I really appreciate this reply, I was having difficulty finding information on this subject and what you quoted helped a lot. Good responses to my concerns as well, they coincide very closely to what I was thinking and supplement the other posts well.

I was having trouble trying to think of an appropriate title for what I want to ask, so hopefully my explanation will be adequate. As a preface, I have been active for a little over a month with a 55 Jug but I have nearly 7 years experience tanking in other MMO's. Most of what I ask will not be based purely on stats but more on experience and observation which is what I am currently questioning. For the initial thought, from what I have seen there is practically no support for increasing endurance through gear in place of defense or absorb rating on a tank, especially in the case of augments. The argument is that mitigation is superior to raw health, which I would fully agree with if I considered these two stats to be true mitigation. Defense and absorb are chance based mechanics in that they are not functional at all times, whereas armor rating is a true mitigation which always functions. Because of it's chance like nature my concern with neglecting endurance in place of these two stats follows a few issues that I am looking for the community to address. 1) Overhealing. It will occur in every raid, players and tanks will always be healed for more than a necessary amount due to various reasons, typically "topping" players health off does this frequently. While much of the overhealing likely occurs on other members of a raid, it will occur in some form or another on the tanks. Better healers will have less of this but concerning the majority of good healers rather than the few elites I would like to give some basic examples for this part. Tank A has 37000 max health and Tank B has 42000 max health, a difference of 5000 max health. Both tanks are currently at 30000 max health, both are healed, and the total healing from the abilities is 10000. Tank A is now healed to full with 3000 healing wasted, while Tank B is healed to 40000, no healing wasted. The 3000 extra healing Tank B receives would make a subsequent 9000 damage hit on Tank B equivalent to a 6000 damage hit on Tank A. I could explain this many different ways but the main point is that healing lost to overhealing is also lost as a resource to exchange for damage taken, while a tank with more max health should experience less overhealing and thus have more resource to exchange for damage taken in a fight. 2) Abilities which work in conjunction with max health. This should not require any lengthy description, but the value of heals and buffs which work with max health would be higher on a tank who has more. 3) Max health buffer. This goes alongside issues with taking burst damage and what happens between being full health and low on health. Large pools of health allow for more damage taken before potentially dieing, which allows healers to finish channeling their heals, cooldowns to refresh, or to allow healers to restore other raid members before focusing back to the main tank (after a large AOE as an example). Max health is always there, afterall, whereas defense and absorb may or may not function based on an RNG. While working defense and absorb is absolutely superior to more health, defense and absorbs which fail to work are worthless. Combining these 3 points as benefits for max health the alternative is boosting either defense or absorb. It is a fact, which I will certainly not argue, that the damage taken over time will be lower on a tank with more defense and absorb ratings than a tank who simply has more health. My issue is not with DtPS in regards to the tank but a tanks ability to manage damage and healing over short bursts. Tanks are often shifting between full health, moderate damage taken, and major damage taken while occasionally dieing from too much damage taken. This, to me, seems to put the importance not on what would happen to a tank over the course of a 5 to 10 minute fight but what happens to the tank everytime he can potentially die. Another way to look at this is that the periods of damage which are most crucial for a tank are those which his health will reach their lowest and until his health can return to full. These are the periods I concern myself with as a tank because this is when you live or die and the raid succeeds or fails. Now for the more direct questions, and I apologize for the long read for those who are less patient: Is there not a value of max health which would be worth sacrificing defense or absorb to achieve in order to compensate for overhealing or potential healing, abilities with effectiveness based on max health, and burst damage? Do these arguments for defense and absorb consider healing rates and abilities or raids with periods of minimal to no damage that allow for complete healing or are the simply focused on DtPS? If not, are these points not important to practical tanking? I believe I have made my points and posed questions in a way that will suffice. I am not looking to prove myself right or disprove the community in anyway with this thread, I am hoping to resolve these simple questions and nothing more. I have and always will consider myself a practical tank and look for ways to improve myself based on specific situations rather than statistics, so it has always been hard for me to look at a chart and say "this is how I should play" so I am hoping to find a resolution to my concerns which will improve my gameplay and solidify my choices without relying strictly on the numbers. If you made it this far thank you for taking the time to read and any response you may have to offer

Thanks for the great replies, gonna need some time to sort through the links

Wanted to ask here because it would be primarily for PVP (who needs this stuff for PVE?) I'm building a new PC and looking into the last bits with the peripherals now, namely the mouse and keyboard I want to use. I figured this would be a good place to ask for advice from others so in short I am looking for suggestions on a few things: What sort of features do I need to look for and how much of a difference do they make(dpi, anti-ghosting, macros, etc)? Any good suggestions for mice/keyboards people use currently (would like to keep things under $120 or so for both)? I have seen the "gaming pads" on keyboards with movement and number keys off to the side, anyone have experience with this and is it worth it? That's about it, just looking for some general feedback to help decide and I can make comparisons between products while scouting out a good sale. Thanks in advance.

Had a Civil War with me on my jug trying to deal with cross-healing. Some idiot was calling me a noob and telling me to focus the healer, which was funny because I said "which one fool?" At the end of the match, checking the scoreboard, there were 4 healers and 1 tank...The cross-healing was near impossible to break through, and when the tank shifted his guard to your healer you had to switch because it was absolutely impossible to kill him at that point (something the other guy didn't realize apparently). Three of us had 500-600k damage, healers were at 500-700k each. On their side, they had two DPS who matched our levels, yet we had no healers. The unfortunate consequence of this was their two DPS being able to focus and kill us while we couldn't kill any of them without an extreme amount of effort. However, we still won the match All 4 healers were camping mid, they left one guy alone to defend, and another player and myself ended up taking him out. They lost because of a failure to properly manage objectives and nothing more, had this been a huttball or hypergate we would have lost.

I decided to spend my comms on DPS gear instead, since the tank gear asside from earpiece, belt and bracer is worthless for my jug. I figured if I can get set piece drops or a good random drop then I could make use of the mods there (using lower end armorings for set bonus pieces seems like a fine alternative considering I am less reliant on armoring/endurance). That said, I should not be without any defense enhancements on even a single piece of tank armor from any vendor. It's already a turn off that I need a DPS and tank set of gear to switch roles on my jug while healers do not, but now the only way I can get good enhancements is by ripping the mods out of raid drops, that is a bit much. Also, at least take the accuracy out of the implants and maybe make them shield+absorb instead so it's not as bad there, those things are completely unwanted as is.

And to reply specifically to this one, I was explaining that this was not working because for some reason the slam was randomly hitting people despite being behind the mob (i.e. avoiding the hit).

Methods to avoid broken mechanics are irrelevant as broken mechanics should be fixed regardless. That said, we tried a solo tank method, healer couldn't keep them up because of the affliction DoT annihilating the team for 6k damage a tick, either someone had to die or the tank was going to die. One time we lost both tanks and I was kiting both of them after AOE taunting, which worked for a while until that slam wiped out two of our members from behind. I tried to focus on interrupting one while a tank was holding him, with everyone else on the other. Still a problem because we have yet to have a run with all 8 lasting when that DoT hits, healers cannot bother interrupting because they are healing, one of our players failed at interrupting, and there is also the ravage which needs to be interrupted as it can stun our healers or interrupters. Either way, for a story mode it is a bit extreme to rely on everyone playing perfectly as well. Consider not just elite groups that do NiM runs but the groups that may have the gear but not the skill. As the name implies, a few bad RNG's and one or two weak players should not result in the entire raid wiping, which is going to happen in most groups hence most groups are not making it through this operation. The slam combined with that DoT are excessive and apparently broken anyways.

We have done many attempts on this boss on SM, and we do very well until the Guardian wave. Several times now, after carefully observing it during the fight, my raid group has noticed an issue with the Slam attack. Standing behind the Guardians, even up to several meters away as one of our snipers was, the Slam affect is randomly hitting and killing players. The purple cone affect is easy to avoid and should be easily avoided, however, players dieing while standing behind these mobs during this affect should not be happening. Oddly, I have been in the cone affect while kiting one away from the rest of the raid yet I avoided the hit while players behind the Guardians have been killed, so again it seems that something odd is happening with this ability. I won't comment on the rest of the raid for SM in this thread, it's a fun raid although it puts a lot of pressure on the healers during this fight, but if there is an issue here it should be fixed.

As I said, 4 good snipers are not really going to have a problem, they are going to destroy their targets easily. Although after 1000's of warzones I have never had a team with 4 good snipers. Most do half the damage they should. More typical DPS, even good ones of various AC's, are going to have a difficult time. Guarding is also fairly simple. You should be observant as a tank so that you can see who is being focused and who is vulnerable. If you are trying to "DPS" rather than either shutting down or protecting your team you are bad and you should feel bad Does my mercenary not count as a healer then? I seem to do quite well on it and have more than enough utility to survive far more effectively than I feel is balanced. My problem is how ridiculously easy it is to survive, healers should not be so mobile and immune to things necessary to counter healers, but bioware seems intent on making them as anti-anti-healer as possible. Again, no real nerfs are necessary, just force me to be stationary longer, make me rely more on short term procs, or make me drain energy easier if I am not careful with my healing management.

If you have 4 good snipers it doesn't matter how many heals either team has...No one is really saying any of this other stuff either, it's "the team with no healers will lose to the team with healers" which is almost always the case. The skill of the DPS and tanks you need to offset the lack of healing is very high, while the skill of a team with two healers and average DPS does not need to be very high to win objective based PVP.

This is a good point, and I noticed this quite often as well. Last night, for instance, I was on my new sniper and was dealing with a scoundrel healer (this is tier 1 for reference). I was the only player targeting him and simply could not finish him off while he was kiting around the pylons in a voidstar. He was not able to heal anyone else on his team, however, and after the rest of the players were wiped out someone ended up finishing his last 15% of health off. One cross heal, a guard, or someone stunning me would have made all the difference though. It's hard to blame a team up against 2 tanks and 2 heals when they have no healers either. You can't expect all the DD to go all out if they can't even last long.

What's interesting here is that you just described something incredibly challenging to begin with: Coordination via chat boxes while people are actively PVPing...not easy to do. Marking targets helps, but when you have 2 or 3 marked targets because you have 2 or 3 marked healers, then how easily do you expect people to focus fire the correct target? It is a L2P, if this means learn to be psychic and read each others minds, because the majority of the time this is very difficult to do with pug groups even with moderate to good skill. The other things also come into the problems of communication and the fact that warzones are not 4 DPS vs 1 healer, so you will never be able to patiently take your time to deal with the healer and ignore the DPS and tanks bearing down on you and your healer at the same time. This L2P thing sounds really legit, but it ignores every reasonable issue with warzones. Communication is difficult, coordination is more difficult, it is objective based which means you cannot focus 100% on healers, it is team based which means you are working against the enemy team not a single enemy player, and of course differences in skill. And to resolve the interesting part, while the previous aspect is difficult enough you end up mentioning the guards and cross healing as another challenge players simply need to overcome with some L2P skills. I see no reason why the entire enemy team should be experts at PVP just to kill my scoundrel when he is being guarded by a competent tank. The reasons for this are because healing is no challenge and surviving is no challenge. We don't need to nerf or boost any stats though. Rather than forcing all DPS to L2P just to kill a healer wouldn't it make more sense to force healers to L2P to survive?

Not necessarily. I am more of the mind set of making healing as complex as DPSing will solve most of the problems. You can focus a healer as good DPS, which is what you should do, but it should not be necessary to focus half the team just to take down a bad healer. Make it easy for a healer to screw up and I would be happy. Not trying to be a ***** but I do want to point out that there are some possible problems with these images. A player with less expertise is going to be hit harder. Players who are armor debuffed by other classes are going to be hit harder by your attacks. I know personally I can see top hits of 5000 or so on my sniper in one match and then hit over 10k in the next match. That said, there are some really high damage hits that can be produced, and quickly as well. A good RNG roll and you can burst someone down to practically dead in a few seconds.

Was considering ideas to improve the resolve mechanics to make them work to actually counter CC's and had an idea I felt was worth discussing. Allow resolve to work as it currently does up until the point at which a player has full resolve. At this point, have the resolve bar work the same until it is supposed to begin draining or reset. Instead of draining, have the resolve bar change colors. The resolve bar will now remain until a player is targeted by another CC which normally builds resolve. This will now break the resolve bar in exchange for "resisting" whichever CC was used. In effect, it guarantees that your resolve bar stops at least one stun or kb rather than often times being useless. Players who are stun locked and killed would also retain their resolve bar after respawning, which removes that complaint as well. Now I do understand that it could make certain classes stronger, but keep in mind that a boost in one area does not mean we cannot reduce things to balance it out. Thought it was a reasonable alternative so any thoughts?