Tank Accessoires 4.0

[aleph_null]

I don't know maybe i am just overthinking it. But it sounds like a tank should be a dps with tank utilities? so you would have healer, pure dps, dps with defense abilties

Yeah because being overly tanky and overhealing people won't help the group at killing the boss. Once you're good enough that you don't have to stay in tank stance or healing non stop you should contribute dps.

[Reynhart]

When you don't need all the mitigations you can have, you'll start by removing the ones that carry a "cost," e.g. tank stances from your list.

The problem is that, in fights designed around spike damage, the tank stance is basically the weakest mitigation available. That's why you take the liberty of dropping it and why I think, in a world where the designer try to enforce tank stance, that it should be much more powerful...and mobs should it much harder.

This is pretty much the reason why I like tanking in this game. The rotations on tanks aren't as complex as dps, but being able to maximize your dps and minimizing the dmg you take or heals you need (thus maximizing healers' dps) is pretty fulfilling.

So you're saying that even if you had a more complex damage rotation, you'd still find turtle tanking not appealing ?
Or, if your rotation would have to min-max between active mitigation and damage ?

For example, instead of having enmity bonuses (Which could be 100% covered by the stance), some of our WS could put a cumultive shield on us, and you'd try to judge the sweet spot between building more shield and doing more damage.

[aleph_null]

Well unlike dps, mitigation has a threshold, but if that threshold requires turtle tanking and is challenging enough I think I can be satisfied enough. If a boss hits so hard that I have to perfectly time inner beast or sheltron for every single cleave and tank busters need a few more cds on top of that, then yeah that sounds absolutely interesting to me.

However in that case the difference between good tanks and average tanks would be the difference between clearing and not clearing so to be fair on top of that you'd have to put equally intense healing and dps checks (think gordias savage dps checks + midas savage mechanics/tanking/healing checks), and furthermore to avoid people outgearing the content it'll have to be designed assuming BiS sets on everyone. Now you'll get a really hard fight that actually needs tanks to turtle tank to survive, and also healers/dps to be on top of their game as well. The only way for this to happen is to put it as the super hard boss fight they mentioned during the live letters that we'll get in odd patches (which I'm really looking forward to, since the devs seem content with savage mode being as easy as creator).

If perfect mitigation isn't required to clear then any extra mitigation like stacking shield you mentioned will be weighed against the extra healer dps you're affording your healers, and you'll get back to where we're at.

[Reynhart]

However in that case the difference between good tanks and average tanks would be the difference between clearing and not clearing

Not automatically. For example, if RoH would apply the cumulative shield I'd mentionned, you'd have PLDs that mainly accumulate shield again and again, to the point of "overshielding", and maybe put aside Royal Authority totally. As a good tank, you'd pinpoint the amount of shield you need. It would work pretty much like judging the perfect amount of enmity combos you need, except than overdoing it could be useful.

You see, I totally support players optimizing their DPS, it just that stance dancing, for me, feels like an unatural and clunky way of doing it.

[Falar]

They just need to add STR to our accessories now.

Like the 2nd secondary, it would not be as high as the "primary" primary. Thus DPS would still have much more atk power plus all their other damage skills.

I can't believe anyone would advocate turtle tanking. Talk about boring. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed tanking in this game because the damage was not so abysmal. Now that they take that away.......