Strength Tanks

[fm_fenrir]

I genuinely hope this whole VIT/STR issue is cleared up in 3.2 along with this whole "damage first" mentality that has gone too far and really puts the whole tank & healer roles into question.

I can't wait for SE's fix to be "VIT affects tank DPS/AP instead of STR", so I can bottle up those tears like Poland Spring. You can't get rid of tanks trying to maximize damage without gutting the functionality entirely, which makes tanks boring to play and requires every single ability to have an enmity modifier adjustment made to it to make up the difference in damage output.

[Zojha]

You can't get rid of tanks trying to maximize damage without gutting the functionality entirely[...]

Sunder Armor used to be a thing. Pretty sure you could even include it in a combo system without changing the classes from the ground up. Heck, you could give every ability a weapon/stat-dependent enmity modifier and then purely supportive effects with no damage whatsoever. Let some inflated enmity numbers flash up on the screen so people don't "get bored" and you're set.

But then you step outside the dungeon and lack the dedicated damagedealers to kill anything. And "that" is why we have a hard time getting rid of the damage paradigm of tanks. Frankly, tanks/healers have as much business doing damage as damagedealers have healing/tanking: None. That's the trinity design. And that's totally fine, until the trinity is broken in solo play.

That's where the mess starts. You now give tanks/healers the tools to end a fight ASAP and of course they'll try to use it in a group setting as much as possible as well. Which can't be resolved without essentially designing two different classes for each type of content. Hence, do as little tanking/healing as possible while doing as much DPS as possible.


TL;DR: Trinity design is stupid.

[Sapphidia]

TL;DR: Trinity design is stupid.

I generally agree with this. Lord of the Rings Online did something interesting though with its tanking class, the Guardian (though I havent played it in years so not sure if this is still the case).

Guardians were able to equip 1h/shield or 2h weapons. They had a bunch of skills that did damage after they parried an attack, and a bunch of skills that did lots of -threat- after they blocked an attack. Obviously you could only block with a shield equipped, so if you were using a two handed weapon you naturally lost access to the vast majority of your threat moves (you had like... one move you could use without needing a block that was for getting initial threat, but not keeping it).

The idea was quite elegant - in a dungeon environment you equip a sword and shield and as you block attacks you use your reactive block moves to generate AOE threat (most did virtually no damage). In a solo environment you equipped a big two handed sword and used reactive Parry moves to do lots of solo damage. However, you couldn't effectively be a DPS class in a group because your big damage moves required you to be being hit for parries, and you couldnt hold threat well without the shield.

It worked fairly well I think. Point is: it's possible to have a situation where a class has two "modes", one for solo and one for group tanking. Doing lots of damage in a solo environment is not necessarily going to mean you always do huge damage when tanking too.