Tanking help

guangui · October 2016

HI All,

I'm trying to be the best tank i can be but i have a few questions i cant find the answers to.

What resistances should i have as tank unbuffed? What would be a good area to be at.

Is nirnhorn worth it on my gear? The resistances it gives isnt even that much, does it make a big difference or should i create different gear?

Aimor, is the armor stat what increases both my physical and spell resistance? Meaning i would get the most benefit from heavy gear ?

How much health should i be aiming to have as a tank? Im currently sitting on 28K.

What is the cap on resistances so i know when to stop going for it.

Any help is appreciated!

DocFrost72 · October 2016

Heyo,

A good idea for resists is much more easily judged with your buffs up. If you are 30k or so in purple gear, you're likely fine. The armor cap, btw, is 33,500.

Nirnhoned shields are best in slot, because for some reason they give more defense than reinforced. And yes, tanks wear mostly (if not all) heavy. Protip: gloves and belts give the least amount of armor, and the chest gives the most. Keep that in mind if going for light/medium pieces.

The armor rating of equipped gear is tied directly to BOTH your physocal and spell resistance, which is why reinforced is so handy on your chest pieces.

Health all depends on your build. Most trial tanks like 30k+ with food, but that said 25k is definately doable in 4 man dungeons where you have a dedicated healer on you like glue.

You seem to be in the right area for tanking, so the best advice I can give is to get into the thick of it. Oh, and please, please slot a taunt!

guangui · October 2016

@DocFrost72 I always have a taunt on and some form of CC. Just wish they'd add a group taunt! Going around poking adds can be tedious. Thank you for the information. I am near the cap when i am Buffed so this pleases me. Now i can focus on gear sets that give me just health bonuses.

idk · October 2016

As long as you have high CP (400+) I wouldn't stress about resistance. With 5 heavy, 1 light and 1 medium and of course the heavy armor passives you should be fine.

A good setup is 5 Tava's, 2 bloodspawn and the other 5 can be dragon, werewolf (no more than I armor) or ebon. Of course you'd use the medium armor skill for the buff to proc Tava's.

Asardes · October 2016

I will answer your questions together: Maximum useful resistance is 33.5K but that only gives you 50% mitigation. Anything about that cap won't give you more actual mitigation. If you have slightly less there's not a big issue; anything above 30K magical & physical resistance is good, and anything above about 31K that gives fast diminishing returns up to the cap. I can hit that without any reinforced or nirnhoned pieces, with light waist and medium hands, for the Undaunted Mettle bonus. It's better to put CP in elemental resistance and other mitigation stats as you earn them - those give diminishing returns as well, but not at the same rate as resistance, since they are applied before incoming damage is considered against your resistance. Hardy and especially elemental defender should be priority when you allocate CP. 27K-28K is more than enough even for trials. If you are already there you should invest in your other resource pools, magicka and especially stamina by putting attribute points in them, running infused on big armor pieces and tri-stat glyphs. Also the undaunted passive helps a lot, and racial bonuses are important as well. Another important stat is magicka recovery, because magicka is used for most utility skills (shield, ward, CC etc.). Running divines on small pieces and atronach mundus, and CP in spell cost reduction and magicka recovery is very helpful.

Synfaer · October 2016

I run a Nord stamina DK as a tank and have about 28K resists with 10pts in magika and the rest in stamina. With purple tristat food I have about 27K health which is fine for most vet dungeons.
If things get tricky I have a set of plague doctors I can switch to which gives me 40k health, but most of the time I run with tava's + thunderbug (to add some dps). I switch out tremorscale for bloodspawn on most bosses to increase uptime on warhorn. At the moment I have S&B on both bars with crushing or decisive (not sure which is better) on main bar and defending on back bar together with my heal (vigor) & buffs.
I have chains on my 1st bar (unrelenting morph which gives some free dps on bosses), as well as talons for CC, igneous shield (good for saving melee dps that are slow to run from those melee AoE's). Ransack (taunt & debuf) and heroic slash (debuff mob damage + ulti generator) also on 1st bar.
I have vigor on back bar, with igneous weapons & spiked armor (a bit of dps & gets resists from 28k to cap), also have cinderstorm AoE to initially CC trash in one spot (keeps everything neat with tremorscale for dps to melt) use this with talons and trash is literally superglued to one spot. Lastly I use shuffle, mainly to proc tava's, but 20% dodge is solid for tanking. For ulimates I use warhorn on bar 1 and magmashell on bar 2 (for when everyone else is sleeping and I need some quality time to wake them up).
As far as set composition goes, I use 5 heavy + 1 med & 1 light to utilize undaunted mettle passive (i used 7 heavy before i achieved the skill). I have infused trait on legs/head/chest to maximize the Tri-stat enchant and sturdy on the rest to reduce block cost. All other pieces have max stam enchants except for jewels which have shield play.
Red CP is generally assigned to hardy/elemental/thick skinned, green assigned to reduced skill stamina/magika cost & a bit in stam regen, blue in elfborn & blessed. You play around with other CP bonuses but the ones listed are where I have most of my points.

WalksonGraves · October 2016

Not sure if this was covered already but you can run light/med sets with no loss of defense if you do 1h/shield/ring/ring/amy.

Synfaer · October 2016

WalksonGraves wrote: »

Not sure if this was covered already but you can run light/med sets with no loss of defense if you do 1h/shield/ring/ring/amy.

Agreed but getting the traits you want on the weapons/shield is painful in this incantation of OT. Far easier to make the weapons/shield the crafted component and the rest is 'relatively' easy to get. If desperate, use the gloves/belt & boots slots for med/light subs.

Vildebill · October 2016

25k health is perfectly fine, more is just a waste, invest the rest in mag or stam. Same with over 30k resistance, if you have 30k don't waste your time to get the last numbers up to 33,5k (buffed). There are many ways to achieve this, reinforced chest piece and nirnhoned shield is effective ways. I always go for 5/1/1 for undaunted mettle to maximize stats.

Try to wear sets that gives utility for your group, like ultimate generation sets for your war horn (bloodspawn, tava's favor, werewolf) and resistance debuffing sets (alkosh, hard to get though since it's from maw). Some people like ebon a lot for group health buff, might be good for certain situations i guess (and it looks cool which of course is important

) but I wouldn't wear it in most situations. Sturdy gear and CP helps you reducing the block cost and save stamina.

Debuff the boss with pierce armor and heroic slash (which also gives you ultimate). Use crushing enchantments on weapons.