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SWTOR 3.1 Darkness Assassin Tanking Guide by Aelanis

SWTOR 3.1 Darkness Assassin Tanking Guide written by Aelanis of The Shadowlands.

Contents

  • 1 Intro to Darkness Assassin
    • 1.1 Utility Choices
    • 1.2 Gearing and Stats Priority
  • 2 Abilities and Rotations
  • 3 About the Author

Intro to Darkness Assassin

Darkness is one of the 3 unique tanking specializations in SWTOR. It has, under optimal play, the lowest Damage Taken Per Second (DTPS) of any of the three tanks before counting Defensive Cooldowns (DCDs), and brings some nice utility and one of the cheesiest DCDs in the game to the table. To achieve this, though, requires a slightly higher level of awareness and precision than with the other two tanks, as well as having somewhat staccato mobility. Assassin tanks love Absorb, and to a smaller extent Shield, due to the Dark Ward ability boosting their shield chance to unreal levels. It has middle of the road DPS compared to the other two but has excellent snap threat, even when your highest threat moves are on cooldown.

Utility Choices

Utilities as an Assassin tank, while a little less spectacular than as a DPS, can still offer some reasonably strong options. There are a few I take regardless of the fight, and a few that have very specialized uses. We’ll go over the universally useful ones first.

  • Celerity/Avoidance: Reduced cooldown on our stun breaker, reduced cooldown on our interrupt, and a huge (25%) cooldown reduction on Force Speed make this utility a no-brainer. Being able to quickly move the boss to where it needs to be, or move back to it when knocked away, is hugely important. (Skillful)
  • Misdirection/Obfuscation:Much for the same reason that the above utility is useful, this utility is a very strong choice for tanks. Movement speed is love, movement speed is life. (Skillful)
  • Mind Over Matter/Disjunction: This utility takes one of the cheesiest abilities in the game (Resilience/Shroud) and makes it last even longer. For bonus points, it even lets you travel further with Force Speed. This utility is extremely useful as a tank. (Masterful)
  • Shadow’s/Assassin’s Shelter: 3% increased healing received is very nice as a tank. An additional 5% healing done by any healer standing in your circle is an even nicer boon to your raid group. It helps you out directly with your survivability, and thus should be selected for every fight, even if you can’t lay down the circle due to frequent and deadly ground targeted AoE mechanics (GTAoE). (Heroic)

The following utilities have varied uses, and can make certain fights or phases of fights much easier.

  • Shadowy Veil/Insulation: Useful for if you know at least one person in the raid is going to take continuous, somewhat frequent damage. Example: final burn phase in Revan fight and the adds during The Underlurker. (Skillful)
  • Mental Defense/Shapeless Spirit: Useful for the few occasions where you get stunned and beaten to near death, such as when tanking Pearl. 30% reduced damage is huge, and should not be underestimated if you’re going to take damage while stunned. (Skillful)
  • Lambaste: Lots of adds? Sick of trash pulls taking forever? This ability will help you significantly contribute to your group’s AoE damage, and will make holding threat much easier (the damage boost is multiplied in threat by your stance!) (Skillful)
  • Egress/Emersion:This is a utility used to make DPS Assassins jealous for a reason. It’s invaluable on fights where there are persistent slows, back to back roots, or enemies leaping to you. This utility makes The Underlurker Hard Mode a little more bearable.(Masterful)
  • Fade: As odd a choice as this might seem, it can actually be quite useful for a tank. In fights where you take a lot of damage (as the tank, this should be all fights), and where you can spend time not actively tanking a boss, Assassins have the neat trick of being able to reset their once-per-fight medpack by using Force Cloak. Taking Fade allows you to synchronize the cooldowns of both Force Cloak and your medpack, allowing for the maximum amount of usage of that medpack. (Masterful)
  • Containment/Haunted Dreams: Very situational. In fights with non-CC immune enemies (read: Revanite Commanders), it can be very useful to point at an enemy and insta-mez them for 8 seconds. (Heroic)

With so many situationally useful choices, the utilities I pick for each fight can vary greatly, and rarely do I have the exact same set of utilities for multiple fights. With that in mind, for each boss, I take:

Ravagers:

Sparky:

  • Celerity/Avoidance
  • Mental Defense/Shapeless Spirit
  • Misdirection/Obfuscation
  • Lambaste
  • Mind Over Matter/Disjunction
  • Shadow’s/Assassin’s Shelter
  • Sturdiness/Dark Stability

Bulo:

  • Celerity/Avoidance
  • Misdirection/Obfuscation
  • Shadowy Veil/Insulation
  • Lambaste
  • Mind Over Matter/Disjunction
  • Fade
  • Shadow’s/Assassin’s Shelter

Torque:

  • Celerity/Avoidance
  • Misdirection/Obfuscation
  • Lambaste
  • Mind Over Matter/Disjunction
  • Fade
  • Shadow’s/Assassin’s Shelter
  • Cloak of Resilience/Shroud of Madness

Master/Blaster:

  • Celerity/Avoidance
  • Misdirection/Obfuscation
  • Shadowy Veil/Insulation
  • Mind over Matter/Disjunction
  • Force Harmonics/Audacity
  • Shadow’s/Assassin’s Shelter
  • Literally any other utility

Coratanni & Pearl/Ruugar:

  • Celerity/Avoidance
  • Mental Defense/Shapeless Spirit
  • Misdirection/Obfuscation
  • Mind Over Matter/Disjunction
  • Force Harmonics/Audacity
  • Shadow’s/Assassin’s Shelter
  • Sturdiness/Dark Stability

Temple of Sacrifice:

Malaphar:

  • Celerity/Avoidance
  • Misdirection/Obfuscation
  • Lambaste
  • Mind Over Matter/Disjunction
  • Fade
  • Force Harmonics/Audacity
  • Shadow’s/Assassin’s Shelter

Sword Squadron:

  • As Master/Blaster.

Underlurker:

  • Celerity/Avoidance
  • Misdirection/Obfuscation
  • Lambaste
  • Mind Over Matter/Disjunction
  • Egress/Emersion
  • Fade
  • Shadow’s/Assassin’s Shelter

Revanite Commanders:

  • Celerity/Avoidance
  • Misdirection/Obfuscation
  • Lambaste
  • Mind Over Matter/Disjunction
  • Egress/Emersion
  • Containment/Haunted Dreams
  • Shadow’s/Assassin’s Shelter

Revan: (for those masochistic enough to take a non-bounty-hunter into this fight)

  • Celerity/Avoidance
  • Misdirection/Obfuscation
  • Shadowy Veil/Insulation
  • Mind Over Matter/Disjunction
  • Fade
  • Shadow’s/Assassin’s Shelter
  • Cloak of Resilience/Shroud of Madness

Unfortunately, since so many of the utilities we have are only situationally useful in PvE, we see a few fights where there are only 5 truly good utilities to take, and so you have some room for personal preference, though it won’t really make a difference. I like Force Harmonics/Audacity for the little extra threat bump it provides, as well as helping me be less of a slouch in my DPS.

Gearing and Stats Priority

If you wish to gear like Zorz and some other progression tanks do, you’ll want to skip a little bit lower, and be aware that I am no expert in gearing that way, and so what I’ll suggest is a mix of their methodology and Mean Mitigation theory. I have always preferred the mean mitigation method of tank gearing for Assassins up until 3.0. For the mean mitigation theory you’ll want to view this post by KeyboardNinja, an excellent theorycrafter with an excellent program written to calculate gear for the best possible mean mitigation at discrete gear levels. He recently updated this for the Hard Mode versions of the 3.0 Operations, with the help of a few people, so this is a big shout out to him!

For specific gear levels, using all gear at that level, your stat budget will look like:

Resurrected:Defense: 497, Shield: 1526, Absorb: 1716 (Total: 3739)
Those who use the interpolation sheet (below) to check these numbers will notice that they’re not quite perfect. This is simply due to discretization of defensive stats, and not being able to trade stats in single point increments. These values, however, are (about) as close as you can get to the ideal numbers. This is achievable with 7 Absorb Mods, 7 Absorb Enhancements, 6 Absorb Augments, 1 of each Implant, an Absorb Earpiece, 2 Defense Mods, any two relics, an Advanced Anodyne Fortitude Stim, and 8 Shield Augments.

Revanite:Defense: 527, Shield: 1668, Absorb: 1808 (Total: 4003)
Again, this is close to the ideal values, but itemized for available gear. 2 Defense Implants, 9 Shield Augments, 5 Absorb Augments, and everything else Absorb. Again: Defense is not so good in this tier of operations.
Here is a link to a Google Spreadsheet I made to help you out with your gearing. If you enter your total stat budget, with your stim active, into the appropriate cell, it will spit back out at you your ideal mean mitigation budget, based on KBN’s most updated values. Feel free to copy the formulas into your own spreadsheet to keep for yourself, or you can just continue to use this one. Please be considerate of others, though. If the calculations in the sheet can be edited because I messed up the protection settings, please let me know and I will fix that as quickly as I can.

Spike Mitigation

If you favor having some more hit points to take bigger spikes without sacrificing too much in the way of mitigation, you will want to trade away your token mods for the B lettered mods that drop in Operations and come from the Commendations vendors on fleet. Updating the previous values for B mods, you would get:

Resurrected/Massassi: Defense: 481, Shield: 1474, Absorb: 1640(Total: 3595)
This is achievable with 9 Absorb Mods, 5 Absorb Enhancements, 7 Absorb Augments, 2 Absorb Implants, an Absorb Earpiece, 2 Defense Enhancements, any two relics, an Advanced Anodyne Fortitude Stim, and 7 Shield Augments.

Revanite/Deceiver: Defense: 518, Shield: 1564, Absorb: 1759 (Total: 3841)
Follow the exact same strategy as for the Resurrected/Massassi profile for how to achieve this profile. If you literally just upgrade every piece from that profile, you get this profile.

Beyond this, you may wish, at whatever level you are comfortable with, to trade some Defense and Absorb back into Shield in the only way you can, and then trade a little more Defense into Absorb. You want to do this because you’re trying to reduce spikiness in your damage profile. When you have high absorb, but lower shield, you absorb a lot when you shield, and take normal damage when you don’t, resulting in a large difference between shielding and not shielding a hit, and Defense is a bigger culprit, since you take no damage at all from a defended hit. However, if you trade Defense and Absorb for Shield, you will shield more attacks, even if you take more damage when you do, which helps to stabilize your profile, and will help you take the edge off of big hits. However, this causes you to take more damage overall, and will cause a little more stress on your healers since they have to heal you for that extra damage you’re taking.

A Visual Representation

The first graph represents how much of each stat you should have, by Mean Mitigation theory, at each gear level, and shows the interpolation between points in KBN’s data. The second shows how much of each stat you should have as a percent of your total gear value.

Shadow Tank Mean Mitigation

Shadow Tank Stat %s

Accuracy: 10% given from Tank Stance + 1% Companion buff = 101% Melee Accuracy

Armorings: Force Wielder, you need the extra Endurance, which benefits from your 3% boost in your Discipline. Also, all of your set bonus armorings will be of this type anyway.

Mods: For Mean Mitigation Theory, you want unlettered mods. For a strategy that tries to survive spikes, grab those B mods. Either way, if you’re upgrading, and trading away less than 1 point of mitigation per point of Endurance you pick up, carefully consider the trade.

Enhancements: Immunity and Sturdiness enhancements are your bread and butter. Anything else trades away mitigation stats for Endurance at a poor rate. However, if you have the choice between a 186 rated Sturdiness vs. a 198 Bulwark, you should take the Bulwark. As you gear up, always ask yourself: “am I getting more than one point of Endurance for each point of mitigation stat that I trade away?” If you’re comfortable with the trade, then take it.

Implants/Ear pieceThe commendation pieces are actually decent, they trade Endurance at almost a 1:1 rate with Mitigation. Mean Mitigation theory still says to take the token versions, however. Beware, though: the MK-2 versions, which are usually slightly better than the MK-1, are a trap: you lose Endurance AND mitigation over the token versions!! Don’t fall for it!

Set Bonus

  • (2) Slow Time/Wither increases DR by 2% for three seconds. You can pick this up without sacrificing the old bonus, and it’s a really nice boost, and worth more than armorings a few stages up, if you get it on your belt and bracers (you should). Consider it a free 0.66 time averaged DR.
  • (4) Slow Time/Wither reduces the CD of taunts by two seconds. This is pretty underwhelming, but can be useful to achieve a 3 taunt rotation in your opener with an 18 second duration of taunt on the boss.Otherwise, not terribly useful in PvE.
  • (6) Kinetic/Dark Ward’s duration is increased by 3 seconds and charges are increased by 3. Compared to other tank 6 pieces, this seems slightly underwhelming, but greatly increases survivability on fights where you lose your stacks quickly. I’ll talk about this more in a bit.

Getting the new 6 piece is essential if you want to tank Hard Mode operations in this expansion. However, as you’re gearing up, make sure you keep your old 4 piece bonus, as it’s quite strong.

Bonus Topic: Old Set Bonus vs. New Set Bonus

You might be wondering why I’m advocating the new set bonus when the old set bonus is stronger in terms of overall mitigation. The 2% raw DR from the old 4 piece keeps your DR ahead, even using 4 old 180 armorings, until after the 210 Gear Rating level, and the Shield boost is just gravy on top of that, and you trade that away for a slightly higher time-averaged absorb value, what gives?

The problem with the old set bonus is that you rely so much on keeping Dark Ward up at all times. With the old set bonus, at the Resurrected gear level, if you lose all of your Dark Ward stacks, your effective damage reduction, including defense chance (which doesn’t play into the % extra damage you take), drops 4.9% static, meaning you’re taking a whopping 18.7% more damage from all attacks! Granted, that’s per second, but for the brief time that Dark Ward drops, you become far more likely to die, especially from Force and Tech damage attacks, which a lot of big hits are. Keeping those last few stacks is a big deal, and it just goes to show you how much we rely on Dark Ward.

Abilities and Rotations

Unlike the other two tanks, Assassin tanks have to pay close attention to their buffs and ability cooldowns in order to maintain their optimal mitigation, and their threat to less of a degree. They have to build and spend 3 stacks of Harnessed Darkness, manage their Dark Ward, and keep up their 2 tank debuffs on the target, which can be tough to get used to for new players. As a reminder, you should always open from stealth as a tank, due to the way the Conspirator’s Cloak talent works.

With the current PTS proposed changes to Assassin tanks, the rotation will largely remain the same, though Discharge will take a more prominent role.

Abilities in your main rotation:

  • Depredating Volts
  • Shock
  • Wither
  • Thrash
  • Maul
  • Discharge
  • Saber Strike

Situational abilities (out of range or AOE):

  • Lacerate
  • Force Pull

Maximum Threat Opener (no new 4 piece)

  1. Force Pull – this ability generates over a whopping 11k threat, and is your best immediate option, bar none. Proceed to Force Speed into range (bosses are physics immune, so pull won’t bring them to you)
  2. Shock
  3. Wither + Mind Control (taunt immediately after Wither)
  4. Discharge (with proc, swap with next GCD if no proc yet)
  5. Thrash
  6. Shock (if you triggered Energize, use Recklessness on this attack, for the big threat boost from the extra damage)
  7. Depredating Volts under Recklessness (use Recklessness here if you didn’t use it on the previous global). If you have all 4 raidwide buffs present, along with the sunder armor and extra Force damage debuffs on the target, you may see up to 4,500 damage ticks on Depredating Volts, which generates a ludicrous amount of threat. Immediately use Mass Mind Control afterwards.
  8. Thrash
  9. Shock
  10. Wither
  11. Taunt again when it comes off of cooldown to ensure you maintain threat.

This rotation has a brief (2 GCD window) where you can lose top threat on the boss to burst dps, but is the best you can do without the new 4 piece set bonus.

Maximum Threat Opener (with new 4 piece)

  1. Force Pull
  2. Shock + Mind Control
  3. Wither
  4. Discharge (with proc, swap with next GCD if no proc yet)
  5. Thrash
  6. Shock (Use Recklessness first if you have Energize) + Mass Mind Control
  7. Depredating Volts under Recklessness (use Recklessness here if you haven’t yet)
  8. Shock
  9. Wither + Mind Control

While you don’t have your threat from Depredating Volts under your second taunt (and multiplied again under your third) you have 18 straight seconds of taunt on the boss with no gaps, and without help from your second tank, who is free to then use their high threat rotation with their triple taunt rotation.

Advanced tip: If you’re feeling a little cheeky, you can actually pre-cast Crushing Darkness before you use your Force Pull, so long as you leave stealth as you begin the cast. You will run very low on Force in the first 2 Depredating Volts rotations, but it will produce higher threat.

Ability Priority:

  1. Depredating Volts with 3 stacks of Harnessed Darkness
  2. Wither (builds stacks of Harnessed Darkness, maintains Weakened debuff)
  3. Shock (builds stacks of Harnessed Darkness) (with or without Energize)
  4. Discharge (very high threat, to maintain the Unsteady debuff)
  5. Assassinate (execute phase only ability)
  6. Maul (with Conspirator’s Cloak Buff, also triggers Energize)
  7. Thrash (triggers Energize)
  8. Saber Strike (< 35 Force with Shock or Wither coming off of cooldown)

In 3.1, Discharge moved up to 4th in priority, due to the huge damage boost it received, making it a far more valuable move for threat generation.

AoE Rotation & ability priorities:

  • Depredating Volts (if Dark protection duration almost out)
  • Wither
  • Discharge
  • Shock (with Energize and at < 3 stacks Harnessed Darkness)
  • Lacerate
  • AoE taunt if you lose aggro on too many

Make sure to use Force Pull and Overload to group enemies up on AoE pulls/phases so that they can be more effectively killed.

Recklessness

Recklessness simultaneously gives you 2 stacks of the Recklessness buff and a 20 second long, 30% extra Absorb (that’s additive to your value). Unfortunately, you need the extra threat in your opening rotation, and so you’ll use it there, despite its value as a defensive ability. As for what to use it on, your first choice is Depredating Volts, since it does so much damage. For your second move, if you can, you want to use it on a boosted Discharge, due to the incredible threat it generates, especially in AoE situations, or an Energized Shock, for the 50% boost to Surge, which is also a nice boost to threat. However, don’t delay Shock for Energize, as you need to build your Harnessed Darkness stacks as quickly as you can.

Harnessed Darkness

Your mitigation method that shapes your rotation is based around building and spending stacks of the Harnessed Darkness buff, which does nothing on its own, but provides 4% additive DR against all types of attacks when you use the 3 on Depredating Volts to maintain the Dark protection buff at 4 stacks. A single tick of Depredating Volts is enough to refresh the duration on Dark Protection, but it only lasts 12 seconds. The key to maintaining the buff is to use Shock and Wither as soon as they come off cooldown, while prioritizing Shock, since it has a much shorter cooldown. You also want to try to keep from getting stunned or knocked back during your channel, to give you as much time as you can get to use Shock and Wither again.

Dark Ward

Dark Ward is, hands down, your best mitigation mechanic. You get pretty good shield and absorb boosts from the discipline, but this ability pushes your shield another 15% higher, so long as you maintain the buff and keep at least 1 stack of the initial 15. It also does not respect the GCD, so you can use it as you use other abilities (aside from Depredating Volts) However, due to the Dark Bulwark mechanic, you should only be refreshing Dark Ward as it is about to fall off. Depending on the fight, the difference in mitigation between using it on cooldown and only as necessary can be almost as large as letting Dark protection fall off. It’s one of the things that separate the excellent from the okay Assassin tanks. To make tracking this buff easier, you can sort your buffs on your buff bar (great 3.0 quality of life change!) by duration, and by your own buffs first, which makes finding the Ward buff much easier to find quickly, so you can get back to paying attention to the fight.

Sample Dummy Parse

swtor-3.0-darkness-assassin-parseAs you can see, Depredating Volts is a massive portion of your threat, even as delayed as it was on this parse. You rely a lot on enemies hitting you to recover your force, and thus on a dummy parse, you see far more Saber Strikes than you would on a real boss fight. Beyond Depredating Volts, Shock and Wither are going to be your next highest abilities. Wither has much higher threat, but you can’t use it as often, and the longer cooldown makes you delay it for Shock, in order to make sure you can keep your Dark protection buff. Maul is a smaller percentage of my threat than it should have been (again, poor regeneration while not getting attacked), but per use is much higher threat than Thrash. Assassinate, once you reach the execute phase, will take precedence over any move that doesn’t generate Harnessed Darkness stacks, because it just generates so much threat.Discharge should have been a higher percentage, but with poor Force Regeneration, I could only use it enough to maintain the Unsteady debuff.

Cooldown Usage

Defensive cooldowns are best used to mitigate large hits, or lots of small ones, and to buy the healers some time to get the situation back under control. As anAssassin, you also have an ability (Shroud) that lets you completely negate a large amount of nasty mechanics that other tanks have to deal with, but is mostly useful proactively, when you know the mechanic is coming.

  • Overcharge Saber: Grants you 25% additive damage reduction against all damage types for 15 seconds, on a 2 minute cooldown. It’s one of the shortest cooldowns and one of the strongest defensive abilities among any of the tanks, and works on all damage types. To top it off, it heals you for 15% of your total health (icing on the cake)
  • Deflection: Grants you 50% additive defense chance against melee and ranged attacks on a 2 minute cooldown. Not nearly so powerful as the previous ability, but still highly useful against packs of adds and against bosses who hit you very often with melee/ranged moves.
  • Shroud: 3 seconds (5 with the utility you should always have) seconds of immunity to Force and Tech damage, as well as purging you of all hostile, removable effects. Extremely useful in mitigating big hits from bosses, or ignoring mechanics entirely (such as eating all load lifters and Exonium carts on Bulo, or walking through the fires on Torque).
  • Recklessness: 30% Absorb boost for 20 seconds. Enough to make you feel invincible if you get a lucky shielding streak. Not so good against single, big attacks, but very useful against a large series of hits.
  • Exotech Absorb Adrenal – Increases armor rating by 1675 for 15 seconds. Very powerful with the 150% armor boost from our stance and in the Discipline, which makes it worth almost 10% extra DR from armor. This old, level 50 adrenal is so good that it soundly beats the new Anodyne Absorb Adrenal, even with all our Shield and Absorb boosts from our Discipline.
  • Prototype Anodyne Medpack – Heals you for 7192-7533 immediately, and an additional2750 health extra over 15 seconds. You can reset your single use per fight by using Force Cloak, just beware of the consequences of dropping out of combat.

A very important part of learning how to tank is learning how to best use your defensive abilities to survive boss mechanics and which abilities are best against what. Recklessness and Deflection are very good against a large series of attacks (Deflection only being useful against melee and ranged), whereas Shroud and Overcharge Saber are far better for dealing with single, big hits. Overcharge Saber is also incredibly good for lots of small hits, but is your only ability that works on all damage types, and so you should always consider that when deciding on whether to use it or not.

Tanking and You & How to Improve

Milas wrote a very good section in his Powertech/Vanguard guide, labeled the same as this section. I suggest that you read it if you are new to tanking, as it’s quite informative, and anything I write here would be parroting him. Vanguard Guide/Powertech Guide.

About the Author

Aelanis is an avid forum-goer on theAssassin/Shadow forums, hailing from The Shadowlands. Despite having only raided Nightmare content since 2.8 released, Aelanis has been playing Shadow tank since 2.0 released and mained a Shadow tank since 2.3.If you play on the Shadowlands, you can reach him on Theraton, in Exit Area on the Imperial side, or Ellendra, in Death Mark on the Republic side.