The shift to tanking glyphs

Secret World Legends General Discussion
1

Veteran of TSW/SWL trying things after 1.5y of hiatus.
Really hesitant to switch my cr/cp glyphs to glance/evade on my hammer/shotty builds(mainly tank).
I understand that the signature abilities makes the tank builds more usable on soloing but does the scaling really help that much on solo content like dark agartha?

Or should I still stick with crits to burn the bosses fast.
The problem is obviously the timer and time to kill factor of it vs survivability.

Before I could really well dance with thick skin, pain suppression, cruel delight combo on hardest possible level, but now I’m a bit worried how the changes affect the self healing and the dps speed if I go to glance/evade.

Really not sure where to go with these changes.

2

I made the switch to defensive glyphs (3x stalwart, 2x elusive), running hammer/shotgun everywhere, using Sonic Blast as the signature. I use the shotgun with the All Eyes on Me passive, so I get my 30% bonus hit points for free while still being able to use Demolish and I get five hammer passives.

I also got rid of Pain Suppression altogether, because with the 60s cooldown it’s just rubbish. Depending on the fight, it’s Cleanup or Opening Shot for that slot. With only crit on the weapons, it’s mostly Cleanup.

Compared to my alt who’s still on a crit / crit power setup, I don’t have to think about self healing in DA unless I forget to cleanse or fat finger something. But that’s what potions are for :slight_smile:

3

With the extra baseline survivability of glance/evade, Forged in Fire can handle your healing needs without Cruel Delight.

My understanding is atm Hammer is top tier in dps in normal crit form, and the Signature dps does not bring it to that level but it’s as good as the lower end weapons in crit builds.

For me survivability is a bit down in my crit gear but I also dropped a crit glyph (since CD is worse anyway, I went to 4 crit 2 crit power instead of 5 crit 1 crit power, better dps but fewer CD procs), and now it just actually matters which damage buffs DA bosses get. GK with stacking enrage can kill me pretty consistently through 15k hp with Forged in Fire + CD.

Due to the way extra hp works, the Hammer signature is not actually good for survivability, only its passive… definitely better off using a chaos or shotgun one if possible.

4

Real nice info!
Thanks, much appreciated! :star_struck:

5

I thought 4/2 was the standard anyway?

6

Not sure what’s standard but 8% extra crit on top of ~30% in E16-17 from 4 is a pretty noticeable increase in CD procs, and with it healing for 1/4 my hp on crits I wanted more frequent, not larger values.

7

Emm, Cruel Delight’s HPS is also slightly stronger with the 4/2 setup compared to the 5/1. CD procs can crit, and they are therefore affected by crit power.

Edit: this information is wrong, i stand corrected below.

8

My calculations show higher HPS and more frequent procs with 5/1, but even if you’re right, the number of procs is more important to me, the way I die is not sustained hps being too low, it’s how long I can go without doing a critical attack.

9

With how much HP allocation gives after this patch and how rebalanced the incoming damage got, consistency is pretty much an irrelevant factor now, it was already mostly irrelevant even before the patch.

Cruel Delight procs are not affected by Weapon Expertise.

With the standard 4/2 setup and at least the SA agent (to get realistic crit power values), here’s what we get for a red 20 Cruel Delight:
Crit chance: 38.1%
Crit power: 153.6%
The HPS is then equal to:
455 x 0,381 x 2,536 + 455 x 0,619 = 721 HPS

Now, you need a crit to trigger CD, which is affected by Weapon Expertise, crit chance becomes 45.6%:
721 x 0,456 = 329 HPS

With a 5/1 setup, here’s what we get:
Crit chance: 45.5%
Crit power: 109.8%
The HPS is then equal to:
455 x 0,455 x 2,098 + 455 x 0,545 = 682 HPS

Now, you need a crit to trigger CD, which is affected by Weapon Expertise, crit chance becomes 53%:
682 x 0,53 = 361 HPS

Actually, this shows the HPS is indeed better for the 5/1 setup, you were right, we’re looking at a 10% difference. With that said, if you happen to die with the 4/2 setup, the glyph setup is likely not the cause, but rather builds choices and/or gameplay, as a 10% difference in CD’s HPS should not be the determining factor of your success or failure (otherwise, you’d be basically saying that having +32 life per second is what magically saves your life in a ~13.3k HP pool? i don’t believe this much, correlation is not causality, and at best, you have a meager percentage of correlation coming from the 4/2 setup that contributes to your deaths).

Also, the other way to see it is to say that with the 4/2 setup being the superior option for DPS, you’ll require less healing in total since you’d kill your targets faster.

10

I did say I switched to 4/2, cause the smaller overall numbers made it matter less. CD + passive heal being inadequate for E17 DA is a separate topic that applies on either glyph setup, when the boss gets the wrong combo (like enraging + the 15x hp one).

11

btw @Funcom well done on the rebalance! :star_struck:
I find it enjoyable to level my tank stuff now that I can solo with it.
Bravo!

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