Is it time for enrage timers in normal content?

[LilyPendragon]

I get wanting to prevent some tanks from holding the rest of the party hostage because they're selfish jerks, so a system that clocks them out whether they like it or not to remind them it's a team fight sounds nice.

But... this is kinda running counter to that whole "we're not asking to make game harder to push out casuals" argument we were having a few days ago by trying to turn normal content into "hardcore lite" by implementing mechanics from Extreme/Savage/Ultimate/etc.

Having an enrage doesn't inherently make the fight harder. It just stops tanks being able to solo it. If for example you have a fight that generally takes 5 minutes, would a 15 or 20 minute enrage really matter? It would literally just stop tanks soloing bosses while the party is held hostsgd

[kaynide]

This comes ups enough for me to have a canned response to it.. so just imo:

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

It’s not a player’s fault the game is badly designed in this way. Also, nothing stopping you (any “you”, not anyone specific) from asking to reset.

1) ToS: It's not against policy to solo the fight

It is not against the ToS to solo a fight once the party wipes.

People can disagree on how to play, and can/should discuss it in a civil manner. Do note that specifically telling a player, including a tank, that they’re not allowed to play their job as it is designed IS against ToS. Asking and discussing is encouraged, forcing others to play how you want to play is not.

And before you say “but the tank is forcing you to sit and watch!”, they are not. It is not their job to keep you alive. And it is certainly not their fault that you died.

If a healer refuses to raise you, then sure, you might have a case.

Now if you wanna talk about what’s polite, then sure, the tank probably SHOULD kill themselves and rest the fight, but it is important to distinguish between set rules and polite manners.

2) My solution: Give Tanks Raise

Hear me out:

The problem (including #healerstrike) is that the healer role is just not that fun or challenging, and generally unneeded for a LOT of content.

Imho, it is because the devs painted themselves into a corner:
1) If you make it so healers are crucial, then there's too much pressure on when/if they die, which..
2) Makes people not want to play healer so...
3) You make the tank able to survive without a healer, even though it takes forever.

This is easily alleviated by giving raise to more jobs so that the healer can die without much penalty, as long as someone else can "save the day" by raising the healer.

This would allow enemies to hit harder and allow healers to die if they screw up, but not cause a single healer death to sour the duty for everyone (aka healer dies and we all die...or we all just sit here for 10 minutes waiting for the tank to solo)

3) Tl;DR:

1) Make Mobs hit a LOT harder. Like the vuln debuff you get for not avoiding a boss attack? Straight up 25% damage per stack (4th time no dodge? you 100% dead!)
2) Give tanks raise
3) Allow healers to die, and be raised mid boss.

This makes healers:
A) need to focus on healing over DPS, even in trash packs
B) makes the tank survive at best 20% of a boss’s hp bar. They would NEED to focus on raising their healer.

[SwadTheFrog]

Because as much as you like to think you and every other tank are just on some enlightened level looking down on the plebs in 99.99% of these situations where the tank ends up soloing they DID make mistakes, they are just protected from dying from them because of their defensives

If you are in that 0.01% who played flawlessly while your party fell apart around you and even used your shared defensives to keep people up for as long as possible but they still died in spite of this (key word here being you actually tried to protect them with your shareable defensives) then still in 99% of situations resetting is faster than watching the tank solo the boss

So my point focuses on the tank making mistakes because the tank will make mistakes, it’s a part of life, it happens. I don’t make many mistakes, I rarely die due to my own mistakes, but as I often play casters I often die to others incompetence, I don’t think myself better or deserving of the chance to solo the boss because I’m not making mistakes, I peel myself off the floor from the stack marker I died to because the healer was dead and the tank ran away rather than shielding me and try again

Look, I'm in the lane that if you're soling a boss at 50%, you realy shoud just wipe as it'll be faster anyway, but you're being *incredibly* silly if you're genuinely implying only 0.01% of the playerbase can do the mechanics perfectly on normal mode bosses. They are actually relatively easy to clear without mistakes.

[CaptainLagbeard]

An Enrage Timer would make it so that everyone has to at least be able to perform at least at a very basic level...

It shouldn't definitely be anything too demanding of a time limit, but you shouldn't be able to beat bosses by just outlasting them and so the DPS players would have to learn how to play their role... Which includes such high IQ concepts as dodging AoEs and hitting the boss...

[Supersnow845]

Look, I'm in the lane that if you're soling a boss at 50%, you realy shoud just wipe as it'll be faster anyway, but you're being *incredibly* silly if you're genuinely implying only 0.01% of the playerbase can do the mechanics perfectly on normal mode bosses. They are actually relatively easy to clear without mistakes.

I specifically said if you are part of the 0.01 that play flawlessly and liberally use your defensives (so both AOE and shared defensives) to try to desperately keep anyone alive in spite of their absolute best efforts to die

Doing mechanics correctly is relatively easy, having an instance where you do the mechanics correctly but the healers and DPS are so bad both healers can’t stay off the ground and the DPS can’t keep themselves alive even with you using nascent/HOC/TBN/intervention on them constantly is much much rarer

[SwadTheFrog]

I specifically said if you are part of the 0.01 that play flawlessly and liberally use your defensives (so both AOE and shared defensives) to try to desperately keep anyone alive in spite of their absolute best efforts to die

Doing mechanics correctly is relatively easy, having an instance where you do the mechanics correctly but the healers and DPS are so bad both healers can’t stay off the ground and the DPS can’t keep themselves alive even with you using nascent/HOC/TBN/intervention on them constantly is much much rarer

I still wouldn't call that 0.01%? I've seen people do it semi-frequently. Granted, I've stuck to Paladin for such a long time precisely because it could do that kind of party support, but after several expansions and Paladin basically ended up getting nothing but "haha funny sword combos" and nothing to further it's role as a somewhat support-focused tank - and the genuine easymode that tanks have been feeling, I've swapped to Viper.

That being said, and it might be because of the strike, but I have seen Healer quality plummet recently. Genuinely the worst I've seen, I've genuinely had to use bloodbath and second wind to keep myself alive multiple times despite doing mechanics correcctly.

[TBerry]

I'll be blunt:
It won't get better after the 4th or 5th wipe, so if the boss is at 25% HP or below you might as well do it yourself.

[Bonoki]

Adding enrages to normal mode sounds good in theory, but it probably wouldn’t work out well in practice. Normal mode is meant for casual players who are still gearing up and those who just want to see the story, so many people queuing for it are undergeared, lacking pentamelds, or working on tomes. If you add enrages to normal mode, it shifts the challenge from testing player endurance to testing gear, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a more accessible, casual difficulty.

[SushiOishiiii]

Maybe there could be an option for this, but it has a 10% reward bump or something..who knows. Then it could also be dungeons, trials and whatever else.

[koko-on-da-forumz]

Adding enrages to normal mode sounds good in theory, but it probably wouldn’t work out well in practice. Normal mode is meant for casual players who are still gearing up and those who just want to see the story, so many people queuing for it are undergeared, lacking pentamelds, or working on tomes. If you add enrages to normal mode, it shifts the challenge from testing player endurance to testing gear, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a more accessible, casual difficulty.

We literally used to have enrages in normal content. You almost never saw them.

I think it was ShB who killed them outright, like it did so many other things.