Black Raven Dragoons

[Tirian]

Any thoughts? I'm undecided. What are you guys enjoying?

[Grimblast]

I leveled a Juggernaut to see how it performs and more or less, you don't die easy. Long fights but great survivability. I have seen Humble and HG's marauders and they are pretty impressive on the damage output. Squishy, but if you kill it first, who cares! I think Humble used a different dps tree than HG but both their characters' type of damage compliments each other allowing both to churn out a ton of damage in the hard modes. There are a few nice dual tree specs for the Juggernaut if you don't want to feel like its a slow tank grind but I prefered to level as a tank since it gave me practice with all of the abilities. Damn Sith Warriors have a ton of abilities. Some situational, others not.

I'm somewhat disappointed with the AOE threat generation of a Juggernaut. You get smash and one other ability and the rest of the time is combating DPS that tunnel visions on one target alot or DPS that drops aoe when you are still building threat. You don't have much in the line of snap threat abilities besides taunting. You will find that abilities like pommel strike, for instance, require the mob to be some how incapacitated to use the ability. News flash, in hard modes, most of the mobs are gold elites usually and silvers and normal mobs die too quickly to get a quick stun/pommel strike in. I've found some abilities just go unused due to the conditions they require. I've found on some boss fights that I'm really pushing for single mob threat. DPS flies by me on threat and I'm having to blow taunt a lot. I'm not sure if there is a balance issue at play or not since I don't have any hard mode gear on my Juggernaut yet. I've started leveling a powertech so I can make a better assessment of the 2 classes as tanks. From watching Sunder tank, Powertechs have great opening AOE threat generation by using 'Death From Above' as well as all the flame effects you can use to keep all mobs on you.

A word of advice though, your abilities only properly work with a lightsaber. Stay away from vibroblades. Especially the high level ones that armstechs can craft. The stats look impressive but as I found out, they don't interact well with threat abilities and Marauder ability tool tips specifically state to lightsabers. You can't use any abilities properly without a lightsaber. I used one of those crafted vibrolades at 50 and I was pumped about the tank stats and all but had threat issues out the yin yang. When I swapped all the mods over to an orange quality lightsaber, things started looking up. Threat suddenly didn't seem to be as bad an issue. Not sure if the developers intended that or not but I'm sticking with a lightsaber from now on. Kept the vibroblade for looks though. That crafted one is very bad ass looking.

[Damorte]

I <3 my marauder, but the companions are rather weak. The only one I've found useful so far is Malavai Quinn.

I agree that we can be squishy but once you get Quinn its all good, just slaughter and keep a few medpacs for emergencies. You get enough dmg reducing buffs to get by.

I have yet to figure out my rotation but I definitely figured out building the Rage tree is the way to go. I tried Carnage and was thoroughly disappointed by the weak final skill.

Armor is easy to find, Power and Endurance, bunches out there.