Hey all. I’ve been toying with team builds for multiplayer play lately, and one of the things I notice when character build designing is that Soldier just lacks taunts. It has War Cry on a long cooldown (helmets aside), and then… that seems to be it in terms of holding aggro. Whereas Oathkeeper seems to have three hate generating abilities (Aegis of Menhir, Vire’s Might, Judgment).
This clearly isn’t an issue when soloing. But when a DPS build is armed to the teeth with damage and debuffs, I find playing soldier (outside of the Warlord combo) powerful, but lacking in abilities to hold/maintain aggro.
Blade Arc’s transmuter also has “generate additional threat”. Mythical Untouchable has it as a skill mod to Overguard. Battered Shell and Serrated shell grant a shield slam skill that taunts. And some items have “Provoke” proc, which is self explanatory.
I’d completely forgotten about Blade Arc’s modifier. The Provoke Proc seems to trigger when blocking, but that makes it a bit tricky; if an enemy is running off aggro-ing someone else, they won’t be attacking you; you won’t be blocking them, and the provoke won’t trigger. I guess this makes it great to keep aggro once you’ve got it, but if you didn’t get a chance to establish yourself as the tank, then it doesn’t help with stealing aggro off your poor teammates…
Um, it adds Taunt to your pets, so technically it reduces aggro on you, but increases it on your pets. Which is still works out well for other players I guess. The question is, why would you use pets for that and how long they could survive. I thought aggro tank should be a Warlord or Witchblade or Tactician maybe.
Hm, interesting take on Dark One. Can’t say much about how good or bad it is, since I don’t play multiplayer, but I think it should work. Sustain from two totems should be pretty great thanks to high HP and some extra % healing increase. Too baad you were unable to 22/12 it.
Fair enough! I’m hoping that yes, it’ll have enough sustain and taunt for higher SR (100ish and above) if someone else is bringing the firepower. I guess I’ll have to test it and see!
Pets can make for some of the tankiest units around when supported by players with the potential increasing further if one stacks the right auras or buffs on top of them in team scenarios. With enough of them, they can also generate constant aggro in high amounts.
Take a Ghols build as it’s one of the best ones. 2 Blight Fiends generate constant AoE threat with Rotting Fumes and extra on Blight Burst and if built around Unstable Anomaly (which does break the set to make full use of now) can have 3 Fiends instead where you don’t care about the health on them as you can keep re-summoning more to take the place of the one that just died in an endless loop.
Briarthorn is also great due to Ground Slam generating threat and at 17/12 as a break point upgrades to a taunt instead and with Beastcaller you can have 2 of them.
I’m no deep SR player but from what I have read from pet players, the real danger on Ghol’s Ritualist before the recent SR changes was more related to your character catching aggro and getting one shot (though careful management helps here), fishing for the right mutators and kiting a few key nemeses they couldn’t handle (e.g. Grava, Kaisan, Aleks). Otherwise, they’ve been shown to be capable.
Pure pet builds - sure. But I thought WyreZ meant mixing pets in with Soldier for extra aggro, and I don’t believe you can amass enough pet resists/health for them to be tanky, while also keeping YOUR stats in check.
But since we’re talking about them, it became an interesting idea to consider ; if high end pets could be tanks, then a summoner could do well in a team as the ‘tank’ provider, presuming they can keep aggro.
Totally! In Diablo 2 summoner Necro was great at holding monsters at bay while damage dealers like Sorcs dispatch them. It’s nice to have a pet build in your team even if for stuff like Briarthorn’s Emboldening Presence.
Ahaha We’re enjoying exploring the theorycrafting and attempting to push ourselves. But we also understand that people have already designed team builds that have made it to 150+ SR…
I suppose we’re enjoying reinventing the wheel or something.
I’ve been toying with team builds for multiplayer play lately, and one of the things I notice when character build designing is that Soldier just lacks taunts. It has War Cry on a long cooldown (helmets aside), and then… that seems to be it in terms of holding aggro. Whereas Oathkeeper seems to have three hate generating abilities (Aegis of Menhir, Vire’s Might, Judgment).