SWTOR 7.7 Focus Guardian PvE Guide and Best Builds

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

Introduction to Focus Guardian

Focus Guardians earned their name because of their intense and unwavering Focus, allowing them to continuously concentrate immense amounts of power into individual lightsaber strikes and bursts of raw Force energy. 

Focus is one of the strongest disciplines in the game when it comes to single-target sustained DPS. They aren’t at the top, but they’re not far off either. They have access to a decent amount of AoE damage as well, though they have to give up a considerable amount of single-target DPS if they want to hit multiple targets, though Vigilance Guardian offers the best AoE in the game, so you can just switch to that if your group is lacking in the AoE department.

While Focus does have access to stronger burst than it’s had in quite some time, it’s not remotely competitive in that department because it lacks offensive cooldowns. It’s also a bit lacking in the group utility department where the only thing it really offers is the Taunt, so there’s not a strong argument to bring Focus specifically over something else.

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 Focus actually came out less scathed than a lot of other disciplines.

The biggest survivability issue that Focus players will face is caused by their rotational leap ability, Zealous Leap, which can easily kill players if they leap to a dangerous location, such as a deadly circle or cleave. 

Despite these limitations, Focus remains viable in most fights and is pretty fun to play once you get the hang of it. The base rotation is quite simple, but you have highly granular control over exactly how much you want to focus your damage into a single target vs spreading it out over an entire area.

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. DPS Guardian 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

Focus is one of the most independent DPS specs in terms of DPS debuffs. It gains very little DPS from debuffs from other disciplines. 

DPS Debuff	Presence of debuff increases DPS by approximately
Force	1.9%
Internal/Elemental	0.5%
Total DPS Gain:	2.4%

All Sorcerer / Sage and Assassin / Shadow DPS disciplines provide the Force debuff, which is the only one that Focus players should care about getting at all, but even then, it’s a pretty low priority. Focus can easily fit into any group, regardless of composition. 

DPS Mindset

How can I do as much damage as possible in each GCD (global cooldown, 1.5 second duration before I 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 finish this cast before I need to move? What happens if I don’t have time to finish a cast before moving? Can the healers deal with it 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

Zephyrean Slash

(Discipline Passive)
I want to start this section by explaining Zephyrean Slash, which is a discipline passive. It makes it so each time you use one of your rotational abilities, the active cooldown of Focused Burst, Force Sweep, and Zealous Leap is reduced by 1 second and Combat Focus by 2 seconds. Zephyrean Slash basically defines how the rotation works and forces you to have high uptime in order to use your most damaging abilities as often as possible. The resulting effect is that any sort of downtime or other delay in your rotation is equally detrimental to your DPS, rather than being only sometimes more detrimental, so Focus ends up behaving more like a DoT spec than a burst spec in this regard because DoT specs tend to require higher uptime to do their maximum DPS. 

Burst specs on the other hand sometimes aren’t affected by downtime that much at all since a majority of their damage dealt is concentrated into a few abilities that are always on cooldown while a majority of their time is spent doing weak filler abilities. This means that when downtime occurs, there is less likely to be lost DPS for a burst spec because they are most likely only missing out on their filler abilities. 

I imagine this was done to make Focus feel a bit more unique and might have been an attempt to balance out their burst in PvP as well. I can’t speak on how effective it was for PvP balance, but it did succeed at least at making Focus feel different to play as it’s the only burst spec in the game that follows a rotation rather than a priority list.  

That said, Focus would be in a better place if Zephyrean Slash were reworked to where Combat Focus, Force Sweep, Focused Burst, and Zealous Leap just had constant shorter cooldowns equivalent to what they already effectively are rather than have their cooldowns constantly reduced by using other abilities. This would be very simple to do and wouldn’t change the rotation. 

Focused Burst and Force Sweep

(Force/Kinetic/Direct/Single-Target and AoE/Instant)
I am choosing to talk about two abilities at the same time here because they are nearly identical because they have the same cooldown as well as generate and consume the same procs. The only difference is that Focused Burst is single-target while Force Sweep is an AoE, so Force Sweep deals less damage per target than Focused Burst.

As a result of them interacting with, generating, and consuming the same procs and you should only ever use one in each rotation cycle in the single-target rotation and which one you use depends on whether or not you need to do AoE. Focused Burst and Force Sweep have 4 discipline passives associated with them that almost completely define the Focus rotation:

Felling Blow
Zealous Leap and Force Leap make your next Force Sweep or Focused Burst an autocrit. Lasts 20 seconds. Since Zealous Leap has the same cooldown as Force Sweep and Focused Burst, you just have to make sure you use it at some point before your next Force Sweep or Focused Burst. You shouldn’t ever use Force Sweep or Focused Burst without this proc. You shouldn’t ever have to delay Focused Burst or Force Sweep in order to generate it.

Singularity
Combat Focus and Force Exhaustion grant Singularity, increasing the damage dealt by your next Force Sweep or Focused Burst by 15% and consume no Focus. Both Combat Focus and Force Exhaustion have cooldowns that are twice as long as the effective cooldown duration of Force Sweep/Focused Burst. This means that you can only use one of Combat Focus and Force Exhaustion per use of Force Sweep/Focused Burst.

In my opinion, this is the most important thing to pay attention to because it takes the longest to fix if you mess it up and can easily throw off your rotation if you aren’t careful. If you do mess up, you’re basically guaranteed to miss out on this proc for 2 Focused Bursts/Force Sweeps, and it isn’t worth delaying Focused Burst/Force Sweep if you don’t have this proc. I’ll explain how to fix this mistake in a later section. 

Heightened Power
Increases all damage dealt by 5% for 6 seconds after dealing damage with Force Sweep or Focused Burst. Cannot occur more than once every 8 seconds. In practice, this means that everything but Focused Burst/Force Sweep and a single ability preceding it in each cycle are buffed by 5%. Part of constructing the rotation is about putting the weakest ability in that unbuffed slot in order to minimize the DPS lost from that GCD and maximize the damage dealt by the other GCDs.

Protective Focus
Activating Force Sweep or Focused Burst increases your damage reduction by 10% for 6 seconds. Cannot occur more than once every 8 seconds. Basically, you have an extra 10% DR while Heightened Power is active. This is the only DPS spec in the game that is guaranteed to not have 100% uptime on their DR proc. 

In single-target situations, Focused Burst is consistently your most damaging ability, though Concentrated Slice crits will almost always hit harder and sometimes deal more damage on average depending on how often you actually crit with it.

Focused Burst was actually created in 3.0 as a way to rein in Focus’ AoE damage. Prior to 3.0, they only had Force Sweep. I would argue that this is no longer necessary. No other spec has to give up single-target damage in order to use rotational AoE, meanwhile Focus has to give up thousands of single-target DPS in order for it to have any rotational AoE. 

To be clear, when I say rotational AoE, I’m only referring to AoE attacks that are built into the rotation and may spread DoTs, like Searing Wave (for Pyro PTs only), Chain Lightning, and Death Field. I’m not talking about spammable AoE abilities that can be seamlessly inserted into the rotation like Flame Sweep, Force Storm, and Cyclone Slash. 

Zealous Leap

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
Zealous Leap causes you to leap to your target and deal a bunch of damage, enabling this melee attack to have a 10m range. The rotational leap is the main reason why Focus (and Concentration) aren’t considered consistently viable in Operations. It is often referred to as a self root because the leap animation locks you in place for the full GCD and has the potential to prevent you from getting out of deadly circles or wreck other mechanics before it’s too late. 

You could just omit it, but it deals a lot of damage and makes Focused Burst or Force Sweep automatically critically hit, so you are sometimes forced to choose between giving up a substantial amount of DPS by skipping it or risk causing other mechanical problems. In fights where it’s problematic, you’ll have to make this choice frequently because Zealous Leap has a short cooldown and is used (at least) once per cycle. Zealous Leap doesn’t have any other procs, debuffs, or discipline passives associated with it that are relevant to your rotation that I haven’t already mentioned.

Concentrated Slice

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
Concentrated Slice is the most damaging and most expensive melee attack in the game. It costs a whopping 5 Focus per activation, and shockingly, you can afford to use it quite often since most of your other attacks cost little to no Focus. A big part of Focus’ rotation is making the most of this attack since so much of its effectiveness is baked directly into the base damage unlike Focused Burst or Force Sweep which require more setup. Concentrated Slice has 1 debuff associated with it that I want to mention:

Beat Down
Dealing damage with Concentrated Slice applies Beat Down, which makes the target take 5% more damage from melee attacks for 45s. This is the melee debuff, it’s valuable to Focus as the discipline deals a lot of melee damage, but you get it for free. Assassins / Shadows are the only combat style that benefits from the discipline that does not provide it. 

Force Exhaustion

(Force/Kinetic/Periodic/Single-Target/Instant)
Force Exhaustion is one of your stronger attacks, but it might not feel that way because it has a super long cooldown and the damage it deals doesn’t go out immediately. The first half of the damage from the ability as a GCD comes from the initial 3 ticks over 3s while the other half comes from the final detonation.

Force Exhaustion is the best ability to use immediately before Focused Burst or Force Sweep since most of its damage will not get dealt until after Focused Burst or Force Sweep is activated, enabling you to effectively sneak another GCD into the 6s damage window that follows Focused Burst and Force Sweep. Force Exhaustion has 2 procs associated with it that are essential to your rotation:

Singularity
Force Exhaustion (and Combat Focus) grant Singularity, making your next Focused Burst or Force Sweep cost no Focus and deal 15% more damage. Singularity does not stack. This proc allows you to use Focused Burst on cooldown without having to worry about whether or not you can afford it while also boosting the damage it deals.

It’s less essential than the Felling Blow proc from Zealous Leap (and Force Leap), but you still want to have it for every single activation. Since Force Exhaustion and Combat Focus have an effective cooldown that are twice as long as Focused Burst and Force Sweep, you’ll be alternating which one you use with each cycle. One of the trickier parts of the Focus rotation is making sure to only use one of them before each activation so you don’t waste any Singularity procs.

Focused Vision
Force Exhaustion makes your next Concentrated Slice cost no Focus. Since Concentrated Slice is so expensive, this is quite the boost, though the duration of the proc is only 3s, so you have to use Force Exhaustion, then Focused Burst or Force Sweep, then Concentrated Slice and can’t have any sort of interrupts or you’ll miss out.

Depending on your build, this will determine whether you get to use Concentrated Slice 3 times in a row or only twice. This proc is notably not granted by Force Exhaustion while playing Concentration Sentinel.

Blade Storm

(Force/Kinetic/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
In Focus, Blade Storm is one of your weaker abilities, it deals similar damage to Riposte. Since Blade Storm has a 10m range and is not affected by Force Clarity, I prefer to use it immediately before Focused Burst alongside Combat Focus and Force Clarity. This ensures that you will have the 10% damage boost from Descent of the Fearless active for Focused Burst and allows you to activate your off-GCD abilities at the same time. Blade Storm has 1 proc associated with it that is relevant to your rotation:

• Momentum – Force Leap and Zealous Leap make your next Blade Storm deal 5% more damage and generate 1 Focus, rather than consume Focus. This proc enables Blade Storm to be used rotationally. 

Sundering Strike

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This is the weakest of your rotational abilities, though it needs to be used often since it’s one of the main ways that you generate Focus. You’ll be using it at specific points in the rotation depending on your build, either immediately before Force Exhaustion or immediately after your Combat Focus window.

Sundering Strike also applies the Armor debuff which reduces the target’s armor by 20%. Since bosses have 35% DR from armor, the debuff reduces it to 28%, effectively increasing the damage they take from Energy/Kinetic damage by 7% just like the Internal/Elemental debuff does for those types of damage. Sundering Strike has 2 advanced class 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 advanced class passive isn’t strictly related to Sundering Strike, but I figured I’d mention it here since it will occasionally cause your Focus level to fluctuate.

Riposte

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
I wouldn’t say that Focus really has a filler ability, at least in the way that other specs do, but Riposte is easily the closest thing the spec has because it’s your weakest rotational attack that’s actually used to deal damage. Its main selling point is that it triggers Zephyrean Slash, though you can and should only use it if Dispatch is available. Riposte has 1 discipline passive associated with it that is relevant to your rotation:

Force Lash
Concentrated Slice enables Riposte and makes Riposte (and Slash and Cyclone Slash) deal a tiny amount of additional Force Energy damage. The important part of this passive is that Concentrated Slice allows Riposte to be usable consistently, every cycle. Depending on your build, you’ll either be using it every cycle or every other cycle.

Dispatch

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This ability is super strong, only slightly weaker than Concentrated Slice while being cheaper and having longer range. The key limitation is that it can only be used if the target has less than 30% HP. Its cooldown is just slightly too long to enable you to use it every single rotation cycle, so even though its cooldown is shorter than that of something like Force Exhaustion, you can’t sustainably use it more often than that. Dispatch doesn’t have any other discipline passives associated with it that are relevant to your rotation.

Blade Barrage

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
Blade Barrage doesn’t cost any Focus and deals roughly the same damage as Blade Storm, though its range is shorter and it doesn’t generate 1 Focus. Blade Barrage doesn’t trigger Zephyrean Slash or benefit from Force Lash either. Depending on your ability tree build, you’ll either be using it once every other cycle or not at all. Blade Barrage doesn’t have any discipline passives associated with it.

Other Semi-Rotational Abilities

All of the abilities in this section should only be used if you are unable to use one of your rotational abilities. This will only happen if you are outside of melee range or make a mistake.

Force Push

(Force/Kinetic/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This ability deals slightly less damage than Riposte, but has a 10m range, doesn’t cost any Focus, and resets the cooldown on Force Leap. You shouldn’t need to use it unless you find yourself more than 4m away from the boss and have a spare GCD or mess up your rotation and don’t have enough Focus for something else.

Saber Throw

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This ability also deals slightly less damage than Riposte, but has 30m range and grants 3 Focus. Overall, it is the best and most versatile of your semi-rotational filler abilities, though since it is the only one with 30m range and deals ever so slightly less damage, I recommend only using it if Force Push is on cooldown if you’re within melee range of your target so you generally have Saber Throw available for use when you’re further away.

Strike

(Melee/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
Strike is your most basic attack, it’s spammable and deals extremely little damage, but it does generate 2 Focus per activation. The only time you’d want to use Strike is if you messed up really badly and can’t afford to do anything else. Some DPS is better than no DPS.

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. 

Focus is a little different from other disciplines because all of your attacks either deal AoE damage or significantly boost the damage dealt by another attack that can deal AoE damage. You can still fluff your numbers, but not in the same way that other specs can because you can’t spam AoE attacks or give up single-target abilities as easily. In other words, you don’t really have to change your rotation to do AoE damage in group content.

Force Sweep

(Force/Kinetic/Direct/AoE/Instant)
This is your primary AoE attack, though it is a single-target DPS loss over Focused Burst and you can only buff 1 per rotation cycle, so you can fluff by using Force Sweep instead of letting your other group members handle the adds that don’t have to give up single-target DPS. There is no need to ever spam Force Sweep during Combat Focus with Focused Meditation because Blade Storm will deal more damage.

Force Exhaustion with Enrage Crush

(Force/Kinetic/Direct/Single-Target and AoE/Instant)
The Enrage Crush tactical makes it so that dealing damage with Focused Burst or Force Sweep to a target affected by Force Exhaustion causes it to detonate immediately, dealing its remaining damage to up to 8 enemies within 5m of the primary target. However, if the target dies before Force Exhaustion is able to deal damage or Force Exhaustion is able to detonate on its own, the effect doesn’t trigger, so you have to be careful about who you apply it to and make sure you can detonate it in the next 3s.

Blade Storm with Blade Burst

(Force/Kinetic/Direct/Single-Target and AoE/Instant)
Blade Storm deals AoE damage with the Blade Burst ability tree buff. The cone doesn’t originate from the player’s mouth like you might expect, but rather originates from the primary target. The way it deals damage is similar to what happens when you fire a laser through a prism. There’s no need to adjust your priority since Blade Storm is already rotational and used as often as possible.

In group content where you aren’t taking Enrage Crush, Blade Storm actually ends up dealing more AoE damage to spam during Combat Focus (with Focused Meditation) than Force Sweep. It surpasses Concentrated Slice in terms of DPS if you can manage to hit multiple targets, though keep in mind that this is a single-target DPS loss. Blade Storm surpasses Concentrated Slice in overall damage if you can hit at least 3 targets. 

Focused Burst with Unstable Focus

(Force/Kinetic/Direct/Single-Target and AoE/Instant)
If you’re taking Unstable Focus, Focused Burst deals 50% of its damage to nearby targets within 5m of the primary target, effectively allowing you to forgo using Force Sweep at all.

Blade Blitz

(Melee/Energy/Direct/AoE/Instant)
Blade Blitz deals a decent chunk of damage as a long-range AoE attack. Since it has a long cooldown, I recommend only using it if you need to cover some distance (as a gap closer) or mitigate damage while dealing AoE damage or don’t have any other options and can finish off multiple enemies. In other words, only use Blade Blitz as an AoE you’re simultaneously benefitting from another component of the ability.

Sadly, Blade Blitz doesn’t cost any Focus, so you can’t spam it 4x during Combat Focus with Focused Meditation for 6s of damage immunity and 80m of distance. I guess BioWare wanted to reserve that power for Darth Malgus on Elom…

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.

You can use Cyclone Slash instead of Riposte if you can hit multiple targets, but the ability is really only useful for leveling and ripping opponents out of stealth in PvP.

Offensive Cooldowns

All offensive cooldowns should be used as frequently as possible under the conditions stated here or if it needs to be saved for a DPS check/burst window, but don’t start delaying it for that until you see that you have to. 

Combat Focus

This ability has all the hallmarks of being an offensive cooldown, but you’ll be using it on cooldown as part of your rotation and it does have the same effective cooldown as a fully rotational ability since it benefits from Zephyrean Slash and has a pretty short cooldown to begin with.

Combat Focus has different effects for each discipline. In Focus, it does the following:

• Grants 6 Focus immediately.
• Grants the Singularity proc, which increases the damage dealt by your next Focused Burst or Force Sweep by 15% and makes it cost no Focus
• Increases your movement speed by 50% for 6s and grants 1 Focus each second. With the Focused Meditation ability tree buff, Focus-spending abilities that are activated during this window are not put on cooldown.
• Increases your critical chance by 20% for 8s thanks to the Champion’s Precision implant.
• With the Critical Conditions ability tree buff, Combat Focus also purges movement-impairing effects and grants a stack of Felling Blow, which makes your next Focused Burst or Force Sweep autocrit, and thanks to this effect, the proc also stacks up to 2 times.

Besides the Focus generation being essential to the rotation, Combat Focus needs to be used roughly on cooldown because you need the Singularity proc for each and every activation of Focused Burst or Force Sweep, and Force Exhaustion only comes off cooldown in time for every other activation. Make sure that you aren’t using Force Exhaustion and Combat Focus in the same cycle or you won’t have either for the following rotation cycle. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s not great either.

With Focused Meditation, you’ll need to activate Combat Focus immediately after the Focused Burst following the cycle with Force Exhaustion, but I’ll cover that in greater detail later on.

Force Clarity

Force Clarity was given to Guardians and Sentinels as a baseline ability in 6.0 and then locked away behind an ability tree choice in 7.0. Theoretically, it helps to give Guardians and Sentinels a bit more burst since they didn’t really have much in the way of offensive cooldown abilities prior to 6.0, though no discipline gets much use out of it anymore since the alternatives passives are always stronger. You really only see it on dummy parses since you can pop it to get all 4 stacks and then take the stronger passive for the fight.

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.

In order to get the absolute maximum in sustained DPS out of this cooldown, you should use Force Clarity immediately before using your strongest melee abilities, which are Concentrated Slice and Dispatch for Focus. The only other abilities that will consume a charge are Zealous Leap, 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 if you use Force Clarity Charges as you gain them, but the DPS difference is minuscule if you want to save them up and just pop Force Clarity whenever it hits 4 charges, though make sure you are using the ability as soon as it hits 4 charges or you will begin to lose DPS. 

In fights that require burst, make sure you have all 4 charges available for the burst DPS check, though wait until you’re relatively close to the burst check to refrain from activating it. You need about 30 seconds to get 4 charges. It can and will probably happen in less time than that, but given that 2-3 of the charges will trigger based on RNG, I think it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Adrenal

The best time to activate your Adrenal is immediately after applying Force Exhaustion since that sneaks an extra GCD into the window and maximizes the number of your most powerful abilities that are allowed in the window.

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.

Challenging Call with Stalwart Defense

Challenging Call is your threat drop as a DPS and with the mandatory Stalwart Defense utility, it becomes arguably your best defensive cooldown, providing 60% AoE RDT for 15 seconds. In group content, the vast majority of damage dealt is considered AoE damage, even if the attacks themselves don’t look like AoEs, so this DCD is super valuable and should typically be your first line of defense unless you know there’s another attack coming up that will mitigate even more damage.

Enure

Enure increases your max HP by 30% and heals you for 30% of your new max HP, though you lose the health and healing gained once the effect wears off. 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. With DCDs in general, it’s important to make sure you’re mapping the strongest hits to the most effective cooldowns against that damage, though in times where you’ll be taking more sustained damage, it’s important to use things in the order that maximizes the number of uses you get out of your DCDs. 

For example, if a burn phase lasts 1 minute and 15 seconds, you’d want to use Enure first since it would allow you to get 2 uses out of the single burn phase whereas if you waited, the second use would only come off cooldown as the burn phase ends. 

Enure also functions as your-self cleanse. Sometimes the act of removing a DoT altogether would provide greater mitigation than the extra health, but other times you’d be better off saving Enure for a more significant source of damage. Just because something is a DoT doesn’t mean it hits hard or is worth a cleanse.

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, it gives you 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 than giving you 50% DR 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/range 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 or you get aggro on the boss, though Saber Ward is one of your best cooldowns in those situations.

Saber Ward also provides 25% damage absorption against Force/Tech attacks, though for a couple of reasons, 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, so the 25% isn’t added to whatever your current DR is, 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, recommend using it as soon as you 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 can’t get killed 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. 

In general, this utility is best used in situations where you’d use Saber Ward. If you find yourself in a fight where you’re using Focused Defense on cooldown, you might want to consider taking the Through Peace ability tree buff.

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. You can fall back on Blade Blitz though if you accidentally mess up and use Saber Reflect on something else.

 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

(Melee/Energy/Direct/AoE/Instant)
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 mitigatable, 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. 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. If you’re using it within 30m of your target, try to hit something with Blade Blitz.

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)
Force Leap is your main gap closer ability. It generates 3 Focus, deals very little damage, and has almost no cooldown. It can often be used while you are still flying through the air from a knockback, definitely do that if you’re able to.

Force Leap also interrupts the cast of whatever target you leap to, though it doesn’t put that ability on a 4s cooldown 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 though 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 only use in PvE if it will save somebody’s life. 

That said, healers and tanks are fully capable of doing their jobs without your help, so 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. Their job is to spend GCDs to mitigate damage while yours is to spend GCDs to deal damage.

Crowd Control and Other Notable Abilities

There are only a handful of instances in operations where CC is required, so I will briefly go over what the Guardian has at their disposal along with any other abilities I have not yet covered in this guide.

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 that Focus. 

Force Kick

This is your interrupt. You have one of 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, so you are more likely to be assigned interrupt mechanics as a Guardian. 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 Sorc or Merc that has a minute long mez. Furthermore, many enemies are immune to mezzes but are still vulnerable to hard stuns. The only time you’ll probably get use out of this is as an additional quick interrupt like Force Leap. 

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 and are unable to deal damage or avoid taking damage as a result of being CC’d. It doesn’t matter if it’s a root or a slow or a full stun. Your objectives are to deal damage, follow mechanics, and survive.

Ability Tree Choices

Make a habit of reading through all of your ability tree choices each time you log in. They are intended to be changed on the fly and having a clearer idea of what all of them do will help you to recognize situations where individual choices will be useful in-game.

Level 23 Choice – Focused Burst Buffs

Zenith

• Effect: Dealing damage with Focused Burst or Force Sweep increases your critical chance and critical damage dealt by 15% for 6 seconds. This effect cannot occur more than once every 8 seconds.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this in PvE. Zenith offers the greatest single-target DPS increase by far, though it can also boost your multi-target damage when paired with Focused Meditation so you can spam Force Sweep. 

Unstable Focus

• Effect: Focused Burst deals 50% of its damage to up to 8 enemies within 5m of the primary target.
• Recommendation: Only take this in solo content and only if you prefer an easier rotation. Unstable Focus can’t compete with Zenith in terms of single-target sustained DPS whereas Force Sweep offers greater AoE damage and Zenith can compensate for the difference between Focused Burst and Force Sweep’s damage against the primary target. The only benefit of Unstable Focus is that it allows you to not have to think about Force Sweep at all, though if you’ve made it this far into the guide, that probably doesn’t apply to you.

Focusing Strike

• Effect: Focused Burst deals 15% more damage and applies Trauma to its target. Trauma reduces healing received by 20% for 10 seconds.
• Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. The single-target DPS increase isn’t nearly enough to match Zenith, the only real advantage comes from concentrating more attack power into a single hit, which isn’t relevant in PvE.

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’s better than Trailblazer because it expands your capability to deal AoE damage, with a single-target ability no less.

Level 39 Choice – Zealous Leap Buffs

Zealous Discovery

• Effect: Activating Zealous Leap reduces the cooldown of Combat Focus by 3s.
• Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. You already get a sufficient cooldown reduction to Combat Focus from just doing the rotation in order to alternate it with Force Exhaustion each cycle. Technically, you can make use of it with Critical Conditions and use Combat Focus on cooldown to get a slight DPS increase, but it’s not enough to make it surpass Focused Meditation. The bigger benefit in PvP comes from pairing Zealous Discovery with Focused Meditation so you can spam Zealous Leap 4 times in a row more frequently, causing your target to be rooted a lot more often.  

Zealous Defense

• Effect: Activating Zealous Leap grants Zealous Defense, which absorbs about 15k damage. Lasts up to 10 seconds.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this in group content. For the optimal single-target build, Zealous Defense is the only buff to Zealous Leap that offers a consistent benefit. The absorption effectively lowers your DTPS by about 1.5k and since it’s absorption rather than self-healing, it actually allows you to survive slightly bigger hits, though this does come with the drawback that you can’t accumulate the effect like you can with self-healing.

Zealous Annihilation

• Effect: Killing an enemy within 3 seconds of dealing damage to them with Zealous Leap resets the cooldown of Zealous Leap, Force Sweep, and Focused Burst and grants Zealous Annihilation, which increases the damage dealt by those abilities by 25% for the next 6s. Cannot occur more than once every 6s.
• Recommendation: Always take this in solo content and in specific fights in group content. Zealous Annihilation is super powerful and one of the core components of the Solo Content Build for Focus. Since you can only trigger the effect if you kill the enemy shortly after hitting them with Zealous Leap, it’s difficult to utilize outside of specific add-heavy fights in group content. 

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

Force Clarity

• Effect: Grants the Force Clarity ability, 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%. Stacks up to 4 times and has 15s cooldown.
• Recommendation: Never take this in Focus. The effect isn’t horrible and arguably synergizes better with Focus than any other Guardian or Sentinel DPS discipline, but it’s just weaker than the other options, so there’s no reason to take Force Clarity. It’s a shame that it isn’t given to Guardians and Sentinels as a baseline ability, especially Focus because it would be super cool to use alongside Focused Meditation. 

Critical Conditions

• Effect: Critically hitting with a Force, Energy/Kinetic attack reduces the cooldown of Combat Focus by 1 second. In addition, Felling Blow can now stack up to 2 times and Combat Focus purges movement-impairing effects and triggers Felling Blow.
• Recommendation: Take this in PvP or if you’re feeling nostalgic. Critical Conditions offers slightly less sustained DPS, though the rotation is basically the same as that of Concentration Sentinel, allowing you to transition easier to this discipline. It’s better for concentrating as much damage into Focused Burst as possible, which is useful for PvP. Force Energy/Kinetic attacks that generate lower the cooldown of Combat Focus include each tick of Force Exhaustion, Focused Burst, Force Sweep, Blade Storm, and Force Lash. There is no rate limit, so if you hit multiple targets, you’ll get multiple Rage. The DoT from Cauterized Coronary is a Force attack, but deals Internal damage, not Energy or Kinetic.

Focused Meditation

• Effect: Each time you deal damage with a Force energy or kinetic attack, you generate 1 Focus. In addition, Focus-spending attacks have no cooldown while Combat Focus is active.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this. Focused Meditation offers the greatest burst and sustained DPS and greatly improves your overall flexibility with regards to AoE damage, allowing you to do absurd combinations of powerful abilities. The Focus generation enables you to spam whatever you want. Force Energy and Kinetic attacks that generate 1 Focus include each tick of Force Exhaustion, Focused Burst, Force Sweep, Blade Storm, and Force Lash. There is no rate limit, so if you hit multiple targets, you’ll get multiple Focus. The DoT from Cauterized Coronary is a Force attack, but deals Internal damage, not Energy or Kinetic.

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. The damage increase to Force Push is more valuable in solo content since you sometimes need to knock adds into the group in order to AoE them. The increased range on Blade Storm is nice too, but it’s not essential. Overall, this is the most useful option in solo content. 

Battlefield Command

• Effect: Getting attacked reduces the active cooldown of Force Leap by 1s. This effect cannot occur more than once every 1.5s. In addition, Force Leap enables your next Dispatch to be used against a target with any percentage of 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 while the proc that makes Dispatch available eliminates the DPS loss from using Force Leap instead of another GCD. In solo content, single-target damage is far less important and the cooldown on Force Leap will be reset once you exit combat anyway, so neither effect provides much value.

Defiance

• Effect: You generate 4 Focus when stunned, immobilized, put to sleep, or knocked around.
• Recommendation: Never take this. The other options are far more useful.

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

War Master

• Effect: Force Leap grants Unstoppable, increasing your DR by 20% and granting 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 Unstoppable prevents that while offering a bit of DR. 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 fights. 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 6s. 1 min cooldown.
• Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. 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, purging movement impairing effects, and making you immune to damage and CC while dashing. Cannot be used while hindered.
• 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 movement speed is useful and it also functions more reliably as a cheese. In solo content, this option is better if you value higher mobility. 

Level 73 Choice – Gather Strength, Purifying Sweep, 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 and solo content only. Adds are usually the ones that apply slows in PvE, where Purifying Sweep would typically be more useful. If you find yourself in a situation where you’re getting slowed but aren’t using Force Sweep, definitely take this.

Purifying Sweep

• Effect: Force Sweep applies the armor debuff to targets it damages.
• Recommendation: Only take this if you find yourself using Force Sweep. You’ll mostly be taking this in solo content, but it can still be worthwhile to Force Sweep even if you’re mostly letting DoT specs in your group handle the trash as Force Sweep is still a potent AoE GCD and the armor debuff will help the other players. 

Through Peace

• Effect: The cooldown of Focused Defense is reduced by 30 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this in PvP and 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 provided by this option.

Gearing and Stats Priorities

Tactical Items

Cauterized Coronary
Effect: Concentrated Slice causes its target to bleed, dealing damage 3 times over 9s.
Recommendation: This snooze-fest of a tactical item is sadly what you’ll be using by default in sustained DPS situations. Technically, it is considered to be a Concentration Sentinel tactical, but it still works just as well for Focus Guardians. Cauterized Coronary is the default because it provides the greatest single-target DPS increase compared to the other Focus tacticals

Enrage Crush
Effect: Dealing damage with Focused Burst or Force Sweep detonates Force Exhaustion, dealing Force Exhaustion’s remaining damage to up to 8 enemies within 5m of the primary target.
Recommendation: This is your AoE tactical item. Like Cauterized Coronary, it is technically a Concentration Sentinel tactical, but it still works just as well for Focus Guardians. It’s strong enough to defeat most enemies in solo content and enables you to use other single-target abilities on the ones with more HP. You can also put it in your Combat Focus window to use it twice back to back. Unfortunately, Enrage Crush doesn’t offer any boost to single-target sustained DPS. This is more problematic than usual because the alternative is Vigilance with Cut to Pieces, though that has more to do with Vigilance’s AoE being ridiculously overpowered. You may also want to use it in Warzones, though it can be unreliable because it’s timing-dependent.

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 Guardian 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 DPS Guardian:

• Champion’s Precision – Combat 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 Focus 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.

Focus Boss Fights Build 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.

If you feel super comfortable with the spec, you can give up a bit of survivability by taking Zealous Annihilation instead of Zealous Defense in fights with adds, but it is challenging to make use of in group content.

Make sure to swap the ability tree choices at level 68 and 73 to best suit the needs of the fight, refer back to the ability tree choices section for more information on when you should take each of those options.

If you want to play Focus like it was in past expansions and how Concentration | Fury still is, take Critical Conditions instead of Focused Meditation.

Focus 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.

The Focus solo build emphasizes resetting or turning off the cooldown of your strongest attacks boosting the damage they deal. You have unparalleled flexibility to focus a massive amount of your damage into a single target or spread it over a wider area to damage a whole group.

This absolutely exceptional amount of control over where your damage goes does mean that Focus is considerably harder to learn and play than another solo build, but practically everything you learn will prepare you for group content if you end up wanting to do that. This complexity really only comes up in heroics and FPs though since combat doesn’t last long enough outside of those situations.

Focused Meditation and Zealous Annihilation are what enable you to ignore cooldowns. Focused Meditation makes it so abilities that cost Focus don’t have a cooldown while Combat Focus is active and Combat Focus lasts 6s.

Zealous Annihilation makes it so defeating an enemy within 3s of dealing damage with Zealous Leap resets the cooldowns on Focused Burst, Force Sweep, and Zealous Leap, and makes them deal more damage for the next 6s, though you can’t reset the cooldowns again while the damage boost is active.

The other essentials are more general but still have significant damage boosts. Zenith offers higher overall sustained DPS, which is nice for bosses, though it’s harder to use because you need to incorporate Force Sweep instead of being able to rely solely on Focused Burst as you can with Subjugate. If you opt for Subjugate, use Pooled Hatred instead of Crushing Fist for your level 73 choice.

Blade Burst and Unyielding Justice give you a longer-range AoE Blade Storm, and you can spam Scream from range 4 times in a row with Focused Meditation, though this is weaker than your other AoE, so I don’t consider either choice to be essential.

Focus PvP Build 1

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 also be useful in solo content, but your burst is focused onto a single enemy and is often super duper overkill. Unlike with PvP, it is better to spread that damage out a bit.

Your objective with the first PvP build for Focus is to crank the damage up on Focused Burst as high as possible, leveraging the second stack of Felling Blow from Critical Conditions and Focusing Strike to boost its damage by 115% coinciding with the collapse of Force Exhaustion followed by the activation of Concentrated Slice.

The cooldown reductions from Zealous Discovery and Critical Conditions will ensure that you have Combat Focus available for every single Focused Burst Cycle, instead of every other. Combat Focus Crush offers additional AoE damage and further reduces the cooldown of Combat Focus. 

Focus PvP Build 2

The second of Focus’ PvP builds focuses on mobility and control, rather than maximizing your damage spike. I personally recommend using Grit Teeth and Nimble Master with this build to lean into that emphasis, but it’s not essential.

Focused Meditation allows you to spam Zealous Leap 4 times in a row, meaning you can stay in range of a rooted opponent for the full 6s if you like, and you can do it a whole lot more often thanks to Zealous Discovery.

Your uptime on Champion’s Precision and Zenith will be higher as well, increasing your overall damage output.

Since Zealous Leap has 10m range, you don’t need to use it 4 times in a row to stay in melee range of your opponent, and you have enough Focus to use Concentrated Slice or Dispatch or whatever you want instead. 

Openers, Rotations, and Priorities

Group Content Rotation and Opener

The opener when using Focused Meditation is just the rotation starting with Force Leap for the initial autocrit proc and Focus into Force Exhaustion and the Adrenal. There are no other differences, so there’s no need to cover them separately.

1. Force Leap (only for opener to generate Felling Blow proc and Focus)
2. Force Exhaustion
3. Adrenal (if applicable)
4. Focused Burst or Force Sweep (Cycle 1 begins)
5. Combat Focus
6. ( Focused Meditation window begins)
7. Concentrated Slice or Blade Storm
8. Zealous Leap
9. Concentrated Slice or Blade Storm
10. Concentrated Slice or Blade Storm
11. ( Focused Meditation window ends)
12. Sundering Strike
13. Focused Burst or Force Sweep (Cycle 2 begins)
14. Concentrated Slice
15. Zealous Leap
16. Blade Storm
17. Dispatch or Riposte
18. Force Exhaustion
19. Repeat from Focused Burst or Force Sweep (Cycle 1)

This rotation is quite static and alternates between 2 rotation cycles defined by singular activations of Focused Burst or Force Sweep, Concentrated Slice, Zealous Leap, and Force Exhaustion or Combat Focus. It ensures that your most powerful abilities are getting used as often as possible given the constraints of the discipline.

Force Exhaustion must always be used immediately before Focused Burst or Force Sweep in order to maximize the amount of damage being dealt while Zenith and Heightened Power are active. If you’re gonna use it that cycle (and you almost always will be), Concentrated Slice must be your first GCD after Focused Burst or Force Sweep since the Focused Vision proc only lasts 2 GCDs.

Concentrated Slice is your strongest single-target attack, so it makes the most sense to spam it 3x while Combat Focus is active and you want to use it while Heightened Power and Zenith are active to maximize their damage dealt. 

It’s essential that you use Combat Focus BEFORE your first Concentrated Slice (or Blade Storm) or you’ll put that ability on cooldown. This will also make it so the detonation of Force Exhaustion has a greater chance to crit since the Champion’s Precision proc will be active. If you mess up, you can just use Zealous Leap 4x in a row instead, but this is a significant, and now unavoidable, DPS loss.

To be clear, Zealous Leap always needs to be one of the 4 GCDs used during Combat Focus so it doesn’t go on cooldown and can be used in every cycle so you get the autocrit. You can squeeze an extra tick out of the Cauterized Coronary DoT if you don’t use it as the last GCD, though it’s far more satisfying to finish off the Combat Focus window with Zealous Leap and forgo that extra tick that only has a minor effect on DPS.

If you can hit at least 3 targets, Blade Storm will deal more DPS overall than Concentrated Slice, but it will be spread over the targets you hit instead of being concentrated on the primary target, resulting in a significant loss to single-target sustained DPS.

Sundering Strike is the final GCD of the first cycle because it’s one of your weakest attacks and will be outside of the Heightened Power and Zenith boosts. You’ll need more Focus after spamming your most expensive attacks too, though you can technically delay it for a few GCDs before you actually run into trouble.

Cycle 2 starts out the same as Cycle 1 where you’re doing Focused Burst or Force Sweep ▶ Concentrated Slice ▶ Zealous Leap, but then it diverges and you use weaker abilities, namely Blade Storm and Riposte. You can and should replace Riposte with Dispatch whenever it is available. It doesn’t matter which order you do them in so long as Force Exhaustion is the final ability of Cycle 2 so that it’s active as you go back into Cycle 1 and you can maximize the benefit of Zenith and Heightened Power as well as benefit from Focused Vision at all.

The adrenal should be ending right before you apply Force Exhaustion, allowing you to get a full 2 rotation cycles, including 2 Focused Bursts or Force Sweeps, most of Force Exhaustion, and the maximum number of Concentrated Slices.

Using Focus in Solo Content

In solo content, I think it makes the most sense to think about Focus in terms of the different ability sequences you can do since you don’t have to worry about cooldowns while Combat Focus is active and you’ll have Combat Focus for every single trash pull thanks to Preparation. Against stronger enemies on higher-level planets, you will need to chain these sequences together or finish enemies off with other attacks.

Much of this information is valuable in group content for making use of the Zealous Annihilation ability tree buff, recovering from mistakes and downtime, and maximizing the power of Focused Meditation.

Enraged Crush AoE

This is the main sequence that will be enough to take out most groups of trash outside of heroics and FPs.

1. Force Leap (to enter combat and for autocrit)
2. Combat Focus (for Focus generation and Focused Meditation)
3. Force Exhaustion (against healthiest and most central enemy)
4. Force Sweep (with Zenith) or Focused Burst (with Unstable Focus)
5. Zealous Leap (to something you can defeat within 2 GCDs)
6. Force Exhaustion (against healthiest and most central enemy)
7. Force Sweep (with Zenith) or Focused Burst (with Unstable Focus)

The main idea is you’re using Combat Focus to go through and do Enrage Crush twice. The Force Leap and Zealous Leap are essential because they make your Force Sweeps / Focused Bursts autocrit.

The Force Exhaustions will deal AoE damage, but remember to be quick about it because it only deals AoE damage if you hit the target you applied it to with Force Sweep or Focused Burst before they die.

If any enemies are left standing, you can finish them off individually with Concentrated Slice and/or another Zealous Leap ▶ Focused Burst. When you exit combat, the cooldowns on Force Leap and Combat Focus are reset, though notably not Force Exhaustion.

Single-Target Burst

This is the sequence to use if you want to focus a ton of damage into a single target. You should be able to take out a strong enemy or weaker and should be able to proc Zealous Annihilation to reset the cooldown on Zealous Leap, Focused Burst, and Force Sweep.

1. Combat Focus
2. Zealous Leap
3. Focused Burst
4. Zealous Leap
5. Focused Burst (defeats target)
6. Zealous Leap (boosted by Zealous Annihilation)
7. Focused Burst (boosted by Zealous Annihilation)

You may defeat something earlier, which is fine, but it’s a bit wasteful. Only the first Focused Burst will be free and deal 15% more damage thanks to the Singularity proc, though the damage will actually be higher on subsequent activations because they’ll benefit from Zenith (if you’re taking that).

This is also the main sequence you can take advantage of in group content in add-heavy fights instead of Cycle 1 if you can finish off multiple enemies in a row.

Scream Spam

This isn’t optimal, it’s just a fun one for when you want to channel your inner Vaylin with repeated screaming. Thanks to Blade Burst and Unyielding Justice, you’ll be able to deal AoE damage to targets up to 30m away.

1. Zealous Leap or Force Leap (for autocrit)
2. Force Exhaustion (optional)
3. Force Push (optional)
4. Focused Burst or Force Sweep
5. Combat Focus
6. Blade Storm
7. Blade Storm
8. Blade Storm
9. Blade Storm

You can technically skip to Combat Focus if you want, but you’ll be missing out on some significant damage boosts like Zenith and Heightened Power.

If you really enjoy this sequence, consider using the Joiner’s Pressure tactical in solo content only instead, which makes it so you deal 20% more damage for 10s after using Force Push against a target affected by Force Exhaustion. I personally don’t enjoy it because the cooldown on Force Push is too long and the timing is really tight, but you do you.

In group content, this is the main AoE sequence you can do with Focused Meditation.

Dedicated Finishers for Solo Content

These attacks are either not used as often in the attack sequences or are otherwise often available while dealing a high amount of damage. If an enemy has a bit of remaining HP, you can use 1-2 of these to finish them off.

• Concentrated Slice
• Dispatch
• Blade Storm
• Riposte
• Zealous Leap (for Zealous Annihilation proc)

To be clear, it’s fine to finish enemies off with other attacks, but you will run into situations where you’ll need another hit. If you know something will take 2 hits, try your best to incorporate Zealous Leap so you get the Zealous Annihilation proc.