Is there any particular reason to go with the DPS relic in place of a MK-26 Shrouded Crusader? As far I can tell, you lose a very small amount of endurance and gain an extra defensive proc in place of a DPS proc (and some crit and power). You're getting most of the best of both worlds, high(er) mitigation, and high(er) health. It's entirely possible this has been answered somewhere past the first few pages and I missed it; if so, feel free to tell me to go find the previous discussion

Don't forget about the crit bonus on relics.

Wrong order. Taunt is a *multiplier*, it doesn't do anything on it's own. You want to Saber Reflect before you AoE taunt if you are going to use AoE taunt.

It's great for Advanced Prototype, particularly when combined with the raid wide alacrity buff at the start of a fight. I wonder if it would be worth it to use an alacrity relic / adrenal (do they make alacrity adrenals?) for this specific mechanic.

SM means Story Mode operations, which drops rating 216 gear, which is named "Defiant" at the Operations Gear Vendor. Deceived was an old name that no longer applies. Yes, that is correct, 9 augments with shield. It doesn't matter what things you augment with shield and which you augment with absorb, just that the ratio 9/5 is correct. What is *not* listed in that stat line is how many shield enhancements and how many absorb enhancements to use. I'll come back to that momentarily. There are 3 "levels" of gear available from the vendors for crystals. The lowest level gear is rating 208 and is named Outlander. Next comes the rating 216 gear and is named Defiant. Last comes the rating 220 gear and is named Exarch. There are better versions of Defiant (216) gear available from story mode operations, and better versions of Exarch (220) gear available from hard mode operations. In order to get numbers close to what the Dulfy guide is suggesting, you need to get the story mode operations gear. Without that gear, you won't even come close. So with that in mind, here's what I'd recommend. Spend tokens on a set of "Outlander Bulwarks [name] MK-4" armor, MH, and OH. Do not buy an earpiece or implants yet - this should be 9 items. Take off all your gear. Put on only the Outlander gear you just bought. Check your stats to see what your shield and absorb are at. Ignore defense and endurance. Buy an earpiece and 2 implants with the goal of getting roughly 1 shield for every absorb you have. I have no idea what these numbers will be for you offhand, but make shield and absorb roughly balance. You should now have 12 items. There are no rating 208 relics available right now, it's weird. Use whatever you have. Honestly there are no good relics available for just crystals, but there are some that can be crafted relatively cheaply by an artificer. Look for a [level based name] Relic of Fortunate Redoubt and a [level based name] of Serendipitous Assault. Augment your gear with 9 shield augments and 5 absorb augments. Endurance and Defense you can't do much to affect once you start talking about end game raiding gear. You get what you get with a few exceptions (ie. can swap a defensive relic for an offensive one to get more endurance - which I suggested you do above with the Serendipitous Assault Relic). How much shield vs. absorb a juggernaut should have is basically *the* question for tank builds. The more shield you have, the more frequently you mitigate damage, however the larger the amount that you get hit for when you do shield. Consider this example. Suppose a mob is hitting you for 1000 a bunch of times in a row. If you have lots of shield but not much absorb this is what would happen: 1000 damage 800 damage 800 damage 1000 damage 800 damage 800 damage Whereas someone with lots of absorb but not much shield would get 1000 damage 1000 damage 300 damage 1000 damage 1000 damage 300 damage Or something like that. I invented those numbers out of thin air to demonstrate the point. So there are people who have crunched the numbers and have found that if you want to take the least *total* damage possible, then for a Guardian (this is not true for Shadow or Vangaurd), you want to have roughly equal shield to absorb. The way Dulfy has you gear, you will take more damage, however you are less likely to take a lot of damage in a row. The reason that Dulfy suggests this is due to the fact that healers can in general heal more damage than the tanks need over the course of the fight, however they have an absolute limit on how much they can heal in a short window. Thus if a tank gets unlucky and doesn't shield anything at all in a short window, then that might be too much damage to heal in that time frame. This is sometimes referred to as "burst damage" or "squishyness" . Average mitigation doesn't help you at all if you get an unlucky string of no shielding. Dulfy suggests that you get more shield to make those unlucky strings less frequent. Nope, just get the purple artifact gear from the supplies section. tldr: Get the Bulwark's gear, get some augments. This will be enough for the HM flashpoints.

It's worth noting that the given optimization/rotation yields higher DPS that is posed on the first page for 224.

From a programmers perspective (though not one who has ever actually written/worked with large distributed systems), excessive button mashing could be causing synchronization problems that is adding latency. I've heard anecdotal evidence from a couple of people who parse heavily that *reducing* the queue time and pressing a key only once can actually help with latency; though sometimes at the cost of the skill not going off at all due to dropped packets. Perhaps someone can do an experiment with this somehow?

For storymode operations, gear is no longer a concern. If a player knows the operation and their class, then with the bolster your stats will be more than sufficient. The easiest story mode to tank is undoubtedly Kragga's Palace, followed by Eternity Vault. Every fight has like 1 or 2 things to care about (if that) and that's it. Here's how I would rank the story mode operations in terms of how difficult they are for someone going through them as a tank for the first time. Kragga's Palace Eternity Vault Toborro's Courtyard Scum and Villainy Temple of Sacrifice Ravagers Dread Palace Dread Fortress Terror From Beyond Explosive Conflict Undoubtedly people will disagree with me (and be right to do so), partially because I only remember some of the differences between SM and HM and partially because everyone finds different things more or less challenging. That said, this at least gives you a vague reference. As for the HM flashpoints ... I dunno. There are certainly ones that are harder than others, those that come to mind would be Lost Island Tython False Emperor if it's still bugged. Nothing else comes to mind directly.

I'd be curious how you could actually balance such a class. If it's doing more DPS than the current healers (and I mean significantly more, not minor 5% differences), it would necessarily need to do significantly less heals or it simply becomes the only healer people bring in progression. If it does less heals than the other classes, then there are fights where that just isn't going to be enough, so you don't bring this class in progression. So then the only option would be to put both its heals and its DPS on par with current classes (yes, I know operative healer DPS is much lower than sorc healer DPS). If you need to use DPS skills to use your heal skills, then given that your DPS is low, you would be spending many GCDs per fight doing almost nothing. Either that, or you have multiple skills that are off the GCD and this whole class would play very differently than any of the current classes. (Not saying this is a bad thing, just observing.) I played LOTRO for a while and the Warden was a very different class compared to any others and they made that work. So it's probably doable, I'm just curious how it would be done.

Thanks.

No, I get why to use a DPS relic instead of a 2nd tanking one. I'm wondering why power proc instead of mainstat proc.

Any particular reason for this change? I scanned through some of the more recent pages in this thread and I didn't see anything. If I had to guess, it's a marginal DPS increase but that's it?

The DPS should (with very few exceptions) never start on the golds. So if they pull the gold off you due to anything but AoE, they are doing it wrong. In most cases, they should kill the small stuff first, then go on to big stuff. As for you, with the above in mind, ignore the standard mobs. As for strong (silver) vs. elite (gold), the strongs often do more damage than the elites, so they should be your focus. Ideally both DPS are attacking the same mob so that you don't have to split your attention. What level/class are you? The ability to keep AoE threat is really dramatically different between the classes while leveling.

Think of it like a sorc bubble that lasts 6 seconds and absorbs a maximum of 1360 damage.

We need to know the damage profile of the new raids before the numbers can be crunched. In fact, there are no numbers to crunch without that profile.