DLC9: Rage Powers

This appears to be a problem as well for me. Can't say for sure I've nailed it down to that specifically, but there were several times when there would be no visual effect or sound.

I was in AnB and was recieving no heals at all from any healers. Even in Dox I never got any heals at all from them while in rage mode. Only in nexus have I received heals and dont get why that is happening really.

i was around back then but had completely no idea what i was doing. can you remind me what fire tanking was like then? i think it was similar in that you could buff your health without limit, like how rage is now, without adds being factored in.

also, how have you been using rage mode? im seeing it as more beneficial to not even use it, and instead just stack my health to the moon. its as if you are fire, without the healing in buff of course. i meant to try my no rage mode loadout in a+b but was too tired after work today. it works fine in the 4 man ops.

i love the idea behind the rage mode mechanic. i just think its not that useful. and the health buff for tanks is awesome, but very power hungry. ive never gone through so many soders. and the fact that with only a single boss its a lot harder to get that health up as high as it needs to be, maybe there should be a flat increase to your health while activating a power. i know that sounds just like fire, but rage doesnt get the healing in buff, so id suggest triple the health? maybe quadruple it? or maybe buff like 90% health with even more depending on dominance? i definitely dont want fire 2.0, but im just trying to come up with ideas to be as effective with boss fights without draining my power bar and still being useful to the team. if rage was changed to some kind of flat increase to health, i could see using rage mode a lot more often, or at least a lot more useful.

You could buff your health up to about 360% of normal. The issue was, even with the healing buff, your healers had to work much harder to keep you topped off compared to an ice tank because your mitigation was so much lower. You had to learn how to properly buff yourself and strike a balance between that buff and how much your healers could keep up with.

That's one of the reasons fire tanking got such a bad reputation those first few months and almost became extinct, at least on the server I was on.

That same issue is what's happening now with healers trying to heal Rage tanks. A lot of rage tanks are going "woooo 50k health" and just spamming powers and Rage mode indiscriminately and it's getting a lot of players (myself included initially) killed.

I haven't been using Rage mode every time it's off cooldown, as tempting as it is. Here's how I'm using it:

Activate Rage before jumping into a fight when my health is full
Go to town with powers, making sure to spam Ragebringer a few times to get a nice health buff going
Use the Rage Crash canceler or Vindictive if I get knocked down
Turtle until Rage comes off cooldown and my Healer is able to get my health bar fairly full again. Then use it.

The lower your health is at the time you activate Rage mode, the less useful it becomes.

The reason for the last step is because of what happens to your actual health when you get your health buff. It's similar to fire - the "2/3rds times dominance" health buff isn't the amount you're actually buffed. It's how much your maximum health is buffed. Your actual health is buffed in proportion so the percentage of health you have compared to your maximum health stays the same.

If you're fully healed and have 10k health as a tank, and 1200 dominance, when activating the buff 1 time your max HP would increase by 800. So would your real HP because you have 100% of your max HP.

If you instead only had 5k health due to damage and therefore 50% of your max HP, the same buff would raise your max HP to 10,800 but your actual health increase would only be 400 to keep the ratio at 50%.

If you start buffing or activate Rage close to death, it won't do anything for you because if you only have 10% of your health left, that ratio stays the same even if you "buff" your HP to 50,000 (You'll still only have 5,000 health total). The healer has to make up the other 45,000. Now if you had 90% health before you buffed yourself to this amount, the healer only needs to top up 5,000 health because you just buffed your actual health to 45k.

Because of this, as long as you aren't taking enough damage per second to kill you, you're in reality healing your own HP for far more than what the numbers show when you activate Rage and start buffing. You're healing all damage you're taking in personally, and that gives your healers basically eight uninterrupted seconds to top you up - and the heals become more efficient over the course of Rage mode as long as your HP is above 50%.

Stacking your health to the moon works but it puts an incredible strain on your healers because you don't have a healing bonus like fire does. It is easily the worst of the three tanks to heal when Rage isn't active.

The overwhelming majority of Rage tanks right now either activate Rage the second it's off cooldown or they're buffing their health as high as possible, which is causing many of them to fail. Those two strategies aren't the way to get the most out of Rage that I've seen and tested, at least in top tier not-overgeared-for content.

Haven't had a problem yet, actually loving the new tank power, it's crazy fun

Yup I get all of that about rage. I guess my real question was if you saw rage mode as being useful. You do. To me it's only useful if you buff up your health, which can take a lot of power to do. And by that point your health is so high, rage mode almost doesn't seem as useful when you consider the possibility of crashing. I get that it's part of the risk/reward. Of course I'm still practicing and trying different things. I haven't been having problems, just trying to see what works best.

If nothing else, with your playstyle of buffing as high as possible, you could turtle through Rage mode to take the least amount of damage instead of going all out. You're still giving your healer 8 seconds of uninterrupted healing, and if you use a 50% mitigation power, you might as well just eat the damage from Rage Crash since it won't be that high.

I don't want to buff my health to the moon though. It is crazy fun seeing how high it can go, but it's not practical. I'll do some more playing around with it and figure out what works best for me. So far it's been a lot of fun.

Specifically the sound. I feel it is related to the amount of adds on screen and being active.

Instances in nexus today ( for a specific example) I couldn't hear it at all in any instance while in the first room of the boss fight (4 enemies)

On the sub boss room, I hear it just fine.

Activating it on my back/knocked down, I never hear it regardless of the amount of adds.

oh, and the taunt from the group pull (ragebringer) seeming does nothing to taunt.

I thought i was the only one having this problem , i tried pulling the last bosses in Nexus but they still attack my group after 5 consecutive pulls, i also think the heart beat is too inconsistent to tell when you rage crash so i suggest the devs should add an animation at the end where the red circle around you in rage mode pops to indicate rage crash.

I was

when in dps I was placing the rage crash powers at the last two slots and using them in high add areas and worked great when I needed a bailout lol, I could see where this would help survivability for dps's in dox.

Are those rage crash damage reducer power stackable?

He could have had been controlled by the trollers, any time he is flashing white you will not be able to pull him, it sux I know, darn controll effects lol!

Nope. Flat 50% reduction.

When the crash hits, there is a "flare" like visual that lets you know you're screwed.

I like both ideas. My healers were asking how to heal me....lol....I'm not very proficient at healing, so I couldn't give an expert answer. They said they noticed one second their heals hit me for 1/3 what they normally would, the next, nothing. If we are essentially healing ourselves thru the crash, where are their heals going? lol

Wanted to elaborate on this a bit further. Are you trying to buff up and have high health before you activate Rage, or are you trying to buff through it while it's active?

For those saying Rage isn't worth it.

Remember how much health you do have. Remember there is no healing bonuses. And remember your healer, rage mode takes a LOT of stress off him for those 8s. BUT it does make it inconsistant because those other 4s you're vulnerable. EIther way though, I find it pretty useful, also lets me do things like tank boss on the mogo side of the split without a healer

And it's pretty easy to block rage crash with echain. 7-9 oclock position on the rage mechanic reuse. Or even easier, if you see the power bar number to the bottom left of it. when it lines up with that, that's like 7 oclock, so it's time to hit it. Makes it pretty smooth.