Need help with PvE Vanguard Tanking

[Lordmird]

As the title suggests, I need help. If you could provide a link to a guide that would be great. Basically I want to tank for people in FP's and Heroics and stuff. But I've never tanked before, and currently have all my points pooled into Shield Specialist tree.

Oh and, should a Vanguard tank be able to survive without a healer in a group?

 

Lordmird

 

"Strength in the face of fear is not inherited, learned, or bought. Strength in the face of fear has always been inside you. It's in the fear. Turn it into strength, and courage. Sharpen it like a blade. You are strength."

Edited December 3, 2012 by Lordmird

[Kitru]

As the title suggests, I need help. If you could provide a link to a guide that would be great. Basically I want to tank for people in FP's and Heroics and stuff. But I've never tanked before, and currently have all my points pooled into Shield Specialist tree.

 

First off, if you're going to ask VG specific questions, I recommend you post in the VG forums, rather than the Trooper forums. People that answer VG related questions tend to have a better response in there than out here.

 

Secondly, VGs are incredibly easy to tank with. It was actually part of the design intent of the class, interestingly enough. All you have to do is keep Stockstrike, Energy Blast, and High Impact Bolt on CD while not letting your ammo drop below 7. If you're getting low on ammo, just use Hammer Shot. If you're full on ammo but Stockstrike and HiB are on CD, use Ion Pulse. That's pretty much how you tank as a VG. There are some tweaks when you're doing AoE damage/threat (open with Mortar Volley, throw out Pulse Cannon if there are more than 2-3 targets, use Explosive Surge instead of Ion Pulse if you've got a lot of enemies around), but, honestly, it doesn't really get much different than that. The only other real considerations are that Harpoon (your pull) is not a threat generation tool (it will generate less threat than you'll get out of a Hammer Shot most of the time), it is a positioning tool (so don't use it to generate threat at the start of a fight; use it to move an errant target into a position that you would rather they be, such as pulling a ranged NPC away from a CCd target so that the idiot DPS don't break it or pulling a ranged NPC into a large cluster of enemies so that they can all be AoEed down together) and that interrupts should be used *a lot*, especially once you get to the higher levels (you'll soon discover that there are some attacks that, if they get off, are going to immediately ruin your day if they're not interrupted; learn them and interrupt them asap when you see them; Project Storm, Force Storm, Heat Beam, Spinning Strikes, and Ravage are the ones that come to mind immediately, but I know I'm missing a few).

 

This is what your spec should look like at 50. While leveling, you always want to go up in your main tree before branching out into other trees.

 

Oh and, should a Vanguard tank be able to survive without a healer in a group?

 

For solo content, yes. For group content, no. Group content is designed with specific compositions in mind. For 4 man content, that composition is 1 tank, 1 healer, and 2 DPS. Sometimes, if you're really good and your companion is well geared, a healing companion can take the place of the healer, but not often (companions are roughly equal to half of a player by my general reckoning).