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Guardian Tank Guide: From Beginner to Master


Vaidinah

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Intro

 

This guide is meant to explain how to play a Guardian tank, with the main emphasis being on operation boss fights. While the information here will likely benefit you for leveling, doing flashpoints, and PvP, I don’t participate in those activities anymore. Thus, I can’t guarantee this will improve your performance in those areas.

 

The guide is split up into many different sections, each of which focuses on a different aspect of playing a Guardian tank. These are Spec, Gear, Single Target Opener, Single Target Rotation/Priority System, AoE (Area of Effect) Opener and Rotation, Defensive Cooldowns, and Utility. Furthermore, each of those sections is subdivided into three sub-sections depending on your level of experience/skill. This makes it easier for you to go to the appropriate area to focus on what you want to learn.

 

Start with the Beginner sub-sections if you are new to playing a Guardian tank (or tanking in general), go to the Advanced ones if an experienced player who is just looking for more knowledge and ways to improve, and eventually finish with the Master category if you want to play optimally or close to it. In general, everything is written on a need-to-know basis so Beginner sub-sections especially will omit a lot of explanations as you don’t want to get overwhelmed with unnecessary information. The Advanced and Master ones are there to give you a deeper understanding.

 

It should be noted that while this guide can do a great deal to improve your understanding of Guardian tanking, the most important part is understanding the flow of the fights. What determines your success in operations is your knowledge of the fights, your understanding of your role/class, the skill/experience of your teammates, the skill/experience you have on your character, and lastly, your gear.

 

To be clear, you do need an appropriate set of gear for the operation you are trying to complete, especially if you are playing with a PUG (pick-up group). In a team with people you know and trust to play well, you can be well below the necessary gear requirements to succeed. Tanking is mostly about understanding what needs to be done and doing it, not about executing the best possible rotation or having the optimal gear setup.

 

As long as you can hold aggro within the first 30 seconds of the fight, use defensive cooldowns somewhat correctly even part of the time, and do the mechanics needed to beat the boss, you have done everything you *need* to do to win. Of course, there is a great deal more to playing a tank if you want to become good at it, but those are the necessities.

 

Spec

 

Your spec is how you distribute the talent points you get while leveling into the three skill trees of your class. There is little variation in the Guardian tanking spec as it ends up being 36/8/2, however, there are 2 points in the Defense tree and 2 in Vigilance can be moved around as desired.

 

Beginner

 

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#101GrRbddrorzGzZcRMZb.3

 

This is the simplest option and when starting out, putting your 2 available points in the Defense tree into “Battlefield Command” is best to help with movement and will be the most forgiving for incorrect positioning.

 

 

Advanced

 

 

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#101GMRbddrRrzGzZcRMZb.3

 

In this spec, you trade the 2 points in “Battlefield Command” for 2 into “Jedi Warden” to help with your rotation by decreasing the amount of filler. This also allows for more Force Pushes, which improves your DPS/threat and more opportunities to reset your Force Leap.

 

 

 

Master

 

 

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#101GMRrddrorzGzZcRMZb.3

 

Once the priority system is understood very well, you can maximize the damage/threat out of Riposte with “Guard and Thrust”. This talent allows you to use Riposte every 1.5 seconds instead of 4.5, which adds a great deal of DPS/threat if used at the right time.

 

Depending on your preferences and the boss fight, you can adjust the spec to fit your needs/desires. The 2 points in Defense can be moved to Battlefield Command (for convenience or more interrupts), Expeditious Protector (assuming you have an ally that is being damaged regularly), or Jedi Warden.

 

Another variation that is good is moving the 2 points from Perseverance to Accuracy. This gives you 94% Accuracy (along with the 1 from companion) that the other two tanks normally receive and is the best choice for fights where you want to minimize missing skills as much as possible (like Styrak NiM). Some players prefer 3 points in Accuracy over 1 and having 2 in Perseverance, however, I would recommend taking the latter. Perseverance is a guaranteed increase in mitigation (as higher Strength equals a stronger Blade Barrier) and DPS/threat while the boost in Accuracy is up to chance and isn’t strong enough to make up for its lack of consistency.

 

One last spec that was recommended by DuEldrvarya is 36/10/0 with the 2nd tier points going into both Perseverance and Accuracy. This particular spec is best mainly in situations where you don't need AoE damage, but still really don't want to miss (i.e. NiM Styrak).

 

 

Gear

 

This is probably the most overrated aspect of playing a character in general, even more so for tanking. When it comes to being ready for operations, don’t use more than say 10% of your total effort you put into your Guardian to figure out the best possible gear with what you have.

 

Beginner

 

 

All you need to know is that you want Defense, Shield, Absorb, Endurance, and/or Strength in every piece of gear you get. Nothing else matters significantly to you so remove any pieces that give you Accuracy, Alacrity, or so on unless you have nothing else to fill those slots. The only exception is Power and Force Power, which automatically come with your augments, off-hand armoring, and main-hand hilt. The augment you should go for is Redoubt and you can afford to buy the blue ones (Redoubt Augment 28) initially as they are very cheap and only slightly less effective than the best ones (Advanced Redoubt Augment 28).

 

Use your elite and ultimate comms to buy most of your tank gear (Bulwark) from the vendors (Oriconian and Verpine) and try to buy both Veracity Implants and a Veracity Earpiece from the Galactic Trade Network to give yourself a good base of mitigation (Defense, Shield, and Absorb) and Endurance. If you enjoy PvP or are willing to do a lot of matches to get gear, you can pick up Conqueror/Obroan relics as well (Fortunate Redoubt and Reactive Warding). Once you are able to, get and keep the armorings that give you your set bonus. Unless the difference in gear levels is drastic, always maintain your set bonus as it will significantly increase your survivability.

 

 

Advanced

 

 

Once you start gaining more gear from doing operations, you want to start optimizing towards the better mods/enhancements, implants, earpiece, and relics. For mods, you want to use the following:

 

Resilient (Absorb)

Elusive (Defense)

 

Of these, the unlettered mods (does not have the "B" at the end like 34B) are slightly better as they provide more Absorb or Defense rather than Endurance, but it makes such an incredibly small difference that either one is fine. When it comes to enhancements, go for ones below:

 

Advanced Bulwark (Absorb)

Advanced Bastion (Defense)

 

These are the only good enhancements for current gear as they provide the best benefits for mitigation. The high endurance ones (Steadfast and Vigilant) are both inferior and what you get from the comm vendors, but if that's all you get, just take it until you can replace it. As you do DF/DP, you'll get random tank gear drops that have good mods and possibly the best enhancement (Bulwark or Bastion).

 

You can choose to push your gear more towards Defense or Absorb based on what you want as they compete against each other in gear. Shield only competes with other stats you don’t want like Alacrity and Accuracy so you don’t have to worry about gearing for it specifically. The main benefit in higher Defense is better mitigation, more Revenge stacks and more Retaliations, which improves resource management and DPS/threat. Higher Absorb makes the damage you take come in more smoothly, but you end taking slightly higher damage overall. Not counting augments (which are all Redoubt for Defense), I run an almost completely even split between Defense and Absorb pieces in my gear.

 

At this point, you should be able to upgrade your augments to the purple ones (Advanced Redoubt Augment 28), upgrade your earpiece and implants to Dread Forged ones, and do the same for your relics. The two consistently good relics are the Dread Forged Relic of Fortunate Redoubt and Dread Forged Relic of Reactive Warding. If you get the Arkanian Relic of Reactive Warding (from doing the DF/DP quests), you can use that instead of the Dread Forged equivalent as the former is currently bugged to work every 20 seconds, which makes it slightly better. However, it may be fixed at any point so upgrade to Dread Forged when you have the opportunity to do so.

 

 

Master

 

 

The main places you can improve your gear is to get all non-B mods and to modify your gear (mainly relics) based on the boss. You want all unlettered mods as a Guardian tank because Blade Barrier/Guardianship gets stronger with higher Strength. The alternative is to have B mods, which increases your health slightly, but at this point you should know you know how to use your defensive cooldowns well enough that to avoid spikes. The other benefit for bonus health is to improve Focused Defense’s 3% self-heal, but the boost is marginal and you won’t be using it enough to justify it.

 

What it comes down to is that non-B mods will benefit you in every single fight as you have higher mitigation and DPS/threat while B mods will benefit you only in the case you happened to be low enough that the extra health would actually save you, which is rare. You have Enure for such times as well. The better your mitigation as well, the less chance you have to be put into this kind of situation so it generally works out best use all non-B mods.

 

In the end, you must make the right choice for your team. The difference between B mods and using unlettered mods is small and as I stated before, gear is not going to be the big factor in beating bosses. This is a relatively minor matter to be concerned about so focus mostly on the other aspects of your Guardian in this guide.

 

As for relics, if you happen to have more than 2 Dread Forged Relics, you can invest in a clicky relic (Imperiling Serenity or Shrouded Crusader) for boss fights where you are off-tanking. Clicky relics are better than passive ones in these types of fights as they have more uptime than normal (their massive amount of downtime is why they aren’t normally used). In fights like these (i.e. Tyrans in DP), you can replace your Fortunate Redoubt relic with one of those depending on how you built. For example, use Imperiling Serenity if you put more or your mitigation towards Absorb or Shrouded Crusader if you focused on Defense. This also helps balance out your mitigation so you aren’t relying too much on defending or just shielding.

 

The last area to change out your gear involves the armoring in your bracer, belt, and one other one (head, chest, gloves, legs, or boots) depending on which one doesn’t need the set bonus. If you want higher Strength over Endurance, you can switch out the Guardian Armorings you have there to Might ones for slightly better mitigation. This also applies to your main-hand hilt and crystals. It really doesn’t matter much either way right now, but I mention this as a possibility if you are so inclined.

 

While these last changes can slightly boost your mitigation, I don’t recommend it and I don’t do this for my own character. This is because you do need a certain level of Endurance to survive heavy boss attacks and to give your healers time to react. You can get away with as low Endurance for all current content, but when it comes to Nightmare DF/DP, this will likely not be the case.

 

 

Single Target Opener

 

How you start a fight is very important as a tank. In fact, your highest priority is to keep control of your opponents. This is because nothing else you do matters if they are constantly attacking the rest of your team. Your survivability (your second highest priority) only really matters if you are the focus of the boss. If you are uncomfortable starting off with the boss, have the other tank take it and practice the opening rotations listed in each section. If you are off-tanking (the tank not holding the boss), remember not to use “Taunt” or “Challenging Call” unless directed to do so by the other tank as they will guarantee that the boss will attack you for 6 seconds (with some exceptions).

 

The way players control who the enemy is targeting is through “aggro”. Aggro is based on the “threat” a player has built by doing damage or by using certain skills on the boss to cause it to attack a target. Normally, damage increases your threat by a 1:1 ratio so 1000 damage = 1000 threat. For tanks, your threat is doubled by being in Soresu form so doing 1000 damage = 2000 threat. Certain attacks state they have “high threat”, which means instead of your threat from the skill being doubled, the multiplier is even higher. For example, Hilt Strike increases your threat from the skill by 3 times instead of 2 and Guardian Slash increases it by 2.6 times.

 

Anyways, you hold aggro on an enemy by having the highest threat. If another player surpasses your threat by a significant amount, the boss will change to that target. All you need to know is that your goal is hold threat if you are tanking the boss at the time. If you lose aggro, use Taunt or Challenging Call to regain control of the boss. This will put you at the top of the threat list, forcing the boss to attack you for 6 seconds. If you continue to have the top threat after that, you will keep control of the enemy.

 

You can use the skill “Guard” on any DPS that you notice is generating too much threat (i.e. they are much more experienced/geared on their character) if you see they are grabbing aggro off of you. You will notice when aggro is taken from you as the enemy will face someone else. A better way to tell if you lose aggro is to have “Target of Target” turned on the interface. You can do this by going into your Interface Editor from Options, clicking on “Target of Target” (it will be a red bar if it’s off), and clicking the “Enabled” check. From there, just hit the Save button to keep this on (it will turn into a blue bar).

 

Also, you want to position the enemy so that it is facing you and its back is to the rest of your team as most bosses have “cleaves” that will strike the rest of your team along with you if they are in the path of its attack.

 

Beginner

 

 

Saber Throw

Force Leap + Saber Reflect

Force Sweep

Guardian Slash + Riposte

----------

Taunt

----------

Sundering Strike

Master Strike

Hilt Strike

Blade Storm

 

From here, you can go into the beginner single target rotation listed in the next section. Use the skill “Challenging Call” or “Taunt” to regain control of the boss if he starts attacking anyone other than you (unless it’s the other tank’s turn to hold the boss).

 

 

Advanced

 

 

Saber Throw (or Force Leap) with Combat Focus

Force Sweep

Guardian Slash + Riposte

----------

Taunt

----------

Sundering Strike

Master Strike

Hilt Strike

----------

Challenging Call (AoE taunt)

----------

Blade Storm

Force Stasis

Force Sweep

Guardian Slash + Riposte

 

As noted, you want to start with either Saber Throw or Force Leap with Force Leap being better as it puts you into position to use the rest of your skills. Use Saber Throw if the boss is going to jump to you instead. Saber Reflect can be used to boost your opener as it adds 8592 threat, but then it can’t be used defensively for one minute. You have plenty of other defensive cooldowns, though, so use your best judgement. It won’t make a large difference in your survivability if you do use it so don’t worry too much.

 

When it comes to using taunts, you use them in your rotation in the beginning because they boost your threat massively. What a taunt does is force the target to attack you (with some exceptions) for 6 seconds. There is another part that is mentioned about damage reduction, but that only applies to PvP and only with regard to enemy players, not NPCs.

 

Beyond the guaranteed aggro, it increases your personal threat to the highest on the threat list (the individual threat of everyone in the fight) and then increases that by 10% (right next to the enemy) or 30% (if you are at 4 meters or more away from the middle of the boss). Thus, the rotation is set up so that you reach your target, hit your heavy threat skills and apply buffs/debuffs, and then taunt to boost it. 6 seconds later after you use Hilt Strike and your taunt is about to wear off, Challenging Call is used to further build off your threat to try to keep you above anyone else. Try to move to the maximum of almost 4 meters (melee-range) when using Guardian Slash and Hilt Strike (right before your taunts) to gain the 30% boost to your threat.

 

 

Master

 

 

The optimal opener I go for is as follows (use Riposte on cooldown as it is available):

 

Pre-cast Combat Focus about 5 seconds before you start

Force Leap (or Saber Throw)

Force Sweep

Guardian Slash + Riposte

----------

Taunt

----------

Master Strike

Blade Storm

Hilt Strike

----------

AoE taunt

----------

Force Stasis (can be interchanged with Force Push if desired)

Force Push

Slash (or Force Sweep if you really want to be careful about holding aggro)

Sundering Strike

----------

Taunt (one more time as soon as this becomes available)

 

The main key in the opener is to delay Sundering Strike as much as possible since it does little damage/threat. Saber Reflect can be used near the beginning of the rotation if desired for extra aggro, but I only recommend this if you are using it on a boss that has nothing for you to Reflect in the next minute (like Nefra or Tyrans) since you are essentially wasting a defensive cooldown to do so.

 

This opener is engineered to help your single target rotation as Guardian Slash comes off cooldown, Force Sweep is already delayed for more Courage stacks, Combat Focus comes off a bit faster than normal since you pre-cast it, and you have enough Focus to continue using your skills. You will likely still need to maximize the threat from your skills to set up for one more taunt 15 seconds later just to be completely safe. From that point on, threat becomes irrelevant and you can focus on your priority system to maintain your survivability and do as much as DPS as possible.

 

To explain a bit more about the taunt placements, each taunt is also placed in such a way to hold the boss during the burst most teams’ DPS have and use their damage to build your own threat. As mentioned before, taunts give you the same threat as the top player in the threat list and then boost off that. If your team’ DPS is very high or more importantly, they have high initial burst (like Combat Sentinels) and have relics/adrenals going, they will have the top threat and you won’t have Guard available for every one of them to reduce their threat (especially true if you are tanking in 16 man). By making use of their massive burst, you can safely keep aggro. Depending on your team’s DPS composition and the playstyle of your team, you may need to modify the placement of the taunts to compensate.

 

 

Single Target Rotation/Priority System

 

Your rotation is just the order in which you use your attack skills with your main ones being Force Sweep, Guardian Slash, Riposte, Sundering Strike, and Blade Storm. Around 30 seconds after you start a fight, threat stops mattering since you or other tank should have used your taunts at least a few times to boost threat to the point where no one else can catch up. This is when your rotation focuses on just survivability and damage.

 

With more experience, you can put a larger percentage of your time into increasing the damage you do, but your main priorities at almost all times are to hold aggro and survive. The more damage you and your team do, the faster the fight ends, which means you and your team take less damage and there’s less of a chance that a disconnect or other random event doesn’t come up.

 

Guardian tank rotations can seem intimidating at first as you have a great deal of skills to utilize. If you come from another tank class, it will be a lot more than you are used to, but in time, you’ll adapt. Eventually, you will end up using around 15 skills, which means you have 10 other skills that aren’t main ones. As you progress, you can start adding each one to your rotation until it becomes a priority system. This means your skills aren’t used in a set order each time, but instead rely on a number of factors like your total Focus, number of enemies, applying buffs/debuffs, and so on. Resource management is critical to playing a Guardian tank as they must generate Focus to fuel most of their skills.

 

Beginner

 

 

Initially, your rotation is very simple as you simply use Force Sweep, Guardian Slash, Riposte, and Blade Storm on cooldown. Riposte will be available after every Guardian Slash and if you defend an attack, but the other 4 are on 12 second cooldowns. While waiting for your main skills come up, simply use Strike (to generate Focus), Master Strike, Hilt Strike and Force Stasis on cooldown. The last two skills may seem odd as they are stuns, but Guardian tanks are unique in that these skills do respectable damage and should generally be used to help boost damage/threat.

 

If you end up low on Focus and need to increase it quickly to use your main skills, use Enrage to give yourself 6 free Focus.

 

 

Advanced

 

 

At this point, you’ll have noticed that you have a lot of time waiting for your main skills. You’ll likely have gone over your cap for Focus (12) many times as you had nothing to really use that extra Focus on, but this will change now. If you know you will have enough Focus to keep your main 5 skills, dump all your extra Focus in Slash and Dispatch (sub-30% of enemy) as they are used to fill in the gaps in your rotation. The reason you have extra Focus is due to three different factors.

 

The first has to do with your Courage stacks. You may not have realized it, but as you defend (i.e. parry or deflect), shield, and sometimes resist attacks, you gain a buff called Courage. Each stack of this buff reduces the Focus cost of Force Sweep or Blade Storm, depending on which one is used first. This can stack up to 3 times, which makes them free to use, but most of the time, you will end up with around 1-2 stacks. If you use Force Sweep and Blade Storm on cooldown every time, there won’t be much of a gap between them, which means you can get 3 Courage stacks for one skill and 0 for the other one. Since you can’t go over 3 stacks, your goal is delay Force Sweep until it is 6 seconds apart from Blade Storm’s cooldown. This will evenly divide your Courage stacks between them, giving you more Focus overall to use on stronger filler skills than Strike.

 

The next way you gain extra Focus is due to a passive called Visionary. This gives you 1 Focus every time you get attacked once every 3 seconds. The third one has to do with Sundering Strike. This gives you 6 Focus every time it used and with the knowledge of how your Visionary works now, you’ll want to delay Sundering Strike in your rotation. Wait until you have 5 Focus or below in case Visionary procs so that you don’t lose out on potential Rage.

 

Another way to improve DPS is to delay Guardian Slash if you have Riposte already procced, but are unable to use it due to its 4.5 second internal cooldown. Riposte will do the most DPS of all your skills in any single target fight as it does good damage, is off the GCD, has 15% more crit chance, and does not miss (especially great since tanks don't itemize for Accuracy). You can afford to delay Guardian Slash about 1-2 GCDs if needed to get more Ripostes.

 

Lastly, you should start using Force Push as one of your filler skills for more damage and use Combat Focus pretty much on cooldown for bonus Focus to add in more Slashes and Dispatch.

 

 

Master

 

 

A common myth about Guardian tank DPS is that it is very low compared to the other tanks, but this is not true. People have low tank DPS as a Guardian because they don’t understand how to maximize their skills so you end up with players hitting several hundred DPS lower than their counterparts due to a lack of experience/skill. The difference between a great Guardian tank’s DPS and a normal one is massive and once well understood and practiced, you will be able to do the same DPS as them. You’ll just need to put a lot more time and effort into getting there as you have many more skills to utilize and your priority system is more dynamic.

 

Now for the priority system itself, I should mention first that tank DPS is really very similar to DPSing on another character. Your main rotation/priority system revolves around using your most important skills ASAP, filling in the gaps with your strongest fillers, and then using your weakest fillers (typically rage builders or resource neutral skills). Of course, the weakest fillers can be needed a bit earlier to make sure your most important skills have the necessary resources available when they come up. I'll list these for our class in order of priority for these 3 tiers of skills for a single target.

 

In the case of Guardian tanks, our most important skills (top tier) in our non-opening priority system are as follows:

 

Riposte (highest DPS and off the GCD)

Blade Storm (for least possible damage taken)

Guardian Slash (keep up buffs, high damage, and more Ripostes)

Force Sweep (keep up debuffs or when 2-3 stacks of Courage are accumulated)

Cyclone Slash (in case Force Sweep is resisted to keep up the Accuracy debuff)

 

Then we have our good filler skills (middle tier) to use whenever the above are not available or the time is not appropriate like these:

Dispatch

Force Stasis

Master Strike

Sundering Strike (5 Focus or below)

Hilt Strike

Force Push

Saber Throw (if possible)

Slash

 

Lastly, we have our weakest fillers (low tier) that are used as follows:

 

Force Leap

Strike

 

Let’s go over each of these skills now.

 

Riposte will be the highest DPS skill so use this skill on cooldown virtually every time. You will also want to plan your other skills around its 4.5 second internal cooldown.

 

Blade Storm is incredibly important and should be used on cooldown (regardless of Courage stacks) as it contributes significantly to your mitigation. You will also need to plan your other skills around this one so make sure you have enough Focus.

 

Guardian Slash offers good damage even in single target situations, gives you another Riposte, and keeps up your armor boost. As stated in the Advanced section, you can afford to delay this skill if you have a Riposte already procced, but are unable to use it due to that skill’s 4.5 second internal cooldown.

 

When it comes to Force Sweep, delay it until you have 3 stacks or the Accuracy debuff has almost worn off (it lasts 20 seconds) to maximize your Courage. This depends heavily on the boss as the more attacks you defend/shield/resist, the more stacks you can accrue so bosses with faster attack speeds help a great deal. Ideally, this would be 3 stacks for both Force Sweep and Blade Storm, but often, you can only get around 2. You don’t just rely on activating Force Sweep 6 seconds before or after Blade Storm anymore as your Courage stacks can fluctuate greatly based on RNG. There is only a 50% chance that a Courage stack can even occur when you parry/deflect, shield, or resist, but it should be noted that boss attacks are generally split up into many smaller attacks, which increases the chance of one of these occurring.

 

As noted above, Cyclone Slash is useful even in a single target situation as it applies the Accuracy debuff so use it if your Force Sweep gets resisted. It does barely more damage than your weakest attack, Strike, but keeping up your survivability is more important.

 

Dispatch does great damage, but costs 3 Focus. Once your target gets below 30%, you’ll want to use this in place of Slash as it does almost double the damage of it. Try to save Combat Focus when you start getting close to 30% and get your Focus up beforehand as Dispatch has a very short cooldown of 6 seconds and maximizing this skill improves your DPS a lot.

 

To explain one skill that may be surprising, Force Stasis is amazingly good. It actually does more damage than any other skill except for Master Strike or Dispatch, is free, and generates 3 Rage so use this skill on cooldown unless you are already capped.

 

Master Strike does great burst damage, but requires a 3 second channel and its placement in your priority system must be thought out. This is because you don’t want use it if Riposte hasn’t procced recently and it doesn’t interfere with any of your higher priority skills. You can also clip the end of the channel as the last tick of damage hits around 2.7 seconds. Since Master Strike has a 30 second cooldown and you need to clip perfectly 5 times to even get one extra attack overall, the benefits to doing this are very small. I don’t really recommend this in general, but it’s mentioned here for the sake of completeness and it’s useful in burst situations to fit in an extra skill.

 

Sundering Strike does low damage, but generates 6 Focus and as such, should only be used when at 5 Focus or below and at a lower priority than all of the above skills. This skill can be delayed quite a bit as a result.

 

Hilt Strike and Force Push both do decent damage and are free and should be used mostly for extra damage. They both have extra components that can be beneficial at times as they are both crowd control skills and Force Push resets your Force Leap.

 

Saber Throw is mentioned here as the damage again is decent, but requires your character to be over 10 meters away from your target. This skill can be used (especially when off-tanking) in conjunction with Force Leap for a total of 6 Focus, which is equivalent to using Combat Focus. The way you do this is to utilize the 1.5 internal cooldown of most attack skills to activate skills and move at the same time until you are able to Saber Throw. An example of this is to use any non-Master Strike attack skill to start moving away from your opponent, use a mid-range skill like Blade Storm to keep moving, then go into the Saber Throw --> Force Leap combo. If done correctly, you have no downtime between using your skills and gain a great deal of Focus for some extra legwork.

 

Slash is an underrated skill in general and good use of this ability ends up adding a significant amount of DPS. It just requires good resource management to use more than once in a while and should replace your weakest attack, Strike. It does about 700 more damage in almost full 78 gear so it’s definitely noticeable.

 

Force Leap can be used as explained in the Saber Throw explanation and does not require any knowledge to maximize. Just remember that when you jump, your enemy may have already moved some distance away so get ready to use a mid-range skill like Blade Storm if needed to strike until you are in melee range.

 

Strike is your worst skill overall as it is the basic “auto-attack” for Guardians. It has no cooldown, requires no resources, does very little damage, and only generates a paltry 1 Focus for getting used. Your goal is to use this skill as little as possible, but do so if you need the Focus for any of your more important skills.

 

 

AoE Opener and Rotation

 

Controlling multiple enemies at the same time has always been unnecessarily difficult for a Guardian tank. If you are playing a Guardian after coming from another tank class, you will likely notice your lack of ranged AoE options, but despite this, it’s not too bad. You just need to be in melee range to be effective as a Guardian tank and must be aware that your AoE attacks have a smaller range of effect as well. A Guardian who understands the limitations of the class and keeps his/her AoE cooldowns available for the right time will be about as good as any other kind of tank for this purpose.

 

Force Sweep and Guardian Slash will make up the core of your AoE damage/threat and both of these skills have the benefit of doing good damage, have bonus threat multipliers (as they are high-threat attacks), and provide important buffs/debuffs to aid in your survivability. Your goal is to jump or move to your opponents, keep them off your team, and do your best to stay alive at the same time.

 

One point I’d like to reiterate is that while your survivability is very important as a tank, it does not matter if you don’t hold aggro. As a tank, it’s critical to keep control of all enemies so when you have to prioritize your skills, do so with the intent of grabbing aggro first, then surviving second. If you are in a flashpoint, your main focus is holding aggro on the strongest enemies while the DPS clean up the weak ones first. This prevents the weak enemies from eventually going onto the healer as they will if no one else attacks them.

 

Beginner

 

 

In operations, adds (i.e. the extra enemies that spawn) typically come out every 45 seconds or so with some being more frequent. You have 2 other skills that can help greatly with controlling the monsters; these are Saber Reflect and Challenging Call (your AoE taunt). If you are using the talent points into the recommended spec, Saber Reflect gives you a massive amount of threat on all available enemies. Challenging Call grabs aggro on any enemies within 15 meters of you for 6 seconds.

 

You can alternate between using this and your AoE taunt to give yourself all the threat you need to hold the monsters long enough for your team to kill them. You generally only need Saber Reflect or Challenging Call to hold aggro before going into your normal rotation so save the other one for the next pull or set of adds.

 

For example, let’s say you are in a flashpoint and you are about to pull a large number of enemies. What you want to do is Force Leap into the strongest target (if you don’t know yet, just pick the one with the highest health) and use Saber Reflect. When you are the one who starts the fight, you will automatically have aggro on every target and with Saber Reflect’s boost, they will stay on you for some time. Once you’ve leapt in and used Saber Reflect, try to move your target close to the other enemies, hit them with your other skills like Sundering Strike (important to keep up your Focus), and if they are close enough, immediately use Force Sweep followed by Guardian Slash. If you see that you are starting to lose control of the enemies and they won’t be dead very soon, you can use Challenging Call to grab the rest of them. Thus, your rotation will look like this:

 

Force Leap --> Saber Reflect --> Sundering Strike --> Force Sweep --> Guardian Slash + Riposte --> Blade Storm

 

It takes some getting used to the range on Force Sweep and Guardian Slash as they are very small, but with practice, you will intuitively know their limits.

 

 

Advanced

 

 

As you gain experience and/or the enemies don’t die quickly enough for above rotation to keep aggro, you should start using Cyclone Slash. This attack costs 2 Focus and does not need a target to be used (like Force Sweep). Using Force Sweep causes your Guardian to strike all melee-range enemies in a roughly 180 degree cone in the direction your character is facing (this is better explained in the Master sub-section).

 

Due to this, the position of your Guardian and the enemies is important as you need them to be in front of your character. Also, you will likely be using Cyclone Slash multiple times and 2 Focus for each one quickly adds up, especially when combined with the 3 Focus for Force Sweep and 3 Focus for Guardian Slash (and 1 for each Riposte). When fitting this skill into your rotation, you need to keep your Focus, which means using Combat Focus (+6 Focus every 45 seconds) and Sundering Strike (+6 Focus every 12 seconds) pretty much on cooldown. When you know adds are coming out soon, you should be prepared with as much Focus as possible (12 is your maximum, but you only need 9 if you are going to Force Leap in) while having Force Sweep + Guardian Slash available to be used as soon you can jump in or move to the enemies. Your rotation will look something like this with 9 Focus:

 

Force Leap --> Force Sweep --> Guardian Slash + Riposte --> Blade Storm --> Cyclone Slash --> Sundering Strike --> Cyclone Slash --> Cyclone Slash --> Combat Focus + Cyclone Slash --> Force Sweep --> Guardian Slash + Riposte

 

You can still use Saber Reflect to help with aggro on adds especially if you were not prepared, but focus mostly on using your AoE taunt and use it after you see yourself losing aggro. As explained in the Advanced section of the Single Target Opener, taunts give you the threat of the top person on the threat list plus a percentage bonus of that as well. Thus, they work best the later they are used as they will generate more threat.

 

 

Master

 

 

Your rotation doesn’t really change at this point, but you should be able to keep Saber Reflect solely as a defensive cooldown now. There are some extra tips to help out, too. One example is for your AoE taunt as it’s very possible to grab aggro on enemies you don’t want when it’s your co-tank’s job to hold them instead.

 

For example, let’s say you are doing Grob’thok in the Dread Fortress. If it’s your duty to grab the adds and not the boss, you must watch out when using your AoE taunt so you don’t accidentally grab the boss as well. Any larger-than-normal boss has a giant hitbox (collision area where the boss is affected by skills, typically bigger than the character’s model), which means even if they don’t look close to you, they may still be close enough. If your co-tank is not prepared with another taunt to grab aggro, this can cause a wipe. When facing large bosses, be wary and only use your AoE taunt only when far away from the boss. This knowledge only comes with experience and lots of practice so just be aware of your position.

 

Another tip involves reaching the adds you want to control. Normally, you can just Force Leap to get in range, but this often is not the best idea. In the previous example with Grob’thok, if you jump to the adds, you will hit one, but by the time your character actually reaches that point, the other 2 adds will have moved out of range of you to Force Sweep. This is fine if you have your AoE taunt up and you are out of range of grabbing the boss himself, but if not, there are better methods.

 

What you will want to do is use Guardian Leap (gap closer + threat drop) to jump to your healers and hit Force Sweep + Guardian Slash when the melee adds inevitably go to them. They will do so after the first few waves because healers build threat on all enemies when they heal. The exact equation doesn’t matter, but essentially, on a fight where adds continually spawn, they will typically focus on the healers first. Thus, it is important that you get to them before they attack your healer. If the adds are ranged attackers, you should definitely Force Leap to them instead.

 

The last interesting trick has to do with Cyclone Slash. I stated before that it is a melee range attack (4 meters or below) and that it hits a 180 degree cone in front of you. This is somewhat inaccurate and you can use this information to your benefit. In fact, Cyclone Slash hits 5 meters in front of you and can actually hit slightly behind your character (about 45 degrees to the left and right of your back and 1 meter behind you). You can test this out on the operations dummy on your ship if you have one or on the fleet.

 

Edited by Vaidinah
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Apparently my guide was too long as the character limit is 50000 characters. The rest of the guide is here.

 

Defensive Cooldowns

 

There are 5 defensive cooldowns used by a Guardian tank: Saber Ward, Warding Call, Enure, Saber Reflect, and Focused Defense. Beyond that, you can also use an adrenal every 3 minutes. For adrenals, use a Rakata/Exotech absorb adrenal as it boosts your armor instead of your shield and absorb ratings, which is especially important since Guardians have by far the lowest shield/absorb of all the tanks. Exotech is best for progression, but the Rakata version is almost as good and you can get a reusable version of it as well if you use Biochem. Biochem is a generally good crew skill to max since it just makes all those stims (Nano-Infused Fortitude), adrenals, and medpacs (Impeccable) reusable.

 

When it comes to using your defensive cooldowns, don’t be reluctant to do so. They can do a great deal to help reduce the damage you take with Saber Ward and Warding Call being useful on every boss fight. The other skills range from somewhat conditional (Saber Reflect) to very conditional (Focused Defense).

 

It’s good to save Enure as a defensive cooldown in case there are problems during the fight. It increases your health by 30% for 20 seconds and removes all that health after it ends. It won’t kill you if you are below 30% of your max health, but will drop you to 1 health. It’s used as a stop-gap solution to give healers time to deal with other issues that may arise during a fight.

 

Beginner

 

 

The simplest way to use your defensive cooldowns as you start to learn about them is alternate between your most consistently reliable ones once a minute. Try using Saber Ward once you start taking heavy damage one minute, Warding Call the next, and your Rakata/Exotech absorb adrenal in the third one. You can continue this cycle until the boss is defeated.

 

Saber Ward: This is your strongest overall cooldown so try to use it whenever you notice you are taking a great deal of damage. It protects you against the type of damage most enemies rely on the most.

 

Warding Call: This is another powerful skill except that it works on all types of damage equally well, but is weaker in general than Saber Ward.

 

Enure : Save this until you get very low in health and then use it to give your healers enough time to heal you back up.

 

Saber Reflect: Initially, you can use Saber Reflect for the bonus threat it gives you during the opening rotation. Throughout the rest of the fight, experiment with using it to see if you start reflecting damage back to your enemies.

 

Focused Defense: This skill will now heal you for a small amount of your health every time you are hit, up to 10 "charges" within a 10 second duration. The heals are weak individually, but can add up to almost half your health if you use up all the charges. Use this skill when you start getting low on health in place of Endure Pain when possible.

 

 

Advanced

 

 

From here, it’s invaluable to understand what type of attacks you are going up against to figure out how to start using the best defensive cooldown at the right time. There are basically 2 types of relevant attacks in the game. These are melee/ranged (M/R) and Force/Tech (F/T). Force and Tech attacks are effectively the same type of attack for our sake. The type of attack the enemy is using determines in great part what defensive cooldown is most useful.

 

For example, if an enemy is mostly using melee/ranged attacks (which is the vast majority of bosses), Saber Ward will work the best by far as it increases your M/R defense chance by 50%. This is a massive amount made even more useful by the fact that you will probably have around ~25% defense or so (~20% from gear + 5% from using Riposte) and your opponents have a 5% chance to miss attacks from using Force Sweep. This gives you an effective defensive chance of 80%. Being able to negate roughly 4 out of every 5 attacks is incredible.

 

F/T attacks are important to note because they are likely candidates to use Saber Reflect or Invincible. Most operation bosses in this game rely on melee attacks instead of ranged ones, but there are some notable examples (i.e. Draxus in Dread Fortress).

 

The simplest way to tell what kind of attacks enemies are using against you is to see how your character responds to avoiding that type of attack. Look for different types of animations when bosses attack and see if you are able to parry, deflect, resist, or reflect them. Parrying means the attack was a melee one, deflect means it was ranged, resist means it was a F/T attack, and reflect means it was ranged or a single target F/T attack. F/T attacks tend to look energy-based so note when bosses use such skills. The new operations in Dread Fortress and Dread Palace are pretty good about making F/T attacks obvious with purple cones/circles and the like.

 

Saber Ward: As stated, this increases your defense chance by 50% for M/R attacks. F/T attacks can’t be defended against, but it will reduce your damage by 25% against those as well. Use this when bosses are mostly or only using M/R attacks.

 

Warding Call: This reduces your damage taken by 40% for 12 seconds (with the 2 piece set bonus). Once you get a better understanding of what type of attacks you are getting hit with, use Warding Call to help reduce damage against heavy F/T attacks that you either don’t have Saber Reflect up for or are AoE. If the boss is mostly reliant on M/R attacks, just cycle this alongside Saber Ward to help your healers.

 

Enure: You still only use this in situations where you are very low in health, but you can also right-click the buff off when you are safe again. This is to prevent your healers from pumping heals into you as anything above 70% is wasted when Enure wears off.

 

Saber Reflect: As stated, you should be looking for the type of attacks bosses are using and trying to use Saber Reflect when you see them using F/T attacks. Good use of this skill requires a great deal of practice as there are many attacks in this game that it works on that appear to be AoE. Experiment with this skill as much as you can.

 

Focused Defense: As a tank, this skill is now a simple defensive cooldown that provides no mitigation, but is the only one of your skills that will actually heal you and works even while stunned. It can also crit to give a stronger heal, but since you are a tank, this will be rare and not that much stronger than a normal heal from the skill. Due to the massive nerfs to this skill as of 2.8, you have a very limited time to use up your 10 charges and in most cases, it is impossible to actually do so. This is especially true unless you are hit by lots of F/T attacks as defending a M/R attack does not provide you with a heal.

 

 

Master

 

 

By now, you should be uploading your logs to Torparse and/or looking at the type of damage you are taking in a parsing program like Parsec. Both of these are extremely helpful tools in determining what has hit/killed you as they give the names of the skills. You should have the “Show Death Messages in Chat” checked in the Combat Logging section of Preferences to see the exact attack that finished you in chat as well. You want to be very aware of type of damage you take in each boss fight and the frequency of use. Since you know when the attacks are coming, predictively use your defensive cooldowns for maximum effect.

 

Unfortunately, neither Torparse nor Parsec actually state the type of attack that is being used, only the type of damage. There are 2 main types of damage with these being Kinetic/Energy (K/E) or Internal/Elemental (I/E). For our purpose, you should know that K/E damage varies as Kinetic attacks can typically be parried, deflected or miss you (due to an Accuracy debuff) while Energy attacks vary a great deal between parries, deflections, misses, or resists. I/E damage, whether they are Internal or Elemental, are the same as their damage ignores our armor, but they are also always F/T attacks.

 

The more times you enter a boss fight, the better your understanding of the fight will become. Once you have enough practice and think about it strategically, you will know where in each fight your healers will be the most stressed. It is during these times and when your cooldowns will negate the most damage that are when you should be using these skills. I highly recommend playing a healer in the same operations you are tanking as you will gain a much greater understanding of when tanks are most prone to dying and when healers are going to be busy. In general, playing other roles improves your understanding of fights and gives you a sense of perspective you cannot otherwise obtain.

 

As mentioned before, use your defensive cooldowns before your opponent’s strongest attacks and use them before you start getting low (except for Enure). They do not benefit you while unused and waiting until you already in danger of dying puts you at the mercy of RNG. You don’t want to rely on luck to stay alive and getting that low generally causes your healers to play inefficiently as they spam heals in a mad frenzy to save you.

 

Saber Ward: I’ve neglected to mention one important feature before and that is Blade Turning. With the 4 piece set bonus, you have 3 seconds (2 without) of 100% M/R defense chance. This means that if you time the skill correctly, you are guaranteed to reduce damage in those 3 seconds to absolutely nothing. Many bosses use F/T attacks intertwined their normal M/R attacks so using this well gives your healers a huge break.

 

Warding Call: This skill is still the same as before, but it should be noted that the damage reduction is not as great as it appears. The 40% damage reduction actually equates to about a 31% reduction in damage as the damage reduction is multiplicative, not additive. Thus, if you have 48% DR, it doesn’t actually push you to 88%.

 

Enure: The only extra tip I have is that you can pair it with Focused Defense at times for extra healing as the bonus health you have does improve the skill’s self-heals. Just make sure you won’t need Enure for the 90 seconds it takes to come off of cooldown.

 

Saber Reflect: Remember that this skill not only reduces your damage to nothing, but reflects damage back at your opponents. This damage can go up to a cap of 4698 damage and a threat gain of twice the potential damage (no cap) plus the 8592 bonus threat on top. This skill is very useful as a defensive cooldown for yourself, but it’s important to note that the damage boost is helpful as well. Be creative in your application of this skill.

 

One example where you can help your team out is on Brontes HM in the Dread Fortress. In the phase where Kephess clones are dropping, orbs attach themselves to your team and force them to deal with it while doing massive damage. You can grab an orb with a taunt and Saber Reflect to ignore the damage. This is very helpful on the very last orb as your team needs to get into position to start killing droids so you can relieve one of your DPS of this task and if timed well, do damage and build threat on the droids that spawn.

 

Focused Defense: Unfortunately, optimal use of this skill is now highly reliant on luck. As stated, M/R attacks that are defended do not trigger the heal and you have a limited amount of time to use your charges plus you need to be at 70% health as well. Instead of being good on every boss fight (like Invincible and Saber Ward are), it will be somewhat useful on them, though, still better than Enure in general since it actually heals. Your best opportunities to maximize this skill involve getting hit by a large number of attacks within a short period of time. This is especially true if the boss has delayed damage attacks that coincide with their normal skills as Corrupter Zero in his Ranged Form soon after he uses Missile Barrage.

 

 

Utility

 

Guardians have a variety of miscellaneous skills that aren’t purely attack or defensive skills. One set of them I’d like to mention are their crowd control (CC) skills, specifically single target ones like Force Stasis, Hilt Strike, and Force Push. These are skills that paralyze the enemy, causing one to be unable to attack or move. In the case of Force Push, it actually knocks the enemy back fairly far. If you are used to playing another tank, these types of skills are usually only used to stun/displace enemies as they do little to no damage. With the Guardian, they have other uses as all of them deal respectable damage. Due to this, you will want to make frequent use of them even during boss fights in operations.

 

There are a couple other crowd control skills that work on multiples enemies in a small area around your character. One of these is Awe, which stuns all enemies and does so for a longer period of time than your other ones, but breaks the stun upon enemies taking damage (this is called a “mez”). The other is Freezing Force, which slows all nearby enemies by 50%. Neither of these abilities are useful most of the time in operation boss fights, but you may find that to be the opposite case during flashpoints and when leveling. There are certain situations even during boss fights when adds spawn that they may become valuable to you as well.

 

Beginner

 

 

One skill all classes have is an interrupt ability, which is called Force Kick for Guardians. This stops the use of an enemy skill and only works on skills you can see enemies channeling. If successful, it locks the enemy skill for 4 extra seconds, preventing it from being used. When leveling and during flashpoints, this skill can significantly reduce the damage you or your team takes by preventing the cast of an enemy skill. You will want to bind this skill to a key as soon as possible and make great use of it. During operation boss fights, this skill sees much less use, but on certain bosses, is essentially required to win. Thus, you want to be comfortable using it quickly if needed.

 

If you use Force Leap at an enemy using an interruptable skill, this will also interrupt it. Since there is no lockout on the enemy skill, the ability will probably be used again. Luckily, the Force Leap of a Guardian tank resets the cooldown on Force Kick to be used again. This is due to a talent called “Daunting Presence” in the Defense tree (our tank spec).

 

When it comes to your single target crowd control skills like Force Stasis, Hilt Strike, and Force Push, you can just use them on cooldown in place of Strike for extra damage on boss fights or to stun weaker opponents.

 

 

Advanced

 

 

When using your interrupt or crowd control skills, it’s important to note that some enemies are immune to them. As hinted previously, stuns and interrupts generally do not work on bosses and on certain non-boss enemies. They will have a yellow buff called “Boss Immunity” that prevents them from being stunned, rooted, or slowed. The interrupt immunity one is a blue buff called “Unshakable”. When dealing with enemies immune to your interrupts or CC, don’t bother interrupting, but you can still use your CC skills for extra damage.

 

One tip for using Force Push is that it resets the cooldown on your Force Leap. If you know you will need a second Force Lepa before the 15 second cooldown finishes, use Force Push to reset this gap closer. This also allows for a ridiculous amount of interrupts as you can use Force Kick, move 10+ meters away to Force Leap, Force Kick, Force Push, Force Leap, and Force Kick again.

 

An ability that has not been mentioned yet that can be used help protect your teammates is Guardianship. This provides a Blade Barrier to all allies within a 15 meter range of your character upon using your AoE taunt. The Blade Barrier is the same self-shield that you normally get from using Blade Storm except that it does not gain the 20% boost to it from your 4 piece set bonus.

 

Another skill I should point out is called Guardian Leap. This skill can be used to jump to teammates to help with movement. It also drops the threat of your target and reduces their damage taken by 20% for 6 seconds. For now, I only recommend using this skill to reduce the threat of any DPS that have taken aggro (or before they grab it if it’s been a problem) or to aid in positioning.

 

 

Master

 

 

As you become comfortable with boss fights in operations, you will know how the damage your team takes ebbs and flows in each battle. This knowledge is invaluable for knowing how to maximize the use of Guardianship to protect your team. Many bosses will do AoE pulses of damage every so often so you can use your AoE taunt to reduce the damage your team takes.

 

With Guardian Leap, you can reduce the damage of nearby allies when you know they are about to take a great deal of damage. There are various game mechanics where a particular DPS or healer will be forced to endure an attack by the boss and Intercede is great for this purpose. You can also use Guardian Leap to protect your co-tank from damage for 6 seconds out of every 20. Since Guardian Leap is also a threat drop on your target, you will want to coordinate with your co-tank so that they taunt immediately after your Guardian Leap. Alternatively, you can Guardian Leap to him/her first, have him/her taunt, and then have him/her use their AoE taunt to ensure complete control.

 

One way to help your team out is simply to apply your buffs/debuffs to targets beyond just the one you are on. For example, on the Bestia HM Dread Palace fight, if the Dread Monster you are holding is not the one your team is focusing on to kill, feel free to help out with killing the Tentacles that spawn. You must be careful with your positioning as the Dread Monsters use a Smash-like AoE attack called Pulverize every 12 seconds, but through good positioning, you can help take down the Tentacles significantly faster while reducing the damage your team takes by applying your Armor and Accuracy debuffs to each target. If you are the tank holding the Dread Monster being killed or Bestia when she is out, help out with Dread Larva by grabbing aggro on them to keep them from harassing your team and kill them more quickly.

 

 

Outro

 

I’m going to leave you with a Juggernaut parse with Guardian terminology shown in parenthesis.

 

http://www.torparse.com/a/557083/21/0/Damage+Dealt

 

This is an example of what can be done with a strong understanding of Guardian/Juggernaught tanking and this fight is 8 man Nefra HM. In this fight, I do 1348.81 DPS while using Enraged Defense (Focused Defense) twice and my gear is almost full 78 (was just missing 2 implants). The use of Enraged Defense (Focused Defense) two times costs me 16 Focus/Rage total (4 for initial cost + 4 triggers for each one) and I use it on every other Power of the Masters DoT the boss places on me. As my co-tank, an Assassin, is holding the boss’ aggro, this helps out the healers without losing threat, though it does drop my DPS by a significant amount. I also cycle my other defensive cooldowns during the fight to lower the damage I take.

 

For my DPS itself, it’s lower than that what is capable of being done due to this as the extra Rage would have allowed for more Vicious Slashes (Slash), more Vicious Throws (Dispatch), and a lot less Assaults (Strikes). If you note in the parse, you can see that I have delayed Smash (Force Sweep) and Crushing Blow (Guardian Slash) several times just as I mentioned in the Master sub-section of the Single Target Rotation. I also use my AoE taunt, Threatening Scream (Challenging Call), three times to shield my teammates during the Power of the Masters DoT.

 

Hopefully this guide has helped you understand just how much you can do to improve your own play and helped you with completing operations. If you have any constructive criticism or suggestions, please let me know. Good luck.

Edited by Vaidinah
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This is a really comprehensive guide, thank you. I didn't even think to use force push as a filler, but it makes sense when tanking bosses that don't include adds.

 

Only thing I noted was maybe changing your 'Master' opener to include cyclone slash over regular slash, as I believe cyclone generates a little more threat early on in the fight ( http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=712195&highlight=cyclone+threat ).

 

I also personally find myself using hilt strike, then stasis, then blade storm before master strike, because master strike's damage is seemingly back-end loaded (though I admittedly haven't tried to prove this out via parsing). EDIT: I'm realizing that it doesn't matter if the damage is back-loaded in your opener, since it falls immediately after the taunt.

 

This is great.

Edited by Rufussay
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Thanks for the comments. As for Cyclone Slash, it will generate more threat overall than Slash when used, but this is because mainly because it costs less Focus (2 to Slash's 3). Thus, Cyclone Slash generates more threat per second if used as the lower amount of Focus gives you more Cyclone Slashes. When used an equal number of times, though, it generates significantly less threat even being high threat as it does such little damage.

 

In the thread you linked, another poster, Methoxa, replied showing that one use of Cyclone Slash generated 2119 threat while Slash generated 2743. Since we want to maximize threat initially in the opener, Slash will give you more aggro in the short time you need to hold aggro.

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Thanks for the comments. As for Cyclone Slash, it will generate more threat overall than Slash when used, but this is because mainly because it costs less Focus (2 to Slash's 3). Thus, Cyclone Slash generates more threat per second if used as the lower amount of Focus gives you more Cyclone Slashes. When used an equal number of times, though, it generates significantly less threat even being high threat as it does such little damage.

 

In the thread you linked, another poster, Methoxa, replied showing that one use of Cyclone Slash generated 2119 threat while Slash generated 2743. Since we want to maximize threat initially in the opener, Slash will give you more aggro in the short time you need to hold aggro.

 

I could be wrong but isn't the focus cost of cyclone slash 3 focus and it generates 30 percent threat from soresu stance?

 

In Shien Stance as a Vigi guardian i lose a net 2 focus from using cyclone slash, and shien stance refunds 1 focus making it mean that it SHOULD lose 3 focus. Not positive though.

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Cyclone Slash does generate 30% more threat than normal, but the cost is still 2 in Soresu form. There's a talent high up in the Defense tree called Cyclonic Sweeps (6th tier, middle icon) that reduces the cost of this skill, Blade Storm, and Guardian Slash by 1 Focus.
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One question:

 

While tanking on my alt, I've noticed problems arose even if I executed the strongest aggro opener if DPS was getting lucky crits.

 

So I did the obvious thing and started to use Reflect after force sweep or after GRD slash, then I taunted.

 

The initial aggro is so high that way that even a shadow would be flabbergasted.

 

I understand it's a Def. CD, but it's a 1min cooldown and at start, healers are untaxed so they should technically be able to cope without you using Reflect for first minute.

 

Question is: Why is using Reflect not mentioned anywhere in opener rotations?

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One question:

 

While tanking on my alt, I've noticed problems arose even if I executed the strongest aggro opener if DPS was getting lucky crits.

 

So I did the obvious thing and started to use Reflect after force sweep or after GRD slash, then I taunted.

 

The initial aggro is so high that way that even a shadow would be flabbergasted.

 

I understand it's a Def. CD, but it's a 1min cooldown and at start, healers are untaxed so they should technically be able to cope without you using Reflect for first minute.

 

Question is: Why is using Reflect not mentioned anywhere in opener rotations?

 

It's mentioned near the beginning of the Beginner Opener and mentioned in both the Advanced and Master sub-sections in the paragraphs below.

 

Beginner

 

Saber Throw

Force Leap + Saber Reflect

 

Advanced

 

Saber Reflect can be used to boost your opener as it adds 8592 threat, but then it can’t be used defensively for one minute.

 

Master

 

Saber Reflect can be used near the beginning of the rotation if desired for extra aggro, but I only recommend this if you are using it on a boss that has nothing for you to Reflect in the next minute (like Nefra or Tyrans) since you are essentially wasting a defensive cooldown to do so.

 

So you can and should use Saber Reflect if the boss has nothing for you to Reflect in the first minute. If you are unsure whether there are any reflectable attacks or aren't comfortable with doing the Master Opener yet, just use Saber Reflect. The loss in overall mitigation is fairly small so it's not a big deal either way.

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  • 2 months later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Thanks for the comment.

 

I updated the guide mostly with regard to the overall change to Focused Defense and subsequent massive nerf to the skill. Other than that, I just added in the 36/10/0 spec as another alternative as suggested by DuEldrvarya.

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  • 4 months later...
I don't know if this would be considered "necroing" a thread, I just wanted to point out that you would only receive the CDR on riposte for "Guard and Thrust" while Saber Ward is active, other then that, this is a very informative thread.
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  • 5 months later...

The only MMO that I have ever invested significant time in is World of Warcraft - I played DPS. That was a few years ago, and recently some friends and I decided that we were going to try out SWTOR. I wanted to try something new, so I decided to start out rolling a tank.

 

I only had a chance to glance through the guide (I'll take a more in-depth look at it later this evening), but unfortunately near the beginning the Torhead links no longer work.

 

Also, how relevant is this guide now? It's about 14 months old or so - if I read the date correctly. I hope it is still usable, as I really enjoyed reading what I was able to so far.

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The only MMO that I have ever invested significant time in is World of Warcraft - I played DPS. That was a few years ago, and recently some friends and I decided that we were going to try out SWTOR. I wanted to try something new, so I decided to start out rolling a tank.

 

I only had a chance to glance through the guide (I'll take a more in-depth look at it later this evening), but unfortunately near the beginning the Torhead links no longer work.

 

Also, how relevant is this guide now? It's about 14 months old or so - if I read the date correctly. I hope it is still usable, as I really enjoyed reading what I was able to so far.

 

Irrelevant. use this: http://dulfy.net/2014/12/11/swtor-3-0-defense-guardian-tanking-guide-by-artorias/

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The only MMO that I have ever invested significant time in is World of Warcraft - I played DPS. That was a few years ago, and recently some friends and I decided that we were going to try out SWTOR. I wanted to try something new, so I decided to start out rolling a tank.

 

I only had a chance to glance through the guide (I'll take a more in-depth look at it later this evening), but unfortunately near the beginning the Torhead links no longer work.

 

Also, how relevant is this guide now? It's about 14 months old or so - if I read the date correctly. I hope it is still usable, as I really enjoyed reading what I was able to so far.

 

The guide was written for 2.0 operations tanking, but even now in 3.0, it's mostly accurate and still relevant to the game. The main difference is one you already mentioned with the "Spec" section. Players used to be given a large number of skill points to put into a skill tree, however, that was replaced with another system called "Disciplines" to prevent players from using hybrids (going significantly far up more than one tree). Disciplines automatically give the player most of their abilities/buffs for that style of play with some limited choices in what are called "utilities". Since you are new to this game, you are probably leveling, but I haven't leveled a character in a long time so I don't know what the best utilities for that are at this point. If you're looking for utilities for end-game tanking in operations, I'll list them below.

 

Utilities don't vary much for operation tanking so this is what I use in the vast majority of cases. In the "Skillful" section, take Trailblazer (25% damage increase on Cyclone Slash), Narrowed Focus (gain 1 Focus when taking non-periodic AoE damage), and Second Wind (Resolute's cooldown is decreased by 30 seconds and gives a 10% max health heal).

 

For the "Masterful" section, take Guardianship (your AoE taunt, Challenging Call, gives a small shield to all nearby allies) and Inspiring Force (Freezing Force increases the movespeed of all nearby allies by 50% for 8 seconds). Lastly, Heroic utilities have the most good choices available. I typically take "Daunting Presence", which causes Force Leap to reset your interrupt, Force Kick, increases the duration of Saber Reflect by 2 more seconds (to 5 total), and gives you massive amount of threat to all engaged enemies within 30 meters (make sure you are attacked at least once before using for this to work). I would also take "Through Peace" (decreases cooldown on Focused Defense by 30 seconds) or "True Harmony" (Enure increases movement speed by 100% and makes you immune to movement-impairing effects).

 

Other than that, there are a small number of changes. You now replace Sundering Strike on your bar with Warding Strike and use it as much as possible once you have your 2 piece set bonus from the new gear. For your single target opener, you can skip Force Sweep and go straight for Guardian Slash since it has much higher threat and damage.

 

If you have any questions, please let me know.

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I don't want to get into this too much here, but that guide serves a very different purpose than mine. His guide is good for beginning to advanced level tanking, which is enough for most people, but it does not go into any great level of detail. The purpose of my guide to give players information to progress from beginning level Guardian tanking to mastery of the discipline.

Edited by Vaidinah
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  • 5 weeks later...
I don't want to get into this too much here, but that guide serves a very different purpose than mine. His guide is good for beginning to advanced level tanking, which is enough for most people, but it does not go into any great level of detail. The purpose of my guide to give players information to progress from beginning level Guardian tanking to mastery of the discipline.

 

I kind of cut out the middle man and just list the advanced/master reasons of why I do what I do, why cooldowns are used when they are, why abilities are used when they are rather than having stages of progression through experience. Get the best habits of a tank, beat them into the person upon hitting 60, they'll do HM Stage Rotation, Cooldown Management etc. from the moment they hit 60 to the moment they kill HM Monolith or something. Of course to each their own, but saying a great level of detail is semi-irrelevant, when 9 time out of 10, people don't typically like to read mountains of text to learn a spec. Which is nothing against your guide of course, just speaking from experience.

 

People have been resilient in the past over guides going into too much detail and I've gotten positive results with my guide's layout. Respectfully I feel our guides do share a similar purpose, though their forms are different the method is the same, to teach people rotations, cooldown usage, threat and so forth.

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