At first I thought maybe he'd be a good switch-out for the Kira role, because he doesn't have to move around to deal with all the shooty mobs. But I haven't even tried him, because, you know, Doc.

I completely agree, although I think there should be a baseline multiplier increase for our heavy armor usage, to give all of us - but especially DPS Guardians - slightly higher mitigation. It doesn't "feel" like you're wearing heavy armor. Cyclone Slash is a real weak spot. A debuff would be cool, but I'd be fine if it just had a 25% higher threat rating.

Not to detract from OP's very good suggestion, but Opportune Strike, Pommel Strike, and Riposte seem to me to be excellent opportunities for threat-generators as well. Lorewise Soresu is designed around exploiting a weak point in the opponent's approach, and this would naturally be aggravating (which is itself part of the strategy of the form). So without making any changes to the gameplay or animations these abilities could be traited to generated threat, or simply say that in Soresu form they generate low-moderate additional threat. (I really prefer a ticking threat-over-time mechanic as a way to bolster Guardian, so that mobs that we aren't hitting right now are still gaining aggro toward us.) Of course we'd have to have these abilities NOT switched off for every elite - we'd need to be able to reliably use them.

As others have already said, your tanking gear will be all about mitigation and will be missing all the nice critical and surge bonuses. My son is playing a Focus Guardian right now and his stat priority is something like Strength > Critical > Power > Surge > Endurance. You end up stacking plenty of Endurance anyway, it's just not worth worry about. On the other hand, my Defense Guardian looks to Strength > Endurance > Defense > Power > Shield > Absorb. I know people will question where I put Strength and Power, but I have a lot more issues keeping threat than I do with sucking up damage. I need to hit hard. Anyway, you do end up with rather different kit.

I completely agree with you, and there are bad DPSers aplenty, but this doesn't account for boss fights with powerful adds (which you can't CC in advance and no time to mark out a kill order for them) and DPSers being able to pull single targets off us. Guardians just do not have enough threat generation to keep aggro away from high-damage DPSers unless those DPSers don't attack things until after the Guardian has spent 3 or 4 GCDs hitting them. If all tanks had to use that strategy, OK, it's the way the game plays. But it's only Guardians that need this handicap. The only conclusion is that Guardians don't generate enough threat. (We also don't have quite enough mitigation but that's another story.)

This is the correct answer. The fix will be to force people to slow down. Everything plays well when you don't spam-queue abilities. The test for this is simple, and I will try it next time I log in: set your ability queue down to a very low number (or zero if that works) and see if the problem persists.

Good point, this would need to be a Defense tree thing.

This is a really fantastic idea. All Guardians should have access to a passive blaster-reflection skill. However, I think the basic idea should be extended even further, so that every time a Guardian parries anything it procs low threat-over-time, so that you're more or less always ticking threat, but you have to use it or lose it. This also makes taunts work to recover threat and not just trump threat as they are now.

Get Exporatory Surgery for gaining Upper Hand. You can heal yourself before the fight even begins to get Pugnacity and two stacks of Upper Hand, and then launch your initial attack. Do some fighting, stun the target(s), run back, heal again for more Upper Hand, rinse and repeat.

And even in terms of damage and kills I usually rank in the top 50%, if not in the top 3. But yeah it's the protection points that you really have the opportunity to shine on.

Or just go straight Defense. You won't have any problems soloing.

I agree with the general concept - saddle the player with a detriment and then make them spend all their skill points getting back up to "normal" - is unfriendly. I'm not going to propose a grand solution to it. I think we're stuck with what we have. However, it would go a long way if the sprawl of focus-helping skills in the Defense tree could be consolidated somewhat. Maybe they could be replaced with threat-over-time skills or other kinds of procs after parrying or blocking. But let me counter all that by saying even at very low levels there is no focus-generation problem for Guardians. It is also untrue that Guardians need to "build up before using their attacks." I don't know why people say this unless they're looking at the class theoretically but haven't actually played it. In practice you unload large amounts of damage up front and then go into a build-up phase. Finally, my opinion on tank comparisons with Vanguards. (Strangely, for all their supposed greatness, I have seen no Shadow tanks yet.) I have pulled aggro from Vanguards, and not by using Taunt either. I have easily out-lasted Vanguards in dual-tank situations. In fact, I have out-lasted and out-aggroed Vanguards who were 3 levels higher than me. Having never played a Vanguard, I can only guess at why this is. Maybe they are more healer-dependent than Guardians. Maybe it's resource management, which is supposed to be quite punishing for a Vanguard if you don't do it right. Whatever it is, I can well imagine that those Vanguard players going "*** Guardians are OP."

Praven's AoE attack is vicious. You'll lose half your health. When he starts casting it, just walk away from him. After his attack is done, you're in a perfect spot for a Force Leap. Throw in some cooldowns and everything will work out fine.

This was the first time I'd seen this myself. I didn't get to open with a good Leap/BS combo, so I kinda came at him cold, but for some reason I could not burn him down.

These are excellent ideas. I'd also like to see Pommel Strike and Opportune Strike merged into something else, like automatically kicking in when you use Strike on targets that meet the conditions. I'd prefer Momentum to ramp up damage by less (like 4/6/8) but in addition its stun gets longer and applies to tougher mobs.