Banluil
08-28-2008, 07:16 PM
Ironbreaker: Tanking taken to a new level..
The ironbreaker is the tank that most of us have wanted to see out there for quite a few games now. He is the the gruff, grumbly dwarf that claims to hate everone, but you find to be extremely loyal to his friends, and this is actually accounted for in the game mechanics.
Grudge : Grudge could be compared to Rage for warriors in WoW, in the fact that it will build up during a fight while you are tanking, can be used to power some abilities, and will go drain away after 30 seconds of you not being in a fight. However, there are quite a few differences. Many of the Ironbreaker’s abilities will scale depending on how much grudge you have built up. When you reach 100 Grudge, there can be some truly amazing effects, such as the Rune Etched Axe attack (AE Spin attack that hits everyone surrounding you) that at 100 Grudge will ignore 100% of the armor of those that it hits. In other words….OUCH!!!
Oathfriend: This is the second part of what makes an Ironbreaker unique to the tanking classes in WAR. Oathfriend is a buff type ability that all IB’s start out with at level 1. You can select any person in you GROUP as an Oathfriend. What this will allow you to do is to share some of the buffs from your attacks with your oathfriend as long as they are within a certain disatance of you. Some of the more effective buffs are +Armor, +Strength (this one also will buff willpower at high grudge levels), +toughness. The oathfriend placed on another tank in the group, or a melee DPS person is usually the best way to go. If you don’t have a melee DPS person, or another tank (usually the case with our little groups so far with the guild), sticking it on your Warrior Priest buddy is a good idea also, because the improved Str and Armor can do some good for him if he ends up offtanking for you for a little bit.
Guard: Guard is a great little ability that all tanks get at around 10th level. Guard is a great thing to have and use in PvE, but not so much in PvP as I will explain. What guard allows you to do is twofold. You will take 50% of the damage that the person you are guarding takes, along with 50% of the agro that they generate as long as they are within a short distance. Once again, this is great to use on your healer (to stop them from getting agro, or to stop them from dying if they do manage to pull agro), or if you have that Nuker that can’t seem to understand the wonderful world of agro control, then you can pull some of the agro that he is causing off from him. However….we now move to the other world of RvR, where Guard can be a very dangerous thing to use….for example, we were in a scenario, I dropped guard on Nathanial (Warrior Priest), and we proceed to run up into battle. Nathanial moved ahead of me, and got jumped by about 5 guys (because I didn’t expect them to come that way around the big tree, figured they were coming the other way). Needless to say, I was close enough for the guard damage to go to me still, so while he was getting hit, I was also taking 50% of that damage, and then getting hit by the guy that saw me and came running up to me. End result? I die, from damage from my guard, Nathanial then dies as there is no one around to help protect him.
Moral of the story…..while guard may not be completely useless in RvR, be VERY cautious when you are using it, as it may cause your death without you even really being touched by the opposing realm.
Taunts: The ironbreaker gets 2 basic taunts in the game, the first one you get is called, simply…..Taunt. It is a single target taunt and is on (I belive from off the top of my head writing this at work) a 10 second timer. It is fairly effective, and will pull a mob off from just about anyone, no matter how much hate they have built up. Now, if that person continues to build hate at a dramatic rate, then all the taunts in the world aren’t going to keep that mob off them, and it may be a good idea to let them die a time or 2 so they get the point. The second taunt you get is an AE taunt called Challenge. This is a WONDERFUL ability in that it affects a cone infront of you, causing all enemies in that cone to attack you for at least 3 attacks. One of the most effective taunting tactics that I have encountered once you have challenge is this: Have your battle tactics set up for tanking ( will explain tactics in a moment) so that you cause 100% more hate from all attacks, cause more hate the higher your Grudge is (see…told you it was really useful), and have the “ancestral armor” (+ good amount to armor buff) or the +Toughness racial tactic equipped. From there, proceed to do the challenge taunt which grabs all those ugly nasty brutes onto you , and then proceed to hit your Rune Etched Axe attack, which will hit all of them and cause a good amount of agro on top of the challenge. If you have taken the Brotherhood path up to level 9, you also have the Earthshatter AE attack, which you can use right after the REA, and cause additional damage and hate. This was one of the tactics I used effectively in a little AE group we had running at one point, and it surprised those in the group how effectively I was able to keep agro from them. There were the occassional mob that leaked out that I needed to use the single mob taunt on, but overall, it is a great way to keep a large number of mobs focused on you at the same time.
Armor/Weapons : You get heavy armor. Is there really anything else I need to say? Yes? Ok, I’ll say a little more. You are a TANK. Tanks are not the little roadbumps that they were in DaoC when it comes to RvR. They are a force to be dealt with, especially if you have a healer backing you up. IB’s have the choice of going two-handed axe, or axe and shield. There are good sides and bad sides to both of these choices. You have a few attacks that are avaliable only if you have a shield, and a few attacks that are avaliable only if you are wielding a great weapon. Shields (obviously) offer you greater survivablity in both PvE and RvR situations, and the 2h Axe (obviously once again) offeres a greater amount of damage. I would recommend picking a route that you want to go once you hit level 11 and start to get your mastery points. Before that point, just go with the best equipment that you can get your hands on, be it 1h or 2h for damage output. There are Armor sets in this game that work by wearing multiple pieces of that individual set. The more pieces of that set that you collect, the greater the bonus that you can gather. So far, it seems that the sets pieces are dropped both in RvR and PvE. You can usually find one piece of the set in the Scenario for your level. It will drop off the opposing players, and you will need to roll against others in your group for it. The other piece(s) will usually drop from the higher end loot bags from PQ’s. This is a great reason to do those PQ’s and try to get higher contributions to them to get the high loot bags.
Stats: The main stats that you are going to be worrying about as an IB are Str and Toughness, with a close behind of Willpower and Weapon Skill. Strength is obvious, the higher strength that you have, the more damage you do. Makes sense to me. Toughness will add to the mitigation that you do from physical attacks, both ranged and melee. As you can imagine for a tank, this is pretty important stuff. Willpower sounds a bit strange for a tank to be wanting to have, as it is mostly considered a healer stat in WAR, however, you will notice that a LOT of the IB equipment that you get has Willpower on it, this confused me at first, until I realized that Willpower helps you disrupt incoming enemy spells. Yep…another good thing for a tank to have. Weapons skill is on the lower end of my list of the skills that you really want to have, simply because we aren’t a damage dealing class. Yes, a higher weapon skill allow you to hit more often, and to get those wonderful critical hits more often to cause more hate and keep the mobs on you better, but we aren’t there to cause the damage, and we really have enough ways to keep agro.
Overall : Ironbreaker is the tank class that many of us old school tanks have been looking to play for many years. If you like to charge into the thick of battle, knowing that you are going to be the one who can push through that line and make them sorry that they have ever considered doing RvR, then the IB is for you. If you want to be in the face of the enemy, letting them know that it’s not acceptable for them to look at you that way, then the IB is for you. On the other hand, if you would rather sit back and watch how the battle is flowing, and play a more back of the line class…then you may want to look somewhere else.
The ironbreaker is the tank that most of us have wanted to see out there for quite a few games now. He is the the gruff, grumbly dwarf that claims to hate everone, but you find to be extremely loyal to his friends, and this is actually accounted for in the game mechanics.
Grudge : Grudge could be compared to Rage for warriors in WoW, in the fact that it will build up during a fight while you are tanking, can be used to power some abilities, and will go drain away after 30 seconds of you not being in a fight. However, there are quite a few differences. Many of the Ironbreaker’s abilities will scale depending on how much grudge you have built up. When you reach 100 Grudge, there can be some truly amazing effects, such as the Rune Etched Axe attack (AE Spin attack that hits everyone surrounding you) that at 100 Grudge will ignore 100% of the armor of those that it hits. In other words….OUCH!!!
Oathfriend: This is the second part of what makes an Ironbreaker unique to the tanking classes in WAR. Oathfriend is a buff type ability that all IB’s start out with at level 1. You can select any person in you GROUP as an Oathfriend. What this will allow you to do is to share some of the buffs from your attacks with your oathfriend as long as they are within a certain disatance of you. Some of the more effective buffs are +Armor, +Strength (this one also will buff willpower at high grudge levels), +toughness. The oathfriend placed on another tank in the group, or a melee DPS person is usually the best way to go. If you don’t have a melee DPS person, or another tank (usually the case with our little groups so far with the guild), sticking it on your Warrior Priest buddy is a good idea also, because the improved Str and Armor can do some good for him if he ends up offtanking for you for a little bit.
Guard: Guard is a great little ability that all tanks get at around 10th level. Guard is a great thing to have and use in PvE, but not so much in PvP as I will explain. What guard allows you to do is twofold. You will take 50% of the damage that the person you are guarding takes, along with 50% of the agro that they generate as long as they are within a short distance. Once again, this is great to use on your healer (to stop them from getting agro, or to stop them from dying if they do manage to pull agro), or if you have that Nuker that can’t seem to understand the wonderful world of agro control, then you can pull some of the agro that he is causing off from him. However….we now move to the other world of RvR, where Guard can be a very dangerous thing to use….for example, we were in a scenario, I dropped guard on Nathanial (Warrior Priest), and we proceed to run up into battle. Nathanial moved ahead of me, and got jumped by about 5 guys (because I didn’t expect them to come that way around the big tree, figured they were coming the other way). Needless to say, I was close enough for the guard damage to go to me still, so while he was getting hit, I was also taking 50% of that damage, and then getting hit by the guy that saw me and came running up to me. End result? I die, from damage from my guard, Nathanial then dies as there is no one around to help protect him.
Moral of the story…..while guard may not be completely useless in RvR, be VERY cautious when you are using it, as it may cause your death without you even really being touched by the opposing realm.
Taunts: The ironbreaker gets 2 basic taunts in the game, the first one you get is called, simply…..Taunt. It is a single target taunt and is on (I belive from off the top of my head writing this at work) a 10 second timer. It is fairly effective, and will pull a mob off from just about anyone, no matter how much hate they have built up. Now, if that person continues to build hate at a dramatic rate, then all the taunts in the world aren’t going to keep that mob off them, and it may be a good idea to let them die a time or 2 so they get the point. The second taunt you get is an AE taunt called Challenge. This is a WONDERFUL ability in that it affects a cone infront of you, causing all enemies in that cone to attack you for at least 3 attacks. One of the most effective taunting tactics that I have encountered once you have challenge is this: Have your battle tactics set up for tanking ( will explain tactics in a moment) so that you cause 100% more hate from all attacks, cause more hate the higher your Grudge is (see…told you it was really useful), and have the “ancestral armor” (+ good amount to armor buff) or the +Toughness racial tactic equipped. From there, proceed to do the challenge taunt which grabs all those ugly nasty brutes onto you , and then proceed to hit your Rune Etched Axe attack, which will hit all of them and cause a good amount of agro on top of the challenge. If you have taken the Brotherhood path up to level 9, you also have the Earthshatter AE attack, which you can use right after the REA, and cause additional damage and hate. This was one of the tactics I used effectively in a little AE group we had running at one point, and it surprised those in the group how effectively I was able to keep agro from them. There were the occassional mob that leaked out that I needed to use the single mob taunt on, but overall, it is a great way to keep a large number of mobs focused on you at the same time.
Armor/Weapons : You get heavy armor. Is there really anything else I need to say? Yes? Ok, I’ll say a little more. You are a TANK. Tanks are not the little roadbumps that they were in DaoC when it comes to RvR. They are a force to be dealt with, especially if you have a healer backing you up. IB’s have the choice of going two-handed axe, or axe and shield. There are good sides and bad sides to both of these choices. You have a few attacks that are avaliable only if you have a shield, and a few attacks that are avaliable only if you are wielding a great weapon. Shields (obviously) offer you greater survivablity in both PvE and RvR situations, and the 2h Axe (obviously once again) offeres a greater amount of damage. I would recommend picking a route that you want to go once you hit level 11 and start to get your mastery points. Before that point, just go with the best equipment that you can get your hands on, be it 1h or 2h for damage output. There are Armor sets in this game that work by wearing multiple pieces of that individual set. The more pieces of that set that you collect, the greater the bonus that you can gather. So far, it seems that the sets pieces are dropped both in RvR and PvE. You can usually find one piece of the set in the Scenario for your level. It will drop off the opposing players, and you will need to roll against others in your group for it. The other piece(s) will usually drop from the higher end loot bags from PQ’s. This is a great reason to do those PQ’s and try to get higher contributions to them to get the high loot bags.
Stats: The main stats that you are going to be worrying about as an IB are Str and Toughness, with a close behind of Willpower and Weapon Skill. Strength is obvious, the higher strength that you have, the more damage you do. Makes sense to me. Toughness will add to the mitigation that you do from physical attacks, both ranged and melee. As you can imagine for a tank, this is pretty important stuff. Willpower sounds a bit strange for a tank to be wanting to have, as it is mostly considered a healer stat in WAR, however, you will notice that a LOT of the IB equipment that you get has Willpower on it, this confused me at first, until I realized that Willpower helps you disrupt incoming enemy spells. Yep…another good thing for a tank to have. Weapons skill is on the lower end of my list of the skills that you really want to have, simply because we aren’t a damage dealing class. Yes, a higher weapon skill allow you to hit more often, and to get those wonderful critical hits more often to cause more hate and keep the mobs on you better, but we aren’t there to cause the damage, and we really have enough ways to keep agro.
Overall : Ironbreaker is the tank class that many of us old school tanks have been looking to play for many years. If you like to charge into the thick of battle, knowing that you are going to be the one who can push through that line and make them sorry that they have ever considered doing RvR, then the IB is for you. If you want to be in the face of the enemy, letting them know that it’s not acceptable for them to look at you that way, then the IB is for you. On the other hand, if you would rather sit back and watch how the battle is flowing, and play a more back of the line class…then you may want to look somewhere else.