Good self-heal for a Tank?

arizoko

Title says it all really. I'm kind of leaning towards Conviction since its low CD would sync well with Molecular Self-Assembly (and since it can be used whenever, I could get to 100 Energy out of combat whenever I wanted, which would be a neat little plus), but I'm open to change.

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spinnytop

Conviction is okay. Absorb heat is pretty neat if it fits your theme. Burning Chi Resurgence aint bad either. Drain Life can be handy as well. Getting a mix of something that stacks Furious and something that procs Restoration can add a bit of healing too. Devour Essence, again if it fits theme, can be good.

servantrules

I personally use Bountiful Chi. Short CD (great if you rely on MSA) and the effect actually lasts longer than the CD. Downside is the penalty to damage during the duration and it really works best if you have some respectable Dodge (even without Masterful Dodge). Barring that, Conviction is the go-to of most builds since it heals average to good amounts even without building for it.

chaosdrgnz43

If you're bestial and use Deep Wounds, Thrash might be good. It is similar to Devour Essence only that it req Bleeds/Deep Wound to be effective.

You can also try Sentinel Mastery. If you have an aoe stun and aoe atk, you can recover 2% max hp whenever you hit something you stunned. Downside to this is that it's a spec mastery.

Conviction is still pretty good tho. I've seen it as a standard self-heal in most builds.

roughbearmattach

If you are using Defiance, why even bother with an energy unlock? Defiance does that for you. Then you don't have to pick a self-heal to trigger MSA.

My tanks and support toons often run without an energy unlock and do just fine, particular against Cosmics, when you have to block a lot (and gain energy while doing so).

kamokami

I run Resurgence, Conviction, Heal potions on my tank.

Personally I don't recommend Bountiful Chi for any build expect a healer. The damage penalty is too great and runs counter to a Tanks goal of maintaining aggro and a DPSers goal of dealing damage.

BCR's damage pentaly is 10% reduction of your base dmg.

For reference, going from a DPS role to Hybrid reduces your base dmg by 20%. Similarly taking all of your dmg dealing powers and reducing their rank from R3 to R2 reduces their base dmg by 20%. So 2 stacks of BCR will be the same as downgrading your role or unraking all of your damage powers.

Most content that requires Tanking dishes out spike damage as opposed to lots of small hits. BCR does nothing to help you vs spike damage.

aesica

As someone who loves self heals, here's a few thoughts of my own:

• Conviction: Probably the most flexible for the most builds. Since you use MSA, the short cooldown of Conviction works very well to keep the energy generation almost always rolling.
• Bountiful Chi Resurgence: If I recall, the overall HPS of this is similar to Conviction, meaning you'll get roughly as much HP per second with less button pressing. It also has the benefit of being truly instant, so you can't get interrupted or accidentally block-cancel it. The 10% damage penalty is only worth taking into consideration if you care about min-maxing your damage output--something largely irrelevant outside cosmic cheese. You probably won't even notice the damage penalty in normal content.
• Lifedrain (and its clones): This pairs really well with BCR, as the two together can give you a lot of healing. The downside is that it requires a target within 50 feet and it can be an energy hog if you didn't build for high-drain powers.
• Resurgence: A very reliable emergency heal that only needs to be ranked to 2 in order to be effective. The downside of course if its long cooldown.
• Stim Pack/Restoration/etc--the "advantage proc" heal: This isn't a very big heal and while useful if you're using an ability with these advantages for something else, I wouldn't rely on it exclusively for keeping myself alive.
• Furious: Same as Stim Pack/Restoration. There aren't many ways to reliably apply this, so only seek it out if it already fits with the powers you want to use. Note that Furious has taken something of a nerf on PTS, decreasing the value of its Willpowr effect even further.

chaosdrgnz43 wrote: »

You can also try Sentinel Mastery. If you have an aoe stun and aoe atk, you can recover 2% max hp whenever you hit something you stunned. Downside to this is that it's a spec mastery.

I played with this for quite awhile (Thunderclap is amazing with Sentinel Mastery) but I wouldn't really recommend it for anyone who isn't trying to either tank or heal. The loss in damage output is significant since you're giving up offense-based specializations in favor of the support-focused Sentinel tree.

roughbearmattach wrote: »

If you are using Defiance, why even bother with an energy unlock? Defiance does that for you. Then you don't have to pick a self-heal to trigger MSA.

My tanks and support toons often run without an energy unlock and do just fine, particular against Cosmics, when you have to block a lot (and gain energy while doing so).

What happens if you're in, say, some alert or open mission where there's a better tank than you? They end up drawing all the aggro, leaving you in a state of energy starvation and low damage. Unless you're okay with being stuck in that scenario from time to time, I find it best to have some way to gain energy that doesn't involve getting hit.​​

kamokami

aesica said:

The 10% damage penalty is only worth taking into consideration if you care about min-maxing your damage output--something largely irrelevant outside cosmic cheese. You probably won't even notice the damage penalty in normal content.

aesica said:

I played with this for quite awhile (Thunderclap is amazing with Sentinel Mastery) but I wouldn't really recommend it for anyone who isn't trying to either tank or heal. The loss in damage output is significant since you're giving up offense-based specializations in favor of the support-focused Sentinel tree.

How do you reconcile these two statements? Not sure how someone....you (?)...could not care per the first statement but care based on the second.

I'm assuming the OP wants to build an effective tank, where having an effective tank actually matters. Which might include lairs and rampages and cosmics. In those cases, it's unclear how you can both worry about not taking an offensive spec but not worry about reducing your overall damage output (and threat) by using bcr.

If by "normal content" you mean content that doesn't need tanks....well then yeah....they can take any heal they want and have it be "good enough".

flowcyto

For reference, going from a DPS role to Hybrid reduces your base dmg by 20%. Similarly taking all of your dmg dealing powers and reducing their rank from R3 to R2 reduces their base dmg by 20%. So 2 stacks of BCR will be the same as downgrading your role or unraking all of your damage powers.

Just a quick note: the dmg penalty for BCR doesn't stack, though the HoT portion can.

servantrules

flowcyto said:

For reference, going from a DPS role to Hybrid reduces your base dmg by 20%. Similarly taking all of your dmg dealing powers and reducing their rank from R3 to R2 reduces their base dmg by 20%. So 2 stacks of BCR will be the same as downgrading your role or unraking all of your damage powers.

flowcyto said:

Just a quick note: the dmg penalty for BCR doesn't stack, though the HoT portion can.

Right. I've been using BCR since forever, and it never got 20-30% damage penalty for R2-R3, just increased heal per tick.

roughbearmattach

aesica said:

What happens if you're in, say, some alert or open mission where there's a better tank than you? They end up drawing all the aggro, leaving you in a state of energy starvation and low damage. Unless you're okay with being stuck in that scenario from time to time, I find it best to have some way to gain energy that doesn't involve getting hit.​​

That can be a concern, of course. In Alerts . . . well, they are so easy as not to matter for me. If I literally can just use my EB a couple times while someone else beats an alert boss, so be it. In an open mission, there are so many AoE attacks that this has never happened to me while playing my main tank, even when I don't have primary aggro.

spinnytop

Well the solution to that is actually simple in an alert - just run over to the next group that the party isn't fighting and aggro it.

aesica

kamokami wrote: »

How do you reconcile these two statements? Not sure how someone....you (?)...could not care per the first statement but care based on the second.

I'm assuming the OP wants to build an effective tank, where having an effective tank actually matters. Which might include lairs and rampages and cosmics. In those cases, it's unclear how you can both worry about not taking an offensive spec but not worry about reducing your overall damage output (and threat) by using bcr.

If by "normal content" you mean content that doesn't need tanks....well then yeah....they can take any heal they want and have it be "good enough".

I imagine BCR isn't something you'd have up 100% of the time since healers exist, while taking Sentinel over offense-based specializations (usually the guardi/wardicator cookie cutter combo since that also comes with OP defensive benefits) is a damage penalty that is always on.

Besides (and I could be wrong since I haven't played a Sentinel character in awhile) it seems like the damage penalty suffered by taking Sentinel over Guardi/Wardicator is a lot higher than the 10% from BCR.

That said, the OP uses MSA, so he should probably go with neither of those in favor of Conviction.​​

flowcyto

One other thing to point out when competing w/ other tanks and using procs when hit, is that Challenge doesn't deal as much threat on 2ndary targets than on their primary target. So, at least in AoE pulls, you can always try to gun after a target that the other tank isn't focusing on w/ a single-target Challenge attack and at least have an easier time trying to out-threat them on that. Otherwise, if its easier content and you can handle it, then yea maybe just go fight a diff mob and let the other tank and their allies do their own thing.