Firstly, excuse my noobiness for asking this question, but why are so many PVP guides for Tank Jugg set it as a Skank? People say that Immortal Juggs do

hit hard: but why try to be hybrid when your job is a Tank?

My main is an Immortal Jugg and from doing group content (operation story FP), I tried to learn how to taunt, intercede and guard swap. If I am running Skank, then my DPS output will be higher. But I am still not a pure DPS. The job of DPS is to jump in and going ******* on enemies. Even if the higher DPS is to clear out enemies if you got bombarded in PVP, dont we have Shield and Absorb to mitigate damages?

Honestly, because immortal juggs are easily the best tanks while dps juggs basically suck and there's little to no point running tank gear in PvP.

You want good warrior dps? Roll a fury mara. You really want to jugg dps in PvP? Go vengeance and hope everyone just happens to group up.

The main reason is because nobodies job is to 'survive'.

Survival is a byproduct of 'completing the objective' which can only occur if you deal damage.

The holy trinity has existed for a while and the consistent message people need to bring away from it is...

'you only win when you're killing'.

If there was a challenge to reach point B from point A with mobs you cannot kill then... would you bring any dps?

Alternatively, if there was a challenge to reach point B by killing everything at point A and they didn't deal ANY damage... would you bring any tanks or healers?

So now you hopefully understand how every single player has a responsibility to ensure everybody is capable of dealing as much damage as they can (raid output) you can begin to understand why...

a) in content where a tanks durability far exceeds damage input they should be a skank tank

b) in content where a there is little to no healing required in most places the healer should be dpsing with a lot of their resources.

If everybody is playing properly, dps can heal, tanks can dps, healers can tank if the overall output is a faster run.

As someone who has 4 current 75 tanks (2 sins, 1 of the others) I have now put a Victor set on each of them for their skank set and tend to run half skank in flashpoints (that is to say, left side tank right side victor dps) which runs around 37%/37% shield and 45% crit (plus capped power in 70 content). The victor set lets me pull faster through the 20% heal every 8 seconds on kill, so there is no downtime of me having to regen. If I go full skank, I put out 10-15% more damage but waste ALL that time on regen downtime between groups, removing the reason to do that. It's like a hatred tank in a master flashpoint... they gain damage, but lose MORE time while dead or forcing the other dps to react to stray mobs or forcing the healer to get fewer force storms in.

So.. the reason for Skank Tank? Same reason you want anyone in a flashpoint... to make it quicker.

I am going to answer your question as simple as I can.

• If you are doing PvE, mitigation tank is the way to go.
  
• If you are doing PvP, skank tank is the way to go.
  

But why?

--------------------------------------------------------PvE---------------------------------------------------------------

In PvE, your main objective as a tank is to take the damage from the boss. You will taunt him and it will attack you, therefore you need mitigation gear.

--------------------------------------------------------PvP---------------------------------------------------------------

In PvP, your main objective as a tank is to protect your allies. Now think, you cannot force enemy players to attack you, they are not stupid. Many players who slightly understands whats going on in PvP will stop hitting you immediately after they notice that you are a tank, since tanks are hard to kill + a healer can easily ruin their dozens of seconds of hardwork with just a few heals on the tank.

Since the most effective method is to lower the number of enemies, they would go for vulnerable targets for kills which are dps and healers. This is when you use your ability: "guard" as a tank. However, this is also something which does not require mitigation gear.

First of all, you will be taking only half of the damage from your guarded target. Second of all, and more importantly, (as I just said) people are smarter than operation bosses. If they really know how to play, they will immediately swap their target to another one of your allies, and will keep doing this untill they kill your allies one by one. Eventually, you are going to be the last one standing while all your teammates are busy with respawn stuff, and you are going to get globalled by 3-4 people. At this point, even mitigation gear cant save you.

So as a result, if you do PvP as a mitigation tank, you will just run around while taking the least focus with most protective armor, and doing attacks to enemies which is literally going to do nothing more than tickleing them. That is why people are running as skank tanks.

Summary: Skank tanks have the same exact armor rating, same tactical items and most importantly, the same defensive abilities which is enough to survive 4 PvP. And since PvP is about killing the enemy before they kill you, they wear dps gear to assist their teammates as much as possible. Maybe this shouldnt be like this, but the game mechanics require this. And, the results are outstanding, skanks are OP in literally every SWTOR version, while mitigation tanks are nothing but memes.

I know I said simple answer, sorry if I wrote too much