1. I think Defense Guardians are perceived as "okay" for flashpoints but I doubt anyone really wants us raid tanking. In PvP Defense Guardians are useless for all warzones except Huttball. 2. The class definitely has damage issues, both in actual damage(Lowest in the game) and uptime(When Force Leap is on CD you can do nothing to close with an enemy). 1.3 actually made the class worse, as Guardian Slash had its damage replaced with an AoE that only effects enemies practically touching each other. My AoE taunt is the only ability I have with a large enough radius to grab an entire group. Any boss fight with add management or "red light/green light" dps phases like Soa feel like the devs are flipping the AC the bird. Solo questing on a Defense Guardian is probably the most horribly tedious thing in the game right now, on par with Defense Warriors in WoW Classic. I cancelled my account due to the 1.3 Guardian changes.

The aoe effect is ridiculously tiny. Unless the enemies are shoulder to shoulder it won't trigger.

I'd rather keep my original Guardian Slash.

Basically the game was teaching both Riposte and the underlying passive ability to trigger Riposte as part of the same talent point. Very often when people unspecced and respecced Riposte in beta the passive would either fail to be relearned or not apply to the character without logging off and back in.

After the butcher job done on Shiv in beta and Project in 1.3, I can live with a slight animation delay. I have both a Guardian and a Marauder and the difference isn't noticeable.

Defense Guardians/Immortal Juggernauts already had the lowest dps of any class in the game. Can you explain why you decided to drop their damage even further in 1.3?

Earliest is the Artifact version of [Prototype]RD-12B War Chestguard, which is in the mid-teens and should drop on Taris. Be advised that although the armor is green and white, any armor matched to it turns white and green. My personal favorite is the TT-15A Powertech Body Armor at level 35. Any armor matched to that turns forest green with dark red trim.

Well, you'll be doing three times the damage of a Guardian tank and 1.5 to 2 times the damage of a Vanguard, so as long as Bioware insists on putting hard enrage timers on every encounter people will prefer Shadows to the other two.

Because they only ever made Riposte a base Jedi Knight skill to avoid fixing the bug from learning and unlearning Riposte when it was the 11 point talent in the Defense tree. After they gave it to both Guardians and Sentinels they promptly forgot Sentinels had it.

I find it a bit ridiculous that after 1.3 troopers will be able to tank in slave girl outfits but still can't tank in heavy armor that doesn't have some sort of ridiculous shoulder pad.

So you really have zero experience with this latest round on the PTS. There has been not one single response by devs to issues raised by people on the PTS. The only questions they've cherry picked to answer in the Q&A blog are in regards to the Shadow/Assassin survivability nerf.

For Defense Guardians: Flat 6% nerf on all melee damage due to loss of Single Saber Mastery. Blade Barricade nerfed from 6% to 3%, forcing you to put 3 points in SSM just to get your old survivability back. Guardian Slash damage cut by 25/40%! It now does less damage than Blade Storm, meaning the only "heavy hitter" Guardian tanks have is Master Strike. Hilt Strike damage dropped by 25%. Nothing added to Solidified Force to replace Hilt Strike's cost reduction, so it's another worthless half-talent like Command. Sundering Strike no longer stacks with Grav Round, Dust Storm no longer stacks with other accuracy debuffs, so Guardians no longer bring any useful debuff to a raid. For Shield Vanguards: Stockstrike's crit chance reduced by 15% and surge reduced by 30%, leading to an overall 20% reduction in damage from their primary single target attack. Overall 10% reduction in damage from Explosive Surge. Ion Cell procs are doing about half the damage they do on live. Basically they decided to give tanks an AoE threat buff, and balance it by taking away our real single target damage and replacing it with fake damage. And their "big revamp" for Sharpshooter Gunslingers turned out to be swapping around two skills instead of confronting the fact that a dps tree for a pure dps class has more defense/utility talents than most tank trees.

Why post in the PTS forum when it's abundantly clear nobody at Bioware reads it?

They're pushing this patch live with the tank nerfs as is? Time to go cancel my account. (And for all the apologists: It's not just the nerfs, it's the total lack of responsiveness from the developers, and the complete lack of common sense with which they approach class balance.)

Here's the thing. Thanks to Guardian and Vanguard single target DPS nerfs, Shadows went from "Same mitigation with a bit more damage" to "Less mitigation with 50% more damage." Shadows will be the default tank on anything with an enrage timer thanks to the Guardian Slash and Stockstrike nerfs.