Ok, long time no updates, took me a while to gather myself and write something, a lot has happened in past days, so this post is probably end as a quite long one.

All hail the Earthshatter

On saturday’s night I’ve finally dinged 40, and started to play with builds. I’ve went with the 14/0/11 route from my last post, and I’m very happy with it. The only thing I’m not actually using is Punishing Knock, I just feel that I’ve more than enough CC already and I’m often using Inspiring Attack just to buff my strength or my healer’s willpower, in such case having an inferior knockdown (which, as it turns out, is a stun and not a knockdown), which also apply 18 seconds immunity on my target making me unable to use Cave-In problematic in some cases, definitely good stuff if you are not that deep in Vengeance tho.

So, instead of that I’m loading Focused Offense on my bar, now many people will tell you how Focused Offense sucks and how you are not a tank when you are using it - they lie as they have no idea how meaningless armor can be in the endgame. From all destruction classes that deals physical damage: Black Orc will stack Wot Armors on you for -75% armor debuff (I know the math says 73%, but the tooltip of 5x stacked Wot Armor? actually shows 75%), chosen deals a lot of spiritual damage anyway, marauder can insta debuff 75% of your armor with Cutting Claw in savagery build or just ignore 50% of your armor with a tactic, Witch Elf doesn’t stay behind with armor removal either and Squig Herder has options to deal non-physical. It’s not like having less armor isn’t noticeable, but it’s not as bad as many people try to make it, what makes you a tank actually is your Toughness and Wounds above everything else (and shield block if you are running around with a shield).

The ability I was very positively surprised with is Earthshatter, going with the flow of Vengeance tree I was expecting this ability to apply a dot for the duration of the snare it applies, but as it turns out, it deals instant damage, and it’s a lot of damage, on 100 grudges it hits like a fucking truck, an aoe truck of doom:

 
The underlined damage is on a squishy after applying 100-grudge Stone Breaker and Taunt, probably some buffs from my group and/or debuffs on the target increasing damage as well, it’s usually under 1.5k mark for crits, and it crits not that often as I’m not using a single +crit tactic or ability atm, 1k non-crit hit is still quite a lot of burst damage anyway.

It’s also a good thing to notice that, while it’s an aoe ability, it actually (unlike Grip Of Stone) requires an offensive target in range, so you will never waste the cooldown into air - this is extremely sexy when chasing someone and spamming the button to get the snare from the range, much like piercing howl in WoW is used (PH doesn’t require a target, but it doesn’t have a cooldown either, so one can catch a target out of melee range with it).

Two-handed wielding tanks?

This is a very hot topic, as it has been since the release, there are countless topics about how two-handed tanks are viable, and just as many about how you have to use a shield to benefit your team in RvR. The truth lies in between, as two-handed wielding tanks are neither a true melee dps, nor are they a true hard-rock tank, but rather, as it’s often called - an offensive support.

I’m often actually playing the role of melee dps in scenarios, mostly assisting in melee trains (well, calling targets as I’m used to do that from WoW, but this time it’s not me who brings the mortal strike to the table), but I try to never loose an eye from my healer(s) and always keep the one I’m guarding in my defensive target so I see when he needs my help. There are times when all I do is staying at back near the healers to make sure that every Witch Elf trying to attack them ends watching the respawn timer, and this is something an offensive specced tank do really really well. 1h + shield tank can guard a healer just as well, but it will take him a while to kill any attackers, his best bet is to peel the attackers from the healers and wait for support to finish them off, offensive support is totally independent in this role, handling any ambush attempts on his own.

I’ve already had a good chance at doing pretty much everything with my Veng/Brotherhood hybrid, from T4 scenarios, to open RvR, to keep capture and defense, to PvE. In all aspects of the RvR I can always find myself very valuable, and in PvE when you have to tank, just grab a shield, switch the tactics and skill bars and you are ready to go, no respeccing required (same applies to tanking keep lords). Either way, having a shield in your backpack is a must, you never know when some big zerg fight starts (haven’t really seen them on live yet, but seen them a lot in last stage of Closed Beta), at which point not having Hold The Line when pushing is asking to be killed.

DAMN! Those Doombolts!

Well, not only Doombolts, but when wondering about what resists to pump up, your best shot is Corporeal and Spiritual, as those are the schools the glass canon of Destruction - Sorceress - use. Once they get to 100 dark magic (and they get pretty often in scenarios with healers at their back) they hurt a lot, and it makes it quite of a pain to do a melee push when facing multiple of them.

Stacking Corporeal and Spiritual resistances are your best bets for RvR as Order, and Dwarves have it pretty good, as we not only have a tactic for corporeal resistance (I don’t see anyone using it anytime soon), but also an ability to buff it on us and our oath friend - Stubborn As Stone - pretty cheap and has a quite nice haste effect for auto attack as well. I’m sitting at 49% corporeal resistance with this selfbuff, above that when buffed with Prismatic Shield by Archmage easily getting above 50%. Now resists are not granted, they can be debuffed just as armor can be, which makes stacking lots of them even more important, as having low amounts often counts for nothing (literally). Get the right gear and talismans, and you will see the results:

 
Eltharion queues, lags and poor GOA support

Eltharion is THE Open RvR server for Europe, which means it’s has HUGE population. In the primetime Destruction has to wait 2 hours to get in (if you have 5 hours of quality time to play after work, that means you are spending 40% of it just on waiting), and even Order gets to as high as 40 minutes queues. But that’s not what’s worse, it turns out the lag inside scenarios can really destroy a lot of fun from the game, when everything in open world zones works perfectly fine. Using some morale abilities is often virtually impossible - and I’m talking about self-castable stuff like Skin of Iron, where latency problems with target out of range are out of question, these are often life saving abilities, if you spend 10 seconds trying to activate a 5 second duration life saving ability, you end up dead. Fix this shit, seriously!

We had patch server unavailable for few hours, and there was no word from GOA at all, not even a simple confirmation “we know there is a problem and we are working on it”. Nope, nothing, the first information we got was from Mythic employee, seems like US is more concerned about European players, than European company running the game for us. It’s really sad that a company which can setup such a professional booth on Leipzig GC, is showing such a lack of customer support. Hopefully they will learn from their mistakes, but after years of running Dark Age of Camelot in Europe I guess we all expected something more.

Terhix