what mod is that for pods/lurker health?
For pods, the podded player has a debuff when targeted, so it is tracked by EffectsUI (i could post the full string once home, later). For the podded NPC, i use an old TSW mod which is Uta Madre (this is the mod that also displays the HP of the boss etc…). I however do not use the mod to monitor boss HP since it is sometimes unreliable, while things like Personal Space thresholds are simply in my head.
Edit: i’m using the following strings:
Inevitable Doom | show: @owner
From beneath* | show: @owner is PODDED! | pulse
Thoughts on Oni War Cache weapons for this build? (Chaos/Hammer)
Chaos (Focus of the Unwritten Talisman) is the only one really relevant to tanking, with “evulsion gives you 2560 protection” and resetting evulsion’s cooldown every 8 paradoxes. Only useful for a chaos primary build which is quite limiting. Unless you need frequent impair/purges you’d just want to stick to a chaos that gives you extra effects on your paradoxes.
Blue Oni cache weapons are the same as hell cache iirc. It does include the chaos focus of choice for offhand use.
1 Like
Thanks for the reactivity!
So it comes pretty much down to what Onevia said. The chaos focus, while looking good, is a problem for tanking because of the fact that it takes you an active slot for Evulsion, for only a tradeoff of 2560 protection.
It’s pretty much a weapon to have fun in PvP with.
Regarding the hammer, it gets better than Pneumatic Maul (if you consider 50% crit chance) after 21s of fight in terms of pure extra healing provided by extra rage. In case you do not consider the first proc of Pneumatic Maul to be useful at the beginning of a fight where you most likely pull the boss under Immutable and where its healing does not matter, then the hammer of the Red Road is better from the get go. However, the Frost-Bound hammer is still the undisputed best in slot for tanking.
1 Like
I think it always happens sooner than later if you use Fast and Furious cause you’ll proc it 33% faster at the start of the fight (24 instead of 18 rage per pulverize) and 60% faster once you’re in a 50-50 groundpound/pulverize split.
There might be a couple fights where removing the 1 rage per incoming attack matters (eg. in NYR pneumatic maul will do more heals) but in general that only loses you 1 every 2-2.5 seconds. The maul really can’t beat it for F&F proccing though, you’d need to be hit >6x per second. (maybe in occult defense) and that’s still arguing 4th best vs. 5th best.
Haven’t actually tried it though cause tank stats make weapon power more important and my Red Road’s only mythic so it’s got literally half aggro gen. Using Fast and Furious instead of Unbridled Wrath is also questionable from a survival pov.
When being hit, you can only proc 1 rage per second. For Pneumatic Maul, with 50% crit chance and Brawler’s Belt, you’ll have the following rage regen per second:
50/11.5 + 1+7/50 = 5.49 rage/s
For Red Road’s hammer, with Brawler’s Belt:
6+7/(50/6) = 6.84 rage/s
The difference in rage/s is equal to 1.35 rage/s in favor of Red Road. The breakdown for Red Road to beat Pneumatic Maul if we count a Maul proc at the beginning is:
(50+<maul rage/s>x-1,5)/diff = (50+5.49x-1.5)/1.35 ~ 31s
TLDR: the Red Road hammer will provide more healing even in NY raid, after ~31s if you take into account the initial Maul’s proc as extra healing, or from the get go if you don’t.
About fast and furious, it is useless in NY raid since aggro is irrelevant for anything but birds (even there, it’s pretty useless as well if you’re on your toes with your provoke). For the rest of the content, i’d personally rather not remove Unbridled Wrath, but instead pick up an offensive agent or reduce a bit my Anima Allocation in order to get more aggro. The Lycanthropic Essence actually helps a lot with initial aggro under Immutable.
I like the extra speed of F&F more than the damage, sorta disappointing you can only get 1 rage/sec cause now the Maul’s just worse no matter what. Only advantage being <5 second fights. Which aren’t particularly worth making a lv.70 weapon for.
If its damage works out well enough it is better than AA though. Cause tank AA gives you extra prot, Unbridled Wrath is hp only. So 97% as much dps = 103%^2 of mitigation.
I don’t see the issue here. Not every weapon in this game is equal, and there are “best in slots” for everything 
. Maul is already king for flexibility with DPS roles, and selfhealing from Percussive Maintenance does not matter much at all (in fact, any real selfhealing only mostly starts to really matter for non-standard tanking builds like cleansetanking, etc… - builds where you drop cooldowns).
Fast and Furious’ damage increase on top of a low base damage cannot compensate the lack of base damage to begin with, and the base damage is only brought by the weapon if you go 100 tank AA. Also, i think you might be overestimating what Fast & Furious with such a short duration actually brings. The speed boost is mostly irrelevant if you’re versed into Alacrity + Quickness, and is actually rather difficult and/or unreliable to take advantage of.
TLDR: in case of aggro issues, Fast and Furious alone over Unbridled Wrath will not fix those issues. Dropping AA most likely will.
This is why i always advise to take offensive agents, such as Sarah Skelly and/or Oleg Yablokov, so you can get a beefy boost in attack rating. The new 10% agents are obviously overpowered and should be used. Although, Unbridled Wrath isn’t a simple flat HP boost but a percentage boost, so this isn’t as simple as the equation you suggested.
For the matter of loosing AA costing too much mitigation, i have to say that there is no reason to stay at 100 AA anyway if one is getting close to be fully geared (or, in general, for anyone starting to overgear content), otherwise it would just be an invitation to wipes due to aggro losses.
Was wondering if it was more profitable to go for Faction Recruit / Jeronimo de Montejo agents and decrease the Allocation a bit, or rather take damage agents and increase it. Found out (won’t detail calculations here this time) the most profitable combination is to take Oleg Yablokov + Sarah Skelly + 10% agent or Petru, and consequently increase the allocation by ~4-5% by defensive agent you had previously and that you removed.
Edit: according to my calculations, in terms of opportunity cost in this same example, Margot is actually superior to Petru. This is due to the fact that attack rating boosts a tank’s damage more than % increases of crit power because contrary to a DPS, from the 3 multipliers which are base damage, damage increases and crit multiplier, a tank has the damage increases multiplier and the crit multiplier pretty much as high as a DPS, but the base damage is way lower.
So, after converting Petru’s 490 HP to the equivalent in terms of potential damage with Anima Allocation equivalence, i found out that Margot surpasses Petru, even without considering the proc on crit damage which has no aggro multiplier - i only considered 650 attack rating as really relevant from her.
TLDR: best agents for tanking in any content besides NY (if aggro is a concern) : Oleg, Sarah Skelly, Margot / 10% agent.
Edit2: i reexamined my previous statement about Margot, now with all 3 agents taken into account at the same time. It comes down to Petru and Margot being pretty much equal in terms of efficiency, Margot will pull slightly ahead for builds with Immutable (since the aggro from the proc will get multiplied by 50%). So it’ll come down to whatever of those 2 agents one might have. In case one does not have Oleg, then Sarah / Margot / Petru are the most efficient agents, alongside a 10% agent rotating with Margot or Petru.
1 Like
Since I don’t have Oleg or Margot it feels like my best options are Skelly, Jeronimo, Petru, in that order. Jeronimo’s quite solid although that may be my personal stats (hammer power signet, maxed out weapon w/ mix of yellow/red talis) If I only count protection he’s better than Skelly, protection/hp combined he’s about equal.
Updated the guide with new agents and hammer of the Red Road.
Updated the encounters with the most recent and efficient strategies.
1 Like
as an agent is Queen Ranavalona IV that bad that she is not even in the list ? She sounds decent at least for who does not have Petru …
Also Sanity Aphelion bug has been fixed and now the protection buff works porperly 
The problem is the loss of opportunity cost with her. Crit power, especially after you’re soft capped, has very little value. Obviously she is an option, but keep in mind that in any case, Margot will end up being better (again, in terms of opportunity costs), and her dossier is VERY affordable (around 40k recently?), there’s no real excuse of not being able to get her.
Indeed, i must have forgot to remove the mention of the bug.
1 Like
I’m considering leveling a dedicated tanking hammer, so I’d like to discuss the efficiency suffix. Shortly after the game launched I wrote a script to calculate the probability of reducing immutable cooldown to 10s, which would allow a tight rotation of immutable, rock hard, immutable, pain suppression, and achieving sustainability with only three cooldowns without any frantic kiting after rock hard wears off, and none of that nerve wrecking “use cooldown right before boss lands a hit” which I know Molov is fond of. I’ve misplaced the script, but I think my conclusion was that you could get a 90%+ chance with a maxed signet of transcience and efficiency mk 3. I did not consider a maxed signet as achievable at that time so I discarded the idea. These days I have a maxed signet of the Ascendant, which is slightly worse than Transcience, but much better than the purple stuff I had back then.
So, does anyone have experience/maths surrounding the expected cooldown of a 20s elite with efficiency and various signets?
My Frost-Bound hammer has the Efficiency suffix since when i decided to acquire the hammer, i already had a Pneumatic Maul of Alacrity, which is where i went to telling myself that i’d just take the Maul for fights where i’d need the additional runspeed.
With a maxed out Ascendant signet, the elite’s cooldown is reduced from 20s to ~14.25s. From my tests of this setup, i can manage to get the cooldown to somewhere around 12s with Efficiency mk3 added on top of the Ascendant, which is quite decent.
Here’s a table with the average cooldown reduction on each tick calculated as 50% x 5%. This case assumes you start hitting as soon as you use the elite, and then hit once per second.
The following table assumes you start hitting 1s after you use your elite:
The average of both final total cooldown reductions provided by Efficiency with a maxed out Ascendant is therefore equal to 2.083s, which brings the base cooldown from 14.25s to 12.167s, which backs up my statement of the cooldown becoming approximately 12s.
Here’s what we get with a maxed out Transcience:
This makes it an average reduction by Efficiency with Transcience equal to 1.688s, bringing a base cooldown of 12.794s to 11.1059s. Therefore, it is pretty much impossible (probably totally impossible) to get to 10s of cooldown reduction with Transcience + Efficiency mk3, but 11s is the aimed result here.
1 Like
To add some bits of personal experience, you don’t really need additional cooldown reduction from Efficiency to already be able to easily sustain tank with the classic hammer/chaos build with 3 cooldowns. With the gear you have, which is almost maxed out, the total EHP you have will carry you just by itself for some periods without any cooldowns. The case you describe of me loving to use cooldowns right before getting hit by a boss is mostly relevant for cleansetanking shenanigans with 2 cooldowns, and not 3.
So that no one gets the wrong idea, I just want to specially emphasize that living on two or three cooldowns consistently requires a health pool much larger than the minimum Item Power allows to enter an Elite tier.
I’d say, around 200 IP above the minimum required IP is the safe spot where you can start playing with 3 cooldowns. For 2 cooldowns, a nearly maxed out gear is necessary (in order to cleansetank E10). These indications obviously assume a build followed from the guide, and a smart upgrade path (prioritizing the head talisman for upgrades, and not some random talisman like a minor, or a bit of everything being equally upgraded, which is not optimal at all).
I surprised myself a bit by doing E8 on 2 cooldowns (thick skin + pain suppression) but in the other slots I had rocket pods compensating a bit. 24k hp is about 50% more than e8 asks for though and there were some sketchy moments of “have 7k hp but it’s gonna hit for 5-6 so it’s fine”.
I intended to just passive aggressively push the healer into healing but the whole DW it never turned out to be an issue.