I'm with this wolverine-tank idea (no claws, just the regen), but from the builds I've seen here, Regeneration is not even mentioned. Is it that bad? If it is, I have to ask:
1) Which one is better: Invulnerability, Defiance, or Lightning Reflexes?
2) Any ideas to mimicry a regen state?
Thanks in advance
Comments
2) I'm sure you can do that without using Regen, by using Defiance.
It's not really fun and you always run the risk of getting one-shot. Defiance and Invulnerability are more trustworthy (not even gonna touch Lighting Reflexes, i don't trust my life on RNG)
If anything Regen tanks are better for offtanking and secondaries tank to contribute the damage taken from the cosmic bosses
Aside from LR's dodge and the several abilities that stack on it, Regen probably has the most synergies with other abilities to help make it work better. Resurgence will generate a healing boost from your passive, and then you got Moonstruck with the Moonlight advantage, which will prevent the damage-mitigation portion of Regen to not decay when you take damage. Small things, but they work, and Moonstruck's format works extremely well for cosmic fights.
To answer the other two questions:
1. If we're talking purely about cosmic fights, the ranking of different passives would go like this:
Defiance > LR (built for it) > Invuln > Regen > LR (passive only/standard build) >>>>>>> PFF
Defiance's sheer total damage mitigation and other features make the most sense for a cosmic fight.
If you have a build that's crafted specifically to maximize dodge chances, LR tanks can do amazing things. I've seen someone solo-tank Teleiosaurus using a LR build that would stack effects from stuff like Thundering Kicks and Crashing Wave Kick. The big problem is that grabbing aggro with something like that is really difficult, does poor damage, and might not even be worth the effort. And if you don't use these gimmicks then you're obviously taking a gigantic risk.
Invuln is a surprisingly popular cosmic-tank choice and works well generally, but much like Regen you need to be pretty good at blocking. The +Defense passives are more popular than the +Healing passive, because there's like a million sources of healing you can stack, but not many direct defense buffs you can place on yourself outside of a passive.
That's not an end-all ranking for defense passives though (if Nightmare Event ever comes back up, that's a great case where Invuln > Defiance).
2. Pre-superstatting and utilize BCR and a healing circle. Like I said before, there's a lot of healing sources you can use through most of the powersets, but with high health you're probably going to struggle to get a lot of value out of them unless you have strong healing buffs. The value of doing this also diminishes a bit if you aren't specialized at healing since most cosmic fights already have several people that should be healing you up. Not to say that PRE is a bad superstat choice, its primary tree is actually pretty decent for damage output with the Moment of Glory option.
So yeah, as a regen tank you can tank pretty much anything but the toughest enemies in the game.
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