Interesting idea w/r/t RoS VP, I wasn't around for that so didn't know they'd tried it. I'm thinking of that 20+ year old experience where when you were finally able to hang in that hard section of a zone or hard zone the rewards for being there were noticeably better than elsewhere in terms of xp or gear.
This is something I hadn't thought about, but you're right. There used to be zones that you worked to gain access to (whether by gear or flags or whatever), all the while hearing about how great it was there. Then you finally get there and... everyone was right. It's amazing. (Old Seb, Plane of Fire, Riftseeker's Sanctum, etc) That experience doesn't really exist in live EQ anymore (RoS Veeshan's Peak was the most recent one almost at that level). I'm not sure if that's good or bad, though. Gaining access to all of the zones is more about the completion now than anything else.
I'd like to chime in about my experience trying to tank, as a warrior, during TBL content. It was a while ago and I can't remember all of the specifics but doing the first mission, even with a group that I suspect had some autonomous assistance, was brutal. I was wearing the red colored warrior gear which I think was T2 or T3 group gear, only a few ranks below best-in-slot raid gear, as were most of my other pieces. My augs were decent, I had the shield aug from iksar land, I was doing my best to balance the H stats for rank breakpoints. My AAs were auto-granted (I was only ever able to stay current a few times) but I was at least capped or working on capping all defensives of the expansions. I had also done (what I considered) sufficient research on AA/ability timers for my defensive skills, even finding a spreadsheet for timing and had at least 3 or 4 rows of multi-binds set up and timed macros for proper layering. I had adjusted to the best of my ability everything I would need to perform decent enough for the groups I could find. All of this and I could barely tank through the first mission. Everyone had to be precise and coordinated or I would not be able to make it through the 3? named mobs before cooldowns were exhausted. Jumping into the Trial of Smoke mission and having failed fairly quickly, I knew that I would not be able to carry the group through in my state. I even watched Tucoh's video on how to do it for any pointers but without something big coming through for me, I was done-zo with that expansions content because I knew I wouldn't be progressing any more. This being said, I was looking for any edge I could get from the class, people I had to play with, and equipment I could procure. The best ideas I could come up with were putting a rune aug in my weapon and finding as many other absorb type clickies or abilities I could fit on my bar because that was the only way I could gain more mitigation, against the brutal hits of the TBL mobs. Watching an SK do more of what I could do because they could leech more than I could mitigate was disheartening because I knew I wouldn't be able to acquire enough HP to make up the difference that their leeching was doing. Since I went on a rant I'll end short with this. I think Warriors do need more tools for the group game. Super mitigation only makes the edge against super threats and that shouldn't be in the group game. Adding more rune like absorbs to the toolkit can make sense from a fantasy of mitigating damage and can work like leeching SK's and healing Paladins to give warriors more tools for surviving the group game without super good healers.
You can rotate great mitigation all the time on a warrior. You can rotate super mitigation for a significant amount of time (8 mins for one of the rotations I came up with). It's all about knowing what your enemy is going to throw at you and gauging your groups dps in terms of how long you have to put him down before you run out of stuff if sustained mitigation isn't enough for certain points of the event. I think warriors need some updated damage caps and thresholds (hello, roaring shield) but overall a grouping warrior who knows what they're doing shouldn't be getting destroyed if they got all the things from the last expac. Bigger problem is warrior is the hardest tank class "to play well" due to needing to kinda know how damage calc works in order to structure your mitigation properly. Unless someone can feed you all the info and you actually take it in. Most warriors I have played with are....pretty clueless how to play a warrior in the group game despite doing great in raids.
A few points: The TBL missions are no joke. Even Fight Fire, a mission I've done 60+ times for the stupid chase gear, was still challenging if I didn't pull carefully when I limped through with my newbie shadowknight through last year. So don't be ashamed by being challenged by it or any other missions in TBL I'd say the only "super mitigation" that shouldn't be required for the group game is the glyph of dragonscales. Everything else should be used with regularity on a warrior, just like Lich Sting (SK 2.0 epic) for SKs and Revered Guardian Disc for Paladins. A warrior must be really good at layering their defense based on the situation. Every class has to worry about layered buffs, but layering defenses is most of the strategy for warriors. Based on your post you weren't slouching on your defenses, so it's possible the other side of the equation, healing, was not set up correctly. Folks here are happy to help with all of these areas if you want it.
The best way for me to utilize all the crazy amount of buttons we have to push was to create multi-binds for spammable off/def/aggro abilities and 1 push button macros for my layers of defense with the best (although very likely not perfect) overlap of SPAs I could do with the information I was able to find at the time. To the best of my knowledge I utilized a shield with def stance after last stand since it gave (I think, I haven't played for over 2 years now it looks like) 10% and eliminated incoming damage from OH riposte strikethroughs. Obviously this setup will have aged and like I said is probably far from perfect to begin with but the best I could put together from the fragmented knowledge and different websites out there. Couldn't insert the link, not sure if it will work but this is a link to a SS of my UI which kind of shows my setup of the multi-binds and timed macro buttons. https://ibb.co/jWGdFBg EDIT** I would link gear but it's from velious expansions and I'm not subbed so I can't provide AA count, HP, etc.
I do not play a tank so I won't comment about discs and stuff. I do wonder if group tanks are waiting to use all their stuff for group named (like some/many group DPS classes do that I see) and are losing out on consistent mitigation instead of blowing all of it on a 2 minute named encounter. I also see a ton of tanks not use a shield. I know many raiders have the gear and are using discs generally to allow them to not use a shield, but maybe the shield is something that group tanks need to use? And those that aren't are seeing poor tanking results? I could be wrong, but just wanted to throw that out there
Tanking the banshees and giants in Velious land wasn't so bad during partisan tasks and such. I could probably tank 3 giants with the first disc line running (45% damage mitigation, etc.) and it was doable with rotating gut punch and shield sunder and stuff. I would consider that reasonable difficulty for group geared (albeit purchased from the baz) farming. Using the shield is something I do only if I needed extra mitigation and the higher lines were down. From what I remember the defensive disc reduces incoming damage by XX%, the next abilities reduce a certain amount of damage from whatever wasn't mitigated from the disc. The shield/ defensive stance only reduces 10% of the incoming damage instead of whatever higher numbers the defensive disc does. Usually a parry from the off-hand would reduce way more damage than the 10% from the shield/def stance but I was getting such high rates of parry strike-through that using the shield was best. I think the real issue becomes the sustainability of the warrior in the group setting. I could mitigate as much damage as the developers will let me but if the group supporting me isn't up to snuff then it's only a matter of time/health until we fail. With a recovering tank, either the SK or Pally, the group supporting them doesn't have to be nearly as good to accomplish the same objective. I can't remember exactly how much more the warrior mitigates vs the SK and Pally but if it was so one sided then the knights wouldn't be used. The fact is that knight mitigation was/is good enough to support group and raid play but the self recovery they are capable of provides more/real tangible benefits to a group than what warriors provide by their mitigation, which has been my experience since I've played the character (since 2001). Basically: Knight mitigation+recovery > warrior mitigation alone
I don't have any comments on your multibind setup, except that I blindly spam fast re-use aggro/attack skills and have about 6 other big aggro or special aggro abilities. One way I make it easier to layer my defense is using GINA triggers, which you can see in my videos between my warrior and his buff lists. I use this to know when to pop Dichotomic Shield vs Roaring Shield, how much defensive stuff I have, whether Brace for Impact / Finish the Fight is up, etc. Re: dual wield, for grouping a warrior with even moderate ADPS confers so much DPS that using a shield probably lowers the group's overall survivability. Dual wield is really strong defensively compared to 2H and should be the default for most warriors while grouping, with shield / 2h being special usage.
TBL was my favorite expansion for many of the reasons that you gave for being troublesome. In era, it was challenging. The group challenger achievements kept that expansion from being boring for months and months beyond what anything since has (for me). I took dozens and dozens of people (not just characters) through the trials and and all the challenger achievements. I had many people (out of guild) arrange times and dates for me to take them through after they'd been beating their heads against the wall for weeks. I had one warrior tank so excited to have finally beat them all, he was almost orgasmic. He told me he didn't think he was a big enough warrior to handle it and had never come close to a win before. I never group with merc's, so we were never handicapped for healing. But for an under geared warrior, we brought a cleric and a shaman. For an adequately geared tank, single healing with either cleric or shaman was enough (I don't druid, cuz, ew). These groups were all 6 live players, every time (in era). So in your case, Nobildus, if your warrior was up to speed with everything as you've said, you may have been able to eek out a win with better healing and/or different strategies for those missions. All of that said, I think warriors are in a fine place for group tanking - behind SK's and ahead of Paladins. Conq
I miss the rush of tanking mobs that are tough. Tofs2 and velks was the last time I felt that. Those were also the last mobs most knights didn't want to tank. I started using more offensive focused gear in favor of tank gear because I dont need to be full turtle ever. Proc augs to include the tov type 8s, dps belt, don't even own a shield. I have even started being put in dps groups. Clerics can put me on xtar. Warriors have become a dps class with defensive abilities.
Warriors are in a very solid place. Dps wise, and mitigation wise. If you use all your tools an stack accordingly the games trivial as a warrior.
I think you nailed it. Or at least your guess is 100% inline with my personal tanking experience. My playstyles for context: 1. Main berserker (raid and group) 2. Two-box a shaman with the berserker in groups with real people 3. 3-box berserker, shaman, warrior with 2 cleric mercs and 1 rogue merc (completed merc/partisan quests with this team) 4. I rarely main tank as a warrior in a group. When I first started preparing my warrior and understanding tanking (to what little extent I do understand it), I did significant research on these forums and I saw plenty of "I don't even use a shield in raids" and "two-handers are worthless". I tried dual-wielding in current content and... spent most of my time spam-healing from my shaman. I put the shield back in and there were fewer panic heals required. Lesson: Your goal is to take only as much damage as your healers can heal. If there's any struggle, use the shield. I knew I had my spam buttons set up well, but timing and stacking disciplines and abilities is complex, so I was just mashing stuff if/when a nameds came up. As you predicted, I was was saving the vast majority of my longer-refresh abilities for that important "just in case" moment. I made a post detailing exactly what I was looking for and a few warriors happily chimed in with a nice, simplified "general trash disc cycle to make your healers less stressed" along with a "sh*ts going down" cycle. Lesson: Save "something" for the named, but use almost everything during the grind and you'll attract all the healers/DPS you need for your groups thereby enabling you to succeed in more encounters.
