This is the question for me, although I know it differs from tank to tank somewhat. How much HP should you be shooting for, for endgame content (Nightmare Denova basically)?

I want to know at what point I can strictly focus on mitigation. Is it 24k? 25k? 27k? Right now I have a hybrid Guardian in almost full 63's with 34% defense, 46% shield and 47% absorbption, along with 24.5k HP. If 26k is where I want to be, I could probably sacrifice 1% absorb and 1% defense to get there, but do I need 26k?

For all 8 man content, 24-25k hp is more than enough. For 16m content, you want ~27k hp to account for the increased damage. Anything more than that is largely wasted.

Of course, this assumes that you've got good healers that know when to preheal for burst phases rather than waiting until you've dropped to 10% hp before throwing a heal on you while you're tanking Kephess. If you've got healers with bad reaction times, you're going to need more hp to account for it. If you're not sure whether you've got enough hp or not, just ask your healers. A reasonably cogent healer is going to be able to tell whether the tank is short on mitigation (taking too much damage overall) or simply doesn't have enough hp (dropping really low before they're able to be picked back up).

Thanks for the response Kitru.

I'd follow with this... as a Guardian tank, do you think it'd be better to swap out a couple of enhancements for the extra Endurance, along with using the high Endurance Hazmat implants? I hate the idea of lettered mods because threat is so difficult with Guardian tanks.

If I use 2 Vigilance Enhancements and the Hazmat high Endurance implants over my current BH mitigation ones, I'd sacrifice 8 shield, 32 absorption and 8 strength for 64 endurance, with my current setup. That would raise me from 24.5 to 25.1 HP, and I still have a 63 armoring I can replace a 61 with (40 more HP) and I can swap out my Might hilt for a Guardian hilt when it is learned (120 HP).

The hardest-hitting repeated damage in the game comes from the Pulsar Droids in Nightmare EC. There, you're seeing a 13.3k (unmitigated) hit once every 5 seconds or so. Assuming terrible RNG, that means both healers need to be sustaining 1.3k HPS to prop you up for the next hit. Since there's essentially nothing else to heal during this phase, I'm not sure this is a valid case.

A more interesting case is something like Toth & Zorn, where you can get hit pretty hard (8k jump ftw) and that hit coincides with a moment when the healer may have to abandon you for a period of time due to knockback or having to heal something else. Even still, Toth hits like a wet blanket between jumps, so it's unlikely to be a problem.

Let's go with a different scenario: tanking Kephess pre-60%. You get the bleed and your co-tank taunts of you. They take a BOATLOAD of damage. Let's assume for the moment that the healers can only spare about 300 HPS for you (which is roughly equivalent to a HoT from both healers). The bleed ticks 5 times for about 7k, once every 3 seconds. That's 35k damage in 16 seconds, or 2.18k DPS. Subtract the 300 HPS and we get 1.88k DPS. Assuming you're topped off before this starts, you would need 30.2k HP to survive. That's doable, but only by sacrificing a lot of mitigation.

The assumption we have to make is that the healers will be able to spend more time on you than just 300 HPS. Unfortunately, this is really a question of your *co-tank's* mitigation, not yours. If he's stacking endurance, then he will take a lot more damage from Kephess and will require extra healing. Due to that need for extra healing, the healers won't be able to spend time on you and the bleed will be a straight subtraction from your HP. It sets up this unfortunate Nash Equilibrium, where both tanks have to be itemized in the same way.

My co-tank is mitigation stacking (as am I), and looking at my logs, the healers appeared to be doing around 500-800 HPS on me during the bleed (though this is a hard statistic to parse out for a single phase of the fight). That means the bleed will eat 22k out of my total health pool. So, that's the amount of endurance I need to ensure I have, plus a 4k-ish buffer around that. So, 26-28k?

It's very very situational though. I don't (at present) have a really good model which predicts the exact minimum HP required for any given piece of content. It just varies too much depending on your co-tank, your healers, and how much stupid your DPS feel like standing in.

As a healer, I *vastly* prefer healing tanks who stack mitigation. With that said, there are times when I appreciate the large health pool. (e.g. when I have to cross heal on paired bosses and step out of range/LoS of the tank for which I am responsible) It's situational.

The one observation I *can* make is that assassin/shadow tanks benefit inordinately from endurance due to the way it enhances the self-heal. If you're in Dread Guard gear and you want to minimize the amount of external healing you require, the magic value is 28.3k HP. I wouldn't go that high for another type of tank (25-26k seems more than ample), but 28.3k is a really nice spot for an assassin/shadow tank in current BiS gear. Important to remember that the reason for this much HP is *not* to provide some sort of extra buffer, but to improve the self-heal. On a purely buffer basis, I'd say 25-26k would be more reasonable.

Appreciate the responses guys. OK, I'm going to shoot for 25+ then I think.

EDIT: Last question for now... currently at 24.8k hp, if I trade out an EWH Defense relic for the Dread Guard absorb proc relic, that would bring me up to 25.3k hp at the expense of a little under 1.5% defense. Fair trade you think, especially considering the absorb proc relic is still helping my mitigation?

The sacrifice for more Hp is not as great as many would like you to believe. There are a few thing people forget to take into account.

Defensive stats suffer from multiple diminishing returns. The first one is just written into the calculation so each defense/shield/absorb rating increase is not as much as previous increases to those ratings.

Second Damage is on a 2 rolls system and multiplicative therefore increases in one actually devalues you other stats. For example if i increase defense then I am shielding less because it never even goes through and my armor shield rating and absorb is actually less valuable since it was not needed as much.

Another point is there is substantial damage that is not able to be mitigated at all and you can have all the defensive secondary stats you want but it will hit and do the same amount of damage no matter what. Toth and stormcaller are prime examples as is Kephess in HM TFB where 90% of his damage cant be avoided.

There is a happy medium somewhere of course. I personally feel that endurance and secondary stats are equally valuable so I add up endurance and tanking stats on each mod/enhancement and take the highest total and use those. For mods this is typically the "B" mods. From there I obviously optimize the tanking secondary stats to provide the optimal mitigation. Doing this for most tanks puts them at around 28.75k HP fully buffed and stimmed. For assassins you can further modify your augments towards endurance and the mitigation loss is offset slightly by increases to self healing and increase their time to survive even further.

TLDR: the sacrifices to mitigation are not as extreme as people think because of standard and inherent diminishing returns and boss damage types that are not mitigable. Endurance has no diminishing returns at all dramatically increases your time to survive over any other stat. Healers HPS is high enough compared to boss throughput that time to survive should be a focus (endurance).

TLDR: the sacrifices to mitigation are not as extreme as people think because of standard and inherent diminishing returns and boss damage types that are not mitigable. Endurance has no diminishing returns at all dramatically increases your time to survive over any other stat. Healers HPS is high enough compared to boss throughput that time to survive should be a focus (endurance).

First off, everyone that tells you to stack mitigation stats already knows about diminishing returns. It's not something that escapes our notice. In fact, it's one of the biggest things that has to be considered. Of course, you're also vastly overstating the impact of diminishing returns since it all operates on percentage decreases to damage taken. A 1% increase in defense is worse less when you have the base 5% defense chance than when you have a 30% defense chance (the first is a 1.1% decrease in damage taken and the second is a 1.5% decrease in damage taken; it gets even *bigger* when you get to the higher numbers with Shield and Absorb where 1% more shield at 65% shield chance equates to a 2.9% decrease in unshielded attacks). Diminishing returns doesn't exist to encourage people to stack Endurance; it exists to offset the progressive improvements in performance based on decreasing percentages of incoming damage.

*Secondly*, it's been proven numerous times over that Endurance does *not*, in fact, dramatically increase your time-til-death, nor is time-til-death even a moderately useful method of comparing tank survivability. Even at the top tier of content, time-til-death in TOR is *exceptionally* high. Even with 25k hp, it's going to take in excess of 10 seconds without any healing for a tank to die. Once time-til-death is beyond the "healer noticed I'm taking damage" threshold (which should be *well* below 10 seconds, especially if you're doing progression content), time-til-death is pointless since, if your healers need longer than 10 seconds during high damage phases, they're doing something wrong (or you are because you're not burning a CD when you should be).

The *only* thing you've said that is even remotely true is that mitigation isn't useful against unmitigatable sources of damage, such as on Kephess the Undying where *so* much of his damage is F/T. Of course, you're overstating the important of it since that's the *only* fight where you actually have to worry about it: for everything beyond EV and KP, the ratio of M/R to F/T damage is so heavily in favor of M/R damage that it's largely a non-issue. If you have to worry about your survivability on T&Z or twin tanks, it's because your healers aren't up to snuff, not because you don't have enough hp: the tanks are the only ones taking appreciable damage during twin tanks (or should be) in predictable, non-bursty amounts.

Short answer: Whatever you end up with using Tank armouring, non lettered mods and low endurance enhancements. If you really what higher HP get endurance augments but mitigation are better. Regardless of DR it is impossible to get into stupidly heavy DR with current gear available.

Doing all that, even with the mitigation augments you will end up cca 26k

Healing:

Mitigation tank - Force Armour, Rejuvenate, Healing Trance, Youtube, have 80%+ resource the whole time except predictable intensive phases.

Endurance tank - healing the whole time, easily run out of resource with derps happening.

Mitigation tank - Force Armour, Rejuvenate, Healing Trance, Youtube

LOL That sounds familiar…

The *only* thing you've said that is even remotely true is that mitigation isn't useful against unmitigatable sources of damage, such as on Kephess the Undying where *so* much of his damage is F/T. Of course, you're overstating the important of it since that's the *only* fight where you actually have to worry about it

"You only have to worry about it in the hardest fight available in this game atm".

I used to agree with you and KeyBoardNinja Kitru, but since EC NiM, I've changed my mind. You may end up slightly better off in most fights in the current end game with the mitigation stacking, but what you should optimize for is the hardest of them - the rest you should be able to handle anyway.

For the same reason that you don't consider HM FPs, I don't consider EV/KP (any difficulty) or EC/TFB SM/HM.

Mitigation is still important ofcourse, but that fight made me switch to 27B mods.

I personally feel that endurance and secondary stats are equally valuable so I add up endurance and tanking stats on each mod/enhancement and take the highest total and use those. For mods this is typically the "B" mods.

This is what I do. I don't refer to mods as "high endurance/low endurance" - I call them "high willpower/low willpower". What do I need more willpower for anyways? I'll take the ones with the highest endurance + mitigation, which is the same as "low willpower".

If you really what higher HP get endurance augments but mitigation are better.

Endurance augments are the last place to look for more HP. Changing a "high willpower" mod for a "low willpower" mod gives you more points of endurance than you lost in mitigation.

Even with 25k hp, it's going to take in excess of 10 seconds without any healing for a tank to die.

This is very much *not* true on 16-man. The difference in damage on large hitting attacks is usually 2x and sometimes almost 3x compared to 8-man. Time is often much more important on 16-man than efficiency. Even one or two seconds can be crucial.

This is very much *not* true on 16-man.

You'll notice that I specifically said earlier on in the threat that you want ~27k hp in 16man.

With 16 man content the overhealing inefficiency also needs to be considered. If you take more damage but have a larger health pool you are less likely to be overhealed which actually will increase your healers overall effective HPS to compensate for the increase incoming DPS while also increasing your TTS greater than increases to mitigation do.

HAHAHA!

So the fact that the healers have to spend 10-15% more of their effort and time my way because my Mit is low and health is high is ok. All that extra time wasted on me is acceptable cuz it's not overhealing.

Sure....sounds perfectly logical to me.

First off, everyone that tells you to stack mitigation stats already knows about diminishing returns. It's not something that escapes our notice. In fact, it's one of the biggest things that has to be considered. Of course, you're also vastly overstating the impact of diminishing returns since it all operates on percentage decreases to damage taken. A 1% increase in defense is worse less when you have the base 5% defense chance than when you have a 30% defense chance (the first is a 1.1% decrease in damage taken and the second is a 1.5% decrease in damage taken; it gets even *bigger* when you get to the higher numbers with Shield and Absorb where 1% more shield at 65% shield chance equates to a 2.9% decrease in unshielded attacks). Diminishing returns doesn't exist to encourage people to stack Endurance; it exists to offset the progressive improvements in performance based on decreasing percentages of incoming damage.

.

So many people don't understand this about tanking stats

I'd say 27-30k for endgame content. 25k may not well be enough. Someone in optimized 63's will likely have 27k hp fully stimmed / buffed.

30k is bit overdoing it but not by too much, provided you follow minimum percentages in mitigation to a certain level. Still able to complete all the content this game has to offer.

Endurance augments are the last place to look for more HP. Changing a "high willpower" mod for a "low willpower" mod gives you more points of endurance than you lost in mitigation.

Ye that's better, still do not want.

Also if anyone feels that they need buffer HP blame your healers. In fact just blame your healers by default, we are used to it.

Maybe for 16 man, but my laptop would melt at 16 man so I dunno.

Maybe a little off topic, but do you Tanks ever carry around multiple sets of Tank Gear? (or at least pieces that you swap in and out, maybe a different Relic, change a chest piece etc...)

For example:

I am a Damage Sponge - High Hit Point Pool for boss fights that hit hard, but really slow.

Avoidance Set - Multiple weak attacks, mainly Trash type stuff?

Threat Set - sacrifice some tanking stats for more DPS/Threat

I know when I played WoW and Raided, I had about 5 Tanks sets for the above plus for things like Elemental Damage type resistant Gear.

And in Rift I would even switch my spec out during Dungeons/Raids for specific fights as well (really loved my tank that could not be knocked back during a fight).

Or is it mostly just one Tank Spec, one Tank Set of Armour?

Maybe a little off topic, but do you Tanks ever carry around multiple sets of Tank Gear? (or at least pieces that you swap in and out, maybe a different Relic, change a chest piece etc...)

 

For example:

I am a Damage Sponge - High Hit Point Pool for boss fights that hit hard, but really slow.

Avoidance Set - Multiple weak attacks, mainly Trash type stuff?

Threat Set - sacrifice some tanking stats for more DPS/Threat

 

I know when I played WoW and Raided, I had about 5 Tanks sets for the above plus for things like Elemental Damage type resistant Gear.

 

And in Rift I would even switch my spec out during Dungeons/Raids for specific fights as well (really loved my tank that could not be knocked back during a fight).

 

Or is it mostly just one Tank Spec, one Tank Set of Armour?

I do carry around different relics, however the latest round of content has me mostly using the dread guard on use relics.

The on use power relic used to be nice on fights where there was nothing to defend/shield but the changes to tank threat and the higher endurance on dread guard tank relics make this one kind of pointless.

I also carry around war hero relics but I find in EC the on use relics are a lot better. There is a lot of time in every fight where you are either not taking damage or are only taking force/tech attacks. This devalues the static stats of the war hero relics. EC has very predictable phases which makes it easy to take advantage of on use relics.

I personally don't like the absorb proc relic. It's nice, but shielding an attack is already like winning the lottery. Absorbing a little bit more of a relatively small hit doesn't do anything for me.

I will continue to replace each type of relic as they are upgraded to be ready for future content that might make them superior.

I don't keep multiple sets of tank gear. That would be very expensive to maintain and it would siphon gear or crafting materials from other people that need it. With the Tionese/Columi/Rakata tokens it was easier to create multiple sets because chances were good that no one could use it, but now everyone can use the tokens. Any extra gear usually goes to off-specs, alts, recruits. Plus a lot of gear gets reverse engineered even when people need it to better benefit the guild. The relics are a nice way to customize gear without spending a lot of credits.

As an assassin there is not really a lot of choice in spec. You might move a point or two around but it won't make much difference either way.

Maybe a little off topic, but do you Tanks ever carry around multiple sets of Tank Gear? (or at least pieces that you swap in and out, maybe a different Relic, change a chest piece etc...)

 

Or is it mostly just one Tank Spec, one Tank Set of Armour?

I carry 1 gear swap (extra piece of body armor) to keep closer to ideal stat distribution when toggling between a WH Defense relic and a DG on-use Shield/Absorb relic. Essentially, I can choose between ~80 Absorb and ~80 Defense from body armor to offset stat changes from the relics.

The DG relic gets tossed on for boss fights with tank swaps where I'm either not taking damage or not taking M/R damage periodically to maximize my effective mitigation pool. The WH relic is used for trash, less challenging content (e.g. GF dailies, so I can pay even less attention to content that I can do half asleep), and any fights with consistent damage profiles.

Beyond that, I don't see a lot of point to fiddling with multiple gear sets (which is ironic, because I played FFXI for years, which could easily leave one with an entire inventory crammed full of situationally useful tanking gear). Assassin has little trouble with threat, and shifting a few points around between Defense/Shield/Absorb is not going to make a noticeable change when tanking different things other than slightly increasing overall damage taken. This game has the MMO formula so simplified that I don't see value in over-complicating it for little to no gain.

As for re-spec'ing, I don't really change my spec around for PVE when tanking because there isn't really a huge pool of alternative viable talents beyond the 31/0/10 standard. Situationally I'm sure I could justify making some tweaks, but the upside isn't great enough for me to justify the chance of forgetting to swap back and be running a sub-optimal spec when it matters.

Maybe a little off topic, but do you Tanks ever carry around multiple sets of Tank Gear? (or at least pieces that you swap in and out, maybe a different Relic, change a chest piece etc...)

I change my heal procing relic to a shield procing relic on kephess nim, then change it back to the heal procing relic after the trandoshian phase. I have noticed it helps out the healers a bit more for that phase but overall probably would be fine if i didnt do it.

When it comes to question of mitgation vs HP, i usually work on a balance between the two. I use only letter mods, but will use a mix of high and low endurance enhancements, and will never use end augments. I usually aim to get the most endurance + mitigation stat, over willpower. This leaves with ~29k hp on my darksin, in the worst situation possible (tanking NiM Kephess while having the bleed (the other tank went splat because they a pure hp build)) I was able to survive with minimal stress on my healers (was a Merc and OP healer) without the need of CD's. I feel that if i was full mitigation or full hp build, i wouldnt of been able to survive in such a situation due to the fact that the a large amount of the damage i was receiving was not being mitigated.