Tank adjustments we can agree on?

[Cidolfas86]

Ah, but you see, you're looking at DRK and PLD in a vacuum. What you need to do is look at them in a toaster, then you'll see where the balance comes into play.

Everyone knows you look at them in an oven. Toaster scrubs should go back to WoW.

I didn't know 20% mitigation = 40% mitigation but I'm sure this makes sense to you, somehow. WARs can cry about how PLD and DRK don't deserve off-gcd stance dancing when they stop being the best tank in the game by an absolutely ridiculous margin. You know what blows my mind? That the physical class with the absolute lowest TP consumption in single target of all was given pseudo invigorate when they absolutely had no need for it, while the other tanks have to cry for goad 3 minutes into a fight.

Eh, even during the 50 cap era I could still run dry on WAR if my Pacify was getting regularly cleansed and I was using IB regularly. It's nowhere near as fast as DRK, and not quite as fast as PLD, but it could happen. Not to mention WAR is the only one of the 3 that uses TP for AoE threat so its not entirely undeserved that they got it.

However it wouldn't hurt to see something similar on the other 2. They could just as easily apply a TP regen or TP save buff to Tempered Will. That would instantly make it shoot up high on the useful ability list. Add equivalent for DRK outside of Blood Weapon that can be used as MT-boom problem solved. DRK especially needs help in this field because there is no "Shield Swipe" equivalent to stem the tide as MT.

[Freyyy]

Add equivalent for DRK outside of Blood Weapon that can be used as MT-boom problem solved. DRK especially needs help in this field because there is no "Shield Swipe" equivalent to stem the tide as MT.

I think Sole Survivor may be a good candidate for such an addition. It already restores both HP and MP, why not TP after all. The CD and requirement for it to work would make it completely balanced.

[Teiren]

but the player base has minmaxed to the point where they're using a clunky kit in an optimal way that -probably- wasnt how the devs intended the class to be played.

This is exactly correct, and this is exactly what's upsetting me. This game started out being as casual as possible, which is why Oaths/Grit work like they do, and I think they need to keep it that way because people will just go back to WoW if they try to do overly difficult/annoying gameplay. However, at the same time even people that don't play MMORPGs to death will eventually learn and grow frustrated with this Oath/Grit system (many probably already have), so they definitely should change it.

Most tanks now, on hard content, use their tank stances in the same way they might use a short duration cooldown: incoming damage, pop tank stance + rampart/skin or something, absorb big hit, back to DPS stance. This feels fine for Warrior due to the fluidity of the kit, but just feels "off" for the other two tanks.

I'm not primarily a tank, and I haven't done Savage yet, so these are all honest questions that I'm not trying to be accusatory or inflammatory with:
How is this possible?
Why would a tank stress out his healer(s) like this?
Putting aside player psychology (which is still important), isn't healer DPS higher than tank DPS?
Therefore, aren't you contributing more DPS by reducing damage taken by as much as possible in order to let the healer DPS more and heal less?

I've played WoW for many years, and if a tank ever tried something like this they would die before the healer could heal them. Is Savage's damage output on the tank really not deadly enough? It already seemed almost lethal on Normal before everyone outgeared it to hell and back. Burden of the Father's burst was somewhat a nightmare. I assumed it would scale up properly in Savage.

[Lucke]

Putting aside player psychology (which is still important), isn't healer DPS higher than tank DPS?
Therefore, aren't you contributing more DPS by reducing damage taken by as much as possible so you need to be healed less often and letting the healer DPS more?

As I understand it, of the 3 classes, DRK and WAR DPS blows PLD DPS out of the water. So going VIT PLD and Shield Oath while letting the healer DPS is just as good as a WAR or DRK pushing out DPS at the cost of having the Healer heal more rather than DPS. So really, I guess it depends on the tank. I go full turtle no matter what though, to make healing me a little less stressful.

So like in terms of DPS: VIT/SO PLD with healer DPS = STR WAR/DRK with healer healing.

[karateorangutang]

I'm not primarily a tank, and I haven't done Savage yet, so these are all honest questions that I'm not trying to be accusatory or inflammatory with:
How is this possible?
Why would a tank stress out his healer(s) like this?
Putting aside player psychology (which is still important), isn't healer DPS higher than tank DPS?
Therefore, aren't you contributing more DPS by reducing damage taken by as much as possible in order to let the healer DPS more and heal less?

I've played WoW for many years, and if a tank ever tried something like this they would die before the healer could heal them. Is Savage's damage output on the tank really not deadly enough? It already seemed almost lethal on Normal before everyone outgeared it to hell and back. Burden of the Father's burst was somewhat a nightmare. I assumed it would scale up properly in Savage.

I'm no expert either, but this is what I gather. In the current meta tanks can achieve the survivability needed fairly easily. Since fights are so scripted and generally auto attacks hit like wet noodles then you can coast pretty easily in DPS stance most of the time without being a giant burden on healers. A good tank with a good awareness of a fight can switch back and forth without placing a huge burden on MP. Additionally, the tank's DPS when doing this is greater than the DPS the healer could be doing otherwise.

The only way to fix this problem without changing stances would be to make healer DPS sufficient enough to make the extra time they would have while we are in our tank stance worth more than us being in DPS stance.

Then we are talking about total game balance though and that is an issue. Honestly though when I'm running tank stance on bosses, etc. The amount of extra incoming damage is completely laughable.

[Teiren]

I had this in my post up there, but it works better as a separate post:

I'm starting to think the problem isn't how the stances are designed off or on-GCD but rather that they don't affect survivability ENOUGH. If Shield Oath/Grit/Defiance all had their %'s increased to something like 35%-40% from the current 20%, that would allow the devs to dramatically increase damage dealt by monsters that are supposed to be hitting a tank. This way, tank stances would be absolutely necessary and used almost always appropriately. In other words, the off-GCD/on-GCD thing wouldn't matter because you wouldn't be swapping nearly as often. In fact, I think this is what happened in WoW, though very gradually.

So yeah, this is my final feedback on what I think should happen: Widen the gap between tank/non-tank stances to allow the intentionally hard parts of the game to be designed so that tanks have to actually tank when they're supposed to. Then again, many would be against that because the current game design apparently lets people get by with active swapping which feels smart and fun when executed well, so they would have to shore up tank stance gameplay if they did this...ugh, I don't know.

Anyway, back on topic: All the front page changes still seem great and common sense to me.

[Freyyy]

Putting aside player psychology (which is still important), isn't healer DPS higher than tank DPS?
Therefore, aren't you contributing more DPS by reducing damage taken by as much as possible so you need to be healed less often and letting the healer DPS more?

Absolutely not, it's the contrary. The DPS a healer gains from a tank being more tanky is and will always be inferior to the DPS a tank gains from going STR + DPS stance. The reasons for this are simple : Healers need to completely stop to perform their primary role in order to start DPSing, whereas tanks can do both at the same time, they're damage-dealing jobs and constantly hitting the boss. Tanks have most of the time even more uptime than DPSers themselves on the boss. The second reason is that healers don't meet the accuracy in order to have 100% hit chance, so their DPS is at some degree tied to RNG on raid content. Even with melded accessories with accuracy, they can't have enough to fully meet the cap. The only situation where healer DPS gain can be superior to tank DPS gain is for massive pulls during dungeons with a WHM and a PLD.

With that said, going into DPS stance and wearing STR in Savage doesn't stress out the good healers. The fights are completely 100% scripted and are always the same with almost no RNG involved except "who will be targetted by this mechanic ?". By good enough CD usage and proper stance-dancing, the incoming damage in this game are a real joke and completely predictable which makes healing more of a song to learn perfectly and repeat everytime you do the same fight than just being like "oh this guy got hit, I heal him, oh my god this tank got destroyed, I need to heal him right now !". It's more like "Oh, we gonna get raid-wide damage soon. Pop mitigation, make sure everyone is topped off, pre-cast AoE heal/hots. Tank is getting only auto-attacks for a little bit of time now, let's keep regen on him and SCH go cleric stance. Oh, spike damage on the tank incoming in X seconds, let's stoneskin/adlo him and make sure he's topped off, he uses a CD so he will take almost no damage, top him off, throw a regen, go back to DPS."
The tank being in DPS stance doesn't change anything about that. Fluff damage is still gonna be fluff damage. As long as you have your tanking stance and CDs for spike damage, there is no stress for healers.

[karateorangutang]

Snip

Thinking outside the box here.

What if the damage from autoattacks was increased and the damage from tank busters was slightly decreased. This would make the damage over time a bit larger and force a tank ( at progression anyway) to stay longer in their stances.

[Teiren]

It feels like you're not supposed to always know exactly when something like, for example, Royal Fount (that's the laser cone in Alexander 1, right?) is going to hit. It's supposed to look sporadic. But true, when you do something to death, you're going to eventually learn patterns, especially in a game with a somewhat slower pace like this one.

Also I think a big part of my confusion stems from greatly underestimating how much healing one spell cast does. I mean, I've levelled all the healers to max level, and it was always easy but still kept me much more engaged than the other Jobs. I just figured in Savage it got insane. As a damage dealer, healing always looks really scary and always a stressful, unsure race to catch up, but I guess that's just how Alexander Duty Finder is sometimes. I really ought to get back into regular raiding with a real raid group, lol.

Anyway yeah, increased autoattack damage to smooth out damage taken would probably solve it, but I don't think they could really change up tank gameplay that much until next expansion. That would maybe tick off too many people.

[karateorangutang]

As I understand it, of the 3 classes, DRK and WAR DPS blows PLD DPS out of the water. So going VIT PLD and Shield Oath while letting the healer DPS is just as good as a WAR or DRK pushing out DPS at the cost of having the Healer heal more rather than DPS. So really, I guess it depends on the tank. I go full turtle no matter what though, to make healing me a little less stressful.

So like in terms of DPS: VIT/SO PLD with healer DPS = STR WAR/DRK with healer healing.

In most cases yes WAR will blow PLD DPS out of the water, especially in aoe situations. I run STR on my PLD too and running in SwO is never really an issue. The issue with PLD isn't single target DPS in SwO, but its DPS in ShO and AoE damage potential in comparison to DRK and WAR.

Also at the end of the day, there is almost no situation where tank dps won't be greater than healer dps. That goes for PLD too ( again AoE is an issue here).