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Aegis' Wrathful Defender Build, a tanking guide
talesmith
Member Posts: 116
Update 6 10: Changes to equipment and added a video guide.
Update 6 15: Added tips and trick and bugs section, some alternate feat choices and fixed some text.
Update 6 25: Added and updated some images
Hello all. Looking for a guardian fighter specialisation that uses both shield and weapon to full extent? If so this might be the guide for you!
This is a fairly agressive protector setup meant to both deal and take considerable damage. In using this build you should have no problem holding aggro whilst being able to take a lot of beating. This build will let you both take and dish out good damage!
Ability scores
Your primary focus is STR, it will net you more damage and guard meter, both of wich you'll make good use of.
Secondary is CON, the boost to hit points is decent, but the action point increase is what you really want.
DEX is worth dumping some stats into, if ony for the aoe damage resist. The deflection chance gained is paltry and not worth specializing into.
Feats
Heroic Feats
Action Surge: 5/5 Most of your ap comes from blocking, especially powerful attacks. Get this
Strength Focus: 3/3 More shield more damage
Armor Specialization: 3/3 You have a lot of defense and a lot of AC, and your main goal is still to mitigate damage. Good investment.
Powerful attack: 5/5 10% more damage for just 5 points invested? Grab it without hesitation!
Weapon Mastery: 3/3 3% more crit chance is nothing to sneeze at, even if you never raise crit severity.
Potent Challenge: 1/3 Have to put this last point somewhere. Honestly with the kind of thread you'll be making, and come threat buff, you don't really need this.
If you're human, fill up Potent Challenge and/or Ubiquitus Shield, however you prefer.
Heroic Feats you shouldn't take
Distracting Shield: It's a trap! No seriously, 5% is not much and the debuff duration only lasts for like 2,5 seconds wich is optimistically just enough time for a monster to strike you again with a light fast attack, provided he doesn't move or anything like that. More often then not it'll do nada, just bad.
Grit: The numbers are just bad, unless you're desperatly looking for some temporary health for wrathful warrior, not worth it one bit.
Paragon feats
Plate Agility: 5/5 More deflection, why not. Armor of bahamuth might be good to, I'm unsure wich is better.
Shield Defense: 5/5 More mitigation. Unlike deflection mitigation from AC is additive with that of defense, very nice get it.
Shield Master: 5/5 Shield talent is currently bugged so I assume this feat doesn't work propperly. I take this one in anticipation of a fix, this bonus added to the already nice shield talent is awesome.
Balanced Shield Fighter: 5/5 Aggravating strike is your bread and butter and primary damage source, this feat is magnificent.
Iron Guard: 1/1 For a paragon master feat this one isn't all that great but decent enough to invest a point into. You got this far into the tree, might as well right.
Take Measure (Conqueror): Not bad but not great, you'll get crit often enough to have this occur every 50 seconds or so. You're mostly interested in the synergy with the next feat.
Wrathful Warrior (Conqueror): 5/5 This feat is awesome and let me tell you why. Firstly you'll have a power (and the previous feat) this has great synergy with, and 15% more damage all around is just great. Secondly as protector you can keep your guard up and sit on this temporary health for quite some time, so you'll keep the damage buff for a pretty long time.
Alternatively
Fight On (Tactician): 10% is a lot less cooldown, great feat for being the first in the path. Better then Take Measure most certainly.
Battle Trample (Tactician): Bonus threat and damage on the passive power Trample the Fallen, great if you plan on using it. You'll be missing out on wrathful warrior, but in a dungeon group there will be many occasions where this will be just as good. Decide for yourself wich you find is best.
Powers
Yes, I like to put a single point in things I will probably never use. You never know.
Also only reason I took crushing surge is for the unlikely event they decide to buff it.
At Wills
Threatening rush: This is mandatory for any serious tanking. Who can say no to a leap either.
Tide of Iron: The guard recovery is good and so is the debuff. You won't be using this often, but when you do you'll be glad you have it.
No damage at will? You want to spend most of your time with shield up, aggravating strike is your damage!
Encounters
Iron Warrior: This encounter is amazing, it is so very often overlooked as it is one of the three last encounters you get. The boost to your guard meter is massive, and it has good synergy with wrathful warrior. Activate Iron warrior, get temporary health and guard all the attacks with ease, and deal 15% more damage while doing so, just yes!
Enforced Threat: It's a solid encounter even if it has a cap on total targets hit. The damage is good and marks are always welcome. Good to snap monsters off someone if it would take to long to build some threat on them.
Frontline Surge: An amazing encounter, you probably want this in any and every GF setup. The cast time is extremely short, the CC is great and the damage is just godlike. It builds up a whole lot of ap as well. Slot this once you go iron vanguard and never take it out again.
Other interesting encounters
Knight's Challenge: Here's an interesting one, it has tremendous amount of flexibility. The target lock is nice, but those damage numbers are interesting. Sitting on a lot of guard whilst fighting single target? Pop Knight's challenge to turn your defense into offense, especially after using iron warrior wich superpowers your defense. Alternatively fighting a large zerg of monsters and having trouble coping with the damage? Put knights challenge on the weakest monster in the bunch.
Try it out, see if you like it.
Knight's Valor: If there's just to many monsters for you to aggro, or running around and building threat on all of them is impractical, this encounter is a good choice. I'd only use it in these specific circumstances though. Also you can block the damage shared by your party.
Into the Fray: Even without the tactician trait to give your party a whopping 5% more damage, this encounter is still a solid choice. I'm not a huge fan but if you like it use it.
Passive
Combat Superiority: Even if you don't have the conqueror feat to add another 5% dmg, the damage boost is still great. As protector you will have no problem getting this debuff on your opponents.
Enhanced Mark: Honestly you don't need this, but I found all other passive powers to be lackluster so there it is. Will gladly switch this out for something better.
Shield Talent: You feated for this and it fits the protector playstyle. Problem is it appears to be bugged, so don't use this for now. Just putting it in here because on paper it is awesome.
Trample the Fallen: There will be a lot of cc flying around when in group, and the damage bonus is all out great. If you decide to go into tactician the extra damage and threat is also nice.
Whatever you do, do not get
Guarded Assault: 3% reflect is garbage, reflects in general are pretty bad in this game. Do not take this even if you will be taking a whole lot of damage.
Enduring Warrior: It is incredibly bad and may as well not exist. Do not use this on any build.
Daily
Villain's Menace: You will be generating enough ap to keep this up permanently if you're doing it right. In particularly hairy fights I sometimes have two menace active at some points, athough I don't know if the damage boost stacks or not.
Good damage, the bonus to damage done is pretty impressive (I think it's 20%, but not sure) and the immunity to cc is pretty good if not amazing in some fights.
Fighter's Recovery: The cleric should be able to keep your health up, but if things go south because the cleric is dead or there's just to much damage coming your way this is a nice daily to have at the ready. Will keep you topped up provided you can deal the damage quite easily, especially combined with frontline surge. Also useful if for some reason you want to tank a dungeon with no cleric.
Also interesting
Supremacy of Steel: Doesn't deal as much damage even if your guard is getting pushed to its limit. Might sometimes be good just before extreme high damage attacks and you think you won't be doing much other damage in the meantime. Villain's menace will generally trump this ability by a very large margin but it's not all terrible, so if you insist on using it feel free.
Equipment
My current equipment, still a work in progress.
What I'm aiming for
Set: Stalwart Bulwark
Weapons: Ancient Grand Knight
Neck: Grand Exorcist's Necklace of Blessings
Rings: Grand Slavemaster's Ring of Control
Belt: One of those blue ones with an offense slot
Weapon Enhancement slot: Flaming Enchantment
Armor Enhancement slot: No clue, I'd probably take one based on the visual effect I like
Offense slots: Dark Enchantments until 22% armor pen, then silvery or azure as needed.
Defense slots: Radiant
Companion: Cat, crit to good.
In general avoid the defense stat like the plague. I know this sounds counter intuitive, but your armor will already have more then enough defense on it, literally. Diminishing return makes it a bad choice to raise it beyond 3500, or even 3000.
Instead, try and get as much armor penetration, then recovery and critical strike as you can.
Playstyle
Keep marks on your opponents at all times. When you have your opponents marked, raise shield and start stabbing away. Try and collect as many enemies in front of you as you can so you can stab 'em all up and mitigate that damage. Use iron warrior to help your guard hold whenever guard meter starts running low or when you anticipate a large attack, or when you're low on health and could use the temp health, or all of the above. Frontline surge on cooldown, but avoid using it when your action points are nearly full as it makes a lot of it, don't want to waste it. Should your guard ever break, just stop guarding at all and keep using iron tide and allow your guard meter to regenerate automatically; it should be up before long. Avoid red circled when your guard is broken, they hurt much more then when you block them. When fighting a single target, or only a few, use iron tide in between attacks to keep the damage resistance debuff up.
Overall be a big obstacle and stab enemies into oblivion. Lots of aoe damage and threat if you can hold your ground.
Tips and Tricks
-When guarding and in aggravating strike animation, face camera to an impending damage source and use shield smash to cancel aggravating strike and immediatly face where you want, blocking the damage instead of taking it.
-Against a single target you can animation cancel using shield smash midway aggravating strike, causing you to attack just a tad bit faster. No great difference but you recover a little extra guard whilst sacreficing less damage.
-Frontline Surge and Iron Warrior have the same cooldown, combine them to cast iron warrior without leaving yourself open and losing marks and temporary health you may get.
-In a dungeon group, ask your party members to consider not using the Man At Arms companion.
-When blocking a ground targeted powerful attack, be sure to face its epicentre in order to block the damage.
Results
Because sometimes you need to see to believe
Video
Not my finest plays, but good enough to give you an idea of the playstyle.
A video guide showing this build in action, and tanking in general.
Bugs
Listing of bugs involving this specialisation
-Aggravating Strike and Shield Smash both do not trigger on hit effects. This included Iron Guard and Weapon enhancements, making our master feat lackluster and missing out on weapon enhancements.
-Shield Defense appears to not work propperly, not nearly boosting your guard as much as it should.
-Some attacks will cc you regardless of block or villain's mance (e.g. Plague Reaver)
-It's possible to mark ghost entities with enforced threat (e.g. Mad dragon's poison breath trails)
-Using aggravating strike against an enemy lifted up through cc will cause you to move underneath them.
-Moving in guard whilst under the effect of a movement speed buff, then lowering guard causes you to run incredibly fast for a short amount. (Or something like this. I'm unsure what goes on with this, can anyone verify they experienced something similar?)
And that's it. Thanks for reading this guide, and feel free to make remarks or suggestions so long as you keep things constructive. I'd be happy to answer any question I can so ask away.
Update 6 15: Added tips and trick and bugs section, some alternate feat choices and fixed some text.
Update 6 25: Added and updated some images
Hello all. Looking for a guardian fighter specialisation that uses both shield and weapon to full extent? If so this might be the guide for you!
This is a fairly agressive protector setup meant to both deal and take considerable damage. In using this build you should have no problem holding aggro whilst being able to take a lot of beating. This build will let you both take and dish out good damage!
Ability scores
Your primary focus is STR, it will net you more damage and guard meter, both of wich you'll make good use of.
Secondary is CON, the boost to hit points is decent, but the action point increase is what you really want.
DEX is worth dumping some stats into, if ony for the aoe damage resist. The deflection chance gained is paltry and not worth specializing into.
Feats
Heroic Feats
Action Surge: 5/5 Most of your ap comes from blocking, especially powerful attacks. Get this
Strength Focus: 3/3 More shield more damage
Armor Specialization: 3/3 You have a lot of defense and a lot of AC, and your main goal is still to mitigate damage. Good investment.
Powerful attack: 5/5 10% more damage for just 5 points invested? Grab it without hesitation!
Weapon Mastery: 3/3 3% more crit chance is nothing to sneeze at, even if you never raise crit severity.
Potent Challenge: 1/3 Have to put this last point somewhere. Honestly with the kind of thread you'll be making, and come threat buff, you don't really need this.
If you're human, fill up Potent Challenge and/or Ubiquitus Shield, however you prefer.
Heroic Feats you shouldn't take
Distracting Shield: It's a trap! No seriously, 5% is not much and the debuff duration only lasts for like 2,5 seconds wich is optimistically just enough time for a monster to strike you again with a light fast attack, provided he doesn't move or anything like that. More often then not it'll do nada, just bad.
Grit: The numbers are just bad, unless you're desperatly looking for some temporary health for wrathful warrior, not worth it one bit.
Paragon feats
Plate Agility: 5/5 More deflection, why not. Armor of bahamuth might be good to, I'm unsure wich is better.
Shield Defense: 5/5 More mitigation. Unlike deflection mitigation from AC is additive with that of defense, very nice get it.
Shield Master: 5/5 Shield talent is currently bugged so I assume this feat doesn't work propperly. I take this one in anticipation of a fix, this bonus added to the already nice shield talent is awesome.
Balanced Shield Fighter: 5/5 Aggravating strike is your bread and butter and primary damage source, this feat is magnificent.
Iron Guard: 1/1 For a paragon master feat this one isn't all that great but decent enough to invest a point into. You got this far into the tree, might as well right.
Take Measure (Conqueror): Not bad but not great, you'll get crit often enough to have this occur every 50 seconds or so. You're mostly interested in the synergy with the next feat.
Wrathful Warrior (Conqueror): 5/5 This feat is awesome and let me tell you why. Firstly you'll have a power (and the previous feat) this has great synergy with, and 15% more damage all around is just great. Secondly as protector you can keep your guard up and sit on this temporary health for quite some time, so you'll keep the damage buff for a pretty long time.
Alternatively
Fight On (Tactician): 10% is a lot less cooldown, great feat for being the first in the path. Better then Take Measure most certainly.
Battle Trample (Tactician): Bonus threat and damage on the passive power Trample the Fallen, great if you plan on using it. You'll be missing out on wrathful warrior, but in a dungeon group there will be many occasions where this will be just as good. Decide for yourself wich you find is best.
Powers
Yes, I like to put a single point in things I will probably never use. You never know.
Also only reason I took crushing surge is for the unlikely event they decide to buff it.
At Wills
Threatening rush: This is mandatory for any serious tanking. Who can say no to a leap either.
Tide of Iron: The guard recovery is good and so is the debuff. You won't be using this often, but when you do you'll be glad you have it.
No damage at will? You want to spend most of your time with shield up, aggravating strike is your damage!
Encounters
Iron Warrior: This encounter is amazing, it is so very often overlooked as it is one of the three last encounters you get. The boost to your guard meter is massive, and it has good synergy with wrathful warrior. Activate Iron warrior, get temporary health and guard all the attacks with ease, and deal 15% more damage while doing so, just yes!
Enforced Threat: It's a solid encounter even if it has a cap on total targets hit. The damage is good and marks are always welcome. Good to snap monsters off someone if it would take to long to build some threat on them.
Frontline Surge: An amazing encounter, you probably want this in any and every GF setup. The cast time is extremely short, the CC is great and the damage is just godlike. It builds up a whole lot of ap as well. Slot this once you go iron vanguard and never take it out again.
Other interesting encounters
Knight's Challenge: Here's an interesting one, it has tremendous amount of flexibility. The target lock is nice, but those damage numbers are interesting. Sitting on a lot of guard whilst fighting single target? Pop Knight's challenge to turn your defense into offense, especially after using iron warrior wich superpowers your defense. Alternatively fighting a large zerg of monsters and having trouble coping with the damage? Put knights challenge on the weakest monster in the bunch.
Try it out, see if you like it.
Knight's Valor: If there's just to many monsters for you to aggro, or running around and building threat on all of them is impractical, this encounter is a good choice. I'd only use it in these specific circumstances though. Also you can block the damage shared by your party.
Into the Fray: Even without the tactician trait to give your party a whopping 5% more damage, this encounter is still a solid choice. I'm not a huge fan but if you like it use it.
Passive
Combat Superiority: Even if you don't have the conqueror feat to add another 5% dmg, the damage boost is still great. As protector you will have no problem getting this debuff on your opponents.
Enhanced Mark: Honestly you don't need this, but I found all other passive powers to be lackluster so there it is. Will gladly switch this out for something better.
Shield Talent: You feated for this and it fits the protector playstyle. Problem is it appears to be bugged, so don't use this for now. Just putting it in here because on paper it is awesome.
Trample the Fallen: There will be a lot of cc flying around when in group, and the damage bonus is all out great. If you decide to go into tactician the extra damage and threat is also nice.
Whatever you do, do not get
Guarded Assault: 3% reflect is garbage, reflects in general are pretty bad in this game. Do not take this even if you will be taking a whole lot of damage.
Enduring Warrior: It is incredibly bad and may as well not exist. Do not use this on any build.
Daily
Villain's Menace: You will be generating enough ap to keep this up permanently if you're doing it right. In particularly hairy fights I sometimes have two menace active at some points, athough I don't know if the damage boost stacks or not.
Good damage, the bonus to damage done is pretty impressive (I think it's 20%, but not sure) and the immunity to cc is pretty good if not amazing in some fights.
Fighter's Recovery: The cleric should be able to keep your health up, but if things go south because the cleric is dead or there's just to much damage coming your way this is a nice daily to have at the ready. Will keep you topped up provided you can deal the damage quite easily, especially combined with frontline surge. Also useful if for some reason you want to tank a dungeon with no cleric.
Also interesting
Supremacy of Steel: Doesn't deal as much damage even if your guard is getting pushed to its limit. Might sometimes be good just before extreme high damage attacks and you think you won't be doing much other damage in the meantime. Villain's menace will generally trump this ability by a very large margin but it's not all terrible, so if you insist on using it feel free.
Equipment
My current equipment, still a work in progress.
What I'm aiming for
Set: Stalwart Bulwark
Weapons: Ancient Grand Knight
Neck: Grand Exorcist's Necklace of Blessings
Rings: Grand Slavemaster's Ring of Control
Belt: One of those blue ones with an offense slot
Weapon Enhancement slot: Flaming Enchantment
Armor Enhancement slot: No clue, I'd probably take one based on the visual effect I like
Offense slots: Dark Enchantments until 22% armor pen, then silvery or azure as needed.
Defense slots: Radiant
Companion: Cat, crit to good.
In general avoid the defense stat like the plague. I know this sounds counter intuitive, but your armor will already have more then enough defense on it, literally. Diminishing return makes it a bad choice to raise it beyond 3500, or even 3000.
Instead, try and get as much armor penetration, then recovery and critical strike as you can.
Playstyle
Keep marks on your opponents at all times. When you have your opponents marked, raise shield and start stabbing away. Try and collect as many enemies in front of you as you can so you can stab 'em all up and mitigate that damage. Use iron warrior to help your guard hold whenever guard meter starts running low or when you anticipate a large attack, or when you're low on health and could use the temp health, or all of the above. Frontline surge on cooldown, but avoid using it when your action points are nearly full as it makes a lot of it, don't want to waste it. Should your guard ever break, just stop guarding at all and keep using iron tide and allow your guard meter to regenerate automatically; it should be up before long. Avoid red circled when your guard is broken, they hurt much more then when you block them. When fighting a single target, or only a few, use iron tide in between attacks to keep the damage resistance debuff up.
Overall be a big obstacle and stab enemies into oblivion. Lots of aoe damage and threat if you can hold your ground.
Tips and Tricks
-When guarding and in aggravating strike animation, face camera to an impending damage source and use shield smash to cancel aggravating strike and immediatly face where you want, blocking the damage instead of taking it.
-Against a single target you can animation cancel using shield smash midway aggravating strike, causing you to attack just a tad bit faster. No great difference but you recover a little extra guard whilst sacreficing less damage.
-Frontline Surge and Iron Warrior have the same cooldown, combine them to cast iron warrior without leaving yourself open and losing marks and temporary health you may get.
-In a dungeon group, ask your party members to consider not using the Man At Arms companion.
-When blocking a ground targeted powerful attack, be sure to face its epicentre in order to block the damage.
Results
Because sometimes you need to see to believe
Video
Not my finest plays, but good enough to give you an idea of the playstyle.
A video guide showing this build in action, and tanking in general.
Bugs
Listing of bugs involving this specialisation
-Aggravating Strike and Shield Smash both do not trigger on hit effects. This included Iron Guard and Weapon enhancements, making our master feat lackluster and missing out on weapon enhancements.
-Shield Defense appears to not work propperly, not nearly boosting your guard as much as it should.
-Some attacks will cc you regardless of block or villain's mance (e.g. Plague Reaver)
-It's possible to mark ghost entities with enforced threat (e.g. Mad dragon's poison breath trails)
-Using aggravating strike against an enemy lifted up through cc will cause you to move underneath them.
-Moving in guard whilst under the effect of a movement speed buff, then lowering guard causes you to run incredibly fast for a short amount. (Or something like this. I'm unsure what goes on with this, can anyone verify they experienced something similar?)
And that's it. Thanks for reading this guide, and feel free to make remarks or suggestions so long as you keep things constructive. I'd be happy to answer any question I can so ask away.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
You don't need damage to tank, stacking your Threat gain's + aggravating strike is all you need and this is of current not update, I can hold aggro of 13k Geared Tr's on single, and if it wasn't for the target limit's on our aoe threat builder's I'm sure I would be fine on large pack's.
Pet: Acolyte of Kelvenmore 10% damage resist buff > all.
She also has a lifesteal buff also isn't bad but you need to get as much as you can for her.
Enchant's
Weapon: Lifedrinker is an amazing tank enchant it causes a Huge amount of threat.
Armour: Negation is also amazing for a Main tank you really need greater or better to get the most efficiency out of it.
I suspect the threat from lifesteal will be reduced just as any other healing, but I could be mistaken. Even so, I don't see why you would want to get lifesteal when you can have fighter's recovery, wich would similarly generate some good threat.
Negation is...minor. Seems like all the armor enhancements are. If anything soulforged seems the most useful but then it really doesn't matter a great deal.
A 12k TR rolling Shocking Execution's every 6 seconds to hold is not child's play, but it can be done with Gear.
Lifesteal is amazing and is always on, you can also use it with FR , And other classes can debuff AC better than you so why use Plaguefire (note you can no longer take Armour below 0) (CW,TR and GWF) but it depends on your Group/guild makeup with pug's sure but why pug?
Soulforge is ok, but as with any % based buff if you are at 26% and are taken to 0% it won't trigger, Greater Negation (still working on my perfect) is 6 sec out of every 60 sec you have 20% dam resist which stacks with other dam resist's, Leave soulforge for those that don't get hit, as a GF I look for a high uptime enchant, and I only hit below 25% Hp if the rest of my party is dead.
60 GF 13k, 60 CW 12k, 60 DC 11k, TR 10k, 60 GWF 12k.
I was tinkering with some graphs earlier and thought I'd share. By no means part of the guide or an authority, just a best fit I made showing some interesting stuff regarding the defense and deflection stat.
Plot these if you care to have a look Thanks for letting me know, I wasn't aware of this change. Will have to figure out what this means for armor penetration and wich amount is ideal now.
I should say I'm no wiz with video editing, in fact this was my first. Feedback would be appreciated, be nice to know if something like this is helpful.
I've been enjoying my DC while they tinkered with the GF and it looks like when the patch hits I'll be respeccing to this
I'll let you know how it goes!
Keep up the good work!
Thanks for taking the time to write this up!
Sadly the block bug hasn't been fixed entirely. There's a bit more margin of error to the point it's not possible to bug it by releasing and holding block rapidly, but if you hold block for longer then a second before the end of an encounter or daily animation, it'll still bug.
Alright standing bugs let's see.
Iron guard still doesn't proc on guard at wills
Shield talent appears to be doing something. Only it doesn't seem to do as much as it should.
Me with the feated bonus had about 10% more hits to guard break, someone else with the non feated power enjoyed a 15% increase to hits to guard break. So I'm guessing the feat bonus is overwriting the normal one, but I can't be sure yet.
Feel free to help test shield talent if you want, post hits to guard break with and without and wether or not you feated the power, or something else that'll give us the data we need. Want to get to the bottom of this power.
On further testing, it appears I have 12% more hits to guard break. Course numbers vary, deflection and critical and all that. Not entirely sure what to make of that number.
Also scrap block bug still being there, it appears they have fixed after preview.
If you end up speccing for Current (Y), could you also include an "if working as intended" then I'd spec (X)
?
Most likely you respecced out of the conquerer tree, the last feat in that line gives you +-2000 power (it doubles your base power when you have full shield). Power from that passive is included in gearscore so a non conquerer gf spec will always have less gearscore.
If you pug Spec Tank you are going to need to shoulder the load.
If you guild run DPS spec all the way
Sadly the differences between a tank spec in our tanking sets vs a DPS spec in our DPS sets is marginal in DR, Deflection but huge in Power, ARP and Crit. The current content favors the DPS since all high damage attacks are avoidable. As soon as they add constant damage auras or faster incoming high damage attacks then the Tank spec will find a place but even then it is going to need a buff.
The biggest difference between a protector and a conqueror setup is the former puts more emphasis on blocking and the latter gets more power but avoids blocking.
The difference in power can be large yes, but as far as armor penetration and critical strike is concerned that depends entirely on how you itemize. Also power isn't such a great offensive stat, and you must consider relative mitigation gained rather then the flat difference.
You sacrefice bonus power for heavy shield use, you don't magically become nothing more then a meatshield.
All things considered, a protector may even contribute just as much damage if not more, by boosting party wide damage through marks, and keeping guard up to avoid marks being removed.
DPS spec can put up as many marks as a Tank spec. Mark is a none issue here. Even if they fall off, they go up quick on anything that takes more than one combo. The only place you are going to notice the Damage boost from Mark is on Bosses and Brutes.
The way the fights are right now you rarely if ever actually have to block so again your not gaining anything by doing so most of the time. I can't think of a single attack that is unavoidable attack that does enough damage that I must block it.
Your talking about relative stats but what it comes down to is how much do you actually need. I'm sitting on 48% DR and 15% Deflect and have no problems surviving. So is the extra 2% less damage per hit from mobs really that big a boost? I'll give you 5% Deflection may be worth it in some of the nastier fights but overall I barely notice the difference on my runs.
What I would like you to do though since this hasn't been confirmed is what is the range on your Knights Valor party damage buff. My group says they almost never saw it. Or when they did it often wasn't available when they had their damaging encounters on ready. So please next time you run ask your party to check to see if your buff is actually coming up for them and at what distances?
I personally prefer to use abilities that I can count on since the RNG hates me. That is why my armor is currently piecemeal, it either hasn't dropped or it is a % chance to work.
Your build is great and works really well but sadly as a class the GF is still a bit of a red headed stepchild.
Knights Valor doesn't give a damage buff even when feated for (the feat increases damage resist while knights is active), I think you're confusing it with the feat for Into the Fray in the tactician tree.
I'm going to assume the damage buff is the same range as the movementspeed, temp health and action point gain buff wich is 50' according to the tooltip, I could test for you if you really want.
I don't have the tactician feat for the extra 5% on it, same as the guide, so can't help there I'm afraid.
What about "Knights Valor" I don't currently have it on my bar so can't test the range on this.
Actually the current instances lends it self to the more heavy DPS build since it speeds killing time while still being able to tank the brutes and bosses.
As for the set bonus on Knight's you can see I have a thread currently trying to establish the effectiveness of it's 4 piece buff. Which as you say would probably be a much bigger buff than Stalwart if it applies correctly. If say it has an ICD of even 20 seconds its usefulness drops way off. Also it may be range limited as well.
The problem I have with it is, on Stalwart you can get the buff up when you need it where as anything that has a % change of activating is subject to strings of non effect and can't be predicted.
Again trash for a competent group evaporates so prolonged buffs only shine against Brutes and Bosses. Which is where I find the difference between Tank and DPS spec. On a pug low damage group the control offered by Tank spec is great but in a group that knows what it is doing the extra damage from DPS spec really helps speed things along.
Just a small question, the Ofensive/Defensive/Utility Enchants that should be used, what are the desired ranks of them? 5? or the 10th rank of each?
thanks in advance