Tactician Theorycraft - Maximum Tankage

Alright, so I wanted to try to make a build that increased the overall resist caps as much as possible.
With that in mind, I chose gear to maximize resist caps. After some more playing around, I ended up going for 100% shield block chance + 100% shield recovery time as well. (Is that even possible in game? There doesn’t seem to be a cap in GrimTools, so I assume it is).
I rounded out the build with Inquisitor as the second class, and chose some armor that gave physical resistance. (Maybe going for Armor over Physical resistance is better? Anyone with tank experience, I’d love your insight).

Here’s the final product:
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/YVWKQ8yV

Every resistance is overcapped by at least 20%, barring poison/acid which is only 19%.
I’m a bit concerned about the armor levels, but against trash (as in, anything that does less than ~11k base physical damage in one hit) it should be slightly better than 91% resistance for any other damage type. Meaning, they’ll deal literally 0 damage to you. It’s only against the hard hitting stuff that the armor levels might be a problem. Something that’s probably better tested than theorycrafted.
I’m not even sure if it could clear everything, something with insane lifegain like Kupacabra would probably spell death (by boredom) for this build. It only has Cadence (not even maxed) and retaliation damage. It might be a better multiplayer build than a singleplayer one.
That said, it’s just a theorycraft at this point, wondering what your guys’ thoughts and suggestions are. :slight_smile:


Just some fun calculations. With just overguard and inquisitor seal (plus any permanent buffs) affecting you, a (non-Chthonic) enemy dealing <10,202 base vitality damage would deal 0 damage to you. They’d have to deal more base damage than that to even scratch you.

On the other end of the scale, with every possible buff procced (nothing from allies or banners), including damage reduction from War Cry, a Chthonic or Eldritch enemy dealing <57,021 base pierce damage would deal 0 damage to you. Again, they’d have to deal more base damage than that to even scratch you. “That’s a lotta damage!” - Phil Swift with Flex Tape®.
To put that in perspective, Aleksander’s Meteor does (very rough estimate) ~25000 base damage, just in physical and aether combined. About half and half of each.

Your build is interesting as a concept but I don’t think it could clear high level content. It has a pitiful OA, less than 2k means you’ll be missing 40% of your swings for sure and the low damage means that you won’t be able to clear incoming enemies fast enough to keep up even in the campaign.

You need a way to kill things other than retaliation. Retaliation is great but doesn’t help with ranged and magic enemies, and your cadence damage output is not going to cut it. You also need a bit higher elemental resist so that you don’t have to be in a seal to be capped on lightning. Valdaran could teleport you out of your seal and then nuke you.

I’m not sure you can achieve these suggestions without sacrificing the core idea of the build so, ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Your build is indeed tanky, but it’ll boring as fuck. You have no damage, you can only receive hits and that’s all. You literally overdosed the tankiness there, you don’t need over 80% resists everywhere on a tank, mostly if you play with Shaman or Inquisitor (pick one, not both) - you can heal it and mitigate by Inquisitor Seal. You can easily make a build that will hit for 10 - 60k and still be tanky or even tankier than your build.

Here’s a proof.

34k damage with ~8k armor when fully buffed is something enormous. Resists on that character are capped at 80, physical resist is ~41%, 220, 350, 400 and 4200 flat damage absorption (depending on skills), 13% damage absorption from Menhir’s Bulwark. Ravager can shred me to ~20% HP sometimes, but then he can’t hit me at all because of all the damage absorption, therefore I can easily wait for another Word of Renewal and Overguard, healing 31% of my HP back (+ flat amount) and my HP regen also heals me back to full. Even though I can heal (only) 31% HP, Ravager rarely hits me enough times to take it back down to low HP. I usually can cast these twice before he starts to hit me again, this is how much can damage absorption do, even Turtle devotion isn’t a bad choice in such situation, you’re basically unkillable and don’t even have to bother about potions (I had to use one and only one when Ravager had like 10% HP and my turtle was on cool down, but this was only because of me being like level 94 or something like that).

I’m not going to post that build (yet) because I am planning on doing a guide on tankiness in the future (most likely after FG).

Now more about flaws of your build aside of no OA or damage, you don’t even have every resist overcapped (which should occur on a tank, except for chaos resist, which is useless, kinda). Your armor is decent, DA is good, physical resist is good, but the lack of damage makes your build not viable at all. In fact, my build has 900 more damage than your, when mine is not buffed (only permas) and your is fully buffed. You don’t even have RR, so there’s no point of even playing this character since you build tanky (mostly) to kill super bosses. So basically, you should re-build and focus a bit on damage in gear, devotions can stay, although I’d change some stuff in there. You should consider going for Octavius set, as you play a tactician, and picking Forcewave for 1/1/12 in levels, leave Cadence as is. Don’t pick useless skills like Inquisitor Seal’s Arcane Empowerment or Steel Resolve (Word of Revewal), Markovian Advantage or Zolhan’s Technique, Veterancy or Counter Strike (in fact, this skill is good, but on a pure tanky build it doesn’t really do anything, put one point and leave it, unless you picked a set that supports this skill, then max it). War Cry’s Break Morale should be at at least 12 level. Menhir’s Bulwark should stay at a level that provides the most out of it, for a tanky build, you want 13 points, max it if you have spare points - remember to not set it at a level where the % absorption doesn’t scale, so in your build it should be set to level 17, because it increases the absorption by 15%, and you get another 1% on level 19, so level 18 is useless as you don’t focus on retaliation. Unless you want block only, I would keep Overguard at level 12. Blitz is good to help you move - 1 point there. Fighting Spirit might be a good option to max, or set to a higher level if you lack OA. Shield Training overcapped as much as possible, there’s no questions about that.

So there’s that. If you have some more questions, just ask.

Builds like this make fall asleep in my chair. And as User_Name_01 pointed out, you didn’t even do your tank properly. What I noticed is a huge armor gap because you have just 83% absorption, meaning your effective armor is 17% lower than your number on screen.

Also, in current meta super tanks are only meant for Ravager and Ravager only and even there they are surpassed by quite a few offensive builds that do Ravager in under 5 minutes. What content did you make your tank for?

I actually wanted my absorption low because 96% pierce resistance is insane, so I’d rather take pierce damage than physical damage.

I didn’t build this for anything, like I said it was just to see if I could, not if it was good :stuck_out_tongue:

That’s nice and all but the fact remains that physical damage is a lot more common than pierce is. Armor is still the better option overall.

Is there even a serious threat besides Fabius who deals meaningful amounts of pierce damage? Hell, even Fab is one of the less dangerous nemeses.

Basically, no there’s not. Fabius, I can tell from experience, is a joke at 95% pierce resist though, good for a laugh :slight_smile:

I don’t see how this makes sense. Pierce damage is countered by pierce resistance. Physical damage is countered by physical resistance, rest is absorbed by Armor. Why not invest ONE point into Scars of Battle and swap Antivenom Salve for Ugdenbog Leather and Resilient plating with anything really, like this.

“While Fabius Gonzar was asleep, we snuck into his house and replaced all his notched bones with inflatable copies. Let’s see how long it takes him to notice.” Guess pierce can join cold as a member of the no-overcap club.

Well, Rashalga actually does pretty sick amount of pierce damage along with pierce (and all types of) resist reduction. Problem is, that build in op’s post will never kill Rashalga.

You call that damage? Please. :cool:

In fact, she mostly does %HP damage. :stuck_out_tongue:

Takes a real pro to take a phys-vit-chaos-acid-pierce build and make it work.

Not exactly true. And you can test it. Try fighting her with Acid/Vitality/Pierce overcapped by 40 and then fighting her with those resists just soft-capped. You will notice the difference.

I did have these overcapped back when I still played my DK and she still could shred me hard. On the other hand, I kinda had no armor or physical resist, so that might also be why. But then again the red buff she uses shredded me the most.

Now I remember I haven’t farmed her for like over half a year. I should change that.

I doubt that at 100% block with 100% recovery for 7k damage anything else matters.

There are things you can’t block, like lots of aoe spells and debuffs, and there are (fairly rare) things that can deal more than 7k in one hit.