^agreed, while it seems on forums that many people are unsubbing it definitely represents a very small part of the overall community that actually cares about this or even reads the patch notes. It may even be on bioware's great interest that those people leave.

I remember when using the deceased MoniTOR having the full log and not having any problems with that, maybe if it was a 16man raid (never really done many of those). It was also amazing because you could save the full party log into a file and then upload it to ask mr. robot parser which was an amazing post-raid evaluation tool, probably better than torparse is now

or even better, a tab just for uptime of debuffs, buffs and dots

uploading would be nice but if not possible saving the full ops log on your computer so you can check it later would be cool

Commando is really hard for for force leech since one heal leaves a HoT (they can spec out of it but it reduces their healing effectiveness on other phases), the other heal is very heat/ammo ineffective and requires the first one that leaves a hot to be cast first to reduce cost, the other heal is the healing bubble which releases healing as you take dmg (also kinda dangerous, but easily manageable since he can put on someone else instantly) and the last single target heal is free but on a long cd. Other than that kolto bomb is a good chunk of their heals, but the kolto residue has a huge area of effect (bigger than the green puddle) so there is a chance you will run into one of those, its is another thing they can spec out of but decreases healing effectiveness. Last but not least, the auto-attack heal consists of several heals in sequence instead of a single one, which means if they don't time it right it may still dmg the tank even if they use it before force-leech.

In my guild (or better, I do this with people that ask for help) I have done several different training situations, I'll mention the ones that I like the most and were most successful: 1-) Go to a dummy, any dummy, and start a duel with the guy being evaluated, use your skills and companion to simulate mechanics (this one is generic and works for tanks and dps, even healers if they consider their companion a tank that they should be healing): Sending your companion would represent an add attacking, so if a dps and a tank are supposed to drop whatever they are doing and go for the add, using explosive dart simulated a mechanic in which the dps/tank needs to move away from the group so he can take the dmg alone and not inflict any aoe on the raid, using any area-marked aoe would test their ability to move away from circles, droping also a healing circle or something like that would test the guy's ability to stop what he's doing and go for an objective/mechanic that requires him going somewhere instead of avoiding it. This is basic general mechanics training and is very good for beginners in the game. 2-) 4 or 5-man (depending on your gear) TFB storymode, just go in and clear the trash, you can kill first and second bosses if your group is good but the point is not killing the bosses but actually putting people to the test, the trash is really interesting since you have many nice mechanics (malfunctioning that needs to be stunlocked, self destroying droid that you either kill fast or run away from explosion, little adds that need to be separated from small adds, cleanseable debuffs on trash, big guy that needs to turn away for purple vortex, carvers that knockback, adds that drop aggro all the time.... that trash is a pure tank workshop), the 2 bosses are really good for practicing too, first boss is great for tank swaps, keeping your back to the wall for jealous male knockbacks, predicting boss movement so you keep yourself always at melee range etc., second boss is probably the best tank swap test in current content, the fact that you will have only one healer will make it feel like you are in hardmode and force you to swap as quick as possible, it is possible for your tank to get doom or mark for death, the reduced people will make the place totally full of green puddle that they need to avoid all the time, ciphas is a very nice kite test, there is a good chance you will enrage the boss at the end of the fight which would make everyone work really hard at the end. As you can see this is probably my favorite since you can train in a lot of stuff, it doesn't really matter if you can kill the bosses or not but how well you perform while trying. On a sidenote you make really good money from this. 3-) Classic ops, in special EC HM, or even SM since most of it is easily 3-manable and possibly 2-manable, EC is one of the most mechanic heavy ops in the game for bosses (not so much on trash) and undermanning content makes you have to deal with mechanics in some unusual ways sometimes, which many times take a lot of advantage from particular class skills that may not be very conventional and requires quick adapting to situation - very good communication training. 4-) Champions and world bosses -> I don't love this one, I come from a pvp server and player interference is always possible, not to mention *******es who can interfere without pvping (taunting bosses, attacking without being called for etc.) Now, as for how to try and make the tanks better, here are some thing I ask them to do: 1-) Try tanking as much as possible without a taunt, if you do a run with people you trust in a hm fp try to ask him to completely take taunt off his bar, this will teach him not to rely much on his taunt and also learn to direct people for focus targeting (since this is his only hope for keeping aggro in large groups), it also makes him see the importance of the opener and also how to throw some attacks on the other enemies so you keep aggro on them. 2-) No guard, I actually got so used to this that I go through entire runs without noticing that I didn't guard. Lets face it - guard can only protect you from 1 crazy-burst dps, if your guild is good you will have 4 dps who can do crazy high numbers and even more if you do 16-man, even if you have 2 guarded if you suck the other ones will rip aggro from you. 3-) You can make them run with more-geared dps to teach them how to use taunt rotation to make sure you keep the boss, even when no matter how good you are in your rotation it wont be enough to keep aggro from that OP dps (which is a situation that should never happen in a real raid) 4-) Always pretend you're in a tier above - If you are doing storymode try to pretend that the hm mechanics are there, if you do hm pretend NiM mechanics are there. Those are the main thing I can think of, I've tried some other training methods that were not very successful and some others that were but not really worth mentioning for being either too specif to a class or boss fight or for being to specific for a problem that one guy had instead of general tanking issue. I am btw the "training specialist" in my guild, which means I'm responsible for providing training to my fellow members and as such I am very interested in this kind of subject KN, if you have any nice ideas or things you've done in the past in your guild, be it related to tanking or not, I'd greatly appreciate if you share it with me I do realize that the idea of a workshop is different from a small training and most of my suggestions are instance-based and thus wouldn't work well for a workshop, but my experience in trying to provide training showed me that big things like that are not really effective, I'd prefer to find the people interested in becoming better players and working personally with them.

Really well done, I like your parse and the combat log function is really nice, didn't test it with raids though, will do it later. But pretty much it's what I've been missing from parsers ever since MoniTOR was discontinued is a full log for all your group members instead of just you, don't know if your parser offers this but if it doesnt you should think about adding this, it really helps troubleshooting in raids for example if a tank dies you can then look at the logs and see if he didn't take any heals or if he was actually one-shoted, you check if someone forgot to cleanse a dot that they should, if a dps neglected a mechanic and took unnecessary damage and that kind of stuff. Also one thing that I always wanted on parsers was a pop-out that would detect from the log which boss you are fighting and what difficulty (even if you have to input this) and then as soon as you start the battle if would show you how long till enrage (again, even if you have to input the enrage timer). Also going a step further you could even create a timer profile for mechanics that occour with time or boss health so that for DG fight for example the overlay would say something like "Heirad lightning field in 3:00" and then keep counting till it reaches zero, and then the timer starts for the next one till heirad dies and then it becomes a timer for doom, and then mark for death from kelsara and force-leech... I think you get what I'm saying, same thing for mechanics tied to boss health, it would show dmg till mechanic or something like that. There is an app for custom timers on my razer keyboard but something reading your combat logs would be much better not only because it could work for boss health-tied mechanics but also would know when to start and stop timers automatically. Anyway, just an idea, keep up the good work.

but do you save your MS for when you have zen or do you use it regardless of zen? I never delay it unless its 1~2 GCDS but I only use it during zen

So, even though you don't have any armor pen debuff what about if you always run with guardian tanks/dps, snipers or commandos middle tree? That will guarantee the 20% armor pen all the time, would that be enough to make the kinectic relic better? I use the kinectic relic on combat spec but sometimes I go watchman and I don't want to get a 4rth relic (also have the boundless that I swap in some fights)

^what he said While you can go to the dummy and get higher parses with crit, crit puts you into a more rng-dependant situation, same for strength since what makes it better is the added crit chance, while strength is mathematically better it will make your numbers fluctuate more so you will get more consistent numbers with power instead of strength. In the end, our gear tier is too low right now which means that it is pretty much a choice between wanting to gamble or getting consistent numbers, and the difference will not be huge, when the gear tier gets higher the budget will probably allow you to get enough crit so that it wont be a gamble anymore

From what I can tell they are trying to make pyro the one and only pvp spec for the class, and failing miserably at it and also making it even worse for pve. After seeing the reply for the sentinel class questions it came clear to me that the devs doesn't really design specs to be viable for anything, but each to be good at one thing (and bad at the other), the case here apparently is middle tree pve and pyro pvp, I guess anyone that likes pyro in pve should start learning prototype. I want to check though how big is the improvement on burst for thermal detonator because that would be really useful in pvp, but the bursting flame change really seem to hurt pvp, not really because of the dot dmg since that is crappy dmg on pvp (specially before target gets to 30%) but because of the slow it inflicts on targets

That new relic is very interesting, I wonder if we're seeing those new relics in pve versions. When the DR start getting too high I can see that relic being a very good choice, also the fact that it works for any damage and unlike the healing relic this one will never "overheal". It would be really awesome to see an on-use version of it too

You should definitely talk to your raid leader about loot rules, in my guild we only allow rolling for alts if all the group members main character's gear is finished, even if they bring an alt to the raid they need for tokens to their main and then transfer through legacy gear, they can roll on verpines though. We ask that everyone lists how many mods they need from each underworld piece so that they know if they need 1, 2 or 3 mods out of it and need/greed accordingly, sometimes we prioritize someone for a specific piece too for different reasons, like a character that is upgrading relic from DG or pvp to underworld instead of arkanian to underworld, in the end the raid leader and the members need to have a good judgment and figure out how the raid overall will benefit more and not the individuals.

Crafting would be the way to go, though I didn't find it hard to min max using verpine drops, the only problem is that pretty much everything I get is absorb so I had a little bit of trouble getting my defense up there, that said you can always get enhancements from other tanks verpine drops too. My guild deals with token loot like this: Need if you'll use 2 or 3 mods/enhancements on it, greed for 1 and pass for zero (reroll if everyone passes). Relics and implants need if you don't have any, greed if you have 1, earpiece need if you have greed if you don't. Everyone in a hm raid should already have their 4-piece set-bonus from sm ops so people would be needing stuff not for set-bonus but for raw stats, going from 69 to 72 armorings provides a very marginal increase on dps or healing from main stat so prioritizing people who need to upgrade armoring over people who need enhancements and/or mods is stupid, not to mention that tanks should be the first ones to get armoring upgrades due to the fact that the increase in endurance and armor rating plus the extra main stat for threat are a better overall gain than any mainstat increase on dps and healers.

Probably the fact that you don't have a 100% effective cooldown for that, only exotech adrenal + battle readiness, and OP healers don't have anything that helps you mitigate dmg (like sorc/sage bubble or shield from overloaded kolto bomb on merc/mando) ffs, I've been one of the guys who points the shadow spikiness all the time to try and get the attention of the devs, but even I know that a lot of people are completely overreacting, the problem exists but its not so bad that it would make it impossible to do NiM content, shadows are still the preferred tanks for some fights, in my opinion they are a very good choice (if not the best) for one of the most challenging fights in the game right now (NiM DG on TFB). Spikiness is also much less of a problem in 8-man than 16-man. Now as far as gear goes, I would first of all work on getting a shield amplification relic now that you can use 2 proc relics without any problems, and then figure out which fight you're better off using it or the shrouded crusader (basically, shrouded crusader would be better for fights with tank swaps because they increase uptime, for example WH, OPIX, TFB 2nd phase - youre a shadow you can swap gear on the fly), for the rest of your gear you would benefit a lot by getting your KD implants and earpieces, convince your raid group that you should be getting those first, the other stats depend on which raid you are gearing for since numbers for tfb and s&v and kinda different, you can find the data here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=645948 as to how you use it, you can go to http://www.tor-tank.com and go on advanced options, input the data for the specific raid of fight you are trying to gear for, check to override advanced options, input your gear and check the results, just by looking at your stats I'd say you are very nicely geared for tfb but could use more def for s&v.