Amorpho wrote: »

So, I have a magicka nightblade (Altmer) I'd like to turn into a tank, but I have absolutely zero experience with this playstyle. Ever since day one I have been focusing entirely on dps. I think I could easily figure out skills, rotation and stuff. What I need help with is gear. Can you guys suggest something that might start me off? Possibly something that would work decently both in PVE and PVP, something easily accessible since I am experimenting. I was thinking of maybe starting with a 5 piece Black Rose. Any wisdom from you expert tankers?

Black Rose is more commonly used in pvp by semi tanks. You should definitely use Hist Bark for the five piece bonus, it is great in pvp and pve.

Hist bark is a crafted set only requires like 3 or 4 traits

Brrrofski wrote: »

Nestor wrote: »

Thing to remember about a Tank, in PvE anyway, is your not there for Damage, your there for drawing aggro and surviving that, crowd control and group buffs. In other words, your loading up Health rather than Magic and Stamina. Although you might want some of those to have a large enough resource pool to fire off your taunts and other utility skills as needed, but the more Health you have, the better off you will be.

5 Piece Hist Bark
4 Piece Allesias or other similar set (as your going to be One Hand Shield for Tanking)
Endurance or Footmans or other Jewelry set to further buff your survivability.

Not with a saptank. You can deal a lot of damage as well as keep aggro on everything. It's far better for dungeons than my Dk tank. I have over 2.5k spell damage, 32% crit and like 34k magica. My Swallow souls crit for 8k and I'm spamming it. Trials I prefer my Dk tank though because of chains and talons, the two things a saptank lacks.

Even on any tank, histbark and resistance sets are bad. Tava's and bloodspawn is amazing for getting warhorn even 45 or so seconds. Big resource kickback on a DK and a lot of extra crit damage for your group.

Plus you have blur on a nb, which either gives speed or extra resistances depending on what morph you choose.

That's the thing, being a NB it will be a sap-tank. I think you nailed it on the head mate. What would work best on a NB sap-tank? Bloodspawn and Tava's blessings are on my list already. What about Jewellery though? Willpower? Cause the more I do damage, the more I heal myself...

I'm in the same situation, but I'm a Dunmer Templar. Still looking for gear info, but seems that tanks are very much versatile to reach a consensus.

It heavily depends. If magicka tanking, 5 piece seducer heavy (or in the case of sap tanks 5 Julian is heavy) is a good foundation. Remember for a fair amount of tanks, magicka use is important. As a nightblade tank, even full stam, your resource management comes from magicka based skills.

If stamina, my personal tried and true is 5 piece hist bark and 5 footman's. That said, replace hist bark for tava's if you are already running major evasion. The ult gain is really nice, and potions also give you ult as a nightblade.

You may decide to go 5/1/1 for max raw stats. If you do, remember: belt light, hands medium. It's the min/max armor number.

It depends on the content you do.

Nightblade tanks don't have a lot of traditional tanking utility. But we do have a ton of damage and healing potential. For dungeons, I tank in Kagrenac + Bahraha (any 2p monster set would do, though once Update 12 hits, try to get Swarm Mother), and as a tank, I have 36K magicka and 2K spell damage. Esp. in AoE, I can contribute a fair amount of DPS. (I recommend Kag over Juli--for a tank, Kag provides much more useful stats.)

For trials, though, you'll want a more traditional tank build. E.g., Tava, Ebon, Blood Spawn. The damage from the tank can be significant in small 4-man groups, but is inconsequential in a trial. Likewise with the healing that you can do. Instead, in trials, you want to maximize group support, so increasing ulti gen to get more frequent War Horns.

Personally, I'd go with a DK tank in a trial because the things that make saptanks unique (damage and healing) don't really matter in a trial. But for 4-man dungeons, saptanks are great, and I much rather tank a dungeon with my saptank than with my DK tank.

The concept of DK tanks being superior to NB tanks in a trial setting is a myth. I can personally attest to that fact, and yes, I'm accounting for vMoL and hardmodes too. The only real difference between a NB tank and DK is chains.. that's it. And I've proven many a time that chains are not necessary to stack adds.

NB sustain is the highlight of the class. As such, the case for Black Rose is not as strong, but it is still an amazing set. If you're looking to do something that works for both pve and pvp, I'd pick something else, because Black Rose just doesn't provide a benefit to you that you actually need in a trials setting. What you really want for trials is an Ultimate-regen build, but its uses in pvp are fairly limited (but still viable). I guess what I'm getting at is that you'll probably want to do different sets for both pvp and pve, but it is still realistic to have the same sets for each. If you don't plan on tanking trials, the solution is very simple: heavy Kags, Juli, Seducer, or another set that affords magicka stats like spell damage and max magicka. Recovery is not a significant stat for pve for a NB, but in pvp it is still necessary due to the limitations for attack weaving.

Autolycus wrote: »

The concept of DK tanks being superior to NB tanks in a trial setting is a myth.

I have a good friend who mains a nb tank and tanks all the trials, and I agree that nb tanks are perfectly viable in a trial. The main reason I don't use my nb tank in a trial is because it loses all of its flavor and uniqueness. It's not that they're bad for trials. It's that they're just sooo much better in small-group content where the tank can be more active.

code65536 wrote: »

Nightblade tanks don't have a lot of traditional tanking utility.

What do you mean by this?

code65536 wrote: »

Autolycus wrote: »

code65536 wrote: »

Nightblade tanks don't have a lot of traditional tanking utility.

What do you mean by this?

Mostly, no chains and no prevent-the-ranged-dude-from-backing-out-of-the-AoEs-of-death CC.

New monster helm makes chains less of a defining skill. Look at the new strangler set. Very excited to try some templar tanking, myself.

code65536 wrote: »

Autolycus wrote: »

code65536 wrote: »

Nightblade tanks don't have a lot of traditional tanking utility.

What do you mean by this?

Mostly, no chains and no prevent-the-ranged-dude-from-backing-out-of-the-AoEs-of-death CC. Of the 2 CCs nightblades have, one breaks the instant the target takes damage (at least make it a threshold like the DK one, but that's another topic) and the other disperses crowds when tanks generally want to consolidate crowds.

This isn't an issue if you have any mag DK dps or healers. I heal vMoL on my mag DK sometimes and this is what I do, and that's when we have DK tanks in the party even. Mag DK dps does crazy damage with Burning Talons, so it makes more sense for them to do it anyway. Aside from a handful of encounters, chains and talons are entirely ineffective due to CC immunity.

Even in fights like the Stone Atronach in vet AA when the Chainspinners and Nullifiers need to be collected in the AoEs of death, it's easily done if you know the mobs' maximum attack range. It's really as simple as moving a little further away - which is virtually riskless and quite efficient given a NB's unlimited access to Major Expedition and a plethora of self-healing.

Chains and Talons are extremely useful. I'm most definitely not debating that fact. But with so many enemies being completely immune to them and perfectly viable alternatives in even the most challenging encounters, I don't think that's justification for leaving out NB tanks. It's on the player, not the class.

code65536 wrote: »

Autolycus wrote: »

code65536 wrote: »

Autolycus wrote: »

code65536 wrote: »

Nightblade tanks don't have a lot of traditional tanking utility.

What do you mean by this?

Mostly, no chains and no prevent-the-ranged-dude-from-backing-out-of-the-AoEs-of-death CC. Of the 2 CCs nightblades have, one breaks the instant the target takes damage (at least make it a threshold like the DK one, but that's another topic) and the other disperses crowds when tanks generally want to consolidate crowds.

This isn't an issue if you have any mag DK dps or healers. I heal vMoL on my mag DK sometimes and this is what I do, and that's when we have DK tanks in the party even. Mag DK dps does crazy damage with Burning Talons, so it makes more sense for them to do it anyway. Aside from a handful of encounters, chains and talons are entirely ineffective due to CC immunity.

Even in fights like the Stone Atronach in vet AA when the Chainspinners and Nullifiers are easily collected in the AoEs of death with minimal knowledge of the mobs' maximum attack range. It's really as simple as moving a little further away - which is virtually riskless for a NB's unlimited access to Major Expedition and a plethora of self-healing.

I was speaking mostly about dungeons. In trials, my DK usually doesn't even slot chains and talons except for specific encounters.

Fair enough. I don't have issues with it personally. When I have ranged adds that need to be stacked, then I use their max range against them. In most cases (running with guildies) it doesn't even matter, because we mow them down in seconds.

Edit: Except what you were saying earlier here:

code65536 wrote: »

The lack of chains is particularly annoying in the SotH dungeons. All those spiders that range you from the safety of darkness? Bleh

In which case I completely agree, because there is no room to use max range against them, and LoS is not very effective.

I've ran a NB tank since PS4 launch. I DONT sap tank and I only PvE with him. For trials just go with the standard 5 tavas 2 bloodspawn and 5 ebon/alkosh.

For NB specific skills I use mirage, siphoning attacks and shades. Plus I slot bolstering darkness on my front bar for the max health passive.

My resource pools sit around 9.7k magic 36k stam and 35k health (with ebon) with siphoning attacks you can control your resources very well only downside is you have to drop block. Just need to be more raid aware of when you can and can't.

Hist is a huge waste of a 5 piece. DK tanks are using it cause they have to cast a high costing stam ability for the dodge chance. As a NB you have a cheap magic skill that also grants you the minor resistance buffs.