From my experience, HM Esseles is one of the hardest of the lot. I had a group that did HM Taral V last night, and we managed to down every boss save the bonus one. It was much easier than Esseles.

Late November, hoping for today

I was thinking of making blade barrier a set of charges, something like the gunslingers ballistic dampers. Just keep the duration below that of the Blade Storm cooldown.

It's not only the difference between OS and GS, and the presence of unremitting in the Vigilance tree that we base our decision to go deep into the Vigilance tree to tank. Truth is, the upper tiers of the defense tree aren't really that useful. From what I hear, and I'm sure you have read this as well, Blade Barrier is sub par. I consider Inner Focus rather useless. And cyclonic sweeps isn't really that useful either since I find myself, at least at 25, focus saturated, so there is no need to use inner focus anytime in a fight. Stasis Mastery and Force Clap aren't terribly useful in PvE either, only in PvP. Even in PvP, Force Stasis with its 3 second duration isn't really all that useful. Truth is, the upper tiers don't offer that much, not as much as the vigilance tree, hence why the majority of us, and probably myself included, will be going deep into that tree until things are changed.

Making Blade Barrier a 3 charged ability with slightly higher damage absorption would be a nice start.

I'm going to be honest. Whenever I tanked I never had a problem with generating focus. In fact most of the time I have found myself focus flooded and had to dump a lot of it into slash. So no, focus is never a problem, at least up till lvl 25. And yes, a lot of this can be said in the tank forum. This probably would be a better place for this discussion.

Thing is, is that sundering strike has a 4.5 second cooldown, and triggers GCD. Strike is only affected by the GCD. Now, it can be argued that sundering strike can be the main attack, and attacks like force sweep and overhead slash can be used in the interval. However eventually you're going to run into a situation where everything is on CD and you need to generate focus and threat. As for the amount of damage Guardian Slash does after the 5 sunders, that was it. In this case I average the damage to 2500, a decent round number. It was given in the tooltip as the damage after all 5 sunders are applied.

Made some revisions to the mitigation calculations. Same results, just numbers are a bit different. Had an error in the damage calculation after mitigation. Please see the edit of the post.

Just did the math on this. With a full 5 sunders on a target, overhead slash actually does more DPS on a target. More DPS means more threat via Soresu form. The downside of this is that you have to constantly keep the sunders up using Sundering Strike. But keep in mind that using Sundering Strike also generates focus. Guardian Strike however is more used to do both DPS and keep sunders up more easily. This means that you probably wont be generating focus via sundering strikes as you wont need to. Instead you'll probably be using Cyclonic Sweeps to reduce the CD of combat focus, and use that to keep your focus up, when applied alongside normal strikes. Both abilities use the same amount of focus. In greater detail, Overhead Slash has a 9 sec CD (with talent), and with 5 sunders, does approximately 266 DPS Guardian Slash has a 15 sec CD, and with 5 sunders does approximately 166 DPS. Clear distinction.

The reason he chooses to go deep into vigilance like this is because the defense three is bottom heavy. Most of the better talents are at the bottom of the tree, and the higher you go, the more the talents become more 'meh'. Meanwhile the vigilance tree has talents that provide decent tanking ability. Probably the only higher talent that would be useful to get is cyclonic sweeps, in order to use inner focus more often, and perhaps guardian slash for decent snap aggro. However skills like Force Clap, Inner Peace, and Stasis mastery I can easily do without. Even Blade Barrier, as far as people on this forum are describing it, is inferior to the Protector/Unremitting combo.

I just don't like it when people throw out opinions without data. I'm the kind of person who needs to verify with evidence. If I have evidence, I can substatiate my claim. That's why I use numbers. And thanks for the armor rating.

First of all, seraphimm, I don't suppose you recall your armor rating at your max level do you? Secondly, I just did the revised calculations for Blade Barrier vs. Protector/Unremitting build. The assumptions that were made here were: Mob hits for 3000 damage per cycle (2000 DPS) Character was lvl 50 Character had a 4000 armor rating Character had Soresu form on Blade Barrier absorbs 300 damage per 1 hit. Both Protector and Unremitting stack Ideal conditions (basically all moves are done on time and there is no lag time between guardian leap and force leap) Maximum mitigation is 75% Known details: Protector mitigates damage by 20% for 6 seconds. Has a 20 second cooldown. Unremitting mitigates 20% for 4 seconds. Force Leap has a 15 second cooldown The first set of calculations that were done were per cycle. The vigilance build depends on the cooldown of guardian leap, so that was set to a 20 second cycle. Blade Barrier depends on Blade Storm cooldown, so that has been set to a 12 second cycle. Per cycle, damage taken by the player is as follows Vigilance build: approximately 15570 damage taken per cycle Blade Barrier: approximately 10070 damage taken per cycle. Over a 1 minute time period, the results were Vigilance build: approximately 46710 damage taken Blade Barrier: approximately 50351 damage taken What this shows is that when armor is taken into account (the other calculation negated armor) the Vigilance build does indeed mitigate more over time. However, as per cycle, blade barrier absorbs more. The reason for this is that Blade Barrier has a shorter cooldown period than the Vigilance build, so it is less spiky. This is opposed to the tank taken full damage on the Vigilance build for a full 14 seconds. However, over time, the percentage mitigation for the Vigilance build wins out. The last thing to note is that the full mitigation for the Vigilance build is not being taken advantage of. The base mitigation without these abilities was 43%. You tack on 40% and you get 83%. However, the assumption is that the mitigation cap is 75%. So not all of the new mitigation is taken advantage of. Just keep in mind the mitigation cap is a assumption, and is subject to change with more data. Hope this helps. I'll be making revisions as I gather more data over time. Edit: Was slightly wrong on these calculations after inputting the new armor value. The results do not change, but the numbers are slightly different. Per cycle, damage taken by the player is as follows Vigilance build: approximately 13875 damage taken per cycle Blade Barrier: approximately 11593 damage taken per cycle. Over a 1 minute time period, the results were Vigilance build: approximately 51173 damage taken Blade Barrier: approximately 57966 damage taken

It does make for good discussion, I have to admit. What you are doing here is giving a creative alternative to a standard build, one that most likely does work. On the forums you saw my calculations. It is very comparable to the standard defense calculations. Actually... I'm going to have to redo them to take into account Soresu form and armor rating. I'll let you know what I come up with. Number crunching, number crunching...

You're right on point 2. The tooltip does say increase defense by 6%, according to TORHEAD. So I redid the calculations, it's down to approximately 43% mitigation, with Blade Barricade. Still, it's a good number. Of course, that is assuming the formula I used for it is correct.

Both abilities that you mention apply to riptose. What makes riptose really special is that it's not connected to the GCD. So even if you are in the middle of a non-channeled ability, you can still use it once it comes up. The additional argument is that Blade Barricade increases defense percentage. Now, I like to use numbers. I live on numbers. From one calculation on damage reduction that I got here: http://sithwarrior.com/forums/Thread-SWTOR-formula-list?page=5 (Not sure if this is the right formula or not, but since it's the only one I could find, I'm going to use it.) Assuming that the character is lvl 50, and has 4000 armor (defense), he would mitigate 27% of the damage coming at him. You tack on 6% with Blade Barricade, you get 33%, if I understand it correctly. To me, 33% sounds a whole lot better than 27%. Edit: Didn't take into account Soresu form, which increases the base armor to approximately 37%, plus a 6% damage reduction which makes it 43%. Adding 6% from Blade Barricade makes it 49%. That's nearly HALF of all damage that becomes reduced, an astounding number.