Focused Feedback: Tank Updates

[Widower]

This is intended to be a feedback thread. Can we please keep the personal attacks out of it? Thanks.

[Haijinx]

There will always be those who want the game to remain as it was when the NCsoft servers closed.

 

 

[Noyjitat]

1 minute ago, Bossk_Hogg said:

I'm truly sorry you suck at building your brute then. Do you want some build advice?

My brutes fine, my tanks are fine too. They don't need a damage buff.

[Noyjitat]

Just now, Haijinx said:

There will always be those who want the game to remain as it was when the NCsoft servers closed.

 

 

Got no problems with changes just not radical changes. When you want to give an AT that is meant to be a tank a damage buff comparable to a damage character you may as well make a new AT. You're fundamentally changing the tanker to something it was never meant to be. We should not even be having this discussion....

[siolfir]

1 hour ago, golstat2003 said:

I thought the original devs said that Masterminds were supposed to be the tankers of COV 🤣

 

They have, and Masterminds can occupy mobs and split aggro, either by having their pets taking aggro away from players or using bodyguard mode to split the damage that the Mastermind takes, which requires the Mastermind to dip into pool powers to hold aggro on themselves because they have no in-set ways of doing so. They don't collect aggro on a single target within their primary or secondary powersets.

 

Brutes collect aggro just by being there and hitting things. This had to be intentional, because it had to be specifically added to all of their powers.

 

1 hour ago, Noyjitat said:

Brutes are not supposed to have a small damage advantage. Thats the reason why the damage cap on a brute is so much higher and always has been. You can't give tanks that high of a damage bonus and still let them have super high hitpoints, resist and defense. Now if you want to give them brute level defenses/resist/hitpoints but have the 600% cap with improved taunt then yeah sure. That would be fine but then the tank would have to work as hard as the brute does with setbonus defense/resist/hitpoints.

 

This change is letting the tank have both damage and defense without having to work for it.

The damage cap on Brutes is so much higher because originally Fury provided +3% damage per point and decayed much more quickly. Running at 70% Fury (+210%) with ED damage slotting (+95%) meant you would hit a 500% ("damage AT" +400%) cap with Build Up and +5% extra damage from any source. At +2% it's a lot harder to hit the cap than it used to be, but when it was changed they lowered the decay rate at lower levels of Fury, tweaked the gain formula at higher levels, and the cap remained where it was so that they could say it wasn't a straight-up nerf because it was "more consistent with the same peak".

 

And yes, I realize that doesn't explain why Warshades are able to remain capped on damage (+300%) and resistance (85%) permanently with enough targets and recharge, but I guess they didn't want to have two ATs that were almost always capped on damage when they introduced CoV.

Edited September 13, 2019 by siolfir
consistent -> consistent with the same peak

[Bossk_Hogg]

19 minutes ago, Noyjitat said:

My brutes fine, my tanks are fine too. They don't need a damage buff.

Well then use DO's. 

 

An invuln brute has to make up 6% defense and 8% various resistances to catch up to the tank. Easily doable with some set bonuses. Think the tank can catch up to the brute in damage with the same? Or even come close? 

[Profit]

31 minutes ago, Noyjitat said:

You're spouting the same meaninless bullshit that everyone else here is that wants tanks to get a huge buff.

And you're getting defensive like every brute player that doesn't want their toy touched or lose their specialness. But here's the thing, your not losing anything, Brutes have not been touched at all. You should be very ecstatic about that, your brute is going to do exactly what it's always done. And be glad I'm not in powerhouses shoes, because if I was then brutes would lose the taunt click power and it would be replaced with provoke faster than you can blink. Brutes shouldn't be using taunt anyway, it takes away from fury generation that you can do simply by attacking.

 

Although I think your main problem is tanks coming closer in damage to brutes. You probably would have liked all my original proposals. The current changes are actually very close to what I wanted so I'm supporting them. But you can check out exactly what I wanted here.

 

 

[Haijinx]

For 95% of level 50 content for a lot of sets the Tanker has no practical survival advantage over a brute.

 

Probably a lot lower level than that tbh.  But a lot of people don't use many sets until 50.  

[Haijinx]

2 minutes ago, Profit said:

And you're getting defensive like every brute player that doesn't want their toy touched or lose their specialness. But here's the thing, your not losing anything, Brutes have not been touched at all. You should be very ecstatic about that, your brute is going to do exactly what it's always done. And be glad I'm not in powerhouses shoes, because if I was then brutes would lose the taunt click power and it would be replaced with provoke faster than you can blink. Brutes shouldn't be using taunt anyway, it takes away from fury generation that you can do simply by attacking.

 

Although I think your main problem is tanks coming closer in damage to brutes. You probably would have liked all my original proposals. The current changes are actually very close to what I wanted so I'm supporting them. But you can check out exactly what I wanted here.

 

 

Brutes actually are getting a slight buff.  Arent they? Their ranged modifier is going up

[Noyjitat]

9 minutes ago, Profit said:

And you're getting defensive like every brute player that doesn't want their toy touched or lose their specialness. But here's the thing, your not losing anything, Brutes have not been touched at all. You should be very ecstatic about that, your brute is going to do exactly what it's always done. And be glad I'm not in powerhouses shoes, because if I was then brutes would lose the taunt click power and it would be replaced with provoke faster than you can blink. Brutes shouldn't be using taunt anyway, it takes away from fury generation that you can do simply by attacking.

 

Although I think your main problem is tanks coming closer in damage to brutes. You probably would have liked all my original proposals. The current changes are actually very close to what I wanted so I'm supporting them. But you can check out exactly what I wanted here.

 

 

Im not a brute player. Like you (i expect) probably have tons of alts. What I dont want to see happen is the tank turned into a brute the only difference here being the tank doens't have a fury bar and can't reach a damage bonus as easily on its own. But it still reach a very high number of damage that it was never meant to have with this change. I have basically no problem with the other tanker changes but im 100% opposed to giving tanks the bonus damage increase.

[Profit]

19 minutes ago, Noyjitat said:

Im not a brute player. Like you (i expect) probably have tons of alts. What I dont want to see happen is the tank turned into a brute the only difference here being the tank doens't have a fury bar and can't reach a damage bonus as easily on its own. But it still reach a very high number of damage that it was never meant to have with this change. I have basically no problem with the other tanker changes but im 100% opposed to giving tanks the bonus damage increase.

I personally didn't ask for a damage scale buff either. I am a believer a tank should have a large cap though. So that the team can funnel the energy through the tank if they choose. Doing so creates a very interesting coin with tanks on one side and brutes on the other. Basically a selfish tanker and a team tanker. I would expect the damage scalar to be adjusted a hair lower for the tank, even in light of the radius reduction changes.

[siolfir]

1 hour ago, Haijinx said:

Brutes actually are getting a slight buff.  Arent they? Their ranged modifier is going up

It's not really a buff, though - no Brute powers were using their ranged modifier except maybe the attack in Sorcery(?).  All of the melee ATs were using their melee damage modifiers for both melee and ranged attacks, which I always thought was silly. This fixes that, while adjusting the modifiers so that it's not nerfing anyone.

[William Valence]

3 hours ago, Megajoule said:

Okay.  How would you like to see Tanks improved, within your perception of their intended role and the technical constraints (which are significant) of the engine, if not by improving their damage dealing (in some way)?

The first thing I would do is test what the limitations of the engine actually are. The game shutdown for me in 2012 and only came back recently so I'm playing catch-up with these code releases, but what I've seen is confirming some suspicions. The first being that the devs were freaks, and the things that they did were very difficult because it seems very apparent they didn't have license to modify a good percentage of the that code we can.

 

For example I was explicitly told by both Castle and Synapse that they couldn't modify the arc of a power, only the radius, so boost range was possible, but boost arc was not. Yet here we are with an arc boost effect. So:

 

I would like to see a new attribute/mod made, right under elusivity, which would be a cur type called Aggro cap. I know that the AI can check the health cur to make decisions, and I would recommend the devs go to the location where the AI critter aggro cap is called and replace it with a check of the Aggro cap cur that would be made. I don't have the files at work here, but IIRC it should be in one of the hentai c files. Around 980. To specify I believe that the devs couldn't do AT specific aggro caps is most likely because they didn't have license to modify this part of the code.

 

This would then allow you to add aggro cap modifications to the Inherant powers of ATs. You could set the base aggro cap at 17, and then have the inherent increase or decrease this by level, so you could have tanker caps ramp up without throwing a tanker right into a say 24 aggro cap immediately at level 1. Or things like having defenders ramp down to a 10 aggro cap. If this check works as I think it would, you could even have powers that modify player's aggro cap. Placate lower it for Stalkers or Tanker taunt additionally reduce the cap of non-brute/tanker allies in the taunt AoE. Or brute aggro cap increase with fury, stuff like that.

 

That would be my ideal.

 

And hell, The proposed change to tankers isn't even too egregious until you get to the max target cap. Sure the larger areas violate the AoE damage mod calculations, but scrapper critical hits violates the general damage rules too, it's not that bad. But the effect output that is possible with the increased target cap is just so much. Like 92% of my concern would be gone if the target cap was brought in line.

3 hours ago, Leogunner said:

Have a Blaster that reduces the number of enemies to 5 with 2 clicks (Aim+Nuke).

Does the blaster also have 90% res and 3k+ health?

 

3 hours ago, Captain Powerhouse said:

The Target caps and area increase simply allow the tanker to use his own hide to solo more efficiently.

Yes it does, but I think the magnitude is being underestimated. To my knowledge Stalkers only have one instance, being spine burst from hide, where they can do more than 10 hits worth of damage guaranteed. Stalker's other AoEs only have a 50% chance per target to apply additional AoE damage from hide. And Stalkers themselves are a great showing as to how much more valuable AoE is than ST.

 

Tankers will be far more capable of engineering situations to fill the cap of their powers, a lot of the time just by abusing taunt and dragging stragglers to the next group. It will be tremendously more frequent that a tanker will hit 10 targets with a melee cone than a scrapper will crit all 5 with theirs. I was regularly getting 5 or 6 (I actually can't remember which) with golden dragonfly, so ten on a 100* plus cone isn't an unreasonable expectation.

 

The old target caps with a crit chance on AoEs would have less game-able output. Slightly better if the player is lazy and doesn't use aggro management tools to merge groups and keep their powers full, with a much less abuseable high end if the chance is something like 5-10%.

 

You may even be able to make the area bigger again since the output wouldn't be so much higher, just easier.

 

[Profit]

3 minutes ago, William Valence said:

Does the blaster also have 90% res and 3k+ health?

My arch/nin is pretty close...

 

[siolfir]

16 minutes ago, William Valence said:

Yes it does, but I think the magnitude is being underestimated. To my knowledge Stalkers only have one instance, being spine burst from hide, where they can do more than 10 hits worth of damage guaranteed. Stalker's other AoEs only have a 50% chance per target to apply additional AoE damage from hide. And Stalkers themselves are a great showing as to how much more valuable AoE is than ST.

Burst, from Kinetic Melee, is the 100% critical chance from hide. Spine Burst is 30%. Burst also has an 8' radius, so it's not really all that likely you're hitting 10 things.

[siolfir]

15 minutes ago, Profit said:

My arch/nin is pretty close...

 

So what I'm getting out of this is that you're capped to half the damage types, softcapped to almost all the damage types, and capped on hp on a Blaster. Just go kill more and stop interrupting threads for the lower damage ATs that would only get in your way.

[Profit]

1 minute ago, siolfir said:

So what I'm getting out of this is that you're capped to half the damage types, softcapped to almost all the damage types, and capped on hp on a Blaster. Just go kill more and stop interrupting threads for the lower damage ATs that would only get in your way.

Well, I mean. He did ask about the blasters... >>

 

I main a tank though 😄 that blaster is my third pick for character when I log on.

 

My second pick is a tank... <<

Fourth is a troller...

[Vanden]

28 minutes ago, William Valence said:

Does the blaster also have 90% res and 3k+ health?

The Blaster doesn’t need it if the enemies are attacking the Brute or Tanker.

[Myrmidon]

5 hours ago, Captain Powerhouse said:

If that was the case, this would not be happening now, and the AT would have been given 1.1 modifiers over 5 years ago. If i was to go for my personal favorite idea and ignore everything anyone else said, tankers would be running with an offensive/defensive toggle right now. My potential bias is one of the reasons I have forced myself to take years on changing anything on the Archetype.

 

I proposed countless approaches to give a tanker a better place over the last decade and a half, to both former devs when the game was live and to players. Almost everything that has been suggested here I had at one way or another suggested too, and was shut down by one, the other or basically both due to me bringing it up multiple times.

 

At the end of the day, the most common thing everyone came to, is they made a melee at to tank and punch, and no one wanted to see crazy complicated mechanics getting in the way, or be sidelined into melee defenders, or any other AT.

 

A version of this was actually tested a few years ago and had had the most positive reaction of anything that was proposed up to that point, in great part because it does not force most tank players to do anything but what they already did: grab as much aggro and AoE as much of it as possible.

 

Even if i took a melee-defender approach, the effects of it would have to be extremely subtle for (something that just comes for free) to make any impact, or it would have to be a whole AT redesign. At that point one simply enters New AT territory.

 

I been meaning to do an explanation on the reason behind most of the details of the patch and what they are meant to address, every time i start I end up with a giant wall of text and i want to make it more to-the-point than that, but have had no much time as i been spending most the last two days fixing pvp bugs. But want to cover a handful of points here:

 

The base damage scale is being increased to the point it is precisely because forever the devs maintained that the tanker should be doing 75% the damage of a scrapper. In practice, the tanker was doing, an average of 60%~65% the damage of a scrapper, after mods, crits and higher +damage mods came to play. A base damage scale of 0.95 takes the tanker to approximately that point.

 

Leveling up, the tanker can take a lot longer to kill things than the equivalent scrapper, but they burn endurance at the exact same rate. That is where the +max endurance comes into play, it's meant to let them continue a fight longer before their end is so low they can only use their T1/T2 or eat a blue pill.

 

The Target caps and area increase simply allow the tanker to use his own hide to solo more efficiently. This wont do do as much as most people think in teams as blasters or any other AT with a nuke ends up obliterating minions in half a second, leaving way fewer enemies around than players realize. Even solo, the tanker will eventually see the enemy count drop bellow a point where there is an advantage. It is even less of an advantage when you count that the target cap increase only applies to melee set attacks, and both Brutes and Tankers get access to 16 target cap attacks on their epics pools, not to mention Incarnate Judgement at that level of play.

 

Finally, a Dev that gets it.❤️

[Myrmidon]

4 hours ago, Leogunner said:

Well the reason to play a tank is to use sustain to shore-up damage received thus mitigating damage to others.  The reason to play a Tanker is, should and hopefully will be for the specific unique aspects of the AT fitting the desired concept of the character you're creating.  For these changes (specifically, the area/range and target cap changes), the reason to play the Tanker is to hit many foes and get lots of attention.  It's actually justifying the entire concept of taunt retroactively.  Why does a Tanker taunt? One might answer "because he's a tank" but I'm talking about the concept of taunt itself.  It's not specifically shouting out a challenge using gestures or words, it's mostly just a game mechanic.  I suppose one could say the reason Tanker attacks taunt is because they use fancy hand waving or some such while they are attacking to goad enemies into targeting them (and decreasing their effectiveness at the same time...kinda dumb justification if you ask me) but with the change, the answer why Tankers taunt is clear: their attacks are perceived as more dangerous.  Why?  Because it hurts lots of people, it shakes the very room, it's deafening and extremely obvious.  So that would be the AT to use if you wanted to fill that concept.

 

The reason to play a Brute is even simpler: they are just offensive tanks.  They get their offensive powers sooner, they get more damage with more aggro and they have high potential when buffed.  The fury mechanic can be somewhat ignored if you don't like it but want to be an offensive tank but with the changes, one can actually decide to *gasp*....build a Tanker offensively and it work like a standard or non-optimized Brute.

 

This is the best explanation between the two (once these changes go live) that I have seen in this entire thread.

[Myrmidon]

4 hours ago, Yuro said:

Recreated my dark armor/staff tanker, buffed it to 50 and IOed and Incarnated it out to match what I had.  It feels almost too powerful, compared to what is a very equivalent build on a non-testing server (the only real difference is the live version doesn't have most T4 incarnate abilities, only T3ish).  I was taking down packs of mobs really quickly in the DA arcs.

 

I'll have to try buffing a tanker to ~20-30 or so with just SOs to see how that feels.

 

Are Judgement incarnates exempt from the radius increase?  I feel like Void Radial T4 had a much larger radius than 50' (seems more like 80', which makes me think the radius increase is applying to it).

Try a second build just using IO commons and see where that brings you.

[Myrmidon]

10 hours ago, Mr. Igneous said:

Well, at least you read that far...Veteran Tank. 

 

Although many of us played in Live Beta 15 years ago.  Some of the people playing now were not even born yet.  Mmmm....Old may be a decent descriptor after all! Ye Old Fogey Tank from Live Beta, YOFT for short.  Now there is a desriptor!  All tanks from Live Beta shall now be known as YOFT!

That needs to be made into a badge as soon as possible.🤣

[Myrmidon]

1 hour ago, William Valence said:

And hell, The proposed change to tankers isn't even too egregious until you get to the max target cap. Sure the larger areas violate the AoE damage mod calculations, but scrapper critical hits violates the general damage rules too, it's not that bad. But the effect output that is possible with the increased target cap is just so much. Like 92% of my concern would be gone if the target cap was brought in line.

 

The drop from 100% to 60% will be closer to what you’re looking for.

[William Valence]

3 minutes ago, Myrmidon said:

The drop from 100% to 60% will be closer to what you’re looking for.

I may have been mistaken, but the drop from 100% to 60% was regarding the radius boost for AoE size, not the target cap.

 

Did I understand that incorrectly?

 

It's the target cap that's got me so riled up, like I said lower in that post, I'd be less scared if the cap was dropped back down and the radius kept high.

[Myrmidon]

56 minutes ago, siolfir said:

So what I'm getting out of this is that you're capped to half the damage types, softcapped to almost all the damage types, and capped on hp on a Blaster. Just go kill more and stop interrupting threads for the lower damage ATs that would only get in your way.

And send me that build, Profit, so that I may make my own adjustments to the Blasters that I manage.