Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about tankier gear in context of guardian and after hours upon hours of theorycrafting (I like you build editor) still couldn’t decide on specific one so I’ve wanted to ask you about your PvE experiences
There are few constraint under which I’m thinking about specific gear combinations:
- default weapons set: mace+shield & longbow
- traits improve traps and meditations and naturally promote these skills for slots in utility bar
- not going with full nomad even though it is obvious choice for immovable object that hits like wet paper (prefer to keep some semblance of damage dealing capabilities)
- thinking mostly about 5 man organized group
Without further ado:
Option 1 is your standard cleric guard with some extra vitality and less power.
Option 2 sacrifices healing power for additional critical chance and vitality. That is something that I think about the most. Whole build operates under premise that between hits from high damage bosses team of 5 can still heal (including party wide heals) to full and healing power doesn’t have great scaling, so extra tougness and more hp to survive burst is welcomed (we also have bigger damage to boot). Here comes the biggest question as we lose among other at least 100hp/s from VoR compared to option1 and average skill with healing component has from 500 to 1000 hp restored less per cast: can guard self-sustian without healing? power.
Option 3 is that weird thing in between that hits both of sweet spots regarding armor and health (respectively 4000 and 20.000 as my ocd and love for round numbers dictates) and still retains some of healing power that with proper food and buffs can round up to respectable near 1k range. Yet we have damage around full cleric build (less power more criticals)
Option 4 is almost full soldier – something that comes up a lot talking about tanky gear for any class with power-based offense.
In the end it pretty much boils to few questions:
- what was the highest burst health-wise you survived through?
- how much toughness + healing power made you self-sustain on hardest bosses you know (not counting ones that have dps checking mechanics)?
If you had to choose one of the options above, which one it will be and why? Maybe you have some specific tanky gear choice of your own or tried opinions regarding tankiness sweet spots.
Answers to faq:
1. Yes, I know that zerker on player with good reflexes is optimal …
2. … No, I don’t want to wear zerker (have one set when it’s completely necessary to die from boss snorting in my general direction, because my pug goes with “zerker or gtfo” or simply I’m doing even less challenging content and actually zerker IS optimal, because perspective of wipe is non-existant)
3. Yes, I’m playing with some irl friends that use even “sillier” builds and we are fine with that.
4. I know tanky gear is pointless in like 90%+ of all pve content
5. Let’s not bring up that toughness stacking discussion and everyone know about universally proclaimed sweet spot for armor amount – stating that toughness scales lineary vs with dimnishing returns vs expotentially depends on the factor which we take to base scaling upon.
BTW. 1st post so … hi everyone