This is the best possible time to use Assault Plastique if you have it. Other than that, I'd rotate Hammer Shot and Ion Pulse to keep your ammo at 10-11. I hold onto Stockstrike until the cooldown on the proc is up.

My only advice here is to keep at it. I went through the muscle memory pains too when I switched to SS. I'd leveled from 10 to 50 as Assault, and already had nearly full BM and a couple WH Eliminator pieces. I still have some of the WH Eliminator mods. But once you get your new muscle memory, things get much better. Likewise, you're going to see a huge, drastic improvement from just getting a couple pieces of BM gear. Unfortunately, that doesn't work. The crafted gear is for appearance only and does not have the set bonus. Oh, yeah, I'll never argue that damage is worthless as a PvP tank. What bugs me is the people who roll a tank, but then play like a DPS. They're not supporting their team, they're just doing extremely sub-par DPS and dying slower. I try to focus on AoE pressure damage as much as possible. Our single-target damage is pretty weak and easily healed through, but we can put out strong AoE damage. This makes it harder on the enemy healer, and easier on our allied DPS. Sadly, it does not. Likewise, Smoke Grenade doesn't count towards Protection. The only things that affect your Protection total are Neural Jolt, Sonic Round, and Guard.

I'm running out of energy to answer threads like this. If you are a tank and you're attacking a healer, you are doing it wrong. That is not your job. Stop it. Your job is first and foremost to protect your team, and that's what you should be focusing on. You can also apply great AoE pressure on the side, but target takedown is not what you should be doing. DPS specs have the tools needed to kill healers, but tanks do not. Tanks exist to counter enemy DPS by lowering their damage. Trying to kill a healer (or anyone receiving heals) as a tank is like trying to ram a square peg into a round hole. Even if you can occasionally hammer it in, that's not what it's meant to do and you will always perform poorly. Either switch to the square hole (protect your team) or get a round peg (play DPS). If you want to actually tank PvP, then that's great. Check my signature for a build that is effective at both PvP and PvE. I use it to PvP all the time to great effect, and I also tank HM Ops without a hitch. But if you're looking for a build that can deal high damage while still being viable for PvE tanking... it doesn't exist. Even Iron Fist couldn't handle that. The whole point of Iron Fist is that it kept all of the good PvP defensive bonuses (armor, straight damage reduction), but got rid of the defensive bonuses that favor PvE (shield/absorb) in exchange for higher damage. If you want to tank any serious PvE content, you need to go full shield. Also, you're going to be bad at everything in recruit gear. Recruit gear exists to prevent you from being utterly massacred when starting because you're in level 45 green quest gear. However, there is a large gap between Recruit and BM/WH gear. Just stick with the game; it gets much better after you get three or four pieces of battlemaster gear, and those are really, really easy to get.

That's also definitely viable. However, I have a few questions/comments about that. I would strongly, strongly recommend against removing Rebraced Armor. I can understand the thought behind skipping bonuses to shield/absorb (although I don't agree; I like countering weapon-heavy DPS). However, Rebraced Armor is a defensive bonus that affects almost every attack we take. For me, it's a 2.3% increase in damage reduction. It would be a much better idea to drop one of the shield-related upgrades, like counterattack. Also, if I were you, I'd drop one point in Counterattack in exchange for a second point in Shield Cycler. You'd lose 1% shield chance, but gain a 25% chance to gain one ammo when you shield an attack. It's a small defensive loss for a strong boost to resource regeneration. The reason my build is a little more defense-heavy is that I'm also my guild's primary PvE tank. This spec is only three points away from what I would choose if I was building for pure PvE. I'd take points off of Defensive Measures and Neural Overload, and move them to Ceramic Plating and Steely Resolve. Since the difference is only 4% absorb and 3% aim, I can get away with not having to respec several times a week. Also, you should use the Ask Mr. Robot skill tree tool. It does the same thing as TORHead, but it's not... broken.

Well, armor value does you more good than anything else. However, that comes automatically as you gear, so it's not something you can really gear towards. Your number one goal is endurance. It's a fairly useless stat for PvE tanking, but in PvP it's one of your biggest defensive boosts. My goal is to pass 20k endurance at minimum. I'd recommend getting shield/absorb to around 35-40%, and defense to 5-10% (all including talents). That gives you some strong defensive boosts, especially against Snipers, Marauders, and Juggernauts, but still allow you to gear for plenty of damage. After that, I'd push for at least 25% crit (unbuffed). Past 25% crit chance, I plan to stack power and surge. Accuracy is a low-priority stat. You may get it on some of your stuff, and that's okay, but if you get a chance to replace accuracy with anything else, I'd take it. You should never take any alacrity.

If you want to focus on killing people, go Tactics (or Assault). I've never really played Tactics, so I can't give you build advice for that. However, I can give advice on PvP Tanking as a Vanguard, but I'm going to preface this by saying something really important about PvP tanking. I see lots of PvP tanks that play wrong, so you need to hear this if you're considering it. Your job is not to kill the enemy. That's what damage dealers are for. If you want to be able to take down enemy players, play a DPS (Assault/Tactics). A VG Tank can do well in a 1v1, but it takes a while to kill anything. However, if the enemy is getting heals of any sort, you'll have no chance of taking them down. If you go shield spec, but then spend your time pretending to be a DPS, you're just weighing your team down. Yeah, you won't die very often (you're easy to heal), but you aren't helping your team nearly as much as an actual tank or a DPS player. A good PvP tank's focus is on defending your allies. We have tons of tools for doing this. Your primary tools are guard and taunt. Either use guard on your healer or the current focus target, and taunt whenever anyone targets your healer. However, those are far from our only tools. We also have strong debuffs and lots of CCs. Use your CC frequently, and you can really trip up people attacking vulnerable allies. In between using your defensive abilities, focus on AoE damage. Shield Spec has weak single-target damage, but we can put out a large amount of AoE pressure. You won't get many kills with this, but you'll really support your team by sapping enemy heals. Now, here's a solid PvP tank build (it's what I use): 31/8/2. You'll notice that I get most of the shield upgrades. Most people will tell you that shields are nearly worthless in PvP. However, these are the same people that whine about how OP Snipers and Marauders are. With some decent shield upgrades, you get a massive defensive boost against Snipers, Marauders and Juggernauts, with a lesser bonus against Assassins, Operatives, Mercenaries and Powertechs. Also, this spec works great for PvE. It's only two points away from a full PvE spec (Defensive Measures to Ceramic Plating). For gearing, click the link in my signature and click on the "Wish List" tab. My current gear is pretty bad (I got a lot of DPS gear before I became a tank), but my Wish List is pretty good. Basically, you want to build for really high endurance, as that's our most powerful PvP defensive upgrade. Get a little shield/absorb, but don't stack it extensively. I aimed for 25% crit, and then stacked power and surge. It's really not worth getting accuracy, in my opinion.

Here's the thing about endurance. It does not help you take damage at all in PvE. Its only real purpose is to give you room to soak up spike damage, and to give your healers a little room for error. I'll elaborate. Endurance increases your max health. In PvP or solo PvE (questing etc.), this is an important defensive boost because it greatly increases your survival time. You're taking very little damage per second, so 1k more health is several seconds longer that you live. However, in group PvE, you're taking massive amounts of damage every second. On your own, you're only going to survive for a few seconds on any boss. Your survival depends on the ratio of damage taken to healing received. If you are taking more damage than you're getting healed for, you're going to die (and in most cases, die quickly). If you're getting healed for more damage than you're taking, you can survive indefinitely. Getting stats like Shield, Absorb, and Defense lowers your damage taken. This means that you can now survive things that would kill you before. Getting more Endurance means that if you're not getting healed for enough, you'll survive for a few seconds longer before you die. I'll give an example. Let's say that you put an augment slot in every piece of your gear, and filled each slot with an Advanced Fortitude Augment 22. That would give you a total of 252 endurance, or 2.5k health. Foreman Crusher (KP 3rd boss) hits me for almost exactly 2.5k (unshielded, no CDs) when he's in a frenzy. So by stacking all endurance augments, you absorb one free hit. After that, the extra endurance does nothing for the rest of the fight. On the other hand, if you get Defense rate in 14 augments, you'll easily dodge multiple attacks that you wouldn't have dodged otherwise. They'll contribute far more to you surviving a fight than a larger health pool. If you have Endurance past 20k (which is really easy to get) I wouldn't worry about it at all. That's enough of a health pool to allow for some error. If you were running around with 5k health, the healers would have to be 100% perfect. If they get stunned or lose LoS or run out of resource for half a second, you'd die. However, with 20k health, you can survive for long enough on your own for the healers to get back into the fight and keep you up. I don't think you'll ever run into a situation where 2.5k health helped you more than 5-10% shield, absorb, or defense.

Not true. You can win 1v1s pretty easily against certain classes. SWTOR has a rock-paper-scissors for PvP. Tech/Force (armor-penetrating) DPS beats Tank. Tank beats weapon damage DPS. Weapon DPS beats Tech/Force DPS. So yes, given equal skill and gear, a PT/VG DPS will melt you as a tank. They have lots of attacks that ignore your shields and defense, deal internal/elemental damage, and/or penetrate armor. They're pretty clearly designed to be able to beat tanks. However, going up against a Sniper, Marauder, or Juggernaut, you have a large upper hand. The majority of their attacks and all of their high-damage burst attacks can be shielded and defended. This means that your shields and defense rate cripple their DPS, and smoke grenade really hurts them. You still have enough damage as a Shield Vanguard that, given equal skill and gear, you should be able to beat weapon-heavy classes in a 1v1. However, this really isn't all that relevant anyways. A Tanks should rarely (if ever) find themselves in a 1v1. Our job is to protect our team, not to go gallivanting around like a DPS player.

I'm actually aiming for the 2-piece supercommando and 2-piece combat tech. They give me less damage, perhaps, but maximum utility, which is what I'm all about. However, the Supercommando 4-piece is a very valid bonus, and it shows that you're actually playing correctly. It'll actually give you a higher damage boost than Combat Tech's 4-piece, especially when you factor in -1.5s CD on Energy Blast.

PvP Gear PvE Gear I spent a lot of time and money customizing the look of the PvP gear. That's a lvl 40 PvP piece, a BM piece, a crafted piece, a world drop, and a quest reward, all remodded to have the stats of BM with some War Hero. The PvE set is mostly stock Rakata, but it just looks so awesome that I see no reason to change it ^^

Psh. I used to think my Assault VG was mobile. Then I experienced the joy of covering thirty meters in 1.5 seconds

Well, there's an easy way to fix that. Start playing a PvP tank . It's an incredibly challenging, fulfilling role. You get to leap into the fray and save people (which I love doing), you're unbelievably hard to kill, and you get to feel secretly smug and superior because you're part of the 5% doing things right. I've been thinking about writing a VG PvP tank guide for this forum, in hopes that it'll get stickied. It'd be 1/3 discussion of why a PvP tank is worth it (so I can point all the nay-sayers to one post) and 2/3 build advice and tactics. Maybe that will encourage more people to play PvP tanks, and play them well.

See, now this I can agree with 100%. The people who play a tank spec because they don't like dying are dragging their team down (you can actually see me chewing one out here). Those "tanks" are the ones that give PvP tanking a bad name. And unfortunately, a large majority of people in tank spec fall into that category. Anyone who fails to break 10k protection, ever, fits this bill. The key to effective PvP tanking is a complete priority shift. Most DPS/faketank players focus first and foremost on themselves. Their main priority is attacking the enemy and staying alive (good players put objectives above that). Then, if they have some energy/time/attention to spare, they defend their team. In order to be a good PvP tank, you have to put defense of the team above killing people or keeping yourself alive. If I see a friendly healer going down or an enemy with low health, I'll go for the healer 100% of the time. Oh, and about protection totals. Protection totals don't tell the whole story any more than the other numbers do (but of course you know that). I almost never get under 50k. For a moderate-length match and with PUG healers that are willing to work with me, I average 75-100k protection. For PUGs, my goal is for my protection+damage to match my team's top DPS. I don't often meet that, but I usually come pretty close. When I'm running with a highly-skilled healer that really knows how to work with a tank, I usually get around half of what the healing my partner gets (so if they get ~200k healing, I'll pull ~100k prot). My protection record is 251k, from a drawn-out stalemate voidstar. It was the kind of match where DPS'ers pull 500-600k. I got over 200k damage too, but I can't remember the exact number. My healer pulled 580-something, if I recall correctly.

I'd actually like to argue that. Tactics could apply better pressure than me with their epic Pulse Cannon, but a Shield Vanguard can actually apply more AoE pressure by quite a bit than Assault. I'd count myself as barely behind Tactics in AoE; my lower DPS is made up for by my higher downtime. Also, it comes down to a matter of playstyle. Even when unsupported, I still place a primary focus on control, debuffs, and taunts before I worry about DPS. Most DPS players focus on DPS first. However, it's incredibly rare for me to be unsupported. Almost all healers recognize the value of a good tank, and they're willing to work with me. With a decent healer, I guard the healer and keep them alive. With a good healer, I guard the lowest-health player and the healer keeps us both alive. Whenever someone attacks a target I'm protecting, they do roughly 46% less damage overall. The original target takes roughly 31% of the damage they would have, and I absorb an additional 22%. That means that the healer has basically half the healing to do, and it's far harder to burst down a target that they're healing. That's ignoring a lot of factors. If the attacker is a juggernaut/marauder/sniper, drop that damage by another 10% (even more if I have Smoke Grenade up). I'm also pulling and rooting and stunning throughout this whole fight, and just generally making it miserable for you to attack my team. (Math) If you honestly think that having a tank is hurting your team, go to the healer forums and ask them. I can almost gaurantee that they'll tell you that tanks make their heals far more effective. You can't have more than two tanks on a good team (because after that you're cutting DPS to minimal benefit), but us PvP tanks do have our place.

I'm a Shield Spec PvP tank, and proud of it. I duo with a really good Scoundrel healer in my guild a lot, and the two of us working together can take a crazy beating. I've had three DPS (two of them were BM+ judging by health totals, one was a bad tanksin) and a healer beat on us for like a minute straight before backup arrived without them managing to kill us. There's nothing like holding off half of the enemy team with only a quarter of your team to convince you that the spec is worth it. Even without my pocket heals, I feel like I contribute a lot to my team. If the healer is willing to work with me, I'll guard them. However, in a PUG I focus on taunts, CC, positioning, and AoE pressure damage. I root and stun people all over the place, and do a lot of constant pressure. My single-target damage isn't all that great, but I can do enough AoE to nullify the output of a single enemy healer. That means that the enemy healer is doing nothing but cancel out most of my damage, but I still get lots of taunts/CC/debuffs off.

Yeah, I'm not so sure you should be taking Stockstrike out of your rotation. It's still a high-damage skill, especially when you factor in the extra ~200 from auto-proc Ion Cell. It's dropped below HiB in priority now (because of the bonus threat on HiB), but it's still up there and I use it pretty much on cooldown. Also, guys, I discovered something awesome! Now that we have another 33% threat, we can actually tank at range now. I ran KP HM with my guild on Saturday, and I tanked Sorno using only skills that have a 30m range. I kept my single-target taunt on rotation (I like to save Sonic Round for emergencies), and then used this priority list: Harpoon Hammer Shot (<9 Ammo) High Impact Bolt Full Auto Sticky Grenade Hammer Shot I led with Harpoon, then did Full Auto -> Hammer Shot, taunted, and never had issues the whole fight. I need to find a fight where it's actually good to tank from range so I can show off my leet skills ^^. Vanguard tanks are the best! I'm going to do a threat parse against an ops dummy and see how much TPS I can pull. I'm betting it was right on the edge of the DPS pulling for the first bit of the fight until taunts start to stack up. Also, I remember reading a post somewhere detailing the different threat mechanics for melee versus ranged. Is that still valid? Can anyone link it?

Okay, our single-target damage was dropped by exactly one thing: the nerf to stockstrike. Nothing else changed. So if people have been seeing a 20% drop in DPS, then that would mean one of three things: Stockstrike made up 80% of their pre-1.3 damage. Stockstrike was nerfed down to 20% of its pre-1.3 damage. Some outside factor (gear changes, different armors on the target, poor rotation management, etc) was affecting the parses. Numbers 1 and 2 are clearly ridiculous. That leaves number 3 as the only logical conclusion. As someone who actually tested on PTS, I'll also mention that for a while Ion Cell was bugged so that it didn't scale with stats, meaning it did far, far less damage than it's supposed to. That could be the cause of those parses. Anyways, I have hard math, whereas you only have a nebulous "other people said".

Well, to be fair, you can augment your recruit gear. I'd strongly recommend you not do that, but you could. Things improve drastically once you get even two or three pieces of battlemaster gear. Until then, focus on objective play. You can be one of the two guys that guards left. You can get guaranteed four medals a match if you focus on defending objectives, and it's pretty easy to get a few more medals. Get a killing blow and involvement in ten kills, and then either medals from taunts or a little spot-healing depending on your class. It shouldn't take long to get a few pieces, and things will get better quickly.

Exactly! Toughness would give anyone the option to drop some of their offense to feel less squishy.

Yes, there are. However, those are all random in nature and only work against certain attacks. It'd be like if you could only pick crit/surge gear. We need a defensive boost that is reliable (always reduces damage by x%, rather than having an x% chance to work), and that works against all attacks. This would give us more gearing options.

Ideally, a gear system should exist to give you two things: progression, and customization. Bioware has nailed progression. There are tons of tiers of gear for you to progress through. However, they left a big gap in their customization. If you're picking gear to do more damage, you have plenty of options. You can go with crit/surge for bursty damage, power for higher sustained, accuracy for reliability, or alacrity for greater speed (making you harder to interrupt). You have a ton of choices for how you want to deal damage. If you stack a ton of power and a healthy chunk of accuracy, your attacks will reliably hit for high damage, although your burst will be weak. If you stack crit and surge to the exclusion of all else, you'll be highly reliant on RNG; sometimes you'll do awesome burst damage, sometimes you'll miss four times in a row. However, if you're picking gear for defenses, you have far fewer options. You can pick defense rate, for highly random defenses against some skills, you can pick shield/absorb for moderately random defenses against some skills, or you can pick endurance to last a few seconds longer. However, we don't have any options that give us reliable, sustained defenses. Only endurance is reliable, and even a huge endurance boost (4k health) means you'll only last for another second or two. We have no option to gear against force/tech damage, and we have no option to gear for reliable defenses. There's a (relatively) easy fix for this. Add a new stat called Toughness. Toughness would be a flat reduction to incoming damage, parallel to armor (like how crit chance from your primary stat is parallel to crit rating). Make it 50% effective against internal/elemental damage (because that should still be heavily armor-penetrating). Adding toughness would give us an option. Armor rating isn't an option. You can't sacrifice damage for more armor. If you added toughness, I could drop my power enhancement for a toughness enhancement. This would give me the ability to choose just the right balance between reliable defenses, spikey defenses, and offense.

I'm going to preface this by saying something really important about PvP tanking. I see lots of PvP tanks that play wrong, so you need to hear this if you're considering it. Your job is not to kill the enemy. That's what damage dealers are for. If you want to be able to take down enemy players, play a DPS (Assault/Tactics). A VG Tank can do well in a 1v1, but it takes a while to kill anything. However, if the enemy is getting heals of any sort, you'll have no chance of taking them down. If you go shield spec, but then spend your time pretending to be a DPS, you're just weighing your team down. Yeah, you won't die very often (you're easy to heal), but you aren't helping your team nearly as much as an actual tank or a DPS player. A good PvP tank's focus is on defending your allies. We have tons of tools for doing this. Your primary tools are guard and taunt. Either use guard on your healer or the current focus target, and taunt whenever anyone targets your healer. However, those are far from our only tools. We also have strong debuffs and lots of CCs. Use your CC frequently, and you can really trip up people attacking vulnerable allies. In between using your defensive abilities, focus on AoE damage. Shield Spec has weak single-target damage, but we can put out a large amount of AoE pressure. You won't get many kills with this, but you'll really support your team by sapping enemy heals. Now, here's a solid PvP tank build (it's what I use): 31/8/2. You'll notice that I get most of the shield upgrades. Most people will tell you that shields are nearly worthless in PvP. However, these are the same people that whine about how OP Snipers and Marauders are. With some decent shield upgrades, you get a massive defensive boost against Snipers, Marauders and Juggernauts, with a lesser bonus against Assassins, Operatives, Mercenaries and Powertechs. Also, this spec works great for PvE. It's only two points away from a full PvE spec (Defensive Measures to Ceramic Plating). For gearing, click the link in my signature and click on the "Wish List" tab. My current gear is pretty bad (I got a lot of DPS gear before I became a tank), but my Wish List is pretty good. Basically, you want to build for really high endurance, as that's our most powerful PvP defensive upgrade. Get a little shield/absorb, but don't stack it extensively. I aimed for 25% crit, and then stacked power and surge. It's really not worth getting accuracy, in my opinion.

Well, if they've spotted me at range and they're hitting me, I basically have three options. I can use Storm to close on them, Harpoon to pull them to me, or LoS and run away. If I don't do one of those three things, I'm looking at a fast death as I run straight at them and die. However, I'll obviously try to close in as much as I can if they haven't spotted me, so I'll have the option of leaping once the fight starts.

It depends on whether you're talking about one mob or several. If Mortar Volley is available and they're grouped close enough, use that. However, if it's on cooldown or you can't get all the mobs within your reticule, then open with Storm. After that, you can either use your two free Explosive Surges immediately, or lead with Pulse Cannon, SS/HiB, or Sticky Grenade. For single targets, I like to lead with Harpoon, followed immediately by a Storm to get up close (so you can position them if needed). While storm is going, use Energy Blast and your taunt. Follow up with Stock Strike and HiB, and you should have no issues holding threat for the rest of the fight.

For PvP, you absolutely need it. For PvE, it's strong but not essential. It beats Sticky Grenade by a much wider margin than the tooltips indicate. It has a higher base damage, and it gets a larger benefit from power than Sticky Grenade does. This means that the more you gear up, the better it will be in comparison to Sticky Grenade. That being said, you can make a pretty strong case either way. It gives you a nice mobile, ranged option for times when you can't be in melee range and have to move around. I believe that skipping it for passive boosts low in Tactics and Shield will probably give you slightly more DPS, but I doubt we're talking about a change of more than 3%. It's not going to be making any huge differences either way.