The Fighter is a well-armored yet versatile class. It uses its sword and shield to issue rapid attacks and has the privilege of taking punches. No matter your preference, players can use the Fighter to deal damage and get into scraps, twisting limbs around opponents, battering them, knocking them down, or just straight up laughing in the face of danger. If, like us, you’re looking for your Fighter to take a tanking role in your party, then you’re in luck because the Fighter’s tanking capabilities are well and truly potent. Here’s a closer look at a Fighter Tank Build in Dragon’s Dogma 2.

Fighter Tank Build Overview in Dragon’s Dogma 2¶

For the most part, the Fighter has two playstyles, one specializing in fast attacks with your sword and board, with the other turning you into a target, using your shield to your advantage. This build will be looking towards the more tanky and supportive elements of the build, allowing a player who wishes to play a knight-type character or have a Pawn do the tanking for you to come to your rescue.

With that out of the way, here’s a ToC, allowing you to auto-scroll to the relevant parts of this Fighter Tank Build guide:

• Skills
• Attributes and Leveling
• Augments
• Pawns

Tank Fighter Weapon Skills in Dragon’s Dogma 2¶

The Tank Fighter build in Dragon’s Dogma 2 will have a wide variety of skills that you will use fairly often. A few of them will be skills you want on your skill bar at all times, which will define your ability to become a tank in the game. On the other hand, you have a few skills that are more situational, and you will likely want to swap out at Campsites from time to time to adapt to the upcoming battles when you know what you’re dealing with.

Core Weapon Skills:

• Shield Summons/Shield Drum: A skill that taunts enemies in an area around your Fighter.
• Perfect Defense: A heavy stamina use skill that blocks all manner of damage from the front of the shield.
• Blink Strike/Burst Strike: Dashes the Fighter forward, allowing you to close the gap between you and an enemy before slashing if the target is in range.

The three skills listed here are three key abilities you want to use for the Fighter Tank build. Blink Strike and its upgraded skill are key gap closers, allowing you to get to annoying enemies, or get your Fighter back in the fight if they get punted away. It also allows them to jump toward any enemies running toward key back-line allies like Mages, Archers, or Sorcerers.

Meanwhile, the Shield Summons and Shield Drum weapon skills are your taunt button. You’ll largely want to use this skill to grab the attention of packs of enemies, bosses, and other threats in between. It’s very handy as it means most of the melee units will clump around you, ready for support and damage to come in, or for your Perfect Defense skill.

The Perfect Defense skill is a Fighter Tank’s main survivability tool. It will drain your stamina a lot, but it will block all frontal damage. Use this to cheese big threat boss starts or use it when you have a lot of aggression from enemies after using your taunt skill.

This leaves you one spare optional skill to use. We recommend any of the following skills to occupy your fourth slot.

• Compass Slash/Cloudward Slash: Swipes at enemies around you twice. Basic AOE skill easily applied while taunting or a good early game skill.
• Launchboard: A skill that allows the user to launch an ally into the air. Handy for launching melee DD (damage dealers) like Thieves or Warriors onto larger foes like Griffins, Ogres, Cyclops, Minotaurs, and more, allowing them to easily hit the weak spots.
• Shield Bash: This is a hard-hitting move with lots of knockdown. It’s very good for building stagger on boss creatures like Ogres and Cyclops or putting down annoying smaller melee foes.

Again, these moves largely depend on where you are in your Vocation rank, your party composition, and what strategies you wish to employ for your team, hence why these skills are optional.

Attributes and Leveling¶

Like in the first Dragon’s Dogma, players can opt to level up in other Vocations to focus on specific attributes for leveling purposes. In Dragon’s Dogma 2, however, the attribute increase per level is not consistent, with each level of each Vocation offering some different stats. Without knowing the full extent of each individual level, it’s hard to recommend specific level orders like with builds for the original Dragon’s Dogma. So, we recommend leveling as a Fighter or Warrior to increase your Health, Defense, and Strength attributes consistently.

If you need more Stamina in your build, we recommend leveling as a Thief. From what we can tell, Thieves tend to get decent Strength stats alongside more Stamina. This enables you to keep up your damage stats while still getting durability but still chipping away at more Stamina values. Stamina is handy for holding skills like Perfect Defense for longer, along with using skills and blocking on a Fighter.

If you need more Magick Defense in your build, try leveling as a Mage. You’ll passively build up Magick power, too, which is handy for enchants given to you from certain weapons or your party. So, you can get even more damage scaling on some of the more end-game weapons, such as the Dragon’s Dogma sword or the Molten Fury, for example. You can check more of the confirmed Fighter Weapons by going to our Weapon Database and viewing all of the matching vocation weapons and shields we’ve seen or our interactive map (Map Marker) for relevant world pickups.

Best Fighter Tank Augments in DD2¶

Regarding Augments for a Tank Fighter build in Dragon’s Dogma 2, we largely recommend the following. Remember you can equip six at a time, so there’s some multi-classing you’ll need to do to make the perfect build. Here’s a table that reflects the Augmentation name, its effect, and where to get it from for all the relevant ones for a tank. There’s more than six here, so you will need to take some depending on your own personal taste and playstyle.

For the most part, you want to grab the first two Warrior Augments since they increase Def and your taunting efficiency. The other one we recommend is going for the Mage’s first Augment for the Magick Def increase, along with the Warrior’s Vitality for even more defensiveness. This gives you four that you need for the tanking playstyle. The remaining two Augments largely depend on your personal preferences.

Out of the optional ones, you have the increased carry weight from Fighters since large warriors tend to have more carry weight. Meanwhile, the Mage’s second augment, Beatitude, is great for synergy with either the recommended Spec trait, Chirurgeon, for better self-healing or for party synergy with Mage healing spells. If you plan on bringing your own pocket healer to support your Fighter Tank, we recommend taking a look at our Support Mage build.

Now it is time for optional Warrior augments. If you like using Shield Bash, then the Warrior’s fourth Augment, Dominance, which increases Knockdown, is valuable, but it is a grind to get. The final Warrior Augment is also fine to lower Loss Gauge, making your tank more effective, but if you have that much HP and tanky stats, it is not a big deal. The option is there, though, if you like the idea.

Pawn Fighter Builds¶

If you would rather have a Pawn tank for you, then there are a few things to consider. We ideally recommend the Pawn having the following Inclinations and Specializations:

• Inclination: Calm - Prioritizes defense to ensure survival
• Specialization: Chirurgeon - Enables the Pawn to heal and use curatives on themselves and allies

For the most part, Calm and Chirurgeon are your best pairings. The Calm inclination allows Pawns to focus more on being defensive in nature. It means they’ll often think about blocking with their shields and dodging attacks rather than blocking with their face. This personality on a Tank Fighter means more parrying, blocking, and generally more defensive tactics.

A good pairing for the Inclination is the Chirurgeon Spec. It allows the Tank to heal themselves as long as they have the healing materials in their inventory at the time of need. It heavily dips into the defensiveness of the role, allowing them to be self-sufficient essentially. This can free up a role in your party where you don’t need a Mage or allow your Mage more breathing space to use more offensive casts if you still want to take one.

This summarizes everything you need to know about a Fighter Tank Build in Dragon’s Dogma 2. You should now know how to spec your tank with Augments, the types of skills you want to use, and when to use them. You also know about other leveling and attribute generalizations, amongst other factors important to the build, role, and playstyle.