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Five Tanks, One Boss - mechanics
Nerror
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Are there any MMOs that have mechanics for multi-tanking a single boss? Beyond tank-swapping I mean, where the single-boss encounter actually calls for several tanks working together, forming a metaphorical Voltron of sorts. Or an actual one 
To be very clear, I don't mean multiple tanks for tanking adds during the boss fight. I mean multiple tanks having to use their skills at the right timings to survive the attacks from a single boss. Splitting the damage, using a taunt combined with a knockdown from another tank, combined with a snare from a third tank, combined with a debuff with a fourth tank, combined with a shield skill from the fifth tank, all going off at once. Something like that, but more imaginative I hope.
Because I really want to see something like that so we can get away from the single main tank syndrome, where the only reason to bring more tanks in a raid is to tank adds or tank-swap.
To be very clear, I don't mean multiple tanks for tanking adds during the boss fight. I mean multiple tanks having to use their skills at the right timings to survive the attacks from a single boss. Splitting the damage, using a taunt combined with a knockdown from another tank, combined with a snare from a third tank, combined with a debuff with a fourth tank, combined with a shield skill from the fifth tank, all going off at once. Something like that, but more imaginative I hope.
Because I really want to see something like that so we can get away from the single main tank syndrome, where the only reason to bring more tanks in a raid is to tank adds or tank-swap.
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Comments
Def not worthy of spending time whilst developing an mmo.
What's next? An all healer boss? Exorcism?
An all bard boss? Poetry contest?
And as Nerror said, just controlling adds is shite. So what do you suggest those tanks do?
Same, I want formations, I want synergistic abilities (outside of just "I do this and you repeat the same action, which will result in some CC or whatever")
And those abilities definitely could have links to boss mechanics or stages, to make the whole process a bit easier on the more casual crowd (not like I think they'd ever even see a raid boss though
The main reason for this is simple - other classes bring more.
Lets say there is an encounter that needs a simultaneous taunt, knockdown, snare, debuff and "some shield skill", then I am going to use the tank for the taunt, a support class for the knockdown and snare, I'll find an alternative to the debuff, and perhaps (at a stretch) consider a second tank to use "some shield skill" if no other options exist. Then I have all those other classes bring everything they bring outside of this one situation we are talking about here.
The problem with this kind of thing though, is that it is significantly worse than tank swap mechanics for those tanks. I mean, with your suggestion, a raid would be bringing along five tanks (doing it your way), but four of them are functioning as support classes, not as tanks.
Why bring a tank along on content if they are not tanking. Why would Intrepid design encounters that require 5 tanks, but where only one of them is actually tanking? What kind of tank player wants to roll a tank, level a tank, gear a tank for raid content, join a raid as a tank, and then be happy with not actually tanking anything?
If (and that is a fairly big *IF* imo) a developer wants to add in mechanics to a game to force raids to take along more tanks, then those mechanics should be aimed at giving those additional tanks the kind of gameplay they signed up for when they rolled a tank. That would be tanking.
the thing is, the only way to force a raid to take along extra tanks, where those tanks are actually tanking rather than being support characters, is to have either adds or tank swapping mechanics.
The abilities like that forcefield from the showcase indicate that we might get that kind of gameplay in Ashes. And if raids are designed with such abilities in mind, those 4 tanks could properly support the raid through tanking. It just wouldn't quite be the super classic form of tanking.
If you aren't actually attempting to hold the attention of the target, you aren't tanking.
Take those forcefield abilities and put them on a support class like a bard. Is that bard now tanking when using them?
As Azherae said in a few different threads, FF11 kinda did this already by people just playing in a way where particular builds could serve as "tanks" during farming. So it's not like I'm suggesting something completely revolutionary and never done before. I'd just like to see a game designed with this in mind rather than just letting people do it when it might not even be the optimal gameplay style.
If there is just a tank, healer and a range of DPS, then the tanks role is to pull targets, bring them to a safe location, position them in a safe manner, facing an appropriate direction, keeping them as still as possible, and watching out for potential adds and dealing with them should they become an issue, all while attempting to keep the attention of the target (or targets), so as to minimize the number of targets the healer needs to heal.
If you have a class that is better at pulling, then that aspect of being a tank goes to that class. If you have a class that is a CC specialist, then they keep an eye out for adds.
Just because another class takes over one aspect of a tanks role (keeping an eye out for adds and dealing with them if they become a potential issue for a CC class, or pulling for a pull class), doesn't mean they are tanks.
Same deal with a class that gets a forcefield type ability.
An example of this from EQ2 would be that many classes have abilities that protect your group (as in, 6 players in your group, with 4 groups of 6 making up a raid) from AoE abilities. It is essentially a forcefield type ability, but only against area effect attacks.
This ability is found on bards and healers, not on tanks. It is performing a small function of what tanks do (protecting others), but that doesn't make these classes tanks.
And I'd definitely like if the bard or even the healer had a similar ability which would also synergize with some of the tank's abilities.
To me it's about how much of that role you fill. A mage that does a shitton of damage and keeps permanent threat because of it can be "a tank", if it has enough hp/def to sustain incoming dmg. The same could be applied to a healer who agggros stuff with his heals and has enough mana to keep that up throughout the farm.
But "tanking" would still be a smaller part of the class' impact on the whole process. Mage would still be a dps, the healer would still mainly heal (unless all partymates manage to completely dodge any and all dmg).
And the tank itself would also have several smaller roles that it plays. Def buffs could be seen as a bard role, any dmg-based taunting abilities would relate to a dps role, CCs could be a yet other role (depending on which archetype Intrepid decide to make the most CCing).
So pretty much as you said yourself, the roles are fluid. And that's not even considering all the potential augments that will push that fluidity ever further. Which is why I say that tank could be taken in more directions that just "threat holding", while upholding the idea of concentrating incoming dmg onto the tank itself.
And as for position holding part of tanking. That comes down to the overall design of the game. Do classes need the target to stay in one place? Does the location even support that? Does the boss have mechanics where position control would benefit the players? And what about the rng-based difficulty relating to aggro switching or to movement and ability patterns in mobs or any other rng-based mechanic that would make position control completely useless.
The roles are fairly set. It is the specific aspects in the periphery of the role that are fluid.
In a game like EQ, you would often have a puller and a CC. But you would still have a tank. The fact that some of the periphery tasks of the tank role have moved on to some other player does not alter the fact that the core role of a tank is still in tact. If the game has a maximum range on abilities, or if the game has backstab type abilities, or if the game has barrage type attacks on mobs, then yes.
If the game doesn't have any of these things, then it isn't likely to have good PvE. Not because "these things" make for good PvE, but because without these things, you have limited your PvE options by a massive amount that it simply won't be as good as it is in games that haven't limited it via these things.
We've already seen that you can move with attacks, so it's not like the classes with a more limited range couldn't just keep up. That movement would be part of the skill requirement for max dps output.
And backstabbing control could fall under the broader aggro control mechanics. You mentioned in one of the threads that EQ had items that moved you on the threat list and tank ability that moved you up one spot. What if Ashes had similar effects on different archetypes (especially those who're positionally challenged), but instead of moving them on the list, the effects would redirect the aggro or remove all aggro for a quick moment, or flip the aggro (making the target turn around towards anyone at their back), etc etc etc.
L2's epic bosses aggroed randomly quite often, but that didn't stop the dagger classes from backstabbing them, and L2's combat was completely rooted. I know that you'll say that the pve probably suffered because of that, but Ashes is also not L2 so they can design the game with that kind of gameplay in mind.
Though there is a possibility that in the end the majority of abilities will be castable on the run or at least have a directional part to them, so that you move with your attack instead of being fully planted.
Even worse, imagine it with 80 or 120 people all going after one boss.
If keeping the target stationary isn't considered a major aspect of tanking, then fighting over top end content is absolutely not going to be fun.
But you do bring up an interesting point, how exactly do Intrepid plan to address this interaction. An overworld boss with potential hundreds of people trying to kill him would be an absolute mess, no matter if it's stationary or not. I hadn't really thought about it before.
I was involved in large scale fights over encounters in Archeage as well (several hundred people). No collision makes the whole thing a non-issue. Even then though, the boss needed to be kept still.
Collusion makes it an issue on a number of different fronts. Assuming the content is well designed, those ~20 people will be having a great time.
At this point it comes down to - are you making a game for people to play, or a show for people to watch?
Potentially, though I have yet to see well designed mobile content.
However, the comment was more aimed at what you were saying, using how gameplay in an MMO looks as an argument just isn't overly compelling.
If the game can make it so that the tank can protect up to 5 other players or only a small area around him, and if the boss is a big dragon causing waves of some kind of damage, then it makes sense to have more tanks against one singe enemy.
The boss can be also be a hydra and fighting against each head would split the big team into small ones, each with a tank.
Or the boss could teleport from a place to another and having players distributed over a large area could be an advantage.
Then they could make encounters where tanks die slowly or suddenly no matter what you do and they should either take turns at tanking or clerics should use their resurrection spells to revive them.
I've seen dungeons where players were entering one by one to do as much damage as possible until being killed and running back in time to do that again. The NPC was constantly under attack and unable to heal. Was not the intended way to solve the encounter but is fun when players find unintended solutions.
So for any battle with more than melee trying to beat on something than there was space around it, you had to sheath your weapon, walk through players to get close enough to the boss to hit it, then unsheath and attack. Then do it again every time the boss repositioned itself....or did something that forced you to move out of the way. Positional attacks were even more of a pain.
That game ran a group size of 5 IIRC: 1 Tank, 1 healer, 3 DPS. Even in instances (5 player cap), it was recommended to not have more than 2 melee DPS because of collision issues around the boss affecting mDPS
Collision is just one of those aspects where developers have to make a compromise between PvE and PvP.
There is no doubt at all (to me, at least) that collision is great in PvP. However, it introduces serious issues for PvE - and the larger scale that PvE, the bigger those issues will be.
An argument could be made that collision is good for smaller scale PvE, but MMO's are not really about small scale.
But this is the gist of the fight. Just going to list the steps to give an example of what tank play in pve can look like.
Tank pulls boss and engages, it has an area effect that hits for high damage and debuffs folks, triggers tell you when to get away, we don't have visual cues so this is done with audio triggers responding to text cues.
At 75% boss disengages and becomes untouchable, 3 mini bosses spawn, all with different effects and must be picked up by 3 tanks, 2 of these tanks go down within the first few seconds as healers don't adjust fast enough, burning 2 other tanks cooldowns to get things back on track. Count it, that's now 5 Warriors engaged. These 3 bosses heal each other if their health isn't balanced within 5%, during the entire fight waves of adds spawn and must be cc'd and tanked and killed to avoid being overwhelmed. 5 minutes later the 3 mini bosses are brought down, and a fresh tank, the original in this case having played Dps during the fight and offtank, to save heavy tanking cooldowns reengages the boss.
At 50% of the bosses health add's begin to spawn continuously, up to 8 total active at a time, none of these are dangerous if you are one of the 3 tank classes, or a heavily geared dps class, and a healer can pay attention to you. If your a caster or a light dps they will drop you in 3 seconds or less. This is the easy part of the fight.
At 25% boss health, heavy add's spawn in pairs these hit as hard as the minis from before but have way less hp. They have to be picked up and burned by true tanks, and most of the raids dps to avoid being overwhelmed. These spawn every 45 seconds, and every 5% of the bosses health. So if those 2 things line up thats 4 at a time, they are picked up within a couple seconds and tanked, or they tear through healers and dps and you wipe. Additionally, the up to 8 lesser adds are still continuously spawning, and a Viral curse is being cast by one of the 3 possible add types, The curse sets off a trigger to the person receiving it to get out of the raid and cure themselves, otherwise it infects other people within 10 feet of you.
At 20% of the Boss health, the first tank is now spent, has burned through their defensive capabilities, and needs to swap with their backup. This backup played dps through the entire fight till now to avoid burning defensive's. Swap completed, and the first tank disengages the boss and joins the melee, popping offensive cooldowns to help burn adds. Tank 3 moves into backup position on the still parked boss. If that boss gets loose, it will eat through about 5 non tanks within the time it takes for another tank to realize it's joined the mess of adds and tries to engage and pull it away. Usually that isn't recoverable. We engage this fight with 5 warriors,(eq's Tank) 2 paladin's and 3 shadowknights. At no point are any of them, not busy.
I wrote this wall of text, not directly to answer the OP's question. But just as an example of how hectic Tanking can be even if shield wall type tactics aren't being employed, with multiple tanks on a single boss to soak damage.
I am under no illusion that raids will be this complex in Ashes, the margin of error for content like this would make PvP content added in impossible. It would take 1 assassin dropping a cleric to wipe a raid.
The Extra tanks in this case, will likely be either playing dps, which in a multi tank setting is what you do 80% of the time. Or offtanking, either add's or other players. I'm always amused when people assume Tanks shouldn't have a damage dealing role. It's the simplest way to keep playing a tank fun, since barring extremely intricate engagements, Only 1 main tank is useful at a time. But a solid group of them is always needed for engaging and difficult raid content.
I really hope they get this balance right, and find a way to make tanks viable in PvP. If you don't need good tanks your content isn't engaging from a PVE stance. Hearing that aggro generation includes damage done, coupled with Steven tanking with a 2 hander excited me on the tank stream. As I prefer a tank archetype with a damage dealing focus.
Love to see creative ideas for how boss fights could interact with the different facets of these systems
Make boss abilities spread damage amongst nearby people on first hit, then do AoE no-limit aura damage on all still within range.
Give the boss powerful single target debuffs that are not easily cleansed or that limit healing on a target, silence them, or make their cooldowns longer for a certain amount of time (force tank swaps).
Have the boss more likely to do slower AoE if multiple people on their upper half of their hate list are in the range of it (preferably conal).
Actually give tanks more 'wall' or 'protect person' style abilities, but with long cooldowns.
Give Tanks minor 'Roadblock' abilities so that a boss literally cannot charge past them, but also give the boss massive knockback style CC, meaning you need at least two tanks for this (one will get knocked back, the other then Roadblocks to prevent the mob maybe going after them).
Similar to above, give bosses the ability to Fling a nearby target at a different one for damage. In Soviet Verra, Tank Busters You. Still another tank swap mechanic really, but less so, as it doesn't absolutely require it, since the point would then be to use targeted ranged AoE on the Tank anyway.
Give Bosses 'Charm' or 'Dominate Will', which is functionally another 'force Tank Swap CC'.
These are the things I know Ashes can use, while not losing the game's identity, and without immediately opening the larger holes in design that come from open world PvX Raid level bosses. Less effective in 16-man but given the thread title that's probably not being considered here.
Some of this has the benefit of also making one bring one healer per tank in MOST games. In Ashes I'd expect more like 1.5 healers per Tank, presumably some of the Summoners will help since that'd be 'safer' to do in a PvX situation, so still back to the '5 of each Archetype per Raid'.