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Tank Relics for Guardian/Jugg


NwahsNirom

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I am a Guardian, with some clears of HM TFB.

 

Current stats, with buffs and a Rakata Stim, are:

48.76% Damage Reduction,

27.09% Defense Chance

49.25% Shield Chance

50.13% Shield Absorb

 

 

I currently roll with a Dread Guard Relic of the Shrouded Crusader (Shield and Absorb Clicky) and the Matrix Cube. I have enough comms for another Dread Guard Relic. I'm thinking of getting either the Defense Clicky, or the Shield/Absorb proc.

 

I love having full control of my clickies to save myself in crisis situations, so another clicky might by nice. I just wanted to ask a few questions:

 

1. I am pretty sure they don't share a cooldown, the defense clicky and absorb clicky, but I want to make sure before I buy.

 

2. Since I already have so many clicky cooldowns to survive, should I grab the shielding proc relic to smooth out my damage mitigation?

 

Thanks for your input.

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I'm not sure how the clickies interact with each other.

 

That said, I go with one Defense clicky and 1 Absorb proc relic. Absorb proc because the returns I get on it with how low my Absorb is are pretty huge, and Defense clicky for another mini defensive cooldown with decent uptime. I prefer 2 DG relics to 1 or 2 EWH relics because of the extra HP they provide, while still providing situational mitigation boosts (clicky active with absorb proc = more mitigation than 2 EWH relics).

 

I'm sitting at 26.3k HP, 53% damage reduction, 31.5% defense, 46% shield chance and 46% absorb chance. 18/23 hybrid (I go with the no channel stasis, Grallmate made a good argument a while back about the burst threat it helps to provide at the start of a fight).

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Let's look at what relics are available to tanks:

 

Dread Guard Defense on click

Dread Guard Shield/Absorb on click

Dread Guard Absorb on Proc

 

War Hero static Defense

War Hero static Shield

Matrix Cube (Juggs and PTs only)

 

Before we talk about relics, let's ask what your actual chances are for defensing and shielding an attack is (if you theorycraft yourself skip to the next paragraph). With your current stats, your 27% Defense chance will be buffed up to 30% with Retaliation. Now the base accuracy for boss attacks is 90% aside from "special" attacks as the developers call it, couple that with your Smash debuff and the bosses accuracy is at 85%. Now the chance of dodging the attack is a roll of Defense against Accuracy, and basically is 100% - (85% - 30%), or 45%. Quite a bit larger than your listed Defense chance. The next roll is for Shields, all attacks that bypass your Defense roll have a 50% (rounded) chance of being shielded. The probability of and attack bypassing Defense and then being shielded is then .55*.5, or 27.5% chance to shield.

 

Now, to start crossing relics off the list. Dread Guard clicky relics share cooldowns, so you only want one. The Defense click relic gives better mitigation to a Jugg than a Shield/Absorb click, so the Shield/Absorb click is tossed out.

 

The War Hero Shield relic is not ideal for Juggs, you pick up around 550 Shield Rating just through Enhancements and Implants alone unless you're grabbing a lot of Accuracy (which you shouldn't). All calculations that take a total number of defense/shield/absorb points to be allocated, and finds the mathematically ideal allocation show that the amount of Shield rating you have to carry on enhancements and implants is the correct amount of Shield.

 

Now, the DG Absorb proc relic. You get the boost for 6 seconds after you shield. The slowest attacks will be around 1 attack every GCD. For 6 seconds you have 4 GCD's, so at worst 6 attacks. With our 27.5% chance to shield, it is expected to shield only 1 of those 4 attacks with the Proc still up. Furthermore, the 20 second rate will not be on a 20 second cooldown as there will be 2-3 GCD's after the 20 seconds ends before you shield again to proc it. Now at the upper end, the last phase of NiM Kephess is 5 attacks every GCD (bye bye Sin tanks). That leads to 20 attacks in the 6 second proc window, and at 27.5% chance to shield you expect to absorb 5.5 attacks, and have the 20 second rate constantly refreshed. Each of those attacks Kephess does hits for 2700 after armor. So at 50% absorb, a shielded hit is 1350 damage. Without the proc up, shielding 5.5 attacks in 6 seconds is 7425 damage taken, or 1238 DPS (just from the shielded attacks). With the proc up, you gain roughly 10% absorb, at which point a shielded attack hits for 1080, and shielding 5.5 attacks during the proc comes out to 5940 damage taken, or 990 DPS (just from the shielded attack). That's 248 less damage taken per second during the proc window, but factoring in the proc only being up 6 out of 20 seconds, it averages out to 74 less damage taken per second.

 

In comparison, the Matrix Tank Cube has a static +21 Defense chance on it. That adds about .4% Defense Chance. When looking at the tank melting numbers from Kephess (19500 DPS pre-mitigation) that made the absorb proc relic look viable, that .4% Defense Chance actually works out to 30 less damage taken per second. Not quite where the absorb proc is, but you have to realize that this is one phase of one fight. Every other fight in the game save the TFB tentacles attacks with far less frequency, at which point the RNG will go full 6 second windows where you don't shield again. For Hybrid Juggs with less than 45% shield chance, and those like myself with 31% Defense Chance, the math is even more in favor of a Matrix Cube providing all around more mitigation than the Absorb proc, and has the added bonus of a lot of Strength to help with threat.

 

The last relic to mention is a War Hero static Defense relic. There shouldn't be any argument about this one, it's a viable relic and the only knocks against it are being low endurance and without power or main stat. That leaves the DG Defense click, War Hero Defense, and Matrix Cube as the three more viable relics for appropriately geared Jugg tanks (if your defense chance is below 25% I can't help you...). Personally, I pick the DG and Matrix cube because I like the main stat boost, higher endurance, and less pvp involved with the Matrix Cube over the War Hero, but most combinations of those 3 will work well.

 

Side note for Sin/PT tanks. The absorb proc relic is certainly more viable (and I think BiS for PT's), though the Defense click will likely be better than the shield click. I sort of mess with my PT alt, but I'll admit I don't know much about Sin tanks.

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I'm currently running def clicky but since I already have cca 600 def rating or 30% stimmed I find that I get very little in return from the DG def relic it pushes up my def rating to over 800 but less than 2% in terms of actual def gained. Problem was I got the relic before checking out the DR graph and from that I feel that a shield relic would be better, first of all shd/abs have much steeper curves but their actual DR sets on later, especially for shield, abs is about the same. Second I already have a fairly low shd/abs in comparison to other tanks and thus I feel that I would get more from the Shield Relic.

 

For second relic I am thinking either shd proc or WH/EWH defence, which in turn means I can get more shd/abs on gear.

 

Also aren't clikcies on 1m lock out from one another, and thus the second one could be used before the first one is off cd?

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Now, to start crossing relics off the list. Dread Guard clicky relics share cooldowns, so you only want one. The Defense click relic gives better mitigation to a Jugg than a Shield/Absorb click, so the Shield/Absorb click is tossed out.

 

No, they don't. Identical relics share the same CD but different relics (different tier *or* different stat) simply put the unused relic on a 1 minute cooldown. As such, if you have 2 use relics, you can use them both on CD, once every minute without any loss to uptime.

 

You're also forgetting something *very* important about the DG use relics for tanks: they only have a 20 second duration. You actually get better returns out of the Rakata Defense relic (290 Defense for 30 seconds every 2 minutes = 72.5 Defense on average) than you do out of the DG Defense relic (350 Defense for 20 seconds every 2 minutes = 58.33) because of this. It's one of the reasons why pretty much no one recommends the DG tank use relics any more: the previous tiers are actually *better* (for use relics, the Campaign relic is best for Shield/Abs and the Rakata is best for Defense; the DG relics are both major downgrades).

 

the math is even more in favor of a Matrix Cube providing all around more mitigation than the Absorb proc

 

While it's true that, for a Guardian tank, the Absorb Proc is friggin' terrible, saying that the Matrix Cube vacillates between "slightly better" (1.2% less damage taken) in high attack/second scenarios to "slightly worse" (.25% more damage taken) in average scenarios isn't the same as "math is in favor of the Matrix Cube providing more mitigation", especially since you're only factoring in *basic* attacks rather than any of the special M/R attacks that are going to have substantially less real contribution from Defense (so you've ended up inflating the value of Defense by a fair margin). If anything, since the situations you should care about as a tank are those where you're predictably taking a crapton more damage, weighted properly, the Matrix Cube is actually substantially worse. Even so, at worst, it's functionally a break even, and, at that point, it's not because they're both *good* relic choices: it's because they're both *bad* relic choices.

 

TThat leaves the DG Defense click, War Hero Defense, and Matrix Cube as the three more viable relics for appropriately geared Jugg tanks

 

As I've pretty well demonstrated, there's only 1 real "viable" relic for Guardian/Jugg tanks and it's the WH/EWH passive PvP relic. The Matrix Cube and the Abs proc relic are both terrible, terrible break evens and the DG use relic is, at *best*, marginally better than either of those. All 3 of them are *worlds* worse than the WH/EWH passive relic though so there's no real option otherwise: if you're not using the PvP relics, you're using painfully subpar ones.

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All 3 of them are *worlds* worse than the WH/EWH passive relic though so there's no real option otherwise: if you're not using the PvP relics, you're using painfully subpar ones.

 

How much does your war hero relic help when tanking zorn, or stormcaller, or not tanking vorgath, or not taking damage on kephess, etc, etc, etc? Saying that all other relics are sub-par is absolutely silly. Get both, use the best one for whatever fight you are on. The factors that determine this choice are: (1) % of time taking melee/ranged hits, (2) % of incoming damage that is melee/ranged, (3) frequency of melee/ranged damage spikes, (4) farm vs. progression content.

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How much does your war hero relic help when tanking zorn, or stormcaller, or not tanking vorgath, or not taking damage on kephess, etc, etc, etc?

 

You're essentially attempting to defend the use relics here (the Abs proc relic and Matrix Cube are functionally static benefits that only apply in situations where the WH/EWH relic is outright better), so I'll elaborate as to why the use relics are functionally sub-par compared to the WH/EWH: their durations and DR.

 

The duration matters because the best use relic for a Guardian is the Rakata use relic, which averages 72.5 Defense averaged over time. Even if you have 50% uptime on a boss doing only M/R attacks with the other boss doing pure F/T damage (T&Z or twin tanks with swap) and use it on CD, you're getting, at most 145 Defense averaged over time on the M/R boss. This assumes the absolutely *perfect* use situation for the use relic, which doesn't happen in reality. At best, you can assume something closer to 40% uptime in the relevant situations, which equates to ~120 Defense averaged over time, which is what you get constantly out of the EWH relic. This is where the second part comes into play.

 

Because the use relics provide a massive amount of a stat for a short period of time, they suffer from diminishing returns much more severely than the passive relics. Because of the severity of the DR curves, you're going to experience roughly 25% more diminishing returns out of the use relics (and the proc relic) than you will out of a passive relic. As such, you're not getting 120 Defense out of the Rakata use relic: you're getting closer to 100-110.

 

Even leveraged properly, the use relics are going to provide less mitigation than you would get out of the passive relics. Before DG and EWH gear and relics were released (the former because they pushed you further into the DR curve which makes the diminishing returns effects of the use and proc relics more sever and the latter because the durations were, apparently, standardized at 20 seconds rather than fixed to both be 30 seconds), the use relics were a viable option (I used a Campaign relic of Shield/Abs on my Shadow tank and championed it's use *regularly*; in fact, I was the one that brought up the variable uptime argument and did the math to prove that you got more out of the use relics than the WH relics 6 months ago). The problem is that, since the best use relics *did not* improve while the best passive relics *did*, compounded by gear pushing further into the DR curves to diminish the comparative value of the use relics, the use relics are *no longer* a truly viable and effective option.

 

In short, the use relics *used* to be a potential and viable BiS option, but they are no longer. It's not even a question of situational benefits any more; you're better served outright by using the passive relics.

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Kitru, it's been long over due that I got to bounce relic ideas around with someone. To argue against a few points:

 

1) The 20 seconds of use for DG. Yea, that was annoying to see. However, for defense click relics, the Campaign relic has always been 20 seconds of use, and the Rakata relic is only available to Artifice users. So, unless you're using Artifice you're stuck with 20 seconds on use, at which point the DG relic is more favorable for its higher boost and higher endurance. It appears I was wrong about click relic cooldowns, though I'm not sure why you would need two then, given you have 2 good cooldowns as a Jugg and hopefully adrenals. That's another debate though.

 

2) I'll concede Matrix Cube ~= Absorb Proc for Juggs. I like the Matrix Cube more for its main stat and decent endurance (more than Campaign relics, less than DG relics) than its defensive stats since I take all lettered mods and have some real ******* Marauders in my guild. I've been running that setup since before the DG relics were put in game and I didn't have much in the way of 63 gear, so I'm a bit stuck in my ways.

 

3) The PVP Defense relics are very good, but I would caution against using 2 of them. The Elite War Hero relics lose 51 endurance to the DG relics and take away a soft cooldown.

 

Can we come to an agreement that the more preferable arrangement is 1 (E)War Hero Defense relic and 1 DG Defense click relic for Juggs? The extra Defense on use (5.25% for me, sitting at 566 Defense Rating) can be very useful when things are only going slightly bad, and is pretty much needed with an adrenal or second click relic to survive the last phase of NiM Kephess.

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You're essentially attempting to defend the use relics here (the Abs proc relic and Matrix Cube are functionally static benefits that only apply in situations where the WH/EWH relic is outright better), so I'll elaborate as to why the use relics are functionally sub-par compared to the WH/EWH: their durations and DR.

 

Yes, I personally believe the absorb proc and matrix cube are both terrible.

 

The duration matters because the best use relic for a Guardian is the Rakata use relic, which averages 72.5 Defense averaged over time. Even if you have 50% uptime on a boss doing only M/R attacks with the other boss doing pure F/T damage (T&Z or twin tanks with swap) and use it on CD, you're getting, at most 145 Defense averaged over time on the M/R boss. This assumes the absolutely *perfect* use situation for the use relic, which doesn't happen in reality. At best, you can assume something closer to 40% uptime in the relevant situations, which equates to ~120 Defense averaged over time, which is what you get constantly out of the EWH relic. This is where the second part comes into play.

 

Because the use relics provide a massive amount of a stat for a short period of time, they suffer from diminishing returns much more severely than the passive relics. Because of the severity of the DR curves, you're going to experience roughly 25% more diminishing returns out of the use relics (and the proc relic) than you will out of a passive relic. As such, you're not getting 120 Defense out of the Rakata use relic: you're getting closer to 100-110.

 

Even leveraged properly, the use relics are going to provide less mitigation than you would get out of the passive relics. Before DG and EWH gear and relics were released (the former because they pushed you further into the DR curve which makes the diminishing returns effects of the use and proc relics more sever and the latter because the durations were, apparently, standardized at 20 seconds rather than fixed to both be 30 seconds), the use relics were a viable option (I used a Campaign relic of Shield/Abs on my Shadow tank and championed it's use *regularly*; in fact, I was the one that brought up the variable uptime argument and did the math to prove that you got more out of the use relics than the WH relics 6 months ago). The problem is that, since the best use relics *did not* improve while the best passive relics *did*, compounded by gear pushing further into the DR curves to diminish the comparative value of the use relics, the use relics are *no longer* a truly viable and effective option.

 

In short, the use relics *used* to be a potential and viable BiS option, but they are no longer. It's not even a question of situational benefits any more; you're better served outright by using the passive relics.

 

In general I feel there is too much emphasis on "averages" in this forum. There is no doubt that war hero relics will provide a higher average mitigation in just about any fight you can imagine. The point I want to make is that there are often periods in every fight where the incoming damage is very high above average. This is the point in time when defensive stats are at their highest potency. Deflection is 5% melee/ranged defense on average. Pretty awful - but if you use it at the right time you become nearly immortal. There can be no proof that one is better in general than the other because it depends on the fight. I will leave it to the individual to decide which is better. This is how it should be, because when new fights are released there is no one to ask which is better and every fight can be defeated with different strategies.

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In general I feel there is too much emphasis on "averages" in this forum.

 

This. You can have a full combat log of NiM Kephess showing an average of about 1150 DPS taken over the course of the fight. That more than hides the fact that without cooldowns you're eating around 4000 DPS from under 60% Kephess. With a click relic activated you're taking 160 less DPS than if you had a War Hero relic in that slot, and you only have about 20 seconds at a time on Kephess. Let me put this misrepresentation of averages into perspective: Assasins get ROCKED by Force/Kinetic damage, but, they can often come out far ahead of other tanks by Force Shrouding key damage spikes.

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it would be nice to run numbers specifically for nim kephess. obviously we cant do anything about the dot that goes out, but the on-tank pre 60% and the on tank post 60% would get some considerable benifit from the on use relics i think.

 

pre 60) keph does (pre mitigation) a 24500 arcing slash (100% or more accuracy) then a 16,206 hit (90% accuracy) every 1.5 seconds for 4.5, then repeats

 

post 60) five 5850 hits go out every 1.5 seconds (90% accuracy)

 

i think this is the most difficult thing to single target heal in the game (warrior phase and dreadtooth(5) are a pain too), where both healers have to focus as soon as the tanks swap since 3 seconds can be 27k+ in damage if you get all bad roles.

 

my guess is a on use shield/absorb relic would be pretty nice there, and being able to use th DG 20 second one might be prefferable since you going to have to place the blue circles half the time anyway.

Edited by dipstik
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3) The PVP Defense relics are very good, but I would caution against using 2 of them. The Elite War Hero relics lose 51 endurance to the DG relics and take away a soft cooldown.

 

I don't put much stock in Endurance whatsoever, especially for Guard/Juggs and VG/PTs so the "loss" of 51 Endurance means almost nothing to me.

 

The only thing that would have an appreciable effect would be the loss of the soft CD which is, honestly, isn't a major of a concern as you might think: you *should* have Saber Ward and Warding Call both up and available for each of your sub-60% tank turns and Enure for the last if you get it. If you need more than 2 full tank phases on each tank for sub 60%, you're pretty much screwed anyways so you shouldn't absolutely need the "extra" CD: NiM Kephess on 8m has 1288301 hp; 60% hp is ~773k; each DPS should be doing at least 1900 DPS and tanks should be dealing 700 DPS while they aren't affected by Breath of the Masters, which totals to 8300 ops wide DPS (4 * 1900 + 700); the TTK for Kephess sub-60 should then be slightly less than 93 seconds (should be some rollover DPS from DoTs at the pushover); each Breath of the Masters cycle takes 20 seconds; 93 / 20 = 4 cycles with a 13 second overlap, which is short enough to ride Enure (or just kite him).

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My personal preference for Guardian tank relics is to use a EWH Defence Relic and a Shield/Absorb clicky relic. I'm currently messing around with the DG vs the Campaign one. While the Campaign has the longer duration, the DG one used at the right time seems to make more of a difference.

 

All that said: tank stats (and healing stats to a degree) are very separate from DPS stats. For DPS, highest average up time is almost always desirable. Tanking is much more reactionary as such, the added utility of the clicky relics is nice. For example, a 20s clicky DG relic during Toth's frenzy or Foreman Crusher's frenzy is worth more than a 30s clicky Campaign during their normal phases. Now with that said, Guardians already have AWESOME CDs for dealing with those situations (Foreman's 3rd frenzy aside) both of those CDs already being better than a clicky relic.

 

All that said, when on Kephess (even just for HM, we aren't up to him for NiM yet), I want all the CDs I can get.

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In general I feel there is too much emphasis on "averages" in this forum. There is no doubt that war hero relics will provide a higher average mitigation in just about any fight you can imagine. The point I want to make is that there are often periods in every fight where the incoming damage is very high above average. This is the point in time when defensive stats are at their highest potency. Deflection is 5% melee/ranged defense on average. Pretty awful - but if you use it at the right time you become nearly immortal. There can be no proof that one is better in general than the other because it depends on the fight. I will leave it to the individual to decide which is better. This is how it should be, because when new fights are released there is no one to ask which is better and every fight can be defeated with different strategies.

 

Averages reflect the vast bulk of game content. Boss fights are a comparable minority, and a smaller minority yet are ones that severely stress a tank's survival and healer resources. They're out there, but from a time perspective, something like 95%+ of one's interaction with the game falls into encounters where the statistical average is applicable and useful.

 

Luckily, relics are sufficiently easy to obtain that picking up a variety beyond what is best-suited to the average case (e.g. ones that are quite obviously well-suited to a particular tank during spike-damage phases) is not excessively onerous.

 

At worst, one totes around an extra piece of gear per relic slot to accommodate swaps, which is not, to my mind, excessively onerous either. For myself, as an Assassin, I do alternate between a static Defense relic and on-use Shield/Absorb relic, and it requires only a single swap (at present my body armor, once fully re-optimized for available 63 mods on my server, an implant) to keep overall defensive stats in line with the mathematically optimal numbers.

 

Obviously, there are specific fights which hugely benefit from intelligent timing of on-use relics and normal defensive CDs. That will always continue to be the case, and good tanks will always carry additional relics to be prepared for them. When new content comes out and we don't already have a model for the fight, the first couple attempts will undoubtedly be trickier, but it doesn't take long to figure out whether any given encounter mirrors the statistical average or has properties that make it an outlier and thus better suited to a slightly changed gear makeup.

 

And really, this entire discussion boils down to relics, because there is precious reason otherwise not to have a single tanking gearset optimized for one's particular class (there's an easy-to-calculate mathematical "best", from which any deviation statistically means more damage taken). One is never better served by having more Defense for one particular fight, and more Shield for another. Other than ensuring sufficient HP (trivial at present), the math doesn't support a lot of customization.

 

To bring this ramble back to the task at hand... for the vast majority of overall game content at present, one is best served, mathematically, by EWH Defense relics for Juggy/Guardian. For those particular boss fights with highly non-linear damage profiles, one can easily adjust. The number of tanks operating at a level to be concerned about such things is quite small, and a dramatically higher percentage are critical thinkers able to make sane adjustments without too much outside help (progression raiding, especially progression tanking, tends to attract a certain type of person at higher levels of play, and those people are typically more autonomous). It makes the most sense to recommend the most common "best case" to the masses, recognize that there are outliers, and also recognize that most of the people for whom such things even matter are better prepared to see the limitations of the general suggestions.

Edited by Omophorus
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Averages reflect the vast bulk of game content. Boss fights are a comparable minority, and a smaller minority yet are ones that severely stress a tank's survival and healer resources. They're out there, but from a time perspective, something like 95%+ of one's interaction with the game falls into encounters where the statistical average is applicable and useful.

 

It's true that the vast majority of time spent in the game is doing trivial tasks, but I don't think it's worth optimizing gear for that content. If you are in EC nightmare there is no point in optimizing for Soa, dailies, etc. At the same time there are people whose highest level of content covers the whole spectrum of the game. If the most you do is dailies every day then the healing relic and absorb relic may very well be the best for you.

 

Luckily, relics are sufficiently easy to obtain that picking up a variety beyond what is best-suited to the average case (e.g. ones that are quite obviously well-suited to a particular tank during spike-damage phases) is not excessively onerous.

 

This is what I recommend. Keep each type of relic up-to-date in case it turns out to be useful.

 

To bring this ramble back to the task at hand... for the vast majority of overall game content at present, one is best served, mathematically, by EWH Defense relics for Juggy/Guardian. For those particular boss fights with highly non-linear damage profiles, one can easily adjust. The number of tanks operating at a level to be concerned about such things is quite small, and a dramatically higher percentage are critical thinkers able to make sane adjustments without too much outside help (progression raiding, especially progression tanking, tends to attract a certain type of person at higher levels of play, and those people are typically more autonomous). It makes the most sense to recommend the most common "best case" to the masses, recognize that there are outliers, and also recognize that most of the people for whom such things even matter are better prepared to see the limitations of the general suggestions.

 

I am perfectly fine with this (although "vast majority" is an overstatement imo). I only have a problem when people say war hero relics are the best for every imaginable scenario.

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I am perfectly fine with this (although "vast majority" is an overstatement imo). I only have a problem when people say war hero relics are the best for every imaginable scenario.

 

While it's inappropriate to say that the PvP passive relics are absolutely better in all scenarios, it's also not really appropriate to say that the EWH relics are substantially sub-par compared to the "best" relics even in those scenarios. Most of the effect of the use relics is eaten up by DR, especially at the current tier of gear. Even when the relic buff is active, you're not getting appreciably more than you get out of the passive relics, which is why it's not really all that big of a deal for those situations where the passive relics aren't the best option.

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My raid leader made a quip before our Kephess kill this week saying that NiM Kephess is the only fight in the game where you really should use a stim. I took that as a challenge and tanked TFB HM without a stim and without any problems last night. While sitting on the upper platforms because our healers get bored otherwise (I think they both run single screens, can't youtube mid fight). After we get our titles and I can risk a wipe on Toth and Zorn and the tanks I'll run up to Kephess without a stim too.

 

Point being, min-maxing and looking at slight improvements to gearing end game, at the DG level, only really matters for Kephess. For Kephess having a click relic and adrenals ready is far more advantageous than having flat mitigation; I don't think under 60% Kephess is meant to be healable without even a soft cooldown. I blow Saber Ward on either the first or second bleed so the healers don't have to heal the bleed and the damage from Kephess. Even if I hit it on the first bleed it's not back up for the last phase. Our DPS routinely takes the walker to under 20% on the second burn phase, we were 6 seconds +/- 2 under the 4 minute enrage timer. On the kill we had 5 full cycles of Breath of the Masters, and got the kill as I placed the 1st circle of the 6th set. Having Invincible (40% DR), a relic, and adrenal for each of my 3 turns, as well as constant Predation from a Marauder (still beat enrage) made the healing far more manageable.

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Averages reflect the vast bulk of game content. Boss fights are a comparable minority, and a smaller minority yet are ones that severely stress a tank's survival and healer resources. They're out there, but from a time perspective, something like 95%+ of one's interaction with the game falls into encounters where the statistical average is applicable and useful.

And those are the ones you need to optimize for. If they're not really a stress anyway, you'll be perfectly fine in under-optimized gear.

 

And really, this entire discussion boils down to relics, because there is precious reason otherwise not to have a single tanking gearset optimized for one's particular class (there's an easy-to-calculate mathematical "best", from which any deviation statistically means more damage taken). One is never better served by having more Defense for one particular fight, and more Shield for another. Other than ensuring sufficient HP (trivial at present), the math doesn't support a lot of customization.

False, it depends on the attacks used by the boss. If it's using M/R E/K attacks defense will have less value since an attack that gets trough the defense will be mitigated more by armor and shield, but if it's using M/R I/E attacks each defended attack will provide more damage reduction.

That's what's messing my calculations up at the moment - I want to optimize for Kephess, but I'm not sure what his balance of attack types are, so I'm going with the optimal values assuming only M/R E/K and then arbitrarily raising defense a bit when I mod my gear.

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False, it depends on the attacks used by the boss. If it's using M/R E/K attacks defense will have less value since an attack that gets trough the defense will be mitigated more by armor and shield, but if it's using M/R I/E attacks each defended attack will provide more damage reduction.

That's what's messing my calculations up at the moment - I want to optimize for Kephess, but I'm not sure what his balance of attack types are, so I'm going with the optimal values assuming only M/R E/K and then arbitrarily raising defense a bit when I mod my gear.

 

Uh...

 

This is total hokum. There ARE no M/R I/E attacks in the game at present. If there were, it would indeed slightly inflate the value of Defense, but there aren't, so it doesn't. In its absence, the repeatedly-calculated ideal mitigation values remain as the stat split which minimizes mitigate-able damage taken.

 

Kephess is easy. All of the big spike damage hits in the entire fight except for Rail Shots on the Pulsar droids are yellow damage (Empowered Slash + Savage Wounding, Rocket Blast). The bulk of the damage you take is from Kephess' regular melee attacks, which are just plain Jane M/R.

Edited by Omophorus
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Uh...

 

This is total hokum. There ARE no M/R I/E attacks in the game at present. If there were, it would indeed slightly inflate the value of Defense, but there aren't, so it doesn't. In its absence, the repeatedly-calculated ideal mitigation values remain as the stat split which minimizes mitigate-able damage taken..

 

Are you sure? I admit I haven't really checked, so I just took Kitru and Keyboardninjas word for it. One of them, can't remember who, claimed that there are M/R I/E attacks, but no F/T E/K attacks (or did I get that mixed up and it's the other way around?)

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Are you sure? I admit I haven't really checked, so I just took Kitru and Keyboardninjas word for it. One of them, can't remember who, claimed that there are M/R I/E attacks, but no F/T E/K attacks (or did I get that mixed up and it's the other way around?)

 

Other way around. About 2/3 of F/T attacks are E/K.

Edited by Omophorus
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