Tanking

Hey guys. I was inspired to talk about a few things after seeing Asmon react to the more recent footage released on YouTube; and today I want discuss Tanking. I think we can agree that this is a relatively niche role, so with that being said it’s important to prime what’s expected.

I hail from FFXIV and dabbled in other various MMOs. I think there are some really important fundamentals that should be considered when developing Tanks.

1.) Damage
I know. (“I thought this was about tanking.”) It is! However, one factor that Holy trinity MMOs fail to realize is that tanks shouldn’t be doing minuscule damage. No, I don’t believe they should do the same amount of DPS as DD but while leveling up it shouldn’t feel tedious fighting mobs. FFXIV managed to find the sweet spot. Tanks and Healers deal 2/3s of what DDs can do.

2.) Balance
It’s not always clear cut and issues can always be ironed out later regarding the arch type system. What’s really important is that Every tank is viable. I’ve seen terms like Main Tank, Off Tank, Side Tank, and honestly if you pick tank 1st or 2nd you should be viable as a tank. Otherwise you’ll run into issues of dividing the player base. Why take a (X/Tank) when (Tank/X) and (Tank/Tank) is better.

3.) Mechanics
Please hire a battle designer or anyone that is a Tanking enthusiast. I’d argue that is definitely one of THE most important aspects of tanking. Fluff Damage(Auto Attacks) and Tank busters are absolutely needed, but for the love of god don’t let it end at that. I can’t express enough how important it is to R&D battle Mechanics like:

Movement & Placement Optimization
QTEs
Active Mitigation & Passive mitigation
Adds & CC
Tank Swaps & Provokes

Point is to keep everyone engaged and provide a rewarding experience wether you have the bosses attention or not.

This was just something off the top of my head. I want to open the forum now to the people. What do you like the most about Tanking? What games have you tanked in? What are some things they did right? What are things they did wrong?

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Comments

Jahlon

So #2

If you pick sub class Tank so Anything/Tank you aren't a tank. Your role comes from your primary selection. If you want to be a tank you need to be a Tank/Anything

And yes Tank/Tank is going to be the pinnacle of tanking. They have doubled down on their tanking. This comes from the developers. They sacrifice versatility for commitment to the role.

#3 - there are no auto attacaks

Wandering Mist

I know it probably won't happen but I'd like to see a return of the "tanking playstyle" that we had back in Classic WoW. What do I mean by that? Well, now-a-days tanks in mmorpgs are just damage dealers who happen to have aggro on the boss. Sure they do less damage than the DPS classes but they still do a normal DPS rotation with the threat management all but done for them. FFXIV is a perfect example of this. As long as you hit a mob once as the tank, they will stick to you like glue no matter what

In Classic WoW, tanking was a completely different playstyle to DPS because the focus was on threat generation. If you tried to do a normal DPS rotation as a tank you would be next to useless.

Regarding your second point about roles and balancing, it really depends on how hard Intrepid make the content. The harder the content the more restrictive players will have to be on what classes they bring to the fight. Technically speaking any class with a taunt and threat generation can tank, but depending on how the fight goes, that might not be enough to be an effective tank.

Atama

I think that we might see your first point addressed by a combination of gear choice, skill choice, and subclass choice. Get gear that boosts damage output, choose skills that deal damage and/or debuff enemy defenses, and grab a damage-dealing subclass, and you shouldn't feel like a guy in a trash can smacking things with a rubber hose.

If you go tank/tank, wear all +defense gear, and only take defense-boosting skills, then you are choosing to be the waddling turtle.

Tam Hawkins

HiPotion wrote: »

......
3.) Mechanics
..... Fluff Damage(Auto Attacks) and Tank busters are absolutely needed, ....

I also was a tank in FF XIV and that design philosophy for bosses is one of the reasons I left.
For anyone not knowing what he means. In FFXIV a boss normally has three types of attacks.
1. Autoattacks: Miniscule dmg that is absolutely wothless. We talk about 200-500 dmg every 1,5-2,5 sec to a tank that has around 8000 lifepoints.
2. Group wide aoe/Small random aoes: Aoe dmg that is either strong enough so that everyone has to do their best to avoid it or unavoidable aoes that do enough dmg to motivate healers to throw out their hots on a regular basis, sometimes extra mechanics that decrease aoe dmg are involved.
3. Tank busters. Attack that are supposed to take a tank out and need one or sometimes multiple migitation skills to survive. some are fine tuned to take you into the range of lifepoints where an auto attack can take you out if not healed instandly afterwards (the only time autoattacks actually mean something)

This design has multiple problems (in my eye at least).
First of all: Migitation. No matter if it is Parry/block (passive defense that can proc on any attack against you) or active migitation skills (take only X% dmg for Y sec), the skill only matters if it reduces the tank buster, if it does reduce something else you could as well have taken full damage.
I don't know yet how blocking in AoC works but in FF XIV it made parry and block absolutly useless as these blocked randomly and did not reliably block the only attack that matters. Latter they introduced an additional ability for paladins that gave you a 100% chance to block the next attack (8sec cooldown), that skill was extremly powerfull as it was avaiable for every single tankbuster. So you had an additional migitation skill.
But it was a band aid to fix bad design.
Another skill that existed earlier increased your block chance by (I think) 60% for a few seconds. You did not need to time it as strongly as the 100% skill meantioned above but I think the highest you could get your block chance with this skill was 80%.
Now immagine beeing in a raid and the you tell your group that you are going to use a skill that will work 80% of the time, the remaining 20% though it is a wipe.
The skill worked fine on multiple attacks, so the very few tank busters that were a combi of 5-10 attacks (only came in much later) were actually blocked really nice by that skill.
Now for the migitation that is not chance based. The problem here is less present as you simply use the skill and voila the dmg is reduced. But you just used a skill with a 20 sec duration to block one attack, for the remaining 18 sec your skill will not do anything besides blocking Autoattacks.
sure, it did what it was supposed to do and it worked, but it still felt weird.

Second: Healing
I never played much of a healer so that is mostly from the tank side of receiving healing.
Against a hard boss you would want to be at 100% of your lifepoints during the tankbusters as well as rigth afterwards. So healing was mostly done in bursts. Even worse, healing was done pre mediated so the healer already strted casting their heals before the dmg was done.
Reason for this is that you already knew which attacks were serious and which were nothing big.
That lead to something interessting. Healers would always heal you full. That means they always assumed you would almost die and try to heal you up to 100% before the dmg got in. That in return meant that it did not matter if I used my 20% dmg reduction, 40%dmg reduction or 60% dmg reduction skill or saying it differently it did not matter if i needed 2000 lifepoints of healing or 5000 lifepoints or 8000 lifepoints. The only time that was different was in tight knit groups of people I knew already.
That means that 1. It does not necessarily matter that you take less dmg as long as you survive, so a tank 1 taking less dmg then tank 2 did not really help as long as you survived and 2. Healers would almost always heal to much instead of just what was necessary -> wasting mana and generating unnessecary threat.

Third: Making the fight more static
In some figths that was more extreme (titan) in others it was less important. But that design choice lead to very static figths that had groups going from tank buster to tank buster as if they are checkpoints. you survived the tnak buster #4? Good, then we are save until Tank buster #5. Sometimes with an enrage here or there. It made figths static and extremly plannable.
The figth against titan is an extrem in so far that as long as you have the minimum equipment for it and someone reading out the phases in that fight you will have a hard time not winning it. (some of the guides for that figth even had joke sections in it for the tank to stand up and stretch a bit or get some water because the have time until the next tank buster comes).

I think figths that are a constant race between boss dmg vs Tank migitation+ Healers healing will give more satisfaction towards both healer and tank as their abilities are needed constantly and the figths are a bit more action loaded and less predictable.

AntVictus

HiPotion wrote: »

2.) Balance
It’s not always clear cut and issues can always be ironed out later regarding the arch type system. What’s really important is that Every tank is viable. I’ve seen terms like Main Tank, Off Tank, Side Tank, and honestly if you pick tank 1st or 2nd you should be viable as a tank. Otherwise you’ll run into issues of dividing the player base. Why take a (X/Tank) when (Tank/X) and (Tank/Tank) is better.

No. As already stated your primary locks you into your role and is your class. Otherwise every class can do everything, and when everyone can do everything everything is meaningless. Class identity is something that games need to stick with, if your class is supposed to be a tank then you're a tank...that's exactly what 14 does. The other thing you're..I guess implying is the concept of specializations, which is something that other mmo's have done. So if it helps you as it has helped others, look at your secondary as a specialization. Regardless of whatever spec though...you're still a Tank if you chose the tank primary just with a different flavor.

Wandering Mist

@Tam Hawkins I've faught bosses like the ones you describe and on their own those "tank buster" mechanics are very boring and predictable. In order to make the fights more interesting you need to combine those "tank buster" abilities with other fight mechanics that force the tanks to choose when to take those big hits and when to use their big cooldowns.

For example, let's say you have a boss which has an ability that deals damage and applies a debuff to the tank, increasing the amount of damage the tank takes with each hit. So on the first time the ability deals 40% of the tank's max health. The second time it deals 60% of the tank's max health, etc until it can 1-shot the tank from full health. This debuff forces a tank swap to occur which will reset the debuff and keep the damage manageable. Fairly simple right?

Well, now let's add in some adds that the off-tank needs to deal with. Suddenly this changes the dynamic of the fight because now the tanks have to think about when to do the swap and whether to use their emergency cooldowns to withstand more stacks of the debuff than they should normally be able to. This may be necessary depending on how quickly the adds can be killed by the rest of the raid.

Tam Hawkins

Wandering Mist wrote: »

@Tam Hawkins I've faught bosses like the ones you describe and on their own those "tank buster" mechanics are very boring and predictable. In order to make the fights more interesting you need to combine those "tank buster" abilities with other fight mechanics that force the tanks to choose when to take those bit hits and when to use their big cooldowns.

For example, let's say you have a boss which has an ability that deals damage and applies a debuff to the tank, increasing the amount of damage the tank takes with each hit. So on the first time the ability deals 40% of the tank's max health. The second time it deals 60% of the tank's max health, etc until it can 1-shot the tank from full health. This debuff forces a tank swap to occur which will reset the debuff and keep the damage manageable. Fairly simple right?

Well, now let's add in some adds that the off-tank needs to deal with. Suddenly this changes the dynamic of the fight because now the tanks have to think about when to do the swap and whether to use their emergency cooldowns to withstand more stacks of the debuff than they should normally be able to. This may be necessary depending on how quickly the adds can be killed by the rest of the raid.

I know the mechanic you talk about.
In ffXIV at least one of the raid bosses (a gigantic sphere i think it was in the first raid coil-3/4) had exactly this mechanic. And you are right that does make the figth better. Another was the figth against garuda where you needed to divide multiple mobs between the tanks (they had different buffs) and have mutliple tank swaps between for the boss (while plaing tank garuda is my favourite Raid boss in early FFXIV). I still think the extreme of absolutely laughable attacks between tank buster and one tank buster every 30-120 sec is not a very good basis to design boss figths on. I, mean some attacks that a really hard to take, sure. but instead of 99,9% of dmg coming from tank busters and 0,1% of dmg (on tanks) beeing the rest a ratio of 60%/70% of dmg comming from extremly dangerous tank busters and 30%/40% of dmg coming from normal attacks. Practically bringing them a bit closer to make it not so extrem and then adjust further from there.

Plateau

Tam Hawkins

leonerdo wrote: »

@Tam Hawkins @Wandering Mist

A couple things (nevermind, a lot of things, sorry, I just kept typing):

Y'all are talking about 2.x content which is 5 years old now. I'm not saying that makes it irrelevant or bad, but it's limited information. For instance, I would add that, at max level in 5.x, tanks have a minimum of two abilities to reduce team-wide damage as well. So they can/should coordinate some of those cooldowns with their healers (and Ranged DPS, who also get 1 team-defense cooldown).

Not only, I was also talking about 3.0 content. But yes my tanking experience in FFXIV is a few years old and my complains migth not stand for the current game. Although I only made the comparison because the OP said he was playing FXIV and that he wanted strong tank busters and fluff auto attacks.

leonerdo wrote: »

So just keeping tabs, we now have 4 comments talking about different FFXIV tank mechanics. And I could add more (about positioning, and invuln skills, and big trash pulls in dungeons). Clearly, there's a decent amount of gameplay available to talk about.

I'm not saying that tanking in FFXIV is bad I found it very enjoyable (to a certain point). The mechanic I was complaining about wa smore of a boss mechanic then a tank mechanic and the problem was that it nullified at least two tank mechanics (parry and block) and simplified some other.

leonerdo wrote: »

The only thing I would fault FFXIV for, in regards to tanking, is the near-complete removal of threat management in 5.0. And maybe I could complain that it's not as active as tanking in TERA (or other Action MMOs that I didn't play).

That already started to become a problem in 3.0. I don't know what they changed in 4.0 and 5.0 but in 3.x I had no reason to manage threat at all. I could enter a lvl 60 dungeon and be absolutely undergeared while the rest of my group was having the highest avaiable gear during the time (outside of endlevel raids) and I did not even need to use my threth rotation, full dmg and absolutely no problems.

leonerdo wrote: »

AoC is obviously not going to take it as far as TERA did (actively blocking auto-attack patterns all the time), so I'd say FFXIV is a fine example to look to (aside from the threat part). All of that is IMO, of course.

Active block is something that existed in FFXIV it was an 8s cooldown for a 100% chance to block the next incomming attack. You only had to pay attention not to use it on an auto attack. (though I assume that is not what you mean with TERAs example as you mention auto attack patterns)

leonerdo wrote: »

Although, I have to admit, you're right that tanking in FFXIV is fairly easy for a veteran of the genre (not so much for newbies). And a lot of the end-game optimization is around DPS rotations rather than tank-specific mechanics. And some of the content (especially content which is vastly out-geared) can be super boring no matter what role you play. But I'd still say there's plenty of fun to be had as tank in FFXIV if you know where to look.

Tanking as just that is easy, absolutely. Thats why I like to bring up the titan and the garuda figths. Titan is absolutely easy because it does not really involve you as a tank, you stand in front of him and hold aggro....that is it. For Garuda you have to do all kind of things, lead her around, reposition her regularly, tank swaps, taking care of mobs. Garudas figth is not exactly hard for a tank but it keeps you bussie and you need to pay attention.

Funnily most of the time I find it harder to speed run a new dungeon then to tank a new boss. When I speed run I have to make a decision how many mobs I can take, I decide the difficulty of that encounter and If I'm of we could wipe. From the first step I already have to make important decisions and make sure my judgement of what I can take, the healer can heal and the dd can destroy is right (especially difficult with a group of randoms). With a boss the difficultie is set by the developers and especially the standart and daily stuff is so easy that normally you don't have to do much.. I had a group running a new dungeon where both dd's only used auto attack. took us almost 30min but we managed.

Plateau

Jamation

Also a FFXIV vet, cleared all the newest savage content (that music though), but I joined during Stormblood so I don't have experience with super older content as much, but was here before the big skill changes. I primarily played a healer and DPS so I mainly watched the tanks and haven't gotten the chance (I mean don't want to ever dear lord above take me away if I ever play a tank) to play as a tank.

Since I agree with your point one about the sweet spot FFXIV found with tank damage, and point two has been covered by others I'll mainly focus on point 3

Auto attacks are fine since that's a normal thing to expect from any mob, but tank busters were kind of meh in my opinion. It wasn't super fun to just sit there and say "okay here comes the big punch, push that button and we'll watch as nothing really happens but if you don't we'll probably still be okay because the other tank will just swap over while one of us rezzes you". I just don't think it really adds any skill other than memory/timing. Which don't get me wrong, is important, but doesn't take a whole lot of skill for the amount of potential impact it does.

I mentioned movement and placement in another thread, but I whole heartedly agree that I'd love to see more mechanics that involve either turning the boss, players dodging mechanics based on telegraphs/boss body displays, all while watching the bosses position/direction in relation to their own. I don't want to be able to stand in one spot for an entire boss fight. Make me work for my survival. Hit me boss senpai. HIT ME

I'm not sure which quick time events you're referring to in FFXIV that you liked, but those were never my favorite. You just sit there and watch a cut scene and wait to spam a bunch of buttons. It never felt challenging and kind of just felt like a way for them to show us a cut scene mid fight with us "participating"

As for threat I don't necessarily hate the new threat system in FFXIV, but it does make it significantly easier and a little boring. I remember when I was first starting and tanks had to manage their threat a little more manually while healers had skills to reduce their threat, the adrenaline I felt when I saw my threat meter start creeping up and forcing me to pause to consider what my next move should be was so fun, yet a lot more challenging. I was still new so I didn't know all the tips and tricks I do now, but gosh it was fun. I remember troll parties I had with my FC where we would all actively try to be the person with the top threat. Good times.

As for CC/skill related things I think that'll come down to how a person chooses to customize their tank. With the ability to augment their skills from so many different (aaaarchetypes...classses? I still get confused on those) secondary choice things, I can see not all tank types having CC's or potentially choosing to go into more specialized routes depending on their likes, DPS/CC/shielding, etc etc etc

Nagash

Say what you will about final fantasy bosses but they have amazing music (hades fight)

Caeryl

I really liked tanking in ESO‘s later trials (12 man raids). There’s no AoE taunt, which I see as a positive, so tanks actually have to prioritize their taunt targets and positioning to keep soft aggro on them. Off tanks are often necessary, or a high self-healing beefier build, to keep priority hard-hitting adds away from the squishies in the group.

Active blocking (not mitigation abilities but actual active blocking) makes for far more interesting gameplay. Granted this was ruined in the February patch that left the game in shambles on a technical level, but before that, you were able to alternate between offering a bit of extra damage and enchantment procs with weaving basic attacks, or perma block and lose out on resource regen in exchange for the strong mitigation.

Basically I’m in favor of high-demand tanking. Tank and spanks are really boring, and should only be for the most basic sort of group content.

grisu

I don't think that there should only be high octane inducing 3d chess bosses in every aspects. There is nothing wrong with having parts that are not too demanding. MMORPGS have the luxury to cater to a lot of different kinds of people. Offering more laid back classes or fights isn't inherently wrong.

I'm all for alternative design of boss fights and I still wish more people would have humoured me in the boss mechanics thread but I don't need that or highly complex ones for every boss out there to feel good about defeating it.

Caeryl

grisu wrote: »

I don't think that there should only be high octane inducing 3d chess bosses in every aspects. There is nothing wrong with having parts that are not too demanding. MMORPGS have the luxury to cater to a lot of different kinds of people. Offering more laid back classes or fights isn't inherently wrong.

I'm all for alternative design of boss fights and I still wish more people would have humoured me in the boss mechanics thread but I don't need that or highly complex ones for every boss out there to feel good about defeating it.

No one said there’s anything wrong about having simple fights, there is something wrong with touting simple fights as difficult content.

grisu

OP's 3rd point expresses the wish of wanting a way more demanding boss scenario overall. So I disagree with "no one said that." I also disagree that simple is mutually exclusive with difficult/fun.

Caeryl wrote: »

Basically I’m in favor of high-demand tanking. Tank and spanks are really boring, and should only be for the most basic sort of group content.

and I am of the opinion that there is nothing wrong with parts of a difficult boss fight to be simple and/or a class/skill choice being simple in execution.
There are performance check bosses that are thrilling because they are what one would commonly refer to as "simple tank and spank." They are difficult in their own right and in my opinion have a valuable place in every multi boss raid. <shrug>

Lostforever

Speaking of tanks, do we know how the role of tanks will scale from group to raids?

In many other MMO, a group need 1 tank. Raids are usually 4 or 5 groups yet most raids will only need 2 tanks and in very rare cases 3 tanks. However, a group will need 1 healer but raids will need 4 or 5 even more! I play EQ2 and in that game a raid is 24 players but we only have 2 tanks in raid yet we will have 6 to 8 healers in raid! I saw similar issues in WoW when I used to play that.

This causes a problem for tank player in that they don't really get a raid spot. How will AoC solve this issue of tanks not scaling from group to raids?

Other games solves this issue by giving tanks an off spec role, so if they are not tanking, they change spec and go to DPS etc.

Caeryl

grisu wrote: »

OP's 3rd point expresses the wish of wanting a way more demanding boss scenario overall. So I disagree with "no one said that." I also disagree that simple is mutually exclusive with difficult/fun.

Caeryl wrote: »

Basically I’m in favor of high-demand tanking. Tank and spanks are really boring, and should only be for the most basic sort of group content.

and I am of the opinion that there is nothing wrong with parts of a difficult boss fight to be simple and/or a class/skill choice being simple in execution.
There are performance check bosses that are thrilling because they are what one would commonly refer to as "simple tank and spank." They are difficult in their own right and in my opinion have a valuable place in every multi boss raid. <shrug>

Tank-and-spanks are by definition "just stand there and taunt" kind of fights. Good for basic content with low entry requirements, not so much for an organized raid. I've done a few tank-and-spank fights as a dps "off-tank" juts by tossing on one different armor set, which is fun to do as a dps, but I imagine its boring as hell as an actual tank.

If the fight is broken up with mechanics the tank has to follow (ie aggro swaps, kiting, moving bosses, meaningful threat management), then it's not a tank-and-spank.

Gnaru

#1 PLEASE DON'T.
I'm a tank from 15 years till now, i only played tank in every major mmos from everquest to wow to ESO to ff14. IMHO a tank should cares ONLY to get the aggro and mitigate dmg, stop. You are a tank not a dps , you won't do any dps , i think we need in game some sort of active mitigation skills like obsidian shield in ESO, shield block from classic wow, ignore pain from BFA wow, Rampage from ff 14. Please just don't commit the error to make tank another fake dd class like in ff 14 where you should care about dps rotation, tank should only take care of doing aggro (low dmg) and mitigation rotation, stop.

Plateau

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