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.
Tank discussion - Opinions after 1st A2 Weekend
Kheil
Member, Alpha Two
Hello Glorious community of Ashes of creation.
I am a man with an insane amount of experience when it comes to MMORPG's. Usually at their highest level.
Let me preface that I enjoyed my time on the Tank class (Lvl. 13) and would like to share the good, the bad, and the ugly, this is pure feedback. I mean no harm
Important note: We started the game without clerics or bards at the start. Some people rerolled to them at some point.
Lvls 1-5: Tank feels very nice to play, you get your damaging spells and are able to charge - stun - *taunt* - and hold mobs pretty well. Overall I am, personally, happy with this side of the tree. I love Protecting/Support playstyle and it makes you feel like a bruiser, with option to help your team-mates.
One weird thing at the moment, is that one of the charges has too long of an animation, but always hits its target {Pulverize.} and the other is fast, but seems to always miss a moving target. (Shield Slam.)
Lvls 5-10: From lvl 5 onwards Tank becomes a bigger struggle without a healer, no ranged damage without real sustain in melee, if you are solo the road from 5-10 is a painful one but you can do with some kiting, but it is not very pleasant.
Grapple is a super fun ability (Probably my favourite.), but sometimes if you use it on a Monster, it hits you before you can block because it's animation is long.
Lvls 10-13: From lvl 10, you buy your Brass upgrades for your gear, weapons, shield and if you turn off your tank stance, you can safely farm most mobs from a distance, not the most riveting tank gameplay but I loved the chill/farming during night hours where you just hang out with the homies and talk. Once you get Indominable Spirit and you combo it with Shake It Off, you can brush off some of that *collateral* damage you take once in a while while farming mobs from a distance, but it is nowhere near being a good, sustained heal that makes you feel like you can stand with the mobs in melee. Even if they are several levels lower.
Proposed changes:
1. Make block a-lot stronger, even with block up, a hit from a bear hits me for 368+hp sometimes in lvl 10 gear and it takes my stamina away, AND costs you your *weapon finisher* damage if you use it. Currently it is just better to Kite the mobs, I personally think that should not be the case especially for a tank. We already have no damage, why not make us actually tanky. (I got oneshot or killed many times by lower lvl mobs). Possibly make it omnidirectional with some passive on tank tree.
2. Fortify should not consume a resource, which yes, it does not need, in the first place, but it does consume it if you have it available. It is already used by our *key* ability Vengeance.
3. I would like to see more passive Temporary hp generation talents in the *talent* tree.
4. More passive Damage reduction. A-lot more. I'm talking 20% at its current state, maybe more, and we already get 25% from the combination of Iron aura and Grit. I just feel like I'm slightly tankier fighter, with no damage. For an easy comparison, put the difference of Fighters effective dps and our dps, into our sustain, either some temporary hp, or damage reduction.
What do you, my fellow tanks think about the Tank in it's current state?
Do you have any tips for me? Maybe something i do not know about like a good combo of abilities, or a must have one.
I am speaking from three days of experience on a Class I never played before, maybe I missed something that makes tank THE tank. And the servers were a little laggy, channeled abilities like spin from the goblins in Oakbane or Zombie invokers were instant and impossible to react to sometimes, which added to couple of deaths on my list {yes i know about the laugh}.
All in all, I saw many other classes like Mages and Bards mass pull and live without any major issues, where i would struggle more and take waay longer to kill. And i saw rangers kiting mobs that i could not even dream of kiting without abusing terrain and pathing. And I felt not needed at all. Monsters still hit me really hard, Block was barely taking damage off if hits, if they got another ranged class, kiting the mobs would just be more efficient.
I know this is not a Solo game and know this, my review was more solo/duo player minded, but even when we were a group, I felt like my role was not needed as classes could kite, and do what I did, without losing only some or any hp during the encounter. And when my role was needed, I got one-shot by some spin that I couldn't react to / my block did not work on.
All in all, I had VERY limited PvP encounters and usually it was me getting deleted by lvl 15 mage when i was lvl 9 or me being lvl 13 and scaring off some lvl 7 from MY herbs hah!
Had a great deal of fun, and middle finger to the people that DDOs'd the servers, not cool.
Lastly, if you wanna follow me on the journey to become one of the best if not the best tank in the game, feel free to come by to my twitch - Kheiltar where I will play every single possible weekend of A2.
Do not be afraid to talk, give me tips or ask questions, I like to remain transparent.
I am a man with an insane amount of experience when it comes to MMORPG's. Usually at their highest level.
Let me preface that I enjoyed my time on the Tank class (Lvl. 13) and would like to share the good, the bad, and the ugly, this is pure feedback. I mean no harm
Important note: We started the game without clerics or bards at the start. Some people rerolled to them at some point.
Lvls 1-5: Tank feels very nice to play, you get your damaging spells and are able to charge - stun - *taunt* - and hold mobs pretty well. Overall I am, personally, happy with this side of the tree. I love Protecting/Support playstyle and it makes you feel like a bruiser, with option to help your team-mates.
One weird thing at the moment, is that one of the charges has too long of an animation, but always hits its target {Pulverize.} and the other is fast, but seems to always miss a moving target. (Shield Slam.)
Lvls 5-10: From lvl 5 onwards Tank becomes a bigger struggle without a healer, no ranged damage without real sustain in melee, if you are solo the road from 5-10 is a painful one but you can do with some kiting, but it is not very pleasant.
Grapple is a super fun ability (Probably my favourite.), but sometimes if you use it on a Monster, it hits you before you can block because it's animation is long.
Lvls 10-13: From lvl 10, you buy your Brass upgrades for your gear, weapons, shield and if you turn off your tank stance, you can safely farm most mobs from a distance, not the most riveting tank gameplay but I loved the chill/farming during night hours where you just hang out with the homies and talk. Once you get Indominable Spirit and you combo it with Shake It Off, you can brush off some of that *collateral* damage you take once in a while while farming mobs from a distance, but it is nowhere near being a good, sustained heal that makes you feel like you can stand with the mobs in melee. Even if they are several levels lower.
Proposed changes:
1. Make block a-lot stronger, even with block up, a hit from a bear hits me for 368+hp sometimes in lvl 10 gear and it takes my stamina away, AND costs you your *weapon finisher* damage if you use it. Currently it is just better to Kite the mobs, I personally think that should not be the case especially for a tank. We already have no damage, why not make us actually tanky. (I got oneshot or killed many times by lower lvl mobs). Possibly make it omnidirectional with some passive on tank tree.
2. Fortify should not consume a resource, which yes, it does not need, in the first place, but it does consume it if you have it available. It is already used by our *key* ability Vengeance.
3. I would like to see more passive Temporary hp generation talents in the *talent* tree.
4. More passive Damage reduction. A-lot more. I'm talking 20% at its current state, maybe more, and we already get 25% from the combination of Iron aura and Grit. I just feel like I'm slightly tankier fighter, with no damage. For an easy comparison, put the difference of Fighters effective dps and our dps, into our sustain, either some temporary hp, or damage reduction.
What do you, my fellow tanks think about the Tank in it's current state?
Do you have any tips for me? Maybe something i do not know about like a good combo of abilities, or a must have one.
I am speaking from three days of experience on a Class I never played before, maybe I missed something that makes tank THE tank. And the servers were a little laggy, channeled abilities like spin from the goblins in Oakbane or Zombie invokers were instant and impossible to react to sometimes, which added to couple of deaths on my list {yes i know about the laugh}.
All in all, I saw many other classes like Mages and Bards mass pull and live without any major issues, where i would struggle more and take waay longer to kill. And i saw rangers kiting mobs that i could not even dream of kiting without abusing terrain and pathing. And I felt not needed at all. Monsters still hit me really hard, Block was barely taking damage off if hits, if they got another ranged class, kiting the mobs would just be more efficient.
I know this is not a Solo game and know this, my review was more solo/duo player minded, but even when we were a group, I felt like my role was not needed as classes could kite, and do what I did, without losing only some or any hp during the encounter. And when my role was needed, I got one-shot by some spin that I couldn't react to / my block did not work on.
All in all, I had VERY limited PvP encounters and usually it was me getting deleted by lvl 15 mage when i was lvl 9 or me being lvl 13 and scaring off some lvl 7 from MY herbs hah!
Had a great deal of fun, and middle finger to the people that DDOs'd the servers, not cool.
Lastly, if you wanna follow me on the journey to become one of the best if not the best tank in the game, feel free to come by to my twitch - Kheiltar where I will play every single possible weekend of A2.
Do not be afraid to talk, give me tips or ask questions, I like to remain transparent.
Good luck on your travels.
1
Comments
As you said with blocking, its a joke right now, i used to try to do as much blocking as i could at first but i quickly found that it barely reduced the damage from things, it helps, but as a tank losing 1/4 of your health to a single attack, even when blocking, doesn't feel great. A well timed block against a heavy attack like that should feel rewarding. The only solution to it is to have your trip not on cooldown and keep them from doing the attack at all, but that also means losing one of your strongest attacks until they do a heavy hitting attack like that because you have to hold onto the trip skill so you can't get the skill chain going off that through the fight.
As fun as grapple is, I'm finding it more effective to just grab a bow and dink away at their health as they run towards me and then switch to melee when they get close.
Compared to many other MMOs i don't feel like a walking fortress with a damage tradeoff, i feel like a slightly more survivable class that still has to sacrifice damage to feel remotely tanky.
But It would be kind of cool to see something with blocking being rewarded with a bash every 3rd successful block for example. It could be a amount damage blocked stored up energy kind of thing but that might be to complicated to code.
Then have something in a shield skill tree that augments/changes bash and or successful blocking generates (dampening blows) which is just a flat % damage reduction that can also be skill tree adjusted.
Maybe this already in the Tank's kit and i'm just showing my ignorance/lack of class knowledge.
But I would have thought the shield would play a far more active part in the Tank's persona..
I have 70% Physical and 40% Magic Mitigation and around 5600hp base which makes me feel very "tanky" in PvE and PvP.
I leveled to 25 with a full 8 man so all of my opinions are from that.
1-19 I used a 2h and it was great. I had no problem keeping aggro and I was doing decent damage for Tank and was not taking too much damage. I would die if we pulled too much when doing limit testing but other than that I was able to hold and tank 10+ mobs. Once I hit 20 I had a decent shield and mace waiting for me so I swapped. I still was and am doing great damage for Tank. Just need to rotate all of your defensives and you should be able to tank anything you want.
Blocking does feel really bad to do but it is needed against some mobs 18+. I also wish that it was a bit stronger so it gave a reason to choose between blocking or attacking and taking the hit(s).
As for PvP. 1v1 Tank is very strong. The only class I have lost to is Bard. We can't kill a decent Cleric but who is trying to solo a Cleric as Tank?
In small-large scale fights I think Tank performs quite well for the role we have been given. Taunt and Intimidating Aura are actually insane, Wall can have some incredible impacts if used correctly. Tank has decent damage for what it is but the real bonus is all of our CCs and protections to other people.