Orb of Arion any good?

Done, done, done, and done. No issues, Had Fire Tanks in that mix too. Nature and Water healing powersets. No need to spam Priority Heals...ever. Maybe you're trying to adjust the OoA to your style and and not adjusting to how to optimally use it.

I main as Fire and I can count numerous times where that OoA artifact on a supporting healer has proven its effectiveness and giving me that relief I needed when needed. As a Fire Tank the most optimal use is NOT Blocking. Thats not how Fire works. I ONLY block for Skulls and Counters, other than that its built to be active. Need High hit counters to maintain its defense boost.

There’re different styles. From my perspective, Orb of Arion sucks since I’m a celestial healer. It might work better for other healing powersets. I bet it’s great on water since you can just cycle through or stack your shields and do double puddles. Arion can work well and I do have it maxed but myself, I do however find Menacles to be superior to Orb in most elites since you can be more reactive with your priority. Then again, I’m a celest with 1 burst and rarely 2 burst heals in the loadout depending on what tank I’m healing.

As far as fire tanking goes, it’s prone to 1 shots moreso than any other tank in the game. You can get through most elites and like 400+ skill points by not blocking with a troll’s 8 man and decent healer. In more difficult and chaotic elites where you have to pull and hold the adds away from the group without kiting them all over. Your 150k bar will be dropping in a matter of seconds and it’s extremely difficult to reliably heal yourself while holding the adds in one place and without blocking. Sure you will mitigate some damage with stoke and backdraft but it will continue to drop unless you are kiting away and healer is spamming HoTs. But from a healers perspective and the tanking perspective, if you pull too much without blocking and kiting away your bar will drop in a matter of seconds and especially if your healer is distracted or controlled. Sometimes you will even get one shot because of too many adds in conjunction with healer being distracted, and I’m sure the healer will be distracted since adds will be all over the room.

You have a huge health pool but no defense to actually keep it manageable as far as incoming damage goes. I was spec’d full health and 150 into dom with full Elite gear and mods, artifacts and wlite gear and self heals suck on a fire tank and so does its passive. You can solo most bounties without a healer and don’t even need a healer in normal raids because you can actually heal yourself. Elite is different story. I’m not sure if you are using bd but I did not, since you get hit for like 15k by the adds. I played a blocking tank and relied on stoke/backdraft and block button and occasional counters with immolation if knocked down. I also ran amazon deflect in place of bd and it worked great and manageable for a healer to pop heals. I did not care about losing 50% healiing while blocking since backdraft would still heal a full amount once I’m out of block which btw you could still spam out of block to keep adds together and on the ground for the group to actually kill all at once.

In my experience 100% defense is much much better than your poverty self heals with 50% bonus, the defense is just simply not there even with HoTs from your healer but even then, it may not be enough if you aren’t blocking. Keeping your health bar manageable for a healer to know when to heal you is what actually sucks about fire. Best healer for fire is water since you can actually not block but if you go in with electric in E and tank adds plus the boss it’s a rip for you. Solo bosses are actually easy without blocking since you can just counter; adds not so much... and you have to kite and bounce all over the map without blocking. Long story short, both can work depending on your healer and instance you are tanking. For me, blocking has worked way way better with any competent healer then it worked having to rely on the mechanic and powerset prone to 1 shots moreso than any other tank and that is because a lot of healers see your bar bouncing around so much that it’s impossible to know when or if you actually need any heals untill your bar drops in 2 seconds

Sorry for the necromancy, but now that I both have this artifact at 160, and have tried more recent content (just broke into Atlantis)... I'm liking it a lot less. During Titans and below, at 160, the artifact seemed really good. But in Atlantis, after the big Sea Beast wave and the torpedo attacks, it's REALLY hard to keep everyone alive. People get hit by the big AoE, I use Righteous Light and Consume Soul (the Celestial 8-person heals)... but those only bring the group up from 5-10% health up to maybe 50-60%, so I pop Renew (Priority Heal), and that brings one person to 100%... then one or two people die to the green-spit/adds/Rath-Pinwheel before my Admonish (4-person heal) or another Consume Soul come out.

I want to tell these Damage folks to block when they see the skull, or put some SP into health, but that would just make people mad at me.

Anyway, when I replaced the Orb of Arion, I found that after the hard-hitting Sea Beast AoE, I can pop the two 8-person heals, then "mash" on the Priority Heal to bring multiple people back up in health (first one hits the lowest health, next one hits the now new person with lowest health, etc.).

I think Orb of Arion is super good when you have proficient players that take a little personal responsibility in keeping themselves alive... but if you have a group where multiple people just take skull attacks to the face... not so much.

Atlantis raids are not Healer or Tank friendly to begin with. Just wait till you get to JLD, as long as your groups aren't populated with morons you'll see a difference with how much you use your priority heal.