THE PROBLEM IN ALL MMOS - TANK SCARCITY & DUNGEON GROUPS

Reposting this from the Dev Discussion on tanks because my post seemed out of place because the question was: "Would you prefer more traditional MMORPG main and off-tank roles, or would you prefer to see combat experiences with several tanks fighting?"

However, I was talking more about having more things for tanks to do and increasing the number of tanks within a 40-man raid to help the Tank Scarcity problem.

I would prefer to see several tanks fighting in a raid and here's why:

One of the biggest problems in MMORPGs is the lack of tanks for dungeons.
We've seen this in World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft Classic, and Elderscrolls Online, where it can take a DPS an HOUR to find a group for a dungeon, but a tank can find a group instantaneously. It has become so bad in some games that tanks can charge fees for their tanking services. I think that tank scarcity occurs because, in many MMOs, guilds focus on raiding content and most raid groups have a large amount of DPS and Healers compared to tanks. Let me show you an example with WoW Classic.

Your standard raid group in World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade has a raid group of
25 Players.
2 Tanks
6 Healers
17 DPS

That is:
1 Tank for every 3 Healers
and
1 Tank for every 8.5 DPS

Now a standard dungeon group has
5 Players
1 Tank
1 Healer
3 DPS

So hypothetically, there are about 5.5 DPS and 2 Healers waiting for a tank.
Raid composition is of course not the only problem with Tank scarcity, but I think it is the largest problem.

The AshesofCreation Wiki states that group content will be "tailored for 40,16, and 8 person group sizes"
"Parties will have up to eight (8) players in a single group
Raids will have 40 man groups."
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Group_sizes

So, to correct for tank scarcity we would have the correct proportion of the 4 roles within Ashes of Creation. Tank, Healer, Support, and DPS. So as an example:

8 person group -
1 Tank
4 DPS
1 Support
2 Healers

16 person group-
2 Tanks
8 DPS
2 Support
4 Healers

40 Person group-
5 Tanks
20 DPS
5 Support
10 Healers

This part is just an example, we don't know how many players we need for each role

However, you can see that every 40-man raid team can be broken up into 5, even 8-person dungeon groups with the correct amounts of each required role.

In short - the proportion of DPS, Support, Healers, & Tanks should be the same between a 40-person raid group and an 8-person dungeon group.

Let me know what you think, and what your solution would be to solving tank scarcity.

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Comments

Azherae

Let tanks build for either decent DPS or mitigation depending on gear sets so that more people can play them in PvP and less-traditional PvE situations.

Then sit back and watch people who enjoy being both survivable and doing 'good but not the best' damage, learn to tank if they don't already know how.

Warth

I agree with you in a sense that, its bad design to make 1 tank necessary in each group, but have 2-3 out of 5 tanks be useless/left out in a Raid environment.

If each group should consist of 1 per Archetype in Group Content, then it needs to be ensured, that the same principle holds true for raid content.

bloodprophet

Some of this lack of tanks concern is a community and people problem.
People tend to have little patience in those games because they have made players disposable. If someone new tried to tank instead of helping them and guiding them along we see far to often the "Get out of here noob!" Mentality.
Not having a dungeon finder should help. Is easier to lift up a newer player then spend the next hour looking for an established one.
Several weeks ago ran a dungeon with a new tank and we helped them best we could. Shame more people don't do that.

Songcaller

This becomes a problem with the main tanks. When I main tanked I did not like other tanks taking aggro in solo tank instances/dungeons. I often played my alt to accommodate other tanks, but, other tanks refused to play alts when I was solo/main tanking. This was never an issue in areas/dungeons where multiple tanks were required - hence why we had multiple tanks in the first place, merely an issue when the instance/dungeon demanded a single tank or a single tank could handle the dungeon alone.

Squeezy

bloodprophet wrote: »

Some of this lack of tanks concern is a community and people problem.
People tend to have little patience in those games because they have made players disposable. If someone new tried to tank instead of helping them and guiding them along we see far to often the "Get out of here noob!" Mentality.
Not having a dungeon finder should help. Is easier to lift up a newer player then spend the next hour looking for an established one.

I disagree here, dungeon finder definitely makes players disposable and I'm not at all arguing for a dungeon finder queue system. But, for example in WoW classic TBC, there is no dungeon finder, and IT STILL can easily take a group of 3 dps and 1 healer an hour to find a tank.

Voxtrium

A possible solution is allowing the composition to change significantly based on what you have, instead of having multiple tanks in a raid as unfeasible, design the role to be flexible enough to fill for a dps or off healer. Id guess this is what they are doing by having a duel archetype system since this means a tank/healer or tank/dps or healer/dps or healer/tank can fill out multiple roles in a raid group. To solve the problem in the OP would be to simply allow a tank/dps to work for a dps role so that way when you get a group that has 3 tanks 1 dps and 4 healers you can still run the dungeon instead of handicapping groups to be 1-4-1-2 or some other rigid design. Now obviously for stat maxing raids on the top end this couldn't apply or if it did I'd assume the balance of classes was terrible, but that's not part of this discussion.

bloodprophet

Squeezy wrote: »

bloodprophet wrote: »

Some of this lack of tanks concern is a community and people problem.
People tend to have little patience in those games because they have made players disposable. If someone new tried to tank instead of helping them and guiding them along we see far to often the "Get out of here noob!" Mentality.
Not having a dungeon finder should help. Is easier to lift up a newer player then spend the next hour looking for an established one.

I disagree here, dungeon finder definitely makes players disposable and I'm not at all arguing for a dungeon finder queue system. But, for example in WoW classic TBC, there is no dungeon finder, and IT STILL can easily take a group of 3 dps and 1 healer an hour to find a tank.

It does indeed take some time. However that is how I started healing way back in Guild Wars. Couldn't find a healer so I did it. Need more people to take the initiative and just do it.

I am hard core against anything almost in anyway resembling GW2's failure of a class system. Roles should be important. NOT a bunch of dps with a self heal dancing around a loot pinata.

bloodprophet

Voxtrium wrote: »

A possible solution is allowing the composition to change significantly based on what you have, instead of having multiple tanks in a raid as unfeasible, design the role to be flexible enough to fill for a dps or off healer. Id guess this is what they are doing by having a duel archetype system since this means a tank/healer or tank/dps or healer/dps or healer/tank can fill out multiple roles in a raid group. To solve the problem in the OP would be to simply allow a tank/dps to work for a dps role so that way when you get a group that has 3 tanks 1 dps and 4 healers you can still run the dungeon instead of handicapping groups to be 1-4-1-2 or some other rigid design. Now obviously for stat maxing raids on the top end this couldn't apply or if it did I'd assume the balance of classes was terrible, but that's not part of this discussion.

Not really how they are setting the class system up.
Your primary archetype will set your skills and role.
Secondary will argument what you skills do a little bit.
Lot of mixed views here in the forums as to how far you can go. Need to wait for more information and alpha 2/beta's.

Nerror

Squeezy wrote: »

In short - the proportion of DPS, Support, Healers, & Tanks should be the same between a 40-person raid group and an 8-person dungeon group.

Let me know what you think, and what your solution would be to solving tank scarcity.

Yeah, that's pretty much the exact same feedback I gave in the official thread, so I agree.

1 of each archetype per party of 8, and 5 of each per raid should be close to optimal in a majority of PvE encounters. Variation is great, and we should also get that, where some encounters call for more tanks, or more healers, or 10 bards for that matter. But as a rule of thumb, 1 each per party and 5 each per raid for optimal conditions, while still allowing for player experimentation and other combinations also working.

maouw

Do you think the fact that you can only have 1 active main tank at a time is what causes the scarcity?

I feel like that pressure on 1 person's shoulders is what scares people off from picking up the role.

DeadDuckling

It's possible the shortage of tanks could be filled by other players switching their secondary class to "Tank." The devs stated they plan on letting players swap between secondaries. Of course, whether these secondary tanks will have substantial enough augments to substitute a Full Tank is completely up in the air as we're still in alpha. But that could be a solution. Obviously a secondary tank wouldn't match a Full Tank on their own, but if a few party members cross-classed with Tank, maybe you could manage

George_Black

Ye well in AoC there wont be many instanced dungeons and groupfinder queues.

Squeezy

maouw wrote: »

Do you think the fact that you can only have 1 active main tank at a time is what causes the scarcity?

I feel like that pressure on 1 person's shoulders is what scares people off from picking up the role.

Yes and No. I think many people, including myself are scared of the main tank role, but at the same time only needing two tanks for a 40 man raid and then needing 1 tank per group of 8 for dungeons would cause the same exact issues we've seen in many other MMOs.

Maybe, if there were a designated 5 tanks per 40 player raid team, people would be less pressured and more enthusiastic to pick up that role.

Warth

DeadDuckling wrote: »

It's possible the shortage of tanks could be filled by other players switching their secondary class to "Tank." The devs stated they plan on letting players swap between secondaries. Of course, whether these secondary tanks will have substantial enough augments to substitute a Full Tank is completely up in the air as we're still in alpha. But that could be a solution. Obviously a secondary tank wouldn't match a Full Tank on their own, but if a few party members cross-classed with Tank, maybe you could manage

They already said that Tank Secondaries are not meant to be primary/main tanks the same way Heal Secondaries will not be main healers.

BaSkA_9x2

Squeezy wrote: »

In short - the proportion of DPS, Support, Healers, & Tanks should be the same between a 40-person raid group and an 8-person dungeon group.

I don't think there should be a formula to beat PvE content, a magical number that always needs to be followed. In other words, I think some PvE content should be beatable with 1 tank, 10 healers and 29 DPS. Other piece of content, needs 10 tanks, 5 healers and 25 DPS. You get the point.

Squeezy wrote: »

Let me know what you think, and what your solution would be to solving tank scarcity.

In my opinion, most people think that playing as Tanks and Healers is less fun than DPS because killing people is more fun than tanking or healing. However, if you make Tanks and Healers killing machines, the game becomes unbalanced and then there will be a scarcity of DPS classes.

Funnily enough, I never played as a support class in any MMORPG I've ever played - and I played quite a few - but I was a main support position 5 in DotA for a few thousand hours and got to 6k MMR by doing so. Why? Because being a support in that game was very rewarding for me, and often more fun than being the carry.

So, to answer your question, how to solve tank (and support) scarcity? Make those classes (and roles) fun: they might not win 1v1s frequently, but they can turn the tides of group fights via intelligence and skill.

CROW3

George_Black wrote: »

Ye well in AoC there wont be many instanced dungeons and groupfinder queues.

Fortunately...

Also, I think the beneficial result is that guilds become the best approach to organize teams for content. Unfortunately, the LFG mindset has grooved an expectation for instant gratification to play through dungeons - at the price of social interaction, player significance, and meaningful gameplay.

So part of my thought here is that by guilds being the largest denominator it will slow down the overall approach on dungeons. If folks are on, great let's go. If not, we can move back to planned content sessions - making calendar / planning tools MUCH more valuable for interaction than Dungeon Tinder.

This is all goodness in my book.

DeadDuckling

Warth wrote: »

They already said that Tank Secondaries are not meant to be primary/main tanks the same way Heal Secondaries will not be main healers.

right. and they shouldn't.
Obviously a secondary tank wouldn't match a Full Tank on their own, but if a few party members cross-classed with Tank, maybe you could manage

Songcaller

From a main tank perspective and one who does not really want to tank in Ashes, the problem starts with the conquests. The fun and difficulty of finding a new dungeon to tank is a thrill. Run that dungeon 50 times or more, or, have a dungeon on farm and all of a sudden tanking is just repetitive shite that we'd rather not be rostered in to do every week. Tanks then spend more time on alts. In every MMO you will have this problem. It can be difficult to expect someone to be main tank for multiple years.

SirChancelot

George_Black wrote: »

Ye well in AoC there wont be many instanced dungeons and groupfinder queues.

Even if people have to yell in town "group looking for tank" versus sit in a auto fill queue, a tank shortage is still going to be a tank shortage. I don't see how ashes will be different than any other MMO here.

Ludullu

What if, and hear me out here, we had a "class statistic" when we were looking for a server to play on? So like, if Intrepid sticks to the "1 of each archetype parties" design goal, they could track how many of each archetype there is on the server (would probably have to be a "first character on the account" kind of tracker rather than a pure char one) and then advertise the imbalanced roles with some small text and maybe a video of some cool abilities from the archetype.

So when a new player wants to play, say, a bard - he can look for a server where there's not enough bards. Obviously there's a high chance that alts would be helping out with that issue, but I'd assume any group of people would be more happy to have a pure main archetype than making one of their members play a class they didn't want to play.

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