Can We Talk About Group Tank Balance Problems?

Discussion in 'Tanks' started by Luclin.Dragonball, Feb 24, 2023.

  1. Syylke_EMarr Augur

    For whatever reason, NoS group content is very low on the group damage side of things (minimal AEs or single target damage effects on characters other than the tank). This leads to a design that is more advantageous to a tank that can self heal since, in theory, a group could be formed with no healer at all.

    Going back to an expansion like TBL, which was rife with AEs in group content, and even merc healers were not up to the task of keeping the group and the tank alive.

    It's simply a shift in content design. Content can be (and has been) designed in such a way that there is no functional difference between the tanks in group content, insofar as they all require the same support.
  2. Annastasya Augur

    This is patently false. You may know some exceptional knights, some less than exceptional warriors, or have a support team so good that this may look like the case.
  3. Szilent Augur

    His experience matches mine in this regard.
    Cadira likes this.
  4. Dre. Altoholic

    Paladins are in a pretty good place actually.
    SK's, don't even know where to start.
    Warriors are a lost cause.
  5. Waitwhat Elder

    If the warrior class was removed from the game today, no aspect of the game would suffer. We'd just be tanking with the knights and be successful and happy doing it. Maybe this is the real frustration behind the first post.
    Dre. and bard007 like this.
  6. Annastasya Augur

    And i can see how you might be biased. If all i did was look at numbers, i might come to the conclusion that Shaman are the superior raid healer, and clerics bring nothing to the table that could not be replaced with more Shaman. There's some part of truth to that, there are probably many events that would not suffer in the win % column by only Shaman showing up to heal.

    Let's be frank. i've heard this kind of stuff from Warriors (not all) since the dawn of this game. Wish i could self heal. Wish i could cast this spell or that. If i were being a troll, i'd call it class jealousy, as it has been so many times, but i think it's more a cry of frustration. You roll a warrior, you have to know, more or less what you're getting into.

    My entire job, in this game, is watching health bars, primarily of tanks, in my group or in the raid. i can tell you unequivocally, that when tanking raid mobs, boss or trash, warriors take less damage, less frequently, with less spikes as far as melee damage is concerned. They are easier to keep alive, last longer, require less focus, have a larger hitpoint pool, can take more rounds of combat without heals, and get one-rounded with far lower frequency than Knights do. This does not mean that Knights can't tank raid mobs, or that there are not situations where a Knight does a better job. By and large, however, Warriors are still out tanking knights by a good measure.

    If you don't believe that, drop all the warriors from your raids and see how it goes. Pretty sure my guild would straight up call raids off if zero warriors show up.
    Velisaris_MS and Lluianae like this.
  7. Szilent Augur

    I'm not expressing envy. I'm describing my experience. My raid forces both on E.Marr and now on Cazic not just can but have used knight MTs. Warriors have some pretty good tools, but the bosses that require those warrior tools are basically as uncommon as bosses that legitimately favor knight tanks (lookin' at you, Shei Vinitras). For everything in between, which is nearly all bosses in EQ, the three tank types are fungible.
  8. Lluianae Elder

    It's not equivalent, and that's what Annastasya is getting at. I mentioned such earlier, it's just that it can be "good enough" in various cases, but it's not "as good as". Any healer worth their salt not only observes these differences but recognises how tangible it is where it truly counts. Just as it's tangible when tanks don't use their tools sufficiently and makes it a pain in the for us.

    When you throw in Dragon glyph it's anyone's game. Take that out and differences are more pronounced. Then for Sheis of the world, I'm sure if I could hold aggro I would be able to tank him. It's not saying much other than how undertuned he is in damage output for what is a DPS pinata. Tanks are more likely to die if they're marked (even with Lich Sting running) than from inc melee + strikes.
  9. Syylke_EMarr Augur

    I typically tank Shei with my 2hander, only swapping to Flash for rebuffing. Probably speaks equally to the silliness of SKs and how undertuned Shei is.

    That being said, yes Warriors absolutely tank single target raid bosses better than knights. Over short durations, the difference is small. The real, tangible advantages of Warriors come in when needing to tank for longer durations (which knights do not have the, non-Glyph, abilities for) or to layer defenses (something knights have very limited options for).
  10. Tucoh Augur

    This is something I bring up in the "why do clerics exist" threads. Every expansion should have at least one zone and a mission that stresses group healers. The zone should have several named and at least one trash mob with significant AE damage and the mission should be similar to The Call in Sleeper's Tomb in terms of group damage.
    Syylke_EMarr and Aiona like this.
  11. Tucoh Augur

    A look at the available tools for a warrior vs knights supports this observation. Warriors can stack so much stuff on themselves and sustain it indefinitely that a warrior + healing team will undoubtedly out-tank a knight + healing team.

    Where things become interesting is examining the feasibility of using a knight as a tank and reducing the number of healers (especially clerics), which is largely what I did in my 6box group. Depending on the encounter, swapping a warrior for a knight and then swapping a cleric for a druid/shaman, or swapping a healer for a DPS / ADPS class outright may boost raid DPS enough to have a positive effect on the lethality of the raid by just killing things faster. For example, fights with timed adds that can be cut through or a boss with a burn phase that can be done a tick faster. I don't raid and am totally ignorant on what fights are common, so I'll stop talking out of my butt about this :D
  12. Gorg00 Augur

    My experience is that knight tanks are just as capable of tanking anything a Warrior can. We use warriors to MT bosses mostly out of tradition at this point, and because we have more of them than we have knights.

    The situation is roughly that knight tanks are more self sufficient than warriors, so to make up for that deficiency warriors require outside help. The problem is that any outside help that a warrior could get, applies (almost) equally to knight tanks.

    If you assume a group or raid of competent people, the differences matter less, which is partially due to the fact that none of the tanks are in a particularly bad spot right now, and partially due to the fact that none of the content in EQ really stresses tanking much in 2023, at least in terms of class performance.

    I have both a raid geared SK and a raid geared warrior (warrior is main, so I'm both better at it and it has better overall gear), and swapping them into the exact same group (Tank + Shaman + Bard + 3 DPS) it is pretty noticeable how much stronger the SK is. The warrior has to work harder to achieve less, which is particularly noticeable in group content when you (a) have less support and (b) can tune the difficulty more easily by pulling larger or smaller packs of mobs.

    My warrior has more or less become a raid only character unless I specifically need something for my warrior from group content, and then I typically just drop one of the DPS characters and throw him in as a DPS character rather than as a tank. There's basically no reason in group content to ever prefer a warrior over a SK.

    Other than losing a few utility things (Shining, DI, etc) there's basically no raid or group content that requires or is even benefited by having a cleric rather than a shaman.In part this is because both clerics and shaman functionally have infinite mana, and damage profiles have gotten to the point where heals from both cleric and shaman are largely going into overheal because it's no longer about the size of the heal, but just having a constant stream of incoming healing is the main thing that matters.

    Honestly, clerics have it worse than warriors in this regard. Not only have their "healing superiority" role been watered down (much like a warrior's tanking superiority), but they bring almost nothing to the table besides healing. That means that anytime you bring a cleric when a shaman would have been good enough, you're effectively making your group/raid worse off.


    We'd probably cancel raids if zero warriors showed up, because that's half of our tanking force not because we had 0 warriors. If all of those warriors re-rolled as SKs that were equivalently geared and skilled and showed up as that, there is no way we'd cancel.

    Fortunately, EQ just isn't a game that is tuned tightly enough to need a particularly optimized comp, so you're perfectly fine making less ideal choices like bringing along warriors, clerics, monks, etc, and maybe at some point the penduluum swings and those classes will get their moment in the sun again.
  13. Tucoh Augur

    Yeah, that's the key point for both clerics and warriors.

    For warriors, if raid mob damage output was high enough that tanks would get one-rounded if they didn't have a heavy set of defensive abilities running, warriors would start to become necessary. A warrior's total effective HP is far beyond a paladin or shadowknight, especially when considering sustaining that effective HP over longer periods of time.

    It'd harken back to the days of old where a warrior running defensive discipline was critical and warriors would cycle through bosses. Not really a paradigm many would prefer to today. The existence of Glyph of Dragon Scales kinda muddies the water since an SK running glyph and a modest loadout of defensive abilities can eclipse the effective HP of a warrior not running glyph and popping all their best defensives.

    If DPG ever decides to create raid content that stresses players at a stat level they should also just delete glyph so players don't feel required to use it until they gear up in order to beat content.
  14. Gorg00 Augur

    I don't mind glyph, but I never stack it with anything else, on any character, unless I'm doing something silly like filling my xtar completely.

    The correct way to handle tank CD usage in modern EQ is to always have *something* running, the one place warriors do better than SKs is that our main innate defensive disc lasts 3 minutes and is about 10% better than SKs get, which if you stagger that with glyph gives you 8 minutes of mitigation, and both defensive and glyph have a 10 minute re-use time so you only need to fill 2 minutes of gap between those two CDs. Warrior dicho is basically as strong as those, but lasts ~30s (or less if it fades early), which can bring you down to only needing to cover 1 minute of gap.

    Compare that to SK which has the same 5 minutes of glyph on a 10 minute timer, but their defensive situation is a little worse off. I'm not a professional SK, but compared to a warrior's flat 3 minute defensive they have what, Mantle for 1 minute (can fade early) every 15, carapace for 2 minutes every 7.5 minutes (can fade early), Corrupted Guardian for 2 minutes. Other than glyph those are all about 10% worse than what warriors get, but I think with those discs they can actually keep 100% up time unless Mantle or Carapace fade in under a minute.

    They also have one of the strongest (in terms of damage reduction) abilities in the game in Reaver's Bargain, but the damage cap has been ignored on that for so long it's getting less and less useful on it's own, but can work to extend something else.

    That completely ignores all of their self healing of course.
    Tucoh likes this.
  15. FranktheBank Augur

    Hi. Sure if all 6? of our warriors showed up, we would probably cancel raids, because Mean Streets and Pit Fight with like 3-4 tanks doesnt sounds very fun. If (like Gorg said) they became SKs? even if 4 of them became SKs... wouldn't effect us at all.
  16. Szilent Augur

    if one zone does that, that zone will be deserted.
  17. Tucoh Augur

    Sad but true. I'm a fan of the concept of hot zones and would love to see them revitalized to motivate the playerbase into moving around.
    Graag Baash and Szilent like this.
  18. Szilent Augur

    1000% on board with that. Not just exp, though. Rotating Hunter bonus a week at a time, a zone at a time. Not just periodic game-wide Hunter boost. Use that bonus to funnel folks somewhere, incentivize grouping up for credit.
    Luclin.Dragonball likes this.
  19. Qimble Augur



    If they made it 5AA per kill with a full group and similar HP to other zones, I'd go there for a quick AA grind a couple times a week. :p


    Really if they did do something like making 1 zone so hard it require top healing / tanking / etc, the only way to draw players in would be to have augs or other drops from there that were amazing and exclusive.
    Syylke_EMarr and Szilent like this.
  20. Tucoh Augur

    Veeshan's Peak in RoS was kinda like that. Required keying to get in and being successful was non-trivial. With just one-time rewards it's something most people do once and then never go back unless they need to help others or move alts through it. Like Szilent says, funneling players in zones with rotating hunter bonus (or XP bonus, or group currency from names, or double item drops, or all the above) would go a long way to solving a lot of problems EQ has.
    Syylke_EMarr and Szilent like this.