I have loved Tankasin since release of the game but now I just can't make it work. I could protect my healers and do nice damage. Now it just feels underpowered/useless. Does anyone have advice for an old broken down TankaSin? Edited April 19, 2013 by Dencre

What do you mean by not working? If you're dying a lot, that's a good thing. We still have far higher survivality than pretty much any DPS even in DPS gear so it implies whatever DPS used to kill you would definitely kill another DPS with some left over. Since a good DPS class can easily beat us in DPS now (as they should), this means it's a bigger loss to your team if a DPS died instead of you. Tankasins only put up amazing numbers against good teams, who are smart enough to know to focus on healer/DPS first and leave you last, and bad teams outnumber the good teams by a lot. Against a bad team you're likely to be focus fired while still eating guard damage and die horribly, but that's exactly what you want the enemy to do so you can't ask for a better scenario than that. Your numbers will take a huge hit for dying 15 times but the rest of your team is strictly better off this way.

 

In terms of gameplay mechanics there's nothing really new besides now that you've to occasionally close in melee distance to proc the frontal Maul. Darkness have very little resource issues that sometimes you should just Maul someone even without the proc for extra DPS.

Well I use to wear all dps gear and use a standard darkness spec. Now I am not sure what gear to get, ive tried out a couple of things like full tank gear and full dps gear. It feels like I am taking too much damage and not dealing out enough damage. Maybe i should try full dps gear with a sheild and put dps mods in the sheild? I just dont know what to do -cry-

Well I use to wear all dps gear and use a standard darkness spec. Now I am not sure what gear to get, ive tried out a couple of things like full tank gear and full dps gear. It feels like I am taking too much damage and not dealing out enough damage. Maybe i should try full dps gear with a sheild and put dps mods in the sheild? I just dont know what to do -cry-

 

The changes in 2.0 makes it unlkely you'll ever beat a good DPS in Darkness spec, especially if your enemy is playing badly by targetting you first instead of the guy who does more DPS than you. Now, in a game where the enemy also knows what they're doing, you're likely to still top DPS just because everyone who can do better DPS than you is going to die first, but it's rare to fight such good opposition. Gone are the days where you can be focus fired by a bad team, shrug it off, and still top DPS at the same time.

 

Obviously your performance will be improved if your healer is actually healing you, but you might not even always have a healer on your side.

 

Shields without the corresponding absorb/shield stat is simply not very useful. The baseline Dark Ward gets you 35% shielding chance and 20% absorption, or 7% damage mitigated. That's hardly going to turn you to unkillable. It will help but you also take a significant DPS hit for using a shield.

 

One trick I've been contemplating but never bothered to put the resources into is that maybe you can try to stack modifications that are high on endurance (but not tank mods), because there's a tendency for people to give up when they see someone with a ton of HP and move on to the guy with the less HPs. Therefore you only need to give up a small amount of offense to intimidate your opposition into attacking someone else. Of course, I have no idea if this will work (it's entirely dependent on the mindset of your opponents), and it's really a bad idea to 'trick' your enemy into not attacking the tank. Darkness, even in DPS gear, is still far better at withstanding damage than any DPS.

Well I use to wear all dps gear and use a standard darkness spec. Now I am not sure what gear to get, ive tried out a couple of things like full tank gear and full dps gear. It feels like I am taking too much damage and not dealing out enough damage. Maybe i should try full dps gear with a sheild and put dps mods in the sheild? I just dont know what to do -cry-

 

Just curious did you ever find a spec that worked well for you? I have been trying to find something comparable to the old 23/1/17. I was wondering what others have found affective for running the darkness charge? Most people I see are Deception due to the great burst. And while it is fun I like to guard people and generally play to win, I should've have to say that but a lot of people do not really its more scoreboard and death match

Just curious did you ever find a spec that worked well for you? I have been trying to find something comparable to the old 23/1/17. I was wondering what others have found affective for running the darkness charge? Most people I see are Deception due to the great burst. And while it is fun I like to guard people and generally play to win, I should've have to say that but a lot of people do not really its more scoreboard and death match

 

Since ranged classes no longer loses to an Assassin of any kind at range (which is long overdue as it'd ridiculous to kill a ranged class from range pre 2.0) there's really not much gained by having some kind of alpha strike attack like Death Field, not to mention the crit/surge nerf hits that pretty hard too. At some point you got to melee and if you go deep in Darkness, the frontal maul is like the second best melee ability you can get for an Assassin (the Deception tree's Maul is better but no way you pick it up and still have the stuff from Darkness tree). If you go deep enough to pick up frontal Maul you might as well have Wither. Harnessed Darkness is not as good as it used to be PvP because you're not going to beat a ranged class with just that now, so going just deep enough to pick up HD is a bad idea.

 

In general for Darkness PvP you still try to rely on your ranged game as much as possible, even against ranged class, but you have to know when to step in to melee to get your frontal Maul/energize procs because you can no longer beat them solely from range.

Just curious did you ever find a spec that worked well for you? I have been trying to find something comparable to the old 23/1/17. I was wondering what others have found affective for running the darkness charge? Most people I see are Deception due to the great burst. And while it is fun I like to guard people and generally play to win, I should've have to say that but a lot of people do not really its more scoreboard and death match

 

No I am still bouncing around specs. With healing and burst as high as it is right now things just havn't been working out for me. Really not enjoying the game all that much now.

36/5/5

Using 2pc tank set 2pc force master set with all dps mods and I'm pulling very high sustained dmg and I'm don't die very often. I also have high burst damage. I also throw CD into my rotation if you didn't pick up on that from the 2 pc force master

I have about 4% Alacrity which has helped a lot in my opinion. Just recently I pulled 700k dmg in Voidstar, not even fully geared in Partisan stuff. Only thing that has really changed is our self healing.

 

72% Surge Rating, 17% Crit, Damage 1024 - 1273, Bonus Damage 550, 30% Damage Reduction, 20% Shield Chance, 24% Shield Absorption

Edited April 22, 2013 by Rawwwdog

Full Darkness is indeed the way to go. I actually find it more refreshing than I did back in the day before 23/1/17 became the thing to run with for utility + survival. The ability to facetank Maul is, perhaps, the best thing to come from the 2.0 changes, though Shield finally being useful is a close second.

 

My intention is to run 2pc Darkness for the Spike cooldown reduction and 2pc Stalker for the added range to Jolt. Then use High Endurance DPS mods and enhancements so that I can at least dish out a bit of damage while also playing the role of a damage sponge.

There's not much point to try to increase your survivality as Darkness because Huttball is the only map you can force the enemy to focus on you. Even with all the DPS mods you're not going to out DPS a pure DPS class, so unless you're counting on the enemy confusing you for a Deception Assassin, they'd still have no reason to attack you first over say, a Sniper who is easier to kill than you and does quite a bit more damage. Increasing survivality only matters against bad players who simply attack the closest target, though there certainly are a lot of those players out there. Still, I don't think it's wise to have a strategy centered around beating bad players.

 

The other scenario that matters is when you're the only guy chasing their healer and getting focus fired, but again this implies your team is pretty bad (everyone should be going after the healers) so again you're talking about planning for failure. When all DPS participate on killing the enemy healer, the enemy certainly isn't worried about your burst DPS as a Darkness Assassin and have very little reason to concentrate on you compared to any pure DPS class.

conspirators cloak is near worthless. probably every keyboard turning clicker sins dream come true but for anyone with half a brain and/or an ounce of skill, gettting a maul off is rarely a problem. 23/1/17 tank stance/dps gear type specs are still good and viable (at least for regs). no more instant whirlwind + no more spike out of stealth are both hits and the spec is not as good as it was pre 2.0 but...its still good. its still is capable of 400-600k dmg/100k protection type of numbers on a regular basis/good utilty, peels, huttball offense and defense, node guard, etc.

The point of Conspirator's Cloak is that it also reduces Maul cost by 50%. It was never hard to get a Maul off but it's also almost never worth the cost at 50 Force.

conspirators cloak is near worthless. probably every keyboard turning clicker sins dream come true but for anyone with half a brain and/or an ounce of skill, gettting a maul off is rarely a problem. 23/1/17 tank stance/dps gear type specs are still good and viable (at least for regs). no more instant whirlwind + no more spike out of stealth are both hits and the spec is not as good as it was pre 2.0 but...its still good. its still is capable of 400-600k dmg/100k protection type of numbers on a regular basis/good utilty, peels, huttball offense and defense, node guard, etc.

 

I tried so hard to like this spec. Ultimately went full darkness. It's better. I promise.

I'd imagine that with shield being the biggest buffed mechanic in all of swtor in 2.0 full tanks in tank gear would be much, much better in pvp.

Haven't tried it myself, unfortunately, since the PTS was so retarded when I wanted to test it.