Well Ive been level 50 on my Powertech for about 3 days now. I spent some money on the GTN did my dailies and now I have purple in every slot. My aim is about 1450, my endurance with self buff and stim is just over 1800(putting my health at just over 20k). DR is sitting right around 49 percent and my shield is 47 percent. My absorbtion however seems to be sitting at about 39 percent(44 with shield tech procs) The procs are nice, but in a big mob pull with elites in HM FPs(seems everyone is morally against CC these days) I can take alot of damage before I get 4 flame bursts down. Keep in mind, my first day with most of this gear(ive upgraded some of it since) I went through 3 HM FPs, got the daily group finder, daily terminal and weekly terminal quests done. 2nd day, I had a big fail at Kaon(didnt help that we had a very impatient healer who thought to pull the elevator boss with half of us there and while i was typing a question about the fight, then votekicks me and one dps after it doesnt work out. Had another fail on false emperor,

Idk is 39 percent enough for tanking HM FPs? All my gear except for a couple slots(my main is rakata quality and my boots are columni) are approximately tionse quality(rated 126 and above) so IMO that should be enough to do most HMs with (save for Lost Island of course) And before you suggest recruit gear, all of my gear is better in PVE than recruit gear(i meticulously checked)

also later that day I did FE again with a different group and it was a flawless run.(people were also using cc and focus firing strong mobs)

Idk what do you guys think? Whats a good number? Any tips for tanking HMs? Or should I chak up those 2 bad runs as badluck/me being tired/impatient group and be thankful for the 4 good runs Ive had sofar.

You want to have atleast 50% shield chance and 50% absorption (w/o shield proc) with around 15%-16% defense chance... Armor rating 8200+. With end-game gear you can push that higher, but the above is about the "level" you want to aim for as a new 50. Make sure you are augmenting your gear for the stat boost.

As far as pugs and CC behavior... In levels like Kaon, dps'ers and healers who refuse to CC anything are the noobs and I would vote kick them. All the other teir I FPs probably don't really need CCs unless you are all in recruit/tionese gear... But it doesn't hurt.

The most important dynamic in tanking is the group understanding kill order. As long as the DPS'ers are taking down the trash first (start with lowest HP and work up), the tank knows how to scoop up the elites and hold the bosses, and the healer doesn't forget he is heals and not DPS, things should work out more times than not.

did what you said and augmented some gear(ran out of money lol, need to do more slicing missions/dailies) but that helped a great deal. Got all my clothes and my gun augmented. Also tweaked my spec. there was a perk in shieldtech i didn't have(no idea why not) which gives me +4 percent absorb and reduces the cooldown on one of my...cooldowns lol.

So with the augments and that I got up to 48 percent absorb and still have 6 pieces i have yet to augment. Might put down a little defense and maybe some endurance. Most of what i read is for PTs to focus on shield and absorb before defense so idk, but what I do know is that what I've done sofar has caused noticeable improvement to my survivablity. Thank you again for the tip!

I left swtor in march, came back three weeks ago and made this PT. I hate to say it, but I didnt even know I could augment any gear before reading this post. when I left, the only way to get augment's still was a lucky crafting roll. That could explain why the implants my sorc was hawking on the GTN seemed to not sell anymore.

TLDR thank you very much for the advice!