27 Jul 2012 15:54
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No updates to any guides just yet, but I have been trying to do a lot of compilation and collating of the current state of tanking over on the main forums. (Because my primary cabal role is usually main tank.) Today, I simply present you with a few interesting tidbits that are not in the primary flow of opinion and information that most tanks see. Are these true? I don't know; I'm not in a position to test them for myself yet.
Allegation #1: Hit Rating is bugged and will actually cause more glances and evades if you go over 400-ish total Hit Rating. Remember, you might have as much as 300 Hit Rating just from your passive "World Domination" buff from PvP. If you feel like "why the hell am I glancing so much?", try actually dropping your hit rating below the reputed threshold for this reputed bug.
Allegation #2: Heal Tanking is possibly a strong method of hate generation in Nightmare dungeons. Especially if you use Blood as your healing weapon. Some players have posted interesting details from a few angles. For one, healers report frequently that Blood barriers seem to generate full hate for both the heal and the barrier component of the ability immediately upon casting it, and that the huge team-wide heal + barrier of Cold Blooded is especially prone to pull aggro right off a tank who is otherwise holding aggro fairly well. (Although I must report that my main healer never pulls off me with Cold Blooded, but I really stack a lot of hate multipliers.) For two, some tanks report they have good success with using healing not only to generate hate, but to even out their spike damage a bit. Third, and most intriguing, I've see several reports that Exquisite Corpse might be a wee bit broken in a good way. Apparently, EC will fully mitigate 50% of any attack that hits it. Even a huge attack, and the NM bosses can put out some really large attacks. So, for example, if an 8K boss attack hits your puny EC, they'll of course blow up the EC in that one single hit, but not before the EC barrier mitigates that 8K attack down to only 4K that actually gets through to you. Yes, I thought that might make you crook and eyebrow and go "huh?!". So what I wonder is whether a healtank setup with something like Chaos/Blood might actually be viable in NM dungeons (at least until Funcom decides to nerf EC or Cold Blooded). You'd use Cold-Blooded as your hate generator after the boss resets hate, and you'd use EC as a mitigation shield every time you knew a big hit might be coming. If you try this out, please report back!
Update: Player Krytical provided some excellent feedback about #2. Here ya go:
I messed around extensively with chaos/fists and chaos/blood healer tanks. They worked pretty well in elites to the point I could run SH with 4 DPSers, but it didn't hold up with my regular nightmare group. Survivability was fine, arguably more sustainable than the classic chaos/blade tank, but even with 3 healing pieces and 300% threat multiplier the DPSers would pull aggro occasionally. The build worked perfectly with sub 1.5K DPS, but I was not able to hold aggro against 2k+ DPSers, which my chaos/blade tank has no issues doing with just 2 DPS pieces.
Yes, blood/chaos can provide better survivabilty than blade/chaos. However the hate generation is alot lower.
Now if you look closely at some of the skills in blood, you will realize that at least at some point it was intended to be an option for tanks. It is one of the handful of weapons that has impairs (a signature tank skill) along with other notable benefits to a tank.
There are several complexities with heal tanking:
1) You must sacrifice some hit points and/or attack rating in exchange for heal rating to make it viable
2) Blood/Fist healing builders do not build resources for both weapons.
3) Healing generates half of the hate that attacking does and healing does not proc Fuel to the Fire. So to generate the same amount of hate with healing, you must heal for more than twice as much as the damage you would be dealing otherwise.
4) Grabbing aggro quickly may be hard due to needing to wait for somebody to take damage under some circumstances.
Now heal tanking can still be effective under conditions where the amount of hate that needs to be generated is lessened. Such as:
1) Team with players who do significantly less damage and healing, than players with similar gear as you
2) Have the other members of the team wear more hp gear
3) Fight bosses with large shields (such as in Hell Fallen Nightmare)
4) Have the other members of the team use subtlety and confuse more often than normal
The only case where I have seen heal tanking be more effective than the conventional approach to tanking is in Hell Fallen Nightmare. It does not hold up in Elite Hell Fallen, because bosses do not have the shields and kiting is not required. So… I think the prime candidates for heal tanking will be: HF NM, SH NM, Facilty NM, and raids.
Either way, I seriously appreciate it. It's a thankless job, and I apologize for my silly joke about escalation. :)
@LJHalfbreed: I'm skeptical too about heal-tanking in NMs, so that's why I clearly titled this particular update "Rumors, lies, and allegations". That was supposed to clearly mark these two bits reported by players who reputedly tank NM dungeons as suspect, but interesting to think about and possibly investigate further. Also, I haven't included this information in any guide. It's only out here in the blog stream as an interesting note.
I find this post to be terribly misinformed, as heal tanking is ineffective at actually tanking, since heals do not apply exposed, and applying exposed is the only way to tank.
… lol.
Thanks so much for the great site, and all your hard work (both of you). I really appreciate you taking the time to glean important nuggets of hard info (speculation or otherwise) from the forums and put them in a cohesive spot for easy checking.
-LJ