Honestly, for leveling, Focus is probably the best - you usually fight lots of packs of trash mobs, and that will whizz through them. Played correctly, focus will only be a bit behind vigilance even in boss fights. That said, Vigi is still definitely my preferred non-tank tree. Go with what you like!

Hoth is a 38-42 planet, right? So you're right near the bottom of the recommended level, which means things are going to be more difficult. What level are the enemies you're fighting? Further, by switching to some tanking skills, you've reduced your damage output for comparatively little gain (an extra 15% armor when you're not in Soresu form is not doing you a ton of good, and a 5% reduction in accuracy when you don't have a shield generator or high defense is also not helping much), which means it takes you longer to kill them, and gives them more time to kill you. If you're not bringing a healing companion with you, of course you'll take more damage over the fights. In other words: if you went with a 4/25 build instead of an 8/21 build, you'd get an extra four points for DoT boosts from Force Rush and Burning Purpose, or if you're interested in damage reduction, you could take the 2 points in Commanding Awe in place of one of the other two. And I know you hate the glow from Unremitting, but it's honestly the best way to spend the points and makes you a much more effective DPS, since everything you're fighting tries a knockback in the first few seconds. You could put them in Gather Strength (2 force when movement's impaired) or Stagger (1s longer stun on force leap), but neither provide the pure utility at the beginning of a fight so that you're in position to apply all your DoTs and burn your target down. tl;dr: You appear to have reduced your damage output and not significantly improved your incoming damage reduction, and you're likely fighting enemies higher-level than yourself without a healer. Those things don't combine very well.

Force armor doesn't heal, if that's what you mean. How much it absorbs is, as I understand it, dependent on your power, however. The general rule is very little crit (I use 0), between 4 and 6 slots of alacrity, and everything else power and surge.

Just run some flashpoints until you get an orange moddable generator and keep improving it by sticking better mods in it. No reason to level a crafting discipline when you can just win an orange (even Esseles can drop one, I believe) on a low-level FP and keep it updated.

The pair of vanguard DPS in my guild just went full tactics (previously hybrid) and actually saw good DPS increases and had more fun with it. They're in the 2200-2300 DPS range on mostly-comms-built 69 gear, so it can only go up. Curious about the difference now.

I haven't gotten there in NM, but surely you can spare a few seconds to get near somebody and merciless them to keep your four stacks rolling, can't you? Or is the doom timing so tight you can't waste it at all?

Yep, that's basically what I was saying, though perhaps poorly. You'd need a lot to make a dent, and by then you're probably eating through too much of your primary damage stat budget.

Yeah, if your guild doesn't run operations, it might be time to start offering yourself up in general or finding another friendly guild you can join in with. But agreed with everything else - you can always start going achievement hunting Start ripping through thousands of enemies with all your companions, kill all WBs, kill all flashpoints 25 times, etc.

Sharpshooter can be a cast-heavy rotation - 1.5 seconds for charged burst, 1.5-2.5 for aimed shot, the channel on speed shot - alac can be helpful here. I don't know what the sweet spot is for noticeable channel reduction vs negative impact on damage, though.

Generally speaking, it benefits you more to stack main stat augments than it does to stack power augments - you get more out of main stat (since it also benefits crit chance) than you do out of power.

Combat. Burst > DoTs in PVP.

Yes. My main is a sage healer, my imp main is a sorc healer, and neither of them have any crit. It's better to have stronger overall heals (especially when you get to heal 8 people at once) than a couple of bigger and the rest mediocre. Keep spamming your circle and you'll keep topping the HPS chart.

I'm actually moving all of my ops-running characters to biochem - it's just too useful to have for everybody. It's kind of disgusting, really. Reusable (better-than-buyable) medpacks, reusable stims, reusable adrenals - for a tank, I have my absorb adrenal available as a quickbar selection, for my sentinel, I have my attack adrenal right next to my relic so they can be activated at the same time, etc. It honestly feels like the only viable progress/operations profession, which kind of sucks. If you have another biochem and can make your own blues for other chars, not *everybody* has to be biochem, but as said above me, if you're keeping yourself stocked - we're talking probably 5-10 adrenals per operation, 1-2 stims, 4-6 medpacks - that's a lot of cash.

The PVE relics you're going to want to go for are the Boundless Ages (power click) and Serendipitous Assault (power proc). Everything else is basically suboptimal.

Haha, "we're all agreeing to making ourselves less likely to have our damage avoided and giving us a ton more damage over time. Let's do this!" Vigilance doesn't need buffs, guys. Guardians and Juggernauts on the TorParse leaderboards right now are putting out over 2500 DPS minimum. We're viable without radically increasing our damage with no tradeoffs.

I tried this for a PVP build a month or two ago. It was interesting, but ultimately it just felt wishy-washy. It may well have been my own skill, though.

Does if you're vigilance-specced.

You should stack power (and mainstat) with basically all DPS and heal classes now. Some will also require accuracy or alacrity, but all will require power to drop the most output.

This has been answered elsewhere, but all the math and experience points to defense proc and shield/abs click relics. The defense proc gives you more def and more frequently than the click relic, and the shield/abs relics have a longer active time and split the values over two stats, which means lower impact from diminishing returns. If it ends up confirmed that def proc and shield/abs proc can work together in 2.3, that math might change, but it's pretty straightforward now.

Look at your combat logs. I don't know if they're in the base logs, but I use TorParse (along with the majority of the SWTOR players, I imagine), and if you look at the actual combat logs, it'll tell you things like "<X ability> hits <enemy> for <damage_value> damage, generating <threat_value> threat!" It will also tell you that certain abilities just generate threat, such as the shadow's and vanguard's pulls, which are a static amount of threat without any damage at all. Same as taunt! Generally speaking, damage is equal to threat unless you're in a tank stance, in which case threat = 2x damage. If you use a "high-threat" ability - saber reflect as a tank, guardian slash, hilt strike, etc. - that's bumped to 2.5x damage, if I recall correctly.

Of course it's "pretty effective" - I'm just saying that one of the primary reasons focus users get much bigger numbers in a match but are coinflip-or-worse in evenly-matched 1v1 is because their best attack is AOE and is frequently used to generate giant hits/crits on multiple enemies at once. The question was why they put up such high numbers but are manageable in 1v1, and that's typically the answer.

Sure.

Agreed there. I have debuffs big, buffs normal size at the moment. I put a little extra space between my ops frames to account for a bit of overlap, something like this.

Ah, you're right, but the inverse applies as well - I want to see the buffs so I know if my Force Armor is still up after the deionized wears off Great guide, of course!

I'd say your UI suggestions are perhaps good for your situations, but not ideal for all. My sage, for example, needs to see debuffs - my force armor deionizes people as a debuff, and I need to know when that falls off so I can pop the shield back up. Sure, I could count the seconds, and I've mostly got it on autopilot at this point, but it's still useful to show, especially for new healers. Secondly, putting your group/ops frames in the middle is interesting, but I wouldn't say it's required, as it seems here. For one, what happens when you get into 16/24-man operations? Suddenly you're scaling over your bar. Personally, I leave mine on the left and just arrange stuff so it's easy to reach anyway (so tanks all the way to the right, etc.). Another important piece to my healing is key- and mousebinding. All of my standard heals are on mousebinds, so I can do my basic, highly-effective rotation with mouse only. This allows me to select a party member and trigger a heal without moving my left hand. Meanwhile, DPS abilities and healing modifiers are on keybinds on the left hand - shift-1 is force potency, shift-2 is mental alacrity, shift-5 is mind crush, etc. A good 15-20 abilities can be used with an absolute minimum of movement over the UI. You can assign keybinds in the preferences field; I assign shift-<numRow> for the second ability bar, ctrl-<numRow> for the third, and alt-shift-<numRow> for the fourth (and I mousebind some of those and ignore others so as to minimize finger gymnastics). And finally, key- or mousebind your interrupt to exactly the same key on all your characters. Interrupting will become part of your muscle memory, and you never want to hit it and have it not be there.