Tanking felt really bad this weekend and did not have fun. Here is why

Highborn

There were made some changes to the Tank but unless I missed something there was one HUGE undocumented change.(Unless I can't read)

Before, when I pressed E my shield came up, unless I was in a very specific animation, like Pulverize ( jump up), or the AOE thing that staggers. Maybe there were more but these stand out. Basically I could animation cancel auto attacks.

Now, I could not. Take example the heavy slash of meele mobs in citadel. They can hit HARD. While their heavy slash is bugged ( goes off before progress bar finishes), they CAN be reacted to. Now, with having to come to a complete standstill, it nearly was impossible. If I was in the middle of a skill, might as well not bother.

Then the spin attach. Before the "miss" combat text change, I could block in the middle of the spin channel and actually block. Now, raising my shield is futile as I wasn't reducing damage. No sound feedback, no visual feedback, no combat text feedback, stamina wasn't draining. Yes I could dodge roll out, but with that I could pull something I don't want to.

Combine this with the general squishieness against random bs that can happen and I was dead so fast.

I felt like I couldn't do my job, blocking as the game prevented me even when I was pressing the button in time.

Pet peeves:
Furthermore tanking is just expensive. As a tank my gear gets broken a lot. I can die in combat on a flip of a coin. Ninja pulls, overlulls, 3 random crits one after another etc. My gear repair costs are always higher than my friends as I'm just broke. Not sure how to fix it, and I'm not comfortable asking randoms to chip in for my repair costs.

Bugs:
Also the wall skill is still bugged and worthless fyi, mobs will cast or run through it.

Also reflect animation cancelling upon doing anything, EVEN THE BACK SWING of auto attack is just scuffed.

Edit: another undocumented change was that iron aura now giving 2% instead if 10. That's was an 80% nerf. Brutal

There was a line about being able to cancel block, but it's different from block not being able to cancel other things. Mainly AA

Edit2 talking to other tanks, it's mostly a nerf for my play style. I like to play very active block heavy, and they don't.

Getae

Iron Aura tooltip sais 2% but when you activate it it shows 10% so maybe is just a bug

ThevoicestHeVoIcEs

I heard that early levels tank experience is pretty bad, and yes getting my tank to level 8 was a chore. I'm a bit spoilt by how well tank classes are done in Warhammer Return of Reckoning for sure. RoR has a lot of tanking playstyles, including 2 handed weapons tanking specs, separate stats for block and parry. Also RoR tanks offer some great self sustain and feel really good in solo EXP grinding. Not so much here. I like some skills, but Ashes tank for me personally just feels painful and rather shallow.

Now, lets assume the extended class offer that variety of class gameplay some of us crave, however up to level 25 you are stuck with the basic kit and levelling is far slower than in something like RoR.

Lanba

ThevoicestHeVoIcEs wrote: »

I heard that early levels tank experience is pretty bad, and yes getting my tank to level 8 was a chore. I'm a bit spoilt by how well tank classes are done in Warhammer Return of Reckoning for sure. RoR has a lot of tanking playstyles, including 2 handed weapons tanking specs, separate stats for block and parry. Also RoR tanks offer some great self sustain and feel really good in solo EXP grinding. Not so much here. I like some skills, but Ashes tank for me personally just feels painful and rather shallow.

Now, lets assume the extended class offer that variety of class gameplay some of us crave, however up to level 25 you are stuck with the basic kit and levelling is far slower than in something like RoR.

haha you play ror too?? i think aoc tank hard to def and regen build

Rfalias

I did find regular 'E' block to be less responsive. I ended up using reflect against any skill I actually cared about blocking. Constantly active blocking is hurting you though, that is for sure. Losing finishers and combo buffs is not too good.

Highborn

Constantly active blocking is hurting you though, that is for sure. Losing finishers and combo buffs is not too good.

Dunno man, so far worked out great. Floating stamina seems suboptimal to me.
As for loosing finnishers if you pick the 15% extend through both weapon skilltrees, you'll do just fine. I do. They don't really fall off + you can optimize skill useg around keeping them up, if you really want to.

With that aside, not being able to interrupt AAs with E just feels wrong. I can interrupt them with a skill, so what the hell? I don't want to burn a CD for things that can be perfectly solved with a bit of active blocking.

But this new changed made active blocking not so active.

ELWOW

I often feel like I can't do anything about my health issues. We got decent mitigation, nice HP increase cooldown, but we miss good self heal and some HoT. I recommend adding to bonus perk of Shake it Off (Unyielding that we need to spend additional 1 skill point) to also add HoT equivalent to the health restored from basic skill. If we heal for like 15% after Shake it off, we get additional HoT for 10 second for another 15% (or dmg that we heal between 10-30%).

On top of that Vengeance skill is completely useless with it's 0,1/0,2/0,3% temporary health (or shield). It should give ATLEAST 1.0/2.0/3.0%, it feels like a typo from Intrepid. Gaining 1% max health + level will give level 20 (with around 4k health) 60/100/140 temporary heal for 33 courage.

Both of these will easily help us in reacting to death scenario and in the same time reduce our death amounts without breaking completely our survivability in terms of PvP/PvE.
It will also make use of our Courage (other than Ground Pound and Fortify) plus let us spend Shake it Off additional point (it's not often worth to take besides some pvp actions)

Highborn

I did find regular 'E' block to be less responsive.

Comming back to this as i was thinking about it, the first few weeks tanking felt great. Trying to actively block felt rewarding. Now i feel punished. It interrupts general gameplay loop that i developed for myself. It's (with quite a bit of exaggeration) take hands off keyboard. wait for everything to finnish, press E, hold until things happen, resume.
Before it was just OH SH... Press E, you blocked, skillcheck passed, resume. Less suffered dmg, more fun.

Botaxalim

buff the tank !!!, reason:

• tank got exp debt first, because they are first to die, lose glint, slow level cause more death than other classes
• tank literally cant solo anything, cause other class do more efficiently (time wise/apm) can kite/range with their damage skill.
• tank took gear durability than any classes (repair is making tank poor)
• if already one tank on grinding spot party, another tank will be excluded, cause one tank is enough, better add more dps/bard/healer to the party

mooniem

I definitely agree that auto attacks delaying the shield coming up is an issue. Blocking didn't feel responsive enough and it felt like the best thing for me to do to mitigate damage was to stand still and not attack, or I risk getting chunked by one of the big slashes because my auto attack animation is still happening. This was especially bad when using a mace, which attacks a lot slower. It makes it a straight downgrade from a sword for a tank to use, once I switched to sword the difference was very noticeable in the speed my block could come up. Fair enough if I use a long animation ability and get punished for using it at the wrong time, but I feel like auto attacks should be interruptable by blocking so that the best thing for me to do isn't stand there doing nothing so I can block in time.

Vengeance temporary health is also negligible, the percentages do make it seem like a typo was made. Most of the time I can't even see the shield on my health bar like you can with other big shields from bards etc.

ELWOW

Botaxalim wrote: »

buff the tank !!!, reason:

• if already one tank on grinding spot party, another tank will be excluded, cause one tank is enough, better add more dps/bard/healer to the party

I agree that we struggle to find a party, in other games you had 5 men party or even less and tank was precious to have around, but with 8 men party it is no longer a pro to be a tank, it's often a con because you get excluded from parties and our solo grinding is terrible. I think it can be fixed with better quest design and/or comissions so we can do some exp with that while waiting to be picked to some aoe grind.

Highborn

I disagree with the tank needing a buff. QOL changes sure.
Maybe grit needs numbers but the tank does not feel to be in a bad place rn

ShankNemesis

I would agree with Highborn that the Tank is in a good spot, but it definitely needs some things tweaked. Here is a quick list of what has previously been said, but I would like to add another voice behind.

1. Blocking (E) Skill is unresponsive. It has been fixed since the first weekend where it is actually viable to use, but ends up only activating after you have finished your auto attack combo, usually to late to block a skill, or your stuck holding it for far to long and not contributing any finishers to the fight.
2. Vengeance skill is basically useless. The small level plus .1% trade off for courage is not worth it. At level 25 with 5k health, your maxing out with an extra 105 health [(25+0.1%)+ (25+0.2%)+(25+0.3%)] if used consecutively is null compared to keeping 10% damage mitigation.
3. I added in a different post, but the brunt of death fallouts in group more often than not fall on the Tank. A good suggestion was a group payoff to the exp debt of the Tank.
4. Shake it Off feels useless even when timed right. At most I have seen it heal for about 600 damage, most of the right right around 340 damage. Using Indomitable Spirit as a heal often works better. (This may be a bug now that I am rereading that skill)
5. Grapple is by far the most useful non-tank ability. It needs to be fixed so it works. 75% of the time I have to recast it 3-4 times before it will drag a mob (non-miss) Luckily it currently doesn't give a cooldown a majority of the time (bug?)
6. Inciting Strikes really is the best agro builder with 400% threat, but man does the damage feel horrible.
7. Tomahawk is boring and useless when you can use grapple or taunt to pull. Might have some use in pvp, but in very limited scenarios.
8. Shield Slam vs Shield Assault - I generally prefer assault as I can stagger groups of enemies, as that is the majority of what you tank is groups in my experience. The ability to use it without a target as a projective movement skill is nice as well. It does suck horribly when you miss with it though.
9. The wall is generally useless at this junction IMO.

All in all, I have had a lot of fun with the Tank. They are definitely the commanders of the battlefield in group situations for the most part. They have been relativity fun to play with some of the mechanics of bears and such while leveling. Closer to 25 and with better gear, things can get more 'tank-and-spanky'. In PvP their CC ability and general tankyness is definitely noticeable and makes them an actual threat. Taunt being used on a high dps enemy is also a very, very useful tool.

RocketFarmer

A QOL improvement for me would be to associate a tanky-tank build with Grit activated and an off-tank/solo build with Grit not activated. Meaning a parallel skill tree based on having Grit active, because you need Grit on to truly tank otherwise you may as well save the design space and have it always on just for being a Tank. I dare not call these “stances”, but that sort of describes the general concept.

Also tied to weapon load outs so in off-tank mode you can play with the two handed weapons rather than strictly sword and board.

You can make a tank that can solo within the current design, but once respec is no longer free, tanks will suffer more than they already do.

Each tank subrole has its utility in the group and should present enough variety to make it interesting. Secondary archetypes should help with even more variety.

I think lack of variety may be what’s keeping players away from playing a Tank.

Not saying the other points brought up need to be addressed. Figure this archetype will have many facelifts and mechanical changes.

Ebro Epaito

After level 10 Tank is pretty decent...getting to 10 sucked a$$...