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Tanking Relics for PVE


Songwhistle

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Hi guys,

 

This is for all newish tanks that keep saying that the only real choice for a tanking relic are the ones with a steady shield rate as opposed to an "on use" relic that increases shield and absorb rate by a lot but for a short time.

 

This is as far from the truth as you come. Yes it is good on majority of the fights however there are several fights in the game that will give you better survival with other relics. So for those select few fights you might want to consider using other relics with on use effects. The fights where you might want to consider using a on-use relic are the high spike damage fights where you will be taking high damage for a limited time. This puts less strain on healers during spike damage phases and increases your overall chance of survival. Math suggests you take less damage througout a fight with the WH relic however getting killed as a tank is most often occurring when spike damage hits and your healers can't keep up. This is only in the case that people otherwise do as they should be doing. Assuming such you can prevent tank deaths in a lot of incidents by taking that spike away.

 

For those tanks attempting to do jarg and sorno on 16 man nightmare you are helped a lot by using on use relics due to the fact that after a certain point damage keeps increasing and you have to do tank rotations. Relics with on use will further increase the time you can tank before you end up getting one-shot.

 

Another example of a spike fight is Foreman Crusher - although not as difficult as jarg and sorno on 16 man using relics with on use in conjunction with one defensive cooldown can totally negate the spike damage from his frenzy. This also means you never have to switch between tanks.

 

A last example of a fight with high spike damage is Kephess in ec hm either 8 or 16 his spike damage can be negated. of course taking the debuff off the tank helps a lot as well however the amount of time you are tanking is very short before other tank takes over you can use 1 defensive ability together with a relic and then switch to other defensive cd and use last relics. depending on class you will have different amounts of def. cd's but generally speaking you will in many cases always have something up to pop.

 

relics i am talking about here are the ones ending with Imperiling Serenity and Shrouded Crusader. Check out Torhead for the ones im talking about.

 

So in conclusion - your relics can be switched and should be switched depending on what fight you're on. Don't just leave the relics on and dismiss other relics being better in other situations.

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I don't think anyone ever asserted that clicky relics aren't better in certain fights where high damage phases are predictable. They do fall behind static PvP relics when the damage is consistently high or unpredictable. I personally run both and swap them depending on the fight.

 

Toth + Zorn and Foreman Crusher I run a clicky shield relic. Everything else I run the passive Defense relic. For NiM Jarg & Sorno, it is important to remember that Jarg's biggest hits are ele/int damage and much of Sorno's heavy damage can be prevented by interrupting unload. As such, the clicky relics aren't AS useful in this fight but can be used to provide an extra CD if you find you are needing them.

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As a vanguard using the shield/absorb looks good, but when I swap out the pvp relic I loose a heap of defence, so I end up using the defence click relic (even though the duration should be 10seconds longer)

 

Also, I have read that using the absorb proc relic with the shield/absorb click causes some righteous DR, making the def click relic better if using the absorb proc.

 

Or would using 2 click relics be better in these damage spike fights? that would give 2 relics to rotate in with defensive cool-downs for kephess' last phase. The shared cool-down would be up on the the 2nd relic in time, meaning a relic would be up for the first and third tank swaps.

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I pretty much always use a WH Shield+ Campaign Shield booster, as when the proc kicks in, it jumps me from 70% to 77.5% absorb, which is almost 25% less damage taken per shield while it's up.

 

I'm trying to think what Fights burst a ton of white damage at you. Jarg loves to beat the snot out of me on our NM runs, but that's mostly as my Shields aren't a great deal of help against him. It would be nice on Crusher, whose pretty tame outside his frenzy moments, and that's what I used to do before the WH relic's came out, as use it combined with oil slick as a mini CD in between power shields.

 

EC would be similar, as Toth's Berserk can hurt, and I'm not getting any benefits from Shields with Zoth, so less advantage for the always on relics. Same thing on Tanks, but Firebrand doesn't really have much burst to worry about at all. Kephess could be a big one, but he's more or less always in perma kick my *** mode, with no real spike phase, so I prefer the always on effects there, as while it'll help this time, next time I swap back in, i'll miss that 3.5% shields.

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Kephess could be a big one, but he's more or less always in perma kick my *** mode, with no real spike phase, so I prefer the always on effects there, as while it'll help this time, next time I swap back in, i'll miss that 3.5% shields.

 

Kephess forces you to use tank swaps, which diminish the value of the passive relics in favor of the use relics. When you're not on Kephess, you don't have the benefit. When you are on Kephess, roughly every other time, you'll have that use proc up to bolster your survivability (meaning that the uptime goes up from 25% to roughly 50%, which definitely favors it over the passive). Whenever you're not tanking something, or are tanking something that ignores your defense, the passive relics are progressively less useful the longer you're on said target and the more useful the use relics become, assuming that you're going to switch back to a situation wherein the tank stats *are* useful.

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As a vanguard using the shield/absorb looks good, but when I swap out the pvp relic I loose a heap of defence, so I end up using the defence click relic (even though the duration should be 10seconds longer)

 

Also, I have read that using the absorb proc relic with the shield/absorb click causes some righteous DR, making the def click relic better if using the absorb proc.

 

Or would using 2 click relics be better in these damage spike fights? that would give 2 relics to rotate in with defensive cool-downs for kephess' last phase. The shared cool-down would be up on the the 2nd relic in time, meaning a relic would be up for the first and third tank swaps.

 

Dual clicky relics is arguably the least useful option as they share a CD. If you're going to run clickies, pick one type for the fight and run a passive or proc relic in the other slot.

 

Back to the absorb proc relics. I don't like them because:

- They only increase mitigation on attacks that would already be mitigated anyway (its the ones you don't mitigate that kill you).

- You can't control when they proc (same reason I hate the healing proc relic, no point if it procs when I top off a DPS).

They're still completely viable and great for increasing your mean mitigation, but IMO they help your healer rather than actually keeping you alive.

 

Kephess forces you to use tank swaps, which diminish the value of the passive relics in favor of the use relics. When you're not on Kephess, you don't have the benefit. When you are on Kephess, roughly every other time, you'll have that use proc up to bolster your survivability (meaning that the uptime goes up from 25% to roughly 50%, which definitely favors it over the passive). Whenever you're not tanking something, or are tanking something that ignores your defense, the passive relics are progressively less useful the longer you're on said target and the more useful the use relics become, assuming that you're going to switch back to a situation wherein the tank stats *are* useful.

 

The clicky relics become more useful every time the fight reaches a 3 minute threshold (aka, they come off CD). Every time the fight drags on past that point they go down in effectiveness. A 3:30 fight favours a clicky relic while a 2:50 fight favours the passive. All that assumes that the relics are used on CD to increase mean mitigation and not held as an extra CD. If you need an extra CD the relics are great for that but if you are using them to increase your mean mitigation (in a stand and take it fight) then the passive ones are (IMO) better - set and forget.

 

Again: if the fight has predictable (and unavoidable) high damage phases, the clicky relic comes out ahead. Pure math indicates that fights with partial uptime (tank swaps or breaks in combat) also favour the clickies, but I still prefer passive relics for these. Why? If I have a clicky relic I use it like an extra CD and not to increase mean mitigation.

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On-use and proc relics really aren't worth a damn in my experience (PT tank). You're counting on them to be useful/available when you need them the most, and that's just not the case. The tank should be in control of when he needs a boost, not leaving it to chance.

 

The logic between those 2 statements is completely contradictory. The tank controls when to use the use relics, so the tank has the ability to specifically activate the ability when needed. The proc has a 100% chance to activate when you successfully shield, which, unless you're not stacking Shield whatsoever, is going to happen within 1-2 GCDs of the ICD coming off. The proc relic may be "random", but it's got a good enough uptime on a short enough ICD that it more than offsets it.

 

The only advantage to the passive relics is that they are just that: passive. The proc relic has the best mean contribution even though it's only active for ~30% of the time, and the use relics have the most controllable/burst damage resistant nature (because they're functionally an extra CD). The passives are only best if you're largely unwilling to learn fights and then react to the changing situation and varying damage levels virtually every boss operates with now as well as unwilling to cede to the mathematical superiority of the proc relic (which, regardless of how you feel about randomness, provide more mitigation than the passive relics do).

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The logic between those 2 statements is completely contradictory. The tank controls when to use the use relics, so the tank has the ability to specifically activate the ability when needed. The proc has a 100% chance to activate when you successfully shield, which, unless you're not stacking Shield whatsoever, is going to happen within 1-2 GCDs of the ICD coming off. The proc relic may be "random", but it's got a good enough uptime on a short enough ICD that it more than offsets it.

 

No, not really.

 

On use and proc trinkets have a cooldown, which means they could be unavailable when you need them. Granted, a lot of the mechanics for boss fights are on a timer or % of health and can be predictable. But that doesn't change that you still run the risk of not having a boost when you need it most.

 

My tank is a Powertech, which excels at static mitigation. I will equip an on use relic for boss fights that demand it (Foreman Crusher, Garg, etc.) during their frenzy mechanic. Aside from that, I don't need it, and it arguable whether I need it even then.

 

Healers tend to prefer PT/Vanguard tanks, (at least most of the ones I talk to) because they're more predictable as far as the amount of damage they take. My healers know that they can leave me be for awhile and heal up others who may need it without worrying that I'm suddenly going to take a ton of spike damage.

Edited by TheronFett
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On use and proc trinkets have a cooldown, which means they could be unavailable when you need them. Granted, a lot of the mechanics for boss fights are on a timer or % of health and can be predictable. But that doesn't change that you still run the risk of not having a boost when you need it most.

 

First off, the ICD on the proc relics is miniscule. It's like bringing up the CD on Kinetic Ward: sure, it's there, but it's so short no one even pays attention to it other than to make not of it while theorycrafting to learn about contributive values.

 

Secondly, the entire point of the use relics is that you don't use it until you actually need it. If you are using it when you wouldn't need it for whatever reason, then you're a bad tank that has no idea how to manage CDs. Saying "it might not be up when you need it" concerning a CD that you have direct control over when it is used is essentially a complaint that you suck at using it. If you don't suck at cooldown management, it's a substantially stronger benefit.

 

My tank is a Powertech, which excels at static mitigation. I will equip an on use relic for boss fights that demand it (Foreman Crusher, Garg, etc.) during their frenzy mechanic. Aside from that, I don't need it, and it arguable whether I need it even then.

 

You could tank effectively with DPS relics up (I've actually done it before). It's not a binary question of "needed" or "not needed" but instead one that exists on the sliding scale of "optimal". Hands down, the proc relic is the most optimal tanking relic: it provides the most increased survivability averaged over its 20 second proc cycle. You can bring up the 14ish seconds that the buff is down for whatever reason, but that is more than made up by the fact that you get 4 times the rating that the passive relic provides while it is up. There's a reason that every theorycrafter that I've seen tells people to use the proc relic. Beyond that, the second place spot is entirely dependent on the mechanics and incoming damage rates of the fight at hand. Since there aren't any fights that are without distinct phases of higher and lower levels of M/R damage in the current or next of content that are easily predictable, there isn't any reason to reliably claim that passive relics are more valuable than use relics unless you're either lazy or ignorant of fight mechanics.

 

Healers tend to prefer PT/Vanguard tanks, (at least most of the ones I talk to) because they're more predictable as far as the amount of damage they take. My healers know that they can leave me be for awhile and heal up others who may need it without worrying that I'm suddenly going to take a ton of spike damage.

 

The only reason many healers prefer to run with PT/VG tanks is because it is *stupidly hard* to screw up a VG tank because almost all of their mitigation is static and you just have to faceroll your attacks. Shad/Sin tanks require a fair amount of skill to be appreciably durable because it requires that you pay attention to buffs, restrict the use of attack until you have the appropriate buffs, and know what types of attacks are being thrown at you. Guard/Jugg tanks are incredibly easy to screw up because of their resource generation mechanism. Pretty much anyone that actually understands the tanks will tell you that a bad VG is better than a bad Shadow which is better than a bad Guardian. On the other hand, a skilled Shadow is going to be better than a skilled Guardian which will be better than a skilled VG. The fact that it's so painfully difficult to screw up a VG tank also prevents VGs from operating at the same level that it's possible to get Guardians and Shadows up to.

 

Also, the fact that VGs have such static survivability and the fewest CDs means that they have the least burst survivability. On Kephess, it's way better to have a Shadow or Guardian than it is to have a VG because the Guardian and Shadow have more than 1 CD (not to mention that their CDs also provide more than the VG's). As a VG, it would actually behoove you to take a use relic specifically because it helps offset that weakness.

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The logic between those 2 statements is completely contradictory. The tank controls when to use the use relics, so the tank has the ability to specifically activate the ability when needed. The proc has a 100% chance to activate when you successfully shield, which, unless you're not stacking Shield whatsoever, is going to happen within 1-2 GCDs of the ICD coming off. The proc relic may be "random", but it's got a good enough uptime on a short enough ICD that it more than offsets it.

 

The only advantage to the passive relics is that they are just that: passive. The proc relic has the best mean contribution even though it's only active for ~30% of the time, and the use relics have the most controllable/burst damage resistant nature (because they're functionally an extra CD). The passives are only best if you're largely unwilling to learn fights and then react to the changing situation and varying damage levels virtually every boss operates with now as well as unwilling to cede to the mathematical superiority of the proc relic (which, regardless of how you feel about randomness, provide more mitigation than the passive relics do).

 

Again, the downside of the proc relic is it doesn't affect the attacks that are likely to kill you and it doesn't reduce the likelihood of you dying. It only applies against attacks that are already mitigated, so while it is excellent for mean mitigation, it is uncontrolled and merely improves the mean. It does nothing to reduce spikiness (in fact it increases relative spikiness) and doesn't reduce the chance of you dying to a string of unmitigated attacks. You know: the situations that kill tanks.

 

I'm also iffy about your numbers since all relic will vary in usefulness thanks to DR, and we can all agree that the 415 absorb from the proc relic is pushing it into the high DR area. IMO that Absorb proc relic is the worst relic to use for those reasons.

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It does nothing to reduce spikiness (in fact it increases relative spikiness) and doesn't reduce the chance of you dying to a string of unmitigated attacks. You know: the situations that kill tanks.

 

I play a Shadow tank (the tank with the highest spikiness of incoming damage) and I've never found spikiness to be all that much of a complex survivability factor. With 30% defense chance and 65% shield chance, there's only a 6% chance that any 2 consecutive attacks would be normal hits. The only time that would actually kill a tank is against phase 2 Kephess, wherein the tank should be burning a CD anyways, further reducing the chance of consecutive attacks getting through.

 

I'm also iffy about your numbers since all relic will vary in usefulness thanks to DR, and we can all agree that the 415 absorb from the proc relic is pushing it into the high DR area. IMO that Absorb proc relic is the worst relic to use for those reasons.

 

I really don't think that DR is as big of a factor as most people think it is. It's important to remember that, because mitigation mechanisms are percentage based, the more of any specific mechanism you get, the more valuable that specific percentage increase becomes (a 5% increase in defense is a 5% decrease in incoming damage if you have 0% defense, but it's a 6.67% decrease in incoming defense if you have 25% defense; the effective difference between 60% and 70% absorb is a 25% improvement in total performance from successful shield effects). As such, DR is effectively countered by the progressive increase in effective decreases in percentage damage taken. The entire point of DR is to balance out specialization contributions so that they don't completely overshadow diversified mitigation mechanisms. DR is not the massive evil that so many people make it out to be (unless you're completely ignoring a specific mitigation mechanism, wherein you are shooting yourself in the foot).

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I'm also iffy about your numbers since all relic will vary in usefulness thanks to DR, and we can all agree that the 415 absorb from the proc relic is pushing it into the high DR area. IMO that Absorb proc relic is the worst relic to use for those reasons.

 

I really don't think that DR is as big of a factor as most people think it is.

 

I'm inclined to agree with grallmate.

 

Any decently geared tank is going to be pushing the boundaries of DR just with normal gearing + augments. The DR thresholds have been pretty well documented and nearly universally agreed upon, and pushing well beyond those limits with a proc or on use relic is counterproductive. The reason most healers don't care much for Assassin/Shadow tanks is because they're high maintenance and rely on smoke and mirrors. That's exactly what proc trinkets are, more smoke and mirrors. I can't for the life of me understand why any tank would want to worry about managing another cooldown, but to each his own.

 

On use and proc relics have more use for an undergeared tank than anything else. Anyone who is Rakata geared or better really shouldn't have much use for them.

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The reason most healers don't care much for Assassin/Shadow tanks is because they're high maintenance and rely on smoke and mirrors.

 

I'd be really interested in seeing how many healers you actually find that prefer VG to Shadow tanks and how experienced those healers happen to be.

 

I can tell you, in all of my personal experience (I've got one of each tank at 50 and have done all content on both my VG and Shadow and I've healed as both a Commando and a Sage on all 3 types of tanks through all content), that a properly played Shadow is a better tank from both a threat and a survivability standpoint than a VG. I do say "properly played" because I've run into more than my fair share of Shadows that are largely incompetent and, as such, suck miserably as a tank. Properly played, a Shadow tank is going to require less overall attention than a VG tank.

 

It's not just my personal experiences either. The healers (and parsers) I've run with stand to support this: Shadows require less healing overall compared to VGs (or Guardians). Shadows do have higher spikiness in their incoming damage (by dint of lower K/E DR and higher reliance on defense and shield/abs) but the spikiness just as easily favors Shadows as it hurts them, not to mention that a well played Shadow should have no problem offsetting burst damage intensive phases with use of CDs. The risk of spiky incoming damage is *vastly* overstated by many people that purport it to be a substantial factor in TOR tanking. The number of consecutive hits that are required in order to kill a tank quickly are high enough that the statistical likelihood of having your mitigation be completely ignored and causing a tank death is infinitesimally small except in a small number of high burst damage circumstances wherein you're, as a tank, expected to offset that with CDs.

 

It's also important to note that spikiness is not a problem to Shadow tanks exclusively. Because of their higher Defense/Shield/Absorb compared to Guardians and especially VGs, the chances of a VG getting hit with 2 consecutive unmitigated attacks is almost double that of a Shadow (15% Defense + 60% Shield chance = 66% chance of mitigating an attack; 34% chance of having an attack unmitigated equates to an 11.56% chance of 2 consecutive attacks being unmitigated; 30% defense + 65% Shield chance = 75.5% chance of mitigating; 24.5% chance of having an attack unmitigated equates to a 6% chance of 2 consecutive attacks being unmitigated), and it's important to keep in mind that it generally takes more than 2 consecutive attacks to bring down a tank (making unmitigated strings even *less* likely to be a major factor). Yes, VGs take less damage than those attacks against them that get through their defense and shield, but they're substantially more likely to have those events occur in the first place. If you only ever care about what is *possible* but outright *implausible*, then the only tank stats that matter even remotely are Endurance and Armor, since those are the only stats that actually factor in to the *extremely* unlikely cases that you seem to care so much about. I've never had a problem dying due to unmitigated strings. The times they do occur are so rare that I've more had wipes occur due to DCs than I have had due to unmitigated strings. The things that actually pose a real risk to a well played tank are instant death mechanics (Kephess' insta-gib after knockback) and healer incompetence. The tank can explicitly control the first by learning and knowing fights, but there isn't much else that a tank can do beyond increasing mitigation to offset the second.

 

As to the DR curves, yes they're well known, but they aren't the entire story concerning DR and its application. Looking at the DR curves exclusively does nothing to analyze the comparative reduction in incoming damage at those various stages of DR. If you're stacking one stat *exclusively*, the DR curves will demolish you, but the DR curves don't have such a substantial impact that the contributions of 113 defense are greater on whole than the contributions of 430 absorb with ~30% uptime (assuming a healthy shield chance). On a point for point basis, absorb mitigates more damage per point of rating than defense does (Absorb contributes to its percentage at roughly 4 times the same rate as defense; with a 60% shield chance, this means that Absorb, exclusive of DR, would contribute to mean mitigation at 2.4 times the rate of Defense; to render them to equal mean mitigation, the DR curve would have to reduce Absorb to only 40% of the same percentage contributions of Defense; DR hits hard, but it doesn't hit Absorb that much harder than Defense).

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I'd be really interested in seeing how many healers you actually find that prefer VG to Shadow tanks and how experienced those healers happen to be.

 

Assassin/Shadow tanks are few and far between on my server, in PvE at least. I've seen several of them during Flashpoints while leveling up alts, but it seems that a lot of them don't make it to endgame. In the hundreds of times I've run Operations, I can probably count the number of them I've seen on one hand. This is personal experience of course, and your mileage may vary. I won't deny that the skill cap is higher for an Assassin/Shadow tank versus a Powertech/Vanguard, which is probably why there aren't as many...especially skilled ones.

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It's also important to note that spikiness is not a problem to Shadow tanks exclusively. Because of their higher Defense/Shield/Absorb compared to Guardians and especially VGs, the chances of a VG getting hit with 2 consecutive unmitigated attacks is almost double that of a Shadow (15% Defense + 60% Shield chance = 66% chance of mitigating an attack; 34% chance of having an attack unmitigated equates to an 11.56% chance of 2 consecutive attacks being unmitigated; 30% defense + 65% Shield chance = 75.5% chance of mitigating; 24.5% chance of having an attack unmitigated equates to a 6% chance of 2 consecutive attacks being unmitigated)

 

Just curious, how are you calculating the math for these probabilities?

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Just curious, how are you calculating the math for these probabilities?

 

Chance of not mitigating two consecutive attacks is

(% not shield attack 1) * (% not dodge attack 1) * (% not shield attack 2) * (% not dodge attack 2)

 

so, for Kitru's scenarios

Vanguard, 15% dodge, 60% shield

(.85) * (.40) * (.85) * (.40) = 11.56%

 

Shadow, 30% dodge, 65% shield

(.70) * (.35) * (.70) * (.35) = 6.00%

Edited by CitizenFry
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I play a Shadow tank (the tank with the highest spikiness of incoming damage) and I've never found spikiness to be all that much of a complex survivability factor. With 30% defense chance and 65% shield chance, there's only a 6% chance that any 2 consecutive attacks would be normal hits. The only time that would actually kill a tank is against phase 2 Kephess, wherein the tank should be burning a CD anyways, further reducing the chance of consecutive attacks getting through.

 

The point is, I prefer to reduce the RNG in my mitigation by improving my change to mitigate than by increasing how much is mitigated. Proc is good for mean mitigation, but point for point, Defence is better for mean mitigation. How many tanks do you see stacking Defence?

 

IMO the Absorb proc relic is similar to the Sage AoE in PvP. The numbers look great but it doesn't actively keep anyone alive.

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The point is, I prefer to reduce the RNG in my mitigation by improving my change to mitigate than by increasing how much is mitigated. Proc is good for mean mitigation, but point for point, Defence is better for mean mitigation. How many tanks do you see stacking Defence?

 

IMO the Absorb proc relic is similar to the Sage AoE in PvP. The numbers look great but it doesn't actively keep anyone alive.

 

upto a point.

 

if you keep shield static and plot a graph of def% vs Mitigation and absorb% vs mitigation, you will see that specially for an assassin, def stop being better than absorb at somewhere around 27%ish

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upto a point.

 

if you keep shield static and plot a graph of def% vs Mitigation and absorb% vs mitigation, you will see that specially for an assassin, def stop being better than absorb at somewhere around 27%ish

 

There are 2 variables in play. You can't look at them individually. I do know that absorb has more relative value for an Assassin thanks to Dark ward. But point for point, Defence should come out ahead assuming equal points in each. It's also worth noting that, since Defence is rolled first, higher Defence chance lowers the worth of Shield and Absorb,

Edited by grallmate
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  • 4 months later...
There are 2 variables in play. You can't look at them individually. I do know that absorb has more relative value for an Assassin thanks to Dark ward. But point for point, Defence should come out ahead assuming equal points in each. It's also worth noting that, since Defence is rolled first, higher Defence chance lowers the worth of Shield and Absorb,

 

First of all, ths is a no-snark reply and I'm not an expert (it's so hard to convey tone in textual format); I only know what I've read and even then, the finite mechanics are only truly understood by the dev's. End disclaimer.

Defense will be superrior percent for percent, not point for point. Defense, after somewhere between 25-27% has a stiff diminishing return. Absorb has a much lower return, which kicks in at a much higher percentage. Also, absorb gives more percentage gain per point of rating than defense. So you will never have a "point for point" exchange between the two. Past an undefined amount (at least, I can find no hard number), the amount of defense rating you have to stack to gain even 1% when compared to the amount of absorb (and thereby mitigated damage) you would gain by replacing this with aborsorption is unbalanced. At that time, it is then more beneficial to stack absorb than defense; the defense you would have to stack to get from ~27% to 30% could easily get you around %50 absorb. the additional 3/100 damage not taken, when you could mitigate 25/100 of all damage [(.50 shield)*(.50 absorb)] would be inferior.** Of course, this is predicated on taking shield/defense and shield/absorb mods, because as you know absorb does nothing without a high shield rating. The magic numbers that I see in most technical reviews of how the three mechanics synergize is D% ~27-30%, Shld% ~50%, abrb% ~50% (for guardian tanks anyway; different for Shadows and Sins b/c they have a much higher shield% potential). I write enough term papers every semester that I don't need anymore practice citing sources, but the info is outthere for anyone who wants to know bad enough to thoroughly research :p Given the fact that all of us have different ideas or methods and we're all still out there tanking with varying degrees of success, I say "forgedda 'bout it" and go have fun!

 

**However, up to around ~27% defence chance, defense is superior because it gives comparable gains, and = a "no damage chance" vs a "reduced damage" chance.

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from another thread in here. these are the damage modifiers for the various DG relics (starting at 1600 build, lower is better)

 

on use Def - on Use shield - proc absorb - 100 stats

PT 0.464 - 0.462 - 0.46075 - 0.4566

Jugg 0.42515 - 0.4237 - 0.42315 - 0.42

Sin 0.3519 - 0.35015 - 0.34846 - 0.3452

 

assuming time averaged. based on 1600 optimal build (not considering itemization limitations)

Edited by dipstik
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