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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Really strong tanks
consultant
Member
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.
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.
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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.
I'm drunk. Cheers.
Or I guess you could give tanks the power to absorb all the damage, but that either makes tanks overpowered or it comes at the cost of all their dps. And I for one like doing a bit of bashing while I'm a tank.
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.
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
Tanking is really great in that game though, since you have to actively block attacks and focus as much on the boss as you do your own rotations. AND you still have to do good dps to keep aggro. Pretty insane. DPS classes had it easy, smh...
And while I'm gushing, Warrior in that game had one of the best action-oriented kits I've seen in a game. Building up those Edge stacks super fast with different combos so you could unleash as many thicc Scythes as possible... MMmm delicious.
Gonna be honest, TERA is not a good MMO, but it's a damn fine dungeon brawler.
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.
You're bleeding for salvation, but you can't see that you are the damnation itself." -Norther
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
They should just buff the dps classes, who needs healers and tanks, when you can just blast everything away?
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.
Heh, well, aggro was important in FFXIV, but it looks like they're taking a big step away from that in the expansion in 3 weeks. It's been like 2 weeks since the info was dropped and I still don't know how I feel about it. I'm leaning towards "it's a bad decision that dumbs the game down a little." But it also lets tanks focus more on DPS, reactive defense, and party-utility, so idk.
Healers, on the other hand, are gonna lose a bunch of DPS skills in exchange for receiving even more healing skills, and holymoly a lot of healer mains are not happy about that one. The prevalent criticism is: "If the devs wanted healers to spend less time DPSing, then they should have just made enemies do more damage so that healing is more needed. These changes just make healers more boring without solving any balance issues." I'm trying to wait for the release before I pass judgement. In Tera, the healers did absolute garbage damage in dungeons, and that was still fun because you had to constantly save your children (aka DPS) all the time. Maybe FFXIV will end up in similar territory.
As for Ashes, we already know that there will be a lot of options for "pure" tanks/healers or ones that focus more on support or dps. The key to making that approach work is to make sure each spec is roughly balanced (you have to give up something to be better at tanking/healing). And even more important is making sure there is diverse content, so that there's a good time/place for every spec. Some dungeons should have weak-sauce enemies, who's damage can be avoided easily, and therefore healers are unnecessary. Other dungeons should have much higher damage threat, and therefore would be easier with a healer (but maybe still possible without one).
I haven't read that the changes will be in the next FFXIV expansion, but just removing threat management doesn't necessarily dumb down the game, it just switches the focus to something else. Whether that be the active mitigation, or the positioning, or the resource management, etc as long as there is a focus for skilled players I don't mind. It's almost impossible to develop a combat system where you are expected to do all these elements to the max, so games have to focus on certain aspects of the role more than others.
More importantly the tanking focus needs to work well in the context of the other roles and in the overall gameplay style. One of the things that always puzzled me about the raid boss encounters in GW2 is that a lot of the boss mechanics force players to split up and work individually, and yet there are no targetted healing abilities. All the buffs and heals are done in small aoe's which means the raid group have to be stacked in order to make use of them.
All the roles in a party need to complement one-another and the group content needs to be designed around that dynamic. Again, going back to GW2, the combat in that game was designed to be high mobility individual gameplay. Every character has a dodge roll and a self-heal. But then when the players cried out for end-game PvE group content, the devs literally just ham-fisted in a holy trinity that the core game wasn't designed for, and put the players into WoW-style raid encounters. It's so bizarre and it just flat out doesn't work. Oh and as the cherry on top the UI in GW2 is absolute garbage and in no way suited for group content.