My first Ishanekon: World Shapers Article at long last. This article is about all the methods we can use to make a character more survivable in Ishanekon and optimizing those tools to make us as hard to kill as possible; as well as a bit about the role of a tank in general

What is Tank Mage

The ultimate lifeform. Mages are often depicted as squishy and delicate party members; but those following the way of the tank mage know better. We can have awesome spells and incredible bulk; Especially in Ishanekon.

Tank mage is a spectrum of builds that range from “A survivable mage build” with basic armor or wards, to mages who use their magic largely for the purposes of tanking; Drawing enemy agro and denying enemy damage while placing themselves on the frontline rather than the back.

Tell that bulwark to take a hike and embrace the way of the tank mage

Temporary Vitality and you

Temporary vitality is generally the best way to increase not just your own but your entire teams survivability. Not only can you hold more temporary vitality than standard vitality, but it’s also easier to give out and restore temporary vitality than it is regular vitality, with many healing spells requiring a certain creature type but temporary vitality ones not having said requirement. Temporary vitality’s only real downside is that you can’t pick someone up off the ground with it if they’re at 0 HP. There are a few ways around this, stabilizing someone, keeping healing items around via crafting or even buying them, having a healing ability of your own, or in later tiers using revival magic.

If you’re not built around the concept of survivability but want more of it on your build; this is maybe the lowest investment option; simply take the shield ability and cast it a few times, or craft shield consumables, or find any other method of generating temporary HP and get your temp vitality bar to full or almost full and you’ll have more than doubled the survivability of your character.

If you are built around the concept of survivability; you’ll want to fill your temp HP for sure; and you should strongly consider ‘temporary vitality boost’ as an upgrade on your equipment.

While other things on this list are going to do wonders for your survivability as well, temporary vitality will also multiply the effectiveness of most of your other survivability options as well as giving you a great fallback encase those are expended or run out for whatever reason.

Upgrades and Armor

Armor is good in this system. Every level of armor has its uses; from clothes to heavy, but we generally lean on one of the extremes.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that wearing the lightest armor means we can’t be a tank or we’re squishy. Tank-mages functionally equally well in all forms of armor.

Clothes are generally best for those more focused on evasion, and heavier armors are more suited to those who want to forgo evasion. Heavier armor also has the hidden upside of the fact we can use the “Vulnerable Armor” negative upgrade on it.

I generally think evasion is better than armor as a stat to focus on. Both are good; and compliment each other, but +1 evasion is roughly a 5% chance to avoid a hit; where as +1 armor is 1 damage reduced from a hit. The smaller the hit, the more worthwhile armor is, but the larger the hit, the more evasion matters. If you receive 1 attack for 100 damage, the armor made it into 1 hit for 99 damage, which is almost nothing. However; if you took 100 attacks for 1 damage each, you negated all of them with armor. From what i’ve seen in the game; you’re generally only going to be struck 1-3 times in a round, and the threatening stuff is going to be doing more than 20 damage in a hit. +15% chance to dodge with +3 evasion is going to do more here than 3 armor.

The downside to evasion as a stat is that it’s harder to get more of; lighter shields bring your evasion up by 1, where heavier shields bring it up but lower your cap, which we don’t want.

Evasion also won’t save you versus a critical hit, but we can usually save ourselves from crits by re-rolling the dice with narrative momentum.

My favorite upgrade for armor is Warding field; a once per combat upgrade that lets us negate 9 damage per stack of itself. Having a few stacks of warding field lets us negate attacks that could oneshot other player characters.

Damage Resistances and Immunities

In relation to upgrades; one of the potentially most important would be ones granting damage resistance and damage immunity to different damage types.

The easiest to add into our collection are elemental damage types, followed by mystic types, with psychic and reality being the most difficult to obtain.

our best method of getting these upgrades and thus to becoming resistant or immune to certain kinds of damage is with the abilities summon weapons and summon armory; with summoned shields (shields are a kind of weapon) allowing us to change our damage resistances with a single weapon swap action. We can also use the expanded shield upgrade to give this resistance to our allies.

We can typically determine a monsters main damage type, then swap weapon to become resistant or immune to it depending on how much space for upgrades our shield has to offer. Consider the ‘shield mage’ lesser talent to avoid the increased casting cost while wielding a shield.

Upgrades like these can also help us avoid negative status effects; which we can similarly swap out as needed or keep on ourselves to avoid things like being stunned, restrained, or shocked.

Abilities

Summon armory is a truly amazing buff spell that we can cast right from level 1 and it continues to be a great choice for the entire game; only really seeing downsides if your team can hand-craft better equipment than you can summon; and even then, the high versatility of this ability along with its 1ap cast time keeps it in my list. As mentioned above; warding and impact armor upgrades are the best for surviving big hits. Shields also add to our survivability, possibly giving resistance or even immunity

a summoned piece of armor at t1 can, for example, deflect 45 damage in one instance, or over a prolonged fight, deflect 15 damage every round. At level one with 20hp, we have already more than doubled our effective healthpool.

A shield with resistance to the enemies damage type can half this incoming damage, doubling our effective HP again; or we can even become immune to their damage, unless it’s physical.

Temporary health generation, as mentioned above, is also really important. abilities like shield are going to allow you to make temp HP fairly consistently; easy to use before a fight and during if need be

Resist and parry are two very good abilities focused on survival; Parry adding +4 to your evasion while resist allows you to negate 8 damage. Resist upcasts to +4 per willpower, while parry gives you an extra +1 evasion per willpower. Resist is overall better than parry because not all incoming damage is going to come from attacks. Resist even allows you to block damage from things that go through armor; unlike barrier. Barrier however is almost always the best ability to use for protecting our allies.

We could attempt to push this idea further; but that gets more into the specifics of what build you’re using.

Paths

Dedicating your path to defenses obviously isn’t necessary if you’re just looking for baseline survivability; but if we want to be the active tank of the party it’s likely a good idea to invest into a path to do so.

Path of Reaction: possibly the best path for a tank-mage; who has the necessary willpower to run a build that relies on reaction abilities and who won’t benefit as greatly from Path of Defense. Path of reaction makes all reaction abilities cheaper while more than doubling our reaction point total; it not only gives us survivability but allows us to soak up massive amounts of damage for the whole party by simply casting barrier; with the lesser talent ‘gift for all’ also letting us apply resist to a hit.

Path of Buff: Stacking defensive buffs on yourself is an incredibly effective tactic; Summon armory plus infuse item [tech-exclusive, but extremely good] could give us tier 8 armor to wear; along with something like Evil Spirit; could give enemies disadvantage to hit us while we have 19 evasion and ward upgrades to block massive attacks encase they do manage to hit.

Path of defense: much less effective than the former two paths; does not synergize with your ‘mage’ capability and adds much less effective defense than either using defensive buffs or defensive reactions.

Putting it Together

Lets look at 3 potential versions of a level 1 build

Build A: Has 20 hp, has not invested into any survivability beyond basic gear. Wearing medium armor. Damage needed to be delt to build A before they are down: 22

Build B: Same stats as build A, 20hp. Invests in 3 abilities build A did not: Summon armory, shield, resist.

Summoned armor for clothes; uses some less consequential negative upgrades [this is gonna be another entire article; i suggest hungry item for now]. We take 3 stacks of warding and 2 stacks of impact armor (We’re not usually getting hit for our entire HP bar or more.). We resist a 21 damage hit once; then 6 damage off another hit (plus more reach round we use impact armor).

With just summoned armor, we now take at least 47 damage to put down and our evasion in this instance is substantially higher.

Add in the summoned shield from summon armory? we could effectively double our health by giving ourselves resistance to the enemy damage type and increase our evasion. For now; i’ll assume it’s physical damage and we can’t double our HP versus a specific source or outright negate it.

Lets cast shield once after we wake up for the day and assume an average of 7 temps rolled. This adds… 7 more damage we’d need to take. But it only costs 2 willpower at base. Great for preventing one-shots from particularly powerful blows.

Resist allows us to negate 8 damage for 2 willpower. We don’t have to use it preemptively; but each cast of resist adds 8 more damage an enemy needs before defeating us; and we can upcast it for even more damage negated; every 1wp letting us negate 4 more damage.

By having 7 temps and our upgrades and having resist available; a single blow now needs to deal 70 damage to us before we go down. This is with just 10 willpower invested; about half for a reality or mental archetype character at level 1. We can make this cheaper with our summon armory spell by using the efficient equipment upgrade.

Build C: Has the benefits of build B; but places more into them. Using path of reaction; their use of resist is now 1wp cheaper; with the efficient equipment upgrade; they can now use resist or barrier for 0wp to negate 8 or 6 damage respectively. now they have the same damage negated as build B; but for 8wp instead of 10, and they can continually use their reactions to resist smaller blows; it would take 9 damage from a single hit before they had to spend any willpower or charges off their armor; allowing them to stay in hard fights longer.

Conclusions

Just taking the time to look at a build and take 2 or 3 abilities out of your pool can more than triple your potential survivability. Leaning into this harder allows us to not just be survivable but to actively protect our entire team. Mages never have to be squishy; even one buff ability [summon armory my beloved] boosts our survivability through the roof.

Don’t neglect your reaction abilities; they can and will save your character and even other characters should you choose to do so