Title says it all really, tanks have long been hard to gear and aa but right now It's just too big a mountain to climb, where is the fun in joining a group of friends as a tank only to have a merc have to tank to save the cleric mana. I guess what I'm saying is tanks currently take too much to become useful in the current game and I think this will contribute to the death of the game.
I do agree. Tanks have always been the most gear dependent, which is fine for raids, but not for group content. Maybe up the ac/hp on group gear for the three tank classes. Many ways to fix the problem but a simple increase to group gear for tanks might be the easiest.
So your solution to make them less gear dependent is to increase the stats on gear thereby making the gains greater?
Many solutions to the problem, but yes, that is one way that would help out. I know it sounds strange being that the word "Gear" is used to address the problem but if you think about it, it helps allot. The trouble with gearing tanks is not getting gear. It's that you need the end group content gear to compare with others. So yes uping tanks gear in group game would help allot.
Actually .. while raising the AC/HP on gear on the next expansion would make this expansion's content easier (after the next expansion comes along) it would only make the next expansion's content harder. The issue is not the AC/HP on gear - it is how hard they want to make the content relative to player power. Make it too hard, and only the three plate tanks can tank anything. Make it too easy, and you have magicians tanking for their DPS pets - or some other equally ridiculous mythological example. Every class has to climb a steep hill nowadays, it is a logical consequence of the path that EQ has taken over its lifespan. AA's, gear, and yes, level, all play a big part in making that mountain bigger. While it may seem that tanks have a larger hill to climb than others, *everyone* needs gear - be it for the AC/HP, or for the mana and the casting foci. *Everyone* needs a bunch of AA's - everyone wants a level 90 cleric with 0 Healing Adept/Healing Gift just as much as they want a level 90 warrior with no CA or CS. You guys don't want a change in gear - you'd be asking for the same thing a year from now, whether they make any changes or not. What you want is a change in the overall paradigm.
A change in the overall paradigm will never happen, and yes, a short fix of just giving tanks more innate AC or more AAs to increase it and/or HP will not fix the overall problem. Though yes, everyone needs upgrades, some can pick and choose and literally play naked and still solo better and faster than tanks with mercenaries. Tanks need EVERYTHING, and that right off the bat sets the standard high. I kept getting told in-game that some elites were complaining that RoF was too easy, so the difficulty was increased to their liking, which is of course setting the bar higher than everyone else could handle... but that was their explanation as to why RoF was so hard to them, so I don't really know. What I do know is that I have better-than-average gear than most paladins heading to RoF, and even I splat way more than I'd like to. And I really don't like my healer merc being able to tank better, either. I mean, there's a recent thread of someone wanting a level 120 zone just for the hardness. Just think of that; no one would be tanking, just kiters everywhere instead and melee players chasing the mob around. lol
For group I would say tone down the non raid targets dps just a bit. If they could make it spike less that would also be good. At leats Huadmer offerd a solution, you bring nothing to the table, try to offer a solution at least.
I've been working with a group or two on the Kael Partisans and we came to the King Tormax portion. A tank in t1 rof armor can't tank him, at all. So we used a pet. It works better, but I hate having to bum a friend or a mage just for named fights/specific quests.
the biggest time investment on my tank alt has been hunting ac augs. tanks are expected to have a set of decent ac augs, along with the gear, aa, etc etc. perhaps making some tank only ac augs available on the defiant vendor or player made using jewelcraft would alleviate some of the time sink it's become to get a tank up to par.
everyone needs more gear mroe aas etc..but tanks DO need the msot, of all of it. especially knight tanks. that being said, when you look at threads about augs etc, rarely do you ever see casters askign for mana on their augs, they all want tnakign augs. ac/hp/hst ac/hp/hagi gear isnt the biggest part of casters/healers having sufficient mana, aa's are (GoM etc ) tanks need all those aas too. thing is, a tank CANT tank without a certain amount of aas, augs, gear etc, while all other classes (minusMAYBE healers, depending on the tank) can do THEIR jobs without being nearly up to par. if you do a little less dps, who cares, if you med more often, who cares, if you cant tank: people care. in chain-pullinggorups, dps stop and med whenever they feel like it and the chainpullingcontinues, if your'e the tank in one of those groups and you need to med: good luck getting htem to stop pulling (mainly for knightswho need their mana to help tank) see, you may do 20% less dps in t2 voa gear than in t2 rof gear, but you don't tank 20% worse in t2 voa gear vs t2 rof gear: you either can tank or you die. healers love better tanks that dont need as much healing, but as long as they can keep the tank alive, it's all good. the tank is literally the 1 thing standing between the group and death, there is no almost tanking like there is almost dpsing, there is no using 2 tanks to equally distribute the damage being dealt (yeah you can have a spare but its not the same as having 2 healers insted of 1 or having 4 dps instead of 2) 2 tanks cant tank at thesame time to pick up theslack of a lesser geared one, 2 healers CAN, 2 dps CAN, and this is waht the OP is talkingabout. Tanks can't just wait for upgrades to come along and continue to do their job in the meantime, they have to get those upgrades asap. This is the same reason top-end raid guilds gear their tanks first: they know the tanks and the entire raid depends on that gear. a 5% increase to caster or healer focus isnt going ot win the raid if a tank cant heal through it, so giving that 100hp/mana 5% focus upgrade to a caster/priest instead of the tank that it's also a 15% increase to ac/heroics, makes no sense. this is the same reason we don'tsupply our civilians with bulletproof vests but they're standard issue to law enforcement: law enforcement are society's tanks, civilians play the healers dps(funding) and utlity (manufacturing etc etc) sorry wall of text, but how to fixit? idk, beyond putting an end to pushing mobs' attackvaluesso far taht most require raidtanks in group zones or exceptional grouptanks and exceptional gorup healers to go with them. stop tuning the game to the bleeding edge raiders, and start tuning it to the groupers that are glued to it. same goes for raids: stop tuning tier ZERO raids to the bleeding edge guilds that can beat the entire expansion in their sleep, and start gearing them toward the target audience you've stated: the rest of the raidingworld
Actually, a sufficiently-empowered pet (IE - its master has a high enough Enhance Minion focus, and enough pet-related AA's) tanks better than RAID-GEARED tanks under certain circumstances. So don't feel bad that your group geared tank could not do it; some things just were not meant for PC's to tank.
As I said, this is asking for a paradigm shift. Simply putting more AC/HP onto gear simply encourages the next expansion mob to chew through those things faster. It is a very very fine balancing act - one inch one way, things are too easy; one inch the other way, things are too hard. Actually, I suspect that the entire scale of too easy vs too hard is all messed up. -----------------------------------------------------<*>------------------------------------------------------------------------- <-Easy ......................^"Its Too Hard" ......^Current setpoint ........^"Its too easy"................. Hard-> It shouldn't be that way, but that's the impression I get about the easy vs hard debates.
If SOE were to reduce the impact of gear they would be reducing one of the primary rewards for tanks that progress. Afaik everyone who rolled a tank and played one for any length of time learned that tank are gear dependent. Put another way - if you progress and improve your gear you can actually see a difference. WOOT! (Put the opposite way - if you don't progress and don't improive your gear you'll see a difference too.) Too hard to improve one's gear? Defiant armor, Othni, Reis, T1, attunable, .... pretty darned easy if you ask me. And I'm not saying that just as a raider. I geared up a Paladin alt who's level 85ish and a Ranger alt who's roughly level 75. The Ranger primarily soloed and traded High Quality Lion Skins (Precient Fleeting Quivers were a hot commodity at one point) for some nice gear. I argue that gearing up to some kind of minimum standard might be tougher than minimally outfitting a caster but it's still pretty easy. So what's the real problem??? It's not group content being too tough for group geared tanks. I'm told they test group content with group geared tanks. I submit that the game is more unforgiving of tanks that don't make sufficient effort. I see no reason why the impact of my character's loot rewards should be reduced because Charlie over there can't be bothered to try. (There are non-raiders that gear out in the group endzone in the first 3ish months of new expansions. I agree with the point that you ought not design for a power elite - doing that wrecks the game for everybody else. But I don't agree that gear should be costume and props just to flatten the power between achievers and non-achievers. Let ubers run out of stuff to do in 4-6 months and people who can't keep pace with the game spin their wheels.)
As mentioned above, you have have 2 healers, 2 dps... but only 1 tank for most group stuff. Maybe a solution would be to make it easier to share tanking duty. Giving tanks (War, SK, Pal) a better ablity to 'have each others back', like the old /shield command (what's the state of that?) Off the top of my head; a very short range Aura (which I know the devs hate) that mitigates melee damage by 50%, but passes it on to the tank; like the mage pet shared health AA (That I never once have remembered to hit before I die...) So that two tanks can stand shoulder-to-shoulder, and pool their HP.
At this point or this early in the game as with just about all past expansions the mobs are OP and need to be tuned. Group mobs need to be tuned so players that have the previous tier can take them down. Doing so may or will trivialize encounters depending on group make up and gear but for the group content the mobs do need to be tuned to allow for a group of players Non merc to be able to take down the mob or complete the encounter or event. Providing good info for the devs will help in this process. Group make up, gear, classes and some basics stats as far as gear, aa. Devs, Please don’t make group content a chore, make it fun. At the moment it looks as if tanks are being alienated in group content. Any way to give tanks a boost in the following? Warriors should see the lions share with SK and Pallys not far behind. AC return. Mitigation. Damage reduction. Avoidance. And while im on it, can this also be done for Bards, Clerics and Rangers? The Aura Idea is a great one as well, Make sure it to exclude pets from it.
That would be perfect, caveat it's my opinion. I hate seeing warriors fall to a mob like stalks of wheat, because that only means I'm going to die soon and much faster than them and there's nothing I can do. Being able to /shield (you know, that thing mobs do ALL THE TIME and we can't?) shaves off like just 10% of incoming damage and transfer it to myself would be better than throwing heals which obviously aren't sufficient enough. Aaryonar (we're still trying to figure it out) hits for 36k or some outrageous number, and quads. I have 110k hitpoints.... he one-rounds me every time. If our best tank can't handle it, the entire raid has to consider a) not doing that for a long time, or b) defaulting gear just to outfit a warrior to do it, and that would be unfair to everyone else raiding to earn their own. I guess there's a c) keep trying in case there's something missing aside from the tank-and-spank aspect (i.e. strategy). To put in perspective why tanks need more investment than any other, its when a mob hits them from start to when it dies that utilizes all the AAs they put into survival, all the AC from their gear, augments, skills, etc. No other class does that.
There is no easy fix here and IMHO, there should not even be a fix. Mainly because all classes need to be geared and AAed to some degree to proceed. Non-tanks get to cheat a little with gear from past expansions as long as that piece of gear doesn't have a focii associated with it, which really isn't many pieces. Otherwise, sorry mate but you are barking up the wrong tree. As much as I would like to see more competent tanks enter the game, with gearing being a fair percentage of that competency, I don't see how much more SoE can do to either gear tanks faster or to bypass the need to have current gear without breaking the game somehow or making it blatantly unfair to everyone else. It still is as it always has been: On the players. There are AC augs that seem to drop quite a bit at the front end of the expansions. There are also guild/fellowship/circle of friend administrative methods to get tanks gear first. Any raiding guild is going to give priority in assuring that the best visible armor makes it to the tanking classes sooner rather than later, even if it means everyone else has to wait. "Later" beats "Never" because if the tanks are geared like garbage than you won't win many raids. The same rules should apply to grouping as well. Hardly anyone PUGs so it is not unreasonable that if you have a tank friend as a regular member when doing group content, it is going to make it easier on the whole group to get that tank geared up first. EQ isn't just AA and gear as far as success goes. There is a huge aspect of social engineering as well and tank classes are probably more reliant on other players than most so it is best to make some friends if you want to be a successful tank.
With this Im going to assume the devs tuned the group names expecting tanks to be decked in raid gear? If so this is not good. The names or the entire GROUP event should be able to be done with a mix of current Tier and lower tier gear. Re-tune the mobs.
