Why the Vigilance Spec is awesome and how to make it work for you!

[RDeanOU]

well shien doesnt had that much more damage to tell the truth compared to survivability (im testing it right now). It is mostly the other talents in the tree like overhead slash etc.

 

Soresu :

 

reducing all damage taken by 6%

increasing armor rating by 60%

increasing threat generation by 50%

increases shield chance by 15%

taking damage builds 1 rage

but all Assault abilities generate 1 less rage

This effect cannot occur more than once every 6 seconds

 

Shien :

 

increasing all damage dealt by 6%

All attacks that cost focus will refund 1 focus when used

taking damage generates 1 focus

this effect cannot occur more than once every 6 seconds.

+talent 6% more

 

So one you are less squishy , the otehr you do 12% more damage + generating focus points way faster, meaning you spam more attack.

 

The point is, to help your friend healer, you will guard them no? If you guard them, you share 50% of the damage they take. So lets take a regular WZ crit of 2k. You take 1k he take 1k. When there is 4 people attacking him, your life will drop. If you are in shien form, first , you wont be able to guard him since you need to be soresu. So your friend will die really fast. If you are in soresu and guard him, with talent like Blade baricade , guard stance, warding call, saber ward, guardian leap etc. you can prevent ALOT of damage on you and on your friend becuase the damage you take go through your mitigation.

 

Shield might not be that good but flat decrease in damage of those talent are god sent to survival. So the longer your healer survive, the longer you will too. Because if 3 people jump on your healer while you are in dps stance , he will die. If they jump on him while you are in tanking stance guarding him, there is a greater chance of survival.

 

You cannot Guard unless you are in Soresu form. If you are using Shien form you will help the healer by killing what is beating on him more quickly.

[XV-Dragon]

Could some tell me if this is a good build for me to follow?

 

http://db.darthhater.com/skill_calc/jedi_knight/guardian/#::f9e2fef26e3fe2fede4fe7

 

I'm not nomrally a PVP person but to help my guild later on since we trying to balance both aspects of PVE and PVP in a RP server

[GarfieldJL]

Could some tell me if this is a good build for me to follow?

 

http://db.darthhater.com/skill_calc/jedi_knight/guardian/#::f9e2fef26e3fe2fede4fe7

 

I'm not nomrally a PVP person but to help my guild later on since we trying to balance both aspects of PVE and PVP in a RP server

 

It probably would work, just remember that slash is actually a skill that you use for your set up.

 

Another option would be switch those points to second wind which would add to survival.

 

However, having the huge crit boost for slash makes slash a useful attack.

[Naethion]

I like Vigilance... reminds me of Arms spec... I think making a class like this work well comes down to your gear.

 

Like all warrior type class your damage is really gear dependent

 

EDIT: in my opinion for Warrior classes its:

 

25% Mobility 30% Gear 50% Skill

Edited February 20, 2012 by Naethion

[GarfieldJL]

I like Vigilance... reminds me of Arms spec... I think making a class like this work well comes down to your gear.

 

Like all warrior type class your damage is really gear dependent

 

I don't think Vigilence is quite as dependent as Focus when it comes to gear spec in the damage department. Which is good cause you have to pay a lot of attention to survivability.

[Naethion]

I don't think Vigilence is quite as dependent as Focus when it comes to gear spec in the damage department. Which is good cause you have to pay a lot of attention to survivability.

 

Yeah, I just added a little edit to my Original post. I say its gear dependent because thats all I have ever had to really deal with. If I can be good with the class thats already half the battle. now comes the gearing up so you can really break someone in half.

[Ethias]

I don't think Vigilence is quite as dependent as Focus when it comes to gear spec in the damage department. Which is good cause you have to pay a lot of attention to survivability.

 

In my opinion, Vig is FAR more gear-reliant to perform well (unless you are talking about vig/def or something). A vig with poor gear is basically unable to pressure anyone significantly without a great, whereas a vig with good gear is able to drop people solo pretty quickly. Focus, on the other hand, still puts out large damage numbers even in poor gear (I had 5k crits without biochem in centurion-level gear as Focus pre-surge nerf), and still scales extremely well.

 

Vig's survival starts out better than Focus', but it's damage is lower. I think they come closer together in terms of survival and damage the better the gear, though Vig always has a lead on Focus in the survivability department, and Focus always had a slight lead in the damage department, imo. Neither "lead" is so large as to make the other spec not fun to play or bad in warzones right now, though.

[Marqhill]

For the most part I'm going to have to pretty much agree with Ethias on this one. I not only had to completely regear for DPS instead of tanking but I also had to modify some of my gear for the specific type of DPS that I'm looking to do in Vigilance. With Focus you can absolutely get away with just taking the regular stats from the PvP gear and to an extent you can with Vigilance as well. However, my performance increased significantly when I started buy other pieces of PvP gear and pulling the mods out so that I could stack Accuracy and Power. Those are the stats that have worked best for me. They work much better than Crit and Surge in my opinion.

[Wrathoran]

ive been trying vigilance + defense a little bit tonight. Mind you, my JK is just 30 so all my point are in vigilance for the moment.

 

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#500ZhGMMrhzz.1

 

Im in soresu and with a shield. Of course since i dont have the talent to increase the point generation of sunder, it is harder. I get starved alot on focus generation in pvp at lvl 30 being vigi/def but i can top the medals and still top the chart in different aspect (sometime dps). As a pure vigi (at 30 too with shien) i was topping the meter but rarely the medals. Altought i was good a making passes in huttball , every time i carried the ball i was torn in half in a sec. With Vigi/def i can score point or defend door easily.

 

The damage in term of number seem the same or almost. I was critting for 2.3k on overhead full vigi/shien and im critting for 2.1k as Vigi/def. BUT my output of dps is lower suffering from focus point generation. So i hit almost the same but i dont hit that often.

 

Its funner then full vigi at the moment because i feel i can weight the balance win or lose in my team. I can distract 3 people for a while , staying alive longer or i can guard a door and still kill the oponent or give him a rough day (him escaping) in 1v1.

 

Destroying healer though is almost impossible even with all the CC , im lacking enough focus to really make the kill happen BUT i can pressure it.

[RDeanOU]

ive been trying vigilance + defense a little bit tonight. Mind you, my JK is just 30 so all my point are in vigilance for the moment.

 

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#500ZhGMMrhzz.1

 

Im in soresu and with a shield. Of course since i dont have the talent to increase the point generation of sunder, it is harder. I get starved alot on focus generation in pvp at lvl 30 being vigi/def but i can top the medals and still top the chart in different aspect (sometime dps). As a pure vigi (at 30 too with shien) i was topping the meter but rarely the medals. Altought i was good a making passes in huttball , every time i carried the ball i was torn in half in a sec. With Vigi/def i can score point or defend door easily.

 

The damage in term of number seem the same or almost. I was critting for 2.3k on overhead full vigi/shien and im critting for 2.1k as Vigi/def. BUT my output of dps is lower suffering from focus point generation. So i hit almost the same but i dont hit that often.

 

Its funner then full vigi at the moment because i feel i can weight the balance win or lose in my team. I can distract 3 people for a while , staying alive longer or i can guard a door and still kill the oponent or give him a rough day (him escaping) in 1v1.

 

Destroying healer though is almost impossible even with all the CC , im lacking enough focus to really make the kill happen BUT i can pressure it.

 

If I were leveling and wanted to use the Vig/Def hybrid I would take all of the points in Defense that I was going to take first before I started putting points in Vigilance. This is because there are things at the bottom of the defense tree that you simply can't live without if you are using Soresu form (Victory Rush, Guard Stance, Lunge, etc.). Once you took those skills you would then move over to the Vigilance Tree. So at 30 you would be 14 points into Def and only 7 into Vigilance. Your build would look like this:

 

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#500dMG0uZhMM.1

 

The Vig/Def hybrid is a little focus starved and without Victory Rush I just don't know how you would be able to make it work.

 

Of course I'm not sure I would bother with a hybrid build until high level anyway. The real strength of the hybrid is combining the higher up talents of Vigilance (Commanding Awe, Overhead Slash, Force Rush, Protector, etc.) with the advantages that the lower level talents of the defense tree give you in Soresu.

 

Without those talents in defense you aren't a hybrid. You are just a Vigilance spec using Soresu form.

[Wrathoran]

yes i am focus starved, i need to use the cd for focus point as soon as it is up. It is not "THAT" bad but still enough to be a concern.

 

Well i do like to have overhead slash, speed the questing by X2, since i get the beating, point are less hard to generate

 

edit: even with the focus point problem, i go from 4-5 medals to 8-9. I scored 4x time with huttball with relative ease. Compared to shien vigi(with focus) i could only walk a little bit with the ball before getting ripped to shred. Since def medal are easy to get, its like 2 each time and protecting healer really help having a succesful WZ.

 

but my 2 next point will go in sunder focus point generation

Edited February 20, 2012 by Wrathoran

[Wrathoran]

i was wondering , Dust Storm the first tier talent from def, reducing 5% the accuracy. Is it something good? because everyone seem to have around 100% chance to miss. 95% is still an awful lot

[TipsyDrow]

I'm very excited that there was a great deal of feedback to this particular thread. I've found in the past few weeks that there is a general lack of reasoned and thought provoking debate on this forum and it's good that we're able to discuss this in a fairly objective manner. Now that I've gotten some time to respond I'd like to make some clarification as well as debunking some of the common misconceptions about the Vigilance skill tree, Shien form and the differences between the Jedi Guardian saber forms in general.

 

I think we should start at the beginning. There's a lot of debate about which saber form is "best." To me this debate is like arguing about whether it's better to butter the top or the bottom of your toast. From a base stat line point of view the difference between the saber forms is an approximate total 12% differential spread between damage dealt or damage reduction. I know that the 60% armor increase seems to equate to a HUGE difference in defense but keep in mind that all your armor value does determine your damage reduction. Open up your character screen on your guardian/juggernaut and turn your Soresu form on and then turn it off and then look at your damage reduction. You should see an approximate 12% - 13% drop in damage reduction when you have it off. The difference between Shien and Shii-cho is much easier to differentiate. If you take single saber master, which you always should, then Shii-cho is a 9%(Single Saber Mastery + Shii-cho) increase in damage with 3% damage reduction where Shien is a 12% (single saber master + shien) damage bonus. So as far as stats are concerned it goes like this.

 

Soresu - 12% damage reduction

Shien - 12% damage

Shii-cho - 9% damage 3% damage reduction

 

Now that we have the stat portion of the disussion out of the way we can talk about the difference in abilities. I also want to include the topic of the "hybrid" spec while we're on this subject because I think that the skills acquired by a particular stance are directly relevant to the subject of hybrids and why I don't feel that they perform well. Each stance has it's own set of abilities that are reall specifically designed for a particular skill tree. Soresu gives you a %15 bonus to your shield chance as well as the ability to guard a team mate. The problem is that this comes at the cost of focus generation. This is BAD in any otner skill tree besides Defense. Defense has abilities that mitigate the focus generation deficit built into the Soresu form. Shii-cho doesn't have that and the Vigilance tree actually costs more focus than ANY of the trees to use its most important DPS abilities. Now I can understand switching to Soresu temporarily when doing the "stance dance." However, using the Vigilance skill tree in conjunction with Soresu form is a mistake in my opinion. Think of it this way. Shien generates focus from taking damage every 6 seconds just like Soresu but Shien also refunds 1 focus for every focus spending attack where as Soresu generates 1 less focus per focus generating attack. At that point you're using the highest focus cost skill tree and you're operating from a focus deficit of 2 focus per attack if you're using Soresu instead of Shien. That was my experience with this type of build. When I started using full vigilance I found myself with all the focus I need to keep pumping outbig hits constantly. Shii-cho is another one that was obviously designed for the Focus tree. There are abilities that you have to take to get to the next tier in the Focus tree that are specifically designed for Shii-cho. Also, while the Focus tree doesn't use as much focus as Vigilance, Shii-cho doesn't generate as much focus either. So you find yourself right back in the same situation you were before. You're not generating enough focus to effectively DPS but you don't have the defensive abilities from the Defense tree to be a proper tank. That's why I don't like hybrids. I'm completely ok with the Stance Dance but I think doing a hybrid build is never going to be as effective as putting 31 points into any given tree.

 

Now, back to Vigilance and Shien. I think that there is a common misconception of how the build is supposed to work and what exactly you're supposed to be doing with it. The damage over time abilities are nice, but they're not really the point. The ability to generate focus and keep throwing out 2000 point hits is also nice. But the real thing you need to focus on when using Shien/Vigilance is getting your target down below 20% health. If you get your target below 20% health they are DEAD. There are few surer guarantees of death than fighting a vigilance spec'ed guardian and letting yourself get to below 20% health. Every Jedi Knight has Dispatch. But so far as I know ours is the only one that has a 60% bonus to your critical hit chance. Force Rush is the most important vigilance ability. It forces you to spam Overhead Slash and Plasma Brand (which forces you to spam sundering strike) and when you use either of these abilties, which are your main dps and you should be using anyway, it gives a 60% bonus to your critical hit chance on Blade Storm and Dispatch. My Dispatch hits for 3 - 4000 damage. Which means if you're at 20% maximum health then you would have needed to have a maximum health of more than 15 - 20,000 in order to have the possibility of surviving my Dispatch. That's kind of a big deal. I've seen people survive dispatch from other guardians and I've actually survived more than a single dispatch from enemy players. NO ONE survives when I dispatch. A hilariously excellent example of how powerful the Vigilance Dispatch can be is a warzone yesterday night when I dispatched a guarded target for so much damage that it killed the target and the tank who was guarding him. They were both low on health but it was still pretty amazing.

 

Also, as it concerns gear and stats to gear for, I have been stacking Power as my primary offensive stat an it works out pretty well. The idea behind using Power over Surge is that my critical hit damage isn't as important as doing more consistently high damage always. Which power does for me. So I stack a lot of power on my gear where available. This is open for debate. I haven't tried getting huge amounts of surge but honestly power has been working so well for me that I don't really care to try anything else. I know that Surge is the stat to go with for Focus skill tree but Power seems to be the on for Vigilance. Let me know if anyone else has had a different experience.

 

Anyway, thanks for the responses.

 

This is one the most well written posts I have seen on gaurdians in quite some time. I use a 14/27 defense/vigi build.I have a balanced set of gear(half centurian, half champion) stacking power/defense/shield rating ,absorbtion in that order. I fight in soresu. I don't put up the raw numbers a pure vigi guardian does, but like the above poster states, no one survive my crit dispatch. No one. For me it's a very comfortable build that provides exellent survivability and decent damage output. It has many tools for any occasion. All in all I firmly believe any guardian build played by someone who knows their own skils well is very very viable. It all just boils down to playstyle.

 

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#500dMGczZhGr0rhdzMM.1

Edited February 20, 2012 by TipsyDrow

[Naethion]

Lets not forget Commanding Awe gives us 4% damage reduction. So we still get back some of the defense we had in Shii-cho +1. :3 So we are pretty much in the same spot we were if we were in Shii-cho, more or less by 3%(the damage increase).

[GarfieldJL]

The mistake a lot of people make is that they don't get plasma brand when they go vigilence tree.

 

Yes most of the damage is DoT, however it is nice in fact that it ignores shields and bypasses typical damage reduction.

 

Throw in Overhead slash or Blade storm elemental damage and you have multiple DoTs going all at the same time.

 

That's why I said Vigilence isn't as gear dependent (cept you have to watch how much damage you take).

 

You generate very little threat, so what? As a dps, having the critter completely ignore you while you are calmly hacking away is a good thing.

 

When you use shien, you can just spam your most powerful attacks over and over.

 

Force Sweep is a focus generator.

 

You can maintain a steady stream of your powerful attacks. You don't really have to worry about surge stats cause you're supposed to do a more steady stream of attacks, one after the other, you aren't dependent on getting criticals all the time.

Edited February 20, 2012 by GarfieldJL

[Naethion]

The mistake a lot of people make is that they don't get plasma brand when they go vigilence tree.

 

Yes most of the damage is DoT, however it is nice in fact that it ignores shields and bypasses typical damage reduction.

 

Throw in Overhead slash or Blade storm elemental damage and you have multiple DoTs going all at the same time.

 

That's why I said Vigilence isn't as gear dependent (cept you have to watch how much damage you take).

 

You generate very little threat, so what? As a dps, having the critter completely ignore you while you are calmly hacking away is a good thing.

 

When you use shien, you can just spam your most powerful attacks over and over.

 

Force Sweep is a focus generator.

 

You can maintain a steady stream of your powerful attacks. You don't really have to worry about surge stats cause you're supposed to do a more steady stream of attacks, one after the other, you aren't dependent on getting criticals all the time.

 

I think the Blade Storm and Overhead slash ticks could be a little stronger. Seriously they tick for about 50-90 damage. It should have been maybe 200 Elemental damage every 1 second for 6 seconds. even if it was just 100, anything would be better than 200 damage over 6 seconds. They feel like something the devs threw in so there would be as many talent options as the other 2 trees

Edited February 21, 2012 by Naethion

[GarfieldJL]

I think the Blade Storm and Overhead slash ticks could be a little stronger. Seriously they tick for about 50-90 damage. It should have been maybe 200 Elemental damage every 1 second for 6 seconds. even if it was just 100, anything would be better than 200 damage over 6 seconds. They feel like something the devs through in so there would be as many talent options as the other 2 trees

 

I agree they could stand for some improvement.

 

However when you add them together they are doing 90 to 100 damage a tick.

 

Then throw in plasma brand which does 200 to 400 a tick.

 

Okay you can get tics doing 245 to 450 a tick with plasma brand + blade or overhead.

 

Even better there are times you can get all three for brief periods and that will bump it up to 290 to 500 damage a tic.

 

All ignoring shield and standard armor.

[Marqhill]

Garfield actually is getting to the heart of the matter. I personally feel that a lot of people are looking at the DOTs the wrong way. They shouldn't be considered as several small DOTs but one big one. Plasma Brand, Overhead Slash and Blade Storm should all be part of your rotation right in a row regardless of any other factor. So after you get off all of these big hits right in a row you do your burn damage which lasts into the reset of your rotation.

 

I just added up the burn affects from all my DOT's on my character and found that added all together when I do my regular rotation I'm burning them for 2235 damage over the course of 12 seconds. Damage that ignores armor and shield as well. That's kind of a big deal. There's no damage reduction from that, just kiss 2235 hitpoints good bye.

 

Now imagine if at the end of my rotation I throw in a Master Strike, which now that I'm using it in PvP I wonder how I lived without it, and that's another 3244 - 3581 damage while my target is burning. My current rotation opening rotation is looking something like this.

 

1) Saber Throw (1000 damage + 3 Focus)

2) Force Leap 1000 damage + 3 Focus)

3) Sundering Strike (1000 Damage + 3 Focus)

4) Plasma Brand (1000 Damage - 4 Focus)

5) Overhead Slash (2000 Damage - 3 Focus)

7) Blade Storm (2000 Damage - Free)

 

- Burn for 2235 for 12 seconds

 

8)Freezing Force - 50% movement snare

9) Master Strike - (3000 damage - Free)

10) Dispatch (assuming focus gain from damage taken) (3000 - 4000 damage)

 

This is assuming I'm fighting an armored target. Your average armored target in pvp gear is going to have around 16500 HP. This rotation WILL kill as long as you're not banging on a target that is actively receiving heals. If it's a sorc then step 8 is actually Dispatch. When I jump to a second target then replace Freezing Force with Force Stasis because Master Strike will be on Cool down. Not as much damage but it's an extra DOT that stuns and sets them up for Freezing Force snare or Dispatch.

[Lemmy_DB]

i was wondering , Dust Storm the first tier talent from def, reducing 5% the accuracy. Is it something good? because everyone seem to have around 100% chance to miss. 95% is still an awful lot

 

Been wondering about this too.

I may be wrong here, but as I understand it, there is 1 roll to see if you are hit/missed or parried. So for example, if your attacker has 95% chance to hit, and you have a 10% chance to defend, it will calculate something liket his: generate a random number between 1 and 100 - if it's between 1 and 5, it will miss, 6-15 will be parried, 16-100 will hit.

 

You could spend points in the defence tree to increase your chance to defend by 2% per point - or you could reduce the enemy chance to hit by 5%.. Which is better? Obviously, the 2% always affects you vs defendable attacks, the 5% is only on those you have done a sweep on - so not much good vs ranged enemies beating on you.. But on the flip side, it helps your allies too (The pvp tanks job is reducing incoming dmg to your allies afterall).

 

Me? I put 1 point into it for the 50% chance. It lasts 18 seconds afterall - so it sounds like it would be up most of the time. So I guess, from the example above, if I also spent points in guard stance and blade barricade, lt would be 90% chance to hit, 17% chance parry (not counting any gear) - so in effect the attacker would miss 27% of the time. That's not bad. Obviously you can up it with defence gear - and he could up his hit% with accuracy, but a base of 27% is not to be sniffed at.

ofc this is only vs ranged/melee attacks. Not sure if dust-storm applies to tech/force attacks. If it does, then it makes it a win imho.