Tank guide ?

Hello

I've recently hit 55 after getting back in game from almost 2 years break. Leveled with 2 handed pretty easily.

Now I want to do PW as a tank but haven't been successful in finding any decent and detailed guide.

While using shield and 1h weapon my current stats are :

BD : 1413-1614
AS : 1,52 attacks per second
HP : 22965
Armor : 6517 ( 50,45%)
Block rate : 7062 (35,31%)
Block strength : 2,68 (62,64%)
Critical hit rate : 1725 (8,62%)
Critical damage : 2,50 (149,79%)
All res value : 4417 (40,84%)

Additional info : Wisdom level 21, current pet gives 5% HP, all items are over level 53 mostly legendary and mostly 55, extro shield and extro gloves, uniques : Mace of Desert Tomb, Cloak of Desert Tomb and Blood Rune ring. Just started doing q1.

I would like to know, which skillset should I use as tank ( both skill and wisdom tree), where to farm, what uniques to look into farming, what to look for in stats for non/unique items and any info that could actually help me on this matter.

If you have time to write this or know for a decent guide, I would be very grateful

 

Welcome back. And thank you for making the request. I haven't written one of my guides in ages and it's been a lot of fun (This part was written after I wrote the giant wall of text below). Also, what server do you play on? Looking for a helpful guild should help the long process of building a tank while you acquire what you need and I'm wondering if I know anyone who could help.

I don't have a LVL 55 tank build yet since I've had very little time to play in the last nine months, but here is what I can tell you about building a tank. Don't forget to check out the various "Show Off" threads in the DK sub-forum. There are some sick builds that can show you some of the crazier possibilities in your future.

Lets Start with stats:
First off, the biggest thing you need right now is HP. Just replacing those old items with decent legendaries will do wonders for your HP. I have a RA friend who recently came back and she replaced some of her LVL 50 items with LVL 50 items with the new stats and in less than 3 hours, she went from 8k HP to 15k HP without leveling up. Some of those replacement items were even magic or extraordinary, but were still better than what she had sitting around.

While you fix your HP, your armor/resist will also go up due to the new base stats. I'd say that, for a start, your goal should be 60k HP, 60% Armor, 40% resist, 55-60% block rate, and 50-60% block strength. From there you should be able to tank most Fatal bosses.

Regarding your knowledge, for a tank build, all of it should go into HP for now, and maybe Mobile Fortress. Once you have 25 points in HP, you can start putting points in Mobile Fortress or attack speed or the regen skill, but the second two are situational.

Regarding Skill points, most skills are pretty straight forward. Starting with your base attack, you have two. If you are tanking in a PW, you want to use Rageful Swing with the 20% damage debuff to monsters. That will improve your survivability since it is an AOE skill and if you turn and hit multiple monsters while fighting, it can make a significant difference in a melee fight. On the other hand, if you are in a boss battle, the bosses are immune to the damage debuff, so you are better off using Rage Attack which as a self attack speed buff for faster hits/rage generation, and a cool down reduction based on crits. For Rage Swing, pick up skill 2, and maybe skill 3 (discussed below). For Rage Attack, pick up all three.

Regarding skills other than your base attack, your top four are Dragon Hide, Battle Frenzy, Furious Battle Cry, and Mighty Wild Swing.

1. Mighty Wild Swing heals based on the damage you do, so it is more useful against large mobs than single bosses. That isn't to say that it can't be useful when the boss spawns minions. I recommend skills 1 and 3 in the dungeons and just 3 in the boss.
2. Furious Battle Cry is most useful as a stun break/status debuff. If you are frozen/stunned/armor broken for 3-5 seconds, it can be a death sentence. It's rage generation is secondary since you will usually have enough rage from Rage attack and being hit. I recommend skills 2 and 3.
3. Dragon Hide is similar to Mighty Wild Swing in that the HP healed is based on damage done, but with the defensive buffs that come with the HP regen options, Dragon Hide can usually let you heal up a significant amount, especially when paired with Battle Frenzy. It also serves as a second stun break and temporary immunity. One caveat though; once you get closer to the insane stats that some DKs have these days, the boost to the defensive skills becomes less important and it is mostly useful as a stun break. I recommend you pick up all three skills here.
4. Battle Frenzy is the most useless skill on the surface, but with it's talents, it becomes the cornerstone of modern tanking. The DPS classes these days do so much damage that it is near impossible to tank by having superior DPS anymore. The agro skill attached to the 2 point skill makes sure that even a no damage DK can hold any boss's attention. The three point skill is also important because the HP regen is based on your total HP pool and not your damage, making it the primary source of regen for a Tank. Finally the 5 point skill boosts your HP pool, and since you will use it regularly, it effectively acts like a permanent 20% HP buff for most fights. This is another one where you want all three skills.

Other skills that are situationally useful in the main dungeons include Charge and Ground Breaker for stuns on demand and Head-butt against mini-bosses for a stun and armor breaks. Charge also acts as an escape skill. Also, when used with it's own skill 3 and skill 3 from Rage Swing, it can give you near unlimited stuns and those are incredibly useful for crowd control. Rage Jump can also act as an initiating skill or can be used as an escape skill. With the second talent selected, you receive a defense boost that helps when jumping into the middle of a bunch of monsters.

In bosses, charge a jump are both useful to doge directional attacks or AOE attacks quickly. In those cased, I'd recommend picking up skills 2 and 3 for the jump and maybe skill 3 for charge.

When it comes to tanking, I'd say the lest useful skills are Bloody Wild Swing, Banner of War, and Fury of the Dragon. Not to say that they can't be useful, but their uses are very limited for a tank.

Stats to be looking for on items... I'll make my recommendations, and if you want the detailed "why," let me know later since this post is getting really long.

• On boots and gloves, I'd recommend looking for %HP On This Item. 28% minimum, preferably 30% or higher. Attack speed or Run Speed (or heaven forbid Damage on this item) serve little purpose for a tank who's job is to take a hit.
• On torsos, aim for % Armor On This Item. In the past, it was more of a toss up, but since they keep introducing and higher tiers with higher and higher base stats, there will come a time in the near future that you will be able to get almost all the armor you need from your torso and the base armor from other items. Accept no less than 58% or higher, but you really want 60% or higher.
• On Shoulders, you can get % Block Rate, Block Strength, % Armor. I really haven't done much number crunching on these, so I can't offer too much advice. My recommendation off the top of my head is to look at what you have and use the shoulders to fill the gaps.
• Helmets are great for offensive boosts. It seems counterintuitive, but they offer % Crit and % Damage. Neither is too useful for a tank, so aim for % HP. Minimum is 9%, but your goal should be for 9.75%+.
• Rings come in two varieties. On type comes with Crit/HP on it as a base stat while the other is HP/Resist. While both can come with a selection of bock strength, % HP On This Item, or % Crit Damage, you need to be careful crafting them since you can pass on the crit base stat when I'd assume you'd want the resistance. While this isn't an issue if you are planning on doing transfer crafting, it can reduce the effectiveness of the item if using it in the interim. I'd recommend % HP on this one given how huge the % HP lines are. You want a minimum of 58%, but preferably 60% or higher.
• Belts are a great source of resistance. It comes in two forms on a belt; % Resistance On This Item or % Resistance. Which one you want depends on your gems, other items, runes, etc, but to make a long story short, you probably want % Resistance on this item, but one % Resist wouldn't hurt the final item. %Resistance on this Item should be 58% or more and preferably 60%+ while a % Resistance line should be 9% or higher and preferably 9.75%+. For the long winded explanation, see below.
  Spoiler: Math Stuff

  % Resistance On This Item applies to the gems socketed on the item and the base resistance. On the other hand, % Resistance applies to resistance from other items and diamonds socketed on other items. If you have a belt with 600 base resistance and 675 worth of diamonds in it (5x Flawless Qaizah Diamonds), then each 60% Resist on this Item is worth 765 resistance. Now, if you have a total of 20x Flawless Qaizah Diamonds, 5 on the belt, and approximately 1900 resist from your amulet, shield, and rings, and the belt with all % RotI, you have about 8260. If you replace just one of the %RotI with % Resist, then you end up with 8226. On the surface, that is rather close and you'd figure you might as well go with %RotI, but there are runes to consider too. Lets take the same two scenarios, but with 5x20% RotI Runes, you get the following two numbers: Pure %RotI=9535, 3x%RotI and 1x % Resist=9624. The gap continues to shift in favor of the % Resistance line as you add more %RotI runes to the belt, and if you have higher resistances on your amulets/rings/shield. Ultimately, %RotI is the easiest to recommend, but in some top tier builds, it might not hurt to throw in one % Resist. More math would probably confirm this.
• Amulets are pretty easy. Go for % HP. While you can get Block Strength, I think that % HP will be much more beneficial for the tank build given the diminishing returns for Block Strength. The important part is that your HP regen from Frenzy is based on your total HP, so more HP is almost always universally good.
• Shields are also tricky. They changed the stats when LVL 55 came out and made it all sorts of confusing. Block Strength enchantments are now limited to about 0.3 on a shield Compared to old shields having 0.65 as the max. They now have a % Block On This Item as opposed to the old % Block (which is now found on shoulders, if you recall.) That said, if you have some old shields with 60%-65% block rate or the higher block strength, you are in for a treat. See the math below for the explanation for the % BR vs % BRotI, but your get a really nice boost from combining the old style with the new style. My overall recommendation, if possible, would be to get a shield with +0.63+ Block Strength and either a 2/1 or a 1/2 mix of %BRotI and %BR with % BRotI being more preferable.
  Spoiler: Math Stuff

  Similar to how %Resist vs %RotI or %Damage vs %DotI (on weapons) work, the %Block Rate vs % BRotI enchantments on a shield would work similarly. If you have a shield with 2x60% BRotI and 2x60% BR, your total multiplier applied to your base block rate is 2.2*2.2=4.84. However, if you have 4x60% of either type, the multiplier would only be 3.4. Another mix, like the one recommended above might 1.6*2.2=3.52 which is still better than a 4/4 60% BRotI shield or 4/4 60% BR shield, but you have a spare enchantment line for block strength. Now, you might wonder if 2/1 or 1/2 would be better, and I'd argue that %BRotI is more favorable than %BR because the size of the block rate on shields compared to items like Dragan's Battleworn Pauldrons which come with base Block Rate. While %BR would apply to them and the %BRotI would not, the size of the Block Rate of the shield is just too large to ignore. Sample: Shield with 2500 block rate and Battleworn Pauldrons with 1600 and 20% BR, with the Mobile Fortress skill selected. In the case of 2xBRotI and 1x BR, the total would be 2.3*((2500*2.2)+1600)=16330. In the case of 1xBRotI and 2x BR, the total would be 2.9*((2500*1.6)+1600)=16240. This effect can shift even further in favor of the % BRotI if you have crafted pauldrons with %BR, especially if they were transfer crafted into the Dragan Battleworn Pauldrons.
• The weapon stats are the least important for a tank build because the most popular tanking weapon is Lifekeeper. While it is not eligible for transfer crafting (yet), it's ability to restore 0.8% of your HP per blocked hit is insane.
  Spoiler: Math Stuff

  If you have 70% damage reduction (armor/resist) and a 70% block rate with 70% damage reduction, then out of every 10 hits, you block 7 and recover a total of 5.6% of your HP. If you have 100k HP (which many tank DKs do), that means that in every 10 hits, you recover 5600 HP (at 800 a tic). Now, lets work some backwards math. If all the hits do the same damage, the monsters have to do more than 3600 points of unmitigated damage per hit to even make a scratch on the tank, and that is before accounting for any other sources of regen. Battle Frenzy would be recovering 2000 per second and natural HP regen would be about 800 per second.
  Basically, Monsters need to hit super hard just to even leave a mark. That said, if in the future they introduce transfer crafting with Lifekeeper, then one of the most important stats for pure tanking is attack speed. Arena builds may chose to emphasize damage, speed wins when tanking. In that case, 4x% Speed lines of 18% speed or higher and preferably higher than 19% would make Lifekeeper faster than you would probably ever practically need.

Finally, Uniques that could be helpful:

• Heredur's shield: The best unique shield in the game at the moment. It is available in T5 and can obtain some insane block rate numbers if you are lucky. It also has 10% Block Strength as a "Unique Value" which sticks with it through transfer crafting which is awesome. Also, you can combine it with the Heredur Helmet for another 10% Block Strength.
• Dragan's Battleworn Set: This set is built for tanking. It is comprised of shoulders with +Block Rate as a base stat, a cape with HP and an impressive resistance line, a torso that can be good once you transfer craft some % Armor on this Item lines on to it, and a 2H Sword that has no business being a part of a tanking set. With just two pieces, you gain 0.25 block strength and you unlock a stacking effect. Every time you block, up to 25 times, you gain 0.04 more block strength for 5 seconds. At a full stack of 25, that is an extra +1 block strength. The only catch is that the monsters need to keep hitting you. If you have three pieces of the set, you'll also gain 2% armor, 2% resistance, and a nearly worthless 1% damage per stack. At 25/25 you are looking at a 50% Armor and Resist buff.
• Dragan's Signet Ring: This is more of a nice piece. When your HP drops low, you spawn a Black Knight that fights for you and draws agro. It can provide a much needed break allowing you to hide on the other side of the monster or boss and heal up a little. It takes 2 min to reset, so this is more of an "in case of emergency" effect. It comes with nice HP, but it has crit instead of resistance, but that might be fixable with augmentation core crafting (replacing the base stats). Was away from the game a while and misunderstood an aspect of the system.
• Ring of Life: The key thing of interest about the RoL is it's Unique Value is a 1% HP per second regen. With of them, you will regen as much per second as you will from Battle Frenzy as part of your natural regen. The stats it comes with are nothing spectacular, but you can replace them with % HPotI (+240%), and load it up with %HPotI runes, and then glyph it up to LVL 60 and you would have an insane amount of HP from a single item. With just a simple bit of math, each ring could easily provide over 15000 HP.
• Full Moon Amulet/Belt/Ring: While the set is designed around lots of HP and HP orbs (which you won't have many of as a tank) and includes an interesting 2H sword, what is more interesting is that it has something no other set has... a 1/4 set bonus. The bonous is also something useful, namely +1000 HP. I wouldn't recommend using more than just the amulet or the belt, (RoL is a better ring), but the 1/4 set bonus make either on of those useable on their own. Additionally, the belt and amulet also have a flat 10 HP per second regen that is a decent treat. Their base enchantments are not bad, but I'd recommend them for transfer crafting with resist for the belt or HP for the amulet.
• Keens Set: If it drops for you, it isn't a bad choice for defensive boots and gloves. Most of the other unique boots and gloves are more offensive oriented, but the Keens items are mostly defensive with a level dependent HP bonus for a 2/3 set bonus.
• Other PW uniques: The biggest advantage of using the other PW uniques, be they the rings or the 2 piece sets, is that they often come with some nice resistance to one kind of element in their Unique Values. If you use a mix from the various PWs, you can end up with fairly well rounded resistance.

Hope this giant wall helps. Good luck, and have fun!

 

This "giant wall" is gonna be my guidance trough PW from now on, even tho this post is still open to suggestions and advices, your wall is really gonna help me while building my tank.

Sending tremendous amounts of gratitude for your help and time @_Baragain_

Quick edit, im kind of unlucky because at my first gameplay i've choosen Grimmag which is mostly considered with CZ, PL and around those countries players. I am from Balkan and speaking bosnian and english, and having hard time even finding english speaking players not to talk about finding a decent guild xD

Quick edit #2 : So, basically I should farm items with my 2h as I can deal some damage with it and go trough q1 perhaps q2/q3 ?

 

If you are farming solo, 2H is the only time efficient way to do it. The Q1 circle is a popular place to farm, as is the first map of Q3 due to the density of the monsters. You shouldn't have too much issues killing monsters in painful/excruciating and that will be your primary source of glyphs, gold, ander, and crafting ingredients. Your tank build will mostly see use in the higher difficulties and bosses when you are running in a team to kill bosses.

 

There are plenty of Balkaners playing on Grimmag ... including me
If you give me your character name ... I can recommend you to some of the guilds.

 

@_Baragain_ yeah, was thinking that @trakilaki Hargonary

 

I would like to add another consideration regarding minimum enchantment value as ingredients for your crafting.

Let's take an example of getting 4x %HP Legendary Amulet. And you want to have this kind of amulet as soon as possible.
Getting gold line enchantment from loot is already hard. You might want to consider to lower the enchantment value target let's say about above 8% minimum.
8% x 4 lines = 32%. Having Amulet with 32% HP is already good enough for a start.

Or you could think the other way around. For example getting Torso with 4x%Armor On This Item. You might want to target it for total of 200%. Does not matter what the enchantments values are. Let's say combination of 45%+55%+40%+60% or 60%+50%+55%+35%. The total is 200%+.

You'll be surprised with your character performance once you equip those items though they are not with gold lines.

Lowering the target cut down the time of getting specific items, thus your character getting better and better faster rather than to wait for best enchantment lines.

There will be a point where your character is already strong enough. Gold, Ess, GoP, items with gold lines, ect.. come down like rain. You can always do another iteration of crafting to improve enchantments for your final items.

One other thing that is very important for your tank is getting good shield as soon as possible.
I don't recommend to farm T3 Shield or asking stronger players to help you to farm T3-T5. It cost time for waiting help & farming it. It is better to use your worthy time to farm Q1/Q3 M1 for resources and ingredients. Of course to make sure your legendary shield is ready for transfer craft to unique.
Consider to save your Materi Fragment to just buy at least T4 shield. Or if you could have a little more patience to save up Materi Fragment to buy T5 shield. Strong players are more willing to help out if it just 1 run to help you to get to unique merchant.

Do not make it harder than it already is.

 

Definatly a very good advice.
Once you have 3,5/4 crafted gear tranferred onto t4-t5 you'll be able to tank any content in the game while engaging the snowball effect that will let you farm faster and better gear and, most of all, as soon as they will release better unique to use for the craft you won't have any regret to switch on them.
Waiting for perfect craft will cut your chance to farm higher contents and will slow down a lot your progression.

This ain't gonna happen, augment core's tranfer won't change the base stats and, in general, Dragan's signet massively screws tank's agro because the knight agro locks mobs agro table, overwrites it (taking the agro from anything) and resets it once he dies (so the DK must rebuild the agro from the scratch even if the DK has the stacks displayed) which is a common mistake a lot DKs do when they have to deal with those kind of skills (they forget to stack up again the agro once a Dragan's knight/guardian/MC mob/Dwarf-in-a-box dies).

About the ammy, end-game players use Q9 ammy because it gives massive "all res" unique bonus and they put on this a mixed +%HP and block strenght because it's the only item worth to sacrifice some HP for some block strenght.
%HP pool will be inflated pretty fast (wisdom, helm, pet bonus).

Another option are weapons like arakhna's & Wolf slayer's weapons you can use to get some crit rate which is extremly useful to reset the cooldowns with 15% crit chance & 3.0 attack speed you can half the cooldowns on the dragon skin, banner of war and rage jump by a lot.

 

Yea, I was away during when augmentation crafting was introduced and I misunderstood it a little.

Really doesn't cause too much trouble when the DK is spamming Frenzy. A good tank should have a feel for when he needs to hit the skill.

True, the resist is good, but I disagree about the Block Strength. After a certain point, %HP is almost always superior to block strength. Because Block Damage Reduction is 1-1/Strength, you have the worst diminishing returns of any stat in the game. With a block strength of 1 (no block strength from items), your reduction is 0%. Just adding +1 from a shield's base gives you 50% reduction, but adding + one more only gives you 66% total (16% more). Add another +1 block Strength and you get to 75% (9% more), and the last 5% to get to cap takes another +1 Block Strength. Assuming you have the Battleworn set, it has 0.25 and you can count on it for an extra +1 once the stack caps out. Any shield comes with 1, the base is 1, and it is not too difficult for a top tier tank to build up another 1.0-2.0 to be able to cap out it out at 80%. Any place where you use Block Strength where you could have % HP is a wasted line. I have a friend with no crafted uniques and she has a 4.08 block strength before the Battleworn set stack and 79% block rate. If anything, I think she could sacrifice some of her block strength for more HP.

True, the crit helps with the cool downs, but given how little crit most 1H builds have to begin with, I'd prefer the regen. Also, Banner of War is one of the least useful skills for a tank and the only other skill with that long of a cool down is DH and it is more of a "Break Glass in Case of Emergency" skill to survive nukes.

 

Contact Magischerose level 55 SW ... say Prcko sent you.
She sent you invitation but you are already in a guild.

 

Yes don't be shy

 

This is the kind of post I have been looking for forever! I knew some of this but there are tips in here, logical ones that are going to help take my game to the next level. Thanks!
My challenge has been, being mostly a solo player and having more fun just dealing damage, it has been hard to take on the big bosses. Now I am having more success, even using my T2 old Full Moon shield.

 

u can message me in game on agathon "sirlansalot" for any advice too.
im max black rate in infernal 2 with 71% resists/75% armour/197k hp(with frenzy in 5 man). so my gear is pretty good and i might be able to help

 

Thanks much! I appreciate that and added you to buddy list. Currently I am farming frags (I only have 22k) and craft items to put gold lines onto my uniques. I don't want to waste your time on an Infernal II run until I have enough frags to buy what I am sure ain't gonna drop

 

I have a black belt in infernal too

 

But that's a red belt.

 

#whenkeepitrealgoeswrong

 

Ah ... that visual glitch again.
Fixed

 

once u are strong enough to tank hardest content then you will become very popluar and u can run as many infernal II maps as u want for drops hehe. in reality, ideally u would get dragan set first then u can figure out how much block u need on your heredur shield and with shield/shoulder enchants to reach max, after that everything else falls into place quite quickly!

 

Banner of war isn't the primary skill you want to reset the cooldown, the ones you want to reset asap are Rage Jump (def buff and fast repositioning), Furius Battle Cry (stun free and movement buff), Charge (massive dmg blows avoid skill), Dragon hide (bread & butter DK skill). Banner of war as a tank is useful to early stack agro when combined with Battle Frenzy and to massively regen health (spamming it will refresh the first health regen tic) on later stages of the boss fight (if ever needed).

I don't see where you would get this other than ammy.
0.30 from battleworn set bonus + armor unique attribute
1 from shield
1 from 50 3/3 set bonus (50 stacks that are hardly suistanable in many boss fights I.E. Heredur, Herald, Khalys, Bearach, in general any boss that doesn't spam minions and doesn't apply DoTs that frequently)
+20% Block stregth from 2/2 set bonus (= 0,46 block str)

Block str can come from rings, ammy, shield. On the shield you would aways get IBRotI or %HP (probably just the IBRotI is anyway the best if you want reach 80% Block rate in inf2 and higher), then you can chose rings or ammy, since %HP is extremply inflated the best choise is always on the ammy. Then you have to calculate the Effective HP earnt with 9%HP or 0.18 Block str (which is a 0.21 when you have heredur set).

I haven't done the math yet and I'm not meant to do that, but, the correct answer on what's the best craft on ammyes lies there.