Beginner Tank Build

General beginner Tank setup for Blackwood.

This is a very good, affordable way into Tanking for dungeons. This would be a build you use to begin farming other useful Tank sets from dungeons, and also doing your daily pledges for Undaunted Keys for more monster set shoulders. This setup is capable in both Normal and Veteran dungeons.

The strengths of this build are sustain and survival, both are vital components to Tanking and work well when combined with each other. Akaviri Dragonguard will give you additional Health, Healing Taken, Health Recovery, Magicka Recovery and lower Ultimate cost which is great for Tanking, especially on a Dragonknight.

If you can’t afford that set then you could opt to go for Crest of Cyrodiil. The reason why this is good at this stage is because you are likely to be blocking often and if provides you with a safety net just to help if you end up without a healer or in situations where you are taking extra damage. It also helps a lot because not all classes have a burst heal skill that works well for Tanks.

With the self heal from Crest of Cyrodiil you will have more room for error because you have the option of blocking a hit to gain a burst heal. We have our self heal and survival covered, so the other two gear sets we use are sustain based sets because we will die no matter how much healing we have if we run out of Magicka and Stamina. Armor of the Seducer is our first sustain set and this is great for our sustain and survivability.

Magicka Recovery is an extremely important stat for a Tank, since we really need a high Health pool to be able to absorb lots of damage we rely on Magicka Recovery over Max Magicka to help us to sustain our casting of abilities. Magicka is needed for most Tank skills but mostly for our self-healing, our self-armor buff and our self-sustain abilities. Using Armor of the Seducer also reduces the cost of all of our Magicka abilities by 10% meaning we can cast even more because we will have good Magicka Recovery and cheaper Magicka based abilities.

Our final set is Engine Guardian and this is the best sustain set in the game. You want to get whatever weight you can for the Helmet and Shoulder and then you can simply craft the Armor of the Seducer in whatever pieces you have missing but the overall aim is to have 5 Heavy, 1 Medium, 1 Light so just work your crafted gear around whatever monster set you can get. Engine Guardian is such a highly active set, it will be with you in combat nearly 100% of the time meaning it is always giving you some kind of resources. It heals or gives you Magicka or Stamina, the set is random and you can’t choose what resource you want to receive but since its such an active set, it will help you a lot over the duration of a fight.

For some classes this is better than others, for a DK and Sorcerer for example they have abilities that cost Magicka and give back Stamina. DK has Igneous Shield which costs Magicka and will give back Stamina via the Helping Hands passive. Sorcerers have Dark Deal while the Warden has Bull Netch. All classes have access to the Mages Guild skills Balance or Spell Symmetry which costs Health to give back Magicka. So effectively on some classes whichever resource you get from Engine Guardian it can be converted back into Stamina which is the hardest resource for Tanks to sustain and obtain.

Engine Guardian Looted: Veteran Darkshade Caverns II – Helmet. Shoulder buy with Undaunted Keys via Maj.

Armor of the Seducer Crafted: 3 Traits research needed.

Akaviri Dragonguard Looted: Eastmarch, Buy from Guild Traders.

Alternative Gear Options:
Crest of Cyrodiil Looted: Cyrodiil, Buy from Vlastarus Elite Gear Vendor or Guild Traders.

Torug’s Pact Crafted: 3 Traits research needed.