"Everything Freezes" A Guide to Ice Tankers and their Secondaries.
By
Flints,
Posted on: 2010-11-20 02:23 in Player Guides
Choosing the right secondary for your play-style is an important part of your Tanker, luckily Ice Armour works well with almost all secondaries, and with the versitlity of EA, different things can be achieved with different secondary powersets.
Battle Axe, War Mace, Stone Melee, Ice Melee and Energy Melee all provide great choices for any Tanker Primary, and its no different on Ice Tankers, the first three provide great Cone or AoE knockback/down (KD or KB) powers to keep targets on the ground (A target unable to attack can't do any damage.) As well as providing solid Single Target (ST) damage to targets such as AVs to maintain aggro via Gauntlet.
Energy Melee offers its Mitigation in the form of Disorients, and makes a great ST damage set, Ice Armour is a good combination for Energy Melee due to its Area of Effect (AoE) damage in Icicles, as Energy Melee is mostly ST-focused.
Ice Melee fits well thematicly with Ice Armour, and due to previous changes to that powerset, it now has an incredible damage output, as well as one of the most useful Mitigation powers in Ice Patch, a PBAoE that causes knockback and a large amount of movement slows to whoever stands upon it. Ice Patch also only requires one slot. Ice/Ice will provide a good amount of -recharge powers and slow effects to make losing aggro not an issue, and to slow down the rate of incoming attacks.
A healing proc can be slotted into its AoE power (On par to the damage to Foot Stomp without Rage) That helps to add to survivability.
This guide is great to those choosing Ice Melee.
Kinetic Melee has similarity to Energy Meele, but offers a better alternative due to the -damage component of Quick Strike, and Power Siphon, these will stack with CE's -damage debuff. Kin Melee is rather rounded to AoE damage, ST damage, and debuffing, while not providing the best in those directions, its a well-rounded set. Combine it with Soul Mastery for even more -damage debuffs and some -tohit.
Dark Melee is another option for debuffing and the "Bag Of Tricks" effect. Ice/Dark will provide you with loads of options for +End powers, self-healing powers, single target damage and -tohit debuffs for AV battles. If you're looking to be great against one target at a time (For example Lord Recluse in STF) Ice/Dark will offer you to tools to achieve that, take Fire or Mu Epic Power Pools and issues of a lack of AoE will be solved.
Fiery Melee and Super Strength, are great high-damage options, with both sets mainly focusing on damage, survivability comes from literally killing things quickly before they kill you. Due to Ice Armour's high S/L/N/E defences, they work well together due to having solid defences in Armour Armour, and solid AoE and ST damage in the offensive. I would be very surprised to see a Ice/Fire or Ice/SS Tanker lose aggro, ever.
As I don't know enough about Dual Blades to offer an opinion, Ice/Elec would be the final secondary to talk about, while it provides solid AoE damage in Thunderstrike, Lighting Rod (A really fun power to use.) and its cone/chain powers, I find the main weapon in Ice/Elec's arsenal is the end drain. My Ice/Elec tanker intends to end up as Ice/Elec/Mu, with defences soft-capped Pre-EA (Via taking Weave and CJ), EA can then be slotted for End Modification, and while most minions and some Lts will be killed in a wave of Lighting Rod > Electric Fences > Thunder Strike > Ball Lightning, the (extremely high) end cost of such an attack wave will be recovered with EA, and the remaining targets will be close to 0 Endurance, considering how Elec Melee attacks also debuff Recovery, as such enemies that can't use attacks simply can't hurt you at all.
Depending on how you wish to soft-cap, and how willing you are to use expensive IO sets, power pools are a good place to start.
To achieve 42% defence to S/L/N/E at level 20, a Ice Tanker needs to take Combat Jumping and Weave, which will take up 4 power choices (Although only 4 enhancement slots need to be used.) You could equally take Hover or Stealth and achieve the same effect.
Tanking the fighting pool, really negates the use for taking Permafrost, as the slow resistance can be gotten in a Winters' Gift IO in a travel power, and Tough being used to place the 3% Def steadfast IO instead of Permafrost. So effectively, this method of soft-capping only takes 3 power choices.
Hasten is another good option, if you want to go towards heavy IO recharge builds and achieve perma-Hasten, you'll also achieve Perma-Hoarfrost as well, which will put your Max HP at the cap all the time with the accolades. Or if you just want to have bursts of high HP and higher damage outputs from not having Hasten perma'd (Still extremely useful.)
Ice/ has an advantage over other sets in which an increase of global recharge will provide no Endurance use issues that some combos will suffer from due to attacks being used more frequently (Fire/SS or SD/Elec Tankers come to mind.) due to EA being up faster to compensate.
There's also been a change to EA that may or may not be a bug, in which multiple applications (For example the second recharge with the duration of the first one still in effect.) are increasing defence more than the "10x" limit, while each trigger of the power will only hit (And hits automaticly.) 10 targets, these will then stack, if someone was clever enough with their power choices and IO slotting, achieving perma-hasten, thus putting EA to a <20 second recharge (45s duration on the buff.) a continuous 20% Defence buff to all but psionic could be achieved. With the 3% Steadfast and 3% Gladiator's Armour IOs, Weave and CJ, 41% Defence to all typed damage except psi can be reached.
Tankers Tier 1 powers on their secondaries now provide a 20% resistance debuff, this effectively increases a Tankers solo damage, and helps in teams to debuff targets. A neat little trick for those who can afford it, is to slot the Fury of the Gladiator IO proc for -20 resistance into Icicles, this will not only increase your and your teams AoE damage, but also help bring down AVs without having to keep using a high end-cost PBAoE attack on one target when there's only a 20% chance to apply the debuff. In Icicles, it'll keep rolling the chance of the debuff every 10 seconds on all targets in range.
The slow grind.
Levels 1 to 20 can be a painful process for a defence-based tanker, with i19 bringing Inherent Stamina, most of the endurance issues will be solved, but still the best bet for these levels is to be in a good team.
Also at these levels most people tend to go for defences quickly, so your single target damage may be lacking.
Defence Soft-cap.
At 20 you can be almost soft-capped, so these next few levels become relatively simple, you can pick up more attacks, and you won't be worrying about not having a support AT with defence buffs or heals to keep you alive, here's where Ice/ first starts becoming easy.
Now comes the fun part of Ice/, picking up EA will start to solve all End problems you may have had during those 1 - 26 levels, and if you hadn't gone down the root of the fighting pool, you'll start to get soft-capped from level 26 onwards.
Energy Absorption.
at 32 you'll probably want to pick up Hibernate, it requires no slotting to be effective, and becomes a great tool throughout the game to either take alpha strikes, hide in safety while you combine Inspirations or wait for EA to recharge, you may find yourself using it more than you'd like to admit.
Just be careful with Hibernate, as if you don't hit Taunt beforehand (40 second duration, with Hibernate being a 30 second duration, if you don't cancel it.) you may end up losing aggro and having a few any players staring at the ice cube.
Epic Power Pools. - Which one is best for me?
Here's another turning point in the levelling of Ice Armour, which one you choose can either solve issues in your build, help with AoE or attack chains, or define your build completely.
Arctic Mastery and Pyre Mastery will provide you with solid AoEs, ranged immobs, holds or attacks. (Personally I take the immob for the quicker recharge and higher damage.) to take out troublesome mobs such as Malta Sappers, with either immobing and moving out the way, or holding them while you kill. Ice/Ice/Arctic was my first toon and first Tanker.
Earth Mastery offers a way to debuff enemies Defence (that great thing that's been stopping you from getting hit all these levels.) So your attacks, and the attacks of your team are more likely to hit.
It offers a decent amount of damage, and while icicles will break Salt Crystal's sleep, stick 2 recharge IOs and the sleep healing proc into it, and you've got yourself a cheeky self-heal that provides 93hp. I've seen that proc trigger up to 3x at once in my Ice/Ice Tankers Frozen Aura, which is roughly 7-8% of that toon's max HP.
Body Mastery is an option if even after EA, you're still finding some end issues within your build, slotting a +end proc in Physical Perfection and one in Stamina as well as a 2 End Mod IOs in each should end up providing you enough End to keep on going regardless.
Soul Mastery tends to be a good "Go to" Patron Pool for tankers, Gloom offers great ST damage at range, and the set provides ample -ToHit to protect you with synergy to your defence, and in the cases that you're fighting something with a damage type you have no protection against. (Psi for example.) the Toggle AoE -dmg debuff works well with CE's -dmg debuff and Kin Melee's -dmg debuff. Ice/Kin/Soul was the direction I took on one of my toons.
Mu Mastery makes a good second choice, as said earlier, the end drain and -recover works well with EAs autohit end drain, the aoe immob provides a good way to make sure you keep aggro on everything around you, and due to it having two aoe's with a damage component with good recharge times, its a great choice for Ice Tankers lacking AoEs in their secondary.
I went Ice/Dark/Mu and Ice/Elec/Mu with end-drain in mind for both those toons.
Leviathan Mastery work great with cone tier 9 secondaries (Mace and Axe.) due to by the time you reach 41 and start selecting an Epic Power Pool, you should be used to pulling, gathering and grouping up mobs to maximise your cone attacks. You've also got a variety of damage types and debuffs to close up any problem-enemies you may be facing resistant to your attacks.
Mace Mastery is something I tend to avoid, the pet is great if you want to take it due to having end draining attacks, but only lasts 4 minutes and recharges 15 minutes, and the immob aoe doesn't provide -kd effects to make Disruptor Blast a particually useful attack. Mace and Body Masteries are what I would consider the least appealing options, although those a fan of knockback powers may decide to combine attacks such as Handclap and Disruptor Blast to have a little breathing room.
Note: EA is "Energy Absorption". Not "Aura".
The other really nice thing with EA is, with a bit of recharge, it also stacks VERY nicely. Allowing you to hit massive levels of defense very early on. Heck, two levels after getting EA, I cranked my Ice/Ice (BABY! TOO COLD!....Sorry! Sorry! Couldn't help myself! Firmly ingrained meme here!) tanker's diff to +1x8. The only time I've received serious spankage since was the last mission of the Ouroboros intro (shivan debuffs from hell).
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I did forget to mention that cranking the difficulty up on Ice/ tankers normally makes things easier, due to the nature of EA.
For those interested in knowing why,
Energy Absorption will provide a defence buff, and a chunk of endurance based on how many targets are around you (Due to autohit.) With the first providing the biggest bonus to defense.
It generally takes 3 targets if slotted with End Mods to be restored to full Endurance, and about 5 without any End Mods slotted (15% Endurance per target). So in situations where you're fighting one or two bosses and your end bar is getting too low, pulling the next mob or group will allow you to maintain end throughout the boss fights, while Icicles can take care of most minions by the time the Boss is dead.
"Everything Freezes" A Guide to Ice Tankers and their Secondaries. (i18)
- Introduction:
There are some good guides going in-depth to each power and what it does, here I'm going to focus on how to tailor your Ice Armour tanker to its secondary, or how to best choose a secondary to suit you and Ice Armour.
Ice Armour is a powerset that suffers from bad publicity, namely it's visual effects, and the same steep curve most defence-based tanker powersets suffer from.
But Ice Armour has some saving values, first off, it's possibly the easiest Tanker powerset to soft-cap Smashing, Lethal, Energy and Negative Energy defence types. (More on soft-capping here.)
Secondly, Ice has what is considered amongst most tankers to be the strongest aggro aura in the game, coupled with how Icicles also helps gaining and holding aggro in that is a pbaoe toggle. Chilling Embrace (CE) is available at level 2, so with the launch of i19 and Inherent Fitness, Ice Tankers will be incredibly useful in low level teams to hold the aggro.
Other tools at Ice/'s disposal, is its AoE damage when combined with AoE-heavy secondaries (Ice Melee, Fiery Melee and Super Strength for just a few examples.) due to procs in CE and the damage component of Icicles.
Due to Hoarfrost, Ice Armour can easily hit the new Tanker HP cap using all the accolades, this is a great way for Ice Tankers to separate from Scrappers and Brutes in survivability.
The Energy Management of the set, Energy Absorption (EA) is one of the main reasons people roll Ice Tankers, simply put at level 26 (or 27 with slotting.) Endurance becomes a very minimal issue for the build, any problems with End after that point are either due to a low recharge of EA, or a lack of end reduction enhancements in attack powers.
EA can also boost defence by upwards of 10% across all Typed Defences with the exception of Psi.
Depending on what secondary you choose, whether or not you take Weave, if you want to drain your targets Endurance, or slot IO bonuses for defence, EA will provide useful tool for those concepts.
Hibernate is the final tool in Ice/'s bag of tricks, unlike other tier 9 defence powers, Hibernate has no weakness to specific damage types, nor does it require you to be dead to use it. Hibernate offers you a way to quickly recover health and endurance during a battle, because it makes you phased so that you can't be effected by damage (Aside from Hamidon's) it's drawbacks are mostly the inability to attack with it, and due to the No Phase self-buff, you can only use it every 120 seconds.