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. #41
    Senior Member Celerity's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chilton View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Chilton View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Chilton View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Chilton View Post
    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.


    Quote Originally Posted by Yaffy View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Yaffy View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Yaffy View Post
    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.
    Last edited by Celerity; 11-20-2020 at 06:27 AM.

  2. #42
    Senior Member Yaffy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Celerity View Post
    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.
    Last edited by Yaffy; 11-20-2020 at 11:07 AM.

  3. #43
    Senior Member Celerity's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yaffy View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Yaffy View Post
    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.

  4. #44
    Senior Member Yaffy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Celerity View Post
    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.
    Last edited by Yaffy; 11-20-2020 at 02:55 PM.

  5. #45
    Senior Member Glythe's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Celerity View Post

    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Celerity View Post

    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.

  6. #46
    Senior Member Yaffy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Glythe View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Glythe View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Glythe View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Glythe View Post
    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.
    Last edited by Yaffy; 11-20-2020 at 04:27 PM.

  7. #47
    Senior Member Glythe's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yaffy View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Yaffy View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Yaffy View Post
    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.
    Last edited by Glythe; 11-21-2020 at 12:57 AM.

  8. #48
    Senior Member Yaffy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Glythe View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Glythe View Post
    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.

  9. #49
    Senior Member Glythe's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yaffy View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Yaffy View Post
    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.


    Quote Originally Posted by Yaffy View Post
    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?

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    Senior Member Yaffy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Glythe View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Glythe View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Glythe View Post
    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.


    Quote Originally Posted by Glythe View Post
    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.
    Last edited by Yaffy; 11-21-2020 at 02:51 PM.



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