Deathtouching non fighters

Discussion in 'General Gameplay Discussion' started by Fairin, Nov 28, 2017.

  1. Earar Well-Known Member

    why are fighters picky ?

    because so much is expected of them and people are so impatient .. fighters just don't want to PuG just to be yelled at for failling on new strats

    people are so exigent and impatient if not everything goes according to plan. People wanna farm but not enjoy the zones.

    see how impatient people are .. they already want all their orange adorns unlocked.

    and a tank isn't paid for his tanking.. so better play with friends :)
    Dezzy, Malleria and Spindle like this.
  2. Jhen Ro Active Member

    Raided last expac as a conj. Without casting, I would watch my hate meter do this:

    12....16....19.....100.

    No warning, no mem wipe, JUST the pet attacking.

    And now it's going to insta kill me for something I had no chance to even correct.... Great.
    semisus likes this.
  3. Thand Well-Known Member

    yup i have gone from from 1 to dead mid fight raiding on my conj. Btw is is usually the tank who sis first to quit when things do not go as planed in my experience. Tanks can be picky because so many groups are always looking for tanks. They can Always get another group almost instantly,
    The real question is why do more people not play tanks since it is so easy for then to find groups. The answer is thier are so few raid slots for tanks they have to spend thier time gearing up their dps for raids :) Even i wish i had more time for my monk.
  4. Zeddicious Well-Known Member

    Sad that this mechanic was introduced rather than do a few passes over the fighter class to address the issue of being able to generate enough threat to maintain aggro. Its not like this whole "tank can't hold aggro" thing is new either - with statflation and the introduction of ascension and epic 2.0 - DPS charaters' power have tripled in one expac. Unfortunately, a fighter's ability to generate triple the amount of hate didn't scale the same.

    Of the 9000 ways to fix the problem - we get this. smh. I wonder what ever happend to the "round table" and if conversations like this actually ...make the rounds?
    "hey, dps toons are ripping aggro all the time..what should we do?"
    "we could fix tank threat generation..."
    "from the back: Deathtouch the Aggrorippers!"
    "hmm, that takes less time to implement than fixing tanks - done."

    Guess I'll dust of my lowbie old Brawler and .. ohhh wait, he's not done epic 2.0 yet. nvm.

    Edit:
    more people don't play tanks because the entire group expects the tanks to 100 percent know all of the winning strategies for every zone - know every zone location - never lose aggro - and never die. It a lot of pressure, and some players aren't shy about their criticism.
    Most of the time, the 5 other blokes in the group are just tagging along with no real input other than facerolling wards, sending in their pet to attack and /afk lunch.
    So if you really wanna know why ppl don't wanna tank - consider rollin one yourself - gearing it up with epic 2 / ascension... bring lots of antacid and wear your thick skin..
  5. Jhen Ro Active Member

    Think it also has to do with the people who don't even try to manage their agro.

    Hard to manage the agro when it jumps so suddenly like that and have only one de-agro via aa's, though. Could be just a conj epic 2 pet issue, not sure.
    Zeddicious likes this.
  6. Relanah Active Member

    Well, I'd argue that Swashy at least has always shared in the tanking niche. Maybe not always main tanking, but it's always been there, since heck, it's a significant portion of the class as a whole.

    That's really the only class I honestly have an issue with removing from the tank pool, given how much of them leans towards at least off-tanking if not MT. It's flat out just eviscerating the class by slapping on such a ham fisted "Fix" to the problem that due to how many fighters work, they do sucky damage but have nothing to make up for it so "DPS" classes like Swashy are preferable...

    To be honest, the binary function of the Deathtouch mechanic doesn't really alleviate the concern of "Useless classes"

    It just shifts it from the sucky fighters (But not really, you'll just see people playing SK/Bruiser/Zerker and Guard/Pally will still pale in comparison) not feeling worthwhile compared to the Tankier DPS classes to instead making it so that the non-T1 DPS classes feel worthless in comparison to the T1 DPS classes because they can only do the same thing, just worse...

    Like, people already advertise for T1 DPS (Conji/Necro/BL) while Brigs/Swashy/Wiz/Lock generally aren't actively wanted... Cutting the ability for them to have a flex opportunity just limits their worth...

    Especially when there are numerous soft fixes that don't just blanket shut down options, but instead just make it so that you have to actually work towards atypical builds to make them work right.

    Because they can afford to be.

    With how lusted after tanks are, they generally start to get a sort of god-complex form. Knowing that they can easily find a group to whatever, while everyone else might have to wait hours for a replacement lets them force people to play to their rules and if not? Well off they go to the next group who might appreciate them enough to pander to them...

    The expectations of them doesn't usually cause them to be picky, usually it just pushes people away from attempting the role in the first place... Which is always a significant cause of a low population (The other is trying to make playing fun. Some games try and give Tanks damage so they feel like a DPS and have parses to try and top. While others fail to make them engaging and they're just "Hold Taunt Button and go watch a movie" classes... It's always a fine line to make a Tank feel impactful and engaging and being just a taunt bot)


    If I recall correctly, someone in another thread mentioned about how Fervor doesn't affect hate on taunts/skills. While it will multiply damage/healing output, it doesn't boost threat output of tanks.

    Something simple like making it affect hate would be an easy way to address threat issues...
  7. Grumpy_Warrior It's a KILT, dang it!

    A kinder, gentler alternative to the death touch mechanic: If a non-fighter pulls aggro, put a buff on them that zeroes out all their DPS for the next 10 seconds, including the DPS that caused it (probably a big ascension). If they are still insulting the tank after 10 seconds, put the buff on them again.
    Malleria and Earar like this.
  8. Fairin Active Member

    Problem - death touching non fighters = bad thing for non fighter tanks, face it there are non fighter tanks. and groups that run without fighters as a static or there simply isnt an option to wait 2+ hours for a pug fighter or "roll an alt' as it were.

    I would rather have the entire thought process of death touching removed, but if your looking to keep your shiny new mechanic consider the following solution that is my olive branch being extended.

    possible solution - death touch people not wearing a shield, excluding fighters from this check. - kinda meh. everyone would just wear a shield then. only mages would cry. - not good enough

    possible solution - as grumpy stated. debuff the person for snappin aggro instead of DT - still kind of hamfisted but at least groups would have to wait hours just to do a zone if necessary

    possible solution - double down on the ideal , death touch people for being out of alignment (evil/good) or not having a pair of bards, or having less than 2 healers in the party, have encounters throw out 3 curses that must be cured or die.... (this is sarcasm, will find you and feed you decaff coffee if you put these in)

    Best Solution. Death Touch people not wearing 100+ % hategain - only tanks would wear this, thus saving the heroic pool from shrinking even further and is obtainable by people tanking out of necessity instead of script mechanic enforcement of bring a fighter "or else"


    when pug groups say LF-Tank, they were not picky before as long as you could do the job . scout mage fighter whatever. fighters got as many groups as they did before as they do now. the problem is the number of groups needing them has increased but their number has not. and will not. - it is a lot of effort to becoming a fighter capable of holding aggro.

    it is a proven fact that actually doing a heroic is much more fun and entertaining than sitting in LFG for hours.


    if you think making fighters a necessity by making heroic mobs death touch non fighters is a good thing and will make more people mainswitch over to them, then consider this counter argument.


    lets make heroic mobs death touch the party if we do not bring a swashbuckler or brigand to interrupt them or something. surely every heroic group would go nuts tryin to find such a rare class just to do their weeklys!
    Zeddicious likes this.
  9. Furycai Member

    Fairin, great post! Well thought out arguments by many. Here's two more cents.

    I agree death touching just because you pulled aggro is a bad idea. I PUG as a tank, one of those fighter types, a lot but not in PoP yet, I have no problem with other classes pulling aggro, yeah they might die but so what. Either they are going to die and realize they need to manage their hate better or not. A few times I've ever experienced this problem are when dps is not running -50% hate, I was just starting out tanking, or the other people in the group were fully raid geared to the nines and doing more than 4-5 times my dps without a bard in the group.

    Whatever the case those unnecessarily pulling aggro are just putting stress on the rest of the group and the rest of the group should point the finger at that person pulling aggro and try to help them understand how not to do it.

    Let's add another option to Fairin's list: If you don't have -50% hate or 100% then you die.

    The pet hate stuff where the hate increases without attacking is either a broken game mechanic, poor programming, or something that is too difficult to understand for even above average players. I've seen beastlord's with gear similar to mine have this problem and going to -50% hate seems to help dramatically.

    The death touch thing is just going to stress tanks more. Hopefully the class changes will make it easier to control aggro. Maybe there can be a PUG group buff that gives the fighter + another 200% hate gain if your group is PUG instead of this deathtouch thing that seems stupid.

    We'll adjust if we need to but it would be great to avoid programming that takes the fun out of the game.
    Fairin likes this.
  10. Fairin Active Member

    patch notes tuesday:

    Plane of Innovation [Heroics]
    • Bosses within the normal heroic zones should no longer use a direct scripted death mechanic on non-fighters. It is still the intention that it be preferable to use fighters to tank these bosses.
    Torden, Bastion of Thunder [Heroics]
    • Bosses within the normal heroic zones should no longer use a direct scripted death mechanic on non-fighters. It is still the intention that it be preferable to use fighters to tank these bosses.
    this is a step in the right direction, we as non fighter tanks appreciate this change and still want the change for ALL heroics however in response i will lower my torch and pitchfork approximately 50%
  11. Conifur Well-Known Member

    I died 5 or 6 times on pulls from bosses tonight without doing anything. I have a hate meter, I use it and know how to manage my hate. I would not even be near the mob and would die without them even targeting me. The mechanic is broke. It is not about threat management, it is about a poor mechanic.
  12. Fulton Active Member

    As a returning player and a tank, i tried to tank in heroics but didnt go well. I have new quested gear and the pot bonus but i am just too far behind. I dont have high ascension, like level 7 now, i dont have epic2.0, tons to do before i get it, i dont have the health adorns and cant get deity sta for health. Im pretty much useless compared to the players ive grouped with. Cant keep aggro, low health,low dps. Hard to focus on strats when im working extra hard to keep aggro and stay alive. I would gladly tank but by the time im up to speed expansion will be half over....
  13. Bhayar Well-Known Member

    This is being fixed in this morning's patch. Nuff said.
    Semperfifofum likes this.
  14. maxximum Active Member

    I've been forced to play my dirge on recent expacs, and I've had to run my tank this expac so I'll offer a few observations:

    1) This expac is far more script heavy than previous expacs. You can't just mash buttons to see how high on the parse you can get. There are many encounters where you actually have to do something other than hit the mob as hard and as often as possible. I see people in various threads whining about zones, mechanics, etc, and they're people I've grouped with. People who don't listen. People who don't click stuff when they're supposed to. People who just stand there when they're supposed to move. People who don't turn their pets off when training trash. People who are miles behind the group because they're too busy typing instead of running. People casting ascensions when I've already said the boss is immune or that it's a slow burn. People who, well, you get the idea.

    2) If you can't get a tank and you think you can do it, roll a tank. That's how I started tanking. As someone else mentioned, it's a thankless job. You have to know all the strats, or be able to adapt to them quickly, hold aggro off reckless dps, keep checking that people are running and clicking stuff they're supposed to be clicking, watching your own detriments and health, watching the threat meter, and sometimes watching the chat box for fight scripts. I'm already sick of babysitting people who have to be repeatedly told to do or not do something, while I'm trying to do my own job. I did the disease event heroic yesterday, and the final boss requires that everyone checks their detriments and clicks the right shell, or the boss gains stacks which means he hits harder. Most of the group did it before it got to 10 stacks, but one dps just sat there, burning away while the stacks slowly went up, all the way to 100. Meanwhile I'm trying to manage the rest of the fight, watching these stacks rack up, calling out whichever detriment needs sorting, and we wipe. I'm not taking people like that in my groups any more, regardless of their awesome dps. Some people need to wise up.

    3) As Jhen Ro pointed out, aggro can just spike massively so I have to be able to deal with that and manage my own taunts and target locks effectively. That's something every tank has to deal with every expac, and it hasn't been an issue in these heroics tbh, despite people constantly ripping aggro. I'm not really sure what this supposed death-touch mechanic is, because I don't recall seeing people randomly die apart from script fails so my guess is either the tank or healer is not doing their job properly, or the people dying are out of healing/curing range or just engaging in general dumbassery. If there is such a mechanic in heroics, then I've not seen it yet.
    Zeddicious and Semperfifofum like this.
  15. Kayas Member

    In my opinion, it seems like every eq2 expat starts out this way with heroics very hard, then as time goes by they make it easier to complete. I can only assume it is to reward the hardcore at first, or maybe they just end up dumbing it down as more and more complain
    Semperfifofum likes this.
  16. Semperfifofum Well-Known Member


    Huh? I've grouped a lot more and PUG'd a lot more than I expected to when I came back. Every group I've had in KA Experts was a PUG. I don't raid though, not anymore, but that's because I'm too ill to promise I'll play at a specific time weekly.

    First no I don't WANT such a mechanic, but I'm not against it. I wouldn't have gone to the developers and said "hey please add this mechanic." Not in a million years. But I also reflect that in my experience you did die if you took aggro until Resolve came onto the scene. Now that Resolve makes it possible for a non-tank to NOT die during aggro, I'm not really against this mechanic. But I also noticed that the argument has morphed from a complaint about raids... and is now an argument about heroics. So that's why I said I hadn't made up my mind about it.

    If the change had been implemented like many previous mobs... such that, in large groups, each living individual mob gives a buff to nearby individuals, until it overwhelms the Resolve/armor/defense of the player, then tanks would not be immune to it either.

    Instead, the mechanic is merciful about not killing your tank and allows you to gather more mobs IF you have a tank (and are doing a reasonable job of aggro control as a group), instead of forcing you to slow down regardless.

    If they switched to the "buff each other" method, tanks would not be able to protect you and you'd have to go slower and kill one maybe two groups at a time. I think this change is merely enforcing the old school trinity grouping, that's all. Think how much worse it would be if it didn't skip the tank.

    This is so true.

    Ditto.
  17. Dannni Active Member

    Im a tank, i run heroics. If you remove the necessity to have a tank in the group, why take a tank? Better off taking more dps. This is people trying to flip it round on tanks and say - oh youre a tank, we dont need you anymore.
  18. Fairin Active Member


    when people are LF TANK for a group it wont matter who can do the job as long as that someone can actually do said job. no group in their right mind would say no to the first fighter that had the resolve for the heroics.

    your job is not being taken away. your niche is still intact, no one is going to replace you as a tank, this just opens more options for other people to actually run more groups instead of sitting in LFG all day.... which will eventually happen once the majority finishes the sigline and whatnot =)

    Nizara does that..(buff each other) Nizara has to rank in the top 3 least popular zones... abit because of PATHING and IGNOREING Z-levels.. but i digress... ask your priests about it... > : )

    its not resolve that prevents a dps from dieing, its gear + defensives (although it does help a whole lot to have the resolve for zones for dps purposes)

    resolve makes you take more damage and deal less damaged based on a % scale difference between you and the mob in question, so everyone wants to have more resolve to negate these and deal normal and take normal damage. (and i believe PoP mobs have some other fun things to do with resolve under the hood from what i've seen so far, like bleedthrough and stuff... but might be my imagination.
  19. Fleurs Active Member

    Great idea to deathtouch DPSers.
    As a shaman, my ward doesn't break to damage, all i need to do, is cast a rotation every 30 sec, and spam a macro that hold all my attack spell.

    Now, if DPS/Healers get deathtouched on heroic/raid, i will no longer need to farm proving ground to get to 35m hp (during kunark), as having a quarter of that will not change my chance of survival.

    Furthermore, while in heroic, i tend to cast Carrion warding + Spirit aegis or soul shackles, to protect the dpsers in case they get aggro. (those are long cast)

    Now i can free up two more slot in my rotation, no need to ward the group anymore, just cast your 3 single target ward on the tank, and spam dps.

    Woot!

    /sarcasm off
    Fairin likes this.
  20. Errrorr An Actual EQ2 Player

    Imo this mechanic should remain for raids, perhaps with a slight bit of lenience (Like they added to Co-Op strike back in the day) where you get 2s to react to the situation, rather than instant death.

    For heroics, It should remain in a different form. If the mob is on a non-fighter, it should gain substantial buffage. It shouldn't make the fight impossible, but it should make it significantly harder.

    Fighters pretty much died out in KA due to the long term issues with them (Hello 10k potency taunt cap) and that is the real problem. There is not enough fighters, and it is far more 'fun' in general to be a DPS class rather than a fighter.
    Semperfifofum likes this.