Me when I use Pulverize for the first time:
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I started off tanking with Hammer/SG but have since branched out into Hammer/Chaos and am working on sustaining.
Found this guide very helpful. Thanks for writing!
I’ve finally updated the Encounters section.
Also, i’d add that Fast&Furious is also a solid option for potential aggro issues, it can replace Unbridled Wrath or Percussive Maintenance in the standard setup.
If we dismiss the claim that Chaotic Enigmas provide a significant boost to group DPS (I’ll cover this in an upcoming thread of its own), there is some truth to what you say. But such a build requires more base health than for Hammer to survive in some of the higher tiers, especially against the Primordial Dweller and the Ur-Draug. There’s just no real advantages to choosing Chaos over Hammer in a self-sustain build unless you have Chaos signets attached to your talismans.
You can, in fact, for the heck of it, incorporate Pulverise in your build and survive with a rotation of Immutable, Pain Suppression, and Twist Fate (replace Pain Suppression for Thick Skin on the fifth and sixth Polaris encounters). The critical point of survival rests for the duration of Backlash, where you’re relying on your health, mitigation, and self-healing for five seconds until Immutable comes back off cooldown. (Here’s video proof.) But, again, the base health requirements for each Elite tier far exceed the minimum health of what a Hammer/Chaos build can get away with. I found that, in Elite 8, 21,000 HP necessary; in Elite 9, 26,500 HP. A tank following a normal course for gear progression, in comparison, is likely to have 18,000 health by the time they hit Elite 8 and 19,500 for Elite 9.
Right, HP is the catch, but once you cross the threshold, you can sustain either way; Hammer’s extra meat lets you cheese things early while Chaos functions when you’re geared at or above level.
Interested to see what you found mining on Chaotic enigmas, especially proc rate. Been curious if I could use Enigmatic Apparatus without Resonance Cascade to force more buffs onto a boss to manually purge for Recursive Circle procs. :>
Hello everyone!
Here’s a little fun way to deal with last bosses of HR as a sustain / utility tank. We got this to our farming standards, pretty much!
The idea here is that the 3 last bosses of HR are all slow hitting and have downtimes for some casts, so the challenge is to “snipe” the 2 only cooldowns at the very last moment when death without them would be inevitable (modulo glance / evade RNG). Potions and dodge rolls with Quickness act here as additional cooldowns and as means to temporize until the true cooldowns are up again. The gear has to be able to sustain an autoattack without any cooldown while being full life - for reference, i was short (from being fully maxed) 2 minor talismans which are lvl 35 mythic and a head talisman which was roughly 45 legendary, with the rest being maxed out legendary 70. I had to put myself to 80 surv / 20 damage AA to keep up with aggro, an extra tough task compared to the standard sustain-tanking build since i had no more extra aggro coming from Immutable, Backlash shield and redirect damage, while my only agent slot was taken by Faction Recruit. Glyphs are 1 short of being all fully maxed, and the cooldown reduction is an Ascendant lvl 9 legendary - still has room for improvement on some tight Lifeburn timings.
On MT, the challenge is to temporize for cooldowns by running away at the same time you have to drag the boss into an anima well.
Overall, here is where having strong selfhealing really comes into the equation - the ability to absorb a hit without any cooldowns, to use Rock Hard on the next hit and then to be able to selfheal to full life within seconds before Rock Hard falls off is a gigantic step forward into being able to sustain 1 more hit before having to use Pain Suppression, for instance.
Panic inducing and all I was doing was watching a video.
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No risks no rewards! No pain no gain! 
Hello all!
Wynn made a short video explaining how to position correctly the Ankh 6 boss for melee DDs. I feel like it belongs to the strategy section here. Check it out!
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Hello again!
Few things to mention:
- I ended up testing Incongruity + Enigmatic Apparatus setup (see details in the guide) with maxed Ascendant and Efficiency. It is not worth it - too random, and end up getting Potency enigmas way too rarely (once every 1-3 dungeons on full runs). Not worth extending on that unfortunately.
- We’ve been internally discussing and trying out bufftanking setups within our community. With gear close to being maxed, we’ve been succeeding with the following ideas:
- Hammer/Shotgun : Eruption (exposed / interrupt with reduced CD), Opening Shot. The problem with this setup is that Eruption drains energy from the hammer’s energy pool and it is weak from the aggro side, which reduced the number of Pulverises used, so it reduces the aggro potential. Can be useful for E9 runs where mitigation is less of an issue than in E10.
- Hammer/Shotgun : Kneecapper (interrupt with reduced CD, mitigation, burst aggro), Opening Shot. This setup basically replaces the previous one with Eruption. This is what i’ve been personally testing in E10 runs where i need extra mitigation, and i have to admit that i’ve been very close to dyeing at times and had to use a potion in panic. With fully maxed out and optimized gear (i’m missing the Brawler’s Belt, 2 glyphs to max out and the last agent slot - the combination of all that should allow me to be able to tank at 100/0 AA), it should be reliable enough on most of the E10 content.
- Hammer/Pistols : Trick Shot (exposed / debilitated with reduced CD), Blindside + Beatdown (interrupt, energy debuff) or Kill Blind (extra exposed / debilitated and an interrupt). Trick Shot with reduced cooldown already provides roughly 80% uptime on exposed and debilitated, and the good part is that it takes energy off the secondary weapon’s pool. For up to E9.
- Hammer/Fists : group cleansing and buffing, see video several posts above. Used for HR4-6 and HE3 on any difficulties (with Wild Surge added instead of Blindside for double Lifeburn stacking issues).
Cheers !
It’s sorta the bastard offspring of that first build you suggested, but this build is viable in elites that I outgear.
It’s kinda built to a single purpose - make paradoxes at near-dps rates for the benefits that entails (mostly that paradoxes look cooler than raged pulverise)
Immutable makes it a lot more secure in initial aggro but could be bad long term cause you’re losing energy for your only hate move. Depends how Immutable modifies Deconstruct’s hate; don’t think anyone’s tested that?
I didn’t test it in practice, however i believe hate coefficients “should” work as follows : damage * (sum of hate coefficients). Immutable and Black Sash are both supposed to provide 10% additional hate. You end up having a hate coefficient of 1.1 for Deconstruct under Immutable (for Turmoil you’d have 10.1 instead under Immutable). I don’t think one would get aggro issues with this build since the power ability is the majority of the aggro generated here, and at the beginning, you’d be spamming it with the initial energy. What matters the most is to probably the lack of aggro coefficient on Eruption, which basically becomes a global with low aggro.
Otherwise, this is an interesting build you got here, i just don’t have any chaos above purple level 1 to level up to test it myself XD. I might end up trying it out if Funcom rebalance enigmas one day and remove the wellness and reciprocity enigmas.
I dunno, I don’t have chaos signets so my ability balance is a bit off - in my hammer build the aoe basic does 25% of hate, in this build it’s ~5%. Losing a 20% margin seems like a pretty big deal. Of course the tradeoff is nearly 25% more paradoxes from attacks.
Eruption’s definitely more aggro than Deconstruct, probably a bit less than Turmoil if you use Ascendant. But like you observe it’s mainly for impair/expose/purge.
With fully maxed glyphs, 25% of total hate done by basics is impossible since you crit so much with Pulverise and get a ton of energy and since the base damage of Ground Pound is so low that even with an aggro coef of 10.0 on it, its total aggro is weak-enough. I’d parse it at some point to see how it goes, but it shouldn’t be more than 10% imo. Are you also counting all the heals and barriers in the equation, as well as non hate-modified procs, or are you only looking at the damage numbers?
By the way, i’ve updated the agent section.
For NY raid, the best agents are the most defensive ones:
- Faction Recruit (+1000 protection, +980 HP)
- Thomas Grady (+3.5% hammer damage, +980 HP)
- Jayesh Suresh (+1000 protection, +500 defense rating)
- Christina Del Rio (+1000 protection, +500 evade rating)
I’d settle for Faction Recruit + Thomas Grady + Jayesh Suresh or Christina Del Rio for the raid. In NY raid, the aggro on the lurker isn’t ever an issue since you get a huge aggro bump at the beginning, and most likely each time you provoke the boss. The aggro is potentially only an issue during P2 on birds, but the provoke usage on this occasion should solve the problem if it is used in a smart fashion (immediately after an Eruption from a hammer DD, for instance).
For dungeons, it’s a matter of balance between Anima Allocation and agents. With a more aggressive choice such as Faction Recruit + Oleg Yablokov + Sarah Skelly, one can settle to a higher AA into survivability than someone taking Faction Recruit + Thomas Grady + Warlawurru, for example, then it all obviously depends on the DDs part of the group.
Only damage-based aggro (can’t really rely on heal stuff anyway) and my glyphs are maxed mythic. Basic’s about 5k of 20k per second aggro.
1k hp seems like enough allocation (~7%, which is just about that much extra dps on a tank) that it’d be worth more damage than any agents, esp. since it’s multiplicative instead of additive with signets.
I am using 3 pieces built up specifically for tanking (hammer, chaos focus and neck tali) and, since I have not finished my dps set yet, I filled them with cheap defense glyphs untill I can replace the crit/crit power ones.
Someone in game told me that Pain Suppression is bugged with defense as it does not heal on glances and that defense glyphs may as well get you killed, is that true ? Should I replace them with evade glyps instead ?
The guide covers your questions, check out the Mechanics and Stats sections.
For reference about your question regarding defense and glances:
“Pain Suppression currently does not provide any heal on a glanced hit due to a bug (most likely).” - Mechanics section.
You’d be better with no glyphs than a defense glyph if you want to start sustain-tanking with the given build. And no, if you want to optimize your tanking, you should not replace defense with evade, but with crit or crit power. While having evade won’t get you killed, it will be pretty much useless to you - sustain-tanking does not rely on mitigation based on random rolls - you don’t have a healer to back up on healing if you fail the evade or glance rolls, so you’ll just get killed if you rely on that.
Thanks you for the quick answer, looks like I oversighted that part, my bad.
The plan is to use crit/crit power glyphs, but not immediately as my priority is still my dps set. In the meanwhile I guess that evade glyphs, which I have purple 1 ready, are better then nothing.
Why don’t you just use your DPS neck talisman with the correct crit or crit power glyph? What do you have as DPS neck?