Quote Originally Posted by Izsha View Post
They would need to redesign tanking all together. Mitigation is "hit this button before this attack". Mitigation isn't hard or interesting in any way in this game. Push button, take less damage. It's exceedingly rudimentary. There's no way to "test" tanks in any meaningful way because there is no meaningful active way to mitigate damage. The only tank stat is hp. So you litterally gain no actual mitigation by playing turtle. More hp doesn't reduce the amount of heals you need.
That still all comes back to bad design though, whether the encounter or the tank is poorly designed doesn't change that overall it's bad design. I do generally agree that to a large degree it's already too late but still doesn't excuse the bad design decisions that really are still going forward. They could have made parry actually do something, they could have made vit directly reduce the damage you take. We have a stat determination that increases all damage, why not a stat like I don't know, mitigation, stack it to take less damage. We have elemental resist on our char sheets and absolutely no option to do anything with it.

They added new skills to the tanks in the expansion they could have used those to make things more interesting but didn't. The new skills could have been all kinds of active mitigation but didn't really realize that at all. Closest is pld with shelltron and divine veil but those fall woefully short. So yeah it's kind of too late for radical gameplay changes, but there were a lot of things they could have done.