[Guide] Sustain-tanking for anyone

Secret World Legends General Discussion Orochi Labs
21

Did you test if the Frost-Bound works like this for sure ? I’d never spend any MoF on this hammer since i’ve got everything i need, but the maths looks correct IF the hammer works like this.

Edit: ok checked that out, it looks like you’re right, that’s pretty much the same principle we can get with things like Raging Volcano’s flat reduction.
Damage taken formula: damage taken = (1 - damage mitigated by prot) * (1 - flat reduction)
for 50% mitigation by prot and 7.5% frost-bound, we’ll get
damage taken = (1 - 0.5) * (1 - 0.075)
damage taken = 0.4625
We get to your numbers Levsky.

22

Just as a note I run a Flanged Mallet of Energy and the damage buff definitely affects Pulverize.

23

I was under the impression that the Flanged Mallet was fixed in 2.11 as of Sep 7, 2017 where the patch notes read, “Fixed an issue with the Hammer ability Pulverize that prevented certain weapons, such as the Flanged Mallet, from triggering their effects properly.”?

As for Chaos Focus, Otherworldly Artifact may belong in the list of things that have an effect, its tooltip being “Your chaos abilities have a 45 % chance to generate 1 paradox.” (“Abilities”, not “power abilities”, “hit”, “deal damage divisible by 8”, etc., so defensive CDs should count. Of course, with 2 chaos abilities, Immutable and Twist Fate, we get less than 1 paradox on average per 20 second rota, so something in the ballpark of 3 minutes for a whole set of 8. And of course, depending on the circumstances, Enigmas may be unwelcome to boot.)

24

Ok so that’s 2 people confirming me that the Flanged Mallet is bug-free, i’ll update the guide.

As for Chaos Focus, Otherworldly Artifact may belong in the list of things that have an effect, its tooltip being “Your chaos abilities have a 45 % chance to generate 1 paradox.” (“Abilities”, not “power abilities”, “hit”, “deal damage divisible by 8”, etc., so defensive CDs should count.

The effect does not work with Defensive CDs.

Besides, even if it actually worked, the occasional Controlled Chaos effects once per dungeon run or something wouldn’t ever beat the 880 protection granted by the Sanity’s Aphelion. There’s a clear reason this weapon is advised, and i’ve explained that. I know people often tend to throw protection away, but this is a big mistake, and the Sanity’s Aphelion is entirely part of the best-in-slot gear for this build.

25

You said, “Any other chaos focus will have no effect since no skill besides defensive CDs is ever used in this build.”; to which I noted, “If artifact works as per its tooltip, it will have an effect, albeit a negligible or annoying one.”, to which you said, “Yeah, but it’s not better.”, which was at no point claimed anyway. Not sure why you feel the need to move the goalposts when someone agrees with you, but suit yourself. :smiley:

Awesome to have all the info in one place by the way, thanks!

26

You said, “Any other chaos focus will have no effect since no skill besides defensive CDs is ever used in this build.”; to which I noted, “If artifact works as per its tooltip, it will have an effect, albeit a negligible or annoying one.”, to which you said, “Yeah, but it’s not better.”, which was at no point claimed anyway. Not sure why you feel the need to move the goalposts when someone agrees with you, but suit yourself.

I don’t remember by heart each sentence / wording i’ve put in my guide, and i won’t take time to look up after each comment i see, sorry. I wanted to make sure people understand why i suggest such choices, hence my commentary being more generic than just a personal answer to yourself (that means i might extend a given answer to the whole subject related to that answer, to develop things a bit for potential other readers). Besides, there’s no point in nitpicking between “no effect” and “a potentially such negligible effect that it does not matter”.

27

This is my response every time you or someone else suggests “buff-tanking” with the Enigmatic Apparatus is a viable and worthwhile method for tanking. :wink:

28

Yes, this feels sad, even if you made it look funny! :grin:

29

Yesterday, I was sustain-tanking alongside Szarlord through three Elite 10 dungeons, and I thought it’d be interesting to see how much my barrier and heals contribute to my average Aggro Per Second. Before I begin, however, it’s important to know a couple things: 1) I do not have Power or Basic signets for Hammer equipped and 2) this data is relevant most for a tank’s sustained APS, not burst APS.

  • Heals per second: 2,388.48
  • Barrier strength per second: 2,449.76
  • Damage per second (Aggro abilities): 1,824.89
  • Damage per second (non-Aggro sources): 326.64

Aggro per second can, therefore, be calculated in this manner:

(1824.89 * 10) + 326.64 + ((2388.48 + 2449.76) * 0.5) = 20,994.66

Heals and barriers made up 11.52% of my overall APS, with heals being 5.69% and barriers 5.83%. About two -thirds my my healing came from Pain Suppression and Immutable, followed by Percussive Maintenance, Cruel Delight, Lycanthropic Essence, and Mark of the Starspawn. Being without Hammer signets skewed the portion of my APS towards heals and barriers a bit higher than a properly equipped tank, but this should still give us a general idea of how much you can expect heals and barriers contribute to APS in an average encounter. The ratio for a given encounter will differentiate based on how often and how hard a tank is being hit.

2 Likes
30

The last sentence if one of the most important. Two things to keep in mind:

  • The aggro generated by damage mainly comes from Pulverise spam, therefore, it is single target, whereas any healing and barrier aggro is generated on every target you’re in combat with. Example: on Primordial Dweller (pol5), when small add waves spawn, and you throw a 50k barrier Rock Hard, you generate 25k aggro on each of the adds present in the room, so with 20 adds it becomes 500k instant aggro total. In this situation, only Ground Pound can concurrent AoE aggro, and it is capped to 6 targets anyway. This is why aggro generation by selfhealing (including barriers) is mainly the most important with any AoE tanking.
  • DumbOx and myself are very well geared compared to pretty much any content done these days, which means less damage taken because of higher protection. This fact + the fact we keep using the defensive cooldowns means the HPS required to stay alive will drastically get reduced. The selfhealing (hence aggro coming from it) will matter more for the majority of people in the game who aren’t overgearing content (and at that point, since you overgear content, almost nothing matters that much anymore). There is a way of aggressive tanking with less cooldowns and/or on-purpose slacking in AoEs and such (notably during Immutable and/or Pain Suppression) which will actually be advised as it will grant free aggro per second since more damage is taken and more damage is therefore healed afterwards, but this is a bit too much, and take this as an additional notice to understand the concept.
  • Another detail that matters: the type of content, mainly the bosses being tanked. While the majority of the dungeon bosses will have a similar average damage output, if we take the Lurker’s damage at E10 NY, and use Pain Suppression upon provoking the boss, we’ll start at approximately 13k hits with 2 hits per second with 25k protection, and after 8s, the damage will drop down to 7-8k per hit. If we average this to 10k per hit for the entire Pain Suppression duration, we’re looking at 20k HPS hence 10k APS, which is ridiculous and one won’t ever reproduce this kind of HPS / APS on other fights in the game.

From DumbOx’s notice however, it’s clearly visible that the majority of the aggro from a sustain-tank in a single-target situation comes from the Pulverise spam, and the selfhealing part is a minor part of the whole picture (it is still important, especially since the secondary weapon here does not use the dedicated power ability, reducing the DPS of the build, so the APS coming from selfhealing somewhat compensates for that loss a bit).

31

Great guide and nice work covering a wide array of topics on sustain tanking!

Possible addition:

You don’t necessarily NEED Hammer as MH, and can go Chaos MH instead. While you lose the Pulverize proc for extra meat, you gain significantly in group dps from Chaos buffs and… if you’re using Otherworldly Artifact + Paradoxical Restoration passive, the amount of self-heals from that is incredible. Saw y’all parsing out Anima and Resto procs, but Paradoxical is almost a consistent 4%mHP/sec heal. More, for multiple paradox generations. I have a vastly easier time doing a 3 CD rotation with Chaos than Hammer for that reason.

32

I let DumbOx provide advanced data on how the buffs from chaos have such a low uptime that in practise it’s not worthwhile even considering them, especially since you use Otherwordly here. How high of a difficulty did you tank with this setup so far ?

Moreover, the amount of selfheals in chaos is a lot lower than what you can get from hammer due to Pain Suppression alone, and you need a ton of passives in chaos to enable efficient paradox generation to proc paradoxical restoration (you need restoration + cascade + blessing of the octed + butterfly effect, so you’re only left with 1 slot for Backlash) while you only need Percussive Maintenance with a hammer. This setup just doesn’t work in high-end content where hits from bosses take giant chunks of your health away or even sometimes oneshot you - hammer as primary has tools to deal with that, when chaos as primary does not. Loosing Pulverise is basically asking for oneshots, and lowering all your selfhealing by 35%. Your setup is viable until E4, after that, you’ll need a regular healer to support you if you don’t overgear drastically the content (and at that point, it’s just better to transition into a more offensive build with hammer, drop 1-2 cooldowns or grab extra utilities). Just watch my video at the end of the guide in the resource section, and tell me honestly if you’re able to facetank without any healer the flappy regional with full level 1 purple gear and with your setup, where at that time, any hit dealt by the flappy outside protection buffs was a oneshot.

This guide isn’t made about overall tanking discussions on ever weapon setup / builds, it is centered about the most optimal combination of sustain-tanking - i don’t see how this setup could join the theme. I’m not telling people what to do, because lots of people play different weapons and tank with different builds besides them not being the best of the best, and it is fine. I’m just presenting a high-performance tanking build for those who would look for such a thing.

33

To determine the breakpoint of Frost-Bound becoming better than the Orochi Motivator in terms of damage mitigation with an uptime of 90% (so in practice an average of 7.5% x 0.9 = 6.75% damage reduction), the following equation must be solved:
(P x 100) x 1.0675 / (P + 24538) = [(P + 2250) x 100] / (P + 2250 + 24538), with P being the protection rating that we’re looking for

The equation is a bit complicated and has big numbers, so i plugged it in an online equation solver, and got the following solution:
P =18187

34

Hm, good that you know everything already. Carry on then.

Seriously though, you went careening down a wild tangent there. I have tanked e8 and regionals like this - yes, Flappy to the face sitting in filth if I’m lazy enough to stand in it - and was offering you endgame tested information for consideration. The base sustain rotation doesn’t change; only a single passive and your actives.

Editorializing, you seriously need to chill out and quit presuming your delusions of self-importance are shared. That’s how you turn a good-faith gesture into a middle finger.

/salt

35

I’m not certain who needs to chill here.

Hm, good that you know everything already. Carry on then.

No i don’t. Levsky provided some very solid maths about the Frost-Bound hammer, which i didn’t know was that powerful, so this hammer earned the top spot for pure tanking. I’ve also changed some rankings of weapons and affixes after discussions with Kahleon and Shalrys. DumbOx provided insights on the portion of the overall aggro provided by selfhealing which i didn’t know about being so low. I learned things. So nope, no sarcasm needed.

and was offering you endgame tested information for consideration.

Nope you were not offering anything. I don’t see anything besides a claim that hammer mainhand isn’t needed nor Pulverise, which makes you oneshottable even under Thick Skin on way too many circumstances.

The base sustain rotation doesn’t change; only a single passive and your actives.

The base rotation ? So now you were grabbing hammer as offhand instead ?

What’s the point of making yourself 35% more vulnerable to derps without Pulverise, and to exchange a selfhealing source (Paradoxical Restoration) for another (Percussive Maintenance) just to get Potency Enigma procs once in a blue moon ? You can ask DumbOx how high of an uptime that enigma is at, he’ll answer to you he was getting 5-6% uptime in whole dungeon runs, and that was with Enigmatic Apparatus. If you ever manage to get more than 4% average uptime with the Otherwordly, consider yourself up to play lottery. So yeah, if you prefer, keep downgrading yourself in favour of a close to non-existant group buffs. So far, until your provide us so more proof (claiming that you’re sitting in filth under Immutable isn’t very challenging, sorry, anybody can do that), your setup just requires more gear to pull out the same performance a hammer/chaos build can do. If you want to contribute, it’ll be accurate to provide some in-depth reasoning and/or videos or whatever else, otherwise just don’t be surprised if people don’t blindly trust your advises. I’ve personally tested your variant a long time ago, as well as many other tanks out there, and the conclusions are the same, it was just fun to play before E5, after that, you needed either some solid gear or a healer, no possibility in undergearing anything.

Editorializing, you seriously need to chill out and quit presuming your delusions of self-importance are shared. That’s how you turn a good-faith gesture into a middle finger.

I don’t care about your susceptibility issues. While i know i sound condescending at times, it is me being direct and logical. In any case, there’s no need of any agressivity on this thread (or on this forums ever), so please bring it away forever.

36

Pretty easy to get an estimation of usefulness if you assume the enigmas are equally likely.

  • Tumultuous Sash = 6.5 paradoxes instead of 8 - noting that this seems unreliable (I can definitely end up at 0/8 sometimes)
  • Otherworldly Artifact = 0.45 paradoxes per second
  • base rotation (power/basic) = 0.9 paradoxes per second
  • resonance cascade = 0.185 paradoxes per second

The other passive slots are paradoxical restoration and the 3 cooldown passives (thick skin, pain suppression, twist fate)

6.5/(.45+.9+.185) = 4.23 seconds per full set
= 12.7 seconds per enigma
= 51 seconds per crit power enigma (should be 10% uptime? so about 3.7% more crit power)
Obviously evade chance and damage reflect are useless to dpses, the heal enigma might offer a small benefit to the tank

If Enigmatic Apparatus increases the odds of enigmas to less than 50%, it’s worse in terms of frequency than the Artifact. But it does buff their strength so it might balance out.

The general reason I don’t use chaos of course is that 5 seconds of 47% evade per minute is nowhere near as good as 35% extra hp 100% of the time. You’re making every %heal less effective by using chaos only. (which includes all heals except cruel delight in this build) Also hammer’s heals scale with crit (more energy = more pulverize = more rage) and chaos’s don’t.

Immutable’s passive has pretty high potential (in above NYR scenario it’d generate about 20 paradoxes) but I assume it’s limited to 8 per cast unless they roll over. Still way better than butterfly effect and octed.

I’ll probably get my chaos focus leveled a bit more once my hammer’s done, at the moment I’d lose about half my aggro by using chaos primary anyway.

37

This is a fine, introductory analysis on Chaotic Enigmas. And as much as I’d like to continue discussing it here, this topic warrants its own thread. I’m gathering additional information and hope to be ready to present it soon.

38

resonance cascade = 0.185 paradoxes per second

The passive stops working at 7 paradoxes, so there has to be a penalty applied to it.

Immutable’s passive has pretty high potential (in above NYR scenario it’d generate about 20 paradoxes) but I assume it’s limited to 8 per cast unless they roll over. Still way better than butterfly effect and octed.

Indeed. While in practise it can generate up to 8 paradoxes, in reality it generates just as much as you’re missing to proc a Controlled Chaos. It is somewhat difficult to model. In fact, the whole chaos mechanics are not as straightforward to model as you make it sound, and i believe DumbOx has a very different maths on that matter.

39

Yeah, I went best-case with that, in practice resonance cascade not triggering at 7 is a huge paradox loss as is overflows from the 2-4 you get from the attack itself. It’s not as bad with Otherworldly Artifact cause you have >60% chance per cast to get paradoxes, with other ones you really get stuck at 7 a lot.

40

You seem to have misunderstood what I was saying. Immutable gives five seconds of invulnerability. Rock Hard adds another five. Pain Suppression is eight. That gives 18 seconds of invulnerability without needing any form of self healing. Do you disagree with this?

Based on this (18 seconds invulnerability in a 21 second window), I state that self healing is not very important. I never suggested it should be removed completely. Further your examples show how a missed rotation is lethal, not that self healing is required. The first example is simply failing to chain pain suppression after rock hard, and the second example is failing to overlap pain suppression and twist fate.

But I’m sure we can agree on the following:

  • Self healing is great for getting initial aggro on adds.
  • Self healing reduces the risk of incoming glancing hits. (It’s ridiculous that incoming glanced hits is a risk, but that’s another rant…)
  • Self healing somewhat reduces the risk of dying in the three seconds between pain suppression and immutable.

To expand on the last point: Most bosses hit every two seconds, which means that worst case is two incoming hits without invulnerability. Further, the hit before this landed on pain suppression, so we can simplify to one heal to full health, followed by three incoming hits protected by twist fate/backlash in the space of four seconds. Due to the heal at the beginning only self heal in these four seconds is relevant. So to survive, EHP + self-heal must be bigger than 3*y, where y is incoming damage from the boss. EHP is 2.83 times your normal HP (backlash is 0.55 of HP, twist fate multiplies shield+HP by 1.83). So, if the boss normally hits you for less than 94% of your full HP, you will actually survive the last three seconds without any self healing. Also only self healing gained from the four hits after your last pain suppression heal matters.

So my advice to players wanting to try out sustain tanking is to take your rotation seriously. That’s what keeps you alive, not self healing. For new sustain tanks, playing at their appropriate gear level, asking dps to help you with a second gadget is much safer than trying out a three-buff rotation, which is a lot harder and actually relies on self healing.

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