Welcome to Project: Gorgon!


Project: Gorgon is a 3D fantasy MMORPG (massively-multiplayer online role-playing game) that features an immersive experience that allows the player to forge their own path through exploration and discovery. We won't be guiding you through a world on rails, and as a result there are many hidden secrets awaiting discovery. Project: Gorgon also features an ambitious skill based leveling system that bucks the current trend of pre-determined classes, thus allowing the player to combine skills in order to create a truly unique playing experience.

The Project: Gorgon development team is led by industry veteran Eric Heimburg. Eric has over a decade of experience working as a Senior and Lead Engineer, Developer, Designer and Producer on successful games such as Asheron’s Call 1 and 2, Star Trek Online and other successful Massively Multiplayer Online Games.



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  1. #1
    Senior Member Yaffy's Avatar
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    Post 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.
    ___________________________________________

    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.



    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.
    ___________________________________________

    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.
    Last edited by Yaffy; 03-19-2020 at 01:28 PM.

  2. #2
    Senior Member Aionlasting's Avatar
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    Agreeed with you on those three abilities, the staff and shield ones. Talk about yawn and ouch! Bad design for sure. I mean it makes sense if they are on a 3 or 5 minute cooldown like WoW has big tanking cooldowns because thats waht these are but these spells are on a 30 second cooldown, lol. Thats insane.

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

  3. #3
    Senior Member Glythe's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yaffy View Post
    The right way to design a tank in an MMO

    If anyone else would like to share their opinion on how tanking should be designed, especially those who usually enjoy playing as a tank in these games, please share your comments as well. Thank you.
    Yaffy is 100% correct with these comments (and his entire post). These powers should not just be invincible switches you turn on with zero mod investment. Attack powers with zero mods are generally nearly worthless and so should defenses.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    One last point.... There should be at least 2-3 viable options for elemental tanking. An animal tank and a human shield tank should be on relatively equal footing. It should not be the case we had before where unarmed tanks had an insane advantage over physical shield tanks. They do not need to be equal, but they need to both be viable.
    Last edited by Glythe; 03-18-2020 at 10:23 PM.

  4. #4
    Junior Member Mirromorka's Avatar
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    Hi im currently making a hardcore tank on pazz , like yaffi says its hard work really hard , i do miss the unarmed like it was , cow unarmed was my tank and it was amasing i used mirromorka, for me right now i see 3 kinds of tank with enough aggro also to do theyre stuff .

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

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

    Havent finished the build tho on the hardcore tank ..

  5.   This is the last staff post in this thread.   #5
    Administrator Citan's Avatar
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    @Yaffy - Great write-up, thanks! I'll keep that in mind as we go forward. For the record, the removal of those mods from Unarmed was twofold: at the time I felt Unarmed was a little overpowered (when taken as a whole), and more importantly, removing them made room for some Evasion mods. I figure if there is any (non-animal) skill that can focus on Evasion, it has to be Unarmed, so I wanted to at least get the basics of that slotted in for the skill. Of course, evasion has its own problems with interactivity (or lack thereof) which need improving...

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

  6. #6
    Senior Member Celerity's Avatar
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    I tend to agree. I've thought for years that those abilities, blocking stance in particular, requiring 0 mods to be effective never made any sense. With a staff build you could relatively easily solo any physical damage boss in the game, and I tended to see staff used for damage for every build, including tanks, because all you ever needed to tank was just those 2 abilties, completely unmodded, which meant everyone can build damage too, as you said.

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

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

  7. #7
    Senior Member Mbaums's Avatar
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    I’m going to be the negative Nancy and nitpick some:

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

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

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

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

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

  8. #8
    Senior Member poulter's Avatar
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    Agree with Yaffy.

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

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

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

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

  9. #9
    Senior Member Yaffy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Citan View Post
    @Yaffy
    Since the old mods weren't strongly themed, they can get slotted in anywhere -- I figured I'll reuse them for the last tanky skill I'll be eventually adding. Or it may make more sense to use a similar mechanic when revising the existing tanky skills.
    That's great to hear! It means a lot to know you're listening, thank you. Whether it be the specifically mentioned mod again or something similar, I hope that my post gives some inspiration to what can make a tank fun to play!

    Quote Originally Posted by Celerity View Post
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the unarmed mod removed because unarmed was just TOO good at tanking. I specifically remember doing gk runs where unarmed tanks could pull something like 10 elites and tank them all easily. Obviously this was before crit changes, but I still see players achieve similar things nowadays even with the nerf and crits introduced, it just means you have to have pig/bard/rabbit support, extra skin, cc etc now. So I wouldn't mind seeing that mod make a comeback, honestly I never played a tanking build so didn't really notice the difference between removing this mod or say the one which passively always reduces damage, but now you've explained it, it does make more sense. The numerical values would 100% have to be nerfed in some regard though.
    I honestly believe that unarmed on its own was actually very balanced as a tank. Speaking from experience as an Unarmed/Shield tank, usually your "Real" limit for tanking mobs was about 3 or maybe 5 if you had a good healer. The thing is that it was heavily based around having stacks built up beforehand, which I believe makes it fair. It usually meant that you took a much easier fight beforehand in order to build up mitigation stacks, so it rarely meant taking on large packs all the time as much as it was bouncing between "Easy" and "Hard" pulls. You are however right in that there was a time where things got ridiculous and you could pull huge packs of enemies, but this was because of two things that combined with unarmed's normal tanking ability.

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

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

    So yes, while unarmed was definitely good, I believe by itself it was fairly balanced. It was very strong for negating physical damage but had some large shortcomings which prevented it from being too ridiculous. I do believe that its physical damage mitigation was too powerful and could have used some nerfing simply because of its snowball potential and how well it stacked with a priest buffing you, but I firmly believe it was for the most part fair because of the skill required and the excellent gear it required to work.
    In my opinion I believe the best way to "Nerf" it in its current state would be to make the amount of damage it reduces lower (Ex.5% and 50 damage), but to allow it to block elemental damage as well. This would make it a lot harder to snowball off of stacks and overall reduce its effectiveness, but would mitigate unarmed's complete vulnerability to elemental damage. Perhaps unarmed's weakness to elemental damage shouldn't be changed so the player has to rely on their other skill line and to give unarmed a clear weakness, but really the only option in that case is to use shield's elemental ward because in reality very few skills offer elemental resistance at all.
    Last edited by Yaffy; 03-19-2020 at 02:54 PM.

  10. #10
    Senior Member poulter's Avatar
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    The 'extreme pull' runs I went on with with Yaffy using UA /Shield were often 'speed runs' to see how quickly a group could get to GK level 2.

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

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

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

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



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