Now possibly we might want to wait a few weeks until the majority of the playerbase is able to compete in Ilium. However I can definitely see your standpoint and while only 15% of the population is level 50 you might need to get from node to node quite a bit. However when we have 50% of the population level 50 we may not have to go from node to node as much in the gameplay? Though I could be completely off of course. I appreciate the great write-up and look forward to competing in there once I can level more. Just wanted to add my food for thought.

I am a Defense specced Guardian and I tooled on the Sand Demon this afternoon. Questions: What kind of gear is your Kira wearing? You are using Kira right? Are you using Stimpaks? Are you using Medpaks? Are you using your cooldowns cycled through the fight?

I'm actually going to completely agree with the changes you purposed minus two. Everything you said having to do with focus generation is completely accurate. Our rotation is simple enough such that we can plan out ahead of time quite a bit and have plenty of talents that reduce focus cost of many skills. I'm also a fan of blade barrier being a better damage reduction ability, though I'm not sure it really "needs" to be done to have parity between the tanks specifically. I would be in favor of it just because I like it more, though I do not know if we need it. You have both tanks so you're more of an expert between them rather than myself. CC for a dps specced guardian is a great idea, CC for a tank specced guardian I can't say is also a problem. We have a lot of CC spread through the other 3 classes, if we have one in the group, use it, if we don't, oops, trash pulls are going to get harder the more guardians you bring to a 4 man. Solidify force, see ya later, give me free "CHUCK NORRIS ROUNDHOUSE KICKS!" skill. Like. +1 The change for another gap closer I can't agree with. We as a melee dps can not have 100% expected uptime on a target, and I think this is going too far. Now many times you need to plan out encounters with players before hand, and I am sure you are. I personally can't say we need another gap closer. If we are going to be pvp tanks, I say go spec 1/2 defense and then to zealous leap in focus.

Basically, it's a free absorb every time you use Blade Storm, which basically should be on cooldown after Hilt Strike, Guardian Slash, and making sure you have your accuracy debuff up. Overall it's free mitigation for something you're going to be using all the time anyway. It's definitely worth it in a "tanking" build and probably even a "grinding build" depending on whether or not you want to have a bit more survivability or a bit more damage output.

Stealth doesn't matter while tanking. CC does matter but only to a degree, it's like the difference between being a Druid tank(having roots/sleep/cyclone) in WoW and being a Warrior(where all you had was fear). Now we do have some CC, Stasis Mastery is a form of short-duration CC. Also Force Knockback is viable CC to give the healer, or yourself a few sparse seconds to get a breath in. Guardians also have a small self-bubble every time we use Blade Storm. Guardians also have two taunts, since Challenging Call will fixate mobs on us for a short duration of time.

Well I think the fact that some of the tiers higher up are less tank orientated are just simply because they are situationally useful. They're not static bonuses and you have to think whether or not the content you are doing needs those. Not only that but what your role is in the content you are doing. Now respecs are expensive, is it wrong for the designers to make us consider that? Especially when we are switching roles back and forth say main tank on this boss then add tank on the next? I would think not, especially with respec costs as high as they can get. Now the top 6 skill points in Defense I think are a no-brainer. You get Guardian slash, 5 seconds more on Enure with some passive defense increases against a few types of damage, and Cyclonic Sweeps which will increase your focus regeneration and lower the cooldown on combat focus over the course of it's cooldown(note, this means you should use Combat Focus on cooldown asap if you have that talent). After that 3 out of the 4 skill choices in Tier 5, Blade Barrier, Stasis Mastery and Hilt Strike are all worth taking as well. More mitigation, more threat, more Focus. Easy peasy. Now let's not get confused, Damage/Threat talents =/= pvp talents. Just because we don't have 10 talents in the top 3 tiers that reduce our damage taken doesn't mean they're pvp talents.

I appreciate the challenge! Unfortunately I can't really commit to that as I usually only get an hour or so playtime a day on only three days a week so it would take me a few weeks to get the time to level my other character to the level my JG is at right now! Now of course I'm solely basing my perspective on my own experience!

Well Tat can be pretty crazy sometimes especially depending if there aren't a lot of Republic players around. The only thing that's saved me thus far is attempting to talk to people and having friends on the server I've made while leveling. Keep your friends list growing and be a good friend and they'll come help you when you need it! What is the worst that could happen? You have fun and die!

Heya Hulkster, honestly many people say that Guardians are much more underpowered and useless in their early levels than their later levels. Now I'm up to 26 so far in the last few days and just hitting Tatooine and really haven't noticed anything difficult either yet. Now if I start having difficulties in my 30s, 40s, or at 50 believe me I will voice my opinion. However in my opinion yet, there is nothing wrong with leveling a Guardian and nothing stopping me from competing my quests or flashpoints, or competing to "WIN" in pvp warzones.

Oh and if you're wondering where to get more keybinds, get a Razer Naga, best idea evar!

Hahaha, quote of the night right there. Love you.

Even if they do everything better, I have yet to have a single problem on my JG in any way shape or form in pvp or pve. In questing or flashpoints. Now I'm going to hit 30 tonight. Guardians are notoriously weak at low levels supposedly, where is this? I've yet to see it. I hate to say that you're doing it wrong if you think otherwise, and I won't, but I've gotten there without breaking a sweat. I can't imagine what you've done differently to have issues. In pvp you need to play as a team. If you're ever outmatched by someone who does a lot of non-mitigatable damage to you and you think you're winning that fight or holding even a candle, you're dead wrong. You should never expect to hold nodes alone, you should never expect to cap nodes as a tank. Stick on D, get a healer with you, and make sure to communicate effectively. It's not always perfect but that's pvp in a pug group, it happens. Hope you guys are happy in whatever class you choose to play. The game just came out so take your time and play what you feel is right.

Got my new rig up and running, definitely going to be a while with the whole patching, and updating of swtor and all my other junk, but I am definitely looking forward to rendering some vlogs next week of some good footage this weekend of swtor gameplay and tanking in general. More than likely will just talk about tanking metrics and their overall importance on encounter design and class balance in depth. Mostly the passive mitigation model we have here in swtor with the small amount of active mitigation mixed in. Thanks again and hope to see you all soon!

Well good to hear, I was quite amped up on Monster when I wrote it. That might have skewed my wording toward the dramatic. I am completely focused on balance being an end-game issue primarily. Most players, including myself, are leveling right now so that's where we will see most of the complaining focused at the moment. However I hope some people at least try to take another look at themselves and do the best they can! Looking forward to moving further towards end-game and getting some real experience in actual difficult content!

I won't disagree with you at all! I know that is my argument. However in these cases over the last 10 years we have always seen these things happen in the last two huge raiding MMOs that being EQ and WoW and they are already drastically out of proportion compared to the real issue. I mean if you played a druid main tank and wanted to tank Black Temple in wow, you had a real complaint. However the differences are always out of proportion and realistically I guarantee many people complaining on the forums and saying guardians are broken would be better off making sure they are playing to their utmost potential. Everyone makes mistakes and thinks they play perfectly, when in fact no one does. Now understandably you have more experience than me and you beg to differ. I don't think guardians are fine, but they certainly are not as broken as many people seem to think. Especially in their early levels, I have had nothing but fun and absolutely no downtime/problems while leveling this toon.

People get scaled up in pvp in order to keep it even. Honestly the level 12 sorc should have been pretty dead if it was a 1v1 match and you had all your tricks up your sleeve. They don't have that much CC at that level. Really the only thing that can probably change your perception of the class is to group up with some great players and be their "tank." Playing with people and being organized matters much more in pvp encounters than nearly anything else. Good luck though in whatever you choose to do, always be happy with what you play! If you aren't happy, then play what makes you happy!

I've had quite a great time leveling as defense up through Nar Shaddar as of last night. I strictly use Kira as my companion and keep her decked out in synthweaving stuff/good mods if I can afford them. Hit level 25 last night and can tear through groups of normal enemies, can down silvers without any space in between and can take on golds with cooldowns and kira going in first and a stim/pot mixed in with it. Now I honestly don't know if every class is supposed to solo mobs with 3x the HP as them, but I certainly can. Also you definitely want to realize which casts you want to interrupt and which you want to let go when fighting difficult enemies. Letting a "missle barrage" go off and kicking "reloading" will net you a lot more damage taken than the other way around.

Right now Jedi Guardians just have lower damage output. Guardians need to keep Riposte up, +accuracy debuff, and manage their cooldowns efficiently to come out even. Right now there is no question that JGs are just the undoubtedly weakest class out there for soloing as it just is not a great class for soloing unless your cooldowns are all up and even then you have 3 mins in between. One thing that every tank should check out is sending their companion in first on a group of mobs just to take a bit of damage. Even Kira I've noticed can take quite the alpha damage hit and you can just force jump in, challenging shout, force sweep, and then work on getting a riposte proc off and going from there. Usually when you engage a silver/gold mob they will immediately use their CC ability upon being engaged, so letting your companion get stunned/knocked back instead of you will help immensely. I think the only companion I wouldn't want to try this with is Doc because he won't really do any damage to the elite mob/mobs before you jump in and the only thing you're negating is the alpha stun/CC.

Wanted to say thanks for all the read's last night and all your private messages and comments! Appreciate it a ton! Hit level 25 last night and ordered the last component to my new rig today so the next entry will definitely be a video blog or at least have mucho more examples of video gameplay so I can demonstrate some Jedi Guardian *** kicking in action.

Absolutely agree with your sentiment on the robes. I do love my Female Guardian in the robes but unfortunately her Mirakula headwear usually slightly sticks out of the hood! I can easily look past it but it's somewhat of an eyesore! Also that is definitely an awesome "want" for our future abilities. It would of course be difficult to balance and have to be a short duration buff you get from Riposte. That would only make sense right? Blaster Defense: You have a 5% chance to reflect the next ranged attack fired at you back at the attacker after a successful Riposte. Internal Cooldown: 20 seconds I like it.

So have time at work today and spent a while updating a new blog post in response to all the "Sky is falling" going on here in the Guardian forums. If you want to feel better about your Guardian, or just want a to fight with me about how bad a position we are in, I strongly recommend my newest post titled, "Community Misinformation and Filtering the Noise." Thanks and hope you have a great night! Hooray for Optimism!

So have time at work today and spent a while updating a new blog post in response to all the "Sky is falling" going on here in the Guardian forums. If you want to feel better about your Guardian, or just want a to fight with me about how bad a position we are in, I strongly recommend my newest post titled, "Community Misinformation and Filtering the Noise." Thanks and hope you have a great night! Yay for optimism!

As a complete Defense specced Guardian up to level 23 so far. I've had zero issues with my Guardian. I love it, I haven't had this much fun in a long time and I am really enjoying the storyline. Now I haven't tried a single other class thus far. And maybe that's my saving grace. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing? I'm planning on keeping him my main, especially since Guardians as have been said previously are due for a balancing pass, at least they were late in beta and we've definitely not seen one. Though realistically I know how to cycle cooldowns like a boss and have kept my synthweaving up as well. To each their own I guess.

I personally love my guardian. I am sorry you are unhappy with the class. Though it's pretty awesome personally.

A few times today on Taris I was able to take Boss level mobs(Gold + Silver on one mob) by sending in Kira first and waiting til she had the guy down to about 90-85, then doing my normal leap, rotation. I'll usually pull off her once she's about 50% and by then I can rotate cooldowns on the boss mob and he's dead by the time I've used a medpak and cycled through Warding Call, Saber Ward and Call on the Force. Really I love Kira as a companion, she hits like a truck, and I've got her geared to the teeth, yay synthweaving, for the early 20s, so taking on a mob with 18k HP is no issue when I've got 4k.