Health recovery tank, does it work?

Ariisen · March 2016

I'm levelling my Nord DK because I want to switch my Imperial to a Stam DPS, I was wondering if a health recovery build (PvE) is viable for tanking.

My Idea was 5 Orgnum (or Willows Path), 5 Permafrost and 2 Engine Guardian.

Most of the new builds are heavily based on ultimate regen and warhorn spam but I want to try something different.

Is it worth it?

failkiwib16_ESO · March 2016

It is best to have good mitigation and resource pool for off dps/healing.

A somewhat normal-to-good healer can cast Mutagen/ Rapid Regeneration that will make up for whatever amount of health regen you can stack. Remember that regen stats in battle are half of what they are outside of battle, so if you stack 4k health regen, you only get about 2k regen in battle.
-meanwhile you focus gear to stack health regen, it will be at the cost of your mitigation, resistances, resource pools to do off dmg/healing with.

Health regen is totally viable for pvp though, because healing is reduced there.

Steel_Brightblade · March 2016

What he said but with an added:
Give it a try with guild friends for testing, sounds interesting and you may find that it suits your play style.

I'm currently in the process of getting gear to get my standard hist bark dk tank to swap to 5 medium pieces with reinforced, been told I'll hate it by a few people but that hasn't stopped me getting ready to try it out for myself. Also received some helpful advice and encouragement from a few (less of those though).

failkiwib16_ESO · March 2016

Steel_Brightblade wrote: »

What he said but with an added:
Give it a try with guild friends for testing, sounds interesting and you may find that it suits your play style.

I'm currently in the process of getting gear to get my standard hist bark dk tank to swap to 5 medium pieces with reinforced, been told I'll hate it by a few people but that hasn't stopped me getting ready to try it out for myself. Also received some helpful advice and encouragement from a few (less of those though).

In general I recomend players to wear 5 pieces of heavy, however if you have good friends to do dungeons with regulary, it's best to adjust to the group to get overall better results in dungeons.
..tanking group dungeons in medium or lightarmor allows you to deal much more dps, and bosses go down so fast

you'll love it with a good team
you'll most likely hate it with an inexperienced team or pugs

NBrookus · March 2016

Ariisen wrote: »

I'm levelling my Nord DK because I want to switch my Imperial to a Stam DPS, I was wondering if a health recovery build (PvE) is viable for tanking.

My Idea was 5 Orgnum (or Willows Path), 5 Permafrost and 2 Engine Guardian.

Most of the new builds are heavily based on ultimate regen and warhorn spam but I want to try something different.

Is it worth it?

I run a regen build, but I mostly rely on tri-drink and CP for that. My raw health stats come from armor enchants and part of my attributes; the rest are in magicka.

I rarely run out of resources. There's a few trial bosses where I still need shards, but the combo of shielding/regen has been very effective and more fun to play since I can pay more attention to the fight than my resource bars.

DinOwned · March 2016

This guy has a cool health regen build:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=aF2JfgcGnuc

Steel_Brightblade · March 2016

I never do pugs, lucky enough to have a good active guild. We've already talked about it and there's a few willing to help me run a few test runs.

Baconlad · March 2016

Regen does NOT get cut in half in combat...it gets DOUBLED outside of combat, so you have 3k regen on stat sheet, that's the regen you have in combat. Sooo.....yeh. Also health regen builds work fanTASTIC with templar max health builds, nord, and using blazing shield primarily. 55k health, 4.5k health regen, takes a LOT to take me down. Casting blazing shield every three seconds sustained. Your doing crazy damage for a tank too. GL and have fun

Personofsecrets · March 2016

a bit of hp recov is okay in 1v1

Cathexis · March 2016

Health recovery really only puts up in 1v1.

Used to be great in open cyro until they put in gap closer stun.

FriedEggSandwich · March 2016

Baconlad wrote: »

Regen does NOT get cut in half in combat...it gets DOUBLED outside of combat, so you have 3k regen on stat sheet, that's the regen you have in combat. Sooo.....yeh. Also health regen builds work fanTASTIC with templar max health builds, nord, and using blazing shield primarily. 55k health, 4.5k health regen, takes a LOT to take me down. Casting blazing shield every three seconds sustained. Your doing crazy damage for a tank too. GL and have fun

This is correct. The regen values you see on your character sheet are in combat values, you need an addon to see your out of combat regen values.

GeertKarel · March 2016

It is a good thing that people are just thinking about different tank builds, but sadly it is quite hard to see why health recovery as tank would be any good. Basically if you would have 4k health recovery, that is actually for solo tanking actually quite good but sadly if you have a healer with extended or purifying ritual on the ground that will heal you more then that 4k health recovery ever will. Also with your build you will lose way more damage mitigation then you normally would and mitigating damage is better then recovering damage, what you aren't losing you don't have to gain back.

For pledges I think you would totally survive w/o a healer in that kind of a setup.
and for PVP it is a whole different story.

Autolycus · March 2016

I'd have to agree with most of what's stated here so far. Health Regen builds are really only useful in pvp, and in small-group encounters or duels. Once you start zerging around with larger groups it becomes inferior to the many other options we have for zergbusting, and health reco. generally will not afford enough survivability in those large-group encounters to make a huge difference.

I'd also agree that the most suitable characters for a health recovery build are Nords and Argonians, and either DK (playing on mitigation and health recovery bonuses) or Templar (playing mostly on high, health-based shields and recovery).

Imo it's a good idea to find a balance between health recovery and either SD or WD. Get a reasonable amount of mag/stam (whichever you choose to do, most likely mag) and a fair bit of SD/WD so that your skills hit harder than a wet noodle. They don't have to hit that hard, but hard enough that someone can't simply vigor over it. I recommend shooting for at least 2k SD for a mag build and at least 2.5k WD for a stam build. Again, this is strictly for health reco tanking in cyro.

Edit: Also use Orzorga's (the legendary food). I use it on three characters now for pvp and will swear by it for the foreseeable future. You can usually get the max stats and SD/WD you need from gear or enchants, so let your food buff your recoveries to some extent. It's 351 health recovery, and 300 mag/stam recovery. That alone frees up all three of your jewelry glyphs for SD/WD. Pair that with something like 5set Orgnum's Scales, 1 Kena, and then a 3set of your choice (head, sword, shield -or- head, dual wield). I would probably use the 3set of Torug's and 3 Willpower Jewelry with SD enchants, personally. Let the Orgnum's kick in at <60% where it matters most, otherwise be a mag/tank hybrid.