Dancer - Evasion Tank. Fabulous Support.

[Techro]

continued..

See, the skill has to be the defining factor in difficulty, can't be HM, Extreme Mode, Super Duper mode because eventually everyone will have gear and the gear will make it so it is easy. Now in a tank where you need to manage skills, a combo of dodge/insta heals/lifesteal/ Hp percentages is something that can take this into a different direction. It will not be for everyone, but that's ok. they already made a tank for everyone. I personally love the role of a tank in MOBA games, such as LoL. limited mitigation, paired with intense CC. If i can evade/lifesteal/ and have the ability to cc/stun/interrupt more, I am now in complete control of my life, as oppose to helping the healer keep me alive. If that makes any sense.

[Kitru]

Dancer would fit.

You seriously think that it makes sense for a Dancer to have 10k hp in the equivalent of hoplite gear? In full DL, they would be packing 12k hp and, in full Allagan, 14-15k. The entire problem with the 65% evasion 100% +hp design is that it makes absolutely no sense for a lithe dancer type to have more hp than the guys wearing heavy armor, not to mention the culture shock associated with on tank having ridiculously huge hp compared to absolutely anyone else.

Also, you can edit a post to break the 1000 character limit.

[Techro]

.. keep 100% evasion, but 60-75% with "perfect" play could be reasonable.

I agree now let's say that you have an active CD in which, loses cool down based on a value. It can be the more you dodge, the faster you get a "70% dodge rate for 5-10 secs" <not reffering to balance, just mere ability theories>. Another one can be as such: i.e Bloodbath when you reach a certain amount of damage dealt or health regen, you will get a massive heal as an active. Now you have this on reserve, granted you can not use bloodbath for the time being. Tank got crit in the head 3 times in a row, did not dodge, the ol' RNG. You will have the bloodbath to bring you back up to a normal standard. Another good one is an ability that while CD is up any damage done to you, not evaded, stacks on this CD, once filled can grant you invulnerability for 10 secs. now you have a calculated approach and a sort of skill needs to be applied to the play style.

[Techro]

not to mention the culture shock associated with on tank having ridiculously huge hp compared to absolutely anyone else.

Yes this would be a problem, even though this is where the dancer would fit as a tank but like Piper said let's say it's not a Dancer then. Let's say it is something tanky, agile, with a decent amount of armor and mobility. Let's talk about the possibilites of different ideas. I won't mention Dancer anymore as that has struck a chord. you have to admit they would be fabulous, half naked at 15k hp.. hahaha

Also, you can edit a post to break the 1000 character limit.

Thank you

[Kitru]

Yes this would be a problem, even though this is where the dancer would fit as a tank but like Piper said let's say it's not a Dancer then. Let's say it is something tanky, agile, with a decent amount of armor and mobility. Let's talk about the possibilites of different ideas.

Keep in mind, as soon as you start increasing static mitigation, like armor, you have to start dropping evasion to compensate for the increasing mean mitigation. This is why there was the whole "65% evasion, cloth armor, and 100% +hp". You have to have tanks maintain roughly similar levels of mean mitigation *and* eHP and mechanics like evasion and parry only increase one. Basically, you *have* to have +hp or some significant variety of not-usable-at-max-hp absorb shields if you're going to have a lot of evasion because otherwise you either have way too little eHP or way too much mean mitigation. It's part of that delicate game that I referred to: you can't use something too much without preventing yourself from using something completely different: high evasion (i.e. enough that you can expect to see more dodges than hits) precludes any kind of significant level of armor or increases to static mitigation unless you're just willing to toss balance completely out of the window (which I'm pretty sure the devs *don't* want to do).

You could bring the evasion down to 50%, increase available armor from "cloth" to "leather" (it would require a 45% increase in static mitigation which I *think* is about equal to the transition from all classes->DoW gear), and you'd only need about 70% +hp to achieve the same eHP and mean mitigation as the 65/cloth/100 loadout. However, the lower you bring the evasion, the less reliable that evasion mitigation becomes. If you're going to have a cloth wearing evasion tank, you really do need to have that ridiculously high hp because the half-measures don't really create an effective tank. There's a certain threshold that you can't really cross unless you're willing to go all the way to the other end and, with RNG based mechanisms, the number is actually comparatively low: most players tend to dislike evasion chances that form the basis of their survival any time they're higher than ~25-30 or lower than 60-70% because people like to be able to reliably predict outcomes to some extent and, when you're turning every attack into a coin flip of "no damage" compared to "full damage" it tends to get pretty irksome.

Just look at what most people react to their various hit/miss chances in games like Final Fantasy Tactics: evasion-mitigation characters/jobs would be *distraught* to see an enemy's hit chance against them as high as 40% and expect it to be at *least* below 25% whereas a static mitigation/hp tank would be incredibly happy to have a hit chance as low as 70-80%. Even if the mean survivability of the tank was the same as the evasion tank or static mitigation tank, people just really don't like compromises that land them in the coin flip territory.

[Techro]

every attack into a coin flip of "no damage" compared to "full damage" it tends to get pretty irksome.

hmm yes. If we were to implement a maintenance mechanism, stacks per say, where one would have to maintain stacks to keep mitigation, not dodge, at a certain level. Maybe through damage. Now there is a stat that not many games take advantage of, and that is glancing, a great way to incorporate a dodge rate and mitigation at the same time. One can then stack dex. dex can raise glancing percentage of dmg. like STR to block. Now add an ability with a stacking glance parameter and has a proc in which gives you an invincible dodge rate for a certain amount of time. GOD MODE if you will. Sacred ground. This will create a nice juggle for you to play with while evading/glancing/tanking. I believe this can fall into the 58-60/"leather"/100hp. i agree leather would be the right choice here and a little less dodge. Do you think this would break the balance?

[lyndwyrm]

I see quite a few number being thrown out here (which I'm not going to look in to because I don't have the data at my fingertips), but would it really be necessary for an evasion tank to have much more HP than our current mitigation tank (PLD), even in cloth armor? If evasion chances were high enough, then normal hits wouldn't one shot them, and there would be plenty of time to heal between hits (this is on average, there are CDs for those times when the RNG hates the RNG tank). Then for heavy hits, they would have to have abilities just for those. I was thinking along the lines of what PiedPiper had mentioned

prevents any attack which hits the ACDC for say, 30% or more of its total health from killing it (leaving them with 1 hp, next attack would kill of course since the ACD now has less than 30% hp to loose).

for hits like HM Titan's table flip, which would reduce them to 1 HP, and then HOPE that you can dodge any hits before you get healed, which would have to come fast.

My concept of the abilities for an evasion tank, mostly consist of additional evasion, and the ability to flat out survive attacks, like survive with 1HP after heavy damage.
1. a static ability to increase enmity and evasion, like sword/shield-oath
2. a long cool down ability to survive with 2-10 hp after any hit would reduce you to that little
3. a reasonably short cool down or two to survive with 1HP after taking a large percentage of their, or some other condition.
4. an ability combo that increases evasion temporarily
5. and maybe another cool down, also, for increased evasion.

Of course, any class has more than 5 skills, but, something like this is what I imagine.

Of course, there are some things to be careful of: undodgeable attacks, party-wipe skills (although if everyone else dies, it probably won't make much difference), and the ability to reach 100% evasion for any extended period of time.

A note however, I would put dancer and ninja in DPS roles, with dancer having some support skills and ninja having some debuff skills. I like the idea of a evasion/ranged/magic tank, just seems different (kinda like a melee healer).

[Kitru]

Now there is a stat that not many games take advantage of, and that is glancing, a great way to incorporate a dodge rate and mitigation at the same time.

Parry/Block is already glancing. It's an RNG based mechanism that causes you to take partial damage. Many games actually incorporate it.

GOD MODE if you will. Sacred ground.

That would be more than a little borked. Any time you provide players with a regular time frame of "omg, lol, can't kill me", stuff gets borked. Hallowed Ground is *already* pretty nuts. Giving a class something like Hallowed Ground as a proc would just be massively worse (and, in order to give it anything approaching an uptime that isn't laughable, it's going to take up a *massive* portion of your mean mitigation, lowering everything else).

Temporary increases to RNG based mitigation mechanisms that don't catapult it to a 100% chance really don't work out too well as far as players are concerned, especially when you're talking about something as extreme as dodge. When you've got 90% damage reduction, you're going to take 10% damage 100% of the time. When you've got 90% evasion, you're going to take 100% damage 10% of the time, meaning that you've got a 10% chance that absolutely nothing happened at all. However, having evasion at 100% also creates problems because you're effectively rendering yourself immune to all damage for the duration. Anything that boosted evasion as extremely as that would have to be on the same CD as Hallowed Ground, else you're just telling one class that they're *supposed* to be outright immune to damage more often than anyone else (which, given the fact that the devs love burst damage, allows that class to excel at avoiding said burst damage).

This is why Keen Flurry and Bulwark provide monumentally high increases to block and parry rating whereas Featherfoot only increases it by a little bit. Increasing evasion by *that much* gets a little broken because it's all or nothing. Evasion as a long term relatively static attribute works because you can just "law of large numbers" it. Having it vary heavily over the course of time is just asking for it to be broken, especially when you want there to be explicit time frames of invulnerability.

I believe this can fall into the 58-60/"leather"/100hp.

It's not 60/leather/100. It's either 65/cloth/100 or 50/leather/70.

[Kitru]

I see quite a few number being thrown out here (which I'm not going to look in to because I don't have the data at my fingertips), but would it really be necessary for an evasion tank to have much more HP than our current mitigation tank (PLD), even in cloth armor?

Yes, and the reason is very simple because you're basing your theory on some fundamentally flawed logic:

If evasion chances were high enough, then normal hits wouldn't one shot them, and there would be plenty of time to heal between hits (this is on average, there are CDs for those times when the RNG hates the RNG tank). Then for heavy hits, they would have to have abilities just for those.

First off, evasion has nothing to do with getting one shot. If you have 99% evasion, you will get 1 shot 1% of the time if you only have 1 hp. eHP is what governs your chances of being one shot and evasion has no effect upon that.

Secondly, Evasion, as an RNG mechanism, cannot be predicted. You cannot *know* when the RNG is going to decide to take a crap on you, nor can you *know* that there will be plenty of time between hits. You can expect the *average* amount of time between hits to be relatively high, but, when you're packing an evasion chance of 65%, you've got a 12.25% chance of two attacks hitting you back to back and a 4.3% chance of 3 attacks hitting you in a row. Assume that a boss makes a basic attack once per GCD and that a boss fight lasts 10 minutes, or 240 GCDs. In a gross oversimplification of the actual math that I'm too lazy to do at the moment because it involves all kinds of stuff that it's too early in the morning for, we can split up those 240 GCDs into 3 GCD packets to compare. At a 4.3% chance, one out of every 23.3 packets will end up not missing at all. The actual chances of getting 3 hits in a row is actually much higher, given the fact that we're ignoring packets where the last 1-2 attacks landed and the first 1-2 attacks landed as well, but it is proves my point. Over the course of a normal boss fight, you can expect to see at least 4 occasions where you don't dodge anything for several attacks in a row.

So, even if you're getting the same mean mitigation as a PLD or WAR, *eventually* you're going to get a chain of attacks that eat right through your RNG based defenses, not to mention that we're completely ignoring those spike hits like Hood Swipe and Mountain Buster that one shot anyone that isn't armored like a tank. If said evasion tank *doesn't* have a massively inflated hp pool such that they can have equivalent eHP to a PLD or WAR without having the *armor* or DR of a PLD or WAR, they *will* die to RNG and it *will* piss off everyone and their cousins (it's for this exact reason that Shad/Sin tanks in TOR are having to be largely overhauled and caused a *lot* of players to leave thanks to the devs completely fumbling how they handled it).

for hits like HM Titan's table flip, which would reduce them to 1 HP, and then HOPE that you can dodge any hits before you get healed, which would have to come fast.

The problem with mechanics like this is that they don't really work out well. A ability to prevent an attack from one-shotting you will either come in one of two forms: an ability with a limited uptime that works at any hp level or an ability that works constantly but only while you are at max hp. The first doesn't work because, as previously mentioned, you can't *know* when you're going to get an unlucky string of hits coming your way and you're forced to use it preemptively. As an evasion tank with negligible armor, 1 hit alone is the equivalent of 2-3 hits on a mitigation tank. If you get 3 hits consecutively, that's like a healer ignoring a PLD or WAR for a good 15 seconds *without the tank having a CD active*. Evasion tanking compresses hits and distributes them randomly. The second doesn't work because it does absolutely nothing when your healers are not constantly topping you off. When your healers have to babysit you *that* much, especially when it takes more than 1 heal to bring you back up to full from being hit by an attack, you're *still* going to experience instances where you got popped by the auto-attack right before Mountain Buster, even when you were topped off, and MB followed up, ignored your "anti-one shot" mechanic, and wiped the floor with you. On top of all of this, if the effects are based upon a duration rather than a charge based system, you're essentially saying that the user can't die for the duration and that they shouldn't be bothered to be healed as long as it's up. It's, effectively, a Hallowed Ground that also reduces all healing by 100% as well.

One-shotting of tanks is weird because, most often, it's not just a one-shot from full health and, very rarely, is it actually a one-shot, unless it's a mechanic that got screwed up. What tends to happen is that tanks die within a very short time frame (1-2 GCDs) before the healers are able to get a heal off of them. Mountain Buster doesn't present any real threat to a reasonably geared tank at full HP, even if they've got no CDs active. Mountain Buster *alone* doesn't do enough damage. What makes Mountain Buster nasty is that, right before Titan drops it, he uses Rock Buster and an auto-attack. If one of those hits, the tank just took enough damage to make Mountain Buster worrisome. If both of them hit, the tank is way *below* the danger zone unless they've got a CD active and, even then, Mountain Buster hits hard enough that it will often kill the tank *through* the CD. The same is true for Hood Swipe. It's not Hood Swipe that kills you: it's Hood Swipe and the 1-2 attacks before and after it.

The law of large numbers basically ensures that, unless an RNG tank actually has equal eHP to the other tanks, they *will* get hit with a string of attacks that demolishes them completely. It's not a question of "whether". It's a question of "when". If they've got a fraction of the other tank's eHP, those occasions, which *are* going to crop up, are going to wipe them out with no real recourse. Providing CDs to coopt them or procs to prevent it doesn't really stop it from being a problem because you can't predict when it will happen.

A tank that relies upon evasion for mean mitigation *has* to have some extreme eHP increase. CDs and other temporary effects will *never* do this without being completely broken or useless half of the time. Without an major eHP buff, RNG tanks just fall over dead randomly and no one enjoys that.

[Techro]

Parry/Block is already glancing. It's an RNG based mechanism that causes you to take partial damage.

Yes parry/block is a stat but to glance CAN be another stat. A glancing HIT would mean that the person nicked you while you were evading..This would create a mitigation in a dodge. thus giving you a percentage of damage. As oppose to parry or block, it is physically straining for you to hold the amount of pressure from the attack on your weapon or shield, therefore hurting you.

I'm not getting into the numbers as this game doesn't really show us a lot of numbers to play with and hides a lot of numbers that affect abilities in game. I would add to LyndWyrm and say that a stacking CD with an active to massively heal or god mode dodge would be what you need. granted the CD would be one of the long ones. This helps lessen the RNG, now you have a control, a constant, and you make it a skill based ability. You got yourself an evasion tank.