Whether an ability says "weapon damage" or not has nothing to do with whether you can shield or defend against it. Shield and defense applies against melee and ranged attacks. While "weapon damage" abilities fall in these categories, they are not the only abilities that do so. The other two types of attack, Force and tech, cannot be defended or shielded. Instead they can only be resisted (scroll over Defense Chance in game and you'll see what stat I'm talking about). Abilities that say "weapon damage" only mean they do the damage type of your equipped weapon. If you are holding a lightsaber, that ability will do energy damage. If you swap it out for a vibrosword, that ability will now do kinetic damage. The type of damage an ability does has no bearing on whether it is shieldable. The only thing that affects this is the type of ATTACK it is.

Go with the first set. Health stacking is not useful at all. You essentially have limitless health as long as healers are alive and you are not being instantly killed. Making yourself take less damage is far better for raiding than health stacking. Just ask any healer and they'll tell you the same.

The tooltip for our shielding says "Chance that a successful melee or ranged attack will have its damage reduced by your shield." The Sith Inquisitor's shield says "Surrounds the target in a lightning shield that lasts 30 seconds and absorbs a high amount of damage." I think the Inquisitor shield effectively gives you bonus health, which would explain why it works on all sources of damage. It's probably better to just think of their spell as an absorb instead of a shield.

In the course of trying to figure out our stat priorities, I made a little spreadsheet that lets you compare different sets of gear to see what gives the most mitigation against a raid boss. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ag4zALEBKKuGdFI2N0lkanpUcU05SHIxM3BzTnlGVVE Just go to the link, click on File > Make a copy... and you have a copy of your own to play around with. Values in black require user input, with talent spec, Combust application, and attack and damage types being drop down menus. The ratings you'll have to enter by hand. If you enter in your ratings you should be able to check its accuracy against your character screen stats. Let me know if something doesn't work right, or if you have any info about raid boss crit chances or surge, or if you think of anything helpful to add to it. Hopefully at least someone finds this fun.

Hi. I read through your guide and it was quite comprehensive. I just wanted to comment on one thing. I actually stumbled upon your blog while investigating this myself. You posted that you cannot shield kinetic or elemental damage, but can only shield weapon damage attacks. This isn't quite how shielding works. In fact, "weapon damage" attacks are not even a real type of damage. They just do whatever type of damage your weapon says it does, such as energy for lightsabers or kinetic for vibroblades. There are four types of attack (Force, melee, ranged, and tech) and four types of damage (elemental, energy, internal, and kinetic). You can avoid and shield melee and ranged attacks, not Force or tech ones. If you look at the dueling experiments in your blog, all of the attacks that were never shielded were Force or tech attacks. The damage type does not actually have anything to do with shielding, only if armor or Mark of Power applies.

Hey all you awesome Powertechs! I'm Jormungandr, Shieldtech and raid leader of RTL on Prophecy of the Five. I write a blog about my experiences tanking as a Powertech. I post every couple of days or so. While I was leveling it was pretty dull (even I got bored) but I'm now 50 and only writing about content that is valuable to us at level cap. My last post was a normal walkthrough of the Eternity Vault. If you ever get bored of hanging out on the forums with all the other cool Shieldtechs and just something to read on your own for a while, stop on by. http://swtorshieldtech.blogspot.com/

The last boss in boarding party is pretty massively overtuned and almost impossible with melee DPS in the group. I wouldn't worry about not being able to do that one.

I play SWTOR for two reasons: the MMO and the story. During leveling, these two things are (at least for me) not mutually compatible. Fighting over mob spawns and gathering nodes, running into opposing faction players 10 levels higher that just got bored, entering an area and finding all the enemies already slaughtered, all these things destroy my immersion in the story. I LIKE the instancing for leveling. I think it is a wonderful feature that lets you play the game at your own pace without feeling rushed or threatened by others. I like seeing just a handful of other players per area. Is this what I want at 50? Hell no. I want to see other 50s everywhere. I want massive world PVP battles, huge guild gatherings, cities filled with people selling crafted goods and showing off their new gear from yesterday's raid. Daily hubs should be chaos, filled with danger and constant combat. Going outside of a safe zone to farm mats should require constant vigilance to avoid being ambushed. I guess what I really would like is for this current instancing system to stay in place for leveling players only. Level 50s would be defaulted into much, much larger instances with hundreds of people in view instead of just a couple. Low level players that enjoy this kind of crowding could of course feel free to play in these instances instead of their emptier leveling ones. This way people could enjoy story and quest accessibility during leveling while retaining the crowded, massively multiplayer interaction we all want at level cap.

http://tinypic.com/r/2lbmcnr/5 I use 1 2 3 4 Q E R F MB4 MB5 and their shift variants. E is for heatless abilities, Q is for single target powerhouses, R is for other single target abilities, F is for AoE, MB4 is gap closers, MB5 is taunts, and 1 2 3 4 are cooldowns, channels, and interrupts. Determination is set to mousewheel button, Recharge and Reload is on `, and my speeder is on Shift+`. Buffs and toggles are on the left action bar without any keybinds.

So far I have seen enough conflicting opinions about which tanks are "better" that they are probably fairly well balanced. I certainly wouldn't worry about not being picked to tank something because you are a Powertech.

Flamethrower - Is it frustrating sometimes? Sure. But should it be changed? Probably not. If you get used to the range on it you will very rarely miss. And if a mob is out of range you only have yourself to blame, since positioning is at the discretion of the tank. Flame Burst - I actually LIKE that we still have to use Rapid Shots. We hardly ever get to use our blaster and it is an iconic part of the BH class. If we used Flame Burst instead, hell, I might as well dump my gun for a second flamethrower. Oil Slick - Not the greatest tanking CD I agree, but it is quite low in the tree as well. I feel like it does its job acceptably considering it only has a 1 minute CD. Just don't expect it to save your life. It's more of a use-on-CD-for-mitigation tool. Grapple - No minimum range would be a nice QoL change. Personally though, I am not a fan of moves that have increased threat and low damage. It just FEELS like I'm being useless. Plus, we already have two taunts, do we really need another? I'd hope I wasn't dropping aggro that much. Jet Charge - Where is the need for all this threat gen coming from? It works great as a gap closer, and like Grapple it would be nice QoL to have a low minimum range, but I wouldn't ever use this in melee for the same reason I wouldn't use grapple. I'd rather use an actual useful ability. Kolto Overload - Underwhelming, I agree. Flame Sweep - The range on this is quite low and I agree it would be nice if it was longer. The heat cost on it is fine, so long as you are not trying to spam it. Like Flame Burst, it just clearly isn't meant to be something we spam all the time. Hit it once to get AoE aggro and then single target. If you are being forced to use it every GCD then you should rethink the way your group is approaching the pull. Shoulder Slam - Not even on my bars. Quite useless. Heat Blast - I really don't understand the Heat Blast hate. It is an amazing skill that costs 24 less heat than all your other single target abilities. When you hit 40 and get HB your play FEELS DIFFERENT. Heat control becomes much more fluid and dynamic. How can you really complain about an ability that does that? Considering it is the most heat efficient use of a GCD you have it is difficult to complain about its damage or threat generation, especially when both outclass Rapid Shots anyway.

One of my friends is playing an Assassin and he likes to screw with me by knocking back all the mobs I pick up like that. Sure it makes pulls take longer because of the lack of AoE damage, but on the plus side its extremely easy to hold aggro (since the DPS cannot AoE and are pretty much forced to single target mobs down).

I often use Flamethrower if I can hit three or more enemies with it. The deal with that post is that I am aware a lot of people dislike channels for the mobility loss and pushback. Without looking into specific situations, I can't say whether Flamethrower is flat out better or worse than one and a half Flame Sweeps so I simply listed it separately as an option and left it to individuals to decide if they could use it effectively or not. Flamethrower is quite strong threat but it is difficult to get enemies grouped right to exploit that. I'll go into more detail about good Flamethrower usage in a later post. On topic, my current action bars look like this: http://tinypic.com/r/i1mmiv/5 I'm probably gonna have to keybind the empty slots soon though. Buffs are on an unbound left action bar since there isn't any hurry to activate them.

I went Shield Tech first. Talents like Ion Overload and Flame Shield are big DPS boosts and are very good to get quickly.

http://swtorshieldtech.blogspot.com/2011/12/tanking-in-twenties-hammer-station-and.html I just wrote a short post about tanking early on in the game. Don't use Missile Blast. It is extremely heat inefficient and provides low AoE damage as well. Use Explosive Dart, Flamethrower, and single target attacks to hold AoE aggro before you get Flame Sweep. Without any stated increased threat on an ability, its threat is directly based off the damage it does. Integrated Cardio Package gives very low returns for three skill points. Generally people feel there are better places to spend those points, especially right next to it in Iron Fist.