The Shield Tech/Shield Spec Compendium

[Cuba]

(02-05-2012 03:39 AM)kray Wrote:  1) The lowest we ever want to have our heat be is 13 or so. This means that if, in the next second a shield-vent proc combined with passive dissipation will not put us at 0 heat.

I appreciate the effort you put into this, as well as what you're trying to bring to the table, but I can't agree with this. Our heat should never be below 13 just so we'll be able to vent it? To me that's almost like saying you want to be sick so you'll be able to take your medicine. Furthermore, the general consensus thus far has been simply to keep our heat in the first rank (through whatever means necessary) so it dissipates at the greatest rate. The one exception you correctly noted is when we're trying to frontload threat.

Also, in my mind it's simply not realistic to micromanage our threat at the level you're talking about - especially without a mod that would display our heat in some prominent way. Staring at a tiny bar on the bottom of your screen is not a good raiding habit. I do like the work you did talking about heat levels of abilities and such, but, at least in my experience, sticking too close to perceived formula leads me to sacrifice too much adaptability, intuition, and situational awareness.

[kray]

(02-05-2012 04:54 AM)Cuba Wrote:  

(02-05-2012 03:39 AM)kray Wrote:  1) The lowest we ever want to have our heat be is 13 or so. This means that if, in the next second a shield-vent proc combined with passive dissipation will not put us at 0 heat.

I appreciate the effort you put into this, as well as what you're trying to bring to the table, but I can't agree with this. Our heat should never be below 13 just so we'll be able to vent it? To me that's almost like saying you want to be sick so you'll be able to take your medicine. Furthermore, the general consensus thus far has been simply to keep our heat in the first rank (through whatever means necessary) so it dissipates at the greatest rate. The one exception you correctly noted is when we're trying to frontload threat.

Also, in my mind it's simply not realistic to micromanage our threat at the level you're talking about - especially without a mod that would display our heat in some prominent way. Staring at a tiny bar on the bottom of your screen is not a good raiding habit. I do like the work you did talking about heat levels of abilities and such, but, at least in my experience, sticking too close to perceived formula leads me to sacrifice too much adaptability, intuition, and situational awareness.

I see the analogy you put forward, but looking at a sustained threat rotation, dropping below 13 heat yields the possibility of less attacks later. Look at it from a WoW perspective: Rogues or Feral Druids never -ever- want to let their energy cap out, because that's wasted resources. Every bit of heat wasted means a net loss in threat and DPS throughout the course of the encounter. If you waste, say, 5 heat every 5 seconds through wasted procs or passives, over the first minute of a fight, that's 60 heat that you could have used for threat or DPS! When we're talking cutting edge content, 4 extra attacks per minute can make a big difference!

Truly it's not so difficult. I look at 10-15 heat as "0" in my mind, and have no issues managing abilities at all =]

Edit: I made up those wasted heat numbers. Substitute your own made up numbers for best results.

[Mesrith]

(02-05-2012 03:39 AM)kray Wrote:  As you can see, the text from the guidepost directly contradicts what I've laid out here. If someone sees a flaw in my reasoning please let me know!

- Kray

We don't really disagree on anything, but you're assuming shieldable attacks on every fight and perfect RNG in our favor, and I do the opposite. I'd rather compensate for good RNG at low heat levels with more Flame Burst than be forced to compensate for poor RNG while at higher heat levels with Rapid Shots. The only thing I disagree with in your post is this:

Quote:However, jumping into the second tier of heat isn't that big of a deal as long as you don't push over 45 heat. This means that it's likely for only a single tick of 3 heat/sec dissipation will occur before you get back to the first tier.

If you're rocking along with Flame Burst and then your primary ability cooldowns line up again while you're at 40 heat, you're going to have the possibility of RP > RS > RP > ED happening while you're only dissipating 3 heat per second. That's a gain of 64 heat without potentially a dissipation of only 18. Even with Heat Blast and good RNG, you're either climbing down from that Heat disaster using multiple Rapid Shots or having to wait before using a RP or ED cooldown, both of which are lost damage.

The only thing I would look at changing in my heat guidelines is when to use Rapid Shots as filler. I play more dangerously with Flame Burst than what I recommend people do here, and I've had success with it. The problem with that is that regardless of how you break down the numbers on paper, any fight with shieldable attacks is a RNG-based tug of war on your heat bar requiring a good feel for the situation based on which cooldowns are available soon and where you currently are on heat. We can't teach "feel" in a compendium, it comes through experience.

[kray]

I'm certainly not expecting perfect RNG, but a 50% chance to shield an attack seems like it's pretty common that our heat is going to drop by 8 every now and then. In my heat management, at no point do I assume or wait for shield vent procs, but rather account for the possibility. Keeping your heat so low -will- cause heat to be wasted, which I desperately try to avoid.

As far as your second point, that rarely, if ever, happens. First off, you're contradicting yourself by saying to not expect RNG in terms of shield vents, but then to expect RNG in terms of Rocket Punch resets. Playing with heat like this -is- more dangerous, but it has a higher payoff. Mods in other games have kinda made people lazy, as there's a zillion timers and PowerAuras procs on your screen to tell you when you can and can't do things. A rapid glance at my toolbar can tell me if ED or RS are about to come off cooldown plus a mental "feel" for how long it's been since RP got reset allows me to determine if I need to keep spamming Flame Burst or hit a Rapid Shots while I wait to ensure I'm good on heat when the time comes.


That being said, I see your logic and your points ! Is there a rotational spreadsheet around that works for tanks for calculating TPS? If not I can whip up a spreadsheet or simulator (I refuse to code too much in VB).

Anyhow, enjoying the conversation. Time to go make BLT+Es.

[LagunaD]

(02-05-2012 03:39 AM)kray Wrote:  Second, we know that every time we shield an attack, we have a 50% chance to vent 8 heat, on a 6 second internal cooldown. Simplified, this means that roughly every 8 seconds we should expect to have a sudden drop of 8 heat.

Assuming 50% Shield Chance, the average rate of incoming Shield-able attacks would need to be 2 per second for you to expect a vent proc every 8 seconds (including the effect of the 6-second ICD).

While that may happen in some circumstances, I suspect it is rather optimistic overall.

[Mesrith]

As I was doing some updates/additions to the OP, a couple of things came to mind. The first is that the tooltips for several abilities in SW-DB are very outdated, especially Carbonize

Carbonize
Bounty Hunter

Heat: 8
Activation time: Instant
Cooldown: 60 secs

Incases up to 3 nearby targets in carbonite stunning them for <<1[%d seconds/%d second/%d seconds]>>.

. The second is that I nearly mentioned a personal experience with our taunts, but wanted to get more feedback before doing so. Do other players notice a significant delay in the taunt effect, specifically on Foreman Crusher? After his Frenzy and threat wipe, the timing of taunt seems to be very picky. If I hit Neural Dart as soon as the button lights up and shows that he's tauntable again, it seems to be too early and the effect doesn't happen, forcing me to use Sonic Missile to grab him. If I wait until he has turned towards whichever DPS or healer in my party has aggro after the threat wipe, he walks over to the party and always does one attack, even though he has already been taunted. It feels that even after he has been taunted, the effect doesn't happen until he finishes executing his current action, which in this case is an intended attack on another player. Have other tanks noticed this on him or other mobs?

[Kypsta]

Yes, I definitely have. There's sort of a stickiness about taunts in general. Even though they're off the GCD, sometimes pressing them once won't make them go through, and that's pretty irritating, because you basically have to spam it to be sure it'll happen.

My experience has been that if a boss is in the process of executing an attack, that attack will usually finish before they return to you. This one is pretty apparent everywhere, as you see bosses turn and use a channeled ability before returning to you. But in some cases, it seems like the boss is doing multiple attacks before returning, and I think this may be attack animation. Some bosses attacks look like multiple hits but only do damage once, and those would still go through before the taunt took effect.

But what's weird is that I've had a few situations where the taunt has stopped a boss mid-attack. This happened a few times on Bulwark after a punch, when he started bursting on a player and a taunt immediately whipped him around to finish it on me.

Either way, I would say there is definitely some delay in taunts, and I can't completely figure out what the cause of it is.

[Totenfaust]

(02-06-2012 07:22 AM)Mesrith Wrote:  As I was doing some updates/additions to the OP, a couple of things came to mind. The first is that the tooltips for several abilities in SW-DB are very outdated, especially Carbonize

Carbonize
Bounty Hunter

Heat: 8
Activation time: Instant
Cooldown: 60 secs

Incases up to 3 nearby targets in carbonite stunning them for <<1[%d seconds/%d second/%d seconds]>>.

. The second is that I nearly mentioned a personal experience with our taunts, but wanted to get more feedback before doing so. Do other players notice a significant delay in the taunt effect, specifically on Foreman Crusher? After his Frenzy and threat wipe, the timing of taunt seems to be very picky. If I hit Neural Dart as soon as the button lights up and shows that he's tauntable again, it seems to be too early and the effect doesn't happen, forcing me to use Sonic Missile to grab him. If I wait until he has turned towards whichever DPS or healer in my party has aggro after the threat wipe, he walks over to the party and always does one attack, even though he has already been taunted. It feels that even after he has been taunted, the effect doesn't happen until he finishes executing his current action, which in this case is an intended attack on another player. Have other tanks noticed this on him or other mobs?

Foreman Crusher applies a debuff to his target at the end of his Frenzy period. You'll notice it saying something along the lines of "Not regarded as a threat." During this period, he will not attack you regardless of whether you have taunted him or not. If you taunt him right when your taunt button lights up again (the end of frenzy) he'll come right back to you as soon as the debuff drops. He will, however, hit whoever is next highest on threat once before he comes back to you (you can avoid a squishy DPS/healer taking the hit by having an OT taunt immediately upon the completion of his Frenzy).

I've noticed no problems regarding taunt lag in any of the ops encounters so far. I've tanked every single encounter on every difficulty setting and by far my only complaint for the current tier is that as a PT tank, our threat generation seems to scale at a much slower rate than DPS gains for our damage dealers. Survivability (with the exception of a few NiM encounters) has not been a concern whereas building and holding threat is.

Just my 2 cents.

[LagunaD]

(02-06-2012 11:50 PM)Totenfaust Wrote:  I've noticed no problems regarding taunt lag in any of the ops encounters so far. I've tanked every single encounter on every difficulty setting and by far my only complaint for the current tier is that as a PT tank, our threat generation seems to scale at a much slower rate than DPS gains for our damage dealers. Survivability (with the exception of a few NiM encounters) has not been a concern whereas building and holding threat is.

Since threat is entirely based off damage (with one or two abilities maybe having a threat bonus, depending on the class), that isn't so surprising.

As the DPS classes improve their gear, they are presumably increasing primary and secondary stats that boost their damage. If a tank uses gear upgrades mainly to boost survivability (Endurance and defensive secondary stats), their threat generation relative to DPS will inevitably erode.

[Totenfaust]

(02-07-2012 02:32 AM)LagunaD Wrote:  As the DPS classes improve their gear, they are presumably increasing primary and secondary stats that boost their damage. If a tank uses gear upgrades mainly to boost survivability (Endurance and defensive secondary stats), their threat generation relative to DPS will inevitably erode.

I agree with this entirely. Our gear upgrades do provide additional aim and accuracy to increase our threat generation somewhat, but by far your biggest stat gains are in endurance and defensive stats. Unless I'm missing something, DPS will inevitably outscale our threat generation.

I believe this was already mentioned (perhaps numerous times) throughout the boards, but we can only hope Bioware realizes and addresses this in additional future content.