Get your Rocks off -- Earth Guide

Are you talking about stacking? I was talking about alternating.

No I'm talking about alternating. Before you could alternate them. If brick was out with damage shift you could hit jack hammer and stop the damage transfer and have higher absorption for 12 seconds. Then when it wore off you'd be back to transferring damage. Since the update that changed the descriptions you can never get the effect from jack hammer when brick is out. Before I would hit jack hammer when brick was about to die. That way I still had mitigation and it never dropped. Now if you do that you have to wait until after brick dies. If you use it before he dies you never activate jack hammer, brick still dies and you end up with the standard 25% with no brick and jackhammer on cool down. Doing it after brick dies defeats the purpose as you still have to wait the now 2 seconds. Which also messes jack hammer up even more. With a 10 second cool down and 12 active time, a 2 second activation time means you have to hit it immediately of cool down. So you either are forced to have jack hammer AND upheaval, or get smacked in the face because you have to hit jack hammer ever 10 seconds and hope the boss isn't about to kill you. No more, "Wait one second to not get hit by this boss attack." I've used upheaval with jack hammer before. It's alright, but I only used it when kiting the bosses in wave and after 2 raids I removed it.

Hmm. I follow you, and I've not tested specifically, but from tanking raids using that technique (even A&B at CR 96 and only a little over 7k health), I never seemed as vulnerable as you describe. I would think running with essentially 25% mitigation, I would be getting killed all the time. Have you brought this up in Arkham or anywhere in the forums?

He and I discussed this before when that description "change" happened. I appreciate all of the hard work and knowledge 13igtyme has passed on, but the way he describes damage shift and jackhammer working was never supposed to work that way. The descriptions have always had some kind of note saying aftershocks/damage shift wouldn't work while the other was active.

Edit- I believe in alpha's old guide, if you can find the archive, it mentions this in there.

I've never thought it to be a big deal. Overrides happen all the time whether its powers or power interactions. The last one used would simply override the other, like almost everything else in this game. With both that change and this upcomming change earth tanks are going to have two options. Either use both jack hammer and upheaval or damage shift and a golem. Damage shift will be more constant, and yea a sorcery healer could keep the golem up with sustained damage, even before the revamp. Now it will be better, but the golems are still going to die from burst damage. Do you want the ranged and out of the way crystal with ~3k health or the melee brick with ~10k, who just loves to dance with the wave sentry. Keep in mind they barely have any defense. Then there's jack hammer and upheaval, of the time it takes to cast and aftershock them is 2 seconds you are forced to use them both. 2 seconds of not blocking every 6-10 seconds plus other moves/pulls/buffs/shield, yea sounds fun. Too bad we aren't at the mitigation cap while not blocking like ice is.

Yeah. Earth tanking end t5 content will feel like earth tanking at the beggining of t5 content again, unnecessarily harder. Not to mention t6 just around the corner.

I will say that Gems is very fast now (almost too fast, it seems). Pretty easy to get that up and running out of block. Hopefully, they will change some things. I honestly think they should just have full absorption applied on the cast itself. Forget about the aftershocks for tanking.

I think changes will be coming out of the wip thread, but when they will come is a mystery. Until then, earth tanking will be handicapped after u36. F'n shame.

Just posted in there.

When only after shocked once or twice you can be in and out of block faster than any shield in the game on live right now. Making it faster isn't going to change much unless you after shock it three times and get the damage attack.

spord and mepps are in the testing threads answering direct questions from people. i know we kinda got a response yesterday, but with them talking directly to players about hl and gadgets, might be a good idea for someone to bump up that earth tanking thread.

did anyone get a response?...im hoping they fix the issue....

From my understanding, they are on it.

this makes me smile

So in researching what Earth needs for the revamp, I was doing some testing. These are some of my results that I've posted in that thread.

Earthquake: does surprisingly good damage on the initial cast. Not up there with Temporal Vortex but close in overall damage. I still need to figure out how the AS damage compares to just doing the cast 4 times. I believe it causes the might damage to become precision damage , including the burning tick.
Debris Field: without PI, does approximately the same damage as CIrcle of Protection without the PI. With PI, Circle does 50% more damage and DF only 25% more damage. I am hoping this gets changed as TB does not hit as hard as Shard of Life either. So for similar moves, Earth is less power efficient. Note that this also takes into account Circle's Cooldown.
Entomb: encasement when it breaks does same damage to enemy around it. On a single Target, one cast of Earthquake does more damage.
Meteor Shower: does significantly lower damage than Bunker Buster (which we knew). MS does medium ticks and 1 larger. BB does 1 larger and 3 medium. The ticks are higher on BB than MS.
Rumble Crush: weaker might damage than TB

Good info. One thing to note is that Rumblecrush does double damage with Superstrength.

Yeah, but SS shouldn't be required to use Rumblecrush. That should be a bonus!

Agreed, but at least we have the option to benefit from it. Honestly, I was of the mind that the rock should drop from the sky until I saw how the manifesting and throwing of the rock was sped up with GU 36. Now, I want to keep it as is and use SS to improve it. You know as well as any that Earth has PP to spare in our builds. I'll also point out that TB doesn't hit nearly as wide an area as RC. RC will hit everything within max range from what I've seen, even if it's behind you.

The kicker here is it might be faster but on ps3/4 it sticks most the time if this is. It fixed it's still useless I believe PC never had the problem of it sticking... Or if so it wasn't as bad it was more of a too slow issue when casting for PC.... I agree the damage needs to also be buffed and sis should only be a bonus not a necessity to be on par with other 50% modifier pi set ups

I did notice RC was much faster on test as well. But still, 2 PP to do the same damage potentially as Shard of Life. Regardless of having the extra PP or not, for 350 power, one expects a certain amount of damage. So either they up the damage or decrease power cost.