On phase 2, try to have your group position itself and move so that aoe heal use can be maximized. This means as little motion as possible. An aoe heal is still quite effective if you place it on the edge of where the group is currently with some of it advancing into where the group will move next. When someone in melee range drops a green circle, the tank can move the boss slightly enough to get everyone in melee range out of the way of the circle while still staying in the aoe. Watching for spikes from force choke is important, but you don't need to necessarily worry about them dying from another hit right after the choke, so you have time to get them up. Also be aware of when the other healer has doom, as they will pretty much only be able to cast instant things while they run through the circles. For an op healer this is less of a gimp, but being limited to resurgence and static barrier can reduce healing significantly for the duration of doom. Last thing is try to use aoe heals to recover health lost to consumption as much as possible. I'm currently working on this myself, and avoiding cases where I happen to be standing in my own aoe at full health. I will purposely use consumption say two times before casting an aoe so that I am healed back to full (assuming I'm not taking a lot of other damage). Personally, this was the hardest fight for me. Aoe's work for cases near the pillar, but damage going out is not as high as the Dread Guard fight so it's easier to use your single target stuff. For the person taking the laser beam, static barrier and best single target heals work best, but you could add an aoe if other group members in the area are low as well. You will want to do the same thing for people getting jumped on in the second phase. And of course, aoe in the burn phase helps a lot. I wouldn't use an aoe at any point during the second phase. I believe that aoe heal only reaches efficiency greater than your other heals when it affects three or more targets, and at no point during the fight will three people be on the same platform (except for dps, but they aren't taking damage). So, just stick to your single target heals. The one thing to watch out for is the aggro generated at the beginning of the second phase. Make sure your tanks are taunting and using the highest threat output they can as large heals in the beginning (which might be necessary) can pull the boss due to the 75% damage reduction. And having the boss on you for more than five seconds is basically death.

Concentration will give you more force regen if you are able to get in a disturbance every ten seconds. However, that will not necessarily be possible and the real issue with that spec is the missed point in Will of the Jedi. If you consider a base value of 2000 willpower (not too hard to get), you will get 60 willpower from that second point in the talent, a significant stat boost. Also, no points in preservation is not good in my opinion, but that may be a playstyle thing. Rapid delivery of force armor has its utility in some fights, such as the spike phase on Toth and Zorn and the lightning field phase on hard mode Dread Guards. Thus I would take one point out of pain bearer for this purpose, combined with the additional point out of concentration. I play a sorc, but the equivalent build would be: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#600GGdRrd0dGzZf00MZ0M.2

I like it, roughly the same as my powertech's stats. You won't have any trouble tanking the current content. Powertechs also don't have much use for accuracy as it only affects rail shot, unload, and rapid shots, so 0 is fine.

All good stuff on here; it is interesting how end-game performance has developed. Two points: One of the main issues from PuGs is the disparity in knowledge of fights. A group (or part of a group) that hasn't seen all of TFB is most likely going to struggle with mechanics unless they are preparing appropriately. This is an area where in my opinion many people fall short. When I join an operation, be it pug or with my guild, I am always trying to improve my performance on fights and do the best I can to be ready for new encounters when we get to them. I feel it is my responsibility to contribute my role to the group as much as possible in this way. For example, the first time I need SM TFB I joined on last boss, but knew the fight better than most of the group because I had watched the video guide in detail. Unfortunately, I see many people taking a more casual mindset along the lines of "I'll just listen to whatever the raid leader says and assume I'm doing everything right unless he/she says otherwise." The raid leader might know the basics of a fight, but cannot be actively looking at every player for mistakes and ways to improve, so it should fall to the individual to improve as necessary. This lack of responsibility contributes to a lot of "poor play," and adding in the fact that a pug player is not really held "accountable" by any means, the lazy way out is very easy to take. Second, some people lose that drive to improve even more when carried by an overgeared player. The high gear level of one player can make up for a multitude of mistakes on story mode operations, which creates a negative chain effect by only reinforcing the mistakes or bad strategies players are using. If they can complete the story mode content while playing badly, but always get carried by a higher geared player, it justifies (incorrectly) the mindset of not needing to improve. The issue becomes apparent, and can present a lot of difficulty when you reach content that cannot be carried through, or at least not easily. Players set in their ways will have a hard time changing, but they must do so as a few amazingly geared people is not going to cut it in terms of mistakes being made. Going back to the OP, the group you encountered may simply have wanted to be "carried," or thought you were not dependable because your lower gear level suggests (once again, incorrectly) less knowledge of fights. I'm not sure how many people would lie about their fight experience to get in a group, but I can see it happening. However, in that case, it should become obvious simply by watching the player, so there was no reason to deny you the spot in the group as you could be replaced if you performed inadequately (which you wouldn't).

Are you talking about running with a base 20% alacrity or what you are able to do when you add the ability bonus of 20%? You will also not get the telekinetic wave and telekinetic throw off in 3.6 seconds unless you are casting the t-wave and using the procced version of t-throw, giving you 2.4+1.2. However, you should never actually be casting t-wave to use it as even with the 20% alacrity it is a waste when you can keep using shorter casted spells and then instant cast t-wave with proc after mental alacrity fades.

I'd say the four piece set is better, a 2% defense chance increase all the time is an impressive buff. Three extra seconds on energy shield isn't much considering its cooldown, and carbonize is not really useful for "end-game" encounters. If you were looking at only maximizing for flashpoint completion it might be worth it, but otherwise it has limited utility.

20% from gear is not "easy" by any means, though I was wrong, it is possible. The maximum alacrity rating you could obtain currently is 1078, but that is completely neglecting surge. The grind to get the proper enhancements and gear for even 891 rating would be tedious, and you should never have been at that point anyways.

I believe you will get more damage out of simply casting force lightning (as well as force) and waiting for Crushing Darkness to be up, could be wrong though.

The 20% alacrity should be added to your current value from gear, whatever that is, so if you had 20 to begin with, you'd put yourself up at 40%. Obviously 20% from gear is impossible, but you get the idea.

Your analysis is correct, but when considering ratings you really don't want to be anywhere near the point where you are generating 30% or 50% from rating alone. The hard cap is an absolute value that requires an infinite amount of rating to produce the max percentage. The confusion comes in when, as you say, people mix up the hard cap from rating with the suggested value on your character sheet. It's interesting how the guideline total value for defense on a jugg, for example, is around 30% while the max percentage from rating is also 30%; not sure if this was planned or it just turned out that way.

Sweltering heat to degauss shouldn't have much of an impact, but why would you give up the perks of burnout for 16% armor rating? If you're dpsing you're not going to be taking many hits so armor shouldn't matter, while burnout is incredibly useful for boss fights and burnout phases. I am curious, though, about the possibility of taking one point from burnout and putting it into prototype cynlinders as you did. For some reason, a 3% higher crit chance overall (tech) seems more powerful than 1% increased crit and 10% bonus periodic damage when targets are below 30%. Thoughts?

You cannot treat fair gear distribution as a two case system (need/greed), whereby needing means you have "use" for the item. Utility of the item has a range of values that include direct improvement to main spec (highest), improvement to off-spec, improvement to companion gear, reverse engineering, and even improvement to alt gear via legacy item transfer. Thus, players have developed the social custom of clicking need only in the case of main spec improvement because it has the highest priority. All other levels of utility should be discussed, which is really not a hard thing to do as most people will let you need on something for a companion.

Along the lines of this discussion, I am curious as to what people think the implication of "designed for columi gear" is. Everyone seems to agree that HM EV/KP and SM EC/TFB are designed for people in this level gear. However, when develops or players say these things, are they implying optimized gear with augments or simply the gear as it comes when first purchased? Performance levels are quite different between face value columi versus optimized columi, so it seems to me that operations such as SM TFB are catered towards optimized columi. However, it is much easier to get higher level gear than to go for full optimization of columi before upgrading, so the point of gear designation becomes muddled in discussions of what is required for various operations. Thoughts?

Lol

Check out this thread for reasons why a tank might want to stack more endurance: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=545904 I personally will always go for only mitigation, because I think the hp you get from not stacking endurance is high enough to get you through everything. Some people will just want to feel "safer" though by having more hp, and with such a lower amount of damage affected by defensive stats in TFB, there is a certain amount of justification for this thought.

I am curious about a set of enhancements, signified by the title immunity and sturdiness. They are tanking enhancements with low endurance, but a high allocation of shield and a defense stat (either defense or absorb). They would be the ideal mitigation enhancements; however, they only seem to be available in the rakata level variant as drops from hard mode EV and KP. This one is about equal to the next best level 63 enhancement except with respect to endurance (51,33 vs. 60,24 for shield,def), so the 26 or 27 versions would definitely be the better choice. However, these enhancements don't exist in gear, despite being listed as actual items on askmrrobot. Does anyone have any information on why they stop at the rakata level and if they will ever be available at a higher tier?

My current gear follows along the line of your setup, but with respective pve modding, which put me at the following stats (if I can remember correctly): 1005 bonus dmg 767 bonus healing ~37% crit with agent buff ~77% surge 7.83% alacrity I only have the battlemaster relics for power, and if I do pvp i just use an out-of-date champion set with a few battlemaster pieces. The thing to remember in warzones is that you can only heal damage that was dealt. So while things like purging a dot are much more force efficient in getting rid of the damage, you will see more numbers on the scoreboard for the person that healed the damage after the dot ran its full course. People that are scoring a million heals (if they actually are) only get there because their group is taking a lot of damage that could probably be prevented with better coordination. As such, it is more useful to look at all aspect of the scoreboard, such as how often people die. I would bet that often the team with more deaths loses (depending on the objectives), so instead of a goal being number of healing output, make it preventing the most deaths.

I didn't look through everything, but your stats seem to be pretty much 1.3 BiS. Most healing "BiS" is the same or similar to dps BiS, you just can't definitively say it's what gives you the highest mean hps (though that is a good indicator of healing power). I mostly pve though, so I don't know the exact ideal pvp stats and can only assume you're at the right place based on your mod selection. As to your question, your response could be the answer, as a well geared pve player will have higher stats than yours but heal for less in warzones. You have to take it case by case though and look at all of their stats to determine the difference. It could be that they are a hybrid spec and prefer to dps more than you.

I believe you would encounter the same problem if you limited it to one role, as dps could simply queue as heals or tank to get in a group faster. Also, though its not a common thing, sometimes I will queue as both because my respec cost is 0 so I wouldn't mind switching to dps for more fun.

I do follow your line of thinking; I'm just not sure what benchmarks to set with respect to stat improvement as you gear up. I only run 19% defense (with stim) and push shield/absorb. One thing I am unsure of since you brought it up is the nature of attacks rolling for each stat. Before reading your post, I was under the impression that if an attack can be dodged it can be shielded, and visa versa, so that you cannot say shield or defense is more valuable for a specific fight. Now I'm not sure, so any information on this would be useful.

Ideal shield/absorb is ultimately related to defense, but you can definitely get your shield and absorb higher than 54 and 52 respectively. I think people switch to prioritizing defense at about shield/absorb 50/50 or so because at that point defense becomes more valuable per point, up until you start to reach the DR on defense. Thus the ideal ratings are a balance of the three; I'm sure someone has calculated it somewhere, but even if you're not at that exact point you can still do everything just fine. Endurance augments can be used as a buffer to make "OH NO" situations easier to deal with, but I personally don't prioritize any endurance and go as high as I can in def/shield/absorb. Also, the rocket punch not proccing could be due to the nature of a fight, such as attacks that arent shieldable or rate of attack by an enemy.

You seem to be on the right track, could just put more rating into defense as you get better gear. My stats at near 1.3 BiS are: ~19% def (with stim) ~58% shield ~60% absorb I am fully mitigation stacked so my hp is at 24.1k; would be useful to know your hp to determine endurance vs. tanking stat allocation. But, generally, you have a decent amount of room to improve your tanking stats without getting too much into DR. That being said, I will always prioritize tanking stats even if I'm pushing into higher DR because the benefit of those stats is more important to me than any contribution of endurance (or any other stat for that matter).

How are you able to get so high with your damage reduction?

Good point, didn't think of that; I think somewhere someone did extensive calculations as to stat value gain per point for ideal cases, but can't remember where. Because the OP said the tank he saw had 5% defense, I just used that value for base defense, and did not include set bonus nor stim rating boost in either case (though of course one should have those to be most effective). I'm not going to run through the calculation, but I believe adding those factors in would favor defense to 20% even more because you have to go less into the DR curve of defense to get to 20%. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

The original damage calculations were not done correctly as you have to factor in damage reduction for attacks that hit; even doing that with your data still results in a situation favoring the no defense argument. However, the main flaw is that the stat distribution in the first case is not necessarily possible (could be with dread gear) and has such a higher gear level than the second case that you cannot compare the mitigation values effectively. For purposes of this explanation I will use for the two sets of stats (5,61,76) and (20,50,50), assuming that no points were put in the power armor talent to make things even. Considering the first case, we need 0 defense rating for 5% chance and about 855 shield rating for 61% shield chance (including talent buffs). 76% absorb cannot be reached from a static point without the use of heat screen because we get 24% absorb from shield generator and the ablative upgrades talent and absorb % from rating caps at 50%, resulting in 74% total (if you reached the maximum absorb value which is not possible anyways). Thus we will consider absorb with the additional 8% from heat shield, so 32% from abilities/buffs. To reach the value of 76%, we need about 945 absorb rating. This gives us a defense stat pool of 1800, which extremely high. My current power tech has a total of 1705 defensive stat rating allocation (pure mitigation), and is 1.3 BiS. Thus you might be able to get to 1800 with the new gear, but I'm certain no one has done this yet. To compare to the second case, we must use the same rating pool, and I will use 20% defense as the baseline for distribution. To make that we need about 565 defense rating, leaving 1235 points for the remaining two stats. You could distribute these in many ways, so I'll just use a roughly equal distribution as an example, with 620 in shield and 615 in absorb. The result is ~55% shield chance and ~61% absorb; note that this is without heat shield so comparing this accurately to the first case we will use instead 55% shield chance and 69% absorb (in reality you'd probably want more shield compared to absorb to help with proccing and what not). Thus our final two stat sets are (5,61,76) and (20,55,69). If you set the OP's original case 2 as the standard, you will get something like (25,51,62), which is still higher than (25,50,50). 20 seems to be a good spot for powertech defense though, so pushing it up to 25% isn't really the best choice. To finalize the point, I'll post the results of calculations similar to the OP's regarding these two stat setups, taking into account that hits not shielded are reduced by armor (we'll assume 50% DR for convenience) and shielded hits are also reduced by armor. And instead of just using 10 attacks, I extended it to 100 attacks still at 5k each (500k total damage incoming). No defense mitigation: 127.3k gets through. 20% defense mitigation: 124.1k gets through. Though the difference is not much, 20% defense stacking is favored in terms of overall mitigation (considering attacks that can be mitigated). It is also worth noting that as your armor rating increases, absorb loses value because you have less damage to reduce when hit with an attack.