Sell me a Tanker

[Sublime]

As title says, i have basically tryed every other AT in game and back in live Brute was my very 1st to ding 50. I tryed hop in Tankerwagon but i always drop it short, i mean there is always something that other AT´s do better (exsept for Tanking). 

 

I would love to hear your thoughts for making an PVP Tanker.. Yes its not the best idea but i want it! 

 

Been fallin for Rad Armor, love it on my brute and overall it seems fulfill everything that would go for pvp aswell BUT if got better ideas or builds im all open for suggestions! 🙂

Edited June 25, 2020 by Sublime

[Bill Z Bubba]

I had 1 tank back before the snap. Ice/EM. Can't even remember her name. Tanker low damage was always just too dang much for me to deal with since I always mained a scrapper.

 

However, since the latest buff to tank base damage, I now can't seem to rationalize building brutes. They say they were going for tanks doing 90% of brute damage while brutes get 90% of the mitigation of tanks. Seems like they hit the mark on the damage side but didn't bother to realize the mitigation side isn't there.

 

So why be weaker on the mitigation front when you can dish out damn near the same damage and be leaps ahead on toughness?

 

I've got a rad/em tank I just dinged 50 with. Rad's extra AoE is very nice. Rad's mitigation is very nice. But if you go rad/claws? Wow. That'd be crazy on the "let's slaughter everything and be just fine doing it" front.

[Sir Myshkin]

So you want to build a Tanker?

Can't you just play a Scrapper.

You can smash anything, out live everything, you don't have to die at all!

And you'll occasionally have some others

To help you out,

you don't have to ask them why...

 

Go and build that Tanker

Okay, bye.

 

I couldn't resist, sorry, not sorry, it's been stuck in my head for like six hours.

[kiramon]

Bigger aoe and higher target cap- why play anything else 🤪🤪

[Heraclea]

If wanted to PvP, I wouldn't make a tanker.  Tankers basically have no role there.  Keeping toggles up is a constant nuisance.  The only melee class I'd consider for PvP is a stalker. 

 

But if I wanted to make a PvP tanker, I'd consider one where your aura toggle plays a very small role in keeping you alive.  Fire would be good for that.  You will definitely need massive knockback protection for that purpose, so take defense toggles like Weave (for Karma) and many travel powers like Combat Jumping (also resists immobilize) for Blessing of the Zephyr.  You can put one of each in Combat Jumping.   Steadfast Protection can go in most of your primary powers; in an autopower like Temperature Protection it can't be detoggled.

 

 

 

[Funkenstein]

I'd consider one where your aura toggle plays a very small role in keeping you alive.

 

Ugh ?

 Have you pvp once to say that kind of things ? Sorry but there a lot of mistakes in your "analysis".

 

To the Op go in the "Pvp build" part of the forum, you'll have better chance to have pvper answering.

 

 

Edited June 27, 2020 by Funkenstein

[KC4800]

1 hour ago, Heraclea said:

If wanted to PvP, I wouldn't make a tanker.  Tankers basically have no role there.  Keeping toggles up is a constant nuisance.  The only melee class I'd consider for PvP is a stalker. 

 

But if I wanted to make a PvP tanker, I'd consider one where your aura toggle plays a very small role in keeping you alive.  Fire would be good for that.  You will definitely need massive knockback protection for that purpose, so take defense toggles like Weave (for Karma) and many travel powers like Combat Jumping (also resists immobilize) for Blessing of the Zephyr.  You can put one of each in Combat Jumping.   Steadfast Protection can go in most of your primary powers; in an autopower like Temperature Protection it can't be detoggled.

 

 

 

Does a fire tank still need acrobatics? (Asking for a friend) 😜

[Heraclea]

No; Combat Jumping and anti-KB IOs are enough.

[tidge]

6 hours ago, Heraclea said:

If wanted to PvP, I wouldn't make a tanker.  Tankers basically have no role there.  Keeping toggles up is a constant nuisance.  The only melee class I'd consider for PvP is a stalker. 

 

But if I wanted to make a PvP tanker, I'd consider one where your aura toggle plays a very small role in keeping you alive.  Fire would be good for that. 

I agree with Heraclea; the only thing I think a Tanker can really bring to PvP is to be a target... you likely won't be defeating any other player in PvP. Possibly the best thing a Tanker brings to (team) PvP is the Taunt.

 

That being said, any good Tanker build should be able to keep the toggles up... at least long enough to realize you may be in over your head.

[Heraclea]

3 hours ago, tidge said:

That being said, any good Tanker build should be able to keep the toggles up... at least long enough to realize you may be in over your head.

IME any toggle with any kind of debuff or damage added will be detoggled by ANY mez, however brief, in PvP.  So if you are Willpower you are constantly losing Rise to the Challenge, and if you are Invuln you are constantly losing Invincibility, and so forth.  Since these are linchpin powers for those sets, they don't sound to me like a good idea for a PvP character.  They are major reasons why my reaction to PvP is to get the hell out and not go back. 

 

This is why I suggested a tanker primary whose aura is purely offense, and that does not form a major part of the system that keeps you standing: like Fire for instance. 

[Sovera]

As others have mentioned you are 100% in the wrong forum. PvE and PvP follow different rules and the diminishing returns in PvP means completely different slotting and a huge emphasis in burst attack. As a tanker you're not going to really be killing much, your job will be as a taunt bot (which is important, mind).

 

So with all of that said definitely look in the PvP sub-forums and look for the PvP discord. There will builds and avid PvPers who will give you clear answers to any doubts. The brief time I was there everyone was super friendly and informative when something was asked.

[Sailboat]

On 6/26/2020 at 12:38 AM, kiramon said:

Bigger aoe and higher target cap- why play anything else 🤪🤪

Not  PvP player myself,  but I would imagine the higher target cap, so wonderful in PvE, isn't often a factor in PvP.  Unless, like, sixteen guys jump you and somehow fail to burst you down.

[SeraphimKensai]

Retired pvper here, tanks are useful in team based pvp for running distraction by taunting damage off their target and ruining an incoming spike on the called target. In Solo duels, they aren't ideal, and an FFA format aren't really going to get any kills unless they get lucky on a kill steal.

[CR Banana Man]

The best places for info on PvP builds are these forums:

 

Main PvP discord: https://discord.gg/fH44egF

Smol KB discord: https://discord.gg/RVUaCcd (basically a PvP help center aimed at helping out newer players, or players looking to transition into team arena PvP, they also run the smol kb event).

 

Tank viability is really dependent on what you're trying to do. Things like rad armor or invul tanks can be built to levels of near invincibility, but also lack any sort of consistent high damage output. 

 

For 8v8/team pvp, tanks really aren't that hot at the moment. Tanks are super hard to kill, but the current consensus among arena teams is that taunt is broken, and typically taunt isn't allowed in this format. 

 

For 1v1s, you'll probably never die, but you might struggle to kill more experienced players. 

Edited July 5, 2020 by CR Banana Man

[Seigmoraig]

On 7/5/2020 at 2:24 PM, CR Banana Man said:

For 8v8/team pvp, tanks really aren't that hot at the moment. Tanks are super hard to kill, but the current consensus among arena teams is that taunt is broken, and typically taunt isn't allowed in this format. 

What's wrong with taunt exactly. I never pvp but I am just curious as to what makes it so bad

[Sovera]

25 minutes ago, Seigmoraig said:

What's wrong with taunt exactly. I never pvp but I am just curious as to what makes it so bad

Broken, in this context, means OP. It forces the damage to steer away from the squishies to the heavily armored tank. Who then take forever to kill.

[Seigmoraig]

20 minutes ago, Sovera said:

Broken, in this context, means OP. It forces the damage to steer away from the squishies to the heavily armored tank. Who then take forever to kill.

ok, seems kinda working as intended then lol, might as well ban tanks all together if one of their main features can't be used. But I never pvp so I'm just spewing here. Although now that I learn it has cottage rules, it makes me even less inclined to try it some time.

Edited July 8, 2020 by Seigmoraig

[nihilii]

2 minutes ago, Sovera said:

Broken, in this context, means OP. It forces the damage to steer away from the squishies to the heavily armored tank. Who then take forever to kill.

You'd think that'd be the point of a tank, heh.

 

It's always been dubious to me how the loudest voices in the CoH PvP community never question the supremacy of team Ventrilo (or I guess Discord these days?) unsuppressed movement ranged blast and heal spikes, something that has been true since the introduction of PvP - but have taken offense over the years to just about everything that ever challenged that supremacy.

I mean, coming from Quake, Tribes and Starcraft I can kind of get it. From a mechanical point of view, the freedom of movement in CoH makes for much faster paced dynamics, to the point if you enjoy that style you probably would fall asleep in classic, static MMO PvP. It makes sense to defend this style tooth and nails.

 

Still, seems scrubish to yell "OP" whenever a counter surfaces, rather than adapt and overcome. Especially as there's no indication the highspeed unsuppressed blast spikes paradigm is anything but arbitrary emergent design. From Live days, it was obvious if hard to prove most players favored very static MMO fights. We all recall Siren's Call "Fight Clubs". Hardcore PvPers who made the most out of freedom of movement defeated those players with ease, over and over. Again, impossible to prove but I'd wager a silent majority was driven out by the hardcore minority - for lack of accepting the "rules" that majority wished for, stand still and whack on me until either of us drops dead. Then that hardcore minority turned around and argued for rules, rules, rules.

 

But yeah, knowing the egos that come with the territory I'm sure the people involved have rationalisations for banning Taunt. "It's different, because we know better than you what makes the game good. Getting perma Taunted is not a fun experience. Now, highspeed blast spikes, THAT is a fun experience". Irony aside, personally I could actually agree with that statement. But the whole concept of competitive PvP being more about haggling for banning things rather than brainstorming evolutions is such a turnoff.

 

I suppose we can't blame players too much. CoH PvP started as a broken mess with no significant ingame incentives, got little developer attention and what attention it got arguably made things worse. Got to work with what you've got, and it seems there's at least enough people who enjoy this player made balance on to have a good time.

[CR Banana Man]

For the record, it's only organized team arena pvp where taunt is banned/frowned upon. I wouldn't let that discourage you from trying PvP as a whole. In most casual PvP scenarios, it's harder to abuse to power.

 

The issue with taunt is not that it pulls some damage away from squishies and over to characters that are harder to kill - this would be fine.

 

The issue is that it does this too completely, and has no counter-play. Taunt in it's current state doesn't reduce the effect of an offensive player, by forcing them to sometimes attack a "harder to kill" target - it entirely eliminates the offensive effect of that player by forcing them to target an unkillable target. 

 

Effects of taunt do not suppress like CCs do after repeated use. They're supposed to break when a player breaks line of sight from the taunter, but they often don't. Even if they do break, taunt is a fairly spammable power with a short cooldown, so they can be reapplied almost instantaneously. Taunt also has a stackable, auto-hit -range debuff (75% for brutes and scrappers, 100% for tanks), so even the target does break line of sight and escape the "taunted" status for a few seconds it's not uncommon for that target to be debuffed with 300% -range. This level of -range efftively turns most ranged attacks into melee attacks - basically, even for the few seconds of a 10 minute game where you break taunt, you still can't really contribute anything to the game.

 

Taunt's required effort is disproportionately low to the high rewards it gives. It is indeed an example of player made balance, as mentioned. And it's not ideal. Melee characters do currently under-perform in 8v8 games with regard to offensive contributions, and that does suck - that's not something lost on me. The issue is melee characters also drastically over-perform with regard to survivability, so a great deal of imbalance arises if you give them a mechanic that takes virtually no skill to use but completely removes another player from the game, indifferent of that player's skill level.

 

The player being perma-taunted basically doesn't get to play, and might as well not even be in the game. In an 8v8, if a team brings two taunters, unless the skill gap between these teams is disproportionately large, the only counter has historically been "bring your own two taunters." The result is 4 players out of 16 perma taunted, running around in circles doing nothing for 10 minutes waiting for the game to end while the other 12 actually PvP. A common joke was "can we just 6v6 without the taunters?" It's not only broken objectively, but it's also a pretty terrible mechanic from a "fun" standpoint. I realize fun is subjective, but this is a pretty extreme case - you basically just don't even get to play the game. There's no level of skill or strategy that will untaunt you or allow you (or you and 5 other people) to get a kill on a tank who has a basic understanding of the PvP system. You can try whatever you want, but it will be completely nullified by a near invincible character hitting F, and then spamming taunt and web grenade for 10 minutes.