The design behind "Tanking"
The right way to design a tank in an MMO
I've been talking a lot about tanking in Project Gorgon with other people recently, and something that I can't help but bring up a lot is the current "Design" for what people consider tanking in Project Gorgon now vs what I believe is good design behind a tanking skill.
Because of this, I wanted to make a thread about what I hope to see as a player who loves playing tank, and I think one of the easiest ways to show that is to talk about one treasure effect (or really two, since there was another very similar mod) in particular as an example.
"Unarmed attacks have a 23% chance to conjure a magical field that mitigates 10% of all physical damage you take for 1 minute (or until 100 damage is mitigated)."
Unfortunately, this mod no longer exists as it was removed from the game about nine months ago, and was replaced with the current mods related to evasion instead. I'm not sure if it was replaced for balancing reasons or because the developers wanted to encourage synergy with evasion boosts and had to make room for it. Of course the mod was strong (hence why it was impactful to the design of tanking as an unarmed user), but ignoring the actual numbers behind the mod I want to explain why a mod like this was so amazing both from a build design standpoint and a gameplay standpoint.
1. It required investment to be useful
This might sound like a no brainer, but one important part about unarmed tanking's design was that it required a large amount of mods dedicated to it for it to work. Considering the mod, a 23% chance to block only 10% of damage is not a reliable amount. If you only have one copy of this mod, the chance you get the mitigation buff is very low, and you should only consider it an occasional "Bonus" every once in a while. However, you could build four copies of the mod on your armor. This took up a lot of potential slots on your gear and required good gear to get, but this turned a low chance into a consistent mitigation buff which enabled unarmed to be the great tanking skill that it was.
The idea here is that in order to become a powerful unarmed tank, you really needed to dedicate your build to it, and your ability to tank was heavily based on how good your gear was. This in turn meant that you had less slots to build for damage, meaning your damage was lower which should be true for a character who can survive much longer. You could build damage, but the thing is that your damage would never be as high as other players because of the commitment you made to tanking, and that meant you would be unable to generate enough aggro to effectively tank. This meant that you had to build taunt modifiers in order to tank effectively, cutting into your damage even more.
The end result is that unarmed allowed you to make a very powerful tank character, but you had to sacrifice your ability to do damage and it was based on how good your gear was, which is an example of how unarmed was an excellently designed. This might sound obvious, but I'll come back to why it might not be later.
2. It encouraged different ability sets
Another important aspect of the mod is that it has a chance to trigger each time you use an unarmed attack. This meant that the more unarmed attacks you used, the more mitigation effects you'd acquire. This meant that in order to use this mod to its fullest, you wanted to plan a perfect skill set which allowed you to make the most out of your entire unarmed ability bar.
For example, you could use bodyslam, but that would mean one less unarmed attack you can use to keep up your mitigation buffs so you wanted to make sure you could use your other 5 while it was on cooldown. This encouraged players to either make a balanced set of attacks that all had decent cooldowns, or a set with several fast cooldowns with a few larger ones. Essentially this mod encouraged you to make a completely different unarmed build that many people weren't playing, but was still flexible enough to allow variation. Other variations of unarmed were typically "Fire and forget" such as bodyslam or barrage nuke builds, so this mod encouraged players to try out a new skill set just to make the most of its passive effect. All this could get even crazier if you wanted to implement meditation combos as well.
3. It was challenging and engaging to play
It might be easy to scoff at the idea that a build in an MMORPG "Difficult to play", but this mod was the reason why Unarmed was such a fun and challenging skill to play. Because this mod was better the more unarmed attacks you used, this meant that in order to be as tanky as possible you had to be on point with using unarmed attacks as much as possible. This meant that you had to manage and use your skills off cooldown as much as possible to avoid downtime and therefore missed mitigation buffs. In other words, you had to be on point with your rotation because mistakes lowered your survivability.
Not only that, but I believe that this mod showed just how great Project Gorgon's combat can really be because not only was it an example of how rotations were important, but it was an example of how important it was to not follow a rotation at the same time. Your general goal was to simply use as many unarmed abilities as possible, but only spamming unarmed attacks was generally a terrible idea because of the limitations of unarmed. For just one example, unarmed doesn't have a proper AoE taunt, so if your party ended up pulling another enemy you would need to make a quick decision on what to do. You could try using unarmed's single target taunt, but if you had used it to keep up your unarmed rotation then it would be on cooldown. You could fall back on your other skill line's AoE taunt (Ex. Cow's Deadly Emission), but that didn't count as an unarmed ability so therefore you would lose mitigation. You could try just switching targets and using normal abilities, but then you might not be able to get aggro before your party member dies.
There are tons of examples I could give on the nuances of how you could play unarmed tank and why it constantly challenged the way you played, but basically what I'm trying to say is that it was difficult to play but rewarding if you got good, and that's why it was great. Just using unarmed attacks without thinking would quickly lead to death.
4. It actively changed the way you adventured
Aside from just being difficult to play, the way this mod worked encouraged lots of interesting ways to approach certain enemies, which made it a lot of fun and gave a lot of thinking even in between battles. The mod stacks, but disappears if you take too much damage or after a minute passes. This encouraged unarmed tanks to learn how to "Build stacks" effectively in order to make the most use of unarmed.
For example, Zuke is a boss that deals a lot of physical damage and stuns you, meaning that unarmed tanks had difficulty building mitigation on him because he would constantly remove your buffs and prevent you from getting new ones, forcing you to take full damage. Something you could do however, was pull an ice mage next to him beforehand and build stacks off of it instead because it lacks physical damage, and then fight Zuke with your acquired stacks for a much better start. This is just one example, but when you apply it to the entire dungeon run it becomes significantly more interesting. Unarmed tanks were encouraged to selectively pick which enemies to fight in order to build stacks, and then quickly change targets to something that their stacks help defend them against in order to make the most of their stacks while they lasted. This lead to significantly more fun dungeon runs because it encouraged constant combat with smart pulling, rather than the usual style of pulling one enemy and then sitting around waiting for cooldowns to come back. As a tank player, this meant that I had to make decisions on whether to push forward to take advantage of my stacks while I had them, or waiting so that my party can regain stats and their cooldowns, which made going through dungeons significantly more fun and engaging.
So after these four points, I hope I've properly communicated just why exactly I loved the design of old unarmed so much and why the removal of this mod made such an impact. I'm sad to see it gone, but I sincerely hope we'll see something similar to it again in the future since its design was so great.
Now many people are probably wondering what I'm so sad about since there's other "Tanking" skills to play with, which is why I'd like to continue this wall of text.
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The wrong way to design a tank
In my experience, if you ask players what skills are for tanking, a vast majority of the time you will hear them say that staff and shield are their first recommendations. This isn't really a surprise, since the skills advertise themselves tanking skills and are noticeably very useful and are probably the best ways to tank now that the aforementioned unarmed mods no longer exist.
However, I believe that staff and shield, while not poorly designed skills, are not well designed tanks. The reason can easily be shown by using these three skills.
https://i.imgur.com/8uHZ4MS.png https://i.imgur.com/rbP4zu0.png https://i.imgur.com/qtPIs66.png
These three abilities a major part of the skills' survivability, if not the only major source of mitigation the skills have. Without these three abilities, these skills would be significantly less useful in any sort of tanking role and are primarily the reason why staff and shield can be called "Tanks". There's nothing necessarily wrong with the skills relying heavily on a specific ability to be good, after all unarmed was heavily reliant on a specific pair of mods and that turned out to be excellent. However, let me explain just why these three skills cause Staff and shield to be "Good tanks" for all the wrong reasons.
1. They require no investment to be useful
One major issue with these abilities is that they don't require any treasure effects to be good whatsoever. It doesn't matter whether you're wearing the best gear in the game or completely naked, using blocking stance will make you completely immune to physical attacks and elemental ward makes you immune to elemental damage. It's not that the abilities don't have mods, but that the mods are incredibly minor compared to the normal effect of the ability. In fact, most of the mods related to these skills have nothing to do with tanking at all.
What this means is that when you build a "Tank" with Staff or shield, you don't actually need to spend many mods on becoming tankier at all. Right from the get go you are practically maxed out on how tanky you can get. What this means is that you may as well build pure damage on these builds so you can take advantage of the invulnerability by killing your target before it runs out. You can build things like more health and armor, and maybe some self healing, but all of it pales in comparison to the vanilla abilities.
2. It limits the way you build
Another major issue with these abilities is that they make the skill lines incredibly samey and are restrictive. Because these mods offer so much survivability without using mods, every single player using staff or shield should be using them. There is not a single build in the game that doesn't want the equivalent of an invincibility button so these abilities are just as viable for a pure glass canon character as they are for a pure tank. Even if a player doesn't build around it, they require 0 mods, and therefore can be switched in or out of a build at any time it becomes convenient at no cost.
3. They aren't engaging or challenging to use
Because staff and shield are reliant so heavily on these abilities, it makes "Tanking" with them incredibly stale. Whereas unarmed's mod had a constant presence on combat, staff and shield's abilities have large cooldowns meaning that once the player uses the ability, it's gone. This means that tanking with staff/shield usually only has two major decisions.
a.) Pull while using your ability as you start taking damage to be as safe as possible.
b.) Using it right before you die for max effectiveness.
After you use your ability its cooldown prevents you from using it again for a while, so this either means that you need to kill your target before your buff runs out and you die because you have no more real mitigation, or stall for half a minute until you can use it again. This encourages people to build pure damage to win as fast as possible, or use cheesy strategies to stall out enemies to death. Regardless of what players do, these abilities are hardly what I would call challenging to use, and are only fun in how much you can abuse them.
4. It changes the way you play... in a boring way
Lastly, one of the biggest problems I have with these abilities is that they encourage or even force players to play in incredibly boring and/or cheesy ways. Because of the abilities' strength and the long cooldown, this typically means that staff/shield players are worthless as tanks when these skills are off cooldown, and far too powerful when they have them.
For example, when playing through Gazluk and playing with a staff/shield tank player (And not in a party that just instantly destroys everything), it is incredibly common to see them pull an enemy, use their abilities, and then have the party wait around doing nothing for 10-20 seconds or so because they know they cannot tank properly without their skills. Not only is this way more boring compared to a tank that can keep up constant combat, but it shows just how overly reliant they are on these abilities they are. There isn't any sort of planning outside of making sure they aren't caught in combat with their abilities on cooldown. This results in a loop where the staff/shield tank will pull, kill the enemies without taking damage 90% of the time (Which makes things boring for healers), sit around awkwardly doing nothing, and then repeat.
Because of these reasons, I don't believe that shield or staff can really constitute as real "Tanks", as the design behind them being tanks is lacking compared to what unarmed used to be. That's not to say that they can't be used as part of a tank build (Shield in particular has very excellent support for a tanking kit), but these skills themselves have very little variety to offer in terms of mitigation, and the mitigation they do offer is designed in a way that encourages "Tanking" in all the wrong ways. I also want to clarify that I'm not saying staff or shield as a whole are poorly designed, but just the idea of using them as your way of preventing damage is lacking design wise.
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Sorry to have such a negative wall of text at the bottom, but I want to use that negativity regarding staff/shield as a reminder for how amazing the design of unarmed was. I hope that by comparing why old unarmed was so good with my opinions on staff and shield, I can make a stronger point about how I hope tanks in the future of this game can be designed.
If anyone else would like to share their opinion on how tanking should be designed, especially those who usually enjoy playing as a tank in these games, please share your comments as well. Thank you.
