Tanking gear: Offense or Crit Chance?

crappynamerules

I'm just curious to poll other successful tanky folks how they prefer to gear themselves. I would prefer input from folks who successfully tank stuff like F&I, TA, and the new cosmics. I have struggled with the idea of either gearing for crit chance like I do for pretty much everything, or for offense instead. Offense gets the added benefit of getting pushed through defense on most builds, but does it have the capability to generate threat comparable to having a solid crit chance with ~100% severity?

pantagruel01

Offense and crit rating both have diminishing returns, so it somewhat boils down to where you are on the DR curve for each.

crappynamerules

Usually I'm talking about a resultant crit chance of maybe around 25% being hit if geared for it? No Dex SS.

flowcyto

W/o Dex SS and something like 6th Sense or Moment of Glory, ur prob not gonna get much more than 24-27% base crit% on the char sheet w/o trading too many other stat item points. If ya can get it around that range w/o any of those other things then I think ur doing alright as far as crit%. Keep in mind that ur specs can/are also a source of extra crit, as is ES/NM (assuming you took it in a tank build that stacks Con). ES/NM is particularly good on tanks for a burst of threat gen, even if its uptime isn't high.

crappynamerules

I'm kinda ashamed to say I use ego surge on damn near everything nowadays.

flowcyto

crappynamerules said:

I'm kinda ashamed to say I use ego surge on damn near everything nowadays.

Eh, its just the poor state of balance that the AOs are in atm. Maybe Kaiz et al will come around to a balance pass for them.

dirtydwarf68

Panta and Flo... Don't you DARE ever leave this game Your advice is always invaluable to us 'casual' players.

dirtydwarf68

pantagruel01 said:

Offense and crit rating both have diminishing returns, so it somewhat boils down to where you are on the DR curve for each.

So as far as them being on the same layer, do they effect each other for DR? Like would having a high crit and a high OFF be counter productive? Better to stick with on or the other? And at what point do the DR start hitting? I usually have about a 25-30% crit rating and around a 90% Sev. Would a build like that be better off not worrying about +OFF? I know overall crit+good severity > Off, I just don't know the cutoff point where you start wasting time and resources when using one of the other or combining the 2.

flowcyto

Well, it depends on the build. If ur using the common Guard/Wardicator specs, then ya can't really help but get high Offense if ur taking the optimal choices anyways. Its also cause there aren't many options to pump stats into for dps (for dps, ur likely going to have to pick between crit%, severity, and offense for gearing anyways).

Note that there are flat crit% and flat severity modifiers (mostly all the ones in specs, like Ruthless, 6th Sense, Brutality, etc) that ignore the DR. Severity rating (not flat%) diminishes pretty much as soon as ya get one high-level primary offensive gear w/ one severity rating bonus on it (Dex Mastery's severity can sub for this). Crit rating DRs pretty heavily once ya get into the 32-34% territory (char sheet crit%, minus flat crit% like 6th Sense), and Offense's decay is more gradual, but generally if ur above 10% (char sheet) then ur gonna see the DR in effect a bit more.

For illustration.. here's some graphs from Jimhsua's older analysis of them:

Offense rating to '% offense':

(again, more gradual, but getting to the very high values here takes a ton of offense gearing; for ex, 200 offense gives ~7.5%, doubling that is 450 offense to give ~15%, but in order to double that to 30% it takes ~1200 offense- and by then ur prob giving up crit and/or severity for it)

Crit rating to crit%:

(note the shallower slope of >30% values; keep in mind also that Dex's crit boost contributes to the same DR as crit rating on gear)

Severity rating to severity%:

(rough graph, due to there not being many many data points avail, but even by '+2.0 severity rating' in game ya see a sharp loss in the slope)

dirtydwarf68

Thanks Flo! That helps a lot