Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Skills I think every tank needs: block stance, pulling enemies, aggro shouts, sprint, maybe some protection shields/aura's that you can put on party members. I also like something Silkroad had: pain split. A move to distribute damage over the team or a buff to partially carry over the damage taken by a party member to the tank.
Stat wise damage output should be minimal, defense should be max!
Role
What should actually tank do?
This question could be answered in several different ways, but i believe, that tank should do different things depending on their skill level.
New tank should just be able to hold the aggro (or do any mechanics they need to do in order for party to survive)and survive to complete their role.
Mediocre one should be able to control mobs' movement and buff allies or debuff the enemies.
A good tank should be able not only to survive without or with minimal help from healers and keep higher uptimes of buffs and debuffs.
The best tanks(that refers to about 1 or 2% of the tanks) should have enough versitility to fill another role with a hindered effectiveness, say a top cleric/tank or tank/cleric should be able to fill the role of a healer but perform on a level of mediocre healer
Please note, that this is just my thoughts on tanking, what I believe to be fun and challenging.
Encounter design
The way one tanks may be heavily influenced by the circumstances, for example, boss that is all alone and hits mostly basic attacks in a conal area will be tanked differently than that often summons packs of mobs.
The circumstances, in my opinion, should vary heavily between the bosses and raids, I would love to see many different mechanics that are not only about holding aggro, but swapping it between two tanks, moving around to block projectiles meant for teammates or perhaps taking avoidable damage or debuffs to complete mechanics.
Damage mitigation
Damage mitigation, in my opinion, should also be an interesting topic, I would divide it into two types
Active - block, dodge etc.
Passive - armor, health, resistances etc.
First, none of these should be random, the outcomes in highly decisional and challenging PvE encounter should always be predictable with enough skill and experience. Player should always need to choose, whether they use block, dodge or take the full damage.
Another flavor and layer of difficulty, mostly in planning(and perhaps for ingame or community challenges?), could be resistances to specific types of damage, for example raid in a volcano could require tank to wear gear that provides higher protection from earth/fire damage, while dungeon in tundra should be more water/ice oriented.
Aggro management
I myself prefer hard taunt options over aggro system, as it allows dps players to fully focus on dpsing without worrying if tank can keep up with aggro. This also opens ways for tanks to manage aggro between themselves in certain situations without worrying about aggro to decrease.
Multiple tanks?
I would like to issue a doubt I've seen in some comments, I believe that two or more tanks in a raid is completely viable and offtanking should definately be a thing, especially for groups that lack experience where both tank cannot handle many mobs and hold the boss at once and dps do not deal enough damage to neclect the mobs as soon as they are stacked. what's more, in some mechanics, in my opinion, offtank should be a must.This system works in many MMOs I've played and I believe it is viable, after all this is one of the tactics players came up with in order to remedy any problems they have encountered with a single tank in raid.
Should we be able to complete the entire game with the same 8-player crew, lather-rinse-repeating the same skill combinations time after time? Should we have to mix things up party-wise in order to be the most effective in each encounter?
Personally, I'd like a mix of different types of encounter, so that they stay feeling fresh. If you only ever need one Tank for any given encounter, then Tank players are going to feel pretty left out. The first group of 8 takes the Tank, and the other groups don't need one, so take the extra DD, meaning that the other Tank players don't get a look-in. Why be a Tank, in that case?
I would like to see less threat mechanics needed and more "body guard" like features. For example say you're on a world boss with AOE projectiles and the tank jumps in front of his allies and it does damage mitigation based on say a cone shape around the player. This would be cool because it would encourage players to make formations rewarding organization and skill and punish disorganized stragglers. Also more skills that enrage a target to attack you instead of relying on threat. The tank taking a more active role with utility makes it far more enjoyable to play and more likely people will want to play it.
PvE:
Threat diminishing as a factor. Lets say threat is not just a sum of damage*modifier but it diminishes over time like every 10 seconds all acumulated threat is halved which more or less evens out threat output thus increasing tank participation in combat, instead of simply spamming threat skills it now requires more flexibility from the tank while those who overdps close their gaps and lets them carry on. In theory, at least, it should prevent tanks from perma locking bosses while adding more flexibility to the DPS.
Threat management skills would be a nice addition. Not just an "oh-shit-threat" button but things that would either transfer a part of threat from a party member to the tank or limiting threat generation by other party members.
Skill interactions. Lets say you fight a caster boss, interupting one's spell would provide a boost to threat, either flat amount a percentage or whatnot. The idea is that certain interactions would increase threat levels at a significant rate making timing, adaptation and tactical use of skills more important than simple threat skills spam.
Passives. Another way of making it more engaging to play the tough one. We might modify threat management by giving certain passive bonuses that increase threat generation while we are not at the top of threat table. It would help to catch up and take the aggro but wouldn't make it straight forward to maintain it. Lets say for example you're a Nightshield and you open up the raid encouter with a stealth attack that deals a lot of damage, this allows you to generate even more threat but as the fight goes on you are not as efficient in threat generation as lets say the Guardian, so once you drop to the second place you can perform another burst attack that will set the fight back on track.
Threat disergard situations. Lets stick to the mage type boss. A player casts silencing or magic dampening spell. As the spell is being cast the boss regardless of its threat priorities targets that very player with a type of counterspell to interupt or block spell casting. Setting up few weakspots around which boss behavoir operates should add some flavour to the fight.
Second-level skill interactions. This ties with threat disregard and skill interactions. Lets assume the same situation but add another step. A player casts silence, the boss disregards threat and casts counterspell. The tank interputs and the threat is multiplied.
PvP:
Taunts work on players forcing them attack the caster for a reduced amount of time.
Primary tanks take less damage from players this value is halved for secondary tanks.
Please design group encounters around one of each archetype in the party being optimal, as a general rule, including one tank/x. Perhaps still doable without a tank/x, just less optimal.
Please use the same general rule of thumb for raids. If the encounter is meant for 40 man raids, design it so 5 main tanks are needed for optimal chances in general. Variation is fine, with some bosses only needing 3 tanks, and some requiring 7 tanks for the most optimal setup.
If a 40 man raid only needs 1-2 main tanks like we've seen in several other games, I would consider that a rather flawed PvE system for Ashes. It's a system that actively discourages people from playing tanks if they can't find a spot in the raid with their tank/x character, because the 1-2 slots are already filled.
PvP
Just please make the tank decent and equally necessary in PvP compared with the other archetypes, and we should be all good.
As someone who played healers for years, especially in shaiya, it can be rough to heal multiple targets at once but it was also enjoyable to figure out priorities and cast/cooldown times for the most beneficial healing of the party.
I also fell in love with being tank/tanky. I've both played tanky healer and dps tank, mostly because full tank felt unrewarding/useless, especially in PvP. I think most tanks work best when they do something else besides of only being a dummy (or get ignored) for your team, but I would like to see more love towards true tanks.
With all this said: I would love to see more main tanks but also off-tank possibilities. I do want to see main tank being viable in PvP and actually feel like they bring something to the fight besides of just poking enemies with debuffs and be a buff bot for your team.
- Tanks should be able to dodge attacks/skills by tumbling or sidestepping mitigating some dmg and making it easier for healers to maintain their health
- Boss skills/attacks should be interruptable, since it partialy Action combat it would be nice if "staggering/stunning" skills aimed at right part of boss that is a core of attack/skill would interrupt cast. This would also allow party members to help tank mitigate some damage and would reward skillfull plays.
- Some Bosses should be smart enough to know they should focus healers/dps so tank would have to keep their instant aggro skills at hand.
- I'd like to see some mechanics that would require multiple tanks to rotate on a boss and his minions.
Giving tanks the ability to seriously damage mobs as well will help offset the need for the group to crowd control. To me dps should not be the only thing a class can bring to a group but something every class brings, even healers.
Ranged (bow/caster) tanking would be really cool for example.
Debuff based tanks would be another example.
In PvP I think it would be cool to see tanks that can constantly peel by kicking other players off their team-mates and act as line-of-sight barriers against ranged attackers.
Maybe a tank-healer hybrid who heals over time based on a multiplied absorbed dmg amount.
Maybe a generalized situation where off-tanking or ''burst tanking'' (only being able to directly tank for a short while) is the only real possibility agains top-tier bosses and larger groups of players, so players would have to play ''hot potato'' with the boss(es) all the time. Would definetly keep things more lively than the classical stuff.
Honestly, I'm not a big fan of tanking.
I've never been a tank in any of the mmo-rpgs I've played, but I know there's going to be no real success without taking risks, without innovating.
And that's why I say, yeah, go for something new and unique.
If it just doesn't work and people hate it, you can always just tone it down to something more standardish.
I mean, you can have one/a few ''standard'' tank classes and others who are innovative and more rewarding.
For example, tanks should actually be worth their weight in PvP. In a lot of MMOs, tanks are looked down on for most of PvP. Tanks should be able to lead the charge in PvP events, their "taunts" should be replaced with a silence or a debuff that reduces an attackers damage.
For PvE, tanks should have a more active role with their shield. A lot of MMOs forget about a tank's shield, and just add it in for the stats. There should be active blocking and parrying. Making the tank feel more unique in their role will of course break the hard theme of most people avoiding to play a boring tank.
Hello again! So, I agree with the sentiment that tanks shouldn’t do as much damage as dps is fair. If we want to secure our role, it’s fair that dps and support have their role secured as well.
Utility: omg yes. Tanks need to be as engaged. So having active and passive utility options is nice.
Active blocking: having the ability to engage in blocking is a fun mechanic. Instead of shields being a chance to block but more being an active ability like a weapon swing is fun. Better shields could use less stamina to block absorb more from the swing. Larger chunks of damage would eat more of your stamina and what not.
Parry/dodge:
This is another fun mechanic to involve. If you’re actively tanking a boss/mob having the ability to evade or parry just adds to the mix. I don’t know if this is possible to add in, but it is enjoyable to have things to do. I don’t know how you’d be able to incorporate this. I imagine it would be difficult.
Ideally, it is nice to actively damage and actively mitigate, not just in cooldowns but in placement and damage absorption.
Just spitballing. A huge fan of the work done so far. I’m sure I’ll have more to add.
What im worried most about as a tank is being killed in a pvp system you can not turn off. if all the dps deal more damage than you on equal footing then your mitigation needs to be good enough to put you on equal footing. I understand the game is supposed to be group and community oriented but there will be days when friends are offline and you just want to go out and gather. I don't think anyone should be punished for choosing a class whose role is not maxing damage. that being said, tanks should not do as much damage as the classes you have designed as dps.
raiding/ dungeons.
I think simple is best when it comes to threat generation and holding. the average joe or jane should be able to tank. so can high dps pull threat off someone sure but it should not be hard to get that threat back as a tank. if you want to make tanking feel important in dungeons and raids id treat it like housing. ( location is everything) that being said paying attention to a fight instead of your abilities has always been what's fun for me. if the boss is about to breath fire at you make sure no one else is behind you. if the boss is about to stomp on the ground make sure he does it away from the rest of the group. there are obviously more creative and fun ideas but movement is what's fun for me in a fight as a tank. if I have to jump to not be rooted or brought to my knees awesome. if i have to active block a tail swipe as an off tank woah i better be paying attention to the animations. keep me focused on where everything is and what's going on. not a meter of how much damage others are doing. if i wanted to worry about making up for my lack of damage with threat generation. i would just play something that feels more rewarding for doing higher damage.
Good luck on whatever you decide.
1. Tank's skills
- Tanks needs skills that aggro mobs to them and gives them defense which they can also get from another support class or healer type of class.
- Tanks needs skills that either debuff the enemy or buff allies with certain elements like fire resist etc.
- Tanks needs skills that do not too much damage but helps him out with defense.
2. Different type of Tanks for different Areas
- Tanks needs to have some special sets of armors for certain areas which they need to grind to be better in Fire type areas or any other type.
- Tanks needs types of shields that also helps them but could also buff certain skills cause of the special ability of the shield.
- Tanks needs Swords with that aswell as the shields I just mentioned.
3. One Tank or many Tanks.
- The Tank needs to be unique in itself. Having metas for certain areas with different type of damage would be greatly appreciated but having one gear that does it all will not be good.
- There needs to be ONE Tank and not any other class that could tank as much or have the other type of tanks balanced.
- Tank Specialty in certain Areas, Tank Gear better in some areas. It needs to be unique.
As for the end of my post, I might not be the most experienced MMO player out there but one thing is sure, most of these things I said is mostly true for most of us. Having Meta Gear is boring. We want diversity and types of Gear for the tank. Best Fire Tank build, Best Water Tank build and even Lightning. Different Meta's in different domains. I think every classes should have diversity aswell as the tank. Please don't make One Meta if you think of having some Meta in the game put different types of it. Thank you for Reading
Chatting, discussing but mostly here to give my opinion/ideas. Howdy !
Mitigation, mobility, shields, crowd control.
Honestly the question is phrased so vaguely i assume it needs to be taken literally as in " 1 MT + 1 OT" vs "multiple tanks".
Also it surprises me how many people are talking about tank mechanics, so either everyone misunderstood the question or i am.
That said if i understood it correctly: several tanks is the way to go especially considering AoC decided to go with the 64 class combo / 8 tank classes.
Which out of those 8 there will UNDOUBTEDLY be a few that lean towards more group support and less self mitigation, and others will be better tanks and shine under certain conditions were as the meta class will be determined by consistently performing above the others for the available encounters.
Also designing encounters to require more tanks will have raids dedicate more slots to tanks translating into that it will be more forgiving towards bringing "under performing" classes.
Otherwise If you go with the traditional MT + OT that translate into that both tank slots will need to be for "top performers" in the meta.
The other benefit of designing around having several tanks is the freedom to make more epic feeling encounters that rely more heavily on teamwork, let alone a hectic chaotic fight is fun and exciting.
Thus ideally content for a 8 man grp should be designed for 2 tanks; 16 man 3-4 tanks, 40 man 6 tanks
One thing that i do want to mention about PvP, if taunt skills are implemented for PvE please make them useful for PvP. Either by debuffing the affected players reducing their damage done to anyone else but the tank that applied the taunt, or by having the tank redirecting the damage output of the affected player onto him for X duration of taunt.
Because turning tank playstyle and theme of mitigating and redirecting damage onto themselves in PvE to CC machines with burst damage cooldowns in PvP like some other games do...feels cheap !
That system would be a snooze fest. Anything that is passive threat from team mates to a tank is a pathetic system. The party members should be able to limit threat generation, a tank should be able to pull aggro but a system where party members limit threat by giving the threat to the tank will result in very boring dungeons. It would be tanking on rails. Worse, it would be grouped dungeons on rails.
In truth, we require dungeons where a single tank can tank and also dungeons where multiple tanks should be required to tank. Any single line input whereby every dungeon needs multiple tanks or every dungeon needs only a single tank will be monotonous and not cutting edge at all. In reality, a real fight doesn't have a designated target and in the best combat simulators you don't either. Its the reason why FPS is so rampant on all platforms - there is not a designated kill order, a designated threat generator or a designated ability to shed threat unless you kill the threat first.
Due to the disposition of MMOs whereby one shots are often reserved for enraged bosses or for select bosses, there can be little deviation from the standards at all. Thus, the only solution is the grey solution of some dungeons requiring a single tank and some dungeons requiring multiple tanks.
IMO, DAOC style balancing is still the model to follow all these years later. Healers are very bad at healing theirselves, but very good at healing others. Every powerful CC/ability in the game has a counter. Great team play means healers need help from other healers, brutal CC has a counter, and team play peeling DPS is more effective than healers healing. Coordination is king.
The TLDR: Tanks should be strong, but far from invulnerable. Great team play makes tanks nearly invulnerable.
Tanks should be absolutely essential in a siege fight for example, holding bottlenecks with a sheildwall, rushing in with their dps friends headfirst and harrasing/debuffing the enemies.
Three core abilities from the best pvp mmo that tanks have:
•Hold the line: You bring up your shield and buffs everyone behind you.
•Guard: You take 50% of the damage from your guarded target if you stay within short range.
•Challenge: You make the enemies in front of you to only deal 70% damage to everyone but you.
When i heard AoC will have big castle siege fights and a trinity system with heal, dps, tanks I was really hoping it would atleast be a somewhat similar experience like this ⬇
Would you prefer more traditional MMORPG main and off-tank roles, or would you prefer to see combat experiences with several tanks fighting?
I would love to see something new or blended to the experiences I've had since Everquest 2 (Desert of Flames onward) all the way to Overwatch. I think most of us would.
I really loved the idea (can't remember who said it) of Guardians all coming together to create a wall in certain unique scenarios to defend the players (or whatever) behind doing the DPS and healing work. Sort of a synergistic approach in unique encounters.
I also would like to still be able to use the traditional tank/off-tank roles for the more traditional content.
Hopefully there's a way to blend these play styles to complement each other rather than a binary approach which would only serve to limit our options.
Like most of the career tanks, I have a lot of opinions on the topic but after all of dissertations already put forward, I would say the topic has been well covered already. Thanks for listening and keep up the great work Ashes Team!
hmmm, this tells me that if we are talking about tank role and not tank "archetype" this will likely mean that other archetypes which have tank as secondary will have taunt abilities/increased threat. I like this.
As far as the question goes, its kind of confusing still but I'll try my best to answer.
It's nice to have diversity in fight mechanics where different types of tanks are needed. Thinking back to Vanilla/TBC WoW, you would need to have a warlock tanking in AQ40 for twin emps/Ilidan, or mage tank in Gruul's lair. This makes it interesting so that it wont just be the archetype tank needed but also other archetypes that spec into tank as secondary. But that doesn't really answer the question.
Most boss fights feel epic to tank is when more than 1 tank is needed for boss fights, where either aggro resets during a phase, tanks have to rotate because of debuff stacks, they teleport/go somewhere else and another tank has to quickly get aggro. The whole 1 MT and then OTs that are only necessary for like trash between fights and then they just change gear and dps for boss feels kind of off-putting.
So in short, Several tanks fighting would be my personal choice, especially given its going to be 40man raids.
I've seen complaints that Tanks get ignored in other MMOs. Here we can take a leaf from League of Legends (strong PvP combat design), where you CANNOT ignore tanks because:
- - If tank A reaches the backline of team B (where the glass cannons and healers are) they will CC the back line, which opens a window for the rest of team A to sweep into otherwise dangerous positioning and unleash devastation on team B.
- - The counterplay is for team B's tank to CC the incoming attackers from team A, so that team B's backline can get back on their feet and counterattack.
That is to say: Tanks in League emanate threat because of their ability to tie you down - not because they will deal damage to you. This is what allows tanks to hold a front line, because you DO NOT GO CLOSE TO THE ENEMY TANK - but you poke them from afar and try to wear them down slowly (Or the tanks butt heads and all chaos breaks loose). Ignoring a tank in PvP is allowing them to tie down your dps/healing.Some abilities that help tanks achieve this:
Otherwise, it always helps when Tanks can positionally intercept incoming danger on behalf of their teammates.
For PvE content, I think we need a new approach to how tanking is shared:
-
As someone who thoroughly enjoys tanking in MMORPGs I think having a mix of both is always the way to go.
I enjoy main tanking, I enjoy off tanking, I enjoy tanking packs, I enjoy tanking bosses.
What makes it enjoyable in the long run is being able to show that you are a skilled tank in whatever situation you are in. But overall I think the more variance there is in how fights can be handled is where it gets truly interesting.
A full on tank that never gets to tank because only 1 Main Tank is needed feels bad.
A tank that always only tanks packs or off-tanks also feels bad.
I enjoy tank swaps, tank mechanics, being able to get adds stacked up and bring something to a group other than just tankiness.
As a tank I want to provide a layer of safety to the party a damage dealer or healer cannot provide.
What I don't like is being locked out of certain encounters where other tanks might outshine me so drastically that I will be benched. I want to have options to adapt to certain encounters without having to hold on to 20 different armor sets. I dislike having one for each elemental resistance, physical damage, avoidance, high HP/Armor etc.
Also in case I am not needed to tank I'd like to be able to support the party with cool downs, auras/shouts, etc and not be completely useless.
I don't mind not being a damage dealer but I also don't want to be in a spot where a DPS would be taken over the off tank because the tanks are lacking drastically in the damage department.
Thinks like Armor debuffs, making bosses miss the current tanking tank while I am pummeling their back etc.
In the same vain, I love Boss fights where multiple enemies are up and around. Where the raid group gets split in multiple smaller groups fighting individual phases on their own before merging back together for the grande finale.
I would also love to see a ranged/caster tank.
I would love to see variations of both in different dungeons for different bosses.
But there is a caveat here, like all MMOs ashes will probably have a tank shortage compared to DPS roles. I feel like having only one archetype that will be capable of tanking will only make this problem worse. So having content that require 3-5 tanks to work through would be very difficult to even get a party together for.
I feel that ashes could benefit greatly from opening up different class combinations to have the ability to shift roles, rather than have roles predetermined by your primary archetype alone. Maybe if a fighter/tank, mage/tank, or summoner/tank were capable of filling in those roles that multi tank content would be more feasible.
I've asked about it multiple times with no real definitive answer, but I get waiting until A2 to learn more about classes and augments first.
Not to poke the bear even more on this one... But the fact that this needs clarification should point out that it's not a good nomenclature choice for the archetype. 😆