Tank Feedback

Relhaz

I got to level 25 as a tank over the week of thanksgiving, have done some gear grinding at level 25. Currently have no legendary gear. I played almost exclusively in a group as solo'ing was extremely miserable until at least like lvl 15 and even then I can't fight any hard mobs without running out of mana first.

So in no particular order:

• Casting Absorption Field as a defensive is basically useless. In a hard/large pull you take more damage from casting it than you get as a shield. The animation is so fricken long the enemy could start a heavy hitting ability and finish it before you're done casting. Can't even protect your team from a fireball unless you get lucky.
• I think it would be beneficial if the healer could see your stamina.
• Grapple is very jank (often doesn't work, or doesn't pull them all the way). Just alpha things.
• I found myself wishing I had some kind of interaction with stamina. Like a way to regain it on weapon combos or something.
• Most of the defensive cooldowns are clustered near the top of the tree, but by then you have gear to make up for it.I need the defensives more at low levels. I DEFINITELY don't need protect. I need to take less damage, not more damage. I also don't need tomahawk for ranged pulls. I have a ranged weapon.
• I haven't done the math but I'm fairly certain that I take MORE damage if I cast vengeance. The shield is non-existent even with the talent. I only used this ability while soloing for faster damage, usually after casting intercept on myself to make up for the damage.reduction loss.
• Intimidating Aura is the only important offensive ability. It guarentees threat on every mob and every other offensive ability is basically just fluff to make you feel like you are doing something. They aren't even good damage for the fact that you only have a couple of them.
• Why the heck is intimidating aura magic damage and scales of magic power?
• Because vengeance is really bad, the only reason to press Rush of Courage is with Fortify. You might as well get rid of Rush of Courage and just make fortify not consume courage. Its also annoying that they have different cooldowns, as if trying to bait you into making a bad decision.
• At ~lvl 18 I was having trouble finding a group so I was farming the otters near Halcyon. I could pull and fight like 10 otters at the same time. The problem is that Shield Assault and Ground Pound are so freaking small that I couldn't hit all of the mobs that I could pull. That just seems silly.
• This isn't necessarily a tank thing, but you can't see any ground effects under the mage magma pool. Which is very much a tank problem.
• I NEED to be able to see the cast bars of targets that I am not targeting. The most important thing while tanking mobs was making sure I had my block up during the tank busters. This isn't so bad for the ghost knights, because you can see their animation (they raise their sword above their head to cast smite) but the humans? They like, put their sword behind them to prep for a big overhand swing. Thats impossible to see mid fight with multiple enemies. Just let me see all of their cast bars.
• More alpha things but I frequently had lag problems with Reflect not going off in time. I would also like the window on reflect to be a little larger, because if you try to use reflect on a big tank buster, but you are tanking multiple mobs, there is a high chance it gets eaten by some other auto attack. And you can't hold block while reflecting so you get trucked by the tank buster.
• Block sometimes doesn't work? I get the text saying its blocked but my healthbar still moves the full amount.
• Tank provides no debuffs for other classes that anyone cares about (fairly certain only fighter utilizes stagger, and thats just to get a trip. Who cares about that as dps?).
• Do I really gotta wear light armor so that I can get magic resist? Really fulfills my tank fantasy wearing cloth so I don't get destroyed by arcane blast. Speaking of arcane blast, its a douche move to make the thaumaturges of carphin cast arcane blast, which requires you to move, but if you move out of melee with the knights they start a piercing ranged attack that might destroy your group.

I also participated some large scale pvp fights (50v50+).
I know its an alpha and this is not the point of the current phase.

Some general notes:
The game is laggy and unplayable at those sizes.
Weapon scaling is out of control. People with legendary weapons are doing too much damage compared to how much defensive stats legendary gear gives you.
War declarations are a hot mess when the guild cap is 50 players.
Tank thoughts:

• WTF are you supposed to do as a tank in a large scale fight? You can't stand on the frontline ,you just get deleted.
• So then you must be a support? Absorption Field has a 90 second cooldown compared to Bard's shielding dance at 25 seconds. And they shield for a very similar amount AND they can move it around AND the shield stays when you move out of the area AND it scales so gear actually matters to you..
• Wall is too short to be used in the open world. Plus you can just jump and shoot attacks over it. Its only particularly useful in chokes (which it is quite good for ignoring how easy it is to shoot/jump over, and the lag in its summoning).
• Ground pound is incredibly small. INCREDIBLY small. This thing would need to be the size of Absorption Field for it to be good and even then it has the problem of....
• The abilities that apply stagger are also extremely small. Enemies have to be on top of each other to hit anything reliably. That would be fine except there is no clump forming ability (camlann mace from albion, orianna from league).
• You have no presence or threat on the field except grapple. Which is great at small scale but literally doesn't even work in large scale (alpha things hopefully) and even then, picking off one person is less important.

Relhaz

Forgot to mention, I don't think tanks will feel tanky in large scale combat, while still being balanced for PvE, unless you add something like focus fire protection from albion online.