Thread: DualShocker Interview - 3.5 pt 2 next week, supposedly

Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

Fixing healers is kinda easy - nerf healing potencies, up healing requirements, possibly do something about how brutally effective their DPS is while in Cleric Stance, boom. But how would you "make tanks tank", exactly? Looking at the design of something like a PLD, which relies heavily on cooldowns, if you simply make things hit super hard so that a tank always needs to have CDs up to soak damage...well, it'll work well at making WARs tank, because they'll be using Inner Beast instead of Fell Cleave (I don't play DRK so not sure how they'd be affected), but how would PLD handle that same scenario? They don't really have a "spammable" cooldown outside of Shelltron, which is 30 seconds and...not super great, tbh, because of how parry works in this game. (It also doesn't affect magic damage, so rip pretty much every major raid boss ability in the game.)

And how exactly would you make offtanks "tank more" instead of sitting in DPS stance? Endless dual bosses a la T1? Constant add waves to manage? There's only so much you can do to try to regulate how much damage tanks do...even WoW, which IMO has a lot better trinity balance still doesn't really find ways to make off tanks do a whole lot outside of swaps and adds.

Sorry if I seem like I'm attacking you, since I actually agree that the slow distillation of the trinity into "who can deeps moar" also bugs me, but I've struggled to find a solution for tanking woes for some time now that would work outside of a straight tank re-design. Things like, dropping fire n' forget tank stances in favor of making those same effects be maintenance buffs that tanks have to use certain combos to keep up, etc, to make them feel more like they're tanking and less like they're DPSing. And I don't really know how well that would translate here, all things considered.

Tanks are somewhat limited in they will always be a partial DPS. The issue is more how little they actually require mitigation. For example, a Dark Knight can handle both A9 and A10 without ever turning on Grit, provided they have a Ninja to help control their aggro. Even A11 and A12, you'll barely need your tank stance once you've seen the fights. One potential solution would be less predictability. Say they adjusted it so all three tanks could swap stances off the GCD ala Warrior. If the boss suddenly did unpredictable high tank, it forces the tanks to mitigate with their tank stance-- turning it into a cooldown itself. Not necessarily a perfect solution but it's the first that came to mind. Perhaps forcing both tanks to stack together for more mechanics might be another option. Unfortunately, I cannot imagine the devs would ever go into the unpredictable route because that would make learning fighters harder.

Originally Posted by Istaru

They could be mean..

Want an encounter where DPS is not all that matters?

How about this one?

Boss at 95% health does two (2) tankbusters back to back...on the HEALERS!!!

It is a guaranteed attack for 100% health and ignores all shields. Lose 1 person and the boss gets a 10% damage reduction boost that lasts for 1 minute. Lose 2 characters? You cannot damage the boss for 10 minutes.

Solution? Cover. The PLD or PLDs gets to save one or both of the healers from dying. Thus the run can continue.

In this case, the PLD mitigation matters, it's actually all that matters. DPS is secondary.

Bad part of this? Either WAR or DRK or both are excluded.

This would never happen, and I'm not saying it should. But this is simply and example of a fight where the usage of abilities is key, not how much DPS you generate as a tank.

All this accomplishes nothing except forcing Paladin into the meta. You literally couldn't complete the fight without one. Either Dark Knight or Warrior will be flatout ignored even more so than Paladin is currently. Not to mention, forced mechanics such as this are rarely fun. It's entirely artificial and would only sour players on the fight. None of this accounts for being unable to damage the boss because you messed up a mechanic is boring. It lacks any creativity and most groups would simply wipe to try again, thus invalidating it regardless. Another thing... A9S and A10S enrage at 11 minutes. So... yeah.