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Can Devour Essence keep threat without Crippling Challenge?
hubrix
Posts: 264 Arc User
Anyone have any experience keeping up threat with high end DPS with just Devouring Essence? Say a Regen tank with Compassion and PRE as a secondary SS for large heals. Can it generate big enough threat when combined with threat from heals?
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Silverspar on PRIMUS
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It's never going to be consistent enough without CC - when you're competing with high dps CC is what compensates. Now for "average" damage, it's satisfactory, but one should also keep in mind how scaling wreaks havoc with threat gen as well if you're planning on a lot of alert activities.
Yes indeed! Because for some strange reason Toxic damage is under the elemental damage type.
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Well, yes, I can say that I have had some of that experience. Sort of.
Actually, the character I have using Devour Essence is a full out support hero that has used Infernal Bolts, Devour Essence, and Supernatural Power as her first three powers and only direct attack, instead choosing powers with various support options like Aura of Ebon Destruction, Support Drones, Radiant Summon, Protection Field, and a few others.
Devour Essence does get some damage penalties from the support role, but that really opens up the healing portion of it. Even though she is set up for a "support" role, she ends up tanking very well when the situation calls for it. And frankly, the situation calls for it all too frequently. It takes a proper tank with proper tactics and proper challenge advantages to keep the threat off of me. Anybody else, especially new tank players who haven't invested in Crippling Challenge yet, and I end up the "tank."
For your concept, I would probably recommend Intelligence primary and Presence secondary, if at all. Honestly, I'm tempted to recommend Constitution and Recovery for secondaries, using Recovery to fuel compassion. You'll probably also want to specialize in Sentinel Aura as soon as possible, even though filling out the rest of that specialization group is going to be a pain. There are also a lot of healing bonuses you can pick up from offense equipment. Heroic Hands of Healing with a sentinel's brooch is a very good thing in this case.
The reason for the Intelligence primary is mostly because of active defenses. A Regeneration tank is about as squishy as tanks get, although they don't stay hurt for long. You will probably need to use active defenses like Masterful Dodge and Unbreakable frequently, and anything you can do to reduce those cooldowns is very helpful. Protector specialization is helpful too, for Defensive Expertise to reduce cooldowns on active defenses even further. But having Bulwark in that group will allow you to go into Hybrid role and still have the threat generation of a Tank role hero.
Devour Essence is capable of holding enough threat on its own. However, I still recommend you have Crippling Challenge on something. The advantage breaks the target's blocking ability, and can force attention onto you for 4 seconds out of every 10. So it's extremely useful in certain fights.
Not having someone with Crippling Challenge will make any alert with Baron Cimitiere a nightmare. His Voodo block amplifies and returns damage to the attacker, your team. So I've seen teams wipe many times over trying to tackle him without Crippling Challenge to disable that.
As for SS, I'm currently running CON/STR/DEX with FotT. I'll probably retcon it later but so far it's working decently, the CON specialization that gives dodge based on Dex combined with Parry and Elusive Monk is giving me a decent 40% dodge chance. Not sure how it will be affected by DR later with Heroic gear so I'm putting off most of the stat optimization until then. I think it will end up as a Regen/dodge tank using Guardian/Vindicator for extra offense and defefese.
I did end up sticking CC into DE just for the ease of use.
I know I said I wouldn't but I was curious so I brought her into a few Gravitars and it was actually pretty smooth all 4 times. Threat didn't seem to be a problem with DE /w CC on it. The life drain seemed to help alot for staying alive too. I was thinking of going PRE and Compassion for stronger heals but I think I much prefer staying a sort of DPS tank over an undying tank so I stuck with DEX.
I still like playing as support mostly because it feels like there's more happening what with throwing heals and running around rezzing while trying to stay alive.
As a side note, is Smoke Grenade working again? It seemed so in one of runs I did.