I currently play a Paladin Tank with 250Con and 150 Focus. With this build I am also able to heal myself, that means the healer can take care of the DDs. You don’t need Str to tank, it just makes things easier since you build aggro with successful blocks.
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o ye! right now void gauntlet makes tanke more tanky.
oblivion is amazing.
with new weapon perk added during holidays patch soon we are gonna see even more viable and flexible tank builds!
trenchant rend : rend on heavy
Pure tanks are still necessary for end game areas, but are generally pretty poor at soloing or small grouping efficiently. They aren’t too great in war, either, except very limited circumstances. Damage and cc are just alot more useful, and just enough tankiness to not get totally rolled.
I agree, to make tank build more viable so ppl start doing them, Sword and Shield shall be given many CCs, like chain pull, stun, root… the damage is expected to be really bad, but if you can cc like that, ppl will be forced to focus and attack tanks instead of just ignoring them.
Tank mmm we are useless, i give up.
No game has pure tanks, like if you want to be competitive in most games you have to deal damage as a tank. You also rely on mobs hit animations to kite.
A big part of tanking is maintaining mobs with the back at your group. Specially in NW.
And ye, 160 con +40 food buff gets you where you want to be 200 con is minimum for tanking.
I’m a tanker, for 30+ years. Always been, always will be. Pure tanks exists in most games: aggro/wall/immortal. Dodging is not for tanks. I was completly wrong about the stamina. The masteries were in a heavy fighter mode, eventho the build was named tank.
I thought a pure tank was impossible. But I’m still very low. We will see. But I already a big difference from yesterday. I can block heavy, I can block a ton now, I’m very hard to kill. In a fight in BW, against that level 35 lost elite in the middle, it took a long time the first time. It took longer until a level 60 WH arrived. I was still able to keep the aggro and he barely needed to block. A level 47.
I’m so happy. But it’s still very early. But that immortal PVP tank build above is real.
But yeah, we get bounced too much around and we don’t block like a linesman, like a 3-man wall.
#WeAreTanks
Have you tried stacking Sturdy on your gear? It’s must have for shield tanking, and allows you to block for quite a while.
Tanking has always been about mitigation vs threat and almost never about HP(after a certain threshold).
Tanking in this game is more about hitting your fortify cap, wearing the proper enemy wards and enemy positioning when doing the harder content.
Fortify Cap
You can hit the fortify cap in multiple ways, but I chose to go for a shield rush build with the 18% fortify perk. With a refreshing move sword and reverse stab it is ready to go constantly. With onyx’s in all my gear and jewelry I am at 48% after coming out of a block and doing a shield rush all on my own.
I run this build because if a healer doesn’t run orb of protection(which is really underrated) for the extra 10% fortify or doesn’t have the fortifying scared ground perk(9.4%) I can still almost hit the 50% cap. Also if you always run with a healer that has orb you can switch your gems to a mix of onyx/opals and take a bit less elemental damage as well.
The point is always try to stay as close to 50% fortify as possible by any means possible.
Damage Wards
I won’t say these are 100% needed to do the content, but it sure as hell makes it much easier.
For example at 0% fortify and no wards on your armor you will take 30% more damage than someone who has wards on their armor. However, at 10% it’s 35% more, at 20% it’s 41%, at 30% it’s 50% and at the 50% cap its 88% more damage you would be taking. When using defiance stance or a ward(corrupted, lost, etc.) potion you can get to ~94% mitigation at fortify cap and wearing your ward armor. If all the stars align you can get to 98%+.
With all that being said I was doing Genesis/Lazarus with pearls and no ward armor taking 2-3x the damage I am now.
Threat/Positioning
If you are not having threat problems at really high constitution you may not have gotten to that point yet. I was thinking the same thing when I first hit 60, but now it is a different story our DPS started to get good gear.
When I DPSI run with a pretty good tank that runs with 250 con and 200+ strength and I still pull aggro if I don’t slot 4 carnelians in my armor. It’s because we always try to get the enemy’s back to the DPS so they can get the backstab damage.
I’m able to tank genesis and lazarus with 300 str and 150 con just fine, run with leadership bonus, sundering shockwave, and armor breaker and shit just melts.
Backstab and defiant stance are a good combo, and the leaping strike allows me to either save a healer or dodge a scary situation when I need to regain stamina.
Having grit for all attacks is also pretty nice, you could block mid 2 or 3 hit combo from a mob or boss if needed, the fast stamina regain is also pretty nice, and not being perma-staggered from large trash packs is probably the best feeling in this game. All these advantages are better in my opinion than some extra HP and armor, specially when they are not needed.
Tanks in NW are not afraid of running out of HP, they are afraid of running out of stamina, as long as I have stamina I pretty much take no damage, almost everything in the STR perks is better for tanking than anything in the CON line.
Not yet, cuz I couldn’t find the right build to really have a tank. Still learning this game. Now I will optimize it. But raising levels makes you waste so much gems, so much stuff, cuz there is often something else better after each level.
Your comments about threat are spot on friend.
@truffsekka For me, tanking as always been about taking a beating to block access to your DPS and healer. Let the DPS damage, healer heals you, bob’s your uncle.
I’m not judging how you play. That’s the most important part, tbh. It’s hard to be a true tank when you can be bounced around like a pinball and can’t block like an offensive linesman in football.
More than 25% in STR starts to look like a Knight build IMHO.
In most MMOs I’ve played in decades, in a group of 5, it’s always usually 2 tanks, 2 DPS, 1 healer. When it’s easier, 1 tank, 3 dps, 1 healer.
The 300 CON perk is just too perfect for a tank, I believe.
As for specific content, yes, that’s what I figured and that’s like that in many games, it’s the affinity vs affinity, the bonus against, protections, that makes or break a fight and at level 60, that must be critical.
Thanks the tips on the Healer, in game, next, I will ask: LFM Healer with protection orb. Hahaha
currently in game Constitution does not give us much. i wish that they would make us receive less stamina bar damage if our constitution is higher.
Check the 300 CON perk. 
This is an action RPG not a tab targeting graphical spreadsheet RPG. You need to avoid damage primarily not just mindlessly take it. When the WM scaling was first announced and people were saying in global that people wouldn’t be able to do dungeons with low WM our tank ran Genesis naked besides Sword and Shield. He kept aggro the whole time on everything and never died. That is a good tank.
I play a lot of tank and have a tanking build with 21k Health, about 490ish points in Con. My 2cents in PvE Dungeons is that the extra 4-6k Health I get from Con isn’t as important so I just use my Luck gear instead. As for Bosses there are moves you either block or dodge, it like boss attacks will either take 10 stamina or take 100 stamina, right not it just don’t feel good. It’s either I block things and take no damage or I don’t block things and take massive damage and get hit for 100% of my stamina. That leads me to the main problem is that tanking is just blocking with a shield and having more health then other heavy users, beyond that there is no extra mitigation we get for being a tank. Which just makes being a tank kinda in a odd zone, like yes we block a lot of dmg with a shield but w/o a shield we have 0 mitigation. Gameplay doesn’t feel smooth.
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No, I only tanked for a little while. It was too messy for my taste and hardly rewarding and not really needed with many tanks around. Either way, finding the correct perks on high gs gear is difficult on a dead server. trade post is so empty…