Earth Tanking Improvement Thread

Increase epicenter size by .5 and increase brick damage absorption.

Just the regular mechanic. For a SC it can be higher.

Ahhh ok
Agreed

Just a couple of different ideas I've seen people float around on more than one occasion.

Increase range of Epicenter

I don't see this happening anytime soon nor do I think it should. All three point blank aoe pulls have the exact same range; the only difference among them, as I stated earlier, is that Epicenter is the only one that just pulls. Rather than looking at increasing the range (which is much larger than most realize) Epicenter needs to be given added utility.

Make Earthen Grip an aftershockable multi target pull

This is an idea I can get behind but unfortunately this will never happen. Or probably won't, anyways. If the devs wouldn't give Fire a ranged pull (single or mutli target) during any of its multiple tweaks then I don't see them updating Earthen Grip. Honestly though the best change they could make to Earthen Grip would be to reduce its cooldown. Since it only pulls one target at a time it should be spammable.

Bring back the old Damage Shift animation when at max absorption

Earth community is about 50/50 on whether or not we want a visual indicator for max absorption. To me, maintaining our buff is as simple as maintaining Fire's buff and Fire doesn't needed visual cues. However, I understand that adding such a cue would help some people. Right now with Brick out in tank role both Brick and one's toon are covered in this faint dust thing. I like that aesthetically as it is a bit more subdued than the old Damage Shift animation, but some people miss the old one.

Buff Brick's health

I made a thread that contained a video of Brick's health with a 114 cr toon. At 106 his health was 34068 and at 114 cr his was 32302. So despite my cr going up by 8, Brick's health drops by 1766. Hell, if his health had increased by 1766 from 106 to 114 cr that wouldn't be enough. Any future tweaks to Earth tanking should definitely address Brick's low health pool.

Allow Brick's Envelope ability to be cast power-free

Mentioned this in the thread about Brick's health. There is so much we can't control about Brick; whether or not he stands in an aoe, avoid a one-shot, etc. Another thing we can't control is how much power he uses. If Brick decides to empty his power bar while his health drops, then he is unable to use Envelope. Envelope is only usable once per fight, preventing it from being spammed or abused, and I feel that is sufficient enough to remove its power cost.

I think Brick should be given his taunt back at when you're 40 percent health and an overall improved AI.

Bricks AI needs a bit of improvement too, it needs to be a pet not a mindless drone. In my opinion it should take a more active role when taking or damaging and use a little less power.

A bit of CC would be nice too. Maybe having an aftershock ability added to epicenter for it to knock up or down targets so that we have a bit more breathing room and maybe having brick and aftershocks being used at the same time but when your 50% damage absorption is up , he also receives 50% damage too which would increase his usefulness tenfold.

If brick and aftershocks are able to be used together then brick definitely needs a health boost and needs to act like a tank. When i was starting earth i was thinking of brick as an extra tank but as i got higher in cr i found that sometimes he could even die in solos and duos and sometimes just stand idly by watching my health bar fall while damaging the enemy for almost nothing which is why i use aftershocks now.

What would also be nice is if earth had to multi target pulls like rage. So use earthen grip and turn it into a max range frontal aoe pull that stuns our targets for a max of 4-5 secs which would help us so much and make our load outs so much more diverse.

I think that's it for now.

I've removed myself from the idea for a ranged aoe pull.
The 1 thing that would make me happy, if they decide to touch earth. Would be if they removed the cooldown for e-grip.

The ranged pull issue has at least been acknowledged, even if there is no solution anytime soon.

Wellens said: ↑
“Don't you think it's a little sad that Earth needs to go out of it's own power pool to use pulls? I mean, single target pulls are a thing of the past and AoE, while nice, don't recharge fast enough and don't allow for the range. Perhaps an update is in order?”

Spytle said:
"I do. It makes me cry. It's in the backlog, but behind other important power issues."

Where was this posted?

Why is it in the backlog earth needs improving ASAP. Sorry if i sound harsh but I think its slightly unfair that Earth has just been shrugged off for so long and now munitions is out I think you should shift your priorities back to 'balancing' the powers.

Come on devs, I still have faith you can do it!!!

It was in the thread that Spytle was very active in last week giving tanking advice, where he convinced several people to give brick a 2nd shot (didn't persuade me).

Here's the link.
https://forums.station.sony.com/dcu...e-needed-earth-tanking-latest-content.248355/

There's 2 more powers that are on the clock to get signed off and on live, I'd say priorities lie there over further balancing.

Until then work with what you've got, so when adjustments are made finally you have a solid base to be head and shoulders above the fotm crowd.

Dude i was reading this and for some reason i just thought afterwards this dude awesome

Haha, I try to be level headed when I'm sober
I encourage a bit of back-&-forth after a few though

Back on topic,
I enjoy earth tanking overall. The biggest gripes I have are lack of a ranged multi-pull, and no viable "oh s**t" supercharge.

-For the pull I would prefer unlocking e.grip grants 2 powers, e.grip as is & a sort of reverse pebble blast which would be the ranged multi. Best of both worlds.

-For the SC, scrap envelop and give us rock armor like the ice super. Would be cool if we became a giant version of brick.

One of my leaguemates is Earth and he has been trying to find ways to make Envelope viable in end game content. He found that using a "usable while controlled" ability will re-taunt enemies while encased. While neat, it doesn't negate losing aggro right when we become encased and the enemies will still get off at least one attack at group members before coming back.

Personally I find rock armor or anything like that kind of goofy but I definitely agree that we need a defensive SC.

One thing that get's brought up quite a bit is our dominance buff. Currently for every 1 point of dom we get 1 point of defense. What is interesting about our dom buff is that, of the four tanks, our buff is the only one not tied to our main mechanic. Ice's shields, Fire's healing/health buff, Rage's health buff, all are strengthened by stacking dom. Earth's main mechanic is absorption but stacking dom does not affect it directly.

The two knocks against our current dom buff are 1) it is useless while blocking and 2) increasing def on a 1:1 scale with dom is too small to make an appreciable difference in end game content. I have two ideas to update our dom buff-

• Have every 1 point of dominance increase defense by 1.5. Even though it doesn't address the issue of utility while blocking it does make modding for dom somewhat worthwhile when out of block.
• Have dom increase our absorption, cap the increase at 10%, have the dominance required to reach the 10% cap change with one's combat rating (for instance, someone with 115 cr and 3000 dominance would not reach the 10% cap but someone with 110 cr and 3000 dominance would reach the 10% cap). This idea is a bit more convoluted but I think it works better with our primary mechanic and overall design.

You'll notice I didn't mention having dom increase our health. While I would love this idea (I mod straight health in blues since it increases overall survivability moreso than dom) it would make our buff too similar to Rage and Fire.

Apparently "Brick" is the hook. According to Spytle. If thats the hook, good luck catching many fish.

Yeah I've seen the tweets. If that's the plan going forward than pet tanking needs quite a few tweaks to surpass aftershocks.

Well the multi-target grip was confirmed via Twitter. Unfortunately this was after the announcement of brick getting buffed up. No word about Aftershocks yet.