Shattered Kingdoms

Uh..SA and sanc stack. SA and protection and sanc all stack..Somebody tried to tell me SA and protection didn't stack, I can't remember who it was. So, my first while playing Eiveira I never used it, then I got the sacred armor, and had it 24/7, it makes a massive difference.

Yeah, I've got to agree with Syn actually, a shaman in good mithril or dragonscale +MV is going to tank better than any adamantite wearing merc, a barb isn't even close. Barbs are generally rather horrible tanks.

Spirit aura can't work together with a certain religion spell. That's all.

Which sucks. Just imagine the tanking!

I sincerely doubt it, mithril doesn't work with MV so I doubt it's even close, but dragonscale/MV might be better. With the same spells up, merc is going to be better due to heavy armor bonus and parry/eparry and a larger HP pool. Not to mention even using a one hander and shield is likely going to deal more damage in the interim requiring him to tank for a smaller amount of time overall.

If you're throwing in merk sklz.

Blindness, slow, sleep, curse, poison, spirit horde, shield block, dodge.

A merc has to be really elite to have access to high lvl spirit aura.

A shaman doesn't have to be that elite.

But to answer Syn's earlier question, Orland is a recent mercenary who was a better tank than any shaman imo. He had high level spirit aura scripted though, 2 HP regen rings, full adam with 5+ MP on each piece, an energy kama he was specced in and he was getting 25 str/dex, even con due to a certain religion spell back then. Oh yeah, add in a plethora of other religion spell buffs that he had that greatly increased his tanking capability. He was certainly a superior tank than what your shamans ever were.

But that's way above the common average merc anyway.

Sure, obviously spirit aura + adamantite is better than spirit aura + mithril, but we were just comparing class per class, not a merc + vials/scripts. Even so, spirit aura is really only good if you have strong/powerful spells of it, and most vials around only hold weak spells. A shaman with SA + sanc wearing a shield is going to tank better than a standard merc with a shield/one hander. Especially if you factor in the shamans spells such as blindness/weaken/poison/plague, they can just debuff their opponent to hell.

I wasn't really counting Spirit Aura, but considering you're counting magical vestments for a shaman, I'll give the merc Sanc. Also, to tank you have to be front row, and if you're front row you're easily bashed negating all your debuffs.

I'm not really talking about the class as a whole, I'm talking about tanking ability, and I don't really see a way that the merc isn't going to win the tanking contest with equal prep.

If I hadn't played a shaman so recently, I would totally reroll one, especially now with the prone change, which is a huge buff to the already stellar tanking ability of the class. If you think shamans are subpar compared to heavy armor classes, you are most definitely doing something wrong. They are, plainly put, friggin' awesome.

Concerning the bug that puts you into a resting position once hit with spirit horde, I'm fairly neutral towards fixing it. Sure, it's an additional advantage, but anyone with half a brain is going to neutralise it, by bashing down the shaman so that it cannot be cast.