You are of course correct and I wasn't trying to blame the Shadows. I should have clarified.... Shadow tanks always seem to have the highest amount of HP and, I think, benefit from high HP more then the other tanks (due to self heal mechanisms). The problem is that players see a Shadow with 41k health, then see my Guardian with 31k and assume I must be a horrible.

Mitigation > Endurance It is sadly a common misconception.... too many folks think the best tank is the one with the most HP. I blame the abundance of Shadow tanks for that. The truth is often the opposite.

I have a guardian and I play both roles. I have two sets of gear, and I can respec on the fly thanks to something I grabbed with Cartel coins. When I play as a DPS (vigilance), my DPS is as good as any other DPS out there. Sure, some gunslinger might squeeze out a few more DPS then me, but only if they are really good. But my DPS is 100% viable as a guardian and the same applies to Shadows and Vanguards. Remember, its the skill tree as much as the class that determines your role in this game.

I'm interested in hearing more about your gearing recommendations. I have a few alacrity pieces but I have to say that I am not really sure if I am getting anything out of them. What are other folks doing with that? For the most part, all I hear is that folks are stacking power, power and more power.

A successful run means no wipes. A perfect run is no wipes and no deaths. But a successful, or even perfect run isn't always the most fun. I'm with what others have said about pulling extra mobs, or being solo healing some boss fight in an Operation. I like a challenge, and when I rise to it, and impress people with my healing skills, thats fun.

On my commando healer, I am actually stacking crit. I know most folks feel that power is the way to go, but I find more utility in higher crit rating. Could just be that I run with two spikey shadow tanks, but my big issue in raids is dealing with big spikes of damage vs. long term sustained small heals

I've been selling em on GTN. Been going for around 65-70K a pop in my server.

Hard to say how much I've made credit wise... I've spent a lot and made a lot. I also used a lot of the stuff I have made on my own toons. I do have more then I started with at this point though.... maybe up 4 or 5M. Been selling Augments, MK-9 kits, 66 armorings, mods and enhancements lately. I sold a few hilts in the early days but stopped that cause the market tanked. The crafted 66 tank enhancements are currently BIS if you want high mitigation instead of high endurance.

I haven't PVPed in a while, but I'm tempted to after reading this thread.

Did you mean coddling? Cuddling is like snuggling or spooning. Any anyways, they are not coddling raiders. They are just making it so you can't craft / buy your way to the best gear as easily as you could prior to 2.0. I know a number of players who had BIS gear before 2.0 that had never even run a hard mode Op. I don't personally care that they were able to do so... but Bioware did. This is all part of making people need to spend more time gearing up. Its the same reason they put limits on the amount of Comms you can get in a week. I certainly understand folks may not like it, but it is what it is.

I play a guardian tank. I'll take ranged DPS over mele DPS. I know both get the job done, but the ranged folks just seem to take less damage and are able to keep DPSing at times when mele folks would need to run in or out. I like gunslingers, and I really like commandos who know when an off heal is going to be more valuable to the raid than added DPS. I'm less familiar with heals. I run a commando healer and am a big fan of them for keeping up tanks. I guess my ideal healing pair is a commando and a sage.

Here is a different way of looking at it.... You have two cars. The goal is to drive as far as you can. One car gets better gas mileage. The other has a larger gas tank. All others things being equal, which one do you want? There isn't any right answer per say here, just different approaches. I'm a fan of the high gas mileage (i.e. high mitigation) option.

Im holding onto the set bonus for now.

Aim for sure. You want the extra crit you get from main stat as well as the 9% bonus.

I'm also wondering this. The thread for the most part is all about DPS, which is fine. But the combat medic doesn't need accuracy. Do we want alacrity? How much crit?

Yes, but if you go the high mitigation route, there will be less times where you reach that point where you can't keep up with incoming damage. From the healers perspective, I would rather have a tank with high mitigation. My challenge as a healer is to keep up with the damage the whole raid is taking. The less damage we take, the easier my job. If I can't keep up, cause my tank is taking too much damage, its not going to really matter how long it takes before all die. I suppose if the difference in health pools was something huge, like double or triple, it might be worth it. But its really pretty small all thing considered.

This makes sense on Shadow tanks.... but what about guardian tanks? Our set bonus is different.

Apologies if I mistook what you were saying. I just thought you were pointing folks to the DPS thread and saying just use those stats. I was simply pointing out to anybody who thought that might be the case that you would not want to follow it directly, since it strongly recommends a lot of accuracy. As far as not taking any crit goes, I understand that might make sense. Personally, I am not going that route with my Commando healer though. I have a lot of crit boosts in my skill tree and find that crit is more useful to me than straight power, even if it means slightly less HPS overall.

I don't have a sage healer, so I admit I'm not an expert. But I don't see how a healer would need to have much (any) accuracy. The DPS build linked above makes accuracy of the highest importance. Which is to say, I don't think they are really the same...

Its been getting worse and worse for me over the past few weeks. There have been some times where its been on my end (i.e. my ISP), but I know when it is not on my end and that is far more frequent. Are the servers just too crowded with lots of folks coming back to check out 2.0?

Thank you for sharing that. Good information!

Has anybody run the missions since the patch and actually gotten the useless mats? I just want to confirm if it is still borked or not.

I can say this was true for me in the 55 HMFP (Mando raiders I think) I ran the other night. I was healing with everything I had just to keep the tank up on some of the trash pulls. The damage he was taking was crazy.... I quickly realized I wasn't going to be able to throw out a little DPS like I normally do. And even with full heals, he still went down a couple of times. And yea, I pulled agro more than I ever have. Made the tanks job really challenging and made mine tough as well. I personally enjoyed the challenge (we finished the FP), but it was no joke hard. I'm sure some better gear will help a lot for both of us.

Yea, I stopped running most of my crew missions a week or so ago. I'm not going to start again until they fix this issue cause its a huge credit loss. Hopefully this gets taken care of in this patch....

To the best of my knowledge it has not really changed. I'm curious to hear if others have different opinions though.