Shield Tanker or Brute?

I'm thinking about making a shield tanker or brute with a melee set of axe or mace.
I want to be able to tank and will probably take taunt but don't want to sacrifice too much damage capabilities.

Additionally, which of the two melee sets is better and do they work well with shields?

Any feedback would be great.

Axe and Mace are basically the same power sets.
If you want to TANK it, you must have Taunt.
If you want to do more DAMAGE go Brute.

Being a Tanker is more about AGGRO control, herding mobs, protecting suqishies. While playin a Tank you arent overly concerned about Damage or finishing opponents, just controlling their attention. A good Tank hits the taunt power as soon as it comes up and cycles thru the enemies to Taunt.

If you have any serious concerns about damage, go Brute.

A Shield Tanker is far easier to softcap and receives more DDR. The Brute will do more damage overall because of Fury, but the Tank benefits slightly more from Against All Odds having a .8 base damage modifier and a .96 modifier after Bruising is applied. This means that the damage enhancement is having a greater effect on the AT-- but not causing the Tank to out damage your average Brute. It lessens the gap, if you will. Overall, this choice comes down to personal preference.

Mace is better than Axe for performance, having better AoE and single target potential. If you look at the numbers you will see that Crowd Control beats Pendulum by a wide margin because of it's superior geometry and higher target cap. Clobber is also an excellent single target attack that comes early in the set.

Shield works a lot better on a scrapper than either a brute or tanker. So I would suggest a WM/shield scrapper. You'll benefit a lot more from AAO, and shield charge will be a totally godlike kill everything power, instead of being just a decent AoE.

Tank or brute? Scrapper is the answer you seek

I must warn you about a problem with tanks, in particular with gauntlet.

It will cause you to miss.
A lot.

As in I have over 95%+ chance to hit almost anything in the game and have seen attacks that were forced to hit through streak breaker. I have missed four times in a row with a 95% chance to hit. This is not a freak occurrence, it is an every day thing.

After dealing with this with my INV/EM tank, I parked my shield/WM tank and I play other ATs where a 95% chance to hit something means just that.

Thanks for the feedback everyone, I already have a shield scrapper so I'm trying to go with something I don't have yet.

The whole to hit thing is a bit scary since it's one of my pet peeves in the game.

If it makes you feel any better I have never noticed that issue on any of my tankers and I have never heard of it before. I am pretty sure that if there was actually a tohit problem for tanks then some of our resident math geniuses would have picked up on it a long time ago.

Between Battle Axe and War Mace, the general consensus is that War Mace is better, but the sets are not wildly disparate.

Shield is better on a Scrapper than a Brute, as mentioned, but that doesn't mean it's bad on a Brute. You said you want to tank and don't want to give up much damage, which is pretty much a perfect description of a Brute. You will be less sturdy than a Tanker, of course, but there's a huge gulf between "less tough than a Tanker" and "not tough enough to tank at all".

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cheetatron That is really only true on teams with significant +damage buffs I think the base damage of shield charge for all 3 melee ATs is similar

No, Shield Charge's base damage is about half again as much on a Scrapper as it is on a Brute (Mids for some reason is displaying the Scrapper damage wrong, but you can check in-game). As a pseudopet, it also has a damage cap of +300%, which means it often cannot benefit fully from a Brute's fury, either.

Right, it's a 400% damage cap, but that includes the base 100%, so +300% of buffs/enhancements hits the cap.

Damage toggles aren't pseudopets, so no. I'm not sure about Burn, but I don't think it has that limit either.

Since the last change burn does an initial non-pet hit in addition to the pseudopet it summons. Thus it does technically suffer a bit on a brute compared to other ATs but nobody cares because it's good enough.

I'm surprised that nobody has unequivocally told the OP that of the options he presented, shield/mace is far and away the best. Shield is hands down the set that enables the narrowest damage gap between tankers and brutes and there is no non-concept reason to prefer axe to mace. Tankers get 25% more health than brutes and can softcap with their IOs tied behind their backs, which of course makes it far easier for them to go all the way and incarnate softcap should they so choose.

Now that you mention it I'm almost tempted to make that combo my first tanker in a long time, but I still hate the clicky mez protection. Sorry, shield.

With a 95% hit chance, you will miss twice in a row on one in 400 pairs of attacks. That's not a very high chance, but considering how many attacks we throw while playing, it's plenty high enough to see it happen multiple times in a single play session.

That's without the streakbreaker, of course. With the streakbreaker, if it worked properly (and Gauntlet screws with it, which you're correct on), missing an attack with a 95% hit chance will make Streakbreaker force the next attack to hit. The streakbreaker has an allowed streak of 1 before it kicks in, if hit chance is >90%. This means Streakbreaker will force your next attack to hit one time in 20.

So if the streakbreaker doesn't work at all, you should see two misses in a row pretty often. If it works perfectly, you should see Streakbreaker forcing a hit even more often. If it works but gets screwed up by Gauntlet, you should see something in between, which apparently you do.

So, given the game's mechanics and basic probability, you should and in fact must miss two attacks in a row AND see Streakbreaker force hits. Not seeing either of those things would mean something was REALLY broken.

Unless you mean that you're actually hitting with (statistically significantly) less than 95% of your attacks, but as I understand it, Gauntlet just screws with the streakbreaker, which at worst means you will still land 95% of your attacks.

I have only one tank, a mace/shield tank which is likely one of my cheaper builds nowadays. Mostly I use him to lead ITFs, and visit Warberg for some missiles, and have tanked Lord R during a Stateman's TF before all these ipowers just to see if I could.

All in all, happy with my choice for a tank and likely will keep her for many years. Which all in all is kinda funny, since I only made her so I could level pact with my friend's shield scapper.