Shadow/Assassin Post-Patch 1.3

I had planned to spread my play time out a bit more last night to actually run through the changes from the last patch - but after all the continued doomsaying I decided to focus on my shadow for the night.  I'd been playing him the last few days just to get back in the feel of things and so I'd have something recent to compare to.  I haven't played him as much lately because my Vanguard and Guardian are both in end game raiding guilds and I just don't have the time to place a third tank - there aren't enough days in the week.

Stylin my Champion armor - remember this stuff?

So first I ran through KP Hard Mode - actually first I spent a few hours redoing all my skills on all my characters and starting augment stuff going.  Then I ran out of time and it was raid night so off we went.

I was particularly excited to try out my new "smart" aoe that doesn't break CC needlessly and to see how my overall threat had increased.  My Shadow isn't overly geared, I think I'm 1/2 Rakata 1/2 Columi with some Recruit implants and a Tionese Earpiece.  So I figured Hard Mode would be a good test to see where he was sitting.

Bonethrasher went smooth - as it usually does when you have a skill that avoids getting swiped at off cooldown pretty much whenever you need it.  I also didn't break the Cat's CC every 10 seconds by using my Slow Time - which really helped upping my DPS output during this fight.

Similarly Jarg and Sorno didn't cause any trouble.  I did notice my health spiking a bit (I was tanking Jarg) because of all the elemental damage, but I notice the same thing on my Vanguard so it didn't really concern me.  The only real trouble we had here was some DPS dying because they couldn't kill the carbonizer droids fast enough (go figure).

Crusher wasn't a problem for me - we wiped twice due to lag and people not seeing red circles.  Not sure if it was excuses or if it was a real issue ( we were all getting lag spikes ) but when I asked my healers if it was just too much damage to handle with me MTing they felt it wasn't an issue.

We tried a new strategy with Fabricator that ended up with him dealing a ton more damage than he normally does.  It was still manageable, my mic was even busted for the run and without being able to communicate tank swaps we got through it just fine.  The armor reduction stacks added up faster on my Shadow and we ended up swapping a bit earlier, but that's a given since he has less armor in general.

He knows what's coming

Karagga went even faster than usual, I'm sure it was partly becausemy DPS had increased quite substantially over the other tanks that I play.  I've always felt the Shadow did a lot more damage, and that hasn't changed.  The damage output was close to the same - I felt like I actually mitigated more damage with my cooldowns and put less stress on my healers overall.  I also helped with the droid spawns much more effectively.

After the raid I decided to hop over and try some PvP as well just so I could get an overall feeling for where things stood.

A wall added in 1.3 to extend the time it takes to run between doors

For those of you that don't know, they added this huge wall down the center of Voidstar to prevent teams from being able to float back and forth between the two doors so easily.  Now it takes a bit of extra time to run around and help defend a door under attack.  Now if they did the same thing on the second set of doors this game would be much more interesting.

The above picture is shortly before I capped the door from stealth while the whole team deathmatched down the middle beside the wall - Go Go PuGs!  I guess all the reasonable players are in Ranked tonight anyway.

Now, just to prefix this - I'm wearing mostly Champion gear with a few BM pieces.  I haven't PvP'd seriously on this guy for a long time.  I have been for the last 3 days ... but that hasn't got me very far yet.

So - I die pretty quickly.  I actually ended up with a decent healer on my team and I threw my guard up on him for most of the match.  He would get focused a lot, and so would I for some reason - so I did end up taking a lot of damage.  I found that I was squishier than I was used to - but it certainly wasn't gamebreaking.  My heals were less substantial and I had to play a bit more strategically than I was used to.  No more standing there shooting rocks and people and just expecting not to die.

Respectable Showing in my first 1.3 Voidstar Match

I ended up with respectable numbers.  On par with the Vanguard in the group for damage with a ton of protection.  I don't have a lot of examples of what my numbers used to look like, but my healing feels a bunch lower than it used to - which was kind of the goal of the last patch.

I managed to get a second match before bed (yay populated server!) - Huttball this time.  Unfortunately that is probably the worst game to try to measure your utility.  But I did my best.

I spent about half the game attempting to control mid - which helped pad my damage numbers a bit.  Every time I turned around it seemed like someone else on their team was healing (which of course wasn't true) but it makes things a lot harder when you aren't sure who to focus fire on.  My team actually came together pretty well and everyone was right on top of things.

First Huttball match of 1.3

For the other half of the match I was running the ball.  Both our points are a result of me passing over the finish line, or carrying most of the way to (and then across) the finish line.  With a healer keeping me up I felt like I still had the same kind of survivability.  I lasted a good 30 seconds down in the pit waiting for someone to show up so I could pass at one point.  They never came and I died, but still - 30 seconds with 5 people on you is pretty decent, you can't really ask for much more than that.

Overall I think with all the changes in that the game doesn't play much different than previously.  I was never a "top end" shadow so there might be more missing at the very high end than for those of us sitting at about average gearing.  One thing I did notice was keeping a healer guarded and alive was tons easier, there might have been more damage flying out (which I kind of noticed from the scoreboards) but it was more spread out over time and didn't seem as scary.

One thing I really noticed in PvP was that I kept hitting my on-use relic and adrenal for extra cooldowns and then was confused when nothing happened.  It took me a few seconds each time to figure out why they weren't activating.  So as far as active mitigation goes - yeah I lost a bunch there, and that was noticeable.  But everyone lost that, it wasn't a class specific kind of feature.  I'm still trying to decide if the PvP relics are BiS or not?  And if they are - are they only for PvP or should I wear them to raids?  It's hard to pass up that "always on" extra stat boost over the "on demand" stat boost for sticky situations.