The design behind "Tanking"

[Chilton]

I want to share my thoughts as to the concept of tanking and suggest an alternative direction that Citan can take the game in, if he feels that is in the interest of the game.

The direction we seen to be going in:

The debate thus far on tanking have the made the fundamental assumption that tanking means standing there and "face tanking" the mob. I am going to call this "WOW style". What it involves is essentially:
1) Running ahead of the bulk of the party
2)Drawing aggro (either body pulling or the far more dangerous and definitely not recommended practice of hitting the mob with a ranged attack)
3) Pulling them back to the group
4) Maintaining aggro on the mobs you pulled, usually through "taunt" skills or just pure unadulterated DPS
5) Using defensive skills so that you do not die
The last two steps usually involve a particular "rotation" of skills that allow you balance the need to keep damage on the target (thus maintaining aggro) and using defensive skills (if there is any) to avoid damage, a good "rotation" therefore maximises the taunt you can maintain on the target, while minimises the amount of time you are not under the influence of a protective skill.

This is by no means easy as Yaffy's post have alluded to, and maintaining a good "rotation" while responding to bosses special attacks (in WOW you had to interrupt those or move out of the area of effect) and dealing with extra mobs (literally called adds in WOW terminology) is what differentiates a mediocre tank and a great tank.

Under the "WOW style" system, I estimate 70% of your mental capacity is spent on maintaining your rotation, and 30% of it is dealing with additional problems that might derail it.

Crazy new direction XD

There is an alterative model of game design. I am going to call this the "Guild Wars 2 style". Now I last played Guild Wars 2 was when Heart of Thorns came out in 2015, so I am not sure how if this design philosophy still holds sway in later expansions.

The purported revolutionary feature of Guild Wars 2 was that it did not have the holy trinity of "tank/DPS/healer", but rather there are "party roles", each player can contribute to the party by providing 1) "control", 2) "damage" or 3) "support". All player professions (ie classes) can take on anyone of those three roles by selecting the appropriate skills that does these things, and skills can be freely changed outside of combat (same as Project Gorgon).

The role of the player who provides "control" in the party is essentially they are actively trying to counter what the enemy is doing. They are trying to prevent the enemy from attacking their teammates, they try to stop enemy from self healing, they try to lure the enemy into area debuffs where they take extra damage from their teammates, etc. They do this with stuns, knockbacks, cripple (slow), silence (stops casting), interrupts, debuffing their damage output, applying fear, immobilise (root), or good old fashion kiting the melee enemy. Of these options, face tanking the enemy is an option, but only one of many options and you cannot actually stand there and exchange hits with the enemy for more than 5 seconds and expect to survive. You have to proactively do things to the enemy to stop the damage reaching your team rather than just maintain aggro.

In the "Guild Wars 2" style of being a tank (of course you are not called a tank), I estimate your mental capacity is spent 30% on maintaining aggro (mobs are constantly under a barrage of debuffs and stuns from your entire team, that in some ways it does not matter who they are actively targeting), and 70% on actively trying to predict the enemies' next move and trying to counter it, or just trying to maintaining maximum uptime on the silence on the boss, or trying to use stun every time it is off cooldown.

The key difference I feel is that everyone can contribute all three roles to the team, and they are expected to do so. Everyone runs with a party wide buff skill (so they are providing support), everyone bring some form of control skill (stun, root, silence, debuff damage etc) and everyone has their own dedicated healing skills (similar to First Aid and Push Onward). Party wide healing skills have long cooldown and heal for a relatively small amount, so they are not actually as useful as actively preventing the damage from reaching you.

Summary

I actually think there is a lot of similarities between Guild Wars 2 and Project Gorgon in its current form. Players are rewarded for stunning the enemy and preventing damage from reaching the group. Fear is present as is mesmerise as crowd control. Classes that can root the enemy are useful (at least historically) in abusing the pathing AI to stop damage coming out. There are multiple ranged evasion skills and mods which I feel would be useful if paired with a way to force the enemy on concentrating fire on you, and quite a few high level players use kiting to avoid damage.

In summary, I feel the current "broken" state of Project Gorgon has unintentionally (I think its unintentional, correct me if I'm wrong Citan) encouraged the same type of player behaviour that Guild Wars 2 has deliberately tried to cultivate. I feel it would be a reasonable option to take the game in the direction of Guild Wars 2 and further encourage players to actively maintain disables/debuffs on the enemy as an alternative to "tanking".

Some thoughts as to how to achieve this

I am not a game designer and this is straight out of my imagination
1) Mob type and density needs to be rebalanced
- Encounters should be at most 2 elites, with possibility of many weaker "trash mobs" that have lowish HP but decent damage, so any player can take down 2-3 easily, but 10 can swarm a single unprepared player so the key is for the team to burn them down quickly before they get out of hand (aoe skills are very desirable). During this time, someone is handling the elites, either face tanking them for 3-4 seconds or using crowd control on them.
- The elites should take 10-20 seconds to kill, and players are encouraged to chain stun/knockback/root and abuse AI pathing to avoid damage. Elites do hit HARD and the emphasis is on avoiding hits. Consider making elite attack more slowly in general and rage attacks more telegraphed (so easier to tell they are about to rage attack you, so you can stun them at the right time or hit them with a rage reduction skill)
2) Rebalance the rage bar, each fight should only allow the enemy use rage twice so those are the most important skills to avoid.
3) Each skill should have some form of "control" skill and they are balanced so that they are actually useful in certain situations. Fire for example currently has no skills or mods that allow any kind of disabling as far as I can see, maybe add fear to some skills so that they can provide some crowd control.
4) For the love of God get rid of the diminishing return on chain stuns

My aim is of course not to see Project Gorgon turn into Guild Wars 2, but I just want to provide an alternative design philosophy.

[Celerity]

@Chilton I think you're correct in the comparison to Guild Wars 2. I didn't play that game for too long, but the impression I got was that you were wasting your time if you played anything other than dps in that game. I think most groups refused to take people who didn't play dps, because you could avoid damage with the cc and dodging as you mentioned. This is actually quite similar to how it is in Project Gorgon already, most groups are all dps, they build 0 defence and rely purely on cc and kiting, or they do single pulls and kill the mob too quickly for it's damage to matter. The main issue is balance and the huge advantage that ranged classes immediately get over melee classes, not only can they get an extra hit or 2 in before the melee can even start attacking, but ranged classes can completely avoid damage from melee enemies with roots and kiting. By increasing the mob damage, you're increasing the reliance on cc, which I think is your aim. However, this increases the bias towards ranged classes even further and weakens the power of direct face tanks, who are already incredibly difficult to build in this game. You'd just be making dps with cc as the only way to play, instead of one of many options as it is now. The only reason almost anyone is let into a group at this point is because the content is fairly easy and this is the balance issue I mentioned earlier. If difficulty was increased, such as by increasing mob damage as you suggest, then I could see pg going the way of gw2 where people playing off-meta stop being allowed into groups. Personally, I really don't mind that playstyle and I certainly don't want to see it be eliminated from the game, but I also don't want to see it encouraged more than it already is since it's already the meta.

The most efficient way to play is what Citan referred to as a "CC-mitigated AoE pit" at one point. Essentially you pull as many mobs as the group can survive pulling, usually 3-7 depending on the group, you aoe root/slow them so the melee mobs cannot attack you, then you aoe damage them down and kill them. This is the basic idea and it's how you do stuff like 30 minute Wintertide all chests all bosses speedruns. There's a reason that fire magic is probably the most popular skill in the game, despite not even being in the top 5 skills for single target damage and having close to 0 cc. The reason is it's ranged with high aoe damage which plays perfectly into the meta. The lack of cc can easily be fixed by choosing a secondary skill such as bc, and I think that's part of the charm of the pg skill system. It's what maintains balance between the skills. If you gave cc to every skill then it just becomes a numbers game where certain skills are just absolutely better than others with no reason to pick the skills with worse numbers. Not only that but every skill would start feeling the same too. This was something I distinctly remember happening in gw2 as well, certain classes would go completely unplayed because they functioned as inferior versions of others.

Back to Project Gorgon, having a tank is still useful in the CC-mitigated AoE pit, if the tank has the aggro, then melee dps players are able to hit the melee mobs without dying, and obviously the ranged enemies will still be dealing damage that somebody has to take too. Personally I think the tank already has a role to play in the optimal group since it simply allows you to do bigger pulls and results in fewer deaths. A support is also useful for the same reason, as well as providing perhaps a bit of extra cc and damage buffs. With this in mind, this is why I think the solution is the tank just needs to become easier to build/play, and/or cc needs to become less useful and less prevalent, e.g. by keeping the diminishing returns and extending combat by buffing mob hp or nerfing player damage.

In short, encouraging further cc play is the exact opposite of what Project Gorgon needs since it is already the meta. It ruins balance and either leads to everyone forced into the meta, or the game feeling too easy, as it already does now. Giving cc to every skill would also ruin the balance between skills and many would go completely unplayed.

[Mikhaila]

Sometimes I question the need to go back to the holy trinity that started in EQ, then wow and beyond. I get that some people want to be healers, some want to tank, some want to kite, etc. But that's essentially saying "i used to play this style, and i want to do it again". It's not something that needs to be a requirement in groups. I really hope we don't move to a system where a group needs a tank, needs a healer, etc. As an option? sure. It would be nice if some content needed something other than just a few seconds of massive dps. And having healing, tanking, and other styles be viable in a group is good. I just don't want to push things so that they are required.

[Celerity]

Sometimes I question the need to go back to the holy trinity that started in EQ, then wow and beyond. I get that some people want to be healers, some want to tank, some want to kite, etc. But that's essentially saying "i used to play this style, and i want to do it again". It's not something that needs to be a requirement in groups. I really hope we don't move to a system where a group needs a tank, needs a healer, etc. As an option? sure. It would be nice if some content needed something other than just a few seconds of massive dps. And having healing, tanking, and other styles be viable in a group is good. I just don't want to push things so that they are required.

It's not about forcing groups to have a healer or tank. In fact, I very much hope that doesn't happen either. It's about making supports have any kind of role at all. Abolishing the trinity makes people think that everyone plays every role. This just simply doesn't happen, unless you're forced into it, because it's always more efficient to specialise. So either you get someone that starts to take on the tank role, someone that starts to take on the healer role etc. and end up with the trinity again, or everyone just goes full or almost full dps with the bare minimum defence. Why? Because if you've eliminated the trinity then that means you don't need a tank by definition. If you don't need a tank, then full dps is the correct answer every single time for maximum efficiency and supports/tanks become a liability rather than an aid.

If you still want groups to even accept supports into them then you need to make content easy enough for them to do it, which results in the few seconds of dps we have now. The perfect solution is where both are possible, and both are close in effectiveness so the game can be correctly balanced. I also think there's the need to actually make the trinity more efficient or easier to play since players will always tend towards dps.

I think in the case of Project Gorgon, the trinity is already more efficient, it's just too difficult to get into, specifically the tanking role. The other disadvantages of the trinity, such as solo leveling being a pain for healers or tanks has already been fixed with the way skills work in pg.

[Mbaums]

Everyone put a lot of time into your post/thoughts and I’m going to poke at it because I think we have the same goals of an improved experience. You really can’t compare GW2 and PG because GW2 has this whole dodging mechanism that everyone is supposed to master. Some of the PG problems I think stem from skills coming out bit by bit, and low numbers means tanks are really rare. Like, after priest came out combat was supposed to change to require more tank+healers, and I think that idea lead to the mob crit change. Instead of a history lession, I say that I think an elite taking 20 seconds vs a group in all red mods and maybe just under 15 seconds vs a group in all yellow is a good goal. And elites need to grant MORE exp. Solo mobs as is, I believe are perfect. I hope they stay the same.

But about PG’s direction: Maybe I’m not the best of players, but there isn’t that much of a rotation that I really do. The damage related combos technically have an on-paper-best, but a realistically “gimme 3 buttons to pew” is the in-group rule. If it’s more than 3 buttons, its not happening because of time. One tank build I like stays alive with the help of stuns, debuffs, some self heals, and mezing/fearing mobs on inc so everything won’t all smash me at once. I think that’s how the game is meant to be played. I’m making it sound like “soloing next to friends” but it’s not because my play style changes with and without a healer changes (regarding the volume of monsters I bring my group).

Unarmed is really meant to be a control skill, but stun is really the only control that I think has value across any skill because if fights last 5 seconds and the NPC is out of commission for 2, it’s huge. Stun also has those diminishing return issues, so if you don’t end the fight asap, you really run into issues. I’m on board with not allowing mobs to get chain stunned to death, but there should be some middle ground. For example, can the mob AI to give themselves stun immunity via their rage bar, instead of an attack? Maybe the mob rages once, 2nd time the creature is allowed to make it’s max stun timer 0.5 seconds instead of a 2nd rage attack (rage buff?).

I don’t know how knock back should change, but I think it should because people don’t think of it as CC when it is. People don’t really get that knocked back attacks generally suppress shout, because that’s kind of a so-what situation. The debuffs that make the NPCs hit for less or miss more are very sparse across builds, single target and players don’t notice when they’re used, but they’re really nice. I think they just need some graphic like a small effect that orbits around the mob.

It’s funny how almost every player agrees that the de-rage soothe style debuffs have major issues. I’ve seen it work once under an extreme situation in labs, with 2 people modded for derage and we had no fire damage. One with ment+ice, another with psych+ice and our group noticed the golems didn’t rage. The de-rage one person can do is a drop in the bucket vs how fast rage can increase unless multiple people can de-rage in a group, and at that point damage is way more worth it. The idea behind rage is great, but it’s not worth the damage trade off.

There are problems with CC on players-- When players become CC’d they cant cure themselves which just feels like BS. This has been brought up before, I think the reason this isn’t changed is to avoid the solo next to each other situation. But healer in the group can’t actually see their stun/knocked down status in the group window so its nearly impossible to communicate that you need help. I get that there is a sound, but it gets missed. The game needs to communicate status effects better and give players options to combat these effects. I know UI is always bottom of the barrel, but I think this one thing is different because PG’s community wants to fill support roles. Also, adding more debuffs, like one named “cross eyed” that breaks ranged attacks, or “fat fingered” that breaks melee attacks can give players more options besides pew pew.

[Mikhaila]

I'm just a bit confused by the concept of 'groups not accepting supports'. I can't remember the last time I had anyone in a group be picky about anything at all. You just get a group together and go. If things don't work, a bit of talk ensues and people maybe switch around some skills a bit, or we decide that we need more people, etc.

Are there really people trying to form groups and being that picky? (I'm really asking for information, and not saying it doesn't happen. I just don't encounter it at all.)

[Celerity]

I'm just a bit confused by the concept of 'groups not accepting supports'. I can't remember the last time I had anyone in a group be picky about anything at all. You just get a group together and go. If things don't work, a bit of talk ensues and people maybe switch around some skills a bit, or we decide that we need more people, etc.

Are there really people trying to form groups and being that picky? (I'm really asking for information, and not saying it doesn't happen. I just don't encounter it at all.)

I was talking about Guild Wars 2. I'm sure it applies to other games too where if you don't play the meta you don't get accepted.

Thankfully, it doesn't happen in Project Gorgon but only because the content is easy enough that it doesn't matter. It's the main reason why you can't just buff the monsters stats and call it a day on balance.

[Glythe]

I can't speak for everyone but I would much rather play high end content with a tank who can shrug off damage when supported by a dedicated healer rather than making parties that abuse the AI mechanics and focus only on damage (especially AoE).

[corelion]

I can't speak for everyone but I would much rather play high end content with a tank who can shrug off damage when supported by a dedicated healer rather than making parties that abuse the AI mechanics and focus only on damage (especially AoE).

me not. I dont want to spend the day looking for tank and healer. Getting full groups its already a slow process. Adding roles will kill it.

[Niph]

Everyone can switch to any role if necessary (if they worked on their toon to be able to), so I don't see that as a big problem.