SWTOR Juggernaut PvP, PvE, Leveling Guide

Leveling

Quick notes–

Some things to remember when comparing classes who have an “easier” time of leveling:
In many cases they likely do
Other classes reach the “holy trinity” of mmo’s easier, i.e. healer, tank and DPS given that crappy DPS or heals is all that is required for 97% of leveling (for any game) to be irrelevantly easy.
Anything I say here is my opinion. If you want to level 1-50 as immortal or whatever, 15-15-11 be my guest.

The Three Trees –

Leveling as Vengeance – The Preferred way to level to 30

This is the preferred way to level if you don’t think you will do many flash points, but you can still tank a flash point as this spec. It doesn’t really matter what spec you are for low level flash points, you won’t hold agro over anyone good at doing DPS, but that is to be expected.

Be proactive and make sure people in your group focus down normal mobs on their own, as you tank the strongelite that isn’t CC’d and hold that aggro.

You get taunt at level 16, if you’re tanking before that be prepared to not hold aggro, as we are very gear based when it comes to threat generation.

A nice rotation is Charge – > Smash (with no cc going out, or no cc near you in a flash point) Sundering assault – > Force Scream or Ravage

Levels 30-41 – Vengeance, Immortal or Rage

**NOTE** Choose the style that fits you, Rage is burst, Vengeance is consistent damage and nice mitigation, Immortal relies more on companion DPS and control.


a. Immortal – Put Guard on your Companion!

Immortal at 31 Spec.
http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#101cMGckdMoz.1
At this point you can get Force Grip in immortal, meaning you can run around while a mob is choking and rage is building, and in 1-3 more levels you get backhand, an all purposes stun that works on anything except *Boss* mobs, and sonic barrier which is basically a free heal every 12 seconds.

Personally I leveled here as immortal, did decent damage and let Vette do a ton of damage. Gearing her up to do damage is extremely important. Implants (since she starts with none) and better weapons is a must. Do not waste mission rewards on gear for her, either try the GTN, have a friend make you some, or equip from drops you see while leveling.

A nice rotation is Enrage – > Charge – > Smash – > *Choke Strong (situational) – > Force Scream – > Ravage -> Sundering Assault -> Repeat via Force Push if you need.

Save Backhand for when you switch to the strong after you Charge – > Savage kick a normal.
Backhand the strong and Ravage the last normal assuming a group of 3 normals and a strong. Vette can easily solo 2-3 normals.

Charge – > Savage Kick comes later at 34, and feel free to bind this now as I did, but at 50 I click this when I’m doing a quest, as it is situational enough that I don’t want to waste a good binding ( I rebind for flashpoints )

b. Vengeance – Quinn, Vette, Jaessa

Vengeance at 31 Spec.
http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#101ZIbMRMuzz.1

At this level you get Impale, you’re best damaging ability you will ever get in this tree, that is a bug and shatter is being fixed.

Making good use of Force Push and groups that are spread apart for your Unstoppable buff is a must to have less downtime.

Your rotation is very similar to the above, I tend to Ch->SK a normal, Smash – > Ravage another and then Impale the last, then kill the strong.

For companions, if you can gear him then Quinn is nice, if you’re poor Vette is best and if you can get a moddable saber and some gear, Jaessa does a ton of damage and can tank a strong until you kill the normal(s).

c. Rage– Quinn, Vette, Jaessa – Personally I’d go with Vette in AOE mode.

Rage at 31 Spec.
http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#101ZbZGbRbdbR.1
From here you want to spend your next points in finshing out Decimate in Tier 1 Vengeance, and then Shii-Cho Mastery in Tier 5 Rage.

As you can tell you could probably transition to Rage any time you’re 27 or 28 as at that point you get Shockwave, which builds the stack that make smash hit 2x as hard.

Unfortunately at this point you can only do this with Force Choke, what I tend to term the primer move, AKA Force Choke primes your smash to hit 2x as hard, and Force Charge or Obliterate primes it to automatically crit.

Guaranteeing yourself a crit on Smash should be enough to farm without any issue those tough groups of 1 strong + 3-4 normals.

The rotation I would use is Force Charge the Strong, Force Choke the strong while all the mobs are beating on you, Smash and then clean up. Between you and Vette everything should be dead in very, very short order.

So Enrage -> Charge – > Choke Strong*(any mob will work, but best on strong) – > Smash – > Force Scream any ranged mob outside of Melee range.

Levels 41+ rage. Rage. RAGE.

This is where the fun really begins. Force Choke begets Smash death. Force Crush annihilates mobs and then you Smash, and death. This spec is the best spec right now for PVP, PVE above 41 for leveling and instances as dps.

See End Game PvE, PvP Rage in post 6.

The rotation stays the same as specified above, except you now have Force Crush, which means every single pack you fight you can do the rotation outlined above. Having either Rage (low level) or Adept enhancements (35+) will make you hit so hard that mobs just explode.

This spec works just fine tanking as well. You want to make sure you charge or enrage for every pull, as you sacrifice the latent rage generation present in Immortal builds, but one crit smash and you will never lose aggro again.

If you plan to level at all playing PVP above 41 this is the spec to go. All the ways to get medals that you do as an Immortal spec you can easily do as this spec. Next time people are all dps’ing someone near you, say 4-6 people, just threatening taunt -> intercede on that target and watch the medals roll in.

Some notes on trinket use

You want to have a power trinket, and trinkets in SWTOR apply to anything currently done or being done by your character. For instance if you Force Crush and it normally hits for
200, 200, 200, 200, 520.

If you use your power trinket after casting Force Crush it would look like this
200, 200, 220, 220, 600

If you prefer Vengeance at 40, it would look like this
Vengeance at 40 Spec.
http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#101ZIMMRMuddhR.1

Some overall leveling tips.

Do not be afraid to shield wall early and often. It’s a three minute CD, its up ALL the time. I come from vanilla WoW warrior leveling and have that “zomg 30 minute CD” mentality and so I still am hesitant to blow it at the start of what I think will be a tough fight ( non-elite fight) , in case I need it next fight.

A moddable Light Saber is a must, find green artifice hilts and you instantly have the best weapon at that level ( even better with blue or purple quality hilts ).

Always- ALWAYS use your Channel Hatred out of combat health regen after every fight. When you beat a class quest elite, just click eat. I don’t care how awesome or epic the movie or fight just was. Click your Channel Hatred.

Always have a few pots on you. You generally don’t need this with endure pain ( level 28) and I can’t tell you how many fights I ended with 1 health, when EP goes away all that health is lost with you retaining 1 health. Still, having that pot for when an elite has a strange ability, ie elemental bleed damage that will absolutely tear you up, these help a ton.

General Flash point tips.

If you did not play Vanilla WoW as a warrior, then these mechanics may seem strange to you. Basically when you taunt a mob, you gain 110% of the threat of the DPS or healer that had aggro before you taunted. Generally aggro or dps is built on a linear curve with spikes and valleys. So 150 Aggro means when you taunt you are now granted 165 aggro. 2480 aggro when taunted grants 2728 aggro and so on. Unfortunately currently the juggernaut does not have a true “spike” threat move. One minute CD Backhand will not cut it with any DPS worth his salt going all out.

So how do we solve this? Well for one thing luckily this system is not like WoW’s initially was, at least not that I can tell, where you had to do a certain amount of threat to retain aggro.

TLDR: Mors what do I do?

Long and short let the dps tank if they pull aggro for about 2-3 seconds, they will not die. Build your rage and then taunt (use judgment on this amount of time) and when you taunt – > chain high damagethreat abilities and you won’t lose threat again. This may seem counter intuitive but it is FAR, FAR better than taunting immediately and losing threat again soon after, and being SOL for 13 seconds. Why is it more beneficial to wait? Simply put 10% of a bigger number is a bigger number. For anyone who didn’t get my joke, 2300 *1.10 (2530) low rage low threat potential vs. waiting 3 seconds building rage, taunting 3800 t*1.10 (4180) into high threat moves. This also satisfies the linear building of aggro with spikes and valleys gap for your DPS.

Right now our limitation is our AOE threat ability, which is really poor, and our single target which is decent once we can get going DPS lays off a few seconds. However with the gear check of some bosses for fresh 50’s that is not always possible in heroics, though they may be fixing some of this in a patch soon.

People may not understand how your class works, but trust me you can DPS in a heroic as Rage, anyone who says differently and won’t listen to reason probably isn’t worth dealing with anyways. However, mentioning that you can tank is always a plus. Why roll this class if you never want to tank?

Eternity Vault –

Annihilation Droid

This boss is fairly straight forward. He doesn’t move and has three abilities. He does a knock back every 15-20 seconds. If you position yourself where you can be knocked into the corner of the walldoor that is behind him to an angle, you can immediately charge back in. If there is a way to avoid that I haven’t found it.

His second ability is a targeted ground strike (red reticle) that is easily avoided. You need to move about 12 the distance of the diameter of the circle outside of it to make sure you aren’t hit at a minimum. The entire raid is targeted in a random fashion and move to avoid them.

Strategy 1 –
His last ability is his Missile Salvo. This ability he hunkers down and begins to chain fire rockets at the entire raid. They, the raid, should be positioned near the droid gun pillars you killed right before the boss. Intercede to a dpshealer to get out of LOS.

This usually lasts about 12-15 seconds, you’ll get a feel for it very quick and I normally charge back in while he’s firing his last 1-2 missiles.

Strategy 2-
Group up on his butt and use AOE heals and any raid cooldowns like the sniper CD to just soak the damage, and increase DPS uptime on the boss. Even if people come out of this phase at 20% there is about a 10 second window where he does nothing while he stands up. Use this time to stay bunched for more aoe heals and then break to your spots ( besides the MT who should move quickly to a spot away from the Raid )

Gharj –

This boss starts on an island and there are rocks leading up to him. These will disappear shortly after the fight begins. He has three abilities, one of which doesn’t concern the tank, its an AOE knockback that knocks you to the ground, but you can still use all abilities.

He has a casted ability called Pounce which is based on proximity to him, so be sure to move out when he is casting that, you want to be farther than 30 yards to minimize damage, but I usually go about 20 out and charge back in.

His last ability will shake the ground and make new steps appear to another island. If this appears where you are tanking him, be sure to avoid running through his model, or the black circle in the ground under him ( this especially goes for everyone else in the raid ).

When you get to the next island position yourself away from everyone else, and try to saber throw at him if within range, otherwise be spamming taunt just in case. He will jump over and stun you, Unleash should be up for every other one of these, if not all of them.

Loot boss of the Puzzle clicky thingy –

This is one of the toughest encounters ever designed.

Duel of the fates –

This encounter isn’t tough per se, but everyone needs to be on their game. If you’re tank spec’d throw on a few DPS pieces that have more STR, Surge as you will barely take any damage. Make sure you to use your damage abilities on CD, keep 5 stacks of sunder so Crushing Blow does max damage.

The Soa encounter –

First begin by zooming your camera out to at least 80% for phase 3. Personally I’m at 100%.

Phase 1
This boss has the few tough mechanics involved in EV. First phase, is a DPS burn to 75%, he puts up blue glowy stuff on the lanterns in the outside ring, ranged and healers should avoid.

Phase 2
At 75% he goes to phase 2, and the first phase of the fall down the levels boss. My job on this fight is usually the beacon everyone follows as they fall down. A good rule of thumb is that if it looks too far, the platform God will provide one for you shortly. You usually have a pause no matter how fast or slow you go every 3-4 platforms, this is where AOE heals are dropped on the group. Wait until the heal glow disappears then move on. Repeat until on the bottom.

At the middle platform for Phase 2 he now casts Mindtrap (ignores tank? So far for me yes) on a raid member. If it’s on a healer use your cool downs, keep dpsing him but DPS will be hitting mindtraps so aggro shouldn’t be as hard to hold. Now is a nice time to saber throw the mindtraps if you can manage it to help out, and intercede low people.

At 30% begins the second fall down the levels boss. Same procedure as before. I have transitioned at 30% with a mindtrap up, so try to coordinate that as the person is either stuck inside or will fall to their death at the bottom. Not a huge deal but should be avoided. As the tank on the boss, make sure you’re calling out what % he is at.

Phase 3
Phase 3 is the only tough part for the tank. As you pick up the boss when he drops to the bottom you want to make sure you have aggro, do a taunt – > sunder – > force scream and then begin searching the room for the floating and spinning upside down triangleobleisk that comes from the walls of the room.

When you see it, make sure you have your camera directly above you with 0 degrees of angle. This makes it easy to spot where the spinning yellow will fall on the ground. You don’t want to stand in that but have the boss near where it drops. It seems to be pretty liberal but if you’re not close enough he wont get stunned, and remove his immunity shield.

Should you miss even 1 of these, you most likely will wipe due to mindtrap issues or enrage issues (for most freshly to some heroic geared 50’s).

It’s about 10 seconds from when the yellow spinning item stops moving that it drops, make sure to call out for your DPS to switch to him and start DPSing. Congrats on Tier 2!

All specs will be linked down below.

PVP.

Juggernaut can spec for PVP in a couple of ways. If you think you will always be running the flag and have a healer queing with you, you might try a hybrid spec. If you primarily want to protect people, do an ok amount of damage, you can be immortal spec’d. You will be nigh unkillable solo, 1v2, or even 1v3 situations with chain CD’s until help shows up. However, you aren’t survivable to the point that it is viable over killing people 4 times as fast.

For that you would spec Rage. I PVP’d extensively as Vengeance and while it is a nice spec, and has some talents that make me cry I can’t get while being 31 in the Rage Tree, ultimately the versatility of the Rage Tree makes it superior for all things but Running the flag in huttball, and being anti 4 Inquisitor ( 3 sorcs 1 assassin etc etc any combo ) flag running teams.

Some notes about Rage gearing. You want Power as your primary stat. I say that because EVERY piece of gear has STR on it, so saying that’s our best stat is a bit redundant. But specifically to Rage, it’s major attacks are based on Kinetic damage (aka Force damage). So when gearing you need to examine the pieces individually. If one piece has 48 accuracy and 48 expertise, and another has 42 power and 42 surge ( surge being the best after power ) that is a pretty tough call. I’ve done a whole bunch of math on this, and I can’t be certain what the answer is as the math I do isn’t reflected in the real world when hitting someone in PVP.

Just know that an equivalent value of power is more valuable than STR for this spec. Gearing with this in mind I generally hit for 5k to 5750 with my trinket rolling, and 6300-6850 with the PVP red buff. I’m not biochem nor do I buy the pvp consumable, but presumably you’d get into the high 7k range with those.

This spec is about your mobility in relation to a target’s mobility, not your overall mobility in the course of the game. People who complain about being rooted, and I rage just as much as the next guy when I’m playing, need to realize this is a fundamental balance inherent in these games required to be fair. That is not to say that Sniper behind cover beating on you with literally nothing you can do about it is always cool, but that might be called their unique skill set.

Sorcerers who do the same or more damage than you and have a 4k shield, and a very low CD knock back knock off can definitely get frustrating. If you find yourself wanting to kill those people (specifically Sorcs ) above all else a hybrid Rage Venge build or Vengeance build is the way to go. Personally I just use positioning to thwart that move after I charge up to them.

Once you get the 4 piece PVP set your basic fight should go something like this, Enrage on the run to the player targeted, Force Crush as soon as you’re in range. Roll your trinket. Can force grip if they blow a CD to run, or Ravage if they have a shield up. Force Push – > Charge – > Smash – > Force scream. This will get anyone in any gear to sub 20% except a class with shield wall up. From there I usually Obliterate and interrupt and run around them auto attacking and Vicious Slashing until Smash is off CD.

That is a basic tutorial, I’m sure there are many things you will learn only from playing 50-75 matches with the spec.

Medal tips. Not as important come 1.2

My strategy is usually the following:
Get PVP buff
Get stacks, roll trinket
Get hopefully Assassin, Quick Draw, 2.5k and 5k in one hit on one target(healer) and kill them.

Eventually, playing situationally, 75k damage. From there I play like this helping the team (the burst I described above in the opening seconds always helps the team, whatever anyone says).

You can easily get medals for guarding the focus target of the enemy team (your teammate) and interceding to him. If you are in a clump of people not hitting you, Threatening Scream. This reduces all damage done BY ALL OF THEM against anyone but you by 30% for 6 seconds. This is unbelievably powerful used correctly with intercede, especially since it costs no rage to use. Also be sure to carry superior or better medpacs and in downtime, after the pvp debuff (-30% healing) wears off if you’re guarding something or have just won a fight and are sub 40% and need to go get OOC to heal up, use it and get a medal for a 2.5 k heal.
Not possible anymore. Pick up unleash in your spec for a chance at the 2.5 medal.

Using this strategy I average 9-10 medals a game with my highest being 13. It is pretty easy once you’re geared to get the 300k damage medal, and everyone likes the E-Peen aspect of PVP. But winning games AND getting all these other medals is far, far more efficient for time spent.

Force push is your friend, I can’t tell you how often I win ‘duels’ in PVP against other jugs who do not use it.

Don’t be afraid to auto attack. Auto attack is your friend.

Rage PvE (a lot of this applies in PvP)

One thing I want to start off with, anything I say here is something that I’ve tested in game, and have a reason or theory behind what I’m saying, and where I can I will lay this out for anyone reading this. That is not to say that something in here will be 100% right or wrong forever, or once we have better tools to analyze DPS in general, and specifically operation DPS, but generally you can take what I say as a loose guideline at the very least.

Stat priorities (as of 1.1.4), and Gear selection.

1. Power above all else. For example we have the choice between two deft mods.

Deft mod 25A = 61 Str, 37 Endurance, 11 power
Deft mod 25 = 48 Str, 30 Endurance, 37 power

You can break that down to roughly Deft 25A = 23 power and Deft 25 = 47 power. Now strength does give us crit, but this is so negligible, I think, for all builds not just Rage, that it’s more or less pointless. However rage with auto crit on smash I find it even less valuable.

2. We want surge up to around 275-300 where it begins to really steeply level off through diminishing returns. This leads us to several interesting dilemmas:

1. You can’t get Power without Surge on enhancements
2. The only Power enhancement besides PowerSurge is PowerAccuracy
3. Rage is primarily a Yellow hit monster, and I’ve never had a Ravage miss, so accuracy is basically awful (you’ll end up with 4-5% accuracy on gear like implantsears anyways).
4. With the advent of 1.1.4 our best enhancement is now PowerAccuracy for PvE given the dearth of options, and still PowerSurge for PVP. Our best mod is the aforementioned Deft 25 (24, 23… etc.)

Special Note
There is Reflective Enhancement, 18 stam, 39 shield, 27 crit 27 power. I have not done the math if this is our best enhancement ( I’ve yet to see a level 25 one, but assuming there was an equivalent to our current level 25 powersurge or poweraccuracy enhancements, my suspicion is that it would be)

Gear

Currently I use 4 piece PvP gear re-moded as described above with Adept 24 enhancements as my PvE gear, primarily for the set bonuses, both of which are useful in raids. The Rakata Bonuses are awful in comparison.

I also use a Crit Crafted Artifice Relic of the Boundless Ages with an Augment slot, augmented with an Overkill 2, or 28 power augment. Your highest individual spell damage comes from having your matrix relic equipped, however you lose about 12 power for a chance every 4.5 seconds to hit for 300-400 damage, that can crit, with a trinket from Karaggas Palace.

For every decision I make on gear, it can summed up with:
Does this gear give me more power? If it doesn’t its very likely not an upgrade.

Rotation or Priority List, and Spec

You want your spec to look something like this.
http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#101cZG0MZG0RrddMdGR.1

Rotation

1. Force Crush* – > ChargeOblit – > Smash – > Scream – > Sunder – > Ravage

*as you cast this you want to strafe so you can charge, you very easily can get this in before the GCD is up if you practice this

2. Force Choke – > ChargeOblit – > Smash – > Scream – > Sunder – > Ravage

3. After I’ve done either rotation, and Ravage is coming off CD I’ll do this
Force Crush* – > Charge- > Smash – > Scream – > Ravage – > Sunder – > Choke

Typically in any 47 second window (the CD on Choke, or 54 sec for 4 Force Crushes ) you have 2-3 ‘garbage’ globals free. Saber throw, sunder, and vicious slash can all be used here as fillers.

Information of Note

Currently there is something either bugged, or buggy with our stances or the tooltips. I would have just assumed it was a tooltip error until I saw that the math is consistent across all abilities, and is this way even in Shien Form, but primarily concerns Shii-Cho. Anyone can feel free to replicate these results as I lay them out here.

As per Tool Tip

1. In “no stance” or Soresu Stance our abilities hit for X according to the tooltip. X = 100% or base.
2. in Shii-Cho with or without 33 Single Saber Master (SSM from here on out) yellow = 106%, white 112.8%.
Real Testing in Game
I hit a player 20 times each in the following ways:

1. No Stance, No SSM
2. No Stance, SSM
3. Shii-Cho, No SSM
4. Shii-Cho, SSM

Assuming no stance, no ssm as our baseline 100%

1. 100% Yellow
2. 99.7% Yellow — no variation, SSM does nothing when not in stance
3. 104.43% — This is weird, need a lot more testing done
4. 104.7% — Same result basically

So my conclusion is that something odd is happening, I can’t be sure of what. Unfortunately I didn’t test white hits for 1, and 3, but I did for 2 and 4, and that resulted in a 12%!!! Increase almost as if they coded SSM to = Shien form on white hits.

How Buffs Work

You want to have a power trinket, and trinkets in SWTOR apply to anything currently done or being done by your character. For instance if you Force Crush and it normally hits for
200, 200, 200, 200, 520.

If you use your power trinket after casting Force Crush it would look like this
200, 200, 220*, 220, 600 (*trinket used just before this tick)

If you’re fighting an elite, or even in PvP, Force Crush on a target then trinketing into Force Choke is a huge amount of burst, especially if coupled with our 4 piece PvP set bonus, which is a flat 10% boost on damage.

This means that your power trinket + that boost is then applied to the damage already in progress.

This means that you can Force Crush – > Strafe into Charge or Force Push into Charge – > Use your power trinket while in Force Charge flight – > Force Choke – > Smash for an unreal amount of damage in that sequence. Or
Force Crush – > StrafeCharge – > trinket in air – > Smash – > Scream.

Will this work every time? Of course not, other players might push you, or you might have positional lag, or something else. This ability hits hard enough that it has to have some skill to using it or it would be overpowered, as it currently is toeing that line in most situations.

The Rage spec as I see it for PVP
http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#101cZG0kZGrRbdbRdGo.1
PvE
http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#101cZG0MZG0RrddMdGR.1

The Hybrid Flag running spec with good damage.
http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#101ZI0r0RZGRRMdbMdG.1

Our PVE Tank spec.
You can sub out accuracy when you get there (i.e on your gear) for reduced Force Choke or Crit % in the Rage tree. If you don’t tank operations, and only tank in PVP or Flashpoints, pick up ‘Thrown Gauntlet’ tier 4 Immortal tree.
http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#101dMGcubrouRZhGM.1

Conclusion.

I’m sure I’ve missed something here or there, or that someone might come along and disagree with me on a point, or some fine point. However, it doesn’t take much effort to discover what game I played before, and to what level (and I don’t mean character level) I played it at. From this all I hope is that you take into consideration anything I’ve said and will see how useful it can be for you.

Thanks for reading.