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

[therpgfanatic]

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.

You are looking at it as if no other characters will be generating threat with their own abilities. So what you are saying is 100% incorrect. The fact is you don't generate significant threat until the end of the combo. In the 6 seconds that it takes to reach the Halone part of the combo other characters have an opportunity to pull the mob off you.


Using the damage parameters of the chart,

Fast Blade + Savage Blade = 1,125

x2 Halone = 1,500

If you are trying to build and maintain threat, using a non-comboed Halone is superior than the spiky threat of the Halone combo.

Also, 10% STR reduction, whoopie freakin do. I don't have problems taking too much damage. At all. I rarely ever die because I use all my defensive cooldowns and step aside from AoE cones.

I have been playing this game exhaustively since starting. If I am telling you that when I do a Halone combo I lost threat in eight mans with high tier DPS and healers, but if I spam Halone I maintain threat then I mean exactly what I'm saying. It's not a problem with not understanding the class, it's a problem with the class design and how it wasn't accounting for the realities of play.

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.

You have already been told that you are mistaken about MMORPGs being invented in the late 90s. Go read Dr. Richard Bartle's book, Designing Virtual Worlds and become educated on the actual history. You really need to drop this accusation because it's making you look foolish. MMORPGs are just a graphical MUD, and folks like Ralph Koster (lead design of Ultima Online) have repeatedly said this in interviews. Richard Garriot came up with the term MMORPG when marketing Ultima Online but it was by no means the first of its kind.