SWTOR 7.7 Vigilance Guardian PvE Guide and Best Builds

SWTOR Vigilance Guardian PvE Guide (DPS) for beginners and more experienced veterans: Skills, Choices, Rotations, Gearing, Builds, Tips!

Introduction to Vigilance Guardian

Vigilance Guardians brand their foes with heavy, Force-empowered swings from their burning-hot lightsaber.

Vigilance is pretty average when it comes to sustained, purely single-target DPS. It’s not one of the strongest specs, but it doesn’t have any glaring weaknesses in that department either. Thanks to Combat Focus having expanded functionality alongside specific ability tree buffs, Vigilance is capable of better burst than it has been in the past, though it still can’t hold a candle to actual burst DPS specs.

By far the biggest strength of Vigilance Guardian is its incredible potential for AoE damage. The only other discipline in the game that can even compete is Hatred Assassin | Serenity Shadow.

It’s so strong that it can easily allow other players in the group to ignore AoE altogether and focus their ability tree buffs on increasing single-target DPS. Furthermore, Vigilance Guardians can often substantially increase their single-target DPS when multiple targets are present because of how their various AoE buffs work.

In terms of survivability, DPS Guardian is technically in a worse place compared to 6.0, though the nerfs to survivability don’t affect their performance in PvE content very much at all.

Saber Reflect is only useful against specific attacks in certain fights and you’ll always have access to a cheese ability whenever you need it. That said, almost all disciplines received some sort of survivability nerf in 7.0, and in PvE, I think Vigilance actually came out less scathed than a lot of other disciplines.

BioWare will likely be making balance changes throughout the first few patches, so be sure to check back to this guide after each update. You can check at the top of the guide to see if the guide has been updated for the most recent patch.

Major Changes in 7.0

Utility points are gone! Instead, there is a new system called the Ability Tree. Each discipline has 8 choices where they pick 1 of 3 options. The options have several similarities across the Combat Styles:

• 2 choices buff a discipline-specific ability (2 abilities, 1 choice each).
• 3 choices which are just old Utility effects. These choices are almost always the same for all disciplines. 
• 2 choices where you’re picking between 1 ability or 1 of 2 passives. One of the ability choices tends to be an offensive cooldown (OCD). The other seems to be related to PvP balance, but there isn’t a clear pattern beyond the choice forcing players to decide which of 3 capabilities they want to keep.
• 1 choice where you’re picking 1 of 3 abilities. One of the abilities is always one of your primary CCs, either the 8s mez or 4s hard stun. Another of the abilities is the movement ability with the longest cooldown. The third option is less consistent, it seems to be there as an extra balance lever for BioWare since some abilities that got locked away are more impactful than others. The 3 abilities are almost always the same for each discipline.

This means almost all disciplines had 5 abilities locked away behind choices with the option for players to keep up to 3 of them. In addition, many extremely situational abilities were pruned entirely. Vigilance permanently lost access to 2 abilities: 

• Freezing Force
• Guard

Guarding is now a tank-only ability, which is the logical next step since the nerf to Guard for DPS partway through 6.0 was ineffective at stopping its ubiquity in PvP. 

Battle rezzes in general are now healer-only, but there is no longer a global 5 min lockout on those abilities, so it’s treated just like any other ability, albeit with a much longer cooldown. 

Group Composition Tips

Since the damage dealt by Vigilance is split between several different damage types, it is a bit more dependent on having a good group composition than some other specs, so having multiple Vigilance Guardians in the same group could hurt your overall damage output. In order to deal maximum damage, Vigilance requires 3 other DPS debuffs:

DPS Debuff	Presence of debuff increases DPS by approximately
Force	3%
Internal/Elemental	2.5%
AoE	1.25%
Total DPS Gain:	6.75%

Since both Sorcerer / Sage DPS specs and Hatred Assassins / Serenity Shadows provide both the Force and AoE debuffs and also benefit from at least 1 of the debuffs provided by Vigilance, they are ideal classes/specs to bring alongside a Vigilance Guardian. Another great DPS class to bring is Operative / Scoundrel since both specs provide the Internal / Elemental debuff (which Vigilance needs) as well as the Tech damage debuff, which will allow the final DPS to bring whatever they want. 

To be clear, the disciplines and Combat Styles I mentioned above are by no means required and are not the only ones that provide the DPS debuffs required by Vigilance, they are just the most efficient and allow the 4th player to bring whatever they want. 

So long as each DPS is given the debuffs they need (or at least the most impactful ones), you’ll be fine. Don’t fixate on having a 100% ideal composition. 

DPS Mindset

How can I do as much damage as possible in each GCD (global cooldown, 1.5 second duration before you can activate another ability) given the constraints of the fight? Which ability do I use right now that will provide me the most DPS? How can I maximize my uptime? If I’m not activating an ability right now, why not? Can I use one more ability before I need to move? Can the healers deal with me sitting in a circle for an extra GCD without too much stress?  

Check out the SWTOR Damage Types and Damage Mitigation guide.

Abilities Explained

Please have the game open while reading through the next few sections. I will not be writing out ability descriptions and I will only be transcribing the components of discipline passives that directly relate to the ability and rotation. This forces you to read through what everything does so that you can understand what all of your passives and abilities do as well as locate these abilities in-game. Make sure you place all of these abilities on your bar in an order that makes sense to you. 

Single-Target Rotational Abilities, Attributes, and Important Procs

Shien Form

(Discipline Passive)
I want to start this section by going over Shien Form, which is a discipline passive. It used to be an actual ability way back in the day, but the devs decided to do away with stances in order to streamline things. For the sake of nostalgia, I kind of miss it, but at the same time, I get why the devs decided to just make all stances passive. 

Every single spec always had an optimal stance for DPS purposes and they were always active, so the only thing they really did was make it so people playing those specs sometimes did way less damage than they were designed to do if they were using the wrong stance or didn’t have one active. Yes, Guardian, Shadow, and VG could use them to switch to their tank stances for defensive purposes, but that only made things harder to balance. 

In any case, I am choosing to begin this section with this passive because it has a significant effect on the rotation. Shien Form Increases all damage dealt by 6% and movement speed by 15%. In addition, all attacks that consume Focus will refund 1 Focus when used. The first part is pretty straightforward. Every melee spec with the exception of Focus has access to a 15% movement speed boost if they want it. 

For those of you that are interested in lightsaber form lore, I would like to point out that Shien Form is depicted in this game as being objectively better than Juyo Form (used by Watchman Sentinels). Shien Form provides several buffs including an always active 6% damage dealt increase, meanwhile base Juyo Form only gives a up to a 4% damage dealt increase that has to be built up with multiple Melee strikes and the buff falls off after 30 seconds. 

Now it does get a bit better later on damage-wise by increasing the crit chance of your burn effects by 1% per stack of Juyo Form thanks to the passive called Juyo Mastery, but even that only effectively increases damage dealt by an additional 3%. It takes a completely unrelated discipline passive to bring the number of stacks of Juyo from 4 to 6, but then we’d have to weigh that against Shien’s 15% movement speed boost and Focus refund mechanic. Overall, I just really don’t think it works out in Juyo’s favor here, but I digress.

The Focus refund mechanic is what is actually impactful to the rotation. Basically, it somewhat obfuscates the true Focus costs of abilities and really puts the focus on just making sure you have enough Focus right now to activate your next ability and somewhat inhibits you from thinking about where you’ll be down the line. 

This is further complicated by the fact that different abilities have vastly different Focus costs. Some abilities actually generate Focus rather than consume it while others require that you have almost half your bar filled with Focus in order to activate them. All of this causes you to focus on being in the moment and making split-second decisions rather than looking ahead. I guess that fits with the whole concept of vengeance though as well as Anakin’s reckless behavior. He was a Shien master after all. 

Overhead Slash

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This ability is pretty straightforward, it deals a high amount of damage upfront and applies a short, weak DoT. Since Overhead Slash deals so much damage, it is important to use it on cooldown. Its damage output also makes it the best ability to use with Force Clarity.

Overhead Slash costs 4 Focus to activate, meaning you only spend 3 to use it. You’ll almost always have enough Focus to activate it, though if you aren’t using Sundering Strike on cooldown, you may not have enough Focus to activate subsequent abilities. Overhead Slash has 1 discipline passive associated with it that is relevant to your rotation:

Burning Purpose
Overhead Slash causes the target to burn for a small amount of Elemental damage over 6 seconds. In addition, dealing damage with Overhead Slash applies the Melee damage DPS debuff. This damage dealt by the DoT is equal to about half of the damage dealt by Overhead Slash itself, so the initial hit accounts for about 70% of Overhead Slash’s overall damage. It’s really just important to know that Overhead Slash is one of your abilities that applies a DoT. The Melee DPS debuff is only relevant if you have an Assassin / Shadow in the group since Marauders / Sentinels also provide the Melee debuff and Assassins / Shadows are the only other DPS spec that deals any rotational Melee damage.

Blade Storm

(Force/Kinetic/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This ability is similar to Overhead Slash, though it isn’t quite as strong. It may feel like Blade Storm costs more Focus than Overhead Slash, but they do both cost 4 Focus (and refund 1 with Shien Form). Blade Storm has 1 proc and 1 discipline passive associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Burning Blade
Blade Storm causes the target to burn for a small amount of Elemental damage over 6 seconds. This DoT is effectively identical to Overhead Slash’s Burning Purpose DoT.

Force Rush
Plasma Brand, Overhead Slash, Whirling Blade, and Vigilant Thrust increase the critical chance of your next Blade Storm by 50%. Stacks up to 2 times, lasts 15 seconds. If you are doing your rotation properly, your next Blade Storm will always be an autocrit. Since Overhead Slash and Vigilant Thrust are used on cooldown and have the same cooldown duration as Blade Storm, it’s almost impossible to mess this up. The autocrit is very important to the ability dealing a good amount of damage though, since only an autocrit of Blade Storm deals more damage than a regular hit of Overhead Slash.

Vigilant Thrust

(Force/Energy/Direct/AoE/Instant)
This ability is a fair bit weaker than Blade Storm and Overhead Slash in single-target situations and for this reason, some people consider it to be more of a filler, but I don’t think it’s good to think of it that way since it still needs to be used on cooldown.

This ability is also responsible for Vigilance’s capacity to deal AoE damage rotationally and provide the armor debuff in an AoE fashion thanks to the Purifying Sweeps ability tree choice. I would also like to point out that this ability deals Force damage, not Melee damage, so it cannot be buffed by Force Clarity. Vigilant Thrust has 2 discipline passives associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Burning Storm
Vigilant Thrust spreads your burn effects to all targets it damages, if at least one of the targets is already affected by your burns. This passive makes Vigilant Thrust your DoT spread ability. 

Effluence
The cooldown of Vigilant Thrust (and Force Sweep) is reduced by 6 seconds and no longer consumes Focus. This passive is a bit weird because it never made much sense to begin with and now isn’t visible to the player at all. Force Sweep initially costs Focus and Vigilant Thrust replaces Force Sweep, so Vigilant Thrust counts as an ability that consumes Focus for the purposes of things like Shien Form and still refunds 1 Focus whenever it is activated.

Since Vigilant Thrust is free, it effectively generates 1 Focus whenever it’s used, though sometimes that 1 Focus will get wasted due to how much Focus you generate, but it’s okay to ignore that. The ability is cheap and damaging enough that it’s worth using on cooldown regardless of whether you can actually benefit from the Focus generation. The cooldown reduction is already baked into the ability as well, the only thing you really need to know is that this passive makes it so that Vigilant Thrust has the same cooldown duration as Blade Storm and Overhead Slash.

Plasma Brand

(Force/Elemental/Direct and Periodic/Single-Target/Instant)
This is your most damaging ability. Plasma Brand has an initial direct damage hit that deals about as much damage as your stronger semi-rotational filler abilities like Saber Throw and Slash, followed up by a 12 second DoT that can deal almost as much damage with a single tick as your other burn DoTs do over their entire durations. Plasma Brand has 2 discipline passives associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Burning Blade
Plasma Brand finishes the active cooldown on Blade Barrage and generates 3 Focus. Both components of this discipline passive are crucial to your rotation:

• The cooldown reset on Blade Barrage means that you don’t have to use Blade Barrage on cooldown but rather only make sure that it gets used before you next have Plasma Brand available. It also effectively reduces Blade Barrage’s cooldown which is longer than Plasma Brand’s normally. Since Blade Barrage deals so much damage with the Hemophilic Slash tactical, you should continue to use Plasma Brand to reset its cooldown even if it will clip Plasma Brand’s DoT. 
• The 3 Focus refund is on top of the 1 Focus refund from Shien Form. Since Plasma Brand costs 5 Focus, you need to have 5 Focus to activate the ability but it will only effectively cost 1 Focus to actually use.

Burnmaster
You deal 5% more burn damage with your burn effects for each different burn effect present on the target (up to 15% total). The wording of this effect is a little vague in the game as to whether or not it applies to all burn damage where it would function more like an invisible buff on you as opposed to an invisible debuff on specific targets. It’s difficult to test as the effective change is rather small, but as far as I can tell, it seems to increase the damage taken by each enemy on an individual basis depending on how many burn effects they have specifically.

In single-target situations, this effect doesn’t really matter a whole lot since you have so many other incentives to use your abilities that apply burns on cooldown already and you already want to use Blade Barrage with Hemophilic Slash when as many burn effects are active as well since that is a flat damage increase based on the number of ticks. Basically this passive just adds a damage increase in an interesting way.

Whirling Blade

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This ability is super strong, it deals almost as much damage as Overhead Slash’s direct damage, though since you aren’t able to use it as often, it accounts for a smaller proportion of your total damage output. Whirling Blade has a 30m range, which is super nice and along with Saber Throw and Force Leap, it means you’ll basically always have something you can do when you’re not in melee range.

Since it deals so much direct Melee damage, Whirling Blade is one of your best abilities to pair with Force Clarity. Normally, Whirling Blade can only be used if the target has less than 30% HP, though it has a proc that allows it to be used at any health level:

Keening
Dealing damage with Blade Barrage or one of your burn effects has a 30% chance to trigger Keening, which finishes the cooldown on Whirling Blade and makes your next Whirling Blade consume no Focus and usable on a target with any health level. Cannot occur more than once every 20 seconds. This effect is basically random, though because of Hemophilic Slash, it has a much better chance to trigger during Blade Barrage than anywhere else in the rotation. Since the rate limit is long and the chance of it proccing is relatively low, you shouldn’t ever rely on being able to use Whirling Blade at any given time, just use one of your semi-rotational fillers if you have nothing for the next GCD if you can’t use Whirling Blade.

The 20 second rate limit is nice though, it gives you a lot of room as to when you actually have to use Whirling Blade. You basically just have to use it before the Keening proc falls off, so it has pretty low priority, really it should just only be used instead of one of your semi-rotational fillers. In addition, since Whirling Blade normally costs Focus and Keening makes it free, Shien Form will cause Whirling Blade to generate 1 Focus when used, just like Vigilant Thrust. Finally, the Keening proc is the reason that Vigilance can’t use the War Master ability tree buff since a single use of Whirling Blade will consume both Keening and War Master. Would be nice if they made it so that the War Master ability tree buff just gave you a second charge of Keening instead.

When you get below 30%, Whirling Blade becomes usable without the proc. It has an 8.9s cooldown, costs 3 Focus (and then refunds 1 because of Shien Form). It’s still just as strong damage-wise without the proc, the big difference is the Focus cost. Make sure you have enough Focus when you use it unprocced where it won’t disrupt the rest of your rotation. 

You don’t want to run into a situation where you don’t have enough Focus for a future ability since that will negate the extra damage you just dealt.  You don’t have too many opportunities to use it without the proc though since you still need to use Blade Barrage for Hemophilic Slash. 

If you’re using the Cut to Pieces tactical, Whirling Blade does more damage than Blade Barrage, so use Whirling Blade before (and instead of) using Blade Barrage, provided you can afford the Focus. Whirling Blade doesn’t have any other discipline passives associated with it that are relevant to your rotation.

Sundering Strike

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This is the weakest of your rotational abilities, though it’s the main way you generate Focus, so you’ll still need to use it frequently. Since the new Burning Focus ability that replaces Combat Focus offers a direct DPS increase, you’ll be using it on cooldown and this will make it so you don’t have to use Sundering Strike on cooldown anymore.

I’ll be sure to update the guide when I have a clearer idea about how Focus consumption will work in 7.0. Don’t hesitate to use Sundering Strike if you will need the Focus, but try to delay it for as long as you can without messing up the timing of your other abilities.

Sundering Strike also applies the Armor debuff, so in fights where you aren’t able to hit multiple targets with Vigilant Thrust, there is no need to take the Purifying Sweeps ability tree option. The Armor debuff (along with all other raid ability tree option debuffs) lasts 45 seconds, so there is no chance of the debuff falling off since Sundering Strike’s cooldown is much less than that. Sundering Strike has 2 Combat Style passives that are relevant to your rotation:

Focused Striking
Reduces the cooldown of Sundering Strike by 3 seconds and increases the Focus it generates by 2. This passive should be removed from the game and its effects should be rolled into the base ability. All this passive does is create confusion because it makes the text that appears in the ability tooltip inaccurate. Just so we’re clear, Sundering Strike generates 7 Focus.

Visionary
You generate 1 Focus whenever you are attacked. Cannot occur more than once every 6 seconds. This passive isn’t strictly related to Sundering Strike, but I figured I’d mention it here. Basically this just makes it easier to manage your Focus in actual combat, enabling you to use Slash and Whirling Blade unprocced as needed.

Blade Barrage

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
Most of us miss the old 3 second channel animation for Blade Barrage, but at least for Vigilance, the fact that it’s only a GCD makes the rotation a lot simpler. If BioWare were to ever bring back the 3 second channel for Blade Barrage, I think there’s a good chance they would give Vigilance some sort of discipline passive that would make Blade Barrage the instant ability it is now in order to maintain the elegant rotation they created.

Thanks to the Hemophilic Slash tactical, which makes Blade Barrage refresh and tick your burns, Blade Barrage plays an important role in Vigilance’s rotation. When you have Hemophilic Slash equipped, you’ll only ever be using the ability when at least two of your burns are on the target, resulting in the damage dealt per GCD being stronger than Blade Storm. When it’s able to refresh all 3 burns, the effective damage dealt by Blade Barrage is similar to Overhead Slash’s direct damage and Whirling Blade. 

Now it is important to note that Force Clarity charges should not be used on Blade Barrage because Force Clarity only increases your Melee damage dealt, so it won’t affect the DoT ticks it triggers. This is unavoidable when Force Clarity is activated when 4 charges are available, and that’s fine. The key thing is to just not activate singular charges of Force Clarity on Blade Barrage. 

When Hemophilic slash is not being used, Blade Barrage is still a strong filler, so make sure to use it before you’d use Slash or Saber Throw (provided you’re in melee range), though it doesn’t have priority over any of your other rotational abilities. 

Since dealing direct damage with Plasma Brand resets the cooldown on Blade Barrage, and Plasma Brand is used on cooldown, and Plasma Brand has a cooldown that is shorter than Blade Barrage’s regular cooldown, you only have to make sure to use Blade Barrage before the next time you use Plasma Brand. This gives you the freedom to use it at ideal points in the rotation, rather than use it on cooldown. This doesn’t matter a whole lot when you’re using Cut to Pieces, but it does make a difference when it comes to the Hemophilic Slash tactical. 

The damage contributed by Hemophilic Slash is roughly equivalent regardless of which DoT you refresh. Since Plasma Brand has to be used on cooldown and its cooldown is equal to its duration, refreshing it doesn’t really do anything, therefore the only benefit is the extra tick you get. 

Meanwhile, the individual additional ticks from the Blade Storm and Overhead Slash burns don’t matter as much because they are so small, but the duration refresh is more significant since those DoTs don’t have 100% uptime, though you still won’t double the damage since Overhead Slash’s DoT will get clipped by needing to activate Overhead Slash again and Blade Storm will only deal damage will sometimes only tick once or twice before getting refreshed. 

Your ideal points in the rotation are immediately before and after Vigilant Thrust. Before Vigilant Thrust is the only time in the single-target rotation when you’ll have all 3 burn effects on the target. After Vigilant Thrust, you’ll only ever have 2 of your burns, though if you don’t use it by this point, you won’t always have an opportunity to use it before you have to reapply Plasma Brand. 

Be mindful when you switch targets; Blade Barrage is only ideal to use before and after Vigilant Thrust if you have 2-3 burns on the target. You still should use Blade Barrage before your next Plasma Brand, so sometimes you need to use it even when the DoTs aren’t up, but definitely try to avoid using Blade Barrage when you don’t have at least 2 DoTs on the target.

You will also have 2 burns on the target immediately after Overhead Slash, though this location is worse than after Vigilant Thrust for two reasons. First, you’ll be refreshing Overhead Slash’s burn effect immediately after applying it, as opposed to an extra GCD after like you would if you used Blade Barrage after Vigilant Thrust to refresh Blade Storm’s DoT, basically you don’t get as many DoT ticks by doing it there. 

Second, you may miss out on using Blade Barrage to refresh all 3 DoTs if you aren’t paying attention, which would be the case if Plasma Brand was used immediately after the previous Vigilant Thrust. This also makes you more likely to mess up a raid mechanic because you have to pay closer attention to your rotation. 

By saving Blade Barrage for before or after Vigilant Thrust, you force yourself to check only when it’s ideal to activate Blade Barrage and if you weren’t able to use it then for whatever reason, you don’t have to deliberate about whether or not to use it after Vigilant Thrust because the answer will always be yes.

From my testing, I have not found a noticeable DPS increase to just always save Blade Barrage for use before Vigilant Thrust when you’ll have all 3 DoTs on the target, (though this might change if Cauterizing Brand ends up being used). 

The vast majority of the DPS increase comes from the extra tick of Plasma Brand and significant duration extension on a single one of the other two DoTs because you don’t gain very much DPS from refreshing a DoT that was just applied and 10% vs 15% damage increase from Burnmaster is pretty insignificant as well. 

Blade Barrage does not have any additional passives or procs associated with it that I haven’t already mentioned.

Other Semi-Rotational Abilities

All of the abilities in this section should only be used if you are unable to use one of your main rotational abilities. This will happen naturally in your rotation on occasion or if you are outside of melee range and Whirling Blade is unavailable. Never expend a charge of Force Clarity on one of these abilities.

Saber Throw

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This ability deals almost as much damage as Slash with the added benefits that it has 30m range, provides the Armor debuff (unique to Vigilance), and grants 3 Focus. Overall, Saber Throw is the best and most versatile of your semi-rotational filler abilities.

I want to draw attention to how fantastic it is that this is a non-rotational 30m range ability that provides the Armor debuff. In fights with multiple bosses, this enables you to easily maintain the Armor debuff on a second target, or even on two targets if you use it on cooldown and just alternate which boss you use it on. 

The armor debuff has a 45 second duration, so if you only need to maintain it on 1 other enemy, just use Saber Throw by default on that other enemy whenever you have an opening in your rotation. If you are the only player in your group that provides the Armor debuff, you should always use Saber Throw in this fashion. 

The 3 Focus this ability generates isn’t required for the main rotation, though due to how Focus consumption works for Vigilance, the 3 Focus is able to basically hide in your Focus meter to cover the Focus cost of a single non-rotational ability, like an AoE ability or Slash. From what I can tell, there isn’t enough room in the Focus meter to be able to hold more than 3 spare Focus though, so if you can’t save up more Focus by using Saber Throw multiple times and not spending extra Focus or also save the 3 Focus generated by Force Leap.

Remember that you only get these benefits by actually using the ability, so be sure to actually use Saber Throw if you can benefit from it. If there aren’t any other bosses or you don’t exit melee range over the entire fight, try to use it over Slash as much as you can.

Riposte

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This is technically your most damaging non-rotational ability by a small amount, but it usually isn’t available to you in Vigilance. It only triggers if you miss an attack (which won’t happen since you have 110% accuracy) or if you manage to completely dodge an attack, which usually only happens when Saber Ward is active or if some other accuracy reducing or defense chance increasing effect is active like Diversion or Predation. 

Beyond damage output, Riposte also only costs 2 Focus (1 after Shien) and can’t miss, so you might be able to cheese an extra hit in sometimes if your final hit misses due to some sort of defense chance-based immunity.

Remember that Riposte is still weak, its damage output isn’t competitive with your actual rotational abilities, only use it if you happen to be able to use it when the gap in your rotation appears, where you would use a different semi-rotational ability instead. Never use it just because it’s available. Honestly, it’s also fine to just take this ability off your bar if you’d rather not deal with the added complexity or temptation to immediately press the glowy button.

Slash

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This ability is the worst of your semi-rotational fillers. It deals ever so slightly more damage than Saber Throw, but the reason it is the worst is because it costs 3 Focus (2 after the Shien Form refund).

The big advantage of Slash is that it doesn’t have a cooldown, so you’ll always be able to use it if nothing else is available. There’s nothing wrong with using Slash as your semi-rotational filler ability per se, it’s just not quite as good as your other options. 

Force Push

(Force/Kinetic/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This ability doesn’t cost any Focus to use (and doesn’t trigger Shien Form). If you take Unyielding Justice, it deals about as much damage as Saber Throw and Slash.

Thanks to the Fearless Victor Legendary Implant which increases melee damage dealt by 10%, Force Push is no longer your most damaging filler even with Unyielding Justice. It’s still decent because it’s free, which makes your rotation a tiny bit easier, but you can definitely get away with not ever taking or using Force Push now.

Please note that if you aren’t using Unyielding Justice, don’t use Force Push at all for DPS because it won’t deal enough damage. Be mindful that it is a knockback as well, so if something doesn’t have knockback immunity, you’re gonna send it to another planet, not that it will be too much of a problem for you since you can just leap to it immediately because Force Push resets the cooldown on Force Leap. 

In actual fights (as opposed to practicing on the dummy), the fact that this ability is free is less significant since you’ll gain extra Focus for use on Slash and unprocced Whirling Blade.

Unyielding Justice also makes it so that Blade Storm is usable beyond 10m, though it does deal significantly reduced damage unless you use Force Push to provide a short proc that makes Blade Storm do full damage. 

I find this to be quite difficult to do in Vigilance because you will almost always have to delay something that deals more damage in order to get the Unyielding Justice proc and you don’t have a huge window to use it anyway because Blade Storm is used so frequently. If the stars align, that’s great, but I think it’s generally just better to use Force Push for the damage increase.

AoE Abilities

The formula for determining how much damage an AoE ability does per GCD such that it can be compared to single-target abilities is: (Damage Dealt/Number of GCDs) x Number of Enemies. An AoE ability’s place in the priority is as high as it can be until it reaches a single-target ability that deals more damage than the AoE will deal to all enemies in the GCD. AoE damage is considered fluff if the adds do not need to die ASAP or if you are otherwise shirking your main responsibilities to deal more damage to adds. It’s pretty easy to tell what is and isn’t fluff, don’t be greedy and don’t hurt your group’s chances of beating the boss. 

Vigilant Thrust

(Force/Energy/Direct/AoE/Instant)
This is your DoT spread and most powerful AoE ability. It also applies the armor debuff if you’re taking the Purifying Sweeps ability tree option, which you definitely should be in every single fight with AoE. This ability needs to be used on cooldown in AoE situations. 

Blade Storm with Blade Burst

(Force/Kinetic/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
Blade Burst is a new ability tree buff that makes Blade Storm deal damage in a cone (and slow targets) and should always be taken. Since Blade Storm is an autocrit in Vigilance, this ability can deal a sizeable amount of damage.

Since it’s a rotational ability, nothing really changes with its usage if you’re new to Vigilance. If you are a veteran player, you might have to get used to using the ability more frequently in AoE situations than you’re probably used to. 

The cone itself is super weird because it originates from the enemy you hit, not from your mouth as it should. It might help to visualize your target as a prism and the initial Blade Storm projectile as a beam of light. In order to use Blade Storm effectively as a conal attack, you need to make sure that your target is the closest enemy to you while the other enemies you want to hit are behind your target

Blade Blitz

(Melee/Energy/Direct/AoE/Instant)
Since this ability now has the old Cut Loose ability tree buff effect built in, its damage as an AoE ability is pretty good, though not quite as strong as your other AoE abilities. If you find yourself with a spare GCD and a bunch of enemies lined up, it’s pretty fun to mow through them with Blade Blitz. Only use it when you have a spare GCD though.

Cyclone Slash

(Melee/Energy/Direct/AoE/Instant)
Cyclone Slash is your spammable AoE. It doesn’t deal very much damage and costs a lot of Focus. With Game Update 7.7, it was reintroduced as a baseline ability for Guardians.

If you find yourself wanting to use Cyclone Slash often in combat, it’s probably better to equip Cut to Pieces. You’ll mostly use Cyclone Slash while leveling or if you want to rip someone out of stealth in PvP.

Offensive Cooldowns

All offensive cooldowns (OCDs) should be used as frequently as possible under the conditions stated here and should only be delayed if they need to be saved for a DPS check or burst window, but don’t start delaying them until you see that you have to.

Burning Focus

All Combat Styles now have an ability with shared core functionality that has additional unique effects for each discipline. For Vigilance, that ability is Combat Focus, which gets replaced by Burning Focus and has the following effect: Detonates your burns on all targets within 10m of you, dealing damage and generating 6 Focus. 

This damage scales with how many burns are on a target, so it is best used when all 3 of your burns are active.  In single-target situations, all 3 of your burns will always be on the target immediately after you activate Blade Storm and when using Hemophilic Slash, will continue to be active if you use Blade Barrage to refresh all 3 DoTs. In AoE situations, make sure to activate this after spreading your DoTs with Vigilant Thrust. 

Since Burning Focus has a fairly short cooldown, especially if you’re using Critical Conditions, make sure you can’t get in an additional activation of the ability before you start delaying it for a DPS check. 

Force Clarity

This ability is optional and will likely only be taken in fights with burst DPS checks. While the tooltip says it boosts the damage dealt by your next direct single-target Melee attack, it does not boost the damage of or consume a charge of Force Clarity on Sundering Strike or regular Strike. I assume this is a quality of life thing since those are weak abilities that no spec wants buff. 

The only other non-discipline-specific abilities that will consume a charge are Blade Barrage, Slash, Saber Throw, and Riposte. It isn’t the end of the world if you accidentally consume a charge on one of those abilities, but try to avoid it when possible. It’s much easier to avoid consuming charges on unwanted abilities if you use Force Clarity charges as you gain them. 

In order to get the absolute maximum in sustained DPS out of this cooldown, you should use Force Clarity charges as you get them immediately before using your strongest Melee abilities, which are Overhead Slash and Whirling Blade for Vigilance. 

Make sure you have all 4 charges available for the burst DPS check though. It takes almost 2 minutes to get 4 charges of Force Clarity. 

Adrenal

It’s essential that you have this available for burst DPS checks because Vigilance doesn’t offer a whole lot of burst due to limited OCDs. 

Also delay your Adrenal for when you’re able to use Blade Barrage during the second priority slot back to back since this will be the period of time where you’ll be dealing the most damage due to high DoT uptime. It’s also beneficial to minimize uses of Sundering Strike while the Adrenal is active, though this can be unavoidable. 

It is highly unlikely that a fight will last long enough where this delay will be enough to where it will result in missing out on a use of the Adrenal.

Defensive Cooldowns and Mobility

Defensive cooldowns (DCDs) are not used just to stop you from getting killed, they’re there to minimize overall damage taken. For any Combat Style in any fight, your most effective DCDs should be mapped to the most damaging attacks in the fight while weaker DCDs should be used against weaker attacks. 

Don’t pop all of your DCDs at once or only use them when your health gets low. You should be attempting to mitigate as much damage as possible by using your DCDs against predictable damage.

In fights where you’ll be taking a high amount of sustained damage, it’s important to use your DCDs in the order that maximizes your overall uptime. If you can tweak the order that you use your DCDs where it allows you to get an extra use out of one of them over the course of a long burn phase, you should definitely do that instead of activating your potentially stronger DCDs first.

It’s good to have 1 emergency panic button too, but everything else should be used to prevent your health from getting low in the first place. Part of knowing a fight is understanding how much damage you take and what you can do to mitigate that damage.

Enure

In the Vigilance discipline, Enure also provides 15% DR while it is active in addition to giving the bonus health. Be sure you call out to your healers when you activate this ability by saying something like “I have fake health” so they know your health is temporary. 

If a bit of extra mitigation is needed, Enure is usually a good first choice since it works against everything and has a pretty short cooldown, unless some other DCD is specifically better suited to the damage you’ll be taking. 

Enure also functions as your-self cleanse and that component of the effect is built in. 

Saber Ward

This DCD is useful against any attack, though it mitigates damage differently depending on the attack type and it’s far more powerful against Melee / Ranged damage than force/tech. 

Against Melee / Ranged damage, Saber Ward increases your defense chance, which is the chance to completely avoid taking the damage. Against frequent ticks of damage, the 50% defense chance increase is not statistically different from giving you 50% DR against those damage types instead. 

Thanks to the Blade Turning Combat Style passive, for the first 2 seconds of Saber Ward, you actually have 100% defense chance against Melee / Ranged damage, meaning you are completely immune to Melee / Ranged damage for 2 seconds. As a DPS, you don’t take a whole lot of Melee / Ranged damage in raids unless an add is hitting you, though Saber Ward is one of your best cooldowns against adds. 

Saber Ward also provides 25% damage absorption against force/tech attacks, though it is a bit weaker than other DCDs that provide 25% mitigation you might be familiar with. Since it provides damage absorption rather than damage reduction, the 25% isn’t added to whatever your current DR is (mostly armor rating), resulting in less mitigation overall. 

I would recommend using something else against force/tech damage unless this is the only thing you have left. It’s better than nothing, but against big hits, you’ll probably need to pair it with something else.

Focused Defense

This ability provides a ridiculous amount of healing, though depending on how good your healers are and how healing-intensive the fight is, you might have a hard time activating this since it can only be used when you are below 70% HP.

In fights where there isn’t a whole lot of damage going out, I like to use this ability as soon as I see it light up. Otherwise, it’s best used against ticking damage since the healing goes out each time you take damage. Focused Defense will basically make it so you are temporarily immune to death by anything but massive single hits or an insane amount of adds. 

This ability still works okay against singular hits as well, but you have to be careful not to waste it. A lot of the time your health will be pretty high if you’re about to take a big hit, so you may only be able to activate Focused Defense after taking the damage, which means you’d activate it when you potentially won’t be taking any further damage before the DCD expires. 

The situations where Focused Defense is most useful are the same as when Saber Ward is most useful, though I don’t think you’d want to ever use the two DCDs at the same time. 

If you find yourself in a fight where you’re using Focused Defense on cooldown, you might want to consider reducing its cooldown by taking the Through Peace ability tree choice. 

Saber Reflect

Since this ability provides complete immunity to the damage types it works on, Saber Reflect should never be paired with anything else because those other DCDs won’t do anything to increase your survivability if this one works. 

There aren’t too many instances where Saber Reflect mitigates anything though since it only works on single-target damage and as I’ve mentioned several times, the vast majority of damage dealt is single-target. It still works pretty often as a cheese though and sometimes things that look like AoEs are actually considered single-target. 

This ability can also be used offensively by reflecting things that you could otherwise easily avoid. Definitely experiment with it and use it offensively when you can, though make sure it’s available if there’s something you need to cheese. 

Challenging Call and Stalwart Defense

As a DPS, Challenging Call is your threat drop and the Stalwart Defense ability tree buff makes it so Challenging Call reduces AoE damage taken by 60% for 15s. All danger circles are considered AoE damage, but the majority of boss attacks are considered AoE damage as well, even if they don’t look like it, so this is one of the most powerful DCDs in the game for boss fights. It’s far less useful in solo content and PvP where AoE damage is far less frequent.

If you have to stand in a circle or stand in front of the boss, preemptively pop Challenging Call so you can mitigate the damage you might take from a cleave.

Medpac

Don’t save it for a rainy day because today is that rainy day! Unless you get hit by a one-shot mechanic (which you shouldn’t), you should never let yourself die while your Medpac is still available and you certainly should never try to use one of your heals before using your Medpac.

If everyone’s health is getting low or there’s a heal check in the current phase, do not hesitate to use your Medpac if you can take full benefit of the health provided or need to be above a certain health level to survive an imminent mechanic.

If you think Medpacs are too expensive, it’s time to get Biochem on one of your alts or even better, your raiding toon so that you can make your own or get reusables. Choosing not to use a Medpac for financial reasons and subsequently dying is not a valid excuse.

Blade Blitz

This ability is both a defensive cooldown and movement ability. As a defensive cooldown, it’s your cheese ability. It gives you 100% defense/resist chance for the duration of the dash, meaning you’re completely immune to taking damage during your dash, provided that it’s damage that is mitigable, so it won’t work against things like 0 damage kills and typeless damage. 

Since the mitigation is so short, it can be fairly difficult to time, so you may need to practice it a little bit, and don’t be afraid to completely stop DPSing for a moment if there’s something that will kill you if you don’t do the cheese correctly. 

As a movement ability, Blade Blitz does help you cover a fair bit of distance, but it does cost a GCD to use, so it is best used when you’re out of range of the boss so you couldn’t deal damage anyway or after your other movement abilities have been used. It’s not the end of the world to use this ability for movement though, especially now that the damage increase effect of the old Cut Loose ability tree option is built in. Bottom line: try to hit something with Blade Blitz if you can or use it when you’re out of range of everything.

I also want to add that if you’re using this ability against one of the Energy Spheres from Brontes, or some similar mechanic where something detonates on contact with you, make sure that you hit the orb at the end of the animation, rather than the beginning or middle. If you don’t do this, the mitigation might not work because of position lag. The server may not update your position until the end of the animation after the mitigation has ended.

Force Leap

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This is one of your gap closer abilities. It generates 3 Focus and deals very little damage. Depending on how Burning Focus works, this ability (or Saber Throw) will be essential to use at the start of the fight. I’ll talk about that in greater detail later on.

Outside of the very beginning of the fight, it can be a DPS increase to run in from 20m with a 30m ability like Whirling Blade or Saber Throw and then use Blade Storm once you’re within 10m range, but the DPS loss isn’t too huge, only like half a GCD’s worth of damage and it’s less fun than leaping in, so if you want to be super duper optimal with your DPS, avoid using Force Leap to get in range when possible. 

Force Leap can often be used while you are still flying through the air from a knockback, definitely do that if you’re able to. If you are switching targets or haven’t hit anything in a while, you might want to consider using Sundering Strike as your first ability even if a normally higher priority ability is available so you don’t have to worry about Focus at all. It also ensures that the armor debuff is on the target. It’s usually a DPS loss to do this, but it essentially guarantees that there won’t be any hiccups with the rest of the rotation.

Force Leap also interrupts the cast of whatever target you leap to, though it doesn’t apply a 4s lockout like your actual interrupt ability does, so it’s more for just buying you a couple of seconds for your or someone else’s interrupt to come off cooldown than a more proper solution to a mechanic. This does come up fairly often if your group is leveraging your short interrupt cooldown though, so it’s important to be aware that you can do this.

Guardian Leap

You should really only think of this ability as a movement tool to use exclusively when you’re more than 30m away from your target. The threat and damage reduction it provides are nice, but because this ability costs a GCD to use, it’s not really functionally different from an off-heal, which you should not use in PvE. 

Healers and tanks are fully capable of doing their jobs without your help. Their job is to spend GCDs to mitigate damage while yours is to spend GCDs to deal damage. If you can salvage a pull, I guess it’s worthwhile to use for non-movement purposes, but if you feel you have to use this on a regular basis, someone isn’t pulling their weight and you should make that known to the raid lead. 

Crowd Control and Other Notable Abilities

Force Stasis

This is your hard stun, meaning it does not break on damage. In PvE, this will generally only be used for specific mechanics since most things you’d care about stunning are immune, though the more recent operations do have lots of opportunities to stun things. In general, be sure to pay attention when something is stunnable because that often means you’re intended to stun it. 

Force Stasis generates 3 Focus over the duration of the stun and deals the same amount of damage as Strike, meaning it’s technically a better ability to use if you need Focus and have nothing else to use, though you need a bit of foresight to take advantage of since it takes 4 seconds to actually get all that Focus. 

Force Kick

This is your interrupt. As a Sith Warrior, you have the shortest cooldown on your interrupt in the game at 12 seconds, though a few other melee classes can match it. This short cooldown does mean you are capable of handling an interrupt mechanic entirely on your own or with less help than is normally required and your raid group may want to take advantage of this. If you really want to be a clicker, I highly recommend you at least keybind this ability or you will have trouble with some of the shorter casts that need to be interrupted. 

Awe

This is your mez, a CC ability that breaks on damage. It’s exceedingly rare that you’ll be able to use this ability in boss fights. If an add needs to be CC’d for an extended period of time, it will almost always be done by a Combat Style that has access to a minute-long mez. Furthermore, many enemies are immune to mezzes but are still vulnerable to hard stuns.

Taunt

This ability forces a target to attack you for 6 seconds and puts you at the top of the threat table. Only use this if a tank or raid lead specifically tells you to use it or if the boss is running rampant because one or both of the tanks are dead. Make sure that you have a DCD ready or there isn’t too much of a point to Taunting as you’ll probably get killed pretty quickly. If you’re going to use Challenging Call, make sure you activate it right before you Taunt so you don’t accidentally lose aggro after 6 seconds. 

If one tank dies in a fight with a tank swap mechanic, a common strategy is to have a DPS Taunt and hold aggro only for enough time to get the stacks or get hit by the attack that forces the tanks to actually swap and then have the actual tank take the boss back immediately after. This isn’t always possible, but it’s important to be aware of. 

Resolute

This is your CC break. Use it when you get CC’d.

Strike

This ability generates 2 Focus deals very little damage and doesn’t have a cooldown. You should almost never have to use this in Vigilance. If you’re out of Focus and don’t have Burning Focus or Sundering Strike available, you have really messed up your rotation and need to spend more time practicing on the dummy.

Preparation

When you exit combat, the cooldowns of Force Leap, Burning Focus, and Saber Throw are reset. This was previously a utility that is now an effect built into the Combat Style

Ability Tree Choices

Level 23 Choice – Plasma Brand Buffs

Branding Smite

• Effect: Plasma Brand also increases the critical chance of all your burn effects on that target by 10%.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights where you can DoT spread, but enemies don’t die very often. The single-target sustained DPS offered by Branding Smite is effectively identical to that of Branding Smite, and while the damage boost can be distributed to secondary targets, it doesn’t go out immediately or have short-term reliability. The former makes it vastly superior to Branding Smite in situations where you can DoT spread, assuming Branding Burst is not usable. However, the latter makes it weaker during DPS checks. If you don’t want to bother with these minor distinctions, take Branding Smite in group content.

Cauterizing Brand

• Effect: Increases the initial damage of Plasma Brand by 50%.
• Recommendation: Take this in pure single-target situations or in fights where you have to participate in a burst check. The single-target sustained DPS offered by Branding Smite is effectively identical to that of Branding Smite, but the damage goes out with the initial hit and does not apply to secondary targets. The former makes it better if you have to participate in a DPS check, while the latter makes it inferior in fights with any amount of DoT spreading.

Branding Burst

• Effect: Targets affected by Plasma Brand explode when they die, dealing damage equal to Plasma Brand’s initial hit to all targets within 5m.
• Recommendation: Take this for solo content and in fights where adds die frequently. The idea with this option is that explosions will cause a chain reaction, so once one target dies, the entire group dies as other explosions are triggered. Branding Burst will also offer the greatest single-target DPS in boss fights where adds are routinely dying near the boss. If you’re still able to DoT spread but can’t make use of Branding Burst, take Branding Smite instead. If you’re not sure whether to take Branding Burst or Branding Smite for a given fight, try them both out and see which one yields higher DPS.

Level 27 Choice – Trailblazer, Debilitating Slashes, or Blade Burst

Trailblazer

• Effect: Increases the damage dealt by Cyclone Slash by 15%.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Blade Burst will always contribute more to your AoE damage because it expands the number of abilities that deals AoE damage while allowing you to incorporate another single-target rotational ability when multiple targets are present.

Debilitating Slashes

• Effect: Blade Barrage immobilizes the target for 3 seconds and generates 1 Focus.
• Recommendation: Never take this. It is more oriented toward PvP since bosses are immune to roots, and adds typically aren’t worth rooting.

Blade Burst

• Effect: Blade Storm damages up to 8 additional enemies within 5m of the primary target and slows them by 50% for 6 seconds.
• Recommendation: Always take this. As of 7.7, Blade Burst was buffed to deal damage in a sphere around the primary target rather than a cone, making it much easier and less demanding to use, though it still doesn’t make visual sense. It takes 3-4 Cyclone Slashes to deal as much damage as you’ll get out of a single Blade Storm in Vigilance thanks to the autocrit. You do not have the spare GCDs or Focus to use Cyclone Slash that many times in between uses of Blade Storm.

Level 39 Choice – Overhead Slash Buffs

Burning Pommel

• Effect: Overhead Slash deals 10% additional damage and generates 1 Focus for each of your bleed effects on the target it hits.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Burning Pommel offers less DPS than Burning Offense and only offers a tiny bit of extra reliability, though never enough to matter.

Burning Offense

• Effect: Overhead Slash deals a small amount of additional bleed damage that automatically critically hits. Overhead Slash’s critical hit chance is increased by 20%.
• Recommendation: Take this for boss fights. The bleed damage is about as strong as individual ticks from your Overhead Slash and Blade Storm DoTs combined. Along with the extra critical chance to Overhead Slash, Burning Offense is strong enough to result in higher damage output than Burning Pommel. The autocrit also synergizes well with both options at level 43, which each buffs Burning Focus.

Leaping Strike

• Effect: Replaces Overhead Slash with an ability that leaps to your target and roots them for 3 seconds. 10m range.
• Recommendation: Take this in solo content and PvP. The added self-root is problematic in boss fights, but the additional mobility and CC are quite valuable in all other situations.

Level 43 Choice – Force Clarity, Critical Conditions, or Searing Meditation

Force Clarity

• Effect: Grants the ability Force Clarity, which consumes all ability charges of Force Clarity when activated and applies the same number of stacks to you. Each stack increases your next direct single-target Melee attack by 25%. 15s cooldown, 60s for all 4 charges.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Force Clarity is weaker than at least 1 alternative ability tree buff offered at level 43 for all Juggernaut and Marauder disciplines.

Critical Conditions

• Effect: Critically hitting with a burn effect reduces the cooldown of your Burning Focus by 1s. In addition, Burning Focus also purges movement-impairing effects and heals you for 2% of your max health for each burn effect it triggers, up to 20%.
• Recommendation: Take this in group content. Critical Conditions provides the most single-target sustained DPS in boss fights out of the options in this tier. In fights with a lot of adds, you can end up dealing ludicrous amounts of off-GCD damage as the cooldown of this ability drops like a rock. Critical Conditions’s only real drawback is that it doesn’t do all that much when you exit combat frequently since the cooldown of Burning Focus gets reset whenever you exit combat.

Searing Meditation

• Effect: Burning Focus no longer generates Focus. Instead, activating Burning Focus grants Searing Meditation, increasing the critical hit chance of your burn effects by 50% and generates 1 Focus each time you critically hit with a burn effect. Lasts 10s.
• Recommendation: Take this in solo content. The cooldown on Burning Focus is reset when you exit combat, and few trash pulls last longer than 10s in solo content, so you will be getting the effects offered by this option for almost the entirety of combat if you aren’t fighting a boss. Searing Meditation is also superior to Critical Conditions in group content before you obtain the Champion’s Precision implant.

Level 51 Choice – Unyielding Justice, Battlefield Command, or Defiance

Unyielding Justice

• Effect: Increases the range of Blade Storm to 30m, but Blade Storm deals reduced damage beyond 10m. Additionally, Force Push deals 20% more damage and grants Unyielding Justice, which allows your next Blade Storm to deal full damage regardless of your distance from the target.
• Recommendation: Take this in solo content only. Thanks to the Fearless Victor Legendary Implant, Force Push with Unyielding Justice is no longer your most damaging semi-rotational filler ability. It’s still nice since it doesn’t cost Focus, which can help make your single-target rotation slightly easier, but it’s not a direct DPS increase anymore. You’ll likely gain far more DPS from having Force Leap effectively available all the time with Battlefield Command. In solo content, this is basically the only useful option and can be helpful for hitting enemies that aren’t quite close enough for a DoT spread.

Battlefield Command

• Effect: Getting attacked reduces the active cooldown of Force Leap by 1 second. This effect cannot occur more than once every 1.5 seconds. In addition, Force Leap enables Whirling Blade to be used against a target regardless of their remaining health.
• Recommendation: Take this in group content only. Battlefield Command is effectively a DPS increase because it enables Force Leap to basically always be available whenever you need it. In contrast, the proc that makes Whirling Blade available eliminates the DPS loss from using Force Leap instead of another GCD.

Defiance

• Effect: You generate 4 Focus when stunned, immobilized, put to sleep, or knocked around.
• Recommendation: Never take this. The resulting DPS increase will never be worth more than a fraction of a GCD’s worth of damage per trigger, and you don’t get CC’d often enough in PvE for that to add up to anything worthwhile.

Level 64 Choice – War Master, Stalwart Defense, or Second Wind

War Master

• Effect: Force Charge grants Unremitting, which increases your damage reduction by 20% and grants CC immunity for 4 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this primarily for solo content and PvP. Some adds knock you away as soon as you leap to them, and Unremitting prevents that. The only time you should take this in PvE group content is if you can benefit greatly from the CC immunity or if there isn’t a major predictable source of AoE damage and you find yourself using Force Leap frequently. The poster child for such a fight is Gate Commander Draxus in DF.

Stalwart Defense

• Effect: Activating Challenging Call grants Stalwart Defense, which reduces your AoE damage taken by 60% for 15 seconds.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this for boss fightst. AoE RDT (reduced damage taken) is extremely important in PvE since the vast majority of damage dealt by bosses is considered AoE damage. Without this option, you will be extremely squishy in group PvE content.

Second Wind

• Effect: Reduces the cooldown of Resolute by 30 seconds and causes Resolute to heal you for 10% of your maximum health when used.
• Recommendation: Never take this. The other options are always far more useful. It’s not even close.

Level 68 Choice – Saber Reflect, Awe, or Blade Blitz

Saber Reflect

• Effect: Grants the Saber Reflect ability, which absorbs all direct single-target Ranged, Force, and tech damage and reflects 100% of it back to the attacker. Lasts 5 seconds. 1 min cooldown.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights where there is something significant to reflect. This ability has the potential to deal and mitigate a lot of damage, but not every fight has something like that because most damage in raids is AoE and even if there is something to reflect, you might still be better off taking Blade Blitz if there’s a lot of movement and you just need a cheese. In solo content, this option is better if you value the damage and is probably useful in more challenging solo content like Heroics and MM Chapters where DPS is more important.

Awe

• Effect: Grants the Awe ability, which mezzes up to 8 enemies within 8m of you for up to 6 seconds. 1 min cooldown.
• Recommendation: Never take this. It’s useful in PvP, but in PvE, if you need to mez something, 6 seconds is almost never gonna cut it.

Blade Blitz

• Effect: Grants the Blade Blitz ability, which makes you dash forward 20m, dealing a moderate amount of damage (includes Cut Loose damage increase) and increasing your defense chance by 100% while dashing. Cannot be used while immobilized or hindered (maybe).
• Recommendation: Take this for group content by default. Saber Reflect is only useful in specific fights, but there are a lot of instances where the increased mobility is useful and it also functions as more reliably as a cheese since it mitigates all damage types. In solo content, this option is better if you value higher mobility.

Level 73 Choice – Gather Strength, Purifying Sweeps, or Through Peace

Gather Strength

• Effect: Whenever your movement is impaired, you gain a stack of Gather Strength, which increases the damage dealt by your next ability that consumes Focus. This effect can stack up to 5 times and lasts 15 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this in specific fights only. Adds are usually the ones that apply slows in PvE, and Purifying Sweep is typically be more useful when adds are present. If you find yourself in a situation where you’re getting slowed, but there aren’t more than 3 targets, take this option over Purifying Sweeps.

Purifying Sweep

• Effect: Vigilant Thrust sunders targets it damages. Sundered targets have their armor reduced by 20% for 45 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this in AoE situations only. If there’s only a couple of targets, it isn’t too hard to maintain the armor debuff on all of them by just using Saber Throw and Sundering Strike, but if there’s a lot of targets, this option is more valuable. It’s worth noting that the armor debuff really only affects spammable AoE attacks since almost all DoTs and DoT spreads deal Internal / Elemental damage and most spammable AoEs deal Energy / Kinetic damage, though Vigilant Thrust and Blade Storm are notable exceptions to this rule, so this option will always be valuable to you in AoE situations.

Through Peace

• Effect: The cooldown of Focused Defense is reduced by 30 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights where you can’t benefit from the other options. It’s a nice effect, but it isn’t essential unless you’re taking a lot of damage for most or all of the fight, or if the cooldown reduction allows you to use Focused Defense when you need to use it and it wouldn’t be off cooldown if not for the 30s cooldown reduction.

Gearing and Stats Priorities

Tactical Items

Hemophilic Slash
Effect: The initial hit of Blade Barrage refreshes the duration of your Blade Storm, Overhead Slash, and Plasma Brand burns on that target and ticks their damage.
Recommendation: This is your default tactical item. It provides the greatest single-target DPS increase compared to the other Vigilance tacticals. It does tweak the rotation slightly by making Blade Barrage important to use at specific times in your rotation, rather than just being a strong filler with low priority. This tactical can also enhance your AoE damage slightly since it often allows you to have all 3 of your DoTs on the target when you want to DoT spread without having to alter your rotation.

Cut To Pieces
Effect: When one of your burns crits, it reduces the active cooldown of Vigilant Thrust by 1 second.
Recommendation: This is your AoE tactical item. It’s one of the stronger AoE tacticals out there, and has the added benefit of slightly increasing your single-target DPS as well, which is quite rare for an AoE tactical. This doesn’t mean you should use it in single-target situations though since it doesn’t match the single-target DPS increase of Hemophilic Slash and you won’t have a consistent rotation, so I only recommend using it if you are able to hit at least 1 additional target with Vigilant Thrust throughout the majority of the fight. I will cover this tactical in a dedicated section later on.

Grit Teeth
Effect: Getting attacked reduces the active cooldown of Saber Ward by 2s. Cannot occur more than once every second.
Recommendation: This is a generic survivability tactical that works well for Juggernaut DPS in PvP Arenas to help you survive longer. If you’re getting focused (and you will as a Guardian), you can shave off a minute from Saber Ward’s cooldown every 30s. It synergizes with the Nimble Master implant to vastly improve your kiting ability.

In our Catalog of all Tacticals in SWTOR you will find information about all other Tacticals that we didn’t list in this guide. You may find something adequate that is also cheaper and easier to obtain for your needs while you work on getting the recommended one for your combat style and build.

Legendary Implants

BioWare has removed set bonuses from the game and replaced them with Legendary Implants, which are just implants with old 4 or 6-piece set bonus effects on them, so rather than needing to collect 4 pieces of a gear set to get the 4-piece set bonus, or 6 pieces for the 6-piece, you’ll get either a 4 or 6-piece set bonus effect on an implant. 

This was done to improve customization (now you can mix and match set bonus effects), make them easier to obtain, and consume less inventory space. Here are the Legendary Implants you should use as a Vigilance Guardian:

• Champion’s Precision – Burning Focus grants Champion’s Precision, increasing your critical chance by 20% for 8 seconds.
• Fearless Victor – Whenever you use an attack that spends Focus, your Melee damage is increased by 10% for 10 seconds.
• Nimble Master – Your movement speed is increased by 100% while Saber Ward is active.

Fearless Victor is also useful for Marauders and Sentinels, so if you plan to also play that combat style, I’d get Fearless Victor first. If you just play Guardian, Champion’s Precision will allow you to not have to bother with using the Searing Meditation ability tree buff much at all.

In PvP Arenas, you should consider swapping out Fearless Victor for Nimble Master and use it alongside Grit Teeth. Kiting isn’t fun for a lot of folks, but the winning team is usually the one who managed to keep all 4 players alive longer.

If you want to know more about Legendary Implants, check out my guide Legendary Implants in SWTOR 7.0. It explains how to unlock Legendary Implants and contains a list of all Legendary Implants in the game.

Stat Priority

As a DPS, you’ll need to care about 3 different stats: Accuracy, Alacrity, and Critical Rating. There are thresholds associated with Accuracy and Alacrity, so you need to prioritize reaching those thresholds to get the full benefit from each stat point.

1. Accuracy to 110.00% – Before investing in any other stats, make sure you hit 110% Accuracy because attacks that miss deal 0 damage, and no other stats matter if the attack doesn’t land. Furthermore, many procs require you to actually deal damage, not just activate the ability, so you can mess up your rotation if an attack misses. You need 110% Accuracy in PvE and not just 100% because bosses have a 10% chance to dodge/resist player attacks, and any percentage over 100% reduces this chance. Anything over 110% is not helpful in PvE, so you do want to go over 110%, but with as little excess as possible.
2. Alacrity to ~7.5% – Once your Accuracy is above 110.00%, it’s time to think about Alacrity. It has the second-highest priority because you do not get the full benefit of the stat unless you surpass one of the GCD thresholds. It’s less important than Accuracy because your attacks still need to hit. You need 7.15% Alacrity to get from the 1.5s GCD to the 1.4s GCDs. However, as you approach 7.15%, you actually start getting a mix of 1.4s and 1.5s GCD, resulting in an experience that feels clunky and inconsistent. You need roughly 0.4-0.5% more Alacrity past the exact threshold to effectively eliminate those 1.5s GCDs.
3. Critical gets the rest – After you’ve got your thresholded stats sorted out, you can start investing in crit. To be clear, Critical Rating is still valuable; it just has the lowest priority because it does not have a threshold associated with it that you need to meet to get the most out of each point of stat as the other tertiary stats you care about do. Critical Rating increases both your Critical Chance and Critical Damage. If you have a single effect that increases your Critical Chance by 100% all on its own (it can’t be from multiple effects combined), all of the Critical Chance percentage for that attack gets added to your Critical Damage percentage, causing the attack to deal supercritical damage.

Find out which mods to purchase from Hyde and Zeek in SWTOR on the Fleet to minimize spending and optimize your build. The dedicated guide contains tips for all roles in both PvE and PvP.

Augments

Augments allow you to put additional stats on every piece of gear except tactical items. Since Augments allow you to put additional stats on every piece of gear except tactical items. Since the stats come in much smaller amounts, augments allow you to fine-tune your gear to provide almost as much of each total stat as you want.

To equip an augment, you must first use an Augmentation Kit that matches the crafting grade of the augment (ex. Grade 11 augments require MK-11 Kits).

The 296, 302, 310, and 318 iRating augments released with 7.6 and 7.7 are BiS. The higher the iRating, the more stats they offer and the more expensive they are to make or buy, though most of the benefit is provided by having augments at all, and the base-rarity blue 296 augments are the cheapest.

Almost everyone should buy the blue 296 augments because they provide the greatest bang for the buck, but you do have multiple options:

• Gold 318 augments (Superior [Type] Augment 86). These are overall best-in-slot (BiS) and offer ~25% more stat than gold 300 augments, which is roughly equivalent to 4 additional gold augments. They’re extremely expensive and completely unnecessary for all content in the game, so I only recommend them to the wealthiest individuals. 
• Purple 310 augments (Advanced [Type] Augment 86). They offer ~13% more stat than gold 300 augments, which is roughly equivalent to 2 additional gold 300 augments worth of stat. They are cheaper than the gold 318s, but they’re in the same price bracket in terms of affordability, so there’s no reason for anyone to use them at this point.
• Blue 302 augments ([Type] Augment 76) are the mid-tier augments. For all intents and purposes, these are equivalent to the gold 300 augments from 6.0. I only recommend them if you’re close to a stat threshold or don’t already have gold 300 augments and want something a bit better than the blue 296s.
• Blue 296 augments ([Type] Augment 83) are the most basic tier of augments for level 80 players. They are pretty cheap as only the schematic comes from the associated lair boss, Propagator Core XR-53. You don’t need any Corrupted Bioprocessors to craft these augments.

Check out our 7.7 Augments Guide for everything you need to know about augmenting gear!

Earpiece

Which Earpiece you use will depend on what specific tertiary stats the rest of your gear and augments provide. Typically, you’ll need to use either an Accuracy (Initiative, yellow icon) or Alacrity (Quick Savant / Nimble, green icon) Earpiece.

Crystals

Advanced Eviscerating Crystals are the best. They are the only type of crystal that increases one of your tertiary stats. Since the stat pool for tertiary stats is much smaller than that of primary or secondary stats, adding 41 is a more significant upgrade than it would be if you were to add 41 to one of the primary or secondary stats (mastery, power, or endurance).

Relics

I recommend the Relic of Focused Retribution (FR) and Relic of Serendipitous Assault (SA) for all PvE content. Each relic offers a proc; FR’s proc boosts your Mastery, whereas SA’s proc increases your Power stats. If you have the choice, purchase the Relic of Focused Retribution first because in equal amounts, and only in equal amounts, Mastery offers more of a DPS gain than Power.

Biochem Items

I recommend the Advanced Kyrprax Proficient Stim, Advanced Kyrprax Medpac, and Advanced Kyrprax Attack Adrenal for all PvE content. Grade 11 Biochem items from the crafting tier released with 6.0 remain BiS. Since they haven’t been updated to level 80, their effects are weaker than they should be, though they can still have an impact.

You should use the Proficient Stim as a DPS because it provides 2 tertiary stats that you need, Accuracy and Critical Rating, and tertiary stats are harder to come by and what you build your gear around. You should use the Attack Adrenal because it provides Power, which typically provides the greatest DPS increase, though it’s also more consistent, which is what you need for DPS checks.

Regarding the Zeal Guild Perk Alacrity Boost

If your guild uses the Zeal (cyan) guild perk set bonus, which gives a passive +5% Alacrity boost, you won’t need nearly as much Alacrity stat to reach your desired Alacrity threshold. My recommendations do not factor in these boosts, so if you have one, you’ll need to pay attention to percentage thresholds rather than the stat amounts. Just keep adding one augment at a time until you reach the desired percentage.

Guild leaders, I recommend using the Fortune (yellow) guild perk set bonus instead. It grants +5% Critical Chance and also boosts the Critical Rate and Time Efficiency of all Crew Skills by 2%. The reason for this is that you don’t have to change the way you gear in order to benefit from the effect.

Neither effect works in MM raids or PvP, so if you or your guild members do either of those activities, you’ll need to tweak your gear to reach the desired threshold depending on the activity, which I find super tedious. Even if your guild doesn’t do those activities, leaders still need to actively maintain the set bonus because your gear will become suboptimal on top of losing the bonus, whereas it’s not a big deal if your crit is a little lower for a bit.

The Alacrity boost is much stronger than the Critical Chance boost. Still, PvE content isn’t balanced around these guild perk set bonuses anyway, so I find it better to have a smaller boost I don’t have to worry about than a larger boost I have to manage.

Best Vigilance Guardian Builds in 7.0

These are the builds that I recommend for different types of content and situations. The Build Essentials are what I consider to be the core components that make the build viable. Without them, the build no longer accomplishes its primary function. Build Essentials can include important ability tree buffs, a tactical item, and even Legendary Implants occasionally.

The ability tree buffs that aren’t listed as Build Essentials can be changed as needed without compromising the integrity of the build, though I have included a full set of default choices that will be most consistently helpful in accomplishing what the build sets out to do.

Vigilance Single-Target Boss Fight Build

In boss fights, your top, coequal priorities are executing mechanics and dealing maximum, typically single-target, sustained DPS. The talents in this build enable maximum sustained DPS, though sometimes you will need to adjust to account for specific mechanics or provide utility to your group. 

You’ll also be taking talents that increase your survivability and active mobility because you can’t deal damage or do mechanics if you aren’t alive or in range.

The boss build is inferior against regular enemies because your AoE is weaker and less immediate in exchange for being more efficient and sustainable. You’re relying on your target to be alive for an extended period of time to deal damage, and enemy health typically doesn’t line up with a full-fledged boss rotation.

This build is not as performant in PvP because your CC is primarily limited to whatever you get for free, and your instantaneous burst will be weaker or outright non-existent.

Please note that this build is not intended to be used in purely single-target situations. Do not swap out Hemophilic Slash or Branding Smite. I have provided a second build for Vigilance that caters to fights with multiple enemies.

Most of the time, you’ll be taking the non-essential default options, like Battlefield Command, Blade Blitz, and Through Peace, but there are instances where you’ll need to swap them out.

Vigilance AoE Boss Fight Build

Since Vigilance breaks SWTOR’s game balance conventions by being able to reliably increase main target (single-target) damage with AoE-oriented talents, it’s worth tweaking your build in boss fights depending on whether you can consistently hit multiple enemies with Blade Storm.

Talents like Blade Burst and Purifying Sweep are also more valuable, though you’ll still take some single-target and survivability-oriented options when there isn’t a rule breaker.

Cut to Pieces offers more single-target DPS than Hemophilic Slash if you can reliably hit at least 2 targets with Blade Storm. It does not matter if the other targets are bosses or adds, you just need a second target for the cooldown reduction to be strong enough.

Branding Burst can be significantly stronger than Branding Smite if you’re frequently killing multiple adds near the main target. The more numerous the adds, the less frequently they need to spawn for Branding Burst to come out on top. If the secondary targets are bosses or take forever to die, I recommend sticking with Branding Smite.

Vigilance Solo Content Build

In story content, on planets, and in flashpoints, you’ll almost exclusively encounter regular enemies AKA trash mobs. While you can technically use DPS to measure performance against trash, it is far more appropriate to think in terms of how many GCDs it takes to defeat each enemy and a whole group, and which talents get you over the threshold and actually reduce the number of hits to kill.

As of 7.0, SWTOR now offers dedicated talents and tactical items that are designed and balanced for use specifically against trash mobs.  

These talents almost always have effects that trigger when you specifically defeat an enemy or when you enter or exit combat. They expand single-target attacks into powerful AoEs or reset cooldowns on specific abilities, often with a massive yet short-lived, damage boost attached to it. 

These factors come together to create a truncated rotation that incentivizes a high APM and deals enough damage to defeat an entire group of trash in a flashy way in a matter of seconds.

Yes, trash mobs pose no threat to someone more invested in the game like you, dear reader. The advantage of making such a build is that they genuinely deal more DPS. My testing with Assassin showed a ~25% reduction in TTK, and the combat experience was a lot more fun. 

These effects aren’t suitable in boss fights because their effects last such a short time and can only trigger reliably when you are in a small group and are fighting enemies that have a small amount of HP.

These same deliberate limitations also prevent them from being effective in PvP because it’s so difficult to predict exactly when your opponent will die, and such buffs aren’t useful after the fact anyway. Furthermore, you often have to give up effects that are more useful in PvP to take these talents.

Remember, Searing Meditation is vastly superior to Critical Conditions outside of boss fights because you’ll be exiting combat frequently, meaning the cooldown of Burning Focus will get reset before you get a chance to activate it a second time.

Vigilance PvP Build

This build is best suited for fighting against enemy players, where survival and control are the name of the game and fight duration is completely variable. You will be trading a huge chunk of sustained damage output in order to stack as much damage into a single instant as possible, making it harder for your opponent to mitigate at all.

Survivability is king because you secure objectives or win outright when you outlast your opponents, though it also means there is more time for help to arrive. Controlling effects help immensely with securing objective and improving the reliability of your spike damage landing, but they also improve your own survivability. 

Time where the enemy can’t hit you is time where you aren’t taking damage, and CC is especially helpful to use against enemies that have some sort of OCD or DCD active because you don’t want to be taking more damage than your opponent or not hitting as hard against them.

The PvP build is far less effective in boss fights because most bosses are immune to CC and the ability order you use to set up your massive damage spikes requires you to break what would be a sustained rotation by delaying important abilities. 

This often results in higher resource costs, but the downtime from CC helps to mitigate the inefficiency. Fillers often play a role in survivability as well, so it is as much of a waste to use them either. 

The CC will be useful in solo content, but your burst is focused onto a single enemy and is often super duper overkill. It is better to spread that damage out a bit.

Vigilance can deal a bunch of AoE damage, but they lack traditional spike damage and their survivability is inconsistent. This build leans into its strengths and covers for those weaknesses.

Don’t forget that you’ll take 20% less damage and be immune to CC for 4s every time you use Force Leap.

Alongside Champion’s Precision, I recommend using Branding Smite, Fearless Victor or Second Wind, and Cut to Pieces in Warzones, and swapping them out for Cauterizing Brand, Nimble Master, and Grit Teeth in Arenas.

Openers, Rotations, Priorities

Hemophilic Slash Opener

The opener is the rotation you use at the very beginning of the fight and for burst DPS checks. It’s important to get as much damage as possible while all of your damage boosts are available and active to maximize their impact.

1. Force Leap
2. Sundering Strike
3. Force Clarity (if it were applicable, but it’s not)
4. Adrenal
5. Overhead Slash
6. Plasma Brand
7. Burning Focus
8. Blade Storm
9. Blade Barrage
10. Vigilant Thrust
11. Whirling Blade
12. Rotation

The opener for Vigilance is basically just the rotation with a set starting point and your offensive cooldowns thrown in, though I do want to point out a couple of things.

It’s necessary to leap in with Force Leap and use Sundering Strike. If you don’t, you won’t have enough Focus and be forced to use Burning Focus early. You can use Saber Throw instead, but you will be using it mostly on cooldown in order to delay future activations of Sundering Strike, so it’s not much of a DPS increase if you can pull the boss without having to leap in.

Burning Focus should be used before Blade Storm because you’ll deal more additional supercritical damage with Blade Storm than you would by ticking its DoT since the Champion’s Precision implant increases your critical chance by 20% and that gets converted to supercritical damage because Blade Storm is an autocrit.

Hemophilic Slash Rotation

Vigilance’s rotation is a hybrid between a priority list and a static rotation. There are 3 abilities that all have the same cooldown duration: Imaple, Blade Storm, and Vigilant Thrust. In order to use all of those abilities and all of your other high-damage abilities on cooldown, you have to alternate using one of those 3 abilities and another ability from a priority list.

1. Overhead Slash
2. Slot 1
3. Blade Storm
4. Slot 2
5. Vigilant Thrust
6. Slot 3
7. Repeat

Overhead Slash, Blade Storm, Vigilant Thrust, and Sundering Strike should be coming off cooldown just in time for you to use them. If this is not happening, you probably need to increase your APM. 

The relative order of those 3 abilities isn’t all that important, it’s mostly just convention. It’s beneficial to do Vigilant Thrust last out of the 3 because you will spread all of your DoTs.

If there is a bit of downtime or you make a mistake and accidentally use 2 priority slot abilities in a row or two of Overhead Slash / Blade Storm / Vigilant Thrust rather than alternating, just keep going with the alternating pattern that you normally do. The cooldowns will correct themselves momentarily, though you will sometimes see two of Overhead Slash / Blade Storm / Vigilant Thrust available at the same time, so just use whichever one is supposed to be next.

Main Priority

You should prioritize using all of these abilities in Slots 1-3 if any of them are available.

1. Plasma Brand
2. Sundering Strike (only if you need the Focus)
3. Blade Barrage (only if in Slot 2 or 3)
4. Whirling Blade
5. Semi-Rotational Abilities Priority

Plasma Brand and Sundering Strike will occupy all 3 slots evenly. Each time they come off cooldown, they will be used 1 Slot later than they were the last time they were activated. For example, if you use Plasma Brand in Slot 1, the next time you use it will be in Slot 2.

Conversely, Blade Barrage should never be used in Slot 1. It’s not the end of the world if you do, you just miss out on some DoT ticks by refreshing earlier than you need to. Whirling Blade is the ability you can delay to account for the more specific timing requirements of the other 3 abilities.

You can use Sundering Strike on cooldown, though the Focus generated by Burning Focus will end up getting wasted, which is a DPS loss because Sundering Strike is quite a bit weaker than what will usually be Slash.

However, being forced to delay one of your stronger abilities will destabilize your rotation, resulting in a far greater DPS loss, so it’s better to use Sundering Strike if you’re not certain that you’ll have enough. Keep in mind that you can pre-cast Sundering Strike if there’s downtime because you generate Focus upon activation, not upon dealing damage.

You can sometimes use Saber Throw in lieu of Sundering Strike if you only have room for a few Focus. It will let you delay Sundering Strike longer, and you won’t miss out on damage over Slash, but this is a more advanced technique.

You can easily end up shooting yourself in the foot by prioritizing Saber Throw for Focus generation because you are giving up your only real ability with 30m range and might end up not building enough Focus to afford your next rotational attack.

Semi-Rotational Abilities Priority

If all of the Main Priority abilities are unavailable or it’s not time to use any of the ones that are technically available, you’ll want to use a Semi-Rotational ability instead.

1. Whirling Blade (unprocced)
2. Riposte (if available and you care)
3. Saber Throw (situational)
4. Slash

The vast majority of the time, you’ll be using Slash, but the others do come up occasionally, especially in Priority Slot 1 when you need to delay Blade Barrage to Priority Slot 2.

You shouldn’t ever see Retaliate while practicing on the dummy, but it does come up in boss fights. Remember, it’s only a little bit stronger and cheaper than Slash. You’ll need to resist the urge to prioritize Retaliate over one of your strong attacks just because you see it glowing, and its proc can fall off before you get the chance to use it.

The most common time you’ll be able to activate Retaliate is when a boss becomes immune, and you hit it with a pre-casted Sundering Strike for the Focus generation.

Saber Throw should be used as a semi-rotational attack whenever you are out of range with your other, higher-priority attacks or you want to apply the armor debuff to a secondary target, typically another boss. Again, you can also use it for Focus generation, but that’s a bit risky unless you’re really comfortable with the fight and spec.

Cauterizing Brand Rotation vs Old Rotation

As I mentioned before, the Cauterizing Brand Rotation will result in slightly higher DPS than the old rotation, but in order to receive DPS increase, you have to do the rotation pretty perfectly because lots of pieces are dependent on each other to result in said increase. The Cauterizing Brand Rotation should only be used while you have the Cauterizing Brand ability tree buff active. Without both components of Cauterizing Brand, you’ll lose a lot of DPS unless you use the old rotation instead.

If you don’t want to use the Cauterizing Brand Rotation at all, you really don’t have to. The DPS increase is rather small and you’ll have to use something more in line with the old rotation in a lot of situations anyway.

Cut to Pieces Tactical

The Cut to Pieces tactical makes it so that the cooldown of Vigilant Thrust is reduced by 1 second whenever one of your burn DoTs critically hits. In my opinion, this tactical should typically only be used when you are able to consistently hit at least 2 additional targets throughout the majority of the fight.

AoE Priority

In multi-target situations, which is what you should be experiencing for the vast majority of the time that you use Cut to Pieces, you have to use this priority system:

1. Plasma Brand (only if the DoT has completely fallen off)
2. Blade Storm
3. Overhead Slash (if an enemy you need to focus is present)
4. Vigilant Thrust
5. Overhead Slash
6. Sundering Strike (if you can benefit from the Focus)
7. Blade Blitz
8. Whirling Blade
9. Blade Barrage

Depending on the number of targets, you will find yourself using Vigilant Thrust quite frequently. You will generally have more opportunities to use your abilities that apply DoTs when those DoTs fall off because it means that Vigilant Thrust’s cooldown won’t be reduced quite as much, though this is less noticeable the more targets there are. 

Since Vigilant Thrust will have a much shorter cooldown than Plasma Brand and Plasma Brand’s initial direct damage hit is rather weak, it is possible and necessary to bounce that DoT in between multiple targets so you never have to physically reapply Plasma Brand. 

You bounce Plasma Brand by initially applying it to one target, then spreading it to another target, and then once it has fallen off of the original target, you spread it back to said original target from the second target. Bouncing Plasma Brand in this way is required in order for Cut to Pieces to match Hemophilic Slash in terms of primary target sustained damage output. 

Blade Storm takes a higher priority than it used to thanks to the Blade Burst ability tree choice. To be clear, you don’t need Unyielding Justice for the passive to function (assuming the two synergize). A 10m conal is still quite large. 

Overhead Slash’s place in the priority is largely dependent on the type of situation you’re in. If the situation has you fighting a higher health enemy or one that you otherwise need to focus down, like if a boss or champion add is present, Overhead Slash should probably take priority over Vigilant Thrust. In more AoE-centric situations, Vigilant Thrust should take priority. This distinction is basically the same as discerning what is and isn’t fluff damage. If the secondary adds don’t need to die quickly, Overhead Slash should take priority over Vigilant Thrust.

Single-Target Priority

When only a single target is present, the actual rotation you use with this tactical doesn’t seem to matter all that much, though you shouldn’t have too many instances where a pure single-target rotation is relevant when using Cut to Pieces.

1. Plasma Brand
2. Overhead Slash
3. Vigilant Thrust
4. Blade Storm
5. Sundering Strike (if you can benefit from the Focus)
6. Whirling Blade
7. Blade Barrage
8. Saber Throw (if you don’t need to save it)
9. Slash

In pure single-target situations, I have found that delaying Vigilant Thrust until after Blade Storm will result in ever so slightly higher single-target DPS numbers, but again, that shouldn’t come up very often on fights where Cut to Pieces is used, so for the most part, I think it’s better to just stick with a priority system that more closely resembles what you’ll be doing when you can hit multiple targets. 

There is an argument to be made for using the same rotation you would use if you had Hemophilic Slash in pure single-target phases of the fight over the priority system I listed above. You will lose a few hundred DPS, but your rotation will be far more consistent. 

When using the priority system, you will have more variability in your rotation since the cooldown reduction from Cut to Pieces is based on DoT crits. It’s also just easier to do the normal Hemophilic rotation, allowing you to focus more on raid mechanics, though you will need to get comfortable with the Cut to Pieces priority, and it’s difficult to practice outside of raids. 

You’ll be fine so long as you’re trying to do your most powerful abilities roughly on cooldown. Remember, if you find yourself able to use the Hemophilic Slash rotation for a sizeable portion of the fight, you should reconsider if it’s a good idea to take Cut to Pieces. There’s a good chance that there isn’t enough AoE in the fight if you’re able to mostly use the single-target rotation. 

I also want to mention that it is beneficial to slightly tweak the Hemophilic Slash rotation when using Cut to Pieces. You should always use Whirling Blade if it’s procced over Blade Barrage and feel free to use Blade Barrage in Slot 1 in between Overhead Slash and Blade Storm. This allows you to take advantage of Blade Barrage’s 30% chance to proc Destroyer, which will enable you to use Whirling Blade more often rather than your less-damaging semi-rotational abilities.