I've experimented with several different perk decks, and honestly, I found myself hating both armor builds and dodge builds. In the case of the former you can very easily end up in situations where you're simply not going to get a chance to regenerate your armor, since you will never regenerate your armor unless you spend several seconds not taking damage and when is that gonna happen when you're surrounded by the police? As for the latter, dodge builds are entirely based on how lucky you are. You're either going to do fabulously well with it or you're going to get downed every 5 seconds and pull your hair out.

Health tanking, on the other hand? Sure, you can't stack quite as much damage reduction as an armor tank (since you cannot take Frenzy unless you're insane), and hard hitting shots (sniper rounds especially) are gonna take a big chunk out of you no matter what (no chance to dodge after all!) but with the right setup, you can constantly regenerate health without even needing doctor's bags or first aid kits.

So then, now that we're established why you'd want to use Health tanking, the next question is "Why use the Stoic deck?"

The big reason to take the Stoic deck is that it gives you a number of perks that work incredibly well together to make you almost indestructible.


After you get the stoic deck, any damage you take is automatically reduced to 25%. The remaining 75% of the damage you just took is instead applied to your healthbar in the form of stripes. The stripes represent the damage you're going to take over the next 12 seconds. In effect, you're going to take the 75% damage you just avoided over time instead. This sounds stupid, because this means you're using a perk slot to "still take 100% damage, but just not immediately." But wait! There's more.


The Stoic deck also gives you a new throwable to equip, one that you'll never want to be without again (queue many unsuccessful AA meetings). This is the Hip Flask. When used, the Hip Flask immediately negates all damage over time you're about to take. In effect, if you had 100 hitpoints, and you took a shot that dealt 100 damage to you, you're gonna take 25 damage immediately and 75 damage over 12 seconds. If you use the Hip Flask immediately however, the damage over time is negated and your health stays at 75 points (maybe a little less based on how quickly you used the Hip Flask). This gives you, effectively, the 75% damage reduction the perk deck originally promised you, just for real this time! Maybe not with 100% effectiveness, but still.

In addition, the Hip Flask has charges, rather than using ammunition. After using the Hip Flask, it goes on cooldown for 10 seconds (reducing by 1 second for every enemy killed). Then you can use it again... And again... And again! The amount of "damage avoidance" (for lack of a better term) is absolutely astounding!


Later in the perk deck you also gain an additional huge benefit. If you're wearing any kind of armor, the armor is instead applied directly to your healthbar. This can be hard to appreciate, since you cannot see your actual number of healthpoints ingame, but trust me, this makes a huge difference, especially when combined with your various damage reduction and regenerative effects.

Furthermore, Stoic also gives you a special benefit later on that makes it so that if you can avoid taking damage for 4 seconds, you automatically remove all damage over time you were going to take! Those two advantages basically cover all the benefits of using armor over health!


Lastly, the perk deck also gives you an additional boost. When you remove damage over time, you immediately heal for 50% of the damage you avoided. Free health!

In order to make the most of the perk deck, we're gonna need a few skills that really let us get the most out of our humongous healthbar.


We're gonna need several skills from this tree in order to maximize our healthpoints, though many of the skills we're going to have to take as prerequisites are not gonna be that great.



Resilience gives you a useless bonus (since you're not gonna have armor) but the aced benefit is great. At high difficulties flashbangs will be everywhere and you're not gonna be able to avoid them all, especially when using heavy armor.



Being able to throw bags 50% further is only a minor bonus, though reducing how much movement speed you lose when you're carrying bags is pretty nice.



50% damage reduction while interacting with objects is super circumstantial, but the aced effect (+20 to all ballistic vests) is perfect for this build.

Gives you a whopping +30% armor regardless of the vest you're wearing, but then also gives you access to the strongest ballistics vest in the game (Improved Combined Tactical Vest, ICTV for short). This makes our healthpoints reach staggering heights.



This tree really helps us round out the build by giving additional health, damage reduction and health regeneration.



At first this one seems really underwhelming. You don't need cable ties to take policemen hostage, only civilians, which aren't gonna exist on all maps. However, getting some flat damage reduction for every hostage you have is a lot better than it looks! This is because flat damage reduction is applied last (so if you have a natural 50% damage reduction and 8 hostages giving you 4 points of flat damage reduction, and you take 10 damage, the 50% damage reduction reduces it to 5 and then you substract the 4, leaving you taking only 1 measily point of damage). It's not gonna make a huge difference, but it's more than worth 4 skillpoints.



Take a cop hostage, then turn him into a minion! When aced this also gives the cop a massive amount of damage reduction and a fair boost to its damage as well. You can't turn special cops into minions, but the best cops to convert as the ones wearing body armor.



Increases the power of your intimidation, making it easier to get a cop to surrender. When aced, lets you have 2 converted cops at once. A must-have, if only to ensure you'll always have at least one converted cop on your side.



When aced, this gives you extra movement speed and a big chunk of extra health (30% boost!) while you have a converted cop under your control. The extra movement speed is nice, but the extra health is the benefit we're going for here. In addition, it also gives your converted minions so much damage reduction they'll be able to stand in the open for minutes at a time, even while under fire on Death Sentence.



The skill that rounds out our durability. As long as you have a hostage or a converted cop, you regenerate 4.5% of your health every 5 seconds. Remember how this whole build buffs the size of your healthpoints into the stratosphere? Yeah, this skill is great on this build, and gives you a much needed source of passive regeneration.



Gives you 30% damage reduction both during and for 5 seconds after you revive someone. Practically mandatory since on Mayhem+ it can get really dicey trying to revive allied players that got themselves into a sticky situation. This will at least let you tank it out.


We only need two skills from Fugitive to help deal with one of the two biggest weaknesses of this build: what happens when you go down. Going down with a health build sucks because you're gonna get revived with only a fraction of your healthpoints, meaning you can easily go down again.



You get to stay down for much longer when you do go down, giving your teammates a better ability to revive you, and you can go down 1 more time before being brought into custody, thus saving you doctor's bags. You're not likely to go down much unless you're playing at the highest difficulties, and at that point this still becomes a godsend.



While it's hard to go down with this build, it's nightmarish when you do. This skill helps soften that blow by giving you more health when you're revived and some damage reduction for a brief time afterwards.


Lastly, two skills from the Ghost tree to help us deal with the other big weakness of this build: your slow movement speed.



Extra stamina regeneration and significantly faster sprint speed. Exactly what we needed! You might want to ace this too just to get the 10% dodge chance, since that's not gonna hurt anybody, but since that only applies while you're sprinting it's not a big deal not to ace this skill.



Extra movement speed, plain and simple. Helps offset your penalty to movement from heavy armor.


This build gives you 41 leftover skillpoints at level 100. Use them on whatever you like, these are just the core skills needed to make this build work.

Honestly, you can use whatever weapons you want with this build. However, you must use the Improved Combined Tactical Vest for your armor slot and Stoic's Hip Flask for your Throwable slot. Both are needed to make this build work. Beyond that, pick whatever you want.

This build requires you to micromanage your Flask. Remember, it has infinite uses and the cooldown goes down every time you kill something. Use it liberally, especially if you've just taken a bunch of damage. Waiting is oftentimes a bad idea because the longer you wait, the more damage over time you will actually take and be unable to heal away.

Secondly, don't be afraid to take cover if you just took a bunch of damage but can't use your Flask yet. Do not try to score desperation kills just to get the flask cooldown to go down faster. Remember, waiting just 4 seconds behind cover will automatically remove all your damage over time as though you used your flask.

Always try to get 2 converted cops under your control asap. This gives you a ton of benefits, on top of adding an additional gun to your group.

Remember while you do heal for some amount when your damage over time is removed, you can only really take much advantage of this if you have a significant healthbar left over. If you're very low on health, take cover for a bit and let Hostage Taker do its job or use a First Aid Kit.