Sword and board and ice staff

Double ice staff and you're gonna be struggling

I built a straight up health recovery Warden tank with 1h+Shield on front bar and Frost staff on back bar, specced primarily for PVP with a lot of utility (read: stuff to annoy enemies). There's no real specific way to build a tank like that as far as I'm aware, but all you really need to do in my opinion is remember that as a tank you don't really care about your dps, and as a Warden you have a good start for a health focused build, so you could almost use whatever weapon you want. The Frost staff and 1h+Shield just happen to have good defensive passive boosts that synergize well with tanking. If you do want to focus more on the frost staff then, maybe give yourself a bit more magicka recovery for blocking and slot a few more magicka abilities. The Warden class skills that use magicka can be quite nice for some tanking builds, so try some of them out.

kylewwefan wrote: »

I tried the light armor tanking out. It wasn’t really bad, but there were some pain points. It was hard to sustain. In dungeons. It did work, but took some effort. Might need to switch some things around.

Maybe you don’t take the trifocus passives? I dont know? Blue Netch instead of green maybe? Have to mess with it some.

Anyways, it is do able. I had issues on the first boss of vet scalecaller peak. It could be just the nature of pug mixed with me trying to learn a new style. It was rough. Other random dungeons were not a problem.

When I stayed on the staff bar. Blocking would take a lot of my magic away. A lot more than the Stam on the S/B bar.

Light armor tanking is much higher risk reward than heavy armor. You really need to focus on mechanics and resource management so much more than heavy armor tanking. The upside is that you can eek out enough damage and healing to do things besides just tanking way more effectively than a tank has any reason to be able to.

If you want some things that might help for a light armor/magicka tank...

• Use your magicka to heal instead of relying on traditional tank methods of healing. If you're running light armor, chances are you can get some decent healing out with restoration staff or class abilities. Maybe slot a resto staff on backbar.
• Only run 5 light armor pieces. Make the other 2 heavy, or at least one heavy one medium. Preferrably a heavy cuirass.
• There's not much room for error if you're not max health decked out in full heavy armor. You can't afford to take those big hits. Focus on blocking at the right time, dodging at the right time, and only tanking the mobs you absolutely need to. Obviously still always keep the boss taunted, but know your limits, because unlike every other tank, you have some.
• Get those resistances up. Whatever it takes. You might not have heavy armor to get you there, but you still want around 30k physical and spell resistance. This is common sense for most tanks but... just in case, I figured I should mention.

And of course, nothing wrong with basic heavy armor tanking with a frost staff on backbar.

MartiniDaniels wrote: »

^ I'm sure everybody knows it, but still just to make it clear - when you block with ice staff magicka regeneration is blocked, not stamina regeneration. Advantage here is that you may directly restore magicka with Balance.

Really? My mistake then. Magicka *used to* recover while blocking with a frost staff, while stamina still stopped recovering, lol, at least for me when I checked it. I suppose if you swap S+B and FS back and forth though, you'll always have one stat regenerating, so that's a plus side as well. Will change my previous post.

i don't recommend it. but if you're looking to do casual content it will be just fine just like everything else. if you try to get more competitive you're going to be forced to ditch it.