Sword 1 > Peltasta 2 > Rodelero 2 > Squire 2 here.
Pelt 2 is enough to be honest, haven’t really found many situations where my Swash Buckling doesn’t take all enemies on the map. Rodelero’s slithering is buffed a lot in kTOS and there is a good chance that they’ll implement these in iTOS later down the track. If they do, slithering will look like this:
Source
This means Slithering will be up 50% of the time.
10 sec magic immunity is very nice as it allows me to group a bunch of monsters together in those 10 secs for wizard to AOE them down without having to run around. Especially useful in tight spaces.
Squire repairs will be handy, and the repair / weapon maintenance / HP recovery foodbuffs are nice for long dungeons / grind sessions. However, note that none of these are absolutely necessary if everyone in the party brings their own supplies / buffs / repair kits.
So how does this compare to the current tank meta of Pelt 3 > Squire 3?
The tank meta can also deal with magic mobs by taunting then running around to gather them together. Squire 3 is meta mainly because of its foodbuffs - HP recovery and SP recovery. HP recovery especially, combined with Krivis’s Aukuras / Sorceror’s cat buffs can bring down your HP/SP regen time to 1 sec (lowest), meaning each second you will regen HP/SP. This is why it’s meta right now.
You can read more about this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/treeofsavior/comments/4jgghy/pelt_c3_squire_c3_doubts/?
So how does my build compare to the meta?
Squire c2’s food buffs will require you to be paired with Krivis c3 to get HP regen time to 1 sec, whereas Squire c3 only requires Krivis c1. Krivis c3 is pretty rare to see, although now with ET being cleared by Krivis c3 uing Melstis, we might see more Krivis c3 around. SP regen, however, is impossible to bring down to 1 sec regen time without Squire c3 I think, as cat buffs only go up to lv 5 (someone please confirm).
I’m not gonna be like the other “experts” out there talking up their builds as if it’s the best there is when they’re only like level 150. The mechanics of the tanking meta are all here laid out for you to make choices on (at least the important ones), rest is up to you.
The rest of the stuff I won’t bother with. Physical damage is not the problem at high levels so I won’t bother going into why Hoplite’s additional block is unnecessary.
Be warned though, there are video of parties finishing all 20 levels of Earth Tower (end-game dungeon) WITHOUT a swordsman, so tanks might be totally unnecessary unless they nerf Melstis to not sustain immunity buffs for such a long duration (almost no downtime)