Seems to me an avoidance tank should have an innate ability to avoid thus differentiating them from plate tanks with shields they can wear regardless of the stance they choose to fight in . I'd even go so far to say the immunity to strikethough should be manifest in all stances . I say this because of the difficulty in maintainging aggro in def stance against skilled dpseers .I know some feel that the monk class has improved greatly in the capacity to tank , and this is true .That is what is so sad . I recently made lvl 90 and am trying to gather xp tanking and making myself known . For four days I have not been invited to a group and have been denied every request to join one .Thus adding to my problem of gearing up well although I havve almost 20,000 hp self buffed w/e . I cannot understand why hidden openings is no an encounter taunt to help our need for aoe aggro w/e .Making another point that it seems the totality of the brawlers lines seem to be a feeble attempt to fix the many issues of our class . Our aa's I was made to believe , were introduced to add variety in individualism too our toons but its pretty standard which lines one must take if you even hope to stand a chance tanking . It seems when a monk does tank it means time for every other class to show the monk how they can tank just as well if not better than us . I have played a wizard for years before trying this class and I have to be honest and say my wizard is much better at tanking than most monks i come across . Not the raiders mind you ... well geared from harder zones . But in heroic instances my wizard has more mit uncontested avoid in with no stance of course and aggro for him is never an issue if he pulls . Yeah we can tank a bit but not well enough for folks wanting their "sense of urgency" type ach. and so on and so forth . They want a tank that can run in a room body pull everything and take the beating . Like Sk,s and Pallies running into Demetriek's Bastion and going straight for the first named and tanking it with all the mobs adding .... and doing it .Yep senn it done while on my wiz . I dont care what monk you have he could never even give the thought of trying that serious considration . Ok so can we do anything as good or better than any other tank ? Not from what i see .i hear a lot on the forums but what I see in game is SK,s runningnside by side with locks and zerkers not much behing them . Someting needs to be done by this point to make the eq2 communtiy to really respect our capacity to tank and tank well not ...."whew , you made it dude gratz " . I am not sure what all we need but we need it . Sucks lvling to 90 just to find out everyone wants a plate tank .Oh and the 4% mit but from epic repercussions is funny many adornments can be bought giving , ehat is it 5% or so ? So a signature quest with an epic weapon , the main reason for getting the weapon imo since uncontested avoid should be innate by all means , can be bought with some tokens from raiding or pvping . Disappointing to say the least . SOE personally I must day it is tiring logging every day and never getting an opportunity to prove I can tank besides groeing in experience .
ok, so first things first avoidance. in heroic zones you dont require the uncontested avoidance ot be able to avoid. its actually the mitigation boost form defensive stance that you actually are needing right now. that being said yes the level of the mobs is lowering your chance to avoid in the the higher end heroic zones but thats due to level differences nothing else. get your deflection and parry skill up and you can negate a nice chunk of that. i see where you are coming from. when i hit 90 my monk was t2/t3 shard geared, so yeah your gonan get hit a bit. just fomr questing up to 90 though theres quite a bit of decent jewleery items to upgrade into off the faction merchants. your largest problem i bet is agro. but that will go away in time. get some undeniable malice procs they will do wonders for your agro. if your avoidance really is lacking the only response i coudl give is upgrade your armor cause im betting its the culprit. in a set of jsut heroic instance legendary armor your block woudl be capped at 70% your parry would prolly be somewhere around 26% and base over 45 ild bet. to get to that gear though it will be a struggle im nto gonna lie to ya, youll either have to find a steady group type thing that will give you the shot or join groups as a dps monk until you get that new stuff. as far as aoe agro and stuff. there are options out there to do decently enough but if your trying to agro a room and hold it as a monk you picked the wrong class. monks are a single target tank, so runnign straight to the named in demetriks isnt gonan be done by a monk unless stupidly overgeared for the zone. as far as our ability to tank. liek i was saying above your view point on that is liekly coming form a gear difficiency. and if you have a wizard that can tank better then a monk then in all seriousness you havent met a real monk yet. it is a struggle to get there for sure but you did choose a leather wearing tank afterall. keep at it and one day your gonna log in and be getting tells to tank for people. as an example on my monk there isnt a single mob in this game i woudlnt stand in front of and tank. it took some work to get that level of confidence and enough gear to back it up. (and im not done yet either heh) but in heroic zones i find myself pulling rooms, as far as the demitriks thing. bruiser and guardians arent doing that either, its not the skill of the player or any crap liek that its straight up the difference between teh st tanks and the ae tanks. it sucks i know but if your gonan be a monk you gotta deal with it. but i gotta saythough comparing your ability to tank things against those ae tanks (that are a wee bit overpowered right now) is jsut gonan frustrate you more. its gonan be tough no matter how you try to do it though. your nto a real dps'er so will be tougher to get groups in that role and until your geared up into at least a full set of sf legendary you wont have the survivabilty of the plate tanks either. worse case scenario get groups with your wiz and heirloom the gear to your monk (sucks to have to do that but if ya need to) as an aside if your wizard is pushing over 80% avoidance ild love to see that
I mean I can tank but we have been poor at it for so long that it hampers our chances at getting groups . btw I noticed i bruiser with hid myth and it said he got 10% mit buff from it but on my epic repercussions buff reward I only have 4% is this right or did I do something wrong ?
Shredderr wrote: Bruisers have a straight up 10% damage reduction on all incoming damage while monks have 4% boost to their mitigation, you did nothing wrong.
(( I understand where the Original Poster is coming from. The other weekend, I joined a group, for Demetrik's Bastion as well as it happens, and there were five in group and the groupleader was just looking for a sixth. One member of the group asked the leader, what classes he was looking for. A scout group member replied, well obviously a tank. To which of course I said "So what am I? Chopped Liver? ". No disrespect, but monks are poor tanks, he said. It is a common view. However, since the leader of that group had just invited me (admittedly with a very stacked group of raidgeared characters (other than me of course)) to tank Vig2 and Vig3, which I had just done, he ignored the scout, picked up a mage as the 6th, and I tanked the zone. To be fair, at the end, the scout said he had changed his mind, that he had only grouped with brawler tanks who had failed until then, and indeed has joined some groups I have formed since that time. I suggest you just forget the crusader way of doing things. I never pull whole rooms, I pull one encounter at a time, but I do it in a chain fashion, no pauses. This is the ST tank way - pulling whole rooms and holding aggro is not going to happen for an ST tank in defensive without any raidgear. I recall someone saying on here, the best thing to do was start to build a reputation as someone who can tank and clear the SF instances in groups, and it was good advice. Every evening, as long as I can find a dirge, I start forming groups and tanking some of Library, ERH, VD1, DB, OuterVault, with any pickups I can get. I find getting folks is becoming increasingly easy, as more and more have grouped with me now and know that the groups will just work and be pretty fast. No, not pulling whole rooms fast, but still pretty sharpish. Yes, Monks still need a way to generate more threat/second in defensive stance, I feel, to be able to hold aggro even close to as well as some of the other fighter classes. Yes, there are inbuilt weaknesses to the class, and for the min-maxer, it is definitely not the best choice. But it is proving fun, at least, when one can get past the "monks are rubbish" attitude that a section of the playerbase continue to hold whatever. ))
Also I'd like to say I am not looking to tank like a crusader . I feel like why can any tank be able to do that ? where is the skill in that ? No just saying it doesnt seem to be about skill but speed of getting through a zone and the acheivement for doing the zone fast aint helping although i have earned a few . But it is frustrating holding aggro well when in offensive as a OT , then going in to tank in defensive and now I have aggro issues it equals frustrating class . Can hold aggro when you dont want it and I mean mogoose stance and all on and still pull aggro while being a bit out dpsed by the MT . Then when its time for me to tank the orange mobs and I go defensive .... no way wizards and swashies and w/e taking aggro . So gimme my avoidance innately I had though would allow us to tank hard mobs in offensive without being raid geared . I did notice this today though ... Sk was killin parse ( guild leader got all the dps type buffs) raid geared with a good dirge , could not seem to hold aggro off my wizard who is horribly geared and never raids , got a couple pieces unadorned cause he just sits out and no troub or illy I believe there was a coercer though . And kept ripping aggro in Outer Vaults even though the Sk was killing the parse at the top as they usually do nowadays with my wizard at number 2 anywhere from 6k to 10k behind the sk although I was usually at 16k to 20k ...meh zerkers top that also lol . But couldnt understand why I kept pulling aggro yet he continued to show me he was out parsing me as often as possible lol . I see that the pulling a bunch of mobs and tanking them is what really helps their parse look so incredible . But holding aggro is a diff story they dont so so cool it seems .
If that SK pulls a large number of mobs and begins AEing they will be quite high on the parse, but most of that damage (and therefore threat) is going to be spread out among all the targets he is hitting. Meanwhile, you as a wizard will be doing most of your damage to one target. So while you may be lower on the parse, your generating more single target threat than that SK is. While you did say there was a dirge in that group, the reason for your agro issues may have been that the dirge did not think that the SK would need any kind of hate buff, choosing to put up another group DPS buff instead. I notice a large number of bards / coercers being reluctant to use their hate buffs on the group because they would rather put up another DPS. They have gotten used to tanks who simply don't need those buffs. In regards to our tanking, I would love it if we could get our avoidance in any stance but I don't really expect that to happen. If you are going to be assigned to off-tank with a monk in raids, make sure your raid leader knows that you will need hate buffs and hate transfers otherwise you are not likely to be successful in holding agro. If we are going defensive we are going to need hate transfers and hate buffs. I would still like the ability to generate more personal TPS though. One suggestion might be to change Dragon Rage to proc on every successful combat attack while we are in defensive stance. It would be a decent boost to our TPS while in defensive stance, but I don't think the overall boost to the amount of threat it generates would be that large as it already seems to proc on every other combat hit. Perhaps the taunt size could also be doubled, or it could be changed to an encounter proc.
Nulgara@Antonia Bayle wrote: That's one of the biggest points in his post, people do want that. People want crazy tanks body pulling everything with a zillion mobs around and survive it. There is just no desire for single pulls or two to five mobs pulls, people go "wth, crappy tank". Another huge point the OP makes is how Monk's appear to be good on paper, but in reality their existance and community appreciation is FAR below that of the other tanks, and that speaks book-chapters. And sure "start your own group" is the way to go in most cases, but that does not solve the fact that in general people just rather have them plate tanks than that funky-move brawler. The issue is also bigger for those that rely more on PUG groups versus those with like 20 rl friends in guild or something. What I mostly read in your reply is someone who learned to accept the issues of their class, and I admire that, but that does not negate the fact some serious changes are needed.
Just getting back into the game after a leave but when I left the game I had people putting me on their friends list and as soon as I would log in I had tells from people asking me to tank and instance. I know getting a group can be hard at first but once people start to know you it will be easier. Also starting your own groups is so much easier. Find a healer friend that you group with a lot and the rest comes easy.
Felishanna@Antonia Bayle wrote: Thank you now I know what to say to my Palli friend when he tells me to stop being a wose and pull the whole room(I have a level 25 monk with 49 AAs so far I'll be unlocking her to get her to 27 soon to try stormhold and Crushbone keep, if I can get my guildmates to do some low alt groups with me.) I am hoping that I can get used to tanking for groups before endgame. I chose the monk at the advise of some guildmates when I explained I didn't want to be expected to MT but would like the freedom to try tanking groups and OT or MA for Raids. tried both Monk and Bruiser liked the Monks moves and wanted to start a barbarian in New Halas so Monk it was. and I'm loving her.
