The Path of the Indomitable Tank

Well he's talking abt total Mental i.e. from stats as well as from armour and avatars also

 

still wrong since mtl is capped at 255. That can lead confusion on some people.

 

Oh, so its capped at 255, so yea cant have the extra ail Resist solely on dragoon mail then.

 

Did you guys convert the extra ailment from equipment and ava into mtl points? but still that is confusing af. I am literally saying the stat allocation on MTL stat does not exceed to 255.

Idk why you people convert it that way tho. Anyway, that will confuse some people imo.

 

Yep, I was wrong about the mtl for 85%ail resist. I never put more pts into special stat, I thought you can do that, if anything, I reduce the mtl instead and go for vit cuz I've some ail resist avatars

 

So after reading this thread and a few others ive decided to rework my tank. The previous focus was on hp and aggro when it clearly should have been resist/ampr. Im taking hero potum out and running blood smeared/zega 4, taking dusk out for yashy mom, replacing fluck with empress.. i have dark tal resist w seele and titan rn but i was thinking about titeres instead of titan for ampr and dodge but i dont really get whether dodge is effective or not and if its useful ir detrimental for tank. Can you tank pros weigh in on this for me plz?

 

Well honestly having more hp ain't bad so it may not be necessary to lower it in favor of something else. Everyone has their playstyle so for you it's based on which area you find that your tank is lacking , however it's good to make adjustments as time goes by if you normally starve for mp then ampr is an option or your combo setup could need tweaking . Tabks can literally have only 1mp combos and function well during battle . I think the problem comes is when you're fighting CRT resistant bosses and you cant hit to regain mp because of low crt or because boss has high flee, but there are skills that can help supplement that .

 

Thanks for the response!

I ran the build in the coryn stat simulator and the hp only dropped from about 43k to 40k with all the changes so its not really a big deal i don't think. I usually have plenty of mp but every once and a while in a crisis i have to spam p def and bottom out. Ill probably just leave it w titan for now but i really would like to know whether dodge would be beneficial or not, i cant really find much useful information about it, especially in regards to tanking.

 

Dodge for the most part is a useless stat in general, mainly because bosses have high critical rates it’s impossible to dodge certain attacks , mind you dodge and evasion are not the same in this game . As for your changes 3k isn’t much now but if your xtals raise hp based on your base hp, it will be more later in the game since you get more hp with vit based on your level. So if your tank isn’t capped run it again with capped stats and see what the difference is. As Yunan said your hp helps a lot when using sanctuary, so along with having high resist and aggro. Having good hp numbers helps.

 

Ok, thank you very much!

 

In my opinion, dodge and evasion is actively bad for tanking. It reposition you which in turn might lure boss aoe to place you don't want (i.e. Your dps). Also on map which can be jumpable, it might push you out as some boss require you to play close to the edge (p.ava).

 

Its good to have at least 50% of magic/physical resist as it gives the highest yield in damage reduction. Either with gears or supplemented with food buff. After you reach 50% there's a cutoff Which makes further damage reduction from resist halved. After that you can still get some hp% or aggro% geats. 40k maxhp is still good enough although you would still get most mid damage Magic/physical attacks bypass your sanctuary's threshold at 50% phys/mag resist. So its still better to p. Def them. 50k HP is my sweetspot to ignore almost all magic/physical attacks with sanctuary. The only time I needed to p. Def is for high fract damage. To heal up I use heal instead of a p. Def spam. My p. Def is actually only set at lvl 1 due to the lacking of skill points for other skills. But as I ignore most attacks I simply don't use p. Def that much and heal up only when needed). Eventually I'll clean up my mistakes on the skill build and get p. Def back to lvl 10 because the 2k heal is still decent and the 500 aggro is still great to have.

 

Only evasion reposition you dodge on the other hand attacks simply miss, as I said they are different . To be honest dodge, evasion and even guard aren’t helpful to a tank so it’s best to avoid them where possible.

 

Thank you all for your detailed answers and wisdom. I made all the changes i was planning on, leaving titan alone, and with hp food im sitting at 47k hp at lv194, 60% phys resist and 55% magic resist. Time to go test it out!

 

Does force shield and magic shield increase phys and magic resistance?

 

Yes, 10%. Also 500 hp each at lvl 10

 

I would mention the effectiveness of having high motion speed as a tank, for example light armor or whatever you use now-a-days for maxed out attack speed as higher motion value means quicker reactions and more actions per second means more aggro and safer execution of combos.

P.def I would say is pretty all powerfull. With just P def and some ampr stuff like trigger slash (and venena armor I dont know if that's still used) can get you up to get 1 bar of mp back per basic attack.

I would also put more emphasis on Knowing when to flinch and how to use your interrupts is also super important as a tank unless they keep adding BS bosses that punish you for saving teamates you can stop deadly AOEs in insta death scenarios like Ult boss runs. On a boss like proto leon, he has a auto react counter for being tumble flinched or stun but you can interrupt that by simply using another interupt skill for example shield bash and then hard hit right after

I also find that having as high of an HP value as possible is very detrimental to you as most of the time you'll be dying to fractional

 

Yes, I need to update this thread. Motion speed is indeed important to be more flexible with how fast you can react to aoe. I usually use gigaspeed pot on top of berserk to get that lil extra motion speed.
I did often get caught off guard because I'm locked in either auto attack or combo, so pattern recognition is important. The examole would be tanking on finstern ultimate mode.

Here is the example of how getting caught in combo delays my interrupts. But I do need to use the bare minimum of combo consists of berserk and sanctuary since I need them for crit and for my main defensive scheme. While p. Def can give aggro and defend yourseld, I find it not the best way to tank because you will do less auto attacks for proration, I also can do stuff like casting spirited dance or even do damage with sacrifice.

Regarding high maxhp, fractional attacks can also be p. Def, with high resistance and high maxhp I could ignore almost every magic and physical attacks and focus on fractionals to p. Def. Sanctuary is my main mean of defense. In the event I got hit by huge fractionals, I heal up with heal that recovers your hp in proportional to your maxhp by 20% and flat 3k. This is a better way of healing compared to p. Def's flat ho recovery at 2k. With low maxhp I would need to p. Def almost everything because magic attacks and physical attacks would kill me instead. And as I said the demerits of doing a lot of p. Def is that you do less auto attacks. The only problem with this scheme is how slow heal can be, I usually use spell headphone and bitter gelatin to boost my cspd to reduce the overall cast time ever so slightly. Its quite noticeable tho.


Then as to why I like to boost my maxhp, I can actually do some damage with sacrifice. 50k hp roughly deals 50k damage as well. I used it as a finisher when the boss have low hp. But more importantly, its to get everything under sanctuary's threshold. There are still a lot more magic and physical attacks than fractionals.


Then the newest stuff is guard, guard power reduce damage in proportion to yhe guard amount. I use heavy arm because it gives me a lot of guard counter. With light armor and shield its only slightly above 100 guard, as the guard counter diminishes, so is the damage reduction capability. Guard also prevents fatal damage, be it fractionals or magic and physical attacks. It can be used with it without exact timing so its much safer than relying on p. Def timing. Higher maxhp does uses up more giard counter for fractionals

Going back to how I prefer having high maxhp. High maxho offers more margin of error. Sure on lower maxhp you can use better heal to damage ratio with both p. Def and heal but whats the point of healing when you can't deal with higher difficulty mode that have higher magic and physical damages. I found a lot of tank struggles on finstern and seele because they either have high magic and physical damage. You had to rely on your p. Def skill and walk between life and death. That aint this type of tank Im looking for. This guide is for tanks that can be as lazy as possible, but contribute more for your party with the time window to give support, do more auto attacks and hard to kill even by your own mistake. Using p. Def to heal up fractionals is like fixing your own mistake after it happens while having high maxhp is like preparing in the event you are making mistake, but overall have a higher survivability due to higher margin of error. The only time I die from fractionals is from multi hit fractional that builds up to fatal, something like hero potums slash or pyxtica's multiple hit fractionals. You die either way whether your hp is high or low if you misstime your p. Def or guard. The difference is that I could always heal up for big physical and magic damage as long as Im not dead, while you die from something like seeles laser if you only have like 20k hp.

 

Hm, I found that using P.def actually increases proration rates instead of constantly casting a buff combo and the like. Rampage also gives you the value of 2 proration hits for the price of 1 and more AMPR although you could get stuck in the finisher but that's why you have motion speed, as in that video I see you casting far more skills than prorating, as I used to play with quite the dps whore katana user lol. I also just like P def more becuase it's more interactive and makes farming for ult runs far less boring and tedious but I can see the merits of your playstyle

 

I usually don't use this long of a combo. Magic:eall animation takes a long time to finish. On finstern I used it to knockback the obscurophany so it doesn't cast spike, not that its super dire either because sanctuary will also reduce the spike's damage. I usually put spirited dance instead of magic:wall so the timer on spirited dance would also give me the sense of time to cast sanctuary. It also gives a periodical mp recovery to the party.

Casting berserk and sanctuary is indispensable to me because while you can just simply do p. Def and auto attacks to gain the most amount of auto attack and flexibility, you will have to p. Def the aoes, not to mention spikes. I saw many non sanctuary users struggles on finstern because they had to shift around to dodge the spikes, making it a bit inconvenient to the other members. Then berserk's crit boost is necessary because my gear setup consist of no crit weapon, I use npc anniv sword for the 30% mag resist and 10 ampr instead of toy hammer. My ampr is ald enough to give me 1mp bar per hit without rampage or trigslash.

Regarding rampage I never heard of it having twice amount of proration, the description says the calculation is done once then the damage spread between the hits, just like tenryu, the mp recovered also counts as one auto attack. Every hit skills gives one proration regardless of hit count. Unless I'm missing it all this time. Rampage also sets def/mdef to 0, not that def is as useful as resist but 250 pts is still 20% damage reduction.

As such the factor that's needed to be minimized is the frequency of p. Def. Aggro combo also scales with aggro% gears compared to p. Def's fixed aggro. In the end its all about tradeoffs. Regarding the more engaging playstyle, I agree that p. Def everything is pretty fun. But considering the role of a tank itself I feel like this style enables me to do other supports on top of aggro and proration management, while keeping the survivability aspect high. Just to give some edge over dps tanks.