I'm fishing around for something a little more specific than "you need full t3" or "you need all your stats maxed". For one thing, I'm working through t1 and, from what I've seen so far, I don't see any set bonus and when I equip the stuff I lose armor and mitigation. So let's take it that all the max values come after a long period of time, and that in the meanwhile, I'd like to find a few new tanking challenges, but I also don't want to gather a group of people and lead them on a suicide mission. I can do the early apw and the easier overlands without any trouble. Not sure what would be considered the most punishing thing I survived. I picked up a "chicken" recently--it had killed the main tank until we ran out of battle rezzes, so I kept it going while he physically ran back from the altar. Apparently it only casts the healing debuff on the original target; it was still pretty rough, but I made it through and had a really hard time losing the aggro when the first tank got back in. So what I'm looking for is, not necessarily the hardest stuff in game, but some examples of mid-grade targets and what (unbuffed) health and defensive scores you would need to expect to make it through. Every buff that exists is available to me and of course I have the MH spell shield thing and, my racial is Vulmane which does something like return 15% of group damage as healing. For example, if I wanted to complete "Humongous Mojo"--what would you need for the tougher giants there? And also are there situations like maybe Teraxes where it may benefit to use resistance gear? Welcoming your suggestions on what could be considered 55 progression. It looks to me like a fresh, relatively ungeared 55 gets to my point with full buffs, much as with full buffs I become as powerful as an unbuffed but well geared tank. Again, this is to help figure out what new things to try without going splat.
The PotA armor bonuses are not a deal breaker in fact a chaos one can be more of a pain than anything else. APW gear has a lot of AC on it and you typically find it difficult to justify replacing APW gear with PotA T1. A number of the stats have a bonus from worn gear and a bonus from buffs. Typically a good target to aim for is 25% Spell and melee mitigation from gear (general counts towards both). 25% critical hit and damage rating and around 14% accuracy from gear (not from buffs or equipped effects). APW and the original overland's were implemented when the player cap was level 50 and the mobs were 3 levels higher than that. That would typically translate to a level 58 mob now. It is always worthwhile going to a mob like Shendu and targeting him and checking your melee mitigation in your character sheet as it varies based on the level of the mob targeted. The melee mitigation is fairly accurate but realize that your spell mitigation on your character sheet also takes into account the amount of resists you currently have - so a hand calc/spreadsheet of spell mit from gear is far better. With regards to hit points, I find it is better to make a "defensive" chat tab that records incoming damage on you. Then every time you die (or get hit), you can look at what killed you. Was it melee or spell damage? Did you die because the mob hit you for more hit points than you had? If you had used you abilities or clickies differently could you have survived? Was it just down to not getting enough heals fast enough etc. Could getting more hit points from meat help? With regards to crits you can get a sense of how often you are critting and how often you are missing but a parse program will allow you to compare yourself to others if you have to same class on the same mob with the same group make up. For instance the effect (at player level 55) of accuracy is not really felt against a level 57 mob (if you have accuracy buffs) but is noticeable at level 59/60 mobs. With good healing and mitigation you should have little problem surviving Zodifin and Shendu type of mobs with 18k+ hit points but once you are farming these mobs and getting augs should be able to push this to 20K+ hit points. Typically a "new" tank coming up and progressing onto harder hitting mobs tends to get hit harder by spell damage until they can catch up with their spell mit.
you may not like it, but its just easier to talk about your tank's gear in terms of pota progress. a spreadsheet and the xanadu database will help you figure out how much extra youre getting. in terms of content, apw/pota t2 will get you through all the group content except cob. if youre serious about raiding you should be completing your pota t3 and all three chicken armor pieces. there really is no reason to break it further down into specifics like "resist gear" etc etc b/c the pota stuff is so encompassing.
I like the idea about the incoming damage tab--guessing you could /log that out individually? The thing about PotA is that it's almost unplayable muck with the ladder rung quests and two sides in it. I like the chicken and the random nameds that show up, but the thing is, you can't just have t3 on Tuesday. I could say "let's try Guar" or something like that which, I suppose to a lot of people is yesterday's trash, but it's those kinds of things that I'm looking for as new targets. It really is more cumbersome to finesse the right group for a quest stage than to go after stuff that's wide open to everybody. Armor Class says that it gives you an amount of mitigation; then you have evasion, "includes dodge, block, and parry chances, but will not be the sum of all four"; and then this goes back to the front as Defense which is some weird score construed out of evasion and mitigation percentages...and from what I've not heard in any thread, this Defense score is not considered by nobody to be nothing. If armor class is really only a bit of mitigation, then I don't understand why armor pieces use another mitigation bonus, isn't that redundant? Or does it *slightly* help on spells as AC seems biased towards melee?
welcome to a good portion of endgame vg - finishing pota trials/quests and grinding armor. that right there is pretty much half of the end game, especially since t2/t3 pieces will make most raid targets obsolete. its like trying to force a kid who hates eating vegetables to clean his plate of broccoli. if you want to advance in this game, especially with a class as gear dependent as a tank, you need to grind out pota. you just made my point for me with all the questions about specific stats. just mouse over your ac # and see how much mit you get. then you'll see why armor pieces have different mit stats. as krolk wrote, certain stats are relative to your target's level, accuracy and mit being two of the most obvious ones. do you want to sit there and try to understand how every single defensive stat affects your tank? the only reason most of us do is b/c we've played this game for so damn long. if you're trying to figure out raid targets to try out for your guild/group, easiest way to figure out how you'll do is to look at your gear and your group's gear as opposed to looking at your stat tab and asking the people in your group/guild for their respective individual stats. once you begin to round out your gear in terms of sets (eg X of 8 apw, x of 6 t2, x of 6 t3) then you can start to look at individual armor/weapon/aug pieces that will help you max out certain stats. as far as raiding goes, even the easiest targets will be balanced around a certain amount of apw gear. apw/t2 gear will get you through everything except isle of garuzamat, half of magi hold, cob, karax, and ot. with borestones, people have a lot more leeway in terms of content they can access w/o the appropriate amount of gear.
Armor class is really simple. It caps at 6500 (ish, it's around that) which gives you a class dependent amount of mitigation. For tanks it's 45%, and capping AC matters. However, it's not something you really need to have to seek out since you'll easily cap it with gear and buffs. The hard cap on mitigation is 65% vs the mob level. You must have a level 59 mob targeted when you check mitigation in the stats tab, otherwise you'll just be misleading yourself. If you can't cap melee & spell mitigation vs level 59, then your "ability" to tank a mob says way more about your healers than it does you. Your priorities are staying alive and holding hate, and doing so without being a mana drain for your healers.
Shal mentions using a spreadsheet; it's the one and only way you can truly determine where you stand for the vast majority of your stats versus their caps. You don't mention what type of tank you're playing or what targets your guild is currently hitting, so this is a bit general. Get your T3 gear finished, get 3x chicken pieces (or the t1/t2 pieces for the buff), fill out your rings (Masuke, IWG, Vi'Rak, Shendu, APW, etc), get at least physic earing (5% ability refresh!) plus the next best you can get (Sparkles, CoB, Guar) get the best weapons (Chicken, Karax, APW) you can and put RoE's in them, get a ranged item (Guar, Masuke, Zodi, Chicken) then fill out that spreadsheet and determine which stats aren't capped and stuff augs in until they are capped. If you can't afford twilights, fill the slots with +13 hp, don't leave them empty. Carry around HP runes and DMG runes, and use them (if you're broke, level up a blacksmith to make your own). Finish up your RI-CoB helm. Get a mask that procs hate, and one that procs silence. Do the formless weapon quest for a cheap meat sword. Cap out Rage/Flurr w/ at most 2x UR version of the gems. It doesn't matter much what type of loot system your guild uses (council, DKP, random) go after the biggest/best upgrades or the hardest to fill slots (ranged in particular) since those will do the most good for you. Figure out what the best in slot item that your guild/group is capable of killing and aim for that, methodical and logical gear progression will do you the most good. Pass on items that others can use if they are side grades or minimal upgrades, this will serve you better in the long run for almost any loot system. I'm sure you're aware of it at this point, but I see some tanks get too sidetracked with DPS gear. From my perspective as a Paladin your role is primarily to take incoming damage from the mob while generating enough hate to keep it off the DPS and healers. I'm not saying ignore DPS as is a significant hate generator I'm saying its not your primary purpose. In my opinion its rarely a good idea to sacrifice any type of mitigation (up to the cap) for DPS on challenging mobs. With careful gear selection T3 + augs you can cap accuracy, crit chance, spell mit, melee mit, Rage/flurry and dmg; leaving only CDB and Strikethrough/strikethrough chance uncapped. Check your defensive stats versus various overland mobs, if you have cob access check vs the lvl 60's in there. Do your best to be capped at least versus the lvl 59's. If you have no target it checks versus your level. Check them in all of your stances. Sparkles is probable the hardest hitting overland raid mob, and he can hit for upwards of 20k on a squishy, about 8-12k non crit on most tanks. Unbuffed raid tanks sit right around 14k, with 21k (no disc) being normal range for raid buffed hp.
Allright, that's a little more to mull over. Amnath is a Vulmane dread knight, I just checked and the racial says 25% of group damage returns to you as health, nice extra cooldown there. As far as nice goodies, has all the Masuke things like the ring and crossbow, and got that wonky shovel off the chicken; Akande's war plate; RI helm; most of the rest of it is not that spectacular. PotA t1 stuff certainly looked dps oriented. Sure, I'm going to continue working that up, I'm not even complaining that it's slow, just indicating that it is, in fact, slow. I figured that lorestones twerked the general understanding of how much gearing was needed for harder things. I don't like the quest, don't know if they're really even appropriate, but I did them all except the strikethrough ones. Having 5% just like voila! when most of these gear increases and runes and stuff are for more like a 1% gain, that just...to me, doesn't seem like it belongs in existence, but there it is. "Humongous mojo" was my example from having done Nerk and Jagund more times than I could even guess, sometimes with only about 12 people, but all I know about Fengrot and Varking is that they're harder...never seen them, don't know where they are, whether you need 18 or 24. Guar has killed my alts many times, easy to find, not part of the quest though. Have done Masuke and Belzane a bunch, most of the earlier APW ones like Vicus, Palp, and that big Cartheon construct; none of those are much challenge to me, although that chicken was, and that was without the healing debuff. That paladin that pops up in PotA destroyed me. Sometimes it's not immediately obvious if it was a lack of healing or just a crazy crit, so a defensive chat tab sounds helpful. I'll try targeting some higher level stuff and start building a spreadsheet. Thanks for your responses.
It seems this is two different subjects. As far as personal survival, no I'm probably not ready to mess with a 58+ raid target. But with some of those giants even being level 53, the difference is with the mechanics especially concerning adds--it simply requires 24 to handle the encounter, or very close. My force fluctuates between 12-18 people and the reason that works for most of APW/BoD/ Virak and some of the giants is that there aren't serious phases to the fight or that many adds. Is this roughly correct? If so then I guess the long range goal is to personally gear through PotA and other goodies and try to build up to 24. In the meantime could anyone suggest other overlands that might be feasible for a less than full raid? From browsing around it was hard to tell. Just a few that would be a notch up from Masuke & Belzane.
All the level 53 raid mobs are tuned for level 50 players in various gear levels. Most of them are 18 man raids, with Guar/IoG/Varking/Slim Jim being 24 man raids. The progression goes something like APW/Jagund/Prime Warden/Nerksawl to Dresla to Fengrot to Guar (which is a DPS check), then IoG / Slim Jim / Varking. Or something like that, I'm probably forgetting some mobs and the order may be slightly wrong. The later mobs expect your raid to be mostly finished with APW and earlier overlands, and the difficulty and gear requirements ramp up accordingly. It is worth keeping in mind that all those mobs used to be locked to 18 or 24 people, so for 18 man mobs group 4 could not help. They were also all farmed weekly by many guilds at level 50. Being level 55 gives you a pretty big advantage and will allow you to skimp on some gear. Working on actual level 55 progression will also make it easier. Doing the old world content is definitely a good thing for building your raid force. There are strat execution checks, DPS checks and tank gear checks spread throughout the progression. Do not avoid fights that you think are hard just because of adds or strat execution or whatever. You need to do them to progress as a cohesive raid force; it's about the raid as a whole learning how to kill stuff effectively. That is vital if you ever want to progress to the point that you can kill, for example, Karax or Shendu.
Never heard of Prime Warden before. Sounds like that and Dresla should be in the realm of possibilities, and whatever other 53s tuned for 18 probably about the same. I don't avoid anything, I thrive on that stuff personally and I think that's a pretty good point about progress as a well-oiled machine. Of course, one step at a time--I tried that target a 59 thing and saw my "capped mitigation" unravel to a lovely 45%. One thing I don't like about tanking is faking it; don't like to hang around as a low melee dps and not really tank anything, if I'm not needed or not able to do it, I would rather bring an alt. Pretty sure it will be quite a while before seeing t3 or Shendu but each step is worthwhile.
Hmm so, just to kick it around a bit more...with stats well, character is several years old, nothing new there. I understand that armor feeds into mitigation, and what that does is obvious; I don't quite see how it blends in with other things to create evasion or how this blends further to create defense. Well, I see that it does blend in; just can't fathom what those aggregate scores do. As far as resistance, that was kind of aimed at MH. Generally agree that tanks are weaker versus spells. That place is far ahead of anything from PotA and coughs out quite a few pieces of resistance stuff. Given those conditions, it seemed like there should be some situation between MH and PotA at least, where a spell vulnerable tank would have a use for that kind of stuff. Instead of doing some of the same things my tank has already farmed out, I sent some dps at the raid mobs. 51 vs a 57, then a 52 vs a 58. They might not have done their full amount but did hammer quite a few crits in both situations. Tanking doesn't allow for the luxury of that kind of spread. Much more step-by-step and then if five other tanks get caught up to my point then progress will be even trickier.
Just mouse over the abilities and you should get a general description of what they do. evasion doesn't really apply to tanks b/c sillius gutted that on tanks a while back. dodge, block, and parry are outright misses by the mob so they would have nothing to do with mitigation. again, if you look at your character sheet and mouse over the resistances, you'll see where they cap. youre not looking for resistance, youre looking for spell mitigation which is harder to build up compared to melee mitigation. you'll hit the soft cap on most spell resistances through class/diplo bluffs. shadow and planar are the two hardest to acquire, but your tank is not close to that point yet. dps doesn't allow for the same kind of luxury youre talking about as well. unless your dps people are exceptionally well geared, they will have the same problems you have.
Yeah I had that one mixed up; mitigation is not in evasion. I just can't get any sense out of evasion and defense. Adding a 1% evasion...sounds nice...but whereas I know that x% block gives that chance to block the hit and return a hate building reaction, don't know if evasion is a % for the attack to miss without generating a reaction, or what. Seems almost irrelevant I guess. No, wasn't really thinking about...oh need cold resist need arcane resist etc...just if there were examples such as Hillsbury Hound which does mostly fire damage where, ok I need to swap into fire resist gear for this fight. Assuming shadow and planar are needed further down the road, I'll try not to toss those specific items. I could just guess they were, since they're nixed from shadow meld stance. Spell mitigation looks like a really long road on its own; have a couple of the runes for whenever getting an item worth putting them in, but it starts really low and you sure don't see it come around very much. On the dps example...well sending a 51 tank at Masuke would be a bad idea. Instead, since I wasn't tanking, my monk was the only one who didn't wipe--got it down second try. If all the dps was 51, it might take a really long time, but in his case I think the only damage ramp is from offensive stance--so if you keep him in defensive, you could go on for an hour if that's what it takes. Certainly for some targets you need a tasty burn phase or beat a rampage timer, just noticed that although I missed a few times, I did pretty decently for the level--i.e., on the monk's long reaction chains, usually landed two if not all three. I bet tanking him in offensive is a mark of the top tanks in game.
Generally you don't have to worry about evasion specifically. Just get your block as high as you can. Whilst there are some fights where resists sort of matter, they don't matter to the point of swapping gear out. You will almost certainly lose more than you gain doing that, since if the non-resist stats were better you'd be wearing the gear with resists on anyway. Shadow damage is pretty much only done in OT. Planar damage is done by Shendu and CoB. You have a ways to go before you have to worry about Planar. Spell mitigation is not that hard to come by. T3 PotA and some raid drops have a bunch of it on, and a small number of runes of mollification will make up the rest. Not really. Whitewind is a low tier mob, end game raid tanks have to deal with significantly higher damage than Whitewind does. To give a semi random example, with your gear as it is now Sparkles would probably one shot you.
No? When the tanks bigger than me take Whitewind it's still done in defensive. In that case you could say Whitewind offensive is a tank gear check you should be able to handle before attempting...something? To mention the current stumbling points, the things I have tried and never succeeded yet are Teraxes and Initiate Nenly. Seems to me it was less of a survivability issue and more of a technique. On Teraxes it seemed more like you just plan on dying and then come back to try to finish him. With Nenly the difficulty seemed to be when he summons you...it was either a stun or the zero distance thing, "can't see your target", and a few seconds of not hitting him with stuff were enough to lose aggro and then he just runs through the raid. I think I could take what he was dishing out, but if aggro loss is the issue then raid needs to be informed to stop dps and use invulns/hate reducers when tank is summoned.
All I can say to that is either your tanks or healers are chickens Everyone has their preferred way of doing things. Sometimes that way is preferred just because it's the way it's always been done and they're too unimaginative (or chicken) to try something different. I don't go into any fight planning on dieing. Ever. If you do that, you have lost before you started. That is why I dislike the spare-group-sat-on-a-hill strat, and why when it's up to me I always send in all 4 groups even if I know some might die.
Trying to sift it out...kind of hard to reconcile points of view here. I'm not t anything, or I don't use the t1 stuff I have. When I do Masuke, doesn't seem difficult really. Watch a t3 tank do it in defensive and they still take some hits, to the extent I would believe offensive would shred them. So when you make it sound like a triviality, and yet it's like pure doom for a t3 tank with multiple t3 healers I...don't know what to draw from that. Maybe it has to do with going in with around 15 people and having more healers and dps would soften it up. For Teraxes, a fire user for whom I've not been suggested it's worth using fire resist gear, information shows that he, in fact, casts a one-shot spell for which the best bet seems to be getting it cast at one person. As the tank, assuming you're going to be that person, why would you not plan on dying? Actually, now that I think back on it, I didn't tank that one. You are not supposed to use hate so perhaps chances are you won't be holding aggro and it's simply the "sacrificial lamb" who should be the one dying. In that case it would be almost tanking irrelevant since melee generates ill effects. Everyone's a kiter and the best one loses?
not sure where you're getting the idea that masuke in offensive is doom for a t3 tank with mutiple t3 healers. its not true. for teraxes, 1. if you as the tank know youre going to get hit with the spell, why would it matter what kind of gear you wore in the first place. 2. i guess you havent figured out the way to kill teraxes w/o the tank dying.
