Tank vs Tank - Comparing the Tank Powers

Very good read, i wil suggest this to any that's new to tanking.

Awsome!

GREAT post! Really informative and well researched!

I would say this last paragraph may be a bit misleading tho.. really in comparison to other powers with weak power-back/regen I don't know if Rage eats more power?

Although I guess that could be said of any support role that isn't using WM. Power is going to be devoured.

I did something like this I had to toss after the big differential CR change. You already saw my bit starting to chew on the CR side of this. I'm happy to throw a bunch of material you can absorb into your guide instead of chugging along to what I was thinking about next.

Unfortunately, I think you have to include the power use complexity you were already thinking about to make this completely fair. Right now Ice is getting the cheapest power budget of your examples. Its efficiency is actually even better than it looks here once you take that into account.

What I was thinking about is giving each tank up to 650 power per cycle and working out what they get for it. For most people that's probably far too much detail. Fire and Ice would both improve a good bit, Earth would improve a little. I'll make a case that Rage is already at that power use level if you look at how people actually achieve your example.

Power use

Ice: single power 300, two powers 600, very simple. Winter Ward is the only oddball at a higher 350, which is one reason I use that shield last in my rotation. (It's also been the most prone to weird taunting problems)

• Reflect 300
• Bitter Winds 300
• Shatter Restraints 300

Fire: single power 350, two powers 650+. Stoke Flames plus Burnout would work. I think that makes for the easiest math comparison that's still realistic. Burning Determination or Backdraft might work better than Burnout here, but their mechanics are a little too complicated to use for an example like this.

• Stoke Flames 350
• Burnout 300
• Burning Determination 330

Earth is so viable partly because of the cheapness of its tank powers. You can squeeze by with Gemstone and Fortify for only 395 power. 645 power actually throws down three useful ones. I don't quite know enough about Earth to work out how that would change things though.

• Gemstone Shield 245
• Fortify Golem 150
• Totem 250

Rage basic power use is completely in line with the other tanks; the two power rotation you're considering is only 375 power. Really you have to think about all these though, picking the cheapest crash canceller for reference here:

• Severe Punishment 150
• Remorseless Recovery 250
• Plasma Retch 225
• Ire 250

(Typo BTW: you're calling that one Remorseless Victory)

You mentioned constant pull buffing as one rage habit people get into. The other issue with Rage is layering in immunity to make sure you stay on schedule all the time. You can't allow yourself to be interrupted the way an ice or earth tank can or you'll lose the entire rage absorption mechanism. Either you use Ire etc. to make sure you're immune when it's Punishment or cancellation time again, or you combine a softener and try to cancel when you can too to reduce risk. SP + RR + PR, 625 power. SP + PR + Ire, also 625. The real problem is when rage tanks quite reasonably go for all four of these, so now you're up to 4 powers @ 875 total.

Two power ice version

Reflection and Bitter Winds stack. You can even stack Hard-Light Shield on top for three layers of shield at peak times.

The 70K one-shot section for ice is actually fine. You can't count on two shields being stacked at that point. The Bitter Winds one is weak enough and its cooldown long enough that it could easily be down at the point the big tick hits.

But the 85000 damage case in a raid situation will realistically go through two shields, so gobbling 600 power instead of the 300 each individual one does. That makes Ice look more like this when the two powers are Reflection and a second shield:

85000 Damage Over Time (Blocking)
Your damage mitigation goes all the way to 80%
Damage In: 17000
Reflection plus BW Shield: 7500 + 14500 = 22000
Net Damage In: 0 (5000 health still left in shields)

And like this when it's two regular Dom + Rest strength shields:

85000 Damage Over Time (Blocking)
Your damage mitigation goes all the way to 80%
Damage In: 17000
Two regular shields: 7500 + 7500 = 15000
Net Damage In: 2000
% health lost: 12%

With two powers in play Ice pulls just ahead of Earth's 16% here, at slightly more power used. Maybe an ending effective health would show things better than a remaining shield amount?

Improving the fire example

The fire case will also improve a good bit with the second power thrown in. I don't know Burnout off the top of my head like I do Ice's powers to show exactly how. Ditto adding Totem to Earth.

If the incoming heal was a lot stronger, going along with the idea the troll and other people in support roles aren't completely useless, then you'd have the fire example I think you really want here. Where Fire can still win big numerically is effective health after healing comes in. Note that in this updated case I just did, there's no healing of the ice tank to do. They end the 85K damage with their shields almost down and the healer can't do anything to improve that. That Circle of Protection they're standing in? Worthless to the ice tank until their shields all drop. Meanwhile, the fire tank is being buffed back up to their big health pool by every one of the healer HOTs as the adds beat them down, plus their own self-healing.

It doesn't fit into your example, but it's worth mentioning the other reason fire can does very well: countering. You get damage absorption after a counter proportional to your health, which I believe is 20% right now. Ice is wearing down its shields before that is applied, which makes the absorption part useless much of the time. But Fire is getting a portion of its amplified health pool each time that happens. If you think of that as being like a 20% health shield, you get a free 7030 damage with each counter. That's roughly as strong as a basic ice shield but with zero power consumption. Give your fire tank one counter per 85K add set because they blocked someone and they improve a lot relative to ice.

Thanks for linking the bug report for Gemstone. The more attention it gets the better.

As much as I love Gemstone Shield, I think you're overestimating it's importance to Earth tanking.

Great guide. Very well written and informative.

Just one thing, I thought Reflection's strength was 10000 + 100% Dominance. That would give it a strength of 13000, not 14500, in your examples.

Shield strength is resto+dom.

You're correct of course. I don't know why I thought it was 10000 + Restoration, but Dominance is the correct number to use according to what I can gather. The right thing to do would be to get on the test server, let venom thugs pound on my shield, and stare at the combat log. But it's Friday night and I'm lazy so I'll just go with what the Chilly Guide says.

The good news is that since this is the Oracle's Guides section and there's no timer on edits, I've updated the post to be correct.

The bad news is that I can now deny every being wrong to begin with. In fact, a week from now I'll probably edit this post to read "What are you talking about... the numbers look right to me!"

lol

Then maybe I'll take a screenshot of this post...

Not for Reflection, which is what I was talking about.

My fault.

No worries.

Added a preliminary Atomic section. Will update it again when I find out how much Spord reduced the healing of Proton Recovery, and when I do more experimentation with Proton Recovery and Gluon Aura together.

I have not updated the summary section, and will not until the power is finalized.

Also on tap is taking power use into account, as per CrazyArtBrown's excellent post. So far, taking power usage into account makes Earth and Rage look a bit better, and Fire quite a bit worse.

Ha! Yes. Just replace the woman with a sobbing man with whiskey and expensive vodka, then That's me

I agree and disagree. In a boss fight ok ice is the best, but if there are 4 or more rage is the best tank. I dont have to worry about rage crash because i have both immminity. So basically within the 10 seconds duration i use 2-3 powers. That keeps me perfectly fine. The only thing about rage is getting 1 shotter when fighting a single enemy. In happiness home elite rage was the only tank i saw that successfully tanked the first boss and the adds together with 126 cr. The best part about rage is if you have 6 or more adds you dont even need to block. Just walk around pop like 3 powers and wait to cancel rage crash.

I would call Ice the most forgiving Tank power to use. In the hands of a skilled player I tend to agree with you about Rage.

Yes very forgiving. Tanking stompa i need to block a lot. But with ice not really.

UPDATE: Updated Atomic with new Heal numbers. It's not easy being Orange.

UPDATE: changed atomic post to reflect the latest changes to Quark-Gluon Aura. For those who aren't following the very spirited feedback thread, the aura now conveys 10% damage absorption, except while blocking. This makes a big difference when not blocking, but in situations where you have to block, Atomic still under-performs a bit.

Also, I'm updating the scenarios to reflect 3 powers/6 combos instead of 2 powers/4 combos. I'm doubtful that most atomic tanks will be able to string together long strings of combos in hard content, but the power cost and healing returned of 3 combo powers roughly matches the power cost and strength of a normal Ice shield, so that seems to be the design point.

great thread! glad to see some humor mixed in with some lf the overwhelming math lol.

updated the atomic post but only with formatting to make it more readable. I'd actually appreciate feedback-- do people like to look at the code boxes better than the plain text with option1/option2/option3 format?