Pyro respeccing to Shield at 50 - what tank armour to start?

[Cotlu-Hunlon]

I've been a dps powertech since lvl 10, mainly advanced prototype while levelling, but since it's not appreciated by the wider community I just went pyro, for PvE and warzones. I'm bored rigid by the pyro playstyle/rotation now, having been doing it at 50 since March and I'm going to start tanking for flashpoints, and hopefully when I'm geared operations.

 

 

My question is....what armour should I get to start that will let me do BT HM? These are what i can think of so far:

 

1. Recruit Supercommando set - ok it's ****-cruit armour, but it's a start and I understand it's better than lvl 49 green armour despite wasted expertise stat.

 

2. Buy some cool looking orange schems and fill with mods.....but where do I get the mods? And will they be any better than recruit gear standard?

 

3. Find by some miracle an Armormech guy who has the final tank set reverse engineered to purple quality and buy that. Again, is it any better?

 

4.Keep playing dps but 'Need' on tion/col powertech tank gear in flashpoints and slowly build up tank gear. Problem with this, is that I WANT TO TANK NOW!! not in like 2 weeks when I finally would get the set.

 

What should I do?

Edited August 11, 2012 by Cotlu-Hunlon

[Quicksil]

I've been a PT ST Spec since the game launched. I leveled from 1-50 as a PT, and am still a ST spec. When I hit 50 I fought with the same problems, here is my opinion on what you should do.

 

---- STARTING OUT ----

1) DO NOT try to tank in recruit gear. I had a friend who tried this with in Black Talon with a Jugg tank. Though I will admit our healer was drunk. We wiped at the first boss, and then wiped again at the break-in after we reset the instance to a bug. Recruit gear is indeed better than green gear or even blue crafted gear. However, its made for PVP (and barely even that).

 

2) What to do. I know you want to start tanking right away, but you need to at least spend a 3 to 4 days gearing up. Here's what I did when I hit 50. Find a orange suit you like (if your 50 corellia dailies and heroics will get you a decent looking set) Or buy a set off the GTN (Hydra is pretty popular). Complete set meaning head, chest, gloves, boots, and pants. RUN DAILIES IN BELSAVIS, CORELLIA and at least the 2+ Heroics on both planets. Each of these heroics will give you a level 50 armoring, mod, and enhancement. Use your dailies to fill the remaining armoring slots from the daily vendor.

 

3) Start running Heroics for Columi Gear. Use Group Finder at least once a day to get the black hole comms. Start with Black Talon. If you can make it through that ok, then do Boarding Party and Foundry. Then the others.

 

Queue in Group Finder (or watch for shouts) for Story Mode Ops, namely KP. If your hit points are around 17.5 to 18k, and you have a good geared group, you can tank it. If not accept the Offtank Role in KP. On average, you'll probably pick up 3 to 4 pieces of Columi in 1 run and another piece from Comms turn in.

 

----- THINKING AHEAD -----

 

I have a feeling some people will argue with me here, but this is what I've found to work best ... Rakata and Columi gear is absolute CRAP for the best tanking armor. Its good to start with, but the gear is optimized terribly for tanking. It will get you through Ops and HM FPs fine. But my suggestion is to build your own customized suit.

 

Weapon & Offhand: The Rakata Main Hand weapon has a ton of Endurance on it, but only 1 Defensive stat (Absorb). Compare it to the War Hero weapon (and I love how Bioware says "PVP gear isnt for PVE but they still cant get it right). The War Hero weapon has 2 defensive stats. Yes the Endurance is lower, but replace the Crystal with an Endurance Crystal and Augment it for Endurance and then you have the best defensive gun in the game. (At least that I know of).

 

I use the Battlemaster Shield. Again it has 2 defensive stats on it and a good amount of endurance. I wouldn't even suggest going up to War Hero because the Endurance is way lower.

 

Relics: Hands down, Battle Master and War Hero. Even the relics from recruit aren't too bad. 100+ Shielding and Defensive Relics that are constant. I'm sure others will agree with me on this one. Augment them for Endurance.

 

Earpiece, Implants: Keep running dailies, to get cash to buy better armoring, enhancement, and mods. In the the meantime buy some purple crafted pieces from the GTN. Don't waste time or credits augmenting them. Use your dailies to buy Rakata pieces from the vendor. When you get enough Black Hole Comms saved up, by BH. Augment the BH for Endurance to make up for the loss of Endurance. BTW .. you want MK1 BH pieces. Not MK3.

 

Belt and Bracer: Buy an orange customizable piece for each. SAVE SAVE SAVE. Get a Grade 26 Armoring (55 Aim, 60 End) and place in the armoring slot. Get a Grade 26B Mod (Absorb) for each. Augment each piece for Absorb (you'll end up with something like 92 Aim, 118 End, and 50 Absorb. If you want you can use cheaper armoring plates (grade 25) while you save.

 

You'll keep these forever, so the investment is worth it. If your defensive stats are low, such as you need to increase defense and your absorb is too high, just change out the mods and augments.

 

Chest, Gloves, Boots, Pants, Helmet: Find something you like that's an orange shell. I'm a PVPer so I use Orange War Hero shells (plus I feel this the only suit that really looks like a Bounty Hunter). Rip out the pieces from your Columi and Rakata that you get and place them in your new shell. For 500K (2 days of Dailies), you can buy a Grade 25 Armoring. For 600 to 800k, you can buy a Grade 26B Mod (50+ end & 32 Absorb or Def) or 26 Enhancement (54 end, 57 shield, 22 absorb or def). Yes, you loose your set bonus, but you'll have the endurance to make up for it.

 

If your going to spend money, spend it on something that will last.

 

Put Absorb Mods and Enhancements in your Chest and Pants. Put Defensive pieces in your Boots, Gloves and Helmet. Use Bastion Enhancements in the defensive pieces, use Bulwark Enhancements in the Absorb pieces. Don't waste credit on the grade 26 steadfast enhancement. Their too expensive (running 1.5 mil) and the shield rating is way too low for a ST. You'll have to augment them to get your shield rating back up, instead you can

just augment a grade 26 bastion for endurance (ie 57 End vs 45+18 end = 63 End).

 

Augment everything for Endurance except your belt and bracers. COMPLETELY IGNORE ACCURACY. Tanks don't use it, who knows why Bioware put it on tank gear. (personally I think the designer was smoking something that day).

 

Run Ops and HM FPs to get the BH comms and Rakata pieces to cannibalize for your orange set. Eventually you'll be tanking EC to get campaign gear that will give you set bonus back. Dont worry about Set bonus, if you look at Black Hole gear, you'll see it doesn't have a set bonus. If you look at Campaign Gear, you'll notice that it doesn't have accuracy.

 

That's my 2 credits Sorry for the long post.

[Cotlu-Hunlon]

First off let me say thankyou for taking so much time to write this for me. You should make a guide type thing for gearing fresh tanks at 50 and try to get it stickied.

 

From everything you've described, getting BiS is a very costly process which will take a very long time. Interestingly, I have already tanked Flase emperor HM twice and Kaon under seige HM in full recruit gear except for a columi wrist thanks to a guildie healer in rakata, and the only times I died where when I didn't know the mechanics instead of bad gear thanks to the super heals.

 

I think what I will do is get a full orange set(hopefully exalted legacy gear) and then do as you described as personally the tion/col/armour looks a bit wimpy, especially on body type 2.

 

Once again thankyou for taking so much time to help me.

[Altephor]

Just run flashpoints as DPS, then buy tank gear. Not that hard.

[CitizenFry]

You can tank hard mode flashpoints just fine in recruit tank gear. I know, because I've done it myself. You'll be missing a fair amount of Endurance and Aim, but your primary tanking stats (Defense, Shield, Absorb) will actually equal or exceed what you'd find in unmodified TIonese or Columi tanking gear. Edited August 14, 2012 by CitizenFry

[yoomazir]

You can tank hard mode flashpoints just fine in recruit tank gear. I know, because I've done it myself. You'll be missing a fair amount of Endurance and Aim, but your primary tanking stats (Defense, Shield, Absorb) will actually equal or exceed what you'd find in unmodified TIonese or Columi tanking gear.

 

I agree with this post.

[DonJuansen]

I want to thank Quicksil for his very neat description of what to get as a PT tank.

My own PT is slowly getting to 50, and I have some related questions.

 

I will be having 3,500 ranked Warzone Commendations when i hit 50.

Considering that i can get the Columi MH via legacy gear, what should i use the comms on:

- War Hero relic (+113 def) & War hero relic (+113 shield)

or

- War Hero Supercommando MH

 

Also, is there a PT tank BiS link available that i can work towards? Maybe on AMR?

[SgtKlavier]

Just adding a few things from personal experience:

 

1) DO NOT try to tank in recruit gear. I had a friend who tried this with in Black Talon with a Jugg tank. Though I will admit our healer was drunk. We wiped at the first boss, and then wiped again at the break-in after we reset the instance to a bug.

 

Recruit gear has the potential to complete hard mode flashpoints, but its success is largely dependent on the rest of the group. An overgeared healer could carry a dps with a taunt as a tank through Black Talon. If you're pugging groups, you might get lucky with a group or you might not, so you'll have to make personal judgements about what the group is capable of.

 

 

Queue in Group Finder (or watch for shouts) for Story Mode Ops, namely KP. If your hit points are around 17.5 to 18k, and you have a good geared group, you can tank it. If not accept the Offtank Role in KP. On average, you'll probably pick up 3 to 4 pieces of Columi in 1 run and another piece from Comms turn in.

 

If you're newer to operations, please do your best effort to prepare on your own (strat reading, videos, etc.) so that a pug group will have the least trouble; I also recommend using a voice chat program for these if you can. Typing out the entire Soa strategy in chat for three people that hadn't done it before was incredibly annoying.

 

----- THINKING AHEAD -----

 

I have a feeling some people will argue with me here, but this is what I've found to work best ... Rakata and Columi gear is absolute CRAP for the best tanking armor. Its good to start with, but the gear is optimized terribly for tanking. It will get you through Ops and HM FPs fine. But my suggestion is to build your own customized suit.

 

Weapon & Offhand: The Rakata Main Hand weapon has a ton of Endurance on it, but only 1 Defensive stat (Absorb). Compare it to the War Hero weapon (and I love how Bioware says "PVP gear isnt for PVE but they still cant get it right). The War Hero weapon has 2 defensive stats. Yes the Endurance is lower, but replace the Crystal with an Endurance Crystal and Augment it for Endurance and then you have the best defensive gun in the game. (At least that I know of).

 

I use the Battlemaster Shield. Again it has 2 defensive stats on it and a good amount of endurance. I wouldn't even suggest going up to War Hero because the Endurance is way lower.

 

Once you have a baseline of gear from running some flashpoints and what not, all of your optimization of stats is going to come from modding gear appropriately. As stated above, columi/rakata gear is not good by itself, but with time you should be replacing the less useful mods (ones with accuracy/non favorable stat distribution) with mods from other gear (Black hole gear is a prime source for such mods). When upgrading, it ultimately comes down to what mods a piece of gear has when deciding to go for something; this being for the five set pieces and main hand.

 

Relics: Hands down, Battle Master and War Hero. Even the relics from recruit aren't too bad. 100+ Shielding and Defensive Relics that are constant. I'm sure others will agree with me on this one. Augment them for Endurance.

 

Agree, though I wouldn't augment with endurance (I'll explain later).

 

Belt and Bracer: Buy an orange customizable piece for each. SAVE SAVE SAVE. Get a Grade 26 Armoring (55 Aim, 60 End) and place in the armoring slot. Get a Grade 26B Mod (Absorb) for each. Augment each piece for Absorb (you'll end up with something like 92 Aim, 118 End, and 50 Absorb. If you want you can use cheaper armoring plates (grade 25) while you save.

 

This is the BiS fitting for belt/bracers, but it is quite expensive to get everything needed. In the meantime, if you have an armor crafting skill, you can easily make rakata belt and bracers as the only difficult material for these recipes is a biometric crystal alloy. These drop from every flashpoint, so it is quite easy to get the two needed.

 

Chest, Gloves, Boots, Pants, Helmet: Find something you like that's an orange shell. I'm a PVPer so I use Orange War Hero shells (plus I feel this the only suit that really looks like a Bounty Hunter). Rip out the pieces from your Columi and Rakata that you get and place them in your new shell. For 500K (2 days of Dailies), you can buy a Grade 25 Armoring. For 600 to 800k, you can buy a Grade 26B Mod (50+ end & 32 Absorb or Def) or 26 Enhancement (54 end, 57 shield, 22 absorb or def). Yes, you loose your set bonus, but you'll have the endurance to make up for it.

 

Personally, I would never pick orange pieces over having the set bonus (I pve though, so that is my perspective). The 2% additional defense for four types of damage (4 set) is a nice boost, as well as the increase to energy shield duration. You can swap mods in and out of set gear just as easily as orange gear, so set gear will provide better tanking ability.

 

 

Put Absorb Mods and Enhancements in your Chest and Pants. Put Defensive pieces in your Boots, Gloves and Helmet. Use Bastion Enhancements in the defensive pieces, use Bulwark Enhancements in the Absorb pieces. Don't waste credit on the grade 26 steadfast enhancement. Their too expensive (running 1.5 mil) and the shield rating is way too low for a ST. You'll have to augment them to get your shield rating back up, instead you can

just augment a grade 26 bastion for endurance (ie 57 End vs 45+18 end = 63 End).

 

Augment everything for Endurance except your belt and bracers. COMPLETELY IGNORE ACCURACY. Tanks don't use it, who knows why Bioware put it on tank gear. (personally I think the designer was smoking something that day).

 

When modding gear, every decision made should be based on your current gear and stats, providing a balance between defense, shield, and absorb ratings. People generally say a goal to shoot for these three stats (taking into account spec bonuses) is 15% def, 50% shield, and 50% absorb. These are not absolute limits, though, and if you see a potential improvement, go for it. Keep in mind that shield and absorb are related for roll calculations, so it is beneficial to have them close in value. Also, shield tech has an ability that vents heat when you shield, so a higher shield chance increases damage output.

 

In addition to the aforementioned balance of stats, you will have to make personal decisions regarding the priority of mitigation and health. There are currently two schools of thought for tanking: that of higher mitigation with lower health, and that of higher health with lower mitigation. Each side has valid arguments for stat prioritization, and both can complete end game content effectively, so it's up to you which way you want to go. The author of the post I'm quoting is a proponent of higher health, in which extra amounts of hp increase the survivability of the tank because the healers have much more time to heal you in intense circumstances, and the extra health could mean surviving a series of large hits. One of the key aspects of the game that this theory comes from is the fact that many boss encounters use attacks that can either not be reduced by armor or cannot be defended or shielded against. For such situations, more health is arguably better because improved defensive stats do not have any effect on mitigation.

 

The other side of tanking is prioritizing pure mitigation (highest possible def/shield/absorb). Though you start to see diminishing returns when upgrading these stats past a certain threshold, they will continue to improve mitigation for fights that consist of mostly melee/ranged attacks. Because health is just a number separating you from death, the more you can prevent damage from hits is most important in mitigation theory. A healer should keep you alive regardless of health, so the more you can reduce incoming damage, the more you are helping your healer.

 

I personally prefer the mitigation method of gearing, so I keep all augments with absorb/shield rating and focus on the three defensive stats for modding. I am always looking for mods with the lowest endurance, as they will have the highest defensive stat ratings.

 

How you tank is ultimately up to you; you could go full mitigation, full health, or somewhere in the middle. How your healer heals might be a factor to consider here as well. As long keep putting in the effort to get upgrades, you will eventually get to the point where you can tank everything, regardless of tanking style.