Really depends on the content you're working on and your role in the group. When our raid group was working on EV/KP I started out as an off-tank so I ran hybrid shield/tactics with an Aim/Power stim to increase the dps I added to the group. Eventually as I geared up I became the main tank while our Shadow switched to more of a dps and off-tank role. At this point I started using the Endurance/Defense stim. Eventually once we as a group over-geared the operations I switched back to using an Aim stim to make things go faster. If you're in EC as a tank you should be running with an Endurance stim until your group has the whole place on farm. You should always be working on increasing your survivability first and foremost when your group is still in progression. This is doubly important if you don't have a regular raid group and you do a lot of pugging. Your healers may not know what you personally are capable of so you always want to give them the most time to react that you can. After that and/or when you have regular healers that you work well with, you can switch out as you see fit.

/stuck Repair costs next to nothing now, quit being cheap and do a few dailies.

We're waiting for your bugged 16m kill vid xeno. What's taking so long, the reset happened yesterday?

Mitigation is your ability to avoid taking damage, and cooldowns are the abilities you use that are usually on longer timers to give you a short buff to your ability to do something (take damage, deal damage, other miscellaneous utility). For VG, we get Reactive Shield, Smoke Grenade and Adrenaline Rush as our major cooldowns. Mitigation stats you'll want to maximize as a VG tank in order from best to worst are Shield Absorption (increases how much damage you absorb when you shield an attack), then Shield Rating (increases your chance to shield an attack), then Defense rating (increases you chance to dodge an attack). Don't worry too much about Shield chance since we get a ton of it naturally on our gear. Likewise with Endurance - you'll have enough just by getting higher level gear. Absorb is the only stat you'll need to actively attempt to get more of, simply because we don't dodge a whole lot of attacks to begin with so it would take too much defense rating to make it a significant chance. Either way our defensive talents revolve around shielding attacks rather than dodging them. This is all more geared toward max level info. As far as leveling is concerned, just take upgrades with more aim and bigger secondary stats. Whether they're defensive or offensive won't really make much difference (just avoid Alacrity, it does almost nothing for a shield spec VG). Just keep this stuff in mind for when you hit 50 and you start working on gearing the character up.

The whole point of going into Shield is to get one of two things: 1. Storm (along with the other pvp talents) 2. Enough mitigation abilities to offset the extra damage you'll be taking by guarding and taunting all the time. As it stands, you get neither of these from the first spec you linked (and you even skipped on Defensive Measures, which gives you an extra stun - a Godsend in pvp). Basically you get none of the strengths of either spec and all of the weaknesses. Not a viable choice. I don't know enough about Tactics to speculate on the second spec you linked, but at least you were smart enough to skip the talents that rely on HEC to get higher in the tree. If I had to guess though, you'd probably lose out on a lot of your dps by not using the tree the way it's meant to due to loss of mobility/ammo regen.

Tank hp isn't as relevant as mitigation stats and cooldowns in this game. Very few boss mechanics can come close to one-shotting a tank if they are geared appropriately for the content level. Having tanked endgame in both games as well as healed in wow endgame and seen the healing in this game, I can say that the model is working just fine.

Not like this is a boon, they owe the community free transfers at this point. Very convenient timing too, since most people will probably be finishing up progression in May and the free month will end right before June so they'll have to re-sub to get the transfer. At least the people in charge of the money know how to do their jobs.

Big waste of time. Leveling is easy enough that you don't need to worry about gear. Planet comms will keep you close enough to level, along with the random greens you get from questing here and there. Just level bio as you go so it'll be ready for you to start working on your max level patterns and so you can stock up the mats you'll need as early as possible. The more I think about it, the more I feel like I need to switch every level 50 I have and will have to bio since for the foreseeable future there are no changes they can make that would make biochem less than stellar. Until overall stats climb significantly higher, reusable items will continue to be amazing.

Yeah, I know exactly how it works, having downed both the first two fights on hard mode as a VG tank. I happen to know very well that there is plenty of time for me to be taunting with my aoe taunt during a phase. Hell, phase transition would probably be the best time for you to pop off cooldowns, since we have to be taunting at that point anyway. Again, there are plenty of tools at your disposal you just have to utilize them.

Warn your tank when you're about to go heavy dps so they can taunt in advance and then again afterward with aoe taunt if necessary. On twin bosses split your dps when possible to keep your threat low. Have a sage use pull on you to lower threat. There are ways to counter it, you just have to look around. Not every class gets everything.

You'd get trucked in the new pve content, and old hard modes would even pose a challenge with a spec like that. You lose 6% shield chance and 8% absorb which is huge for VG. Our whole gimmick is absorbing as many hits as possible to even out damage over time. Plus you lose out on the majority of your big dps increases which would make you even less viable (Ion Overload, Supercharged Ion Cell, Static Shield, Static Surge). The little bit of dps you gain through Gut and its increases will not offset this since it is a Kinetic ability and ost of what you get increases Elemental damage. Also taking Soldier's Endurance instead of Heavy Stock is bad. Even more dps loss. Won't even mention losing out on Energy Blast. You're completely wasting 2 points in Cell Generator since you'd be in Ion Cell the whole time, the points in Tactical Tools should be in Frontline Offense since you don't use Harpoon often enough in pve and using Pulse Cannon that often would make your ammo expenditures such that you would do less dps in the long run from having to fire off more Hammer Shots to keep from going into a deficit. This spec would work well in no phase of the game except leveling, and even that would be more difficult than it has to be. If that's fun for you, don't let anyone tell you differently. But if you're in a group with a spec like this you're just holding them back. Edit: bglodit actually hit most of these points. I skipped past his post when I saw him mention BH forums. I will say however that even decreased interrupt CD is of no benefit to a raiding VG since you can't interrupt bosses anyway.

I just did a writeup in this thread a day or two ago regarding leveling tips for spec and rotation. There's a sticky or a former sticky floating around here somewhere that's got mostly good info in it as well. I'll see if I can locate it. As for being gear dependent, I haven't found it to be an issue. Just find some competent people to play with (specifically a healer) and know your class and it never becomes an issue. Also makes it that much sweeter when you get a new piece of gear.

Don't be so defensive, I never made any assumptions in my post - just questions. The game frankly still isn't hard enough to be terribly worried about examining parses line by line and the VG community specifically is a very small one. I've seen your posts from progression in the early portion of this patch, you of all people should understand that you wouldn't get much response here. Anyway the numbers are about what I'd expect. Not much else to say.

Our gunnery commando did 1050-1100 on HM Toth/Zorn a couple nights ago, so take that for what you will. He does a little min/maxing and has rakata adrenal/stim and is in full rakata with customized enhancements, but consider also that he's the raid lead so he loses a good bit from keeping an eye on the other dps and positioning etc.

Hell yes we are. I tank in our Hard Mode EC guild and we're already 2/4 even with attendance problems since the patch and plan to be at least 3/4 come Sunday. You have a lot of tools as a VG tank, between two stuns, harpoon, a charge, stealth detection and the best aoe of any of the tank classes. The only downside is that our cooldowns are very lackluster. 25% damage reduction is a good one, but 20% accuracy debuff is very meh and 15% healing on a two minute timer is almost a waste of your time to worry about. The only thing it's good for is popping in conjunction with Smoke Grenade in order to take some strain off your healer so they can regen their force/energy/ammo during a light damage phase. The thing about VG tanking is that we're somewhat gear-dependent. Our mitigation stats scale very well as we get better gear. On the plus side aggro generation is a little easier for us than for the other tanks seeing as we have a handful of abilities that we can generate threat and dps from range with. This really helps for those fights where there is a lot of movement going on. If you want to play a trooper because it seems fun, knock yourself out. It really is a neat class and VG plays a little differently than any class I've played (other games included) so it hooked me. And if you're interested in pvp VG is a very strong class overall. Check out the sticky at the top of the forum regarding the Iron Fist spec since it's still pretty darn good.

Zorn and Toth gave us Camp Pants and Bracers two weeks in a row, but Black Hole Bracers as the kicker. Storm and Fire dropped the same stuff for us as you this week though. Haven't gotten to Vorgath but I'll update when we down him if there's any discrepancy.

What's REALLY fun is when you get what happened to me - I'm always tanking Toth when he enrages and on two straight attempts the circle comes up on me. If you get it when you're tanking him, have fun positioning it without mucking it all up for your range dps, since you have to step far enough away from the wall to clear your space and wait for it to turn purple, then get out and back to your spot on time. The first time it caught me by surprise but the attempt was already falling apart so w/e, but the second time I did it just fine. Still pissed me off that it can go on the guy tanking Toth though.

1. The Hoth credit farm is no more. I know that for sure as of Wednesday night the large chest next to the champion in the front of the heroic has been completely removed, and even before that the amount of credits dropped by both it and the champions in there were nerfed something fierce. 2. Imp players have been running BP widespread since launch, whereas the Pub side has only been familiar with the Hoth credit farm in the past month or so. No complaining.

Then whoever you're bringing as Jugg dps just doesn't know what he's doing.

If you do endgame, you should have Stealth Scan or w/e it is on your bars. It's a requirement for pvp and there are multiple situations in pve where you should be using it. Anyway for me Explosive Round came off my bar by the time I hit 15, and I never use Full Auto since I'm a tank. I keep it on the bar but I haven't used it in forever.

Unless everyone agrees before the run that it's cool, then it is very poor etiquette. Leveling gear is leveling gear, but a player character always gets preference over a companion. The warrior should have asked first.

Most accurate and truth-filled post I've read in this thread. We've downed these guys on hard two weeks now. The first time I think some luck was involved. Last night though, when we actually figured out what we were doing wrong the fight became a breeze. There are two huge keys to the fight: 1. Dps MUST be even. When they start getting too far out of whack bad bad things happen. Phase transitions happen at every 10%, but if you let them get super far apart like we did on one attempt you get things like enraged aoe and people die at a loltastic rate. We made sure dps was even by having the tanks calling out the percentage the boss they were on was at every 3-4%. 2. Tanks need to communicate the switch in advance so that everyone is ready to be where they need to be and so that healers are ready for each of the big transition mechanics. I will say that we haven't yet downed them with more than 1 melee dps, however we did come heartbreakingly close a couple times with a guard and a sent dps. The sentinel just isn't very well geared and he wasn't too used to the fight. If we had an hour to spare to teach him that night we probably could have gotten it. More melee definitely increases the difficulty though. Also I'll give our composition so people can compare: First kill was double sage healers, last night we did with Smugg and Sage. Sage makes sure to cleanse the weakening debuff immediately (forget the name), otherwise we call for the cleanse if they don't see it. Dps last night was gunnery commando, tele sage, dot spec gunslinger (can't remember name of spec), vig guard. Tanks are myself as VG and a Shadow. I start on Zorn and him on Toth, we pull them on opposite sides of the canyon with him under the champion that drops down and me on the opposite side just past the outcropping of rock (we use the flowers as markers to know exactly where to stand). The only time we move is to run forward to taunt Zorn during jump transitions; other than that we tank right where we started. If you utilize a VG tank they need to be particularly careful with Fearful. If your dps is doing well enough to beat the enrage timer then the transition will come before fearful wears off so the VG tank should taunt, use Harpoon and then once fearful wears off (and Zorn is on his side) possibly pop aoe taunt to solidify threat. Other than that the mechanics are pretty simple. If your people can't move from the red aoe fast enough or move the yellow circle to Toth's *** fast enough then I don't know what to say. These are very clear mechanics. Mark the bosses (we use Flame for Zorn and Shield for Toth), since a lot of people have difficulty with the names. It's easier to call out Flame or Shield mid-fight than worrying about which is which (although that too gets easier with more practice).

I like you.

Very succinctly stated. Anything that can be done to increase the size of the market is a good thing at this point. I realize that dead GTNs are a direct result of dead servers (like mine on pub side; imp side isn't terribly better off), but the next best answer to increase market size is making it a pool available to all players on a server. I know I've complained to my guildies on more than one occasion that I can't just go to the GTN and buy all the mats I need to power level a new crew skill for an alt or something. I know that's more a luxury, but people leveling professions are what populate the market by and large. After that, my next wish list item is not having to choose a second parameter in order to have a listing show up. Whether this is a bug or working as intended (I haven't paid enough attention to see if it's been acknowledged by Bioware either way, but I wouldn't be shocked if they're keeping mum on it), it needs to go away. The only time I should have to choose a second parameter is when it's a subcategory (armor type, crafting mission/mat/schematic).

If you don't understand how a sustained dps rotation works, then yeah. You should be rotating your ammo cost abilities with Hammer Shot to keep your regen at its highest. This is a pretty basic trooper mechanic.