Shield/War Mace: Epic Pool?

Well, if you're only at 34% then you're a long ways from the soft cap, I would think in terms of a respec to shift things about. For one, Grant Cover is of limited utility for you... the only thing that helps you is the debuff resistance in it. It's nice def for your teammates, but realistically it'll only cover scrappers on your team... the radius is only 15'. I would take it, but much later... 49 looks to be a good spot for it.

One with the Shield is nice, but again it isn't a priority... I've planned it late in my build on my Shield/Fire tank. Tough/Weave is more important in your survivability, you'll notice simply immense improvement in your durability once you reach the 45% soft cap.

All in all it sounds like there's room for improvement in your build... at level 36 my Shield/Fire is at 40% def to all and will hit the soft cap at level 41 when I can snag Weave.

Now, getting back to your original question of epic pools, I pretty much lean toward either Energy if I need Conserve Power (and if you 4 slot your defenses with Gift of the Ancients you won't need it) and Pyre for Fire Blast and Fire Ball. If you're only taking two then you may consider Ice... Block of Ice and Ice Blast are both nice powers.

I typically start slotting set IO's when a character hits 30... I mostly slot 30-35 IO's since I can hit ED caps with them and they let me exemp farther down without loosing my bonuses. Also it lets me enjoy the bonuses on a character I'm still leveling up.

In my slotting I like to slot Deflection with 4 Gift of the Ancients and two common Resist IO's. Battle Agility gets 4 GotA, Active Defense gets 3 recharge to allow for overlap and stacking, True Grit gets the Steadfast 3% def unique and ED capped heals with any leftover slots going to common resist IO's. Tough I like to slot 4 Impervium Armor (a bit pricey but nice recovery/bonus endurance) and Weave also gets 4 GotA. With that slotting you'll have enough recovery bonuses and bonus endurance that your troubles with the blue bar will be a thing of the past. Excepting the Impervium Armor set you ought to be able to afford the rest of that pretty easily by the mid-30's.

That slotting will also push you pretty close to the soft cap; tossing in a few minor defense bonuses from your attacks will easily push you over the 45% mark. A few suggestions would be slotting a Touch of Death set in a single target attack, toss a set of 5 Scirocco's Dervish into an AOE attack and toss a set of Mako's Bite into another single target attack. That should push you to the soft cap leaving plenty of room in your other powers to slot for other bonuses.

What is ED?

So you're saying skip Stamina? That would be great if I could, but I've never tried it on a melee toon. Otherwise, your advice is very interesting, I'll look into it as soon as I can.

Urgh, you should have taken "the big three" as soon as they were available. I think a respec is definitely in order, you don't want to wait until the 40s to get all your AoE attacks.

Call_Me_Awesome's advice is sound, as always, but it would help if you could post your current build. Hitting the soft-cap is much easier with Weave, especially if you don't have a lot of influence to spend, and IMO, soft-capping is much more important for a shield tank than adding epic pool powers.

Enhancement Diversification. The reason why there's no reason to enhance more than around 3 SOs worth of a particular attribute in a power. (No more than 3 damage SOs in an attack, etc.) More info here:

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Enhancement_Diversification

If you're using Mid's and mouse-over a slotted power, any power attribute that shows up in red is past the ED cut-off for that type.

No, no. You'll still need Stamina. But recovery and +end bonuses will help avoid end issues despite Stamina, and can eliminate the need for something like Conserve Power or Physical Perfection.

To actually answer your question:

For a shield/mace, you want the Energy Mastery Epic pool, and I'd highly recommend Conserve power with the base slot full of recharge and Physical Perfection with at least a Performance Shifter +End proc in it.

For your other pools, I'd recommend:

Leaping, for combat jumping and super jump

Fitness, for hurdle, health, and stamina.

Fighting, for boxing (throwaway), touch and weave

Speed, for hasten.

In Shield Defense, I'd take everything except Grant Cover and One with the Shield. Both are of limited utility. A beefy scrapper can benefit from Grant Cover, but serious AOE's make it iffy at best.

In mace.... it's more complicated. I took all but pulverize, clobber, and shatter. But I was optimizing for AOE. I could easily see ditching whirling mace (weak) for Shatter.

Mace is a ticklish set to pick powers for, because you really should decide what you want to be good at: stun or knockdown.

I leave it up to you.

BTW, I found shield/wm to be an extremely enjoyable tank. The major issue is lack of healing, but health and physical perfection with the four hitpoint/stamina accolades makes it bearable.

I strongly disagree; I think it's much better to be good at both, which is why I recommend that a Mace tank take everything but either Pulverize or Jawbreaker.

And for any Mace player not to take Clobber is a *very* bad idea, IMO. Even if you're optimizing for AoE, why wouldn't you take the most damaging ST attack in the set?

I highly recommend learning to use Mid's, if possible, it's extremely helpful in build planning.

Based on your power picks, and following C_M_A's advice to drop Grant Cover and OWtS, (and mine to take all but one of the attacks) if you take everything in your primary and secondary except GC, OWtS, and Pulverize, you'll have room for 4 additional powers.

If you take the Fighting Pool for Weave--which I strongly recommend if you want to soft-cap "on the cheap"--that leaves you room for one additional power, epic or otherwise. You could also consider dropping Build Up, Taunt, or one more attack. It wouldn't be my choice to drop any of those, but C_M_A usually doesn't take Build Up, for instance, so it's really up to you.

I would think that if you've taken care of potential endurance problems by slotting for recovery and +end bonuses, you wouldn't necessarily need the Energy epic. If you end up having room for just one epic power, one of the ranged hold/immob powers in Pyre or Arctic mastery might be useful. Of course, if you end up with two or more slots it'll increase your options quite a bit.

By the way, though Fly is by far my favorite travel power, switching to CJ/SJ would have the advantage that CJ's defense boost would get you around 4% closer to the soft-cap. Just something to consider.

Hope that helps!

Uh, ED is Enhancement Diversification, the mechanic that makes slotting more than 3 SO's worth of enhancement in a power pointless due to drastically reduced values. The way ED works, let's take an attack for example. You've slotted 1 even level damage SO and improve the damage by 33%. Slot two damage SO's and you've improved damage by 66%. Slot 3 and you end up ~95% damage instead of the expected 99% because that third SO is reduced by ED. If you were to slot a 4th damage SO you would only get 5% benefit from it instead of the 33% it should give... that's what's known as the "ED cap", it's the point where slotting for further improvement in that aspect of a power is wasted because enhancements are so severely degraded.

ED works off of a percentage enhancement, not the number of enhancements present... it just works out that the ED cap is equivalent to 3 even level SO's. For Tier One enhancements (accuracy, damage, recharge etc.) that percentage is 95%, for Tier Two enhancements (defense buff, resist buff etc.) that percentage is 55%.

Heavens no, you absolutely want Stamina. The slotting I discussed along with Stamina will eliminate your end problems. Stamina with 3 endmod slotted is more or less assumed on any character... I only have two above level 20 without it out of almost 50 characters.

I can guarantee that slotting for recovery/+end as I listed will eliminate any need for conserve power... my BS/Shield scrapper is slotted that way and has better endurance recovery than my BS/Regen... I have yet to drop below 50% endurance on that BS/SD even while farming the wall in Cimerora non-stop... and a Broadsword scrapper will burn more end than a tanker.

I'll admit I haven't tried to put together a SD/Mace tanker... it's always a jigsaw puzzle to fit in the powers you want. I'll defer to those of you who've played Mace on power selection there; the only Mace tanker I've played is sitting at around level 8 so he doesn't really count.

Your skippable powers in Shield are Grant Cover and, to a lesser extent, One with the Shield. You really won't need OwtS very often, but my experience with my scrapper shows that it's very nice when things turn pear shaped on you.

I recommend taking Combat Jumping/Super Jump so you can get a bit more def and combat mobility out of CJ. Hurdle/Health/Stamina are a given... always take Hurdle on a jumper as it stacks very nicely for jump speed and distance. Fighting for Boxing/Tough/Weave is another strongly recommended pool... even if you've soft capped with IO bonuses without Weave you'll want Tough for the added S/L resistance when something gets through your defense, and trust me it will on occasion.

Let's see, that's 7 required powers from Shield and one very nice to have in OwtS and 8 pool powers. You have 24 total powers available at level 50, so that leaves 8 or 9 from your secondary and/or epic. You're certainly getting into a tight build getting everything in... you simply can't get everything you want so you have to prioritize. If you want 8 from the secondary (and I do always recommend Taunt for anyone who wants to tank, yes I know it can be done without... I've done it with my shield scrapper... but it's a useful tool) then you're getting a really full build. In order to fit in an epic pool you're going to have to make some painful decisions, drop _______ in order to make room for ______.

On my SD/Fire tanker's projected build I've had to make the same kind of choices... there's three powers I'd really like to squeeze in but others took priority. I always prioritize a tanker like this:

1. Powers that increase my durability so that I can survive the aggro tanking for a full 8 man team.
2. Powers that increase my ability to gain and hold aggro.
3. Powers that contribute to killing the mobs to speed up the team's progress through a mission.

Item 1 and 2 are fairly interchangeable but I firmly believe that when I'm playing a tanker my job is to get into battle first and keep the aggro on me instead of on the squishies on the team. That's my primary focus, I concentrate on killing mobs after I've gained the aggro and always watch out for any stray aggro I need to grab during combat. I have attacks and I use them, but on a team it's my job to allow the rest of the team to go all out without fear of aggro.

Mid's is an invaluable tool for fitting together the jigsaw puzzle of your build; as you start thinking about more complex set IO builds it almost becomes mandatory to have a way to work out the build. Set IO bonuses are wonderful things that allow characters to do phenomenal things but they all work together... the maximum benefit comes with stacking many of these small bonuses together. I really cannot recommend it strongly enough; it's extremely useful even with a simple SO build.

Really it isn't needed if you slot enough recovery/+end bonuses... my BS/SD has 4 sets of 4 Gift of the Ancients and 1 set of 4 Impervium Armor slotted and I can hardly make my end bar move... and I'm running 7 toggles: Deflection, Battle Agility, Combat Jumping, Tough, Weave, Grant Cover and Sprint.

If I can't drop my blue bar below 50% after 20 minutes of non-stop farming on the Cimerora wall I really don't think more endurance is a priority

Using the same slotting on a SD tanker you should be even better off since you're unlikely to be attacking that non-stop.

"Jack of all trades, Master of none."

I just prefer more focus. YMMV.


Because it isn't an AOE? Why would I take an extra ST attack when I wanted AOE's? I am a tank, I don't really care how much damage it does. With hasten, AAO, Shield Charge, Whirling Mace, and Crowd Control, I am not short-changing the team at all on my damage output.

Really, the nicest part of the pbaoe is that it allows you to split-tank, since you don't have to target it. I have often,, for instance, tanked Lord Recluse via taunt aura and a pbaoe while keeping the flyer targeted for taunts. Works great!

I'll have room for three powers, I think. I hit 38 and took Build Up already, so my 38 power is already chosen.

Grant Cover is a tough one. I'd really like to keep it. I like the idea of a tanker that keeps others safe.

Even if there's no other leadership running and I'm teamed with a tanker or scrapper who only has resists, odds are someone will have Dark Blast or Dark Miasma or something else with -To Hit. The Defense from GC stacks up with all of that, so I feel it's worth it. Like we keep telling folks on the Arachnos forum: "Take your team buffs."

Good advice I'm sure, but Fly (and Hover) are highly thematic for this character, so I'm committed to keeping them.


I think that leaves me with two power choices if I respec, and remove Build Up and OWTS, I'm thinking Jump Kick (moar knockdown) and Tough. Then Weave at 41, and Whirling Mace at 44 and Crowd Control at 47. That gives me one choice at 49. :-) Yeah this is a tight build.

Oh, duh. I thought you you were abbreviating a power name I didn't recognize. Sorry for the dim moment there.

OK just checking. I couldn't imagine going without Stamina but then I've never actually tried it on anything except my Bots/FF mastermind.

Jump Kick?!? Ugh, no. Believe me, with JB, Shatter, and Crowd Control you'll have *plenty* of KD/KU. Crowd Control can easily hit 5-10 foes at once. I think you'd be better off getting OwtS instead.

If you respec to drop OwtS and Build Up, be sure to take WM, Shatter, and CC when they're available. CC in particular is a fantastic attack, and you'll want to have it ASAP. Now that you've decided on your powers, I can post a suggested power order if you like.

Well, I've never found it particularly challenging--mentally or otherwise--to manage two different forms of damage mitigation in the same attack set, and I doubt most players do either. Similarly, I think I've 'mastered' having both ST and AoE attacks and using them appropropriately; it's not exactly rocket science.

But none of those options is particularly useful against a single hard target, and as a ST attack, Clobber is about as good as it gets for Tanks. Superior damage, quick animation, and the ability to insta-stun minions and lieutenants...why piddle around with Jab or Pulverize when Clobber is an option?

As you can tell, I'm a player that does indeed care about the amount of damage my tanks do, I think it's only second in importance to durability and aggro control for a tank. There's also the fact that damage helps you control aggro since damage done is part of the threat calculation.

I respect the fact that you've decided that you prefer KD to stuns, AoE to ST, but to suggest that a Mace tank *has* to choose between them is ridiculous, IMO.

Well I have to take something to get Tough. It's that or Boxing. Does it really matter?

Ahh, now I understand, you mean Kick. Jump Kick is an attack in the Leaping Pool, and I couldn't understand why you wanted to take that.

Yes, Boxing or Kick makes no real difference unless you want to use it as a set mule. Then it might be important that Boxing takes Stun sets and Kick takes KB sets.