Hey fellow tanks, I wanted to put together a post to provide people with an understand of classes for tanking and the differences on what should be prioritized. I will put a full disclaimer that my preferred tanking is massive pulling and summarized by Carry abilities. Lastly it should be said that no matter the correct choice none of that matters unless you have FUN First lets start with the easy one here when to use sword and shield vs dual or two hander. You should ALWAYS be using a shield (Assuming you have access to one). Even if you are geared to the absolute maximum following a very simple formula will show why. Shield/Defensive stance = More Mobs = More damage = Faster and Easier dungeons. Follow up to the that the Same could be said about Defensive Stance VS Offensive Stance. A bit more of an actual explanation for this is because of the way that AOE damage scales in EQ2 "almost" every class has an ability that hits 8+ targets and the increase in your weapon damage which for even the people scaling the weapon damage is around 30% of your damage. This means if you can increase overall damage by 20% by pulling 2 more mobs vs an increase of 20% of your own damage its less overall for groups. Tank breakdown Guardian - Guardian has the best aggro control on a single target and has the easiest "High End" Tanking. They will take significantly less damage from harder targets. This is far more prevalent in Raid tanking but some Hard zones can be useful as well. Berserker - Berserker is tied for damage with a Shadowknight possessing incredible burst to 8-10 mobs. They have better sustained aggro on Very large packs like 50-100 mobs but that is minorly applicable without double healer combos and later expansions. Their healing is very negligible until the AA for TSO that gives them ward on hit. Monk - Monk has incredible avoidance pairing very well with a Chain healer for the Wards. The more defensive option of Bruce lee flavorings. Excellent versatility (can easily be a DPS class) and soloing utility Bruiser - Bruiser much like monk has avoidance as their mitigation. Bruiser has a lot of temp abilities that causes it to be very competitive for short fights with even the highest of dps classes. Sadly with a lack of defensive abilities tanking on the bruiser can feel a bit slower and or require a better healer. Paladin - Paladin has the most Recovery of all tanks being able to make up for a lackluster the "most" they also possess the strongest threat control ability Amends. This ability singlehanded handles the "Raid dps" people doing 4-5x everyone else. They are very solid at a variety of dungeons the only drawback is top end tanking the healing is borderline meaningless. Shadowknight - My personal favorite. The class that is substantially worst at mitigation receiving no unique Defensive abilities until Shadows line AA. The class also suffers from high play so upgrades tend to be Very expensive. That being said this tank has the highest damage possible in AOE from the tanks as well as the second highest healing possible. Combined with the immunities to status effects from Death March the SK signature ability. Breakdown of Gearing for Groups Shadowknight and Paladin - Follow the same template in order to reduce the amount of damage that is needing to be healed. This is very unintuitive however increasing your Ability Modifier is the best way to increase the survivability of these tanks. As your healing done is based off this modifier. Max health Block and Mit are all great off choices. Eventually Best in Slot will be Health + Block + Ability Mod. Bruiser, Monk and Guardian - All three of these tanks follow the Same template for being the best tank possible. You will want to stack as much Max Health + Block as possible and they stay that way until very late in the expansions for the TLE. Berserker - Berserker is the odd man out of the tanks. The best gear will be Health + Block but only AFTER you hit the Max threshold of your Ability Called blood rage. This use to be the signature ability of the berserker however after many nerfs its sadly a very minor buff but still greatly useful buff. The way you can determine the correct Ability Mod to use is take the ability Min+Max / 2 - ability you already have *.5. Race Choice Honestly the race selection matters very little I prefer liking the way my character looks however there should be a note that the Racial for Barbarians and Ogres are technically the best (they start wtih an incredibly small more sta then the other race like 10) But its more for the Stun immunity buff every 5 mins for 10 seconds Random Advice For all tanks Make sure that in KOS you pick up your AOE auto attack AA (berserker drops it after they get their Mythic) Become Friends with a provisioner for access to BruteFlesh Reductions and Sweetened Devourer blood infusion. These are straight up 4% Damage Reduction When Adornments come out don't Forget about % extra Riposte chance as well as Mending When blue Adorns come out don't sleep on Glyph of Restoration, Bergo healy healings, and the Stone guardian Set for group healing. Ending thoughts I will try to maintain this if this is helpful to people otherwise I will be open to any questions you have about tanking groups on my character Izaro on Varsoon. My profile on EQ2U is open if at any point you want to see what I am geared with or what AA I have selected. With that I hope to hear everyone's thoughts about a post like this and what they want me to touch base on if needed.
The only solice I have is in knowing SK's are trash raid tanks. They are and always have been the favored child of the devs.
It happens honestly. I will say the classes are still far more balanced outside of outliers then all the other MMOs. Buddy of mine is a heavy Wow fan boy he was talking about some classes doing x2 the others on single target for pure dps classes.
i play a zerker, and honestly the shar val has become very handy as a race for it. the pounce adds to their pulling aggro and detect weakness is very handy for seeing what you need to debuff. i should mention i view them as a light tank/heavy dps class more than a full tank.
Since this is posted in the TLE forums I am gong to assume it was meant for the TLE servers. There is so much misinformation I hope no one takes it for anything other than an editorial written by a player who doesn't really understand tanking.
it's not perfect sure, but add to it rather than a fairly redundant comment. critque it instead and give the correct info.
Or. The OP could just choose not to post something in a guide like format riddled with inaccuracies. It would take longer to correct and explain all the wrongs in that post than it did to write it.
While I stand by my information I will admit I don't know everything. I would be more then happy to run a group with you for you to show and or provide data that can be used to update this. Again I run groups on my Tanks and I see how other tanks perform so this is merely based upon my experience and data.
The underlying problem with your guide is much of what you portray as factual is nothing more than feelycraft based on your limited experiences. There are some helpful things included in your guide, unfortunately they are drowned out by all the blatant inaccuracies. Just grabbing a few off the top. "You should ALWAYS be using a shield" - not even close to true. "Guardian - Guardian has the best aggro control on a single target" - nope that's a Monk, but there is some variation depending on the expansion. "Berserker - Berserker is tied for damage with a Shadowknight" - subjective not factual. I think the point you were going for is they are both offensively designed, which is true. But how much damage different tanks do in different situations is wildly different. Your group comp, buffs and gear have a bigger impact than the class does.
There is only ever one scenario in which I believe that a shield can be left to the way side (unless you are a brawler of course) This is where the tankiness of your shield would not allow for more then one mob at a time however the loss of said shield would still allow you to handle the incoming damage. aka a pull limit of 1.25 without a shield but a pull limit of 1.75 with a shield. However on a generalist note I do not advice anyone to skip using a shield especially as a newer or less experienced player. When you talk about monk vs guardian on a single target as with everything in this game they are heavily subjective however I believe if you take shatterlands through DOV the guardian will beat a monk over all. Of course party comp gear and buffs matter an insane amount. The same tank can deal 600dps and 2.5k dps depending on the situation, however no one would read a write up that was 40+ pages. The advice here is if you are looking at the tank in a void.
Shield or not comes down to the tuning of the content, right now you don't even need a tank to do mass pulls in dungeons. So no, I am not limited to how much I can pull if I have a shield on or not. (assuming you have comparable items for either option) Guardian has more snaps, Monk generates more threat single target. Dragon Rage proccing 10 times a minute generates more threat than anything a Guardian can throw at a mob currently. Threat is not subjective, it is measurable. The usefulness of snaps is limited though. Why would anyone look at a tank in a void, but with the purpose of group content? Ignoring some information and focusing on other parts leaves people uninformed. You are right, no one would read a 40 page tank guide on a 20 year old game. But that is not a reason to make factual statements that are just inaccurate, rather than just general tips like "Berserker is an offensively designed tank that performs well with large pulls in a similar fashion as the SK"
No one is more surprised than I am to find out that I agree with Zenji I don't play a tank, but I heal them, so therefore have to have a pretty good clue of what they do - sorry, but your guide is not accurate, for the reasons that Zenji states. At least for the current timeline spot the server is in. Perhaps the guide is helpful to a very new player, for very basic basics - but to someone who is tanking groups, or high-end content, not so much.
Again I got all my data to support my position so you are free to disagree. None the less I appreciate your replies as you took the time to formulate them.
I have solo'd or tanked all of the group content currently on Varsoon. ...my main takeaway/question from this is... How do I equip a shield on my scout pet to make tanking easier than it already is?
specifically talking group tanking the only "hard" encounter are to not pull to many second-round black spiders in tables and forgetting to anti stun on cazel. Pallies have absurd HP pools and can heal themselves very well but their agro is too dependent on amends target. Guards can take a lot of damage and have really good aoe and single target agro but fall short on the HP mark. Monks are baller but when an avoid check fails, it's funny. SK's put out some nice dps numbers but are squishy, fine for heroics. zerker is somewhere between guard and SK, I'm about to betray my guard to zerker for fun and can comment on that later...A good warrior will duel wield, especially in group content. Macro in a shield on incoming. Raid content is different.
Zenji is right, monks indeed generates way more threat single target than guardians (dragon rage is just too strong), not to mention that brawlers do get snaps in KoS with Mantis Leap which is a better version of reinforcement, then you get Reprimand (single target taunt on steroids) in EoF and then you get Peel (hate + snaps + force mob to target you rolled into one) in RoK. This not even a close call lol
