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How to PVP as a Jedi Guardian in defense spec.


Dragonexadon

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EDIT 8/12/2013 I wrote this guide back when protection was a new concept for PVPers. I have updated it slightly and removed some aspects that are no longer relevant. This guide is to make players who are new to guardians aware of tanking/protection in PVP. It is a broad brushstroke that can be used as a stepping stone.

 

EDIT I changed the title of the post. You don't need to be defense spec to gain protection points. The tips I provide below can work with DPS and Defense speced guardians.

I use to post on these forums all the time prerelease. Now I have been so engaged in the game that I forgot to post. Here are my findings on gaining protection points in PVP

 

TLDR: It is easy to gain protection points by using taunts, switching your gaurd to targets that need it most, and using guardian leap. You objective is to keep taunts on high damage dealers, such as smashers, while keeping your healers alive. Guarding nodes are better left for a Shadow tank but can be done as well if need be.

You’re doing it wrong! Don’t you hate it when someone says that to you? In the early days of PVP I often found myself at the bottom of the list. Often I asked myself “What am I doing wrong!”

I would wager that the majority of players, who PVP, only care about the following:

 

  • Kill Count
  • Damage Output

 

As a guardian defense spec you should be focused on the following:

 

  • Protection
  • Objective

 

SWTOR has made it so that a PVE tanking spec can work very well in PVP if you know how to play it. Your objective is to keep your DPS alive long enough to kill the other team as well as keep your healers alive long enough to heal you and your team.

 

Your key abilities to do this are as follows:

 

  • Guard
  • Taunt
  • Challenging call
  • Guardian Leap

 

 

Guard

Guards the target while it remains within 15 meters. While active, the target takes 5% less damage and generates 25% less threat. In addition, 50% of all incoming damage from enemy players is transferred back to you

Normally start out with your Guard on a healer. When the other team notices who your healer is they will focus fire them down. Guard swap as need be. Do this by keybinding your guard and using raid frames to switch targets that are taking most damage at the current time. Remember healers are a priority.

Taunt

 

Taunts the target, forcing it to attack the Warrior for 6 seconds. Player targets deal 30% less damage when attacking anyone other than you. Lasts 6 seconds.

People think of taunt as a PVE mechanic only. Yet if you read the tool tip you will find one important detail about Taunt.

 

“Player Targets deal 30% less damage”

 

Taunts should be used off every cool down. In theory Taunts should only be down for 9 seconds before you can use it again. (6 second duration, 15 second cool-down). Find out who on the opposing team is outputting the most damage and taunt them whenever possible. If they are not in range don’t wait to use it.

 

Challenging call

Much like single target taunt, your AOE taunt should be used off cool down, every cool down. Not only does it provide damage reduction from all targets it is in range of but grants a bubble to friendlies in range when speced correctly

 

Guardian Leap:

Leaps to a friendly target, reducing his or her threat by a moderate amount and reducing damage taken by 20% for 6 seconds.

 

This is under used in warzones even to date. Use it off every cool down with player discretion advised. Clearly on a hutt ball match you don’t want to waste your leaps for protection and instead use them to traverse the ball across the field.

 

With that in mind you should always be aware of your raid frame. See who is taking damage and leap to them to provide them with protection.

 

Hutt Ball:/b]

Hutt Ball is the rare gametype where you can throw protection out the window for the most part. If by chance someone else gets the ball feel free to guard, taunt, and protect while keeping in mind that you should be moving into an ideal spot for them to pass to you.

 

When you have the ball: save your leaps to get over firepits and/or from the pit to the goal line. Use your force push to reset your leap often and always keep on the lookout for friendly targets to guardian leap to. Remind your teammates to get into ideal positions for your leaps. Don’t be a hero, if you are about to die pass.

 

Stuns/Interupts

In addition to protection stuns/interrupts are amazing for protecting your teammates. Despite their normal uses to stop caps and cancel a cast.

 

  • Force Stasis
  • Push
  • Force Kick
  • Force Leap
  • Awe
  • Hilt Strike

 

All of these abilities are great for protecting your healer. When users are focusing your healer down they can still drop. Perhaps you already have one healer on guard and need to protect another at the sometime? They also serve well at saving a DPS from being destroyed. As a defense focused tank your protection won’t always reflect from your “protection” numbers.

 

Gearing up

There are much better guides to how to min/max your gear as a tank. http://www.violentbydesign.org/tankstats.php is the current theory that most tanks are running with in defense gear. I have personally tried, when running with a decent healer, to go DPS gear with a shield in defense spec. Getting around 400k damage and 400k protection with it at best. I find for games like huttball and voidstar defense you are better off using your defense gear. When attacking use your DPS gear with a shield (provided a good healer).

 

Guarding nodes

Shadows are better suited for this. Yet groups don’t always have a Shadow tank. Even if they do people are often detest taking on this choir. When guarding a node stand a good distance from it. Don’t blow your CC break right off the bat. Guarding from a distance forces an enemy to travel back to the node and start the cap. This should give you time for the CC to run out, depending on the CC, and you to interrupt their attack. Clearly it differs depending on the offending class and CC.

Always call out when you have INC. You maybe CCed but your keyboard is not, even if it is just one target. Call out first for foremost.

 

Some closing notes:

 

Here are the following protection medals I know about

 

Shield - 5k Defense

Protector - 50k Defense

Guardian - 2k Defense in 1 Life

Paladin - 10k Defense in 1 Life

Defense Basic - 1k Defender Points

Defense Bronze - 3k Defender Points

Defense Silver - 5k Defender Points

Defense Gold - 7.5k Defender Points

Defense Platinum - 10k Defender Points

 

If you are protection just to hunt medals then you can stop after you hit protector. However personally I don't do this. I like to protect the whole match to keep my healers up, hold objectives, and win games.

Clearly you will still be doing damage. Just don’t expect your damage to ever be close to good DPS. Your focus should be on protecting players to live long enough to do the damage/heals needed to win. Voice commutation is key to winning PVP matches. If you want to win more get on team speak/mumble/Vent. Call out your targets, be organized. Always remember, if you don’t know who to guard then guard a healer. Tanks keep healers alive so healers can keep everyone alive.

 

Sorry if the grammar and spelling is subpar on my post. If you notice an error please feel free to send me a PM and I will fix it. I hope this has been helpful

Edited by Dragonexadon
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Good general guide for Defense specc'ed Guardians. I don't have Guardian Leap yet either, but I use taunt and guard extensively. I've noticed a few nice things recently. 1) That people are starting to respect the protection stat. I've received a good chunk of MVP votes when my only significant contributions were objective and protection points. Healers especially like to vote for you when they recognize you were the one keeping them alive the whole time. 2) It seems that damage mitigated from the taunt debuff counts towards protection. I can't be sure of this, but I do tend to have a relatively high protection stat even if I'm not using guard (I sometimes PvP in Vengeance spec). The only explanation is that the taunt debuff is causing this. I use it a LOT. As in every time it's up.

 

The best thing about taunt is that people tend to either not notice it, or not care that it's on them. The fact that debuffs are very difficult to quickly identify due to the icon size in this game helps us a great deal. Even without that, I imagine a lot of people just won't care that they're taunted, or don't know what it does.

 

One of my favorite situations in PvP is when it's me and a healer against 2 (or sometimes 3) other people, and they decide to focus down the healer. When your opponents have a one track mind (and trust me, most do. Not everyone is a skilled PvP'er) all they want to do is get that squishy down, and you can bet they're not gonna spend much time paying attention to the tank with the wet noodle.

 

Fine. Between Guard and Challenging Call, then a taunt when that wears off on the higher DPS opponent, that healer isn't going anywhere fast. Not only that, but you mitigate even more damage by throwing a Force Statis and/or hilt strike on the attackers while your taunts are on cooldown, or force pushing one of them away. SAVE those cooldowns! Don't blow them right off the bat. CC is damage mitigation. Force pushing a melee away from the healer is mitigation, and more than 2 seconds worth since they have to get back in range. If you're playing a defensive character, then yes, that's your job. If you're specced Vengeance/Focus, then your job can be to do damage, but knowing your role is important.

 

I've won plenty of 2v2 and 2v3 fights simply because the opponents have the mindset of "We're not getting off of this healer until he's dead". Maybe they throw a bit of CC on me, but Guard works through that. I may not do a ton of damage, but if you're spending your time making futile attacks on my partner, then yes, I'm eventually going to kill one of you, then you lose.

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This makes too much sense. If any spec'd guardians started PvP this way we'd be winning a lot more warzones.

 

Vengeance/Focus spec should accept that we can do these things other dps classes cant and they will help us win warzones and get more kills as a team. I understand people want to kill the most but if you keep everyone alive via playing as a team you will get more kills and dps. My stats reflect that in zones where I do the best job tanking/protecting I also get the most dps/kills because I'm alive more and swinging more. People will send tells asking what spec I was using to get such high dps and I tell them I was tanking. It's just counter-intuitive from the typical "slash-->kill" mentality. And really if you want to do that it's fine but recognizing this other path will yield benefits for all.

 

edit: And yeah my tank spec is the half vigilance one. The spec's are weird in that defense has PvP stuff and vigilance has some good tank stuff.

Edited by newport
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I'm usually running with Exadon as a Jedi Sage (Healing). When he puts guard on me and we defend a point, it's annoyingly hard for the opponents to down us. This is the ultimate defense, especially on Alderaan’s turrets.

 

I recommend all Jedi Guardians to try it out a few times and try to find a healer buddy. Good luck.

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Good guide for this. There have been a few other posts noting that we should focus on Protection more than anything. I can still manage to kill a few people but by working on nothing but guarding my teammates I've seen a lot more wins and managed to get my name higher on the scoreboard.
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What's your Training Point spec?

 

I am 42 and so far every point I used has been in defense. I am crazy but I find most , if not all, the tree great for pvp/pve.

 

I plan to max out the tree before moving over. This is not what people normally do though. However I would say the proof is in the pudding

 

http://i170.photobucket.com/albums/u267/Exadon/pvp.jpg

 

I often get near the top of the charts in medals as well as protection. I am sure there are better specs then what I have however...but it works for me.

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I must say one thing they got right is being able to play tank in PvP, not killing ofc, but actually "defending" your teammates effectively, being useful, even needed I'd say, Guardians sure do that well, I like it too. Edited by Pwnzie
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Hey buddy, good guide for people that need to be told how to play their class correctly. Hopefully people will see it and improve, only thing ive spotted is u need to do an edit on challenging call. It has a 45 sec CD untalented and a 37.5/30 sec CD talented (depending on how many points are in it)
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Also you can ruin the enemy's day by interrupting their healer constantly. I find that to be more fun than swinging dps everywhere :/

 

I tend to just drop the healer from full to dead in 5 seconds flat which is slightly more effective.

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Sure, but if we're trying to tank you can get the healer's 2-3 friends to disengage from whatever they're doing to come deal with you. You just drew aggro in pvp. And it's not like you can't do both. Drawing aggro and then killing the healer are both good :) Then our people can more easily take out the enemies you draw in and/or focus on control points.
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I find that guard is a very dynamic ability and needs to be switched based on who is taking damage. A good tip is to unguard after combat so you can quickly guard who needs it without using 2 gcd's. Also, it is very important to bladestorm every time it is up to have the shield buff on.

 

Guardian leap and taunts are so important to keep on cd since you also take less damage from guard.

 

We have a boat load of cc. between push, stasis, hilt strike, and awe you can peel for days. Typically when I engage a group of enemies I leap to one target, awe, place guard if I haven't already, freezing force, then challenging call once they come out of mezz, and guardian leap to their focus target... very effective.

 

Furthermore, you can effectively lock out a healer for a very long time. Interrupt, cc, then interrupt again can be all the time you need to drop a target.

 

Lastly, you have a bit of burst with guardian slash and dispatch. If you are assisting you can put a full stack of sunders and help drop targets. Leap, bladestorm, sundering strike, guardian slash, then dispatch is quite a bit of damage.

 

It takes a little bit of practice and gear, but your role is clearly defined and you will become invaluable.

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I'm not disputing anything in this post, and I agree that in a group a guardian is a fine addition to any PvP squad, but when I clicked on this thread I was hoping it might contain some nuggets of wisdom on what the hell to do when you are solo.

 

The problem is I play on a PvP server where getting ganked when you're minding your own business running missions is part of the 'fun'. I'm the first to admit that I'm no great PvPer, and I'm only on that server because our guild got deployed there (guildleader likes PvP more than the rest of us).

 

I'm seriously finding it difficult to do and continually getting smacked down by ranged classes 4 or 5 levels below me (currently L45) is demoralising to say the least.

 

So any advice on how a guardian is supposed to survive 1:1 encounter with any of the ranged classes when you can't even get within melee range before you're down 75% of your hp would be appreciated. Comments like L2P are not. That's what I'm trying to do - I just don't live long enough to learn any lessons in that situation. I'm fine in group mode - I know my role (protect and serve) - it just doesn't really apply in the situation where you're ambushed / ganked by a player when you're on your own (usually while you're already dealing with a group of mobs).

Edited by Cybermeister
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Good guide. I'm a 39 prot spec Guardian and usually finish bgs with 7-9 medals and ballpark of 40-50k protection. Decent damage and even some heals (I guess from blade barrier) too.

 

People don't respect the PeePS (so don't expect many MVP votes) but it does win bgs.

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Good guide. I'm a 39 prot spec Guardian and usually finish bgs with 7-9 medals and ballpark of 40-50k protection. Decent damage and even some heals (I guess from blade barrier) too.

 

People don't respect the PeePS (so don't expect many MVP votes) but it does win bgs.

 

Agreed, I never get MVP votes. People often shout out in our Team Speak server

"I got highest heals!"

"I got highest damage!"

 

when I say

"I was highest protection!"

 

they all laugh...ugh :p

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Also you can ruin the enemy's day by interrupting their healer constantly. I find that to be more fun than swinging dps everywhere :/

 

Yeah, works pretty well in world PvP but... well, maybe it's just my server but in Warzones there is a huge ability delay. Makes landing what should be a simple force kick really difficult.

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Yeah, works pretty well in world PvP but... well, maybe it's just my server but in Warzones there is a huge ability delay. Makes landing what should be a simple force kick really difficult.

 

Not just your server. This is such a great move...but so annoying because by the time the "instant" kicks off their channeled ability is almost complete.

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I'm not disputing anything in this post, and I agree that in a group a guardian is a fine addition to any PvP squad, but when I clicked on this thread I was hoping it might contain some nuggets of wisdom on what the hell to do when you are solo.

 

Well, here's the best I've got. When going 1v1 with a range, you need to first off interrupt. I like to save Force Kick for when I see a heal, but if you're struggling you may need to be prepared to Kick everything, just to reduce their damage. Freezing Force is basically a requirement... keep it up at all times, lest ye be kited like a little *****. Blade Storm should be pretty close to use on cd, and of course your various cc abilities are bonus. I prefer to hold Force Leap in reserve, because most range have enough slow/cc to keep you off long enough for Freezing Force to wear off if they can land a knockback, so keeping the intercept available is a good ideal.

 

That said, 1v1 is not something that actually happens much. Most of the time your companion (presumably Doc) is with you, which means you have much more to keep in mind. Use Guard, Taunt, and Challenging Call... he can't heal you if he's dead. The double Leap combo becomes very viable if you have it and he's already used his knockback. You can switch your dps train onto his companion. Etc. Think 2v2 arena with a really stupid pocket healer, and you'll have the right idea.

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As things stand right now, all you really need to "tank" in pvp is soresu form. It gives you access to guard -- but, protection numbers can come from taunting a target doing active damage to a teammate, or using guardian leap on a teammate taking damage.

 

The shield tree doesn't provide enough damage to be viable by itself, currently. Since 75% of your tanking viability is wrapped up into things outside of the shield tree -- stay in soresu form, and plop your points into a dps tree. You won't regret it in pvp or pve.

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As things stand right now, all you really need to "tank" in pvp is soresu form. It gives you access to guard -- but, protection numbers can come from taunting a target doing active damage to a teammate, or using guardian leap on a teammate taking damage.

 

The shield tree doesn't provide enough damage to be viable by itself, currently. Since 75% of your tanking viability is wrapped up into things outside of the shield tree -- stay in soresu form, and plop your points into a dps tree. You won't regret it in pvp or pve.

 

I strongly disagree with this post. Soresu is only part of our defenses, and isn't even very effective... Guard is the main reason it's used. But Guard is only part of our toolkit... and honestly, I use Taunt and Challenging Call and the monster amount of cc to be gained from a proper tank spec much more than I use Guard.

 

And I should add that if you're building a Guardian spec around shielding, you're doing it wrong. Guardian is a defense tank to start with, not a shield tank, and is best played in PvP as a crowd control monster. If you follow this advice about spending your points in a DPS tree and using Soresu form, you're gimping your dps with a poor defense tool instead of the offensive tools that you have to spec to even get, and gimping your ability to contribute survivability to your teammates by passing up all of the nice crowd control and a few survivability goods, like Blade Barrier, to be found in the tanking tree.

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I strongly disagree with this post. Soresu is only part of our defenses, and isn't even very effective... Guard is the main reason it's used. But Guard is only part of our toolkit... and honestly, I use Taunt and Challenging Call and the monster amount of cc to be gained from a proper tank spec much more than I use Guard.

 

And I should add that if you're building a Guardian spec around shielding, you're doing it wrong. Guardian is a defense tank to start with, not a shield tank, and is best played in PvP as a crowd control monster. If you follow this advice about spending your points in a DPS tree and using Soresu form, you're gimping your dps with a poor defense tool instead of the offensive tools that you have to spec to even get, and gimping your ability to contribute survivability to your teammates by passing up all of the nice crowd control and a few survivability goods, like Blade Barrier, to be found in the tanking tree.

 

Please read over Soresu again. It offers 15% to shield chance, and an armor bonus that equates to, at moderate gear, at least 20% flat damage mitigation -- as well as generates focus by taking damage. This is the meat of your tanking ability, right here.

 

The only difference in damage comes from specing into the form and talents that offer more damage for that respective form, but arguement is easily reframed as do more damage quickly, or live longer and do more damage over time. AT BEST, in a Vig vs Shield/Vig spec, we're talking 12% damage difference in the boost you can get from Shein.

 

I currently run 31 in focus, rest in vig and shield -- my best run in a warzone was just over 400k damage, with 75k protection. I can mod my gear, if I choose for def/shield and tank any hard mode I want (and have done it), or I can run accuracy/power and in soresu form throw out 4k-5k AE Force Sweeps. My guardian friend has significantly better gear than I, runs in Soresu, and has hit a over 5k on his.

 

The ONLY things you get from the defense tree in regards to defense are 12% defense, a 40% reduction for 10 seconds, and blade barrier. -- and in return you will not do enough damage to kill anything. Taunt, Guard, Awe, AE snare, and guardian leap are what makes you a good pvp tank, the rest only matter if people target you -- and once they see your damage as a full shield spec, I assure you they will not.

 

I'm curious what you think it is a shield spec can do that a dps in soresu cannot.

Edited by Drakks
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