Invulns: Problems and Solutions

[Kabooa]

I remember doing Chadarnook with double warrior and old holmgang's range didn't allow you to stand in the stack marker and still be in range to use it. So I asked my co-tank how he was gonna handle it...he simply stood in the marker alone and got blown up for the rest of the group, he was the real MVP.

[Vyrerus]

Personally, I think it'd be cool if they just buffed Walking Dead to have an, "Enhances Souleater" effect. The effect being that it pushes Souleater's heal to x10 its normal heal, giving the DRK just a bit over half their health on their own. You know, be thematic, the idea that since they're bottoming out and about to go that they want to snatch up some life essence and their "zombie" state makers their sinister sounding attack more edgy.

And then people might even push for Skill Speed builds in order to get in 2 Souleaters without having to worry about timing GCDs or holding GCDs to heal it all on their own.

But more on topic, Invulns are fine, and I'd hate to see them go.

I mean they could just design fights where even if we use them, we eventually still have to do the mechanic, depending on comp. I remember back in Neo-Exdeath I'd eat the first Thunder IIIx2 with Living Dead. My PLD co-tank would eat Double Attack with Hallowed. We had to share the second Double Attack. We had to mitigate for the Aero IIIs and swap to have them all mitigated as well.

I'd also love more gimmicky tank busters, like ones that apply DOTs or automatically critical hit or cause knockbacks. It'd be really cool if they mixed Allagan Field with a tank buster as well. You eat the tank buster, and if you didn't mitigate it properly/enough, it'd deal raid wiping damage. Make the Allagan Field effect also linger for a bit, so that if the swap wasn't prompt, despite proper mitigation, everybody dies. It'd be glorious.

[DWolfwood]

Personally, I think it'd be cool if they just buffed Walking Dead to have an, "Enhances Souleater" effect. The effect being that it pushes Souleater's heal to x10 its normal heal

Said this in another thread, and the reason why I hate this idea when suggested, is because sometimes you want the full length of the invuln, and this doesn't help that at all.

[Vyrerus]

Said this in another thread, and the reason why I hate this idea when suggested, is because sometimes you want the full length of the invuln, and this doesn't help that at all.

Well, if you think about it, with the 10 second duration, depending where you are at in your rotation, you'd be choosing between DPS or helping to heal off your Living Dead. You have to consider GCD timers. Don't think it'd be hard to let it ride for the whole duration, keeping that in mind. Other times you could take it off, almost by yourself, if you were able to have your combo line up right. It'd take some thought. I'm sure SCHs and ASTs would appreciate the help too, cause they ain't letting you ride the invuln for the full 10 seconds, that's for sure.

[phantomr23]

Honestly, I agree with this, at least to the degree that I think either invulns need to be removed or fight design need to be rethought, because right now I think it's making tanking even less interesting on top of all the other issues. The vast majority of fights right now have at least one or two moments where you essentially ignore a mechanic, tank specific or otherwise, and resolve it by hitting a single button. It's partially on the designers for letting the tanks do that, but it does feel like a fundamental issue plaguing tank design at the moment - particularly because there's such a gulf between the strength of them in high end content (it's no secret that Living Dead is a far cry from Hallowed Ground in basically every part of the game). One other solution I've vaguely considered is just changing them from pure invulnerability to either extremely heavy mitigation (think 75-90%) or something more interesting like massive self-healing for a bit; keep the "panic button" feeling while leaving room for the designers to stop the tanks from outright ignoring certain mechanics.

[Absurdity]

Honestly, I agree with this, at least to the degree that I think either invulns need to be removed or fight design need to be rethought, because right now I think it's making tanking even less interesting on top of all the other issues. The vast majority of fights right now have at least one or two moments where you essentially ignore a mechanic, tank specific or otherwise, and resolve it by hitting a single button. It's partially on the designers for letting the tanks do that, but it does feel like a fundamental issue plaguing tank design at the moment - particularly because there's such a gulf between the strength of them in high end content (it's no secret that Living Dead is a far cry from Hallowed Ground in basically every part of the game).

I'm really not seeing it, neither in this raid tier nor in the previous tier. Maybe I'm overlooking something but I can't think of a fight where using an invuln let's you actually avoid doing a mechanic completely. I'm talking about something like O11s where you could ignore the rocket barrage mechanic by just having a PLD soak all of them with Hallowed or using tank LB3 to ignore the red fists, not just using an invuln on a tankbuster that you'd normally split.
Another good example, though not invuln related, would be O5s where you could completely ignore the intermission phase if you had a warrior in the party. I haven't found any of that mechanic cheese in an Eden fight so far, if you have please enlighten me.



Even the example of Hallowed in O11s was suboptimal at best because your pld lost several GCDs by sitting in a corner and an even remotely competent ranged dps could do the mechanic just fine without losing any uptime.

[phantomr23]

I'm really not seeing it, neither in this raid tier nor in the previous tier. Maybe I'm overlooking something but I can't think of a fight where using an invuln let's you actually avoid doing a mechanic completely. I'm talking about something like O11s where you could ignore the rocket barrage mechanic by just having a PLD soak all of them with Hallowed or using tank LB3 to ignore the red fists, not just using an invuln on a tankbuster that you'd normally split.
Another good example, though not invuln related, would be O5s where you could completely ignore the intermission phase if you had a warrior in the party. I haven't found any of that mechanic cheese in an Eden fight so far, if you have please enlighten me.



Even the example of Hallowed in O11s was suboptimal at best because your pld lost several GCDs by sitting in a corner and an even remotely competent ranged dps could do the mechanic just fine without losing any uptime.

I'd say I'm mostly talking about tank specific mechanics, stuff like Conflag, tankbusters, the split tank stack in E4S - you can go entire fights without ever having to even learn the actual intended way to deal with some tank specific sections. It's easy to overlook them as actual mechanics because they are pretty mindless even without invulns, but for me it was a major contributing factor towards just dropping the tier entirely after a few weeks of tanking. My worry is that the existence of invulns means the designers don't need to bother with more complex tankbusters or sections which require interesting uses of mitigation because they know you can just hit the "I'm fine for X seconds" button. They seem to have cracked down on being able to completely ignore full party mechanics, but it's worth considering the warping effect they might be having on tanking at a high level in general.

[Quri]

Invulnerability are mostly fine. It's one of the few mechanics that tanks encounter unique. Tank LB is mostly forced upon, unless the rare "cheese" strategy. Tanks invulnerability is mostly treated as another mitigation cooldown, and is mostly fine (DRK being the only issue).

[ClickOnce]

Sounds like every fight would become a boring fest of spam every cooldown.

[DWolfwood]

Sounds like every fight would become a boring fest of spam every cooldown.

This mentality is kinda funny since that's literally what we do with dps CDs.

That said, I think invulns are fine. I would be much more interested in gameplay that was designed around "TANKING" rotations. As in, the damage coming in was not survivable on a constant basis without proper play, not JUST the occasional tank buster.

They could give us longer tank CDs (30s), more of them, etc.

Eddit - And to add to this, I think invulns provide a unique opportunity for gameplay that should remain.