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Yaffy
03-18-2020, 04:18 PM
The right way to design a tank in an MMO

I've been talking a lot about tanking in Project Gorgon with other people recently, and something that I can't help but bring up a lot is the current "Design" for what people consider tanking in Project Gorgon now vs what I believe is good design behind a tanking skill.
Because of this, I wanted to make a thread about what I hope to see as a player who loves playing tank, and I think one of the easiest ways to show that is to talk about one treasure effect (or really two, since there was another very similar mod) in particular as an example.

"Unarmed attacks have a 23% chance to conjure a magical field that mitigates 10% of all physical damage you take for 1 minute (or until 100 damage is mitigated)."

Unfortunately, this mod no longer exists as it was removed from the game about nine months ago, and was replaced with the current mods related to evasion instead. I'm not sure if it was replaced for balancing reasons or because the developers wanted to encourage synergy with evasion boosts and had to make room for it. Of course the mod was strong (hence why it was impactful to the design of tanking as an unarmed user), but ignoring the actual numbers behind the mod I want to explain why a mod like this was so amazing both from a build design standpoint and a gameplay standpoint.

1. It required investment to be useful
This might sound like a no brainer, but one important part about unarmed tanking's design was that it required a large amount of mods dedicated to it for it to work. Considering the mod, a 23% chance to block only 10% of damage is not a reliable amount. If you only have one copy of this mod, the chance you get the mitigation buff is very low, and you should only consider it an occasional "Bonus" every once in a while. However, you could build four copies of the mod on your armor. This took up a lot of potential slots on your gear and required good gear to get, but this turned a low chance into a consistent mitigation buff which enabled unarmed to be the great tanking skill that it was.

The idea here is that in order to become a powerful unarmed tank, you really needed to dedicate your build to it, and your ability to tank was heavily based on how good your gear was. This in turn meant that you had less slots to build for damage, meaning your damage was lower which should be true for a character who can survive much longer. You could build damage, but the thing is that your damage would never be as high as other players because of the commitment you made to tanking, and that meant you would be unable to generate enough aggro to effectively tank. This meant that you had to build taunt modifiers in order to tank effectively, cutting into your damage even more.
The end result is that unarmed allowed you to make a very powerful tank character, but you had to sacrifice your ability to do damage and it was based on how good your gear was, which is an example of how unarmed was an excellently designed. This might sound obvious, but I'll come back to why it might not be later.

2. It encouraged different ability sets
Another important aspect of the mod is that it has a chance to trigger each time you use an unarmed attack. This meant that the more unarmed attacks you used, the more mitigation effects you'd acquire. This meant that in order to use this mod to its fullest, you wanted to plan a perfect skill set which allowed you to make the most out of your entire unarmed ability bar.

For example, you could use bodyslam, but that would mean one less unarmed attack you can use to keep up your mitigation buffs so you wanted to make sure you could use your other 5 while it was on cooldown. This encouraged players to either make a balanced set of attacks that all had decent cooldowns, or a set with several fast cooldowns with a few larger ones. Essentially this mod encouraged you to make a completely different unarmed build that many people weren't playing, but was still flexible enough to allow variation. Other variations of unarmed were typically "Fire and forget" such as bodyslam or barrage nuke builds, so this mod encouraged players to try out a new skill set just to make the most of its passive effect. All this could get even crazier if you wanted to implement meditation combos as well.

3. It was challenging and engaging to play
It might be easy to scoff at the idea that a build in an MMORPG "Difficult to play", but this mod was the reason why Unarmed was such a fun and challenging skill to play. Because this mod was better the more unarmed attacks you used, this meant that in order to be as tanky as possible you had to be on point with using unarmed attacks as much as possible. This meant that you had to manage and use your skills off cooldown as much as possible to avoid downtime and therefore missed mitigation buffs. In other words, you had to be on point with your rotation because mistakes lowered your survivability.

Not only that, but I believe that this mod showed just how great Project Gorgon's combat can really be because not only was it an example of how rotations were important, but it was an example of how important it was to not follow a rotation at the same time. Your general goal was to simply use as many unarmed abilities as possible, but only spamming unarmed attacks was generally a terrible idea because of the limitations of unarmed. For just one example, unarmed doesn't have a proper AoE taunt, so if your party ended up pulling another enemy you would need to make a quick decision on what to do. You could try using unarmed's single target taunt, but if you had used it to keep up your unarmed rotation then it would be on cooldown. You could fall back on your other skill line's AoE taunt (Ex. Cow's Deadly Emission), but that didn't count as an unarmed ability so therefore you would lose mitigation. You could try just switching targets and using normal abilities, but then you might not be able to get aggro before your party member dies.
There are tons of examples I could give on the nuances of how you could play unarmed tank and why it constantly challenged the way you played, but basically what I'm trying to say is that it was difficult to play but rewarding if you got good, and that's why it was great. Just using unarmed attacks without thinking would quickly lead to death.

4. It actively changed the way you adventured
Aside from just being difficult to play, the way this mod worked encouraged lots of interesting ways to approach certain enemies, which made it a lot of fun and gave a lot of thinking even in between battles. The mod stacks, but disappears if you take too much damage or after a minute passes. This encouraged unarmed tanks to learn how to "Build stacks" effectively in order to make the most use of unarmed.

For example, Zuke is a boss that deals a lot of physical damage and stuns you, meaning that unarmed tanks had difficulty building mitigation on him because he would constantly remove your buffs and prevent you from getting new ones, forcing you to take full damage. Something you could do however, was pull an ice mage next to him beforehand and build stacks off of it instead because it lacks physical damage, and then fight Zuke with your acquired stacks for a much better start. This is just one example, but when you apply it to the entire dungeon run it becomes significantly more interesting. Unarmed tanks were encouraged to selectively pick which enemies to fight in order to build stacks, and then quickly change targets to something that their stacks help defend them against in order to make the most of their stacks while they lasted. This lead to significantly more fun dungeon runs because it encouraged constant combat with smart pulling, rather than the usual style of pulling one enemy and then sitting around waiting for cooldowns to come back. As a tank player, this meant that I had to make decisions on whether to push forward to take advantage of my stacks while I had them, or waiting so that my party can regain stats and their cooldowns, which made going through dungeons significantly more fun and engaging.

So after these four points, I hope I've properly communicated just why exactly I loved the design of old unarmed so much and why the removal of this mod made such an impact. I'm sad to see it gone, but I sincerely hope we'll see something similar to it again in the future since its design was so great.
Now many people are probably wondering what I'm so sad about since there's other "Tanking" skills to play with, which is why I'd like to continue this wall of text.
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The wrong way to design a tank

In my experience, if you ask players what skills are for tanking, a vast majority of the time you will hear them say that staff and shield are their first recommendations. This isn't really a surprise, since the skills advertise themselves tanking skills and are noticeably very useful and are probably the best ways to tank now that the aforementioned unarmed mods no longer exist.

However, I believe that staff and shield, while not poorly designed skills, are not well designed tanks. The reason can easily be shown by using these three skills.

https://i.imgur.com/8uHZ4MS.png https://i.imgur.com/rbP4zu0.png https://i.imgur.com/qtPIs66.png

These three abilities a major part of the skills' survivability, if not the only major source of mitigation the skills have. Without these three abilities, these skills would be significantly less useful in any sort of tanking role and are primarily the reason why staff and shield can be called "Tanks". There's nothing necessarily wrong with the skills relying heavily on a specific ability to be good, after all unarmed was heavily reliant on a specific pair of mods and that turned out to be excellent. However, let me explain just why these three skills cause Staff and shield to be "Good tanks" for all the wrong reasons.

1. They require no investment to be useful
One major issue with these abilities is that they don't require any treasure effects to be good whatsoever. It doesn't matter whether you're wearing the best gear in the game or completely naked, using blocking stance will make you completely immune to physical attacks and elemental ward makes you immune to elemental damage. It's not that the abilities don't have mods, but that the mods are incredibly minor compared to the normal effect of the ability. In fact, most of the mods related to these skills have nothing to do with tanking at all.

What this means is that when you build a "Tank" with Staff or shield, you don't actually need to spend many mods on becoming tankier at all. Right from the get go you are practically maxed out on how tanky you can get. What this means is that you may as well build pure damage on these builds so you can take advantage of the invulnerability by killing your target before it runs out. You can build things like more health and armor, and maybe some self healing, but all of it pales in comparison to the vanilla abilities.

2. It limits the way you build
Another major issue with these abilities is that they make the skill lines incredibly samey and are restrictive. Because these mods offer so much survivability without using mods, every single player using staff or shield should be using them. There is not a single build in the game that doesn't want the equivalent of an invincibility button so these abilities are just as viable for a pure glass canon character as they are for a pure tank. Even if a player doesn't build around it, they require 0 mods, and therefore can be switched in or out of a build at any time it becomes convenient at no cost.

3. They aren't engaging or challenging to use
Because staff and shield are reliant so heavily on these abilities, it makes "Tanking" with them incredibly stale. Whereas unarmed's mod had a constant presence on combat, staff and shield's abilities have large cooldowns meaning that once the player uses the ability, it's gone. This means that tanking with staff/shield usually only has two major decisions.
a.) Pull while using your ability as you start taking damage to be as safe as possible.
b.) Using it right before you die for max effectiveness.
After you use your ability its cooldown prevents you from using it again for a while, so this either means that you need to kill your target before your buff runs out and you die because you have no more real mitigation, or stall for half a minute until you can use it again. This encourages people to build pure damage to win as fast as possible, or use cheesy strategies to stall out enemies to death. Regardless of what players do, these abilities are hardly what I would call challenging to use, and are only fun in how much you can abuse them.

4. It changes the way you play... in a boring way
Lastly, one of the biggest problems I have with these abilities is that they encourage or even force players to play in incredibly boring and/or cheesy ways. Because of the abilities' strength and the long cooldown, this typically means that staff/shield players are worthless as tanks when these skills are off cooldown, and far too powerful when they have them.

For example, when playing through Gazluk and playing with a staff/shield tank player (And not in a party that just instantly destroys everything), it is incredibly common to see them pull an enemy, use their abilities, and then have the party wait around doing nothing for 10-20 seconds or so because they know they cannot tank properly without their skills. Not only is this way more boring compared to a tank that can keep up constant combat, but it shows just how overly reliant they are on these abilities they are. There isn't any sort of planning outside of making sure they aren't caught in combat with their abilities on cooldown. This results in a loop where the staff/shield tank will pull, kill the enemies without taking damage 90% of the time (Which makes things boring for healers), sit around awkwardly doing nothing, and then repeat.

Because of these reasons, I don't believe that shield or staff can really constitute as real "Tanks", as the design behind them being tanks is lacking compared to what unarmed used to be. That's not to say that they can't be used as part of a tank build (Shield in particular has very excellent support for a tanking kit), but these skills themselves have very little variety to offer in terms of mitigation, and the mitigation they do offer is designed in a way that encourages "Tanking" in all the wrong ways. I also want to clarify that I'm not saying staff or shield as a whole are poorly designed, but just the idea of using them as your way of preventing damage is lacking design wise.
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Sorry to have such a negative wall of text at the bottom, but I want to use that negativity regarding staff/shield as a reminder for how amazing the design of unarmed was. I hope that by comparing why old unarmed was so good with my opinions on staff and shield, I can make a stronger point about how I hope tanks in the future of this game can be designed.

If anyone else would like to share their opinion on how tanking should be designed, especially those who usually enjoy playing as a tank in these games, please share your comments as well. Thank you.

Aionlasting
03-18-2020, 05:51 PM
Agreeed with you on those three abilities, the staff and shield ones. Talk about yawn and ouch! Bad design for sure. I mean it makes sense if they are on a 3 or 5 minute cooldown like WoW has big tanking cooldowns because thats waht these are but these spells are on a 30 second cooldown, lol. Thats insane.

Anyway good post. Lots to digest and think about. I htink in general youre right. Especially when you consider those three current abilities that make the staff and shield "tanks." I agree that become a tank should be something that you grow gradually with time as your gear improves and abilities get stronger. Nothing should be "immunity" unless its on a big cooldown like a 3 or 5 min thing. But this game doesn't allow for that since you can only use 6 abilities from a class.

Glythe
03-18-2020, 10:00 PM
The right way to design a tank in an MMO

If anyone else would like to share their opinion on how tanking should be designed, especially those who usually enjoy playing as a tank in these games, please share your comments as well. Thank you.

Yaffy is 100% correct with these comments (and his entire post). These powers should not just be invincible switches you turn on with zero mod investment. Attack powers with zero mods are generally nearly worthless and so should defenses.


That being said I want to address the elephant in the room. In PG 'tanking' is not like any other mmo. The tank runs around like a chicken and taunts while the mobs are restricted in their attacks by crowd control abilities. This seems quite silly and everyone I mention this to seems to agree - a tank should not feel like he is made of glass. He should be tough with high defenses and hp and should be able to stand in the face of danger as long as he is getting healed. Best results right now sometimes have the tank using a huge speed boost run skill to run away from the mob (and the healer) to pop a heal ability. Meanwhile the group gets free damage with the boss tries to chase the tank. While we are here .... can I suggest that if the primary target on the hate list gets too far away the monster says well I will just go after the next highest person on my hate list.

A tank should be able to take hits from high level mobs and not be dead in 1-2 hits. In the Fae realm there are elites that hit for 90% of your health when you have nearly 700 health and 1000 armor. This is in my opinion a really boring and bad design. It just encourages everyone to be glass cannons with cc abilities. There is also a problem with design in that overall more hp is better than more armor (largely because of elemental nonsense and crits).

You can absolutely right now build to be resistant to most melee attacks. Make the right team.... have an ice mage stacking -18 damage twice. Have a battle chemist give you skin. Have a shield tank in metal armor (using shaman infusion) and you can make a very physical resistant tank. But Elemental damage is not something you can defend against except with Elemental Ward.

Suggestion - rework at least some of the powers in the game to include elemental defenses.

Shield Mod:
Slashing Mitigation +6, Piercing Mitigation +6, Crushing Mitigation +6 while Shield skill active

Add: +6 mitigation vs cold/fire/electricity (do not add poison/darkness and leave those as the 'holes' in the shield defense - likewise do not add defense from shield for damage over time effects from fire).

Instead of making elemental ward the 'turn off damage button' I would rather see it have some mods that make it more strategic. Maybe have one mod that only goes on the shield slot ands adds 15% passive blocking of elemental attacks (all the time). Maybe pressing the button is something that you do more often as a reaction for more power? Example ... you are fighting Jack's level 80 world boss and you press the elemental ward button. Base power use gives you a shield that negates 25% of elemetal dmg for 7 sec and a 15% chance to block elemental attacks. Instead of making the power be cheap and have a long cooldown it could be something that you need a mentalist to feed you power to keep using.

You could change the design and make powers people could never afford to continually use without a team.

I would also suggest changing some of the mentalism mods to add elemental defenses (used by all waves maybe). The lore being my mind is so strong I can make like a Sue Storm elemental forcefield to help protect you in case the human torch accidently goes nova.

One last point.... There should be at least 2-3 viable options for elemental tanking. An animal tank and a human shield tank should be on relatively equal footing. It should not be the case we had before where unarmed tanks had an insane advantage over physical shield tanks. They do not need to be equal, but they need to both be viable.

Mirromorka
03-19-2020, 01:42 AM
Hi im currently making a hardcore tank on pazz , like yaffi says its hard work really hard , i do miss the unarmed like it was , cow unarmed was my tank and it was amasing i used mirromorka, for me right now i see 3 kinds of tank with enough aggro also to do theyre stuff .

Rabbit unarmed , ive tried this its great 90% melee evasion 80 burst 70 projectile , best to use nible boots for les burst avoid stun ,
Cow unarmed , totally not as good as it was but still has the skill front kick take - 76% damage every 8 seconds needs to be timed really well .
Staff shield , its still great and high aggro .

Im working on hardcore staff shield tank , its really hard to find the hardcore gear but my armour goes up i was in fae yesterday with 1300 armour didint have enough aggro and damage but working on it , u do migitate very high damage and u get the elemental shield , the new 1 universal migitation for every 50 armour helps a lot so thats great staff shield can benefit very much from that these days , i find staff shield the ultimate tank specially for bosses , cow unarmed was great aoe tank in gk not so much anymore tho ..

Havent finished the build tho on the hardcore tank ..

Citan
03-19-2020, 04:43 AM
Yaffy - Great write-up, thanks! I'll keep that in mind as we go forward. For the record, the removal of those mods from Unarmed was twofold: at the time I felt Unarmed was a little overpowered (when taken as a whole), and more importantly, removing them made room for some Evasion mods. I figure if there is any (non-animal) skill that can focus on Evasion, it has to be Unarmed, so I wanted to at least get the basics of that slotted in for the skill. Of course, evasion has its own problems with interactivity (or lack thereof) which need improving...

Since the old mods weren't strongly themed, they can get slotted in anywhere -- I figured I'll reuse them for the last tanky skill I'll be eventually adding. Or it may make more sense to use a similar mechanic when revising the existing tanky skills.

Celerity
03-19-2020, 05:28 AM
I tend to agree. I've thought for years that those abilities, blocking stance in particular, requiring 0 mods to be effective never made any sense. With a staff build you could relatively easily solo any physical damage boss in the game, and I tended to see staff used for damage for every build, including tanks, because all you ever needed to tank was just those 2 abilties, completely unmodded, which meant everyone can build damage too, as you said.

I also find dungeon runs with an unarmed tank much more fast-paced and much more fun than runs with a staff tank. Exact same reasons as you stated Yaffy, less standing around and I can't tell you the number of times I've been in groups where the staff tank user dies multiple times from their blocking stance and deflective spin going on cooldown and essentially having nothing else to offer.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the unarmed mod removed because unarmed was just TOO good at tanking. I specifically remember doing gk runs where unarmed tanks could pull something like 10 elites and tank them all easily. Obviously this was before crit changes, but I still see players achieve similar things nowadays even with the nerf and crits introduced, it just means you have to have pig/bard/rabbit support, extra skin, cc etc now. So I wouldn't mind seeing that mod make a comeback, honestly I never played a tanking build so didn't really notice the difference between removing this mod or say the one which passively always reduces damage, but now you've explained it, it does make more sense. The numerical values would 100% have to be nerfed in some regard though.

Mbaums
03-19-2020, 12:14 PM
I’m going to be the negative Nancy and nitpick some:

Any solution where the answer is straight + mitigation is unable to add meaningful change. You are asking for a band aid for a bullet wound. Unless the mod you are dreaming of is like, +miti and X% miti vs elites, you are kicking the can down the road.

Deflective spin’s tanky mod is the two +25% health heal when below 50% health. This is survival instead of mitigation though. But Yaffy’s no-mod problem is still relevant.

Elemental ward is most comparable to ice-block, where unmodded it has resistance holes that mods fill. I think both should be balanced together if/when they’re altered. Still, Yaffy’s no-mod problem is still relevant.

Staff’s Heed the stick probably falls in Citans tanking ability list because of the +mitigation mod attached to it. Yeah, you can get +36 mitigation when it’s on cool down, but things are hitting hard enough to dwarf that.

I think the old UA problem came about by accident because balance assumes red-mods. It’s really difficult to figure out how to tank in PG. I’ve seen the run-around like a chicken method (like ice magic to root and stand far away), use abilities to turn off damage temporarily and use abilities to just mitigate damage, and most incorporate some method of stunning mobs during the fight. I think every person that goes into tanking has the goal of using purples or above to accomplish mitigating + holding agro. I don’t think Yaffy and Citan see eye to eye on how +mitigation works. The issue is never solo mobs, which are really balanced well. Elites are an issue though, especially when you are unprepared for their damage type. No matter how hard elites are, I believe groups will adapt, but what should that look like? If reds are the balancing point, how would 3-mods on 9 slots look like to allow proper damage mitigation and comparable agro control vs someone in 3-mods on 9 who is focused on damage?
At first I thought maybe adding a 0->20% mitigation as a plate bonus like mobs have could help. Would this allow anyone able to piece together plate-set able to tank? If someone does fire magic with plate and tries it, they’ll run out of power quick, so maybe it’s fair. But the whole convo is about skills and specific mods, and here I am saying the primary answer should be independent of skills or mods, while including changes to the skills and mods.

poulter
03-19-2020, 02:12 PM
Agree with Yaffy.

I ran with staff /shield when manticores were 'king', but haven't touched it since as I find it linear to use and ultimately boring.

However, with unarmed I have built and used (with max crafted gear) combos for cow, deer, spider and psychology - with meditation also.

UA /Psy continues to be my favorite spec., but since the mod revisions I have changed from mitigation /taunt builds to evasion /stun builds.

UA has stood the test-of-time as an interesting, adaptable build and is the one I currently 'main-line' in FR.

Yaffy
03-19-2020, 02:45 PM
Yaffy
Since the old mods weren't strongly themed, they can get slotted in anywhere -- I figured I'll reuse them for the last tanky skill I'll be eventually adding. Or it may make more sense to use a similar mechanic when revising the existing tanky skills.

That's great to hear! It means a lot to know you're listening, thank you. Whether it be the specifically mentioned mod again or something similar, I hope that my post gives some inspiration to what can make a tank fun to play!


Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the unarmed mod removed because unarmed was just TOO good at tanking. I specifically remember doing gk runs where unarmed tanks could pull something like 10 elites and tank them all easily. Obviously this was before crit changes, but I still see players achieve similar things nowadays even with the nerf and crits introduced, it just means you have to have pig/bard/rabbit support, extra skin, cc etc now. So I wouldn't mind seeing that mod make a comeback, honestly I never played a tanking build so didn't really notice the difference between removing this mod or say the one which passively always reduces damage, but now you've explained it, it does make more sense. The numerical values would 100% have to be nerfed in some regard though.

I honestly believe that unarmed on its own was actually very balanced as a tank. Speaking from experience as an Unarmed/Shield tank, usually your "Real" limit for tanking mobs was about 3 or maybe 5 if you had a good healer. The thing is that it was heavily based around having stacks built up beforehand, which I believe makes it fair. It usually meant that you took a much easier fight beforehand in order to build up mitigation stacks, so it rarely meant taking on large packs all the time as much as it was bouncing between "Easy" and "Hard" pulls. You are however right in that there was a time where things got ridiculous and you could pull huge packs of enemies, but this was because of two things that combined with unarmed's normal tanking ability.

First off, unarmed had 0 forms of elemental resistance whatsoever. It didn't matter how good your build was or how many stacks you had, unarmed didn't protect you against elemental damage enemies. You could pull a lot of physical damage enemies, but if you pulled a pack of mobs and there were elemental enemies in it, you were in big trouble. The real culprit here was shield's elemental ward. Elemental ward gave you complete immunity to the elemental enemies that unarmed would normally have no defense against. This meant you could pull ginormous packs of elemental mobs (Most notably the clusters of mages at the showers) because when you're invincible, you can pull as many things as you like. The most unarmed did in these cases was allow you to pull some physical mobs at the same time, because elemental ward negated the existence of the elemental enemies.

Secondly, the release of priest was incredibly noticeable for unarmed tanking because the buffs and healing it offered synergized with unarmed almost perfectly. Not only did priest have a lot of healing that was perfect for keeping a single target alive, but they had buffs that multiplied the tanking power of unarmed by giving it evasion. What this meant was that the unarmed tank completely avoided a large number of attacks, which not only reduced the damage you took heavily but also meant that your stacks wouldn't get consumed. This allowed unarmed to snowball because your stacks weren't getting used up, therefore allowing you to build a higher amount of stacks and then take even less damage. This meant that a perfectly geared tank with a well geared priest could potentially fight a much larger number of mobs at a time, possibly even twice as many as you should normally have been able to. This is still really an issue with unarmed's ability to snowball and the skills should be designed to not synergize TOO well with each other, but it wasn't just unarmed's tanking ability at play.

So yes, while unarmed was definitely good, I believe by itself it was fairly balanced. It was very strong for negating physical damage but had some large shortcomings which prevented it from being too ridiculous. I do believe that its physical damage mitigation was too powerful and could have used some nerfing simply because of its snowball potential and how well it stacked with a priest buffing you, but I firmly believe it was for the most part fair because of the skill required and the excellent gear it required to work.
In my opinion I believe the best way to "Nerf" it in its current state would be to make the amount of damage it reduces lower (Ex.5% and 50 damage), but to allow it to block elemental damage as well. This would make it a lot harder to snowball off of stacks and overall reduce its effectiveness, but would mitigate unarmed's complete vulnerability to elemental damage. Perhaps unarmed's weakness to elemental damage shouldn't be changed so the player has to rely on their other skill line and to give unarmed a clear weakness, but really the only option in that case is to use shield's elemental ward because in reality very few skills offer elemental resistance at all.

poulter
03-20-2020, 04:15 AM
The 'extreme pull' runs I went on with with Yaffy using UA /Shield were often 'speed runs' to see how quickly a group could get to GK level 2.

They were a continual-pull fest with almost no stoppage time, not even for looting.

It took two healer specs to keep Yaffy alive: Pig? /Priest (from memory) and a (pre-Song nerf) Bard /Druid.

They were very hard on the healers and certainly not representative of normal groups as most people where in very high-end gear.

Interesting to do a few runs to push the envelope, but not very useful if you wanted to have fun.

Chilton
10-23-2020, 06:49 AM
I want to share my thoughts as to the concept of tanking and suggest an alternative direction that Citan can take the game in, if he feels that is in the interest of the game.

The direction we seen to be going in:

The debate thus far on tanking have the made the fundamental assumption that tanking means standing there and "face tanking" the mob. I am going to call this "WOW style". What it involves is essentially:
1) Running ahead of the bulk of the party
2)Drawing aggro (either body pulling or the far more dangerous and definitely not recommended practice of hitting the mob with a ranged attack)
3) Pulling them back to the group
4) Maintaining aggro on the mobs you pulled, usually through "taunt" skills or just pure unadulterated DPS
5) Using defensive skills so that you do not die
The last two steps usually involve a particular "rotation" of skills that allow you balance the need to keep damage on the target (thus maintaining aggro) and using defensive skills (if there is any) to avoid damage, a good "rotation" therefore maximises the taunt you can maintain on the target, while minimises the amount of time you are not under the influence of a protective skill.

This is by no means easy as Yaffy's post have alluded to, and maintaining a good "rotation" while responding to bosses special attacks (in WOW you had to interrupt those or move out of the area of effect) and dealing with extra mobs (literally called adds in WOW terminology) is what differentiates a mediocre tank and a great tank.

Under the "WOW style" system, I estimate 70% of your mental capacity is spent on maintaining your rotation, and 30% of it is dealing with additional problems that might derail it.

Crazy new direction XD

There is an alterative model of game design. I am going to call this the "Guild Wars 2 style". Now I last played Guild Wars 2 was when Heart of Thorns came out in 2015, so I am not sure how if this design philosophy still holds sway in later expansions.

The purported revolutionary feature of Guild Wars 2 was that it did not have the holy trinity of "tank/DPS/healer", but rather there are "party roles", each player can contribute to the party by providing 1) "control", 2) "damage" or 3) "support". All player professions (ie classes) can take on anyone of those three roles by selecting the appropriate skills that does these things, and skills can be freely changed outside of combat (same as Project Gorgon).

The role of the player who provides "control" in the party is essentially they are actively trying to counter what the enemy is doing. They are trying to prevent the enemy from attacking their teammates, they try to stop enemy from self healing, they try to lure the enemy into area debuffs where they take extra damage from their teammates, etc. They do this with stuns, knockbacks, cripple (slow), silence (stops casting), interrupts, debuffing their damage output, applying fear, immobilise (root), or good old fashion kiting the melee enemy. Of these options, face tanking the enemy is an option, but only one of many options and you cannot actually stand there and exchange hits with the enemy for more than 5 seconds and expect to survive. You have to proactively do things to the enemy to stop the damage reaching your team rather than just maintain aggro.

In the "Guild Wars 2" style of being a tank (of course you are not called a tank), I estimate your mental capacity is spent 30% on maintaining aggro (mobs are constantly under a barrage of debuffs and stuns from your entire team, that in some ways it does not matter who they are actively targeting), and 70% on actively trying to predict the enemies' next move and trying to counter it, or just trying to maintaining maximum uptime on the silence on the boss, or trying to use stun every time it is off cooldown.

The key difference I feel is that everyone can contribute all three roles to the team, and they are expected to do so. Everyone runs with a party wide buff skill (so they are providing support), everyone bring some form of control skill (stun, root, silence, debuff damage etc) and everyone has their own dedicated healing skills (similar to First Aid and Push Onward). Party wide healing skills have long cooldown and heal for a relatively small amount, so they are not actually as useful as actively preventing the damage from reaching you.

Summary

I actually think there is a lot of similarities between Guild Wars 2 and Project Gorgon in its current form. Players are rewarded for stunning the enemy and preventing damage from reaching the group. Fear is present as is mesmerise as crowd control. Classes that can root the enemy are useful (at least historically) in abusing the pathing AI to stop damage coming out. There are multiple ranged evasion skills and mods which I feel would be useful if paired with a way to force the enemy on concentrating fire on you, and quite a few high level players use kiting to avoid damage.

In summary, I feel the current "broken" state of Project Gorgon has unintentionally (I think its unintentional, correct me if I'm wrong Citan) encouraged the same type of player behaviour that Guild Wars 2 has deliberately tried to cultivate. I feel it would be a reasonable option to take the game in the direction of Guild Wars 2 and further encourage players to actively maintain disables/debuffs on the enemy as an alternative to "tanking".

Some thoughts as to how to achieve this

I am not a game designer and this is straight out of my imagination
1) Mob type and density needs to be rebalanced
- Encounters should be at most 2 elites, with possibility of many weaker "trash mobs" that have lowish HP but decent damage, so any player can take down 2-3 easily, but 10 can swarm a single unprepared player so the key is for the team to burn them down quickly before they get out of hand (aoe skills are very desirable). During this time, someone is handling the elites, either face tanking them for 3-4 seconds or using crowd control on them.
- The elites should take 10-20 seconds to kill, and players are encouraged to chain stun/knockback/root and abuse AI pathing to avoid damage. Elites do hit HARD and the emphasis is on avoiding hits. Consider making elite attack more slowly in general and rage attacks more telegraphed (so easier to tell they are about to rage attack you, so you can stun them at the right time or hit them with a rage reduction skill)
2) Rebalance the rage bar, each fight should only allow the enemy use rage twice so those are the most important skills to avoid.
3) Each skill should have some form of "control" skill and they are balanced so that they are actually useful in certain situations. Fire for example currently has no skills or mods that allow any kind of disabling as far as I can see, maybe add fear to some skills so that they can provide some crowd control.
4) For the love of God get rid of the diminishing return on chain stuns

My aim is of course not to see Project Gorgon turn into Guild Wars 2, but I just want to provide an alternative design philosophy.

Celerity
10-23-2020, 12:42 PM
Chilton I think you're correct in the comparison to Guild Wars 2. I didn't play that game for too long, but the impression I got was that you were wasting your time if you played anything other than dps in that game. I think most groups refused to take people who didn't play dps, because you could avoid damage with the cc and dodging as you mentioned. This is actually quite similar to how it is in Project Gorgon already, most groups are all dps, they build 0 defence and rely purely on cc and kiting, or they do single pulls and kill the mob too quickly for it's damage to matter. The main issue is balance and the huge advantage that ranged classes immediately get over melee classes, not only can they get an extra hit or 2 in before the melee can even start attacking, but ranged classes can completely avoid damage from melee enemies with roots and kiting. By increasing the mob damage, you're increasing the reliance on cc, which I think is your aim. However, this increases the bias towards ranged classes even further and weakens the power of direct face tanks, who are already incredibly difficult to build in this game. You'd just be making dps with cc as the only way to play, instead of one of many options as it is now. The only reason almost anyone is let into a group at this point is because the content is fairly easy and this is the balance issue I mentioned earlier. If difficulty was increased, such as by increasing mob damage as you suggest, then I could see pg going the way of gw2 where people playing off-meta stop being allowed into groups. Personally, I really don't mind that playstyle and I certainly don't want to see it be eliminated from the game, but I also don't want to see it encouraged more than it already is since it's already the meta.

The most efficient way to play is what Citan referred to as a "CC-mitigated AoE pit" at one point. Essentially you pull as many mobs as the group can survive pulling, usually 3-7 depending on the group, you aoe root/slow them so the melee mobs cannot attack you, then you aoe damage them down and kill them. This is the basic idea and it's how you do stuff like 30 minute Wintertide all chests all bosses speedruns. There's a reason that fire magic is probably the most popular skill in the game, despite not even being in the top 5 skills for single target damage and having close to 0 cc. The reason is it's ranged with high aoe damage which plays perfectly into the meta. The lack of cc can easily be fixed by choosing a secondary skill such as bc, and I think that's part of the charm of the pg skill system. It's what maintains balance between the skills. If you gave cc to every skill then it just becomes a numbers game where certain skills are just absolutely better than others with no reason to pick the skills with worse numbers. Not only that but every skill would start feeling the same too. This was something I distinctly remember happening in gw2 as well, certain classes would go completely unplayed because they functioned as inferior versions of others.

Back to Project Gorgon, having a tank is still useful in the CC-mitigated AoE pit, if the tank has the aggro, then melee dps players are able to hit the melee mobs without dying, and obviously the ranged enemies will still be dealing damage that somebody has to take too. Personally I think the tank already has a role to play in the optimal group since it simply allows you to do bigger pulls and results in fewer deaths. A support is also useful for the same reason, as well as providing perhaps a bit of extra cc and damage buffs. With this in mind, this is why I think the solution is the tank just needs to become easier to build/play, and/or cc needs to become less useful and less prevalent, e.g. by keeping the diminishing returns and extending combat by buffing mob hp or nerfing player damage.

In short, encouraging further cc play is the exact opposite of what Project Gorgon needs since it is already the meta. It ruins balance and either leads to everyone forced into the meta, or the game feeling too easy, as it already does now. Giving cc to every skill would also ruin the balance between skills and many would go completely unplayed.

Mikhaila
10-23-2020, 12:57 PM
Sometimes I question the need to go back to the holy trinity that started in EQ, then wow and beyond. I get that some people want to be healers, some want to tank, some want to kite, etc. But that's essentially saying "i used to play this style, and i want to do it again". It's not something that needs to be a requirement in groups. I really hope we don't move to a system where a group needs a tank, needs a healer, etc. As an option? sure. It would be nice if some content needed something other than just a few seconds of massive dps. And having healing, tanking, and other styles be viable in a group is good. I just don't want to push things so that they are required.

Celerity
10-23-2020, 01:34 PM
Sometimes I question the need to go back to the holy trinity that started in EQ, then wow and beyond. I get that some people want to be healers, some want to tank, some want to kite, etc. But that's essentially saying "i used to play this style, and i want to do it again". It's not something that needs to be a requirement in groups. I really hope we don't move to a system where a group needs a tank, needs a healer, etc. As an option? sure. It would be nice if some content needed something other than just a few seconds of massive dps. And having healing, tanking, and other styles be viable in a group is good. I just don't want to push things so that they are required.

It's not about forcing groups to have a healer or tank. In fact, I very much hope that doesn't happen either. It's about making supports have any kind of role at all. Abolishing the trinity makes people think that everyone plays every role. This just simply doesn't happen, unless you're forced into it, because it's always more efficient to specialise. So either you get someone that starts to take on the tank role, someone that starts to take on the healer role etc. and end up with the trinity again, or everyone just goes full or almost full dps with the bare minimum defence. Why? Because if you've eliminated the trinity then that means you don't need a tank by definition. If you don't need a tank, then full dps is the correct answer every single time for maximum efficiency and supports/tanks become a liability rather than an aid.

If you still want groups to even accept supports into them then you need to make content easy enough for them to do it, which results in the few seconds of dps we have now. The perfect solution is where both are possible, and both are close in effectiveness so the game can be correctly balanced. I also think there's the need to actually make the trinity more efficient or easier to play since players will always tend towards dps.

I think in the case of Project Gorgon, the trinity is already more efficient, it's just too difficult to get into, specifically the tanking role. The other disadvantages of the trinity, such as solo leveling being a pain for healers or tanks has already been fixed with the way skills work in pg.

Mbaums
10-23-2020, 08:14 PM
Everyone put a lot of time into your post/thoughts and I’m going to poke at it because I think we have the same goals of an improved experience. You really can’t compare GW2 and PG because GW2 has this whole dodging mechanism that everyone is supposed to master. Some of the PG problems I think stem from skills coming out bit by bit, and low numbers means tanks are really rare. Like, after priest came out combat was supposed to change to require more tank+healers, and I think that idea lead to the mob crit change. Instead of a history lession, I say that I think an elite taking 20 seconds vs a group in all red mods and maybe just under 15 seconds vs a group in all yellow is a good goal. And elites need to grant MORE exp. Solo mobs as is, I believe are perfect. I hope they stay the same.

But about PG’s direction: Maybe I’m not the best of players, but there isn’t that much of a rotation that I really do. The damage related combos technically have an on-paper-best, but a realistically “gimme 3 buttons to pew” is the in-group rule. If it’s more than 3 buttons, its not happening because of time. One tank build I like stays alive with the help of stuns, debuffs, some self heals, and mezing/fearing mobs on inc so everything won’t all smash me at once. I think that’s how the game is meant to be played. I’m making it sound like “soloing next to friends” but it’s not because my play style changes with and without a healer changes (regarding the volume of monsters I bring my group).

Unarmed is really meant to be a control skill, but stun is really the only control that I think has value across any skill because if fights last 5 seconds and the NPC is out of commission for 2, it’s huge. Stun also has those diminishing return issues, so if you don’t end the fight asap, you really run into issues. I’m on board with not allowing mobs to get chain stunned to death, but there should be some middle ground. For example, can the mob AI to give themselves stun immunity via their rage bar, instead of an attack? Maybe the mob rages once, 2nd time the creature is allowed to make it’s max stun timer 0.5 seconds instead of a 2nd rage attack (rage buff?).

I don’t know how knock back should change, but I think it should because people don’t think of it as CC when it is. People don’t really get that knocked back attacks generally suppress shout, because that’s kind of a so-what situation. The debuffs that make the NPCs hit for less or miss more are very sparse across builds, single target and players don’t notice when they’re used, but they’re really nice. I think they just need some graphic like a small effect that orbits around the mob.

It’s funny how almost every player agrees that the de-rage soothe style debuffs have major issues. I’ve seen it work once under an extreme situation in labs, with 2 people modded for derage and we had no fire damage. One with ment+ice, another with psych+ice and our group noticed the golems didn’t rage. The de-rage one person can do is a drop in the bucket vs how fast rage can increase unless multiple people can de-rage in a group, and at that point damage is way more worth it. The idea behind rage is great, but it’s not worth the damage trade off.

There are problems with CC on players-- When players become CC’d they cant cure themselves which just feels like BS. This has been brought up before, I think the reason this isn’t changed is to avoid the solo next to each other situation. But healer in the group can’t actually see their stun/knocked down status in the group window so its nearly impossible to communicate that you need help. I get that there is a sound, but it gets missed. The game needs to communicate status effects better and give players options to combat these effects. I know UI is always bottom of the barrel, but I think this one thing is different because PG’s community wants to fill support roles. Also, adding more debuffs, like one named “cross eyed” that breaks ranged attacks, or “fat fingered” that breaks melee attacks can give players more options besides pew pew.

Mikhaila
10-24-2020, 10:10 AM
I'm just a bit confused by the concept of 'groups not accepting supports'. I can't remember the last time I had anyone in a group be picky about anything at all. You just get a group together and go. If things don't work, a bit of talk ensues and people maybe switch around some skills a bit, or we decide that we need more people, etc.

Are there really people trying to form groups and being that picky? (I'm really asking for information, and not saying it doesn't happen. I just don't encounter it at all.)

Celerity
10-24-2020, 01:47 PM
I'm just a bit confused by the concept of 'groups not accepting supports'. I can't remember the last time I had anyone in a group be picky about anything at all. You just get a group together and go. If things don't work, a bit of talk ensues and people maybe switch around some skills a bit, or we decide that we need more people, etc.

Are there really people trying to form groups and being that picky? (I'm really asking for information, and not saying it doesn't happen. I just don't encounter it at all.)

I was talking about Guild Wars 2. I'm sure it applies to other games too where if you don't play the meta you don't get accepted.

Thankfully, it doesn't happen in Project Gorgon but only because the content is easy enough that it doesn't matter. It's the main reason why you can't just buff the monsters stats and call it a day on balance.

Glythe
11-06-2020, 03:44 PM
I can't speak for everyone but I would much rather play high end content with a tank who can shrug off damage when supported by a dedicated healer rather than making parties that abuse the AI mechanics and focus only on damage (especially AoE).

corelion
11-07-2020, 06:48 AM
I can't speak for everyone but I would much rather play high end content with a tank who can shrug off damage when supported by a dedicated healer rather than making parties that abuse the AI mechanics and focus only on damage (especially AoE).

me not. I dont want to spend the day looking for tank and healer. Getting full groups its already a slow process. Adding roles will kill it.

Niph
11-07-2020, 09:02 AM
Everyone can switch to any role if necessary (if they worked on their toon to be able to), so I don't see that as a big problem.

Mikhaila
11-07-2020, 09:35 AM
Everyone can switch to any role if necessary (if they worked on their toon to be able to), so I don't see that as a big problem.

Eventually you can, but many players don't have several classes, and the gear for those classes, until they've played quite a bit. Or want to be forced to level a tank/healer class just so they can get groups when those aren't available.