over again to prove your ego does nothing but confuse the small minded BW employees, and the have enough issues as is.

Edited by Kalispa
mispelled word
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Yep great idea, force cloak, lets drop all our threat to maintain the 4%. Oh my you guys are soooo smart. And your idea about timing, the problem is that the extra 2 seconds we have from maintaining our rotation for the 4% doesn't give us any options. When its time to move and it gets us at just the right moment, we lose the 4% of dr that is supposed to parallel us with the other tanks in armor rating.

You keep yammering about the same crap KBN, but yet never offer any alternatives. All you seem capable of doing is shouting down everyone.

Either give an idea on how to better play (something other than play better), or something BW can do to help us out a little. Or better yet shut up!

Ranting over and over again to prove your ego does nothing but confuse the small minded BW employees, and the have enough issues as is.

 

You're wrong you know. It doesn't matter if you lose aggro so long as you taunt right after. Assuming you've been swapping with the other tank or you're a decent way into the fight you should still be quite a bit ahead of losing the mob if you stealth out and back in and taunt.

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Yep great idea, force cloak, lets drop all our threat to maintain the 4%. Oh my you guys are soooo smart. And your idea about timing, the problem is that the extra 2 seconds we have from maintaining our rotation for the 4% doesn't give us any options. When its time to move and it gets us at just the right moment, we lose the 4% of dr that is supposed to parallel us with the other tanks in armor rating.

You keep yammering about the same crap KBN, but yet never offer any alternatives. All you seem capable of doing is shouting down everyone.

Either give an idea on how to better play (something other than play better), or something BW can do to help us out a little. Or better yet shut up!

Ranting over and over again to prove your ego does nothing but confuse the small minded BW employees, and the have enough issues as is.

 

Accuses someone of "shouting everyone down" while shouting someone down. Accuses someone of "ranting over and over again" while ranting...

 

 

 

Back on topic:

 

Thank you for your perspective on the Sword Squadron fight, KBN. I have noticed Depredeting Volts failing to build stacks on enemies that are immune or who resist occasionally due to accuracy debuffs on me/higher defense on the target. This is annoying, especially since they fixed the problem in a previous patch. I have to wonder if they reintroduced this as part of their "taunts can miss now" system. If the rotational buffs of the other tanks also fail to build on immune targets I would assume it is intentional, but it is still highly annoying for tanks trying to keep maximum mitigation up during this fight.

 

On the subject of Force Cloak to maintain stacks, have you found that to be useful on the Quartermaster Bulo fight or Sword Squadron fights? I have been hesitant to use it on those bosses because of how their agro system works. (On Bulo, the tanks need to be the top 2 threat targets and I might want to save the extra few seconds of Shroud for Exonium Carts. On Sword Squadron, Unit 2 switches to Unit 1's highest threat target.)

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Thank you for your perspective on the Sword Squadron fight, KBN. I have noticed Depredeting Volts failing to build stacks on enemies that are immune or who resist occasionally due to accuracy debuffs on me/higher defense on the target. This is annoying, especially since they fixed the problem in a previous patch. I have to wonder if they reintroduced this as part of their "taunts can miss now" system. If the rotational buffs of the other tanks also fail to build on immune targets I would assume it is intentional, but it is still highly annoying for tanks trying to keep maximum mitigation up during this fight.

 

I've noticed it failing to build stacks on immune targets, and I've noticed that the "good old" bug where you have 3 stacks of Harnessed Darkness but fail to build Dark Protection on a channel (though the time window for that seems slightly narrower than before). I haven't noticed resists causing issues though. Maybe I've just missed it.

 

On the subject of Force Cloak to maintain stacks, have you found that to be useful on the Quartermaster Bulo fight or Sword Squadron fights? I have been hesitant to use it on those bosses because of how their agro system works. (On Bulo, the tanks need to be the top 2 threat targets and I might want to save the extra few seconds of Shroud for Exonium Carts. On Sword Squadron, Unit 2 switches to Unit 1's highest threat target.)

 

Yeah, I avoid using Cloak on both Bulo and Sword Squadron. For those fights, I simply plan to drop my stacks in favor of mechanical execution in a couple places. I think that it's possible to fully maintain your stacks on both fights outside of the immunity phase on Unit 1, but I'm not (yet) good enough to do it. I can get close, but not fully there yet.

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Yep great idea, force cloak, lets drop all our threat to maintain the 4%. Oh my you guys are soooo smart.

You have a co tank. They have a taunt. They taunt, you cloak, you taunt back. Very easy, very simple, works all the time, my cotank and I used to do it to reset our medpacks on a regular basis, and he still does, though I've been Guardian tanking recently.

And your idea about timing, the problem is that the extra 2 seconds we have from maintaining our rotation for the 4% doesn't give us any options. When its time to move and it gets us at just the right moment, we lose the 4% of dr that is supposed to parallel us with the other tanks in armor rating.

Here's the thing about our rotation. You will, every single time, finish a Depredating Volts/Cascading Debris channel and follow it up with Wither/Slow Time (or Shock/Project if you planned ahead). You then use the other, and are already at 2 stacks. From there, you have a 30% chance with Maul/Shadow Strike, 51% chance with Thrash/Double Strike, and an increasing 30/51/65.7/76/83/88/92/94% chance to trigger Energize/Particle Acceleration with Lacerate/Whirling Blow, based on the number of targets. Thrash/Double Strike then goes up to a 76, and then 88% chance to trigger it on the second and third moves, and against 3 or more targets, Lacerate/Whirling blow is at a minimum ~90% chance by the secon hit and a minimum 96% chance by the third hit. Your chances of triggering Energize/Particle acceleration early are incredibly high, especially against multiple targets.

 

Now, with that said, you should be able to get up to your 3 stacks of Harnessed Darkness/Shadows in, at best, 6 seconds, and at worst, 9 seconds, though it's more likely to be 6 or 7.5 seconds. That leaves you, at best, 6 seconds of leeway, and at worst, 3. I cannot think of a single boss that will stun you for a full 6 seconds in a row, though there are some that will stun you for 3. In those cases, you have to work your timing on your channels to never be interfered with. It's not hard, just a little extra work.

 

Finally, even if your stacks do fall off because the boss stunned you or knocked you back at the worst possible moment, you will almost always have 3 seconds to finish a channel before another knockback from the boss. The only exception I can think of is SM/HM Brontes in the final burn, when the healing is trivially easy anyway.

 

As for the buff falling off due to not being able to hit things to maintain it, that's not a problem with the class/spec design, that's a problem with fight design. Like KBN said.

 

If you gives a specific instance in the game where it's hard to keep your stacks up, I'm sure he'll gladly (and I will if I beat him to it) explain to you how to keep your stacks up on certain bosses.

You keep yammering about the same crap KBN, but yet never offer any alternatives. All you seem capable of doing is shouting down everyone.

Either give an idea on how to better play (something other than play better), or something BW can do to help us out a little. Or better yet shut up!

Ranting over and over again to prove your ego does nothing but confuse the small minded BW employees, and the have enough issues as is.

With all those niceties out of the way, and me being done trying to be helpful and explain, I have a few more things to say. No, KBN actually does consider other ideas when they give some kind of thoughts/data to back it up. I've seen a lot of it, especially working with him, and when someone can come to him with really solid proof or data to back up their claims, he gladly listens to what they have to say. He keeps saying the same thing because people don't listen to what he says. They hear what they want to, selectively pick out what they want to, and ignore the big picture behind what he's saying. He has always been giving people suggestions for how to better maintain this rotation (mostly: learn where the stuns/kbs are and plan for them), but people seem to ignore that he says that, tells them how to get better, and can only focus on the fact that he tells them they need to get better.

 

He has done an immense amount of work trying to balance out this class with the other tanking classes, and has provided many valuable insights to so very many new players on how to play this spec better. Right now, you're no better than you're accusing him to be.

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I've noticed it failing to build stacks on immune targets, and I've noticed that the "good old" bug where you have 3 stacks of Harnessed Darkness but fail to build Dark Protection on a channel (though the time window for that seems slightly narrower than before). I haven't noticed resists causing issues though. Maybe I've just missed it.

 

Honestly, failing to build stacks on resists is not as big of an issue as it used to be since tanks have automatic 110% accuracy now. The final boss of the Manaan FP is the only fight where I have reliably seen it happen, but I expect it would also be common in PvP.

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  • 1 month later...
With 3.1, and the consequent reduction of threat from Cascading Debris, the "improved" Force Breach now becomes a required part of our rotation, but it can neither build stacks of Harnessed Shadows, nor proc Acceleration. How exactly is this supposed to do anything other than punish us further for being reliant on a 3 second channel to get 4% DR, with a 12 second time limit? If you actually have 4 stacks and break off Cascading early, you're going to run low on force very soon, which is a ludicrous situation for tank. Edited by Ancaglon
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With 3.1, and the consequent reduction of threat from Cascading Debris, the "improved" Force Breach now becomes a required part of our rotation, but it can neither build stacks of Harnessed Shadows, nor proc Acceleration. How exactly is this supposed to do anything other than punish us further for being reliant on a 3 second channel to get 4% DR, with a 12 second time limit? If you actually have 4 stacks and break off Cascading early, you're going to run low on force very soon, which is a ludicrous situation for tank.

 

Breach costs less than Double Strike, and the force on Cascading Debris is consumed with each tick rather than upfront since 3.0. Breaking it early will not give you force problems. Also, using Breach rotationally will not impact the protection building at all. The only thing it might do is make you move Shadow Strike to after Cascading Debris, and more importantly reduce the Particle Acceleration procs. I fear we'll be seeing our dps go down a bit :(

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With 3.1, and the consequent reduction of threat from Cascading Debris, the "improved" Force Breach now becomes a required part of our rotation, but it can neither build stacks of Harnessed Shadows, nor proc Acceleration. How exactly is this supposed to do anything other than punish us further for being reliant on a 3 second channel to get 4% DR, with a 12 second time limit? If you actually have 4 stacks and break off Cascading early, you're going to run low on force very soon, which is a ludicrous situation for tank.

 

You actually struggle less with Force if you break CD early. If you break after the first tick, you spend 10 Force in that GCD, and so you actually go Force Positive for that GCD, and still get to keep your stacks. It makes the timing on the next rotation a little tight, and drastically reduces your threat generation, but it can be done if you're running low on Force. Also, it's about a 6% reduction in damage, so it's not like it's drastic.

 

As for the effect on the rotation, you might notice an average 0.5 second longer time between CD uses with this change, though it probably won't even be that much. The reason for this being that a 3 stack CD and Slow Time are both still better TPS than Force Breach, and Force Breach having a 6 second CD. Your rotation will basically look like: (end of CD) > FB > P > SpS/SS/DS/SaS > ST > FB > P > CD. That's going to be your best TPS even if you trigger Particle Acceleration. If you break CD early enough, you can throw a Saber Strike in before FB to get a tiny bit more Force back as well, and you'll probably have to do that if not tanking the boss.

 

Fun Fact time!

Your moves, by rank of highest TPS in 3.1, are sorted like so:

1) 3 stack Cascading Debris

2) Slow Time

3) Force Breach

4) Particle Accelerated Project

5) Spinning Strike

6) Shadow Strike

7) Project

8) Double Strike

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  • 8 months later...
You're wrong you know. It doesn't matter if you lose aggro so long as you taunt right after. Assuming you've been swapping with the other tank or you're a decent way into the fight you should still be quite a bit ahead of losing the mob if you stealth out and back in and taunt.

 

My method was always to hit Force Pull, taunt, and start using that time to build up threat via the rotation. Man was that fun to see if I could outparse threat from the DPS. Some egotistical DPS in my days, took it upon myself to consider them a challenge and I always left those encounters with a smile on my face.

 

"You'll need to put guard on me." DPS 1

"Are you getting hit?" Me

"No." DPS1

"Lets try this..."

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  • 1 month later...
Can some experienced pve tank tell how were changed rotations for sin tank?

 

Basically: not really at all. This guide is somewhat outdated in that it doesn't cover the 3.0 changes, which served to destabilize the rotation considerably, but nothing changed between 3.0 and 4.0 aside from slightly (though noticeably) lower resource generation due to lower mitigation.

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Basically: not really at all. This guide is somewhat outdated in that it doesn't cover the 3.0 changes, which served to destabilize the rotation considerably, but nothing changed between 3.0 and 4.0 aside from slightly (though noticeably) lower resource generation due to lower mitigation.

 

So I've been a way for a long time what changed in the rotation between 2.5 and now since this guide is outdated?

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Now, I know the OP stated that the tanking rotation stuff is outdated, but I'd just like to say that I've never used the rotation he's listed (played off and on since launch, with a large gap after the first year, anyhoo.)

 

My rotation is shock > wither > thrash > shock > dep volts > maul (when proc'd) > ward > repeat. This rotation has always allowed for damn near perfect cd time for abilites, not to mention the reset proc of abilites like shock.

 

IDK where he gets this saber strike, saber strike, stuff from and I never run into any issues with force.

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