Hello !
I wanted to talk about an aspect of tanking in PvP that I liked a lot, the ability to guard other groupmates.
And to do that I'm going to talk about what I think is a good guard and what I think is a bad guard.
Because often, in PvP games, Tank get the short end of the stick, since they are designed to get aggro from mob in pve, people tend to just cc and ignore them in pvp settings (or just ignore them.. feelsbad)
From what I've gathered in my long journey in mmos, most of the time, if the devs try to do something with the tank they often opt to give them a bit more ccs and more damage, which I find to be a sad solution. It's like when the way they improve healer is to give them more heals while there are plenty of better and more intersting ways to support your team than to just heal.
Not to say that tank should deal no damage, of course (we're on a forum, I have to phrase my idea well enough so that people don't nitpick what they purposely decided to misunderstand
)
The guarding system in dark age of camelot was incredibly fullfilling :
You put guard on one of your friend and you become able to block attacks with your own shield. Negating damage when you block, of course, but also negating cc's that melee opponents are trying to land on your friend. Add powerful crowd control skills that works once you succeeded, some ways to reduce or negate some ccs on the tank himself and the enemies better start to worry about what the tank is doing when they attack someone, or they are going to be useless.
The guard also had no cooldown to switch from players to players, so you could follow the target swap of the melees, asking the tank to be able to read their opponents movements an play to swap guard when needed.
The thing I liked most about this is that the tank is usefull THROUGH his own tanking ability. It actually matters to use a shield and you blocking matters, even if noone attacks you directly
Good !
The guading system in warhammer online was horrendous (although I give them credit for the pvp taunt system) :
You had a CD on the guard switch... quite long iirc like 30/40 seconds ? So you were put in a checkmate situation super easily and could use your guard just to absorb one burst and that's all. The guard wasn't blocking, it was spreading damage... You, as the tank, would get half the damage your guarded mate would suffer... and although it had the advantage of splitting even magical damage compared to the DAoC one, it also meant that your tanking ability didn't matter at all.. it was even designed so that the damage received by the tank wouldn't get mitigated by his own resistances / armors, reducing him to a second health pool. It was also barely interactive.
Bad !
I would very much like to see a dynamic guarding system come back to AoC, building up on this basis, starting with the idea that you should be able, as a tank, to defend your team efficiently based on your own defensives capabilities.
There are of course, more ways to help in an interesting fashion while playing a defensive tank. The ability to cc, grab, throw, intercept, etc...
I would also point that I liked the idea of taunting in warhammer online : your taunt reduced the damage of all the opponents in a small cone in front of you by a good chunk to anyone that isn't the tank, the only way to get rid of it was to attack the tank and land at least some blows on him (or deal with it for 30 sec). It's a good idea I think, the fact that it's aoe makes it so that you can reduce the damage of a whole team assisting themselves, the small range makes it so that the tank needs to be in range, so there are room for counterplays.
