As the title states, how many of you are rerolling or will be gearing a guardian/vanguard tank to use instead of the Shadow tank in the new content? I spoke to a few hardcore guild players on TOFN, all are shadow tanks, and they are giving up on the shadow for their 16 mam nim progression runs. They will be looking at guardian / guardian combos or guardian / vanguard combos.

I have played the shadow tank for a year now and have a vanguard but I mainly rolled it for the legacy buff and to do some damage. I started tanking for the first time with it story mode ops and I am already seeing a totally different animal when it comes to damage take and HP loss. I am also levelling a guardian to see if I will enjoy that class more as a tank because at the moment I find vanguard tanking quite dull. Its going to be a snooze fest because I have a sentinel since the game came out as well so here is to double XP weekends

Well I don't intend giving it up just yet but if it is starts to cause wipes for the guild once we start running Nim I will have to re-evaluate that as its not fair to cause wipes for other guildies just because I will randomly get wiped out by bad RNG

I have to say I ma not hopeful looking at some of the comments form Carnage and Friendly Fire etc

If I have to change then I have both a Guardian and a Vanguard so it just depends on whether we think a Guardian / Guardian combo or a Guardian / Vanguard combo is best (my co tank is a Guardian. I suspect it will be guardian / guardian as the guardian feels rather like my shadow did pre 1.3 at the moment.

Not giving up.... Just gearing my Jugg up to eventually turn my assassin into a PVP dps. I hate PVP so that toon will be semi-retired as I have a geared Marauder for DPS.

Assassins right now are squishy tanks, meh dps, and decent PVP. I am glad the PVP class designers at least kept the AC alive for themselves. I guess the rest of us just get to play our alts until they figure out how to fix the mess they made.

I have all three tanks. While I'm not giving up on Sin...as I think it has more usefulness than PT, Jug is clearly the best tank atm. Arguements can be made for and against Sin and PT. PT is a great off tank for grabbing adds etc. While Sin can cheese mechanics.

But most raid guilds etc...even top progression guilds...don't really min max. So I'd say most won't replace a sin with a Jug.

Couldn't blame 16 man guilds for "giving up" on Assassins/Shadows if they're serious about NiM content.

I think it's completely unnecessary to do so for 8 man content. The occasional downsides are not so severe that they impose a serious detriment to progression, and the upsides remain as they always have been.

Certainly, something needs to be done to address the spikiness of the class (even if it's just doing what they did before and making the "one hit wonder" attacks multi-hit to increase the odds on mitigating at least part of them), but as the majority of progression groups currently are 8 man, I don't think the class is dead.

That's not an excuse for Austin, Jesse, and co. to ignore a pretty serious issue. At the very least, they should probably talk more often and test with more than just Guardians when they design new content.

They're fine. As it is, juggs are the best tanks thanks to their heavy armor and crap ton of cool downs. PT's need another cool down and sin tanks need 5-10% more DR, but all of them are fine for tanking in this game.16 man puts stress on sins with high damage bosses. Sins can cheese some of these fights. Dash' is hard on sin tanks and nothing much to do about it but crunch our teeth. Trasher can either be solo tanked by another class or sins can abuse their cool downs to negate the damage for 12-27 seconds with two minute cool downs, personally I rotate between deflection and overcharged saber as generally one is off cool down every minute or so. Sins are by far the best tank for the burn phase of styrak IMO.

TfB 16 man can be cheesed on almost every corner of it. **** doom, **** color deletion, **** white orbs, **** exploding spawn. It's not even funny how bad you can make TfB seem derpy.

Just curious, but why are shadow tanks so much harder to use in NiM?

There are a couple of mechanics that seriously disadvantage the class.

Writhing Horror's tunneling is manageable but a miscue can wipe the raid.

Thrasher hits so hard that it requires abusing all CDs plus good healers plus no RNG bad luck.

Operations Chief's Terminate is always problematic, and serious risk of OHKO or nearly so each time it's used.

.-. Ether some of you are terrible at knowing your class and can't stand having to abuse cooldowns to be effective or you truly think sins are underpowered to the point of being unplayable. Both are insanely stupid. Sin tanks in 8 man content have higher survivability thanks to self heals, great cooldowns and utility. On 16 man they need a bit of a buff to be competative, their current build is heavily dependant on mitigation stats using RNG meaning the spike levels can either be insanely low or insanely high with their lackluster DR rating.

The other part is this game is not hard to survive through. almost all of the boss fights come down to dps numbers. This game is crazy about tight enrages over actual hard hitting bosses.

Sin tanks in 8 man content have higher survivability thanks to self heals, great cooldowns and utility.

One of the main problems with Shadow tanks is that they're *too* reliant on self heals. Self healing makes up roughly 25% of total mitigation for Shadows, which is just *nuts*, since it's both reactive *and* it doesn't scale with incoming damage. Honestly, Shadows need to have their self healing scaled back (to 30-50% of current self healing) and passive static mitigation (i.e. DR or some mechanism to guarantee Shield attempts at intervals) increased to make up for it. The dual reliance on reactive mitigation mechanisms and RNG mitigation mechanisms causes Shadows to fold very quickly under burst damage conditions.

Based on the current content design models that have a strong focus on heavy burst damage (so as to apply pressure tanks and healers without just making it a throughput fight), Shadows really need to be reevaluated as tanks, especially if the devs are going to continue to design content with Guardians and VGs as the "standard" tank paradigm (which the devs do since they didn't test any of the content with Shadow tanks, hence the appearance of the rather spectacular problems being discussed now).

As to the cooldowns being awesome, Shadows have, honestly, lost that status to Guardians: the reduction in Guardian CDs from 300 secs to 270 secs means that Saber Ward and Warding Call are *way* better than they were before; thanks to the current spike damage model, Enure is easily the best of the "healing" CDs since it provides a proactive short term survival mechanism for Guardians rather than the reactive mechanisms both Shadows and VGs get, and Saber Reflect pretty much takes the wind out of the sails of Shadows since it's, arguably, either equally amazing or outright *better* (it applies to ranged attacks, which is incredible). The buff to Battle Readiness was nice, but Guardians got *way* more than Shadows did and they were already pretty close to Shadows from the awesome cooldown standpoint.

There's a reason that there's a lot of talk amongst Shadows about swapping over to Guardians: whereas survivability between the tanks was incredibly well balanced pre-2.0 (the *only* thing that needed to be addressed was Guardian threat; I still have no idea why the devs felt the need to reevaluate the Guardian survivability model), with RotHC, Shadows have taken a very large hit (thanks largely to the change in Guardian tank paradigm shifting the entire "average" tank paradigm to a highly stable incoming damage profile which makes Shadows even *spikier* in comparison; the content designed with the RotHC paradigm capitalizes heavily upon the weaknesses of Shadows without really providing any real opportunities for Shadows to shine in an appreciable sense) and Guardians have sprinted ahead of the preexisting average.

Shadows are skill tanks that, at best, average *slightly* better performance over time and yet will still die entirely due to RNG through no fault of their own (the burst damage mechanisms happen more often than CDs recharge so the "use your CDs" argument falls flat, not to mention that you're saying that Shadows are *required* to use their CDs to break even with tanks that only have to use them in emergencies, which means that Shadows are, once again, at a disadvantage).

Until Shadows get reevaluated, they're going to see the numbers of Shadow tanks continually dwindle due to the sorry state of Shadow tanking in current content: they're a liability in progression raiding and will die more often than worse geared VGs and Guardians due to reasons entirely outside of their own control.

I still have no idea why the devs felt the need to reevaluate the Guardian survivability model

While the spikiness is a lot higher, I'm pretty sure total incoming damage is lower if used correctly.

Some things that seem to get forgotten when calculating survivabilty are the flexible CD of Shroud, the new added damage reduction on the quite low CD Overcharge Saber and the fact that Assassin tank has both tanking debuffs, while the other two tanks only have either one.

Powertech is superior, simple because of it's easy to use and very effective simple mechanics, but Juggernaut still has horrible threat generation, which can have quite an effect on encounters where 'going easy on damage' is not an option because of enrage timers. if anything at least their survivability seems to be alright now.

For fixing Assissins, I don't think a lot has to be done here. Shifting self healing into passive mitigation doesn't seem right, since it's the hallmark of the class ... but 5% shield chance of Ward being turned into armor wouldn't hurt ... or Dark Bulkwark increasing armor by a fair amount instead of absorb ratio.

Thrasher hits so hard that it requires abusing all CDs plus good healers plus no RNG bad luck.

I'm pretty sure defensive cooldowns are exactly meant for events like this.

I'm pretty sure defensive cooldowns are exactly meant for events like this.

And I'm pretty sure you don't understand that Kitru's simulations show that even WITH all cooldowns used, a Shadow/Assassin tanking nightmare Thrasher in fully-optimized Underworld stands a good chance (I believe it was 30-40%) of being killed outright due to the random number generator -- and the other tanks in fully-optimized Underworld stand 0% chance.

Or, if you don't believe that, look at this post about the situation in 16-man hard-mode Thrasher right now -- a significantly lesser-geared Vanguard tank can do the job that a top-end Shadow cannot.

Powertech is superior, simple because of it's easy to use

Shadows are a skill tank. When played properly, Shadows are supposed to be the outright *best* tanks because of this. Any time the "simple" tank beats out the "skill" tank when the "skill" tank is being played properly, something is wrong (which is pretty damned true at the moment).

Juggernaut still has horrible threat generation, which can have quite an effect on encounters where 'going easy on damage' is not an option because of enrage timers. if anything at least their survivability seems to be alright now.

First off, Juggs for *not* have threat generation problems. Their threat gen is *amazing* now, not that threat generation is really an important issue beyond the first 15 seconds of a fight (after that, taunt fluffing will have pushed any tank so far ahead of even the best DPS that it's a nonissue). Pre-2.0, they had a problem (which is why they needed to be fixed), but, If anyone is having threat problems with *now*, it's pebkac.

Secondly, Guardian survivability is a bit more than "alright" as it stands now: they've got an amazingly stable incoming damage profile, the largest and most effective suite of tank CDs, gobs of utility (the only real advantage Shadows get over Guardians is stealth, which is nice outside of Ops but stops being awesome when you're fighting a boss outside of cheesing a single mechanic in game and refreshing the medpac; Guardians get Guardian Leap, the abs shield on their AoE taunt, better interrupt capability, and Force Leap, which, come 2.2, is apparently going to be next to required as a tank thanks to the random tunneling of the Horror), and average mitigation identical to a VG (excluding massively high DPS scenarios which don't exist yet). In short, the only area where they are not either the *best* or capable of making a strong argument for *being* the best is in mean mitigation, where Shadows are the de facto best (not that it makes much of a difference since spikiness matters more than mean mitigation in the current operations design model).

For fixing Assissins, I don't think a lot has to be done here. Shifting self healing into passive mitigation doesn't seem right, since it's the hallmark of the class ... but 5% shield chance of Ward being turned into armor wouldn't hurt ... or Dark Bulkwark increasing armor by a fair amount instead of absorb ratio.

Just because it's a hallmark of the class does *not* mean that it's a good thing for Shadows to rely on so heavily. As I said before, the fact that Shadows rely *so heavily* on a non-scaling reactive mitigation mechanism is a well and truly *terrible* thing. Shadow self healing *really* needs to be reduced to bolster passive mitigation.

As to fixing spikiness, there's a pretty impressive thread here that provides mathematical evidence (from multiple sources) of an inordinately spiky incoming damage profile as well as all kinds of possible solutions. Specifically, how to decrease spikiness without increasing mean mitigation any further (the goal, generally, is to keep it the same).

What is generally considered the best option, thus far, is a reduction in Defense by 5% (best accomplished by removing the acc debuff from Force Breach) and either a 35% increase in armor or flat out 4% increase in DR (best accomplished by replacing said debuff on Force Breach with a buff that applies said buff to the Shadow tank). It leaves Shadow tank mitigation exactly where it is currently while reducing spikiness to only be ~20% worse than VG/Guards (it's currently at 50% worse; also, as an addendum, for those comparative spikiness numbers, as they get larger, the difference is exponential, not linear, since they represent standard deviation as opposed to mitigation).

I'm pretty sure defensive cooldowns are exactly meant for events like this.

Assuming you're not just being sarcastic, you're essentially saying that Shadows should be forced to use their CDs on an almost constant basis so as to avoid the inevitable massive spikes of incoming damage whereas the other tanks are perfectly alright simply saving them for emergencies. If Shadows had *more* CDs or their CDs were on a substantially lower CD so as to demonstrate that they're *supposed* to be used aggressively to prevent spikiness, your argument might hold some water, but, since they are standard 2m CDs (made all the worse by the Guardian CDs getting brought down to 2.5 mins from 3 mins so the advantage of 2m CDs isn't all that impressive). It doesn't help, in the least, that the designed spikes actually occur *more often* than once every minute, which would need to be the limit to allow Shadow tanks to actually have a CD up for each of these.

In short, no, using your CDs is *not* a viable solution for taking care of regularly occurring heavy spike damage in Ops: that's not what CDs are actually supposed to be *for* (at least it's not what CDs have to be used for on any *other* tank and it's not like Shadow CDs are somehow designed completely differently) and, even if they were, the spikes occur too often to actually accomplish this.

other than the fact that Jesse Sky seems to play one?

Oh, I knew he played one (as well as a few other devs; they seem to play Guardian tanks more than any other tank, afaik; none of them main a Shadow tank, iirc), and I dearly hope that the fact that the operations content designer plays a Guardian didn't impact Peckenpaugh (who actually does the class design). I can understand the *content* being tweaked to follow the paradigm of the class the operations lead plays, but it doesn't make much sense to me for Peckenpaugh to change the class that extensively just because the ops lead plays one (unless, of course, Peckenpaugh plays one as well, but I'm not sure what he plays). It makes even *less* sense, in fact, since, if they *were* talking to each other, one would assume that Peckenpaugh would have realized that, in making Guardians *way* less spiky (presumably at the behest of Jesse Sky) and Shadows *slightly* spikier (not that they weren't already spiky enough before; the loss of 20% armor when 2.0 hit was just adding more spikiness onto an already spiky cake), it would have created *more* problems for Shadow tanks since content was obviously going to be designed with a much *lower* tolerance for spikiness.

The only real explanation I can come up with that explains why the developers would provide such a massive overhaul for Guardians and then create content that makes Guardians and VGs the only really viable tanks is that the class and content developers *don't* talk to each other about their design decisions (so that the content developers only see the design through the lens of the player when running through the content they're designing) and that the Guardian changes were done exclusively to address the changes needed to balance out Guardians (who have low Shield/Abs) with the 2.0 Shield changes. Such *extensive* changes (especially focusing so heavily on changes to passive mitigation) kind of push the limits of credibility on this, since it seems a bit extreme to change their survivability profile *so much* just to balance out they functionality under a new Shield paradigm, but, still, it's the best I've been able to come up with that isn't just "the devs play favorites" (which, while entirely possible, doesn't seem likely since pretty much anyone would recognize that it's not a good way to run a game).

I still had hope for my Shadow and Assassin for some content, but today I finally leveled my guardian to 55 who was relatively HP heavy 61/63. Went in a flashpoint or 2 with that gear, but augmented it with 66 augments and some crafted implants... Honestly she the job just as good and in some situations a lot better than my optimized 69/72 geared shadow/assassin. The healer I always run with also said she was way more straight forward and pleasent to heal. Time to level that Jug and put my Shadow and Assassin away, I heard their DPS is far from good too now.

Kitru already made so many suggestions worth testing to make Shadows/Assassins more viable again, really hope Devs will notice someday.

My dear Shadow tanks,

For the first time since I started tanking with my shadow, more than 1 year ago, I am thinking of dropping the class completely. I have been an avid defender and have stuck by it no matter what but recent changes to the game simply place my shadow as a gimp for my raid. Do not get me wrong, it is not a matter of learn to play or gearing. I am BIS 72, I have finally received my last tokens. My inventory has 2 underworld main hands, 3 underworld pants, but have postponed handing in the un-assembled items. These tokens are more of way to bring my shadow closer to perfection and have the extra +2, +3 on shield and absorb to be spot on. I am a perfectionist and would i have spent millions before the patch to have the +2,+3 extra increase in my mitigation budget.

With the recent TFB 16M NiM issues, Thrasher 16M HM (which I have main tanked all the time and cleared), I do not see my shadow an asset anymore to my progression team. Consequently, I am thinking of gearing up my sentinel and doing damage instead. Those two main hands (challenger versions or vindicator) and pants will tune my sentinel to be perfect and BIS 72.

The dilema is here .... when I play my shadow I have this feeling that BioWare will do the right thing and reduce the spikiness in the next patch or patches, therefore I can get my +2,+3 extra mitigation stats to have it perfect. 2 minutes later I look at the track record and I realize that BioWare takes 1 year to change a class and I want to gear my sentinel instead.

I have a vanguard tank and hate it. I cannot get into it and do not enjoy tanking with it. I have tanked most content with it and its so boring!! My guardian is level 25 and I am already bored of it. What to do ... what to do ....

PS: A post I made in another thread

.-. Ether some of you are terrible at knowing your class and can't stand having to abuse cooldowns to be effective or you truly think sins are underpowered to the point of being unplayable. Both are insanely stupid. Sin tanks in 8 man content have higher survivability thanks to self heals, great cooldowns and utility. On 16 man they need a bit of a buff to be competative, their current build is heavily dependant on mitigation stats using RNG meaning the spike levels can either be insanely low or insanely high with their lackluster DR rating.

 

The other part is this game is not hard to survive through. almost all of the boss fights come down to dps numbers. This game is crazy about tight enrages over actual hard hitting bosses.

Please. Before 2.0 our raid group had NM EC on farm. Since the update, the very same non-scaled run is now harder. Its not about L2P, it is about the spikiness of the AC as a whole. I finally quit doing HM55 FP's altogether on my Assassin because of the fact that even with guild healers I can count on getting killed by mobs at least once in every run. This is with all my cooldowns burned, cc's and stims in full 72 gear. Talk that trash about L2P all you want, but when a assassin tank has to worry about death at every single pull in the best gear, while I can do the same content with a juggernaut in 63's then something is wrong.

I love that the narrative "skilled Shadows are easier to heal" is still being perpetuated. By all means, continue to sabotage your raid groups and engage in this circle of back-patting.

It *used* to be true and is now only really being said out of inertia (it's only been 2 months since the xpac came out and it takes a while to overcome the old heuristics and for the community as a whole to come up with new ones). As it stands, a highly skilled Shadow tank is still harder to heal than a mediocre Guardian or VG and, on top of that, presents more risk as a tank. The only "advantage" Shadows have is that, when healers operate *perfectly* (i.e. no overhealing and perfect timing), they require less healing over time. With realistic healers, a Shadow is going to require just as much, if not more (more, since most healers have to dump overheal into a Shadow to offset the spikiness of a Shadow, since Shadows really need to be kept at full hp to stand a better chance of not dying to inevitable burst).

My dear Shadow tanks,

 

The dilema is here .... when I play my shadow I have this feeling that BioWare will do the right thing and reduce the spikiness in the next patch or patches, therefore I can get my +2,+3 extra mitigation stats to have it perfect. 2 minutes later I look at the track record and I realize that BioWare takes 1 year to change a class and I want to gear my sentinel instead.

 

I have a vanguard tank and hate it. I cannot get into it and do not enjoy tanking with it. I have tanked most content with it and its so boring!! My guardian is level 25 and I am already bored of it. What to do ... what to do ....

I doubt you care for my 2 cents, but still giving them. I personally don't count on Bioware to change the Shadow/Assassin anytime soon. Even if they do plan on it, it will likely take some time, so I'd give a little vote to the sentinel (as long as you kind off like to play DPS.)

I would if you can spare the time give the Guardian tank another chance. I have a Guardian (on top of Shadow, Assassin, but I don't have a Vanguard, so can't compare them) and when she hit level 50 I came to enjoy her a lot more than I did during leveling content. I'm leveling a Juggernaut now and I find it absolutely horrible (atleast I know it will get a lot more fun, might Smash my way through it.) The road from 50 to 55 was quite fun, learning how to play around with how their AoE-threat got improved (saber reflect, you'll love it as much as resilience, just at different times) Ofcourse I can't say you'll get the same feeling, but I assume your favourite role is tanking and the Vanguard isn't scoring any points it seems, so I'd say it's worth the try (if you can spare the time)

I have to be honest though, I used to love everything about shadow, I can't think of anything I didn't like about them. It felt fast and if you played it really well it was very rewarding, the small things really mattered. Where-as with guardian I don't like some mechanics, such as; with melee AoE you often end up spamming 1 skill when Force Sweep, Blade Storm and Guardian Slash are on recharge. It feels that in between Force Sweep, Blade Storm, Guardian Slash (and Riposite, but that's off the GCD) that it doesn't matter much what you're doing (ofcourse there's optimal dps/threat, but once you got the threat it's just the dps... and we're tanks) where-as on shadow it would harm your selfhealing a lot to have a flawed rotation.

I really hope you'll find something you enjoy. And let's hope Shadows are back in action soon.