SW:ToR Tanking and the Assassin

I know I said this post would be up sooner than now, but the holidays and the push to 50 have gotten in my way. In no way will I take credit for the majority of the information contained within this post as I am no mathematician - most of this information was found over at www.sithwarrior.com. All of the information pertained herein came from a primer by Gankstah that I will attempt to put into "plain english", but some of it was copied directly to save time (why reword something that's already awesome). If you still have questions by the end of this blog post please comment and I will try to explain (or at the very least point you towards more information).

First, we will need to clear up a few terms and basic mathematical calculations (if you hate math like I do you can skip past that part and just assume that that's how it works):

Tanking Terms
DR = Damage Resistance: This is the % that incoming damage is reduced by. If your DR is 50% and you are hit by a 100 dmg blast you only suffer 50 points of dmg.
DFR = Defense Rating: This is a stat found on tanking armor and directly affects your Parry/Deflection on a 10:1 scale. That is to say, for every 10 points of DFR you gain 1% Parry/Deflection.
Avoidance: Avoidance is the negation of all damage from an individual attack via in game mechanics such as Parrying or Deflection.

Primary Stats
Primary stats are assigned by your core class. Str = SW/JK, Aim = BH/TR, Cunning = IA/SM and Will = SI/JC.
Crit% from Stats: 5+30*(1-(1-(0.01/0.3))^((Stat/Lvl)/2.5))
All Primary Stats yield +0.2 bonus damage per point

Secondary Stats (tanking)
Accuracy = improves your chance to hit your opponent, anything over 100% results in defense penetration
Absorption = increases the amount absorbed by your shield
Shield Chance = increases the chance you will proc a shield to absorb damage
Defense = increases your chance to avoid attacks (i.e. parry and deflect)

Damage Types
There are four damage types in TOR: Kinetic, Energy, Internal and Elemental. There are three important things to note about damage types:
Force powers and Tech powers, unless otherwise listed, are considered Kinetic damage.
Armor increases DR to Kinetic and Energy damage only.
Some skills and abilities increase specific types of damage (i.e. Dark Blood in the Immortal tree).
What does this mean? This means that certain trees will have a DPS advantage vs. tanks. Trees with a high yield of Elemental and Internal damage which bypasses our high armor rating. Examples would be Lethality for Agents (Elemental), Madness for SI's (Internal) and Advanced Prototypes for BH's (combination of both).

Basic Game Calculations
Armor Damage Reduction = AR/AR+(200*Level+800)
Deflection/Parry = (5% Base Chance) + 30*(1-(1-(0.01/0.3))^((DFR/Level)/0.55))
Shield Absorb = (GeneratorBonus) + 50*(1-(1-(0.01/0.5))^((AbsorbRating/Lvl)/0.18))
Shield Chance = (GeneratorBonus) + 50*(1-(1-(0.01/0.5))^((GlanceRating/Lvl)/0.32))
Accuracy = (90% Base Chance) + 30*(1-(1-(0.01/0.3))^((AccuracyRating/Lvl)/0.55))

To Hit
The first thing we need to discuss is the way that the game deals with "To Hit Rolls". TOR uses a 2 roll system to determine whether you are going to defend an attack or get hit/crit. The way this works is an initial roll is done to determine whether or not you defended the hit first based on your defense stat - hit or miss (a miss is parried or deflected). If the roll is positive for a hit, a second roll is done to determine whether or not the attack is a shielded hit, a normal hit or a critical hit. The results come out that shielded hits can never crit and vice versa. An important part of this concept to note is the following quote from Gankstah: "As your Shield Chance and the Crit Chance of the attacker rises the odds of a normal hit landing is reduced until it is pushed off of the table." What's that mean for a tank? It means that, at some point, all hits on us will either be shielded or crits for very high amounts of shield chance and opponent crit chance. At this point I don't know the crit chance of PvE bosses, but I can assume that this is incredibly important for PvP tanks.


The following is credited to Elobi.
Stat Weights:
Remember Endurance and your primary stat comes with all of your gear – so you don’t have to worry too much about those stats in terms of stat weighing.
Generally defense gear/mods have more endurance than dps.

Primary stats:
Endurance > [insert your primary stat here]

Defensive stats:
Shield Rating / Defense Rating > Shield Absorption
- Generally you have a large amount of defense on your gear, don't necessarily stack defense, but don't forget it either!
- Shield Rating doesn't occur as much, meaning you will have to modify your way to the top.
- Shield Rating and Shield Absorption go hand in hand – > stacking Shield Rating like a champ but not having any absorption rating would negate the effectiveness drastically. The same goes the other way around.
- As a rule of thumb go 2 Shield Rating for every 1 Absorption Rating
- Shield Rating is a cheaper stat than defense rating, and defense hits diminishing returns faster. So augmenting/modfying defense and shield stats on a 1:2 basis will decrease the likelyhood of you recieving a full hit, without inflating your stats.