The Tanks are back! Atomic! Earth! Ice! Fire! and Rage! All our beat-down stars have been revamped and are back for another round or torture and torment. They’ve moved up from T6 to T7, and are ready for New Genesis Now! Well… they think they’re ready. Some of them might be ready. Can they make it through the first boss fight with only Drunken Healer and Useless Troll for support? Well… let’s take a look. The new ground rules We’re now CR116 tanks with beta mods and a handful of skill points. Basically, we have CR116 Gear Base stats + affinities + 1 skill point in each of Health, Dom, and Restoration: Defense: 5000 Health: 9427 + 320 (affinity) + 400 (skill point) = 10147 Restoration: 1719 + 32 + 80 = 1830 Dominance: 1719 + 32 + 80 = 1830 Power: 4306 + 240 = 4546 Lots of things have changed with the revamp: Power is now a thing, and we’ll be paying attention to power use as we look at each power set. Pulls now override most other control effects, and all the power sets now have long range pulls. All abilities no longer counter, and most are no longer vulnerable to being countered. Shields, as we’ll see, are very effective under the revamp, and every power set now has a usable shield. Your base Defense stat is doubled while blocking, and all tank power sets now get a Defense buff when not blocking. You don’t absolutely need the Fortified Block Home Turf Mod—you now have a choice to use Fortified Assault, which gives a defense buff while not blocking. Base DPS gear at CR116 gives about 4000 defense, which should provide 15% damage mitigation. Rounding the base Defense of CR116 Tank gear gives us 32% mitigation. Penryn and I spent a long time working out how Defense works under the Revamp. I'll link to his explanation when I can find it. For the Tanking side of things, I’ll add more details in this guide. OK. So Here's the Story.... We’re now a fresh CR116 Tank attempting NGN with an at-CR Pug Group. Don’t laugh. OK Laugh, and get it out your system. In this raid, we have to deal with 3 “Oh No!” scenarios: 40,000 burst damage when Ingrid jumps up into the air, spins around and does the OH-NO-BLOCK-BLOCK-BLOCK Skull Attack of Doom that kills every DPS in the group. 60,000 damage over 12 seconds from the boss’ channel attack that nobody wants to lunge and stop. 99,000 damage over 12 seconds when the idiot troll puts the device in the wrong place, causing a small hoard of adds to spawn while Ingrid is already beating on you. Those who enjoyed my original guide will notice the third scenario is new. Things changed in the revamp and I felt I needed to capture the really super-stressful moments that come up in Elite Raids or Survival Mode. In the first two cases, we’ll limit ourselves to using just 1 or 2 abilities. In the final one, we’ll use every trick we have to survive the onslaught. Once again we have with us a lazy, mostly useless solo troll -- so we can't spam multiple powers to survive. With a couple of exceptions, we'll limit ourselves to just 1 power-- and a competent healer who's distracted by her baby or her glass of chardonnayfrom time to time. Similar to last time, our Chardonnay-swigging healer puts out a 1,000 health burst heal during each attack, and our Troll sits and stares. Does any Tank make it out alive? What's better? Health? Dom? But… I have a lot of skill points! How should I spend them? Stats Matter now. Which means skill points matter and ignoring them is no way to write a guide. For each Tank, I’ll look at the case where you have 150 skill points to spend see what the pros and cons are for each build. So here they are: Bite My Nuke! Tanking with AtomicLet’s Rock! Revamped EarthJust Chill Dude. Ice TankingFlame On! Attempting to tank with FireWe’ll Burn You All! Rage Tanking under RevampReserved for a Tank Power that will probably never comeDefense Notes (Coming Soon)Skill Points and Mods (Coming Soon)Iconic Abilities, Movement Abilities, and other Tips and Tricks (Coming Soon)other notesSummary: The War of the Tanks will not be won by Love...
Stay Cool with ICE Ice gets a 65% defense buff when not blocking just for being in Tank stance. As a secondary mechanic, using any Shield ability grants ICE ARMOR, which gives an extra 35% defense. This brings your total bonus to 100% -- exactly the same as blocking. ICE can choose the Fortified Assault neck mod to bring their defense bonus to 110% when active, or the Fortified Block mod for 110% when blocking. Shields are your thing as an Ice Tank, and you should know that shields have changed under the Revamp. ALL shields in the game now break after taking damage equal to a Shield Multiplier*150% Dominance*125% Restoration. You've also lost a shield. Bitter Winds is now a melee damage ability. Gone also is Reflection’s super 10,000 bonus—it’s now your medium shield. In is Winter Ward, with a roughly 2.4x multiplier. Shatter Restraints remains a breakout and a shield. Pulls/Immunities Inescapable Storm remains your max-range multi-target pull. Resonating Gale creates an AOE pull centered on what you target much like Quantum’s Singularity. Shatter Restraints is your breakout, and is also a shield. Supercharges: Hibernation—heals, shields, and taunts for a nice break in a fight. Ice Elemental increases defense and damage for a more active supercharge option. Effective Health Ice is our baseline for effective health—which is how much total damage you can soak up. In the neighborhood of 30k without a shield. 40K Burst One Shots are no longer supposed to be a thing under revamp. Ice Tanks certainly have no trouble at all surviving big bursts. With your high defense any shield will be enough to protect you from most high-damage attacks. You can see how strong Winter Ward is now compared to Reflection (which is your "normal" shield now). 0 Damage in with Winter Ward-- our Healer is happy and can keep playing with her cat. But it's even better if I block, right? When you block, you lose your Tank Defense bonuses, but your Defense gets doubled. Giving us: If it looks the same.... that's because it is! When Ice Armor is active Ice Tanks have the same Defense whether blocking or not. You can increase your Defense while blocking with the Fortified Blocking white mod, or you can choose to use the Fortified Assault mod instead and get the Defense buff while active. If you choose Fortified Assault, your Defense stat actually goes down while blocking. Here's what things look like with a Fortified Mod: FOR ALL THE REST OF THE ICE EXAMPLES, WE ASSUME FORTIFIED BLOCK OR ASSAULT Buffed Defense is 10.500 from here on out. 60K DOT OK… so we can laugh off a burst, but how about higher sustained damage over time? Let’s try Reflection or Winter Ward and see how we do with a “standard” shield and also with our new extra-strength one. The staff starts to spin… and here comes that stunning channel attack! Yeah… Ice Tanks everywhere have already noticed that Winter Ward is Awesome. With this ton of incoming damage, we’ve lost 74% of our health though. We’ll be asking our healer to put her glass down and help us out. If we tried to survive this using Reflection, we’re already knocked out and hoping our useless troll has a shield ready to do a pick-up, and screaming into our microphone “Somebody lunge the freakin boss!” Can Drunken Healer come to our rescue? If we used Winter Ward we still have some fight left… if we tried to get by with just Reflection there’s just no way. Our 1000 point burst heal restores about 10% of our total health—and that’s a fairly strong burst under revamp. Asking a healer to restore more than 30% of our health every 12 seconds might be asking too much over the course of a raid. 60K DOT - stacking Fortunately, all shields stack well under the revamp. The rule of thumb is that damage gets applied to the shield that will result in the least total damage for you—so basically you should always max out the protection of every shield that gets stacked. Our troller tells us “Dude he just broke out of my stun, so he’s immune for like another 3 seconds. Sorry dude”. Let’s see how we do stacking each of our shields with Shatter Restraints. Stacking another shield with Winter Ward is probably overkill in a typical fight. Stacking our other two shields is just barely enough to keep us alive—if we used a Fortified neck mod or can count on our healer to not be AFK. Otherwise it’s a KO. Ice Tanks are probably going to want some crowd control to cut down on incoming damage while Winter Ward is on cool down. Each Shield costs 200 base power or 789 at CR116, so 2 of them is about 34% of our total power pool, which is probably fine. 99K OHNO “IF YOU DON’T KNOW THIS RAID DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING! NO NO TROLL! PUT THE GIZMO DOWN! NO NOT THERE! NOT THERE!” The adds come in… and we pull out all the stops and stack all three of our shields. That’s 50-60% of our power pool, which is quite a chunk, but doable as long as our troll has used any ability at all in the past 20 seconds. Our high Defense with either Fortified Block or Fortified Assault cuts down the massive 99k damage in to about 32k. Our 3 stacked shields can only get the damage down to 10277—just a hair over the 10147 we get from gear, affinities, and our lonely skill point. Fortunately, if our healer helped out between gulps of Chardonnay we’re still up and fighting. The bad news is that all our shields are on cool down, and we’re down to about 9% of our original health. SKILL POINTS So how about skill points? 100 skill points in health brings our total to 12961—a 27% increase. With high health we survive the mega-assault all on our own, with about 20% of our Health remaining. After the burst heal that goes up to 28%, an 8% increase instead of 10 because our total health increased but our total healing didn’t. How about DOM/Resto? 150 skill points spent in either of these is a 30% increase. Dom does more for our shields, but Resto helps also! Dominance results in us walking away with just under 40% of our health left after all is said and done. If we go Restoration, we’re doing about the same as health after our shields, but we’re better off % wise with our healer’s help thrown in. Ice does significantly better with high DOM than with Health here. Surprisingly, Resto is almost as good. Summary Ice still has a shield for every occasion, and you still need to never be without one. Your shields vary a lot in strength now though, and as an Ice Tank you need to be aware of that. Ice does best with Dominance. After that, Restoration is slightly better than Health. Since your Defense is exactly the same whether you’re blocking or not it doesn’t matter much which HT trinket you choose.
Nuke ‘Em ‘till They Glow with Atomic! Spord originally designed Atomic to be an active Tank power set—no blocking or turtling required. With the revamp you now get a 90% defense buff just for showing up. Quark-Gluon Aura continues to act like a partial shield in Tank stance, absorbing 25% of incoming damage. Ability Combos (not the initial cast, only the combo) heals you for 40% of your Dominance. On top of that, each attack heals you for 2% of your total health when your Aura is active (procs about once per second). So less defense, but a partial shield and lots of healing. The biggest change for Atomic under the revamp is that combo abilities no longer counter—so if you want to block break or interrupt you’ll need to stop healing yourself and use a weapon attack. Can Atomic keep up with our Ice Tank? Pulls/Immunities Atomic Reorganization is a teleporting pull at max range. Atom Splitter is a teleporting mid-range AOE pull/stun that can be used to combo and pulls and stuns again with each combo (making it a fan favorite). However it’s about 30% slower than Atomic’s other combos, which means less healing per second. Unleash Antimatter is a damaging/knockdown break-out that’s also a short cut to QG-Aura. Supercharges Energize used to be a cheap instant Aura Shortcut with a small burst heal. It’s now a 50% supercharge that’s a very strong heal but obviously can’t be used as often. Mass Density remains an effective group shield with super-cool visuals. 40.000 Damage Burst Yeah one-shots are still a thing-- unless you have your Aura going, which is also still a thing. You can't heal yourself if you're already knocked out. Of note here is how strong Density is. Can Atomic make it by blocking? It’s not secret you can block through one-shots. But Atomic still does much worse. Unless you have Density going, you should be very, very careful of blocking. The Block Button is NOT your Friend. 60K DOT Yeah, your aura is still a thing. Without it, there’s no strategy that ends with you on your feet. With it, you can just barely hang on. Unless you’re relying on Proton Remedy, which is pretty weak now. Ice needed to stack shields or use Winter Ward to make it through heavy damage over time, and Atomic is in the same boat. Nothing in your arsenal performs quite as well as Winter Ward though. Can we just block?It's OK actually!... Wait?!?!?!? WHAT AM I DOING BACK IN THE WATCHTOWER? The only thing that could get our healer to put down her Chardonnay was the option to kick you. And put it down she did. With heavy Damage over time not even Density can save you. Blocking is definitely not your thing. Atomic was designed to be an active Tank, and that hasn’t changed with the revamp. If it seems like I'm beating a dead horse, I just saw an Atomic Tank trying to block to save themselves in an Alert this week. 99K OHNO! Since we’re not doing as well as Ice so far, your heard should drop into the pit of your stomach when you hear the DPS say “Just put the gizmo anywhere and we’ll burn everything down!!” Singularly our strategies aren't as good, but when we put them all together we exceed the performance of Ice stacking all its shields. How we do here really depends on how many combos we can get in over 12 seconds, which in turn is going to depend on which combos you’re using. Remember Atom Smasher is way slower than TCE or Beta Surge. The above assumes we can still get in 6 combos and 92% heals. If you get countered and can't pull that off, things go south fast. Since combos use less power in Tank stance, your power use here is about 800 power spread out over 12 seconds. High Health Should I just throw my 100 skill points into Health? But everybody says Dominance! With high health we get a small additional benefit from stronger 2% heals, but with Dominance maxed out we’re now doing better than an Ice Tank. Atomic loves Dominance—more than any other Tank. So Atomic performs about the same as Ice. A little better if you can combo more or have really high Dominance.
HOT or NOT? Fire Tanking! Traditionally abused by the Dev Team like the proverbial red-headed step-child, Fire has been through many iterations through the years. In its last, most palatable incarnation, it had 60% healing buff, a 60%+Dom (approximately 100%) health buff, and a 22% restoration buff, and it still had issues. Lack of defense made shields less useful, and the need to constantly block to survive, plus the lack of a ranged pull, made it a somewhat unpopular power set to tank with. Enter the Revamp. Fire gets the biggest health buff of any Tank (more on Rage later) at 50%. There’s also a 50% healing buff and a 30% defense buff while not blocking to enable you to be more of an active tank. On top of that, hitting burning enemies gives an extra defense buff of up to 20% (for a total of 50% extra defense while not blocking). Can Fire’s mix of High Health, Healing, and Defense match the other Tanks? Pulls/Immunities Backdraft is still an AOE pull with a large burst heal. Don’t leave the lair without it. Engulf is your new full range multi-target pull that sets things burning and juggles at close range, making it an extremely useful ability. Burnout is your sole breakout, and it’s also a decent burst heal. Supercharges Reignition is a huge burst heal now. Eternal Flame is still the extremely strong healing over time that die-hard Fire Tanks know and love. Effective Health With just your health and defense buff, you have 18% more effective health than an Ice Tank. Though Fire Soul isn’t as useful as Ice Armor, you still have 13% more effective health with Fire Soul than a fully buffed Ice Tank. When you block, your effective health goes through the roof, fully 50% higher than an Ice Tank with either fortified blocking or Fortified Assault. These are very strong numbers. To start out with, Fire looks to be an extremely effective Tank. Dare I say it? OP even. 40K Burst So far so good! Immolation looks to be a decent shield ability. If you’re using fortified assault and Fire Soul you’re doing only a little worse than Ice with its medium strength shield. If you don't use Immolation, you need to block through the one-shots. No huge deal. Since Burning Determination heals for each time you’re struck, we have to use Stoke Flames for healing. When we block our shield becomes way more effective, though Stoke Flames doesn’t help us so much because we lose our 50% healing bonus. 60K DOT Since Atomic and Ice have the option to use Fortified Assault, and Fire now gets a decent defense buff, can we get away with being active against the adds when our Idiot Troll inevitably summons a horde of them? Fire’s extra Defense buff from Fire Soul is a bit tricky to get and keep—you need to set enemies on fire, and then hit them a bunch of times while they’re burning. It only seems to last about 6-8 seconds before it starts to decrease, so you’re basically restarting it with every set of adds, and it’s very possible to lose it in the middle of the fight. We’ll ignore that and pretend it’s always at max…. Ewww. No, really… Ewww. Like Ice with its weak shield, we’re not barely dead, we’re SOLIDLY dead. Unlike Ice, we don’t have a Winter Ward type option that can keep us alive while we fight. If we want to live through this medium-hard scenario while active, we HAVE to stack abilities in all cases, and in most cases multiple abilities. We need to add either Stoke Flames or both Backdraft and Burnout into the mix, which will use up 50-60% of our power every 12 seconds. Probably not something you can sustain for too long given our typical Pug Solo Troll. Fire’s traditionally done really well blocking though. In fact, the rest of your PUG group is screaming "BLOCK! BLOCK! BLOCK!!" at you. Maybe we can just block our way through this? Hey that’s looking better. If we have Immolation ready we’re doing about as well as Ice with stacked shields or Atomic with a few combos. As long as we don’t get countered. It’s also worth pointing out that none of our options do as well as Winter Ward. Another thing to look at here is that we're being healed less efficiently when we block since we lose the 50% healing bonus. 99K OHNO Time for the real stress test. Our Trial by Fire (yeah…. I said it). Can our Fire Tank survive if we pull out all the stops? Can we spam heals like crazy and make it through the adds and boss when our team mates have screwed things up yet again? Doesn’t look like it. Even blocking, with a healer’s help we lose 95% of our health—worse than any other tank (so far). Active Tanking just looks plain awful: even when you stack Immolation, Burning Determination, Stoke Flames, and throw in Backdraft—which is more abilities than we let the other tanks use—you still don’t even come close to surviving. And how much of our power are we <ahem> burning through in our vain attempt to survive? Yeah. We just went through 92% of our blue bar and still couldn’t make it. Note: there’s more heal abilities available (Wildfire, Burnout, Absorb Heat) but using them would push power consumption above 100%. And we still wouldn’t make it. High Health Is there a point to spending skill points? Besides buying might/power and becoming a gizmo-moving, add-summoning DPS? 100 skill points in Health means we can survive the most grueling of the tests even using a Fortified Assault strategy. Blocking—either with or without Fortified Block—also becomes viable. High Restoration Even 100 skill points can only just barely make Fortified Assault work. Blocking we do only a little bit better, because we heal less efficiently when blocking. Resto is valuable for a Fire tank, but it’s not as good as focusing on health. Summary When we look at Health and Defense, it looks as though Fire is the best of the tank power sets. But the self-heals are quite weak and overall I think that’s what brings Fire down to the bottom tier of tanking. Block. A lot. And have lots of skill points. Or maybe you saved that free respec token that they gave out last summer?
Rock On! Earth Tanking Earth has two separate Tanking Mechanics—Aftershocks and Pet (Brick Golem). In the past they produced identical results and were equally viable. As with the other Tank powers, the Revamp changes a lot. With the Revamp, Earth gets a Defense bonus of 65% of Dominance just for showing up. The damage absorption of Aftershocks is gone—replaced with a medium strength (55%) Defense buff that stacks with the Dominance-based buff. When Golem is summoned, Aftershocks does not convey any Defense buff at all, but 2/3 of all incoming damage is transferred to your Brick. Pulls/Immunities Earthen Grip is now a multi-target pull. Epicenter remains a mid-range AOE pull. Either is viable for most content. Soothing Sands is now your Breakout. Unstoppable is now a usable-while-controlled supercharge builder. Supercharges Envelope shields you, heals you, taunts enemies, and powers up your Golem if you have one summoned. You really only have 1 good Tank Supercharge as Earth. Creative players will look to Iconic Supercharges as there are a few interesting ones there. Effective Health I still don’t have hard numbers for Brick’s health. The below numbers assume a 10,000 health Brick (about the same as you). 40K Burst Like all the Tanks, you don’t have any trouble at all surviving a short but large burst of damage. Here we don't even Aftershock Gemstone Shield all the way to survive. Blocking performs even better, but our Healer's getting bored, so we'll try not to block too much. Don't worry though, an idiot DPS has predictably picked to the gizmo and is wandering around aimlessly with it, so Adds are certainly on the way... 60K DOT Here things start to get messy. For Golem Tanking, we’re only using Gemstone shield un-aftershocked and it looks like we’re doing ok-- if brick can actually absorb the 16000 damage we're trying to transfer. For Aftershocks Tanking, we have to aftershock Gemstone Shield twice in order to survive. That’s not too bad… at least we don’t have to stack lots of abilities to survive. OK. So Earth isn't looking so bad with Fortified Assault. Does that mean things go south when we block? If we make a habit of Aftershocking Gemstone Shield twice and then Block, that's looking like a pretty good strategy for the Raid. If you have Brick out your Healer stopped paying attention to you and is trying to heal the DPS who insists on doing melee combos right next to you. If you don't have Brick out, you're "only" doing about as well as Ice with Winter Ward. Gemstone Shield is awesome. 99K OHNO Lots of Earth Tanks just can’t wait to use Fortified Assault with Aftershocks Tanking!! Can we assault our way through the stress test? Aftershocks is so bad it’s… shocking. (Yeah… I said it.) Staggering as it is to say, we’re doing worse than a Fire Tank. I don’t think Brick can actually take 20k Damage in at CR116, but even if it can we still don’t make it through. Earth did better than any other tank so far, but is looking pretty useless once Gemstone Shield breaks. You can’t Aftershock and block at the same time, so nothing can help that mechanic. Does summoning a Brick Golem and Turtling work at all? That would be a big, fat, YES! Even if we don’t use Fortified Block, we’re doing way better than Ice or Atomic. Even if we don’t use Fortified Block and limit Brick to 10,000 health we’re doing way better than any other tank so far. Earth with Brick Golem is like Fire pre-revamp: weakish when active but very, very strong while blocking. High Health 100 Skill points put into Health brings us to 12,921 total Health at CR116. That makes a big difference for and Earth Tank. Seemingly no amount of health can save Aftershock Tanking. Higher health makes blocking look that much better-- I'm not going to bother to show the blocking numbers with high health because they're already looking so good. High DOM Earth does not benefit much from Restoration. 100 skill points in Dominance makes our Assault Defense just a hair lower than Ice. With enough skill points in Dominance, Earth can actually exceed the defense of any other Tank while not blocking. Golem Tanking is now in-line with an Active Ice Tank with low skill points. Nothing can save active Aftershock Tanking. 65% of your Dominance just doesn't amount to that much. Choose Health over Dominance every time. Summary Earth is a mixed bag. Under easy circumstances, active tanking with Aftershock tanking is pretty viable… but it lacks options within the power set to mitigate damage. After you’ve Aftershocked Gemstone Shield to the max you’re out of tricks. Hard Light Shield is a must on your load out bar if you insist upon giving it a try. Brick Tanking, on the other hand, is quite strong if you block a lot. Until Brick dies, in which case you’re just another Aftershocking Tank screaming for heals.
Rage: Feel the fury! Big changes came to Rage with the Revamp. Rage’s unlimited stackable health buff is gone, replaced by a flat 20% buff. You can increase it further by attacking and keeping the hit counter high, but only up to 1x your Dominance. Rage’s unlimited healing is also gone. Now when Severe Punishment is active, only 75% of incoming damage is healed. This lasts only 8 seconds, with a 12 second cooldown instead of 10. Clearly the Devs have taken a chain to Rage and eviscerated it (heh—see what I did there?). So is there anything good left at all? How can we possibly survive? Well… there is a 50% defense buff in tank stance. And Severe Punishment or Remorseless Recovery have an “Enraged” mechanic that adds an extra 50% on top of that whenever either is active. So we can match Ice’s defense, but without all the shields. Also Rage still has a few abilities that heal based on damage out. Can that possibly be enough to make Rage not suck? Pulls/Immunities Ragebringer remains the max range multi-target pull, though since you don’t get per-enemy buffs anymore there’s no reason to spam it. Eviscerating Chain is a single-target pull, a 35% finisher, and a Rage Crash Canceller. Ire is now your group breakout. It also Reduces Rage Crash damage by 50% and gives a small heal. Supercharges Vindictive is Rage Mode without the crash, though it’s less attractive now that it only heals 75%. Infuriate grants a crit damage buff for you, plus increased control immunity and healing based on damage out for you and your whole team. Effective Health Without using any abilities, Rage has the second lowest health of any Tank. Despite the lack of stacking, Rage’s effective health can get nearly as high as Fire when you increase your health based on Dominance by getting the hit counter up, and use Fortified Assault Though we’ve seen that high effective health didn’t save Fire under stress. 40K Burst Like most Tanks, you don’t have much trouble with burst damage. Your health doesn’t explode to unlimited as you use lots of abilities, but assuming you can get enough hits in to buff your health by 40% of your Dominance (which isn’t too hard for Rage) you’ll survive without a shield and heal back enough health to keep going. If you *DO* use your shield, you’re doing really well—as well as rage mode with the crash cancelled. Note that the Defense Buff from Severe Punishment only lasts 8 seconds, so timing is important there. We’re doing great as an active Tank… what happens when we block? Oh hey! What’s going on here!? If you’re turtling too much and aren’t active, you can lose the %Dominance health buff, and your total health drops to 12,176. If you pop your shield turtling works great. If you have your health buffed to the max and then block just through the one-shot, that’s fine also. But if you lose your extra health buff, small though it seems now, you’re vulnerable to a one-shot. Fortified blocking can’t save you here: the numbers above where you wind up knocked out are WITH Fortified block, the numbers where you survive are actually all without it. Blocking works well for a Rage Tank, but only in moderation. 60K DOT Blocking through one-shots can work for Rage. Blocking over time? Not so much. This is starting to look as bad as Fire, unless Redirected Rage is available. How bad does Active Tanking look? Whoa. That looks TERRIBLE. Even Redirected Rage can’t save you when you’re active. Severe Punishment can, but not if you crash, and you’ll lose 70% of your health best case. Note that the Defense buff from Severe only lasts 8 seconds—for the remaining 4 seconds of our 12 second window you have only Rage’s 50% innate buff (60% with fortified Assault). Remorseless Recovery lets you keep your Defense Buff for all 12 seconds of its cooldown, but is still looking Remorselessly useless. Those kinds of numbers are bound to make the Rage Tanks out there mad. Yeah, I said it. So what’s a poor ticked-off Rage Tank to do besides rant on the forums? Well… Ice had to stack abilities to get by when Winter Ward wasn’t available… let’s see what Rage can do with 2 abilities. When put together, Rage’s abilities are incredibly potent. Even in the worst case, where you crash, you’re doing better than any other Tank. 99K OHNO OK here it comes. The Adds! Ingrid! More Adds! Will someone tell the Troll how this mechanic works? Let’s pop our shield and either Remorseless Recovery, Severe Punishment, or both, and see how we do. What the…. OK unlike any other tank, Rage has multiple ways of surviving when things get worse than bad. So if we use only Remorseless Recovery and our shield we don’t make it. But if we’re using Severe Punishment and Redirected Rage we’re doing better than any other Tank (including a blocking Earth tank with Brick) as long as we don’t crash. If we use all 3 abilities we lose less than half our health if we don’t crash, and since Remorseless mitigates Rage Crash, we do better than any tank but Earth even in the case of a crash. Looks like you’re ready to solo the rest of this fight. High Health 100 Skill points in Health is worth about 10% in performance to Rage High DOM Despite the 20% health buff, 100 Skill points in Dom is a big win for Rage. A stronger Redirected Rage, more healing from Remorseless Recovery, and a bigger Health Buff from the hit counter make for a near 20% improvement. With lots of Dominance, and without a crash, Rage numbers look downright stupid good. Summary When I first looked at the changes I thought Rage would be miserable. Instead it is, by the numbers, far and away the strongest Tank power. Keep the Rage Trinity of Redirected Rage, Remorseless Recovery, and Severe Punishment on your load out bar, and Rage on.
Summary Here's Defense, Health, and Effective Health of each Tank Power set: More importantly, here's how each performs under pressure: As usual, under-performers are in red, with the strongest showings in green. In general: If you want to play an active Tank with Fortified Assault, you should spec into DOM (except for Fire, which should spec into Restoration). If you want to play a less active, Blocking Tank, spec into HEALTH (except for Ice, which should always spec into DOM). Rage performance gets quite a bit worse when you crash, even if it's mitigated. Get used to playing Rage before jumping into hard content. Know what you're doing if you want to play Fire. Final Verdict:
I prefer other drinks than wine while healing. Read the ice part amd waiting for thenrest. Love it so far
Atomic is up now. All the others are done math-wise, but I haven't finished writing them up. I'll try to get a new write-up done every day over the long weekend. You may need to wait a bit for the Summary and Iconic posts though.
Only truly interested in fire lol. One thing though, you say the miltiplier for shields is 150% dom, 125% resto. Typo or is the 112.5% for resto in the tooltip wrong?
The tooltip isn't wrong. Shields are: 150% dom * 112.5% resto * <a multiplier> The "a multiplier" part is different for each shield. Immolation's multiplier is 1.5ish. I should probably list the shield multipliers explicitly. I'll get around to it eventually. Want to finish the rest of the write-ups first.
I know you haven't yet covered your iconic abilities section but when you get there it will start to skew all the details and the tests performed for powers like Atomic and Rage will far much farther behind Ice primarily and to a degree fire because of their ability to smoothly run amazon deflection. Atomic and Rage can't fully benefit or in some cases even run that ability because of the time dropping the aura and needing a shortcut on cooldown or the supercharge which is a waste and rage will have to work around their rage crash windows.
The Iconic Abilities. Yeah, they're a thing. But.... They have LONG cooldowns. 30 Seconds in some cases. Can't use a 30 second Cooldown ability every 12 seconds. That having been said, the Devs know they're there and, yes, they assume they are in use.I personally feel that the cool downs make them more like supercharge abilities and less like normal abilities-- they're awesome to be sure, but if you can't use them every 12 seconds they'te not going to make one power set demonstrably better than another.
