Yaffy
02-11-2022, 03:51 PM
It's been a while since my last in-depth thread about a topic, but recently I was having a conversation with some users about tanking. A lot of people were talking about how Staff/Shield is overpowered, as well as there being some comments about why Staff/Shield seems to be the most popular tanking skill combination. A lot of users were also questioning why I always say that Staff/Shield is the easiest tank combination, so here's an explanation to why that is.
Staff and shield have a few very easy to use abilities that give them significantly better tanking capability for almost no investment. These three abilities are Deflective Spin, Bulwark Mode, and Blocking stance. There's also elemental ward but since it's basically just blocking stance for a different damage type and weaker numerically just sub it in yourself if you're thinking of elemental/dark damage.
https://i.imgur.com/8nJipmX.png
First off, in order to understand why these three abilities are useful, you need to understand the formula for taking damage:
(Enemy's attack * Vulnerability (Resistance) - Flat damage reduction) * Percentage damage reduction
So for example, let's say an enemy attacks you for 200 fire damage. You have 20% fire resistance from a meditation or armor, have 25 flat mitigation from your armor and then lastly two buffs that reduce the fire damage you take by 10% each. Something important to note is that buffs like that don't stack, so it'd be two reductions of 10%, not one reduction of 20%. Here's how the formula would look:
(200 * 0.8 - 25) * 0.9 * 0.9 = 109.35 damage taken
So what's important to note here is that due to how the percentage based reduction works, it has a diminishing effect when combined with flat damage reduction. Despite mitigating 10% damage twice, you only reduce damage by about 11% with the two buffs after the other damage reduction or about 16% of the total 200 damage rather than the combined value of 20%. This is how it works for the majority of abilities that reduce damage. This means that the amount of damage you reduce gets weaker the more you attempt to stack and it becomes exceedingly difficult to try and reduce the damage to very low numbers and essentially impossible to reduce damage to 0 this way.
However, for some reason Bulwark mode and Deflective spin are unique in this regard. Instead of being calculated at the end of the formula as two separate instances, they are combined as one form of damage reduction at the start of the formula before flat damage reduction is calculated. This gives it a significant advantage because instead of having diminishing returns, it actually results in significantly better returns when combined with flat damage reduction. For example if we combine Bulwark mode and deflective spin into our previous formula:
(200 * 0.8 *0.7- 25) * 0.9 * 0.9 = 70.47 damage taken
So now instead of just reducing damage by the combined value of 30%, it actually reduces the damage you take by 35%! Instead of having a diminished effect it's actually reduced a larger portion of damage than advertised due to how it is applied before flat damage reduction. This makes it significantly easier to reduce damage to very low numbers or even zero. In fact, with staff/shield it's easy to calculate how much damage it would take to reduce damage to zero.
X * vulnerability * 0.7 - flat damage = 0
By solving for X we can figure out the amount of damage it takes to even deal 1 damage to the Staff/shield user. This is where blocking stance comes in, since it gives a lot of flat damage reduction (102 on elites). Just as an example let's plug that in again.
(x *0.7) -102= 0, X = 145.7
So that means that with blocking stance, deflective spin and bulwark mode up, an elite dealing physical damage needs to do AT LEAST 146 damage to even inflict a single point of damage to the character!
So you might be thinking "Well that doesn't sound very impressive, elites can hit for way more than that at 80", but here's the thing: That calculation assumes that the character is completely naked with no mods or other buffs, which should already ring some alarm bells. With just six level 80 mods for deflective spin and blocking stance, you can get an additional 194 flat reduction! So now let's add that to the calculation:
(x *0.7) -296= 0, X = 422.86
So with just a handful of mods, the player needs to be taking over 422 in a single attack to even take damage, anything less will get reduced to zero, and this is once again ignoring armor, buffs or any mods on things that aren't deflective spin or blocking stance. This is why Staff/Shield is so incredibly tanky for very little effort. For other skills, since their damage reduction has diminishing returns it means that a set of incredibly good gear is required in order to achieve similar results. Not only that, but Staff and shield don't even need equipment to get access to most of that damage reduction, while other skills like Unarmed and Cow are completely reliant on gear for their abilities to even begin reducing damage.
Here's the real kicker though: Playing Staff/Shield is incredibly easy and doesn't require much execution at all. Bulwark mode is a toggle, so players can activate it and don't ever 'need' to turn it off. Blocking stance and deflective spin have 30 and 16 second cooldowns respectively, so this means you can effectively get this much mitigation for having an APM of 6. That's embarrassingly simple.
For comparison, Unarmed's defensive abilities have a cooldown of 10, 12 and 5 (Infuriating fist, headbutt, slashing strike) and Cow has defensive abilities with cooldowns of 8, 10, 12, 15, 10 (Front kick, clobbering hoof, tough hoof, Deadly emission, chew cud) and that's ignoring the two moos. This means that not only is Staff/Shield really easy to build gear-wise, but its execution when playing is considerably simpler because the rotation required to upkeep your mitigation is so easy. Of course there's much more to tanking than just reducing your damage, but this should very clearly show why Staff/Shield is so incredibly lenient to play in comparison.
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So with that I hope this explains why everyone keeps building Staff/Shield for tanking, and why it's so incredibly easy that people complain that it makes things way too boring. I don't mind the idea of some tank builds being simple to play while some are difficult because it adds variety, but staff/shield is so easy to play while also being way too strong for undergeared players. The amount of effort it takes to get similar results with any other tank build to even match Staff/Shield is so high that many players just give up once they realize how demanding it is. It's not even that other tank builds can't be useful, it's just that they can require so much from players that they don't feel like it's worth the effort or they just plain think it's impossible to tank better than their Staff/Shield peers.
With that said, here are my suggestions as to how to even the playing field:
1. Make bulwark mode and deflective spin apply their mitigation last so it's similar other percentage based reduction. This will make it harder for players to reduce damage to 0 as well as nerfing these very overpowered defensive abilities.
2. Spread out the flat damage mitigation from Blocking Stance, Deflective Spin and Elemental Ward to other abilities so instead of a couple of abilities giving you a ton of mitigation you need to use several. This will make it harder to gear up staff/shield since a couple mods won't give you hundreds of damage reduction and it'll require a bit more execution to play. It'll also be a good excuse to buff up some other mods/skills for tanking as well. (The Shield mods that give you "force-shields" are horrendously bad for many reasons and could certainly be improved for example)
3. Give other skill lines intended for tanking (Ex. Unarmed, cow, deer) a "Natural" form of damage mitigation that doesn't require gear like Bulwark mode/Deflective spin. This can either be a new skill thats main purpose is damage reduction or an additional defensive effect to an older skill. Cow does have a lot of healing which is useful at low levels but it can't compare at all to all the mitigation staff/shield get at high levels, while other skills like unarmed just have nothing. This would make tanking as non staff or shield skills much more appealing to newbies.
So anyways once again apologies for the wall of text, but I hope this is a useful explanation and shows just why Staff/Shield pops up all the time. That said, if anyone else has any comments I'd love to hear them. I personally feel like staff/shield is way too easy, but if anyone thinks otherwise or agrees but likes it that way I'd love to hear it as well. Thank you for reading.
Staff and shield have a few very easy to use abilities that give them significantly better tanking capability for almost no investment. These three abilities are Deflective Spin, Bulwark Mode, and Blocking stance. There's also elemental ward but since it's basically just blocking stance for a different damage type and weaker numerically just sub it in yourself if you're thinking of elemental/dark damage.
https://i.imgur.com/8nJipmX.png
First off, in order to understand why these three abilities are useful, you need to understand the formula for taking damage:
(Enemy's attack * Vulnerability (Resistance) - Flat damage reduction) * Percentage damage reduction
So for example, let's say an enemy attacks you for 200 fire damage. You have 20% fire resistance from a meditation or armor, have 25 flat mitigation from your armor and then lastly two buffs that reduce the fire damage you take by 10% each. Something important to note is that buffs like that don't stack, so it'd be two reductions of 10%, not one reduction of 20%. Here's how the formula would look:
(200 * 0.8 - 25) * 0.9 * 0.9 = 109.35 damage taken
So what's important to note here is that due to how the percentage based reduction works, it has a diminishing effect when combined with flat damage reduction. Despite mitigating 10% damage twice, you only reduce damage by about 11% with the two buffs after the other damage reduction or about 16% of the total 200 damage rather than the combined value of 20%. This is how it works for the majority of abilities that reduce damage. This means that the amount of damage you reduce gets weaker the more you attempt to stack and it becomes exceedingly difficult to try and reduce the damage to very low numbers and essentially impossible to reduce damage to 0 this way.
However, for some reason Bulwark mode and Deflective spin are unique in this regard. Instead of being calculated at the end of the formula as two separate instances, they are combined as one form of damage reduction at the start of the formula before flat damage reduction is calculated. This gives it a significant advantage because instead of having diminishing returns, it actually results in significantly better returns when combined with flat damage reduction. For example if we combine Bulwark mode and deflective spin into our previous formula:
(200 * 0.8 *0.7- 25) * 0.9 * 0.9 = 70.47 damage taken
So now instead of just reducing damage by the combined value of 30%, it actually reduces the damage you take by 35%! Instead of having a diminished effect it's actually reduced a larger portion of damage than advertised due to how it is applied before flat damage reduction. This makes it significantly easier to reduce damage to very low numbers or even zero. In fact, with staff/shield it's easy to calculate how much damage it would take to reduce damage to zero.
X * vulnerability * 0.7 - flat damage = 0
By solving for X we can figure out the amount of damage it takes to even deal 1 damage to the Staff/shield user. This is where blocking stance comes in, since it gives a lot of flat damage reduction (102 on elites). Just as an example let's plug that in again.
(x *0.7) -102= 0, X = 145.7
So that means that with blocking stance, deflective spin and bulwark mode up, an elite dealing physical damage needs to do AT LEAST 146 damage to even inflict a single point of damage to the character!
So you might be thinking "Well that doesn't sound very impressive, elites can hit for way more than that at 80", but here's the thing: That calculation assumes that the character is completely naked with no mods or other buffs, which should already ring some alarm bells. With just six level 80 mods for deflective spin and blocking stance, you can get an additional 194 flat reduction! So now let's add that to the calculation:
(x *0.7) -296= 0, X = 422.86
So with just a handful of mods, the player needs to be taking over 422 in a single attack to even take damage, anything less will get reduced to zero, and this is once again ignoring armor, buffs or any mods on things that aren't deflective spin or blocking stance. This is why Staff/Shield is so incredibly tanky for very little effort. For other skills, since their damage reduction has diminishing returns it means that a set of incredibly good gear is required in order to achieve similar results. Not only that, but Staff and shield don't even need equipment to get access to most of that damage reduction, while other skills like Unarmed and Cow are completely reliant on gear for their abilities to even begin reducing damage.
Here's the real kicker though: Playing Staff/Shield is incredibly easy and doesn't require much execution at all. Bulwark mode is a toggle, so players can activate it and don't ever 'need' to turn it off. Blocking stance and deflective spin have 30 and 16 second cooldowns respectively, so this means you can effectively get this much mitigation for having an APM of 6. That's embarrassingly simple.
For comparison, Unarmed's defensive abilities have a cooldown of 10, 12 and 5 (Infuriating fist, headbutt, slashing strike) and Cow has defensive abilities with cooldowns of 8, 10, 12, 15, 10 (Front kick, clobbering hoof, tough hoof, Deadly emission, chew cud) and that's ignoring the two moos. This means that not only is Staff/Shield really easy to build gear-wise, but its execution when playing is considerably simpler because the rotation required to upkeep your mitigation is so easy. Of course there's much more to tanking than just reducing your damage, but this should very clearly show why Staff/Shield is so incredibly lenient to play in comparison.
-----------------------------------
So with that I hope this explains why everyone keeps building Staff/Shield for tanking, and why it's so incredibly easy that people complain that it makes things way too boring. I don't mind the idea of some tank builds being simple to play while some are difficult because it adds variety, but staff/shield is so easy to play while also being way too strong for undergeared players. The amount of effort it takes to get similar results with any other tank build to even match Staff/Shield is so high that many players just give up once they realize how demanding it is. It's not even that other tank builds can't be useful, it's just that they can require so much from players that they don't feel like it's worth the effort or they just plain think it's impossible to tank better than their Staff/Shield peers.
With that said, here are my suggestions as to how to even the playing field:
1. Make bulwark mode and deflective spin apply their mitigation last so it's similar other percentage based reduction. This will make it harder for players to reduce damage to 0 as well as nerfing these very overpowered defensive abilities.
2. Spread out the flat damage mitigation from Blocking Stance, Deflective Spin and Elemental Ward to other abilities so instead of a couple of abilities giving you a ton of mitigation you need to use several. This will make it harder to gear up staff/shield since a couple mods won't give you hundreds of damage reduction and it'll require a bit more execution to play. It'll also be a good excuse to buff up some other mods/skills for tanking as well. (The Shield mods that give you "force-shields" are horrendously bad for many reasons and could certainly be improved for example)
3. Give other skill lines intended for tanking (Ex. Unarmed, cow, deer) a "Natural" form of damage mitigation that doesn't require gear like Bulwark mode/Deflective spin. This can either be a new skill thats main purpose is damage reduction or an additional defensive effect to an older skill. Cow does have a lot of healing which is useful at low levels but it can't compare at all to all the mitigation staff/shield get at high levels, while other skills like unarmed just have nothing. This would make tanking as non staff or shield skills much more appealing to newbies.
So anyways once again apologies for the wall of text, but I hope this is a useful explanation and shows just why Staff/Shield pops up all the time. That said, if anyone else has any comments I'd love to hear them. I personally feel like staff/shield is way too easy, but if anyone thinks otherwise or agrees but likes it that way I'd love to hear it as well. Thank you for reading.