In today’s issue of “Answering questions nobody but me cares about” we’re going to be looking at solving the riddle of what tanking weapon combination provides the smoothest tanking experience once and for all.

We will be looking at most combinations of weapons in multiple NYR e17 rotations and evaluating the difference in incoming damage.

Weapons are as follows:

  • Shotgun: For shotgun we’ll be looking at Reinforce Shells + Kneecapper.

  • Chaos: We’ll be looking at Immutable + Invoke Self

  • Hammer: Hammer will be extensively tested with Unstoppable Force + Pain Supression, Unstoppable Force + Invoke Self, Raging Volcano + Pain Suppression + USM gadget, Raging Volcano + Pain Supression and no gadget.

For each test run we’ll do 10 rotations and measure how many total damaging hits we took and how many of those hits exceeded 10, 15 and in case of Hammer Raging Volcano builds, 20k damage (some of those were above 30k but I’m not going to make another column). It is important to note two things - numbers are inclusive (i.e. if there’s one in both >10k and >15k columns it’s a single hit) and “total hits” can be disregarded as it makes no difference between a 900 damage hit under a cooldown or 9999 damage tick. We’re mostly interested in looking at damage spikes denoted by 2nd and 3rd numbers. Anything below 10k damage can be safely disregarded as ambient damage. All builds included applying as much additional mitigation with Signature / HP% buffs from Pulverize / Distortion as possible.

Shotgun

Total Hits >10k >15k
10 0 0
8 2 0
11 1 1
9 0 0
8 3 1
12 0 0
11 0 0
6 0 0
6 0 0
6 0 0

Totals: 87 / 6 / 2

Chaos

Total Hits >10k >15k
6 1 0
5 0 0
13 1 0
11 1 1
7 0 0
5 0 0
7 0 0
7 0 0
8 0 0
8 0 0

Total: 77 / 3 / 1

Hammer UF / IS

Total Hits >10k 15k
7 1 1
12 0 0
7 2 0
11 3 3
10 1 0
10 1 0
7 0 0
10 2 2
10 1 1
10 1 0

Totals: 87 / 12 / 7

Hammer UF / PS

Total Hits >10k >15k
10 2 1
8 2 1
8 3 1
7 5 4
8 1 1
12 4 2
8 3 1
7 2 1
12 3 3
6 0 0

Totals: 86 / 25 / 15

Hammer RV / PS / USM

Total Hits >10k >15k
8 5 2
5 2 0
9 5 3
11 6 1
7 3 2
10 4 2
6 1 0
9 1 0
9 5 2
11 3 1

Totals: 85 / 35 / 13

Hammer RV / PS

Total Hits >10k >15k >20k
11 5 2 1
10 4 2 1
12 5 4 2
10 3 2 2
8 4 2 2
9 4 3 2
9 2 2 1
7 3 2 2
7 1 1 1
8 4 1 1

Totals: 91 / 35 / 21 / 15

Note: For this build it’s not as bad as it looks, allowance must be made for a greatly increased total pool of health that RV gives you. Still given that this rotation provides no mitigation it leaves you completely at the mercy of your healers not being otherwise occupied. This had also been the rotation that left me at consistently the least remaining health.

So, in conclusion, what have we found out? To my standard, the evidence seems to point in the direction of chaos being the undoubted champion of smooth tanking, closely followed by shotgun, with hammer taking the bronze medal.

Caveat here, of course, being that those weapons are combined together, and can supplement weaknesses of one another. Example of it being Shotgun / Chaos Build having access to a stronger variant of cooldown rotation in Invoke Self + Kneecapper instead of Reinforced Shells + Kneecapper. Needless to say, performance of that rotation will be significantly better.

Last thing worth remembering is that all weapon combinations are perfectly capable of completing every bit of content, so choose what works for you. It’s hammer, duh, big numbers go brrrrr

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