I've been go over every type of way to make an effective PVE dual ice staff tank build and keep running into a wall. Now, before everyone starts yelling, "Why!?" and "Sword and Board is way better!", let me first say that I know. I mainly run 4 man content and I want to change it up a little. I want to try and make something that molds to my normal team.

The main thing I can't get over is how effective pierce armor is for tanking and there's no substitute for ice staffs.  If you think about it, pierce armor does 3 things for 1 skill and is super cheap (taunt, major fracture, and major breach). To get a taunt without using sword and board, you have to go to one of the morphs for inner fire, which costs twice as much as pierce armor, or heavy attack with the ice staff. Heavy attack is problematic in boss fights because of the time to cast when trying to taunt a target. So basically, you have to use 2 or 3 skills to get the same effect as one skill - pierce armor. This makes using dual ice staffs a really inefficient setup.

One thought I had to help with ice staff tanks would be to rework elemental susceptibility to have a cast cost comparable to pierce armor, but magicka, and change the effect from "damage dealt to the target refreshes the effect" to "applies x magicka damage and taunts the target." This skill would then have two effects, taunt and major breach, which would be in-line with a magicka type tank build, but would be a range taunt, making it more competitive to the pierce armor.

The other idea I had was be to have the chill effect taunt enemies. This would help give an aoe taunt and encourage more tanks to backbar ice staffs for blockade or pulsar, but might have a negative effect with some of the armor/weapon sets. I could also see this making warden tanks a must have in trial.

I still want to try and make this tank work, so if anyone is running a dual ice staff setup in pve and you dont mind sharing your rotation, please let me know.