Really strong tanks

If tanks were made strong enough then healers would be less important. There would still be clerics but they would not heal for thousands and thousands of damage they would fill more of a support role. Still very important.

This would make pvp not so healer dependent. . 1) It would not be all about killing the enemies healer 2) teams would not win just because their healers are so skilled 3) You could go and pvp with lets say for 3v3 without a cleric.

Obviously tank would have to be severly nerfed in pvp. Not going to make huge long post about game mechanics devs can work that out just wanted to present idee.

One other thing I would like to mention is depending on game mechanics a party or group might only need a tank to start a raid or dungeoun instead of having to wait for tank and healer. I know that it was already stated that they were going to go with holy trinity but wnated to present this idea.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Noaani

I'm confused.

You say make tanks stronger for PvE, and as a bonus this would make healers less required in PvP, but then you say tanks would need to be nerfed for PvP.

The good thing with grouping in Ashes over other games is that the way the game is set up, there will be an overall need for fewer tanks.

Groups in MMO's usually take one tank and one healer. In a game like WoW where groups are of 5 characters, this means every tank/healer that is grouping allows for 3 others to join a group as well. Or the reverse is that for every 60 non tank/healer characters wanting a group, you need to have 20 tanks and 20 healers to take them all out.

In Ashes, with groups of 8, a single tank and healer is able to take out 6 other characters. This means that same group of 60 non tank/healer characters wanting to group only need to find 10 tanks and 10 healers.

This all kind of makes your last point moot.

As to the idea of just making tanks stronger - if tanks were stronger, then groups would just go out with 8 tanks and kill all the PvE group content. If tanks were made stronger but still needed a healer to clear all the PvE group content, then making the tank stronger would have been an exercise in futility as it would have made no actual change to what people do.

Headmaster

It's all about balance mate.. The healer-role should be vital for almost any group-activity. No healers? Then that should result in massive time-outs for healing-pots to make their magic, which would slow down any activity. For pvp it's even more important to have balance. Beast-mode tanks in order to remove the importance of clerics sound bad though, imho.
I'm drunk. Cheers.

Wandering Mist

Why do you want healers to be less important?

Plateau

Azathoth

Please note, IS has stated they will not split PvE and PvP abilities/gear. So if you are outfitted for PvE, you are outfitted for PvP, same with ability selection. Some might be more favorable in a PvP environment, but none will (supposedly) be made for just PvP or PvE.

CrazySquiggle

I just hope tanks are as important as a tank in this firght from TERA. RMHM is basically a trial by fire for most tanks and will test if you truly know what you are doing or not. In this fight there usually is no "barely surviving" a hit. In this fight the cleric (priest or mystic) is only there for revives and cleanse/debuffs. This fight made my head spin the first few times I tanked it (this video is not of me, but someone a bit better).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0gzM7eP6zY

Wandering Mist

@whitedude31 I'm not overly familiar with Tera endgame but it looks like every single boss mechanic in that video can be avoided. The boss doesn't even seem to use auto attacks on the tank. If that's the case then why have a tank at all? The whole point of a tank is to take hits that other characters can't take, but if all damage is 100% avoidable then why take a tank over a damage dealer?

Damokles

It is easy:
They only have to MAKE TANKS LIKE TANKS.
Slow and steady, low overall damage but burst capable. If you manage to stop a tank in his threads, then he is practically dead.
A tank is not supposed to deal high overall damage, and a tank is not supposed to live on his own. A tank needs his repair crew and his infantry to support his charge.

CrazySquiggle

wanderingmist wrote: »

@whitedude31 I'm not overly familiar with Tera endgame but it looks like every single boss mechanic in that video can be avoided. The boss doesn't even seem to use auto attacks on the tank. If that's the case then why have a tank at all? The whole point of a tank is to take hits that other characters can't take, but if all damage is 100% avoidable then why take a tank over a damage dealer?

The boss is auto attacking every time the hand slams on the ground and it hits hard enough to insta kill any other class. If you pay attention to the party members health bars on the left you will see many of them die multiple times. If the boss moves around at all then it causes a team wipe. Also every time you see the silver emblem appear on the screen it says "Defense Successful" meaning the lancer blocked successfully. Every time a tank blocks in tera it is a manual button press. True skill basically

Plateau

Blackhearted

I just recently started playing prot pala on wotlk on a private server. Do you know what I hate the most? Not requiring others.

I can leave healer drinking mana and just move on, I dont need dps either as I seem to be topping the dps on my lv 50 tank...
But the group doesnt need me either. Healer and dps can just go on w/o me when I need a drink and it feels bad.

I hope that in ashes the types will require each other to progress in dungs. When a tank is lacking a healer in dung he should die, if he has no dps the heal should run out of mana and the party should wipe.

Wandering Mist

blackhearted wrote: »

I just recently started playing prot pala on wotlk on a private server. Do you know what I hate the most? Not requiring others.

I can leave healer drinking mana and just move on, I dont need dps either as I seem to be topping the dps on my lv 50 tank...
But the group doesnt need me either. Healer and dps can just go on w/o me when I need a drink and it feels bad.

I hope that in ashes the types will require each other to progress in dungs. When a tank is lacking a healer in dung he should die, if he has no dps the heal should run out of mana and the party should wipe.

WotLK was the start of the shift towards how WoW is today, particularly for tanking and healing. If you go back and play on a TBC private server you'll see just how different tanking is. The other key difference between WotLK and TBC is that they took away the need for CC. Blizzard buffed tanks and aoe threat generation so much that you can literally charge into 5-6 mobs and be perfectly fine. Try doing that in TBC and you will wipe very quickly, usually because you couldn't keep threat on that many mobs at once meaning the moment the healer tried to heal you, they would pull aggro and die.

I know this isn't really related but I find it fascinating comparing how tanking works in the different mmorpgs. For instance, in Retail WoW tanking relies on correct use of your defensive cooldowns and active mitigation to avoid getting 1-shot by dangerous mobs. In pre-WotLK WoW there is a higher emphasis on threat management. Tanks, Healers and DPS all need to monitor their threat to ensure they don't pull aggro from the tank, something you don't really need to worry about in Retail WoW.

By contrast, in GW2 and FFXIV threat is practically irrelevant and instead the focus is on good positioning while maintaining high dps. Finally in ESO the difficulty comes from managing your resources, since blocking uses stamina and you can easily run out if you block too much. Because of this tanks in ESO can rarely actively tank all the mobs in a pack, and so have to choose which ones to taunt and which ones to leave for their teammates to handle.

As you can see, each game requires different things for tanks, which is partly why I find tanking as a role so interesting. It makes me wonder just what tanking will be like in Ashes.

Wandering Mist

whitedude31 wrote: »

wanderingmist wrote: »

@whitedude31 I'm not overly familiar with Tera endgame but it looks like every single boss mechanic in that video can be avoided. The boss doesn't even seem to use auto attacks on the tank. If that's the case then why have a tank at all? The whole point of a tank is to take hits that other characters can't take, but if all damage is 100% avoidable then why take a tank over a damage dealer?

The boss is auto attacking every time the hand slams on the ground and it hits hard enough to insta kill any other class. If you pay attention to the party members health bars on the left you will see many of them die multiple times. If the boss moves around at all then it causes a team wipe. Also every time you see the silver emblem appear on the screen it says "Defense Successful" meaning the lancer blocked successfully. Every time a tank blocks in tera it is a manual button press. True skill basically

Ah ok. Looking at it closer I can see the boss taking swipes at the tank. Very interesting. It definitely looks like something I would enjoy, if only the levelling process wasn't a complete mess to get to end-game.

Dygz

In Ashes, Clerics aren't just healers. A Cleric/Tank could be doing a significant amount of tanking.
Even a Cleric/Cleric could be dealing more damage than healing - especially if most of his team have Cleric as secondary archetype.
Since damage dealing is an key aspect of the Ashes Cleric, we may not see Clerics designed to deal thousands and thousands of healing as we do in WoW in any case.
In NWO, Clerics run out of mana for healing and have to deal damage in order to refill that mana pool.
Steven doesn't want Clerics to be solely focused on healing, so we should expect a design where Clerics are typically doing more than just healing - regardless of how effective the Tank is.
And, we don't know enough details about Ashes archetypes to know how effective Bards can be at healing.

Also, no reason for the devs to design the Tank archetype to be so highly effective at holding aggro that groups don't have to wait for a healer when several people in the group can have healing augments. Also, several people in a group could have aggro augments rather than relying on one player to hold the aggro.

Ashes is a PvX game, so... the devs are not going to design the Tank archetype to be "strong" for PvP and comparatively "weak" (nerfed) for PvP. If the devs design the archetypes and mobs well, we should generally be using the same abilities and augments for PvP that we use for PvE.

Having a highly effective Tank won't negate the desire to wait for a Cleric to join so the group can take advantage of Cleric utility skills.

seaber

whitedude31 wrote: »

Every time a tank blocks in tera it is a manual button press. True skill basically

Truly reactionary*

Wandering Mist

@dygz This is something we will have to find out, as we don't yet know what all the possible skill augments will do for each role. It will also depend on how difficult the content is. If being a Cleric as your secondary class gives you decent self-healing, and boss fights contain very little unavoidable damage, there might not be any need for a dedicated healer.

Similarly, if there is a set of secondary augments that allow you to kill mobs without a tank, then tanking becomes pointless. This is the problem that GW2 has where even in high level fractals (end-game 5-man content) there is usually no need for a dedicated healer or tank.

consultant

Well noaani with out getting into a bunch of number crunching I will put it to you this way. Tanks can be made so strong that healers are not needed. What this does make it easier to do dungeouns cause healers are not needed so do not have to find a healer just a tank. (Depending on how hard the content is.)

But we are not trying to make healers needless just well if we do not have a healer and a group has a good skill set they can option to just go without a cleric and all dps plus tank.

Could actually do the opposite make healers so strong that a true tank would not be need justed a warrior with a survival set up and sheild.

Cleric would still play the role of a support class and would be a very important role and have something worthy to contribute, but would not be absulutlely necessary in most boss fights. Think they should be necessary in most difficult boss fights.

So the point is while they would still contribute greatly to a party you would not longer need a a dedicated healer to do a dungeoun. Just a tank. (Actually would be cool if non tanks could tank simple dungeouns or entry level dungeouns).

The way the holy trinity works dps tank healer is you have to have a tank and a healer to do just about any thing.

As far as healers are concerned in pvp. Here are some real scenerios. 10 vs 10 bracket with a combined effort of all ten players they cannot kill any one cause healer healing every one. So you have to kill the healer first but even with the combine effort of ten players you cannot kill the healer cause healers can heal so much so...it come down to who runs out of mana first or whatever energy they use. Healers can be so good that is a lot easier to kill a raid boss at the highest difficulty that it is to kill one healer.

Some healers are so good that well it is almost impossible to them and if cannot kill them then you cannot win the battle ground.

Here is a real scenerio some teams have healers so good in pvp that the dps can litereally just go afk and do nothing because there is no the other team is going to kill them cause their healer is do good. And if they cannot kill them then they cannot gain control of the area.

So pvp becomes about one thing about killing the healer. If you cannot kill the healer then you cannot win.
Plus if you have a really good healer that healer can carry you in some instances just because you cannot be killed. You just win caus e you have good heals. Presents real problems PvP cause it ties pvp to one dynamic killing the healer as opposed to a variety of things.

Really strong tanks would have to be nerfed in pvp cause if you say have a tanke that can take up millions and millions of damage and you only have 300k hit points you will never kill him. Would take a whole raid group to actually kill a really strong tank. In my experience I have seen warrior with certain setups that make the extremely difficult to kill which is ok. But if you create a really strong tank and then just let them loos in lets say 3v3 there would not be a way to kill that guy. For example he could have 1000 hp and you would only have 100 hp so you would have to do ten times the dps as normal. And lets say that guy only does 25 percent the dps you do then you would die when you reached 0hp and he would be at 600hp there for no way to win. (Actually a lot more complecated than that but it is just simplified for your understandment) Therefore they would have to be severely nerfed for pvp. Some games intentionaly make tanks bad for pvp (non-vaible) so they do not have to deal with the class balance problems.

Damokles

@consultant
They should just buff the dps classes, who needs healers and tanks, when you can just blast everything away?

Wandering Mist

@consultant I think I understand your concern now, even though I doubt we will ever get into a situation where the better healer wins no matter the circumstances. Still, let's say that is the case. In my opinion the solution shouldn't be to nerf healers but rather to give players ways of shutting down the healers. There are 2 main ways of doing this: healing reduction debuffs and crowd control.

I personally believe that healing debuffs are lazy game design and so would favour adding more ways of shutting healers down. Guildwars did this very well with various hexes that put pressure on the healers. There were also spike comps designed to nuke a single target instantly 100-0.

Putting counters into a game is far more effective than just simply nerfing or removing stuff.

CrazySquiggle

Tera did a decent job at solving that pesky healer problem by releasing the ninja. A class that was designed for pvp and can nuke a single target no matter how strong. Even lancers who were the strongest pvp class in the game get beat by ninjas.

Child Item