Help me tweak my meatshield tank!

thisisgils

My primary toon is one that is pretty dear to my heart. From the word go, I wanted to create a generic, old school tank - that is, one that absorbs damage and then asks for more!

My objectives (in order of preference) for this tank are:

1 - Absorb MUCH damage
2 - Hold aggro
3 - Knock Resist
4 - Deal damage

To achieve this, I've tried to focus on constitution and defence. To augment my weak (might ) offense, I am taking advantage of the best defense spec to boost my offense.

VERY roughly (I'm at work), these are the key points of my build:

Invuln
PSS: Cons - 400+
SSS: Stre - 300+

Silver champ primaries favouring damage res. One secondary utility, a legacy -50% knockback enhancement

Spec trees:

CONS

Amored (+10% def)
Mastery (+20% def)

WARDEN

Fortified Gear (+10% item def)
Best Defense (+100% of defense as offense)

GUARDIAN

Fortified Gear (+10% item def)
Best Defense (+100% of defense as offense)

My build has come out of this pretty well, with a couple of weaknesses:

1 - I cannot hold aggro for love nor money. I take CS or CC on every offensive move I have. I use the tank role. I have a large PSS to generate threat. I use circle of primal dom for a further threat boost. Still, I routinely see my aggro stolen by crit toons, and occasionally even other tanks :-\

2 - Knockback isn't great. I'd expect to have around 300% KB resist at least, but I still seem to get frequently sent flying back in alerts on a bad day, and slide backwards a few feet on a good day.

3 - My damage is pitiful. Even with 8 stacks of enrage and agressor, I still only do around 150 - 200 damage per hit on Shockwave. I'm thinking lack of damage may be what is contributing to my poor threat.

So... I'm throwing this out here. Based on the minor (sketchy) details above, can anyone suggest any tweaks I might want to make to tackle any of my issue? To clarify: I don't really want to make a complete build overhaul, I'm pretty attached to invuln to be honest, but I would be interested to see what others perceive as a weak link in my build.

I've read elsewhere that PSS Strength and SSS Cons is the way to go, grabbing juggernaut to buff damage resistance, and (I'd imagine) best offense is defense twice to kind of do the mirror image of what I achieve right now. Would this be a better solution to what I want to achieve than the way I am currently doing it?

rehmes

Try building your current build with this http://www.champions-online-wiki.com/wiki/ChampionBuilder and post it on your thread that way it's a bit easier for us to see as well.

theprettypixie

Since you have not posted a complete build it's hard to give specific advice. I will therefore just give some pointers.

*Primary superstats get hit by deminishing returns after 250. After 350 this hits so hard to not be worth it. (150/250 for secondaries)

*A hybrid tank with Bulwark (protector spec) maxed will outtank a pure tank due to innate hybrid damage bonuses, and superior threat generation.

*One attack each with CS/CC will be enough. This will allow you to free up points to rank those attacks.

*Hard as it might be for you, you might want to look at Unarmed MA for some attacks. Might suffers due to long activations and charge times now that it lost its toggle.

vitalityprime

theprettypixie wrote: »

*A hybrid tank with Bulwark (protector spec) maxed will outtank a pure tank due to innate hybrid damage bonuses, and superior threat generation.

That's a shame.

cellarrat33

Sekiman gave me a great tip for getting aggro vs a boss. Try defensive combo as your main attack. Helps with defense and gives you some pretty good damage.

My usual attack chain is Mighty Lunge with Crippling Challenge, Iron Cyclone with Challenging Strikes and Vortex Techinque (to pull enemies toward me rather than knock them back keeps then in a tight group for my teammates to use their AoEs) for mobs. For bosses, Mighty Lunge, Def. Combo ad nausem.

I can't always pull aggro from high DPS toons (especially those with Epidemic) but most of the time I can.

ayonachan

You may want to change one of your secondary super stats to dex instead and change your gear to dodge/avoidance.

Invul is a great passive because it doesn't require building up resources but it cannot handle spike damage as well as another passive (at least not alone..)

With dodge you give yourself even more mitigation than your defense stacking can ever give(simply because dodge/avoidance is calculated before all defense mitigation including invul/idf's flat damage reduction not to mention that combined with BCR-RR it becomes a health funnel...except for that internal RR cooldown) Pst...Dodge is even calculated before immunity to all damage FYI...which is slightly silly..

Now since you have con as your primary super stat you can go with Tough(3) Resilient(2) Deflection(3) Adrenaline Rush(2) giving you 1.5 more hp-per-con, knock resistance based on your con, dodge rating based on your dexterity, 2% max hp heal whenever you crit(very very very very useful when you have something hitting faster than .5 sec)

Since I covered the whole 'survivability' aspect it is now time to move onto holding aggro..

Spam your CC at all times and make sure that you are the first entity who attacks the mob first and you will NEVER have any immediate problems with threat...

On certain mobs that can survive for 2+mins you may want to invest your time into building up your stat points on your gear so you can have 'max threat' for your superstats...There is no true way other than CC(aka forced taunt for 2 seconds) to pull any mob away from a glass cannon who has built up their damage so high that it exceeds you and your threat building..Though over a long period of time you can and will build your threat to beat theirs...but it takes alot of time and most mobs don't have that kind of hp...(at least mobs outside of events and alerts)

Now then, onto the last point at hand.

You want to deal damage....what kind of masochist are you!?!

c3rvand0

ayonachan wrote: »

You want to deal damage....what kind of masochist are you!?!

A sadomasochist? Besides, he plays CO, he must be a sadomasochist. To be able to play and enjoy beating up mobs, you have to suffer the pain of the many issues inflicted on us by the developers and their lords and masters

ayonachan

After a little testing I found the best possible way to keep and hold threat from other 'tanks' as well as even the most dedicated dpsers is spamming nothing but CC and having high critical severity(thus requiring critical chance).

Bulwark caps at around 54(at 40...59 at lower levels) and when your in the tank role you can get(from my pts gear testing) 76% threat generation(60-74 from 'average joe' gear to well-to-do gear)

A quick and easy way to achieve high defense as well as high critical severity is to use strength as your primary super stat and make sure you max brutality, juggernaut, aggression. Then grab vindicator branch and get aggressive stance, merciless, modified gear and focused strikes(since all CCs are single target attacks...yes explosive potential makes it aoe but the cc will only affect the primary target! And I believe it still counts as a single target attack even if you get explosive potential..)

If you can get either a rank 5 severity core or a silver champion severity gear(of piercing I believe) then you gain a ~10-12% more critical severity from just the core...or gear...

Rank 9 core mods are 'better' than silver champion gear...and rank 5 core mods are 'less' than silver champion gear. Yes the silver champ offense is 135 and the prism is 74 but if you look at the other champion gear they all give 68 (a 67 difference..same goes for defense and prism but with different values)