Table of Content

1. Introduction

2. Attributes & Stats

3. Equipment

4. Enchantment

5.1 Single Target Tanking

5.2 Group Tanking (Control)

5.3 Group Tanking (AoE)

5.4 Ranged Tanking

5.5 Kite Tanking

5.6 Untankable Tanking

6. Tanking Tactics

7. Add-Ons

Changelist

(19/4): Restructured guide. Added new section about "enchantment glyphs".

1. INTRODUCTION

Perhaps it's the nature of ESO class system, but I'm seeing more hybrids and jack of all trades than builds dedicated purely to tanking and nothing else. This is a guide dedicated purely to tanking both 4-man groups and raid bosses. The goal is to maximise survivability and utility during all possible situations. A basic understanding of tanking and game mechanics in ESO is expected.

Please be aware that the skill descriptions on ESOHead are in some cases incorrect.

Since the appropriate skills for a tank in any given situation can change drastically, rather than trying to provide an optimal set of two ability bars in vain, I have changed this guide to provide a single ability bar for any given situation. You are recommended to equip the proper two bars depending on the situation; Wykkyd's Outfitter is highly useful. You are NOT expected to switch between weapon sets frequently during combat, or use switching weapon set as part of a combo. This is because weapon switch does not work very well, and its lag can be fairly unpredictable.

2. ATTRIBUTES & STATS

0 Magicka / 49 Health / 0 Stamina

0 Magicka / 30 Health / 19 Stamina

There isn't any hard and fast rule when it comes to attribute distribution.

Health: With 49 points in health, you will have 1955 HP while naked at VR10. This gives you a lot of options when it comes to equipment choices, since you do not need a full set of HP gear to reach the HP soft cap of 2500. I do not recommend going beyond the soft cap. The damage in ESO tend to be spiky rather than endurance-based, so a large effective health pool is important. Damage shields ameliorate this problem slightly, but until their targeting issues are resolved it's a good idea not to rely on healers' damage shields too much.

Health Regen: While this stat can save your healer some magicka, it offers little help against burst damage and does not provide any utility purpose. It also has a fairly low cap of 50, so stacking this stat may render abilities which multiply HP regen less meaningful (i.e. Restoring Aura), since the extra regen would be affected by diminishing return.

Stamina: Once you are near/at the HP soft cap, or at whichever level of HP you feel comfortable with for your current content, it will be more worthwhile to invest in Stamina. Additional resource for blocking, spell absorb, stun break, interrupt and roll will improve your effective health pool, survivability and utility. When you start blocking, stamina effectively becomes your second health pool. You will want a large enough pool to ensure that you can survive blocking some burst damage.

Stamina Regen: This stat is just as important as Stamina. Stamina merely allows you to survive bursts, but regen allows you to survive the fight.

Magicka: It's relatively less worthwhile to invest in Magicka, which under this build only improves your AoE bursting capabilities and utility.

Magicka Regen: This stat is generally a bit more useful than pure Magicka, since none of your abilities should be spammed in non-AoE encounters.

Block Cost: This stat is similar to stamina purely from a blocking perspective. However, since it doesn't help you break more stuns, make more rolls or use more stam abilities, and since you won't be capping your stamina, this stat is slightly less meaningful.

A simple graph of priority:

HP (before soft cap) > Stamina Regen = Stamina > Block Cost > Magicka Regen > Magicka > HP Regen > HP (post soft cap)

3. EQUIPMENT

5 pieces of Heavy Armour for Bracing. The 20% reduced cost of blocking is significant.

2 pieces of Light Armour for passives. Why am I recommending Light instead of Medium after all that praises surrounding Stamina? It's simply because Light Armour passives offer magicka regen, reduced magicka cost and spell resist, all of which are beneficial to tanking. Medium Armour on the other hand offers only stamina regen.

You shouldn't be worried about armour value, since it will easily reach the soft cap.

Traits: Infused for armour; Powered/Defending/Infused for weapon.

Crafted Sets: Spectre's Eye (5p) and Eyes of Mara (3p) if spell resist not capped or Twilight's Embrace (3p).

4. ENCHANTMENT

Here is a useful page containing the enchanting glyphs.

Armour Glyph:

Basic stamina/health/magicka glyphs. Apply based on stat priority/softcaps.

Weapon Glyph:

Glyph of Hardening > Glyph of Weakening > Glyph of Crushing.

Ideally some of your DPS should already have Weakening and Crushing.

Jewelry Glyph:

Glyph of Decrease Physical Harm or Glyph of Decrease Spell Harm IF your armour and spell resistance are not soft-capped.

Glyph of Frost/Fire/Shock/Poison/Disease Resist on situational rings/amulet against bosses who heavily use those elements.

Glyph of Shielding for melee bosses and all other situations.

5.1 SINGLE TARGET TANKING

This bar is designed for tanking single or few target boss encounters at melee range. The focus is on maintaining aggro, interrupting cast and sustainable survivability.

INNER BEAST

I have replaced 1H/S taunt with this taunt, since it uses magicka, allowing you to save more stamina for blocking/debuffing.

DEEP SLASH

This is quite a costly ability, but the debuff it applies cannot be ignored. A flat out 15% damage reduction to both physical and spell damage inflicted by a boss is simply too strong. Apply this debuff every 12 seconds, if your stamina allows.

ABSORB MAGIC

This is certainly more effective than blocking spells. The other variant only stands out in trash pulls, while bosses and some elites will be immune to stun. The Absorb Magic variant theoretically allows you to survive for twice as long. With unmorphed Defensive Posture or the other variant, in order to remain at the same amount of health you will have to block every spell. You will have no time between blocks to regen, you'll run out of stamina and die. With Absorb Magic, you can simply block every second spell to maintain the same amount of health. Skip the first block, and let the second block heal you back to full, rinse and repeat. There will be twice as much time between blocks for stamina regen.

VAMPIRE'S BANE

This ability, combined with the passive Illuminate (increased spell resist if target is affected), will give you a 7.8s buff (with duration passives) to spell resist against the affected target every time you throw it onto a boss.

RESTORING FOCUS or SPIKED BONE SHIELD or UNSTOPPABLE

Both abilities offer extra survivability. Stats-wise, Restoring Focus is superior. However, Restoring Focus is not useful in boss encounters where you have to move all the time to chase down the boss, dodge AoEs, etc. Therefore, slot Restoring Focus against primarily stationary bosses, and slot Spiked Bone Shield in boss fights where you can't stay stationary. Ironically, many of the fights where spell resistance is more useful tend to be fights where you have to dodge magical AoEs. Unstoppable is a viable alternative to Spiked Bone Shield if you have a lot of stamina. It offers better stats than Spiked Bone Shield, but it uses stamina. Therefore, its usage will require a lot more care.

SOLAR DISTURBANCE or FLAWLESS DAWNBREAKER or STURDY HORN

The 30% damage reduction can help you survive through some boss bursts. Remembrance is not suitable, since channeling any spell as a tank is not advisable. Empowering Sweep is not meaningful, due to low number of targets and armour soft cap. Flawless Dawnbreaker is always a very neutral choice, if damage mitigation is not too much of a concern. Sturdy Horn increases the party's survivability (+20% max HP), and can be especially useful if the boss plans on throwing out unavoidable party-wide damage.

5.2 GROUP TANKING (CONTROL)

This bar is designed to deal with groups of strong enemies who need to be controlled and focused down, i.e. where burst AoE simply doesn't work. Templar doesn't have a lot of CC, so the goal here is to control the enemies not CCed, and rely on your team members to CC the rest. Of course, don't break CCs!

PIERCE ARMOR or RANSACK

It taunts and deals decent damage. Ransack is a very nice ability, since the armour it provides is quite significant. It's especially useful when your armour is some distance below the soft cap, or if armour debuffs are present in the encounter. However, at some point in time you will have enough gear that the bonus armour provided by Ransack will simply disappear into the soft cap. Therefore, it's worthwhile to sacrifice a couple % of damage reduction for some utility to the rest of the group. It's also somewhat notable that as a result of lower spell resist, a healer can heal you a bit more with the resto staff heavy attack.

INNER BEAST

A second ranged taunt. It uses mana, so it allows you to use both stamina and magicka to taunt a small handful of uncontrolled enemies.

POWER SLAM

This is the only long duration CC available to Templar tanks. Since a good 1/3 of the skills are AoE in this game, you will probably only get to use it on isolated ranged targets. The ESOHead description is incorrect, since the disorientation effect (think "sleep" effect in other MMOs; break on damage) of the morphed Power Slam lasts 15 secs.

ABSORB MAGIC or TOPPLING CHARGE

Absorb the spells of uncontrolled casters and buff your block, or slot Toppling Charge to interrupt those spells and to stun/chase down melee enemies breaking out of CCs.

BLINDING FLASHES

Notice the small radius. The blinding variant allows you to run around while the ability is active to set off balance a potentially more enemies. When an enemy is off balanced, a heavy attack can knock them down. Make sure to communicate this to your team so that a good number of enemies can be knocked down during the ability. If an enemy gets back up before the ability is over, the Blinding variant will apply off balance to those enemies again.

SOUL ASSAULT or STURDY HORN or REVIVING BARRIER

Anything that doesn't break CC is fine. This can be a limited range AoE like Radial Sweep, single target abilities or instant-cast buff abilities.

5.3 GROUP TANKING (AOE)

This bar is designed to deal with groups of weaker enemies who can be burned down via AoE. Relatively speaking, of course, since a group of enemies can still easily nuke you down in seconds. Your goal here is to grab all enemies' attention and survive for that few seconds while your DPS burn the group down. LoS pull to gather all the enemies together is essential. CC every pull is slower, but it's always safer.

Grab attention, buff yourself up, hold down block and hope for the best. You won't be able to block for more than a few seconds before running out of stamina, but you are never expected to survive for longer than that anyway if your DPS isn't finished by then.

SOLAR BARRAGE

Decent range AoE that triggers Illuminate passive against a potentially large number of enemies. Use this to grab attention before other abilities, and apply buff after other abilities.

UNSTOPPABLE

Buff to survivability. Use this sparingly since you want to save the stamina for blocking.

RADIANT WARD

Use this when your mana is about to run out. Buy yourself a bit of time.

RESTORING FOCUS

More buff to survivability.

BLINDING FLASHES

Survivability. Also allows your team to exploit the enemies with knockdowns.

SOLAR DISTURBANCE

The 30% damage reduction is survivability.

5.4 RANGED TANKING

This bar is designed to deal with ranged bosses who cannot be effectively tanked at melee range, i.e. ranged bosses with so many AoE that's inadvisable to stay at melee range. Note that this bar is designed to deal with ranged bosses that can still be taunted. You will want to maintain the boss's attention, apply magicka buff and alternate between blocking and stamina buff to minimise damage intake.

INNER BEAST

Ranged taunt for ranged tank.

UNSTOPPABLE

Stamina-reliant buff that doesn't require you to be stationary.

ABSORB MAGIC

Essential against caster bosses who use projectile spells. You can practically tank without a healer in the right fights. Also buffs your block a little when you have to block non-projectile spells and physical ranged attacks.

SPIKED BONE SHIELD or VAMPIRE'S BANE

Use Spiked Bone Shield if it's a physical ranged boss. Use Vampire's Bane, which is cheaper resource-wise, if it's a caster ranged boss.

HONOR THE DEAD

One of the most common things to happen in a ranged fight against an AoE spamming boss is that it's very likely to be out of your healer's range. You and your healer should attempt to avoid this, but in the event you are out of range, you might as well dump some magicka on this heal.

SOLAR DISTURBANCE or STURDY HORN or REVIVING BARRIER

A nice ranged ultimate that offers survivability. If the boss moves around too much, consider using a buff-based ultimate like Sturdy Horn.

5.5 KITE TANKING

This bar is designed to deal with bosses you simply have to kite, whether due to impossibly high melee damage or AoEs that move with the boss. Note that bosses are immune to knock backs, snares, stuns, etc. You want to keep the boss taunted, and use stamina ability and rolls to get away from the boss. If your kiting fails, dump magicka to survive, create distance again and resume kiting. Do not back peddle.

INNER BEAST

Ranged taunt for kiting tank.

VENOM ARROW

Ranged interrupt. Only use if you need to interrupt; don't use it for damage.

MAGNUM SHOT

This is practically the only way for a Templar tank to create distance between himself and a boss. Save your stamina for this ability and roll dodge.

SPIKED BONE SHIELD

When kiting fails and you are about to get hit.

RADIANT WARD

When kiting fails and you are about to get hit.

REVIVING BARRIER or STURDY HORN

There isn't a lot you can do in terms of ultimates when you are kiting.

5.6 UNTANKABLE TANKING

There are situations where the boss encounter is simply designed without a tank in mind. The boss would be immune to taunt and randomly target someone every few seconds. In this situation, you might as well switch to a bow or resto staff build and help out with damage, healing or utility (i.e. cleansing and interrupts).

6. TANKING TACTICS

Here I will cover some tactics both common in MMOs and unique in ESO. This section is hugely WIP, and I will merely post what happen to cross my mind or catch my attention. First of all, the combat basics.

Line-of-Sight Pull

In ESO dungeons, there are many huge packs composed of a mix of melee and ranged enemies. Line-of-Sight pull is more useful than ever. First, ask your party to wait behind a wall or around a corner. Then you aggro the pack, and run back to where your party is waiting. Since ranged enemies cannot shoot through corners, they'll have to come around the corner and end up grouped together with the melee enemies. The party can then AoE them all down in one fell swoop.

When to Block?

Block has a fixed cost (default 20% of base stam) and a fixed amount of damage reduction (default 50%) no matter what kind of attack you block. What this means is that if you block a large number of weak attacks, you won't mitigate a lot of damage, and you will waste a lot of stamina. On the other hand blocking a heavy attack can mitigate a lot of damage and cost the same amount of stamina. In general, you will always want to ensure that you have enough stamina to block a boss's heavy attack (yellow sparkles). Other times, bosses will still hit you for quite a lot with regular attacks, so you will still want to block whenever your health is low and your stamina is available. Finally, contrary to popular belief, holding up the shield does not inhibit your stamina regen.

When to Roll?

Rolling uses up so much stamina that unless the alternative is dying (or close to), you should avoid rolling. As long as you pay attention, most boss AoEs can be avoided simply via running or sprinting. It's even worthwhile to block and back away if it's a physical AoE and you cannot get out in time.

When to Bash?

Mostly to interrupt, but Shield Bash with passives is actually a very potent damage dealer. Feel free to bash a boss for some extra damage if you are simply swimming in stamina. Bash is especially useful when you are swapping aggro with another tank, where you can contribute to damage with Bash instead of drawing aggro with a taunt attack. Consider preparing a set of "increase bash damage" rings and amulet for PvP and soloing.

ESO Aggro System

The short answer is that there isn't a well-defined system. Taunt usually works, but don't expect to always keep the aggro after the taunt's duration. It's generally a good idea to regularly apply Ransack/Pierce Armor in order to maintain both the taunt and the buff/debuff. Most bosses have aggro resetting mechanics, e.g. charging off at a random player, and these mechanics can trigger even if they were under the effect of taunt. In group fights, don't expect to grab all the enemies' attention even with LoS pulls. Focus on controlling the most powerful and dangerous enemies with taunts and CCs.

Potions

Potions are very useful. Always take some stamina potions. If you have to kite, use speed potions. The Alchemy crafting passive that increases potion duration will truly shine compared to all other crafting professions in terms of gameplay benefits.

7. ADD-ONS

I highly recommend using Wykkyd's Outfitter together with Wykkyd's base framework's macros in order to switch between various sets of ability bars suitable for different situations outside combat.

Aside from that, any UI add-on that displays value & percentage of resource bars and lists buffs & debuffs on self and target should be sufficient. i.e. Foundry Tactical Combat or WarLegend HUD