The idea that I have is Sword/Chaos primarily focusing on using the aoe abilities from the two trees. I did it fairly successfully last time I played (when it was Secret World Classic). Is this still a viable tank option in SWL? If so, any advice for a returning player? I think I’ve got a good feel for the equipment enhancement system, but I’m unsure about a lot of things. I do have to say that I kinda miss the crafting system from TSW, but the enhancement system is kinda nice too.
Not particularly. What you really want from a tank weapon is damage mitigation abilities, one AoE is more than enough, and blade doesn’t have any. You can use it offhand with chaos, but so you can any other weapon, there’s no specific benefit to using blade in particular. There’s general overview of how tank building works here
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@Polin , I am hoping that you were saying that blade does not have any damage mitigation abilities, because it definitely has AOE abilities:
- Method: Hurricane
- Balance: Rushing River
- Technique: Crescent Fang
- Technique: Tempest
- Technique: Typhoon
While it looks like blade does in fact lack mitigation abilities, it does have some pretty nice (to my reading) other abilities including passives:
Balance: Soothing Spring (heals and debuff purge)
Balance: Supreme Harmony (damage buff, heals, movement speed buff, and debuff purge)
Passive: Clairvoyance (gives a barrier from sword based heals)
Passive: Immortal Spirit (gives a hot when generating Chi)
Take Chaos into consideration and I have this concept:
Basic builder: Crescent Fang
Left Click: Evulsion
Right Click: Hurricane
1: Winds of Change
2: Soothing Spring
3: Immutable
Passive 1: Immortal Spirit
Passive 2: Clairvoyance
Passive 3: Veil of Deformity
Passive 4: Contradiction
Passive 5: Mass Evulsion
Just my thoughts…
Evidently. As for proposed build… Well, it’s bad. Blade in mainhand is just not good for tanking. Healing that it gives is capped and completely irrelevant in size to your hp pool, and self cleanses are largely irrelevant for tanks as well. Another problem is that your build has %hp passive from chaos (veil of deformity) but doesn’t have Distortion, so you can’t apply it. I haven’t even looked at blade passive / actives because they are all inconsequential. I’ll just note that there is no such thing as “builders” anymore, it’s just basic.
Blade does absolutely nothing for tanking that chaos/shotgun/hammer don’t do better. One application of pain supression from hammer will heal you for more than 20 soothing springs (I’m not exaggerating). Ditto for any other mitigation ability that will easily outweigh blade puny healing.
That said, if you overgear IP requirement you can tank up to e11 dungeons with whatever you want. I tanked it with blade pistol, for example. But that was borderline memery. You could just use all chaos abilities for mitigation and just use blade basic from mainhand, but then you might as well just put chaos in mainhand and throw blade out altogether because the damage on all basic abilities is the same.
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@Polin thanks for the clarification. Sounds like blade is out then 