Saturday, December 27, 2008

Shields, Low Aggro, Rerolling and a Levelling Pact

Well, after about 20 days or so and 38 levels of shield/dark tanking, I got tired of the low aggro generating capabilities of the pairing. I was regularly being out-taunted by invul scrappers running just their invincibility aura, and any time anyone threw an AOE, half the mobs would run away from me and pay the AOE-tosser a visit, usually with pretty messy results. Well, messy in that I would have to jump over to toss in a taunt on top of them, and the enemies would be scattered across our 2 locations instead of nicely packed in. I never had this difficulty with my Willpower/Fire tank, I think it's probably attributable to the /fire aspect rather than the WP/ aspect.

So I rerolled my shield tank as a Shield/Fire, giving up the health leech of /Dark, and getting back some AOE attacks for both damage and aggro generation. I'm sure I can sneak in a Medicine Pool on this guy if I really need something, he is a good one for med pool since defense tanks don't have to deal with a lot of interrupts. We'll see how this one goes, I figure it should be pretty fast - I always seem to go back to /Fire on my tanks.

I also decided to try a levelling pact so I could get a L50 character on my occassionally-active secondary account. You know, the account that is sometimes subscribed, sometimes cancelled, so that you can do a truly secure transfer, or mess around with dual-boxing. Anyways, I paired up the new shield tank with a Kinetics Defender - probablly not the BEST option for the tank, but a generally viable hero that could play on their own merits in a group if I felt like it.

Anyways, that actually took 2 nights and 2 respecs - my Shield/Dark was decently vested in IOs that I wanted to keep, and it meant that 10 enhancement slots were not enough to keep the really important ones. I had to sacrifice a few since I didn't have a 3rd respec option available, but they weren't too much of a big deal as these ones could be replaced for under a million influence each.

Upsen.

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