Assassin --> Vanguard Night --> Day I don't think ill ever get another non vanguard to 50.

the damage done by guard is not reduced by anything you can do except flat damage reduction cooldowns, all it takes into account are the defenses of the person you are guarding. So no armor and shield do not contribute. And i don't believe that shielding has an internal cooldown, it just makes an animation.

in an Ion cell spec, Sorcs/Sages. They go through armor, have bubbles absorb all the burst, and if they're heal spec you will never be able to kill them alone. i don't play tactics so i don't really know for them, but with assault probably an Ion cell vanguard or powertech equivalent. But in 1v1 sans health pickups I normally only lose to heal spec sorcs.

working around bad programming on 2 skills I rarely use is hella worth not playing imp v imp huttball over 90% of the time.

some of them are a pain to do while leveling. and the +10 all stats even more so of a pain. IMO a .01% increase to leveling speed isnt worth it in most cases, especially when only 2/5 of the stat ones are useful and only certain colors are useful to you. So wait until you have free time at 50 to go pick up the +aim(maybe cunning too) and stam ones along with the ones that you need for lvl 50 matrix. there are places you can find the info for every one, i wont link them because i dont want to find them again.

no reason to beat around the bush, it's the Pure Shockfrozen Water that you get from collecting the pure water from tatooine and freezing it on hoth. It's a 20 min walk including load screens for me(per use) so not really worth it.

people farm the pure shockfrozen water because they didn't patch it's heal out of healing medals when they took medpacks out of them. Each you get is worth 10 commendations.

you really don't have it right at all. You start off with AP if you specced into it, then you IR into HiB, maybe a hammer shot here for ammo reasons, but then you stockstrike on CD and alternate ion pulse and hammer shot until HiB procs or IR falls off your target or AP comes off CD. TLDR; 4 abilities with CDs and a priority, and in between you hammer shot and ion pulse to keep ammo at 9-12.

Sounds like you're trying to play vanguard at 30 meters. ^ probably true regardless of class/spec. Vanguard is hybrid class and only does full damage by dipping into 4 meters and staying around 10. and every tree of vanguard gets fairly bad/utility tree specific moves because you have all you need outside the trees. Every tree uses Stockstrike, High Impact Bolt and Ion pulse/Hammer shot filler. play commando for ranged class. I for one really enjoy the fact that this melee class can at least do half it's damage at range when needed. Coupled with no cast times and a charge if you go SS, this is the most fun character I've played on an MMO so far.

taunt does absolutely nothing unless you arent top aggro. if you just "Work taunt into your rotation", which has holes in it anyway, you wont have it up if someone pulls during those 9 seconds where it isnt fixated to you. meaning if theyre at 99% of your threat and you taunt, you gain nothing from that taunt, and there's the possibility that the DPS will pull off you with a lucky crit string or if they pop DPS CDs. taunt is also for the most part off the GCD, even though you cant use it if you are in an animation, which they seriously need to fix. So putting it in your "rotation" doesnt make sense because its outside of the constricting factor in that rotation(GCD). TLDR: don't taunt unless someone pulls off you

Im guessing this was for PVP, since in PVE all you get to notice is that you die twice as fast to normal stuff and sometimes cant kill elites even with Elara.

It seems like youre asking in terms of leveling. and in that way its not really important to get new mods for your gear every 2 levels, but you still dont want to be wearing lvl 20 mods at lvl 35. doing 2% more damage to quest mobs wont make a noticable difference In terms of lvl 50 gear, every stat increase matters, it may not look like much to get +22 out of 272 damage to your attacks, but that's damage that the guy without the mods doesn't have. at level 50 the only thing that people can look at to whether they want you or the other guy of the same spec trying for your spot is who has the better gear, assuming that they know nothing about your skill or experience. Even if youre ~5% more skilled than the other guy, if he has ~5% more stats hes still gonna do the same amount of damage as you.

should work like deep wounds does for warriors(in WOW). basically the math works out so that every application of the dot does a flat amount of damage. dynamic dots = good

i heard most damage types care about armor, and classes that use attacks that look at armor totally dont pierce nearly 100% of it.

A vast majority of the specs posted on this forum are for pvp. just btw. while some of the same things hold true for things like 0/13/28, the other hybrid specs are chosen for utility in PVP.