Today I aim to detail my NB magicka tanking setup. There are a number of viable and competitive gear combinations that can be used. With enough experience and familiarity as a NB tank, it is completely feasible and realistic to use sets that don't cater stat-wise to what we would normally deem good "stats" or "set bonuses". What I mean by this is that a set like Alkosh, which affords no benefit to a magicka NB tank on any of the set bonuses, is still completely usable on the class and is highly recommended for specific content. Not every set combination is going to shine in every encounter, and because of this, it is usually a good idea to carry multiple set combinations with you to be able to swap out when appropriate. Most endgame trials tanks do have a variety of gear on-hand to accommodate specific fights.

The highlight of this build is it's self-reliance and efficiency. Before going into the build itself, I feel it's important to note that, while this build is incredibly efficient, it is also highly contingent upon the ability to weave reliably. While being self-sufficient is a notable strength as a NB tank, for endgame content our underlying goal should be group support. NB tanking is generally considered a more difficult class to tank with because of the necessity to drop block in order to weave light attacks for sustain (via Siphoning Attacks), but note that there is a distinct difference between being more difficult (the learning curve) and viable. A good NB tank can do any content on any difficulty.

Unlike DK tanking, NB sustain is not contingent on max stats. As such, Undaunted Mettle is an optional benefit. Having a 5/1/1 setup very well could be preferential for some players, while a full set of heavy is preferential for others. Personally, I prefer to use all heavy when I can. However, certain sets (like Alkosh) do not come in heavy, and at least two medium would be in that setup (unless you can get Akosh 1H&S for both bars, which is ideal). This is mostly inconsequential for NB tanking, as 5 heavy / 2 medium is, for all intents and purposes, of approximate equal value to a NB tank. Our sustain does not really suffer because we have a 5/2 setup instead of a 5/1/1 of full heavy setup. One important thing to note, however, is that NBs access Major Ward/Resolve primarily through Shadow passives, and the duration of both is contingent upon the number of heavy armor pieces equipped. This, along with the increased sustain from heavy armor passives, is why I typically use all 7 heavy armor. The duration increase is pretty small, and thus choosing to use fewer heavy pieces does not have a monumental impact on sustain or survivability, but there is a difference. I do not recommend using fewer than 5 pieces of heavy armor, or you will lose important passives that do have a monumental impact on the bottom line.

I don't currently have all of the screenshots for each of my setups (I have 4 different tanking specs). For now, it will suffice to give you a general guideline for the stats you will want to focus on primarily:

Health: 25-30k (for vMoL and hardmodes I recommend 30k without War Horn)
Stamina: 17-20k
Magicka: 25k+
Physical/Spell Restances (unbuffed): ~20k
Magicka Recovery: ~900+
Spell Crit: ~30%+
Spell Damage varies with content, is not critical to this build's functionality, however the higher your SD is, the more potent your self-healing. I'd aim for 2k+ spell damage with buffs, but this is not as important as other stats above. Do not lower any of the stats listed above spell damage to ma

There is a wide variety of feasible and practical gear combinations. The best combination is the one that affords the greatest amount of utility to your group, and varies from fight to fight. This is contingent upon your group makeup, what buffs are already covered, and if there is another tank present (and what he or she is using). To make this easier to understand, instead of giving specific combinations, I'm going to list the best potential sets, in no particular order:

Monster Sets:
- Swarm Mother (dungeons)
- Blood Spawn (trials)
- Sentinel of Rkugamz (trials, dungeons, off-tanking)

As much as it stinks to admit, there really aren't any great monster sets for tanking right now (the only class I can't speak for in this regard is Templar, I know that DKs and Sorcs can do without them as well from personal experience). Blood Spawn is okay, but the ulti regen is really not necessary for 99% of fights, because there is plenty of time to get an ult before the next primary mechanic without it (same goes for Tava's). The resistances are definitely overkill; you simply shouldn't need them. Swarm Mother is not useful in trials whatsoever, but great for dungeons if you use it properly. It's okay to slot two different 1pc sets for recovery, resistances, health, magicka, etc., but if those stats aren't making the difference between doing your job and failing, then it's best to go with something that helps the group. In this regard, Sentinel of Rkugamz is the best option, so if you're getting your War Horn well before you need to cast it (which is the case for me), then use Sentinel instead. Buffing and/or supporting your group is far more beneficial than stacking stats you don't need.

Armor/Jewelry/Weapon Sets:
- Tava's Favor (crafted)
- Akaviri Dragonguard (overland drop)
- Roar of Alkosh (trial drop)
- Ebon Armory (dungeon drop)
- Worm's Raiment (dungeon drop)
- Powerful Assault (IC Telvar coffers)

The sets themselves are usually pretty self-explanatory. The overall objective is group support, and to accomplish this, we cut out a lot of unnecessary bulk like excess health, resistances, changing CP allocations, etc.

The general strategy is to go all-in on magicka. This is contingent upon a number of factors, namely your health pool, but is viable as both a starting point (as you figure out your own preferences for tanking and your setup) and a potential endgame final allocation. Currently I use 20 points in health, and the rest into magicka (note that a stamblade tank will instead go 20 health and the rest into stamina).

Assuming you have proper mitigation values, which I'll get in to later, your maximum health can be as low as ~25k comfortably, even in vMoL. Allotting all of your points into magicka is okay, since you can use Health glyphs and Prismatic glyphs to supplement your health pool. Since health is a dump stat, only put enough points into it to get you to a comfortable threshold, and no more than is necessary, else you are giving up points that can be of actual benefit elsewhere (like more healing or support).

My allocation is perhaps slightly different from other NB tanks, but it's not by that much. I've fused the meta allocation for magblade dps and the allocation for general magicka tanking into a hybrid allocation, which I use to maintain a single character capable of actively switching builds on a whim. This affords me the ability to be a strong main tank or serve as an extra dps (which still pulls about 30-35k depending on the fight). This setup could also be used to design a healer build with a few alterations, but I will not cover the healer role in this thread.

This allocation is a general guideline. There is room for flexibility on just about every star you invest in. Depending on your focus (full tank, tank/dps hybrid, etc.), you will redistribute these points to boost the stats you deem appropriate in the context of your content and role preference.

The Mage
11 pts. Blessed
56 pts. Elfborn
100 pts. Elemental Expert
10 pts. Thaumaturge

The Thief
65 pts. Magician
50 pts. Warlord
5 pts. Bashing Focus
5-10 pts. Tumbling
47-52 pts. Shadow Ward

The Warrior
This allocation is subject to change on specific fights. For hardmode HRC or AA, go 100 pts. into Hardy. For Rhakkat, go 100 points into Elemental Defender.
50-100 pts. Hardy
50-100 pts. Elemental Defender
50 pts. Quick Recovery

Again, this allocation will vary depending on a couple of factors, mainly race, otherwise mostly preference or context. For example, as a Breton, I allocate fewer points into Elemental Defender than most tanks do, which I redistribute into Hardy and Quick Recovery primarily. The key damage types we want to protect against varies from trial to trial. HRC is more physical, AA is a combination of physical and spell, but the hardest part to tank is the axes at the end, which is all physical. Sanctum is mostly physical or poison, but has elemental damage from trash, like Overchargers. Maw is predominantly magic damage, but Hulks and Shadowguards deal heavy physical damage.

Mundus selection is pretty flexible. I've used a lot of different gear combinations and found that, for the mast majority of combinations, mundus selection is largely irrelevant and your choice is rather inconsequential. That being said, specific setups sometimes merit specific boons to compliment them. Alkosh is again a perfect example of when mundus consideration has a notable impact, because neither the set bonuses, nor the armor type (medium) gives us anything we need as tanks. The good news is that a good NB tank could tank without a mundus (or even a second 5set) for 99% of content in ESO. I almost always use the Thief mundus (yes, a crit tank), because in every gear combination I'm providing a healthy dose of healing, and with this mundus the heals crit more frequently, and thus is a benefit to the group.

Bar 1: Pierce Armor, Refreshing Path, Defensive Stance, Swallow Soul, Siphoning Attacks. Ult: Aggressive War Horn.
Bar 2: Inner Fire, Sap Essence, Heroic Slash, Mysic Orb (or Vigor with Powerful Assault), Double Take. Ult: Soul Harvest -or- Bolstering Darkness

I very rarely change my skills, and I use the same bar setup for dungeons and trials. The only time I make a switch is to cater to a specific need, and this doesn't happen often. When a skill must be traded out, it should be Swallow Soul on the back bar. Everything else is a must (including Sap, for the Major Sorcery, which boosts healing to yourself and your group).

Glyphs
The first thing you should do when glyphing your gear is to account for reaching your minimum health threshold. Everything beyond what you need to have a comfortable level of health (to avoid dying to "big hits" or "1-shots") should generally go into magicka (or stamina, if you're a stamblade tank), which will boost not only your sustain, but your self-healing and damage contribution as well. I can't give you a specific recommendation for every piece here, as I sincerely believe that it's a matter of preference. I use a mix of Prismatic, health, and stamina glyphs. Ultimately, it comes down to your light attack weaving and animation cancelling during combat. The better you are at timing your attacks, the more efficient you are with your resources, and the less of a need you have for magicka and stamina glyphs.

Jewelry glyphs are pretty flexible. The more comfortable you are with timing your light attacks between blocking attacks, the less you need shieldplay and recovery glyphs. I recommend starting with 1x magicka recovery and 2x shieldplay, then change it as you see fit thereafter. Spell damage glyphs are the best option for you as a support tank if you don't need the sustain.

Weapon Traits
I've tried a variety of different weapon traits on a magblade tank to see what best accommodates the innate healing utility in the kit. Defending weapons are unnecessary for a full heavy armor setup on a max CP character (and it's counter-productive too, most of the time you are actually missing out if using Defending, it's simply overkill). I've instead tested traits like Sharpened, Infused, Powered, and Precise. We can make a rational argument for all of them frankly, but I ultimately recommend using Infused for your primary weapon with a Crushing glyph, as this affords the highest reduction in enemy resistances, resulting in the highest damage potential to your group.

The back bar should be a shock damage glyph with the Charged trait so as to maximize the Concussion status effect on your target. You shouldn't be the only person using a shock glyph on your back bar; this role is often taken on by at least one of the healers. A shock glyph has a base chance to proc of 20%, and a (one-handed) legendary-quality Charged trait boosts this to 42%. We switch to our back bar about every 10s to reapply Heroic Slash, and we do at least two light attacks plus Heroic Slash while we are on this bar (note that Heroic Slash with a Charged Weapon is a 21% proc chance). The result is reasonably high chance to proc Concussion. If you suffer from poor luck and it doesn't proc, there's at least one other person in your group running a shock glyph alongside of you to help with the up-time.

If the target is concussed, any ally using Blockade of Storms will automatically set them off-balance, and dps with the Exploiter CP passive will deal 10% increased damage. This is a huge buff for dps to have, and we are doing plenty of light attacks anyway as a NB tank. It's also standard practice for DPS to have this passive in today's meta. If your group is not accommodating this, then you are probably hurting your dps, and not simply because they are missing out on an increase, but also because without Off-Balanced targets your dps could have gotten higher dps by putting those points somewhere else. It is a dps loss for all dps who allocate these points if these debuffs are not accommodated, plain and simple.

If your group is already accommodating Concussion and Off-Balance to the extent that you running it, as the tank, is unnecessary, then you have a couple of good alternatives. First, in an off-tank setup (with Powerful Assault) it's your choice between Precise and Powered. Precise will affect both your weapon and spell crit, which boosts your Sap and Vigor heals on the back bar, but does not affect the Sentinel proc. Powered will boost all healing, plain and simple, and since it's a constant benefit, we can argue that it is more effective than Precise since we get the extra healing all the time. Sharpened is a good option too if your group is not already stripping all of the enemy's resistances. As the tank, it's your job to know if you're reducing them fully or not, so know what your group is doing. If you're not running a Powerful Assault setup, then Infused with a Weapon/Spell Damage glyph is probably the way to go.

Armor Traits
A good general guideline is to use sturdy traits on your minor pieces, and infused on major pieces. Divines is okay too, but if you are one who tends to switch mundus boons to fit whichever trial or dungeon you're tanking, you'll have to consider the impact. Using divines with the Lord is probably not worthwhile in most cases, while using divines with the Thief can be beneficial with the right set combinations. However, the underlying point is that divines is not useless to a NB tank, even if it's not necessary. Do so if you wish, and if you're comfortable with it. Don't assume you need to use any or all sturdy traits, because with experience this is a luxury, not a necessity. Having the block cost benefit vs. a marginal healing increase is contingent upon context and is a quality of life factor for NB tanking. Going all sturdy is a viable option as well, and allows you to reduce the number of points into Shadow Ward, or trade your shieldplay/recovery jewelry glyphs for spell damage.

Using reinforced or nirnhoned for your shields is okay, as they benefit from the Shield Expert CP passive. Personally, I use a Sturdy shield on my front bar, and a Divines shield on my back bar, but for a very specific nuance: I run the Thief mundus, and my group utility is on my divines bar - this marginally increases the healing potency of my off-bar skills. Outside of that, though, reinforced and nirnhoned are pointless. Resistances are usually overrated for tanking here on the forums; you should aim to have ~20k physical and spell resistance before Major Ward and Resolve. Note also that Blood Spawn is completely unnecessary for the resistances; we only use this set for the ulti regen and it's not totally necessary either, but as mentioned above, the monster set options for tanking are rather lackluster currently.

Potions
About 99% of the time I use welfare potions (the junk you pick up just running dungeons and buy from vendors). There are some really good potions out there that you can use, but personally I find them to be an unnecessary gold sink, even for vMoL. At the very least, make sure what you use is being supplemented by having Alchemy passives. A more specific recommendation of good potions to use here would likely be Essence of Lingering Health.

There are a few buffs that you need to always keep active:
Major Ward & Resolve (from casting a Shadow ability), Double Take (Major Evasion), Crushing (reduced armor on target), Heroic Slash (Minor Heroism), and Siphoning Attacks. Managing the up-time on all of these buffs is one of the more complex aspects of NB tanking. It's not so difficult once you get the hang of it, and some of these are common practice for other tanks as well, so if you come from a different tank to a NB tank, it'll be an easier transition for you with that experience.

In addition to these "mandatory" tanking buffs, you also want to keep Major Sorcery and Major Brutality active as much as possible, which you very easily get just by throwing a Sap Essence into you rotation from time to time. And yes, it is still beneficial to Sap against a single boss for the buffs - the 20s of extra self-heals pays off in many encounters, especially if you have foregone a healer on your run.

If you are running Alkosh, it is imperative that you coordinate with your group so that you can use a synergy to proc the set every 10 seconds. The use of Alkosh is strongly recommended for trials. It's not necessary in dungeons, but don't mistaken this for meaning it's not valuable. Treat the Alkosh debuff as if it were the same as having IA added, because they afford roughly the same damage increase (8%).

If you are running Powerful Assault, cast Vigor 2-3 times every 15 seconds. Chances are you won't hit every person in the group every 15s. More than 2-3 times is a big waste of stamina, and fewer times is an inefficient use of the set. This kind of setup means you aren't doing a lot of actual tanking, and your primary role is support. It's imperative that you keep your Major Sorcery and Brutality active all the time in this setup, as you are building predominantly to provide buffs, and virtually everything else is supplementary healing for your group. Make those heals as potent as possible and your group will have an easier time with raid-wide mechanics (like meteors on Rhakkat).

- Sap Essence serves as an initial AoE taunt. It's not a "real" taunt, but it will almost always pull everything it touches to you immediately after you cast it - so long as you are the first one to hit them. It won't hold their attention for long, but it lasts just long enough to sneak in a handful of Pierces Armors and Inner Fires without them running away. This is a strong opener, not just for the initial aggro component, but also because it allows you to start the fight with Sorcery and Brutality.

- This is the most important thing to learn and master as a NB tank: Light Attacks are your main source of sustain. The common misconception here is that saptanks rely almost solely on the procs from Siphoning Attacks to retain/regain resources - but this is not true. The proc% on Siphoning Attacks is a supplementary mechanic, not the primary mechanic. As such, you should be weaving a light attack in between everything. Yes, everything. Between buffs, between taunts, between everything, period. Plain and simple: the better you are at weaving your light attacks, the less reduced cost or regen you need. If you stack reduced cost, it merely means you don't have to weave between everything, but can instead light attack once every few seconds (and this just assumes you always try to stay topped off). You should ultimately be at a point where, even during the hardest trials, you don't need to do a light attack but once every 3-5 seconds, and that assumes you're trying to stay full. It's not difficult to recovery from <30% stamina with light attacks alone.

The trick (and this takes a lot of practice) is to light attack weave without getting hit between blocks. Timing is key, and the sooner you get this mechanic down on an instinctive level, the sooner your will excel as a saptank. Practice makes perfect! Knowing the boss mechanics (what types of attacks occur, how frequently) makes your sustain all the easier.

- Without chains, it is crucial for you to stack melee on top of ranged. When you start a pull, find where the ranged adds are standing. Pick a spot where the most ranged adds are grouped together, and take everything else to that spot. The introduction of Swam Mother (monster set) makes grouping enemies together substantially easier. While it is not as quick and efficient as a DK's chains, Swarm Mother does not face the "target too high or low" bug, and it can pull some enemies that are immune to chains (like Haj Motas). You can also break line-of-sight with your enemies to force them to relocate to a better position - a classic tool in any tank's utility belt.

- Know your group make-up. This one is more of a general tanking tip than for NB tanking specifically, but it's very important. Always know how many melee dps vs. ranged dps you have, and always know how your group should be positioned. It is up to you to place the boss in an ideal location so that everyone else has an easy time of being where they need to be. The less time spent on getting the right positioning, the better your dps will perform, which leads to faster, easy, and cleaner runs. It's also imperative for you to know how is giving and who is receiving certain buffs. Competitive trials groups have a couple dozen different buffs running across the whole group. The more time you spend with the group ironing out the nuances, the better you will all work together down the line, and the more efficient and effective you will be.
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