I use the term "taunt" to refer to the skills that say something like "increases threat to target by N" - these skill often do have a damage component also. Since fervor does not affect the threat component these skills are becoming less effective than they used to be. The damage part is scaling, but not the pure threat part. Prior to fervor when people were just stacking potency both parts would scale. I am not bothered if you are a Troub who tanks with high dps, and I can see then why you may not care if taunts are effective..... but the Troub way of tanking is not the point of this thread.
Taunts do little or nothing in the grand scheme of things. Let us re-visit this age old breakdown: 1 dps = 1 hate unit 1. Tanks dps = tank hate generation - is the active component of hate. 2. Tank abilities to generate hate (excluding snaps) is the passive component of hate. 3. Tank snaps: threat position up (like rescue), target locks (like cry of the warrior), damage dealing threat increases (like grave sacrement) are in-between the first 2 categories and mostly used when needed. 4. Threat transfers/siphons -- varies between tank classes so not a consistent marker for analysis. Put them together now: Say a tank doing 500 million dps in a turn and burn fight of 3 minutes where other dps classes are firing on all cylinders at over a billion dps each sustained dps so that is, in essence, 500 million hate output. Now check the amount of times you use taunts in that fight and see the threat output - Exclude snaps here (because logically you use them when there is a rip) - you will be surprised to see how little they do, say for the sake of argument they do 100 million threat per second (all out aggression/crits). That gives you 500 million dps + 100 million threat from taunts = 600 million threat per second. Including transfers/siphons + passive hate generation abilities. All good so far but lets catch up with what is happening currently in the game. Not all fights are turn and burn for once (although comes pretty close in most) but lets say they are. Rising tide explosion on pull with dps spiking to over billions by many classes all at once with ascension classes. You can argue that a tank too will also be spiking to that much at that point but not exactly since you factor in combat mitigation/resists (rare but do happen), lack of debuffs for a few first seconds. Now that 100 million from taunts is beginning to look fairly meagre and the only way to keep hold of aggro is to use snaps (which in their purest meaning are not considered as taunts) and this is where class differences can make a substantial difference. Those with siphons and target locks on fast re-use will do better than those who do not. In short, taunts are not strong and they never have been except when they were boosted in low potency days of ToV. Now the situation is different. The difference in tank dps and tank threat generation is skewed. Fervor is not going anywhere and adding them to taunts should be something as a minimum but Caith has on numerous occasions said that "they are happy with the threat generation and have no plans to change it". My issue is with the entire game and the stat balance but in the interim they can start working on the hate mod so lets say every 10% of hate mode grants a small portion of aggression/potency (ideally something tank specific) or just lift the cap off de-hate and 100% hate and give bonuses for being overcap, so you have items with + over cap "hate mod" that affects passive hate generation of the tank. They can also improve the aggression values in tank defensive stances. Not sure how much aggression is affecting taunts at the moment (because no DEV has ever commented on it - perhaps they don't know either). A lot of options to play around with but sadly the obvious ones are not even looked at. Forgot to mention, when you have a situation when the hardest group zone (reavers challenge heroic) is being done without a tank in group, i think taunts should be the least of our concerns /shrug.
I honestly think that the devs put some items in the game just to make tanking interesting. Ascension Abilities- at some random point in time, your DPSers are going to throw ungodly nukes. Rising Tide- and now those nukes are 90% larger. Celestial Gate- did I say 90%? Ha. Still, I'm having fun, and holding aggro for the most part. I just feel really bad for the tank who is just gearing up for heroics and hasn't gotten to ascension level 5 yet to get some real gear. There is just a really high bar to entry, which means new tanks spend about two months just waiting to be ready, instead of running things. A tank without an orange run can forget tanking for DPS with orange runes at this point. It would be nice to accelerate the pace of ascension scrolls even more, to give those tanks a chance to catch up. The weekly extras can only be gotten by those who can... run weeklies.
In my opinion fervor not scaling with taunts isn't the core issue. Sure it would help a bit but, when I came back I wondered how people could reach 20-30k pot with gear and found it within deity points. Increasing pot gained by 1% per rank. The fact that it takes ages to Increase deity to higher levels will make it verry hard for new Tanks or returning players to catch up. So DBG why do you force Fighters to grind deity to fullfill their group role, while other archetypes just do less dps or heal less (healing required can be reduced by better gear as time passes)?
Hmm agrro management is a group effort, it is not the tanks sole job to manage threat. if you are having threat issues play smarter. In case this is not clear tanks should not get a boost for fervor on their taunts.
I like how dps classes come here and tell us threat management is a group effort, while they've been enjoying a steady decline in the need for utility classes to boost their own dps the last few expacs. If threat management should be a group effort then dps classes should parse like healers without utility in the group.
The way i see, tanks generally struggle without an ideal setup. Having a fervor penalty on taunts just compounds this... After all it affects wards so makes no sense to not have it affect the other non damaging abilities(taunts). Speaking from a DPS perspective.
I've been sort of following this thread since it started, and I am not sure why the people complaining tanks are struggling with aggro are seeing the problem. Do you ever look at the gear of the people you can't hold aggro against? Are you being completely out-geared when you cannot hold aggro, or do they have gear roughly comparable to yours? Unless people are pulling **** at random that I am not actually attacking, I have no issues with holding aggro when my gear is more or less comparable to the DPS. From what I am seeing, even if I am out-geared by a good 25% in terms of Pot, I don't have an real issues. Quite bluntly, you may want to looks at what you are doing and optimize your DPS and TPS output before you start crying that threat is broken. For anyone questioning how I'm geared, this is me: http://u.eq2wire.com/soe/character_detail/433792754217
The problem with that approach is it means unless you start playing your tank at the beginning of the expansion cycle you're going to have a horrible time catching up. It's going to be very difficult as a new tank 6 months into a gear reset expansion to form groups because most of the time the dps you invite will be much better geared than you are. It should become easier to catch up as expansions age, not harder.
Uh ... if you're six months into an xpac and think you should be able to hold aggro with the last xpac's gear, I think you really need to check your CheasyMode(TM) privilege levels. After a number of years away from the game, I came back last summer. I started tanking again with solo and mastercraft gear. Yes, it was a ***** x 10 holding aggro, and it should be when you are that under-geared. If you aren't good enough to pull off tanking in that condition and have another toon that you have been running, why not just run on that toon and say "hey, I'm trying to collect X type gear for my Y class tank." At this point in the xpac, I don't think most people will care if you are up front about wanting to need on the gear, and if the people are that uptight, just run with different people.
Didn't say anything about last expac's gear. And comparing tanking in ToT to tanking now is lol worthy. Completely different ballgame. And sure, just run with different people. Too bad there aren't any other people and getting any kind of pug these days is a blessing. Maybe you should check your privilege levels, because you've obviously no idea what it's like.
I like how tank classes think they need to be able to solo manage my agrro when they are not nearly as geared as I am. IF your not as geared as the group you are in that's the problem. if you are as geared as the dps and you having aggro problems your group make up needs work. There is no aggro prob there is only a people who do not know how to manage their own agrro problem.
DPS and heals can jump right into any group once they have the resolve to survive. They may not do much but they can pretend that they are blowing up the parse as long as they don't actually look at ACT. A new tank just jumping right in is going to feel worthless and frustrated. I think that's the real point, that without gear at a certain point, a tank is useless at the moment, whereas in past expansion just a decent set of mastercrafted was enough to start tanking as long as you had the tank-fu otherwise. I don't think there's any problem for tanks once they are geared, especially if they know how to time ascensions and snaps.
For the most part, I do manage threat solo. Aggro dump bosses aside, the only time a comparable geared DPS really needs do dump aggro with me is at the beginning if they spike with Rising Tides or other front loaded blasts. BUT, I spent time looking at what my spells & CAs were, checking how much DPS & threat they generated in ACT, and then building an attack macro that prioritized the strongest ones.
You're right there are orders of magnitude of difference between KA and ToT. In ToT, I was pulling 15mill or so in heroics and fighting with DPS pulling 150-250mill. In KA, I am pulling 150-500mill+ in heroics and fighting DPS the usually tops out at 1bill. Because of Tanks getting ascension classes too, KA is 10x easier to tank than ToT ever was. Just an FYI, I came back in June of 2016 after being away from EQ2 for years, and started tanking in July when people were already wearing a number of Ethereals. I know exactly what it is to be massively under-geared and have to hold aggro against people putting out 10x my DPS instead of up to a little more than 2x my DPS. I put on my big ogre pants and treated the mobs like my ******* until they died. My earned privilege levels are looking pretty good to me.
Ugh, forget it. If you can't tell the difference between tanking as a 28k pot level 10 ascension and a 10k pot level 1 ascension then there's not much point continuing. This guy gets it ^ And honestly making fervor affect taunts wouldn't even be a great solution to that problem. They'd get an immediate boost from being heartbound, but it would benefit established tanks even more. I'd love to see a more focused approach to helping new tanks. But any attempt to resolve the imbalance is stifled by the ridiculous belief that tanks should be wholly dependant on their group makeup to perform their primary role, while no other class is held to that same standard.
