"Death from Above" requires a bit of a clean up: The animation shows the bounty hunter fly up into the air to shoot down a hail of rockets, however the animation on the bounty hunter shows the character shooting his guns (with kickback and all). Ability effects that attach to the character model do not follow the bounty hunter when he performs death from above. The most obvious example of this is using "Energy Shield". When using death from above, the bounty hunter flies up into the air "out" of his energy shield, leaving it behind on the ground. Also another unrelated nit-pick, the campaign and dread guard bounty hunter armour shows the jet effect coming out of the feet, instead of the jet-pack model included on the item art.

This is a situation all tanks find challenging. OP: The defence/immortal tree needs some love to make it more attractive than hybrid, but other than that juggs are fine. Having a hp skill would bring them in line with the other tanks, but really what would you want to give up for 3% more hp. The hp skills on assass/pt's are extremely uninteresting and provide trivial benefit. Your not missing out on much.

As a vanguard using the shield/absorb looks good, but when I swap out the pvp relic I loose a heap of defence, so I end up using the defence click relic (even though the duration should be 10seconds longer) Also, I have read that using the absorb proc relic with the shield/absorb click causes some righteous DR, making the def click relic better if using the absorb proc. Or would using 2 click relics be better in these damage spike fights? that would give 2 relics to rotate in with defensive cool-downs for kephess' last phase. The shared cool-down would be up on the the 2nd relic in time, meaning a relic would be up for the first and third tank swaps.

Hard mode versions of flashpoints should be modified to reduce or remove dialogue cut-scenes. I understand that the whole point of this game is the story, but the intention behind hard modes is that you will be running them multiple times, that's how bioware has set it up. We need to run these multiple times, and with the random group finder, it could be the same flashpoint more than once. The tedium of slapping that spacebar needs to go. Story Mode should be the only mode with cut-scenes.

This is how I read it also.

In pve, the flat damage and threat reduction does NOT seem to require you to be within 15m of the target. This seems to be reinforced by the tooltip, which only mentions the 15m range for the damage split effect in pvp: “While active, the guarded player takes 5% less damage and generates 25% less threat. In addition, so long as you remain within 15 meters of the guarded player, 50% of all incoming damage from enemy players is transferred back to you. Requires Ion Gas Cylinder." Highlighted section is what seems to confirm what my raid perceives, the 15m range limit ONLY refers to the damage split effect. In every other way, guard is no different to a single target buff, which gives flat threat and damage reduction. The main reason I am bringing this up, Is because putting guards on our highest dps, even if the dps are no where near the tank that is guarding them, they still seem to generate less threat. Is there a way to see if guard is indeed reducing threat out of guard range? EDIT: after looking around the forums, it seems that its been confirmed that outside of 15m NO threat reduction is applied. I'm wondering how that was proved and where I can find the relevant proof to show my raid leader.

Continue the efforts made since launch to make gear appearance more customisable. Update all pvp and pve tier sets, attach the set bonus to the armoring like campaign gear. This would only be possible on the new items bought from the vendors, but I think most players would not mind. Let armormechs and synthweavers reverse engineer ANY green quality armor or better, with the chance of learning an orange shell version of that item. Many green items have unique appearance/colourations that can't be obtained in an orange shell version. Make the rules governing reverse engineering items apply to all items consistently, rather than just those of black hole/campaign or higher. Further down the line, perhaps in an expansion, introduce the ability to dye the dominant colours of the chest peice, giving players the ability to choose armour models they like, with the colour they like.

I have been hoping somebody would make something like this. Thank you very much.

Ship Travel Overhaul Entering your ship should spawn the player in the captains chair, automatically activating the hyperdrive. The ship will appear to be traveling in hyperspace at all times, but does not arrive at any destination until the player chooses one from the galaxy map. This creates the illusion of actually traveling some distance, rather than appearing to travel from loction to location instantaneosly with the current system. Docking and exiting from your ship should be done from the galaxy map, instead of requiring the player to physically activate the ship exit. All the cutscenes of the ship exiting and arriving at locations should only play the first time, during class story missions that lead the player to another location. Low resolution "camera-feed" style cutscenes showing launching off from starports / stations and entering atmosphere should play over the loading screens. This would maintain the feeling of travel while reducing the level of player input required to travel from location to location quickly. A ui element should be added to the quick travel interface allowing the player to quick travel directly to their ship. This would still trigger the quick travel cooldown. Spaceport and Station Overhaul The seperate entry points and instanced hangers for each classes ship should be removed in favour of a single dynamic phase, taking the entering player to their own phase and spawning the entering players specific ship. Automatic hanger doors just after the instance portal would mask the appearance of the players ship spawning out of thin air. These changes would let artists and level designers create unique spaceports, or makeshift landing zones on each planet, like those pictured in early pre-release screenshots. These changes would make orbital stations uneeded, except for special quests or class quests. Though those respective quests could be moved to the player's ship holoterminal or moved to the planets surface.

Agree with cutting back the world quest VO, or even removing it entirely. For things like group content and daily quests, its just mind numbing tedium. I hope they find a way to be smart with using VO, so we can keep it for where it counts (solo class story stuff). I have a strong feeling though that we may not see content that expands on our companions. I think Makeb will feature a classless storyline, with unique VO from the players class, but nothing else (like the Illum storyline). A big update to the companions would be great, expanding on them to make them like the romance companions, with quests in the world and stuff. I hope this will come with the new same sex romance companions. I feel that content like this though is going to be postponed indefinitely with the content drought we have currently and the drive to pull back players with freemium.

Your weighted a bit heavy towards defence, and are neglecting your shield and absorption rating. Also, if you have any mods with accuracy on them, get rid of them in favour of defence / shield / absorption. At your gear level you want your shield chance at around 57%, with your absorb not far behind. You can drop your defence back down to 17%, loose a little hp and drop your accuracy (if you have any) to achieve this. Get rid of your matrix cube, the shield proc relic is better. You may also consider a second war hero relic.

Heat blast is better. Being off the global cool-down makes it an on demand heat dump, which is essential in moments where you are busy paying attention to fight mechanics and loose track of your heat, which will happen if your dps are keeping you on your toes. There are times when you need to burst threat regardless of your current heat. Heat Blast takes a lot of pressure off managing your resource. Retractable Blade does terrible damage for its heat cost, and is designed as on demand dot and snare so advanced prototypes can fire off a railshot. Your ion gas cylinder already provides this function.

Nice simple guide. My only nitpick: For a powertech, thats way too much defence rating, not much point going over 360 rating (without stim) . At that point your shield chance and absorption are going to provide more mitigation per point than defence. Our mitigation priority is different to Jugg/Assassin.

With shield and absorb values so high like this, what are your opinions of using the clickly defence relic as opposed to the shield/absorb? My first guess-timation was that we would get more value out of it with our natural defence being so low, and that it would boost the effectiveness of our oil slick? Not sure though, just a thought.

Forgive me if this is a massive derp, but why would the spreadsheet need to be changed? the absorb buff on heat screen itself is not subject to diminishing returns, but stacking more absorb through rating still is. Why would it change the priority of stats at all?

For EV and KP, I agree 100%. But not denova, as it drops black hole coms that could easily be farmed at a much more efficient rate than trying to progress in hard mode denova for campaign gear.

Heat is high, rail shot, flamethrower and death from above are on cooldown, you have full heat screen buff up and the mob is debuffed. Would it be better to use just another flame burst and rapid shots or try to get off an unload? I suppose I don't like the idea of taking it off my hotbar completely, the damage it can do is nothing to scoff at. It also gives you somthing to do when, for whatever reason, your stuck at range. Of course I'm not saying it should be used in your ability priority, but its not useless.

It does influence rapid shots yes, but that is not really relevant. And it does affect rail shot. Also, unload is very heat efficient and if your in a situation where the channel wont be reduced by damage, why not use it?

You are correct, and dropping accuracy mods for shield/absorb daily variants is a good plan. I would go as far as to say that accuracy is not required at all for a powertech tank. Its more of a luxury stat, being that it only really affects your rail shot and unload.

It was fun while it lasted.

The main reason shield techs are pvping in dps gear is that defence/shield mechanics in pvp are much less effective. The survivability gains are from the Ion gas cylinder stance itself and the passive damage reduction feats, not the gear. I suppose I wasn't aware that powertechs and juggs were doing too much damage? I guess if that was the case then these changes are warranted, I would just like to hear the reasoning behind the tank damage nerfs from the devs in a little detail. They just keep talking about our threat buffs with no mention of damage nerfs.

"Ion Gas Cylinder now generates 100% additional threat while active." The threat buff on ion gas cylinder is cool, but still no word on fixing either the bugged damage or bugged tool-tip on this cylinder. "Supercharged Ion Gas now increases Ion Overload damage by 25%. While Ion Gas Cylinder is active, Rail Shot triggers your Ion Gas Cylinder on the target and up to 4 additional nearby targets. This damage does not affect sleeping, lifted, or incapacitated enemies. This generates a high amount of threat." The wording looks as though the dot portion of ion gas when talented got a damage increase? Its hard to decipher. "Ion Overload" refers to the dot I *think*, so if that's the case the duration nerf is understandable. Rail shot spreading ion gas is novel, but ion gas just doesn't do enough damage for this to be very exciting. The potential of an AoE slow in PvP is cool, but the way the talent trees are structured, picking up the slow is not practical without sacrificing damage or mitigation for a PvE build. "Flame Shield: The critical chance bonus applied to Rocket Punch and Flame Sweep has been reduced to 8% per point." Nerf, not sure what the reasoning is here. "Flame Surge now increases the damage dealt by Flame Sweep by 6% per point and causes Jet Charge to grant 1 charge of Flame Surge per point, which makes the next Flame Sweep free of cost. This skill now requires Jet Charge instead of Flame Shield." The loss of the rocket punch crit damage is completely undeserved, and I am keen to hear their reasoning for this. Most of our damage and threat comes from this ability.

OP: Your being fed bad advice by your guild. Your health pool is the least important factor of your ability to tank. You want shield and absorb to 50% minimum before you start building up your defence rating. Even then, you don't need to stack anywhere near the amount of defence that other classes do. 15% with a stim is a good target. You get HP for free, its built into the mods themselves, just focus on your mitigation stats. Dropping endurance for more mitigation is almost always the correct way to mod your gear.

Hehe, yes I agree. I have been seduced by the abundance of absorb rating on the new tier of gear.

You should never mod your gear for defence if you have the choice of using shield / absorb instead. Put shield rating / absorb rating enhancements, absorb modifications and augments in all your mod slots.