Guardian: True Tanking

andykirkham

I'm trying to build a tank with no focus on healing other players and a secondary focus of attack (DPS). Trying to balance the tank/offence is an art I've not mastered so would appreciate any and all feedback. My build is here:

http://www.stoacademy.com/tools/skillplanner/?build=theguardian_5092

I run power at max on weapons first then auxiliary. Is this right for my build/a tank build.
I usually use attract fire cruiser command.

Looking for ANY opinions so feel free to comment on anything or give advice on cruisers/tanking/power/everything.

Thanks for your time and help

angrytarg

I'd swap attack pattern beta for attack pattern delta and get the threat generation doff. Remember, "tanking" doesn't mean that you simply are tough but it means to pull of threat off of other players. I see this misconception a lot, as "tanking" in STO seems to be reduced to "has a lot of HP".

woodwhity

Sry, but this isnt a tank. A tank has to have enough dps*threat to overshadow every teammate (e.g. take all the heat for oneself), yours wont. Anyonen near 10k without threat increasing or decreasing skills will have to tank when in your team.

Your ship wont even be able to compensate missing aggro with dps, as your dps-potential isnt high either.

If you want to know some science behind tanks, look here.

ryakidrys

woodwhity wrote: »

Sry, but this isnt a tank. A tank has to have enough dps*threat to overshadow every teammate (e.g. take all the heat for oneself), yours wont. Anyonen near 10k without threat increasing or decreasing skills will have to tank when in your team.

Your ship wont even be able to compensate missing aggro with dps, as your dps-potential isnt high either.

If you want to know some science behind tanks, look here.

I have to second woodwhitty's opinion on the matter of tanking.

In general, I recommend that you read the post woodwhitty linked. After that, replace the torps and DBB with beam arrays, cycle EPTW and EPTS using damage control engineers if only using 1 of each, use 2 tactical team abilities and cycle as often as possible to re-orient shields, use energy weapon officers to reduce beam special attacks for getting FAW3 to activate more often, and use the new pilot trait that acts like a weak quantum absorption when activating an attack pattern.

I hope that helps.

ouroboros99

I'm not sure if numerically FAW2 and APB2 isn't better than APB1 and FAW3. I run the former on my D'deridex. You might also want to think about FAW2 Omega 1 as well.

General tips

Lose the torps. They'll cost you DPS and threat everytime you try yo turn and use them. Replace them with two more phaser beam arrays. You should basically just be running 7 beam arrays and the cutting beam. This will ensure that your FAW is both beefy for drawing threat from multiple attackers, and also capable of focus shredding a single enemy. Lose the dual beam bank as well. You want all your stuff to be able to hit the same target at the same time if necessary.

Since you're not using aux to bat get a second copy of tac team instead of the torp spread. That'll give you 100% uptime on tac team which will increase your survivability a lot and keep you from being that guy that dies through one downed facing with the other 3 still blue.

engineering powers.

This is where you get your tanking from

replace your current layout with

eptw1 / rsp1 / epts3 / your choice. A lot of people stick DEM on the commander slot here, I've never been impressed with it myself. If you're doing aux to bat rsp3 goes here and aux to bat goes in the second slot.

You want epts3 instead of etw3 because it gives you 30% damage reduction on your shields. This combined with tac team will make your shields a lot more effective, essential for a cruiser.


science

replace the science team with polarize hull and replace the polarize hull 2 with transfer shield strength 2. The reason again, it gives shield damage reduction instead of just a 1 time heal.

consoles

Get rid of the monotanium, shift one of the universals up from science and slot a field exciter for 20% more shield capacity, or failing that buy a field generator off the exchange and slot that. The first shield capacity booster you slot gives a pretty significant gain. Always try to find room for one of them.

kostamojenx

FYI, Tanking now is as much to do with Traits/Rep Traits and set bonus's as much as it is the rest of it.

Looking at your build, you are also missing several key tanking BO skills, like attack pattern Omega and Auxiliary to Dampeners.

You should also use two +threat gen Fleet Embassy consoles, preferable one of each with the Shield and Hull procs and with the Shield Emitters stat. That MACO set is only OK at tanking, better off using Plasmonic Leach + Elite Fleet shields or the Nukara shield, and a better 2-piece Eng/Deflector set for tanking (Assimilated Eng/Deflector works well).

Combine all that with an Aux2bat build (use Emergancy power to Aux to compensate for low aux levels after using Aux2bat) to reduce your cooldowns and you will be unstoppable.

mementoeden

Sorry to be blunt but tanking or healing has currently no future or in any way come close to the dps role because of cryptic. I tell you this as an engineer who has a tank build for the late or endgame you simply don't get rewarded for what you do in fact you are a burden i advanced and elite stf because dps matters tanking and healing does not. Doesn't matter if there are 5 scimitars and 1 dies, he waits 15 sec and he gets back into fight but if there is a tank and the dps loss is big that matters in the current game state.

For a game to be rewarding and to be playable in cooperation between all classes you actually need to put effort and thought into the game but cryptic doesn't do that they only do the minimum to get easy money. Soon their license will be under review by the IP holder and cryptic knows that they screwed royal with this game. They want to milk out us much money until their license gets reworked.

Now with my rant over there is also the problem of doing enough dmg to be a threat. As said before because there is no thought put into classes by cryptic and the threat model, you need to aggro by getting higher dps meaning making your build to do that (switching consoles and powers from survivability to higher dps) which makes you not a tank but just a ship with higher health than escorts who cant hope to match the dps from escorts, exotic ships. Cruisers right now have and identity crisis caused by cryptic. Sure you can have very high dps on a cruiser but that are not tanks they survivability is so low its just a bigger slower escort type of a ship.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't do a tank. If you enjoy playing as tank like me sure go ahead but know this that you wont get rewarded for it. Lets finish in cryptic words: GET DPS OR GET REKT AND WELCOME TO DPS RISING.

warmaker001b

The big tragedy here is that there are people trying to think and make builds around the "Trinity" style of gaming when STO has never supported that style.

ryakidrys

mementoeden wrote: »

Sorry to be blunt but tanking or healing has currently no future or in any way come close to the dps role because of cryptic. I tell you this as an engineer who has a tank build for the late or endgame you simply don't get rewarded for what you do in fact you are a burden i advanced and elite stf because dps matters tanking and healing does not. Doesn't matter if there are 5 scimitars and 1 dies, he waits 15 sec and he gets back into fight but if there is a tank and the dps loss is big that matters in the current game state.

For a game to be rewarding and to be playable in cooperation between all classes you actually need to put effort and thought into the game but cryptic doesn't do that they only do the minimum to get easy money. Soon their license will be under review by the IP holder and cryptic knows that they screwed royal with this game. They want to milk out us much money until their license gets reworked.

Now with my rant over there is also the problem of doing enough dmg to be a threat. As said before because there is no thought put into classes by cryptic and the threat model, you need to aggro by getting higher dps meaning making your build to do that (switching consoles and powers from survivability to higher dps) which makes you not a tank but just a ship with higher health than escorts who cant hope to match the dps from escorts, exotic ships. Cruisers right now have and identity crisis caused by cryptic. Sure you can have very high dps on a cruiser but that are not tanks they survivability is so low its just a bigger slower escort type of a ship.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't do a tank. If you enjoy playing as tank like me sure go ahead but know this that you wont get rewarded for it. Lets finish in cryptic words: GET DPS OR GET REKT AND WELCOME TO DPS RISING.

There is no question that DPS is part of the equation for a good tank build. A good tank also has enough healing to mitigate the incoming damage that if you run with the super elite folks who you are unable to grab and hold aggro from them, you can help heal them and still be an effective part of the team. So, I can not agree with the overall tone that it's DPS or else. With 9 points in threat control skill, you should be able to grab and hold aggro for the team when you can get between only being 25 to 10 percent, possible much lower, away from the DPS of the best player in the group.

thissler

warmaker001b wrote: »

The big tragedy here is that there are people trying to think and make builds around the "Trinity" style of gaming when STO has never supported that style.

If you're really really interested in what it DID support at launch, ask me. It was actually a very elegant system.

And as far as the OP, do you have access to all the T6 ships for mastery, or...what do you have?

And...I think that it's pretty simple to satisfy the DPS minimums of the game and also satisfy the desire for a tank build.

szerontzur

I'm just going to link the Bastion build I submitted to Smirk's livestream build suggestion thread. It's a slight variant(I run the Nukara shield set for extra damage) of what I use on one of my characters, but the layout is fairly similar to the Guardian and should hopefully give you some ideas:

http://www.stoacademy.com/tools/skillplanner/?build=vacuumbastion_0

It could be focused even more towards defense and threat-gen, but it honestly doesn't need it and my goal for the ship was/is primarily interdiction.

sangrine

warmaker001b wrote: »

The big tragedy here is that there are people trying to think and make builds around the "Trinity" style of gaming when STO has never supported that style.

Thank you. well stated.

---

To OP,

You can make a tank but your expectations should be different than what a tank is in other mmo games. All ships in STO have some durability. It's not necessary to draw all fire from all enemy's so that your allies receive zero incoming fire. In a STF, your goal should be to draw just enough fire so that other ships can stay alive. Beyond that, make sure your ship's survivability is sufficient and then maximize dps.

Personally, I am divided on whether or not to use the attract fire cruiser command. because the shield frequency modulation cruiser command is also quite good. The problem with attract fire is that it only helps your teammates by drawing fire towards your ship. When you are surrounded by 20 or more enemy ships, it maybe difficult to agro everything, even with attract fire. There are simply too many enemies to build up high threat on all of them. Even if you could aggro everything, you might not want to because it's a tremendous amount of incoming fire. Besides, as I already said, every player ship has some durability which means it's often not actually necessary to draw all enemy fire.

The shield frequency modulation cruiser command is an excellent command because it helps your shields AND your teammates shields. If there are multiple cruisers in a STF, then hopefully one will use shield frequency modulation and you can use attract fire, if needed, or vice versa.

In some STF's, the team is separated by great distance. In this case, you will likely be unable to draw fire from any enemy ships which are very distant from you. My advice is not to focus on trying to agro everything. It's usually not necessary and sometimes you will simply be unable. Just be able to draw some enemy fire so that teammates can survive. When starting a STF, you can announce that you are "the tank" which means that other ships should follow your lead. You initate fire on the enemy, and soon after, your teammates begin their attack. If you do lose agro, by that time, the enemy will hopefully be close to death. Don't worry too much about trying to hold agro. Just make sure you have sufficient survivability. If your teammates rush ahead of you and draw agro first, then maybe they don't want/need you to be a tank. Don't feel bad if they blow up.