Defiantly Superior?

vonqball

So, pretty much every main tank uses Defiance. And I can see why, it gives the highest damage resistance and a boatload of free energy. Is there an argument to me made for the other passives? I can see them being useful for soloing and off-tanking, but is there a reason to use them as front-line tank?

servantrules

Rank 3 invulnerability is fine for a main tank, provided it's matched with a high enough Defense and Health. Defiance fully ramped would certainly outclass it versus burst damage by a notable degree, but not by too much. At the very least, you won't have to wait for a few hits before it reaches optimal damage resistance.

morigosa

For a main tank versus cosmics, Defiance is probably the best combination of damage reduction and usability.

Invulnerability works okay; it's actually not that far behind on mitigation, and the flat reduction makes it far more durable against, well, everything that's not main-tanking a cosmic.

Regen is highly vulnerable to being one-shot - you need to be skilled enough to block everything if you want to main-tank with it. Doable in a high con juggernaut/wardicator build, and it does shine in stuff like TA - very few other tanks can survive having their healer go down, but a regen tank can turtle behind block and last for quite a while.

Lightning Reflexes is... problematic at best. You can build it the same way you would a regen tank, using LR to reduce on-average incoming damage - but then it has the same flaw of needing to block everything or risk getting one-shot.
Or you can go for a 100% dodge chance build, which is finicky to play, requires extreme gearing before it even starts to work, risks getting one-shot if anything goes even slightly wrong... and has the highest overall mitigation of any defensive passive.
I do not recommend trying to make a tank using LR - but if you decide to ignore that, I can offer advice on how I got mine to mostly work.

Personal Force Field is... well, it's like Regen but weaker. Can probably be used if you get enough survivability from other sources, but in any long-lasting fight it's only marginally better than trying to tank with no passive at all. Do not recommend.

flowcyto

LR can still be good even w/o a 100% dodge build (which trivializes things if you can get there)- you just have to build around it. LR's innate benefit is tied to having a mini-Regen like effect by pairing it w/ BCR/RR and getting hit constantly, though this also comes w/ a dmg penalty. Like Regen and PFF, you have to have tools built in to handle spike dmg- ADs, high health, good blocking, etc.

Defiance and Invuln are easier to build around and manage, though.

Only main drawback to Defiance, aside from not handling small-medium hits as well as Invuln, is that you need to guarantee aggro to get hit constantly. Not usually an issue for a tank w/ Challenge advs, but could be if a high-dps tank is competing w/ you and you can't maintain aggro vs. them.

morigosa

flowcyto said:

a 100% dodge build (which trivializes things if you can get there)

Having made and played a 100% dodge tank, I strongly disagree with this. Yes, there are some places where a 100% dodge tank can trivialize things - but they're the same places where any well-built tank would do the same, and, most notably, they're not any of the cosmic fights. Every single one of the existing cosmic encounters has one or more mechanics that are specifically designed to mess with dodge tanks, and several of the fights in TA are similarly difficult to work with.

Sounds like we're saying the same thing about LR without 100% dodge, though; it's technically workable, but you have to design your character as if you had no passive at all. (This is actually an unavoidable flaw in cosmics as open world content. From the point of view of the encounter designer, you have to assume that players will bring as many healers as they need - which means you can't threaten a tank with anything short of instant death, since anything else will just get healed through. Which, in turn, devalues tanking passives that are built around strong on-average mitigation, or self-healing, or in fact anything other than just raw worst-case single-hit survival.)

flowcyto

I assume you mean having to block or move around too often, which would really devalue 100% dodge builds as they typically take much active uptime to maintain, and the effects can be very short. In return you likely have lower max health than other tanks, so outside that short 100% window you are pretty vulnerable.

Anyways, I don't advocate for 100% dodge builds, and never really have been a proponent of them, given how strict they are. My LR tanks still come w/ decent defense and high maxHP as backup, and don't lose much if they have to take <12 sec out to do something else (window of TKick's buff).

pwestolemyname

Currently there aren't any good reasons for a non-Defiance tank build. Given that passive tend to be "invisible" powers, there's not even a thematic reason why not to take it.

My main tank is Defiance. I tried Invulnerability on a recent tank build and quickly retconned out of it. I could tell a significant difference in survivability.

That being said, Invulnerability is a good choice for leveling. A lot of stuff in lower levels is ping-ping-ping, so the flat mitigation is nice. Plus, being able to rank it straight up makes for easier play than building Defiance stacks at lower levels. But, once you get to 40, retcon out of Invulnerability and into Defiance.

rtma

Considering the maintenance of using Defiant, I still get one shot by Teleiosaur's bite regardless of Invulnerability or Defiant so, meh.

notyuu

Defiance:Superior for tanking bosses [comics included] but has maintenance issues.. and can be "burned down" by lots of little attacks..and failure to block hurts... a lot

Invul: Superior for tanking mobs, can work vs bosses however things will hurt a fair bit more, and energy will be annoying....failiure to block REALLY hurts a lot.. possibly 1-shotting you

Regen: Good for tanking all kinds of things.....however has massive potential to get you 1-shot by cosmics and the like if you miss a block

LR: Good for tanking all kings of things, slight edge vs mob when combined with BCR+adv, however cosmics have dodge debuffers which basically render LR like regen.. block or risk insta death

PFF: Less of a defensive passive and more of a "defend your passive" has...issues, not the least of which is getting 1-shot broken though block by a number of bosses...

flowcyto

rtma said:

Considering the maintenance of using Defiant, I still get one shot by Teleiosaur's bite regardless of Invulnerability or Defiant so, meh.

Much of that is prob not having many debuffs on Cosmics. Those can go a good way to making them easier for tanks using any defensive passive out there. Max-rank block enhancers help too for block-checks.