I play on Fippy Darkpaw, which is a prior TLP currently on VoA era and entering RoF. So nope, until this conversation, I had infact not heard of Reaver's Bargain. I just looked it up and it seems quite nice, although it will probably be another 1.5 years until I see it. Another thing worth noting is that quoting the description of warriors (from 1999) is hardly a valid argument. EQ hardly follows lore, and lore should not be the overriding factor when determining whether to give a class an ability. Since when does a level 5 ogre warrior have the ability to teleport to his home city? This argument falls apart so fast... The reality is that warriors aren't the "ability-less" class that it was originally. Warriors have dozens of hotkeys for all sorts of situations. Multiple ways of getting snap/AE aggro, clickies for invisibility/gating/heal pots, AAs such as Blade Guardian that act like DI. The list is quite extensive. Whether these are spells, abilities, discs ... EQ applies them in a manner that it ultimately doesn't matter. If we want to draw a hard line on warriors needing materially better tanking ability due to them not having spells, then I think that opens up the discussion to whether warriors should continue to enjoy spell-like abilities that define the knight classes. Should warriors get snap aggro via "Incite" to match the knights Terror/Stun lines? Should warriors have Warlord's Tenacity when SKs need to cast Staunch Stance, which doesn't even stack with the DRU/SHM Growth line? I think warriors should indeed have all these abilities, without them the class is crippled. But they are very much the equivalent of warriors having a spell book. Look, I don't know what the "best" way to tune the classes. "Best" is entirely in the eyes of the beholder, and we are all biased towards promoting our own class self-interests. We all play this game differently and therefore have unique experiences. Tonight we called our raids early because we had five knights but only one warrior, preventing us from doing some additional raids that we've had on farm status for months. Changes such as the ones proposed here would be really nice to enable our guild to keep raiding when these circumstances occur, similar to the way having extra druids/shaman can compensate for below average cleric attendance.
If a guild can't field 3-4 warriors each night, then the problem isn't with tank abilities. It's with the guild and should not be a valid reason to boost knights to the point of being 9% mitigation worse than warriors at max defensives for 3 out of 10 minutes and them being equal - or better - the rest of the time (and that's if the passive 5% mitigation doesn't stack with guardian). Because if the SB proficiency are a copy/paste, then your mantle/carapace will stack and we have nothing even close to those spells to stack with proficiency. Couple with self healing and you'll completely dominate the group game and be within a few percent points of us MTing.
The hardline isn't with spells, but rather healing. With that understood, we've strayed a bit so let's get back to the topic at hand: The changes in the upcoming patch. Proficiencies are broken. The proposed changes not only fail to fix them, but further upset the situation by copying those broken abilities onto the exact classes whose advantages they were intended to offset. And this is done seemingly without this understanding that those advantages are the reason these abilities exist in the first place. If this is part of a greater initiative to redefine the core balance mechanics between tank classes, the devs can come out and say it. I might even support it, provided Warriors receive the appropriate fixes and counterbalances to create proper parity in all avenues (of which soloability and lower levels need be included) But instead I see the cart pushed out before the horse. The pendulum violently kicked in the opposite direction. Eminent domain without compensation. This is not the right way to do things.
I like you Dre! You seem to approach the situation pretty rationally and objectively, which is quite hard to do. Please be aware that SK healing is largely inconsequential when dealing with difficult mobs. My "big" lifetap has a 24 second refresh and only heals for 5% of my life if it doesn't critical (Dire Allegation Rk. III, 6500hp heal out of 125k hp when tanking). My other lifetap spell heals for half that (3334hp) with a 12 second recast. These spells do almost nothing when tanking a mob that hits for 30k per hit. The other SK tap abilities come from our Epic 2.0 and discs (Leechcurse, Unholy Aura). While they certainly help on the margin, lifetaping 50% of my damage fails to be materially effective beyond group named and swarming. Touch of the Cursed, which gives us an innate lifetap proc on every swing, is discontinued after VoA (four expansions ago for folks on live) and is becoming progressively less relevant. The key here is that an SK's lifetaps and a paladins heals give no incremental benefit when facing harder targets or multiple targets. Without some sort of scaling mechanism to do so, SKs will not be a viable tank choice beyond the group game. Imagine if the situation were equivalent and warriors could only tank in raids but got wrecked by group named. You clearly would feel as though your core contribution and defining class characteristics required attention.
And in the rest knights should be able to match the Warrior unmatched ability to survive and survive too? I see things differently. Tell Warriors that they will have unheard of strength and stamina and a ~186HP difference after taking into account knight self buffs is inadequate. Refer to their heavy armor and a ~5% difference in real AC from displayed with classes wearing nearly identical armor is near meaningless. Note that Warriors make themselves the focus of attacks but saddle them with random procs and semi-broken taunt while knights get those things plus at-will/at-range aggro and I'm going to see a pattern. (That's how things were until Warriors stated checking reality against promises.) Have Brenlo write his quite sensible "Conor" post stating overtuned GoD missions (everyone knows GoD was overtuned - SOE even admitted as much) would be retuned but give knight Warrior defensive discs or abilities anyway... In the DoN release notes introduce tank parity in group content leaving only raids where Warriors enjoy the unmatched ability to survive... And then erode even that... For several years I've told new players not to roll a Warrior if they were going to only do group content. Roll an SK or Pally instead (and I meant it). Unless guild leadership or healers decide Warriors will continue to be Raid boss mob tanks despite DBG's campaign to change that I guess I can leave the if you only do group content part out of that advice. Time to dig the lightsabers out of the trunk I'm think. Or has DBG given those to the PlateMonk and Cleric with a Sword too?
Well aware, but consider SK healing is generally an advantage over pure mitigation when dealing with everything but the very most difficult mobs.
There's more than one kind of tanking done in raids and knights are better at add tanking, off tanking, and ramp tanking than Warriors are.
Ironically, this coming from an individual who historically downplays a warrior's ability while concurrently inflating or overrepresenting the knight's ability. A like-equipped and equally skilled warrior can fulfill the same role within a raid setting just as easily if not more efficiently than a knight. This is warrior rhetoric dictating what they believe our role should be more so than actual fact.
Yes, but if your guild doesn't have enough warriors to field a MT rotation, how can we expect your guild to have warriors off tank adds too? You can't use both positions depending on how it fits your agenda.
So how can you have an opinion on a subject that will affect players in live servers lvl 105 which represent the majority of players that will be impacted ? Wait to be lvl 105 with all the abilities you get to post an opinion on class balance, SOE cannot balance class around each lvl. Could you get more accurate information before posting this ? As some other have said, with their self healing ability that you either don't know how good it is or you just downplay it, knights are prefered atm than warriors for group content. Who can solo group trash mob without a healer merc? Knights, not warriors. And if they get the same def proficiency %, they of course will mitigate as good or better than warriors, with knights under their other small disc and self healing stuff. Group wise, group gear warriors were hurting, it has been fixed with def prof and NTTB like stuff. Knights had never been in danger in group content, if so then you don't use enough well your self healing toolkit.
If we take the 2 areas of tanking in raid, MT Boss Mob and tanking raid trash, I think that Boss Mob is for warriors only. Raid trash mob hits hard, and should be tanked by warriors and knights. Warriors need to be able to tank any mob, because they are the best mitigation tank in everything. Knights are a hybrid, with warrior being one of their parent class. They need to be able to mitigate stuff, but less good than their parent class. It's like heals for priests. Good clerics beat good druids and good shamans on MT parses, because it's intended they heal better than the other 2 priests, and in all situations. Things should be the same for tanks classes, but we speak of mitigation here instead of heal power To come back to raid tanking, Warriors can MT Boss Mobs and raid trash mob fine atm. I agree that knights can have some difficulty sometimes to tank raid trash mob. Hence I proposed in some other thread some idea like a lesser defensive proficiency version for knight, like 10 % (seems reasonable for me), that they could keep 24/24 like warriors. That would help them to survive trash mob, while keeping them at a farther distance of warriors when MT Boss Mob. We will see the new version on test, but I think having many warriors saying they say no to a simple copy / paste of war 30 % mitigation stuff can always help devs to not cross the line and rethink some stuff if it was their intention to do a simple copy / paste.
Such hyperbole. Warriors will remain the best tank in a group or raid scenario after these changes. The gap between knights and wars will be closed which is hurting egos but A gap will still remain after. Will have to see what the gap is after testing but its pretty apparent that some warriors will only except a country mile between the two or cry foul.
Correct. The point is, from a raid tanking perspective, a warrior can easily fill the role of any knight without sacrifice. The reverse is not true which is what is this whole issue results from.
While knights can solo a trash mob without a healer, pragmatically, its not optimal. Just like currently knights can tank a raid named, buts its not only just not optimal its not even remotely close to the same degree of disparity within group tanking. Self healing IS NOT MITIGATION. What knights are asking for is the ability to survive big hits where self healing plays no role. As far as your commentary about warriors in the group setting, I am indifferent here. You want self healing, by all means have it. Its a moot issue.
If the proficiency is the same as the war one, how do you suppose warriors will be the best group tank? Knights would then have the same proficiency (with better secondary mitigation abilities that would stack compared to us), plus 5% passive mitigation which would do more than our DI -1. On top of that, you would have self healing which is very valuable in the group portion of the game. If the buff ends up being the same, knights will be the superior group tanks in all situations. They have better snap aggro abilities with quicker recast timers for fast killing groups. They can heal. They can buff. They potentially can mitigate just as well as a warrior now. Where is this warrior superiority coming from? The 2% increase from real ac value over a knight? A couple thousand HP? Then again, your staunch line makes up for that lack of hp. Seriously, I'm curious what you think will make warriors superior still if knights get the exact proficiency? I'm waiting until it comes out, but I see a major problem on the horizon if carried out the way I think it is. I'm not going to throw a fit and stomp my feet and quote outdated class descriptions (I'm looking at you mages), but warriors have gotten shafted far too often. The whole reason why Elidroth specifically gave proficiencies for a reason: To close the gap between warriors and knight utility. He wanted warriors to have the ability to use all weapon combos, not being stuck in SB 100% of the time. Regardless of what knights can and cannot do, it's a bad argument taking both sides depending on how it fits your agenda. If you complain that knights can't MT and you need them to because of you raid make up, you cannot backtrack and state that warriors can off tank, because clearly they won't be in your guild when there's not even enough to MT. Somebody can also plug in a paladin as a main healer for a group. You can't plug a warrior into that role for obvious reasons.
Its not a bad argument when the supply of raid relevant warriors as compared to knights is far less on our server nor does agenda make the statement any less accurate. When it comes to a primary role in a raid setting, holding all else equal, warriors can perform their function without sacrifice where as knights are artificially hamstrung trying to fill the gap. AS far as your example is concerned, you can't fill an SK in that role either. Your point? A paladin can fill the role of a group healer if needed. Yes. Not ideal, but can in most cases. The same can not be said switching out a warrior with a knight on current progression events.
A Warrior is certainly not healing and curing others like a Paladin can, no matter what we sacrifice. SK's lack of (what they feel to be) meaningful raid role is a problem has persisted for far too long. I sympathize and support the quest to address it. But understand that "unmatched survivability" to tank raid bosses is the reason Warriors are Warriors. Knight attempts to encroach on this territory by applying anecdotal and revisionist history aren't going to change this. This gap between "sufficient" and "unmatched" needs to be meaningful. It is the last bastion of Warrior identity.
The blurring of defined lines has been a progressive move by development for years and more than likely motivated by the simple fact that populations and relative class compositions are not consistent. And understand unmatched survivability should not equal what we are seeing today. The gap needs to be reduced.
"Progressive" is always a matter of perspective. One could make the argument that the frequent viability for Knights to tank in raids has already reduced this gap to nothing. If you would have Knights able to tank every mob Warriors can tank (might even be the case today) then understand that you are redefining what little remains of tank balance at a fundamental level, which goes well beyond the scope of this thread.
Will have to see what they do but yes if its an exact copy and stacks with other stuff then its broken. IMO yes warriors should always keep a gap between themselves and knights it just can't be as big as currently is unless they water down group missions so that their bonus really doesn't matter. Permanent 35% compared to self healing is far from equal no matter how you frame it when it matters most and 45% short duration with no cap compared to 20-36% with damage caps and or hits to self healing again are simply to large of a gap.
