It's been a while since my Juggernaut has hit 50, but my guild is leveling more slowly than I did, so I've been leveling alts while I wait for them to catch up. Those who have hit 50 with me rerolled other characters, for the most part. I'm leveling an Assassin tank for the moment, so that I can compare the Juggernaut to it. I've done a few hard mode flashpoints in the interim, but mostly PvP.
Speaking of PvP, there is a
good post over on the official forums regarding the fact that most of our avoidance/mitigation is useless in PvP. Here's a summary of the argument, by poster Avison:
THE PROBLEM
I'll be quick and dirty here. Armor doesn't protect you from internal or elemental damage, shields and your defense rating only affect weapon damage for the most part. Most classes have a spec that involves using these two damage types. You can't dodge almost every single ability in pvp.
Now shields only activate on attacks that qualify. Shields inherently only activate a small percentage of the time and only mitigate a small percentage of the damage. It is possible, with relics and the right armor, to get your shields to 50/50. Which is a 50% chance to occur and they absorb 50% of the damage when they trigger. That's a 25% damage reduction. This is unfeasable but possible.
Now, since only weapon damage triggers shields (sniper attacks, unload, basic attacks) shields only be able to activate on roughly 10% of the incomming damage you'll be recieving in pvp. 25% damage reduction is respectable, 2.5% (25/10) is not. Now that 25% is the maximum possible if shields worked the way advertised and that is the stat cap for both those stats, at 50%. You can't even get those stats normally much less sustain them in combat. It requires using a relic. I'd also like to mention using a columi relic increase the operatives dps by 25%+ or any player using crits which fully negates the power of shields even at there best.
I've been PvPing as Rage as a result, and find it very entertaining. You can find my spec
here.
The basic idea behind Rage is that your Force Charge and Obliterate (a smaller range charge you get from speccing Rage) cause your next Smash to be an automatic critical hit. You also can increase Smash's damage using the Shockwave talent, which causes your Force Crush and Force Choke ticks to stack a 25% damage increase to smash up to 4 times.
The result? An automatic crit Smash dealing 100% extra damage. Ouch.
Needless to say the spec requires proper timing to play effectively, otherwise the combination could be wasted. If you'd like an example of it in action, you can check out
this PvP video on Youtube.
I'd also like to give a shout-out to Ayane over at
Moon Over Endor (which you should check out, by the way) for reaching the level cap of 50.
