Today we debate Tanky HU's

[LonelyGaruga]

Yeah I don't have any use for those things because I always have Anti access, so I just settled for items since I recognized I didn't remember the name correctly.

I'm not really interested in discussing this though. I read enough to know it's not worth it.

Sure you can still benefit from Pretty Good, Flash Guard, Massive Hunter while only investing 3 SP into Guard Stance, but that's 3 SP wasted if you're using Fury and I hate few things more in the game than wasting Skill Points.

Making a strong tank build took like a week because I had to intimately consider the scenario I would likely be in whereas there's only one path for damage.

I'm going to just stick to threads where there's a chance that there are posts worth reading and replying to. I just could not believe that there was someone who thought Pretty Good was "amazing". It's...disheartening, to see how uneducated most posts here are.

[Netro Shine]

Pretty Good is amazing if you're not running a tech capable build since it keeps status duration down, not to mention even tech based builds can't unfreeze themselves unless they know the freezing hit is coming

First off, did you actually read the full statement? It's amazing under limited circumstances. Congratulations.

I'm going to just stick to threads where there's a chance that there are posts worth reading and replying to. I just could not believe that there was someone who thought Pretty Good was "amazing". It's...disheartening, to see how uneducated most posts here are.

Second thing, you literally quoted me saying I hate few things more in game than wasting Skill Points. Pretty Good costs you 5 SP if you're not using Guard Stance. I think if your abilities of inference are so strong, you'd realize that I do not use Pretty Good, but I'm not going to be a fool that looks at the Skill and ignores that it has a powerful effect. To me personally it does not have enough weight to overcome the cost of getting to it, but that's not always going to be the case.

Also, I was under the impression that you find Guard Stance worthless in general, and you tag Guard Stance as a tanking Skill. Why visit the single specific thread where Guard Stance is going to come up a lot since Guard Stance does harden your defenses and change the method of tanking you can utilize? You may not like or use the Skill, but that doesn't mean you can't entertain using it and figuring out in which contexts it would work well.

Last thing, if it's disheartening or you see something you don't agree with, making a statement like this is...an attention grab at best. Why is Pretty Good not worth the effect? You proposed using items as a solution, I gave a situation in which Pretty Good beats out using items; it was a fair exchange of ideas. It doesn't mean one method is better than the other; it all depends on the player that makes the choice. Some of us may find the cost of SP too steep, some of use may really like the effect, some of us may pack Techs, some of us may just prefer to use items. It's all in the player's hands. We're here to make a debate, and what each player chooses is up to the individual. I'm not sure why you have this "one glove fits all" mentality; I generally assume that players know what's best for themselves, and I just try to propose ideas and theories that may help them understand their choices.

[LonelyGaruga]

First off, did you actually read the full statement? It's amazing under limited circumstances. Congratulations.


Second thing, you literally quoted me saying I hate few things more in game than wasting Skill Points. Pretty Good costs you 5 SP if you're not using Guard Stance. I think if your abilities of inference are so strong, you'd realize that I do not use Pretty Good, but I'm not going to be a fool that looks at the Skill and ignores that it has a powerful effect. To me personally it does not have enough weight to overcome the cost of getting to it, but that's not always going to be the case.

Also, I was under the impression that you find Guard Stance worthless in general, and you tag Guard Stance as a tanking Skill. Why visit the single specific thread where Guard Stance is going to come up a lot since Guard Stance does harden your defenses and change the method of tanking you can utilize? You may not like or use the Skill, but that doesn't mean you can't entertain using it and figuring out in which contexts it would work well.

Last thing, if it's disheartening or you see something you don't agree with, making a statement like this is...an attention grab at best. Why is Pretty Good not worth the effect? You proposed using items as a solution, I gave a situation in which Pretty Good beats out using items; it was a fair exchange of ideas. It doesn't mean one method is better than the other; it all depends on the player that makes the choice. Some of us may find the cost of SP too steep, some of use may really like the effect, some of us may pack Techs, some of us may just prefer to use items. It's all in the player's hands. We're here to make a debate, and what each player chooses is up to the individual. I'm not sure why you have this "one glove fits all" mentality; I generally assume that players know what's best for themselves, and I just try to propose ideas and theories that may help them understand their choices.

I did read the full statement, I just didn't quote it in full because I saw no reason to and it saved room. Hunter mains with tech subclasses are already pretty handicapped, unless they're really Bouncers maining Hunter for Fury Gear Boost. There was nothing to address there, so I didn't see it as necessary to quote it.

Pretty Good is a waste of SP. There's really no other way to look at it. Burn, Mirage, and Poison are negligible, Freeze is easy to avoid, Massive Hunter makes you immune to shock, and Panic is something you would want off ASAP unless you got it from a Sanctum turret, and using an item is factually faster than Pretty Good in this circumstance. Whether you use it or not, you have to have Pretty Bad priorities to believe Pretty Good is amazing.

I checked the thread because tanking is viable. Automate Halfline, Massive Hunter, Flash Guard, all of those are good skills and make you tanky. Guard Stance is by definition a bad skill. It reduces your damage output by a ridiculous amount and is not even better than the aforementioned skills. Fury Critical is part of the fury tree, but do people max that out when they say full Fury? Of course not. I had thought, since I play tanky Te/Hu, I might have something of value to either gain or give in this thread, but I hadn't anticipated that it's built on a foundation of awful damage output (for poor party play) and awful skill levels (necessitating these defensive skills) So this is my last post in it, since I do owe an explanation for why I bothered to peer into this thread in the first place.

I've nothing against choices and decisions and differences, but not when they're unobjectively bad. Every MPA will suffer the consequences for poor build planning. I don't see why I have to explain what's bad about that. If you have an idea, pick good options toward fulfilling it. Nobody would encourage Fury Critical for someone seeking pure damage output, likewise, nobody should encourage Guard Stance on a tank build. There are better skills for the same goal.

But yeah I'm not even going to pretend I'm going to ever change anyone's mindset here. Go ahead and worship Guard Stance, just keep your noses out of EQs. Thanks.

[Netro Shine]

But yeah I'm not even going to pretend I'm going to ever change anyone's mindset here. Go ahead and worship Guard Stance, just keep your noses out of EQs. Thanks.

I'm not sure when anybody worshiped Guard Stance, but hopefully we can keep this thread on topic from now on and have legitimate debates without people consistently knocking Guard Stance since it's not actually supposed to be the definitive subject here...

Let me ask an actual question: What would everyone consider the best weapon type for tanking currently in the game? Given all weapons have their own compelling reasons to use them, what are some of everyones' choices and why? I've been using a bit of everything and outside of Dual Blades making for excellent dodge tanking (because aggro grab, Photon Blade Fever and dodge forever), I haven't really found a suitable style mainly with Hunter weapons.

I've been using mainly Katanas and Dual Blades, but doing the same thing over and over again gets pretty stagnant, so I was looking for something new and interesting to try out.

[Evangelion X.XX]

For tanking, I'd say anything that has a Potential that gives back HP like Elder Pain or Chain Saw (Hunter Weps).

Edit: Celestial Bullet (Guld Milla) doesn't work anymore, the nerf is too strong.

[Nitro Vordex]

Let me ask an actual question: What would everyone consider the best weapon type for tanking currently in the game? Given all weapons have their own compelling reasons to use them, what are some of everyones' choices and why? I've been using a bit of everything and outside of Dual Blades making for excellent dodge tanking (because aggro grab, Photon Blade Fever and dodge forever), I haven't really found a suitable style mainly with Hunter weapons.

I've been using mainly Katanas and Dual Blades, but doing the same thing over and over again gets pretty stagnant, so I was looking for something new and interesting to try out.

I always figured Swords were best for tanking, especially now that we have the 360 guard skill. Grabs or disruptions are good on swords, though I'm not entirely sure if that's what you would want to go for, as it might disrupt the party's damage output.

[Omega-z]

In my opinion for weapons I'd say Wands ( more resistances ) then Swords ( blocking and other supports ) and then any weapon that has the HP absorbing or Knock back resistance.

[wargandi]

Swords for me with the "All Guard skill" and for me who tanks I like enrage stance mainly for more damage without taking away points in my defensive side of tree just to add it to fury stance. more damage I have the better aggro control I have with warcry and warbrave.

[Achelousaurus]

Actually, Guard Stance itself not protecting against ranged or tech attacks kills tank hu for me.
The options are spread far too thin to make a realy good tank build.
Cause at the moment I got 2 fury subs, one with all points in s-atk up and one with maxed flash guard and 7 points (21% ) in flash tech guard. Plus maxed IW and 1 point in NGU.

That's a semi-tanky sub plus full fury and the only more defense a tank build has is a few more points into guard and using guard stance for additional 25% s-atk res.
But it misses out on all the fury damage.
Yeah, I have to shave off some points for main hu and all but no matter what tank hu build I come up with atm, it always feels subpar cause the defense boosts are not big enough compared to the loss of fury stance.

Sega should distribute the boosts of Flash guards and Absorption to 5 point skills. Then We could get a truly significant amount of defense and some guard stance only options like GS Advance on a tank.

PS: of course you can use an item to remove a status, but it takes forever and you can get hit like 3 times during the animation (5 or more times in ult).
Pretty Good might not be amazing but it has its uses.
Just stupid that you have to waste 2 points to even get there from guard stance and 3 more if you don't use guard stance.

Trees got cleaned up nicely but in some cases we still have the problem that we have to waste skill points. Also the case for a number of other classes and not to mention the bullshit of having to pay 3-5 points up front for pointless stat boosts.

[Netro Shine]

I guess I could try out the good old drain tank with Swords, top of the line HP, and Elder Pain or Chain Sawd (if it happens into my possession). Now that I think about it, I've never tried out the build because my buddy I usually play with has used that build since the beginning before HP drain was even a thing. It may prove fun, I guess we'll see.

I'm a fan of the reduction of SP requirement for Absorption. It's a very interesting Skill, but it naturally becomes a waste of SP if you go into an EQ like Falz Loser, or when you step into a boss fight like Vardha, but when you hop in a boss fight with mobs, it becomes "Look, you hit me, so I'm going to go murder your buddies, I'll BRB." I dunno, I really like the Skill, and I guess there's always what my Fighter buddy does; he has Twin Daggers with Sacrificial Inspiration, and since if you're taking Flash Guard, Automate Halfine, or Massive Hunter, you have to take Guard Stance to get there, if he gets low on HP, he'll fire Guard Stance, murder some stuff, then go back to Fury Stance. You gain at least 15% HP per kill with Sacrificial Inspiration and you only sacrifice damage when you pop on Guard Stance to recover. Makes those 3 SP you put in as a requisite useful, especially since Sacrificial Inspiration gives you 15% for Level 1, whereas Absorption gives you 10% for 10 SP. I think relying on the specific weapons beats out the SP investment by a long shot in this case. Using 5 SP wouldn't make it super appealing, but it would go towards fixing that gap.

With regards to Guard Stance and the Flash Guard Skills, I really do wish that SEGA would stop hiding our S/R/T Resistances from us. Rebalance the resistances afforded by these Skills and adjust the Skill Tree so that the entire tree acts as a single layer of resistance. This would mean that the effects of the resistances are additive, so taking full Guard Stance and Flash Guard would be 75% Strike Resist, 40% Range Resist, 30% Tech Resist completely passively. You could take that a step further and delegate more defenses into Guard Stance at base and remove some of the effectiveness of Flash Guard if you wanted to encourage players to use Guard/JA Bonus instead of Fury/Flash.

All in all, I'm more of a fan of the Skills that augment some base skills in some interesting way, like Absorption modifies Guard Stance, Showtime Star, One More Time, and Toughness Time all modify Showtime, Rapid Shoot Advance modifies Rapid Shoot, or Combat Escape modifies Katana Combat. The listed Skills confer some effect that augments the Skill in a way that may either bolster its effectiveness or alter the circumstances in which the base Skill can be used, which currently in most cases allows you to optimize the Skill for more damage in a less evident or more tricky fashion. In addition, choices like One More Time or Toughness Time can prove exceptionally interesting since if you don't get hit a lot, One More Time becomes super appealing and Toughness Time will end up as dead SP, while if you do get hit a lot, Toughness Time will mitigate your gear drain and One More Time will end up as dead SP, so there's some actual incentive to consider how you play, the situations you'll frequently be in, and which Skill applies to you more. What I would really like to see are the straight offense and defense augmentations under Fury Stance and Guard Stance replaced by Skills similar to this, where there are a lot more choices depending on how you want to play, and suddenly building for DPS depends more on your level of Skill rather than looking at some guide and building some super strict way. We shouldn't be desperately trying to mitigate damage loss with Guard Stance; naturally Guard should do less damage than Fury, but the system SEGA has implemented makes the whole situation far too one-sided (multiplicative damage bonuses and diminishing damage resistance). Sadly, adjustments like that would take years to consider, develop, test, and implement and with the game already snagging lots of money and audiences fairly complacent with the current system, such drastic change likely will not come unless something pushes SEGA into a real corner.