SOME DEVS HAVE GOT SOME SPLAINING TO DO

Discussion in 'Tanks' started by SK_WAR_MAIN, Oct 23, 2020.

  1. Incantatrice New Member

    This discussion has been had SO many times over the years.

    Knight tanking is driven by the ability to self heal. This healing is fixed. SK from lifetaps and lifeleech and Paladins from heals. The easier the content, the more impactful the fixed healing is. For example, making up numbers, but if a knight self heals 100k/second, it will be near invincible on fights where the damage sustained is less than 100k. As incoming damage is increased, the knight benefit decreases. In group content where damage sustained is very low, raid geared knights require little healing unless a huge group is pulled.

    Warrior tanking is driven by mitigation. Unlike knight disciplines that have a cap, warrior disciplines such as Last Stand will run the full duration even against raid bosses. Basically, the warrior mitigates a higher percentage of damage. So in low damage situations, such as group content, this is less beneficial than the fixed amount of self healing from knights. The better geared the tanks and easier the content, the more pronounced the difference.

    So let’s talk about raid content. When content wrecks you (such as tanking AoW), knight self healing only offsets a small percentage of the incoming damage. It also doesn’t prevent against spikes. Warriors on the other hand benefit from higher mitigation, the benefit of which scales infinitely with incoming damage. THIS is why warriors are the tank of choice for raid bosses and potentially raid adds if the adds hit hard enough.

    So looking at ToV, which was generally regarded as an easy expansion, it is no surprise that warriors won’t perform as well as knights except when pulling a dozen NPCs or tanking the hardest raid bosses.
  2. Szilent Augur

    "warrior disciplines" such as meaning only Last Stand (& timer-sharing direct upgrades).

    Bastion, Dissident, and Roaring are total damage limited in much the same fashion as Mantles & Armors. Warrior ones absorb off the top of hits, knight ones absorb off the bottom, but all of them run out quite quickly against hard hitters.

    Fortitude(Deflect), Spire & Glyph are shared with knights.

    The knight analogues to Finish (Preservation & Skin) are arguably more reliable since they can be recast.

    Armor of Runes is so bad that it's fodder for a Triconix joke in this very thread; Shocking Defense so bad that no one noticed or cared when it was discontinued.

    The total package is not something I'm disappointed in. Really I'm very happy warrioring. But in these conversations it really should be acknowledged that warriors have *1* defensive disc. While it's pretty good, and yes reliable, with a bit over 1/4 uptime compared to 1/6 uptime on Guardian, it's not 3 discs or 4.
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  3. aozs Augur


    In the context of the larger discussion of mitigation tools, I think it's important to highlight that Bastion/Dissident/Roaring can be stacked with Ultimate Stand and Finish the Fight. That's really where the difference shows; comparing Stand by itself to the Guardians isn't quite as compelling (even though it does show some clear advantages).

    For a ludicrously hard hitting raid mob, I don't think there's much of an argument that rotating warriors with the full defensive stack would be your best bet at handling the tank load.

    I'm actually not sure how Reaver's Bargain holds up in raids but that might allow SKs to step into that position as well. I see that as kind of an anomaly though, and the main reason Paladins and SKs need to be treated separately when discussing knights. Paladins don't have nearly as many mitigation tools as the other 2 tanks (I wouldn't count Preservation as an analogue to Finish the Fight, for example)
  4. Chaosflux Augur

    By the time it runs out of counters you should have a good portion of the stack dead, if not the entire stack I'd think. Dead mobs is the most effective mitigation.

    I mean you might have to pop your chest clicky too and use thwart, shield flash reactively, maybe pop some other stuff if it gets dicey.

    I mean if you know ahead of time you are going to be pulling tons of mobs that's a good time to assess whether you want to load extra yellow heals or whatever, if you get caught with your pants down you might have to forceful them.
  5. Flatchy Court Jester

    Are you talking with a real healer or just a merc? The reason I say that is I have not used a real healer since they invented mercs. 10-12 mobs would mash me as soon as my good defensives drop and I have all T3 and good augs. Could be I should just git gud.

  6. p2aa Augur

    He did this with a real healer. He listed a shaman as a back up healer in one of his post
  7. p2aa Augur

    You clearly are downplaying the impact of self healing of knights against bosses, including AoW, or even raid adds (some hit hard too nowadays). This is more than "low fixed amounts".
    As being said, warrior discs don't scale infinitely, so when warriors have nothing to run, knight self healing boost is always there.
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  8. Zaltan Journeyman

    Regardless who tanks what better, Warrior no longer have character identity. It used to be that they had more hp or ac or just was the more raw bulkier tank which is no longer true.

    Sk's get taps, self healing thats their identity to be constantly draining the creatures.
    Pally's get heals, stuns. They are killing the mobs with holy power or healing with it.

    Warriors get ??

    Why do you play sk > its cool, you get self heals, you can pull, your self sufficient.
    Why do you play pallly > they can back up heal, they murder undead they are self sufficient.
    Why do you play warr > They are 1 or 2% better at tanking raid mobs, but in group game your worse by a decent margin imo. ;)
    Skuz and Cadira like this.
  9. Xorsazis Augur

    The thing is no one will agree to how to go about making Warriors different than knights. Self-healing is the typical topic of discussion and is usually a split of those for and those against. A lot of folks like to strictly push the class description at it's word. What is the answer? Most everyone would need to agree on a plan or solution to make a viable push.

    I recall back in CotF(?) when they introduced No Time to Bleed. When it first came out, it had 100% uptime and some number of uses when it would fall off. I recall thinking, "This is what we need to be much more viable in the group game." I felt it was an acceptable compromise to the self healing. A set amount of damage knocked off the top. Not percentages on better tanking or any other nonsense. It leveled off some of the spikes of the group game and it did feel better tanking overall.

    Then it was shortened to 3 out of every 5 minutes of uptime, but no counters. I felt this was better in some cases and worse in others. I could notice when it fell off as I began taking a lot more damage and required a lot more spam healing. The ability has been that way ever since.

    In my opinion No Time to Bleed should have been made innate and 100% uptime. I think if you wanted to you could relate the damage negated to our stamina and strength stats (either base and/or heroic), which leads me to another idea: remove the cap to our strength and stamina (or at least increase the cap to "unheard of levels").

    On top of that, I would increase our innate HP regen drastically. We should be quick to recover, especially in battle.

    As far as armor/weapons, I also believe that we should have much higher skills than other classes (and maybe we do, I haven't done a side by side comparison lately). That probably won't mean as much in the long run, but it would make sense that it would be higher.

    Overall I've felt Warriors were in great shape and quite viable. They just need some minor tweaking to get it perfect.
    Dre. likes this.
  10. Szilent Augur

    Time / Pain / Finish each have 600 hit counters. They each also have a total-absorbed that makes them actually run out at 440 hits.

    This is a very silly way to not really ask for whatever it is.
  11. Triconix Augur

    The real issue with raid tanking is the stagnation of warrior threshold discs. In beta I'm seeing both Dissident and Roaring Shield wear off within a combined 60 seconds and that's with Stand running. Without stand running, they are wearing off within 30-45 seconds. You're talking about 15-25% real-time up-time of the potential up-time. That really needs to be looked into.

    There is will be a complete over reliance on Dragon Glyph in CoV if mob damage output remains this way or we don't see significant total threshold increases for our core abilities. Maybe the stagnation mentioned above is because of power levels that Dragon glyph give? If so, I hate it and had a terrible feeling it was going to happen. I've been on the record stating multiple times that dragon glyph must be nerfed. The ability is far too strong, and while devs won't admit it, there is an obvious stagnation of warrior abilities since the introduction to the revamped dragon glyphs.

    Nerf dragon glyphs, strengthen core abilities, and for the love of God please make some currently useless abilities useful (I'm looking at you armor of X line). You do these things and you instantly catapult warriors back to the no questions asked paradigm raid tank.

    It's also pretty infuriating that abilities that warriors received this expansion are all dps-based. Like is that some sort of joke? Not a single update to a class-only tank AA for warriors.

    For the group game: I don't want self healing. Warriors should be rune-based. Give warrior weapons an additional rune proc or add rune to the current procs. Give warriors a "mashing" rune button - something like 20-30 seconds. Revamp Armor of X runes and merge it into our AC disc or make it a buff so it doesn't take up our disc timer. The current version of it is such a joke that I don't even think warriors even buy the RKI version just to fill out their discs.
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  12. Thoxsel Djess' Pet Warrior

    Many good points of view and different perspectives shared here.

    I'll refrain from comparisons on classes. I have a sk alt to have fun with, while i main a warrior...

    I'd personally love it if warriors were more weighted towards just outright avoiding damage entirely. Let knights tap or heal a loss of hp. Let us simply avoid more entirely. (Avoid not mitigate in my opinion.)

    I wish for a day where pushing buttons at specific times would actually mean something in eq vs just pushing is as quickly as it became available. (Ok I'm exaggerating to some degree here, while at the same time not.)

    Imagine where using abilities to avoid a specifically BIG hit would help survivability big time. The dragon is about to do his breath on you... Short reuse brace type ability where you hold up your shield where you outright avoided the majority of the damage because of your timely execution.

    One can dream.

    Let's say that isn't in the realm of reasonability in eq code or direction that devs are willing to take, then I'd love it if we simply got huge reuse reduction on flash of anger, and maybe sprinkle in avoidance with one of our spam abilities.

    While you're at it combine the rune disc line with ac line and or review the durations our capped abilities last as the hard hitters in current expansion and future are making our discs last alarmingly short durations as incoming damage continues to be super inflated.
  13. Xorsazis Augur

    You want your 5% mitigation back? Boost your defensive skills. Dodge/Parry/Block/Riposte could be easily boosted enough to give what Thoxsel and I think many others want:



    This would address the group advantage knights have with their self healing in either a slight way or more meaningful way depending on how the Devs decide to tune it.

    It will most likely not effect raid tanking because of the high strikethrough values of the raid bosses. I do not think you are going to ever see Warriors become the go to tank for raid bosses ever again. All abilities we had (Defensive/Stances to name a few) were given to knights as well in an effort to maintain interchangeability. I do not foresee them wanting to change this and doing what I mentioned above would definitely not impact this aspect.


    I would agree. It may be a Dev oversight and could need bugged.


    Ngreth outright told us last beta he would not give us a rune proc weapon and that was a knight thing. I'm doubtful he will change his mind.

    I have not been on this beta, but with Aristo no longer doing spells/discs, maybe now is a good time to press these concerns to fresh ears.

    Lastly, how many HP/s are knights healing themselves for? Is it 20,000/s or 50,000/s? Can you see them giving us a rune (disc/proc/otherwise) that would match that? Perhaps a lot of smaller changes is more likely. Food for thought.
  14. Kleitus_Xegony Augur


    Just an FYI... Aristo does in fact appear to be doing spells/discs since he's the one posting the spell update and testing threads.
  15. Triconix Augur

    It's not a bug. The problem is the increase from Dicho to Dissident just wasn't enough to future-proof the ability. A cap increase of only 65k for something meant to last 2.5 years. We've now gone 5 years with this line of abilities and Dissident isn't all that much better than Dicho (maybe 1-2 hit rounds at most). Our HP in that time has tripled, but our Dicho/Dissident ability only increased by 10%. It just doesn't add up. You can't have our best mitigation ability increase only 10% effectiveness in a time period our HP has increased by 300%. The evidence is there that damage output was increased dramatically. If not, we wouldn't see massive increases to our base stats each expansion. Our abilities must follow suit.

    If we get a cap increase of another 10% on this ability for CoV we're only looking at a 70k increase to the cap. The way mobs are hitting right now, that's maybe an extra 1-2 hit rounds at the most or 5 seconds more on the ability, moving it from 25-30 seconds to 30-35 seconds for an ability that has a potential up-time of 60 seconds.

    Roaring shield increased 25% in TBL but it's already lagging an expansion later in ToV. It's now a complete joke in CoV and you're lucky if it lasts close to a minute out of it's 3 minute potential up time. The only way to get close to a minute up-time for it is stacking multiple abilities at once.

    Either these abilities need massive cap increases each cycle (40%+) or the cycles have to become yearly instead of biyearly. The problem with huge font-end power increase is that it lead to problems with current tuning. You'll almost be guaranteed having both abilities last the entirety of their potential. The question is: Is that intended or not?

    Prior devs, I believe Elidroth as an example, stated runes were a warrior thing so there will always be back and forth with that. I don't get the justification of rune procs as a knight thing. They already have healing, why do they get runes as well? That seems like an example of having your cake and eating it, too. If healing is a knight thing then it only seems obvious that runes are a warrior thing. There is evidence that runes are procs were a warrior thing with our armor of X line of discs (defensive proc)
    Skuz likes this.
  16. Szilent Augur

    Offensive proc, not defensive. S' a big part of why it's so bad, it can't proc a rune in the middle of a combat round.

    Also the runes are smaller than the ones included in Ultimate Stand.

    And the runes are hate capped at 1 instead of 1350 like Ult's runes. Which is still oddly low? Whatever, still worse.

    And the duration is 1 minute instead of 3 minutes like Ult.



    Really it's the only thing pointing at runes being a warrior thing, too? I'm not totally against warriors getting stuff, but I'm pretty meh about runes. Feels like they'd make incoming damage lumpy and I like consistency.
  17. Triconix Augur

    That's what threshold mitigation abilities are for. Chopping off large chunks of damage from huge damage spikes. There's a reason why Dissident and Roaring are wearing off so quickly - they are cutting tons of damage off in short amounts of time. This is why Dragon Glyphs will only become more invaluable for us going forward which I'm positively against. It's cheapening the entire tank archetype.

    I don't think we have had runes enough to really test how "lumpy" how damage is, but I don't see it being a concern. I feel we would need a considerably large rune to see very noticeable lumps. A spam 20k rune every 20-30 seconds would not cause high variable spikes of damage. That would cut off about half a hit in one hit round in raids running multiple defensive abilities.

    Runes are pretty much the last available option for warriors at this point outside of healing and we aren't healers. We have way too many 162 types, enough 451s, 100% uptime 168. The only other option is another 197 type to go along with WB and GB, but even then, those abilities give 30-40% uptime per stand cycle depending when you click it (2-3 clicks of GB and 1 WB).

    I couldn't care any less about aggro from runes while MTing. That would only benefit the group scene and it's already not that hard to maintain ae aggro as a warrior.
    Skuz likes this.
  18. Wulfhere Augur

    Runes aren't really any different then the other mitigation abilities. Hit point replenishment is still an issue.

    As a paladin, I can cast Lay Hands and Hand of Piety for 30+ seconds of about 10k healing per second and still die because mob dps is several times higher then that. These are supposed to be emergency rescue abilities, each on their own, and yet they are not a substitute (they're really not Devs) for a mitigation ability even stacked together.

    10: Increase Current HP by 30000 per tick
    2: Increase Current HP by 25000 per tick

    So, I think Warlord's Resurgence could provide significantly more HP regeneration and still be in character balance.
    Skuz likes this.
  19. Szilent Augur

    Sure, except that warriors healing themselves is dumb and runs more *against* the grain of the class than even neutrally across it.

    I'm pretty sure this has come up with you in particular in other warrior-focused threads: warriors, as a rule, don't want to be not-warriors. "A tank that heals themselves" exists, and it's a different class.
  20. p2aa Augur

    I hear that some warrior don't want more self healing, and propose other things

    But devs have yet expressed their view on some of these things, like runes.
    They said no to runes for warriors weapons, do we have a chance to get runes for our discs ?

    What are the chances to obtain such thing, compared by asking boost to our current abilities ?

    My understanding is that devs vision is to make tanks more interchangeable, that's what we have seen in game.

    So if knights got closer to warriors by getting some of their stuff, maybe warriors could get the same way ?

    I'm not particularly fan of getting more self healing, i'm searching for the best ways so that we don't stagnate behind knights. And, given their vision, which has been to make them interchangeable, i'm thinking that maybe we could get something about self healing, and there are yet existing tools that could get boosted (and even warlord resurgence got an upgrade, even if so tiny, so maybe there is something to obtain there, with a much massive boost).

    We can theory crafting about what warriors should be in theory, the master of all weapons, unmatched mitigation, etc, at the end we need to see which things have more chance to happen.

    Yeah, there are low chances that we got massive boosts on self healing tools, but isn't this chance still higher than some other options ?

    More avoidance, why not, if this would been applied in the group and raid game (even if tiny amount in the raid game, so that warriors aren't again the clear choice for tanking every raid mob type).
    Skuz likes this.