The Secret World Guide ~ Magic Tanking

The concept of tanking with magical abilities is pretty foreign in most MMORPGs but it is an interesting one that I was intrigued by. When most people think of a magic wielding character they think of a poorly armored weakling that hides behind the
well-armored meat shields while slinging damage spells at the enemies. This isn’t the case with chaos magic.

Characters that specialize in chaos magic alter the very world that we live in to create protective defenses for themselves. Several spells reduce damage that enemies deal and boost up the defenses of the chaos magic wielding character. Even more of the spells focus on evasion however and that is the main strength of this specialization.

Passive Specialization

While Chaos magic does have some very useful tanking abilities, there aren’t a large number of powerful active abilities that would let you be a very useful tank in many situations. This is why most players couple Chaos magic with another tanking specialization to provide them with the best possible options out there. Even though Chaos magic doesn’t have a huge number of powerful abilities, there are a few abilities that make investing your APs into that side of the skill tree well worth it.

Escalation

One of the most useful abilities of the chaos tree for groups is escalation, and it is one of the main reasons that tanks rely on the chaos tree. Escalation affects five different enemies in the area and it deals damage to each of them creating a high amount of hate for you, but that isn’t why it is so useful. At the same time it applies a debuff to each of those enemies making them take up to 30 percent more damage from everyone in the group. This amounts to massive damage increases by the entire group.

Combination Build

While you could tank plenty of enemies in the game using just the abilities available in the chaos section of the skill wheel, most of the best tanks combine chaos abilities with either sword or hammer abilities for a very powerful tanking build. Many of the sword and hammer active skills are very useful for tanking and dealing damage and they pair nicely with escalation for very high survivability and hate generation. If you are interested in playing in Nightmare mode you will probably have to combine chaos with one of the other tanking specialties to be effective enough to keep yourself alive.

Have Fun!

Rogue