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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.
Is it intentional that tank mana becomes the number one bottleneck for farming groups?
sunaurus
Member, Alpha Two
As a long time tank main, I realized a long time ago that tanking FEELS the worst at times when you are slowing down your party. So far in other games, I have only ever felt this feeling when the rest of the party can just cover ground much quicker than you do as a tank. Thankfully, tank mobility is not a problem at all in Ashes. However, due to how mana-reliant tanks are for basic functions, I still constantly feel like I am slowing down my groups.
Over the past 24 hours of farming, I must have asked my groups to wait for me to recover mana at least 5x as often as any of the mages or clerics I've been playing with. It just feels bad to be the single most mana-reliant role in any of my groups. It doesn't help that apparently actual casters benefit much more from Bard mana buffs than tanks do.
My personal opinion is that tanks as a whole would feel much better if they were more cooldown and proc dependent, rather than mana dependent. But if mana is a core part of the vision for tanks, then what about moving the more crucial aspects, like threat generation & survivability, to be cooldown based, and only leave actual raw damage output to be mana-dependent? That way, we could choose to sacrifice damage in order to still always be ready to protect our groups whenever we are needed.
Over the past 24 hours of farming, I must have asked my groups to wait for me to recover mana at least 5x as often as any of the mages or clerics I've been playing with. It just feels bad to be the single most mana-reliant role in any of my groups. It doesn't help that apparently actual casters benefit much more from Bard mana buffs than tanks do.
My personal opinion is that tanks as a whole would feel much better if they were more cooldown and proc dependent, rather than mana dependent. But if mana is a core part of the vision for tanks, then what about moving the more crucial aspects, like threat generation & survivability, to be cooldown based, and only leave actual raw damage output to be mana-dependent? That way, we could choose to sacrifice damage in order to still always be ready to protect our groups whenever we are needed.
3
Comments
how so?
Either your bard sucks or you're not running a bard in the comp.
I haven't had to eat a single ration for mana this weekend. Perhaps something was bugged last weekend, or perhaps they just heavily buffed some mana regen talents/skills, but it just hasn't been an issue anymore as far as I can tell!
Definitely not in the big ones. It's FAR more common for tanks to be more reliant on resources which are built up during combat, rather than outside combat.
Definitely agree, courage is severely under-utilized at the moment, but I'm also guessing that's just because of how early the game is in the Alpha process.
Mana regen is indeed fine in this patch, as mentioned a few posts above! But just wanted to point out that if hypothetically it was not fixed, then your idea of just auto-attacking being the optimal approach to tanking is really not a good solution, for a few reasons. First and foremost, it's just extremely boring gameplay. But also, it is punishing towards players who want to push higher DPS (both directly through tank DPS, but also indirectly, by making actual damage dealers afraid of pulling off the tank due to reduced tank aggro generation).
Oh 100% agree that it's boring, our kit needs more useful things. I never had one issue with threat after using taunt and inciting strikes. I literally went afk for 2 minutes during a fight with a high HP tank mob and it was no issue at all. Tank damage contribution is effectively nothing even spamming skills so I didn't bother.
The game should normalize not going full hog on all your abilities all the time. This is the main reason for most of the complaints about mana.
That said - get the cleric to bless the tank's weapon and have the bard run Mystery and Pensive Melody with Hymnn of the Mind (one bard should be doing this anyway in every group). Tanks don't currently have a problem with Mana if you are doing this.
And if you don't have a bard, you absolutely should be taking it slower or be prepared to be sitting more often.