How to get people to tank!

[Dzian]

In a perfect world Tanks would have more self sustain, attacks that close gaps or draw in enemies, and have attacks that cleave into multiple adjacent enemies at once. Until that time comes though Tanks will rely on boring 1-2-3 combo skill rotations, press cooldown button for defensive awesome, and overzealously pretend like their armor means something. Especially with 100% useful stats like Parry.

It's less about Tanking and more just playing a smoke and mirrors game of memory match.

I main PLD and I d somewhat agree with this. I wish my defensive mitigation was a lot more interesting than pop a cooldown here and there. I've said for a long time one of the things I miss is aegis boon in 1.23. there was a huge sense of cool when you used that skill properly and laughed off a 4k tank buster with more hp than you had before it hit you... it had a huge impact if used right. where currently defensive cooldowns don't have any real impact

shelltron is sort of ok. but simply doesn't feel powerfull enough, because you block an attack you still take ~80% of the hit. so it doesn't really feel like its made a huge difference or actually done anything at all really. cool downs are kind of the same. and I see this from the tank and healer perspective. as a healer I often don't even notice if a tank has used a cool down or not. it simply doesn't make that much difference generally speaking. a tank will need healing after a smash regardless of whether he used a cooldown or not so nothing really changes... and as a tank they're quite boring to use. 20% less damage for 20 seconds. but visually nothing really changes using it. just the numbers are a bit smaller.

making that 10k hit only do 8k damage to you doesn't really matter when my next heal is gonna heal you for 10k anyway.. what was the point??

where using shelltron for example it feels a lot more involved even as weak as it is... it is a bit more rewarding though. use it badly and you just waste it on an auto attack. and maybe mitigate a couple of hundred damage. time it right you might block a couple of thousand..... as weak as it feels it's probably one of the most interesting tank skills defensively speaking

personally in some cases using mitigation on other jobs is more satisfying than tanks for example pop a manaward / shadeshift and watch that hit smack you for a big fat zero damage. feels more substantial than rampart or something because it's changing the outcome of an event. if you use shadeshift or manaward or something and a hit hits you for zero. you've changed the result of a hit from tanking damage to taking no damage. it's had an impact... aegis boon was the same I.n 1.23 you went from taking damage to taking no damage. or in somecases actually getting healed.

compare that to tank cool downs. you pop a ramapart and you don't change the outcome. you're still taking damage. and most of the time the reduction is barely noticeable at all.

I sometimes think if they made the defensive aspects of the job more involved and interesting you'd probably have more people playing them... but many of my friends tend to agree that the defensive aspectsare very lacklustre because they don't really make a huge difference most of the time

[MagiusNecros]

snippy snip

Good post. I agree 100%. If tanking had more impact and felt more involved it would be more enjoyable. But sadly it isn't. I feel like a lot of responsibility falls on the Healer role in many cases.

[Claire_Pendragon]

Good post. I agree 100%. If tanking had more impact and felt more involved it would be more enjoyable. But sadly it isn't. I feel like a lot of responsibility falls on the Healer role in many cases.

Yes, now that Im i270 for A12S, I can pretty much survive all tank busters with no CDs, and let the healers virus/spam heal me for just about everything.
Healers really do "Carry" the most of all right now. (Of course minimum HP pools, and minimum DPS needs to be met, but atm thats not much.)

[Shurrikhan]

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Can I ask what you have in mind to make mitigation seem more interesting or impactful? More active mitigation? Choice mitigation (maybe some shared resources so you have to be more picky about what you use, but also each can be a bit more powerful as a result)? Should it still be just as front-loaded as now, where as long as you have all your CDs ready you can take on an army, and when you don't you take on an army of mice? Or should it be pulled back a bit? Should diving into the fray have more advantages than just more mitigation output and the few sustain tools like Bloodbath Overpowers or Blood Price? Should offensive, defensive, and utility ever feed from any sort of common resource so that you'd have to pick between those too?

I feel like there's some good points that come out of the system we have now, even if far from seemingly perfect. Front-loaded mitigation toolkits give us a fairly large capacity range or periodic variance around which to pace our runs, which brings out the feeling of the tank as a dungeon leader, the pace-maker, and necessitating variance in that pace. The simple CDs (no charge, just refresh, with any time left unused after recharge going to waste) gives near-obligatory interactions in healer-tank trade-offs for focused output. Their length makes it timeable against very certain attacks in a given fight. Their cooldowns incentivize strategies for non-forced tank swaps, pre-popping CDs to catch the next applicable even if the first's duration would partly go to waste, etc. There's quite a few good things to be said about it, on the whole. Which or, moreover, what could be better? Which are worth throwing out for that something better?

There's also the balance of mitigation (both anti-burst and anti-sustain) and damage-dealing (both burst and sustain). I'd ideally like both to feel impactful, but I don't want to see the simultaneous capabilities of tanks so overwhelm those of DPS that it'd just make sense to go mostly tanks? An extra or two in an 8-man—I'd like to see use for such variance, if merely optional, just as with healers. But just as much as I don't want tanks to feel unimpactful in their mitigation or like wet noodles in their damage-dealing, I don't want to see non-tanks as a burden.

[Khalithar]

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(Side note: I always enjoy reading your posts, just wanted to mention that.)

I was thinking about your thoughts on making mitigation more impactful and doing something about active mitigation and I thought on some other games I've played and how to accomplish that. I don't think WoW's current incarnation of active mitigation is the way to go, what did come to mind for me however were some older abilities in WoW that have since been redesigned and lost any resemblance to their old incarnation. One example is the WoW Paladin's ability Holy Shield, originally it was a buff you had to maintain which drastically increased your block chance for a certain number of blocks or for a certain period of time, whichever happened first, at which point when it ended or ran out, you could usually recast it right away (it had a duration 10 seconds and a cooldown of 8 seconds) and it's overall MP cost was negligible. Now, I'm not suggesting the same incarnation of that ability, but I think adding something in the vein of that on a short cooldown with noticeable enough effect on all tanks could make it more interesting.

What you said stood out to me, particularly this:

Should it still be just as front-loaded as now, where as long as you have all your CDs ready you can take on an army, and when you don't you take on an army of mice?

Because as much as I love this aspect:

Front-loaded mitigation toolkits give us a fairly large capacity range or periodic variance around which to pace our runs, which brings out the feeling of the tank as a dungeon leader, the pace-maker, and necessitating variance in that pace.

And I absolutely 100% agree with you on this, I've lately been thinking that perhaps the difference between when cooldowns are up and when they're not might be a little too much. Note, I'm just saying "might," I'm not completely convinced on it quite yet because I enjoy the front loaded mitigation personally, but when you do use them and you have nothing left it's not a very nice feeling either. Hence why I've started thinking that maybe adding some sort of extra active defenses of some kind might not be a bad idea with their use tied to being in tank stance. But since I like to give more concrete examples...

Paladin- While in Shield Oath, Rage of Halone gives a buff called Halone's Bulwark, decreasing all damage taken by 5-10% for X seconds.

Dark Knight- While in Grit, Dark Arts + Souleater creates a Blood Barrier, absorbing damage equal to the amount of HP healed.

Warrior- While in Defiance, rework Inner Beast so it will only cost 1-2 Wrath but reduce the mitigation some or maybe leave it as is? I'm not sure.

Those are my initial ideas, now obviously I don't know if they would work or be overpowered in the current incarnation of the game, but that's meant to give you more of an idea of what I mean by adding an extra mitigation tool we can use in between longer cooldowns.

[Shurrikhan]

(Side note: I always enjoy reading your posts, just wanted to mention that.)

*blush*

One example is the WoW Paladin's ability Holy Shield, originally it was a buff you had to maintain which drastically increased your block chance for a certain number of blocks or for a certain period of time, whichever happened first, at which point when it ended or ran out, you could usually recast it right away (it had a duration 10 seconds and a cooldown of 8 seconds) and it's overall MP cost was negligible.

I've been thinking about skills like this a lot of late within the domain of active mitigation. Since Legion, though, my favorite example has actually been closer to the Warrior's oGCD toolkit, however (especially back when Focused Rage was still available). Take their Ignore Pain, for instance. To me the ideal design concept for active mitigation should have both choices (not necessarily between other defensives) and application variance. Ignore Pain's interaction with its alternative general resource (Rage) spender, the nuke-buffing Focused Rage, gave both—with or without the (obligatory) Vengeance talent (which traded out choice play for pace play, but also allowed the player to save more rage on one choice than the other through refocusing their priorities while still trying to meet incoming and outgoing windows of play). As effortless as that key was to hit, its timing meant something. It wasn't just a buff you maintain (which is what Holy Shield typically felt like to me).

Just a side-note though, even maintenance buffs like Holy Shield can make that somewhat engaging, especially if they're not oGCDs. Now, that will sound debilitating to some, especially anyone not assuming that the class is (gasp) balanced around that very fact, and is not therefore held back by it. By it being on the GCD, it now has judgment—it needs to be weighed against other choices. Is it about to run out, making some space between this and the next GCD potentially far more painful? How much would be wasted if one were to replace it right now? Depending on how those stats are tracked by which the decision, and how the shield mechanically lasts (by damage or hit count, etc.), it can be either involved or just bothersome. I feel like that's something any MMO ought remember a bit better in regards to some abilities before their initial implementation, rather than having to patch them out later or pretend they're not held back by those small but highly gameplay-affecting details. Some minutia really matter.

I'd like to somewhat avoid concrete examples for now, especially within the combat system as it is now, largely just because I imagine these were meant to illustrative spit-balls, and any counter-suggestions I'd give would be just the same. And because—broken record here—I feel like certain parts of my suggestions will never quite click without some larger underlying revisions to combat (stagger, interception, revisions to RNG mitigation, certain new mitigation mechanics, certain new damage splitting mechanics, etc). For now I'll just leave it at this.

My entirely personal preferences lies with adding as few class or ability-specific gimmicks as possible, while still making them as involved as possible. For instance, even if a stance does something as simple as adding 15% damage, that should be felt through certain benchmarks shifting in the interactions between the attacker and the attacked just because of that damage bonus itself. Even what is simple should be capable of feeling highly involved. Where it does not, that's not a requirement to give the tooltip and extra paragraph's worth of effects—it just means there aren't enough facets of interaction in the first place, universally speaking (or because of some line-up in that interaction). And those are broad mechanics more so than anything unit- or interaction-specific (which would simply be where those marks occur and how the decisions they bring out). Take any actual fighting game for instance, especially where one of the guys has a "Minus Strike" of sorts (like Shugoki's Charge of the Oni in For Honor). It's no longer then just chunking or chipping away at enemy health. Health matters. And so timing matters. Early burst can leave you dead. And yet it's still just health, and one stupidly simple modifier to make it important. That's what I'm looking for in the changes I might recommend. As a tank (or anyone, really) I want things to look forward to beyond just my CD refreshing (something a bit more on the additive side), rather than just thinking about how long I can hold out with my buffs going on CD and their buffs dropping off two by two or so (a more... deductive model, if you will). I want to feel like I'm really "in the fray." We have now slightly through Low Blow and Blood Price, etc. But I want more... a lot more.

One of the things I've suggested to that end before was a revised TP model. That'd be a ridiculously large change, I know, but hear me out for illustrative purposes. By returning TP to a primarily generative resource, building from damage, mitigation, healing and healing dealt and perhaps even damage taken, to differing degrees between different jobs or even stances, there would naturally be an improved output when "in the fray", especially for tanks. Allow TP to then take an effect on or be spent on combo-rushing, thematic tools, extra oGCDs, cleave mechanics, empowering spells, etc., and—in this case the most important bit—defensive abilities, and you have naturally have choices asked of you. Do you accelerate your combos in order to open into your mitigating weaponskills quickly, burn down an enemy (either to undamaging, dead state or stagger him for the time being so he can't do shit to you or anyone else), build defenses, pop utilities... what? Everything has some visible benefit, but you're aiming for the mix that would most produce the outcome you need.