Review of Noxxic's guide for Juggernaut- Immortal - PvE

This time let's have a look at what Noxxic has to say about Juggernaut tanks.

http://www.noxxic.com/swtor/pve/sith-warrior/juggernaut/immortal

"Stat priority"

This stat priority again is total bullshit. Even though it does not have the numbers that are quite so ridiculously high above what is even possible to reach as the assassin guide does, it is still in many ways actually worse than the assassin guide because if someone tried to follow (which is still impossible) they would end up with stats even more far removed from what is optimal.

25% defense, I'm not even sure if it is possible to reach now. With the new gear in the upcoming patch 2.2 it will be reachable, but this would require one to ignore optimal stat distribution.

45% shield chance would require several shield rating augments, which you should never use on a Juggernaut.

40% absorption though possible to reach is way too high as you end up with too low defense if you go for that.

Although these numbers may be possible to reach individually it is absolutely impossible to have them all at the same time.

Furthermore I have said it before that I do not like these stats being separated by "greater than" symbols as optimizing tank gear is not about one stat being always better than the other but about finding the optimal amounts of what proportion of your stat budget goes to each stat. 

However if someone really really wanted to use ">" signs then at least THEY SHOULD PUT DEFENSE FIRTS since optimal stat distribution for Juggernauts has a lot more Defense across all stat budget that are possible to have with the available gear and at very low stat budget they should even go maximum defense and no absorption rating. 

Lastly: Tanks should not use accuracy rating in their gear at all, so including it is just wrong.

For those more interested what are the the optimal stat weights, some of the best theorycrafters are posting their stuff here: http://www.swtor.com/community/forumdisplay.php?f=73

"How stats work"

Most of their explanations on what the stats do are pretty bad too. I covered much of it in the assassin tank guide's review so not going to repeat it here. Those interested can read it:

http://noxxicsucks.blogspot.fi/2013/06/sith-assassin-darkness-pve-stats.html

All I'm going to add here is that Noxxic is pretty stupid for saying that Strength increases healing done.

Item modifications

Mods:

Noxxic tells all tanks to use high endurance "B" -mods, and does not even mention the unlettered high mitigation stat mods. This at least for Juggernaut tanks I can't agree at all. They might be a viable alternative for Shadow/Assassin tanks, but even though the difference between endurance is slightly greater than difference between defense/absorption, when comparing "B" and unlettered mods, endurance just is not that great for Juggernauts.

Enhancements: 

With enhancements Noxxic sinks to plain stupidity again. For one thing Noxxic lists enhancements with accuracy as something tanks should use. That is just retarded. Enhancements with accuracy rating should be avoided at all costs. Even using lower level enhancements with all mitigation stats is better than using higher level ones with accuracy.
Even for the enhancements with all mitigation stats they get it as wrong, by suggesting the overly endurance heavy "Vigilant" and "Steadfast" enhancements as the primary choice over the Bulwark, Sturdiness, Bastion or Immunity enhancements. Nobody who knows anything about stats would agree with that (the exchange rate between endurance and mitigation stats is much worse for enhancements). Vigilant and Steadfast enhancements are utter shit that nobody should use.
Noxxic is even contradicting themselves here, since in their stat priority puts mitigation stats ahead of endurance (which at least they got that part right even though all other details are wrong) but then suggest gearing the exact opposite way.

The Spec

What Noxxic suggests is this:

Not entirely bad, could be a lot worse (as it is in some of their other guides).

Still the 2 points on "Vicious Retaliation" are almost useless, while "Sonic Wall" could be useful in ops. 1 point in Unyielding could be better spent on Accuracy. (If going for mostly single target boss fight, I would even move the 2 points in "Decimate" to "Accuracy" too, though when fighting a lot of adds/trash mobs decimate is nice. Well people have different opinions on that so no need to go too much into that).

Moving on...

"Rotations and Cooldowns" 

Now the weird stuff.

Single target rotation:

Someone more dedicated into looking into Jug tank rotations might have more to say about all this, but I'll just make few observations.

- What is this "healing" they keep talking about?

- For a rotation that claims to be designed for maximum threat, they are not exactly putting their highest threat moves 

- Sundering Assault is not the only attack that puts in Sunder Armor debuff.

- Using the word "maintain" for buff from Sonic barrier, as if it could be kept up all the time, almost implies Noxxic does not even know what it is. It's not exactly going to last until you can Force Scream again.

- Does Noxxic even know that Chrushing Blow and Retaliation give beneficial buffs too?

- WHERE IS RAVAGE? It is both free of rage cost and does plenty more damage than many other attacks. At the very least it should take priority over things like Vicious Slash. Not to mention in their skill tree build Noxxic does tell people put points into a talent that increases damage of Ravage. Why would you put points in a talent that does nothing else but increases damage of ravage if you then don't use it at all in your rotation???

- Why no mention of any kind about Saber Reflect? Even when fighting mobs that do only melee and/or AOE damage which can't be reflected it still causes more threat than most damage dealing abilities. And it should be used for that especially on mobs that deal only damage that can't be reflected since then you don't even need to consider saving it for defensive use. Of course when there are attacks that reflected it is even better threat builder.

There's probably much more that could be said about all of the above, but let's move on...

Now we get to the really stupid part

AOE rotation

I'm not kidding you. Honestly... This is what they have for AOE rotation.

This looks like them just having added completely randomly selected Jug abilities without even 

2 of the attacks there are single target attacks. While I do understand that even in aoe heavy fights someone may include single target abilities in between, but even then from that perspective what they have there makes no sense at all. Why those 2? It is also very inconsistent since all of their other class guides list only AoE attacks in the AoE priority list.

Further more there is a single target attack in the number 1 spot on the aoe priority list, but at the same time that same attack is below Smash in their single target priority. 

How is it even possible to be this stupid?

They also completely forget to include Crushing Blow which has a high threat aoe damage effect to it.

They also fail to even mention Saber Reflect, which is probably the most power AOE threat builder.

And then...

Burst Cooldowns

Uhm... what???

Lets move on...

"Survivability Cooldowns"

Here we have probably the dumbest the most retarded thing in the entire Noxxic.com website.

They are telling tanks to use threat dumps as defensive cooldowns.

While Enraged Defense is not just a threat dump, it is one of the most powerful threat dump abilities in the game. 

Even if you somehow manage to hold aggro after the initial threat drop the Enraged Defense when used, if you take damage (which you will as a tank), will continue to lower your threat even more up to 10 more times within the next 10 seconds, so your chance to loose aggro goes really high. Also it consumes 1 rage each time it does that so it can rage starve you too, which can have additional negative impact on your threat generation.

Telling anyone to use this as a tanking cooldown is so horribly bad advice it makes me believe Noxxic is giving bad advice on purpose. How could anyone get things this badly wrong if they had good intentions?