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No updates to any guides just yet, but I have been trying to do a lot of compilation and collating of the current state of tanking over on the main forums. (Because my primary cabal role is usually main tank.) Today, I simply present you with a few interesting tidbits that are not in the primary flow of opinion and information that most tanks see. Are these true? I don't know; I'm not in a position to test them for myself yet.

Allegation #1: Hit Rating is bugged and will actually cause more glances and evades if you go over 400-ish total Hit Rating. Remember, you might have as much as 300 Hit Rating just from your passive "World Domination" buff from PvP. If you feel like "why the hell am I glancing so much?", try actually dropping your hit rating below the reputed threshold for this reputed bug.

Allegation #2: Heal Tanking is possibly a strong method of hate generation in Nightmare dungeons. Especially if you use Blood as your healing weapon. Some players have posted interesting details from a few angles. For one, healers report frequently that Blood barriers seem to generate full hate for both the heal and the barrier component of the ability immediately upon casting it, and that the huge team-wide heal + barrier of Cold Blooded is especially prone to pull aggro right off a tank who is otherwise holding aggro fairly well. (Although I must report that my main healer never pulls off me with Cold Blooded, but I really stack a lot of hate multipliers.) For two, some tanks report they have good success with using healing not only to generate hate, but to even out their spike damage a bit. Third, and most intriguing, I've see several reports that Exquisite Corpse might be a wee bit broken in a good way. Apparently, EC will fully mitigate 50% of any attack that hits it. Even a huge attack, and the NM bosses can put out some really large attacks. So, for example, if an 8K boss attack hits your puny EC, they'll of course blow up the EC in that one single hit, but not before the EC barrier mitigates that 8K attack down to only 4K that actually gets through to you. Yes, I thought that might make you crook and eyebrow and go "huh?!". So what I wonder is whether a healtank setup with something like Chaos/Blood might actually be viable in NM dungeons (at least until Funcom decides to nerf EC or Cold Blooded). You'd use Cold-Blooded as your hate generator after the boss resets hate, and you'd use EC as a mitigation shield every time you knew a big hit might be coming. If you try this out, please report back!

Update: Player Krytical provided some excellent feedback about #2. Here ya go: