Jedi Guardian-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDPPV5Xgzwc Puts together all of the feelings of my JG. The wonder of exploring the galaxy, trying to save the galaxy, training to defeat sith lords/darths in one on one combat. All there. Out of left field I know, but hey I love the song and think it sums up a predominately light-side jedi pretty well.

Here's my take on Vig DPS(for me anyways). I leveled, and started doing ops specced Vig initially. I didn't have great gear(Champion gear/Oranges with the mods from dailies), and I found the rotation to be a bit unwieldy. I liked the utility sure, but I never really felt like I did much damage. Then our guild's tank quit due to RL issues (possible eviction>this game), and I stepped up to tank. Even though I was more or less ejected into this position, I did my research and tested out different specs, rotations, and ways to gear. Eventually I found my groove and tanked pretty much everything up to about the halfway point of Nightmare ops. My tank gear is all Rakata or Augmented crafting items, besides my weapon. Recently, we are gearing up a Vanguard tank and I have decided to switch back to DPS. For my dps gear, I have picked up all Columi pieces, with about 4 being Rakata. Not only does it feel like I hit 3x as hard because of my new gear(I figure because this class seems to scale with gear so well), but honestly the dps rotation is an absolute JOKE compared to the tanking rotation. I find my DPS to be very high and have amazing utility to the raid. TL;DR: Vigilance's DPS does seem a bit underwhelming at first, but once you get some gear(Columi/Champion or above) and really get used to the rotation, you will start to see some really impressive damage. ...Oh, and whenever you use Master Strike, cancel it IMMEDIATELY after the first two hits! I cannot stress this enough to starting Vig DPS Guardians!

Yes and yes. Biochem is currently the best tradeskill in the game, ESPECIALLY for tanks due to reusable medpaks, stims, and adrenals. Even with the incoming nerf, not having to make your own stuff and essentially having 2 cooldowns to pop at all times is amazing. Doc and T7 are both tailor made for Biochems, with T7 offering a Bioanalysis+10 and Doc having +5 to crit when making Biochem stuff.

Actually kind of an interesting idea, to be honest. I don't really see the value of it over the traditional 31/10 spec though. Sure the 10% heal is nice, but with 4-6 cooldowns to juggle, I don't think having a 10% heal as an extra cooldown will really affect your PvE tanking(It might be kind of nice for PvP, but why have a tanking spec specifically for PvP?) Losing 20% Force Sweep damage, 3% Accuracy, AND 6% strength would lower your damage and threat by quite a bit. I wouldn't ever spec it, but no harm in trying out different specs.

Yeah, I think you should switch those out since the Focus PvP revolves around doing one big hit with Force Sweep. All of the above would be good for PvPing in Vig spec, but not as Focus.

As far as leveling goes, I would actually recommend a hybrid spec of http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#500dMG0uZhGrMMhdzMM.1. This spec works well for leveling because it has a bit more damage than the traditional tanking spec and also gives you flat DR and health (which is important for tanks that aren't geared). Later on at level 50 when you get better gear I would respec to the traditional tanking build of http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#500dMGcubrouRZhGM.1. Short version: Leveling/Undergeared 50 spec: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#500dMG0uZhGrMMhdzMM.1(Hybrid) Geared 50 spec: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#500dMGcubrouRZhGM.1(Defense)

Well, I leveled as DPS but honestly I get the feeling that leveling as a tank might have been faster. It's up to personal preference I guess. If you DO level up as tank though, do it in DPS gear. Leveling up everything is tankable in DPS gear, hell I tanked pretty much everything up to 50 tanking as a DPS spec. No reason to gimp your downtime by picking up tank pieces. Then when you hit 50, start picking up 50 tanking pieces through Champion bags in PvP/cheap purples on the GTN.

I've tried both specs, at both gear level(geared and undergeared....right now I'm sitting in like half Rakta and half Columni, which I guess would qualify as geared). In my opinion, it goes like this: Undergeard: Use Hybrid spec Geared/Overgeared: Use Defensive spec What the Hybrid spec does is give you survivability at the expense of steady force generation and a few other neat utility tools. While the added health and DR is nice, I always found the spec way to spastic in terms of focus usage. It feels like a spec where you either have a ton of focus or nothing at all. Once I started getting gear however, survivability really stopped being an issue. I missed non-channeling stasis, I missed the added damage of Guardian Slash, I missed building my Courage stacks so that Blade Storm/Force Sweep could be free, and I missed the extra focus Cyclonic Sweeps gave. I respecced back to 31/10 after a night or two of raiding and getting some Champion pieces, and noticed an increase in steady damage. Another reason that I found that 31/10 is a better spec for when you become geared is because of the shield chance it gives you. Once you start to get around 26-28% defense rating and a good amount of health, you can start to up your survivability substantially by stacking Shield Chance and Shield Absorption over Defense. Doing this, my defense went down by around 3-4%, but my SC and SA shot up by at least 10-15% EACH and made my healers lives much easier during raids. EDIT: Not to mention the 4 piece PvE set bonus exclusively buffs an ability only in the 31/10 tree.

The misconception here is that weakest=unviable, which is 100% untrue. I've tanked every raid boss in normal and Hard mode up until this point, and I have never experienced a problem tanking a boss based on my class. In fact, most of my healers comment that I am hands down the easiest tank to heal that they have ran with. This might also have to do more with the fact that I've really kept up to date on my class research though. I always prefer survivability over threat, and to be honest Guardians have great survivability. As a Biochem with an on use trinket, I have around 6 cooldowns I can rotate through for when the going gets tough. (Enure,Saber Ward, Warding Call, Rakata Medpac, Rakata Armor Adrenal, Trinket). As far as tanking styles? Well, that's a bit trickier. Guardians feel very awkward at first, but once you learn the flow (Sundering Strike-GCD-GCD-Sundering Strike-GCD-GCD...), it becomes second nature. Shadows are much much more proc based, usually they are staring at their buff bar waiting for ability procs while they are tanking bosses. Not sure about Vanguard, never played one and don't know any of em that tank.

Guardians have no problems with single target threat, it's AoE threat that really sucks as a Guardian. Are they the weakest of the three tanks? Yes Are they broken/horribly underpowered? No You can still tank bosses just fine with them, in fact they have some really great cooldowns and arguably the highest damage mitigating cooldown in the game(Warding Call). Expect to do slightly more than the other two tanking classes though. EDIT: Oh, and coming from a tanking background in WoW myself, one thing I would recommend is to be very liberal with your usage of taunt. It's not quite the "Oh ****" button it was in WoW. It only has around a 15 second cooldown in this game, and actually BUILDS a bit of threat on top of getting the target to attack you. It's often a pretty good idea to weave a few of these in on single target bosses if you have really jumpy dps(at least for the first 30 seconds or so).

The story is painfully slow, up until about the end of Coruscant. Once you get past Coruscant, it starts to ramp up. Even though it can get a bit predictable with the "Oh, the sith have a planet destroying weapon on X planet", I thought the story was really awesome due to the scope of the story and how often you get to fight powerful NPCs one on one. Really adds some personality to the story when you're trying to get through a planet in order to fight a powerful enemy one on one at the end. Well, that and Jedi vs Sith combat always looks really awesome. Oh, and if you get through the JK story, it also teaches you how to interrupt EVERYTHING which is always a nice habit(The bosses you duel rip you to shreds otherwise). EDIT: As far as the Doc romance giving you darkside points, I romanced Kira and only got hit with two darkside flirt penalties throughout the entire story. They were pretty minor though, not to mention I went Diplomacy so I was able to get LS points back pretty quickly.

Generally it goes: Defense>Shield Chance>Shield Absorption Diminishing returns affects Defense at 30% While it affects SR and SA at 50%, thus it's really not all that worth it to go past those numbers when they hit that value. From what you listed, your survivability would probably go up if you started replacing the PvP gear with Columi gear(I think it has higher endurance) and maybe started beefing up your absorption a little bit.