Best Tanks Late Game

[Faytte]

Turn between a few options and curious how they will scale into the late game.

 

Unbroken/Street Fighter: This looked ideal for the engagements and the street fighter passives once you get bloodied or surrounded by enemies. Worries: Not many powers from rogue are actually good, so a lot of the guile isnt used. Also worried its not a very good tank vs single targets. 

 

Unbroken/Bleak Walker: While the tank subclass for paladin is good, also looks not needed. Bleak Walker ups teh damage and unbroken gets you engagements. If the engagement isnt really necessary with fighter stances, maybe devoted?

Some Paladin/Chanter (Troub?): Looks like this has a lot of late game potential with chants adding fire damage, adding life steal and more. Not sure how good of a tank they will be though.

 

Wizard/Paladin: Wizard for the self buffing and Paladin for tank.

 

Anyone have any opinions or found any tank builds that work out well for them? 

[Braven]

Extra engagement can still be helpful so you can pick a different (better) fighter stance, like cleave, when facing multiple foes.

 

Fighter/paladin is a very strong tank. If you are new, devoted can be disappointing if you find a cool weapon that doesn’t match your original proficiency. This combination has a great mix of both defensive and offensive potential.

 

Streetfighter is really only worth it if playing solo on harder difficulties. It is hard to be consistently flanked or bloodied with a party so I think you won’t find it fun.

 

Paladin chanter is a really great tank. Really, any paladin, but chanter can summon disposable creatures to help tank too and create a “wall” of creatures to protect your party. Also great AOE healing. There is also a certain incredibly broken chanter invocation you can get late in the game that allows you to spam your abilities as much as you want without running out of zeal.

 

Wizard / Paladin is really good; probably the best raw defensive numbers available and is super power really early in the game. Wizard has many spells at levels 1-3 for boosting deflection massively so you will mever run out of casts. My favorite is arcane veil which provides +50 deflection for quite a long time. Combined with a maxed out faith and conviction and thr mulitude of other paladin passive defensive buffs, all available in the first few levels, you will be an over-powered beast before even leaving the tutorial island.

 

 

The short answer is that pretty much any class combination can be super over-powered right now, so you can’t really go wrong.

Edited May 17, 2018 by Braven

[Faytte]

I think my only concern with Paladin Chanter is engagements. At most I can see them going shield bearer for +1, another +1 for a shield is three and, thats the cap? There is a chant 'The Silver Knights' Shields Broke both Arrow and Blade' But I'm not sure I would want to spend time chanting that vs the other chanter perks. 

 

Is three engagements enough? Also i get that they can summon but the summons are really long (6 seconds!). Worried about that on someone who is meant to be taking hits. 

 

Torn between it right now and Crusader(Fighter/Paladin). I leveled Eder as a streetfighter (mod)/devoted and I agree with you it..doesnt feel great? I can see why in solo play it be awesome but getting him consistantly flanked or bloodied feels like he is as often hit by the penalty of street fighter as the perks of the class. Meanwhile paladin can just go to town with devoted flame spam. 

[Climhazzard]

On Paladin/chanter engagements, there's an armor you can acquire on an unexplored Island around level 7 at the earliest that gives an extra engagement slot, and there's also at least one weapon that gives an engagement slot.  To be honest though 3 is more than enough because only so many guys can crowd around your tank, aggro will get spread out eventually which is when you want CC or other ways to help manage it.  For me at least the Tank is mostly for taking the enemy alpha or grabbing the attention of the meanest baddies.

 

As for late game tanking, any and all of the combos in the original post will be fine, there's nothing to tank really.

 

Of what I've tried so far my Healing Wall build is my favorite tank, but after level 10 the healing makes the game trivial. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/98968-class-build-the-healing-wall/

Edited May 17, 2018 by Climhazzard

[Katalmach]

I soloed the game on POTD upscale with a Chanter/Kind Wayfarer. They are unkillable. All I used late game was the chant that gives 10 deflection, and the chant that heals you for 1 point every second. I took very few chanter abilities once I reclassed. What I did take was the one that gives you Insightful so your class ability pool regenerates. Unlimited Flames of Devotion that heal me. Late game I was a duel wielder with deflection still at 115. My Endurance Aura got upgraded so it also healed me for 3 points every 6 seconds or so. My self heal was so high I couldn't be damaged past bloodied. I had unlimited duel wielding FoD strikes that healed me and of course give the +10 accuracy so even against enemies immune to fire it was worth using

 

Try it out. I highly recommend Troubador, though. I went with Skald thinking I would be more spell based, and it was a mistake. Weapons are better

[Braven]

Spears also all provide an extra engagement. But really, it doesn’t matter. In reality, only 2-3 enemies at most will ever be around you and those that don’t want to engage will just walk around the small engagement zone anyway regardless of how much engagement you have. Also, keep in mind that the most dangerous enemies use ranged attacks or spells anyway, making your engagement worthless against them.

 

Summons are actually a much better way of tying up enemies. The tier 1 skeletons from chanter is particularly good at this; way more effective than extra engagements and enemies will happily engage them without you forcing them to. They can be upgraded to be even harder to get rid of and are way stronger than in the first game.

 

If you want to go all out engagement, fighter is certainly best. They have many ways to increase it (probably can get 6 or so without too much work). Then, you can use the yanking ability to pull enemies to you or charge into the middle of a pack. That strategy would work well with Paladin as second class because of all the paladin affliction resistances. A number of afflictions can remove engagement, so it is helpful to gain resistances. Between paladin and fighter, you will have the best set of affliction resistances in the game.

Edited May 17, 2018 by Braven