7.4 Kinetic Combat | Darkness SWTOR Guide

Always be in stealth when you pull the boss.  This will give you stacks of shadow protection as you decloak and begin the fight.  This extra Damage Reduction is important and should always be the first step when you are preparing yourself for battle.

Using guard effectively will help keep the boss's threat on you and your teammates alive.  In Flash points, we typically guard the healer to keep them safe from mobs.  In operations, we give it to the top DPS player.  You should get a sense of who is the strongest dps player of your group and guard them.  They take reduced damage and will build less threat regardless of how close they are to you.  You can help the healers as well.  Consider swapping your guard to a player that is taking damage/low on health.

Raise your Kinetic Ward.  This is your primary Defensive that must be up 100% of the time.  Kinetic Ward provides you with an increase to your shield chance of 18%.  As you shield attacks, its 15 charges will count down.  It will collapse after all charges have depleted or after 20".  It is on a 10" ability cool down so keeping it up should never be an issue, however, there are bonuses to having it collapse on its own depending on which passive you have selected.

Always open with Force Pull from range.  This ability builds very high threat and will get you out of the gate and off to a good start.

Use your gap closer to enter melee range and begin your attacks.  The gap closer will also proc your abilities and allow you to use higher threat and damage dealing attacks in your opener.

Note that your basic attack, saber strike, does not proc anything.  There will be situations where you have to throw in some saber strikes to rebuild your force.  As the shadow tank is attacked, it builds force.  IF you are off tanking and acting as a dps while your cotank is tanking, you will find yourself out of force very quickly.  There are also bosses that do not use melee attacks against you, such as Brontes in the Kephess phase.  This makes it very, very difficult to "parse" a training dummy and get a full feel for the rotations and mini patterns of the shadow tank.  For the best training, do flash points and work your skills out against easy bosses, such as in hammer station.  You get a nice mix of AoE and single target, as well as experience with defensives.

Your ward increases your shield change by 18%.  As a shadow, we have to keep refreshing this ability to keep our shield chance high.  Allowing the buff to expire gives us extra perks, but is hard to do as the cool down is so low.  Try to resist spamming it and allow the charges to reduce to collapse it, then fire it again.

Using Kinetic ward correctly and only refreshing it when its charges collapse (to damage) will apply one of the following benefits based on your choice of passive at level 39.  See more about these options below.

Gloom Ward will get your AoE taunt coming back from cool down faster every time a charge of kinetic ward is consumed.  Pick this in fights where you need to be able to AoE taunt more often.
When it collapses, it will deal some damage and reset the cool down of slow time and force breach.
I consider this the weakest of the 3 options and only pick this one when I need my AoE taunt up more frequently.

Dusk Ward gets your cloak back off of cool down faster.  Each time Kinetic ward loses a stack, Force Cloaks cool down recharges faster.  Handy when you need force cloak back faster.
This also adds an extra defensive into Kinetic ward and can be very helpful but cannot be reliably timed.  The 20% accuracy reduction is essentially a 20% Defense chance for 6".  That is HUGE.

Twilight Ward.  Without contest, my favorite.  I use this one much more than the other 2.  Force Potency is an outstanding Defensive and Offensive ability.  Reducing the cool down of an ability that increase our shield absorb by 30% for 20" is massive.  Force Potency has a very low base cool down of 1"25".  Shaving off seconds from the clock to get this back up is a massive help in many fights where cloaks and AoE taunts are not needed.  Getting the bonus charge of force potency when Kinetic ward collapse is supreme.

Resilience is the first of our match game abilities, we use this against force/tech damage types.  There are tacticals that extend the time beyond its 3" duration.  This ability completely resists force/tech damage, but will do nothing for kinetic/energy damage.  Also, a self-cleanse.

Deflection increases your Defense chance against Melee/Ranged attack types.  Keep in mind it's only a 50% increase which probably lands us around 75-80% with our tank stats meaning damage will still come through.  Does nothing for
Internal/Elemental attack types.

This ability provides us a 15% self-heal and well as a 1% self-heal as our "techniques" proc (I have always read this as using the glowy buttons).  We also gain a 25% Damage Reduction.  I routinely pair this with force potency for an exceptional mitigation.

In fights where we need every defensive we have; force potency cannot be used as an offensive cool down.  As a tank, using this gives us a 30% increase to shield absorb for 20".  It's pretty powerful in concert with battle readiness and/or deflection.  Do not pair it with Resilience.

With this one, we have to give up a pretty significant dps increase in the level 27 skill choices for a defensive that will increase our DR by 10% for 6".  Spinning kick has a base CD of around 20" meaning that ideally 30% of the time we will gain a 10% DR.  It's hard to give up the extra damage and taunt time energized project offers, so I largely wouldn't recommend taking unless you need the extra DR.

This is the one where the shadow shines.  We can use cloak of resilience passive @ level 73 to give us 2" of resilience when we use this for extra resilience in fights.  The more interesting use to is to break boss channels.  Say ole Fire Brand (tank in EC) is going to incinerate your armor.  Nope!  *Force cloaks out*.  This makes 2 cloaks a very useful tactical.  Remember to have a taunt on Cool down to taunt immediately after using force cloak to keep threat.

Must haves in any tank's arsenal.  The shield adrenal absorbs 30% of damage up to 84261 in a 15" window.  2-minute cool down.  If you do not need this as a defensive, consider using the Crit Adrenal for extra damage (I typically use one in my opener with battle readiness)

Your Taunt should be used when you need to multiply your threat ahead of the DPS.  It's situational and can happen at different times depending on DPS composition/Experience Level.  As a Novice Tank, Taunt Before Shadow Stride.  As you get a better feel for the role, try delaying your Taunt after Several ability activations/channels to max your threat multiplication.

Works same as Mind Control but effects all targets w/n 15 m of you.  A common Strategy for single target fights is to "Mind Control" use a few abilities" Mass Mind Control" use a few abilities and then "Mind Control" Again as a "Triple Taunt".  Sure Fire way to be the top threat