From what I understand, paladins have been kept at a low dps, low utility, and low surviveability point purely to compensate for the fact that we have spot heals (which are thank god finally decent heals rather than putting a bandaid on a severed limb), and because we have the oh so godly amends that passively gives us all of our hate and likewise will allow us better hate control than any other tank in the game. Seeing as amends is now nothing more than an over glorified rescue on a shorter timer (which will NOT give us enough hate to fully function in high dps groups) that makes me inclined to believe that you'll take the **** stick out of the paladin's rear end since we are now essencially guardians minus the reactive hate and minus the defensive abilities. Without our "over powered" threat transfer, we're nothing more than a regular tank, and thus, should be given similar stats/defensive abilities/dps/utility/mitigation/avoidance/taunt values purely so that we are balanced. Amends is why paladins was sub-par in all the other categories purely due to the fact that the paladin could actually focus on everything else besides hate, which is no longer the case, and thus means that we should be given proper consideration to reflect this.
ReverendPaqo wrote: Very well explained. So, change amends back to how it is right now on live, and maybe reduce the transfer to 25% in order to balance it out since most amends-targets parse over 10k dps, thx.
I'd like to ahead of time appologize for this massive wall of text, but seriously, a developer NEEDs to read this. Its quite apparent that they have no idea just how big of a concern this is to most paladins, and if nothing else, I seriously hope that it becomes very clear how much we care just by seeing how much time and effort I have put into this giant 2 piece post explaining why myself and probably many others as a paladin feel so shafted. I have spent literally months straight pulling apart numbers and testing things, reading up on forums, asking veteran players as well as testing different group make ups and abilities, as well as testing tricks on different mobs. I've commited approximately a minimum of 6 hours every day on work days, and between 12-20 hours on non-work days towards my paladin and being the best I can be with him. I'm most definately not the best paladin by any means, but I meticulously work every day on improving him and my abilities to be as good as I can possibly be, and when I tank for a group, it shows very quickly that I know what I'm doing. Hopefully all of those thousands of hours of work and effort were not in vain and someone actually pays attention to this. If not, then it will be obvious that SOE does not want to have tanks anymore and are playing their "Effective immediately kill EQ2" card and I for one will cancel my subscription and permanently quit this game if people like Aeralik are allowed to continue to behave like a young child in an unmonitored candy shop. It may seem like a good idea at the time, but you are doing alot more harm than you think you are and you need to have a proper grasp on the situation before acting. I want to make it perfectly clear that I'm not in the slightest married to my amends and would have no issue dumping it on the side of the road like an old worn out couch, nor am I uncapable of generating my own hate through other methods. I am not in the slightest upset because amends is going away, but rather I am flaming furious at the fact that it is going away and is being replaced by a significantly inferior ability. The other reason I'm upset is because not only is amends being replaced by a much weaker ability, but hate generated towards other npcs by hostile/beneficial actions is disappearing as well. Believe it or not, that is a second gigantic kick in the paladin's pants because that is the other half of most paladin's hate gain. For example: When I'm in an instance fighting against a mob that aoes my group like the named tentacles in Chelsith, I'll throw in my group heal, which hits everyone for about 1,200 health. For example if you assume that one heal = 1/2 point threat, thats a heal of 7,200 non-crit and likewise basically a taunt for 3,600. Even if it was 1/4 point of threat per point of heal, it would still be higher than the high end of my encounter taunt (which is the paladins biggest taunt spare AA taunts and rescue). It is a VERY effective tool at immediately snapping agro off of whom ever has it at that moment and allowing me to lock down agro. The reason why is because even assuming one quarter of a point of hate per point of heal, it is STILL more than what our encounter taunt was prior to GU51, and holy crap, the best part about it is that it never gets resisted! Very much UNlike my master excoriation which is running about a 45-50% resist rate even considering my 450 aggression and the fact that it's master I is a level 76 spell and 41% harder to resist. This fact in itself leaves me very uneasy about Restitution being 37% harder and level 73. When I drop consecration durring a fight with books in scion of ice, say 2 groups of the books, say 10 mobs (I don't remember how many books are normally in the group) that I'm continuously hitting with about a 500-550 damage, thats not only hitting for the 500-550 damage worth of hate on the mob, but on the others as well, and the hate generated due to the fact that other npcs are getting hate due to the damage done to the other npcs. Consecration ends up being MUCH MUCH larger than just the 500-550 damage. If you count in the Smite Evil hitting for approximately 5k on each, and the circle of conviction that also hits for about 2.3k on each, and my castigation that dispells probably 2 dots and hits for a total of about 6-7k on each, and the doom aura that hits for about 3.5k on each, and circular smite which hits for about 1k on each, and count what my 41% amends is doing from say a warlock and sigil of heroism on the group while that warlock drops acid rain, appocalypse, rift, and all of their gigantic spells at the start of the fight, thats easily over 1.5 million hate burst out in the first 15-20 seconds of the fight. Of course by the time that all of this has occured, I've hit my Divine aura after having used my pathetic ONE attack blocked from my oh so amazing end line ability in the TSO tree, and the other ability purely for the heals, I've burned my Sacrement, and my Celestial touch, and am straight spamming heals until the fight is done but more than likely we all usually die unless we can burn down half of those books before divine aura wears off. So although I generated way more hate in that period of time than ANY tank other than a paladin could have ever come close to, I still spend almost all of the remaining 1 minute fight healing after that initial about 7 seconds. The main form of hate in that situation would be aoes and hate generated due to action against the mob or benefical action on my allies/myself and hardly any taunts if any even at all. Against single target mobs, I practically never taunt because for one, they never hit at any form of a reliable rate, and secondly because the paladins pathetic 1.5k taunts are nothing in comparison to the hate I can generate from well timed healing or warding on myself or others, or even from keeping the mob stunned so that it can't do anything while I cure myself and heal the group or hit it with refusal of attonement/break will. The reason paladins don't taunt much is because you guys made the paladins taunts... well frankly, outright suck to the point that we can't even use them without lowering our potential and not playing to the best of our abilities. When you are playing with top of the line players that are good at what they do, you need to be at the top of your game as well. Even if your other group members are not playing at their best, it also doesn't mean that you can't play your best either. Doing anything other than the best that you are capable of would be illogical and you couldn't in good concience say that you were doing your best and living up to being the tank that you could be if you strictly tried to play only by the way that the developers wanted you to play. If the developers want a specific ability or trait to be the better way to go, then they should make it not only viable but also reasonable, obtainable within reason, and make a it so that there is a definate advantage towards using it. If you force people to do it purely because the big bad developers are going to spank everyone and take away their toys if they don't use the method that is inferior but is the way they want you to do it, then no one is going to like it, and your going to make many people very mad as well as have problems with no one doing it. I assume some of the developers are parents, so use the example of trying to get a child to do something that you want them to do. If you basically threaten them with time out or punish them and take away their toys purely because they don't want to read a bibliography when they're 5, it's just going to backfire and get worse and harder to get what you want that child to do. You're not going to make that child do something that they don't want to do without fighting them tooth and nail the entire way, most likely because what you want them to do is either not fun, they are not interested, or they are not capable of it. The difference between the players and the child is that the child wont reason with you. Most players are reasonable and are willing to accept change as long as you keep in mind that it is a game and the goal is to have fun, not to sit there and let someone force a bad change down their throat with no regards to just how badly you are destroying their character's ability to function, especially when that character is their pride and joy in the game. They will not just sit there and get violated and screwed out of all the effort and time and energy they put into gearring up their character and learning their class just so that you can force them to do something completely different and something that physically does not function properly yet purely and simply because you think thats the way it should be done regardless of wether it works or not. Now, consider for a moment that you, Aeralik, have determined that the paladins are single target tanks contrary to the fact that up until your decision to change us, we were the BEST aoe tanks but it was not only because of amends even though it was a very good percentage of the contribution, but it was equally because of how the player controlled the paladin and the amends target knowing how to play with a paladin. Now you are arbitrarily flipping our role, and are taking away our main tool for generating hate, and as if that wasn't enough already, you are additionally taking away our only other real tool for generating hate and what the paladins have focused on and spent alot of time perfecting for so long on top of all that. What should the paladins not be upset about? You didn't take away assassins Execute, nor did you take away the inquisitor's Verdict, nor did you take away the shadowknights Harm Touch, nor anyone elses big spells, nor have you ever completely taken away anything even close to as significant as the paladin's amends, and yet here is the paladins once again getting nerfed. Seriously, why do you hate the paladin so much? I will admit that amends in itself had potential to be extremely overpowered, but up until characters were doing WAY too much dps, it was never a problem. The problem is that now every character is on dps crack, and amends is happily sitting there doing it's job, and because of extremely poor balancing issues that were implimented into the game, it broke Amends, not the other way around, and now the paladins are being stripped of their class defining ability because of other classes issues, and by absolutely no fault of the paladin. How on earth would you not understand why the paladins are upset? Amends for an example with numbers to show just how much it really did, generated 41% of a 6k dpsing toons hate (approximately 2,500dps worth of hate or 150,000 damage worth of hate per minute) or generated 41% of a 2k dpsing toons hate (approximately 800dps worth of hate or 48,000 damage worth of hate per minute) at their base values not counting modifiers or blame arrow or anything like that. Back before amends was pushed to the point of overpowered, that 2k dps amends target really wasn't the end all tank all no matter what happened, it just allowed paladins to control hate much easier. Now that people are doing absolutely rediculous amounts of dps, it's pushed amends to the point where it is now a godly spell, because it is functioning as intended. Looking at the amends replacement screen shots posted above it shows generating a total of about 20k threat each minute that it's reuseable (approximately 333 hate per second). The ONLY way that this replacement will even match what amends did for us on that 6k dps amends target is if that hate counts for the SAME amount of hate as 8 damage per point of threat. I'm pretty sure that you have not altered the value of threat to be 8 times greater than one point of damage. Are you really going to tell us that it is a fair trade off? I've amended healers that give more hate than this pathetic excuse of a replacement spell gives us. For our entire class to be completely gimped to balance out one of the most powerful spells in the game, and then to replace it with a cheap piece of crap and not retroactively boost the paladin to where it SHOULD be now that we will no longer have that spell that was the only reason that we were kept lower than everyone else is a gigantic slap in the face. Assuming that 1 point of threat equals one point of damage, you either need to really pump up that replacement spell to compensate for how much really is being lost, approximately 8 times more hate output than what it is doing right now JUST to break even with what amends did and thats not even including the ability to generate hate from other mobs via aoe and actions taken against other npcs, or you really need to pump up the paladin so that they are no longer gimped because we no longer will have that one spell that was the entire reason and source of why the paladin was kept gimped when everyone else was pumped way up.
Part 2 A VERY simple solution to the problem would be to pump up the paladin so that they are on par with other tanks seeing as they'll never be the agro kings again after those 2 changes that you've made, and make threats worth 10 times the amount of hate that they currently are worth as of GU50. Either that, or increase the amount that the taunts are hitting for and make the threat from taunts worth a few times more hate than the amount of hate damage/heals/buffs creates. I saw that you have increased the amount of threat on taunts significantly and added it to a couple things in GU51 on the test server last night when I was on it so it is apparent that you are aware that the taunts are no where near strong enough on the paladin prior GU51 to compensate for the amount of hate that the paladins are losing with the removal of amends. Something you should do in addition, after modifying threat so that it really is worth using, put aggression onto gear that is actually considered tank gear so that the average instance running tank can obtain a *MINIMUM* of 60% hit rate on taunts assuming that they obtain a reasonable level of tank gear. Fully geared out raiders should have tanks that will hit their taunts about 95% of the time on an even level heroic 1^ or 2^ non-named mob. I would assume that a fully raid buffed and top of the line raid geared tank would hit about 90% of the time even on yellow epic names, and maybe 75-80% on orange con epic mobs. That way, it really IS tanking via threat, not praying that it hits and watching for the healers to splat. In raids, the tanks still rely very strongly on hate transfers and hate gained by dps. If you cold turkey them and expect their taunts to hold up to a raid doing 150k-200k dps, you are very mistaken. Say that 520 is the hard cap, and it will give you 75% hit rate on an orange con epic 4x named mob. In order to do that, you would have to make it so that by the time a guild had access to a mastered out toon of every class, they also should have had access to the gear that would fill in the gaps to give them 520 aggression maybe more in case mobs debuff that skill, maybe even 520 if theres none that do or if there are but you want to leave a reason for the healers to be more diligent on cures or an uncureable that would mean that the dps would have to watch their damage rates. Wouldn't that be sweet if for every *different* class of player in a raid, you gained another so much aggression and have it built into the defensive stance? That would mean that raids would actually WANT to use all of the classes rather than just carry a dirge, healers, brigand, monk/bruiser, main tank, and the rest assassins/wizards/coercers/illusionists. An ideal addition to this would also be to remove the penalty to offensive abilities on the defensive stance, and replace it with an overall reduction in damage output while in defensive stance, and modify the hate on the offensive stance so that it decreases hate gain by 10% and all taunts effectively do nothing. This would discourage tanks from abusing their "deagro" threat possitions while still allowing them to be tanks. If you leave it where the sneering assault and the like do - threat possitions, whats to stop a tank from putting on straight scout dps gear and just becoming a new breed of auto-attacking scout? Then they can really abuse the whole bringing every class into the raid for more effectiveness and buffs without losing the dps slot to another tank that never actually tanks. Also with that change, instead of punishing the threat on attack proc 5 times more than the auto attack's damage due to the decreased hit rate from lack of skill bonuses, it instead actually punishes the damage and allows you to still hit your melee proc to generate hate. That would make defensive stance definitively from there on out the only way that you could have effective taunts, and would prevent tanks from pretending to be scouts, and between both of those options, it would also allow you the option if you so desired to make an off tank stance with something inbetween for the classes that have more than one definitive defense and offense stance, such as the brawlers. That way everyone wins. It should be reasonable for a tank to be able to obtain 425 aggression in legendary semi-easy to obtain gear and/or quest end line gear and tier 2 shard armor might have say 440 total aggression on it as an entry level raiding set of gear. Add to that the defensive stance gives another 2 points of aggression per unique member in the group/raid, and 3 points of aggression for each point in the defensive stance bonus in the TSO fighter tree. Fabled tank gear could have more so that you could have a little buffer room or have it equivilant to the tier 2 shard armor, because at that point, you'll be approaching 520. At what ever you determine to be the "normal" rate for a legendary tank, they should be able to hit most easier heroic mobs in the instances at about a 60-70% rate at minimum since dps is no longer supposed to be the crutch for keeping agro, so that really only leaves tanks with taunts and thats about it. As it *currently* stands, if you added even a little aggression to some tank gear, it would reach this desired amount, then all you'd have to do is alter the resist rates of taunts, OR alter the amount of difference that aggression would normally do based on the mob's stregnth. For example, say that a tank with 450 aggression has a 5k threat, and at 500 aggression it is at 7k threat. That would increase the taunts in line with the increase of stregnth that the raid gear gives all classes. Currently, the ONLY thing that does not get stronger as you progress and gear up is taunt stregnth, and that above all things is the one thing now that taunts are supposed to do all the hate that should be the first thing to increase, otherwise you're going to be doing nothing more than punishing the raiders for getting higher dps. Being a dps toon as a main, I would assume that you understand how bad of an idea that would be. Once you figure out the whole progressively increasing stegnth of taunts, it will make taunting the only way to go, assuming it remains strong enough to keep hate off of the really high dpsing/utility toons (I.E. those that do 10-11k damage per second and spike alot such as assassins that in groups "spike" a constantly steady 6k dps over 2 minutes if their worth their salt, or 10-12k for 2 minutes on raids, and wizards that spike randomly from 6k dps up to 15k dps because of random 72k ice bolts or something like that). Enchanter's buffs pull lots of agro, healing pulls lots of agro, dps doesn't pull as much anymore because it is getting enough alternative ways to decrease agro on it, where as nothing else is getting hardly any attention. A good and easy way to fix this would be to make one point of buff effect, one point of healing, and one point of damage all equal the same amount of hate, and make threat significantly more than either of those three. If you do that though, everything will become basically easy mode tank and spank, so you would have to modify the rates so that eventually if the tank is slacking it will allow even a healer or a utility to pull agro. Then the only problem remaining is the fact that in tank gear and defensive stance or even offensive stance, a tank will not be able to solo anything at all. Therefore, make a set of dps gear with a penalty towards aggression/taunts and damage proc or increased damage, and a set of tank gear with increases to taunts/aggression and decreases to damage output. The tank gear could have a much stronger focus on defensive attributes and maybe a set or item effect for tanking items that decrease the amount of power taunts take and decrease damage output so that when it procs or is active, it makes them more efficient tanks and less efficient dpsers. It will also allow for more than one tank to be in a raid and still be able to contribute something worth while. These types of things would allow the tank to focus on being a tank while in tank mode such as taunting and what not, while also preventing them from being the top of the parses at the same time, or if a tank wants to come along on the raid but theres already a main tank, they can use their dps mode and gear to be a part of the dps groups. Or you could possibly chose to wear a hybrid of the gear if you're main assisting so you can switch stances at will and have some tank items at the sacrifice of dps when you're not tanking, and sacrifice of tanking ability when in tank mode. You could really be gung-ho and allow people to change gear in fights one piece at a time with the cost of a so many second removal of half their stats, attributes, and defensive abilities so that if people need to adjust, they actually CAN, especially seeing as this game is all about different scenarios and how you handle each one. In closing, my suggestion to you, as politely and civil as I can muster through my still intense anger at Aeralik right now is that you quickly learn just how big of an epic nerf you have hit the paladin with by removing amends and compensate either in hate or in everything else that was lacking because amends was so strong, and do the math to figure out just how much of a difference it will make to the multimob tanks now that you are removing almost all of the aoe hate gain. Especially since you JUST gave the berzerker and shadowknights their cake, and right as they are starting to enjoy it, you are about to take it away. Again. Or, if you can't do those things like a developer should be doing prior to completely overhauling the frail balance that kept things semi-functioning, please do us all a favor and don't mess with what you don't yet understand. Arbitrary flipping of roles this late in the game is bad enough considering we are no longer what we initially signed up for, and personally I feel that an option to betray over to the other side with equivilant spells/epic weapons granted would be very appreciated since you turned the shadowknight into a paladin and the paladin into the shadowknight which is effectively the same thing as if you logged into your assassin one day and found him to be a ranger. But its not like arbitrary class changes are the worst of it. You are in addition taking away the ONE thing that this class has that seperates it from others. That is completely unjust and then to replace it with something far inferior is just adding extreme insult to the injury. Then if we weren't already crippled enough by this, you then decide that you're also going to take away yet another primary form of agro gain that the paladins have come to rely on equally as much as amends. You have successfully slaped us in the face as hard as you can physically achieve short of going in and ninja deleting every paladin without warning. In terms that you can understand, take away the assassins hate transfer, take away decapitate, take away their poisons, all of their back stab abilities, take away all the damage bonuses from their mythical, take away their stealth abilities, take away double attack, and turn them into ranged only, while only allowing them to use a symbol, and you have approximately what you have done to us in this expansion. If it wasn't a big enough hint for you, we DON'T like the way things are currently in test. We tank for a living, and we would very much appreciate being left able to do so when the dust clears, wether it be through amends, or through another means, but please do NOT pretend that this one pathetic taunt is going to magically band-aid replace a hate transfer that is several dozen times more powerfull than any other taunt currently in this game, or that by doing one or two tiny little adjustments is going to replace what many people have built their ENTIRE character around for many years purely because up until this moment it was the only thing that we actually had. Soon, if you continue down this path, the paladin will have absolutely nothing going for them other than a very large amount of time wasted and a very strong hatred for you beyond anything that you've seen before, and there will be folks out there that will see this as the absolute last straw and will try to do something drastic about it. As it stands, I know of at least 1 major raiding paladin that has permanently quit this game and you are very much able to be blamed for that because of what you are doing and how much time paladins will have to spend re-learning their class just to be inferior to any other class in existance and those many months worth of time and trial and error and testing and refining the class will have to be completely respent all over again, and not all of us have that kind of time. If you look at how many paladins have betrayed to shadowknight since the shadowknight overhaul, you should be able to imagine what will happen when you take away the only thing that allows paladins to be goodat that one and only thing that they've ever and always been good at. If the paladin is not supposed to be the end all best aggro controlling tank, then you had better give them something else to be awsome at to replace what you took away, or make them even in all aspects to the other tanks, in which case you honestly should give every paladin an option to betray to any tank class that they want to with equivilant gear and spells if you decide to make them the same as every one else. Amends made them the niche toon for the last 4 years at controlling agro. Revoking what made them who they are now this late in the game is very not funny and without it, the paladin is now dead last on EVERYTHING. Not just everything minus one.
Pictures would be nice also... popup if ya can with nice sounds and chewable corners I got to the second paragraph and I think I just regressed back into childhood
I will applaud your effort ReverendPago, but those two walls of text are simply not conducive to getting anybody to read them. I did read it, as I have every other post in these 14 pages so far. Problem is, with all that text, you didn't really say anything that hasn't already been mentioned previously.
ReverendPaqo wrote: Aerlik is never going to read this for two reasons. 1) You posted this in the Paladin forum. 2) You used big words that are beyond Aerlik's comprehension. Words like 'tank' and 'aggression'
He does however understand really large numbers and only pays attention to how many digits it is. So I figured that although it's all been said already, and although he'd never read it, he may look at it and think "that must have taken some time. and thats almost as big as assassins dps is... these guys might just be able to understand my bigger dps = everythings better system and might not be as worthless as i thought." and hopefully the size would similarly attract another developers attention. Or if we insult his intelligence enough, he just might feel compelled to prove us wrong and actually read it to spite us, and in doing so, get the entire thread in one go. Either way, it's all in vain, so might as well make it visually impressive. Besides, if all of us go into test and feedback the same things, it will be the same as if we all post it in the forums, so might as well make my submission additionally in a form that will be seen by more than just aeralik that looks at it and disregards it once he sees the word paladin in it. Edit: seperated into paragraphs I'm really bad about paragraphs because I'm normally a speaker rather than writer.
1) Nobody will ever read that. First thing they teach you in business communications is that the more concise and less you write, the more likely it is to be read. You failed miserably and I doubt anyone at SOE even if they saw it would read more than the first couple of sentences. It just looks like a bunch of rambling. 2) Sign of the times: I retired from Ascendant, and immediately they opened apps to Guardians, leaving Paladin slot closed. They had no other Paladins, and already had a Guardian (one of the advisors) and also an SK recruit (he's likely to pass vote unless someone is stupid with their vote). Nobody in their right mind will take a well played Paladin over a well played Guardian going forward. SOE should just give Paladins a free reroll to 80 Guardian, and Zerkers a free reroll to 80 SK, and eliminate the completely unnecessary and counter-productive sub-classes since they are completely unconcerned with making it where they will all have a spot on raids and viable/competative at what they are supposed to be able to do.
The only problem with what you said Tharinor is that you have already admited defeat and have chosen to do nothing rather than do something. Even if my doing something is completely for nothing or makes no impact at all, at least I can say that I'm trying everything that I can think of. You are doing nothing other than /quit and posting around in different places how you've already quit and are done trying all the while passively trying to get others to give into the same hopelessness that you feel over all of this. Have you seen someone take that much time to try to defend their class? Since nothing else up to this point seems to have worked, I'm trying any and everything that I can in a desperate attempt to hopefully save the class that I love to play. I am not content to sit back and accept that all of what I've worked for and enjoyed building will go down in a flaming failure, especially before it actually fails and still has time to change for the better. Business communications doesn't fully apply when your talking about a conceted arogant developer that has the forethought capabilities of a child, and thus is prone only to his own shallow thought process and behaviors without any form of reasoning or compassion from outside influences. Business communication requires that the person you are talking to be reasonable. Therefore, nothing we will do will convince Aeralik to change what he's already done, even if we do 100 million in-test feed backs. If I'm wrong, then lets see Aeralik post in this thread about how he is actually reading things and actually does care that most of us actually doing something HAVE tried it in test, and are definately not happy with it. He said he's open to feedback, but only from those that have tried it. Well, I tried it, and it sucks. Try again. Wheres your feedback Tharinor? What *could* actually make a difference is if the developers see that the paladins aren't content to just roll over and take it in the back side again, and not only care about their class, but are willing to put time and effort into it. You have already shown that you are not about to be one that will contribute towards that end. I'm sure that all of this will be a complete waste of time, and that no one will care in the slightest, but when this is all over and done with, I will have at least exhausted all of the ideas and methods that I could come up with rather than sitting on my hands whining about "the times". As I recall, this is not the only time paladins have been hated on by the developers, and it most certainly wont be the last time. But if people keep taking the type of attitude that you have taken, then why SHOULD the developers care? I'm going to keep fighting my fight until the changes have occured. If it ends up staying as bad as it is now, then I'll be quitting as well AFTER the change has occured. In the mean time though, please do not belittle the few of us that still carry enough pride in our class to fight with an ignorant hope that it can actually make a change, because for all you know, it just might.
well if these changes go threw i 6 box a group with a pally being my main tank, so if this goes threw say goodbye to my $90 a month.
ReverendPaqo wrote: You can't blame Aeralik for the changes, and you can't call him "arrogant" or whatever else. I'm pretty sure he's not solely responsible for it. While I strongly disagree with the direction they have chosen for the paladin (and has pretty much ensured I don't play EQ2 in any regular capacity anymore), at least show some sort of respect when voicing your opinions. This last xpac imo wasn't very good, around the same realms of Desert of Flames in how "good" it was. This game is dying, and it's because they lost focus on what worked and what didn't when Scott Hartsman left. What you are seeing now with the changes to Paladins (and the changes to come to the rest of the tanks) are merely EQ2 entering it's death throws, eventually to be put right up there with Vanguard and Conan as the best failed MMOs on the market. It sux, because I really did love this game, for almost 5 years I really did love this game. Don't hate on the devs, they do what they're told, hate on the people above them if you have to focus your anger on anyone. The devs are just doing their jobs the way they're told and trying to enjoy doing something kinda kewl for work. All of them put a lot of effort, love and pride in the work they do, albeit not every agrees with the direction they are given on where to take the game. Contrary to popular belief, the devs aren't some evil scheming force finding new and interesting ways to piss off their player base...that's the job of the people entrusted with making the game make money, and most of the time, they don't even know how to turn on a computer... If you want to give some feedback, great, go ahead, I won't be, I give up at this point, good luck to the rest of you...what has already been decided upon will happen, the only thing you can do now is try to mold the upcoming changes into something everyone can at least live with, but I guarentee you there will be no going back to how Paladins were...that wasn't the directions given to the grunts from on high...the law of the land has been laid down, now you will have to find a compromise you are comfortable with or just give up.
The reason I hate on Aeralik is because the assassin is the only one that keeps getting new sets of golden underwear while everyone else gets nerfed. Any developer worth their beans would also have remembered and considered the spiders in tomb of thuuga before taking away everything spare taunts to hold agro with.
I found that fear immunity was more important when dealing with Thuuga, I usually MT'd and just had someone else run around dealing with spiders on the mistress. I would pick up a lot of them towards the end with AEs to help the OT out, but usually let the OT handle most of them. The trash mobs were more dependant on having fear immunity to really keep things under control than amends. The spiders the mistress seem to ignore everything but damage anyways, I never found amends or sigil very helpful on the widow mistress except to tank the named itself. The biggest problems I see from the change in amends is encounters like Pawbuster, where amends was key to a paladin keeping him facing the right direction. I've always done me and a guard or another pally tanking pawbuster to keep him where he needs to be. The other issue is with stifles. Guardians have an ability that basically is an auto taunt (I forget the name, it's been a long time since I played my guard). Each time they get hit it either procs a taunt on that mob or has a chance to proc a taunt. (again, it used to be on always, but I think it changed to a chance to proc at some point, but I could be wrong). There's some nice AE hate generation right there in situations where you may be stifled or stunned. Where where would we still be able to do such a thing? Amends was basically our equivalent to that ability. Sigil doesn't do anything for you if you are stifled or stunned before using it. From what I understand AE damage when not direct will no longer generate hate on the other targets. That's all fine and dandy for mages and such, but what about the mechanics of paladin tanking? That's one thing that helped us be a good tank. You see an add, or whatever, you get close and AE like mad to stick it on you. What will happen now? I really hope I'm wrong that our ability to pick up groups or adds hasn't been diminished from this addition. Otherwise instead of the squishies getting smacked down, you get the healers dying because they've generated too much hate while you aren't generating any on the rest of the mobs. I hope I'm misunderstanding the AE changes.
Couple things: 1) AE damage still causes hate. You hit 4 mobs with 1000 points of damage each and each one hates your for 1000 pts worth of threat. It used to be that you ALSO gained a small amount of hate spread amongst the 4. You hit mob A for 1000 and the other three also hate you a bit extra just because you hit their buddy. That "extra" hate is now gone but the main damage still remains. 2) Assassins no longer have a hate transfer. It's a proc dethreat. 3) Main point I wanted to mention. How about making the new amends castable while under control effects such as stun, stifle etc.? Not precisely passive hate but accomplishes the same thing (in a much stronger fashion than what the basic threat procs off of the other fighter stances would generate.) It also might be a compromise between what amends was and what they seem to want it to be.
Azian@Everfrost wrote: I agree. I mentioned this in my other post. It'd be an easy way to fix the passive aggro generation and still make the flavor of the class somewhat similiar. It will also help when and if we have to heal ourselves.
I didn't want to cross-post, but wanted the devs to consider responding to the question in this thread. Just a question that I think would help frame the discussion: http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=441712
Garthan@Kithicor wrote: Just to point out, with GU51 the single-target taunt has a faster recast, lower power cost and can be cast while stunned or stifled. Hopefully that, along with Restitution, Faithful Cry, Sigil, etc. will be enough to allow the Paladin to control him. That said, Amends made it easier for Paladins to tank him, but it certainly wasn't a requirement. A lot of raids do him with a Guardian as MT, Berserker as the OT. It just requires more coordination, and is admittedly more of a pain, but it is perfectly doable.
