I'm not getting into the jugg vs. sin debate. Been around the tanking block long enough to know it never ends well, nor ever delivers a satisfying resolution. I will point out to the OP though that Dulfy's guide does not portray sins/shadows only viable as off tanks. At least I could not find any reference to that. What it does say is sins/shadows make the best off tanks; however, it does not mean they make bad main tanks. This is pointed out in the comments as well, I believe. Any additional assertions are by the reader, not by the author. I would also point out that it is technically impossible to write a truly comprehensive tanking guide, for any class. I tanked for many years in WoW and was part of mmo-c's effort in writing, maintaining, and researching all things relevent to tanks, and the best we could do was a semi-comprehensive discussion thread with over two dozen posts. That is what makes a good MMO appealing; that the skill ceiling is so high and that there are so many levels between it and the bottom that you never stop improving. You just can't fit all the details and tricks into a single volume, not without writing a magnum opus and by the time you're done, a new patch will force to revise anyway. This is why you never limit yourself to one article, or one forum post. As someone who is just now getting into sin tanking, Dulfy's guide did not leave me wanting and most of the information there has been mirrored here and in other sources.

Thank you for your reply and words of encouragement. I'm sure it will be a blast I'm sorry if I was vague about my gear; there seems to be so many ways to represent it. My armorings-mods-enhancements and augments are all level 66 or higher; mostly 66, with a few 69s and the rare 72 mixed in; basically whatever I have been able to scavenge from gear drops from 55HM flashpoints and so on. I also made an armoring link so you can see it for yourself: http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/character/f72618c5-4c69-4105-b126-9698b54c3c34 Many thanks for the nice minmax calculator. It does indeed seem that the levels of defense-shield-absorb fluctuate a lot between the fights. We are not a hardcore guild and I doubt we will do HMs, at least in the near future, but with such large difference I might get a second gear set with high defense, just for the few fights that clearly favor it. On our target operations, I'm not exactly sure myself yet. We are still getting our players' gears together, and I think for a lot of them this will be their first end game experience so we probably start with classics operations, just to get the feel for it and move on to TFB and S&V, and then DF & DP from there. I've planned my gear for the current content, which I think are DF & DP. I figured if I can get my gear ready for those Ops, I can do anything that came before them, plus the level 66 gear from the basic vendor seems to aim for that as well. I'm really pleased about my default stat distribution, but my big concern is my health pool; as I said it is only 35k with 5% class and Fortitude Stim, which seems really low. I am also getting mixed signals from HM flashpoint healers; some say healing me is fine, and a couple have said the damage is spiky and causes them to spam a lot, but that could very well just be the nature of the encounter or their own gameplay. It is hard to say, which is why I thought I would ask for some extra peer review and thoughts from these forums.

So, our guild is about to start Ops soon and have spent a lot of time getting my assassin tank ready. I've been reading copious amounts of information, about stat budgets, mods, augments, rotations, cooldowns, etc etc. The past couple of days I have been running 55HMs for comms and to test my tank out. It's been fine, with the exception of the Enhanced Duneclaw in Czerka Core Meltdown, where I felt really squishy. Even wiped a couple of times, though I'm not certain if I was the cause. The encounter itself might just be difficult for healers. In essence, I'm just here to see if someone could confirm that I've geared my beginning tank correctly. My def is 414, shield is at 726, and absorb is 977. I am only a little short from my goal of a 2200 budget distribution (primarily because I have to rely on B mods), being 428 / 741 / 1037, respectively. My problem is that my HP is only 32k unbuffed. With 5% endurance buff and stim I can get it to 35k. I know it says on like a hundred different threads that HP is not a big factor but these are tanks in much better gear than me, sporting 40k HP pools, and past experience in WoW has taught me that HP is a factor when starting from low gear, which is mostly 156 atm, with a few 162 pieces. So how does it look to you guys, is this enough to start doing SM operations? Should I expect there to be difficulties or should I try to exchange little mitigation for HP? All opinions are appreciated.

Darn, that sucks. Thanks for replying though; there are several of the pieces available on the GTN so I can always just or try contact the crafter. Still, a real bummer. I always dislike it when they remove pieces from the game so something that looked great suddenly becomes ridiculously difficult to come by.

Hokkay, so for a long time I did not realize that there were moddable versions of the old BattleMaster pvp sets, until I ran into someone in a flashpoint. So now I've been trying to look around, talked to some people and actually find our where the schematics actually come from. The best I have been able to google is a small mention on Dulfy's site that mentioned that the orange battlemaster schematics were available either on a pvp vendor, somewhere, or you got them by reverse engineering campaign gear. I'm not actually sure what that means so can someone, more knowledgeable fill me in on this; what exactly is campaign gear and where would this pvp vendor be? I have checked the fleet pvp vendors and I saw no schematics there at least.

Yeah, I get it that you and many others like to challenge themselves in this game but a general group finder is not the right place to do it, and if such a challenge is issued, it should be a joint consent. Frankly, if you want to challenge yourself, run the nightmare ops or play high ranked pvp. Or at the very least, if you insist on the playing the way you do, don't be surprised if someone cannot or doesn't even want to keep up. That's just the way it is when you work and play with other people; you have to take them into account and not just be me-me all the time. It isn't as much playing by the "rules," as you put it, but getting along and including someone else's position in your own. I actually find it strange the way some people insist on looking for challenges in places that have none. It's the same thing whenever I ask in General if someone wants to join for heroic mission X; inevitably there is someone saying "you can solo that, you know?" Yeah, I know that. It isn't even difficult to solo, but some of us are just like playing with other people, and when you point that out to them they usually defend their lack of perspective by explaining how they like playing games in a way that challenges them. Okey... so why are these people not playing the actual challenging parts of the game? You know the parts that were designed for that purpose. It's the same thing across all MMOs really; people complaining that there isn't any challenge in a game like WoW, even though they never even set a foot inside a hardcore raid.

Short answer; there isn't any. You have the freedom to play the class and spec that you want to, more in this game than in most because ever spec is viable, but the weapon of choice is an element of flavor embedded in the class system; so no, once you have picked your class, you are stuck with that choice of armor / weaponry.

It's one of those tricky situations where you have different people and play styles coming together. Personally, I think it is far less inconvenient to ask the group to go a little bit slower than to force everyone to run through flying. You might have people who have not yet done the flashpoint many dozens of times over; you might have people who are still learning their classes; or you might have people who simply don't have the skill to go through the instance a hundred mile an hour. Yes, I get it; you do, but that doesn't mean everyone does and it should not be a requirement to play this game. Not to mention that, in the end, you are not really saving a lot of time. Really, you're not. Try timing it sometimes and you will find that you are saving maybe 5-10 minutes, depending on your definition of "slow" pace. If it is a speed run you want, I think you should be doing it with guildies or friends who have the gear and disposition for it. I don't think it's as bad as the OP said, but it does happens. In fact, it happens in all MMOs and it is inherent to the grinding style of this type of games, that force people to grind the same instances over and over again; not for the loot drops, but for the badges at the end of the instance. The good news is that healers and tanks get most of the quick queues; and if you're otherwise a good player, the loss is more on the group than you. I've played both roles in various MMOs and it never bothered me to step out of the group, particularly as a tank because I know I will get an insta-queue right after, and unlike the disassociated teenagers I'm well adjusted enough to not be in a hurry.

Normally I agree 100%; PVE content has no place in a PVP area, but there is so little of it in swtor that I really don't think it is a problem. Yes, the HK quests will send you to the Smuggler's Den and so on but lets be honest, it's an incredibly brief moment and there are hardly any people there anyway, not to mention the HK questline has always been "special." I mean, you need to make a separate alt for your opposing faction to get complete it. That's the HK trademark; it's suppose to be weird. Speaking of pvp in a pve server, there really isn't a lot of it. I just finished leveling a new character from 1 to 55. Somewhere around level 20 or so, my pvp flag got put on. I forget why, was something trivial. In the time from 20 to 55, I killed exactly ONE republic player, and was attacked (unsuccessfully) only TWICE. It's one of the big misconceptions that people have about world pvp; everyone is always shouting how they want world pvp; "give us more world pvp, world pvp is great..." Yet the only time anyone bothers is when they randomly run into someone by chance, and have the ability to gank them; either by having superior gear, level, or position (e.g. attacking someone when they are engaged with quest mobs). It isn't that I didn't run into republic players. It's just that most would turn, check my level, and just move on when they figured they weren't high enough to obliterate me. The one time I was attacked, was by a scoundrel who drove past me at first, hid behind a dune, and then attacked me from behind after I engaged a few sand people, and even then he was only encouraged because he had a six level advantage on me. So no, I don't think this is a problem in the Old Republic.

Yeah, I've tried looking into as much as I can but just doesn't make a lot of sense. I know there were some dark jedi that found Korriban after the Hundred Year Darkness but makes little sense that the sith race would regress so much, even after a long time of interbreeding, much less explain why the human genes survived and the sith did not. Any depictions of Korriban and the sith, prior to the Great Hyperspace War are always of pureblood siths. I can find no humans in any of those pictures. I guess it depends how to define "threat" but I wouldn't describe the original sith as just "savages." As I understand it, Korriban has always been touched, if you will, by the dark side and the sith were able to actually drive off the Rakata from their world. Might have been in the dark ages of their race but still a formidable feat.

Hokkay, so I am not a EU expert so was hoping someone could help me understand this; when you play through the Empire campaign, as any class, you inevitably come across a lot of humans acting racist against any non-human / non-sith members of the empire. But that makes so little sense to me. Wasn't the population of Korriban dominantly sith when Naga Sadow came to power, over a thousand years before the Great Galactic War? In fact, were there any humans on Korriban there, at the time? I'm asking because the empire looks to be dominated by humans but how can that be, when sith should, according to my logic anyway, be the dominant race in the empire? When exactly were humans introduced to the population and when did they become majority of the population?

This is what does it for me personally; it isn't just that the jedi are boring, it is that the whole Republic side of things is generally boring to me. I do not believe for a minute that any of the differences between the two sides are about good / evil. People who think that are very short sighted. Empire is no more evil or power hungry than the Republic; they are just simply more honest about it. It is about ideology, forms of government and disciplines clashing which makes it interesting. The empire is darker because they do not hide their true natures, and that darker world is something I enjoy exploring. It actually started a long time ago for me, when I first read the R.A Salvatore's Dark Elf trilogy, which got me interested in the darker aspects of the human psyche. I enjoy the discipline and mentality of the Sith, where you are encourage to use your emotions, your passion to overcome obstacles, with only the strong surviving and the weak falling. Conflict drives evolution and war advances civilization. The sith encourage the exercise of power, while the jedi believe in restraining. That's it, I guess, in a nutshell. Can't really explain it better than that. One big contributing factor, why I find this line of game play more interesting, is simply because the side of "good" or "light," is the stereotypical setting and ending of almost every modern story, whether in a book or a movie; good always overcomes evil, which, I think, we all know is an illusion. Simply put; that side of things have already been explored to the death. It's like beating a dead horse so hard even its bones have ground to powder.

I did and it just looked silly. Also looked at other artist images and none of them look even remotely good. It wouldn't really be black anymore, if it was grey, would it? Also, the "dark" side is not a reference to the lack of light or the color black. It is a reference to personality, moral and ethical alignment.

For one thing, white actually shines. Secondly, I would wager that the reason they made the black-combination sabers was because they realized black would just look silly: you'd be waving around a stick of background black. Take any of the black-something sabers and imagine it without the color contrast. The only reason those look remotely good is because of that contrast.

I don't really care if it was in clone wars or not. None of the black-something lightsabers ever made any sense to me, since black is not a color. Like dark matter, it would be invisible, since it does not radiate or reflect light. A ridiculous idea.