Analysis of Mit/Avoid for different Sub-Classes Write up

1. Further confirmation that all fighters were balanced to be raid tanks for their specific nitch (resistance). I do not raid and 99.9% of all fights in the game are not raids. Broken concept. EQ2 is now equal to the goal of EQ1 in that there is always a bigger better raid zone to destroy. I left EQ1 becasue I couldn't handle that anymore and now I'm a crappy tank in EQ2 becasue SOE's vision changed to match EQ1 which is still reasonably suscessful.
2. Guardians have the most tools to hold agro on multiple mobs. So what the heck are our protection spells for if we are the best at holding agro? Also, if we can hold many mobs on us at once why the heck do we only get avoidance 180 degrees? Broken thinking again. They give us tools and strip our DPS and do not give us utility for that one reason and then make us gimpy in doing the job they just gave us. WooHoo.. I can chear now that I know my job and that I suck at it.
3. I don't want to be the best tank. I want to be eaual in any normal situation. It appears that SOE is not up to this challenge.
4. They whole Avoidance vs Mitigation tank is not going to be resolved becasue SOE can't esasily resolve them. Not becasue they can't be resolved. They implemented the two concepts and as such are responsible for balancing them. Choosing the bar of balancing as a raid mob spits in the face of 90% of all Guardians.
5. I can see where all fighters are playing out where you wanted them to be solely based on SOE setting the balance bar at raids. SOE screwed all Mitigation tanks for 90% of all fights in the game. How can you sit at your keyboard and type this up and not feel sick to your stomach?
6. In game results are that healser are coming to the Guardian forums and posting that they think Mitigation tanks got screwed. Some have Guardain alts but not all do. Oh yeah, SOE's results only matter in raids. Screw that.
I will keep playing until I can't stomach it anymore. That is becasue my group of friends has only really had me as a tank and they are friends and not interested in being 60 now. They will accept my crappy tanking and we will continue to have fun. I will say that I will always have some guilt in the back of my mind that they are being held back by me.
I will not play another SOE game and when I hit 60 in this game I will leave and not look back unless something changes.

I have tried to write a post to this thread a few times. I keep deleting them as they sound so negative.

I have been playing my brawler alt the last week. I wish i had not. Even given a little grass is greener bias. guardians are pretey **** in comparison. Brawlers are far better in every setting I play in. Mostly small groups. Tanking and dps rule the day in normal groups. I have not had any taunting probelms with my brawler, so i havent seen this guardian advantage. Guardians can still tank ok, but in comparision that is not enough. All fighters can tank Ok in normal groups (that what u13) did. I just dont get it....

It boils down to this. Slightly better group taunting does not make up for 1/2 the dps and limited utility. This is not balanced.Its clear from Moorgards post that SOE considers things balanced. Combine that with the earlier statement that guardian sphere is a useful spell just adds to the insult.

This leaves me in bad spot. Most my friends are 50+ , my brawler alt is 25. I refuse to play a gimped/useless class as my main. I like playing eq2, but frustation over this may be too much.

Well Thanks there Steve that's all the info I needed. Pretty much says right there that "YUP you guardians are not needed or wanted and I am not going to do squat to help ya out unless I deem at absolutely necessary which at the moment I don't"

thanks Bud... if equal only means equal in the areas you want it to be, is it really equal? if other fighter classes out distance me in DPS yet tank as well as I do, do you really think I should be paying for the privilege of being a second class citizen? WOW all I can say to that is Thanks man great job /pats on the back to you.

I really want to say more but I won't just leave it as I truly do not see where you think this is even remotely a good idea.

Grey...

Moorgard,

Thank you for the detailed post. It is good to know that you guys are closely watching the tanking situation and reading these boards. I appreciate the communication on SOE's direction, even if we do not necessarily agree on every point.

Can you comment on the balancing of fighter utility and "fun" abilities? The big unanswered question for many of us is the appearant difference in the usefulness of utility between fighter classes. If tanking abilities are balanced then shouldn't utility also be balanced?

Again, thank you for the communication. Some of us are in the position of trying to decide if the guardian class is still the right role for us, and continued information about the long-term plans for the class will help us make that decision.

Burn

Guardians do exceptionally well tanking multiple-target encounters that do physical damage. They have less DPS to generate hate with single targets, however. Obviously they have a lot of group-oriented utility, but abilities like Sentry and Guardian Sphere have very limited used in most groups or raids. Their lower damage counters their disadvantages at holding aggro from a single target.

Er... Yeah. *quack*

yeah test that little theory out after everyone of your taunts have been resisted pal. then tell me who holds better agro when they have a 50% chance to proc hate with every swing.

Thats great and all, but what he is saying if you had actually read his post instead of just responding to one sentence, that he is saying tanks are not and usually not prefered for exp groups anymore, because its more efficient to get a couple of ae dps classes, a healer and trio kill 3-4 of the same mobs your grouping was tearing through doing one at a time, and do them faster then you do your one mob.

thats a big [expletive ninja'd by Faarbot]in problem.

Actually over the last several weeks I have found that Brawlers are actually better against multiple mob encounters, and my guardian is better against a single target encounter (well certainly better than against multiple targets).
The fact that brawlers parry etc from all directions helps them enormously in these situations, and the constant beatings that guardians get when fighting more than 1 mob hurt and it really adds up fast (also leads to alot more stunning which is never very good).

As to guardians hold the best agro, I would hate to see the other classes then becuase so far it's not very often I can last a multi-mob fight without loosing agro on something in the combat. The refresh timers and the amount of hate generated from our group taunts is not sufficient to hold agro. We have only 1 AoE attack and it is not encounter based so most of the time we can't use it.

In discussions with Paladins and Monks that I know, they can hold agro better than they could before the revamp, and currently can hold it better than me.

You know, I used to have a reasonable ammount of faith in the dev's to leave their own characters out of the mix, but Moorgard's responses really have me wondering if some objectivity has been lost. Are there any dev's that play Guardian's currently? Do they think the class is balanced? If not, maybe it's time to find somebody who's at least not a tank and get them to do a little peer review...

Well I think that answers all my questions except one. Moorgard, since things are staying the way they are, and you have a host of people that are now considerably unhappy with the changes to their class via game mechanics, mit/avoid, and abilities across the board, WILL YOU PLEASE GIVE US A CHANCE TO CHANGE OUR MAIN'S CLASS?????

The changes were massive. Why in the world would you not let us, the now unhappy customers that have been with this game since going live, switch to something that we will enjoy more than a class that we obviously don't enjoy anymore? What could it hurt?

If it helps I already know what I would pick from playing alts and I'm sure most of the guardians that would use the option to reclass do too.

Thanks for the 'heads up', MG. We'll just have to agree to disagree. I did enjoy my guard for 9 months so I'm not sure I have any right to enjoy playing him any more than I already have. The only real downside is the emotional investment that I've lost.
My warlock is fun, and maybe I'll keep my eye on the dev tracker to see if there's any hope.

Moorgard,

I do hope you understand though that we have been put into roles that we may not have choosen for ourselves if the game was released again. We were placed into bins a short time ago, and we are still in the process of understanding what it means to be a Warrior, Brawler, Crusader, Guardian, Monk, and the list goes on. I know I don't understand the mechanics and the roles yet. I've said it before in some of these threads, I don't play a monk, and so I don't know what monks do. Where their advantages are, where their disadvantages are, and so on.

I'm not dissatisfied with my 30 Guardian. He seems a tad underpowered, but I can deal with that. (Oh, and a tad broke after buying all his level 30 armor) I do want to be a informed player. Your post on the advantages and disadvantages of healers was a huge thing to me back in beta. It had numbers and analysis together. I have nothing like that to refer to as a Fighter. So, I have been attempting to gather as much information as I can to do that and understand what's going on in the game.

I understand that there are encounters that will have advantages against each physical and arcane type. However, I can't look at everything at once. I prefer some of the constructive conversations that have come out of this experiment between different subclasses, and it has been nice to see people willing to work together across those boundries.

I do hope that this hasn't caused you any headaches with folks trying to use my numbers as some sort of "proof", but it is still an area that holds my interest. I just like to understand how the world works, real or virtual.

Oh, and I do have a request for you. Can you give me a PM heads up before you post to any more threads I start? That way I can unsubscribe from it so I don't get e-mail bombed again. LOL


Thanks

I have to say this,

5 monks, 1 templar and Glory of combat.

You would be suprised just what you can do with just that little information.

Being a templar, I can honestly state that I can't heal a Guardian at the moment, its to hard, they take to much damage in the first couple of rounds before the scouts engage and start procing the heals. If they can last the first two rounds the damage they take is healable but those first couple of rounds are almost impossible at the moment with how mitigation works.


A monk tanking has more advantages than you can think of, They heal themself when they hit the mob with a templar in the group, and thats dependent on how many times they hit not how hard, and they avoid damage more so than they take it, so they get hit hard but I have more time to heal the big hit than I do to heal lots of little damage that a guardian takes.

The big advantages that the crusader and bruiser classes have over the warriors is that warrios take constant damage, bruiser get hit hard but who cares when there is time in between the hits to heal it, and the paladin can heal themself out of that dangerous red area in an instant. Warriors can draw the aggro but as a templar thats a BAD BAD thing the Warrior is the only one of these three that can not handle more than one mob at a time.

From the which is the hardest to heal perspective, I have almost come to the point of leaving groups where people will argue with me about who out of the monk and the berserker should tank. Its now an obvious choice for me, I do not care what damage the mobs are doing a monk that hits the mob more often heals himself with less effort than a beserker that is just a mana sponge for heals that do not outheal the damage he is taking.

What about proc'ing hate everytime you're hit. I bet that'd be sweet to. Heh.

See Gaige no one needed to point ya to the thread we knew you could find it all by your grown up self..

LOL Gauge thats a good one..... you think MD alone can hold agro on a mob that just got blasted by a Wiz and resisted your taunts.. HAHAHA thanks man I needed a good laugh

What about when I'm missing with my attacks thus no hate proc and my taunts get resisted?
Its not like an escalator that only you are stuck on.

Its funny how apparently guardians gripes about LU13 are unfounded and untrue, yet its not only us that are complianing about this. There have been Various posts from other classes such as templar, inquisitor, defiler, dirge etc saying that we have been nerfed so badly that we are almost useless. Now if our own personal gripes are not enough you would think that when other classes even start taking pitty on us and pleading with Devs to help us out that a red flag would shoot up, but apparently some are blind to this. Now I picked guardian so that I could tank I don't want DPS I don't want utility I don't want jack squat besides being able to take damage and hold aggro like no other. If I had wanted any of the other things I would not have choosen guardian. Just because we admittadly were a bit powerful before LU13 doesn't mean that we need to be nerfed so badly that we are laughed at in groups.

-Spiritmongor of Oasis-

Moorford with all due respect I'm sure your a smart man, but your latest post is just idiotic.
You can sit here and tell us that Guardians are right where they need to be. We Tank far worse then we did prior to LU 13, and we do less damage then any other tank.

How can you sit there and say that a Guardians DPS is fine, but might ned to be tweeked at lower levels.

You sir are a complete idiot. Yes you are an idiot. Do what me what you will, but if you had any any business sense what so ever, you would not make these idiotic comments that you do. Its pretty safe to say that I will be quiting this game. Because you are an idiot and dont realize that you total screwed the Guardian class..

Idiot.

to all you people who complain their taunts are useless if they are all resisted,....that is a totally different issue and has nothing to do with the class balance you are talking about. So please stop saying brawlers actually hold aggro better because they have fewer taunts that can get resisted. that's laughable.

edit: And if you think brawlers build up aggro with dps on those mobs: Do you really think I can hit mobs that are able to resist all my taunts?

Finnster
Message Edited by CosmicAcidGuru on 10-06-2005 05:33 AM

I group almost exclusivly with with a berzerker. The mitigation between the two shouldn't be any different and I have no problem keeeping him healed. What are you fightinging that you can't keep him healed and what levels? I'm not uber geared have no masters except the master II that you can choose, and a couple of adept 3. The berzerker is level 50 and we were fighting mobs group mobs level 50 - 55 in Clefts. We did this in a 3 man group with a brigand as well as in a full group which even made it less of a problem.