Here is the spec that I plan to use for my Vanguard tank, Pinkie-Pie. What do you think, fellow troopers?

It looks great.

I would go for Soldier's Endurance, but considering it's low percentage, I would probably go for the other ones.

Yes, I ignored Soldier's Endurance because it seemed too inefficient for the skill point cost. Also, more endurance simply means a greater max health, which will only make a difference if my health gets really low. Hopefully that will happen rarely if I have a reliable healer.

That seems to be the generally-accepted 'cookie cutter' tanking spec. Grabs all of the necessary tanking talents. However, I'm curious to see what kinds of hybrid builds people come up with on Live. Some unassuming hybrid specs can be incredibly powerful.

On the other end of the spectrum, I'm quite excited to see what kind of hybrid PvP build I can come up with. I've seen a few different ones on the forums. For example, I just whipped up this spec. It gives up some survivability, but has some extra damage in the way of Gut and more points to increase HIB (a very high-damage ability, second only to Stockstrike.) In the beta, I really enjoyed Gut. It gave me another reason to stay in melee range, and it let me get HIB off if, for some reason, Stockstrike was on CD while HIB wasn't. I never really had an issue with Ammo regen in the beta, and in my experience, DoTs have always scaled better than other attacks in MMOs.

It makes sense that you would need to be more versatile than a pure tank in PvP. I do really like that build BronyQuest, I may use it if I decide to focus on PvP for a while.

It's a good enough spec for PvE, but considering that Tanks are very viable (i.e. necessary) for PvP for taking damage off healers there can be some jumbling around if you go that route. Defensive measures is the one go-to PvP talent, it effectively keeps stealth classes from sneaking behind your healers and keeps them pinned. Charge may be a good option in larger scale pvp since you'll want to corral as many enemies as quickly as you can and any speed boosts help. Neural Overload sounds great for pvp but at only a 2 second duration probably won't be worth it. I'd take points off Heavy Stock and invest in those if I were to go the PvP route (you don't need to deal damage quite like you do in PvE because players don't have a threat meter).

BronyQuest wrote:

That seems to be the generally-accepted 'cookie cutter' tanking spec. Grabs all of the necessary tanking talents. However, I'm curious to see what kinds of hybrid builds people come up with on Live. Some unassuming hybrid specs can be incredibly powerful.

On the other end of the spectrum, I'm quite excited to see what kind of hybrid PvP build I can come up with. I've seen a few different ones on the forums. For example, I just whipped up It gives up some survivability, but has some extra damage in the way of Gut and more points to increase HIB (a very high-damage ability, second only to Stockstrike.) In the beta, I really enjoyed Gut. It gave me another reason to stay in melee range, and it let me get HIB off if, for some reason, Stockstrike was on CD while HIB wasn't. I never really had an issue with Ammo regen in the beta, and in my experience, DoTs have always scaled better than other attacks in MMOs.

It's alright but taking away survivability may not be the best option for PvP, between guard splitting damage with healers and being a general nuissance with cc/taunts you will be taking alot of heat. From what I've seen with Warhammer (Which uses very very similar mechanics) the more avoidance/survivability on a PvP tank the better, you essentially are there to annoy people and keep squishies from dying.

I have been playing around with the spec and while I am pretty much settled there are a few points that I am not sure about. Please note that this is mainly for endgame PvE.

1 pt in SS

Smoke Grenade
or
Neural Overload
or
1pt in Defensive Measures

I don't think I have ever seen a Vanguard use a smoke grenade and even if I lower targets accuracy by 20% it seems quite wasteful, the way accuracy works I will still get hit. The slow/snare seems more useful for PvP but the snare (Defensive Measures) might also be useful for PvE, giving me the chance to build some threat on a pesky add.

3 floating pts.

3 in Soldiers Endurance
or
2 in Power Armour and 1 in Blaster Augs
or a combination thereof

As a healer with 2.2 cast I am grateful for every single HP that tanks have and I would like to make other healers' job easier, but I am not sure if 3% endurance is more beneficial than 2% damage reduction in that respect. The increased damage from Ion Cell could also be useful to keep up threat and increases my crit when using Mortal Volley in Plasma Cell in to start a fight.

I use smoke grenade all the time. A defensive ability with only a minute cooldown is incredibly useful. With my set bonus it lasts 20 seconds, which means the enemy has reduced accuracy 1/3 of the entire fight if I use it as much as I can. Plus it's off the global cooldown now, so it's not like it could hurt your rotation. Yes, it only works on ranged and melee attacks, but I'm fairly certain that most standard attacks by bosses qualify.

Power armor is unquestionably better than soldier's endurance. You say that every bit of HP is important to you as a healer, but wouldn't it make more sense to have to heal less in the first place? Extra HP only matters if your HP gets low, damage reduction reduces the need for healing throughout the entire fight. If soldier's endurance was more than 1% per point I'd consider it, but as it is now other stuff is more worth the points. I use blaster augs, but I'm questioning whether or not it's worth it given that ion cell's damage is currently bugged to be less than it should be. But even if I were to move that point, I would put it in brutal impact rather than soldier's endurance.

Yeah power armour is a lot better than Soldier's endurance.

The options you have in SS are extremely limited.

"Brutal impact" isn't great, "Neural overload" is useless, "defensive measures" is useless, "Charge!" has extremely limited uses. You are way better going for an ability that will increase your threat rather than increase your health by about 700. It is already extremely difficult to keep threat of of top dps.

K, in that case I am probably going to go with this. I put the one point in Blaster Augs, even if it is bugged now it should get fixed eventually and that extra crit in plasma cell can be useful.

Yep, that's my exact spec, which pretty much every vanguard tank uses (for PvE anyway). Why would you be using plasma cell as a tank? Even if you were to switch cells in order to DPS temporarily, high energy cell is a much better option. Plasma cell is nearly useless to a Vanguard without ionized ignition, because none of your tech abilities will activate it.

I'd get Frontline Offense instead of Blaster Augs.

In my runs, looking at my combat logs, 3% of Ion Pulse would about for at least twice as much additional damage as 8% of Ion Cell's proc, probably a lots more.

In a typical fight, the only attack I've done that puts out more total damage that Ion Pulse over the course of a boss fight is Stock Strike (or maybe High Impact Bolt. I know it was either 2nd or 3rd, and there was a huge gap before 4th)

Derp

Pinkie Pie wrote:

Yep, that's my exact spec, which pretty much every vanguard tank uses (for PvE anyway). Why would you be using plasma cell as a tank? Even if you were to switch cells in order to DPS temporarily, high energy cell is a much better option. Plasma cell is nearly useless to a Vanguard without ionized ignition, because none of your tech abilities will activate it.

I wasn't aware that you got that cell as a tank (based on the fact that tank Juggernauts have to spec for a form other than tank and their base)

Yes it is rather odd, considering the same is true for shadows and sentinels as well.

Someone edited my post WTF how am I suppose to Derp roll people if yall keep deleting my links!