Has anyone heard of or seen evidence that one tanking class lags behind the others? Most of my MMO experience comes from WoW and remember how pretty much all the tanks except Warriors were useless early in WoWs life. I really don't want to start a class hit level cap and find out I wasted my time because what ever class I picked is useless in one of the roles it was intended for.

It's two days after launch, if you're picking your class based on the balance now, you're just going to get enraged when the game gets balance changed in a month or two.

If you can spec to it, you can be viable at it.

The game seems really easy a well, I think you can get way with any tank at the moment. Besides, it will be a while until the "best one" is decided, no one is sure yet.

Some of the instance bosses can be pretty tough. Interestingly enough, of the four instances I've played, three of them had the second boss of the instance be the toughest.

The Sith Warrior Juggernaut isnt optimal for tanking until level 30. Thats when you get the Shield Slam equivalent called Backhand. Before that your tanking comes from the stance and damage, but it doesnt really matter since most stuff is a breeze up to 30. Some heroic quests are quite tough however and the Mandalorian instance had a quite nasty last boss.

It doesnt really matter. Theres no end-game going on (if there is it aint widespread). Simply put, too many unknown variables to tell.

Ive had Bounty Hunters and Agents tank with great success (and simpler than the warrior)

@Pumpe said:

Ive had Bounty Hunters and Agents tank with great success (and simpler than the warrior)

Agents can't tank, I assume you mean Inq assassins?

And from what I've seen, all the tanks manage effectively. Unlike WoW, the game isn't starting with a "Hybrid Tax" and as long as you're speccing into what you want to do, you can be just as, or at least nearly just as effective as anyone else in a different class, everything else being equal.

I do notice a lot of those instances go a bit easier with a tank and off-tank rather than two dps. Healers while leveling don't have a lot of options or a very large pool, so sharing the damage can be ideal. Add to that, it doesn't seem like dps have that much of a damage edge over the tanks yet, it's there but not as extreme as wow.

@Pinworm45:

Or maybe it was another Bounty Hunter, hehe.

Still working on getting to know what other classes can and cant do.

i think some of the problem of tanking is people still have the WoW mentality to pull everything and try to absorb all the damage.. there is CC in the game and it works very well and almost every class has one, using that makes tanking a non issue... i've ran everything up to mandalorian raiders flashpoint and it's all fairly simple stuff so far.

Juggernauts/Sentinels and Powertechs/Vanguards have the easiest time tanking during the leveling process. It takes a very long time for Assassins/Shadows to come in to their own as they function differently from a traditional tanking class and need to stack high amounts of evasion in order to be effective. However, from what I've heard from friends who have done a lot more research into this game than I have, all the tanks are viable and that for experienced MMO players Assassins/Shadows are particularly fun to tank as because the experience is so unique.

On my Jedi Guardian at level 27 I have hardly any tanking abilities. I got a taunt, and 1 AOE.

I am going to guess you have never played a launch MMO seriously, seeing as this is a problem that plagues even the largest of popular MMO's, WoW. I have been hearing the same things and we need to wait for patch fixes. I do not know if the rumors are true, there is always bitching going on that something is better than the other. If it is true, then we will see Bioware step up and make it better; They are probably one of the only companies I can trust to really adapt their game as well as Blizzard has done to theirs.