Diplomatic Investigations: Sith Assassins – Guard And Stealth

Welcome to our weekly column dedicated to everything Consular and Inquisitor. If you have a suggestion for a topic you’d like covered in this column, drop Tim a line!

This article is a continuation from my previous article about Sith Assassins and their abilities.. In that last article I had a Level 19 character and as a result I was missing out on a lot of skills and abilities that you get at a higher level.

Since then, my character has progressed to Level 25 and some really cool new abilities are available which I will share with you. For the record I am talking about the Sith Assassin but the skills and abilities are the same for the Jedi Shadow (but with different names).

Tanking/Protecting characters

There is an ability called Guard for a Sith Assassin that you cast on a single ally (player or companion). It requires you to have Dark Charge active, which is used to buff your armor rating by 150%, shield chance by 15% and threat generation by 50%.  Dark charge also gives your attacks a chance to drain life force from the target but melee bonus damage is reduced by 5%.

Guard, once cast enables the target to take 5% less damage and to generate 25% less threat, in addition 50% of all incoming damage from enemy players to that ally gets redirected back to you.  You do need to be within 15 metres for it to have effect however.

So who should you use it on? It’s probably best to cast this on a healer.  Why?  Well if you are a tank (remember Sith Assassins can be) then you are (or should be) the number one priority for your healer to keep alive, as your job is to soak up all the threat in fights.  As a result the healer should be focusing on keeping you alive. So your job as a tank is to keep threat off other players, leaving the DPS players to do their thing (hopefully enormous amounts of damage) and the healer to heal you first and the DPS players if necessary.  Of course you can and will do some damage at the same time yourself. It makes sense to ensure that your healer does not get attacked as indirectly, as it keeps you alive.

Guard can also be great in PvP as well.  If you want to be a little selfish then look for an ally about to get defeated, cast Guard on them and in as little as a few seconds you have three medals.  Easy  🙂

I expect with ranked Warzones in patch 1.2, this is going to be something focus on a lot more. But having Guard also mean that technically you could use a companion other than Khem Val for solo play early on (ship droid, I am looking at you).  He is useless as a fighter but reasonable (mostly) as a healer.   Doing this means you have to approach your fights differently as it will only be you inflicting damage and not Khem Val as well, but on the plus side you will have a healer.  It’s worth a try!

I just love Khem Val though (what’s not to love about a 100% evil companion?), so for me it’s a juggling game with limited healing options. In the past as a sith sorcerer with healing, I just healed Khem Val (who generally held threat).  Now if he is defeated I am in potential trouble. The Force Cloak ability has reduced this problem mostly though, because if I do get into the situation where Khem Val is defeated and I’ve used my medpac and am heading towards defeat, I’ll just cast Force Cloak which allows me to vanish from sight and exiting combat – pretty cool.  For 10 seconds you become virtually undetectable. On the downside all healing is decreased by 100% for those 10 seconds.

Incidentally, I found a bug in patch 1.2 for this where sometimes it did not work properly.  It did put me into stealth mode but I was still being attacked!  I am sure this will be sorted out when patch 1.2 goes live. Overall though, pretty powerful.  This really makes it easy to solo most encounters as you can take on large mobs, defeat as many as you can, cast Force Cloak, disappear, move away to heal, wait for the 3 minute cooldown (less with some abilities on the non- tanking skill trees) and then go back and finish off the remainder.

The point is, it’s just another play style to get used to!  And that’s why this game is so much fun, learning the best ways to succeed with a given class! This week’s picture is my character dancing while stealthed with an unfortunate enemy who has had Mind Trap cast on him, rendering him effectively useless for 60 seconds (or until attacked):

Well thats me for this week, thanks for reading. Until next time, bye for now.