Update Discussion: November 6, 2020

[Sims]

The update notes are here: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2714-Update-Notes-November-6-2020

Discussion is in this thread! But please remember to report any bugs through the in-game reporting system so we can track them.

[Ranperre]

I would urge you to reconsider giving only the changed skill a lower reroll cost. The lower reroll cost should be tied to the other skill on gear so that your guinea pigs, I mean player base, can feel the full effect of your changes. Example: Cow/unarmed has changed to increase the value of tough hoof, thereby decreasing the value of weaker unarmed attacks (eg infuriating fist). So I might start modding tough hoof more, while deleting infuriating fist mods (augmenting with cow/tough hoof instead of infuriating fist), this would require me to reroll unarmed mods (at 20-25%) to feel the full effect of your changes.

[Glythe]

Generally speaking it seems like very few people build for a tank. I've seen about 2.5 that worked.

Won't the new Bulwark mode present a huge problem? If you deal half damage you will never keep aggro because about 90% of the other people I met run full dps builds.

It doesn't really seem worthwhile to use considering the best defense from dying in combat is to just use a run skill and make the monster take 20 seconds to chase you. For solo play it also makes zero sense to take -27% damage but deal -50% damage.

Overall 13 armor regeneration is fantastic - when you are fighting level 20 mobs. When monsters can deal 600+ armor in one hit it doesn't matter that you got 13 back.

*suggestion* : change the new skill to make the ratio more like : -27 incoming, -35 outgoing.

If you change the power ratio so that full power skills are dealing half damage the net result with the current changes is :

1. I do half damage but take about 25% less damage.
2. I get a miniscule bit of armor back
3. I get a little bit of power back (shaman infusion provides more)

These three together should offer the player a net gain but what you have offered currently is a net loss. The only time the new ability sounds worth using to me is to make content way below my level deal zero damage thanks to the new 27% modifier. The only problem with that idea is I already have a build that does that with full damage.

[Tandiril]

First things first
- Ilmari desert: very nice, finally the lemon trees make sense^^ Just fix the boulders please, rn they are sometimes solid and sometimes only solid after you walked through half of them (and you get stuck).
- More defense options for cow was really needed, thank you. I am not yet sold on the split behaviour against elites, but it is an interesting take.
Now...

The following wall of text might be long, and very specific, and maybe not 100% cohesive all the time. I apologize in advance. However the issue has been on my mind for quite some time, and now is probably the right moment to talk about it. Bear with me please :)

Damage Mitigation: Flat vs Percentage.
In short:
- Why do we have both?
- What is the „vision“, are the use cases for the 2?

So Elemental Ward and Blocking stance got drastically changed, and now have flat mitigation as their main feature. This might become an issue for all the staff/shield wielders. There are some points that seem problematic to me.

1) Flat mitigation „level scaling“

What does this mean? Basically, one problem with flat mitigation right now is that the combat power of mobs grows much more compared to typical flat mitigation. For example my old lvl 55 cow gear can provide me with a mod that gives chew chud the effect to buff my mitigation against elite enemies by 22. If I read the data right, this is increased by 4 every 10 levels, starting by 6 at lvl 10. However, it is something completely different to have 16 Mitigation against maybe hits for 48 damage at level 30 vs having 38 mitigation against a 300 damage hit at lvl 80. The linear scaling of the buff can't compete with the stronger scaling of the enemy's damage. The numbers are only made up examples, but not that far from the truth I think. Percentage based mitigation doesn't have that Problem, it scales automatically. Which brings us to the next point.

2) Flat mitigation is better against weak enemies, and worse against strong ones.

So let's take a made up enemy that hits you for 300 damage. If I have 50 mitigation, this means I mitigate 16.67% of the damage. Compared it to a 10% damage reduction, I of course mitigate 10% → 30 damage.
Now let's take an enemy that is twice as strong, 600 damage. Now my 50 mitigation is only worth 8.3% of the total damage. My 10% mitigation however is still worth 10% → 60 damage.
So far so good, however the issue is that having a type of mitigation that becomes better the weaker the enemy is kinda defeats the purpose. If the enemy is weak I don't really need the mitigation to begin with.

3) Flat mitigation and its “mitigation, direct mitigation, and indirect mitigation”

This is something that is really confusing and should probably be changed at some point. We have “mitigation of direct damage”, “mitigation of indirect damage”, and something that is simply called “mitigation”, which mitigates both. Because indirect damage mitigation works per tick, the actually mitigated amount is number_of_ticks * mitigation. So 5 mitigation against a dot with 10 ticks protects you from 50 damage total, etc. Which means that having a mitigation of 30 for both direct and indirect damage is totally busted for the indirect part, basically making you immune in most cases, and therefore most higher number mitigation are only for direct damage even though it is not explicitly stated. Physical sources have no dots, therefore it doesn't matter for staff for instance. This applies right now for elemental ward, however. Which also means that you no longer get cold protection from it outside of the 3 second immunity window. Percentage based mitigation again doesn't have that problem, due to the mentioned “auto scaling” it simply mitigates that percentage from the dot, which is balanced.

4) Flat mitigation is calculated before percentage

Let's look again at our 300 damage enemy, with a 50 flat and 10% mitigation at the same time now. This means rn: (300 -50)*0.9 = 250*0.9 = 225. Which is a 25% mitigation. It is not a 16.67 + 10 = 26.67% mitigation. In short: it stacks multiplicatively, not additively, which in turn means that the more % - based mitigation you have, the less use you get from your flat one (or the other way around, however you want to see it). Whether this is good or not I can't really say, I just think giving people the incentive to try to build for both (and therefore try to branch out) might be a good idea. This is highly debatable though.

So after all this babbling, what are my issues? In the long run I simply don't see how flat mitigation can keep up. Right now it seems to be used the same way as percentage based mitigation. However it has the above mentioned disadvantages: scaling is slower than enemy power, which means it falls behind compared to % when you actually need it. Also it is extremely inconsistent in regards to indirect damage.
Which brings me to my questions from the start: Why do we even have 2 different kinds of mitigation, if they stack multiplicatively(=if there is no benefit in “branching out”)? The game would be much simpler if we only had 1 way. Unless →
The “vision”, the intended use case for the 2 is different. Meaning flat is better in scenario A while % is better in scenario B. However right now I don't see that. So what is the intention behind having two types if they are doing the same thing?

There are other points and details that follow and can be discussed, but I will stop here. There are of course ways to solve the mentioned issues, and use cases that could be introduced to give each kind its purpose. But first I was simply curious if there is actually an answer already to the underlying question. Thank you for staying with me. If this is too specific and derails the intent of the thread, I am sorry, please tell me and I will move it to a separate one.

Kind regards
Tandiril

[Melkhiresa]

This is mostly all in regards to the Bunny changes so skip if you hate cute animals.

-The stacking damage to bun-fu blast was a nice change and welcome addition but as I have reported probably numerous times none of the mods that add damage to the ability work. I've tested it both without the ice conversion mod and with. This sadly makes the above change less awesome than it could be.

-The bun-fu strike mod is mislabeled that it changes it from crushing to ice when in fact it starts as slashing(personal gripe why is the base damage so so low on bunny attacks?)

-I'm all for love tap mods but currently it has to be one of the worst skills in this game. Melee range, extraordinarily low base damage with no mods to increase that. Even with the mods it does have it falls short of ever warranting a slot. This new evasion one helps at least a little.

-"Carrot Power: Base chance to consume carrot changed from 33% to 10%" I'm happy for the addition so i don't have to garden so much but at the same time there are two mods that decrease the chance to consume by 34% which this drastically makes them useless. They also only add a separate decreased chance if the first chance happens to fail.

Overall it's nice to finally see at least some attention to rabbit but hopefully there is more to come one day. It has the potential just bogged down by clunky mechanics and lackluster mods.

[Tandiril]

Won't the new Bulwark mode present a huge problem? If you deal half damage you will never keep aggro because about 90% of the other people I met run full dps builds.

It doesn't really seem worthwhile to use considering the best defense from dying in combat is to just use a run skill and make the monster take 20 seconds to chase you. For solo play it also makes zero sense to take -27% damage but deal -50% damage.


The skill is definitly situational, but I think that is the point behind it: you go into turtle mode whenever it seems sensible, and exit it when it's not. For free. I agree that it will be most likely useless in solo combat though.
Regarding taunt: there are 2 mods mentioned in the patch notes that take care of that: "While Bulwark mode is active all your attacks taunt +50% and restore 17 health/28 armor (depending on the slot)". With those 2 you can elliminate the taunt loss at least.
Regarding kiting (letting the monster chase you): Agreed, however kiting is not always an option. Especially in dungeons simply running around might hold nasty surprises if a mob comes patrolling around a corner. Also keeping aggro might be difficult while you are on the run.

[Cragstone]

It's early days so far but I am really enjoying bulwark. With the extra taunt augs and power support it is a very useful skill that has also proved to be very handy in solo play as well. Thematically it is awesome to have a full tanking discipline, and in terms of efficacy it works well, I ran WT earlier and soaked a good amount of damage to the point that I actually felt like I was tanking. Before the patch I could only really achieve this in GK and lower dungeons. The damage decrease feels bad, but I get it (you can't have everything). Like I said it is early days and I have a lot of data to record and look at, but it makes me feel like the devs are going the right way with things!

Also, with so many new options added it makes me feel like there's extra dimensions to building tank, and lots of ways to do it, all said and done I think this is a great step forward.

Another good change which will doubtless be controversial is the nimble nerf. It was overpowered to the point that armor seemed almost irrelevant so long as you had enough evade and stun res, this might go some way to addressing the insane amount of damage that people will front load in a fight, if they get punished for it they might be a bit more tactical in the long run.


Anyhow just my two cents. I love the new desert, love the new tank stuff (at least the stuff I have tried) and think this is going in the right direction towards making fights more than a two second hindrance and instead, meaningful and challenging.

[Mbaums]

Bulwark looks like a great addition to the game. It's like a defensive stance that shouldnt always be on and I think players will make use out of it in group settings. I think the -50% damage will solidify it into a “don’t use all the time thing”, which is good because 27% off of direct damage is serious. All in all, shield is now a serious option to pick when tanking with only 1 “tank skill”.

Overall, I like that cheap transmutes effect a few skills. I think last time you had this event on everything prices went crazy on phlog. But because someone might pair one of the cheap-transmute skills with something else, like cow+psych or cow+unarmed, could the event be changed so that any piece of gear that has cow, shield or staff have cheap re-rolls all around? Just because it’s hard to test skill synergy with just half the mods right. I might be tempted to try staff+unarmed next update, but it’ll be a major PITA if I missed the window to roll half of my gear cheaply. But I get it’s meant for existing builds vs new builds.

Existing mitigation mods now look cheaper is a minor issue. Call it mitigation inflation? The mitigation mods for shield team, heed the stick, and battle chem’s skins look less valuable now without “vs elite mitigation”. But at this point I really don’t know the “feel” of these skills+mods in when competing for mods on gear and in combat, so maybe it’s really not a real issue, just something to keep in mind.

[Mikhaila]

It's early days so far but I am really enjoying bulwark. With the extra taunt augs and power support it is a very useful skill that has also proved to be very handy in solo play as well. Thematically it is awesome to have a full tanking discipline, and in terms of efficacy it works well, I ran WT earlier and soaked a good amount of damage to the point that I actually felt like I was tanking. Before the patch I could only really achieve this in GK and lower dungeons. The damage decrease feels bad, but I get it (you can't have everything). Like I said it is early days and I have a lot of data to record and look at, but it makes me feel like the devs are going the right way with things!

Also, with so many new options added it makes me feel like there's extra dimensions to building tank, and lots of ways to do it, all said and done I think this is a great step forward.

Another good change which will doubtless be controversial is the nimble nerf. It was overpowered to the point that armor seemed almost irrelevant so long as you had enough evade and stun res, this might go some way to addressing the insane amount of damage that people will front load in a fight, if they get punished for it they might be a bit more tactical in the long run.


Anyhow just my two cents. I love the new desert, love the new tank stuff (at least the stuff I have tried) and think this is going in the right direction towards making fights more than a two second hindrance and instead, meaningful and challenging.

I was in the same group, and was pushing to see how much burst damage I could deal to steal agro, and was happy that I wasn't getting beat on a lot. The new changes to taunt worked well. Normally, I expect that if i lead with my 3 best attacks that i'll be the one tanking the mob. Was nice to see the changes work as intended.

[Cragstone]

I was in the same group, and was pushing to see how much burst damage I could deal to steal agro, and was happy that I wasn't getting beat on a lot. The new changes to taunt worked well. Normally, I expect that if i lead with my 3 best attacks that i'll be the one tanking the mob. Was nice to see the changes work as intended.

At that point I had only managed to reroll 2/3 of the bulwark threat mods, the third one seals the deal really well. All in all I have really enjoyed playing as a tank today, and it will only get better once I finish rerolling and put SI bacK on all pieces. Maybe next time you are around we can test it out!

[Celerity]

I really like the changes, shield and cow especially needed the buffs and I'm glad staff and shield had their cooldown reliance reduced. Staff in particular could be op but only when your cooldowns were off so it tended to be used more for soloing which never felt right to me.

Bulwark mode is fun to play around with and knowing when to toggle it on/off provides a nice reactive gameplay element with a high skill ceiling. This is the exact kind of gameplay I enjoy.

I never made a tank build before because it seemed like it was too much hassle to be worth it, but I intend to make one now with these changes.

Also interested in seeing exactly how combat will be lengthened in the future, which I think everyone agrees is necessary.

[Mikhaila]

At that point I had only managed to reroll 2/3 of the bulwark threat mods, the third one seals the deal really well. All in all I have really enjoyed playing as a tank today, and it will only get better once I finish rerolling and put SI bacK on all pieces. Maybe next time you are around we can test it out!

Sounds good. I'll use Fox/Unarmed and see how it goes. I was using Fox/Warden last night, with warden up to 75 and no mods for damage. Probably only 2/3 dps. More taunt though. Way too much fire adding to my taunt.

[ProfessorCat]

There's a lot of good things happening in this update. I use Staff in multiple end game builds. I am excited to try out the changes, and provide feedback when I spend some time behind the wheel.


My immediate excitement, however, is for the Spirit Fox fixes. It has quickly become one of my favorite skills, and just in time, as I've finally got my Fox/Necro build 100% rolled.

(Perhaps we'll add tools to synergize with another skill... what skill pairing would you like to see?)
Combo suggestions:
My first thought on how additional skills could benefit Spirit Fox would be to add combos that don't already exist organically. Druid/Fire Magic/Ice Magic, or even Battle Chemistry could be interesting (Foxes are clever! Maybe they can figure out how to splash a beaker)

Similar to how Bunny is able to cast Ice Magic when wearing a magical Hat, limitations to Head seem the most balanced, as it prevents Bunnies from being able to use the elemental Damage from a Masquerade Mask at the same time.

Sacrificing a MOD that enables an additional skill, or some other limiting implement could be an interesting mechanic, although Fox/Fire Magic may end up with too much DPS/AOEs.

Another idea for enabling a skill that would not otherwise be available is to have the enabler become a skill that you have to upkeep. If enabling Druid (Or any other skill) on a Fox requires an ability on the bar to be used every 120 seconds, it would reduce your total damage abilities to 5, and provide a disadvantage of upkeep in longer battles.


Synergy Suggestions:
As fox stands, its a DPS skill with a lot of CC. I do not think that it needs more DPS, but the avenues on how to reach that DPS could be expanded. The addition of Lightning synergy would go a long way. Lightning synergy would open up the option for Mentalism, and also Rounding out Warden's existing synergy, as lightning/Fire matches both skills.

Lightning/Darkness also has synergy with Necromancy: Spark of Death, Ratkin Blasters, and mods to increase Target's Vulnerability to lighting all exist in Necromancy as it stands. There is also a small amount of Indirect Fire synergy between Necro/Fox.


I have many more thoughts on what could be fun with fox, but I think a lot of those thoughts would fall into alternative animal classes.

[Silkt]

Not sure if it is from this patch with whatever were the additional changes for Ilmari graphics but I have noticed I run through a lot more terrain than before. As in the character legs or more disappear into the terrain. Noticeable areas are the road edges going north out of Serbule keep towards crystal cave and the docks. Follow the direct route you go up and over terrain, follow the road edge and your legs or more disappear into the slope.

Edit: Found the cause of this, in an attempt to ease eye pain from the excessive blue in FR I had enabled "Low Res Ground" in the advanced graphic settings, which seems to make slope changes more angular allowing the character box to slide into them, for want of a more technical description. So unknown if it is really a bug or just an issue that has to be accepted with lower settings.

[Yaffy]

This update having a lot of changes around tanking came as a pleasant surprise. I know there was another forum post recently where it was discussed, but to see the changes so soon is great! I think pretty much every change this patch brought was good, but I would like to go through each one just for my own analysis as well as for anyone who actually cares enough to read my notes. I apologize in advance for the wall of text but I’ll try to break it up into sections just like the patch notes.

General note about Flat Mitigation vs Percentage Mitigation:
I know I’ve talked a lot about the whole flat vs percentage mitigation issue, and that I support percentage based mitigation much more due to scaling better as enemies deal more and more damage while not nullifying weaker enemies. However, I find it very interesting that in these patch notes that there are a lot of flat mitigation options provided, but in VERY high numbers, significantly higher than we’ve seen before. It’s pretty baffling seeing certain mods offering close to 100 potential flat mitigation while older mods might have offered something like 10-20. I do think there is a place for both kinds of mitigation, so I’m interested in seeing where this goes although the numbers may need to be tweaked a bit. The bonus mitigation vs elite stuff is certainly a good idea, and I’m glad to see it implemented. Personally I think the mitigation vs normal enemies might need to be a little lower while the elite mitigation could be a bit higher in most of these cases, but none of the mods look outright busted or outright useless and so depending on how combat changes in the future this might be totally fine.
As a further note, I would highly suggest against the idea of making flat mitigation occur after percentage based mitigation. With these numbers it would be very VERY easy for players to become outright invincible to most attacks outside of rage attacks, so I would advise against it. Even with hefty percentage based mitigation these mods should still prove to be decently valuable, and even without percentage based mods these flat mods will help bridge the gap between an undergeared tank and an overgeared tank, which I think was INCREDIBLY large before this patch, far greater than the discrepancy between an undergeared DPS and an overgeared DPS.


Shield changes:

Bulwark Mode:
Overall this is a great addition to shield’s moveset. It’s surprising to see a tank stance added to Project Gorgon, but its implementation is good. Reducing all damage you take by 27% is a decent amount, but the most important part of this is that it reduces any type of direct damage, which is something shield definitely needed. Before this patch shield was pretty much the best thing vs elemental damage simply due to elemental ward, but it basically offered nothing meaningful against physical damage and lacked defense against many other damage types which was a major flaw with the skill.

The damage reduction is pretty hefty which makes it undesirable to use all the time which is definitely good. The movement speed reduction isn’t too bad but it also encourages players to avoid using it all the time (Ex. while just running around) so that’s good as well. One thing to note however is that it doesn’t cut your indirect damage, so this means thorns and DoT builds aren’t weakened very much. Normally this wouldn’t matter too much… but some of the mods may make this kind of abusable.

I think the one thing I would like to see changed with Bulwark though would be to allow it to be a sidebar skill, since I find shield's bar is already getting really crowded with "mandatory" skills. There's no way you're removing Take the Lead or Fight me you Fools from a tank shield's bar, and if you don't run shield team you're a monster. Since Bulwark is something you don't necessarily want on 100% of the time, I feel like it would make more sense if you could put it on your side bar, although if it couldn't then it would be pretty easy to chuck out reinforce or a shield attack for it.

"While Bulwark Mode is enabled you recover 13 Armor per second"
This mod isn’t too spectacular, with 13 armor per second sounding like a lot but really most enemies are going to be chipping away at your armor much faster than that. It’s about close to what you could expect to get from your combat refresh at end game, but only for armor. Still it can add up, but I wouldn’t prioritize this mod too much unless you’re planning on doing heavy stalling, in which case you can get this mod twice and regenerate more armor.

"While Bulwark Mode is enabled you recover 10 Power per second"
This mod is a bit ridiculous for the wrong reasons, and I think this should be changed a bit. 10 power per second is incredibly strong, and it’s essentially passive regeneration since you can leave the mode toggled. However, the funny thing is that this mod is actually very well balanced while doing normal tanking. Usually power isn’t a huge concern when tanking (You should be building mostly around fairly power efficient moves) but it’s still useful when kiting or doing chain pulls, which are important for playing tank well. Outside of tanking however, 10 power per second basically negates a majority of power issues for other purposes, lets you abuse kiting in a cheesy manner with ranged classes, and even lets you fly forever. Personally I think this mod should be changed to be an on hit power regeneration effect, or perhaps it should require you to get hit (Ex. After you get hit restore 10 power per second for X seconds) just so people don’t use it outside of fighting things directly.

“While Bulwark Mode is active all your attacks taunt +50% and restore 17 Health to you”
"While Bulwark Mode is active all your attacks taunt +50% and restore 26 Armor to you"
Both of these mods are fairly similar, although the armor one is technically more useful due to regenerating faster and appearing on two armor pieces. Overall these two mods offer the strongest health and armor cantrip effects in the game due to applying to ALL attacks, and I believe if your goal is to make a build that can self-sustain itself to tank something infinitely, these would be your ticket to it. Assuming you’re constantly attacking (Which you should be for the most part), you can regenerate up to 40 armor and 13 health per second, which is a pretty large amount. The strongest part about this however, is that due to being a global modifier to your attacks it means you can combine this with other similar cantrip effects, which can result in healing for over a hundred effective hit points per attack. Oh, and I guess the taunt bonus is nice too to make up for the reduced damage in bulwark mode.

That said, before everyone who’s bothering to read this goes out and grabs these healing mods to become invincible, I do want to add that regeneration should not be your priority when building a tank. The most important thing to build first off is damage mitigation, because healing for hundreds of HP doesn’t matter much if enemies are destroying you on the spot. Healing becomes more useful AFTER you build mitigation, as it becomes more effective. For example, if you only take half damage, then 100 healing essentially becomes 200 healing as the enemy will need to attack you for 200 damage to make up for the 100 healing points. Bulwark mode’s mitigation helps with this, but it’s certainly not enough just by itself for end game elites at least.

Elemental Ward:
The nerf to elemental ward was definitely needed, although I appreciate leaving the 3 second invincibility time at the start. I actually find that part really neat, since it essentially rewards players for “Parrying” certain attacks with elemental ward while removing the ability to cheese too hard with it. That said you should normally have been using elemental ward right before getting hit by a strong elemental attack, but this really pushes that idea.
Changing the elemental immunity to flat mitigation is a bit strange because of the issue of flat damage not scaling very well, but the amount of flat mitigation it offers is pretty large, especially with the mod that improves it. It’s enough to block out very strong fire DoTs, which is still very useful even if it can’t outright block fire attacks. I certainly don’t think this will do much to protect you against the strongest elemental attacks (That ””””””Fire”””””” elemental in the fae realm is still going to obliterate your health with a rage crit even with 100 mitigation), but due to lasting for 30 seconds it will block a lot of damage over time, so it will still be very useful, ESPECIALLY against enemies that apply burning DoTs, in which case it could even feel outright overpowered due to negating them entirely.

"Elemental Ward mitigates +54 Darkness damage for 30 seconds"
"Elemental Ward mitigates +55 direct Trauma damage for 30 seconds"
For the most part these mods are kind of lackluster, due to Darkness and direct trauma being fairly uncommon damage types. It’s a bit sad seeing the old poison and trauma resistance being removed, since they were overall more useful for reducing poison and trauma DoTs. Still, +55 mitigation for 30 seconds is a fairly noticeable amount and could reduce Ensign damage by quite a bit, so if you REALLY hate Ensigns then the first might be useful. I’d personally put these two on the bench unless you have a very specific enemy type you want to deal with or new enemies with these damage types get added.

"All Shield attacks have a 22% chance to conjure a force-shield that mitigates 10% of all slashing, crushing, and piercing damage for 30 seconds (or until 100 damage is absorbed). Stacks up to 5 times”
"All Shield attacks have a 22% chance to conjure a force-shield that mitigates 10% of all direct nature, darkness, demonic, and acid damage for 30 seconds (or until 100 damage is absorbed). Stacks up to 5 times”
I just want to start by saying it’s really funny how this mod moved over from Unarmed to Shield, but with some tweaks. This version is a lot weaker due to only having 1 mod for each and having a limit of 5 stacks, but shield getting some physical resistance is nice and the latter mod reduces a wide variety of uncommon damage types which is kinda interesting.
On paper these mods are useful, but it’s a bit tricky to use them due to requiring shield attacks. Unarmed can fill its whole 6 slot bar with attacks (I mean it doesn’t have anything else), but shield has many very useful utility skills which will make upkeeping these barrier effects with a decent rotation more difficult. You could use emergency bash as well, but I think it will be difficult to get the most out of these mods without either spamming quick bash (Which is definitely not preferred) or purposefully skipping out on some useful abilities like elemental ward or take the lead in order to have more fast cooldown shield attacks. Overall I don’t think you should build around these mods as a tank as much as you should simply think of them as a bonus (Ex. Gain 2.2% mitigation on using fight me you fools), but I don’t think they’re worth building in that case.
I’m sure the idea behind things like this is to try and get players to make a build where people use all the shield bash abilities (Since there are several other mods that boost all shield bash abilities), but personally I don’t think it’s worth it. If someone else wants to try and make it though I’d be very interested in seeing how it works out.

"Disrupting Bash deals +40% damage and taunts +460" => "Disrupting Bash causes the next attack that hits you to deal 29 less damage"
I’m gonna be honest I’m not a very big fan of this one at all. I just can’t see this one being useful, and disrupting bash losing its taunt takes away some of its viability in tank builds (The crushing damage debuff on Disrupting is very nice utility for the tank) . Reducing the damage of one hit by 29 isn’t very useful since it doesn’t scale with other forms of mitigation, 29 isn’t a very large amount of damage, and it’s worse than weakening the target’s attack since at least then you could reduce damage to your whole party if it’s an AoE. I really don’t get this one.


Staff Changes:

Deflective Spin:
Similar to elemental ward, changing Deflective spin to have better uptime is better at making the skill line less cooldown reliant, although it wasn’t as extreme as elemental ward/blocking stance. On a vanilla deflective spin 13% mitigation isn’t a huge amount though which kinda makes the skill seem a little lackluster (It kinda feels like a weaker Bulwark stance you have to repeatedly use), but the mods added to it are really great and then it makes a lot more sense.

"Deflective Spin restores 66 Health instantly and provides +50 Mitigation from all Elite attacks for 15 seconds"
100 flat mitigation is a ginormous amount of flat mitigation, so I’m interested in seeing how effective this mod is. In a great tanking set, this mod will probably reduce elite damage by quite a lot, although rage attacks will probably smash through this as if it’s not there.

"Deflective Spin gives you +18% Projectile Evasion for 15 seconds"
This mod is deceptively powerful. 18% projectile evasion is nothing to sneeze at, especially due to the easy availability of projectile evasion on other pieces of gear. This mod could easily reduce the overall damage you take from ranged mobs by over 30%, and it should be a top priority for staff players. Overall an incredibly strong mod despite how simple it looks.

Blocking Stance:
The parrying effect isn’t as useful but it gives 102 physical mitigation without mods against elites, which is kinda nuts since elemental ward needed two mods to get close to that. With two mods you get 192 flat mitigation against elites, which is the highest amount of flat mitigation given by a single ability in the game AND it lasts for 30 seconds, which is pretty ridiculous. Combine it with deflective spin and I'm pretty sure you have so much flat mitigation you won't be taking damage anymore.
I’m interested in seeing how strong this ends up being as I suspect it’ll make normal attacks pretty weak and it might be too strong at reducing overall damage, although you’ll still be susceptible to spike damage from crits. In GK I suspect it’ll probably reduce the damage you take from normal attacks to pathetic levels, although Wintertide has too many elemental mobs for it to make a ginormous difference.
Physical damage is overall much more common so blocking stance is definitely very strong now. In fact it might be kind of ridiculous due to lasting 30 seconds. 34-64 flat mitigation is a LOT against trash, which will probably make staff trash farming builds basically invincible. Overall I think elemental ward is a bit stronger in a fully built tank build due to the value of elemental resistance and its ability to negate burning DoTs, but blocking stance will be useful against a much wider variety of enemies and is ridiculously strong with just two mods. It honestly might be too easy to throw into a build to negate damage, sort of like how it was before. It’d be weaker at cheesing since it doesn’t give outright immunity, but 30 seconds is a long time.

"Blocking Stance costs -16 Power and mitigates +10% of physical damage from Elite attackers for 30 seconds"
Good simple mod, you can get two of it so it’s pretty safe to just say staff should have 20% physical mitigation at all times. Stacked with the previous mod and it’s pretty easy for staff to say it has the most physical mitigation in the game with just blocking stance. This mod mostly prevents you from getting gibbed by rage crits as badly (Ex. Wintertide Trolls), which the flat mitigation from Blocking stance normally isn't very good against.

"Lunge causes the next attack that hits you to deal 29 less damage"
Same as the disrupting bash thing, gonna be honest I don’t really get this one, seems really weak.


Cow changes:

Overall I think the cow changes are nice, but aren’t really quite enough to make cow that great at tanking, although it’s certainly quite stronger and makes cow tanking a bit more viable. However the buffs are really good for a support/DPS cow, since they have both damage buffs and effects that lower damage for anyone, not just themselves.

"Tough Hoof costs -26 Power and mitigates +11% of all Elite attacks for 8 seconds"
An excellent mod for sure, with two copies this mod offers 22% mitigation to all damage types, assuming they’re direct attacks from elites. This kind of stuff is exactly what cow needed, as Cow had a huge problem dealing with a lot of damage types such as elemental damage. However, one thing to note is that Tough Hoof has a cool down of 12 seconds, so this means Cows should be prepared to use the skill off cooldown and expect to have brief periods where they aren’t as tanky with this mod.

New treasure (chest, hands): "Max Power +31 and Vulnerability to Elite Damage -8% when Cow skill active"
Unlike the mod above, this mod is active all the time as a passive, and while it might not seem that exciting, this mod is actually excellent. Not only does it have 100% uptime and apply to all direct damage types, but if the wording of this mod is correct then it actually modifies the player’s resistance. This is important because negative vulnerability is actually taken into account before other forms of mitigation, and therefore this 8% reduction applies BEFORE flat mitigation. Definitely mandatory in any cow tanking set, and pretty useful even if you aren’t a tank.

New treasure (off-hand): "Deadly Emission Deals +170 Nature damage over 10 seconds and reduces targets' next attack by 35%"
An interesting mod, this one is fairly similar to the front kick kick mod in that it reduces damage from one attack by quite a bit. Unlike front kick, you know Deadly Emission is actually going to AoE and apply this to every mob, so this is a pretty useful mod. Overall it won’t reduce damage by that much due to only applying to one attack, but it’s a nice bonus when starting an AoE pull or possibly a rage attack if you can time it right. Two useful things to note is that you can reduce the damage your party takes from AoEs with this mod, and you don’t actually need to be tanking to make use of this ability.

New treasure (ring): "Clobbering Hoof deals +35% damage and if target is Elite, reduces their attack damage 10% for 10 seconds"
A great mod, this one scales perfectly with flat mitigation (Since enemy damage is calculated first) and it lasts for a period of time so it’ll overall reduce enemy damage by a decent amount. Clobbering hoof has a cooldown of 10 seconds, so you can get close to 100% uptime on this effect. However, it only applies to one target which kinda limits it by quite a bit, and once again you don’t need to be a tank to get full effectiveness of this mod.


Other Notes:

Nimble Gear Nerf:
Overall I think this change was good, although I don’t know if it’s quite what we needed. The nimble coat and pants were decent, but not really best in slot for most scenarios so I don’t think they needed to be nerfed that badly. This is because most melee/ranged attacks are spammed at you, so for the most part they would reduce damage by 16% or so if you were only fighting one target who repeatedly used the relevant attack type at you. Still they were better than a lot of other gear, so I guess it’s fair.
Nimble Shoes on the other hand were way too good, and definitely needed a nerf. Back during the Gazluk Keep days I said they weren’t necessarily BiS for tanks because there weren’t too many AoEs and you would usually pull too many tacticians to effectively dodge things if you did pull them, but now it seems like almost every elite has an AoE rage attack and said rage attacks are incredibly strong so nimble shoes are just too useful against everything.
The thing is that even now I think nimble shoes are still BiS for most enemies, even with the nerf. A big reason for that however is just that there aren’t really many other good options for the shoes, with the only option really coming close being the astounding evasion leather shoes (Which to be fair, are looking a lot better after this nerf especially on certain sets). The nerf was good, but if the goal was to make players avoid nimble shoes on tanking sets then I don’t think this really changed too much.

Future Tanking changes:
I’m VERY anxious about the future update mentioned, since I have no idea what’s in store for Unarmed in particular. Ice Magic and Deer deserve nothing but buffs so there’s no problem there, but I know that Unarmed has been the strongest tanking skill for a while and can’t help but be worried about it being nerfed unjustly. Yes I know I am probably the most biased person you could ask, but the only thing overpowered about unarmed was that it was the only thing keeping the concept of tanking alive by being “Acceptable” as a tank while other skills were incapable of holding their own.
I do believe that Unarmed can be nerfed if other skills you can combine it with are stronger (Unarmed/Shield in particular will have a field day with Bulwark mode), but at the very least I would like to suggest that Unarmed tanking be easier to build, even if it is weaker in a perfect set. One major problem with Unarmed tanking is that it is incredibly weak with poor gear, and only starts to get good once you have an INCREDIBLY fine tuned set, and even then you are heavily limited by the strength of your other party members. I do believe Unarmed is the closest skill in the game to getting out of control, in that a few buffs could potentially make it way too good, but it's also volatile in that nerfs could potentially make it worthless very quickly.
If there are any questions you’d like to ask about building an Unarmed tank, please let me know, and I would be happy to lay out everything as objectively as possible if it could give the developers a better idea of how to change Unarmed tanking in the future.
__________________________________________________ ____________________________

Sorry for the long post, thanks for reading it if you bothered to do so. I could talk about this all day. I’m happy to see the game going in this direction since I definitely agree that the game has been getting too fast ever since crits were added. Overall I think this patch was pretty great and I’m really happy to see tanking get some love! I’m really REALLY interested in seeing other people try to build tanks, and I hope people can share their experience and feedback with it. Tanking has always been really hard to do properly and to be honest I still think it might be, but hopefully this update is a step towards making tanking a lot less alien.

TL;DR Good patch

[Mbaums]

Lunge causes the next attack that hits you to deal 29 less damage...

Lunge was quite a bad skill before. I think they nearly doubled the base damage, but the real reason this mod is interesting is because 1) fast cool down 2) a glove mod turns the attack into an AoE. So, every 10 seconds being able to reduce every attack by 58 adds up. I would put it in the category of "skills you always want on cool down, when fighting more than 2 mobs"

[Yaffy]

Lunge was quite a bad skill before. I think they nearly doubled the base damage, but the real reason this mod is interesting is because 1) fast cool down 2) a glove mod turns the attack into an AoE. So, every 10 seconds being able to reduce every attack by 58 adds up. I would put it in the category of "skills you always want on cool down, when fighting more than 2 mobs"

The thing is that it doesn't reduce the enemy's attack damage by 29, it causes you to take 29 less damage the next time you get hit. If you made it an AoE and hit multiple enemies you would still only have +29 mitigation for one enemy's attack out of the whole group since it triggers on use, not per target hit.

[Mbaums]

Ahh misread the mod, you are right! I was so used to the existing debuff mod like "X causes target's attacks to deal -20 damage", which would have been a nice effect!

[Celerity]

I've made my tanking build and decided to go with unarmed/shield. It's really fun to play, especially managing cooldowns and taunt and it's obvious I still have a lot I need to learn in order to play it completely optimally, which I think is a great thing. I think that this combination in particular though, has too good passive mitigation, especially from darkness and physical on the side of unarmed. On it's own, it's maybe only slightly too strong, but the moment you add in just something like extra skin or mitigation from pig or bard, it gets pushed to be a bit too good.

I did a wintertide group and I only ever even came close to dying maybe 3 times in the whole run, all 3 times were when I pulled ~5 elites (mostly accidentally), didn't have bulwark mode active, then got stunned and elemental ward ran out, while fighting cold elementals and hippogriffs. Even then I didn't die, because of healing and support from my group and I was able to use elemental ward which then saved me with the 3 seconds of immunity, used bulwark mode and then a heal with the combat refresh if needed. If I didn't have the extra skin buff and healing from my group I would have certainly died. It was also a very strong group, I think we had at least 3 people in full max-enchanted yellows with a lot of experience, they also had things such as aoe stun and that generic mod on the helmet which lowers the rage attack damage by 25%, which when your nice attack is aoe, can be incredibly helpful.

The phoenixes and droaches really demonstrated they do very little damage without their dots and I was actually more worried my party members would die to dots from the aoe than I was about myself dying. Similarly, for ensigns I think only their rage attacks hit me for any damage at all, and even pulling 6 at a time the bigger worry was about keeping aggro than it was about my own survival. I was still using the darkness meditation for this run though, which I don't think I would for the future.

Overall, I think I maybe just had a bit too much mitigation because of the added mitigation from supports. I wouldn't want it nerfed too hard because then if you're in a group without a support you might struggle. It was definitely still a struggle to keep aggro, mostly due to cooldowns on take the lead and fight me you fools, and obviously it doesn't matter how good your mitigation is if you can't keep aggro, so that's another balancing factor. My build was still missing a couple of the aggro mods, but I would say unarmed/shield also provides some of the best taunt in the game and I myself witnessed tank builds that other people made where they still struggled to get aggro even with all their mods. So, all in all, maybe a reduction of a few % at most on some of the % mitigation mods for unarmed would probably be enough. I haven't played staff, but just looking at the numbers there, I think the flat mitigation might be a bit too high. With my build, shield didn't feel op because I only use 2 attacks so I would only normally have 1 stack of the forcefields up and bulwark mode feels balanced because of the 50% damage reduction. I also haven't played cow, but it certainly doesn't look op from the numbers. I think if you ran cow/unarmed right now it would feel balanced already, so a nerf to unarmed might need to come with a slight buff to cow too.

EDIT: Just to be clear, for my build in particular I think the aggro is in a perfect spot. It's a challenge but I meant it as a fun challenge and it's part of what balances the strength of the mitigation.

[Yaffy]

I did a wintertide group and I only ever even came close to dying maybe 3 times in the whole run, all 3 times were when I pulled ~5 elites


Something I'd like to bring up that I think is important when discussing expectations for tanking is how many enemies you should be able to handle at once, because personally I believe that 5 elites is honestly a fair number to pull in your situation while a lot of others might think this is crazy high, especially after ages of game play of pulling only one enemy at a time. Let me explain what I mean.

First off, there are two facts about Project Gorgon that need to be explained:
1. Specific party compositions (Ex. 4 DPS, 1 healer 1 tank) are in no way required to beat dungeons currently. You can beat dungeons with any composition.
2. By default doing more damage is the most appealing option, because by killing things faster you can grind EXP and get loot faster. Therefore players are biased towards building DPS.

So as a baseline, I think it's fair to say that a full DPS party can reliably handle one elite enemy at a time, because that's the bare minimum for them to be able to complete the dungeon. I think everyone can understand this since most parties have played around pulling a single elite at a time for quite a while.

However, the thing is that if you add a tank into the mix (5DPS + 1Tank), the tank is useless if the party can still only handle one elite at a time. If the tank only pulls one enemy, then they are pulling just as many as a full DPS party would, except they will kill the enemy slower because they do less damage. Therefore, if the tank wants to be useful, they need to be able to handle at least TWO elites at once, or else why even have them in the party?

Continuing on, if we add a healer/support into the mix (4DPS +1Tank +1Support), then we end up with a similar problem if the party can still only handle two enemies at once. What is the point of the healer if the party can't handle more enemies and they just slow down the party by doing less DPS? Therefore, it should be expected that a healer + tank should allow the party to confidently handle three or more elites at once.

At this point you can probably see what I'm getting at. The ability to handle tougher encounters (In this case, more enemies at once) is the goal of non-DPS orientated classes. In many other MMORPGs, this is accomplished by making content virtually impossible to complete with a full DPS group, but because Project Gorgon Content is possible in a full DPS group, a balanced party should be more efficient at clearing the content in order to justify lowering DPS output. The most simple way to achieve this is to allow the party to pull more enemies, since by pulling more enemies you eliminate downtime and improve efficiency by having abilities apply to multiple enemies at once. Your party probably isn't going 3x faster just because you're pulling three mobs instead of 1, but you're probably speeding things up if nobody is dying.

Therefore, when asking yourself if a tank is too effective or not effective enough, you should compare what the party can normally handle vs what the addition of the tank allows them to handle.

If a weak party can't handle a single enemy but you allow them to handle one, then you're making a huge impact as a tank.
If a normal party can normally handle one enemy but you let them handle two, then you're helping a lot.
If a strong party can normally handle three enemies but you let them handle four, then you're doing something.
If an incredibly geared party can handle four enemies and you're still just pulling four mobs, you're probably not helping.

Because a super geared party of DPS can handle 3-4 elites (Possibly more), I think it's more than fair to say that taking on 5 elites in the same party is expected when you add in a tank. It's also important to remember that your effectiveness as a tank is very heavily reliant on your other party members (DPS killing things lowers the damage you take, healers significantly improve your ability to take on longer fights and good support stacks their mitigation with yours), so having a good party should multiply your effectiveness even more.

There's more to tanking than just the number of enemies you can pull, like improving consistency, clear speed, directing the party, etc. But basically what I'm getting at is that if you have a good party, you SHOULD be able to pull a lot of mobs, even if it seems crazy because a well geared party can already pull a good number of enemies. It just feels extra exciting because all those enemies are all trying to murder one player (you) at the same time which is definitely a unique feeling because you're probably used to people dying to getting hit by just one.
On the other hand if your party is only strong enough to handle one mob but you let them pull five, then there might be a problem. Once you're making "Crazy pulls" and you aren't reliant on five people behind you to do so, or you're pulling entire sections of the dungeon because you've hit virtually invincible status (With or without help), then your tank build is getting out of hand.

If player damage gets nerfed and full DPS parties can't instantly nuke elites down like they can now, this will make a heavy impact on the number of enemies you can pull since each enemy will damage you more before dying, so if damage scaling gets toned down then you will see a noticeable decrease in what you can pull as a tank. After all for each target your party can instantly nuke down, that's an extra mob you can safely pull because it won't be hitting you for very long.

[Celerity]

Something I'd like to bring up that I think is important when discussing expectations for tanking is how many enemies you should be able to handle at once

This is an important question, for wintertide trolls I can only pull 3 or maybe 4 depending on the group because of their knockdown. The ice area I can pull 5 at a time and generally be fine and the fire area I can pull 4 or 5, but all my party members die from the aoe so it's more realistically about 3 maximum at a time. The ensign area however, in certain groups I'm sure I could pull every enemy in there and still be fine, in the average group it's more like 7 or 8 as my limit but honestly it's not even worth pulling that many at once so I usually don't. If these numbers are intended then it's already balanced, but I'm sure the ensigns at least are not.


On the other hand if your party is only strong enough to handle one mob but you let them pull five, then there might be a problem

This happened in a group I did today at ensigns. If I was playing my dps build there's no way I would have ever pulled more than 2 at once, but in my tank build I was regularly pulling 4 and a couple times accidentally got 5 or 6 and it was still perfectly fine. The biggest problem became the constant chain stuns even with 60% stun resist and 55% ranged + projectile evasion, which meant I couldn't keep up aggro occasionally. But even then, I think there were only 1 or 2 deaths in what was a relatively weak group since we only had 4 people for a time, and of those 4, I think only 1 had a completed build. In other parts of the dungeon, I think I was pulling maximum 3 at once intentionally, but we could still handle 4 if another came by accident. So I guess going up from 2 at once but still dying sometimes if I ran dps, to 3 or 4 at once and rarely dying, but lower damage is reasonably balanced. Maybe a tiny bit too strong, but bearing in mind, although my build isn't complete, I do have all my mitigation mods. I'm only missing some aggro and damage mods and it is mostly max-enchanted yellows.

I'm honestly just glad it's relatively painless to make a tank build now and I've definitely already seen more people using them. The last thing I would want is for them to become useless unless you have a perfect build like it was before.

So, I think the biggest problem is the passive darkness mitigation mod that unarmed has. After doing a couple more runs with weaker groups, the other parts of the dungeon actually felt reasonably well balanced to me, but it's definitely preferable to have a tank in the group now, rather than an all dps group in every situation I would say. Whether or not that's an issue I don't know, but some people might see it as "forcing" groups to have a tank.

[Yaffy]

The ensign area however, in certain groups I'm sure I could pull every enemy in there and still be fine, in the average group it's more like 7 or 8 as my limit but honestly it's not even worth pulling that many at once so I usually don't. If these numbers are intended then it's already balanced, but I'm sure the ensigns at least are not.

I definitely believe you there. The Darkness resist on Unarmed is really strong, it just never had a chance to shine until Ensigns came along. Combined with the Darkness Meditation and Bulwark mode and you're cutting down their damage to about 30%. Slap on 50% projectile evasion and you're down to 15% (Although that stops when you get stunned), and that's before considering flat mitigation. It wouldn't surprise me if you could pull literally the whole Ensign section with the right setup and a support boosting you (In particular giving you stun immunity or more evasion).

Thank you for responding to my post, since I think context as well as enemy types are really important to discuss when talking about tanking. It shows that balancing out different mitigation types is important, and possibly encouragement for playing as different builds (For example, Unarmed/Staff or Unarmed/Sword would probably be able to pull more trolls than you did, but be much weaker vs the elemental mobs). Context with party members is important too, since a strong support/healer should technically be able to turn an average player into a pseudo tank, or a good tank into an amazing tank.

Stuff like not being able to pull too many Droaches/Phoenixes due to your party members is definitely something I'm familiar with, and I think that's an important part of tanking too. It's another example of being limited by your party's strength (In this case their own survivability) so it's either on them to get stronger or for you to adjust your playstyle (Ex. Not pulling as many mobs and/or trying to make sure the mobs don't AoE on your team mates), and I think that adds a lot to the game. Maybe it could encourage your squishy team mates to build some fire resistance so they don't explode, which is something Citan wants to encourage going by his recent posts.

I do agree with your assessment that shield's buffed up bonuses combined with darkness' resist from Unarmed is too strong vs Ensigns, and a lot of what you say clarifies it (Especially the part about playing with a smaller, weaker party).

As for the "Forcing a tank" thing, I don't think it's a problem if DPS parties are still able to clear content. I think it's good to encourage parties to try and be balanced, in that both tanks AND healers should be desired (Because the alternative is not wanting them at all since less dps = slower clears), but as long as content is still possible with any composition and people in global chat aren't turning away everyone since they aren't a tank/healer then it should be fine. If Gorgon goes down the path of forcing a tank/healer in order to reasonably complete content then that could be an issue.

[Citan]

Great feedback so far! I'll try to answer some questions here. Instead of specifically replying, though, I'm going to paraphrase your questions into my answers. That way people don't need to read the entire thread to follow what I'm saying.

Percentage Mitigation, Flat Mitigation, Scaling
Percentage mitigation is insanely powerful, which makes it great as a baseline for tanking. But it scales too well -- there's no room to grow. If your ability gives you 26% mitigation at level 75, where do we go for an encore? In the case of Bulwark Mode, we're looking at 27% mitigation at level 100... is it exciting to level up 25 times in order to gain +1% damage mitigation? I don't think so, but that's the best I can do there. But then we have to look at treasure. None of Bulwark Mode's treasure can boost that percentage at all: it would be too powerful, allowing lower-level players to tank much higher-level creatures than they should. Instead, the treasure has to boost mitigation by a flat amount. This way, you need to keep finding better treasure as you level up.

Flat mitigation on players makes a lot of sense because monster damage scales almost linearly. (This is very different from player damage, which has multiplicative elements, so mitigation on monsters is much less powerful.) For instance, a level 75 "Carnivine" has +97 damage boost. If it was a level 70 monster, the damage would be +89 instead. If it was level 100 it'd be +143. This monster is a wuss, but you get the point -- these are smallish numbers that increase at a relatively modest pace.

That's true for both solo monsters and Elite monsters -- Elites obviously hit harder, but their damage scales slowly with level. So with some number-massaging, I should be able to make flat mitigation the main form of mitigation.

Giving out tons of flat mitigation does create new problems. I'm especially worried about granting literal invincibility against lower-level monsters. You can see that already with Staff: if you go back and fight newbie monsters, they simply can never hurt you. I don't like this design and will need to fix it with new mechanics.

One mechanic I'm considering to fight over-mitigation is something from Asheron's Call 2 I called "armor chipping". Here's how it worked: if an attack would be mitigated to below 25% of its original value, then a random amount of the damage (between 1% and 25%, rolled randomly for each attack) would "bleed through". So no matter how good your armor was, you would still take an average of 12% of the damage from the attack (plus or minus 12%). So you could still be "chipped" to death by lots of smaller creatures.

This did help prevent overmitigation in AC2 (which is especially problematic in a PvP game), although it wasn't terribly popular with player tanks, who really like seeing "no damage" floating above their heads. But anyway, even if we don't use this particular system, we'll definitely need a few new mechanics to help with balance problems.

Long story short: I've always been pretty hesitant to give out meaningful amounts of mitigation because of the abusability of it for farming lowbie monsters. But I think flat mitigation -- in large amounts! -- is going to be necessary to make high-level group combat work. So... we'll just have to make it work! That probably means changing monster damage, and adding new systems to prevent abusability, and who knows what else.

Not all Bosses/Elites are Useful Data Points for Tanking
It's dangerous to do too much theorycrafting against the most powerful monsters in the game. Zukelmux is probably the best example -- he was made specifically to stump players. He's harder than anything I thought players could handle with level 70 equipment alone, and I expected players to need all sorts of special items and tricks to survive it.

Having this fight in the game was a very useful data point for me, but it's not one I'm trying to maintain forever. In fact, Zuke is destined to get a pretty hard nerf eventually. (I kind of tipped my hand about that when he was included in a daily Aurest quest.) He'll still be really hard to kill, but he probably won't deal as much damage as he does now.

It's also important to realize that monsters can serve different roles, and you aren't supposed to be able to tank them all! The "Multipurpose Utility Elementals" in the newest dungeon are a good example. They have an opening move that sprays acid which will shred armor in seconds. But that's their opening move, and then they can't use it again for 30 seconds. And it does no health damage... so... one simple solution is: don't tank that! Let an off-tank pull it and get hit by the acid, then let a tank take over.

In that case, I tried to make the acid powerful enough to force players to think creatively. Maybe it needs to be more potent, I dunno. But the point is that there are lots of Elite and Bosses with gimmicks, and they need to have different solutions besides "take the damage in the face and laugh because I have insane mitigation". I mean, sometimes that's what's needed, sometimes not.

(And I realize many of the current monster gimmicks just don't work, because the numbers aren't quite right, or something about it just didn't end up mattering to players. In those cases, I'll try to fix the numbers to make their gimmick work. That will help make combat more interesting.)

Other Stuff

"If a piece of gear is eligible for discounted Transmutation, all the mods on the item should be eligible, not just the particular skills that have changed." I like this idea and I think it makes sense. Probably can't implement that overnight, but will at some point in the future.
"What about abuse by kiting mobs or AoE burst-killing them?" I think a good first step in fixing these problems is to make the monsters live longer so they have more opportunities to react. So that's the step I'm focused on. After that, if something is still too cheesy... well, we'll have to fix it one way or another, depending on the exact details.
"Kitchen Sink" reminder: I mentioned this in the last update thread, too. I'm throwing the kitchen sink at the problem, meaning I'm going to try out a few different game systems and see what's fun. That's what Bulwark Mode is. It was actually slated as a special tool just for dwarves. The Dwarven Stalwarts are referenced in the game a few times -- Bulwark Mode was originally going to be "Stalwart Mode." But dwarves are a long way off, and this system seems too useful to be limited to one race. Maybe. We'll see how it all pans out.
Numbers will change! I was working on the numbers for this update right up until the evening before we launched it, never quite happy with them. I'm pretty sure I overdid it with Staff flat mitigation, and maybe in other places, too. None of those numbers are locked in. I'm just trying to quickly shift overall tanking balance in the right direction, which will mean some skills are overpowered for a bit. Please remind players that this isn't permanent; I don't want players to get the wrong idea and and make a Staff build specifically because it's overpowered right now, and then be disappointed when it's nerfed a month later. So if you see people talking about it, please help remind players of the eventual plans.


I had more to say about specific details, but we're really getting into the weeds, so I'll stop for now. Please keep the feedback coming!

[Citan]

Oh, one more thought: I think maybe in the next update I'm going to boost Elite and Boss health by 100% for a while. This is not indicative of where the final stats will be, but it may help players explore the new systems and give feedback on where to go next. (And it's easy to implement in a way that can be reverted.)

[Yaffy]

Giving out tons of flat mitigation does create new problems. I'm especially worried about granting literal invincibility against lower-level monsters. You can see that already with Staff: if you go back and fight newbie monsters, they simply can never hurt you. I don't like this design and will need to fix it with new mechanics.


If I could suggest something, perhaps the armor chipping mechanic could be better suited to just rage attacks instead of normal attacks? That way normal attacks could still be reduced to 0 damage, but rage attacks will do some portion of their damage. This will still mean lower level enemies are a joke (Which to be fair should be expected if someone is over leveled), but it does mean enemies can still hurt you if they manage to get a rage attack off. Since it's just the rage attack the amount of damage could be higher than your suggested 12% average and be something like a constant 20%. It would also prevent people with crazy mitigation from possibly being invincible vs Elites on the same level, although I assume you hope no one gets to that point. It would still mean mobs can't do damage if they're killed before they get a rage attack off, but that requires the player to both meet a tanking threshold and a damage threshold which is harder to meet.



It's also important to realize that monsters can serve different roles, and you aren't supposed to be able to tank them all!

I like the idea of having mobs like the elemental you mentioned, because I realize there's potential to have people who are better/worse at tanking certain enemies (Ex. One player builds a lot of elemental resist while one player builds a lot of physical resistance) but it can be pretty tricky to implement. The thing is that previously the strategy for most players in dungeons was to not tank anything at all and just kill stuff fast, so trying to encourage players to tank stuff in the first place definitely comes first. It can also be pretty tricky because "Off-tanks" are pretty rare, so even if you want someone to take aggro for you temporarily you might not have a volunteer (Although it should get better with tank improvements). Furthermore even if you have a certain mechanic like crazy armor damage, a tank with no armor will still probably be a better tank than the 5 squishy people with no mitigation behind them since they might explode if something looks at them wrong.

If we're going with the whole "A tank should be able to pull multiple enemies" deal, then I think a good way to encourage other party members to tank is to have enemies that have a stacking effect against players, for example like the Werewolves stacking Pack Attack on you or Slimes stacking the "You take more acid damage" debuff. These can result in a tank quickly becoming significantly more vulnerable if they get too many of the debuff, in which case it's a good idea to try and spread the debuff around or switch once the tank is squishier than other party members. Unlike the armor damaging elementals, this directly weakens the tank's mitigation (By a meaningful amount, potentially infinitely) so just healing the tank a lot isn't the best solution. Trolls kind of have this effect to some extent in that knockdown results in the damage you take being multiplied and being stun locked, so in my experience those are usually the enemy where I'm most likely to ask someone else to try and take one off of me.

Ideas like lowering player mitigation could work even if you were just pulling one mob if the debuff was REALLY dangerous, but that risks discouraging tanking at all compared to "Build full DPS and kill it before it can do anything". However if tanking becomes widespread and is generally considered useful, then it could be a neat gimmick to throw into a dungeon in certain spots just to mix things up.

One last thing I could add that might help this would be to encourage other players to off-tank as well through abilities. I can ask my friends to pull something off of me if it's needed, but many random players are allergic to the idea of taking damage unless if they've specifically built for it. Giving some skills a prebuilt way to change aggro without needing mods could help with this, for example a taunt ability that forces the target to attack the player for X seconds, so that way the player knows they always have that as an option in case if it's helpful and can use it if they notice the tank is dying. You can see players using CC effects like fear or mez like this already to save a dying player, so this is basically in the same boat. Even with stuff like this it's honestly pretty difficult to convince people to pull things off the tank unless they've explicitly built for it, but it can help. Maybe if your average players feels a bit tankier they might be more likely to try and off-tank if it's needed?



Oh, one more thought: I think maybe in the next update I'm going to boost Elite and Boss health by 100% for a while. This is not indicative of where the final stats will be, but it may help players explore the new systems and give feedback on where to go next. (And it's easy to implement in a way that can be reverted.)


Normally in any other game the idea of doubling something's health would seem pretty extreme, but honestly go for it because I think the boss fights deserve to be much longer battles. I know they got buffed a bit recently but I still think the Wintertide bosses could use some buffs, since usually in a good party the fight is over too quickly for it to be enjoyable. I think boss fights should last at least a minute or so at least, but usually they're over in around 15-25 seconds even with a bit of a rag-tag party. I would love if "Final bosses" were real endurance tests that lasted for several minutes, but it is important to make sure players have the ability to actually last that long (Which I guess is where tanks and healers come in) and that it doesn't devolve into spamming basic attacks for most of the fight because everyone runs out of power since that's just not fun.

If you're talking about doubling EVERY elite's health by 2x, you might want to be careful with that though. I don't know if newbies need to be dealing with an ultra beefed up mega spider in Serbule crypt or something. It could encourage a lot more parties though so that could be neat, but newbies don't really have many options to handle a drawn out fight unlike higher level players. Maybe the boost could be saved specifically for level 40+ dungeons like those in the dailies or something along those lines or scale so lower level elites aren't quite as tough?

[Tandiril]

Thank you for the answers, that clears up things :) It's also very interesting that mobs damage does indeed scale linearily. I believe you, however it definitly doesn't feel that way. The jump from Gaz damage to FR damage definitly didn't feel linear but I will take your word for it. In that case linear scaling of flat mitigation also makes sense, and if that is the plan I think I also understand now why you try to stick to flat mitigation: character developement.
And yes it's true, the room for percentage based base growth is very limited because it grows on its own. I just want to point something out, however.
Right now you seem to be playing theoretically with the idea of counteracting the effect of flat mitigation on low level mobs. By adding a mechanic that seems pretty unintuitive and also hard to balance properly in regards to a threshold. I know, all theory^^ For the sake of the discussion, let's assume for a second we only have percentage mitigation, then the problem disappears on its own. I understand and agree that player fun and character building is important, it shouldn't be all numbers. All I want to say is that at some point it might be better to replace layers upon layers of band-aid fixes that are "fun" for something simple but "unfun"^^ Not that we are there right now, just talking high level.
Other stuff:

It's dangerous to do too much theorycrafting against the most powerful monsters in the game. Well we have to work with something :D

It's also important to realize that monsters can serve different roles, and you aren't supposed to be able to tank them all! Again, please be careful with that. I also think the idea of specific monsters that require a certain approach are cool, however pigeonhole potential is really high. If an enemy can only be killed by applying ability X while being followed by ability Y that is part of a completely different setup, that fight will be really frustrating for many players. I realize that this is probably needed to make "nuke it before it moves" less viable overall, but personally I am already hard pressed for inventory space with 2 different setups (Which gets me to yet another question: how many setups did you envision a high lvl player to carry around?)
Back to leveling Hoplology!

[Aionlasting]

Everytime you mentined Ac2 my heart melts a little inside. You really do remember the game! This is the reason I followed you here Citan!

To the topic at hand... chipping isn't a bad idea and yaffy mentioned only rage attacks being affected but i'll play the devils advocate and say that if it only works on rage attacks players will easily regenerate that little amount of damage done. I don't think Ac2 had such potent regeneration at baseline though all classes did have a self heal from the magic tree.

[Yaffy]

To the topic at hand... chipping isn't a bad idea and yaffy mentioned only rage attacks being affected but i'll play the devils advocate and say that if it only works on rage attacks players will easily regenerate that little amount of damage done. I don't think Ac2 had such potent regeneration at baseline though all classes did have a self heal from the magic tree.

I assume the point isn't to make lower level mobs dangerous, it's to make it so you can't potentially pull an infinite amount of them for an infinite amount of time by having them deal SOME damage to you, not a lot. A level 80 player reducing damage to 25% shouldn't be threatened by a single level 70 or lower enemy whether the mechanic is only on rage attacks or on all attacks, but either version of the mechanic will prevent players level 80 players from pulling an entire level level 70 dungeons or something silly since the small damage will start to snowball.

The reason why I mentioned only rage attacks being applicable in this case is because Citan said "it wasn't terribly popular with player tanks, who really like seeing "no damage" floating above their heads". By making it only apply to rage attacks, then tank players will still get to negate normal attacks to zero, but pulling a huge swarm of weaker enemies could still be dangerous if they manage to stack rage attacks. Plus it just seems sensible for rage attacks to be the thing that can manage to make a dent in players since they're supposed to be stronger attacks.

[Ranperre]

I'm glad to hear about the other skill benefitting from transmutation buffs. I actually got extremely lucky with my rolls and was able to experiment with the new cow/unarmed. Universal mitigation % is nice, but I await your changes to unarmed.


Oh, one more thought: I think maybe in the next update I'm going to boost Elite and Boss health by 100% for a while. This is not indicative of where the final stats will be, but it may help players explore the new systems and give feedback on where to go next. (And it's easy to implement in a way that can be reverted.)

Transitory issue, but will you adjust drop rates as well? I'm afraid that the math (ease of execution vs profit/hr) might not work in favor of grouping up if you increase our time to clear by 50% or so.

[corelion]

Oh, one more thought: I think maybe in the next update I'm going to boost Elite and Boss health by 100% for a while. This is not indicative of where the final stats will be, but it may help players explore the new systems and give feedback on where to go next. (And it's easy to implement in a way that can be reverted.)

For the 3 headed serpent, please, don't. Doing GK basement daily already takes ages, even with a good group. I dont wanna to spend 2 hours there.

[Yaffy]

So I was finally able to play a decent amount, and I realized that elemental ward's elemental mitigation is only direct damage, so it doesn't protect you against burning damage. This makes it significantly less useful against enemies that apply DoTs. The wording makes it sound like it's all elemental damage, so that's why I assumed it blocked burning damage.

To be fair it is more balanced this way (Negating the DoTs is too strong), but it does make the ability a lot less useful and burning DoTs are quite nasty now with elemental ward not blocking them and burst evasion boots being nerfed so you can't avoid Droach DoTs as consistently.

[Mikhaila]

I'm glad to hear about the other skill benefitting from transmutation buffs. I actually got extremely lucky with my rolls and was able to experiment with the new cow/unarmed. Universal mitigation % is nice, but I await your changes to unarmed.



Transitory issue, but will you adjust drop rates as well? I'm afraid that the math (ease of execution vs profit/hr) might not work in favor of grouping up if you increase our time to clear by 50% or so.

I don't think we can add something like profit into the equation. Players might let it affect their actions, but it's not something on the development side when trying to fix combat. One theme running through a lot of the feedback is "longer fights vs dps burst". If each fight is longer, it's going to have to make clearing a dungeon longer.

The biggest thing affecting the economy right now is a lot of money in the system. Why are stomachs 1k? (I've paid up to 1800 lately even.) Because long term players have a ton of cash and we drive the price up. If I need a stack of stomachs and the only ones available for a day or two are 1800 each, then i pay that. Because I have plenty of money. And then I charge 4k for fets, because 1) the cost of milk and stomachs is going up 2) people have plenty of money and can afford to pay 4k for a snack.

As we get more money, prices on luxury goods will keep going up. If fights being longer means less money, prices won't go up so fast.

And I too am interested in how things changing will affect unarmed. I've used it as my main skill for a couple of years.

[Ranperre]

I don't think we can add something like profit into the equation.

The return in terms of councils from sold loot needs to be considered at some point though. This is a decision many players will make every night they log on: Do I group up with others and kill elites for their gear, or do I farm for resources to sell or craft/do WO's. If clear times increase with no change in loot, the decreased profit/hr will push people into other parts of the economy (WO's/skinning/fat). I believe that the balance between killing/selling and farming/work orders is pretty good right now and might be thrown out of whack if we increase our clear times too much (with no appropriate loot change).

The too much money issue is a symptom of the current state of the game more than the economy. With the wipe and expected price of skills/etc for 90 and 100, we'll most definitely be poor for awhile. The rate at which skill costs increase seems to be higher than the rate at which we can farm for money increases (the addition of things like aurest are unforeseeable), so it makes sense that we're all loaded at 80 even after skilling up everything. This is also why I imagine we don't have access to all 70-80 work orders and our industry is held back.

And also, tangentially related (luxury items), the fox in a box is most certainly not worth 4-5 million.

[Mikhaila]

Players make those decisions all the time. "where is the best spot/way to make money?". If things change, then player behavior changes. But again, it's not a variable or concern for how to make combat better. That's tough enough as it is. ot something the developers should worry about when adjusting combat.

And even if elite fights take twice as long, it's not going to make much of a difference. Farming other things will also take longer. So it takes 6 seconds instead of 3 for a group to kill a wartroll? We add 5 minutes per 100 mobs killed to the time. Minor compared to the overall time.

"Worth" is something decided by each person :) For someone with no money, A Foxnbox isn't worth 10k. For someone with 20million, it's of no consequence. We are spending pixels, so it's up to the individual what it's worth to them. If you measure it's value by what it can make you, it's a poor investment. If you measure it by "Teloch has one, I don't, I'm jealous and want one!", then 4 million is cheap.

[Mbaums]

A major part of the economy isn’t just money moving between players, but money being added to the world via vendors, quests, and work orders. I think the amount of council being added through NPC sales is significant enough that doubling mob HP really should be looked at as possibly cutting that number in half. I’d argue that doubling mob HP, however needed, would reduce the money coming in by a lot more than you’d expect. Three major effects of slower fights would be: 1) regen mobs becoming much harder to kill 2) all crowd control effects become less useful if you use them twice+ in a fight and 3) more deaths because someone is going to misjudge risk. This all means so much time spent on money earning. It could force solo players to group more and it might actually have the opposite effect as I’m describing to global wealth, so I don’t think flat out doubling possible drops is the answer, but allowing for more monsters to drop a 2nd item more often would be welcomed. But the major way to think of any of this is global wealth vs individual.

There was that other thread about Bulwark and players wanting it to go to the side bar. At first I thought, no way I’m sure this is balanced to be on the combat bar, but after reading how it was designed for Dwarfs first, I gotta join the Bulwark side bar club. Shield has a few mods that really support bashing left and right, but there just isn’t enough slots for everything. However in it’s current state shield might already be the most popular tank-skill, but I don’t think that’s the best measure of success. How it feels (2nd hand info) is good, but it can be better with this tweak. To balance it out, maybe disallow flying while Bulwarked?

One of my favorite lines in the patch notes is about how Unarmed, Deer and Ice magic are next. I really forgot ice magic is thought of as a tanking skill. Deer’s place was just strange with taunts but minimal mitigation IMO. Unarmed is good with heavy mod investment, but would just love to what can be done with a skill that can technically work with no hands, 1 hand and 2 hands open. I hope that weapon choice changes how the combat skill plays beyond “barrage or no barrage”.

[Glythe]

Flat mitigation on players makes a lot of sense because monster damage scales almost linearly. (This is very different from player damage, which has multiplicative elements, so mitigation on monsters is much less powerful.)

Giving out tons of flat mitigation does create new problems. I'm especially worried about granting literal invincibility against lower-level monsters.


I would argue that the current levels of flat mitigation make almost no sense. Before this update it was pretty easy to stack flat mitigation and be extremely safe against melee enemies. With level 70 gear as a reference point building for flat mitigation gives you : immunity to level 50 melee elites (except crush+knockdown who can still be problematic) and level 60 normal melee enemies. Level 70 gear/mods give you minimal survival bonuses vs lvl 70 elite enemies. When you compare to say level 80 elite enemies you notice nearly no difference in survivability only considering flat mitigation.

There are multiple builds for example able to solo through DC in level 70 gear and be extremely safe.



One mechanic I'm considering to fight over-mitigation is something from Asheron's Call 2 I called "armor chipping".

Long story short: I've always been pretty hesitant to give out meaningful amounts of mitigation because of the abusability of it for farming lowbie monsters. But I think flat mitigation -- in large amounts! -- is going to be necessary to make high-level group combat work.

Introducing armor chipping will push player builds more towards the already extremely popular trend to ignore defense and build only for damage. Is that what you want for the game?



It's also important to realize that monsters can serve different roles, and you aren't supposed to be able to tank them all! The "Multipurpose Utility Elementals" in the newest dungeon are a good example. They have an opening move that sprays acid which will shred armor in seconds. But that's their opening move, and then they can't use it again for 30 seconds. And it does no health damage... so... one simple solution is: don't tank that!


Is it good design to ask for non tanky dps players to be pulling? The design philosophy of saying "this monster was not meant to be tanked" pushes players into the build suggestion zone where they might ask - why bother tanking at all? Just build elite dps groups that have movement powers and status effects (roots/stun/slow/knockdowns). Tank nothing and kill everything in sloppy AoE style. Currently this seems like the most useful option and I hate that tremendously.

[Mbaums]

Citan has flat out given examples of other games that tried bleed and I don't believe it caused people to totally abandon tanks. I'm kind of against bleeding, but I get that the goal is to allow tanks while allowing lvl 100 content to thrive when it comes out. The problem that I believe he wants to avoid is the best farming build at 100 being something like cow+warden just solo AoEing+damage shield murdering old group content. What this update kind of shows, to me at least, is build diversity comes from when more builds feel strong. So many more people put together tank builds and they seem to enjoy them because their group contribution feels significant.

And not to be picky, it's not like all of WT is made up of those elementals. The non-tank method of pulling kind of trivializes them, but I think most groups still have their tank pull them anyway. The individual+ hard "tank at a range" mob has been around for awhile in PG, like the golems in Labs which are really rough for an at level group, and the best way to deal with them is carefully run around.

[Chilton]

Gday Chilton here.

Getting pwned at work atm (although I shouldn't complain about having a steady job that is giving me lots of overtime), and only just managed to play enough to form an opinion on the latest patch.

Firstly I love the suddenness of it all. We were having a whinge about tanking, and out of the blue, a patch drops that dramatically shakes up tanking in more ways than I have seen since I have started playing about 5 years ago.

I am what you may called a major beneficiary of this patch. My main build is Sword/Shield but I do also have Staff maxed out, with max Hoplology. I had 47 universal event keys saved up from Halloween and 2500 quality phlogistons. On the day the patch dropped I rolled a full set of purple tier equipments and was able to reroll the mods until I got perfect mods on them.

Then I had no time to actually play :( , it took me this long to be able to play for a total of a couple of hours so I can form an opinion on the patch.

I want to offer a few comments, echo one of Yaffy's feedback, and offer a warning of what I would recommend against doing.

Comment/feedback on the patch. I will have to focus on using Staff/Shield as a combination.

1) Lower tier content is beyond ridiculously trivialised when soloing. I can solo the casino dailies offered by Qatik with no preparation and only having low tier food. I agree whole heartedly that something has to be done to fix this. The idea of "armour chipping" sounds interesting and I will wait until I see it before forming an opinion, but I suspect it won't do enough to overcome the problem. Although I gained a new appreciation of the nuances of the balancing process through Citan's reveal that mob damage scales linearly with level, I am still of the opinion that percentage based mods is the way to go, particularly if we are going to aim to limit the number of mods available to players (I still think that is a good idea and would be healthy for build diversity and the game in general).

2) Partying in lower tier content is a mixed bag. If I have a party of lower level players, they are awed by my ability to pull an entire room and tank them while slowly chipping away at the mobs' hp. However when I am running with a high level party, I feel I am almost a liability because I do less damage than compared to if I was running Sword/Shield.

3) The +10 power regen per sec on bulwark form makes it possible to fly forever, and almost abolish the need to have good food. Although I do find some mid level food is still necessary, mainly because I am in full metal armour, but that might change as I upgrade to max enchanted leather armour. I argue it is still vital when soloing because it negatives your power issues, but you can get away with toggling it.

4) I am able to easily solo the elites in fae realm that don't have regeneration, with almost no preparation (just low tier food, no other buffs). I would say this is imbalanced. It's slow and it would be at least 2.5 times faster with a party, but the idea that I can solo them with almost no preparation, while only selected few other builds can do it with lots of preparation and buffs, does not sit comfortably with me.

5) I suspect just increasing the health of elites will not change pretty much any of my observations above. I would advocate that in the next patch, in addition to doubling mob's health they should also have some regeneration added, so that I cannot just slowly grind them down soloing.

6) I haven't had a chance to run a proper high level dungeon with my new build, but I suspect I will be able to solo 1-2 elites in GK, with good food and power regen, but I will not be able to solo WT because of regeneration of trolls, dark damage of ensigns, and DoT effects of a few mobs. I wonder if I can solo the frost hippogriffs and the bears/minotaurs area, once I run past the trolls and ensigns. In any case, the mob density and sheer health pool of mobs in WT will make soloing them very annoying, even if it is doable.

7) I wont comment on the balancing of the taunt component of bulwark form, as I have not yet had a proper high level dungeon run. Likewise I cannot comment on the power and "feel" of the build in high level dungeon.

8) Yes please make bulwark form a side bar skill, I miss having Shield Team....

Despite being a major beneficiary of this patch and so far loving my new found power, I am concerned about the direction this game may be going, if I am reading this underlying trend and Citan's comments correctly (I am concerned enough that I am posting this even before I had time to experience more of this patch).

I am concerned that we may move too far in the direction of making tanks too powerful/useful/indispensable for the party. As an extreme example, I point to World of Warcraft, where having a tank is mandatory for a party, and I felt it drove a lot of the toxic behaviour in the game. I was a druid tank/healer back in those days and I saw my share of tanks behaving badly, examples include belittling other players, rage quitting, booting out players that are seen as underperforming, charging other players to join the party, etc.

Now Project Gorgon has a much older and mentally mature audience than WoW is what I have noticed, but I think the fact that tanks are in high demand still gives tank players an attitude of superiority and creates tension. I have certainly felt annoyed when there are players in the party that are new/underperforming and I have called them out for it, but to the best of my recollection I have never rage quitted a party or booted anyone unless they are clearly griefing.

I guess what I am trying to say is similar to the points made by Yaffy in that we should aim for a sweet spot where having a tank is not vital, but is desirable. We can't make it too desirable either (for example if having a tank allows you to pull 4 mobs while without a tank you had to pull only 1) because it will have the same effect of making tanks indispensable.

Addressing some of the other comments made:

I think the value of having a tank in the party goes beyond the number of mobs a party can handle at once/clear speed. Having a dedicated tank takes out a lot of the mental strain of playing, healers can easily focus on one target to heal, dps can not worry so much about accidentally attracting aggro, pulling one extra mob than you intended to doesn't result in a party wipe. In that sense even if having a tank does not dramatically increase clear speed, I feel its still worthwhile.

I like the idea of having "situations where a player is useless" as a game design, provided of course it's not too often. The Davlos fight brought a few high level players down a peg or two (myself included), having to concede the role of primary damage dealer to the person who is doing least damage on the post fight autopsy report. I support the idea of having bosses or mobs that are "untankable" or just untankable with a particular build, so that you have to find alternative ways to handle them. It encourages us to accept players with unconventional builds, who might not be high level or optimally built into the party. It encourages us to have more than one build/set of equipments so that we can potentially change skills on the fly for a particular fight. Most importantly, it gives someone else a chance to be the indispensable part of the team.

In summary, I think currently Staff/Shield as a combination is too strong, I think the power regeneration component of bulwark form needs a nerf. I suggest introducing a small amount of regeneration to elite mobs in addition to increasing their health. Please don't take away the ability of a full dps party to do a dungeon without a tank and a healer.

Sorry for long post. I will update it when I have had more time to play with my impressions of the build in WT.

[Yaffy]

I would just like to make another feedback post about tanking, since I've gotten some more time to play through Wintertide with a variety of groups. This was all done through Unarmed/Shield, just for context.

1. The change to elemental ward removes the ability to cheese out large groups of enemies (Ex. Pull 10 enemies at once in the cold area and being invincible via elemental ward) since it no longer has long term invincibility which is great.

2. Bulwark mode seems to apply before flat mitigation, this makes it scale a lot better with flat damage bonuses. This is also why it allows you to reduce the damage of mobs affected by elemental ward so much (Fire/Cold/Darkness). This honestly makes the flat mitigation from elemental ward way more helpful than I thought too.
For example, if someone has the 25% darkness meditation resist, bulwark mode and +54 darkness resist from elemental ward and they get hit by an Ensign which does 247 damage with a normal attack and ignoring armor, the result looks like this:
247 *0.75 *0.73 -54 = 81 damage

Slap on flat mitigation from armor, a darkness resist potion and thick skin, and you can easily reduce Ensign damage to close to 0 damage. Honestly I thought that Unarmed's darkness passives were what was reducing the damage by so much, but in this scenario it's shield doing most of the work due to Bulwark mode applying before flat mitigation. Unarmed's darkness resist applies last, so in the same scenario if you had both darkness resist mods you would just be reducing the 81 damage to 44, which isn't that impressive considering you would get the same result by just having a darkness resist potion and 500-700 armor or so. This is why in cases like Celerity's Unarmed/Shield is able to tank so many Ensigns at once. This also happens against elemental mobs if you're stacking fire/cold resist as well, which works especially well with elemental ward blocking 99 flat damage. However if you don't have a lot of flat mitigation then Unarmed's darkness resist gets considerably more helpful.

I'm a bit iffy on nerfing Bulwark mode because it's Shield's main option for reducing damage universally which it seriously needed to be anything more than a utility skill, but I think in this case a good way to tone down scenarios like this would be to make all percentage based mitigation apply after flat mitigation, similar to how Unarmed's works. I'm guessing inherent vulnerability works the way it does because it makes more sense for enemies to reduce damage that way, but on players it can be combined with flat damage mitigation to hit single digit damage numbers much more easily.

3. Elemental Ward having no effect (Aside from the first three seconds) on DoTs makes damage over time effects much more dangerous. Before you could use it to negate 10 seconds of burning DoT, and the old Poison/Trauma resistance mods let you use it for posion/bleeding to a lesser extent. Now it's very hard to build mitigation for DoT effects outside of getting the fire/indirect damage meditations. This isn't necessarily a bad thing because it puts more importance on DoT cleansing effects or effects that specifically target indirect damage, but I do think there could be some more options out there. For example on Shield I switched over to using the fire shield indirect damage reduction mod which works great, especially in combination with fire resist bonuses. I do kind of like how there's some variety in that Shield is good vs fire while Cow is good vs Poison/Trauma, but aside from the one mod each of those skills can get there isn't too much else (I don't think staff has anything!). You can chug consumables, Unarmed has poison resist and Generic/Endurance has some stuff here or there, but I wouldn't mind seeing some more options to handle indirect damage types spread around since I have to assume we'll be seeing more of it.

As an additional note, the nerf of nimble shoes makes the Droach burning damage significantly more noticeable, since obviously you'll be set on fire more often. This is also why indirect damage is a bit more important to try and mitigate.

4. Trolls in WinterTide continue to be the most difficult mob to pull too many of, with things usually getting dicey at tanking 3 at once even with lots of support because of knock down damage stacking + crits creating the potential to randomly get gibbed even from high life. Ensigns or Fire mobs can be a joke if you build for it as I've mentioned in point 2, although the fire mobs can still be difficult if you aren't able to mitigate burning damage. I stand by the point that the acid elementals really don't do a good job at encouraging me to get someone else to pull them, because their armor damage isn't really a big deal and it's pretty risky sending someone else in who might get blown up by Ensigns/Cocks. The Minotaur/Bear area could be kinda dangerous and similar to the trolls with their knockdown + health cutting, but usually the mobs are pretty spread out here so it's not a problem, I'd say they're slightly less dangerous than the trolls.
The nightmare creature level is hilarious. I know they aren't meant to be terribly damaging, but with lots of healing and support it's possible to tank a ginormous number at the same time, and I assume with a staff build you could easily be invincible vs them and pull the whole section, probably by yourself. It's a complete waste of time simply because it takes way too long to kill them in those numbers, but it's really fun!

Edit: Fixed some typing mistakes

[Glythe]

1) Lower tier content is beyond ridiculously trivialised when soloing. I can solo the casino dailies offered by Qatik with no preparation and only having low tier food. I agree whole heartedly that something has to be done to fix this.

This has easily possible for many builds for years before the Bulwark change. If bulwark alone allows you to solo these missions then I would suggest you were not using the right build for the job.

I do not think armor chipping is the right design idea to discourage high level players from farming low level content. Most games make fighting in higher areas so rewarding that you don't bother going back to low tier areas. This is unfortunately not the case quite often with PG (in part due to material crafting). Ranperre mentioned this earlier in the thread and in short whatever you do in the game needs to be balanced as a function of time/reward.

When I started playing the way to make money was : go through each dungeon you can clear on reset and then loot the once per day chests. Later that got changed to : run the casino missions (with multiple characters?). The money you could make through the casino made the previous alternative trivial.

There is also an expected transition when I play these types of games that if I wanted to stomp level 40 content when I am level 80 that I should be able to do that. How heroic do you feel if content far below your level is a threat to you and offers trivial rewards? Would it be more fun or less fun to run around in PG if every zone had some kind of snare/root plants (maybe they are stun/mez whatever)?




3) The +10 power regen per sec on bulwark form makes it possible to fly forever, and almost abolish the need to have good food. Although I do find some mid level food is still necessary, mainly because I am in full metal armour, but that might change as I upgrade to max enchanted leather armour. I argue it is still vital when soloing because it negatives your power issues, but you can get away with toggling it.

There are 2 other ways to fly forever without food. If Bulwark is problematic in this regard then how about a simple fix? If the player is not on the ground then you do not get the +10 regen per second.




4) I am able to easily solo the elites in fae realm that don't have regeneration, with almost no preparation (just low tier food, no other buffs). I would say this is imbalanced. It's slow and it would be at least 2.5 times faster with a party, but the idea that I can solo them with almost no preparation, while only selected few other builds can do it with lots of preparation and buffs, does not sit comfortably with me.

Well geared ranged players can kite and kill them with substandard food. If the problem in general is : well geared players can solo level 80 elites without regeneration then why not just make sure by the time we reach that level that all elites have regeneration.




I am concerned that we may move too far in the direction of making tanks too powerful/useful/indispensable for the party. As an extreme example, I point to World of Warcraft, where having a tank is mandatory for a party

I guess what I am trying to say is similar to the points made by Yaffy in that we should aim for a sweet spot where having a tank is not vital, but is desirable. We can't make it too desirable either (for example if having a tank allows you to pull 4 mobs while without a tank you had to pull only 1) because it will have the same effect of making tanks indispensable.

If you want tanks to be defensive but not excessively sturdy compared to non tanks then what it sounds like you are asking for a defense limit. Imagine for a moment if you were given a 20% defense mitigation for using any tank class (instead of having mitigation power modifiers built into powers - simply as a simplification to say wow neat all the tank classes are balanced). Now imagine that you only get a 5% defense mitigation bonus for adding a second tank class. Would you run two tank classes? I think most people would not if they could get everything they needed defense-wise (taunts included) from one class.

That type of system could be achieved by having similar power modifiers on the armor that can only be applied for a single class. But it would dumb down the game and basically delete "full tanks". It would however make game balance easy.

As long as there is not a single source of easy solo elites for xp/treasure everything should be fine. Two tank classes should be more resilient than one by a large margin.




Having a dedicated tank takes out a lot of the mental strain of playing, healers can easily focus on one target to heal, dps can not worry so much about accidentally attracting aggro

Balanced group play for me at least creates some of the most fun you can have in a MMO. The content is easy because everyone has a specialized role. The only problem becomes finding the roles in the proper amounts. PG in theory could easily handle that because every level 80 character is typically a multi role character with multiple career paths.



I like the idea of having "situations where a player is useless" as a game design, provided of course it's not too often. The Davlos fight brought a few high level players down a peg or two


I found the Davlos fight to be the most boring boss experience for PG. Only one person was able to damage the boss so everyone else just stood around and waited for that to happen. With most other content you can at least deal light damage to the boss (going all physical vs Zuke is an exception but we have more or less been warned that you should never build for all one damage type).

Is it good design for a boss to be so damage type restricted that some party members may as well be afk?

*suggestion* You know how ghosts are almost invincible until stunned? Can we have a slight variation of that mechanic for Davlos? If you use 2 power combinations within a few seconds (4-6) of each other then you can deal 30% damage with a small selection of powers. Maybe fire+electricity opens up a vulnerability debuff that lasts 1 minute until both have to be triggered again at the same time. While the debuff is active the boss takes 30% fire and electricity direct damage and x% of dots (possibly mitigated on a skill per skill basis).

Let me remind you for a moment that the gear you and I are wearing is not what release gear is expected to look like (paraphrased quote from Jack : You will be in a very expensive all purple gear set - not yellows). This is in part problematic because the end game content is currently balanced around max level players wearing all yellows but the expected balance is to match players wearing all red gear.

Inventory in PG is extremely precious. I do not want to play where we use gear set A for the first section of the dungeon, gear set B for the second set of the dungeon and gear set C for the finale. When "purples become the new yellows" it will be far more problematic to have a second set of uber gear to throw on at a moment's notice.



I support the idea of having bosses or mobs that are "untankable" or just untankable with a particular build, so that you have to find alternative ways to handle them. It encourages us to accept players with unconventional builds, who might not be high level or optimally built into the party. It encourages us to have more than one build/set of equipments so that we can potentially change skills on the fly for a particular fight. Most importantly, it gives someone else a chance to be the indispensable part of the team.

Are you suggesting we need a level 80 boss that can only be killed by a necromancer skill for good game balance? And then we will need to have a level 90 boss that can only be killed by poison arrows?

It is one thing to say a boss takes 100% damage from these 3 damage types. Meanwhile these three damage types will do 80% damage and these three types will only do 60% damage. It is something else to say this boss takes damage from only these three damage types (that aren't the most common damage types - say fire, physical and whatever)

How much fun would you have in the game if on release day the level cap were 200 instead of 100? By the time you reach level 200 the cost would be so expensive that nobody could afford to play more than their favorite two classes together. Would you still have the same opinion about not being able to approach certain content?

Remember that a majority of people playing PG are stuck having trouble with their first set of 50-80 unlocks.



8) Yes please make bulwark form a side bar skill

Bulwark feels like it should be a side bar skill.

It doesn't seem quite fair to shield to have almost all of its mitigation in a skill that so severely limits offense.

Question : would it be a better idea to have bulwark be a powerful boost but have at least half of shield's mitigation be passive flat modifiers ( or /gasp maybe even make them % based?)

Making bulwark be a weaker side bar skill would also make it more fitting to be on the side bar in the first place.

[Celerity]

1) Lower tier content is beyond ridiculously trivialised when soloing. I can solo the casino dailies offered by Qatik with no preparation and only having low tier food. I agree whole heartedly that something has to be done to fix this. The idea of "armour chipping" sounds interesting and I will wait until I see it before forming an opinion, but I suspect it won't do enough to overcome the problem.

I agree with Glythe with the response to this, dps builds or literally just using a modded extra skin already trivialised lower level content, including the Qatik dailies. I think armour chipping is a good solution though, it all just depends on the numbers picked for how it's balanced and I think it can be done correctly. In my opinion lower level content should still be easy for a high level to do and it wouldn't make sense to me if armour chipping makes it impossible for tank builds to do, while dps builds could still easily blow through it. The doubling of elite hp should make it harder for everyone though and I'm not sure I would be able to solo dc anymore with my dps build considering nimble shoes were also nerfed. I expect animal handling builds and maybe bc builds would probably still be able to do it though.


Although I gained a new appreciation of the nuances of the balancing process through Citan's reveal that mob damage scales linearly with level, I am still of the opinion that percentage based mods is the way to go, particularly if we are going to aim to limit the number of mods available to players (I still think that is a good idea and would be healthy for build diversity and the game in general).

I don't think mob damage does actually scale linearly, despite what Citan says, because stuff like trolls, minotaurs, worgs and worghests can apply debuffs which multiply their damage to you. This is why the first floor of winter nexus can be deadly to almost everyone, even full yellow max-enchanted level 80s. Also from Citan's own numbers it's not quite a linear scaling since the rate of damage increase does change, but only slightly.

Every mob also has crits which multiply their damage. Crits are very noticeable with elites both due to their higher crit rate and higher base damage. Sometimes you can get some ridiculous things happening, I remember being hit for 500 by a wintertide troll in my tank set, which was through 38% physical mitigation from unarmed and I think the 27% mitigation from bulwark mode, but there's a bug where it can disable if you use/drop an item which might have happened. I think my shield team mitigation and headbutt mitigation were both down (and I was stunned so couldn't reapply them) and I don't think I had any stacks of shield forcefields, but I was at max armour, ~900 with the shield thick armour mod. This is just what happens when you get a rage critical when you're already knocked down since the multipliers push the damage up to crazy amounts. I honestly think it's mostly fine, this was the highest hit I've ever taken in probably at least 15 runs and it was only a one off. However, I'm pretty sure the minotaur rage attack in wintertide is a 1 shot on any player without mitigation. It seems to be bugged and counted as burst damage though, which means you can evade it with nimble shoes.


3) The +10 power regen per sec on bulwark form makes it possible to fly forever, and almost abolish the need to have good food. Although I do find some mid level food is still necessary, mainly because I am in full metal armour, but that might change as I upgrade to max enchanted leather armour. I argue it is still vital when soloing because it negatives your power issues, but you can get away with toggling it.

I really appreciate the power regen on bulwark mode in wintertide especially. The frost hippogriffs have a dot which lowers your power and without the power regen on bulwark mode you can be completely drained of power even just pulling 1 or 2 of them. The power regen here becomes absolutely critical because otherwise I wouldn't be able to use any abilities at all. It's also important for keeping up pulls and with dots keeping you in combat seemingly forever, you would have a lot more standing around which isn't fun and from my experience, people in your group will get bored and start pulling mobs themselves. I also imagine it's practically required if you want to use metal armour, but personally I think metal armour is never worth it with the current state of the game. I wouldn't mind seeing it reworked if the easy infinite flying is seen as an issue however.


4) I am able to easily solo the elites in fae realm that don't have regeneration, with almost no preparation (just low tier food, no other buffs). I would say this is imbalanced. It's slow and it would be at least 2.5 times faster with a party, but the idea that I can solo them with almost no preparation, while only selected few other builds can do it with lots of preparation and buffs, does not sit comfortably with me.

Again, agree with Glythe's response here. Other builds are already capable of doing this, so if anything it just brings tank skills up to par with the other skills. Sword/psych reducing mob damage by 50%, while having high damage and utility of a mez at any point makes them a joke, but so too does simply kiting with a ranged dps skill like fire magic or archery against melee mobs. Animal handling is also insanely strong and I've seen pets solo fr elites on their own. Staff has probably actually been nerfed slightly in this regard, it used to be able to solo any enemy in the game pretty much. You can just look at Space's fire/staff build or Professorcat's staff/druid builds and see what they've achieved with them. I'm not sure that staff could solo the FR elementals anymore but I would be happy to be proved wrong.

I also think the balance in itself is how long it takes, especially with bulwark mode, it takes absolutely forever to kill even just a single elite if you're using a tank build. I've said this before as well, but I really don't think elite soloing is a big issue, you get the same loot whether you kill it with 6 people or just 1 person and there's no special thing you can abuse in order to somehow get a lot of money or exp from doing it. That being said I wouldn't be against all elites receiving a SLIGHT passive regen that although might not stop you from soloing them, would just make it even longer if you're using a tank skill especially.



2. Bulwark mode seems to apply after before flat mitigation, this makes it scale a lot better with flat damage bonuses. This is also why it allows you to reduce the damage of mobs affected by elemental ward so much (Fire/Cold/Darkness).

I was aware it was a separate multiplier, but I did not realise it was applied before the flat mitigation. This explains why I'm actually able to tank the fire/cold stuff despite only having the shield mitigation against them.


Honestly I thought that Unarmed's darkness passives were what was reducing the damage by so much, but in this scenario it's shield doing most of the work due to Bulwark mode applying before flat mitigation.

That was my assumption too, perhaps I was wrong then in my post earlier.


I'm a bit iffy on nerfing Bulwark mode because it's Shield's main option for reducing damage universally which it seriously needed to be anything more than a utility skill, but I think in this case a good way to tone down scenarios like this would be to make all percentage based mitigation apply after flat mitigation, similar to how Unarmed's works. I'm guessing inherent vulnerability works the way it does because it makes more sense for enemies to reduce damage that way, but on players it can be combined with flat damage mitigation to hit single digit damage numbers much more easily.

I would be worried about nerfing bulwark mode too, it's already the main mod-free mitigation provided in shield and therefore a crux of many players who don't have their mods perfectly rolled, which I believe was the biggest issue with tanking before. You also can't forget the -50% damage penalty it comes with, which if you compare it to something like unarmed, which gets 38% passive physical resistance, 53% darkness and psychic as well as 42% acid, nature and poison which actually all turn into damage buffs for the skill, I'm not convinced nerfing bulwark mode is the answer. I also think the ability to tank the fire/cold mobs in wintertide might actually become too difficult again since there's such a reliance on only bulwark mode and elemental ward in order to prevent their damage. Also, although the numbers on unarmed might sound crazy, wintertide is actually still a difficult dungeon to tank even with all of them stacked. Now imagine you don't have every mod and consider that Citan wants to double elite hp and honestly I'm not sure a nerf is necessary. I will say that GK and below becomes somewhat trivial, but armour chipping should be the solution to that so I'm not worried about it.

[Yaffy]

I would be worried about nerfing bulwark mode too, it's already the main mod-free mitigation provided in shield and therefore a crux of many players who don't have their mods perfectly rolled, which I believe was the biggest issue with tanking before. You also can't forget the -50% damage penalty it comes with, which if you compare it to something like unarmed, which gets 38% passive physical resistance, 53% darkness and psychic as well as 42% acid, nature and poison which actually all turn into damage buffs for the skill, I'm not convinced nerfing bulwark mode is the answer. I also think the ability to tank the fire/cold mobs in wintertide might actually become too difficult again since there's such a reliance on only bulwark mode and elemental ward in order to prevent their damage. Also, although the numbers on unarmed might sound crazy, wintertide is actually still a difficult dungeon to tank even with all of them stacked. Now imagine you don't have every mod and consider that Citan wants to double elite hp and honestly I'm not sure a nerf is necessary. I will say that GK and below becomes somewhat trivial, but armour chipping should be the solution to that so I'm not worried about it.

The issue in this case though is that percentage based mitigation that applies before flat mitigation has much more potential to snowball to outright invincibility because of how it scales with flat mitigation, which is why Bulwark mode's 27% is potentially much stronger than Unarmed's darkness resist despite being close to twice as high. Additionally Unarmed's resistances apply separately, so getting both darkness resist mods reduces damage by 46%, not 53% so it's weaker than it sounds. Same goes for its other mitigation passives.

For example, if a mob does 200 damage and you have Bulwark mode reducing its damage by 27%, then you'll take 146 damage and you need 146 flat mitigation in order to reduce it to zero.
On the other hand, if a mob does 200 damage and you have Unarmed's mods reducing its damage by 46%, then you'll only take 108 damage which sounds better on its own, but you still end up needing 200 flat mitigation to reduce the damage to 0 because Unarmed's reduction applies after flat mitigation.
In this comparison, it would take 83 flat mitigation before Bulwark Mode starts to reduce more damage than Unarmed's mod. This is much more easily achievable due to higher flat mitigation sources, hence why I say Bulwark mode can be much stronger for reducing damage despite being a lower percentage.

In a scenario where you don't have much flat mitigation, Unarmed's resistance is way better, but if you can stack flat mitigation then Bulwark mode's resistance can become far better. For players who have tons of defense from good gear and support, Bulwark mode is significantly better because it improves the value of flat mitigation while Unarmed's resistance has diminishing returns and actually devalues flat mitigation. The way bulwark mode works right now doesn't benefit new tanks that much, it benefits players who have stacked as much defense as possible.

Like I said, I am kind of iffy on nerfing bulwark mode, but I think it's necessary to prevent tanks from scaling up TOO well. Maybe if inherent vulnerabilities were nerfed then Bulwark mode could be special, but I think the safest thing to do would be to make it apply after flat mitigation. In that case it could be buffed to mitigate a higher percentage to compensate, which would make it more useful for newer tanks who can't stack lots of other mitigation sources while making it much harder for players to become outright invincible.

I do want to add that as of right now, Unarmed's mods are totally stronger for reducing damage when applicable, since Ensigns hit for more than 200 damage, especially when taking crits and rage attacks into account. However, if you have a scenario where you feel like mobs aren't hurting you at all, it's much more likely to be primarily caused by something like Bulwark mode rather than Unarmed's mods.

[Celerity]

Additionally Unarmed's resistances apply separately, so getting both darkness resist mods reduces damage by 46%, not 53% so it's weaker than it sounds. Same goes for its other mitigation passives.

Rip, then I'm even more sure that unarmed doesn't need a nerf then.


Bulwark mode is significantly better because it improves the value of flat mitigation while Unarmed's resistance has diminishing returns and actually devalues flat mitigation. The way bulwark mode works right now doesn't benefit new tanks that much, it benefits players who have stacked as much defense as possible.

I'm not sure I quite understand this part, in my mind, a new player to tanking, if they're using unarmed/shield at least, would have about the same amount of flat mitigation as me, because of the flat mitigation from armour and the base amount provided by elemental ward. Most of the mods like the shield forcefields and unarmed passives are % mitigation rather than flat mitigation so that's why I said it benefitted newer players. If bulwark mode was switched to apply after flat, then those % mitigation mods suddenly become more important and those would be the mods I imagine people would be missing.

However, this does lead me to believe that as is, staff/shield is probably a much better tanking build because of the high amount of flat mitigation you can get with that build. It also means that supports that provide flat mitigation like pig or bc count for more too.

I understand the rest of what you're saying and agree, my worry is that against a frost elemental for example, if it does 250 damage, right now, with 900 armour and thick armour, fully modded elemental ward and bulwark mode that gets mitigated to 250*0.73-99-45 = 38.5.

If bulwark mode gets changed to apply after the flat mitigation then it would be (250-99-45)*0.73 = 77.38 which is very close to double the damage. I think that's too significant a change with how difficult wintertide can be already without a good support or good damage dealers. So I think what you said about it getting buffed to compensate would probably have to happen.

The more I think about it though, the more I think it should probably happen since I guess it makes it too easy to completely eliminate damage if you have stuff like extra skin and extra flat mitigation provided by supports. It could also be worked around with by armour chipping if that becomes a thing though.

[Yaffy]

I'm not sure I quite understand this part, in my mind, a new player to tanking, if they're using unarmed/shield at least, would have about the same amount of flat mitigation as me, because of the flat mitigation from armour and the base amount provided by elemental ward.

My reasoning behind the statement was that I believe most under geared/less knowledgeable groups wouldn't have as much flat mitigation, or specifically wouldn't have the ability to stack it as much as a well geared player who is prepared to stack it as much as possible. If you're super geared and know exactly what you're doing then you have three elemental ward mods, thick armor, consumables, support willing to give you thick skin, etc to potentially take advantage of how bulwark mode works.

Even though some of those sources are pretty easy to get, I would argue just knowing how mitigation is calculated is already a big advantage. Previously you'd be wasting your time trying to stack flat mitigation, and even now it's only worth doing so if you explicitly know how mitigation works or if you can get it in absurd numbers like with Staff.

As an example, because you read my post you know that if you're running negative Darkness Inherent Vulnerability + Bulwark mode, you're significantly improving the value of flat mitigation and that you should consider going out of your way to get more of it. If you weren't using those and were playing Unarmed/Staff instead, then you would know it'd be pretty unhelpful to try and get flat mitigation against darkness and you would spend your time and resources elsewhere because Unarmed's passive is cutting the value of flat darkness mitigation in half. That alone can make a major difference between the flat mitigation values between a player who knows what they're doing and one who doesn't.

[Glythe]

I don't think mob damage does actually scale linearly, despite what Citan says, because stuff like trolls, minotaurs, worgs and worghests can apply debuffs which multiply their damage to you. This is why the first floor of winter nexus can be deadly to almost everyone, even full yellow max-enchanted level 80s. Also from Citan's own numbers it's not quite a linear scaling since the rate of damage increase does change, but only slightly.

Every mob also has crits which multiply their damage. Crits are very noticeable with elites both due to their higher crit rate and higher base damage. Sometimes you can get some ridiculous things happening, I remember being hit for 500 by a wintertide troll in my tank set, which was through 38% physical mitigation from unarmed and I think the 27% mitigation from bulwark mode, but there's a bug where it can disable if you use/drop an item which might have happened. I think my shield team mitigation and headbutt mitigation were both down (and I was stunned so couldn't reapply them) and I don't think I had any stacks of shield forcefields, but I was at max armour, ~900 with the shield thick armour mod. This is just what happens when you get a rage critical when you're already knocked down since the multipliers push the damage up to crazy amounts.

Going back to the idea of mob immunity for a moment I want to mention that it was easy to build a half tank set for shield that made level 60 elite content trivial (with level 70 gear). This is a shield + another class (that is not a tank) concept. The problem is that as soon as you get to level 70 elites you see almost no protection without considering Bulwark. That doesn't seem right to me.

There is a problem somewhere with the linear damage idea because a level 50 armor set with the complete set of identical mods can also make level 60 content trivial (you will require help with elites because you don't have enough raw power from your lower level skills). Looking at a level 80 gear set with shield I have been fighting elites in the fae realm and been hit for over 900 points of armor damage from 2 attacks. Generally speaking it seems like the defenses for shield (before bulwark) almost completely dropped off. I think we need a major rework of defense in general. It felt wrong when I can stand toe to to with someone who has the same health as me half my armor and the only difference is that 2 big hits bring me to the bring of death (under 100 hp) instead of dead like that mage standing beside me with less than half my armor and no thick armor mod from shield.

On that note I want to mention another reason why I am against the armor chipping idea. Largely speaking armor doesn't matter. People value cheese so highly because it adds health. Armor is in theory an approximation of the same idea but generally speaking in principle it is worth far less. No matter what build you make you can't rebuild armor fast enough to keep yourself armored in a fight. Considering that it is hard to regain/maintain I always felt like it should do a lot more than it does. Adding armor chipping would just make armor even less valuable than it already is.

What if Bulwark were reworked so that your armor value played into how much mitigation you received? This might finally reward high armor stacking to a degree that makes sense. Also it would make your defenses be something you need to pay attention to; this would prevent you from just clicking a button and gaining a massive defense bonus. Part of the danger I see with Bulwark currently is that it is a huge damage defense buff that is available and on demand whenever you need it without any real thought. That reminds me of many ideas that if I recall correctly many people were against.

This would also limit tanking and require well planned builds. It would prevent the use of shield + any tank build you desire to gain an extra 27% defense at a moment's notice. It would also create a scaling component so that a level 50 player with 500 armor using bulwark would be less powerful compared to a level 80 character with ~1000 armor using bulwark.




I would be worried about nerfing bulwark mode too, it's already the main mod-free mitigation provided in shield and therefore a crux of many players who don't have their mods perfectly rolled, which I believe was the biggest issue with tanking before. You also can't forget the -50% damage penalty it comes with, which if you compare it to something like unarmed, which gets 38% passive physical resistance, 53% darkness and psychic as well as 42% acid, nature and poison which actually all turn into damage buffs for the skill, I'm not convinced nerfing bulwark mode is the answer. I also think the ability to tank the fire/cold mobs in wintertide might actually become too difficult again since there's such a reliance on only bulwark mode and elemental ward in order to prevent their damage. Also, although the numbers on unarmed might sound crazy, wintertide is actually still a difficult dungeon to tank even with all of them stacked. Now imagine you don't have every mod and consider that Citan wants to double elite hp and honestly I'm not sure a nerf is necessary. I will say that GK and below becomes somewhat trivial, but armour chipping should be the solution to that so I'm not worried about it.

PG is incredibly mod centric and I don't think it is fair to say well this one new skill gets a pass. You either have the mods or you do not and there are tons of classes that are gimped to the nth degree without 1 specific mod on a certain piece of gear. I would be inclined to make reforms to make rolling items easier (maybe we could have a way to guarantee that if there are 8 mods on an item and you roll 7 times you can sequentially roll through the mods at an increased dust price without costing more durability per roll) - but that is another matter.

As for the balance on Bulwark it seems messed up to me that shield gets -50% damage dealt for -27% resistance. What does unarmed lose to get 38% resistance? Ranperre had a really nice mention of unarmed in that you can just stack attacks/taunts. You cannot do that for shield and this is another +1 reason why Bulwark should probably be a side skill.

Rather than worrying about armor chipping I would rather see a system where you can't just stack things wildly. Imagine for example if you stack shield and unarmed so you will just get the 38% resistance against physical with Bulwark active against incoming physical damage. I may be wrong but it seems currently that we have stupidly high critical and rage critical values because the possible defense values are very high. You get overly penalized for not running the perfect group that has an ice mage debuffing the boss, a battle chemist giving everyone skin, a shield user spamming shield team, etc. I've never been in that perfect group that stacks every possible flat buff for damage prevention but every dungeon run I always see at least one rage crit out of nowhere that kills me or takes me to the brink of death out of nowhere.

If we are talking about critical hits and rage crits I want to mention that overall what is in the game right now isn't fun. If you are familiar with D&D it would be similar to the idea if we added spell resistance. Sorry the enemy rolled a critical spell resist check so your epic damage attack for 3k deals zero damage.

[Yaffy]

On that note I want to mention another reason why I am against the armor chipping idea. Largely speaking armor doesn't matter. People value cheese so highly because it adds health. Armor is in theory an approximation of the same idea but generally speaking in principle it is worth far less.

Unless if I'm mistaken, when Citan mentioned the armor chipping mechanic, he really meant that mobs would just do unmitigated damage, not that it would specifically damage armor. You could argue that it would lower the value of the flat mitigation armor gives, but that would make a very small difference in his example outside of very early game characters stacking armor.

That said, I disagree with what you say about armor. Armor is valuable because it increases your maximum effective life. The issue is that it's not worth trying to specifically build lots of armor as possible as opposed to increasing mitigation. I would say 500 armor at end game is really at the minimum end, but getting 800-900 is excellent if you're a tank to avoid getting gibbed by sudden burst damage. More than 1000 and you're most likely wasting your time and mod slots on things that would be better spent elsewhere. If you're a tank, it's still useful to have more armor than life because healers have an easier time recovering your HP on armor, so that extra buffer on armor can help them heal you through a tight spot.



PG is incredibly mod centric and I don't think it is fair to say well this one new skill gets a pass. You either have the mods or you do not and there are tons of classes that are gimped to the nth degree without 1 specific mod on a certain piece of gear.

The issue with tanking though is that you need a RIDICULOUS number of mods and amazing gear to even be functional. As a DPS/Healer you can still hurt things or heal people just fine even with junky gear, you'll just be weaker. A tank on the other hand is worthless if you can't get aggro so you need to build lots of taunt, and even if you have aggro you're useless if you don't have mitigation to live noticeably longer than other people. Unarmed is a perfect example of this, because you need to dedicate so many mods just to make sure you have some defense against all sorts of different damage types (Don't have the X resist mod? You're useless vs X damage dealing monsters). You aren't just weak, you're useless.

Stuff like Bulwark mode in this case is very welcome because it takes away some of that heavy gear reliance. There is no way that someone is going to be an excellent tank just because they slap on Bulwark mode and nothing else, but it significantly tones down the barrier to entry to becoming a tank. That's why both Celerity and I are reluctant to nerf it too much. It's something that tanking desperately needed to not be limited to only people in perfect gear and it means Shield actually has a good way to reduce damage that isn't just elemental.



As for the balance on Bulwark it seems messed up to me that shield gets -50% damage dealt for -27% resistance. What does unarmed lose to get 38% resistance?


Bulwark mode gives you 27% resistance to every damage type. Unarmed gets those resistances to specific damage types. Shield gets Bulwark mode's resistance for no mods, Unarmed has to spend many mod slots for its resistance. The way Bulwark mode works in the formula is highly favorable compared to Unarmed's mods.
That -50% damage is VERY well deserved.



Ranperre had a really nice mention of unarmed in that you can just stack attacks/taunts. You cannot do that for shield and this is another +1 reason why Bulwark should probably be a side skill.

I don't understand why this is mentioned as if it's a disadvantage for shield and an advantage for unarmed. The reason why you don't stack attacks on your bar as shield is because shield has a ton of useful utility skills for tanking AND taunts, so you would rather use those than shield attacks. Unarmed has only attacks, so you aren't doing it because you want to, you're doing it because it's literally all you can do. Shield has 7 incredibly useful skills that directly benefit tanking and 3 others that can be useful in certain situations, Unarmed has two good skills (A taunt and headbutt which gives you 15% physical mitigation with a mod) and 1-2 that are ok in certain situations.
Shield has WAY better abilities than Unarmed for tanking and it would definitely be wrong to say it's a bad thing that shield isn't filling its bar with attacking skills or that it's a good thing that Unarmed's bar is only attacks.

[Glythe]

Armor is valuable because it increases your maximum effective life. The issue is that it's not worth trying to specifically build lots of armor as possible as opposed to increasing mitigation.

I have said for a long time that this one aspect is a large problem because most games give you a lot more benefit for armor stacking.


it's still useful to have more armor than life because healers have an easier time recovering your HP on armor, so that extra buffer on armor can help them heal you through a tight spot.

For a long time I have asked for the game to emphasize active tanking where you can build more powers that restore armor as a possible mod choice (for healers and tanks). If armor did more than it does now I feel like this could make "standing in front of a monster and getting hit" more interactive and entertaining.



Bulwark mode gives you 27% resistance to every damage type. Unarmed gets those resistances to specific damage types. Shield gets Bulwark mode's resistance for no mods, Unarmed has to spend many mod slots for its resistance. The way Bulwark mode works in the formula is highly favorable compared to Unarmed's mods.
That -50% damage is VERY well deserved.


I would rather see the majority of shield resistance split up onto existing gear mods (possibly replacing say the flat mitigation mods). It seems very strange for one of the tanking methods to lose 50% damage to gain less defense than another option. Bulwark seems intended to make a full tank spec work and be completely amazing but it seems very weak for someone using shield without pairing it with unarmed or staff. That seems like a design fault.

I remember comments you made in the past about blocking stance being broken because it required no mods. Is bulwark not very similar in that regard? For a zero mod investment you can suddenly have a 27% resistance increase.

I also see this as a problem because now for physical mob tanking the baseline is no longer 38% but rather 65% resistance.

[Yaffy]

I remember comments you made in the past about blocking stance being broken because it required no mods. Is bulwark not very similar in that regard? For a zero mod investment you can suddenly have a 27% resistance increase.

No, it's completely different because blocking stance made you outright immune to damage. That meant there was very little reason to build any additional mitigation on top of it, because you can't improve on invincibility. In that case the best thing to do was maximize your damage so you could abuse the invincibility time as much as possible, which was what many players did. It didn't encourage you to build tanky, it encouraged you to build like a glass cannon and to kill things before your invincibility ran out.

27% mitigation is highly useful, but on its own it certainly isn't enough to be good enough to be a proper tank. Not only that, but the damage reduction heavily discourages people from building the way they did with blocking stance/elemental ward by cutting your damage in half. That's why Bulwark mode is in no way similar to old blocking stance/elemental ward.



I also see this as a problem because now for physical mob tanking the baseline is no longer 38% but rather 65% resistance.

The mitigation doesn't functionally stack up to 65% reduction, and if you want to look at ridiculous physical mitigation you should be looking at Shield/Staff, not Shield/Unarmed. It's already high questionable to act as if 38% physical resistance was some kind of "Baseline" when physical damage is one of the most common damage types, yet wasn't nearly as common as it should be to reflect how common it was on enemies. If tanking should be more available then physical resistance needs to be more available, not less, especially at lower levels and with worse gear. Not only that, but even with Unarmed resistance + Bulwark mode the physical mobs in Wintertide are STILL the most dangerous enemies in the dungeon for a Unarmed/Shield tank build.

[Glythe]

No, it's completely different

You are right that this is different in function but it still has the idea of : big bonuses with zero mod investment. Why is that a thing? Other than ease of testing a new mechanic I don't see why shield would be changed this way.



27% mitigation is highly useful, but on its own it certainly isn't enough to be good enough to be a proper tank.

How much mitigation does shield have if it doesn't want to use bulwark for the -50% damage penalty? It makes zero sense that shield as a defense group will only work when attached to another tank group. Out of nowhere if you want to have any % mitigation with shield you must use bulwark to half your damage. This is fine if you wanted to play staff/shield or unarmed/shield to be very defensive but it ruins all other combinations where you had a plan of being slightly resistant to damage but able to deal damage with your other class.

Imagine if the feedback for the game was : bulwark stance is great and we love it. What if all tank classes were expected to be in a -50% damage stance for their tanking ability to function? Would anyone consider farming mobs in a double tank spec for 25% damage? What person is going to say I think I will choose the class that farms at half speed (or less)?

Once again I will mention the aspect of time/reward. There are other mmo games you can play where tanks are incredibly resilient (basline of 78-80% resistance that can be increased with cooldowns) but have a 20% killspeed or less compared to a "standard character". What happens after an hour of farming? The tank has 20% treasure compared to the other guy. The end result there is that nobody plays a tank to farm.




It's already high questionable to act as if 38% physical resistance was some kind of "Baseline" when physical damage is one of the most common damage types

Not only that, but even with Unarmed resistance + Bulwark mode the physical mobs in Wintertide are STILL the most dangerous enemies in the dungeon for a Unarmed/Shield tank build.

You are right that it is questionable to act as if 38% physical resistance is the baseline except to consider that this game is in a testing state and quite often demonstrates a mentality of : well XYZ is possible so we will consider the limits of this mob or this event as if everyone had the ability to or were going to play that way.

I'm aware it doesn't directly stack. But I also want to ask why with that incredible level of defense vs physical are those physical monsters still extremely dangerous? That suggests to me that either the vision of the game designer is not what I want to play or the tuning values are way off. Should you not feel protected when you are wearing nearly perfect gear in a double tanking spec fighting monsters that deal damage for which you are well suited to absorb? And if a full tank does not feel protected then what about a half tank in sub perfect gear? Should they even attempt the dungeon?

[Yaffy]

You are right that this is different in function but it still has the idea of : big bonuses with zero mod investment. Why is that a thing? Other than ease of testing a new mechanic I don't see why shield would be changed this way.


Because it's not just a big bonus with zero investment. You lose half of your direct damage. There's an inherently massive downside to using this ability, it isn't just 27% less damage taken with no strings attached. I don't understand why you keep acting like it's "Free" when the the damage loss easily outweighs the mitigation unless if you're ready to take advantage of it as much as possible. Even in a full tank build you shouldn't be using it 100% of the time because of how heavy the downside is.



How much mitigation does shield have if it doesn't want to use bulwark for the -50% damage penalty? It makes zero sense that shield as a defense group will only work when attached to another tank group. Out of nowhere if you want to have any % mitigation with shield you must use bulwark to half your damage. This is fine if you wanted to play staff/shield or unarmed/shield to be very defensive but it ruins all other combinations where you had a plan of being slightly resistant to damage but able to deal damage with your other class.


There are other options for building tanky than just bulwark mode, and that is literally what this patch and the future patches are trying to address by adding in more. Complaints about how building tank were incredibly restrictive is why we got this patch in the first place, and stuff like Bulwark mode is exactly what the game needs to make tanking more flexible. That said, I have no idea what you're trying to complain about regarding shield requiring another tanky skill in order to build as a tank. Of COURSE if you want to be as tanky as possible you should try to use two skills that offer something to tanks, that's a no brainer.

I seriously don't understand what you're trying to get at. One moment you're saying Bulwark mode has no investment, and now you're saying that Bulwark mode is less useful if you aren't trying to build full tank. If you put two and two together you should realize that the point of Bulwark mode is not to be used in every build or in every situation, it's specifically supposed to be used when you want to do heavy tanking. That said, you certainly don't need to build two full tank skill lines in order to use Bulwark mode, the way it works is also excellent for off-tanking roles as well when a normally DPS orientated build wants to switch to tanking. For example, Hammer/Shield can offtank by spending its big damage, high cooldown moves, then switch on bulwark mode to start tanking while waiting for its cooldowns to come back because its damage will suck anyways. This is why you can toggle it on and off in the first place. It also doesn't lower indirect damage, which is why fire magic + shield can still pump out good damage even with bulwark mode switched on.



Imagine if the feedback for the game was : bulwark stance is great and we love it. What if all tank classes were expected to be in a -50% damage stance for their tanking ability to function? Would anyone consider farming mobs in a double tank spec for 25% damage? What person is going to say I think I will choose the class that farms at half speed (or less)?


There are at least four skills that you can try to build a dedicated tank around, and shield is the only one with something like Bulwark mode which cuts your damage. Just because Bulwark mode is good does not mean every skill needs to have a tank stance. Once again, you don't need to have bulwark mode on all the time, if you want to farm with a shield spec and don't need the damage mitigation, just turn bulwark mode off. I don't get why you keep pretending like it needs to be on 100% of the time. Not only that but shield has always been one of the best farming skills despite always being a low damage skill because it offers incredibly useful utility and movement speed. Acting like damage is the only thing that affects farming speed is definitely incorrect.




You are right that it is questionable to act as if 38% physical resistance is the baseline except to consider that this game is in a testing state and quite often demonstrates a mentality of : well XYZ is possible so we will consider the limits of this mob or this event as if everyone had the ability to or were going to play that way.

I'm aware it doesn't directly stack. But I also want to ask why with that incredible level of defense vs physical are those physical monsters still extremely dangerous? That suggests to me that either the vision of the game designer is not what I want to play or the tuning values are way off. Should you not feel protected when you are wearing nearly perfect gear in a double tanking spec fighting monsters that deal damage for which you are well suited to absorb? And if a full tank does not feel protected then what about a half tank in sub perfect gear? Should they even attempt the dungeon?


First off, it's unreasonable to act as if a percentage of mitigation is a baseline because there are other ways to lower physical damage than just Unarmed's resistances. For example, you can't make a clean comparison between 38% mitigation and 200 flat mitigation. You can argue that one is better than the other in certain situations, but because they're better/worse in different situations it's ridiculous to call either one a baseline. I find your original statement highly questionable because I'm pretty sure Staff's 20% physical mitigation + 300 flat mitigation is easily better than Unarmed + Shield's resistance, so acting like Unarmed/Shield is the best you can get is already not a good idea.

Furthermore, resistance to one damage type should never act as a baseline because there are tons of other damage types. Even if a tank was incredibly resistant to physical damage, it would be silly to act as if it is a baseline or that all tanks should have similar numbers based off of it because said tank could be very weak versus other damage types which would severely hamper its ability to tank properly, which is exactly the case with staff. There is no "Baseline" when you are talking about resistance to a very specific type of damage because it's important for tanks to have a balance of damage mitigation. It's ok if a tank has abnormally high resistance vs one damage type if it's balanced elsewhere, hence why "baselines" aren't as clear cut as you're acting.

Lastly, when I state that those enemies are the most dangerous that does not mean that a good tank build cannot handle those enemies at all. The reason why said physical mobs are the most dangerous is because they apply a debuff that multiplies the amount of damage you take, therefore making them significantly more dangerous when pulled in numbers. A perfectly geared tank should have 0 trouble handling just one, the issue is that they can be dangerous in larger numbers due to their damage stacking effect. Furthermore, Unarmed/Shield does not have "Incredible levels of defense" vs melee physical attacks, it takes about half damage with physical resistance + bulwark mode. If you want to stack better defense against melee physical attacks you can gain much more through either staff or a properly built support helping you.


Honestly, please stop it with all the loaded questions. You aren't helping anyone, and you're only making yourself look foolish. I don't even understand what you're trying to argue for because of all these bizarre statements you keep trying to make.

[Proximus]

hey, I like the update nice!

[Glythe]

Because it's not just a big bonus with zero investment. You lose half of your direct damage. I believe I said zero mod investment. It is a small distinction but an important one (more on this later).


There are other options for building tanky than just bulwark mode

Is there a viable tanky feeling build option for shield without using bulwark? I think the answer to this question is no. As a result I propose the idea that bulwark as a design idea is a faulure to shield as a single class.


The patch notes mention that other classes such as unarmed will be addressed in the future. Do you think it would be a good change for Unarmed's resistance bonuses to be changed as follows?

1. You must use a new skill in order to be tanky (in other words play with 5 damage skills).
2. Activating the new skill will cut your damage in half (possibly again).

I don't think anyone would enjoy that for Unarmed. Likewise I am suggesting the current implementation of bulwark is not a good fit that will lead to a better game for everyone. Right now Bulwark is a nice change only if you are making a full tank spec. Maybe my opinion is wrong/bad and you completely disagree (that's totally fine).

Maybe I misread or misremembered what you wrote but I believe you suggested the following options were poorly implemented.

-New treasure effect (Feet): "All Shield attacks have a 22% chance to conjure a force-shield that mitigates 10% of all slashing, crushing, and piercing damage for 30 seconds (or until 100 damage is absorbed). Stacks up to 5 times

-New treasure effect (Hands): "All Shield attacks have a 22% chance to conjure a force-shield that mitigates 10% of all direct nature, darkness, demonic, and acid damage for 30 seconds (or until 100 damage is absorbed). Stacks up to 5 times

Ultimately I am suggesting an alternative to the current implementation of bulwark: make shield have an option to be tanky with passive modifiers without the need for the -50% damage modifier or an active skill on your bar.

If we turn those mods into something else as well as some of the things that don't work/nobody uses there might be room to make shield be something else other than this iteration.

Maybe for example Bulwark will be the "budget" defense skill that only people who do not have mods and perfect gear use. The real tanks have 6-9 pieces of modded gear that make them have good defense values (maybe you only get 20% defense but have full damage at the cost of many more mod slots). Would that not make shield more similar to unarmed?

Instead of being something of a "gamble" system like many of the unarmed powers used to be built on maybe this new shield option could be built on an idea that you will always have this much defense (probably lower overall) at a set value.

I am not trying to suggest the idea that shield should be better than skill XYZ. I am suggesting shield has room to be better than the currently implemented idea for shield that would lead to a better (more fun) experience.



That said, I have no idea what you're trying to complain about regarding shield requiring another tanky skill in order to build as a tank. I feel certain you have at some point in your time playing PG played a half tank or no tank spec. If you combine two skills with no real defense bonuses you are squishy. If you combine a skill that gives you defense then you are less squishy but you are clearly not a tank either.

I thought the objection I made for shield was quite clear. Without using bulwark while using shield you are very squishy vs high level/powerful enemies (if shield is your only defense class). This makes very little sense if you are trying to play shield as a class capable of dealing "ok" damage that should in theory have "ok" defense. I have been playing shield for a long time so I wanted to give my feedback on that perspective.

The last time I looked not many people used shield who were not in a full tank spec or were running something like fire/shield. I can only remember one person running a mirror of my build for a time and someone who used mental/shield for a support build.

Shield has had a few nice changes over the last year but I do not think this is one of them for the class as a whole.


There are at least four skills that you can try to build a dedicated tank around, and shield is the only one with something like Bulwark mode which cuts your damage. Why does there even need to be one? Does the decision to make shield only tanky when you are dealing half damage make for a better game?

Is it not logical to assume that since there is one class that becomes tanky at the cost of 50% damage then it opens the possibility there could be others? Is that something you want to see more of in this game?



Acting like damage is the only thing that affects farming speed is definitely incorrect. This is a true statement but sometimes mob density is such that movement speed/travel time becomes a near zero factor (such as clearing enemies in a dungeon for a mission). As encounters reach higher levels some games make recovery time be longer than travel time between mobs.



First off, it's unreasonable to act as if a percentage of mitigation is a baseline... If someone is going to tank high tier content (successfully) how often do you see goofy tank builds with low mitigation? How many people really play full spec tanks in PG? When you see one what gear are they using? In my experience the answer is only : well rolled max level yellow sets with exactly the mods they want. I don't think there are many " hold my beer while I tank this with mentalism" active builds. And yes that is a joke (not aimed at you or at your expense).

I have seen two real dedicated tanks in my time playing PG : yourself and Ranperre. Both of you did an excellent job pulling, maintaining aggro, keeping the group safe during large pulls, etc. I have seen nobody else even close to being on the same page. I have played with a number of people who can pull "old content" safely and quickly in their favorite hybrid build but it isn't the same thing as someone who uses taunts and maintains full aggro. There are a ton of really good dedicated support players by comparison that use a wide variety of skills.

I will invite you to disagree (if you wish) but one of the things that tends to happen with game design is that the bar gets raised when players gain new abilities (or old abilities get better). What happens to the difficulty of a game if players can gain 20% more defense? If things were balanced before then giving that boost will likely make all the content super easy now. But quite often I see games that make 20% more defense possible (not necessarily without great cost) because they just made the game 20% harder. If you cannot or are unwilling to make the changes to get 20% more defense then you are sliding down the wrong side of the curve.

In this case I think the addition of more defense to tanks is well deserved. For a long time it has been a better plan to not get hit by high level elite monsters
rather than being able to absorb their damage. This made the game feel quite silly to me. For other players I saw the decision : it isn't worth trying to tank high level monsters.

The problem I see for shield is that if you are not using bulwark with shield then you basically have no % mitigation. I think that design sucks. Is there no room to make shield have some levels of % mitigation without a damage penalty?


Lastly, when I state that those enemies are the most dangerous that does not mean that a good tank build cannot handle those enemies at all.

A perfectly geared tank should have 0 trouble handling just one, the issue is that they can be dangerous in larger numbers due to their damage stacking effect. Furthermore, Unarmed/Shield does not have "Incredible levels of defense" vs melee physical attacks, it takes about half damage with physical resistance + bulwark mode.


Before I spent much time playing PG I can look back an see a time when the game was apparently "too easy". I think the developer sometimes errs too strongly on the side of making things difficult vs the top tier players who are very well geared.

I feel like 50% resistance is an incredible level of defense - maybe you don't (maybe for example you have little to no experience playing squishy classes in PG with 0% mitigation). Having as little as 20% extra defense can be very noticeable in my experience (depending on the situation).



Honestly, please stop it with all the loaded questions. I think you miss my intent. I want to have a discussion with you - not a needless internet argument. I am not asking questions that have no answer or only lead you to answer a question in a very specific way that forces you to arbitrarily agree with me.

You regularly post really good insights into tanking for PG but I can't agree with you about bulwark.

Bulwark is great for a double tank spec but terrible for shield as a single defense class.

[Mbaums]

Is there a viable tanky feeling build option for shield without using bulwark? I think the answer to this question is no. As a result I propose the idea that bulwark as a design idea is a faulure to shield as a single class.”


Isn’t that argument like… Cows can’t hold agro without Deadly Emission? Like, they have it. They can use it. Shield is in a much better spot now than it was, and the subtlest of every mod (ie the bash restore armor mods) are hard to judge without testing it firsthand. Your posts feel like you are approaching what you want to say, but juking away at the last moment. Is the problem that 2 tank skills are the super efficient and 1 tank skill is less so? Or just Bulwark makes high damage difficult? I think we need a reference point or a goal before you judge these skills. As you know, this isn’t a highly competitive MMO, and I get that argument can be made to make things easy or impossible. But where I’m going with this: the fact that you, a dedicated player/tester with strong opinions has only met two people going absolutely ham on a tank build IS an issue. Or I should say WAS, because these skill changes carve new paths and options for tanks, as long as you accept a specific tool in the skill exist.

I’m going to assume you play hammer/shield and the issue is damage loss. It’s just a good example of a high damage skill + shield. You want the best balance of DPS and tankiness. I understand the feeling that a specific combo feels like wasted potential, but you don’t need Bulwark on all the time. With a 3-sec refresh, you can toggle it on and off for the big hits as you hold out for your epic attacks. But still, I believe that anything+shield IS in a better spot than what it was before this update and it’s not just because of Bulwark. I think we are all confusing each other because we are all talking about three distinct scenarios of using these skills: solo, in an at-level group, and vs lower level group content. I don’t think Citan has any sympathy for higher level players being unable to dominate all group content, even if its half their level. Solo, I’m sure you are fine without bulwark on. But group? He wants shield to have a specific role, specific feel and universally believes people should not feel like they are soloing next to each other. I think the slow+lower damage aspect of bulwark reflects. You should have a bad time in a group of 3 vs elite content.

All of the mentions of unarmed are kind of empty because you are arguing about a skill that you know will change, but you are entirely in the dark about HOW it will change. The in game description of unarmed: “Mastery of the martial arts. Not especially damaging, but with great controlling and stunning abilities. Generally requires one or both hands to be empty, although you can use kicks even with other items wielded”. I think in a beta phase, you can only really hold the developers to that description, but not “What if unarmed gets another -50% dmg skill!” I might be wrong, but I think Citan wants the skills to feel distinct, so your post makes as much sense as fearing that ice magic and deer to get a fight me you fools clone (even tho fight me you fools is A-mazing).

Some of the other arguments in this thread said that the combo of staff+shield feels too strong after using ~50 universal keys which is comparable to a month’s worth of WT runs for a very active player. I don’t think these ultra-tank builds are better, just more obvious than the ultra-DPS builds. I ultimately hope that 1-tank skill in a group with someone doing 1-support works as smoothly as one player doing two heavy tanking skills. But I understand these tweaks are going slow to clearly measure the effect of each change.

[Glythe]

Isn’t that argument like… Cows can’t hold agro without Deadly Emission? Like, they have it. They can use it. Deadly Emission isn't a toggle for half damage.



Is the problem that 2 tank skills are the super efficient and 1 tank skill is less so? Or just Bulwark makes high damage difficult?

I’m going to assume you play hammer/shield and the issue is damage loss. It’s just a good example of a high damage skill + shield. You want the best balance of DPS and tankiness.

Actually I played shield with BC - as a combat class. It's a good example of two mid/low damage abilities. Before this patch your only option with shield was to build with flat mitigation. As previously mentioned you could basically build to be almost unkillable vs enemies 20-30 levels below you but you have maybe 5-10% more ability to survive vs even level elite content. As defensive class overall shield felt like a complete joke.

Compared to cow, unarmed and staff -shield was the worst option overall for tanking except in the case of elemental damage (because you had an immunity button). Looking at feedback it seems this patch did not change that arrangement.

Playing shield as your only defensive class now still feels like a joke compared to other currently available options. Does that make for fun play with shield as a single defensive class?



I understand the feeling that a specific combo feels like wasted potential, but you don’t need Bulwark on all the time. With a 3-sec refresh, you can toggle it on and off for the big hits as you hold out for your epic attacks.

The mentality you are suggesting with Bulwark would be fine if it were a side bar skill that could be toggled with no loss of primary skills.

What bothers me about the damage aspect of shield is that somewhat recently it got some pretty nice buffs to damage that changed shield from a very low damage skill to a medium damage skill. All that seems pretty moot with the bulwark changes because you will be dealing half damage if you want % mitigation. Furthermore I disagree that you should want to turn bulwark on and off vs difficult content. My objection with bulwark largely is that other tanking classes get a lot more out of it than shield as a whole. So how about I propose a way for other tank classes to still get great use out of bulwark while making shield get more proportionately when not attached to another tank class?

What if Bulwark were changed so that physical classes other than shield dealt half physical damage while bulwark is active?

This would give the option for someone to build shield as a solo defensive class able to use bulwark and have 27% damage mitigation with full damage. If that's too much maybe shield could deal 75% damage for 27% mitigation. Obviously taunt modifiers would shift to reflect % changes.

I would also suggest that with such a change that fire magic skills also be set for half damage (lore reasons could be something like fighting mostly behind your shield makes fire magic much harder to aim properly). Balance wise this would prevent someone from slapping on bulwark with one or two mods and suddenly being 27% more defensive with almost no investment and dealing the same high damage with Fire Magic.


The danger I see with bulwark being set to function as it does currently is that you are effectively deleting a lot of potential playstyles of any shield + NOT TANK (NOT FIRE MAGIC) option. Maybe it is a moot point that almost nobody plays them but I feel like there should always be more of a reason for people to play a class rather than less. Imagine if someone were trying to decide between druid/staff or druid shield. Should the deciding factor be : I can play druid/staff and be a half tank with full damage or I can play druid/shield and be half tank with half damage?


As far as the ease of being able to toggle on/off is concerned it will be a bigger issue when fights are longer. If you are built without much regard to a single epic attack it becomes something you can't really afford to toggle. Even if you could perfectly toggle the ability on/off It will never be "fun" to do so (there is no built in mechanic that reads using an attack after being hit with X number of attacks while in bulwark gives the next attack a % damage boost). I question adding new game elements that add new complication while reduce fun levels; generally they make a bad addition to any game.

I would much rather see Bulwark be a skill you toggle on when you are fighting and not something you fumble with to toggle on/off during a fight. Maybe Bulwark could be changed to be one of those powers you toggle once per hour? Have the movement modifier only activate if you are "flagged" for combat.




He wants shield to have a specific role, specific feel and universally believes people should not feel like they are soloing next to each other. I think the slow+lower damage aspect of bulwark reflects. You should have a bad time in a group of 3 vs elite content.

All of the mentions of unarmed are kind of empty because you are arguing about a skill that you know will change, but you are entirely in the dark about HOW it will change.

When you choose between skills in PG the choices are sometimes very simple; allow me to give you an example of what picking between certain classes can feel like. Which would you rather prefer?

A) Ice cream that comes with a mandatory punch in the face
B) the same ice cream cone at an increased cost of 3 cents

You are right in that it would be very hard to guess how the game will be changed. But at the same time I can look back and compare how some skills have been since before I started playing. There should never be an example of one skill being so much better than the other as the ice cream example - and yet that happens quite often as a reflection of what is in the game right now (which might be skewed as a limited function of low total areas/mob types), how the game has been for some time and how the game is likely to be before things get changed in the next year. On that last note some people have built for current content knowing it was something of a broken loop that might only last a year or less.


You seemed confused about my position but I hope what I meant is now clear. In short the bulwark changes will likely discourage people from playing shield as a single defensive class with respect to other options. Has anyone besides me given feedback about shield as a single defensive class? I think fire/shield will be ok with the changes so this would really be a case of : shield but not another tanking skill and shield not with fire magic (I have a toon that plays that setup too - who actually was using vigorous defense).


As for combat feeling like it isn't three people soloing next to each other - you probably need to completely rethink combat to make that happen. We could have a very long thread about that one sentence.

[Mbaums]

If my napkin math is correct, a modded Mycotoxin Formula drops from ~1,295 to ~1,001 with Bulwark on.
*late edit for accuracy, it appears Bulwarks debuff effects plus damage and percent but not base, so the numbers should be ~1512 to ~905.

[Glythe]

If my napkin math is correct, a modded Mycotoxin Formula drops from ~1,295 to ~1,001 with Bulwark on.

How will resistances play into that?
What if you hit a 4th target?
How does does the damage difference change a battle considering you will be losing front end damage?
What about all the other direct damage skills that hit for less damage?
What if the mobs get double health; will that difference be felt twice against three targets?
How does the total damage chain available change (when you regularly have 3/4 of your AoE powers available - one of which does only armor damage even though acid in other places deals health damage)?


It isn't about my specific build. I question the decision to have largely speaking similar outcomes for single class defense - one of which comes with a damage penalty and the other does not.

The bulwark change makes shield a good choice if you are going to play two defensive classes. For single defensive class play shield is a less attractive option because it has been fixed in this manner.

Is shield not already an unpopular class? I see it used commonly with fire/shield for combat. It gets used for tanking but the main use was running speed (speaking of which shield lost a movement speed power as a result of that change).

[ChompyNibblers]

Oh, one more thought: I think maybe in the next update I'm going to boost Elite and Boss health by 100% for a while. This is not indicative of where the final stats will be, but it may help players explore the new systems and give feedback on where to go next. (And it's easy to implement in a way that can be reverted.)

I'm a fan of this, although it might have an unintended effect of pushing people away from elite & dungeon content if the loot tables don't change.


Also I'm especially curious to see what happens in the damage reflect fights, I bet players will need to be a lot more cautious about how much damage they're dealing to enemies with reflect.

Regarding elites/dungeons - I would much rather prefer daily dungeon content be not easily solo-able by higher level players but the daily rewards increased and there being some more flexibility in the daily (e.g., your party can pick which dungeon daily they do out of a pool or the party could choose a random one).


I don't like that the Qatik's dailies are solo-able because it promotes solo play since it's faster to just go solo the dungeon instead of waiting for a group. While it may not be bad for some players at all times now, if the game population grows, especially in a specific timezone (Say U.S.) we could see population density issues. In most regions there's probably a 3-4 hour window of prime time during the week day that most players would play in the late afternoons (basing this on my experience in US lifestyle and culture). Even with 10 minutes between boss spawns, a dungeon in a single server game would be able to handle 24 dungeon runs in 4 hours. 24*5 = ~120 players at most. While 120 sounds like a lot, boss spawn congestion (or player congestion in the dungeon even) would become a problem sooner than this and create a disincentive to do this content. If players can solo dungeons, the congestion problem can become a lot worse - the disincentive issue would exponentiated by there being fewer groups of people forming who can clear the dungeon content (since strong players would be the ones soloing) thus increasing wait times and increasing likelihoods that groups fail or have a difficult dungeon experience.

[Glythe]

I'm not sure exactly how it works but someone told me that they played a game where you can do daily missions for lower tier content that temporarily de-levels you. If you are max level but go back to level 10 or 30 content then the game scales you back to limit your power.

Another way to approach the issue would be for the mission giver to give you a debuff. If you have this mission and you are in that zone then your mods and power levels are reduced in effectiveness to be equal to the content. You would likely be more powerful than the guy next to you but the content immediately becomes relevant.

Is it a common issue that level 80 characters are monopolizing spawns in lower tier zones? Or is the issue more of : it is abusive for someone to finish a casino mission much faster than they should be able to because they outleveled the content.

If higher level characters find it more profitable to just shred lower tier areas then maybe: as level content increases drop quality and/or quantity increase.



I don't like that the Qatik's dailies are solo-able because it promotes solo play since it's faster to just go solo the dungeon instead of waiting for a group.
The Casino missions overall were a huge boon to the game as it brought people together to do dungeon missions. But there is a disconnect with the amount of wealth that the daily mission gives you compared to regular adventuring (this was more relevant before the treasure bug got fixed because elites were giving more loot than they were supposed to). In part this is what makes it appealing to do the mission in the first place.

When you compare Dark Chapel to Wolf Cave you can see the opposite side of the spectrum as everyone benefits by the fact that high level players effectively solo the content for lower level players. Sometimes you can see people desperately trying to get DC going for 6 hours while a WC group can get filled in 6 seconds. Just about anyone with a strong build at level 60 with good but not perfect gear can solo WC. It is my experience that people who solo DC tend to be very powerful level 70-80 builds with almost entirely crafted gear sets. I had two characters able to solo DC but I stopped bothering with it for the most part after the loot fix. The only time I would go was with people I knew in a guild group (with a character that could use an xp boost, or I was boosting them).

I make the suggestion that rewards for some of the other content is not yet tuned appropriately. When the WC is mostly empty you can finish the mission in about 6-8 minutes and get most of the chests. You get the direct pay out, 6-8k in items to sell and 5 coins. Imagine for a moment if there were a level 70 team mission that a level 80 character could solo.

All things being equal the higher tier mission needs to be worth more in order for me to want to do that instead of doing WC first. Why? Because I have 4 characters that can solo the WC. If someone could solo a level 70 mission it would require really good food, flowers and who knows what else in terms of expendable items (which cuts into profit). There is also the risk that you die and lose time - not something that would happen in the WC. If I can get say 20k for 20 minutes of work with level 50 content then I would hope that a level 70 mission would jump up in value as a function of scale relative to level 70 unlocks.