Well with your bubble up and HOT, you can take a pretty good amount of damage. A warzone adrenal will also make you more durable as will a warzone health pot, used to stay out of execute range. If you use one of those tank relics that's one additional thing to use to keep you going. After all of that is gone you still have your stuns. It's a fairly decent amount of time where you aren't dieing. If you have a healer with you that isn't being attacked, you probably aren't going to die for quite a while. Obviously when you don't have those cooldowns available to you, you'll just be fairly squishy and then it's kill or be killed. You'd be suprised at how many peeps you can take down with no health. As an assault vanguard you are fairly reliant on your cooldowns. You can still do a decent amount of work without them, but when they are up make sure you do something *********** awesome. If you choose your targets properly you will blow up someone in 5 GCDs. Of those 5 GCDs if you're lucky they'll only have noticed themselves taking damage for a second. Healers won't even have time to react. After that you'll start on his buddies and you'll have your shield and HOT to survive whatever they can dish out, at least long enough for another kill. With a healer healing you, you will singlehandedly wreck their entire team, unless they have like 3 healers blowing everything, but then you'll probably live forever anyways.

In recruit gear, if someone with better gear than you is attacking you, you're gonna die pretty fast. Use your reactive shield and hot as much as possible and run out of their LOS. If you have a healer, try to stay in their LOS. Don't stop putting out damage while you're running. Do as much damage as you can. Play ring around the rosies with the pillars. Just make them waste their time chasing a weak player. If you see a target that you can kill or maybe it's some squishy healer trying to stay near a pillar, harpoon them to you and start beating on them. You don't necessarily want to be in the middle of all of the fighting. That's for tanks and tanky dps. You aren't quite there yet. Target the squishies on the frindge or just be on the frindge yourself and try to stay in LOS of your healers. Use your taunts on enemy dps. Keeping your teammates alive, keeps you alive. Use your interrupt on important abilities/heals. Use your stuns intelligently. Most classes/specs have specific abilities/circumstances where you need to stun them to have any hope of winning. It'd take too long to write about each of them so I'll leave it to you to figure out.

Best Looking like a bad mofo. Worst Looking like a bad mofo. You will get chain stunned and focused out of fear.

Against a really well geared highly skilled concealment operative, you're only going to kill him when all of your cooldowns are up. Since Vanguards have some long cooldowns, you're just gonna get wrecked by him repeatedly if he has it out for you. You've got to realize this and bring friends. No solo guarding a point on Alderaan, unless you have all of your cooldowns and are confident you can kill them. When an operative knocks me down, the first thing I use is my reactive shield. It will activate while you're getting up off the ground. The next thing the operative will do is stick a knife in you, stunning you. Trinket that. You are resolve capped and have lost a decent bit of health. AOE stun. Use adrenaline rush. Run through your max dps rotation. He should be about dead. If he stealths out, use stealth scan immediately. He will die shortly after. If he doesn't stealth out, it's a dps race to the death and most likely you will win. Although it'll still be close. If you screw up somehow and the operative gets the second opener on you, you lose. For the healer operatives, just dps them. They will cc you a lot and gradually wear down your health. If you get lucky with crits and get their health low, stun them immediately. If they stun you, trinket and stun them again. Just keep them stunned. Burst them down and don't let them go. Hopefully you get some more lucky crits. If they are cleansing your dots/slow, then they aren't healing themselves as effectively. Ion pulse to reapply dots and slow. If you see a concealment operative opening up on someone, stun them, taunt them, and start wailing on them. They die really fast with even just two people on them. If you see a healer operative, get on them, try to separate them from their team if you can. They are the best healers in the game right now. They should die first.

I'd say harpoon is useful for putting people in aoe's. As far as isolating targets go.... You have to walk, slowly, away from the fighting to the place you want to pull them. The guardian's force push is way better for that.

Funny how apparently the best thing about Vanguards is it's tanking. Some interesting points were brought up. I forgot about how good the aoe stun is with Combat tech gear. It is pretty solid. I can see how the Vanguard beats the Shadow on that. I don't think a Vanguard can really beat a shadow tank, but whatever. Guardian still wins the who has better cc/stuns imo. I ran Iron fist for a short time and my only problem with it was I just ran out of ammo quick. Then I'm just kind of piddling away with my autoattack. Probably my fault. Assault spec got me in the habit of just using the procced ability after every proc. That being said your damage without stockstrike just blows and even with it you aren't going to beat a tankassin. I still think Shadows and Guardians have better defensive abilities. Storm is cool, but the Guardian's jump is better, plus they have a friendly jump, so those of you arguing that they feel all alone when their tank isn't beside them can instantly have a guardian by your side almost whenever he wants to be. Most of the time your attackers are going to be melee and guess who's also melee? A guardian. Shadows too really. Leaps in general are cool, but they also require you to have someone to jump on. That isn't always the case and I know that shadow tanks love their force speed in huttball. Plus they have stealth so they can go anywhere they want without anyone knowing. Stealth is also a decent gap closer, at least for starting engagements. The vanguard harpoon is the best pull in the game especially if you are specced into it. And the ranged aoe taunt is better than the other taunts. The 6 second specced interrupt is also really nice. Here is why I don't care that much. Harpoon frustrates me half the time. A lot of time people don't go where I'd think they'd go. A lot of the time I'm just wasting it on peeps that get resolve capped or are immune or somehow los it when it goes off. Stuff happens and it happens fairly often for it to be annoying. Harpoon is mainly only useful for killing peeps in traps, which fails often enough and catching runners, which imo isn't very important. I don't have anything to say about the aoe taunt though. It's nice. The other classes aoe taunts work well enough though. The interrupt does however pawn every other interrupt. Another thing that I haven't heard mentioned and I like about the Vanguard is stealth scan. It's just beautiful. I switched to tactics today to get a feel for how it plays. I haven't gotten the rotation down pat yet, but I figured I'd give myself another day at it. I might try out that Tibetan Candle build and see how it plays. So far I've just not been happy with pulse cannon. I haven't noticed it actually slowing anyone. I don't like chasing someone and having to stop to channel it. Seems odd. The damage is good enough from tactics I suppose, but I miss assault.

The Vanguard's slow depends on ion cell procs. It's really only single target. You still only get 2 stuns. Other than being able to minimally attack at a distance, which shadow/assassins can do too, how are you better than a guardian or shadow tank at protecting your healer?

Seems to have gotten worse in 1.2. I don't know. I harpoon someone and they go behind me. People sometimes are warping all over the place. Sometimes even my own character. This is especially annoying in huttball. Trying to stun, pull, push, root people into traps or off of platforms and they just don't go where you'd think they would. Say you see the ball carrier crossing a trap and you use your stun/root on them. They appear to be initially stunned in the trap and suddenly a second later they are warped just outside of the trap taking no damage and their resolve bar is fuller if not full so they can safely pass over the next trap too. Say you are carrying the ball, there is seemingly nobody around you, your cc breaker is up, and you only have one trap to cross over before scoring. You safely cross the trap and are attacked. A second later you warp back into the fire, appear rooted and die instantly. What looked like an easy score now leaves you raging. Or maybe you're trying to pull the ball carrier into a trap. You get yourself setup on the edge of it and use your ability. Lo and behold you somehow managed to pull the ball carrier behind you and set them up for an easy score. How about that time the enemy ball carrier was close to scoring and you had your knockback ready to knock them into the pit. It looks easy they're in front of you all lined up. Your ability has little to no animation delay. You use your ability and wow, you just knocked them into your goal line. This is a pretty big reason for why I hate huttball. I'd probably love it otherwise. Positional lag affects other warzones too, but it's just more obvious in Huttball, because position matters more. It's one of the most annoying things in this game.

Indeed. I will start. Tank Assassin/Shadow. Can't be beaten 1v1.

Why play a Vanguard? What do we do that no other class does? I'm only asking because for PvP, I think we are the worst tank class. We have the worst defensive cooldowns in the game. For DPS other classes do it better. We don't have stealth, so everything we do is completely obvious. Theoretically we can kite, but only to an extent. Sages do a way better job at kiting. We get a whopping two stuns one of which is very short. So it's super obvious which stun to trinket out of. Unless you are specced into tactics the cooldowns are pretty long on those. Harpoon is fun but tankassins have a pull that does the same thing. I play an Assault Vanguard with full battlemaster and a critcrafted warhero piece and I feel more useful in PvP on my guardian alt with way crappier gear.

I don't think the OP was talking about DPS shadows/assassins. I think they're fairly balanced. Tanks aren't. My Assault Vanguard is pretty geared. Full BM with one Warhero piece. Two critcrafted items. A good tankassin will kill me before I can get 20% of their HP down. Stopping them from healing themselves is rough with the GCD how it is and only having two stuns. Stuns not working when they've got their force and tech immunity thing on, etc. I can't kite them. I can't beat them 99.9% of the time.

The Cash hurts. I haven't wanted to level an alt because of it. Pre 1.2 I leveled up an alt purely through PvP and I couldn't really afford to buy the speeder skills. I did level up biochem too, but I don't like being required to level slicing if I choose to level up by mostly PvPing. I also don't want to have to do PvE to get credits. The best PvPers are going to be using the best stims and consumables. That stuff costs money and you just aren't going to win against them if you can't afford it. I can't afford to live and work in SWTOR. The Win a Warzone faster medals don't really scale for Alderaan. You can 3 cap a team the entire time and end up with less medals than if you completely owned in any of the other warzones.

Had this crap happen to me the other day where I was sitting on the edge of a platform waiting to harpoon a guy to his death. I use harpoon and the guy magically teleports behind me. I don't even understand how that happens.

Nice Guide. Saw a sentinel in some 50 warzones today with 10k HP. This level 42 guy in my guild had more health then him. I don't know how you can even do that. Needless to say he got rolled repeatedly.

I happen to have a whole bunch of gear sitting in my inventory mostly champion, and some columi and tionese pieces. I'm a vanguard so all of it can be used by my companions. I really want to know if expertise on your companion effects how effective they are in PvP. Do I need to keep two sets of gear for my companions? In endgame there really isn't much for your companions to do sadly, but I have 3 manned a Hardmode Flashpoint with a healer companion. And I do enjoy siccing my companions on Imps. So they are still entertaining. Anyways back to the question. I need to free up my inventory. Is PvP gear better for my companions then PvE gear in PvP?