Advice for heavy tank character (in General)

I'm setting up a heavy tank team, 2 minions:
One training a little AMF and all haste while the other just focus on HP and strength.

The first will probably be wearing AoL, corn, ToE and an exbow in time to come while the second will be an AC set of about 402 (Adam, SC, CML, HoD, TG, MS, CB T-shirt & AoAC).

The question is should the heavy tank be equipping only a ranged weapon or a melee weapon or both. I'm leaning towards just a melee weapon since I'll probably be able to survive to melee (I think) with the ToE and heavy AC set.

I will also probably hire another minion later on and train HP and PL and slap on a TSA and MgS and even an axbow on it.

What do you think?

The strat will be vulnerable to evasion, UC, EC. and with only 2 minions I'm not sure how you will fare against archers. That means just about everyone except tanks are going to hurt you. But you probably have enough NW to make it work if you can counter the evasion and withstand the mages' punishment with only 2 minions.

but I like the idea and would like to hear how it fares.

With enough pth on your weapon, you will find haste to be wasteful. with all that AC + ToE, Archers are pathetic against you, as is any physical non-VB damage (this includes GA inflicted on the tank). You will have a lot of difficulty keeping your DX on par with other tanks near your level with or without Haste, better to train a small amount (5k or so) to get advantage against non-evasion minions, but leave the battle of hitting to your pth. Without heavy AMF, mages are still doing enormous damage at the higher levels, even with all that AC+endurance, the AMF will have you blanketing everything ^_^

As far as the PL guy, yes, get him later on, he won't need as much XP in the end of things. With an Axbow in play, the use of haste is much more reasonable as well ^_^

Just a little input from information I've gathered running a very very similar char to what you describe

Heavy tanks that relies on AC are awfully hard to train because of the PR disadvantage. Packing all that AC will hurt your CB. Keep that in mind. I would use both an exbow and a melee weapon. Exbow will help you shut down tanks while melee weapon is good for clean up. Good luck.

At worst you'd stale with UC, it doesn't do enough damage. Evasion won't have any multiplier so if you get enough Haste you should be okay, but a lot of Mages use DM. Also, mages will hurt a lot until you get the TSA and MgS minion. EC is a problem yes.

I tried using Haste to get enough dex to hit evasion.

However those evasion mages who use DM are you bane.

I would recommment using EC instead of haste, however, then you cannot use AMF on your enchanter and have to use it on your tank.

If you use a range weapon, it certainly has to be a SoD or speciality bow. I would prefer a SoD as you do not need to spend xp in a skill. With all the heavy armor, your going to lose tons of xp with that armor set.

With a ToE, who really cares about GA as your AC/ToE combo will make that do little damage in return.

Of course, use a Morg. Anything else is just foolish.

As for a skill, evasion to level 100k should give level 40. This should be good vs archers to lower the hits per round by 1.

Thanks for the inputs. For the moment, mages do the least damage to me as I'm using the TSA and MgS plus the rest of the armor. When I get back my +100 Adam and +50 CML, I should have slightly more than 400 AC and about 300 AC versus mages. Together with AMF and the ToE, I hope the damage done by mages will be minimised.

The reason why I train haste is because all 3 minions will be able to use it to do something. The enchanter and the PL battery can use both axbow and exbow to reduce tank's strength and dexterity while my main tank can finish them up with the SoD.

I was thinking of just investing in one weapon so that it can get really big. I'm leaning towards a SoD given that I've got 4 ranged rounds and if the PTH is big, then evasion will be of lesser threat.