Commander Cookoo Banana's guide to WARRIOR TANKING

I've been playing my Warrior for a long time, and have tanked literally every single elite area of the game with him. So I thought I'd share my experience here with those new to tanking, and give some tips for anyone wanting to learn more about the Warrior's PvE tanking abilities in general.

ARMOR > HITPOINTS
Some Tanks try to make themselves durable by boosting their HP a lot. But this isn't as effective as boosting their armor to actually reduce the amount of damage taken, or reducing it directly with skills or equipment. The main reason for this becomes obvious when you think of it from a healer's perspective. If you have a lot of HP, but are taking a lot of damage per hit, it becomes more difficult to keep you healed, since you need a lot more HP healed to restore what you're losing. Alternatively, if you have high armor, you're taking less base damage, and it becomes easier to heal you even if your Max HP isn't as high. Note that there still isn't really anything inherently wrong with raising your maximum HP, but keep in mind that having a high armor level is more important than having a high maximum HP, so raising armor tends to be more effective to tanking than aising your HP. In other words, take armor raising or damage redcuing skills before HP raising skills, if you have to choose between one or the other.

EFFECTIVE EQUIPMENT
Even though your skills are going to be the most influential aspect towards making you durable, don't underestimate the Warrior's equipment choices either. The Warrior is blessed with the strongest equipment in the game in terms of all-out durability, and you want to be sure to take full advantage of that for tanking. I recommend forgoing energy or HP mods on armor, and instead using armor raising or damage reducing mods, such as Knight's, Sentinel's, or Dreadnaught's insignias. Also be sure to use a good shield, preferably with some sort of damage reduction mod of its own, and make sure your build meets the attribute requirements for it. Remember, having a high armor rating is usually the most effectvie way to be durable (just ask any imbagon), so be sure to prioritize your equipment towards armor boosting and damage reduction.

PULL WITH A BOW
The most effective way to avoid over-aggroing is to pull with a bow, rather than with your aggro circle. Generally, you should never run into the enemies, but rather make enemies come to you.
Try following this to pull enemies:
1. First, try to find a place to make your stand while tanking them, preferably just barely out of the enemies' range, and along a wall or at the edge of a corner.
2. Equip a longbow or flatbow and attack the closest enemy (I do this by pressing 'C' then 'SPACEBAR').
3. As soon as the bow's arrow fires, quickly move back into your tanking position, and switch your weapon set off of the bow.
4. Wait for the enemies to come to you, and try to catch them along the wall or corner, blocking them from advancing past you. If they lose aggro, go to step 1 again.
The rest of the team should make sure to stay right outside of the Tank's aggro during this whole time, and take up an offensive position right behind the edge of the tank's aggro circle. They should be waiting first for the enemies to move to the Tank, before ever letting their aggro circles touch the enemies at all. Once the Tank has all the enemies targeting them, and all of the enemy melee classes attacking them, then the offense should begin.

ATTACK AND CALL
Once you are in your tanking position, and have the enemies all gathered on you, you should be free to attack and call targets. This can be useful for directing your team. Try to call enemy monks in particular, so the offensive members of your team don't have to spend valuable time searching them out. Calling a target is also a useful way to tell the team when you're ready for them to initially attack the enemies once you've gotten them all safely contained and distracted. Attacking the enemies is fine to do while you tank them as well. I find that this helps me control and keep track of the enemies better, and help the team's targeting by cotinuing to call priority targets throughout the battle. It can also let you generate adrenaline for any adrenaline skills you may have brought, and also potentially generate energy by switching to a zealous weapon (though this is sort of an advanced tactic, and not usually necessary).

Wow! Great information Scott!
I'm sure this will help more than a few guildies!

Thanks so much for sharing!

Do you have any recommended tank Builds you might be able to share with the guild for people who still need one?

Hey thanks, I hope it can help people.

As for builds, I was thinking of writing about that. A couple of my favorite builds can be seen HERE.

Warrior tanking builds don't really have to be too strictly specific, but there's some general principles to consider with them. The first, like I mentioned, is that armor-buffing and/or damage-reducing skills are a big key to durability. Blocking can also help too, since this is basically reducing attack damage to zero some of the time, but I tend to prioritize damage reduction over attack blocking. Keep in mind that in many areas, and elite missions in particular, you usually have to be concerned with spell damage more than physical damage, and you can't block spells with any Warrior skills. Spell damage is reduced by armor though.

You've mainly got to be concerned with these few things:
1. Physical damage - countered by attack blocking, armor, or damage reduction
2. Spell damage - countered by spell blocking, armor, or damage reduction
3. Condition/Hex degen - countered by removal, health regen, or spell blocking

Try to have ways of handling all of these if possible. With monk support sometimes you don't really need to worry about number 3 though. Note that armor and damage reduction can be effective at countering both 1 and 2. Spell blocking tends to be more effective than physical blocking, except in a few areas, due to the Warrior generally having more armor versus physical damage than spell damage built into their equipment. Spells tend to output more damage than physical attacks in general as well. So the most important thing to counter is usually spell damage, followed by physical damage, and then lastly the degen. Note that the Warrior has no inherent skills to block spells outright though, and need to rely on using a skill from their secondary profession for that (Obsidian Flesh used to be the skill of choice for this, but these days the best one is Shadow Form). They also can't really counter degen at all on their own, but this can be handled by using a secondary profession as well.

What I usually try to do in general is to think about which skills on my build are handling each of those 3 things listed above, and try to balance them out if needed. All of them are important, so you want to try to cover each category if possible, but not overdo it too much in any one of them.

Sometimes when I tank I don't switch back to my melee weapon. I keep using my ranged weapons in places like the Underworld so I don't trigger Ripostes and stuff.

Olrun The Blade wrote:Sometimes when I tank I don't switch back to my melee weapon. I keep using my ranged weapons in places like the Underworld so I don't trigger Ripostes and stuff.

If you're talking about using a bow, then the only potential problem with this is the fact that you can't hold a shield with it, so you're dropping your armor a bit. I like to try to keep my armor as high as possible on Warrior, so in the situation you're talking about I'd just rather sit there with a shield and not attack them with my weapon, or cancel my attack if I see them using Riposte. I guess you could always use a spear or wand with a shield though if you really wanted to, and that might solve both issues.

Yeah, I use a spear. I like my Destroyer Spear.