The thing is, originally Wars and Knights were supposed to be able to tank anything in a game, viably. Wars were supposed to be able to do it easier, is all. Knight tank? Round up another cleric for the chain. Nearly 20 years later, things have changed, but (depending on when you came into the game) all of our views haven't. Should knights be able to stand up against a Raid Named viably? I have always believed so, but then when I started that was both the case, and the intent, of the developers at the time. Of course, that was also back in the day when knights -paid- for their extra abilities by gaining xp at a far slower rate compared to wars. Those extra abilities were not freebies. Knights picked the slow route to power, Wars picked the faster one, but at the end of the day, they were all supposed to end up as viable tanks in all content. All three tanks should be viable, in all tanking roles, with rare exceptions. The fact is, however, they are not. This is something that should be fixed. (I have also been around long enough to remember when the 'holy trinity' referred to Pally, Cleric, and CHANTER...) (Since the trinity was tanking, healing, and CC... not DPS as people list nowadays.) Ramblings aside, all tanks should be viable tanks, at all times, with the rare event exception. I'll honestly admit, though, I'm not sure how to handle balance in that case, in today's game. And it seems to me pretty much no one else is, either, unfortunately.
The exceptions are already very, very rare. All whinging in this thread is about tanking approximately eight specific mobs in all of EverQuest. The list gets one or two more names if you lack faith in your healers, and it loses half of them if instead those healers are good. The current very pinnacle of melee threat in the top raiding challenge zone, against whom warriors are preferred until the knights gear up.
So basically, the current expansion named. SK do need a hand. I don't think we need a huge bump which is why I would like to see our lifetaps be instant as if we can't get them off due to interrupts, we lose the one thing that our tanking is supposedly built around with being able to do some self healing. With the cooldown, we won't be able to recast them any faster but at least we will get them off.
Ah, but see... that is incorrect. Wars are not preferred until the knights gear up, they are effectively mandatory. Which is not how it should be. Wars being preferred isn't the issue. It's that knights are not viable. There would not be an issue if they were only 'preferred.' An otherwise solid raidforce, getting into an expac, when having no wizzies show up for the night says "it's fine, we will bring in some of the other DPS from the bench." That same raidforce, getting into an expac, when having no wars show up for the night, can easily be barred from effectively working the current content, even though they have tanks, in the form of knights. This is, quite frankly, not how it should be. Though I still admit, I don't know how to balance it. Perhaps by increasing warrior DPS considerably, or something.
Haha, i didn't pick a tank class to ask for a dps role. If i wanted to dps, i would have picked a dps class. I'm not sure in what expansion you stopped to play, but been a while that it's intended that Warriors have a solid edge on Knights when MT Raid Boss. So you have your cake, Spellbook utility etc, and want to eat warrior's cake, having the same mitigation than them. Put simply, there would be no reason to take warriors anymore in raid. So no thanks.
I'm just going to post this. I never post my personal tank parses online, but I'll just show you something worth taking a look at. This is the first Arx 5 win my guild had. I didn't start the order of the tanking, but here it is: /GU Tanking summary for: Triconix --- Total Melee --- Damage: 39751047 --- Avg hit: 22269 --- Attempts: 2621 --- Riposted: 27/2621 [1.03%] --- Parried: 169/2594 [6.52%] --- Dodged: 21/2425 [0.87%] --- Blocked: 21/2404 [0.87%] --- Defended: 238/2621 [9.08%] --- Missed: 514/2383 [21.57%] --- Hits: 1869/2621 [71.31%] --- Absorbed: 84/1869 [4.49%] --- Real Hits: 1785/2621 [68.1%] As you can see, I tanked for over 25 minutes. If you just do the rough eye test, it's pretty clear the drop off in my mitigation from LS to secondary things isn't overly ridiculus and this is a very lengthy parse. It's pretty uncommon/rare to have a tank going for 25-26 minutes straight without dying or the event being won. The only huge spikes you see were from the lame calix AEs telling me to run away (I was tanking, I just flashed and ate the spell damage and didn't take in melee damage). Also, 25 minutes of fighting to take an average of only 22k damage per hit means that the drop off from LS (9 minutes under it, 15-16 minutes out of it) to no LS isn't exceptionally high. As I stated before, and I will state again, defensive proficiency is way overtuned and allows for warriors to pretty much tank without any drop off in defensive ability. Am I saying that they should nerf warriors? No, but if you have warriors this strong, it's almost obligatory to increase the abilities of knights.
Good post. I agree with it to a point, As long as that when they fix Knight mitigation ability they don't put warriors in the spot they were 18 months ago Again.
Still, 1400 AC isn't equaled to 15 % mitigation. You can show us all the graphs in the world it's not. Let me share with you a secret : Average hit of Raid Mobs has never been pretty high and is often in the low hit spectrum of the whole raid mob. If you would have a knight tanking this for 25 min, you would end sure with a higher average hit, maybe 30 k, but certainly not the double of a war like 45 k. Also, if you would have tanked 9 min with defensive and 15 min with no proficiency,your graph would have looked pretty much the same all around than the one you posted.
/G Tanking summary for: Barbwarrior --- Total damage: 18076941 --- Avg hit: 23911 --- Swings: 1016 --- Defended: 100 (9.8%) --- Hit: 756 (74.4%) --- Missed: 160 (15.7%) --- Accuracy: 82.5% --- Dodged: 9 (1%) --- Parried: 72 (7.1%) --- Blocked: 8 (0.8%) --- Riposted: 11 (1.2%) --- Absorbed: 0 (0%) 25min seems like along time tanking calix think ours is like 628s
7k per each hit is a lot of extra damage to be taking. That's a 30% increase to my damage which is just an absurd amount. The fact that you don't realize/accept this just means you don't know very much about the strength of our class comparative to others or you just have some ego problem and you don't want to see knights impede on warrior territory. There is no feasible way that my graph would've looked the same if I stripped proficiency off. The average hit would've increased by nearly 30%, up to around 30k per hit with much higher spikes outside the 9 minutes of LS. (Plus, I would've probably died before I could even rip off a 25 minute straight fight again). The fact that you say this makes me question your general understanding of this game, let alone a warrior. How can you even begin to argue that something that gives 30% mitigation off the DI portion of hits wouldn't affect the graph?! You're a lost cause if you think so. Let me share you a secret: Outside of LS, every single spike on that graph would've shot up exponentially. I also posted this based on what you said earlier about having few survival tools that keep us alive and we become relatively weak. As you can see by the parse, we don't become relatively weak. As you stated, I lost all my long timer abilities by the first LS rotation so later into the fight, around the 13-20 minute marks I really didn't have much gas left in the tank, yet my overall damage stayed pretty level. There wasn't a single moment of time in the graph outside of those two AEs I ate where you see a "weak" point in my graphs. However, you yourself are contradicting your own prior statement by now saying that my graph would've been similar without proficiency (which is just the most ridiculous statement I've heard on this board in a long time). Oh, and look at the parse by Barbwarrior. That's about a 10-12 minute parse looking at the hit attempts where he's taking more damage than me per hit. If warriors got weaker over time, shouldn't my damage intake be greater? It's only natural with less abilities up and a higher chance of a bad RNG hit? Like I said, it was the first win. They are much quicker now so I won't ever be able to create a situation like this parse. This was just used to prove a point. You don't see warrior defensive effectiveness decreasing with longer fights, as p2aa claimed initially. Our effectiveness stays relatively the same throughout the entire fight and a major reason for that is 30% mitigation from proficiency.
Do you realize that the fact you stayed alive 25 minutes versus the raid boss was mainly largely due to your healer team and not because of your tools ? Your graph doesn't prove that Defensive Proficiency and Defensive disc is the same, because 1400 AC isn't equal to 15 % mitigation. To go on saying it's the same is just very bad. As for correlation between average damage and length of parse, the longer the parse will be, the more often you will get the low hit spectrum of the raid boss,which is the most numbers of hits come from, the lower your average damage will be.
I can see this might not be ideal for supporting a deep Warrior roster, but current tuning aside, is a paradigm shift away from burst survival tools really such a bad thing? Particularly in a game of dwindling populations...
The issue isn't how well the war tanks, it's that knights need something to make them able to come within viable distance of it.
I'm not saying that it's a bad thing. What I'm saying is that knights are now left in the dust when it comes to modern raid content and tanking. Warriors are hands down superior and it's not even a competition. You do realize that AC is the component that affects the roll of damage portion? So the more ac, the more likely it's going to land with smaller rolls AKA the mob will hit for less. I never once stated that 1400ac and 30% mitigation = 45% mitigation. You're just putting those words in my mouth. What I did say is that on all parses regardless of time, you will not see a sufficient drop off in melee mitigation as a warrior which is a huge indicator that shield proficiency wasn't tuned properly and knights are now lagging behind. Warriors should see a drop off in their tanking ability - something that isn't happening if you are a good warrior. I can show you parses of other warriors anonymously and they are taking much more damage per hit than me, but the graph looks similar, just scaled up due to the damage per hit. Warrior tank graphs should not be flat lining like they are now currently. We should see a drop off in efficiency outside of LS, which we are not (Hint hint: my graph shows this and the longer it is, the better because you can always have fluke parses without getting bad RNG). To say otherwise is just ignorant. Your lack of knowledge or any evidence on your position on this top is mind boggling. All you do is repeat the same thing over and over, claiming that I said it, but it never once came out of my mouth. You just made up some random assumption and look like a complete ignoramus because of it. You have backed up your position with no data, empirical evidence, or parses. Or is it you don't want to show your parses because there is a noticeable drop off in your efficiency? Then we'd have to question why... Not sure why I have to repeat myself over and over. This is the first win from months ago before all the crazy nerfs. The time spent cannot be repeated as the fights are much shorter now. Sigh
Nor was I trying to imply you did, but the question remains unanswered... Sustainable abilities like Phalanx, DefProf, Brace and prenerf NTTB... are things I like.
