Interesting Tank Research

[Izsha]

I read it. It didn't say anything we didn't already know. In fact, it took a very pedastelly approach ("You guys aren't using your mitigation tools")

I'm not saying it's wrong. But it all ultimately means a whole lot of nothing. Damage in this game is real binary. Threats tend to come in small, pre-defined windows and everything outside of that is fluff damage that's almost entirely covered by HoTs which are never not going to be on your tank.

It said where the problems actually are, and how we approach helping people just supports it. How many times have we seen a need help tanking thread and the response is essentially "Mitigate busters enough so you don't die, then do as much damage as humanly possible". Rarely do we get the more correct answers about using mitigation on fluff, especially when healers are dealing with other things like preys or your co tank has an add. But we will turn around and complain about fluff damage mitigation as the cornerstone of many balance discussions. Our priorities are backwards. You can simplify the entire post to "git gud" but that's misses the point. Using rampart more often or TBN more often aren't a result of tanks being 'to hard'. A couple button presses a minute in a game like this is not skill cap issue. Its a knowledge and choice issue. If we aren't even sharing the correct knowledge and not encouraging a decent priority decision tree, then we obviously needed to be told what derps we are in this study.

What the study doesn't get into is things like the usefulness of the mitigation. For example, when taking heavy damage at certain intervals (like tank busters or autos and aoes with mechanical damage) you will value that mitigation greatly, where as the mitigation from TBN is more smoothed out over the length of the fight. If you are using TBN nearly on cooldown, you will take on average the same amount of damage as the other tanks, thats what the data shows. Example, if a buster does 132k to a tank 10 TBN's doesn't equate to 1 hallowed ground use.

Whether or not that mitigation is keeping you alive more so than the other tanks was not studied/gathered. One thing which was painfully obvious was the extend to which tanks in general are not maximizing their defensive casts (not just dark knights this was clear on all jobs), which is also a conversation people should be having: mitigating effectively and not just for busters.

Its a good first step, but it certainly needs follow up.

Its a narrow study looking at a specific subset of situations. More definitely needs to be done, but I like where its goin. Anything that puts actual data analysis in front of our fluffy feelings I'm a fan. Stuff like this helps to inform why people 'feel' the things they do when making general statements, and in other cases remind us that our feelings are easily tricked and not to fall for them.

Honestly I liked 4.1 just fine.

Me too. War was way more fun for me with multiple windows to work for and get a sense of payoff when executed. Just lame now. Effective, but lame.