Beginner Tank Guide

In the Elder Scrolls Online – A Tank is someone who is the heavily armoured shell of a group, the first one into battle and the front-line of combat to protect and defend everyone else against any threat.

A Tanks main job is to aggro and control enemy targets forcing them to attack you and ensure as little damage as possible is passed onto Damage Dealers and Healers. Once aggro is achieved the next task of the Tank is to position enemies safely where allies are as protected as possible to perform their respective roles. As a Tank it is vital to learn fights quickly and efficiently, know mechanics and tactics for each fight as you are the frontline and you will deal with mechanics more than most other roles in a group. Tanks in ESO, similar to the military vehicle, need a very strong defence and good battlefield manoeuvrability: You take a lot of damage as a Tank so the priority is to boost your Max Health and Resistances so you are able to deal with all incoming damage.

The biggest obstacles for a Tank are self-sustaining and survivability. Tanks usually aim for a high Magicka Recovery stat to help with in combat abilities. Stamina sustain can be difficult, when you block – you lose Stamina and Stamina cannot be regained through regeneration while holding Block. With good sustain, you’ll be able to heal yourself if needed and surviving becomes a lot easier, but experience is key to surviving and learning all areas of your class, race, role and each particular fight is a must.

Once you have mastered the basics of Tanking, you will be expected to support your group by setting up in a particular way. This is where you begin to help your group with certain buffs and gear sets, which increase the group damage output (or survivability and sustain) and also begin using further debuff skills and sets which increase the damage your enemy targets take. The reason why buffing and debuffing is important for the Tank is because you are always on the front-line and close to the enemy so it is far easier for a Tank to maintain certain buffs and debuff. Also, the more damage your group can do, the quicker fights will end which benefits everyone in a group especially a Tank who is having to balance sustain, fight management and more.

The race of a Tank does not play a huge part in how well you can Tank later in the game.

Early on in the process, with very little Champion Points or correct gear it will be more important which race you play, and ideally you should choose a race that will help you in some way with Tanking.

The main thing new Tanks struggle with is sustain and there are a few options you can choose to improve your sustain. I would suggest for new Tanks to go with a sustain class as it will make your job considerably easier while you get used to Tanking.

The Tank Races here are listed with beginners in mind, but this list would be slightly different if we were looking at it from an endgame perspective.

For more information check out the Tank Race Page.

From level 1 to 50, each time you level up you gain Attribute Points.

At level 50 you will have 64 Attributes.

General stats to aim for as a beginner:

• Max Health: 38k+
• Max Stamina: 23k+
• Max Magicka: 20-22k

There is no right or wrong way to set your attributes but as a beginner, you’ll want to try and achieve some base level stats to start off with.

To reach these stats you should make sure you have your gear on and enchanted and your skills and passives input. Next you should distribute any Champion Points you might have and then finally you top everything off by inputting your Attributes.

Typically, it can be a good idea to use 64 points into Health and then utilise Stamina and Magicka glyphs on your gear to begin with. Once you have obtained a must have tank set you would invest in some Prismatic Defense (Tri-Stat) glyphs for your gear but to begin with this isn’t advised as they are expensive, but they are far superior for a Tank compared to using single stat Glyphs.

High Max Health is important because Tank based healing skills scale with Max Health meaning you’ll heal for more the more Max Health you have and also any damage shields you use will also be larger. As a beginner Tank you also have more room for error the higher your health so consider this when applying your attributes.

You need to be careful not to put all your eggs into one basket, however. Even if you have 60k Health, if you don’t have enough Magicka you won’t be able to heal and if you don’t have enough Stamina, you won’t be able to block, and you’ll still get 1-shot by bosses.

Max Stamina is also very important because you need Stamina to be able to block, so having more of it means you’ll be able to block and sustain for longer. You don’t regain Stamina back from Stamina regen while blocking. Rather than making your Max Stamina extremely high, you need to figure out how to sustain your Stamina, as sustaining is far more important that having a huge Stamina pool because it won’t matter how much Stamina you have if you can’t sustain it, you’ll always run out.

You also want your Stamina to be higher than your Magicka normally, because when you use a synergy such as an Orb or a Shard that gives you back resources, it will always give you the resource of whichever one has the highest max value.

Max Magicka holds some importance because the majority of your skills cost Magicka, your healing costs Magicka and so you need to be able to maintain your skills and healing if needed and not run out after 2-3 casts. You still gain Magicka while blocking, even with a back bar staff so long as you don’t use the Tri-Focus passives, so Magicka sustain is typically a bit easier than Stamina. You don’t need super high Max Magicka but somewhere around 20k means you should be able to sustain for a decent amount of time especially with your Magicka regen ticking every 2 seconds.

For tanking, you will pretty much always be using Tri-Stat food; food that increases your Max Health, Magicka and Stamina. From your levelling and daily login rewards you will get Crown Fortifying Meal which is usable from level 1 and is pretty useful while levelling and is generally always useful if you can’t afford other food.

The best Tank food is the crafted food Bewitched Sugar Skulls as it gives Tri-Stats but also Health Recovery, plus it will scale at lower levels. The recipe is pretty expensive and can only be obtained during the Halloween Event – the Witches Festival. The food is relatively cheap to buy and is the better option until you can obtain the recipe yourself.

At CP160 you can use crafted Tri-Stat food if you cannot afford the Sugar Skulls – look out for Capon Tomato-Beet Casserole, Jugged Rabbit in Preserves, Longfin Pasty with Melon Sauce or any other Tri-Stat food you can find. Those are very cheap purple foods which are close to the same stats as the Sugar Skulls minus the Health Recovery.

Another good option later in the game is Orzorga’s Smoked Bear Haunch but this food isn’t really advised for brand new Tanks.

Resistances are an important part of being a Tank in The Elder Scrolls Online to help mitigate and reduce the incoming damage you will receive from enemies.

The Resistance Cap is 33,000 so you should never go above that number of resistances as they provide no additional benefit at that point. 33k Resistances is 50% mitigation so each 660 resistances are 1% damage mitigation.

Resistances are split into Spell Resistance which mitigates magic attacks including Flame, Shock, Ice and Magic damage and Physical Resistance which mitigates physical attacks including Disease, Poison and Bleed damage. Collectively these are also known simply as “Armor”.

There is a common misconception with Resistances – many players overvalue the usefulness of Resistances.

The situations where Resistances play a high level of importance include for new players with little or no champion points, anyone not using 5 Heavy Armor, situations where you are not blocking but still taking damage and during fights with high damage especially Bleeds and Damage over Time attacks.

Resistances play into a whole damage mitigation calculation where they essentially come out of the equation right at the end which means they are only marginally impactful when you have a range of buffs and damage reductions from blocking, Champion Points, gear, skills and passives.

As a general rule you should aim for 25k+ Resistances when buffed with Major Resolve.

If you take a 100,000-damage hit from a boss and you have 75% Block Mitigation – blocking this attack would reduce this damage to 25k with no buffs, resistances or anything else under consideration. If you had 33k resistances this hit would become 12500 damage (this is 50% of 25k) but at 25k resistances this hit is still only 15525 damage. If you add in Champion Points, skills, passives, buffs and enemy debuffs, this number would be far less.

Trying to stack resistances can mean you lose a lot of sustain benefits so while it’s useful to have some resistances, don’t make too much effort trying to reach the resistance cap because it’s typically not worth it as you’ll lose other more important aspects of your build trying to do it.

Simply refer to the Tank Champion Point page on the website – we have all the progressive CP you need from 160 to 2000+ to get you setup for Tanking.

You can also check out the Tank Champion Point Guide Video.