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Let's talk about Tank builds.
hillard1959
Member Posts: 197 Arc User
in The Shipyard
With the new Miracle Worker specialization coming out soon, there's been a lot of talk about Tanks and how useful or not useful they are in STFs. That being said, nobody has offered up anything as to what a tank build actually looks like, or will look like come next month.
So let's talk about that. What makes a good Tank build? What would be required?
To my mind, a decent tank build has survivability in mind, not necessarily high DPS. You want as much of the attention as you can get so that the rest of your team can concentrate on burning down mobs. Inversely, if you're not doing enough DPS, you're not going to grab or hold threat, so there's a line to walk there.
So what does a tank build actually look like? What's the skill tree look like? What gear is best for it?
So let's talk about that. What makes a good Tank build? What would be required?
To my mind, a decent tank build has survivability in mind, not necessarily high DPS. You want as much of the attention as you can get so that the rest of your team can concentrate on burning down mobs. Inversely, if you're not doing enough DPS, you're not going to grab or hold threat, so there's a line to walk there.
So what does a tank build actually look like? What's the skill tree look like? What gear is best for it?
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https://www.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/6dwxvd/uss_bedivere_jayiies_s13_science_star_cruiser_t6/
https://www.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/681262/atems_hathor_tal_shiar_adapted_battle_cruiser_t6/
https://www.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/68eql0/florians_nautilus_a_s13_yorktown_tank_tac/
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Of course, I also have a t5U Excelsior, which might also be worth consideration, though I don't consider it nearly as strong as the Archon.
Have you checked how much atks-in % your ship gets over your team in those runs?
| USS Curiosity - Pathfinder | USS Rift - Eternal |
The Science Ship Build Thread - Share your Sci Ship builds here!
Edit: Come to think of it, I'm not sure you can count on shield tanking these days. Borg and Tholians will strip your sheilds pdq, even with shield regen and hardness maxed out. Cardassian Galors at level 60+ seem to acquire a heavy amount of shield pen, bypassing sheilds for direct hull damage. In which case, I think I'd rather have a high hull, hull regen, hull hardness and resists as high as I could get them for a tanking setup. But then, I usually run cruisers.
EPtS at any ranks could use some help here since it's barely noticeable when it comes to keeping shields up vs these types of environments.
For engineering consoles, I would think the winners there, from a tanking perspective, would be a fleet Neutronium with the HP mod on it. Resists and increased hull hitpoints. The other would be an enhanced RCS console with resistances for the content you're currently tackling.
If you're an Engineer and you're not slotting Grace Under Fire, you're nerfing yourself. It's one of the biggest reasons to run an Engineer. Nanite Repair Matrix is, by and large, mostly useless. If you're running 80k+hull, that 5k return you get every 90 seconds is honestly laughable. Living Hull is more useful as it gives you a constant hull regen buff instead of a pittance of a hull hp return every minute and a half if you actually proc the trait.
Of the specs, I find that Intel/Strategist is actually more useful for tanking than Temporal. Temproal is good if you're running a science-heavy build, so I could see that working just fine on something like the Lukari ship. My Science captain runs it on his event Dyson Science Destroyer. But if you're not running heavy science, it's rather pointless and useless compared to Intel. Seonc best, to my mind, is Command. Command can greatly increase your hull hp, pushing cruisers up over 100k hull. That being said, it doesn't have as many good damage and defense buffs as Intel does. It's still a very respectable spec, though, and I do run it on occasion. Usually when I want to fly around in my old Excelsior.
Getting your shields back up/removing shield draining debuffs isn't really the problem. What HE doesn't clear, usually ST1 will. That still doesn't mean shield-tanking is all that effective on an engineering or even tac-heavy build. My archon can get shields back up in a hurry. That's not really a problem. It's being able to take whatever damage gets through while they're reduced/down that concerns me. Hence, more attention paid to hull. Besides, between Miraculous repairs, the Seondary Shields universal console and, if I wanted, the Layered Shielding trait, there's plenty of ways to bring shields back up to max or near max without sacrificing hull buffs.
Edit in response to the above edit: Whether you're talking about shield tanking or hull tanking, survivability and tanking go hand in hand. It's just not all there is to tanking. If you're not pulling enough threat to be the enemy's center of attention, you're not actually tanking. And if you do but you blow up anyway, well, you're not tanking while you're staring at the respawn window.
Get a parser to do it for you?
| USS Curiosity - Pathfinder | USS Rift - Eternal |
The Science Ship Build Thread - Share your Sci Ship builds here!
In ISA you are correct. However, the reason for aiming for such high Atks-In %'s is so that you can be sure that when you move into something like HSE (which is pretty much where tanks shine best), you can be sure you are capable of grabbing aggro. It's a good litmus test on how well you can grab aggro even when a high DPS'er is around.
A recent run of mine (not quite at 50k each, but close with a total team DPS over 250k):
Note I have even higher Dmg-In numbers than your example.
If you can grab the majority of team aggro despite not being the top DPS in the team, when you get into a group with lower DPS, you'll end up with something like this:
At that point, no one in the team will be in any real danger, which is basically what you should be aiming for. The only reason one might die there is either from really bad piloting, from an errant core breach or they get one-shot, which is pretty much something you cannot help.
| USS Curiosity - Pathfinder | USS Rift - Eternal |
The Science Ship Build Thread - Share your Sci Ship builds here!
Hull regen has been pushed quite a bit by the developers; both from the DPRM and PFP, and given that Hull regen doesn't show up on combatlogs then that often is where the missing HPS goes. Combined with High Hull HP you can get quite good HPS numbers. There are other heals than ET2, and people can have wildly different numbers (my ET2 is at +9,287.1 for instance, at once every 15s that's 619.14 HPS).
As for being able to go above 30k...you need to understand how the game works (like Damage Categories and scaling which was as topic you refused to understand because the notation failed to fit what you wanted in the past IIRC). Moving quickly is a combined factor of many things, usually EPtE + ECH, and/or the competitive engines.
While Tanking is a factor of being first, there's generally way more factors involved, like threatscale, DPS, HPS, drain to target, distance to target, HPS to others, and if pets are attacking or not.
In short...you're saying things when there's very obvious answers when you understand how the game works. There is a difference between bugged and over-performing; quite often the two are confused.
-> SO that could just be them using Evasive Maneuvers with the EmPE doff.. I Travel faster than "normal" players but Im built for Speed in my sci ships (Typical cruising speed for me is around 150 full throttle in a sci ship before Evasives or my Competitive engines..).Its no bug.
The "extra" healing...or the Super high healing..Is probably related to the many hull regenerative abilities now in the game. 1 console ups your regen 500% putting some around the 650% range with some of the traits in this game.. Combine that with the Lukari Console and you can be 1200%+ from time to time (Miracle worker + Sci ultimate = 100k hull heal in 1 go and I can do it twice)...One of these regens does not show up in CLR (maybe both but I cant remember) Standard hull regen doesn't show up either. Also Aux to SIF can be brought down to every 10 seconds.The Heal bubble...The lists goes on..So its possible to have a TON of healing. In PVP (Eng toon im somewhere around 2.5k-3k per sec but thats all i can spare before going zombie tank with no damage.)
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I haven’t used the tank build in a while so from memory off the top of my head so this might be a little off but at 100k+ hull and around 300% hull repair rate you regen over 6000 hitpoints per second or two seconds. Although that’s 300% in combat so 600% outside of combat? I don’t remember outside combat, but once combat starts hull repair rates goes down and I think 300% or higher in combat was the sweat spot.
The basic premises is boost hull hit points, boost hull repair rate, boost resistance past 50% then you have a 100% passive tank that doesn’t need active heals.
No bug there. Hull regen is not read by parsers (as it does not appear in the log). Even with my rather average 95k hull, stuff like Protomatter Field (which can push my regen over 1000% with other buffs while in combat) and Rally Point Marker add up quite nicely.
It's actually not that high (I've seen higher HPS numbers from better tanks and dedicated healers). But these are the heal stats of that run:
I don't just rely on 1 or 2 heals. I also run these heals almost on global since healing also creates additional threat for me, and I'm getting hit quite a bit so I need to heal up anyway.
Ok on the aspect of speed, you can have multiple speed buffs in combat. Stuff like Evasive Maneuvers + the ECH DOff and Competitive Engines can give some nice speed spikes quite regularly.
On the ship I use in those parses (a T6 Fleet Galaxy) my normal full throttle speed is 35.89 impulse. Just activating FAW or TS (which I both run) pushes me up to 70 impulse because of the competitive engines. Evasive Maneuvers bring me up to over 140 impulse on its own. If I stack both evasive and comp engines, I get up to over 180 impulse. In combat I'll get a bit faster due to higher power levels (these numbers were in ESD orbit).
You can do that if you wish. I can also provide logfiles for you to pick on if you
This is partly true yes. However, you can skew the probabilities in your favor by generating more threat than everyone else in the team. Positioning and high threat generation is how the best tanks in the game (which I am not one of) are able to consistently draw fire away from even very high DPS players.
| USS Curiosity - Pathfinder | USS Rift - Eternal |
The Science Ship Build Thread - Share your Sci Ship builds here!
I reiterate, Hull Regen doesn't show up in a combat log. I am aware of the game being buggy, but being oblivious to mechanics isnt the fault of the game.
I don't know their exact intent, but with all the new healing stuff they're adding into the game next week (and even on the Kobayashi Maru) they seem to indicate that they want to buff healing up more.
Based on my experience running PUGs on most of my STFs, I think they'll need to.
| USS Curiosity - Pathfinder | USS Rift - Eternal |
The Science Ship Build Thread - Share your Sci Ship builds here!
Attack Pattern Delta Prime. It's a starship trait that buffs Attack Pattern: Delta. Which is useful for threat generation if you have the doffs.
There isn't a trinity in this game like in other games, no. Saying that you can't. play a tank or a healer is wrong, though. Any class can do so. Some classes are better at certain things than others. If that wasn't true, there wouldn't be so many traits, skills and doffs that give you buffs for those roles.
DPS is king in this game mainly because it's the path of least resistance. Making a DPS boat is a lot easier than making a ship that fills one of those roles.