Tank Scaling still a massive issue

[Xtrasweettea]

[...] The only enmity problems that exist are if you try to play tanks like you did in 2.x and 3.x, e.g. sitting in DPS stance spamming DPS combos, which is not playing tank or managing enmity, it's playing DPS with occasional tank cooldowns.

I keep seeing this point made all over this board whenever there is a tank complaint thread or a pro-DPS tank thread on here.

Can a "Tank Purist" like you, Johnny, explain to me (a "Tank Radical") why it I am not considered tanking if I do swap to DPS stance (or drop Grit) and spam DPS combos?

[FallenWings]

Read what I said again.

"Meld more strength and then a bunch of crit/direct hit."

For the cost of 2 strength's worth of damage vs 240 accessories you can meld 160 substats.

It's the same for everyone else as far as I'm aware? I don't see your point other then me reading the meld more strength part wrong.

I keep seeing this point made all over this board whenever there is a tank complaint thread or a pro-DPS tank thread on here.

Can a "Tank Purist" like you, Johnny, explain to me (a "Tank Radical") why it I am not considered tanking if I do swap to DPS stance (or drop Grit) and spam DPS combos?

Duh. It's because you're not in your "Tank Stance" therefore you're not tanking 'properly'. Can you stop trying to maximize your gameplay and stick to your basic functions please? We don't need tryhards in this care bear game.

[Rbstr]

It's very clear SE wants tanks to do less damage. That's fine as a concept, given you don't want tanks to simply be DPS with a bunch more survivability.
The things I really don't get are:
Why do they want tanks' attack power and enmity to unsustainable without future meddling?
Why do they want accessory upgrades for tanks to be worth so little?

On the latter question - we've never needed to have the HP levels that ilevel-current accessories have given us in the past and nothing appears to have changed there. Thus accessory upgrades are basically wasted until everything else has been done already. They're essentially useless savage drops they won't substantially help you clear the later fights. 2 str for 20 ilevels does not change that.

On the former question: They already had a semi-permanent solution with half-vit/str scaling and they threw it away! SO it really appears they want tanks to not scale...
It's plain to see that a some arbitrary future ilvl tanks won't hold hate because they grow slower than DPS. They will have to change enmity modifiers or make tank accs have a big jump in added str or something in the future. Be it 5.0 or whatever.

Even if they don't want to go back to the old way because of the new res sickness there're ton' of ways they could fix it permanently and still reduce tank damage vs. dps. Give tanks full strength on accessories but make attack power .9*str (or .8 or .7 or whatever) instead of 1-to-1. Or they could make tank accessories give exactly .5 (or .4 or .6 or whatever) the DPS accessories. All it has to do is increase at the same rate as the DPS somehow. Problem solved in perpetuity - If tanks can hold hate now they will be able to in the future as well.

That would also solve the problem that it really sucks from the player perspective to continually get worse, and fall father and farther behind, relative to other players even as you increase in ilvl yourself.

[KingFrost]

I wonder, how seemingly impossibly far off into the future would we have to go for this not to be solved by an extra Butcher's Block or two. No being facetious, but seriously asking, given how much of a joke enmity is in this game, how great would the deficit have to be to where you'd have to care more about enmity than... past an Unchained opener.

[Xtrasweettea]

Duh. It's because you're not in your "Tank Stance" therefore you're not tanking 'properly'. Can you stop trying to maximize your gameplay and stick to your basic functions please? We don't need tryhards in this care bear game.

The light of the Truth has been shined upon me. Thank you, FallenWings, for your enlightenment. I have been dirty by sin! What does it take to cleanse myself of all wrong doings? What actions must I do or how much should I pay for indulgence?

[BlackironTarkus]

The only thing you are griping about is that you can't do leet deeps while being a tank. Sorry but if you want to see big numbers roll dps.

Never has this been my stance. If you look at the thread instead of just trying to relegate me to another "hurrr dps tank like" half the of so fondly likes to do, you'd see I don't want us to do as much as a dps, I'm advocating to keep us at a permanent fixed percentage behind dps damage so that they won't have to keep going in and screwing with tank damage or patching in enmity buffs like they have been since the start of heavensward.

The current state of things means that dps will get better at damage faster than tanks do, they have a better rate of return on their gear upgrades. It's unsustainable.

Try actually reading my responses and position on the topic or just fully read the original post before you go shooting off about "oh you're just whining about not being able to big dick dps while you tank".

[Tihm81]

It seems to me that SE had realized that tank/dps balance is off from what they want. They made major adjustments with the release of SB. Now they're trying to get the player base used to their (SE's) idea of balance. At the same time, they aren't able to fully realize the results without letting the players play. I think they either did a decent job taking player feedback (i.e. stance swapping) or their numbers corroborated what player feedback was saying (i.e STR acc). I think once the balance is to their liking, tank and DPS STR will rise at the same level and tank enmity will be a constant. Personally, I think it does no good for a tank to compare their DPS to a damage dealer. I think a tank should be able to hold enmity while pushing out their max DPS, but a damage dealer should always do more DPS.

[StouterTaru]

I wonder, how seemingly impossibly far off into the future would we have to go for this not to be solved by an extra Butcher's Block or two. No being facetious, but seriously asking, given how much of a joke enmity is in this game, how great would the deficit have to be to where you'd have to care more about enmity than... past an Unchained opener.

They gave casters a skill to dump half their hate with 4.0, melee have diversion and other skills, OT has shirk, and if you're losing hate to a brd/mch...

[Jonnycbad]

I keep seeing this point made all over this board whenever there is a tank complaint thread or a pro-DPS tank thread on here.

Can a "Tank Purist" like you, Johnny, explain to me (a "Tank Radical") why it I am not considered tanking if I do swap to DPS stance (or drop Grit) and spam DPS combos?

Certainly. Here goes...

Tanks have 2 responsibilities as far as the Developers see it
1) Secure enmity
2) Reduce incoming damage through tactical use of cooldowns

When these 2 conditions are satisfied, they may OPTIONALLY proceed to

3) Deal DPS

We know tank DPS in DPS stance is efficient and "maximizes gameplay" but it's OPTIONAL. We know it's optional because raid encounter HP is based on the sum of damage from DPS and tanks using their rotations. Tanks in DPS stance and healer DPS is not included, so anything extra is purely optional to speed up runs. Having said that, it's a tactical decision to make. DPSing in DPS stance means less enmity, and more damage taken. However, players realized early in 2.x that tank enmity is so damn efficient, with enough gear we can do ONE enmity combo at the start of a raid in tank stance and basically swap to DPS stance for the remaining 95% of the fight. SE probably didn't like that very much because managing enmity is part of the game. With 4.0 SE said, you know what? Part of the tank game is managing enmity, but tanks have found ways to circumvent this and EZ mode their enmity and then go full-blown DPS. So, we're lowering tank DPS and now DPS and healers will need to help manage their own enmity to not rip it from tanks. So now, not only do tanks need to manage their enmity more carefully, you know, by paying attention...but also healers and DPS need to utilize added skills that were designed for: you guessed it--LOWERING THEIR ENMITY (Diversion, Elusive Jump, Refresh, Tactician, Lucid Dreaming). Enmity is no longer a thing you care about during the first 10 seconds of a fight and then swap to pure DPS. It's now a dynamic thing that needs to be monitored constantly and not just the tank but healers and DPS. Furthermore, SE gave tanks an extremely powerful tool: Shirk, which gives 25% of your enmity to target player. This allows the OT to Provoke the boss (getting to the top of the hate list+1) and then shirking 25% of their MAX hate back to the MT.

MT is at 10,000 enmity.
OT is at 2500 enmity.
DPS jobs are at 1000-1800ish.
OT provokes, is at 10,001 enmity.
OT shirks MT.
MT is at 12,501 enmity and now LIGHTYEARS ahead of DPS now.

That is HUGE. And this can be done every 2 minutes. That is MULTIPLICATIVE enmity growth for your TOTAL ENMITY every 2 minutes, not simply additive enmity from enmity combo. NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE ARE DOING THIS.


So rather than using powerful tools like Shirk, or DPS equipping Diversion, people want to complain tank STR is the issue. I tell DPS to use Diversion and instead of acknowledging the Enmity game has changed in 4.0 they say "muh Bloodbath tho!" or "lul waste of space, SE fix tank enmity".

All the tools to manage enmity as a tank are there, but "tank radicals" hate change and want enmity to be "Set it and forget it" with 1-2 Power Slashes and then drop grit for the rest of the fight. That's not "knowing the role" or "being good", that's just dragging your feet and doing a single enmity combo as a chore before playing like a DPS with survival cooldowns.

[Klongol]

people, as usual, are jumping to conclusions. They see only 2 str difference between 20 item levels and immediately extrapolate that to mean that the sky is falling... again.

The order of events are as follows:

- Tanks focus on DPS for an entire expansion, mainly due to poor savage raid design / overtuning
- 4.0 releases and SE makes it so STR accessories are not usable by tanks 61 and up.
- Tanks get mad at this and don't like their deeps, also claim they can't hold threat without STR accessories. They continue to wear the i270 STR accessories.
- SE patches threat - increasing it a lot
- Tanks STILL use i270 weapons, state that it's because of some alleged meta they have to follow. Many healers lament.
- Tanks suggest, among other things, adding STR to Fending accessories, even admit that lower STR than DPS classes is fine.
- SE patches and adds STR to fending accessories.
- Tanks once again complain that they think it's not enough.

Come ON people. We have no idea how they will scale STR on future accessories. We only know what we can see. Stop complaining for a goddamn minute. Hell, YOU GOT WHAT YOU WANTED!

As others have posted, it looks like it will take hundreds of item levels for the differences people are assuming will occur are felt... if ever. People are not considering how secondary stats play into it. People are STILL saying they will use STR accessories...

I just don't understand this Tank forum sometimes =/