With Ironbreaker currently sitting at 15, I’ve a little experience in both Tier 1 and Tier 2 scenario PvP, along with the comparison that can be made with my Marauder. As with my previous post, this will be interspersed with random scoreboard screenshots, as per my ego dictates.

Starting off at rank 4 or so, I have to say I felt pretty useless as an Ironbreaker. Healers and damage classes have their roles and abilities to perform them clearly defined from the beginning of the game. However as a tank I found I started with a series of mediocre damage moves, and nothing that made me feel very tanky. I basically just ran around with a two handed axe trying to chop people’s kneecaps. This proved vastly ineffective some matches, and slightly better in other matches when the opposition were unorganised and a healer decided to take pity on me.

I ended up avoiding scenarios until about rank 10, where things started to pick up. By this point I still wasn’t feeling very tank like, but being higher for the bracket and having a wider selection of skills made me a little angry powerhouse. Slapping your Oathfriend ability on whoever happens to be getting the snot beaten out of them helps keep your grudges high. Not that keeping your grudge level at 100 is ever hard when in combat anyway. Good matches in the later part of the Tier 12 bracket frequently ended in me topping the scoreboard, whatever metric I chose to look at.

At this point I was still thinking in a similar mindset to my Marauder; try and get lots of kills and do lots of damage. Yes I’d put more of a focus on protecting the healers if I saw someone break through our lines and attack them, but I still didn’t really have many tools to do much about it, aside from taunt.The only class that was consistently out damaging me was Bright Wizards, but then that’s not a surprise is it.

Moving onto Tier 2…

This coincided with my decision to try out sword and board (or axe and board in this case) rather than the two handed weapons. My main motivation for this was actually wanting to try out the shield skills, which had been sitting on my bar for a few levels and I’d never tried. In PvE questing I found the switch not to slow me down much, at least I haven’t noticed it so far.

I now have a series of skills that make me feel more like a tank, I won’t name them all (because I don’t remember the names) but in essence:
- Oathfriend – good for keeping my grudges up, as mentioned
- Guard – protect your squishy, or the guy carrying the scenario objective. Or maybe that Warrior Priest that you hope might heal you but never does
- Shield of Reprisal – activates on parry, knocks the opponent down for a couple of seconds
- The other shield ability (told you wouldn’t remember all the names) which allows you to swipe up to 3 opponents
- Away with ye’ – Knock someone down, 20 sec recast (I think)
- Hold the line – Increases block and disrupt chance for yourself and all team members who are behind you, good to use when moving forwards (if you remember to)

All these skills enable me to much better do the job that I’m supposed to be doing; protecting squishies, holding the line, generally making a nuisance of myself, AND dishing out whatever damage I can. This has lead me to change my focus a little. My focus has been more on protecting people and holding our lines, than trying to kill people myself. Often this involves knocking down and harassing the tanks or melee DPSers that are trying to kill our healers. I find that if I get my hands on a squishie I can dispatch them quite quickly too, so annoying the enemy healers myself also seems to be a valid tactic.

This new focus, combined with my low level for the bracket, and move to one handed weapons, has lead to be sitting much lower down in the tables as far as kills and damage goes. However In the matches that have gone well, I’ve still felt like I was doing a very useful job. After playing a DPS character though it feels slightly weird; you don’t have a metric on that scoreboard that you can use to measure how good your performance was. Yes I know that even for melee DPS characters if you’re just sniping killing blows, or doing loads of AOE damage without ever actually killing anyone you might end up topping the scoreboard without actually helping your team that much, but at least you have some figures on the board to show in most cases that you’re doing well. It’s both a blessing and a curse; I never feel like I really know if I’m doing well compares to other tanks, but at the same time I don’t feel the need to try and beat everyone in quite the same way. Essentially if you’re protecting the right people and doing the right things your team will win (in most cases) and people will recognise you did a good job. That seems to be about the closest you can get to knowing you did the “tanking” part of your job right.

To sum up my general strategy right now; slap Oathfriend on Warrior Priest, melee DPS or other tank, guard a healer, then head to the front lines and simultaneously try and stop the enemy getting through ours, while trying to get my hands on any squishies that venture too close.

In conclusion; Ironbreaker PvP just got fun!