Why will Monks Tank better than Guardians?

Discussion in 'Monk' started by ARCHIVED-Poochymama p, Jun 19, 2005.

  1. ARCHIVED-GamerX Guest

    Some would be ok to loose dps for tanking and yet others wouldnt. Seems monk community is sort of like zerker one. Some people want more dps less tanking and others want the exact opposite.
    Message Edited by GamerX on 06-25-2005 02:09 PM
  2. ARCHIVED-bonesbro Guest

    In general, most monks who are not willing to trade a lower DPS for increased tanking ability believe that we'll never get enough to be viable MTs. Therefore, they'd be giving up DPS for no improvement.

    There are, of course, some folks who want to be pure DPS, and while I hope they continue to enjoy their class I think they've set themselves up for disappointment.
  3. ARCHIVED-Ulkesh-Blackburrow Guest

    I'm glad to know they are making avoidance a viable defense, as it was intended. I just hope it scales appropiately. Also, don't forget the 1st expansion is right around the corner! Meaning(among lots of other things) the endgame scenario at 60 is going to be different than at 50. I'm so stoked about the expansion!
    By the way, the person who started this thread seems a little off on their information. Might want to recheck some of that.
    Oh, and it's futile to compare reality to a fantasy game. If there was any reality to this at all no one would be tanking an animal anywhere near the size of a dragon. It would be like a squirrel trying to absorb a train hit =p One more quick thing on that note martial arts are only designed to combat people hehe.
  4. ARCHIVED-psubullet Guest

    I've only read the first page of responses, so forgive me if what I'm trying to say has been covered already.


    With the combat changes, we can expect to see the following setups for this argument (speculation on information given to us by developers):

    Guardian: 50-60% mitigation. 20-30% avoidance
    Monk: 20-30% mitigation. 60-70% avoidance

    By the logic stated by the OP, this is unfair. But when you look at it closer, you'll understand that it is only fair.

    With 100 hits for 100 damage each (unmitigated), you would have to do more complex formulas to factor in the avoidance and mitigation.

    Avoidance is on a hit-by-hit basis, meaning it is not a 100% set-in-stone thing. If you have 70% avoidance, then when each attack is generated, you have a 70% chance of avoiding the attack. It does NOT mean that in 100 attacks, you will avoid 70 of them (This assumption can only be made in situations where hundreds of thousands of attacks have been attempted during a fight, not hundreds. So if you were to parse an entire month, sure, you would see 70% of all of the attacks avoided). Because avoidance is not a sure thing, there could be times when the monk takes no damage and times when the monk takes devastating damage. You can do a test situation by going out and buying a 4 sided die, and rolling it 100 times for 10 different test situations (use a die over a random number generator because random number generators are not TRULY random). If it lands on 1, its a hit. 2, 3 and 4 are avoided attacks. Do this and you will see that there are streaks of hits as well as streaks of misses.

    Mitigation is something you can rely on every time. Every hit, it absorbs the set amount of damage that is thrown at it. So a hit for 100, with 60% mitigation, would be a hit for 40 damage. So if you are relying on mitigation alone for the 100 hits of 100 damage, you could take a guess at how much damage is coming your way.


    Do the math using my logic here in different situations as well. Think about when multiple MOBs are in the picture, or when one big hitting MOB is in the picture. Some situations will call for the security of a guardian, some will be better suited for a monk. We need to wait and see, and get more people to go test it out.
  5. ARCHIVED-Edyil Guest


    That is probably the most concise analysis of the division between monks to date. Regardless of our future tanking abilities, ALL melee will be taking a DPS hit when this patch comes out. That is a known fact.
    To what degree won't be known for quite some time since they will be slowing all combat down. In other words, the effect might seem extreme at the start, but the mobs are doing far less DPS (will be taking a much bigger DPS hit than we will), so proportionally (and theoretically at this point), our DPS nerf will be minimal.
    But again, even if they don't give us tanking, we are gonna get nerfed on damage.
  6. ARCHIVED-ShashLigai Guest

    psubullet wrote:
    Avoidance is on a hit-by-hit basis, meaning it is not a 100% set-in-stone thing. If you have 70% avoidance, then when each attack is generated, you have a 70% chance of avoiding the attack. It does NOT mean that in 100 attacks, you will avoid 70 of them (This assumption can only be made in situations where hundreds of thousands of attacks have been attempted during a fight, not hundreds. So if you were to parse an entire month, sure, you would see 70% of all of the attacks avoided). Because avoidance is not a sure thing, there could be times when the monk takes no damage and times when the monk takes devastating damage. You can do a test situation by going out and buying a 4 sided die, and rolling it 100 times for 10 different test situations (use a die over a random number generator because random number generators are not TRULY random). If it lands on 1, its a hit. 2, 3 and 4 are avoided attacks. Do this and you will see that there are streaks of hits as well as streaks of misses.

    Mitigation is something you can rely on every time. Every hit, it absorbs the set amount of damage that is thrown at it. So a hit for 100, with 60% mitigation, would be a hit for 40 damage. So if you are relying on mitigation alone for the 100 hits of 100 damage, you could take a guess at how much damage is coming your way.
    [/QUOTE]
    If this is how it really works, then the formula is nerfed from the start. To be consistent with avoidance, 60% mitigation should mean that the tank's armor 'mitigates' the hit 60% of the time. The actual amount of damage 'mitigated' should be based on the type of armor and the location of the hit. In this way, armor wearers would have to repair their armor or its effectiveness is reduced. IMO this is the correct trade-off between monks, who don't have much armor, avoid hits but take nearly all the damage when they do get hit, and armor wearers who get hit alot, the armor absorbs the damage, but eventually has to be fixed or replaced.
  7. ARCHIVED-NamaeZero Guest

    Another way to make Tanking work better for MT's using Avoidance would be to slow combat down (which is what SOE is planning) and/or allow for a short period of automatic or heightened dodging to occur after a hit.

    For example, say you have 50% Avoidance as a Monk, and you take a hit: for a few seconds, your Avoidance could climb to 80-95% or higher. This way Streaks would become much less likely, and the issue of Brawlers being in combat and never taking a hit (uber) would happen much less. This would also make Monks more suited for very fast attacking raid mobs, as the faster they were attacked, the more often they would recieve their higher Avoidance values.
  8. ARCHIVED-Babayaaga Guest

    If I was to try to look at this from a logical perspective, here's how I see the Plate vs. Light Armour debate.
    Let's say Sir Lancelot was fighting Bruce Lee:
    ----------------- Sir Lancelot -----------------
    Lancelot has a full suit of shiny plate that protects him from all kinds of damage, particularly slash/pierce attacks because solid sheets of metal is very hard to stick things through. The only way you can slash/pierce him would be through the weak points in his armour, like the underarms, groin, knee, elbow and neck areas.
    Lancelot's choice of weaponry incorporates a wide selection of huge, heavy weapons including flails/maces for blunt, longswords and claymores for slash, and lances for pierce.
    His weaknesses result largely from his armour and weaponry. He moves slowly and is weakened quickly if he lacks the stamina to maneuver with all of the weight he wears and weilds.
    ----------------- Bruce Lee -----------------
    Bruce is wearing next to nothing. He's got bare feet, no shirt, and lightweight, flowing pants... the only purpose of his clothing is modesty. He is extremely vulnerable to every kind of attack provided he gets hit, which is why he choses the attire that he does. His armour is not what he wears... he is protected only by his skill to focus on avoiding all types of attacks... deftly and swiftly.
    Bruce's choice of weaponry is a lightweight but effective selection of blunt, slashing and piercing hand-held weapons, and featherweight staves and swords that allow him maximum maneuverablilty.
    Bruce's weakness lies only in getting hit. If/when he takes a hit, he is going to get hit very hard and perhaps perish from the blow.
    ======================================================================
    So what happens when you pit these two off in an arena?
    The odds say it would more often result in a draw. Bruce could jump circles around Lancelot, thrusting in several attacks in the same time it would take Lancelot to take one deadly swing... but if that swing hits Bruce... Bruce could be dead in one hit.
    This analogy is what makes me think that both tank types... Plate and Light Armour... should be equal in terms "tankability". The problem is getting that to play out. Healing a Plate-tank is going to be much easier in that he will always get hit for a lot less than a light armour wearer. There is zero risk in a Light-armoured tank who never gets hit either (as we saw in the early days of EQ2). There has to be some risk in every situations, and you need to keep your main tank standing because when he/she goes down there's a good chance it's game over.
    Perhaps the problem doesn't lie with the fighter classes. I am more of the opinion that the problem lies with the Healer archetypes in the game right now. There should be a suitable healing strategy for every tank type... and I do believe it was intended to work that way but in actuality... it just isn't playing out that way.
  9. ARCHIVED-Desultory Guest

    Wow Baba...that was a great analogy. :)
  10. ARCHIVED-Rothgard-san Guest

    I have no problem with my monk becoming more tank oriented - I wouldn't mind having my dps lowered with the trade-off of my tanking ability going up... to an extent.

    However, I have a problem with having Berserkers, Shadowknights, Paladins, Guardians, Monks, Bruisers being a tank class when they aren't actually tanking. A tank that isn't tanking won't be much use after these changes, and most raids seldom need more than 1 tank (2 for some raids). So I suppose this means I'll have to re-optimize my guild roster, by replacing the fighters with scouts? This is assuming of course that the actual difference in DPS will be overly significant between say, a Guardian compared to an Assassin.

    Currently, our secondary tank (Guardian) does damage that nears the higher end scouts in the guild when he's going all out - this definately needs to change, but if they put our fighters on a completely different damage table (like eqoa for example, where warriors quaded for 50/hit, and rogues quaded for 400/hit) we'll definately have some people rerolling.
    Message Edited by Rothgard-san on 06-28-2005 02:37 PM
  11. ARCHIVED-Babayaaga Guest

  12. ARCHIVED-deaddeaddead Guest

    basically offtopic, and probably mentioned before, but IMO a bump never hurts.. (and i took the 40 taunt, so it barely matters, but) the DPS bonus on our 50 taunt gets resisted every single round.
    that's ME, resisting my own buff.
    we've noticed this, yes?
    i shelled out for my lv 50 ad3s at 49, trying to motivate me to go faster.. that'll teach me.
  13. ARCHIVED-psubullet Guest


    If this is how it really works, then the formula is nerfed from the start. To be consistent with avoidance, 60% mitigation should mean that the tank's armor 'mitigates' the hit 60% of the time. The actual amount of damage 'mitigated' should be based on the type of armor and the location of the hit. In this way, armor wearers would have to repair their armor or its effectiveness is reduced. IMO this is the correct trade-off between monks, who don't have much armor, avoid hits but take nearly all the damage when they do get hit, and armor wearers who get hit alot, the armor absorbs the damage, but eventually has to be fixed or replaced.

    [/QUOTE]With what you have said here has a few problems. The first problem is that you have suggested that mitigation's percentage be a representation of how often one would mitigate the attack. Were that true, and mitigation would function the same way as avoidance, why have mitigation and avoidance? Why have more than one tank class? Let's implement this suggestion, and then call the entire fighter tree "Tank," taking away all previously defined classess and subclasses. There are advantages and disadvantages to having the system as it currently lies, but it is the only way to fit split-tanking in the flow of the game. The second problem is the armor repairing. There are many reasons that the dev team decided to, once again, keep items from being damaged in battle. Ask them, not me. But it wouldn't make it any more balanced because remember, our armor would take a lot less damage, thus needing repairs/replacement more often. Just think of Norrath as the land of unbreakable equipment.

    The formula works to an extent currently, and will work even better when they figure out how to tweak their equations to represent the description I gave above.


    (side note: something cannot be nerfed from the start. It can be beefed up or nerfed after the start, but at the start, it is how it is.)
  14. ARCHIVED-ShashLigai Guest

    psubullet wrote:
    With what you have said here has a few problems. The first problem is that you have suggested that mitigation's percentage be a representation of how often one would mitigate the attack. Were that true, and mitigation would function the same way as avoidance, why have mitigation and avoidance?
    [/QUOTE]
    Because IMO mitigation means that my armor takes the hit, avoidance means the hit never lands. A monk with light armor won't mitigate much. The avoidance/mitigation formula as you described it seems broken to me. If I understand what you said, 60% mit absorbs 60% of the damage, while 60% avoid has a 60% chance to avoid the hit. That just seems inconsistent to me.
  15. ARCHIVED-40mack Guest

    admittedly i havent given this a lot of thought but it seems to me that if my avoidance is 70% and because it takes several thousand attempts of swinging at me for the 70% to show itself, why not make it so 70% avoidance shows it self after a few hundred hits? therotically wouldnt that help to make avoidance more stable or atleast less unstable? maybe then we wouldnt have these long streaks of getting our brains bashed in?
    i dont know what kind of coding that would take but knowing im gonna avoid 70-80% of all atks with in ie, 500 swings, should help me be a better tank dispite my low mitigation then all they have to do is implement a hard cap on avoidance to keep people from hitting 100%. something aroud 85-90%.
    also i gotta admitt, i dont wanna tank, never wanted to tank and didnt choose monk so i could tank, but i never expected to dish out dps higher then a scout either. i dont ever wanna tank a raid mob. if i did i woulda picked a guardian/zerker/pally. i like the idea of being able to dish medicore dps and slowly as the tanks die if im all thats left maybe then i can take or dodge a few hits buying my raid some valuable seconds to rez and get a tank back up to do his/her job. if that makes me unwanted then maybe i need a different guild cause last time i checked raids arent pu's leaving me at the mercy of people i dont know.
  16. ARCHIVED-Alkoun Guest

    I'm not keen on the idea of making certain tanks better at tanking certain encounters. It pigeonholes your character to only doing certain raids. What if a Guardian needs to kill a raid mob that flurries for some quest, but was left out of the raid cuz the Monk makes a better tank for this specific fight? Or vice versa? Typecasting people limits their range of opportunities, which isn't fun for some.

    I made my Monk alt with the intention of being a tank, as it was described in the FAQs: "Every archetype has a main role in a group situation, and each member of a given archetype will be able to fill that role equally well. If you're a fighter, you can tank for a group; if you're a priest, you can heal for a group; and so on."
    Making Monks better at tanking X raid mob and Guardians better at tanking Y raid mob isn't giving all tanks the equal opportunities we deserve. The fighter archetype is what makes us tanks, not the subclass.

    Question: Anyone know if/when these DPS changes are gonna go live?

    PS: My main is a 50 Inq and I have had maybe 2 or 3 XP grps with a Monk as a main tank. Reactives are a little weirder on them since they don't trigger them very often. I ended up just using direct heals most of the time while in those grps, but I could certainly keep them alive (most recent one was in Sol's Eye). It's not as simple as just recasting a reactive when it wears off but it certainly wasn't impossible to do.

    Message Edited by Alkoun on 07-05-2005 05:16 AM
  17. ARCHIVED-Eyes_of_Truth Guest

    They need to make x4 raids almsot require 6 tanks anf 6 healers and 12 mage/scout... maby not every raid but the truely challengin ones need this setup. 12 of the classes in this game are defense and 12 are offense. They should all have a role in a raid, mobs should hit hard enough that without 6 tanks dividing the damage amoungst themselves and without 6 healers healing them the raid should wipe. How would the dev's manage such a balanced feat?? Like this:
    Allow fighters to divide the damage of a single blow amongs themselves. I call it a Batalion. 2-6 fighters can join up and as long as they stay withina certain radius as eachother, any direct hit that one recieves is divided amongst them so it can be healed easier than healing one persion taking amazingly high spike damage. Lets say a mob deals a deadly attack that does 10000 damage. One fighter might be serverly hurt or killing by this mightly blow, but insted, this is divided between the 6 fighters, each taking 1667 damage each, which would then be mitigated or avoided. This is how brawlers can effectively tank. If they dont dodge it, they wont get one hit killed, but if they do dodge it, it lowers the overall damage from that blow by 1667. Makes it less of a chance to block or die, but rather a "if you dodge it you save healers even more power", if they dodnt dodge it they will mitigate about 30% so thats around 1000, a ward + regeneration could easily cover this. A Heavy armor tank might mitigate this down 70% and recieve only 500 damage almost every time, making reactive heals cover this damage.
    I have ALLWAYS thought it sooooooo odd that you have the GINORMUSLY UBER DRAGON OF IMPENDING DOOM!.............. and only one persion bold enough <or stupid/recklace enough> to think that they and only they should be taking the hits. (Rambo anyone lol) But a batalion of fighters all shareing the damage and being healing by a squad of healers, eachwitha tank to protect, has allways sounded better and imo adds much more balanced/reasionable idea for massive raiding.
    Currently you only need 1 fighter on a raid and this needs to change!! Dont give them dps that takes away the mage/scout roles, but insted
    let them ALL tank :smileyvery-happy:
    ... and im not saying ALL raids MUST require 6 fighters and 6 priests.... but for balance sake, the truely end game hard core masterfull raids now and in future

    Also, it would be nice to make, like say on difficult x3 raids, make it where one class of fighter tanks it better than other, but the other 2 can tank it just not nearly as effective (aka will have to compensate by having more healers then that reduces overal dps ect... but not FORCING a specific tank)
    Another interesting thing for a x4 raid is 3 mobs that are ^^^ and each can only be tanked easily by a certain class of fighter :
    A magic wielding mob that uses heavy spell damage that requires a crusader's magical expertise to servive- lowest defense vs phys, best defense vs spell
    A deadly blade master mob that has 100% accuracy and deadly single attacks that requires a warriors mitiagion-medium def vs phys, medium def vs spell
    A enraged savage mob that has lower accuracy and deals flurry attack that cant be mitigated, but if avoided, the successive string of 10 blows stops, best def vs phys, worst def vs spell
    This makes all 3 types of tanking a nessessity, as with all 3 type of healing to counter each type of damage. Also, a good blend of casting and physical damage form scouts and mages will be needed, as well as classes that can open up spell and mitigation for the 12 dps classes to effecively attack the foes (Summoners and Rouges i would imagine getting this benefit of greatly owering defense) Enchanters and bards would greatly increase damage done by other while keeping a good constant personal dps just under that of the rouges and summoners, and sorcerors and predators would hammer it down hard with their best damage abilties (that are being enhanced) on the now weakened mobs (thanks to rouges and summoners).
    That is how I wana raid....with varriety bing a key. I want a raid of all of the 24 classes to be the most effective raid force in the game. Not saysing that doubleing or quientuppling up on the same class shouldnt work as the "perfect" raid set up is very rare, but i think that the 24 of all subclass varriety should be the most efficant, with varriables like palyer skill and gear aside.
    If anyone ahs some interesting ideas for Fighters in raids i would love to hear some, and not to toot my own horn, but i have yet to see an idea as effective as mine for what to do with all these wittle tanks scampering around asking "well..just wth am i supposed to do Mr Raid leader??"
    Raid leader responds "Suck it up, soldier!! Now get in formation and go fight Random_epic_boss_01!!! Get in their and lookout for eachother."
  18. ARCHIVED-Suraklin Guest

    I'd take the offensive brawler path if given that option. I hate being MT and with the DPS nerf coming during revamp my Monk is probably going to collect a lot of dust. Which doesn't bother me cause sounds like Necro is finally getting some loving. Dots will stack for summoner classes, our spells are supposed to do more damage, and pets are supposed to tank and DPS better. All pet group anyone??
    Message Edited by Suraklin on 07-13-2005 03:39 AM