Tanktics part three. Guard.

You can check the other two parts of my tanktics series here and here but for those who aren't overly bothered it's simply a small post with combining tactics and the tank archetype abilities to improve them, to give something a bit more well.. Tanky.

Following on from my conversation with Bootae about only being able to guard if you are a shield it occurred to me this is actually a nerf. We're removing something from two handed tanks and not giving them anything in return, it doesn't actually make tanks want to guard more (which they always should anyway) but it certainly gives people ammunition to whine in scenarios etc about "OMG not a 2h tank.. ffs you're not mdps". If we were to only allow guard to be activated if using a shield then potentially we'd have to increase 2h damage to make it worthwhile for tanks to go 2h in scenarios etc.

Orrrrr..... We could look at combining it with a useless tactic. Now barring Unstoppable Juggernaut the other tank tactics are pretty decent, as we've already commandeered it for a Hold the Line buff then we either have to change another archetype tactic or I'm sure there's a useless tactic each tank has we can replace. I wont go through each class to find it, I wont pretend to know anything about Knights or Blackguards so I'll leave it as that, but here's what I propose instead of a straight "you can only guard if using a shield"

1 Slot Career Tactic - No range - No cool down - Passive
IMPROVED GUARD
If you have a shield equipped the damage split on your guarded target is increased to 75% assigned to you and the effect range is increased to 50ft

I have deliberately gone a bit overboard with this as I felt that my Hold the Line was in retrospect quite weak although it had the right 'feel'. Improved Guard might be a bit potent but it certainly makes choppa and blocka tanks be an absolute beast for guarding targets and much better than the 2h equivalent without nerfing 2h tanks.

Thoughts?

More thoughts on tanktics!

So I'm desperately trying to make my brain work tonight, for some reason motivation has disappeared and I'm tempted to just watch a film or some such, but I'm going to force myself to write something. Better to at least be a bit productive today even if I did sod all at work today.

So I wrote an earlier post about having changes to the taunt and challenge mechanic by adding in a tactic which improves it by speccing deeper into the tanking tree for tanks, and after speaking with Bootae earlier in the week we liked the idea of giving sword and board (or choppa 'n' blocka) tanks something more rewarding for speccing that way in RvR. To me, tactics are an easy way to look at how tanks can be improved, we have certain ones which are shared or at least are all very similar and yet we hardly have any that interact with our archetype abilities (taunt, challenge, guard and hold the line). So after my little thought about challenge/taunt being changed a bit, how about we look at Hold the Line....

Tanks have an unused tactic which is shared amongst them... Unstoppable Juggernaut. This tactic is all but useless these days with and in fact was never that great to start with, I can't see any tank justifying using up a tactic slot on it when there is so many better tactics out there. Now I don't want to make a tactic which works with Hold the Line that makes it the Uberbestomgwtfbbqpwn tactic of all time but I do want to make something which makes you think "Hmm, could I possibly slot this instead?". So after a few thoughts and simply looking at the name of the tactic I actually realised it's fairly simple.

1 Slot Career Tactic - No range - No cool down - Passive
UNSTOPPABLE JUGGERNAUT
While using Hold The Line! you also become immune to roots, snares and knockdowns, this also increases the channeling cost of Hold The Line! to 25 AP/sec

Nice isn't it? You can still be staggered and knocked back and the AP cost does go up, but it certainly helps to make tanks push forward more and gives another nice effect to having a shield. My other version of this was was to include knock backs (but not staggers) and increase the AP again to 30/sec.

Would this make a worthless tactic better? Certainly. Would it be used? I don't yet know but I can see potential for keep sieges and with WAR heading to more important sieges it could find a very nice place. Any thoughts?

'aving a look at 1.3 (aka - All tanks secretly get nerfed)

So 1.3 is incoming for the middle to the end of June and with it comes changes.. Oh yes, more changes to our little game. So, let's take an Orcy look at all these wordy notes.

Land of the Dead
Can't wait, though I only have reservations regarding the 30 minute timer, it doesn't leave a lot of time to get into the dungeon before the inevitable zerg hits and rolls through the place, and by that time, the other zerg will have formed and be ready to hit back. Repeat the cycle and I wonder how many will actually get far to start with. No big deal though, I'm sure it wont be a death every 30 minutes as it will take time and the content should last us. So far, it's looking good.

Sigils replacing wards
Oh thank Gork... The ward system was silly broken forcing you to use certain gear, at least now we have a choice and can work around our set bonuses rather than being pigeonholed. I'm not sure how this will work with getting new wards though I've never had too much of an issue in having to run an instance to basically attune yourself for it. I wonder what sort of wards.. err Sigils we'll be needing in LoD and where they'll start to cross over from tiers... Again, this is a good change though.

PQ Opt outs
Pretty decent again though I'm not sure if I will be passing to be perfectly honest. If we take a keep and I would have won a bag but elect to opt out the roll, do I still get my token since I would have received it in the bag? With the new LoD PQ's though, there will be more getting done. I do love the Bastion Stair system of two or three PQ's to complete before the boss and would have loved to have seen this extended into Lost Vale (to the extent of changing some of the minor bosses to PQ bosses instead). I cant see anyway to cheat the system nor anyway this is bad, so here's hoping it doesn't cause problems for invader PQ's or fort captures...

Enhanced Siege Weapons and 'deadbolts'
Making sieges more like a.. well.. siege rather than a zerg on a door is a good step up from what we currently have. I'm always in favour of making WAR more about battles on keeps and forts than mindless. Though I have to admit, I'd rather have seen deadbolts be a tank RvR ability to replace the now worthless Bulwark, make posterns immune to being bypassed for 15 minutes or some such and simply remove the ability to bypass the posterns on the inner doors.

Instance Lockout changes.
Yes. Yes. Yes. About time they changed it to make it more like other games. This will allow so much more flexibility with guilds who may have members that are a bit more casual or have people who need something from one boss. Glad they finally implemented this to work as other games do.

Action Bar changes
Well I have an addon that does this, so I guess it's one less thing to worry about if it will come as standard.

Inventory slots for crafting
Good yeah I like it... Shame they didn't use the chance to dump a gold sink into the game with it though.

Combat & Careers
Ok, the AoE changes (damage drop and size reduction is good) but why on earth then buff the single target dps up? We're more than capable of taking targets down with the existing STDPS that we have. This starts to come back to the arms race I'm worried about from a previous article. Is it a case that Mythic doesn't want to see cries of NERF so they have to add in a boost? It's all fine and well adding in more damage but when will tanks see the reactive update? By this I mean if we see more and more updates buffing damage output then where is our ability to soak up the damage, not only for ourselves but for our groups?

It's fine saying

"Moving forward, offensive stats will increase all damage by a flat percentage. This will result in high base value damage abilities gaining more benefit from offensive stats. Players should expect to see the damage on single target and positional abilities increase, while multi-target abilities will be reduced in effectiveness."

But what about our shitty little 450 damage absorb shields we have? Do we get a reactive buff to make sure the absorb and mitigation affects are not subsequently weakened? Do we hell.

This in fact turns into a global nerf for tanks, no matter what one you are. Sure you can do a bit more damage now but I don't exactly think too many folks rolled tank careers to do DPS.. But to protect and guard our fellows, to control the flow of battle and to be able to take a beating in order to distract our enemy. Simply by buffing single target DPS now, we lose more of our mitigation and absorb abilities. Our guards will cause us to take more damage and thus be harder to maintain as we'll require more healing. We still (and rightly so) lack the burst and damage output of any DPS classes, but since our survivability has not been increased to match increase in damage our role on the field of battle diminishes a bit more.

We're basically, just weak melee DPS right now. I could rant a lot about tanks and the role in WAR but it's for another day.

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So that's a basic run down, despite my hesitation towards the combat changes and the subsequent affect it will have on Tanks, it needs to be done, well at least the AoE part of it does. Overall this is a very promising patch, the combat changes will need to be tested a lot though and I hope they are open to pushing back the patch if it looks like there's an imbalance. Somehow though, with the fact they've said that LoD is out in June means that regardless of what feedback we give on the PTS, very little will be done, most of it will already have been done by the core testers (and we know how 1.2 turned out...). So lets hope they will listen to feedback on the open PTS more.

Speedbumps on the way to the daily IC trashing.

+++ Warning, frustrated rant ahead +++

Well was idling in IC, bored as guild is normally quiet on a Friday night (I work on Saturdays) and I noticed that Fell Landing was under attack (it had literally started) so I decided to pop off an at least try and get some renown.

I got there as the timer reached 56 minutes left. The inner door was at 80%... what the hell? Ah well, might as well try and repair it.. Oh I can't.. it's been stealth nerfed so you can't repair doors. Ah well, lets see who else is here defending.. Mmmm.. I count thirty or so (one full warband and we had a warband of 6).

We got steamrolled.. Well rain of fired within seconds of the cardboard doors that can't be repaired more than twice every minute being sneezed at and falling over.

What is the actual roll of a tank these days in RvR?

We are no longer roadblocks but speedbumps, and soon we'll be a speedbump with a road around it when they add multiple paths into the lord room.

Our resists have been nerfed so we are fodder for the AoE caster face rolling (well rather face smash ontp keyboard for all the ability it takes. You don't even need to roll).

YOU ARE QUICK TO NERF OUR FECKEN BULWARK BUT GOD FORBID YOU NERF THE AOE

We can't taunt pets to attack us.

If it's not AoE it's disable/knockback/knockdown or anything else to make us unusable.. Normally in AoE stacks as well rather than single target, you know.... Because if it's AoE it's better or something.

Ah *sigh* I dunno... I just feel like Mythic are quick to nerf minority classes but cannot get the balls together to acually get a hot fix out there to prevent the abuse of certain skills made by the popular classes. Hey Mythic.. if the hotfix is too much, you can still adjust. Combined with wanting to make it easier to assault keeps and forts and you wonder why even bother trying to defend if your on a server which is dominated by one side.

Well, since that's IC under attack, I may as well log off play Empire: Total War