2/33/11 can be fun for PVP, though it's weaker than a full spec in most situations. I'm a huge fan of Zealous Leap, especially in Huttball and in combating Snipers. Momentum and Swift Slash also translate well with Vig's core talents. That being said, Zen Strike is the cornerstone to Vigilance and you'd be drastically affecting an already poor RNG situation by skipping Plasma Brand. You'd also be forced to miss a couple talent choices in Vig that affect important things like focus generation, accuracy, or dots. There is absolutely no viable way to make a hybrid spec with Focus as the primary tree whatsoever.

Defense Guardian PVP has been dead since launch.

I'm Focus and well geared. Nobody is happy with 6k Sweep crits. People think it's OP, but don't consider health pools in War Hero gear. We have no Unremitting, so we don't make people absolutely abhor us in Huttball, even with Guardian Leap. It can be clunky at times. All the focus on Slash is ridiculous and makes me scoff at the decision to remove Zephyr. I still don't use Slash at all... ever. Focus Sentinels do our job better, minus the taunts.... it's aggravating.

If it's specifically designed to 1v1 healers, then take Warding Call out of the question. The other two will win by far. If you're thinking more realistically, taking on a healer isn't 1v1 very often. If you're looking for straight out DPS, not thinking of Guard or tanking outside of taunts during matches, then it's your preference between Plasma Brand and Zealous Leap. Both have their pros and their cons. Ultimately it's your decision. I'd choose Zealous Leap, myself. Plasma Brand burns through armor.... however the only healer that benefits from any degree of armor is Mercenary/Commando. It's also considered a Force Attack and thus gets no benefit from Single Saber Mastery. Zealous Leap gives a third leap and comes with all benefits, sans the 30m range. It's also 3 focus. Losing Plasma Brand, allows you to drop Sunder Throw, giving you 3 spare talent points. The hard part is that getting to Zealous Leap, you can only afford two points into Defense. This makes you give you up Momentum... or Victory Rush, if Momentum's that important to you. Insight and Swelling Winds will make your free Force Sweeps better and faster. There are plenty of other posts in this thread explaining the viability of Plasma Brand. Picking up Warding Call will make you the best ball carrier in the game for Huttball. But you'll have to be prepared to act like a tank in the other three warzones. Else you won't be getting the full benefit from your spec.

I've never been a fan, myself. Though, to be truthful, I've always been a fan of Hybrid tank over pure DPS Vig for PVP. 5 Focus required for an attack that doesn't hit hard at all. The only way to get the full benefit from that five focus is to let the dot tick through its duration. No talents augment PB, aside from its CD. The talents that make it augment other attacks are shared with Overhead Smash, which has the same CD as PB. Vig is a melee DPS spec and without augmenting talents (like Blade Storm has), PB just doesn't fit in with the spec. Really, if Blade Rush and Zen Strike didn't include OHS, then Plasma Brand would be necessary but still bad. In my experience playing Vig and Hybrid throughout 1.2, I seemed to have more Zen Strike procs without Plasma Brand than I did with it. A guildy who respecs very often had the same experience. The only real pro regarding PB is that it's unmitigated by armor. Personally, I'd take Zealous Leap over Plasma Brand. At least SSM affects it in Shien Form and it allows you to leap to Snipers in cover.

It's three specs that are all very good in a PVP environment, which cannot be said for the Guardian. One of the Guardian's trees has been garbage since the class was programmed. DPS Vig wasn't viable until 1.2; just before 1.2, PVP Guardians were pigeon-holed into Focus or Hyrbid tank. Now, DPS Vig is catching up (but still behind), Hyrbid Tank isn't as good (but still very viable), and Defense is even worse than it was. Compare that three very, very, very good trees that all DPS like crazy and are not broken in the least in the Sentinel. (And yeah, Combat was bugged and broken pre-1.2, but not garbage) Oh yeah, and they have 3 AC-wide defensive CDs to the Guardian's 1. Transcendence and Inspiration easily make up for tanking mechanics and friendly leap, imo, but that's subjective. However, nothing beats a Guardian in Huttball. Especially if said Guardian has Unremitting.

The Strength coefficient is .2, not .21. Either way, the bonus damage increase is still insignificant. Beside that, if you get Perseverance, the difference is even smaller. We have more than enough power from mods. Substituting main stat, which isn't subject to diminishing returns for bonus damage (Power isn't either), for a secondary stat is silly. It's best to go strength for augments.

Both the Vigilance and Focus trees can be fun in their own right. Vigilance is a little better at single-target DPS, it's inherently more "tanky" than Focus, and it has better focus management. It won't do near the DPS numbers of Focus in PVP, due to big sweep crits. Unremitting is one of the best talents in the game, accessible at 12 points into the Vigilance tree. If you're just wanting DPS numbers, go Focus.

Yeah, it was a buff for the long term. 1.2 also came with Expertise redesign, where DPS across the board became glass. Long fights aren't nearly as frequent as they were pre-1.2, these days. So for the short term, it was a hard hit. But the worst part came that it also affected any force ability's cooldown. That's Sweep, Stasis (by 13!!!!!! seconds), Blade Storm, Exhaustion, and Force Push that all became that much less accessible. Focused Defense, which is a garbage PVE CD unless you spec Vig (though it's still mediocre as Vig), didn't answer the survivability problem that they said they were addressing. I understand there were a few neat new things they did to help our QoL, but I can't possibly think that it was a buff in any way. All things considered, with the gear that's available now, Focus would be way OP if they didn't nerf Focus.

That's cool man. We've discussed it to death. Thread's good to go.

That's not a buff. They made it more manageable, but made the burst a little further apart. Beside that, we lost 10% in Sweep damage from talents, lots 3-13 seconds increases in CDs other than Sweep, and had shit talents replace the ones that were moved out of the tree or cut. Though, I suppose the Inner Focus change makes up for the Zephyrean Slash and Through Peace garbage.

Exhaustion and Master Strike contribute significantly more to our DPS now than they did before all this extra bonus damage and the change to Master Focus was added in 1.3. A couple parses will show it. Yeah, all that power is great, but Vigilance revolves around melee DPS. Force attacks have more crit built into it (an additional one inherently and Willpower), especially in the Focus tree where you have an additional 6% from a tier 1 talent. You can get away with stacking power in Focus because of it, since Blade Storm and Exhaustion don't pull from the melee crit chance. It's a combination of the crit and the accuracy. Melee requires more than Force on both counts. Nah, it's pretty easily attainable in War Hero. Remember, mods come crit/acc-power/acc and crit/surge-power/surge. If you've got all might augs, that's another 1.76% to crit. To have to be clever with mods swapping and you'll be able to fit reasonable amounts of Power in there. Just remember that Surge raises drastically in diminishing returns beyond 75%, so balancing the Accuracy between Power and Crit will be easy. It'll be easy for you to replace all the extra surge you have into Accuracy.

Guardians are fine. The only part of Guardian that hasn't been fine is the Defense tree. I'm not QQing and know the game well enough. Doesn't keep me from being realistic about this particular dueling scenario. Sent's just got the edge in this battle.

No, you wouldn't get a bigger bonus. It's only a difference of about 4 bonus damage after all 14 augment slots, but Power gives you more even with the strength talent. The crit benefit from 14 slots amounts to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.76% crit from Strength. So it'd be a safe bet to forgo that 4 bonus damage for the extra dollar and three quarters crit.

In other words, there's one decent Sentinel on your server. We've said it all over that most Sents are garbage.