Some nerd's opinion on tanking

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I’ve now hit that 500 hours played mark and feel like I can reliably give some feedback towards tanking. (technically 550 hours but 50 of those hours were leveling up)

First of all I want to punch home that this is looking towards future end game content such as a “raid” that may involve 10+ players in instance expeditions. At the moment - 5 mans are quite simple to tank. And myrkgard portals are a bloody nightmare.

The most annoying part of tanking:

  1. Difficulty in maintaining position
    1.1) The amount of pushback and general throwing tanks in every whichway direction needs to be addressed. As of now, it is god awful annoying but workable. If you ever start introducing “raids” and such where positioning is key - then this will cause major grief and be difficult to balance mechanics around.
    1.2) Building from the previous point - keeping yourself healed while facing the boss away from the rest of the group(s) is incredibly annoying when facing large NPCs. You risk killing yourself or your team(s) due to the constant pushback suffered by tanks.
    1.3) Finally I believe this issue can be solved via the following: Whether through a 300 con perk or maybe 350 if you go down that route should be able to ignore regular pushback (ie a tank cant be pushed back from light or regular heavy attacks in addition to a large monster walking towards a tanking and pushing them back). Abilities that naturally knockback like clear the way should remain unaffected and still act as they do now.

  2. Specializing deep into Con should give modifiers to increase threat from blocking damage or additional threat from dealing damage separate from sword/shield to allow for different weapon combinations to be used.
    2.1) At the moment, you generate an OK amount of threat from blocking so I believe it only needs to be tweaked by an additional 5-10% more. As of now, it’s not too difficult maintaining threat
    2.2) I can see threat gen on DPS getting out of hand the higher our GS goes up thus forcing the tank to dump more into a str/dex - which imo is counterintuitive to tanking. We’re here to tank damage with ours faces and yell angry your mom insults towards NPCs. Having some damage is great but it shouldnt come at to large of a cost to pvp.

  3. The 250/300 constitution perks needs to be changed.
    3.1) The 250 con should be reduced to 20-40% and last for X seconds after taking a hit. The cooldown should be adjusted accordingly and flip positions with the 300 perk to maintain PVP balance (prevent hammer/ga players from building 200str/210con to grab that perk). Or completely rework the perk altogether and allow for increased block stability - for example, those large block breaker abilities (the ones that 100%-0 your stam) can now be blocked without staggering the tank.
    3.2) The 300 con perk needs to be completely reworked. As I mentioned earlier, allow the tank to be unmovable by either blocking or in general as tanks do need to allow stamina to regen.

Would be nice to have some minor damage increase from investing into CON but not at the expense of PVP.

It’s definitely hard to balance some of what I suggested as the 250 perk is easily accessible to GA/Hammer players but just some food for thought I suppose.

Some tidbits:

Sword/Shield is an obvious must have for your primary.

Hatchet is a great secondary for the AoE taunt, ranged pull and single target rend. Not much else needs to be said - IMO if you don’t know what secondary weapon you should use, just grab a hatchet as you can’t go wrong with this pick.

Hammer is OK, nice CC (if you coordinate with your group), meh AoE taunt and amazing in Lazerus.

Great Axe: with the new changes to whirlwind - stick a red gem in this badboy, grab the fortify whirlwind perk and pull some large groups. Stacked with other fortifying perks, this is honestly imo the best aoe option for tanks. you can get up to 50% (5 targets)+ 15% (blocking) and some decent damage modifiers if your have 3+ targets around you. If you don’t need a ranged pull, highly suggest using a great axe as your secondary.
Ice Gauntlet: the ice tomb is nice and you can deal some OKish aoe threat. You will have your shit kicked in if you try this in end game content.

Firestaff/Musket/Bow: No.

Rapier: Has a nice little niche of being able to dash through enemies. Pretty meh all round though. Not much success in end game.

Life Staff: Surprisingly… yes. If you are running a group without a healer, spec into a 300con/100-150FOC, toss a carnelian on it and go to town. The heals you do to your group are decent, easy fortify stacking, self heals, etc and turns you into a boss. Although you can enjoy being ignored by more competent players in PvP if that’s your thing. In solo content, use an amber gem on your weapon of choice (sword, hatchet, great axe for example) and you can solo most content up and bosses up to 62 (it will just take a long ass time…). AoE pulls will fuck you up though as stagger with the LS is no joke. (this goes double in pvp as you will be in the middle of the fight so trying to use LS will just have you trained by the mindless GA/Hammer zerg)

If you have any questions, fire em away. I think I can safely answer most tank related questions.

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Would you consider yourself:

  1. Min max player that would eventually speedclear expeditions

  2. Casual n chill that values effectiveness over efficiency

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Depends on the content and #2 I feel isnt worded correctly. Casual n chill in my opinion would mean Ill do content with whatever I want to tank with because fun. #1 should be broken up to min/max clear time and effectiveness. Anywho lol…

For all non-myrkgard content - I min max my damage and tankiness. With the correct gear perks, you can effectively run 200STR/210CON (250 with con food). In laz, I will use a hammer for the majority of the fights as theyre weak to it thus you can can effectively tank most of laz while dealing some insanely good damage - especially when you run ancient bane. Genesis Ill run the same attr but use a hatchet or great axe instead of hammer.

In regards to myrkgard - I focus solely on surviving if Im running portals. My weapons will be SS/Hat for aoe taunts + rend stacking. Reason being is that when running portals, the commanders give you very little time to recover so more often than not, you can only get a heavy attack in or a few lights. Most of your threat will come from blocking and the 3 taunts I run can easily help regain threat if I somehow lose it. Basically, my job is the slowly walk around in a circle, block and hold aggro. The dps and healers can take care of the rest.

In my case, Im building 3 different sets for corruption, angry earth and ancients. IMO it is mandatory for effecient runs to have 20%+ warding against the monster type and bane + another good dps perk.

For perks, one of my non warding mandatory gear perks is for shield rush as this allows you to push 60% fortify if you hit 3 targets with rush and essentially lets you damage for free without needing to block.

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Just wanted to put things in perspective. Good feedback

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Yoo bro!
pls can u give me some info from the perks and what is the most important?

Also can u let me how u builded up your sword traits?
If i tnaking with great axe which skills im use?
Thanks you!

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Is voidbent good armor for tanking or are there better? I’m a healer atm but I want to switch to tank cause they’re a rare breed on my server.

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This is what I currently run with sword shield and for great axe, just dump all your points into mauler as you’re not there to do amazing deepz, youre there to tank and control.

I personally use shield rush since I have the shield rush fortify trait on my gear. IE I get 19.5% fortify every target I hit (stacks to 3x) and it gives grit during the animation so it’s nice to use when you’re about to be hit by a heavy ability from a mob (tentacle slam for example).

If you’re not using that modifier, I suggest using this build:

This offers you a strong single target CC as well as another taunt. With reverse stab, you’ll have this up often enough to taunt whenever you need to.

If you’re doing invasions - I suggest:

In this case you’re doing your normal job as a tank and holding aggro on corrupted non elite mobs (spearmen/musketeers), Remember, blocking generates threat so don’t be afraid to run into corruption, throw down a taunt and run out and just hold block.

In addition, you can have a 10% rend and a 5% rend up on an elite for ~80% of the time. Generally with this build I run ~150STR and ~260CON as con food is cheaper on my server thus you can deal a decent amount of damage while buffing everyones damage on that elite.

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Voidbent is OK as beginning endgame gear. I definitely use it when Im doing elite/chest runs. Big thing you will need to do is invest heavily into onyx gems (~22.5% is max iirc). This will leave you with about 1950ish phys resist and ~2200 ele resist.

Personally I prefer using heavy orichalcum aiming for 2300-2400 phy resist + onyx as the majority of the heavy hits you will take are physical (plus as much warding vs mob type as you can get ~20-25%) as there really isn’t that much magic damage that worries me atm.

In pvp, most of my damage is taken by melee anyways so I try to aim for heavy orich gear - mages don’t really worry me atm anyways since Im a tank (I always have 20-60% fortify rolling anyways)

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Which weapon u use in pvp? how u have 20-60% fortify always?
can u send me also your talents in this weapons?

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