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New to Vanguard, assist please :)


Rerednaw

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I have a 50 Sith Warrior (tank) and 50 Sorc (healer). Wanted to see the Trooper storyline and rolled one up.

 

Playstyle is casual, 80% solo PvE and 20% PvP/flashpoints.

 

It seems that Assault is the tree of choice, with Tactics second. Is the shield/tank tree that bad for levelling?

 

Any help welcome and thanks.

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Is the shield/tank tree that bad for levelling?

 

The tank tree is perfectly effective at leveling, if a bit boring. Your first and second comp are a DPS and a healer, so you're set for your companions pretty much from the beginning. You'll kill stuff slower but still plenty fast enough, while having way lower downtime, not to mention shorter queues.

 

Assault is generally preferred for leveling because it's good for PvP and has excellent DPS, which means killing stuff as you level faster, even if you do have more uptime (though not that much if you run with your heal comp).

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Nothing wrong with Shield Specialist leveling. You get your healer companion, Elara, on Taris, which is very early. As long as you keep her reasonably geared (the companion-specific greens you get as random quest rewards worked just fine for me all the way to 50), she'll keep you alive through just about any fight.

 

Combat can get a little slow, especially with Elite and Champion enemies, as you won't be putting out much DPS; you'll basically whittle them down while Elara keeps you up. But it's a perfectly fine way to level. Just keep aggro off of Elara, burn weak/normal mobs first, and use your defensive cooldowns (including on-use relics) when needed.

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  • 2 weeks later...
I am leveling as shield spec right now and I offset the ow leveling with doing a copious amount of flash points. The queues are almost instant as well. One could level at a decent pace just from flash points I would assume at least till level 45 or so when the levels get long.
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  • 2 weeks later...
I have a 50 Sith Warrior (tank) and 50 Sorc (healer). Wanted to see the Trooper storyline and rolled one up.

 

Playstyle is casual, 80% solo PvE and 20% PvP/flashpoints.

 

It seems that Assault is the tree of choice, with Tactics second. Is the shield/tank tree that bad for levelling?

 

Any help welcome and thanks.

 

Having finally gotten around to pushing 50 on my vanguard I had tried all three trees while leveling, all with their own strengths and weaknesses.

 

Tank: still decent aoe damage, bit very lukewarm single target damage. Also doesn't tend to see a lot of great itemization while leveling (quest reward tank garb is all too often defense heavy). With elara you'll be quite beastly but it'll be a slow slog anytime you aren't dropping aoe.

 

 

Assault: like most I spent the bulk of my leveling time in this spec. The burst is incredible and tends to benefit right away from low-tier talents. Only downside is that this is far and away the squishiest vanguard tree, and I dare say despite heavy armor can feel like one of the squishiest dps specs period. Goes decent with a tanking companion as you can keep tanno or forex alive longer by taunt swapping, seemed more effective then just running with a healeras the added bit of damage helped mow through mobs.

 

 

Tactics: best versatility by far but at a tradeoff of being great at no one particular thing. In dps spec you feel less squishy then assault, with the added benefit of being able to run ion cell without losing the throughput of most of the tree. The added boost to pulse cannon is nice, but there's already so much aoe at your disposal that for leveling it doesn't see max potential.

 

That said, for leveling you get a.feel for tankiness without the dismal damage output of shieldspec if you run a tweaked version of the old iron fist spec that's an ion-cell tactics hybrid

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Thanks for the advice folks.

 

On soloing heroics. I was doing okay until Nar Shadda. Then the difficulty took a spike. While working on L31 bonus quests one of the 2+ Heroics (L30 or 31) had a champion with 80,000 health.

 

I'd never seen mobs with that much health before Voss before. My gear isn't the best (half epics ratings 72-80), total health 9200. 43% damage reduction shield chance 26%, absorption 24%. Defense rating was only 8%.

Main weapon has a damage rating of 96 (legacy epic). But I figure I'm pretty decent for my level.

 

I popped my cooldowns and gave the mob a try (since I had 5 levels on him). The guy 2 shot me. Like shoot, stun, (break stun) stun again, shot again.

 

Going to try respec DPS and see if I fare any better.

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Having finally gotten around to pushing 50 on my vanguard I had tried all three trees while leveling, all with their own strengths and weaknesses.

 

...snip...

 

That said, for leveling you get a.feel for tankiness without the dismal damage output of shieldspec if you run a tweaked version of the old iron fist spec that's an ion-cell tactics hybrid

I actually left the game shortly before 1.3 dropped due to them killing my favorite spec in the game, Iron Fist (that, and 1.2 had killed my Combat Medic Commando.) :'(. But I've returned to scratch that Star Wars itch and while IF isn't nearly as strong as it was, it's still a very fun spec, now that I've modified it for PvE.

 

Basically what I'm saying is, give a modified Iron Fist a try, you might enjoy yourself. :)

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