Tank Busters Mitigation

[Kazumac]

Your healers need to be absolutely attentive in that fight for the tank buster. I have always loved the trial since it came out. For the moderate player it was a nice dps check mixed with frequent tank busters and healing. If you are being attentive and using your cooldowns, the healers must also prepare. I mained a SCH back at 50 and yes I made sure my tank had an adlo. If you are topped off and only dropping to 3K after a tank buster and still manage to die due to lack of healing, it might be a healer thing too.

[Ashkendor]

It depends on the fight that you are doing like if you do Sephirot EX you can easily survive his phase 1 tank buster just using Rampart, Foresight, and Sentinel alone. Though I do pop Awareness with Rampart just to insure that I don't get screwed over if the game decides to give him a crit.

Tankbusters can't crit. Followup autoattacks can, though. You're better off pairing Awareness with Bulwark since you can't block crits. Also, abuse the ever-living hell out of Sheltron in Sephirot EX since almost everything in there is physical damage.

The tank buster in Odin is a magic attack so foresight and bulwark are useless against it. All you have as a PLD is rampart, sentinel, hallowed ground and stoneskin.

Er no, you can block/parry it. It's physical.

Keep in mind that Odin is designed for two tanks, if you're doing it at the appropriate level or synced a tank swap may be in order. Rampart + stoneskin > sentinel > hallowed ground > rampart + stoneskin > tank swap > let them do their CD rotation > swap again.

Yep, nothing wrong with a tank swap if you're running out of cd's. Just remember to abuse Rampart's short cooldown!

[Fernosaur]

Stoneskin is your friend in that fight if you run out of cooldowns. Also, on Odin specifically it's nice to save Hallowed Ground for the part in which the raidwide Bleeding effect is up and you get Sangetall. It will give healers a LOT of breathing room. Just remember to let them know through a macro if you're in DF.

Tank Busters in general are meant to be scary moves, but even a single competent healer can help you out a lot. They're actually designed to be a healer+tank mechanic. Tank has to save cooldowns for it, while healers MUST top the tank off before the TB. Otherwise it's very likely you won't make it, since a single TB will usually take away around 75% of your HP with a low mitigation cooldown, but healers should also be ready Adloquium, Nocturnal Field or Stoneskin from WHM, even though for WHM is better to just time their healing so that the damage you recieve is nullified by the time you get hit.

tl;dr: you're doing fine, TBs are made to do a lot of damage, so don't be scared. It's your job to get hit to the face! (but also to try and mitigate those hits :P)

[SpookyGhost]

Sentinel -> Rampart -> Hallowed -> Sentinel -> Rampart -> tank swap. I haven't done Odin in forever, though, so it might be better to go Rampart -> Sentinel -> Hallowed -> Rampart if the tankbusters are too close together. I do remember Odin sucking when I was leveling my alt in 3.0 though, but I was also a DRK so.

Alternatively, you could do what I ended up doing, and grab random lvl 60 people to undersize it.

[Cabalabob]

Wrong, you can block or parry Sangetall.

Went in to see, you're right it's been a while since I've done it and I was thinking of the AoE he does before the tank buster.

[JackFross]

People here seem to be wildly underestimating Foresight.

Foresight by itself isn't really ever enough to mitigate a tank buster well, it gives 20% defense but in reality 20% defense isn't really anywhere close to a flat 20% damage reduction like a real CD is.

This implication is flat wrong in 3.x. It may have been a bit accurate before 3.0 made defense a stat that actually means something, finally, but all of the research on Foresight has proven this to be an inaccurate assessment of how effective Foresight is for physical mitigation, now.

My Paladin currently has 2524 Defense with Protect and 3029 with Foresight on top. According to calculations done in early 3.0, hitting this cooldown is ~15.5% physical damage mitigation. I would say that's actually significant. It's certainly weaker than Rampart, but it's a lot closer than you're implying.

Comparison of different physical tank buster mitigations:
ShO+Sen+Shel = .8*.6*.77 = ~36.9% damage taken
ShO+Ramp+Shel = .8*.8*.77 = ~49.3% damage taken
ShO+Fore+Shel = .8*.845*.77 = ~52.1% damage taken
ShO+Shel = .8*.77 = ~61.6% damage taken

So yeah, it's clearly not better than Rampart, but it's absolutely not worthless. Implying it's "not a real CD" is silly. Would you say Dark Mind is "not a real CD" without Dark Arts? It's essentially the Magical equivalent to Foresight at current gear levels.


If you're eating physical tank busters, Foresight should -absolutely- be part of your CD rotation. If it isn't, you're doing it wrong.

[Syzygian]

Foresight

+1. Foresight is a legit cooldown. Especially on DRK, its a valuable piece of physical mitigation. During early progression on Sephex I mitigated the 3rd Chesed with it and Dark Dance/Conva, and in the final phase, I'd use it on the first tower along with DA Dark Mind for the Da'at, and time Shadow Wall to mitigate both on the second tower+Da'at.

TLDR Foresight is a pretty cool guy. Put the haterade back in the fridge.

[KorenA]

Foresight is great cd now because it's based off your def not, pre hw we didn't have a lot of def for to to really help vs busters without help of another cd. It's still great to use, Sheltron +fore is love

[Ashkendor]

+1. Foresight is a legit cooldown. Especially on DRK, its a valuable piece of physical mitigation. During early progression on Sephex I mitigated the 3rd Chesed with it and Dark Dance/Conva, and in the final phase, I'd use it on the first tower along with DA Dark Mind for the Da'at, and time Shadow Wall to mitigate both on the second tower+Da'at.

TLDR Foresight is a pretty cool guy. Put the haterade back in the fridge.

I use Foresight + Sheltron on the 3rd Chesed, works like a charm. :3

[MeoTwister5]

I personally pair Foresight with Conva. In my experience it mitigates more than a Rampart factoring the improved healing, but of course 2 CDs doing doing a little better than 1 isn't exactly efficient.