Update Discussion: November 6, 2020

[Celerity]

Something I'd like to bring up that I think is important when discussing expectations for tanking is how many enemies you should be able to handle at once

This is an important question, for wintertide trolls I can only pull 3 or maybe 4 depending on the group because of their knockdown. The ice area I can pull 5 at a time and generally be fine and the fire area I can pull 4 or 5, but all my party members die from the aoe so it's more realistically about 3 maximum at a time. The ensign area however, in certain groups I'm sure I could pull every enemy in there and still be fine, in the average group it's more like 7 or 8 as my limit but honestly it's not even worth pulling that many at once so I usually don't. If these numbers are intended then it's already balanced, but I'm sure the ensigns at least are not.

On the other hand if your party is only strong enough to handle one mob but you let them pull five, then there might be a problem

This happened in a group I did today at ensigns. If I was playing my dps build there's no way I would have ever pulled more than 2 at once, but in my tank build I was regularly pulling 4 and a couple times accidentally got 5 or 6 and it was still perfectly fine. The biggest problem became the constant chain stuns even with 60% stun resist and 55% ranged + projectile evasion, which meant I couldn't keep up aggro occasionally. But even then, I think there were only 1 or 2 deaths in what was a relatively weak group since we only had 4 people for a time, and of those 4, I think only 1 had a completed build. In other parts of the dungeon, I think I was pulling maximum 3 at once intentionally, but we could still handle 4 if another came by accident. So I guess going up from 2 at once but still dying sometimes if I ran dps, to 3 or 4 at once and rarely dying, but lower damage is reasonably balanced. Maybe a tiny bit too strong, but bearing in mind, although my build isn't complete, I do have all my mitigation mods. I'm only missing some aggro and damage mods and it is mostly max-enchanted yellows.

I'm honestly just glad it's relatively painless to make a tank build now and I've definitely already seen more people using them. The last thing I would want is for them to become useless unless you have a perfect build like it was before.

So, I think the biggest problem is the passive darkness mitigation mod that unarmed has. After doing a couple more runs with weaker groups, the other parts of the dungeon actually felt reasonably well balanced to me, but it's definitely preferable to have a tank in the group now, rather than an all dps group in every situation I would say. Whether or not that's an issue I don't know, but some people might see it as "forcing" groups to have a tank.

[Yaffy]

The ensign area however, in certain groups I'm sure I could pull every enemy in there and still be fine, in the average group it's more like 7 or 8 as my limit but honestly it's not even worth pulling that many at once so I usually don't. If these numbers are intended then it's already balanced, but I'm sure the ensigns at least are not.

I definitely believe you there. The Darkness resist on Unarmed is really strong, it just never had a chance to shine until Ensigns came along. Combined with the Darkness Meditation and Bulwark mode and you're cutting down their damage to about 30%. Slap on 50% projectile evasion and you're down to 15% (Although that stops when you get stunned), and that's before considering flat mitigation. It wouldn't surprise me if you could pull literally the whole Ensign section with the right setup and a support boosting you (In particular giving you stun immunity or more evasion).

Thank you for responding to my post, since I think context as well as enemy types are really important to discuss when talking about tanking. It shows that balancing out different mitigation types is important, and possibly encouragement for playing as different builds (For example, Unarmed/Staff or Unarmed/Sword would probably be able to pull more trolls than you did, but be much weaker vs the elemental mobs). Context with party members is important too, since a strong support/healer should technically be able to turn an average player into a pseudo tank, or a good tank into an amazing tank.

Stuff like not being able to pull too many Droaches/Phoenixes due to your party members is definitely something I'm familiar with, and I think that's an important part of tanking too. It's another example of being limited by your party's strength (In this case their own survivability) so it's either on them to get stronger or for you to adjust your playstyle (Ex. Not pulling as many mobs and/or trying to make sure the mobs don't AoE on your team mates), and I think that adds a lot to the game. Maybe it could encourage your squishy team mates to build some fire resistance so they don't explode, which is something Citan wants to encourage going by his recent posts.

I do agree with your assessment that shield's buffed up bonuses combined with darkness' resist from Unarmed is too strong vs Ensigns, and a lot of what you say clarifies it (Especially the part about playing with a smaller, weaker party).

As for the "Forcing a tank" thing, I don't think it's a problem if DPS parties are still able to clear content. I think it's good to encourage parties to try and be balanced, in that both tanks AND healers should be desired (Because the alternative is not wanting them at all since less dps = slower clears), but as long as content is still possible with any composition and people in global chat aren't turning away everyone since they aren't a tank/healer then it should be fine. If Gorgon goes down the path of forcing a tank/healer in order to reasonably complete content then that could be an issue.

[Citan]

Great feedback so far! I'll try to answer some questions here. Instead of specifically replying, though, I'm going to paraphrase your questions into my answers. That way people don't need to read the entire thread to follow what I'm saying.

Percentage Mitigation, Flat Mitigation, Scaling
Percentage mitigation is insanely powerful, which makes it great as a baseline for tanking. But it scales too well -- there's no room to grow. If your ability gives you 26% mitigation at level 75, where do we go for an encore? In the case of Bulwark Mode, we're looking at 27% mitigation at level 100... is it exciting to level up 25 times in order to gain +1% damage mitigation? I don't think so, but that's the best I can do there. But then we have to look at treasure. None of Bulwark Mode's treasure can boost that percentage at all: it would be too powerful, allowing lower-level players to tank much higher-level creatures than they should. Instead, the treasure has to boost mitigation by a flat amount. This way, you need to keep finding better treasure as you level up.

Flat mitigation on players makes a lot of sense because monster damage scales almost linearly. (This is very different from player damage, which has multiplicative elements, so mitigation on monsters is much less powerful.) For instance, a level 75 "Carnivine" has +97 damage boost. If it was a level 70 monster, the damage would be +89 instead. If it was level 100 it'd be +143. This monster is a wuss, but you get the point -- these are smallish numbers that increase at a relatively modest pace.

That's true for both solo monsters and Elite monsters -- Elites obviously hit harder, but their damage scales slowly with level. So with some number-massaging, I should be able to make flat mitigation the main form of mitigation.

Giving out tons of flat mitigation does create new problems. I'm especially worried about granting literal invincibility against lower-level monsters. You can see that already with Staff: if you go back and fight newbie monsters, they simply can never hurt you. I don't like this design and will need to fix it with new mechanics.

One mechanic I'm considering to fight over-mitigation is something from Asheron's Call 2 I called "armor chipping". Here's how it worked: if an attack would be mitigated to below 25% of its original value, then a random amount of the damage (between 1% and 25%, rolled randomly for each attack) would "bleed through". So no matter how good your armor was, you would still take an average of 12% of the damage from the attack (plus or minus 12%). So you could still be "chipped" to death by lots of smaller creatures.

This did help prevent overmitigation in AC2 (which is especially problematic in a PvP game), although it wasn't terribly popular with player tanks, who really like seeing "no damage" floating above their heads. But anyway, even if we don't use this particular system, we'll definitely need a few new mechanics to help with balance problems.

Long story short: I've always been pretty hesitant to give out meaningful amounts of mitigation because of the abusability of it for farming lowbie monsters. But I think flat mitigation -- in large amounts! -- is going to be necessary to make high-level group combat work. So... we'll just have to make it work! That probably means changing monster damage, and adding new systems to prevent abusability, and who knows what else.

Not all Bosses/Elites are Useful Data Points for Tanking
It's dangerous to do too much theorycrafting against the most powerful monsters in the game. Zukelmux is probably the best example -- he was made specifically to stump players. He's harder than anything I thought players could handle with level 70 equipment alone, and I expected players to need all sorts of special items and tricks to survive it.

Having this fight in the game was a very useful data point for me, but it's not one I'm trying to maintain forever. In fact, Zuke is destined to get a pretty hard nerf eventually. (I kind of tipped my hand about that when he was included in a daily Aurest quest.) He'll still be really hard to kill, but he probably won't deal as much damage as he does now.

It's also important to realize that monsters can serve different roles, and you aren't supposed to be able to tank them all! The "Multipurpose Utility Elementals" in the newest dungeon are a good example. They have an opening move that sprays acid which will shred armor in seconds. But that's their opening move, and then they can't use it again for 30 seconds. And it does no health damage... so... one simple solution is: don't tank that! Let an off-tank pull it and get hit by the acid, then let a tank take over.

In that case, I tried to make the acid powerful enough to force players to think creatively. Maybe it needs to be more potent, I dunno. But the point is that there are lots of Elite and Bosses with gimmicks, and they need to have different solutions besides "take the damage in the face and laugh because I have insane mitigation". I mean, sometimes that's what's needed, sometimes not.

(And I realize many of the current monster gimmicks just don't work, because the numbers aren't quite right, or something about it just didn't end up mattering to players. In those cases, I'll try to fix the numbers to make their gimmick work. That will help make combat more interesting.)

Other Stuff

• "If a piece of gear is eligible for discounted Transmutation, all the mods on the item should be eligible, not just the particular skills that have changed." I like this idea and I think it makes sense. Probably can't implement that overnight, but will at some point in the future.
• "What about abuse by kiting mobs or AoE burst-killing them?" I think a good first step in fixing these problems is to make the monsters live longer so they have more opportunities to react. So that's the step I'm focused on. After that, if something is still too cheesy... well, we'll have to fix it one way or another, depending on the exact details.
• "Kitchen Sink" reminder: I mentioned this in the last update thread, too. I'm throwing the kitchen sink at the problem, meaning I'm going to try out a few different game systems and see what's fun. That's what Bulwark Mode is. It was actually slated as a special tool just for dwarves. The Dwarven Stalwarts are referenced in the game a few times -- Bulwark Mode was originally going to be "Stalwart Mode." But dwarves are a long way off, and this system seems too useful to be limited to one race. Maybe. We'll see how it all pans out.
• Numbers will change! I was working on the numbers for this update right up until the evening before we launched it, never quite happy with them. I'm pretty sure I overdid it with Staff flat mitigation, and maybe in other places, too. None of those numbers are locked in. I'm just trying to quickly shift overall tanking balance in the right direction, which will mean some skills are overpowered for a bit. Please remind players that this isn't permanent; I don't want players to get the wrong idea and and make a Staff build specifically because it's overpowered right now, and then be disappointed when it's nerfed a month later. So if you see people talking about it, please help remind players of the eventual plans.

I had more to say about specific details, but we're really getting into the weeds, so I'll stop for now. Please keep the feedback coming!

[Citan]

Oh, one more thought: I think maybe in the next update I'm going to boost Elite and Boss health by 100% for a while. This is not indicative of where the final stats will be, but it may help players explore the new systems and give feedback on where to go next. (And it's easy to implement in a way that can be reverted.)

[Yaffy]

Giving out tons of flat mitigation does create new problems. I'm especially worried about granting literal invincibility against lower-level monsters. You can see that already with Staff: if you go back and fight newbie monsters, they simply can never hurt you. I don't like this design and will need to fix it with new mechanics.

If I could suggest something, perhaps the armor chipping mechanic could be better suited to just rage attacks instead of normal attacks? That way normal attacks could still be reduced to 0 damage, but rage attacks will do some portion of their damage. This will still mean lower level enemies are a joke (Which to be fair should be expected if someone is over leveled), but it does mean enemies can still hurt you if they manage to get a rage attack off. Since it's just the rage attack the amount of damage could be higher than your suggested 12% average and be something like a constant 20%. It would also prevent people with crazy mitigation from possibly being invincible vs Elites on the same level, although I assume you hope no one gets to that point. It would still mean mobs can't do damage if they're killed before they get a rage attack off, but that requires the player to both meet a tanking threshold and a damage threshold which is harder to meet.

It's also important to realize that monsters can serve different roles, and you aren't supposed to be able to tank them all!

I like the idea of having mobs like the elemental you mentioned, because I realize there's potential to have people who are better/worse at tanking certain enemies (Ex. One player builds a lot of elemental resist while one player builds a lot of physical resistance) but it can be pretty tricky to implement. The thing is that previously the strategy for most players in dungeons was to not tank anything at all and just kill stuff fast, so trying to encourage players to tank stuff in the first place definitely comes first. It can also be pretty tricky because "Off-tanks" are pretty rare, so even if you want someone to take aggro for you temporarily you might not have a volunteer (Although it should get better with tank improvements). Furthermore even if you have a certain mechanic like crazy armor damage, a tank with no armor will still probably be a better tank than the 5 squishy people with no mitigation behind them since they might explode if something looks at them wrong.

If we're going with the whole "A tank should be able to pull multiple enemies" deal, then I think a good way to encourage other party members to tank is to have enemies that have a stacking effect against players, for example like the Werewolves stacking Pack Attack on you or Slimes stacking the "You take more acid damage" debuff. These can result in a tank quickly becoming significantly more vulnerable if they get too many of the debuff, in which case it's a good idea to try and spread the debuff around or switch once the tank is squishier than other party members. Unlike the armor damaging elementals, this directly weakens the tank's mitigation (By a meaningful amount, potentially infinitely) so just healing the tank a lot isn't the best solution. Trolls kind of have this effect to some extent in that knockdown results in the damage you take being multiplied and being stun locked, so in my experience those are usually the enemy where I'm most likely to ask someone else to try and take one off of me.

Ideas like lowering player mitigation could work even if you were just pulling one mob if the debuff was REALLY dangerous, but that risks discouraging tanking at all compared to "Build full DPS and kill it before it can do anything". However if tanking becomes widespread and is generally considered useful, then it could be a neat gimmick to throw into a dungeon in certain spots just to mix things up.

One last thing I could add that might help this would be to encourage other players to off-tank as well through abilities. I can ask my friends to pull something off of me if it's needed, but many random players are allergic to the idea of taking damage unless if they've specifically built for it. Giving some skills a prebuilt way to change aggro without needing mods could help with this, for example a taunt ability that forces the target to attack the player for X seconds, so that way the player knows they always have that as an option in case if it's helpful and can use it if they notice the tank is dying. You can see players using CC effects like fear or mez like this already to save a dying player, so this is basically in the same boat. Even with stuff like this it's honestly pretty difficult to convince people to pull things off the tank unless they've explicitly built for it, but it can help. Maybe if your average players feels a bit tankier they might be more likely to try and off-tank if it's needed?

Oh, one more thought: I think maybe in the next update I'm going to boost Elite and Boss health by 100% for a while. This is not indicative of where the final stats will be, but it may help players explore the new systems and give feedback on where to go next. (And it's easy to implement in a way that can be reverted.)

Normally in any other game the idea of doubling something's health would seem pretty extreme, but honestly go for it because I think the boss fights deserve to be much longer battles. I know they got buffed a bit recently but I still think the Wintertide bosses could use some buffs, since usually in a good party the fight is over too quickly for it to be enjoyable. I think boss fights should last at least a minute or so at least, but usually they're over in around 15-25 seconds even with a bit of a rag-tag party. I would love if "Final bosses" were real endurance tests that lasted for several minutes, but it is important to make sure players have the ability to actually last that long (Which I guess is where tanks and healers come in) and that it doesn't devolve into spamming basic attacks for most of the fight because everyone runs out of power since that's just not fun.

If you're talking about doubling EVERY elite's health by 2x, you might want to be careful with that though. I don't know if newbies need to be dealing with an ultra beefed up mega spider in Serbule crypt or something. It could encourage a lot more parties though so that could be neat, but newbies don't really have many options to handle a drawn out fight unlike higher level players. Maybe the boost could be saved specifically for level 40+ dungeons like those in the dailies or something along those lines or scale so lower level elites aren't quite as tough?

[Tandiril]

Thank you for the answers, that clears up things It's also very interesting that mobs damage does indeed scale linearily. I believe you, however it definitly doesn't feel that way. The jump from Gaz damage to FR damage definitly didn't feel linear but I will take your word for it. In that case linear scaling of flat mitigation also makes sense, and if that is the plan I think I also understand now why you try to stick to flat mitigation: character developement.
And yes it's true, the room for percentage based base growth is very limited because it grows on its own. I just want to point something out, however.
Right now you seem to be playing theoretically with the idea of counteracting the effect of flat mitigation on low level mobs. By adding a mechanic that seems pretty unintuitive and also hard to balance properly in regards to a threshold. I know, all theory^^ For the sake of the discussion, let's assume for a second we only have percentage mitigation, then the problem disappears on its own. I understand and agree that player fun and character building is important, it shouldn't be all numbers. All I want to say is that at some point it might be better to replace layers upon layers of band-aid fixes that are "fun" for something simple but "unfun"^^ Not that we are there right now, just talking high level.
Other stuff:

It's dangerous to do too much theorycrafting against the most powerful monsters in the game.

Well we have to work with something

It's also important to realize that monsters can serve different roles, and you aren't supposed to be able to tank them all!

Again, please be careful with that. I also think the idea of specific monsters that require a certain approach are cool, however pigeonhole potential is really high. If an enemy can only be killed by applying ability X while being followed by ability Y that is part of a completely different setup, that fight will be really frustrating for many players. I realize that this is probably needed to make "nuke it before it moves" less viable overall, but personally I am already hard pressed for inventory space with 2 different setups (Which gets me to yet another question: how many setups did you envision a high lvl player to carry around?)
Back to leveling Hoplology!

[Aionlasting]

Everytime you mentined Ac2 my heart melts a little inside. You really do remember the game! This is the reason I followed you here Citan!

To the topic at hand... chipping isn't a bad idea and yaffy mentioned only rage attacks being affected but i'll play the devils advocate and say that if it only works on rage attacks players will easily regenerate that little amount of damage done. I don't think Ac2 had such potent regeneration at baseline though all classes did have a self heal from the magic tree.

[Yaffy]

To the topic at hand... chipping isn't a bad idea and yaffy mentioned only rage attacks being affected but i'll play the devils advocate and say that if it only works on rage attacks players will easily regenerate that little amount of damage done. I don't think Ac2 had such potent regeneration at baseline though all classes did have a self heal from the magic tree.

I assume the point isn't to make lower level mobs dangerous, it's to make it so you can't potentially pull an infinite amount of them for an infinite amount of time by having them deal SOME damage to you, not a lot. A level 80 player reducing damage to 25% shouldn't be threatened by a single level 70 or lower enemy whether the mechanic is only on rage attacks or on all attacks, but either version of the mechanic will prevent players level 80 players from pulling an entire level level 70 dungeons or something silly since the small damage will start to snowball.

The reason why I mentioned only rage attacks being applicable in this case is because Citan said "it wasn't terribly popular with player tanks, who really like seeing "no damage" floating above their heads". By making it only apply to rage attacks, then tank players will still get to negate normal attacks to zero, but pulling a huge swarm of weaker enemies could still be dangerous if they manage to stack rage attacks. Plus it just seems sensible for rage attacks to be the thing that can manage to make a dent in players since they're supposed to be stronger attacks.

[Ranperre]

I'm glad to hear about the other skill benefitting from transmutation buffs. I actually got extremely lucky with my rolls and was able to experiment with the new cow/unarmed. Universal mitigation % is nice, but I await your changes to unarmed.

Oh, one more thought: I think maybe in the next update I'm going to boost Elite and Boss health by 100% for a while. This is not indicative of where the final stats will be, but it may help players explore the new systems and give feedback on where to go next. (And it's easy to implement in a way that can be reverted.)

Transitory issue, but will you adjust drop rates as well? I'm afraid that the math (ease of execution vs profit/hr) might not work in favor of grouping up if you increase our time to clear by 50% or so.

[corelion]

Oh, one more thought: I think maybe in the next update I'm going to boost Elite and Boss health by 100% for a while. This is not indicative of where the final stats will be, but it may help players explore the new systems and give feedback on where to go next. (And it's easy to implement in a way that can be reverted.)

For the 3 headed serpent, please, don't. Doing GK basement daily already takes ages, even with a good group. I dont wanna to spend 2 hours there.