You want these recommendations? Orange gear with 21-22 purple mods will suffice for FP HMs. Full columi is recommended for Ops hard mods, at least half-rakata is recommended for nightmare. No matter what gear it won't help if you don't have common sense and adequate skills.

Awesome work done, can't thank you enough. I'd vote for it if there was a nomination for "the best guide to SWTOR tanking mechanics"!! Keep it up!!! I am totally confused on the topic of accuracy, particularly on the debuff that Shadow / SI can apply (Force Breach / Wither). Starting from the very beginning "Rolling to Hit", where is the place for attacker's accuracy? Is it "avoidance"? I'm reading my own "accuracy" description where it says that it shows how probable melee / force attacks are to "hit the target". Assuming this means that the target can further deflect the attack, shield it and so forth. But I am running with 106+% special attacks accuracy myself and I suspect so are many more melees and ranged guys. Isn't this supposed to mean that the whole point of Force Breach / Wither vs melee/ranged PvP is not to increase your DR but rather try to win back what's "eaten" by the attackers' accuracy? I would suspect similar "accuracy boost" on the bosses in PvE because I very rarely see Deflects, though shielded numbers are common. So how would comment on that? Any thoughts what the real-life adjusted "mean mitigation" breakdown would look like?

Dude, questions like this are going to bring up even more holiwars after the combat logs are introduced =)

Finished the fight like an hour ago, yes there are some deep aggro troubles but we mitigated them by having two tanks chain-taunting him in the beginning of the 3rd stage, once he got hit by a pyramid and tanks get some REAL aggro, kiting becomes a bit simpler but you still have to stay on your toes.

Speaking of DPS, don't miss out the AoE skills that Infiltration lacks almost completely (except for the Whirling Blow). Kinetic (assuming Combat Technique) has Force Breach and then Slow Time at lvl 40. Balance has Force in Balance at an earlier lvl. In infiltration you surely can open with 2-3 Whirling Blows after stealth but then you're drained of force. I made my choice of Infiltration on the public beta test server but then on live lvled a tank. For solo questing, many times you'll be clearing groups of trash so AoE will matter.

Didn't try to reproduce it but it happened when I respecced at the fleet, the skill button indicator switched off but the buff icon itself stayed. I clicked the skill and the second stance turned on. I can add that when leaving the zone, the second stance disappears so you cannot use it anywhere. Still fun tho =)

It doesn't necesserily pick the eye that there are two tanking stances on. 10.5k armor is impossible on a light armor no matter the gear (hell it's impossible even on heavy armor). I made a small explanatory video, if you want:

Guess what's wrong with this picture =) http://pics.livejournal.com/tsokotukher/pic/0002111t/ Now I can catch bullets with my bare feet! (It's not photoshopped, all defense stats are as they appeared in-game).

LOL that's two different roles, tanking and dps, you have to choose one! And no, most shadows don't choose Kinetic Combat. Which server are you on, Wonderland?

Any proof links? Recent changes are awful, not only they made buffs stance-bound they also did something with aggro management for mixed builds. Speaking for myself, today Soa HM was running around like crazy switching targets with my 23/16/2 build. I picked and chose this build after a month of trial and error, and never had any problems just changing stances and gear whenever needed, WTH??

Tanking in SWTOR is difficult because I cannot analyze what hit me and for how much (other than looking through recorded videos), how to make defenses more efficient. This makes learning boss fight mechanics a tedious process. When is the combat log going to be available already? P.S. Am not talking about threat meters, aggro control is simple enough as is.

+ Artifice schematics like orange lightsabers require 3x[biometric Crystal Alloy].

That's not true - they were not moved in beta, because a person in our guild has learned these MODS schematics after the launch (is 34 lvl now). Although, I still can see them and it says "You do not have the appropriate crew skill" as opposed to the "You have insufficient skill level" it would normally show if I just didn't have enough wits to learn them.

Great piece of work! On my bookmarks now. It is fantastic how you managed to put this together so quickly. A few comments from my little (30 lvl atm) tanking experience: I pull in most Heroics and Flashpoints from Stealth - Blackout, Mind Maze, Mass Mind Control and then the regular rotation. Shadow Strike can be proved useful to pick up aggro on selected targets that turn their backs to you. I think you might add this as a minority report =)

That's because people never actualy log off the game to avoid waiting in the queue again. I heard many rumors that the guilds advise using autoclicker tools so that casual people will get pushed off from their servers. And as disgusting as it is, BW's failure to act quickly and solve the problem is even more disgusting.

You know how to fix this right? Just use a simple autoclicker that'll ensure you never log out of the game 24/7. Simple. Oh wait.. This means the queue is going to grow even bigger for the others.. But who cares, they already paid subscription fees ]:-> (This is a rather bitter sarcastic remark, in case someone takes this comment too seriously.)