hi As someone who love playing solo or with my merc. I decided to ask question for me is the hardest part or playing my toon. I want tips on holding aggro with my zerker. I see there are some AA I can use and some items are available to increase aggro. When I am in group as the puller what assist way to hold aggro when I in a group that has a lot dps like wizards. Should my gear and my CA be enough to keep mobs attacking me? What gear and stances work the best? ATM I dont have the best gear I want which be full set of potent armor with other good gear. You can see my link and tell me I can do to make it perform better or what gear I should be trying to acquire. Be kind as I just to be better tank looking for some guidance.
Take the time to read your buffs... mainly your mythical buff, insolant gibe and aggresive defense. Once you read those, take that shield off and throw it away. Either dual wield or get a nice 2 hander. Other than getting punched in the face, all you have for hate generation is DPS. With the way encounters currently work with new tank dynamics, you can get away with more offensive armor. Using full defensive gear is in no way required for all but the hardest of content, which you are in no way ready for. Once you start collecting potant gear, keep only Mitigation increase, and WDB, A full set of each. Any thing with block chance, go ahead and mute/exchange it. All you care about is mitigation. Then as you gain experience in each zone you can learn how much defensive you can drop for more offensive power. Ultimatly, if you arent keeping up with all but the T1 dps, you're not going offensive enough. In a general pick up group, since I can control the fights, I often top the parses, both dps and heal.
(19:30) All: 8623255 Ranger2-Exploit Weakness-2539963 ranger D 2427131 H 0 ranger D 2060747 H 0 dirge D 1622275 H 2223 dirge D 1139816 H 1512 Droll D 1072844 H 49991 warden D 300442 H 36925 A zonewide from Fabled vaults. Not a very efficient group make up, but as you can see I'm doing equivilant dps of the bards, and half of what the rangers did, I also out healed the druid, hence the lack of need for silly things like shields. Agro was never an issue even when I was completely stun locked with 40+ mobs in the pile. Every time a mob hit me, it hated me more, even if i couldnt hit it.
Alright that for the help Droll. You have mostly pvp gear I believe but from a PM I got from someone to me and your comments I started looking for potent armor to get with mitigation specs and heres set I found so that my goal to get this set and gemmed unless something better comes along. As they say picture worth a thousand words and posting the armor here to see if what I should be trying to acquire.
Currently I only use the big pieces as defensive mit armor. Helm, BP, and legs. The rest is offensive weapon damage bonus. That is more than enough for any group zone up to and including labs/halls. I will go full offensive for hive and highkeep. So be sure you are collecting some offensive armor as well. On a side note... I use BG armor because it is currently x4 tokens. Thus I can have a gemmed dreadnaught piece much faster than I could get enough etyma to pay for 3 green gems. Stats are exactly the same. I was hoping to collect more energized, but as of yet I've only gotten 2 pairs of shoes, and one bracer.
I have tried 4 diff tanks on 95 and personally i think that zerker is the easiest one to hold aggro with, u get juicy stuff like adrenaline and experienced insight + loads of AEs to trigger that hate on loads of mobs,and lets not forget about insolence! Also draconic Effigy works great with ur 100% AE auto and AE spamming playstyle!
I would use the draconic effigy if it didnt have that crummy block chance on it... instead i went with a red scale for another "defensive" temp. As a zerk, I'll tell you summoners and brigands are the obsulute worst to hold agro against... so if I'm grouping with a raid geared necro, conjie, or brig, I'll often swap over to the paly.
One thing I noticed, op, is you seem to need quite a few adorns. Getting to 350 and filling adorns helps.
Be may be carefull because your mit is only 11K and avoidance 10K. My paladin is over 13K with almost 17K avoidance. It is certainly enough for heroic but for raid i have doubts. Not sure even for the domination, it may be enough now that dps has gotten so high but in the early expansion fights were longer .... Note that crusader aim apparerntly at 17K mit and 20 K avoidance, my tank is far from that but take virtually no damage even in HKC. Our MT in raid sits at 14500 mit and 19500 avoidance. Don't be fooled by instance that my warden could tank (if she could hold agro) or that Lady (the 10 year mercenary) can tank (she tanked highkeep).
First off... he asked nothing about raids. He's a bit late to the game if he wanted to raid at all. Secondly, you cannot compare what crusaders need vs what berserkers need, vs what guardians need, etc. They all use very different mechanics. My swashbuckler has more mit and HPs than my zerk. Simply because the zerk doesnt need it.
Indeed, avoidance is useless in heroics for a zerk. I leave my mit at 15k so that my temps gets me where I wanna be.
Yes I cant edit my post but I want to be good heroic group tank no pvp or raid atm desired. Maybe in the future I might opt to raid. Certainly like have myself setup to make that transition easy. I want to know what stats are most important I need and how much is needed to be effective. Any AA advice open to hear as well as well as CA rotations people using. I see I want mit to be main gear goal what other stats looking at my gear should be worked on and give me some numbers to go by like how much dps is needed for heroic encounters?
You want to start focusing on your health and mitigation to begin with, to make bloodrage heal you more. I can't tell you exact numbers as im not certain of what is the actual mit cap. Someone told me 17k is cap for mit, if that's true then 14k mit is enough to easily reach the cap with a healer buff and your temps. Your HP really cant ever be too high, on a zerk the bonuses from having high HP is huge and makes everything a lot easier thanks to bloodrage. As for the offensive stats. Start by trying to reach 200 haste then get multi attack to 100ish and dps mod to 550ish. If you can reach those numbers and have more reforging options then put ur MA to around 170 to cap it during combat. More haste then 200 will add to flurry wich pwns. Get flurry cloak and belt, use acceleration strike whenever its up to get more haste and flurry. As for AA im sure Droll would'nt mind if u looked him up on EQ2 wire, alltho I believe he has too good gear for u to copy. My zerker is less geared then droll and only running heroic zones so you can look at my specc called "OffensiveTanking". My zerkers name is Kethale Best of luck to ya buddy!
I'm reading all these posts saying zerkers don't need capped mit. Technically, yes, you can get away with lower mit when you're getting hit by large quantities of mobs because of blood rage and battle frenzy/adrenaline healing you per hit, but there is a balancing act. Firstly, capping mitigation means you get hit for less, the minimum amount. You heal for the same amount regardless (percent based on HP), so it's naturally better to be hit for less yet still heal the same. This becomes even more important as the mob quantity gets lower (either through killing them or just smaller pulls). Battle frenzy is only up around 1/4 of the time (from memory around 30s use then the timer kicks in for around 90s), so it can't be relied upon if the majority of the time it's not up. You do gain hate by being hit, and from hitting things. I find holding aggro on lots of mobs relatively easy, with 2 AE snaps, one with quite a quick recast, just in case. Holding single target aggro can be more tricky with people parsing 8-10 times your dps (if you're doing 400k and they're doing 3-4m). With the right group setup and buffs, such as hate gain from a dirge/coercer, or dehate proc on the dps from a coercer, this isn't a problem. But if it's a pure dps group (no utility) and you, then those kind of players need to understand they've gotta use their dehate abilities if they want to blow up the parse. This is why people like Droll are recommending using some dps gear to do more dps therefore generate more hate. And I understand that. However, it needs to be a balancing act with mitigation and I generally wear all but boots as mitigation pieces, cap out mit and still reach the soft caps on dps stats. The difference then between almost full dps gear vs my mostly mit gear is really just Weapon Damage Bonus (WDB). And as a tank, at the front of the mob, I don't hit THAT accurately that I've really noticed a aggro difference. My dps gear doesn't give me a lot of extra stats after the soft caps to be worth it. You don't need a shield except for Dom (arguably) and raids. As a zerker you generally want to get hit, so having a shield and blocking an attack is counter productive, unless they hit so hard with capped mit that any avoidance of a hit is a good thing for the healer.
there is no cap to mit, at least not with what gear is out there atm. Mit has a curve at the end with diminishing results. In heroics and even AS you can get by with a tiny amount of mit but when you start getting into HM stuff the more mit you can get the better. I can tell you from experience that having 18k mit and 22k mit I see the difference when I'm in maw or even in HKC when I grab 4 or 5 groups of mobs. As with all things tho you don't just get mit and ignore all other stats you have to be smart about your choices, group build and other things will affect what you need for where you are at.
There must be a cap, or else why would your tool tip only go to 75% as the percentage. However, it is based on mob level and possibly even mob strength (heroic/epic/etc). Around 15k mit as a zerker gets you that magic 75% for level 95 mobs. But as we're fighting up to level 102(?) mobs, of varying strengths, obviously mit needs to be higher to reach that 75%. My heroic zerker sits at around 1600 mit in his standard gear, which can go up to around 1800 with a few equipment changes and sit around 20k with group buffs and higher with temp buffs. The standard gear gives me soft caps of dps mod, attack speed, MA and reuse speed, with quite high cast speed. The full mit gear sacrifices some dps mod and a little MA. I did have 90+ strikethrough at a sacrifice to dps mod, etc but as I don't raid, it seemed unnecessary and Experienced Insight gives me 75 strikethrough quite frequently. This is of course totally overkill with easy heroics, but not for Dom. I tank Dom pretty easily, but more mit there helps.
My god people... stop telling him to cap mit. Mitigation is all but worthless upto dominion. Mobs just do not hurt in heroics. My 10k mit, plus damage reduction, is more than enough for halls/labs and below. Dominion is a whole nother story... but he's no where near ready for that, and likely will not be prior to the xpac. More mit does not help agro, which was the point of the whole thread.
Mit isn't worthless. Far from it. I have healed plenty of tanks with crappy mit like 10k, and it's harder, much harder as a healer. Yes as a zerk, you can handle it better on multi mob trash pulls, but get to the bosses and they smack you hard and make it hard to heal. It's the reason why at the start of the xpac people took two healers in a heroic group, to compensate for the tanks getting hit like trucks with their lower mitigation. It's just compensated now by having higher dps so it dies before all your temps run out. But you have me with the original intent of the OP. It was about aggro not mitigation.
if you are dead you can't hold agro. again depending on your group and the content you are doing your needs will be different than what we are doing. I know the content I do is not the content Droll is doing so our needs are very different.
So as I suspected there would be different viewpoints on how to do my tank job hold aggro which is fine except when there are 2 conflicting thought on same issue like mitigation. And I suspect people with better gear than me which is going to factor into there thoughts on playing zerker tank. With all my other toons I dont have problem esp healers as I am a good healer. I know I need better gear but how to get it becomes a problem when I am expected to carry group and people get annoyed with me or berate me as a tank if I fail. I can deal with the learning curve to learn the zones but I need to be able to do my job with the gear I have now until I get upgrades. So I want to know with my current gear how would you change it gems, adorns, and what should be forged for other stats?
