I have mixed feelings about this. It gives us a ton more AoE damage (which is great!). However, our single-target damage while using Ion Cell has been horribly cut. Stockstrike is down from +30% Critical chance and damage to +16% crit chance. These things will make me much happier if they fix the damage on Ion Cell. Having HiB do ~700 energy to four targets will be great, but the 250 Ion Cell currently does will be lackluster at best. I do like having free Explosive Surges. That will really help with ammo management, and we can keep up a pretty awesome stream of AoE now. This is clearly a great thing for PvE. When tanking PvE, your single-target damage isn't nearly as important as your ability to hold aggro, and our threat generation (especially AoE) has skyrocketed. I'm already drooling at the huge AoE we'll get, especially with an initial rotation. Having a big part of our AoE rotation based on our leap is a bit clunky, though. For PvP, I'm unsure about how I feel. On the one hand, our single-target damage, especially burst, is taking a pretty big hit. 20-25% of our single-target damage (by my parses) comes from Stockstrike, which has lost 14% crit chance and 30% crit multiplier. However, our AoE damage has gone up a lot (especially because I'm Storming all over the place in PvP). So we have even less single-target damage, but we're a significantly stronger pressure DPS. I guess this is appropriate for a support role. We'll have to see how this actually plays. Assault is unchanged. Tactics is (potentially) getting shafted pretty hard. Currently, the only thing that made up for Pulse Generator's slow being broken was that it boosts other AoE skills. This isn't the best-case scenario, but it was enough of a tradeoff that Tactics was still strong. If they're getting rid of the positive glitch, but not fixing the slow, then Tactics is going to be hurting.

Alrighty, first off, I fixed your link for you. I don't know what you were linking, but it doesn't work. Had a bunch of junk in it. Second, that's a pretty standard Tactics Build. Personally, I think a point out of Brutal Impact into Steely Resolve will give you more bang for your buck, but that's a personal choice (and completely up to you). Looks good.

Honestly, I'd say to figure out what you want to play at endgame, and level as that spec. Every spec in this game is decent for leveling and can go at roughly the same speed. Tanks kill slower, but have less downtime. Levelling as your intended endgame spec will give you a huge advantage over people who are one spec for 11-49, and then swap when they hit 50. Rotations should mostly be muscle memory if you want to be a skilled player. You should be devoting most of your efforts to positioning and teamwork, not keeping your ammo up. With some practice with a spec, you barely have to think about that part. Leveling up as that spec will make things much better for you at 50. You'll already have tons of practice, and you'll barely have to think about the basics at all.

Thank you! Adding more bugs like this is all I want. The type of people who freak out about seams or misplaced rocks or other tiny things like that are impossible to please. It's completely understandable to keep stuff like that out. But the big bugs that affect class gameplay are definitely worth putting in, because a lot of people get legitimately upset about those. Thanks for a great, positive interaction with the Bioware team. I'm feeling much happier with you guys now ^^

Hey Allison! First off, thanks for the response. It's always great when you guys take the time to interface with our community. Official posts make me happy. Would you mind explaining why you don't put issues like this on the list? It seems like it'd be a pretty quick step. At some point in the process of fixing a bug, you guys reach a point where you've confirmed that there's a bug (it's not just rumors/misunderstanding), and the dev(s) doing the fix could shoot a quick email to Amber Green with a bug description. She could just copy-and-paste straight into the list. This seems (to me) like something that gives you a great return of positive community vibes with very little time investment. A few minutes of time from the dev to type up the issue, a minute from Amber to copy/paste into the list, and you have lots of irate players who are suddenly much happier. It's very little effort, and it would placate a lot of fans. There is something really comforting about seeing our issues acknowledged. Nonetheless, thanks for taking the time to respond. I also really appreciate the acknowledgement on our slow issue, and news that a fix is in the works is wonderful! Just something to think about. -Philosomanic

Then they should fix the **** **** **** tooltip. Balancing is something I understand. It sucks to have your class balanced down, but it sometimes has to happen and it's overall good for the game. If they dropped the tooltip to display the damage it's actually doing, then I'd be happy. After all, I'm already doing plenty of damage; I'm typically in the top 25% of a warzone and I don't even care about damage (priority is objectives -> guard -> taunts -> debuffs -> CC/pulls -> DPS). I could see a case for the actual tooltip value being too high. However, as things stand right now, it's broken.

Well, new community team has done... absolutely nothing about this. Additionally, I've found a second large bug with my class. The stance for one of our trees has a proc chance for 750 energy damage, but it's currently doing 1/3 of that. The stance proc is currently doing ~60 DPS against an ops dummy for me, which means I'm losing 120 DPS (huge!) on ops bosses. Considering that my current DPS is just under 800 (PvP-geared tank), that's a large drop. When I posted about it on the Vanguard Forums, others assured me this bug has been around since launch, with no attention.

The degree of this DPS loss is driving me insane. For that parse I linked, Ion Cell is doing 69 DPS. I'm doing a total of 870 DPS. If Ion Cell was doing 3x as much damage (i.e. the tootlip value), that'd give me an extra 138 DPS, or 15.9%. That's a huge boost, especially for a tank spec!

Actually, full Auto is incredibly ammo-efficient. It costs 2 ammo, and takes 3s to channel. You regenerate 1.8 ammo over three seconds (assuming you're at max regen rate), meaning it's basically free. But yes, Explosive round should be used for the rate cap interrupt only, and nothing else.

Oh, sorry, forgot to link it. Parse HERE. That's against the lvl 10 combat dummy on the Gav Daragon. It has tiny armor against my attacks (under 10%). I got similar results (although mitigated more) against all the other dummies, so it's not a glitch on just the one.

I'm sorry, but it's actually you that's having a stupid moment. Ion Cell has a proc for straight damage. The talent "Ion Overload" adds a DoT component. For reference, here are screenshots of the tooltips: Ion Cell Ion Overload So, for me, it SHOULD do 716 damage and THEN 284 over 9 seconds. As far as I can tell, the DoT portion is working correctly. For reference, here's a parse showing it hit for roughly 1/3 of what it's supposed to. That parse was with a power generator (~760 on the Ion Cell tooltip), and against the lvl 10 training dummy, which should have next to no armor. It's not just a glitch on that dummy, either. I've tried it on other targets.

I was messing around on a training dummy yesterday practicing the rotation for Iron Fist (struggling a bit with ammo management). I noticed that Ion Cell was doing far less damage than it should. I'm going to be doing some better testing when I get home from work today, but here's roughly what I found. Against the level 10 training dummy on the Gav Daragon (so armor would be really low), I tested several weapon damage attacks. Full Auto was doing 80-90% of what it was supposed to, and Gut's first hit was also doing 80-90%. I'll nail down the exact armor value later, but it was somewhere slightly over 10% for me. Ion Cell was doing 243 damage. My tooltip has somewhere around 750 energy damage as the number it should be doing. Based on findings with the other skills, I would expect it to be doing over 600 damage. This is a huge DPS drop. Stock Strike (which I use on cooldown) always triggers Ion Cell. Also, Hammer Shot (which I use almost every other skill) has a 2/3 chance to trigger it. This means that over a period of 9s, I'm losing out on nearly 1k energy damage from Ion Cell procs. That's a DPS loss of 80+ (factoring in 25% armor). This is really starting to upset me. That's two vanguard trees that have large bugs, and (as of 6/1) neither of them are even acknowledged by BioWare. It's not that they're working on a fix and I'm impatient, it's that they aren't even on the list of "high-priority in in-game issues" that "will affect the player experience". It's clearly affecting our experience, so... I guess it's not high-priority?

You'd want to get some skills first, but sure.

Actually, I'm going back to tank spec. Once I swapped back to Assault, I realized the difference between them wasn't as big as I thought. Assault has more DPS, no one's arguing that. However, I think a large part of the difference was in using a shield generator and losing all the tech damage, and that my gear is far too accuracy-heavy. I'm going to be using a personal riff on the Iron Fist spec (21/17/1) that's designed for use with a power generator. I'm also going to be picking up Combat Tech gear and remodding what I have. Hopefully, the CT 4-set and more power-centric gear will make up a good part of that gap. Even with the shield generator and a shield-heavy spec, I was surprised at the DPS difference. Assault had more, but it wasn't as much as I'd thought it would have. The only time I noticed huge differences was at 30m (but Storm fixes that) and compressed burst. I'm willing to give up compressed burst for the survivability and support/utility. Once you use Storm, it's hard to go back.

One thing you might want to mention. Shadows actually have a base Defense rate of 10%, not 5%. I'm not sure if any other classes have a different base value.

No you don't. Assault and Tactics Vanguards are crippled if they're using Ion Cell, and without Ion Cell they can't use Guard. However, you clearly stated that "any vanguard regardless of spec can guard". Okay, I'm not going to get into the argument of who could DPS better. It'd be pretty close. However, a tank who is doing their job should out-DPS a healer by a long-shot. A healer doing their job shouldn't be doing any damage at all. They should be constantly pumping out heals. Maybe you can throw out a hammer shot or two if your entire group is over 90%, but that's it. A tank's job is to guard, taunt, and debuff foremost. Guard is set-and-forget, taunts are free and off GCD, and debuffing actually involves attacking. I spend the rest of my time as a tank damaging the people who are hitting my healers. So in an actual warzone, any healer who does more damage than their tank is a horrible healer. Well, yeah, I hope so. Seeing as I have no healing skills whatsoever and healing is your only job. I might as well point out that I'll easily get more protection than you. While tanking, I average 100-150k protection per full match, and I'm still learning. Are you saying you're pulling well over a million heals in an average match? I'd like to see a screenshot of that. Because tanks prevent spike kills, make healing focus-targets easier, and keep the healers alive. As an Assault Vanguard, my self-assigned role was taking down enemy support. I could harpoon and burst down an unguarded healer with ease. Even if you have multiple healers, a tank allows you to heal others. It only takes one good DPS to lock you into "self-heal or die" mode. With a good tank, that person will be doing 31% of the damage to you, and they'll be frequently rooted, pulled, and controlled to make it harder to hit you. This means you can spend far less time self-healing and more time helping your team. A healer who does nothing but heal themselves is worthless to the team. Once again, 31%. That's less than a third of the damage. Add roots, pulls, and CC, and they're going to be far less effective at locking you down. Locking down and killing healers was my job before I started tanking, and I know how effective a good tank is. I have a level 50 Shadow as well. It was my first character. The difference in overall effectiveness is nill. Shadow Tank DPS eats through force and is incredibly hard to sustain. My Vanguard only has to use an occasional Hammer Shot and I'm good. My Vanguard loses out on the coolness of stealth and the Shadow's self-healing, but gains a leap and far better DPS at 30m. Vanguards also have far better AoE damage and an AoE pull, although Shadows have better AoE debuffs. The reason people think Shadows are better is because their defenses are largely reliant on self-healing. This makes them incredibly powerful when taking small amounts of damage; they can self-heal through it all. However, self-healing doesn't scale. So if they're taking damage from multiple characters, that self-healing is far weaker than a Vanguard/Guardian's higher passive defenses. But they're better at a 1v1.

Yeah, I have no issues with Elara healing. I keep my companion bar showing. Now that we have UI customization, It's at 80% scale and it's 2 rows of 6 skills, next to the companion portrait. As far as I can tell, while in healing stance she uses every healing skill on cooldown. I have Carbonized Stream turned off (and manually keybound), but I leave everything else on. What gear do you have on your companions? The important numbers are Tech Bonus Damage, Crit Chance, and Crit Multiplier. Is there a big difference between them?

You should definitely hold onto Mortar Volley and Pulse Cannon. They're incredibly powerful AoE. Even if you lose some channel, they can do massive damage if they hit even two targets. Especially in PvE, these are incredibly useful. Mortar Volley knocks down standard/weak enemies, so if you start it at a distance they won't even get close enough to hit the channel. You can use Pulse Cannon after Neural Surge for an AoE they can't escape. Especially for solo PvE (leveling by questing) or node defense in warzones, you should use these frequently. Sticky Grenade -> MV/PC will get any group of normal mobs to a sliver of health. Here are the skills that you could drop. Full Auto: If you're Assault, keep this skill. For Tactics/Shield, it's situationally useful at best. It's one of our strongest 30m ranged skills. It does strong damage and is nearly ammo-free (costs 2, regenerates 1.8 while channeling). Assault has high enough damage at 30m range that it's sometimes useful to stay at 30m, making this a strong skill. However, Tactics and Shield should be closing to melee, so they'll rarely want to stand still and channel this skill. Explosive Round: This skill is of minimal use, if any. I only use it every once in a while to stop a cap. You may want to keep it in a sup-prime spot on your quickbars. However, definitely don't bother buying upgrades for it. It costs far, far too much ammo to be worth the small damage. I've got this on my lowest-priority quickbar (along with vehicles, pets, quick travel, and sparkle powder), and I use it maybe once a week. Blitz: Utterly useless for PvP, seeing as you can't use it at all on players. If you PvE, this is occasionally useful for taking out trash mobs. However, you can't use it on anything strong. I never remember to use it and I'm primarily PvP, so I never even bought this. Explosive Surge: This is also one that's highly situational. If you have points in Static Field, it's sometimes useful to apply the debuff to everyone around you. Likewise, if a Mortar Volley/Pulse Cannon leaves a group of trash mobs at a sliver of health, I'll spam this once or twice to finish them off. In PvP, it's good for stopping a cap in a hurry because you don't have to target an enemy. However, in terms of damage, it's not worth it for the high ammo cost. The ammo for one use of Explosive Surge takes five seconds to regenerate. Stealth Scan: If you PvP, keep this skill. However, it's almost entirely worthless for PvE. I've heard that you can use it to reveal a few raid bosses that vanish, but other than that there's no real use for it. If you don't PvP, you can safely take this off your bars.

Okay, I was too tired to deal with this last night, when I told you you don't know anything. I'm going to refute this a little more systematically now. First off, only builds that are meant for Ion Cell can use guard. If an Assault Vanguard uses Ion Cell, their DPS will be crushed. That's a 300+ DoT every 2s that they lose, HiB reset gone, and their only source of ammo regen. I'd be willing to bet that a full tank spec can out-DPS an Assault Vanguard using Ion Cell. Second, you shouldn't really expect a tank (or any support role) to beat a DPS. DPS are meant to be much stronger solo, making them the kings of 1v1s. However, a tank, a healer, and two DPS will destroy four DPS players. So just because you as DPS could take down a tank doesn't mean tanks are worthless. After all, when I'm playing Assault I can just melt Commando/Mercenary healers. That doesn't mean you're worthless; it just means that a support player without allies to support is weaker. Third, tanking support is incredibly powerful, especially when combined with healing. Let's go through how it works: Let's say an enemy does an attack that would deal 1,000 damage. This attack would hit a player with 25% armor (good average for a non-tank) for 750 damage. Now, let's throw a tank into the mix: The tank lowers the additional attack to 960 (static field), then to 672 (taunt). When that attack hits, it's split 50/50 between the tank and the target. The target takes 336. Their armor (with the 5% from guard) lowers that to 235 damage. The tank takes 336. Their armor (which we'll guess at 50%) lowers that to 168 damage. So, rather than the focus target taking 750 damage like they should have, they only take 235 damage. That attack deals a total of 403 damage to the team, rather than the 750 it would have done. That's a 46% decrease in damage done. That is so much easier to heal. That makes a focus target nigh impossible to burst down. And if you're the healer and the guard is on you, you'll be able to keep your team alive rather than frantically spamming self-heals. A lone healer is easy prey. Ask any real healer, and they'll tell you that having a good tank makes them far better at their job.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Go away.

Yeah, I love playing support characters. In my first MMO, Lord of the Rings Online, I played a Captain. Captains are the ultimate support class. You're melee-centric and heavily armored, with decent DPS. However, you also have incredibly powerful buffs and decent healing, with some epic support cooldowns. Basically the whole point of a Captain is to rush over to a dying ally, hit them with enough healing to keep them alive, buff up their defenses, and then thrash the morons attacking them with your two-hand sword. It was a decent soloing class at best, but had insane support capability. The difference I found between my Captain and a PvP tank in this game is how you play with bad players. As a Captain, I'd just hit the bad players with defensive buffs and let them be cannon fodder for the good ones. They'd get my AoE heals, but that's it. As a tank in this game, guarding a bad player causes you to die so much faster than you would if you just ignore them. Your ability to play a tank in a way that's fun and effective is heavily reliant on having a good team to protect. If you guard someone who runs into danger, you die. If you guard a healer who ignores you, you die. The type of player who charges into stuff that would kill you in 4s takes a few more seconds to die with you guarding them, and you die too. One good change this has brought, though. I now lean heavily towards voting tanks MVP. Healers get a lot of recognition by doing their job. You see big shiny green numbers, and you know that Bob healed you. However, when Fred is tanking for you, you just mysteriously take less damage. If I see anyone with over 100k protection, they automatically get my MVP (unless someone managed to Rambo a node 3v1 and hold it solo for two minutes, or something equally epic). Now that I've experienced tanking, I'm going to be sure to thank the people who stick with it.

Yeah, the golden rule of Ammo management is to never drop below 8 ammo. If Recharge Cells is available, you can allow yourself to drop down if you need burst. Once you hit 2 or 3 ammo, use Recharge Cells -> Hammer Shot -> Hammer Shot to get back up to 8+ ammo. However, without Recharge Cells, dropping below 8 ammo will significantly hurt your DPS. For PvE, this is a golden rule that should almost never be broken. For PvP, there are occasional exceptions. If you're in a v1 with both of you at 30% health, don't use Hammer Shots to conserve ammo. Blast that ****er with everything you have, and worry about regenerating later. You shouldn't burn ammo willy-nilly, but it's okay to get low if you're smart about it. You just have to be aware of the fact that dropping to 2 ammo to kill one enemy means you'll be an incredibly easy kill if another enemy can attack you before you regenerate. It's almost always best just to stay above 8 and not have to worry about that.

This. All they have to do is say "We're working on it", and I'll calm down.

Well, there's been a new update to the known issues thread since this post, and still no acknowledgement of the PG bug I brought up. I'd like to think the devs keep up with the community and are aware of these issues, but I'm really starting to doubt. Anyone else know of class mechanic bugs that aren't there?

A guildmate of mine hit lvl 50 yesterday, and she was really having a tough time. She was really frustrated with how easy she was to kill in mostly recruit gear. As a really good Scoundrel healer, she was targeted by seemingly every enemy player. I've been itching to try tank spec out for a while, so I thought this was a good time. I respecced to tank spec and focused on keeping her alive. This was my setup. I mostly kept my DPS gear, but I replaced my recruit eliminator gear with recruit supercommando gear. I figured that dropping from BM Eliminator to Recruit Supercommando would barely help my defenses (less armor, less expertise), and would really hurt my damage. The Good Times After I got the hang of my new rotation, role, and skillset, I started to really enjoy being a PvP tank. The healer I was playing with did a great job. The two of us were insanely hard to kill, and we did tons of good for the team. There were several matches where my healer only died once the entire match, and I was preventing over 100k damage per match. Playing a tank with a good healer was a blast. And my guildie wasn't dying after casting her third heal, so she was having a great time too. I really felt like I was making a huge difference to my team. I kept my healer alive, and she kept our team alive. As Assault, my contribution was much less team-based. I focused on isolating and taking down enemy support players. It was really fun, and I'm really good at it, but the element of teamwork was missing. I know I was filling an important role, but I was usually separated from my team. As a tank, I was much closer to my team and had much more interaction with them. It was also nice getting recognized a bit more. When someone is being attacked by two enemies, and you Storm in, AoE stun, guard them, taunt the enemies, and the two of you win, they notice you. That means thanks and MVP votes, which are both great. I've enjoyed playing a support character in other games (I was a Captain in LOTRO), and I really enjoyed being more support-oriented in this one. The Bad Times Things were going great. After four or five matches, my guildmates had to go. I got to experience playing bad PUGs as a tank. I started out my first match by finding out who was healing, and guarding them. However, this healer completely ignored me. I died over and over struggling to keep them alive, and barely got any heals. I even let them know I was guarding them, and still got nothing. Rather than feeling like half of a dynamic duo of awesome, I felt like cannon fodder. I thought this was just one bad player, so I kept going. A few of the healers were good at working with me, but most were not good at working with a tank. They'd run all over the map like a recently-beheaded chicken, and I wouldn't notice. I'd end up chasing after them desparately trying to keep them alive. Some healers were good, but a surprisingly large portion of them weren't able to work with a tank. I also tried guarding key DPS players. My theory was that by guarding them, we should win any 2v2. He'd have the defenses of a tank, but still keep the huge DPS of a damage-dealer. This occasionally worked, but a lot of DPSers would see the blue shield and immediately charge into the fray. Without strong heals, this meant that both of us would die pretty quickly. Once again, I felt like cannon fodder. My role with bad players seemed to be to sacrifice my health pool in a futile attempt to keep them alive. I really missed the solo capability of playing Assault. As an Assault Vanguard, it didn't matter how good or bad my team was. Good tanking and heals were helpful, but not required. I focused on eliminating enemy support, and that was something I can do solo. As a tank, my ability to solo was crippled. My DPS and especially burst were quite a bit lower, so taking down enemy support was out of the question. The best I could do was harass. I could win a 1v1 against most players, but it took much longer and wasn't as natural as Assault was. I really missed the time-burst and range flexibility of Assault. Rather than being slightly weaker at 30m, I was crippled at range and had no choice but to close to melee. Sure, Storm makes that easy, but I really enjoyed being a semi-ranged player. I originally started my Vanguard because I wanted a melee/range hybrid. Assault's rotation and play style fits me perfectly, and feels natural and smooth. Even after I got used to it, Shield spec just felt clunky and inflexible. In the end, I specced back to Assault. Playing a tank was fun, but I didn't like being reliant on a good team to have fun. As Assault, I need a good team to win but I can have fun on my own. Assault is more flexible and the rotation/style fits me better. Playing a tank was a nice experience, and I'll probably give it another try later, but I can really only enjoy tanking if I have guaranteed good teams with every match. Playing with a bad team was far more miserable than it was as an Assault Vanguard.