ESO Companion Tank Build

Updated: Blackwood (June 2021)

Information

Welcome to The Tank Club: ESO Companion Tank Build.

Companions were added into The Elder Scrolls Online with the Blackwood Chapter DLC in June 2021. This idea behind the companions is for players to have an ally to help them through some of the games content.

Their are two companions available by completing the relevant quests in the Blackwood area you can obtain the services of either Bastian Hallix who is a Dragonknight or Mirri Elendis who is a Nightblade.

This companion Tank build works nicely for content such as questing, overland enemies, world bosses in base game areas, delves, dolmens and other lower damage areas and content. You need to be prepared to have a healing ability to help your companion out as they do not perma-block or even attempt to block light attacks. They will only trigger their block when met with a channelled heavy attack so they do take a lot of damage and they struggle to keep themselves alive without your support.

Guides for this will be available soon in the Tank Guide section and on our YouTube channel.

ESO Companion Tank Gear

Companion Tank Gear

Companion Tank Gear

Piece	Set	Weight	Trait
Head	Companion’s Helmet	Heavy	Vigorous
Shoulder	Companion’s Pauldrons	Heavy	Vigorous
Chest	Companion’s Cuirass	Heavy	Vigorous
Hands	Companion’s Gauntlets	Heavy	Vigorous
Waist	Companion’s Girdle	Heavy	Vigorous
Legs	Companion’s Greaves	Heavy	Vigorous
Feet	Companion’s Sabatons	Heavy	Vigorous
Necklace	Companion’s Necklace	Jewellery	Vigorous
Ring	Companion’s Ring	Jewellery	Vigorous
Ring	Companion’s Ring	Jewellery	Vigorous
Main Hand	Companion’s Sword	Sword	Vigorous
Off Hand	Companion’s Shield	Shield	Vigorous

ESO Companion Tank Skills

Bastian Hallix

Other Useful Skills

Skill Information

These are the main skills you will want to use when taking Bastian into boss content.

Provoke: This is your companions taunt skill – will only work when the companion is in melee range of the target.
Kindle: This is a heal that can go to Bastian or to you, he will only cast it when himself or you are under 75% health.
Basalt Barrier: Provides a damage shield to both Bastian and any group members.
On Guard: Another Max Health based skill, this will absorb 25% of the companions Max Health which is great with the Vigorous gear.
Drake’s Blood: A Max Health based heal so it works quite well with the gear setup, also reduces incoming damage. Bastian only uses this when he is low on Health.
Unleashed Rage: Ultimate skill, not really any choice here for Ultimate’s so you kind of have to use it luckily its quite a decent Ultimate with sunning enemies and a burst of damage.

Other Useful Skills – These are skills you can potentially switch around for combat where you have multiple enemies and no bosses.

Bashing Bulwark: This is a gap closer which you can use to make Bastian move quicker to a stack of enemies rather than pulling them towards him.
Crushing Claws: This will immobilise enemies near to Bastian
Blazing Grip: A chain that pulls in ranged enemies, Bastian will only use this if an enemy is 10m or more away from him.

The way to make these work effectively is to have Bastian charge to the add pack, immobilise them and then chain.

Mirri Elendis

Skill Information

This is your companions taunt skill – will only work when the companion is in melee range of the target.
When Mirri is on low Health she dodges the next attack and reduces her incoming damage.
A Max Health based heal which works well with the Vigorous Gear, Mirri uses it when she gets under 50% Health and also goes invisible for 3 seconds.
Another Max Health based skill, this will absorb 25% of the companions Max Health which is great with the Vigorous gear.
This is more damage reduction for the companion which is very much needed.
Ultimate skill, not really any choice here for Ultimate’s so you kind of have to use it luckily its quite a decent Ultimate with sunning enemies and a burst of damage.

ESO Companion Tank Videos

Companion Tanks Trial UNASSISTED! | Elder Scrolls Online | Blackwood

Watch this video on YouTube

Dragonknight Companion Tank Build - Bastian Hallix | Elder Scrolls Online | Blackwood

Watch this video on YouTube

Notes

Gear
After testing a range of gear options the only one that really made a difference was the Max Health – by using full Vigorous your companion should have 40.5k Max Health with Bastian or 39.4k Max Health with Mirri. Having higher health seemed to have a much bigger impact than anything else and also, for a Tank companion there are quite a few skills that scale on the companions Max Health so that helps also.

The damage reduction gear seemed to perform really poorly, combining different gear options didn’t do that great either compared with Vigorous.

Heavy Armor: 2900 Armor (per piece)

Vigorous Trait: Increases Max Health by 2.6% (per piece)

Skills
There are a decent variety of skills you can use for your companions. The priority for a Tank companion is having skills with a high uptime and low cooldown that provide high survivability. You have to really look at the skills that have a low cooldown time or high uptime, especially from a Tanking perspective you want them to be using survival skills as often as possible.

To maximise their ability to Tank in certain situations you might want to add in some crowd control such as a gap closer/pull/immobilise/fear skills that are available, but I found that the content companions are capable of Tanking that it wasn’t really essential for them to worry too much about crowd control.

Bastian

Bastian is much better at dealing with damage situations compared to Mirri – Bastian can keep himself alive in most situations that he was tested in with this build including World Bosses, Delves, Overland Enemies, Normal Dungeons, Non-DLC Vet Dungeons, Normal Trials.