Stone cold iceden tank

Armor Types

Gear and Item Set Info

Monster set: Engine Guardian medium head, heavy shoulders or the other way round, it doesn't matter - this set is great for sustain, it triggers every few skills and  channels either health, magicka or stamina restore. We can use all of these resources. Alternatives if you don't need the sustain would be Thurvokun for damage reduction or Blood Spawn for even more ultigen.

Claw of Yolnakhriin: Chest, Legs, Hands, Feet plus 1 jewelry piece (perfected if you have it, but it doesn't matter if not). This provides a group damange buff and the other stats are all good tanking stats anyway.

Master Architect: Waist, 2 x jewelry pieces, back bar frost staff. This provides Major Slayer whenever we use our warhorn. War Machine is equally acceptable, you will then need the monster set to be H / L rather than H / M and you might want to tweak your attributes a bit.

Wrath of Elements: Front bar frost staff. This drops in Vateshran Hollows, you can use the perfected version if you have it but it's really not necessary. You're going to be using ele drain to debuff the boss anyway, and this adds a nice DOT to the boss plus any adds that touch the tether.

Enchantments and traits: infused, prismatic defence on large body pieces, sturdy with health on small pieces (you can use prismatic on everything if you like). 2 infused jewelry pieces, one with reduce block cost enchant, the other with magicka recovery; the third piece can be infused, triune or harmony and either block cost reduction, reduce spell cost or magicka recovery, to suit your style. Back bar frost staff should be infused crusher, front bar charged with frost damage glyph.

General Info

This is a dual frost staff warden tank aimed at maximiing group support, so both destro staves need to be frost staves. It's aimed mainly at dungeon content.

Food: use bewitched sugar skulls if you have them, otherwise purple tri-stat food.

Potions: use crown tri-restoration potions or crafted tri-stat potions. You can use them on cooldown if you like to keep your recovery stats very high but I just use them as an oh shit button if I'm running out of resources.

The aim of this build is to maximise group support so let's take a look:

The key of this build is using Master Architect to provide Major Slayer every time you blow your war horn. Aggressive Horn is a massive damage buff in its own right and combined with Major Slayer it provides a window for huge damage. It's great in any fight but especially so in bursty ones like Grobull the Transmuted.

To maximise this we want to maximise our ultimate generation. Be a Nord, it's the best tanking race anyway but the ultimate generation passive is perfect for this. On top of that, use shimmering shield to proc major heroism every time you absorb a projectile. The shield lasts for 6s and the heroism lasts for 6s each time a projectile is absorbed so from one cast you get up to 12s of major heroism. You could also use Blood Spawn to get even more ultimate generation but we already have a lot, so I prefer Engine Guardian for the sustain overall.

Use expansive frost cloak to provide the whole group with major resistance buffs. You could use balance for extra duration on your own resistance buff and magicka restore, but it's not as good for buffing the group.

Use budding seeds to provide a heal over time. It's not much of a heal but it procs minor toughness because of the maturation passive for an extra 10% max health for the healed player. Alternatively you can use enchanted growth or leeching vines if you prefer, these don't need aiming as carefully.

Use polar wind for a massive burst heal, plus it also burst heals the lowest health player near to you. The range isn't great but this is great for rescuing dds. Between these two skills, especially polar wind, you can provide a lot of healing to the group which is great if you're running with 3 dds and no healer.

Use shimmering shield to protect you from projectiles but mainly to proc major heroism for colossal ultimate generation.

As this is a frost staff build you don't provide an armour debuff by taunting enemies like you would with pierce armour, so we need to use ele drain. Using the Vateshran's frost staff adds on a nice strong (and free!) DOT to this skill. Ele drain also provides group magicka sustain by applying magickasteal to the enemy.

Use bull netch for stamina restore. I do *not* put skill points in tri focus with this build, partly because it can get expensive taking the skill points out again if you want to swap between this and traditional sword and board tanking, but also because I want blocking to cost stamina and not prevent magicka recovery, as magicka is so vital for all the utility skills. So you need to use bull netch to restore stamina (spam it if you have to). Other means of stamina restore are from potions and from synergies, especially shards and orbs, so you need to make sure that your stamina pool is marginally higher than your magicka pool so that shards and orbs restore stamina. This is where making the third jewelry piece harmony trait can help.

Finally the usual tanking utilities of pulling enemies and immobilising them are provided using frozen device and impaling shards. Frozen device takes a bit of getting used to if you're coming from a DK with chains, but it allows pre-positioning of the portals and is great once you get used to it.

For the front bar ultimate I mainly use temporal guard, this passively mitigates damage by giving the minor protection buff. If you find you need more regen or you are in a high group damage situation you could slot refreshing barrier instead, this provides a big boost to magicka recovery through the Support passives and also a massive group shield if you need it (though it won't proc major slayer as Master Architect is only on the back bar).

The build isn't quite as tough as the most bombproof sword 'n board tanks, it lacks the resistance from the shield, but still sits around 30k resists buffed which is fine.

Champion Point Tips

Pick appropriate content-specific red and green tank CP from the ESO-U page. For blue CP go somewhere in between healer and magicka DPS suggestions.

Build Rating