What’s the best way to make jack as strong as possible?
Able to withstand even the toughest scenarios. All about health and staying out of ffyl?
I bet @Derch will know a thing or two on this.
I do and all 3 of my builds do it similar but a little different.
The basic combo is Best Foot Forward, Leadership, Optimism, and Teamwork.
Sure only one of those is for healing but they all support it. Leadership makes your jacks dying count as kills, Optimism makes them die faster, those kills also count for Best Foot Forward making your Jacks stay out longer and if you recall them well it also increases your cooldown.
So teamwork heals you at 5/5 2.5% per stack up to 10 stacks, so 25% a second. It’s hard to get that up that high but I usually have it around 6 stacks and that is still 15% per second and thats pretty fast. Now coms do boost it and at 10/5 you are looking at 30% per second with 6 stacks and 50% with 10. Thats pretty much a healthgating build at that point.
Delegation is also quite nice and if you are going to tank I would grab it, your Jacks die faster, you take less damage, etc…
Now when your Jacks are down is when you are vulnerable, teamwork goes after they are away but your stacks will go away pretty quick and you loose the agro draw of your Digi’s. 2 skills in the Hero of the Story tree are great for that.
- Hero Pose is nice shield buff to all the stats 20% across the board, cap, rate, delay.
- Persistence is the winner though, at 5/5 you get 10% of your health back per second based on how low your health is and +40% shield capacity. It’s a mini teamwork and again com’s can boost it. What is really nice when your action skill first goes down you have this and teamwork stacked.
Skills that sound good but don’t do much
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Take Their Freedom.
Some have claimed this is better than teamwork, but they are wrong. On kill you get 12.5% health back, but your Digi Jacks also get this, which means they live longer and you get less kills from leadership. The argument is, “well I kill them by running around”. Sure ok, but if you do that you are not shooting much and all your damage is from nova’s not from your guns. With Teamwork and Optimism you get the same effect but you can also shoot things and get way more DPS. Teamwork also heals more even at 2.5%. Teamwork heals more because it is per second, not just flat health. 1 stack of teamwork lasts the same as a kill skill, so 7 seconds. 2.5% x 7 = 17.5% and that is one stack. Since you have 2 digi jacks and many times they die at about the same time thats 35% from each cycle of them. Much more and it synergies better with your other skills. -
Winning
It’s fixed now but outside of amp shield abuse its not that needed and I’ll go over that below in a gear section.
So shields, there are 3 kinds I like with Jack
- Hyperion shields because company man, these are not good for tanking but can be ok if the delay is low
- Nova shields because sharing them with your Digi Jacks is almost broken its so good. It can be good for tanking because all the knock back or pull from the black hole is even more agro relief and things die very very very fast.
- Tediore shields. If you are not going nova spam these are your best tanking shields. The reason why is with heavy health regen below you want speed on your delay, who cares if you get hit if your shield pops right back up and you heal back underneath it.
I think that covers most of it…
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Thanks, I will take a closer look when I am back home.
I forgot to go more into cycling your Jacks. Once you kill a mob you want to recall them and move to the next and put them out. You don’t want to keep them out until they run out unless you have to because that cooldown is so long. But if you call the back you can get a full refresh is a few seconds instead of the 40 seconds if you let them run out. Even on the sentinel you can call them back between each phase.
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Nova shields are good all-around for your jacks. Sham isnt bad either for bullet mobs.
What class mods would you suggest for tanking?
Celestial, boost teamwork and best foot foward
Jack is pretty much unkillable except by instant deaths (e.g. falling off cliff). If you took away his near instant cooldown for recalling early, at least it would be possible to die.
And I’m in the camp for only putting a point in teamwork (with boosted celestial) and pairing it with Winning or Take Their Freedom. I have no problems with TFF. When I’m mobbing, my job is to strip shields (storm front or quasar) and freeze enemies (too scoops or fridgia). I don’t need to be that accurate. The DJs will take care of the rest with their 3 Novas. For bosses, I do the Just Compensation + IVF thing and my DJs are there to restore shields/health as I use a hit and run style. Certainly not the only way to play Jack (and probably not the best), but I enjoy it. Well… it might be a little too easy.
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I think I have found a flow with the celestial, black hole, Eddie, cryo tramsfustion, fridgida, ravager, slippery spitter merged with a cryo Snider via sponsored by. Occasionally, I throw in a cryo hail just for fun. The healing is nice, but its just so damn beastly.
I find it hard to believe Winning not being that good. Sure I have a Com that boosts it to 9/5, pushing it up to 45 percent shield restoration, I would think this would make Jack quite the tank. It and delegation , Idk, I have my skills boosted from that Com and my build is all about Digi-Jacks dying, and releasing novas. I do like Leadership, its a nice capstone.
Winning. Leadership. Shield of Ages.
'Nuff said.