How to make tanks more fun to play (devs please read)

[LRoland]

Cover getting an additional toggle version would be wonderful and certainly an iconic tribute to paladin passive abilities in other games. It would need to only trigger when teammates are low health, but some kind of visual cue that you just took a hit for your buddy would give some nice reinforcement to why I play a tank.

[BotenAnna]

I enjoy playing WAR because it is super fun and there's a lot to do, also maybe you should look up some PLD tanking guides if you are having problems holding threat!

Most of these changes you propose are so disruptive to game balance that I have a hard time believing that you are on the design team for any MMO that is or has been in production, but maybe that would explain why this one is so much better than them.

[therpgfanatic]

I enjoy playing WAR because it is super fun and there's a lot to do, also maybe you should look up some PLD tanking guides if you are having problems holding threat!

Please re-read my latest post. Especially the part about the mathematical facts involved in Halone spamming vs Halone comboing.

Seriously, it's such a cop out to accuse the player as being bad. It's actually pretty insulting. I have obviously been studying guides or I wouldn't know about the threat multipliers to begin with.

(and before you argue that I am insulting the devs with my statement, no. I am sure they have exhaustively playtested many things before pushing live. However I know how MMO playtesting works. It's always done to test for specific conditions because of time restrictions in delivering fresh content, and even open beta tend to miss things, especially if the testers are all using the same gear on the prebuilts. There are just some things you cannot see until the content goes live, such as the effects of Paladin design in a world where nearly all the Party Finder groups have top tier characters with a low tier tank who struggles to maintain aggro while doing anything but Halone spam. )

tl:dr Halone spamming works. I can tank effectively. However it is boring as hell, and limits my character more than it should.

[BotenAnna]

I'm no mathologist, but I'm pretty sure that with regards to the seafoam green parts of this chart:



It clearly states that comboed abilities generate much more hate per second. I don't have a degree in the arcane arts of mathologica, but I'm pretty sure that 750 times 3 is less than 3075, meaning maybe you should spend less time misreading charts and more time actually tanking where you would quickly find out that comboing your threat abilities makes it so you can actually hold threat, something you said you had a problem with.

[Pooky_Pasha]

Thirdly, to those who are accusing me of being a bad player / not educated tank by spamming uncomboed Halone;

Well, the thing is you really are playing poorly/not educated. Lets look at the abilities:
Fast Blade: Delivers and attack with a potency of 150 (threat modifier 1.5)
Savage Blade: Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. (threat modifier 4.5)

Additional Effect: Increased enmity
Combo Action: Fast Blade
Combo Potency: 200

Rage of Halone: Delivers an attack with a potency of 100 (threat modifier 7.5)

Additional Effect: Increased enmity
Combo Action: Savage Blade
Combo Potency: 260
Combo Bonus: Reduces target's strength by 10%
Duration: 20s

So 3xRage of Halone=3x100x7.5=2250 enmity since an un-comboed Halone is only 100 potency. (This would really be 1800 in Shield Oath due to 20% damage reduction)

Now for the Fast Blade >> Savage Blade >> Halone combo: 150x1.5 + 200x4.5 (since Savage Blade has a combo potency of 200 instead of 100) + 260x7.5 (since Halone has a combo potency of 260 instead of 100)=3075 enmity. (This would be 2460 in Shield Oath).

Taking (3075-2250)/2250x100~37% more enmity from a comboed Halone than a spammed Halone. Also, you're missing out on the Combo Bonus: Reduces target's strength by 10% by just spamming un-comboed Halones, and your overall damage will be roughly 50% lower than it should be, depending on how you use your off-gcd abilities. The same is also true of WAR Butcher Block spam vs Butcher Block combo.

It should also be noted that the data you linked is old, and I do not believe it reflects the enmity buff both tank jobs received from the 2.1 patch. Please don't quote me on that though, but it wouldn't change that comboed Halone is roughly 37% more effective than spammed Halone.

As for how to make PLD a little less boring, I've been thinking put Spirits Within as the tail end of the Fast Blade >> Riot Blade combo. It would something like:
Spirits Within: Delivers an attack with a potency of 200.
Combo Action: Riot Blade
Combo Bonus: Damage scales up with current HP (up to a potency of 300)
Non-combo Additional Effect: Silence Duration: 1 sec
That might bloat the ability, however. There would probably also need to be a 30 sec cool down on the Silence effect. I will let the theorycrafters pick that apart if they want.

tl:dr You're "mathematical facts" are wrong. Read tooltips and the entirety of the Valk chart you linked.

[Dano]

never use Rage of Halone uncomboed, it doesn't give you much benefit other than the initial snap hate, which Flash can do just fine with the added benefit of ranged + AoE + blind debuff and saving your tp.

As stated clearly by Pooky, you are losing out dmg and enmity with an uncomboed RoH.

PLD is fine as it is, it's a cookie cutter class, your most basic easy to get into class, i believe future expansions/updates will definitely add more variety to it's playstyle.

The intended design of paladin is pretty sound. Their base mechanics are very simple compared to any other class. But this is so you can focus on other aspects of tanking, IE: positioning enemies, picking up adds, dodging attacks, etc.

this x 100

[Grizzlebeard]

Not so. For example, the very first truly popular online RPG was the original "Neverwinter Nights", on AOL in 1991

I already covered this in a follow up post but, keeping it brief, the OP cited 30 years of experience with MMOs when the genre didn't come about till '97 with Ultima Online. Yeah, you could play NWN online, it was an MO, not an MMO. In the same way text-based games, Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) weren't MMOs. Yeah, it seems a minor consideration but when you're proposing radical class changes on the basis of a misleading statement then it becomes relevant.

As an aside, I used to raid in Everquest in the early days on dial up and can't even begin to fathom how I managed with a 30 minute disconnect. We used to prep for a raid and I'd often log back in surrounded by corpses because someone had accidentally aggroed the boss while I was frantically dialing up to get back online.

[UBERHAXED]

I'm not even going to get into the fact that there are more than twice as many dps as there are tanks. The implications of such should be (at least I hope) well within SE's means of grasping.

This might have something to do with: 9 available to play: 5 DPS, 2 Tanks, 2 Healers... If every person in the population choose jobs so every job has the same number, than there will still be more DPS than healers and tanks (combined...)

[Phaydra]

I have been playing MMOs for 11 years. I find playing a tank fun as it is. Your post is an opinion, and you want the devs to change major things in a game based around your opinion.

[C-croft]

I hate to say this, but a LOT of Paladin i know simply stopped playing the job after they (unjustly) gave Warrior a near-godlike buff when a slight correction would have been sufficient and gave Paladin nothing except a poop-smeared middle finger.

There's your problem why you have so few tanks now. SE made half of them stop playing.

And those tanks are just... bad. And hurt. Funny thing is, PLD is still a better tank by a slight margin....