Reactive Shield is a straight 25% decrease to incoming damage. It works that way for all troopers regardless of gear.

Complaining about Hammer Shot shows you don't tank at all. It's a great ability to use to keep generating threat from range, an advantage other tank classes don't enjoy.

Not sure what you really want us to do with this... Was this a kill or no? Are you looking for advice? Can't tell what if anything you or your group did wrong just by a parse. You took a hell of a lot of damage though, props to the healers.

He specifically states to use dps gear including offhand outside of getting supercommando set bonus.

Leveling in shield spec is very viable, I did it from 1 to 50 but that was partially because I knew that I wanted my first character to be a tank so I wanted to be ready to do that as soon as I hit max level. Once you get your healer companion after finishing the story quests on Taris you'll never have downtime (although things die a little slower). A lot of your spec depends on what you want to do while leveling, so take that into consideration. As a pure shield spec VG you'll want to run in Ion Cell (the tank stance). If you want to tank for groups in pve, your spec should be this or very similar. If you're going to be doing mostly solo leveling the above spec works well enough, though you may want to consider something more akin to the Iron Fist build. This one gives you a lot more dps at the expense of some of your defensive ability. It's primarily a pvp spec, but it works well in leveling content. If you're not pvping then I'd recommend altering it to this. It drops the bonuses to your pvp abilities and gives you more mitigation. The sticky at the top of this forum does a good job explaining the build. Now on to ability usage. For your opener it'll be something like Sticky Grenade -> Storm -> Stockstrike -> Ion Pulse -> Hammer Shot -> High Impact Bolt -> Energy Blast (if you're 31 into Shield spec). The priority list once you get on a mob is Stockstrike -> HIB -> Ion Pulse for max damage. Don't forget that Energy Blast does not count against the GCD so you can use it while using another ability so it's like free damage and also generates 1 ammo instead of costing you ammo. A lot of your rotation is dependent on the type of pull (single target or aoe). For aoe pulls you're of course going to open with Mortar Volley if you can hit a couple mobs, then Harpoon any ranged mobs into the group so you can Pulse Cannon the group. Really the best way to learn your abilities is to read your tooltips and compare the talents you can get to them. It's pretty easy to see your more important abilities and which ones are going to be used as much as possible.

What is this I don't even... No. We use too many ranged abilities that would require retooling of most of the class' base abilities. There's zero reason to give a trooper (a canonically blaster-using group) a melee weapon. To some extent it would take away the core of what it means to be a trooper. Also, how many other classes do you know that can use all of their abilities with an alternate weapon? Knights can use blades rather than lightsabers but a lot of skills become unusable. Same goes for shadows with electro(?)staves.

And then those people go into Lost Island or Denova and ***** about why they can't complete it in pvp gear like they could the previous tier. It creates a bad precedent, whether it's doable or not. And frankly, I don't see average players clearing ANY content in pvp gear. If you're using pvp gear in a pve environment, you're holding your group back plain and simple.

In pvp, the points are absolutely more valuable in Defensive Measures. An extra stun and a situational stun are far more valuable than a few % points of reduction against kinetic and energy, especially seeing as the majority of player attacks are tech.

Our guild shadow tank laughs at me when I tell him about my survivability, and that's even after I re-enhanced all the crappy accuracy off for mitigation. He's still running around with accuracy all over his ****.

I would disagree with your spec. Some of your choices make no sense from the standpoint you're arguing. If you're not worried about dealing damage, Energy Blast is a waste of time. If you want to do support and prevent damage to your enemies, Heavy Stock is another waste of points. Those points can be transferred to Power Armor and Rebraced Armor and/or Soldier's Endurance. You could also argue that due to the way shielding works in pvp the points in Counterattack are wasted and could be used on the talents I mentioned above, although that may be a wash in terms of survivability.

DO NOT do Pvp to get a Pve tank set. You will get trucked and won't have the health to last. Getting tired of seeing people recommend to use pvp gear to do pve, because it's a bad suggestion and you're only going to cause frustration and confusion as to why the person is not able to clear content.

Well I'm not a guard tank, but I do play a VG tank so I can give you some general observations... I don't know if the tank proc relic vs the dps proc relics share a cooldown, but that's definitely something to consider. I know for sure that the dps ones have a shared cooldown with one another so using more than one is a waste. This may or may not be the case between tank and dps relics. That said, threat should never be an issue on a boss. Due to the way taunts work in this game (immediately springs you to the highest threat position and adds 30% more threat as well as forces the mob to target you for a time) you should never have an issue with threat. You have a single taunt and an aoe one but there's no practical difference between them on a boss. You should be throwing them into your rotation whenever you feel like your dps is dipping (unless you're on a fight where tank swapping or threat drops are a specific mechanic). And if your group is hitting the enrage due to not enough dps, there is always going to be something they can do to improve dps. A tank's dps will never make or break a fight. I haven't had the opportunity to see a tank guard in action since our guild runs with me and a shadow tank so I don't know all their mechanics very well, although I do know that you have a lot of cooldowns to use and from what I understand defense is a big stat yes? That being the case I would want to go for the defense on-use relic as it would make you start approaching unhittable while it's up. Being a VG I use the proc absorb and the on-use shield/absorb since those are my best stats and they've served me very well thus far. I'm going to test using the on-use defense relic along with the on-use shield/absorb this week just to see how my survivability changes though. I have a feeling I'm going to end up taking more overall damage since the proc won't be there to help smooth it out over the course of a fight and since defense is a very lackluster stat for VGs. Final point - If you're planning to tank EC you should be prioritizing mitigation and endurance over anything else. Those guys hit hard and as I said above, dps isn't your concern and threat should take care of itself.

While I agree that the defense relic may be less valuable due to our already super-low defense numbers, I feel like I wanna give it a shot on a couple of our Zorn/Toth attempts this week. We downed them on Hard Sunday but it seemed like there was at least one point during every attempt where I was just hovering below 50% a lot. I feel like controlled CD usage might alleviate that a bit. I'll probably give it a go instead of the proc relic for our first couple attempts and see how it plays out. I just hate that we only have one good CD and one decent CD (along with a terrible self-heal). Other tanks seem to have a lot more tools at their disposal.

Good job necro-posting in a three month dead thread.

I felt like the story started strong, with the power guards or w/e they were called. The problem is they fell by the wayside as more super weapons kept coming out of the woodwork and it just felt like the story was meant to evoke KotOR 1 all over again when you started having to Overall the middle portion was very stale and drawn-out to me. I will say however that you do feel like the one meant to and the story finishes with a bang (albeit a recycled Episode VI bang). I just wish it hadn't dragged me down in the middle. Overall I'd give it probably a 7 or 7.5. Just not very original.

The correct way to retract incorrect information would be to edit it out of your post and direct the user to more accurate or up-to-date info, not copy it and put it into your own post.

The ability itself does not change except for when you take talents that affect it. Each cell is a sort of 'stance' that does something different based on abilities that you use. Read the tooltips for more information, they're very clear about how each affects you.

I won't argue pvp standpoints since I don't do much of it. That said, I have to disagree with number 1. We have one great tanking CD, one okay CD and one terrible self-heal. VGs kinda got screwed for CDs in pve tanking. Heavy armor helps to mitigate that a little bit, but I see the difference between myself and our guild's shadow tank and have to wonder how the devs think these two classes are balanced from that standpoint. I'm not complaining just to complain (we cleared NiM in previous tier and just downed HM Toth/Zorn Sunday night so we're still managing progression. I will always agree that a better player can hide imperfections of an inferior class), it just seems like I work a good bit harder to manage less than the mitigation he manages. I customized almost all of my enhancements and a mod or two out of my Rakata gear for mitigation stats while he's still running around with almost full accuracy and still doesn't get trucked like I do.

Your math is way off. I'm not positive of the way that the CD is calculated, so we'll assume two scenarios: a) CD starts counting down as soon as the relic procs (best case scenario). This means that you could get the proc every 20 seconds, so at most 3 times a minute. In your ideal 10-minute fight scenario that means you would have 30 procs of 6 seconds each, for 180 seconds or 3 total minutes. Hey, three minutes of 19% absorption isn't bad. The downside is that it may not occur exactly when you want it to do so. b) CD starts counting down after the proc ends. This means you would have the proc every 26 seconds so in the 10-minute scenario you would get the proc 23 times. That's 138 seconds or 2 minutes and 18 seconds. Significantly less than the other scenario, and you are still subject to the whims of the RNG. Keep in mind that both of these scenarios assume that you proc the relic immediately as it comes off CD (which won't always happen). Also no fight in this tier is going to last 10 minutes. You're probably looking at 6-minute fights for all of them so shave 40% off of each of the time estimations above.

I have the dropped KP HM relic and I have to say it's a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand it's a ton of absorb which is great so it makes your overall damage lower over the course of a fight. On the other hand, it procs whenever it wants to and the way HM EC works right now I'd almost rather have two on-use relics. I get trucked pretty hard by Toth and I was sitting at 42% base absorb when we fought him and I was rolling CDs almost the entire fight once it got going. Having a third CD available would have been nice at some points in the fight, and I'm positive this will be the case when we manage to down the tanks and Kephess. I use the proc relic and the HM Shield/Absorb on use relic although I may try switching the proc out for my Defense on use one just to see how it goes. Luckily pants dropped for me from the twins and I picked up some awesome boots from the chest right before we pulled the tanks so we'll see how I stand up to them this week. Just wanted to add my opinion on the relic situation.

Points in Frontline Offense are wasted if you're not taking Gut, and you have no reason to take it as a PVE tank. In either case, those points will serve you much better in either Heavy Stock (increase damage of your bread and butter attack) or Soldier's Endurance (we need all the health we can get in the new FP and OP). Choose based on your survivability since threat on a single target is almost never an issue due to the way taunts work (and we have two of them). 31/8/2 or you're doing it wrong. There's some decent info in the link provided (and a lot that is missing and is hard to cover in a 'general' tanking thread) above but I feel the need to point out a couple of things: - Energy Blast is now a must-take ability since it has been taken off the GCD. It should be used every time it comes off CD and you should be making sure to be down 2-3 ammo as it becomes ready to make use of the ammo regen. It's free regen and damage, the only way it could be better is if it provided mitigation... oh wait, it also contributes to our new Power Screen so it helps to get that maxed as quickly as possible. - The thread in general seems to be targeting a fresh 50 tank preparing for FPs, but a number of your priorities will change when you enter an OP, so keep that in mind. For example your starting rotation on a boss should include your crit CD (Battle Tactics? something like that) and burn as much ammo as you can then use Recharge Cells/Reserve Ammo/Energy Blast to top yourself back up quickly. You'll need to do this to counteract the fact that your dps are going to pop cooldowns pretty much at the start of the pull so you want to generate a ton of aggro early. - Explosive Surge is garbage except for aoe pulls. Pulse Cannon is great for aggro generation on a boss (just beware of knockbacks). - One of the biggest advantages you have as a VG tank is mobility, since most of our abilities are instant cast and you have a lot of abilities to generate threat from range (this doesn't make you a 'ranged tank' though). Keep it in mind and take advantage. I'm starting to ramble so I'll close by saying I would tend to agree that FPs are a waste of time. In general they are overtuned for the loot they drop and the average leveling-geared group will not clear them in any reasonable amount of time (if at all). Try to get into a guild that has Operations on farm if possible, or start a guild of like-minded people to run them. Or if you're on a really populated server just keep pugging away (you'll get a lot of dudes and more wipes than normal like that though).

Is the Jarg debuff coinciding with happy happy Rail Shot time? Because our group had that issue pre-1.2 however we haven't run it since the patch update so I can't say if there were any significant changes. I do know that our healers had a hell of a time with this fight even before 1.2 and I was pretty much rolling cooldowns on my VG tank and we still had to have a sage healer aoe plus a gunslinger shield to fill in on CDs for us to clear it. I don't think we managed a clean NiM kill of these guys once in any event.

Dean, you clearly didn't read everything. All you did was repeat the complaint about the current tier.

This talent tree is out of date. It's hard to come up with a tank spec that's going to perform well in pvp and pve AND output dps, so honestly it sounds more like you need to figure out whether you'd rather dps or tank. That said, if you're trying to hybrid it up with a focus on tanking, Gut and Frontline Offense are not optimal places to talent. As a primary shield spec you need to have Heavy Stock from the Assault tree. Everything you can do to increase Stockstrike's damage should be taken. Put the leftover point from Gut into Energy Blast in the shield tree. Now that it's off the GCD it's a pretty decent ability as it will increase your burst potential in pvp and helps generate aggro in pve, not to mention it's an ammo regen ability. The problem with trying to have your cake and eat it too comes in here. As a pve tank you absolutely cannot skip Ion Shield. Flat 2% reduction to damage taken. Being viable in endgame pve content as a tank means you need those 5 points in tier 6 shield. If you're going to tank in pvp, you don't need those 5 and now you can go back and take Frontline Offense and Gut, along with the last two in Intimidation since you'll be getting back the point from Energy Blast. Here's your straight tank spec: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#801RMGrdoroGRZMsbZb.1 For more hybrid (take points from Defensive Measures and Neural Overload depending on your amount of pvp): http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#801GRGrdRboMZMsr0oZb.1

Your ignorance is showing. With the release of Cataclysm Wow uses a priority system for abilities as well. Anyway, just wanted to point out to the first person that responded that now that Energy Blast is off the global cooldown, not using Energy Blast on CD is a dps loss (and you should be doing everything you can to increase your dps as a tank since some enrages are very tight). You should be making sure that you're short 2-3 cells when it comes off CD so that you can use it immediately.