Dareena@Lucan DLere wrote:
To the OP. If you really want to play catch up, join a good guild that will be patient with you. Through them, you should also have some opportunities to do gray zone shard runs. Though SOE has made an official statement that they now frown on gray zoning for shards, they've never accompanied it with any sort of penalty beyond attempted peer pressure. If you're trying to play catch up and need to be power leveled for shards, gray zoning is a real way to go.
Also make sure that you get ahold of your Fabled Epic. (If you need a temporary weapon, a Weaponsmith can always make you a cheap 4.0 delay slashing weapon for x3 Chunk of Void Metal via a faction recipe.) Between T2 armor, T2 jewelry, your Fabled Epic, and all Ad3 arts, you should be in really good shape. Once at that callibur, you should also be able to start joining the various pick up raids for your Mythical Epic. Also make sure to understand and take advantage of the Fabled adornments out there. It's amazing when you see just how quickly they stack up on each other.
I agree. This has always been a gear-based game, but now it's massively so. On a level playing field the guard is tough to play these days relative to other tanks, as people have pointed out. But as you stated, you are not even three weeks back after a very long time away. You are simply behind on the gear curve (not to mention AA and esp taunt masters are helpful, but not as good DPS aggro management these days). No amount of skill on your part is going to overcome getting hit by massive damage by TSO bosses because your MIT, resists and especially critical MIT isn't up to par (check out this bonus stat, even on T1 fighter shard armor).
In previous expansions you could have expected to level up, buy some mastercrafted gear and tank a lot of heroic zones, but not so now. Even with full T2 and your epic, I think people have indicated things won't be easy - but you will find them a lot easier.
In addition to working with your guild, and getting grey shards, I would suggest offering to mentor people. While not as prevalent as group invites at 80, you occasionally see people asking for a shard instance group at 78 or whatever, or with people at 80 and others somewhere else in the mix. If you do a zone below 80, you only get one shard, but the daily double will still net you three. This will allow you to learn each zone and named strat without so much pressure.
We ran Deep Forge the other day at around 60 with 5 people by mentoring a bit lower, then mentoring the tank and everyone who could up a bit higher. This allowed some 'new' people and lower levels to experience the zone and learn it with more room for error and lesser gear.