How much armor/protection do I need on a DT? should I use tali or dread build?
You’ll want close to full T4 with a shield.
Desecration shield spec worked best for me.
The standard is full protection with a Dread on the last boss.
Tali is fine, but going to depend on your healers as well. Two weaker healers means it will be harder than a single good bear for example. And as Half said, use Dread on the last boss unless you have two good healers and can still hit around 45-50% prot on last boss.
Since (at least) last boss doesn’t crit, you can use black dragon-t3 armor as well, since it has nice protection.
And as mentioned before, the skill of your healers makes a bigger difference than your gear.
Using dread makes last boss quite easy and helps on other bosses as well, just be careful on 2nd boss when it’s below 50%. Since 2nd on aggro will get the beam, make sure that your shadow doesn’t take the aggro and let you drop on 2nd spot when boss casts the beam.
I have 55% physical mitigation but around 25% protection. should I work on getting more protection? Or should I have a different build just for the last boss which would give me more protection?
You’re going to need more prot for the last boss, tali or shield should be fine for the first two. What does your dread build and gear look like now?
that’s the prot build that I have now
and this is the tali build I use
https://cutt.ly/JuqsA7Q
5 points in Invulnerable Soul will give you quite a boost from those 25% I guess
Ok, thank you.
A few ways to get around lower protection in the last fight is timing your buffs, combos and positioning right:
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Time your Dread Shadow right, if you can’t take lots of melee hits from the boss it might be more useful to summon your DS after pulling the boss. Let the boss hit you two or three times, during the 2nd / 3rd hit summon the shadow, that gives you time to regenerate health during its uptime, if your DS disappears you will have to take less hits towards the end of the first pure tanking phase.
Alternatively, if you can take lots of melee hits but not many magic hits, you should start the fight by summoning your dread shadow and letting it attack the boss, that way the CD of it will be gone after the damage phase and you can instantly resummon it if you are low on health. -
During the pure tanking phase where the boss has the shield, you can side step (move your character so that you side step TOWARDS the boss don’t move too far away and get smite) and sometimes resist his melee attacks
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After running away from rapture you can wait at a distance (where the globes are) until the clickers have used their antennas, the boss will start to smite you but if you saved up your cunning deflection you can get away with a measly 1k hit.
Ideally, if the clickers actually manage to click at a decent speed (and don’t need like 10 seconds to find their antenna) the smite cast gets interrupted leaving you completely unhurt and being able to regenerate more health due to being out of combat for a few seconds (always make sure you have food buffs running, this will heal you up really good in that situation). -
You can keep the Seal of Yog stack if you step for a second (so you get damaged once from them) into a puddle near the boss, that way you can always have the big crit buff running during the damage phase.
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During the situation in 2. above you can preload your Life Leech combo and use it as soon as you have to run back to the boss, that way you can maximize the damage phase for health leeching with full damage
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Don’t forget to use “Hex Marked Soul” to gain a big prot buff, you can use it every damage phase and it lasts pretty long. Also, make sure your healers use their prot buffs, especially if you have a BS in your group. They sometimes forget about these buffs while they are incredible helpful in this dungeon.
Those strategies might take a bit more experience in the fight, you need to have a “feel” for it but they can definitely help doing the dungeon easier.
Regarding point 3 i have better advice.
First use the stygian rune (the one that gives you quite a bit of out of combat health regen) and food with a decent amount of out of combat health regen.
As soon as rapture start put your weapon away and run out of the aoe. After the aoe run close to the boss so he starts a melee attack. Before the melee attack lands, jump/run away so the melee attack misses and the boss starts a smite and again run close to the boss. By the time the smite is close to finish casting, your clickers should be done and the smite will be canceled. Half way through this dance your out of combat regen should start to kick in and you will be full hp.
This small trick is not super useful for DT as you should have dread for the shielding phase, but it’s really good for the other tanks.
Also this kind of works at the first 2 bosses in chaos, the cast time of smite is so long that if you just dodge the melee attack and then take the smite with cunning deflection, it’s very much worth it.
There’s a bunch of time you don’t take damage so the hots will heal you for quite a bit and cunning will make the damage from smite be very low (expecially if a bs/tos helps you with a prot buff or a pom with lithany/blessing).
Thank you. I’ll go try it out
you can dodge mellee attack by running away?
The melee attack is not really an attack. It’s a spell that hits you only if you’re close, so by running out of range when he finishes the cast, you don’t get hit by it, but he’ll start casting smite right after and you can’t not get hit by that.
Oh ok, that makes more sense, cause in aoc you can’t really dodge.