What Happened to the Fantasy of Playing A Tank?

Crusader
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From Blizzard Info Page:

Crusaders are unbending champions of faith and law. These living fortresses use impenetrable plate and towering shields to wade through scores of foes, leaving demonic bodies smoldering in their wake.

The thick of battle is unforgiving, but crusaders rush in without hesitation, relying on holy magic and heavy armor to guarantee victory. Well-trained crusaders are adept at deflecting attacks entirely, often shrugging off massive blows that would fell lesser combatants. If pressed, they can sacrifice speed and mobility for pure staying power.

Bone-crunching flails and wicked shields are perfect for melee, but crusaders are hardly limited to extinguishing evil at close range. When one of these divinely empowered warriors joins battle, blazing fire and blinding light follow, smiting entire packs of enemies who dare to resist judgment.

What happened to the idea of playing a mainstay frontline tank? I love the idea of a crusader, and Itā€™s my favorite class in D3, but lately I find myself a little frustrated that the idealized versions of the crusader I want to play arenā€™t exactly viable for anything above GR70.

The closest we get to viable front lining Crusader is a Rolandā€™s Sweep build. Iā€™ve been able to take it to GR 100-105 last season, but it puttered out as my teammates all started blowing by me faster than my tank and damage could keep up (Not to mention my mobility couldnā€™t ā€˜hangā€™ with the group).

The top builds are:
A wizard with a knife (Hevenā€™s fury build),
A Burst Wizard (Condemn build),
A short ranged wizard throwing destructo discs (LOD Blessed Shield).
A Wizard hurling merorites (Thorns Bombadier for farming).

In all three cases, you run around, praying not to get hit more than once, and blap only specific monsters with a glass cannon burst before running away from the group mobs and scurrying off like a wimp to the next specific elite pack.

Now Iā€™ve been playing around here in the off season with gear and builds to try other non-meta builds - to try and find a crusader that plays the way I want to - but havenā€™t been able to find anything that can push much higher than GR 40-45 before augments and super high gem levelsā€¦ which means these things will probably stop being effective sometime around GR70.

Iā€™ve tried doing an ā€œInvincible Block Crusaderā€ - but I have to give up too much in damage output and passive slots to get raw block percentages high enough for the character to feel tanky - and even at higher rifts I am still one shotted at GR 80 or higher. =(

Where is this coming from? Poorly scaling game mechanics.

Survivability at a certain point is no longer a matter of defensive attributes - it all turns over to your offensive capabilities. Your ability to spam attacks and hit multiple foes for increased life per hit - while (Or) staying at range - is the only way to survive anything above GR90 or so. Your attack speed and maneuverability (That and a ridiculous health total) has more to do with staying alive than any healing skill I can put on my bar, or block percentage chance I can stack off my legendries.

At a certain point - most builds give up on any reasonable defense in the hopes of simply out damaging the Greater Rift level their trying to get through. Their defense stats no longer matter at all - only if they can kill the monster before it can get an effective single attack through.

This - unfortunately - breaks the fantasy of playing a Heavy Armor Crusader. We donā€™t ā€œWadeā€ into the enemy hoard and duke it out. We pray to god and run by everything white in the hopes of finding and killing a blue before a stray missile finds us.

This disconnect between the fantasy of playing a Durable Heavy Hitter and the reality of current game mechanics is why I think Crusaders have been un-popular in the past. Last season they got a big uptick because they suddenly became more Wizzard than the Bazooka Wizard.

My question is this:

How to do we fix and correct this disconnect?

Is it a simple matter of moving certain legendaries around in the cube grouping? Changing up a few more legendary items to allow for increased block percentage (For use with Justice Lantern or The damage redux shield?). Or do we need to start tweaking skills and such?

We donā€™t have much in the way of support outside of mass grouping (But we donā€™t move fast enough to keep up with high level grifting parties AND handle pulls and groups).

Our healing and defensive buffs donā€™t scale with any other stat or have much in the way of augment gear (Holy bolt, Laws, Consecration)ā€¦

And we still need to do something about LOD phalanx builds. For the time and effort to get it up and running - it really does perform poorly above casual low level play. Perhaps give us a legendary shoulder that adds a small AOE effect to phalanx attacks? A buff to phalanx damage (like 10,000% to the akahnā€™s set?)

So yeah - this was a bit of a rant - but I would like to start a discussion on what we CAN do to try and re-align the fantasy of Playing a Sturdy - hard to kill - frontline tank there to support my teammates.

3 Likes
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While I get what you meanā€¦ Have you tried a Thorns Invoker build?

I personally donā€™t love it, but Iā€™m generally not a fan of elite hunter builds, so thatā€™s just me.

As to your questionā€¦

Giving them some better zdps options, would fill the ā€œtankā€ fantasy youā€™re looking for, though Iā€™m not exactly qualified to go into what theyā€™re missing due to my lack of experience with the class.

It certainty feels like Iā€™m tanking when I play a zdps Monk, so it might be nice for Saders to be a viable option too.

I think a lot of players wouldnā€™t mind shaking up the 4p meta either.

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Thorns invoker builds are usually sniper builds, you poke in to blap a mob or two while your belt of the trove wipes packs. You yo-yo a lot to prevent yourself from being surrounded, as you either only want to melee 2-3 monsters at a time, and let the trove thorns bombardment smash the rest. Above GR 80, it is still very much a glass cannon (like many of the other builds), and you are relying on your Akaratā€™s 2nd life and Indistructable passives to keep you alive. You run away and let those cool down in-between. Still one shot blaps. (I.E. The Wizard Hurling Metorites snarky commentā€¦) ^.^

Iā€™ve seen a few Monks play tank and support much better than a crusader can, since they stay mobile while attacking, and have better party skills Cough all the mantraā€™s

Perhaps we can let crusaders have all the laws and activate them untalented?

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This imo, would be a good start. Saders already have Condemn to vaccum mobs to tank, and are also able to drag enemies with their Steed Charge which are both great for a support.

Depends on how strong the Laws are compared to the Mantras, they would probably need to bring something else too.

For Monks, their main strength/niche is their group healing. Combined with the DR buffs they (and Barbs) bring, they can make you practically immortal.

Imo, the Crusader should have a different reason to be there to the Monk or Barb (in a perfect world) but itā€™s very hard to compete with that. Iā€™m definitely not creative enough to come up with that solution, though. :thinking: :man_shrugging:

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I will have to respectfully disagree with your assessment sir. Crusaders are as described in the fantasy lore. It is one class, I can literally walk away from in the middle of a 120 grift, grab a snack / do my business / and they are still alive and well in the middle of a map. Without pausing. Iā€™ve even gone afk on the rift guardian and won. Crusaders avail themselves to many defensive abilities and items.

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You may be playing Thorns Invoker incorrectly then. Thorns Invoker does not rely on bombardment to damage enemies(does not even deal a significant damage at all!)

Thorns Invoker thrive in being surrounded and tanking damage accumulating Invoker stacks from blocking attacks and dealing massive single target damage.

As for Roland Sweep, I mainly use them with Captain Crimson set and Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac so mobility, damage and damage mitigation is not an issue at all. In fact, this Crusader is one of the toughest builds in terms of damage mitigation while still dealing significant AoE melee damage.

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Thank you for posting this. Iā€™ve been trying to play various tank builds with crusaders since returning to Diablo for season 19. I figured I was doing something wrong because my monk and barbarian builds felt WAY more tanky than any of my crusader builds. Thorns felt the best but it was so painful having to kill one monster at a time and still having to worry about damage that I gave up and went for Valor/Fury. It feels like Iā€™m constantly relying our our ā€œultimateā€ of Akaratā€™s Champion and its insane cooldown without the support wizards get from Swami and Changoā€™s to hold us over between reuse. So unless the elite packs are spaced out properly Iā€™m stuck running away or spamming attacks hoping I can get enough Life on Hit to stay alive until I can go large again.

Yeah, I know, Iā€™m a filthy casual that barely solos GR85 but I shouldnā€™t feel squishy with plate mail and a huge honking shield while my monk dual wielding in ROBES crushes everything while laughing off the damage.

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Cute and funny, but didnā€™t happen literally ever.

2 Likes
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The biggest problem with Crusaders feelin un-tanky is access to block.

The highest block chance you can get off a single Crusader Shield is 31%. 20% from the shield and +11% from a magical affix. If You want ANY more block, you HAVE to choose from an extremely limited selection of gear and equipment. The highest Block percentage you can get before additional crusader skills is 83%. And this WILL cost you your helmet slot, your ring slot, pants, and a passive slot (Two hander). If you want 100% block chance to max out your justice lantern or other blocking goodie - it WILL require at least 1 more passive slot, or another cube slot to make that happen.

There are no other options that these items to get block percentage from gear. And considering the amount of damage ā€œPreventedā€ from blocking - itā€™s just not worth it to give up that much - for one or two layers of mediocre damage reduction, at the expense of easier to layer damage output and other damage reduction routes.

Justice lantern - to make work costs you all that. Unity - is one slot and a slot on your hireling. Boom - 50% damage redux. Aquia curass - is one cube slot or chest piece (Or RROG if your getting fancy).

There are only 4 very specific items outside of shields that give any boost to block.

Craftable

Helm of Rule (+11%) / Helm of Command (+8% low level). It IS a legendary, but it forces a RROG pick to be a viable for use alongside sets. Meaning, you canā€™t double down on a 6/2 set layout if you use it. So it only allows for one set, and takes up a ring slot / cube.

Captain Crimson Bowsprit (+5%) - Under leveled crafting gear. You run into the exact same problem as the helmet (RROG plus denial of meaningfull 6/2 set layouts) - AAAND you have to take a pretty big stat hit on one of you armor pieces by grabbing such a low level item from the crafting bench.

Justice Lantern - Ring - up to +16% block chance. - Gives an overall damage redux equal to 45%-55% of your total block percentage as a global damage reduction. Viable, good legendary - problem is to get this to give anything more than 15-25% damage reduction you have to gimp your build.

Blood Brother - 2 Handed Sword. Up to 20% chance to block - Blocked attacks inflict 30% less damage - deal 30% more damage on your next attack. - This SHOULD be a mainstay for Rolandā€™s shield bash build. It increases the overall damage of the bash (by upping block percentage) - gives damage redux and damage boost for blocking.

The problem is with the cube slots when it comes to blood brother - You have to Cube flail of the ascended for the burst aspect of a shield bash build. Meaning you can no longer cube a Pira Marella, or Final Witness in order to make the build spammable or give the widespread Crowd Control Blind to prevent being overwhelmed.

Blood Brother in any other build forces you to give up your mainstay damage proc or The Furnace - which Is needed for higher level grifting. Without the Furnace builds stop working 3-8 levels sooner when climbing the grift ladder. Which harps back to the above complaint that survival at higher level grifts is dependent on Damage output, rather than tankyā€™ness.

Next up we have Shields. Every defensive blocking oriented shield slot is on cube slot 1. Make that EVERY shield ability is on slot one. Which means it competes with the Furnace or another Major utility slot.

Piro Marella - for example - is a resource cost reduction (much like cendercoat or gabriels vambraces), but itā€™s in slot 1.

Sublime Conviction / Freeze Deflection - Which gives a chance to freeze / stun when you block - is on slot 1. Admitiddly this could be argued as an offensive proc off your defensive abilityā€¦ But there are plenty of other ā€œArmorā€ slots that give significant damage boosts.

Salvation - This little puppy is just broken sadly. From my testing it only counts the shields ā€œBlocked amountā€ and not the damage reduction prevention from Blood Borther or Covenā€™s Criteria. For a Frontline Support Crusader, Using Blood Borther, Covenā€™s Criterion, and Salvation - the healing is really paltry for using up three whole gear slots at the expense of any other ā€œStandardā€ offensive kit setup.

Hallowed Bulwark - This would be a great shield idea / concept. Give up a cube slot or manstay and pack a standard defensive skill to jack your defensive block percentage up while Iron skin is active. No need to bend over backwards to eat up a passive. At the expense of standard offensive kit comboā€™s (I.E. goodbye damage output). Plus the few builds that could give iron skin 100% uptime, are already having to make painfull sacrifices to get their mainstay kits up and running (Rolands Build, Akarats, Zodiac Spam builds).

Passiveā€™s are hurting as well. We have four passives that effect or run off your blocking mechanic. Meaning you have to build around those passives to make them work.

Hold Your Ground - No longer doge but get a +30% chance to block. Hands down - one of the simplest - best things you can do if you care about blocking. Itā€™s a requisite if your going to run any of the other blocking procs or passives in order to make them consistent and reliable.

Divine Fortress - GREAT passive skill. Can make you even tankier and stacks with a few other armor granting skills. Problem is - if you have already taken hold your ground - youā€™ve given up two slots already. and if your not super stacking your block percentage, Vigilant (Which gives layered resistance buff AND health regen) or Finery (Which gives LOTS of armor from STR at high paragon level), are better one of picks at every level of the game. Itā€™s not that this is bad - it just competes with other more offensive options.

Insurmountable (Which gives you wrath for blocking - at low block% itā€™s very unreliable) - meaning you have to take bulwark or hold your ground. Means you have to gimp your build or give up at least two passive slots to make this somewhat reliable as resource management (Goodbye damage output).

Renewal - ā€¦ā€¦ Starts crying horribly It doesnā€™t scale or have anything that can increase the healing amound. Wrathfull gets 1% from healing globe bonuses. This is purely static, and I have to use other skills to get the healing amount up - pidgeon holing my build to get a healing amount that canā€™t physically keep up with higher level grifts where you get one shotted. Even if you do manage to block.

So the passives for blocking are either underwhelming - or require at a minimum of two of your passive slots (Or a passive slot and an ammy) in order to make reliable / functional.

Each crusader blocking option - in a vacuum - looks good. Smells good. Fells good. But when taken in the persepective of the entire crusader ecosystem - force you give up WAAAAY more offensive and utility options just to make them viable. Mathmatically your better off saying ā€œGimmie a Pig sticker, Iā€™ll nuke them from orbitā€, because your still gonna get one shotted by a white trash skeleton if you try to stand still for more than 3 seconds at GR 100+

Perhaps we could add more ā€œLittle thingsā€ to the passives, or even consolidate them functionally to give them more bang for the buck. I am looking forward to playing with the ā€œFreestyleā€ cube of next season to see if I can make some of these work since I can trade my mid or tertiary slot to get the extra blocking legendaries working.

Right now you have to sacrifice two passive slots and minimum of two to three gear slots just get another 50% damage reduction - at the cost of multiplicative - compounding damage output.

The easiest fix would be to add a 10%-20% block chance on crusader sets at part of the final bonus. Perhaps even throw in a kicker 5% chance to block on crusader flails. That would give a modest boost to the mechanic and make it viable in exchange for one or two other slots in a build for the added utility without breaking other classes.

=p

2 Likes
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ā€¦ You obviously donā€™t play Invokers.

Bombardment is responsible for less then 1% of Invokerā€™s damage otuput. A true Invokerā€™s build is the TANKIEST build in the entire game bar none.

Whats more, if you want to be able to take even more damage, you can sacrifice 2-3 GRs of damage and get even MORE defensive capability. Itā€™s insane!

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ā€¦ Yea, you should probably read actual guides.

Skill slots - There is an option in the menu called Elective Mode. Itā€™s unchecked, check it. It lets you put ANY skill in ANY slot, period. This is on any platform. How you managed to get this far without knowing about it is mind-boggling.
Block - Again, Invokerā€™s is all about Block, and you should be able to hit 89-91% with solid rolls on Akaratā€™s Awakening (The Invoker shield of choice) Justice Lantern (THE defensive ring for Invokers, and a handful of other Crusader builds, like Lazy HF), and Stand Your Ground (Passive that increases block chance by 30% in exchange for losing your baseline 3% chance to dodge). The remaining 10% is either covered by Blood Brother (The damage dealt portion doesnā€™t really work with Invoker, so you mainly take it for the increased chance to block and damage reduction over the 50% damage to elites from Furnace), or, more often, Hit Me rune of Provoke. A note - If you have maxed block rolls on Shield and Ring, you can actually drop Stand Your Ground as a passive and just completely rely on Provoke to bring you to 100% block chance.

Now, yes, most other Sader builds do not have anywhere near as high a block chance. This is generally due to the fact that other Sader builds have far more damage multipliers available to them then Invoker - Not only do they benefit from Crit, Area Damage, and other multipliers, but they tend to also have more seperate +%skill damage legendaries and whatnot. Thus, if you try to maximize your defense, you end up signficantly gimping your damage, as mentioned.

But yea, look up an actual Invoker Thorns build, and not from Icy-Veins. Invoker can run GR 130 decently (Sure, quite a bit behind AoV, but itā€™s more or less tied with all the other builds), and damage from mobs is a non-issue. Just note that the only way to be efficient with Invokers is to elite hunt while gathering a huge number of mobs.

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i know a lot about sader, and in this game there are no tanks, and there is no such build for that, the only closest tank is invoker, but his low damage to only 1 target and his null support to the party make a tank crusader a liability fpr the other players, take for example a zmonk or zbarb, they are the closest idea for a tank, can soak a lot of damage, can self heal, and heal the party, can bring tons of support for the party, damage reduction, increase damage, cc, etc, crusader is not a tank/support in this game, and thats the reality, invoker build is very tanky but that build shine on solo, so if u want to play solo tanky build in HC use invoker build

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I would definitely not go that far, there are some very, very tanky builds in the game. Invoker doesnā€™t have enough toughness multipliers compared to some wizard build to be even considered ā€œtankyā€. Itā€™s kinda tough at best.

It has one of the best toughness/STDPS ratio though. One of, because AoV single target is just out of this world while still being tanky.

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As itā€™s impossible for thorns to crit, Invokers donā€™t need to worry about CHC / CHD and can instead take AS (benefitting Life Per Hit), VIT, All Resist, Life Per Hit and so on, which means they have a lot of base mitigation / recovery.

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Not the same as a toughness multiplier, there comes a point where the lph is outpaced by the damage. Especially since you have to sit and melee with the set. For me 137 is about the point where I canā€™t kill fast enough to outpace my HP loss.