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Might tank build
xen0bia
Posts: 140 Arc User
Ok so I've playing with a new character for a while and this is the build I had planned for him to use. However I'm currently lvl 16-ish and I've ran into an issue. I really, *really*, do not like Roomsweeper at all. It's impressive the first few times to see your targets flying everywhere, but running around to finish them is not fun... But seeing as it was supposed to be me bread and butter ability to maintain aggro and building rage stacks I'm not sure what I can replace it with and still keep the concept of a brawler hero. Anyone have any suggestion on how I could tweak my build?
PowerHouse (Link to this build)
Name: Sentinel
Archetype: Freeform
Super Stats:
Level 6: Constitution (Primary)
Level 10: Strength (Secondary)
Level 15: Intelligence (Secondary)
Talents:
Level 1: The Devastator
Level 6: Physical Conditioning
Level 9: Healthy Mind
Level 12: Body and Mind
Level 15: Boundless Reserves
Level 18: Bodybuilder
Level 21: Quick Recovery
Powers:
Level 1: Clobber
Level 1: Defensive Combo (Accelerated Metabolism, Crippling Challenge)
Level 6: Defiance
Level 8: Roomsweeper (Rank 2, Rank 3, Challenging Strikes)
Level 11: Enrage (Rank 2, Endorphin Rush)
Level 14: Conviction (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 17: Havoc Stomp (Rank 2, Cry Havoc)
Level 20: Unbreakable (Better You Than Me)
Level 23: Molecular Self-Assembly
Level 26: Haymaker (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 29: Retaliation (Punitive Pummeling)
Level 32: Shockwave (Challenging Strikes)
Level 35: Unleashed Rage (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 38: Mighty Leap
Travel Powers:
Level 6: Athletics (Versatility)
Level 35: Heroic Flight
Specializations:
Constitution: Unyielding (2/2)
Constitution: Tough (2/3)
Constitution: Resilient (2/2)
Constitution: Adrenaline Rush (2/2)
Constitution: Armored (2/2)
Protector: Fortified Gear (3/3)
Protector: Bulwark (2/2)
Protector: Debilitating Challenge (2/2)
Protector: Defensive Expertise (3/3)
Warden: Fortified Gear (3/3)
Warden: Slaughter (3/3)
Warden: Elusive (1/2)
Warden: The Best Defense (3/3)
Mastery: Protector Mastery (1/1)
PowerHouse (Link to this build)
Name: Sentinel
Archetype: Freeform
Super Stats:
Level 6: Constitution (Primary)
Level 10: Strength (Secondary)
Level 15: Intelligence (Secondary)
Talents:
Level 1: The Devastator
Level 6: Physical Conditioning
Level 9: Healthy Mind
Level 12: Body and Mind
Level 15: Boundless Reserves
Level 18: Bodybuilder
Level 21: Quick Recovery
Powers:
Level 1: Clobber
Level 1: Defensive Combo (Accelerated Metabolism, Crippling Challenge)
Level 6: Defiance
Level 8: Roomsweeper (Rank 2, Rank 3, Challenging Strikes)
Level 11: Enrage (Rank 2, Endorphin Rush)
Level 14: Conviction (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 17: Havoc Stomp (Rank 2, Cry Havoc)
Level 20: Unbreakable (Better You Than Me)
Level 23: Molecular Self-Assembly
Level 26: Haymaker (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 29: Retaliation (Punitive Pummeling)
Level 32: Shockwave (Challenging Strikes)
Level 35: Unleashed Rage (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 38: Mighty Leap
Travel Powers:
Level 6: Athletics (Versatility)
Level 35: Heroic Flight
Specializations:
Constitution: Unyielding (2/2)
Constitution: Tough (2/3)
Constitution: Resilient (2/2)
Constitution: Adrenaline Rush (2/2)
Constitution: Armored (2/2)
Protector: Fortified Gear (3/3)
Protector: Bulwark (2/2)
Protector: Debilitating Challenge (2/2)
Protector: Defensive Expertise (3/3)
Warden: Fortified Gear (3/3)
Warden: Slaughter (3/3)
Warden: Elusive (1/2)
Warden: The Best Defense (3/3)
Mastery: Protector Mastery (1/1)
Post edited by xen0bia on
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Comments
And if I may suggest this build, though I am far from a tank expert.
PowerHouse (Link to this build)
Name: Might Tank
Archetype: Freeform
Super Stats:
Level 6: Strength (Primary)
Level 10: Constitution (Secondary)
Level 15: Intelligence (Secondary)
Talents:
Level 1: The Behemoth
Level 6: Martial Training
Level 9: Paramilitary Training
Level 12: Covert Ops Training
Level 15: Accurate
Level 18: Impresario
Level 21: Jack of All Trades
Powers:
Level 1: Clobber (It's That Time)
Level 1: Defensive Combo (Rank 2, Crippling Challenge)
Level 6: Defiance
Level 8: Roomsweeper (Rank 2, Rank 3, Challenging Strikes)
Level 11: Enrage (Endorphin Rush)
Level 14: Mighty Leap
Level 17: Parry (The Elusive Monk)
Level 20: Unbreakable (Rank 2)
Level 23: Shockwave (Rank 2, Rank 3, Challenging Strikes)
Level 26: Conviction (Rank 2)
Level 29: Evasive Maneuvers (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 32: Aggressor
Level 35: Unleashed Rage (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 38: Molecular Self-Assembly
Travel Powers:
Level 6: Athletics (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 35: Heroic Flight
Specializations:
Strength: Swole (3/3)
Strength: Aggression (2/2)
Strength: Juggernaut (3/3)
Strength: Overpower (2/3)
Vindicator: Aggressive Stance (2/2)
Vindicator: Merciless (3/3)
Vindicator: The Rush of Battle (3/3)
Vindicator: Modified Gear (2/2)
Warden: Fortified Gear (3/3)
Warden: Ruthless (2/2)
Warden: Tenacious (2/2)
Warden: The Best Defense (3/3)
Mastery: Warden Mastery (1/1)
It has the advantage of being able to get a respectable dodge with some dodge gear, and just use Evasive Manuvers followed by Mighty Leap to give you a good dodge bonus and get you back into melee in a blink.
Overpower from the Strength tree also lets you convert your strength into crit chance for more damage, and lots of people love Juggernaut.
Addressing Haymaker and Roomsweeper: The point of a tank is to keep enemies up close to you, not away from you. If you want to keep a strong KB attack for the sake of finishing an enemy off in a spectacular way, keep one of them. The KB duration for Roomsweeper works against its CS advantage so I wouldn't waste advantage points for its CS.
Havoc Stomp should be your sole (PB)AoE threat builder (when you're tapping it). Cry Havoc is okay to keep but also get CS for it. Forget about Shockwave. Chances are you'd be Mighty Leaping towards everything as much as you can and constantly be in melee range so I really doubt you need a ranged attack threat builder like Shockwave. Shockwave's NttG advantage seems more helpful for those pesky fliers attacking at range. Then again Mighty Leap with NttG is just as effective, and you have a flight TP to boot. So bottom line: Get rid of Shockwave for something else.
As much as I love Retaliation with punitive pummelling, you're better off with Parry. Having a constant Dodge / Avoidance buff that Parry gives from just making melee attacks is just too good to pass. I assume you'll be gearing up for dodge especially with heroic gear at end game since the dodge mechanic is so good you'd really be missing out if you don't.
Get Onslaught for Clobber. Refresh Enrage stacks the easy, no-cost way.
Unbreakable is terrible. There are so many ways that the damage shield can be reduced to 0 points in a second for it to be redundant. It's only really useful against mass henchmen with small attacks. I can see that you went with Unbreakable for its BYTM advantage, but Havoc Stomp with CS will give you adequate enrage-building capabilities without needing to rely on BYTM. Clobber with Onslaught should also be enough to refresh them. And to top it all off, Unbreakable's quality of protection degrades if you make any attack. Urgh. Just go with Masterful Dodge that gives a full 15 seconds of constant damage reduction. Even Resurgence is more helpful.
Get an active offense in place of any of the powers I've suggested to remove. Aggressor seems to fit your build best.
Have a spike heal power. Having just Conviction won't cut it. There will be "OH SNAP!" moments where you need that huge health boost. Palliate comes to mind. With the right gear choices for cooldown reduction you can effectively reduce its 2 min recharge time to 1 min, making it a better spike heal than Resurgence IMO and because it's not an active defense, it bears no 30 sec cooldown penalty for your main active defense power.
On my tank I have Main CON since I'm using Defiance, and have DEX and STR as my secondaries. The reason why I went with DEX is three-fold: To increase my crit stats so that I can have a crit-damage boost, to compliment my Form of the Tempest in helping with better energy returns from crits while it scales off my secondary stats and lastly because CON spec has a tier 2 that allows for DEX to grant dodge rating for a little extra boost in dodge.
Hope my input helps somewhat.
I disagree with this. Shockwave has a few noteable advantages over Havoc Stomp. Since Shockwave is a maintain, you can activate and apply CS instantly, instead of tapping or god forbid charging your CS move. Also, PBAoE is less helpful for applying CS when mobs are scattered. Keep in mind that you're substituting instantly applying CS at a longer range for Mighty Leap > Havoc Stomp tap/charge. That means you'll be slower at grabbing mobs' attention.
The obvious advantage to Havoc Stomp though is that you don't need to target your enemies, so combined with Super Speed, it's also effective. However, I've found myself often in situations where I wanted to pull more mobs that were attacking other team-mates, while still dealing with the mobs I'm already engaged with. Shockwave is more useful in those situations.
That said, I don't think there's much need to rank Shockwave to 3, but that's just me being stingy with advantage points.
I'm 50/50 on this. What a spike heal will do is increase your margin for error. You can technically just tank with Conviction at rank 3 and some investment in Crit Chance, but you need to be quite good. I'd possibly go with Conviction+BCR, but then again, that's what I'm trying to get used to running, so it might not be everyone's style.
Ironically, having STR as your primary and CON as your secondary gives you more defense and overall better survivability. I know I was confused by this when I tried it out (I initially ran CON when the Specializations were released). You can still stack CON to be higher than your STR in that case and you won't be any less effective.
On the other points, I agree (KBs and Unbreakable being bad choices). Onlsaught on Clobber I'd only recommend if you're really having trouble with maintaining Enrage.
Real Soviet Damage PRIMUS Page | Soviet Might Build | Artwork of my Characters | I wrote a book called "The Ring of Void"
You raise some good points. The way I deal with an enemy at range that I need to get the attention of while currently having a mob focused on me is to lunge toward said enemy, having Mighty Leap's CC grab its attention, then leap back to the previous mob if they weren't already actively kited to run towards me. The CC'ed enemy will close on in me as well and became involved in my PBAoE's CS ticks. It may sound tedious and ineffective but I always seem to maintain a high-enough level of threat to know that any mob I've been engaged with will not fail to break target (most of the time anyway). It's not a 100% assurance but from my personal experience it has always worked out for me unless there's another tank in the team competing with me for threat.
On my tank I use Inexorable Tides as my PBAoE threat-builder. Animation time is quicker than Havoc Stomp, more easily spammable and is able to dish out mass ticks of damage quicker. The only downside that it's a frontal cone and not a radial AoE like Havoc Stomp is. Also, another advantage of it over a maintain like Shockwave is there is no lock-time involved while using the maintain. Inbetween each use of Inexorable Tides, I am able to mix it up a little by using other powers. The 10 second timer for each CS stack is ample time enough for me to do so without having to lose a stack before resuming my CS build-up.
But as you said, Shockwave does have its advantages. It allows you to build CS at range and at a faster tick rate. I guess it just boils down to preference and playstyle.
I usually just tank with Conviction at R3 as well. I'm not that great of a tank to be able to rely on just Conviction and crit chance and usually mix it up with MD (cooldown brought down to 40 secs) the majority of the time. Palliate would be my panic button and only that. I don't view it as some sort of safety net in the sense that it would increase my margin for error.
Problem is that to get an 18% DR on each Defiance stack, CON has to be 315 and I would have to invest in higher-tiered mods to get CON at that level if I opt take STR as my main instead, something I'm not keen on doing. CON mastery also makes it a little easier for me to hit that target while giving me opportunities to raise my other important stat, DEX.
I guess it's a preference of more defense vs more health points thing when it comes to survivability. My current build gives a 48% damage resist from defense while having 12k health points and I seem to perform decently enough.
Yea, I think I'm at 11k hp and 81% damage resistance from defense. It's basically a tradeoff, since the overkill on defense means I could afford myself an Offensive Passive for tanking, but it also means I have less STR, which, if I had invested in, I'd have to resort to a defensive passive.
So, it's all preference. I'd suggest for newbie tanks to run with an AD and typical tanky defensive passives until they get the hang of things. I know if I had used this build 2 years ago, I'd get steamrolled (if On Alert changes had existed 2 years ago, that is).
Real Soviet Damage PRIMUS Page | Soviet Might Build | Artwork of my Characters | I wrote a book called "The Ring of Void"
What it does, I find, is puts the combination of STR+Juggernaut+Invulnerability on par with CON+Defiance in terms of raw defense. For example, if we cite your numbers and assume the formula of 1/(1+Defense) (someone once said this was the formula) to be the thing in which all math goes splat on (and I had to fudge a number for Invulnerability.. I placed it at 70% on the tooltip), we get this:
- CON+Defiance: 1/(1+1.08+0.48) = 1/(2.56) = 60.9%
- STR+Juggernaut+Invulnerability: 1/(1+0.7+0.8) = 1/(2.50) = 60.0%
I flipped the number around to make it a percentage of actual damage resistance but you get the idea, I hope. Two other numbers that are interesting:
- CON+Invulnerability: 1/(1+0.7+0.48) = 1/(2.18) = 54.1%
- STR+Juggernaut+Defiance (at 18%/stack) = 1/(1+1.08/0.8) = 1/(2.88) = 65.3%
This first example is a person running Invulnerability with a CON primary so they don't have access to Juggernaut from Strength. And the second is someone with stats enough to have Defiance at 18% per stack and 80% defense on the tooltip.
In the end it looks to me that the main choices are.. do you prefer the slightly higher HP and energy returns from Defiance along with the potential healing and optional dodge from a CON primary? Or do you prefer the damage shield from Invulnerability along with a possibly higher crit chance or severity? The latter seems more offensively oriented but you may be able to squeeze an extra power out of a spec with Defiance as the need for an energy unlock is less.
Regen and Lightning Reflexes-specced individuals likely see equal if not greater benefit from Juggernaut due to their little-to-no defense as well.
Anyway, that's how I see it. I haven't tried stacking CON at the expense of all else so I'm not that familiar with how that plays out.
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Yeah, ignore Mighty Leap being so late in the build, I actually picked it up already. I was too lazy to adjust my build to reflect a proper progression. And while your are right that leaping does cut on the time chasing mobs around, it's still not to my liking. My playstyle has always been more about gathering mobs in a group and AOEing them down quickly and neatly.
Yeah, I agree with that. Masterful Dodge would indeed be more useful.
I agree entirely with you. I definitely intend on keeping Shockwave in my build for the reasons you mentioned.
Yeah, I'm not sure a spike heal is all that necessary either. On most of my characters I have Conviction R3, sometimes along with BCR, and it's generally good enough. Admittedly, they have high crit and so Conviciton can heal for quite a good amount. I might add BCR seeing as with current build crit % might end up being lower.
Inexorable Tides was something I was looking at to replace Roomsweeper. It's a knock up, something I like a lot more than knock backs, and would work well to build enrage stacks. Would you say it is worthwhile to rank it up or no? It's not a high damage ability to begin with but since I'd be using it so much I was wondering if it would make it more effective.
I tend to agree there. Do you use gear to raise DEX exclusively or is it also a secondary stat? Wondering if I should swap INT with DEX... And speaking of mastery, I picked Protector which is something I saw in another build, however everyone seems to have different picks, some being Warden others like yourself being CON. Which is the most advantageous really?
I would just get the CS and root advantages for Inexorable Tides and not bother to rank it up. It benefits much more as a threat-builder and a minor crowd-control utility than a DPS power. Also, the problem with ranking it up is that it increases knock up distance. That can actually work against you in certain situations. Even at R3 the damage isn't really that great anyway.
DEX is my secondary. I use a mix of CON and DEX mods for my main gear. As commonly done, I'm using all Heroic gear, each having 2 armoring slots each, so it's not hard to get my DEX up in the mid 200 range, while having main CON to above 300. Note that I'm not using the higher ranked mods. I'm using a mix of ranks 4, 5 and 6. I think you'd benefit more from DEX than INT because you can benefit from having crit'ing more often and increase your DPS a little. DEX also compliments main CON because CON spec has a tier 2 that allows for DEX to give a dodge rating bonus. You don't really need the power cost reduction from INT because you'll be getting energy returns from Defiance and Enrage. Gear can give you cooldown reductions as well.
Specialization masteries are really preference. If you want my personal opinion, I'm running Prot / Ward myself and I find neither of their masteries all that useful.
Prot mastery resets your active defense cooldown time when your health is below 30%. While it sounds helpful, it's really purely situational and it only can activate every 60 seconds. It's very easy to lower your gobal cooldown timers via mods and Heroic main utility gear anyway that most often than not, you'll be using your AD regularly without having to rely on the mastery.
Ward mastery seems a tad bit more useful, considering that you might be using Defensive Combo most of the time for threat-building alongside your other threat-builders. You get to have 3 stacks of 3% damage resist buff each when but that's only when you complete a combo attack, and that's 3 hits from Defensive Combo just to get one stack. Not that all impressive to me.
I went with CON mastery because it helped me boost my CON to achieve an 18% damage resist from each Defiant stack on Defiance and if I remember correctly, you need 315 CON for that. The additional 20 defense points is also a plus.
I don't usually wade into the BS of builds, but as I'm sufficiently bored.. I'll just point something out here.
You don't need enraged as a tank. IN fact, there are other powers you need more than enraged. If you're sacrificing damage mitigation toggle (Dampening) for the illusion of doing damage (your passive is defiance and that's good, but it's not a damage booster, nor should it be) then you're losing out on tanking goodness. If you're trying to be a "tank" that is.
KB and tanks.. don't even work in the same sentence much less in practice. If you want to do DAMAGE, I'd go with an unstoppable build rather than defiance. Truly.. full-tanking is awesome. But unless you're going up against a cosmic or are just starting the game and haven't figured out how to use devices, there's really no point.
The defense boost you get from simply choosing juggernaut should more than cover you for unstoppable. Then you can choose whatever KB toys you want to play with.
And the secret to using roomsweeper - rank it up. Hit them with a full charge, then a tap or two right afterwards (you can hit them as many as three times this way) That way you don't HAVE to chase anything if the first hit didn't defeat them right away. And, as with any melee knockback build, I recommend superjump. That way you can practically follow them to the ground and continue beating on them as a follow-through.
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