I came in here to point this out. Not only does this mean that healers need to heal you for more, but it means that they'll be spending more global cooldowns on you thus they have fewer to spend on the rest of the team. Essentially it makes you a sponge, whereas mitigation stacking means you can take the same hits and receive less damage. You want your effective health to be high, which means mitigation over health pool. The only time health stacking is really useful is in bleeding edge content where your team is undergeared due to it being fresh and having not yet gotten the new gear available. Our guild downed Hard Kephess in mid-May (basically the last time I played the game excluding transferring my characters) and I tanked with ~22.5-23k hp as memory serves. Our shadow tank only had ~24k at the time too. We were both mitigation stacking (heavy absorb). We did it with double smugg heals, for what it's worth.

All I know is it's next to useless in pve. Currently the only time I can think of when I use it and feel it's making a difference is when I'm kiting lightning spires on HM Fire and Storm, and that's only because I occasionally LoS my healer by accident.

For the most part I tend to subscribe to the same school of thought, but there are definitely some class specs that far outperform others (both in individual situations and over the long haul). In those situations, you're doing yourself and your raid group a disservice by not choosing the optimal performer. That said, Vanguard is not one of those classes now that the middle tree has been buffed. The two specs are rather close, although it does suffer from requiring melee range more than assault.

Way to repeat what I said unnecessarily guys. Good job.

Yes, having a class that relies completely on a weapon of precision like a gun smack the enemy with the weakest part of said weapon would be a great idea. That wouldn't cause the barrel to get bent and go out of alignment or anything like that. I appreciate that you're trying to come up with ideas to make us more interesting, but you have to remember at its core the trooper base class is about being the grunt and doing things by the numbers. No matter how you played out your story, you're still a soldier - trained to do things the way other soldiers do, and protecting yourself and your equipment is part of that. We just don't do outlandish superhuman things like the force-users do (unless you include walking on air XD ).

The last part may be true (even if the cons for defense stacking outweigh the pros), however the precise balance isn't really up for debate. Due to the fact that Vanguards will never be able to stack enough defense rating to dodge a significant number of attacks and because every one of our mitigation talents go to improving shield chance or absorption percentage, defense rating is a very lackluster stat to stack for VGs. The only way to improve our avoidance is Smoke Grenade and that is only 20 seconds out of every minute - hardly enough to write home about considering your shield numbers would plummet to the high 30s in order to stack enough defense to make that single cooldown worth it. You could have a second cooldown by going with the on-use defense rating relic, but that one is limited to 15(?) seconds out of every two minutes so you're looking at 35 seconds of high avoidance during the first minute (not bad), and then very large spaces where you're likely taking huge hits. The VG tank niche is taking most hits to the face, but also reducing the damage of a large chunk of them. I still think your overall damage mitigation would be sub-par compared to a shield and absorb heavy VG. This isn't to say that you should go out of your way to avoid Defense rating. On the contrary, once you get to very high gear levels defense will start to slightly outweigh absorb simply due to diminishing returns from stacking the stat so high. As it stands though, defense is low priority, standing only higher than armor. I would almost be inclined to say you would do better to stack endurance once you hit absorb DR, if it wasn't for the fact that you're not in danger of being one-shot by anything short of an enrage (and that's a dps problem).

Well you've already failed by having 7 of 8 slots filled by two basic classes and there's zero reason to be bringing that many knights.

No, I mean skill cap. They're both equally easy to do decent numbers on. However there's not much room to min-max a VG, but you can do plenty to make a Sentinel better. There is no "allegedly", sentinels require more skill to get the most out of the class but they definitely have a higher ceiling. That said, you should never tell a new person to roll the flavor of the month class. It's eventually going to get balanced back to the pack so they're better off playing a class they enjoy.

Well we'll agree to disagree on the numbers thing to avoid having another useless confrontation in this thread, but to the second point - a CD reduction to Reactive Shield would be nice, but frankly I think we need either a better or an extra self-heal CD (VG only, make it instant?) or we need to be able to increase our shield chance for a short time (think 6 seconds maybe). We know we don't dodge jack so we're gonna take hits, but if we could guaranteed drop the damage on a big spike ability by 50% (hell my absorb is well over 63% with full Power Screen stacks) that would go a long way to increasing our survivability over the course of a fight. Or maybe the ability to talent Reactive Shield so it nullifies more damage - 2 points for 6 or 8% more? Just tossing it out there.

It's not about the tank swap - due to the way taunt works (it vaults the tank to the top of the threat list plus 30%) the swap is the least of the problems with this fight. The real issue is what was just stated above - the dps are more than likely standing in melee range instead of max distancing themselves from the boss which means it takes a lot less to pull.

Please read quoted text to get better context - I was directing that toward the individual that decided to bring up sentinels in a VG thread.

Recruit isn't too bad, although it's still pvp gear. I wouldn't try to do D7 or Kaon in it, but the rest is probably fair game. The Esseles and False Emperor are good Hard Modes to start with as they are pretty tame (though FE is a little on the long side). Make sure your dps are pretty good if you plan to do False Emp, as the droid boss (name withheld for spoiler reasons) is a pretty big dps check. Taral V is also a good intro Hard Mode, pretty simple place. Just don't attempt the bonus bosses unless the rest of your party is either well geared or knows the strats down cold. If you need any help with the FPs you can post questions in this thread or just hit up the Flashpoint/Ops forum.

I can agree with that. After leveling a knight to 50 and seeing the variety of choices they get from the daily rewards on Belsavis it frustrates me considering our only choice is between a few points of power/crit/defense/whatever. I came off as a bit of a jerk there so I apologize for that. I just get irked when mods jump in for no reason.

Early summer is going to be too late. I'm gonna play out my free month and probably unsub after that until free merges are available. If they won't give me free transfers for my entire legacy I'll be done with the game. There's no excuse for this to not be available right now. We just saw them do it for the Aussies.

Couldn't have said it better myself.