Captain tanking needs a nerf!

I really hate calling for nerfs on any class actually, since in the past nerfs were often either pointless (e.g. that one time early on this year when a few lightning rk skills and a few burg skills got a damage nerf - before the fate bug got fixed... anyone remember that? lol) or way overtuned completely breaking a skill or even an entire trait line (RIP hammer down, execute and rk dps).
When lightning rks were dps meta earlier this year they were just overtuned in dps and had more utility than hunter and champ, that combined with a trivial rotation made them just stupidly strong for basically no effort at all.
But Captain tanking is broken in a completely different way. They have a massive morale pool paired with a huge amount of passive or easily maintainable active incoming healing (without need to invest into it at all), they have very reliable and easy to maintain self buffs (battle hardened, sure strike, pet) that add up to a large amount of damage reduction and they have a large amount of reliable cool downs that either have a high uptime (fighting withdrawal and to arms mainly) or longer ones that pretty much guarantee you to survive in pretty much any situaltion (SoD and last stand). additionally you can choose to combine in harms way with either to arms (ST boss fights mainly) for even more damage reduction, or with last stand (in fights with big aoe hits that can oneshot other group/raid members) to negate the drawback that you take the damage others take. plus they have an in combat rez that you went out of your way for to make unavailable for beorning tanks.

And that's only considering the yellow line traits on their own. captains get even far stronger if you trait into either red or blue - depending on the situation. traiting into red significantly buffs the entire groups dps and can let you maintain the red banner 100% of the time with a red captain in the group (which every raid group has) without sacrificing a dps spot. if you trait into blue on the other hand, your in combet rez will lose the induction and gain an additional target. additionally you will be able to maintain ~15-20k hps on each group member without effort, removing the need for healers in most 3-6 man content.

compare this to any other tanking line in the game (which btw makes up half of the roster of classes, yet only one works well atm), they are all squishier and have far less utility as tanks. even the arguably second best option, namely guardian, does not come close to captains, even tho tanking is the only thing they are designed for. guardians are theoretically speaking in a better spot than they actually are (that spot still being worse than captains tho). but the fact that 2/3 cooldowns are just a b/p/e buff, and all big hits just bypass that entirely, makes it really difficult for them to survive. redirect - while being stupidly strong in theory - is highly RNG based and is very unreliable because of that. all in all guardians would probably be tanky enough to compete with captains on that regard under the condition that the are constantly followed by 5-10 immortal mobs hitting them for 1 damage each with b/p/e-able skills. but since that condition is never given, they just fall flat in that regard.
and even with the recent buff to break ranks they still won't come close to captains on the group support/utility part. captains still have better/more consitant dps buffs and they don't even need to sacrifice damage reduction to use them.



tl;dr: Captains are way overtuned and they trivialize content. unless there are plans on making the other tanking classes as broken as captains (which i doubt cause that would be stupid), they need a number of serious nerfs in multiple aspects (survivability, group buffs and aoe heals while in tanking line) to even get the tanking meta into a somewhat decent shape.

Totally agreed, captain tanks are insanely strong/overpowered and the best by a HUGE gap when it comes to survivability and utility tanking. They are the only real viable tank in the game and also crazy overpowered for it aswell. They definitely need nerfs.

Content works like this now:
Either 1. Captains tanks are the ONLY ones able to tank x content (Look at high tier remmo)
or 2. When another tank can tank it, captains are just insanely much better at it and the top pick for it all the time.

A class should NOT have the best utility AND the best survivability (between tank classes) at the same time.

Even before BPE became an issue, captains were still MUCH better than guardians in every way except for aggro. That's the whole reason why guardians were still considered in anvil for example. (Tho some still did it with 2 captain tanks) Guardians were chosen to high tier anvil content because of the aggro especially at boss 1 adds. But now that captains are insane aggro machines too, guardians are simply trash. They would not even be used in anvil if this would be 120 cap now.

And before people start saying ''if u nerf captains u wont be able to do any content'' well just do shelob t5 or watch any of the videos and you can see that captains can survive it without almost ever dropping below 80% morale. They can easily afford a huge nerf and still be able to tank everything.

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Originally Posted by HolyDuckTape

If a tank balance update would ever happen then guardians would either need their survivability OR utility buffed by a ton to be able to compete with the other tanks, mainly bears but also wardens.

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Dunno. Blue Guards mostly just need a vitality bonus to draw even. Yellow Guard is the one that needs most of the work. Only reason you might find yourself prioritising Warden/Beorning is for their respective mitigation debuffs but adding a mitigation debuff to Guardians isn't really a great solution. Ideally we need to start making those mit debuffs non-class specific so we can stop bringing along lousy specs purely for said debuffs, kinda feels bad if your primary reason for being there is an effect you apply once every minute. Basically several specs across multiple classes should offer the same debuff so you only need one of any of these specs and don't just keep stacking a silly number of mit debuffs.

Outside the mit debuffs, Blue Guardian is somewhat above average. It doesn't need major overhauls, Captain on the other hand absolutely needs a big overhaul because right now the line between each specialisation is far too blurred. The taunts shouldn't be available outside of yellow, revealing and double rez shouldn't be available outside of blue and....this one is probably gonna result in a few die-hard Captain only players complaining but...the passive motivating speech aura probably shouldn't be available outside of red. We are required to have two Captains in every raid because the passive value of having a Captain in your fellowship is just too much. It's gotta be dialled back in some way, whether it be removing it from 2/3 lines, giving other specs similar non-stacking auras or just flat out giving scholars a "Scroll of Motivation" to apply the effect.

Overall I'm not saying that only nerfs need to happen, there is definitely a need to buff Captains in a few areas (blue needs ST healing improvements, yellow needs non-forced taunt based aggro options, red...is kinda fine actually as it's still a guaranteed pick for groups) but we do need those nerfs to happen.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Dunno. Blue Guards mostly just need a vitality bonus to draw even.

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i disagree on that one. even if guards could run around with a million morale unbuffed you would still most likely pick cappies over them just for the pure utility they provide. also, while they would certainly be much sturdier than they are rn, guards are still gonna have nothing compared to the CDs that cappies have. jugger and pledge are just overglorified animation cuts for shield swipe basically since they are barely worth anything outside of trash pulls and maybe some adds. WH is a great skill bit it works poorly with the kind of damage spikes that currently happen on tanks. and with a big morale boost even redirect won't change.

the only thing that would bring guards close to the survivability would be reworking a lot of boss fights into making their big hits at least partially avoidable (and maybe change them into multi hits, as someone else pointed out on one of the BR threads). but a change like that would also increase the survivability of captains as well since they have very high innate bpe ratings passively.

if you wanna fix tanking you won't be able to avoid nerfing a lot of things cappies can do in tanking spec. additionally, other tanking classes would need buffing, with a priority on guardians, since tanking is literally their only role.

just dumb that this class is by far the number one tank. captains would be fine to take into t5 raid content even if their yellow line just got deleted over night...

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Originally Posted by Kotal

i disagree on that one.

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Equal with the other tanks, not equal with Captain.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Equal with the other tanks, not equal with Captain.

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oh that immediately makes more sense lol

We went through and compared pretty much every tank ability a few months back on the beta forum, that thread definitely supports the idea that Captain is the main problem: https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthr...###-Comparison

IMHO that's how they need change captain:

Yellow spec - make In Harm's Way yellow spec only trait skill, same way as Last Stand. Improved Motivation Speech: Change how many % morale getting different classes. 5% for light armor, 7% for medium armor, 10% for heavy armor, 15% for heavy armor classes in tanks spec only. Exemplar - remove decrease CD for Shield of Dunadan. Make Standard of Valour yellow spec only trait skill, in place of Shield Brother's Call. Steeled Resolve - change 8% of morale into 8% of B/P/E. Situational Awareness - change 50% to 25%. Demand Attention, In Harm's Way and Last Stand - put them deeper into build, yellow captain getting them too soon. Stand Tall - remove decrease CD for Last Stand. Shield of Dunadan - decrease effect on captain himself, make -75% decrease damage into others and -50% decrease damage to captain himself. In Harm's Way - decrease effect on captain himself, make -20% decrease damage into others and -10% decrease damage to captain himself.

Blue spec - make Cry of Vengeance blue spec only trait skill, so only blue captains can res 2 targets. Bolstered Resolve, Lifting Words and Gallant Display - put them deeper into build, yellow captain getting them too soon.

Red spec - make Standard of War red spec only trait skill, in place of Blade Brother's Call

No thanks, no nerfs to Captain.

When every tanking class/spec is viable, then we can discuss balance passes to get all of the lines into their own niche and all equal. Until then, please for the LOVE OF GOD, do not nerf THE ONLY REMAINING TANK CLASS IN THE GAME. I am so, so bored of spending hours LFFing and only being able to find tanks in prime-time unless I tank it myself, I'm at the point where I'm considering making a 2nd Captain because it'll be easier than me playing LM/RK Heals/Champ/Hunter or Warden in groups.

Buff every other tank to where Captain is, then discuss nerfs, not the other way around.

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

When every tanking class/spec is viable

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But they are viable. Every single T5 outside of Remmorchant is totally doable on other tank specs. Remmorchant itself is pretty much the only content where other tanks struggle and well...they aren't technically struggling to tank it, they just can't offer the insane utility that Captain has to bypass mechanics.

So yeah, Captain changes are the most appropriate thing here. Those changes would by necessity include nerfs.

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

I am so, so bored of spending hours LFFing and only being able to find tanks in prime-time unless I tank it myself, .

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This alone makes me not want to nerf captain tank, as much as i tihnk it probably needs it. To put it bluntly the tanking system in this game right now is just broken. Theres a reason why guards just arent used. Yes, part of it is the lack of utility, but the bigger part is they just arent tanky enough. Their cooldowns do next to nothing when a tank class would need them, although this is a bigger problem related to bpe. On top of that they lack the morale of a captain, because captain has several % buffs that have benefitted from the absolutely insane stat bloat.


Guardian is perfectly fine at keeping aggro (although i think captain is actually too strong here given its relative utility and healing), it just CAN'T survive in certain encounters. Even the ones it can a captain will do it better and overall be faster

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Originally Posted by 0987654321

but the bigger part is they just arent tanky enough. Their cooldowns do next to nothing when a tank class would need them, although this is a bigger problem related to bpe.

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Captain defensive cooldowns are poor design and should not be replicated in the other tanks under any circumstance. A defensive cooldown shouldn't render you totally immune to death for nigh on 20s.

Remove Last Stand and defensively Captain is roughly on par with the other tanks. The majority of balance issues with Captain revolve around the support aspects of the class.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Captain defensive cooldowns are poor design and should not be replicated in the other tanks under any circumstance. A defensive cooldown shouldn't render you totally immune to death for nigh on 20s.

Remove Last Stand and defensively Captain is roughly on par with the other tanks. The majority of balance issues with Captain revolve around the support aspects of the class.

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im not even saying guards should get a cooldown like last stand, they just need to make guard Cd's (and by extension bpe) a relevant and useful stat for end game tanking. But if im being perfectly honest, a captain is tankier than a guard in most situations, even without last stand.

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Originally Posted by 0987654321

But if im being perfectly honest, a captain is tankier than a guard in most situations, even without last stand.

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They're borderline equal. Captain basically just (and I mean just edges Guardian out due to pure morale pool size but technically a perfectly played Guardian will outperform a Captain). Captain without Last Stand is defensively about the same as a Beorning. Which is a little dumb since Beorning is the least BPE focused tank so should probably be strongest in the current meta but...whatever. It's close enough that any tank can reasonably be considered competitive.

It's not defence that is causing this massive disparity. It's the support capability. If you were to straight up rip away all support abilities from Yellow Captain...it'd remain a competitive tank.

There has to be trade-offs, currently Yellow Captain just isn't fleshed out enough to have any trade-offs. It is the main class that needs work right now.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

They're borderline equal. Captain basically just (and I mean just edges Guardian out due to pure morale pool size but technically a perfectly played Guardian will outperform a Captain). Captain without Last Stand is defensively about the same as a Beorning. Which is a little dumb since Beorning is the least BPE focused tank so should probably be strongest in the current meta but...whatever. It's close enough that any tank can reasonably be considered competitive.

It's not defence that is causing this massive disparity. It's the support capability. If you were to straight up rip away all support abilities from Yellow Captain...it'd remain a competitive tank.

There has to be trade-offs, currently Yellow Captain just isn't fleshed out enough to have any trade-offs. It is the main class that needs work right now.

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I know many people made their captains with a main tank in mind at this point, but I feel the original idea of having a support tank was good. You sure can remove the support a captain offers in yellow but it would not fit the class at all, a main support class that becomes best tank with no support or healing at tank spec. I think quite the opposite would add more diversity to the game, a tank that can help healing and protecting the group, can offer some in combat rezz, some damage support and such but with lower deffensive capabilities compared to other tanks. I think you could increase CD on last stand massively to have a base like 8 minutes cooldown for an effective 5-6 mins cd, reduce the self buffs of captain tanking (parry buff, inc healing buff, battle hardened...) and then keep them with the same utility they have right now.

Every other class in the game has at least one worthless trait tree that needs to be completely reworked in order to be viable. Meanwhile, people complain that one of the few classes that's actually capable at its intended role is "overpowered."

Amazing. It's like poor people suggesting that the best way to achieve equality is to burn all the rich peoples stuff.

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Originally Posted by Kander

I think quite the opposite would add more diversity to the game, a tank that can help healing and protecting the group, can offer some in combat rezz, some damage support and such but with lower deffensive capabilities compared to other tanks.

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Generally it's a bad idea to go this route. Tanks are there to be the defensive wall protecting everyone else, if we reduce the defence of one tank too much...it can no longer fulfil a core aspect of its role and as such will not be taken. On the flip side if we don't reduce its defence enough...it becomes the only tank that is ever taken, because it offers so much support. Right now Yellow Captain fulfills 100% of the requirements you might ask from a tank...as does Guardian/Beorning. What Guardians and Beornings don't do however, is also fulfil ~66% of the requirements of a healer whilst tanking. In fact Guard/Bear basically do nothing outside of tanking but that's a different issue.

When you take a Captain you're getting more than a tank, you're essentially getting a backup healer at the same time. Other tanks can't match that. There should definitely be more added to Guardian/Beorning in terms of DPS so that they offer something outside of pure tank capability but you're really gonna struggle to match the group value a Captain adds via its support. In a hypothetical scenario where Beornings are buffed to be a competitive DPS whilst tanking; you've only increased raidwide DPS by about ~20% since you were already running 5 DPS specs. Meanwhile a Captain who outputs 66% of the support a healer does is increasing your raidwide healing by ~33% since you probably only had two healers to begin with. I get that this is poorly phrased overall, I'm just trying to convey the idea that the support a Captain offers right now is statistically more significant than anything we could reasonably add to Beornings/Guardians.

I'm not opposed to the idea of a tank that offers support but Captain support abilities are generally really poorly done. Most of them are totally passive, the player never actually thinks about them they're just there. They are also pretty darn big in terms of magnitude. In this regard Yellow Captain is totally failing as a support tank because you don't actually feel that you're doing anything to support anyone. If we say dumped the passive support abilities and gave them buffs that they could actively apply on other players to boost their output (and siphon some threat from the buffed player) you'd technically offer less....but feel like you're doing more. And right now we need Captain to offer less, because damn does it do too much.

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Originally Posted by Meshuggenah

Every other class in the game has at least one worthless trait tree that needs to be completely reworked in order to be viable. Meanwhile, people complain that one of the few classes that's actually capable at its intended role is "overpowered."

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Perhaps make an attempt to read a thread before you try to badly guess what it says. Captains are overpowered at the tank role because they bring an insane amount of added support which no other tank can hope to compete with. It's not so much that they're too good at tanking, it has more to do with them being too good at everything else whilst tanking.

People who want to see Captain nerf and think what it allows THEIR tanks shine just don't get what group still need captain for support and no guardian/champion/warden can replace them as support. So you dig your own grave.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Perhaps make an attempt to read a thread before you try to badly guess what it says. Captains are overpowered at the tank role because they bring an insane amount of added support which no other tank can hope to compete with. It's not so much that they're too good at tanking, it has more to do with them being too good at everything else whilst tanking.

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I read the thread. Perhaps make an effort to remain civil even when someone disagrees with you.

My point was that, if captain provides more utility to a fellowship than other tanks, the solution is to increase the utility of other tanks. Not to nerf the fellowship utility of captains, which is the entire focus of their class design.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

But they are viable. Every single T5 outside of Remmorchant is totally doable on other tank specs. Remmorchant itself is pretty much the only content where other tanks struggle and well...they aren't technically struggling to tank it, they just can't offer the insane utility that Captain has to bypass mechanics.

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No, this is total BS and you're full of it in every thread post of yours I've read to date, it's unbelievably irritating if I'm honest.

You will simply NOT find Guardians tanking T3-4-5 Remm in the mainstream, is it doable? Yeah if you have a perfectly geared Guardian (no other class can so your point is entirely moot anyway) that is excellent at the class and you build the entire raid around the weaknesses that bringing a Guardian entails. If you nerfed Captains into oblivion as you've been begging for for months now, you're simply making most harder content impossible for the vast majority of players whilst simultaneously exacerbating the already incredibly problematic lack of people wanting to play tank classes right now.

Your point is also a load of carp because even the new (faceroll easy) Stairs instance on Tier 4 is only doable with a Guardian if you get lucky with the RNG or bring an RK healer that can mitigate all of the group hits for you, OR every player including the DPS has 450k+ morale because they did Remm T5 and got the bracelets (with a Cappy tank, probably lol). Once again, Warden tanks, Beorning tanks and Champion tanks are literally not even worth mentioning because the prospect of trying to do T3-4-5 Remm or T4+ Stairs on those is a joke in itself. I can't even imagine the pointlessness of trying to tank T5 Boss 3 with a Chank.

The current problems are below, along with their fixes:

All tank classes are non-viable except Captain and Guardian, the latter of which needs a serious redesign in its tooling and stat dist. to put it on par (which it is not that far off) with Captain, primarily non-BPE related survival abilities and a ~30% HP boost to put them at the 1mil Captains can sit at, without Motivating Speech.
Due to the above, nobody wants to play the "high risk" class that if you do terribly at, everyone can see it and it's hard to play due to inadequacies. Why faceroll on a class that wipes the group if you balls up, vs just being another trash DPSer and nobody ever knowing?
All of the content is balanced around the only properly viable tank, Captain, meaning that as per point 1, if you try to do this content with any other class you need them to excel at their class and have the group setup to make up for the loss of what Captain brings to the table. This doesn't mean that all content is stupidly easy because it simply isn't, Captain is not that OP, Remm T5 is still extremely difficult despite what you'd have us believe and nerfing Captain does not suddenly make everyone decide to start farming Remm with Chanks, Beorning tanks or for that matter even Guardians, they'll just not bother because it's too difficult for 99.999% of the player-base.

Fixes:

Buff the primary tanking lines (I don't care about Yellow Guards, to be quite honest) of all "tank" classes, every class should be equally competent but excel at a particular niche, no class should be ruled out of any boss or have to be carried by excellent healers to make up for them lacking a certain utility or survival ability

Balance all content on all tiers around the now even playing field that all tanks are sitting on, nobody needs to be nerfed at all if the content and thereby all the tanks are brought up to the same level. Captains can retain their functionality without quitting the class because of heavy-handed nerfs, other classes become viable again AND we get more tanks because nobody feels like their work is diminished.

There is literally no reason what-so-ever other than "I HATE CAPTAINS BECAUSE MY CLASS ISN'T AS GOOD RIGHT NOW!!!" to not go for an even playing field bringing all other tanks up and not just Captains down.

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

Fixes:

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IMO, A large part of the problem doesn't even have anything to do with the classes. It has to do with the way SSG is designing end-game dungeons to be incredibly bursty so that tanks can die instantly rather than using real mechanics that require player skill to overcome.

That is really why captain tanks are so strong right now. Not because of their fellowship utility but because of the nature of their cooldowns that allows them to survive mechanics that would simply kill other classes.

Nerfing captains is not going to fix that problem. It's just going to make the current content a nightmare of RNG, wondering if your tank is going to survive the next hit.

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

No thanks, no nerfs to Captain.

When every tanking class/spec is viable, then we can discuss balance passes to get all of the lines into their own niche and all equal. Until then, please for the LOVE OF GOD, do not nerf THE ONLY REMAINING TANK CLASS IN THE GAME. I am so, so bored of spending hours LFFing and only being able to find tanks in prime-time unless I tank it myself, I'm at the point where I'm considering making a 2nd Captain because it'll be easier than me playing LM/RK Heals/Champ/Hunter or Warden in groups.

Buff every other tank to where Captain is, then discuss nerfs, not the other way around.

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Why tho? Even with massive nerfs captains can still tank everything lol. It just brings them more in line with other tanks and removes the OP status off cappies and doesn't require the other tanks to become OP to match cappies. Ever done remmo t5 or watched it? Captain tanks can get -50% morale and all their inch removed and they can still tank it. It's insane

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Originally Posted by Meshuggenah

Every other class in the game has at least one worthless trait tree that needs to be completely reworked in order to be viable. Meanwhile, people complain that one of the few classes that's actually capable at its intended role is "overpowered."

Amazing. It's like poor people suggesting that the best way to achieve equality is to burn all the rich peoples stuff.

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-The most morale
-4 taunts
-The most inch
-The highest offensive utility (if there's a yellow beorn)
-The highest defensive utility
-2 invincibility emergencies with very low cd
-AoE Healing
-Double rez
-Highest ''trait'' bpe
-A ton of extra insane utility and even the option to tank high tier content in blue/red line.

And many more things. Captain tanks are not only absolutely insane compared to other tanks but they are in general crazy overpowered. No tank should have supreme godly utility and supreme defensive ability at the same time.

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Originally Posted by HolyDuckTape

Why tho? Even with massive nerfs captains can still tank everything lol. It just brings them more in line with other tanks and removes the OP status off cappies and doesn't require the other tanks to become OP to match cappies.

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You could get rid of Last Stand - Captains would still be first pick.
You could get rid of the Double Rez - Captains would still be first pick.
You could get rid of the Red Banner - Captains would still be first pick.
You could cut their heals by 50% - Captains would still be first pick.
You could cut their passive BPE trait bonuses - Captains would still be first pick.
You could cut their morale by 20% - Captains would still be first pick.

NONE of these changes deal with the fundamental core issues; other tanks are too weak for the presented content, ergo content is too difficult for the other tanks, either buff other tanks or nerf the content, this is the only way any other tank will ever be considered a better or priority pick over Captains.

AND for as long as Oathbreakers remains unusable on the same target for 3minutes, Yellow Captains will ALWAYS (it doesn't matter how hard you want to nerf them), they will ALWAYS have their spot, 1 Captain per group in a raid, remains the unbroken raiding law, unless you plan to rework the entire class from the ground up (which will not happen in this stage of the game or development), nothing is going to prevent Captain from being tank first pick.

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Originally Posted by HolyDuckTape

Captain tanks are not only absolutely insane compared to other tanks but they are in general crazy overpowered.

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I haven't said captain tanks aren't stronger than other tanks. I've said that the solution to that problem isn't to gut captain tanks. It's to buff the utility and strengths of other tanks to bring them in line.

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Originally Posted by HolyDuckTape

No tank should have supreme godly utility and supreme defensive ability at the same time.

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I disagree. All classes should be capable of performing equally well within the role their trait tree is designed for while providing strong fellowship utility based on their class flavor. That's how you make an interesting game that gives players choices.

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

No, this is total BS and you're full of it in every thread post of yours I've read to date, it's unbelievably irritating if I'm honest.

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Except it's not wrong. Filth-Well, Shadow-roost, Deep-barrow, Harrowing, Houses of Lamentation, Hall of Black Lore, Fallen Kings and Askad Mazal are all perfectly possible on non-Captain tanks and they go just fine. Stair/AD don't actually have their T5's yet so we'll have to wait and see there.

You seem to be under the misguided impression that bringing Captain in line with other tanks would make people want to tank less...but in reality the only definite conclusion we can make is that tank players would have more options in regards to which tank they wanted to play. Now normally one would assume that more options = more people but you seem to want to argue against that logic.

Also I'm really not sure why you think "unavoidable fellowship wide massive burst damage" is something the tank should be handling. In other MMO's...you probably wouldn't have it as an unavoidable mechanic in the first place but if it did exist? It'd be something the healer would be in charge of protecting against.

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Originally Posted by Meshuggenah

My point was that, if captain provides more utility to a fellowship than other tanks, the solution is to increase the utility of other tanks. Not to nerf the fellowship utility of captains, which is the entire focus of their class design.

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Nah, that's bad design.

Blue Guardian right now is a pretty well built traitline. It has a decent rotation to cycle for aggro, it has decent support cooldowns to pop and has a strong active defensive ability that can be used by a good player to massively mitigate dangerous hits reliably. It lacks a bit in the DPS department but overall maintains a solid active playstyle.

Yellow Captain on the other hand is a complete failure of a spec. The buffs? Mostly passive. The defensive abilities? Mostly passive. The aggro? Almost entirely threat copy. When you play Yellow Captain you don't have to think, your mere presence in the fellowship is more beneficial than a guy working their ### off playing any other tank spec. It's truly baffling how much you guys hate the Captain class. Why on earth would you be so dead set against fleshing out the specs that have no real identity? You could have a legitimate specialisation with strengths and weaknesses that is a joy to play but you argue tooth and nail against that because you'd rather be guaranteed a spot in a raid without having to work for it.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Except it's not wrong. Filth-Well, Shadow-roost, Deep-barrow, Harrowing, Houses of Lamentation, Hall of Black Lore, Fallen Kings and Askad Mazal are all perfectly possible on non-Captain tanks and they go just fine. Stair/AD don't actually have their T5's yet so we'll have to wait and see there.

You seem to be under the misguided impression that bringing Captain in line with other tanks would make people want to tank less...but in reality the only definite conclusion we can make is that tank players would have more options in regards to which tank they wanted to play. Now normally one would assume that more options = more people but you seem to want to argue against that logic.

Also I'm really not sure why you think "unavoidable fellowship wide massive burst damage" is something the tank should be handling. In other MMO's...you probably wouldn't have it as an unavoidable mechanic in the first place but if it did exist? It'd be something the healer would be in charge of protecting against.

Nah, that's bad design.

Blue Guardian right now is a pretty well built traitline. It has a decent rotation to cycle for aggro, it has decent support cooldowns to pop and has a strong active defensive ability that can be used by a good player to massively mitigate dangerous hits reliably. It lacks a bit in the DPS department but overall maintains a solid active playstyle.

Yellow Captain on the other hand is a complete failure of a spec. The buffs? Mostly passive. The defensive abilities? Mostly passive. The aggro? Almost entirely threat copy. When you play Yellow Captain you don't have to think, your mere presence in the fellowship is more beneficial than a guy working their ### off playing any other tank spec. It's truly baffling how much you guys hate the Captain class. Why on earth would you be so dead set against fleshing out the specs that have no real identity? You could have a legitimate specialisation with strengths and weaknesses that is a joy to play but you argue tooth and nail against that because you'd rather be guaranteed a spot in a raid without having to work for it.

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Not sure why you think fellowship-wide damage isn't something a tank should be handling. Not sure which MMO's you play in the ones I've played tanks have group-wide cooldowns, interrupts and/or positional damage soakers that help their party survive. Tanking isn't simply a matter of standing in front of a mob and holding agro and, if it were, that would be a poorly designed game.

Clearly the other tanks don't perform "just fine" otherwise this thread would not exist?

Giving each class its own fellowship utility and making it capable of fulfilling the role it's designed for is "bad design?" Alright. I just don't agree. When forming a fellowship players should have choices. Any game where specific classes are required for any content is just lazy design. The state of current 3mans where players can mix and match roles easily based on availability and preference is much better than the 6man/raid environment where you're forced to bring certain compositions to complete the content.

Rotation and gameplay is a separate issue to its relative strength when compared to other classes. Not sure what that has to do with anything. The ease or difficulty of playing a class has nothing to do with how it should be balanced compared to other classes.

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Originally Posted by Meshuggenah

Not sure why you think fellowship-wide damage isn't something a tank should be handling. Not sure which MMO's you play in the ones I've played tanks have group-wide cooldowns, interrupts and/or positional damage soakers that help their party survive. Tanking isn't simply a matter of standing in front of a mob and holding agro and, if it were, that would be a poorly designed game.

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WoW, SWToR, ESO...

Which MMO's do you play? Because none of the above put "protecting the group from unavoidable damage" on the tank, they all put that kind of thing on the healer. And that's only considering the super rare cases where they actually do unavoidable damage, they mostly don't.

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Originally Posted by Meshuggenah

Clearly the other tanks don't perform "just fine" otherwise this thread would not exist?

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There are 11 instances at cap right now. Of those 11; two don't have t5, 8 have been completed just fine with other tanks and the last requires Yellow Cappy. I use the 8/9 T5 instances as proof that Guardian/Beorning/Warden are a reasonable baseline for tanking and suggest that yellow captain and Remmorchant need adjusting. You on the other hand want to argue that Remmorchant is the correctly balanced instance and thus all tanks except Captain need buffs and presumably the other 8 instances need to be scaled up as well. Do you see the issue here?

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Originally Posted by Meshuggenah

Giving each class its own fellowship utility and making it capable of fulfilling the role it's designed for is "bad design?" Alright. I just don't agree. When forming a fellowship players should have choices. Any game where specific classes are required for any content is just lazy design. The state of current 3mans where players can mix and match roles easily based on availability and preference is much better than the 6man/raid environment where you're forced to bring certain compositions to complete the content.

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You're quite correct, mixing and matching is the best scenario. Which is why I suggest nerfing the outlier down to everyone else's level. So we can mix and match.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Meshuggenah

Rotation and gameplay is a separate issue to its relative strength when compared to other classes. Not sure what that has to do with anything. The ease or difficulty of playing a class has nothing to do with how it should be balanced compared to other classes.

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It's moderately relevant in terms of class work; The skill floor of a spec should be separate from the skill ceiling after all, or do you think a DPS spec that only had 1 button to press in order to pull competitive DPS would be ok? Admittedly rotation and gameplay is perhaps more relevant in terms of spec identity. Yellow Captain basically doesn't have an identity beyond fellowship-wide buffstick. Its existence is almost entirely passive, you're not actively trying to buff people, that will happen whether you touch the keyboard or not. You don't manage aggro through supporting allies, you coast off forced taunts.

When it comes to proposing changes I thoroughly recommend proposing changes that give it the identity that people want to assign to it. They want to be a support tank so give them support abilities that they can think about placing on allies. Maybe make those support abilities siphon threat back to the Captain. Flesh the spec out properly, give it stuff to do that fits with its identity.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Of those 11; two don't have t5, 8 have been completed just fine with other tanks and the last requires Yellow Cappy.

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We clearly have different definitions of "just fine".

Do you hinder the group by taking a tank that is not a Yellow Captain? Yes. Do healers/DPS need to work harder to compensate for the loss of support and DPS utility provided by the Yellow Captain - Um. Yes?

Just because a class can complete the instance does not mean it's "fine", I could tank Anvil T3 on my Blue Champion back at 120, does that mean the class/spec was fine? Um. No?

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

We clearly have different definitions of "just fine".

Do you hinder the group by taking a tank that is not a Yellow Captain? Yes. Do healers/DPS need to work harder to compensate for the loss of support and DPS utility provided by the Yellow Captain - Um. Yes?

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If one spec is overpowered of course every other spec would be a hindrance in comparison. Does taking a non-Captain tank in those 8 instances make them unreasonably difficult to complete? No. Hell, in some cases it actually pushes you towards needing a normal group composition. Or are we supposed to pretend that Yellow Captains tanking AM T5 without healer or support and only one DPS is fine?

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

Your point is also a load of carp because even the new (faceroll easy) Stairs instance on Tier 4 is only doable with a Guardian if you get lucky with the RNG or bring an RK healer that can mitigate all of the group hits for you, OR every player including the DPS has 450k+ morale because they did Remm T5 and got the bracelets (with a Cappy tank, probably lol). Once again, Warden tanks, Beorning tanks and Champion tanks are literally not even worth mentioning because the prospect of trying to do T3-4-5 Remm or T4+ Stairs on those is a joke in itself. I can't even imagine the pointlessness of trying to tank T5 Boss 3 with a Chank.

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Largely agree outside of this quote. Way overshooting here, undermining yourself by mentioning shaka and remm in the same breath. In my experience, T4 stairs is not that hard to tank on Guard and Bear even without 450k morale dpsers for the hobgoblin (more like 350k for hobgoblin. Also doesnt take shelob bracelets to get to 450k unless theres not even a red capt), or RKs in particular, or cheesy kite methods (not mentioned but relevant strat for weaker comps).

To your point in a more measured way, it ought to take an LM (or maybe yellow burg? Not tried that) for non captanks to do w/o kiting whereas captanks can IHW+LS the horn, does take stuff like marked piercing roar or legend of the hammerhand (or even better as you mentioned, bubble + fates intertwined) to be applied right, and solid DPS to let the other tanks' lesser cooldowns last them through the nasty bleeds. I have not wardtanked t4 yet but agree with you more there; despite good mits and OK sustained HPS, without real cooldowns I would have to kite the melee twin and the hobgoblin while being carried by heals support. One trick we learned , after I guard and bear tanked the twins, is that the LM bearpet can taunt away one of the twins bleeds onto itself after a dialogue line.

Chank I can't speak to.

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

There is literally no reason what-so-ever other than "I HATE CAPTAINS BECAUSE MY CLASS ISN'T AS GOOD RIGHT NOW!!!" to not go for an even playing field bringing all other tanks up and not just Captains down.

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Joedangood is a captank, from what I have read him say. His reasoning, which I dont fully buy into, is essentially that SSG can't be counted on (lack of time, lack of ability, or both?) tobuff the other tanks to the captains level but probably are capable of measuredly nerfing the cap to the other tanks level. I ofc disagree that it would be shooting the moon to buff the other tanks. But I do like his idea of moving SotD to blue line without all the rest, in addition to other tank buffs like what people have proposed.

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

Once again, Warden tanks, Beorning tanks and Champion tanks are literally not even worth mentioning because the prospect of trying to do T3-4-5 Remm or T4+ Stairs on those is a joke in itself.

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I guess we are clowns then because we regularly do T4 stairs with a warden tank

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Originally Posted by Omen_Kaizer

I have not wardtanked t4 yet but agree with you more there; despite good mits and OK sustained HPS, without real cooldowns I would have to kite the melee twin and the hobgoblin while being carried by heals support. One trick we learned , after I guard and bear tanked the twins, is that the LM bearpet can taunt away one of the twins bleeds onto itself after a dialogue line.

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The hobgoblin doesnt need to be kited on a warden if you have a good group and get a bit lucky with RNG . The twins are more of a problem. Expect that you are going to die when the archer puts that 1 million+ bleed on you. As long as the dps has the archer dead before he gets another bleed off, the melee guy isnt to much of a problem with a good healer.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Or are we supposed to pretend that Yellow Captains tanking AM T5 without healer or support and only one DPS is fine?

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I don't understand why this is surprising? Or even an "issue" only now.

Captains were solo-tanking Seregost back on 115 without heals - which any other tank was almost incapable of doing (perhaps a really good guard if you had an rk and a hunter). Heck, I even watched Captains tank Quays without a healer - but even outside of that, Captains ability to solo-tank 3 mans without heals has been possible for many years now, so, to suggest just because they can tank AM T5 without a healer is a problem, where was this thread 3 years ago?

And again;

Just because a class can complete the instance does not mean it's "fine", I could tank Anvil T3 on my Blue Champion back at 120, does that mean the class/spec was fine? Um. No?

Furthermore, see my earlier post.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

You could get rid of Last Stand - Captains would still be first pick.
You could get rid of the Double Rez - Captains would still be first pick.
You could get rid of the Red Banner - Captains would still be first pick.
You could cut their heals by 50% - Captains would still be first pick.
You could cut their passive BPE trait bonuses - Captains would still be first pick.
You could cut their morale by 20% - Captains would still be first pick.

AND for as long as Oathbreakers remains unusable on the same target for 3minutes, Yellow Captains will ALWAYS (it doesn't matter how hard you want to nerf them), they will ALWAYS have their spot, 1 Captain per group in a raid, remains the unbroken raiding law, unless you plan to rework the entire class from the ground up (which will not happen in this stage of the game or development), nothing is going to prevent Captain from being tank first pick.

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It is impossible to forgo having a Captain in each group.

Because none of these changes deal with the fact that other tanks offer absolutely zero utility (either in terms of offensive or defensive (except beornings and to 'some' minor extent, wardens), and to suggest that a tanks ONLY role in a group/raid is to be an aggro-bot, yeah, I am sorry, but that is AWFUL class design, and who would ever want to play that to begin with. Tanks should excel at defensive support/utility, that is what they are there to do, all tanks should be able to do this in "some-way", whether by reducing the targets damage, or intercepting said damage, as long as they are equal in strength.

Unless I'm missing something that's the horn blow from the Hobgoblin that caused a wipe so how's kite gonna prevent that. Only Captain LS can bypass it now.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

where was this thread 3 years ago?

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I can offer a 2018 post on the topic:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Ooo, Captain suggestions. Fun:

• Remove all access to the rez from yellow line.
• Make SotD self only and nerf it to around -50% (but let it stack with other inc damage sources).
• Improve Captains capability to generate aggro in yellowline by buffing threat generated through healing and damage skills.
• Increase the number of targets captains can hit in yellow line.
• Remove the motivating speech aura in yellow line or turn it into a self only variant (perhaps with more defence focus) that doesn't stack with other captains.
• Nerf incoming healing modifiers on captain by a fair amount (you know, so they don't hit 80% higher inc healing than anyone else can possibly reach).
• Remove the trait granting 10 extra seconds of last stand (this skill somehow managed to be better than 90% of other tank CD's whilst having a longer duration).
• Add a slight mitigation to the redirected damage from In Harms Way.

Also gonna throw in a fancy blue talent change:

• Gut revealing mark.

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I've got some personal requests for Captain adjustments before that albeit they aren't quite as succinct.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

And again;

Just because a class can complete the instance does not mean it's "fine", I could tank Anvil T3 on my Blue Champion back at 120, does that mean the class/spec was fine? Um. No?

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Certainly not. If a spec is reasonably comfortable completing said content and isn't required for said content then power-wise it's in the right place. It may need quality of life adjustments but it does not require notable buffs/nerfs, at most it needs a rebalance of the power it already has. If a certain spec trivialises content then that spec needs nerfs, if a singular piece of content forces you into using one particular spec then it is likely that that content and spec need some adjustments.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

It is impossible to forgo having a Captain in each group.

Because none of these changes deal with the fact that other tanks offer absolutely zero utility (either in terms of offensive or defensive (except beornings and to 'some' minor extent, wardens), and to suggest that a tanks ONLY role in a group/raid is to be an aggro-bot, yeah, I am sorry, but that is AWFUL class design, and who would ever want to play that to begin with. Tanks should excel at defensive support/utility, that is what they are there to do, all tanks should be able to do this in "some-way", whether by reducing the targets damage, or intercepting said damage, as long as they are equal in strength.

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See this cuts both ways. You complain that tanks would only be aggro bots and advocate for a world in which tanks are basically just buff bots. Captain is not a good example of "More than just a tank" because it does 90% of its support passively. If you ripped away the aura, ripped away the sure strike buff, ripped away the fellowship aspect of the HoT's...then the person playing Yellow Captain wouldn't change their rotation at all.

What is important is not what you can do, it's how you do it. If you bump tank DPS to be more statistically significant and remove AoE forced taunts you no longer have an "aggro bot", you have a spec that spends time focusing on building aggro and carefully managing the mobs in front of it so that other players don't pull threat. If you tweak defensive buffs to have a cost and require maintenance instead of being always on (fortification, guarded) you no longer have a "defence bot", you have a spec that carefully manages its defences to ensure that it doesn't get killed. The same goes for support, add specific single target ally buffs with reasonable uptimes (< 100%) and you can actually produce a tank spec that legitimately plays like a support instead of being a "buff bot".

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Originally Posted by HolyDuckTape

Why tho? Even with massive nerfs captains can still tank everything lol. It just brings them more in line with other tanks and removes the OP status off cappies and doesn't require the other tanks to become OP to match cappies.

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But you don't seem to get it... Nerfing Captains does not suddenly and magically make Chanks viable... So how is that in any way going to benefit anyone at all? It doesn't, it just upsets Captains, the last remaining truly viable tank class in the game, and makes us not want to play anymore when we're a shell of what we once were. So instead of bringing everyone up to to the versatility of Captain and improving upon what each tank offers, you'd just detract from the Captain class and call it quits. Everybody loses, the content is no easier to clear because other tanks are still underdogs for the current content, Captain tanks feel disappointed, and all the community loses even more tanks from the already dwindling pool of what tanks are still left playing the game.

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Originally Posted by HolyDuckTape

Ever done remmo t5 or watched it?

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Yeah, I have funnily enough and whilst I don't doubt that it's doable with a Guardian or that you could get lucky and get through it with a Warden (9 months after it came out and with all the gear from it, gained by doing it with a Cappy tank the first time around), for the masses that is simply non-viable.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

NONE of these changes deal with the fundamental core issues; other tanks are too weak for the presented content, ergo content is too difficult for the other tanks, either buff other tanks or nerf the content, this is the only way any other tank will ever be considered a better or priority pick over Captains.

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This.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Except it's not wrong. Filth-Well, Shadow-roost, Deep-barrow, Harrowing, Houses of Lamentation, Hall of Black Lore, Fallen Kings and Askad Mazal

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So, your argument is that instances that came out the best part of a year ago and were designed with tanks having half the stats we have available right now are doable with alternative classes? Right. I can tank Tier 5 3mans on my Champ in red line with more morale in that build than fully geared Cappy tanks had back when they released, what on earth is your point?

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

You seem to be under the misguided impression that bringing Captain in line with other tanks would make people want to tank less..

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That's simply not logical though, people aren't playing tanks right now because they're boring, two-dimensional and underpowered for the role they're asked to fulfil, except Captains. You'd have us diminish the current Captain population, too, instead of making people want to play the other classes by making them interesting again and adding to their utility.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Also I'm really not sure why you think "unavoidable fellowship wide massive burst damage" is something the tank should be handling.

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I'm not really sure why you think "unavoidable fellowship wide massive burst damage" is something the tank should not be handling? Healers are there to heal, not mitigate damage, tanks are there to mitigate damage and protect the group. It makes perfect sense to me. By your argument Guardians should relinquish Shield-wall and give it to Minstrels.

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Originally Posted by Omen_Kaizer

T4 stairs is not that hard to tank on Guard and Bear

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Not disagreeing here, it wasn't a great example as it's a mechanic (ice boss horn) that's easily overcome in numerous ways, the point I was trying to make is that you're nerfing your group by bringing anything but a Captain, which is my whole point in this thread, Guardians should be wanted just as much as Captains without making the content harder to LFF for by restricting the classes that are able to partake.

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Originally Posted by Omen_Kaizer

Joedangood is a captank, from what I have read him say.

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He may say that, though I've not seen it myself, but I highly doubt it from what I've read, he's misrepresented quite a lot about the class that even the most average Captain tanks at end-game are well aware of. I'm not even convinced he plays any tank classes at end-game.

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Originally Posted by mkcraft27

I guess we are clowns then because we regularly do T4 stairs with a warden tank

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That's great. I don't doubt at all that it's possible or even that hard, simply that it's the inferior option and that simply because a Warden can tank easy 6mans (that are literally faceroll content), the class isn't suddenly viable and in good shape. Go tank T5 Remm full-clear and watch as your group repeatedly wipes because the tank class is falling so far short of what is required. You may well get lucky on the RNG and succeed eventually, but probably not.


To sum up this thread, it appears to be full of people who think that when two employees find out one is being paid 20% more than the other, they agree that the employer should simply reduce the higher-paid employee's earnings by 20% instead of bringing them both up to the same level. That's the simplest way I can put it. That's how you better every tank class without losing any players. If you were the higher-paid employee would you honestly continue working there after?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

So, your argument is that instances that came out the best part of a year ago and were designed with tanks having half the stats we have available right now are doable with alternative classes? Right. I can tank Tier 5 3mans on my Champ in red line with more morale in that build than fully geared Cappy tanks had back when they released, what on earth is your point?

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For starters, they were done at release with other tanks not just Yellow Captain. It's just odd that you're gonna try make this point. Saying that the age of the cluster invalidates it as a valid metric by which to judge tank competency would also mean Remmorchant is invalidated as it came out not long after and stats have massively inflated since then. You want to use Remmorchant as justification for the current state of Captain tank and I want to use 8 other instances (a number that will soon increase) as justification for Captain tank nerfs...and probably some Remmorchant tweaks. Amusingly I guess Remmorchant T5 is probably possible with other tanks these days considering health pools/other stats have increased by more than the bonus of having a Captain afk in your group yields. The only real loss would likely be IHW. Granted we won't see other tanks do it, not because they definitely can't but because there's absolutely no reason to take anything less than a Captain.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

That's simply not logical though, people aren't playing tanks right now because they're boring, two-dimensional and underpowered for the role they're asked to fulfil, except Captains. You'd have us diminish the current Captain population, too, instead of making people want to play the other classes by making them interesting again and adding to their utility.

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No, that's why you think people aren't playing tanks right now. Nobody here can say for sure why people aren't playing tanks, could be that it's because they find tanks boring or it could be because they prefer Guard/Beorning/Warden/Champion tank and people aren't particularly accepting of those. Now the thing is, we could slap motivating speech aura on to Blue Beorning and with that it would pretty much be a competitive tank but the thing is...you didn't make the spec any more interesting. You just gave it a flat numerical boost to everyone around them. For the person at the keyboard it's the exact same spec that it was before so I guess they'll still be bored of it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

I'm not really sure why you think "unavoidable fellowship wide massive burst damage" is something the tank should not be handling? Healers are there to heal, not mitigate damage, tanks are there to mitigate damage and protect the group. It makes perfect sense to me. By your argument Guardians should relinquish Shield-wall and give it to Minstrels.

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Because handling that kind of thing is what is known as proactive healing. Traditionally MMO's leave all kinds of healing to the healers, sometimes they give the odd spec a quick heal ability to assist in healing but it's fairly unheard of for the tank to have better means of keeping people alive than the healers do. Odd that you complain about tanks not having enough things to do but want to strip away healer functionality.

Now technically tanks don't do much to mitigate groupwide damage. Guardians/Captains can just redirect half the damage the group receives to themselves, of course in the case of Guardian this results in their death because they don't have an "I'm invincible" button. They're not erasing damage, they're rebalancing it to mostly go through their own health pool so the healer can focus a priority target (and that's great since most healers are stronger on ST than burst AoE).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

He may say that, though I've not seen it myself, but I highly doubt it from what I've read, he's misrepresented quite a lot about the class that even the most average Captain tanks at end-game are well aware of. I'm not even convinced he plays any tank classes at end-game.

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You want to dispute that most of the support a Captain gives out is passive? Go ahead I guess. Prove me wrong.

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

To sum up this thread

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Yeaahhhhhh, no. Went so abstract that you totally lost the plot on that one.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

If you bump tank DPS to be more statistically significant and remove AoE forced taunts you no longer have an "aggro bot", you have a spec that spends time focusing on building aggro and carefully managing the mobs in front of it so that other players don't pull threat. .

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Soo.....

An aggro-bot that might have to press 2 or 3 skills instead of 1.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Soo.....

An aggro-bot that might have to press 2 or 3 skills instead of 1.

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As opposed to a support bot that need not press any skills.

Granted that level of abstraction is a little silly. You could argue that a warden is a 4 button class...but we can accept that that is a gross simplification of the matter.

not responding to a post in particular, but much rather to what is said by some people generally:

- other, non captain tanks are perfectly fine to tank t5 3/6 mans:
- duh, most 3 mans are basically doable without a tank (other than chamber and maybe filth well idk never bothered with that one tbh)
- it is still a massive difference in 6 mans if you bring a tank that's not captain. you actually need a good group comp if you bring a guard even, whereas on cappy you can bring a lm and basically 4 dps

- captains are the last viable tanks, pls don't nerf them omg i'm crying:
- that's the point. captains do way too much while tanking AND they are by far the most defensive tanks. they trivialize 3/6 man content and basically force the devs to make content harder, making the other tanks even less viable
- you could not buff the other classes in a realistic way to match cappy tanking without completely reworking the core functionality of these classes (or just make them stupid OP with these buffs)
- nerfing captains would actually force the devs to make raid content doable for other tanks. atm content is only realistically doable on cappy tanks, everybody only uses cappy tanks, so the devs see no need to adjust content to make it doable on any of the others



*btw with doable i mean not theoretically doable if the entire rest of the raid puts in 10x the effort to be able to afford to take a guard instead. i actually mean be able to tank effectively without much difference to a cappy tank. this is not like when a dps class falls out of favour where all you need to do is have enough dps to afford to bring a slightly weaker dps class. the difference between a guard and a cappy atm is much worse than the difference between hunter and rk pre fate fix.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Saying that the age of the cluster invalidates it as a valid metric by which to judge tank competency would also mean Remmorchant is invalidated as it came out not long after and stats have massively inflated since then.

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Your sentence literally disputes exactly what you say at the start of it, you're trying to say the age of the content makes no difference when for example a decently geared Captain at MM launch had 600k morale, and I currently have 1.2m, but that somehow now suddenly Wardens, Guardians, Chanks, Bears can do the content perfectly fine? Why might that be? Hmmm.

Again, I don't doubt that a Guardian can in fact clear the hardest content, the point is how much the group has to make up for this shortfall and that all the other tanking classes that you conveniently forget still need massive amounts of work. Chank is a literal joke, Beorning tank looks like they said "screw it" and just released the class to production half way through the design phase, and Warden is still working with a toolkit and stats from level 95.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

As opposed to a support bot that need not press any skills.

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It's stuff like this that makes it so painfully obvious that you've never actually played the class to any real level of competency, if at all. People min-maxing Red/Blue Captains work through a fairly complicated and reactive rotation and have to try WAY harder than any other class to actually get good figures off, but the payoffs at the top of the skill ceiling are huge. Yellow is 100% easiest and no class in this game is by any means hard to play, but to pretend that timing, CD priority and taunt & damage management through rotation require you to "not press any skills" is just farcical, that's the reason why 95% of Captains can't do AM Tier 5 without a healer, but you'd still have the class nerfed into oblivion because 5% can...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

Your sentence literally disputes exactly what you say at the start of it, you're trying to say the age of the content makes no difference when for example a decently geared Captain at MM launch had 600k morale, and I currently have 1.2m, but that somehow now suddenly Wardens, Guardians, Chanks, Bears can do the content perfectly fine? Why might that be? Hmmm.

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Did you actually read the sentence? If you invalidate the MM cluster because it's old you must invalidate remmorchant for the same reason. I'm not trying to invalidate them for being old, you are so you must invalidate Remmorchant by your own logic. To me they are the level 130 cap instances, they should be the metric by which we judge tanks. They remain valid until the cap moves on.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

It's stuff like this that makes it so painfully obvious that you've never actually played the class to any real level of competency, if at all. People min-maxing Red/Blue Captains work through a fairly complicated and reactive rotation and have to try WAY harder than any other class to actually get good figures off, but the payoffs at the top of the skill ceiling are huge.

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I was not referring to blue/red Captain, I was referring to yellow. If I had been referring to blue/red then yes, my point would be invalid...but I wasn't....so it isn't.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

Yellow is 100% easiest and no class in this game is by any means hard to play, but to pretend that timing, CD priority and taunt & damage management through rotation require you to "not press any skills" is just farcical, that's the reason why 95% of Captains can't do AM Tier 5 without a healer, but you'd still have the class nerfed into oblivion because 5% can...

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The vast majority of the support that a yellow Captain offers is passive. The few things that aren't passively active are automatically applied by the Captain when doing their own personal rotation, the only exception to this is WoC. Again, if you ripped away the fellowship part of all the support abilities on Yellow Captain you would not see any change in their rotation.

People really want to label Yellow Captain as "The support tank" when in reality they're not thinking about support 95% of the time. It's like labelling red RK as a "support DPS", yeah they're throwing up a bunch of mit debuffs but those debuffs are a side effect of their DPS rotation, they're not monitoring them in any way. Tagging a fellow with DNF once every 150 seconds really doesn't convey that support mindset.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

The vast majority of the support that a yellow Captain offers is passive. The few things that aren't passively active are automatically applied by the Captain when doing their own personal rotation, the only exception to this is WoC. Again, if you ripped away the fellowship part of all the support abilities on Yellow Captain you would not see any change in their rotation.

People really want to label Yellow Captain as "The support tank" when in reality they're not thinking about support 95% of the time. It's like labelling red RK as a "support DPS", yeah they're throwing up a bunch of mit debuffs but those debuffs are a side effect of their DPS rotation, they're not monitoring them in any way. Tagging a fellow with DNF once every 150 seconds really doesn't convey that support mindset.

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So.... I press battle-shout, and pressing attack once every 15s and go afk?

Super fun class.

Because that is essentially what you're advocating for.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Because that is essentially what you're advocating for.

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Whelp, no idea how you reached that erroneous conclusion.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Whelp, no idea how you reached that erroneous conclusion.

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Not my fault you can't see the end result of what it is you're asking for.

The point still stands, you have an overinflated view of what you expect SSG to do, they're not going to rework the threat system, they're not going to start moving skills off into different lines, and they're not going to change the fundamental designs of a class after 13 years, more to the point, I doubt they "could" even do it because they don't have enough people, time or money capable of doing it in the first place.

They know how to buff classes, that's it, what, in recent history has given you any belief they know how to "nerf" a class (Hello, RKS?) - further to that, they're not simply going to take forum suggestions at face value, they have their OWN opinions and ideas for where certain classes should be, and what certain classes should or shouldn't be able to do, so, ask for what they can do, not for what you'd like to happen if SSG was as big as Blizzard.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Not my fault you can't see the end result of what it is you're asking for.

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So...asking for support abilities that you have to think about applying...results in half the skills being removed?

You aren't making any sense.



Oh and do stop with the whole "SSG isn't capable of that" spiel. If you don't think SSG can reasonably balance classes then why bother commenting? It's just so self defeating.

My impression of the new raid at T4, but valid for lower tiers too, is that in this raid (being highest content available) guardian tanks have their secure place.


You can do the first boss (t4) without captain tank and not feel like you are missing anything at all, either defensively or offensively.

But the differentiator is the second boss.
At the moment I see that a guard and captain tank is the optimal combo for the Ranulur fight.
You want a guard to tank the adds. And a captain for the main boss.

The 10s taunt duration on guards vs 5s on all other tanks makes a huge difference in warg aggro management.
The buffs they got to their defensive and offensive arsenal, do make a difference (even while I agree they need more buffing tweaks to their defensive arsenal)
Our main guard tank has both a competent guard and captain tank, and I think he will agree with me that guardian is a better choice for the hardest job in there (wargs tank).
You can also see this in the available vids of T4 2nd boss, as good as all of them use a guard + captain tank duo.
To me that proves the point that a lot of issues in tanking difference lie with scaling and instance design (and devaluation of b/p/e).


Even though all tanks have been brought in line with # of taunts.
Captains have a very hard way of ensuring solid aggro on the warg spawns when they spawn.
your bread and butter taunts: GW and BoE (and we're not sure if or how long we gonna keep BoE taunt), are melee and prone to bpe or gated behind a skill rotation.
The aoe taunt has to be precisely timed and coordinated with the boss tank (and has a long cd). So that leaves the single target ranged taunt which still only covers 1 warg for 5s.
So some people's statements can be reversed here, you need a captain tank to be fully geared and play perfectly for ~9 min, while a guard tank has a better toolkit to deal with it (don't get me wrong they still have to play darn well).
Even though technically "taunts have been put in line" across tanks, in practice Guards are still the king of aggro/threat management.

Some people have mentioned moving SotD to healer line.
=> the result of that is basically the same as just removing SotD, at the moment no-one is blue line captains for top tier content.
if they have to change anything they could remove the unimbued legacy currently giving it +10s duration and give it the same effect as the imbued legacy.
But I would prefer they first do a buffing pass on other tank classes, instead of swinging the nerf bat to cater to vocal minorities not seeing the long term effects on player enjoyment.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Arotharrr

Some people have mentioned moving SotD to healer line.
=> the result of that is basically the same as just removing SotD, at the moment no-one is blue line captains for top tier content.

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To be fair it could potentially shift the meta into Beorning main tank, cappy/RK heals. You'd also bump the viability of Wardens/Chanks since they'd have access to SotD as a defensive cooldown (they'd probably be stuck in an off-tank role though).

It's not that blue captain is bad, in fact it's straight up the best healer for what it does (massive sustained AoE HPS). Yeah, the damage profile of content doesn't typically match that specialisation but giving them the strongest external defensive in the game for ST situations is a big ol' bump to viability. Most of the danger comes in a short window anyway so it...might make them a solid option?


I mean I still don't really like it as a singular solution, whilst it opens up your options it's basically just giving you one other option at best. SotD should probably get moved to blue regardless but other stuff really needs doing at the same time.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Not my fault you can't see the end result of what it is you're asking for.

The point still stands, you have an overinflated view of what you expect SSG to do, they're not going to rework the threat system, they're not going to start moving skills off into different lines, and they're not going to change the fundamental designs of a class after 13 years, more to the point, I doubt they "could" even do it because they don't have enough people, time or money capable of doing it in the first place.

They know how to buff classes, that's it, what, in recent history has given you any belief they know how to "nerf" a class (Hello, RKS?) - further to that, they're not simply going to take forum suggestions at face value, they have their OWN opinions and ideas for where certain classes should be, and what certain classes should or shouldn't be able to do, so, ask for what they can do, not for what you'd like to happen if SSG was as big as Blizzard.

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Well I'm relieved to hear it, because I'm tired of people calling for nerfs, just in general. If other classes seem weak in comparison, how about improving those classes? Or if they are just as good, but hard to understand (like maybe Warden?) how about... some expert guides could be written?

I see the captain's class is in need of my help again. With this, I honestly did not even read what is being said before on this topic, but I can assume that we've already discussed this many times before.

The only thing that is ''OP'' about captain tank is LS heal.

Again, the content has been biased towards buffer tanking, even though I am not playing at this moment, I know just from a few glimpses that it is biased once again.
I do understand that logically speaking, the warden and guards are once again in a poor position. But this is not because of the captain, rather the fact that the BPE system is still not fixed by SSG.
As for boss mechanics that avoid BPE as a whole, as for ''morale'' damage, which circumvents the mitigations that warden and guard rely on so much.

We've had this discussion many times and to think you can restart this ''performance'' again while I show signs of inactivity does not mean I won't watch this forum. I ask you nabs to leave this forum and make a topic on the BR forum regarding biased content and broken BPE system. So you can address the warden issues too, we captains are not going to compensate for that what makes your class flawed due to circumstances.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Oh and do stop with the whole "SSG isn't capable of that" spiel. If you don't think SSG can reasonably balance classes then why bother commenting? It's just so self defeating.

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It's not spiel when it's the very apparent truth of the situation.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Zaheer

I see the captain's class is in need of my help again. With this, I honestly did not even read what is being said before on this topic, but I can assume that we've already discussed this many times before.

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It's the same old rubbish from the same people, so you're correct :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

It's not spiel when it's the very apparent truth of the situation.

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Except it's not. Can SSG fix class balance in a single update? No. Could they do a decent job if they planned 2-3 years worth of changes? Yeah. Hell, even planning for one year of class work in advance would be a monumental improvement.

Currently they aren't planning ahead at all, they kinda fiddle with things every now and again to shake up the meta but it doesn't seem like they have a concrete path to follow. They have shown that they can crank out a fairly large list of changes with pretty short notice if the Beorning/Guardian changes a few years back were anything to go by. They have the capacity to do it, they're just avoiding it where they can.

They're basically putting out fires instead of arresting the guy holding the matches.

Think we can close the topic here, no need to continue this endless loop of me repeating myself like some tape-recorder about how unfortunate the circumstances are for guard and warden.

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Originally Posted by Zaheer

Think we can close the topic here, no need to continue this endless loop of me repeating myself like some tape-recorder about how unfortunate the circumstances are for guard and warden.

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I'm sorry but you don't have any kind of final word here. You have a right to your own opinion, you have a right to voice that opinion and that opinion has a right to be judged upon its own merits. You do not however get to deny other people the right to voice their own opinions on the matter.

The moderators may close the thread if it breaks any of the codes of conduct but since the thread has been pretty darn civil so far there's no real reason for that to occur. Forums are for discussion, try not to get upset when discussion happens.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

I'm sorry but you don't have any kind of final word here. You have a right to your own opinion, you have a right to voice that opinion and that opinion has a right to be judged upon its own merits. You do not however get to deny other people the right to voice their own opinions on the matter.

The moderators may close the thread if it breaks any of the codes of conduct but since the thread has been pretty darn civil so far there's no real reason for that to occur. Forums are for discussion, try not to get upset when discussion happens.

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I won't mind looping my tape recorder onto you if that is what it takes to cast you out.
You can have your opinion but stating false claims you cannot. Which you do all the time, without looking at the surrounding circumstances. Trying desperately to take down a class who doesn't suffer from those circumstances, I've seen your motives and you cling to every comment that puts the captain in a negative daylight.

No, you won't upset me, I may advise you to not get upset when I will run my same arguments over and over.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Except it's not. Can SSG fix class balance in a single update? No. Could they do a decent job if they planned 2-3 years worth of changes? Yeah. Hell, even planning for one year of class work in advance would be a monumental improvement.

Currently they aren't planning ahead at all, they kinda fiddle with things every now and again to shake up the meta but it doesn't seem like they have a concrete path to follow. They have shown that they can crank out a fairly large list of changes with pretty short notice if the Beorning/Guardian changes a few years back were anything to go by. They have the capacity to do it, they're just avoiding it where they can.

They're basically putting out fires instead of arresting the guy holding the matches.

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No they can't. In last stream Severlin clearly says what class fixes after every update never ending process and they can't make some balance what can stay for 2-3 years.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Zaheer

You can have your opinion but stating false claims you cannot. Which you do all the time, without looking at the surrounding circumstances. Trying desperately to take down a class who doesn't suffer from those circumstances, I've seen your motives and you cling to every comment that puts the captain in a negative daylight.

No, you won't upset me, I may advise you to not get upset when I will run my same arguments over and over.

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https://imgur.com/tXl3g6Q

ok

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Elmagor

No they can't. In last stream Severlin clearly says what class fixes after every update never ending process and they can't make some balance what can stay for 2-3 years.

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It'll always be a never ending process but that doesn't mean they can't develop a long term plan. Right now they don't really seem to have a concrete goal. If you don't know what the destination is you can't really take it one step at a time as you have no idea if you're even going in the right direction. As I said in that post "They're basically putting out fires instead of arresting the guy holding the matches."

The class work they are doing tends to be really inefficient and it isn't improving the situation.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

If you invalidate the MM cluster because it's old you must invalidate remmorchant for the same reason.

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No, that's not why I invalidated them at all, I invalidated the cluster because they are simply not a source of A) any challenge anymore, thus invalidating themselves or B) any BiS pieces of gear.

Remm is still very current because literally every single piece of BiS gear except three new gold items is BiS from Remmorchant. It has nothing to do with age and everything to do with how relevant the content is in a purely factual sense, Remmorchant T5 still offers you BiS pieces of gear and is still the hardest content to complete and as such is an excellent indicator for the balancing of a level playing field for all tanks.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

They remain valid until the cap moves on.

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No. What is this short-sighted way of thinking? They remain valid only as long as they are run, I've not seen an MM instance LFF in World chat/LFF channel for literally weeks on weeks. Nobody is running them precisely because they are irrelevant right now.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

The vast majority of the support that a yellow Captain offers is passive. The few things that aren't passively active are automatically applied by the Captain when doing their own personal rotation, the only exception to this is WoC. Again, if you ripped away the fellowship part of all the support abilities on Yellow Captain you would not see any change in their rotation.

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I know you love cyclical debates but once again, this highlights the level of knowledge (or lack thereof) you have of the Captain class. The careful timing of cooldowns (so as not to self-suicide with IHW for example, which has a longer duration than LS), careful timing of incoming healing boosts, damage mitigators, heals (which are not just rotationally spammed on cooldown by decent Captains) and self-healing capability are all components that set aside good Captains from bad ones, hence why you don't see every pleb-tier Captain on World chat able to self-heal their way through AM T5 or complete Remm T5. You simply do not.

Yellow Cappy is pretty easy to play but it's nowhere near as simple to min-max at the skill-ceieling, not even close to what you're suggesting.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

People really want to label Yellow Captain as "The support tank" when in reality they're not thinking about support 95% of the time.

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Again, you're wrong, this is exactly what the competent Yellow Captains are doing, they're constantly aware of when exactly in a fight they should utilise various components of the toolset they have. What you are describing are the terrible Captains that can barely keep Battle-hardened up and put Shield Bro on their pet, let alone actually aid the group short of the passive 10% morale gain. Any Captain just spamming their "OP CDs" on rotation is the sort of Captain that you wipe with because the cooldowns do not have 100% uptime, and if you're spamming them thoughtlessly then you're going to die. Once again, this is why there's a distinct set of players who can and cannot do content like AM Tier 5 without heals, players that know how to weave and maximise efficiency on cooldowns are the only ones who can do this.

Captain has a high skill-ceiling, you act like every Captain is at it when I'd estimate 95% or more are nowhere even close.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

The class work they are doing tends to be really inefficient and it isn't improving the situation.

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Is it possible you've finally come to the conclusion that they're incapable? :)

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Originally Posted by BinaryTertiary

https://imgur.com/tXl3g6Q

ok

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Ah yes, one of those kids who chain into a topic just to hope he can trigger a person.
It's me that argues with some people on a more personal level, then this boii chains in and hopes he hits a snare by posting it into a cappy forum topic.

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''YES IVE POSTED SOME INFORMATION OF ZAHEER NOW HE'S GONNA BE SO TRIGGERED!!!!''

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alright fanboii, if I wanted to hide that I could've deleted that whole discussion with one click so nobody would ever see it, but I hope you're able to see past the horizon of that nose of yours and understand I do not care in the slightest.
May this answer crush your hopes and dreams, ps you can write your rage message in private to me so nobody will see it, I promise I will keep it private.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Elmagor

No they can't. In last stream Severlin clearly says what class fixes after every update never ending process and they can't make some balance what can stay for 2-3 years.

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Them saying that -> proceeds by introducing a new class

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

The class work they are doing tends to be really inefficient and it isn't improving the situation.

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lmaoooo

Your argument this entire time, thread after thread has been that SSG are more than capable and we should allow them to delve into the Captain class to fix it up and balance it, and that they won't mess it up or break it, now you're admitting that you don't believe that at all but still arguing for them to do it anyway?

If you want to see examples of why we're all averse to any class nerfs, particularly Captains, see EVERY CLASS NERF EVER in the history of the game, there are more than I can count.

- Champ was very underwhelming with no survivability or proper damage output, then they were buffed into madness with bubbles, they could hit like a truck whilst tanking, it was exceptionally fun but honestly just needed the bubbles moved into Blue exclusively and it'd have been fine. Instead it got nerfed into 5 years of being completely un-usable for almost all content.

- Hunter was underwhelming, DPS was mediocre and every skill required standing still, blue-line was junk, Imp Fleetness set bonus turned Blue Hunter into something to be feared and it was promptly nerfed into utter oblivion a few months later after high survival, high mobility, moderate DPS build upset too many non-Hunters. Red-line was still absolutely meh and everyone stopped bothering with the class.

- Hunter again, 2-3 years later received another Blue-line rework, turning it into an absolute DPS machine but with far less survivability, we got about 8 months of that before once again a heavy-handed nerf turned the class from the best ST DPSer to the worst, and for the next 3 years Hunters became obsolete until just recently.

Warden has a history of a yearly Over-powered Under-powered balance tweak that sees them either top of the list or the worst class in the game, this has happened every year, year on year, for about 10 years now and is beyond a joke. I mained Warden for a decade but have given up because the class never stops shifting the goal posts.

- Rune-Keepers, Lightning finally viable as a build again after EIGHT YEARS, they got ~6 months, long enough for everyone to gear one then nerfed into the state they're in now, sub-par DPSer that only brings DNF to the table, but 30% less damage output than Hunters/Champs so why bother bringing them?

- Beorning, from conception red DPS has gone from being: Excellent, then utter trash with Execute nerf, then amazing again with some other buffs, but then QQ caused it to get nerfed and now a red Beorning is a literal joke, which is a shame as it's pretty fun to DPS on and has a lot of potential. Now they're just an amazing healing class or a mediocre tank, a complete shift in what they initially began good at.

The list is almost endless for heavy-handed class nerfs that take a functioning class that is excelling at one role for the first time in years, and is then driven face down into the dirt by players like you (Joedan) crying for nerfs instead of simply asking for the other classes to be brought up to the same level, which we've seen time and time again they are capable of doing, every time they've buffed one of the classes in the past it's been for the better for the playerbase, the only exception I'd say was the oversight with the RK rotation after the recent lightning buff.

You simply cannot take things away from players that play a class for those things without a) upsetting those players and b) causing them to stop bothering. Adding to other classes may make them decide to FOTM to the next fun thing, and that is fine because you don't lose a player, but you can't detract from their experience to "please" another's jealousy.

Once again, and hopefully the final time myself and ~10 others have to re-iterate this very same point:

Nerfing Captains into oblivion does not magically fix Blue Wardens, Champions, Beornings or Guardians. They do not suddenly become viable for the content with the absence of Captains.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

Once again, and hopefully the final time myself and ~10 others have to re-iterate this very same point:

Nerfing Captains into oblivion does not magically fix Blue Wardens, Champions, Beornings or Guardians. They do not suddenly become viable for the content with the absence of Captains.

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Give this man a medal!

+1 to your entire post, and literally the exact same thing I have been saying, as WE HAVE ALL been saying for the past 6 months.

I know Captains are ridiculously strong, I don't play one, and I'm totally fine with it.

Please don't nerf any classes, nerfing does much more harm than good. What we need is to FIX bear, warden, guard, and even champ tanking so that we have more tanks as options.

You know what is going to happen if Vastin listens to this thread, his team will destroy captains just like they destroy every other class they try to "modify for balance".

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Originally Posted by Strider5548

You know what is going to happen if Vastin listens to this thread, his team will destroy captains just like they destroy every other class they try to "modify for balance".

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https://fazewp-fazemediainc.netdna-s...spit-take-.gif

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Is it possible you've finally come to the conclusion that they're incapable? :)

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No, I've come to the conclusion that their current approach is awful. Quite a different conclusion really.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

Captain has a high skill-ceiling, you act like every Captain is at it when I'd estimate 95% or more are nowhere even close.

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Yellow Captain has 3 cooldowns that you might legitimately need to monitor, 4 if you really want to put emphasis on holding defeat response rallying cry as a response to burst. 2 of these cooldowns are 1m long, the third is 2m and super-situational. Are you really gonna tell me that agonising over when to press 2 buttons each minute gives a spec a "high skill-ceiling"? No matter when you press them you're gonna get value, yes you'll get more value carefully timing it for specific events but with 25-30s durations you're covered for a good chunk of a bosses skill rotation. A captain who just keeps the buffs up and fires of To-Arms/Banner off cooldown is still going to be operating at near 80% effectiveness.

You seem fixated on the idea that the reason so few Captains do AM T5 without a healer is because they aren't skilled enough when in reality the main barrier to doing that on most Captains is probably gear or the availability of strong DPSers. Yellow Captain in particular has a very low skill floor and a moderately low skill ceiling. You can make a lot of mistakes on Captain before you legitimately come into danger of wiping, it's not a spec that lives or dies by a single mistimed key press. I'm not going to pretend that other tanks are much different, Beorning even manages to be even simpler somehow. At best you can probably say that Blue Warden is the only tank with a skill ceiling worth talking about and even that is mostly just a case of building muscle-memory. This definitely needs to change a bit; Beornings need to have their mitigation boosts become something they must actively work to maintain, Guardians could probably do with a lower cooldown on break ranks (with slightly lower duration) so they have more opportunity to trade defence for offence and Captains could really do with having a bunch of their support being pushed into things they actively need to maintain.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

A series of examples that follow a pattern of saying something along the lines of "X class was buffed to be super good and then they nerfed it to suck again after a short time"

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You're kinda highlighting that every poorly executed nerf is done shortly after an ill-considered buff. Seems we'd avoid a lot of heartache by just banning buffs now.

In full seriousness this whole "NERFS ARE BAD" rhetoric is grounded in ignorance and ignorance alone. When it comes to class balance buffs and nerfs are essentially the same thing. They are a tool by which one can push a spec closer to their competitors. If one spec outperforms 5 others you can nerf the one spec down to meet them and thus balance is restored, if one spec underperforms you can buff that one spec up to meet the others and balance is restored. Things get a bit questionable when you insist on buffing 5 specs up a significant amount instead of nerfing the outlier down to their (moderately equal) level.

Why make 100 changes across 5 specs when you could make 10 changes to one and achieve essentially the same outcome?

If buffs to other tank specs made sense you can be sure I'd advocate for that...but they don't. The other tank specs are within a reasonable range of one another, Captain alone stands as an outlier and so Captain can easily be identified as the most in need of reworking.

It's pretty funny to read these threads where YOU (players) are bashing each-other instead of concentrating to real problem - SSG. They don't give a #### about current abysmal tank imbalance which was introduced with tiered instance scaling and awfully bad instance designs since MM cluster, unless you as players are really doing something about that - that means STOP GIVING THEM ANY MONEY!!!
The latest crazy Valar sale just confirms their intentions about not doing any meaningful tank-class balance in near future - "we don't really give a ####, just buy a valar and level only meaningful tank (captain)". Instead they are wasting their devs time on some nonsense gimmicks like "Brawler" class and "River hobbits". But good luck to people , who are still giving any money to SSG in hope to get any good end-game content and class balance in near future ...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

If buffs to other tank specs made sense you can be sure I'd advocate for that...but they don't. The other tank specs are within a reasonable range of one another, Captain alone stands as an outlier and so Captain can easily be identified as the most in need of reworking.

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Just because the other 4 tank specs are moderately close to one another (which is already false considering warden/champ are significantly behind) does not therefore posit that where they are is a good place. That is flawed logic, and their inability to complete the highest difficulty of content supports that fact.

Whether you want to dismiss Remm T4/5 or not, it IS the highest level of difficulty this level-cap has, and nerfing Captains will not suddenly mean that these other 4 classes are suddenly able to now do this content, and to also use the argument that they are capable of tanking the rest of the content is also not a sound argument (considering I very much doubt neither Champ or Warden is capable of tanking Thossolun/Shelob even on T3).

I don't recall any Non-Captain being able to tank the first boss on Filth-Well, at least not until we were wildly over-geared.
I don't recall any BChamp / Warden being able to tank the second or third boss in Lamentation OR the Fallen Kings for that matter and even then Beornings + Guardians only IF the group was extremely good (even less so on Lamentation Third Boss until certain changes were made).

As it goes, I hardly recall any non-captains being able to tank any of the instances on the highest tier (except for the 3mans, bar Filth-Well) when they first dropped, only when we were at a point when we had almost the best possible gear available at the time was it then possible for non-captains (or considerably good groups who used Beornings/Guardians but this is within 2-5% of the general player base at most, which even then was a struggle) to be able to tank the content on offer.

Ergo, there is either a problem with the other 4 classes, or there is a problem with the content, so which is it? Hmm?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

You're kinda highlighting that every poorly executed nerf is done shortly after an ill-considered buff. Seems we'd avoid a lot of heartache by just banning buffs now.

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Except that isn't true of the situation at all? Everything you are asking to happen (being easier to nerf one class and then address the others) is EXACTLY what happened with RKs in this past year.

The RK Revamp made Yellow-Line viable, in the grand-scheme of things the only problem was that Hunters had scaled extremely badly from 120 and Champs were struggling to compete in ST, other than the yellow-line rotation being absolutely brain dead, RKs were in a perfectly fine position (and IN FACT doing less dps than Burglars and Wardens, they were THIRD on the DPS list), yet, there was thread, upon thread, upon thread, calling out for RK nerfs, saying they were godmode, saying they were easy, blah blah blah, exactly what we have going on right now in relation to Captains.

What was SSG's response? Let's nerf the class into oblivion, whilst, at the same time, buffing up Hunters and Champs who were lagging behind RKs - so instead of bringing two classes up to par with the current meta, they preferred to nerf the "meta" (according to the forums) and then proceeded to buff the two classes that were lagging behind anyway, so now we are in a position where RKs are so far behind, they are not even considered anymore for the higher tiers of content.

Do you still not understand that SSG is incapable?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Marxlne

It's pretty funny to read these threads where YOU (players) are bashing each-other instead of concentrating to real problem - SSG. They don't give a #### about current abysmal tank imbalance which was introduced with tiered instance scaling and awfully bad instance designs since MM cluster, unless you as players are really doing something about that - that means STOP GIVING THEM ANY MONEY!!!
The latest crazy Valar sale just confirms their intentions about not doing any meaningful tank-class balance in near future - "we don't really give a ####, just buy a valar and level only meaningful tank (captain)". Instead they are wasting their devs time on some nonsense gimmicks like "Brawler" class and "River hobbits". But good luck to people , who are still giving any money to SSG in hope to get any good end-game content and class balance in near future ...

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That happens because they consider Rem and MM cluster as already past project, and don't want waste their time and resources to make huge changes for it. Did you know any MMO what have, (just imagine) complete revamp for all tank classes in 2021 to help them tank instance created in 2019? No. No one waste resources for that. They need revamp guardian in the past, right in time where they introduce Rem. Right now it's too late and pointless. They more smart when some players who create 100000 topics every day asking for buffing their class. If you don't see result, why you keep creating them?

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Yellow Captain has 3 cooldowns that you might legitimately need to monitor, 4

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It has nothing to do with watching a cooldown timer tick away and clicking it, it has everything to do with knowing from tells in a fight when is a good time, when is necessary to use a given skill and the rotation of which you should use for optimal efficiency.

I guess as they say, though, arguing with an idiot....

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Why make 100 changes across 5 specs when you could make 10 changes to one and achieve essentially the same outcome?

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Jesus Christ. HOW MANY TIMES? Are you trolling us all rn?

Me 24 hrs ago: Once again, and hopefully for the final time...

Nerfing Captains into oblivion does not magically fix Blue Wardens, Champions, Beornings or Guardians. They do not suddenly become viable for the content with the absence of Captains.


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Please, for the love of god explain to me how nerfing Captains makes Champion tanks viable for Remmorchant Tier 5. Please, I would just love to know.

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

Please, for the love of god explain to me how nerfing Captains makes Champion tanks viable for Remmorchant Tier 5. Please, I would just love to know.

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Same.

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

It has nothing to do with watching a cooldown timer tick away and clicking it, it has everything to do with knowing from tells in a fight when is a good time, when is necessary to use a given skill and the rotation of which you should use for optimal efficiency.

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Very few Captain skills matter in regards to when you press them, the majority of effects easily maintain a 100% uptime. It's not a high skill spec. Red Captain legitimately requires effort to maximise your performance that is something you can easily consider a moderate to high skill ceiling specialisation but yellow Captain is most definitely not that. It's dishonest to pretend it is.

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

Nerfing Captains into oblivion does not magically fix Blue Wardens, Champions, Beornings or Guardians. They do not suddenly become viable for the content with the absence of Captains.

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They...are viable though. They just can't compete with Captains (still not advocating for an absence of Captains in the tank role by the way). As far as actually tanking content goes (i.e. maintaining personal defence and holding aggro) they do perfectly fine, they just can't help their fellowship bypass mechanics via IHW/LS and they don't passively throw out a bevy of buffs. Not that they should be doing either of those things really. Slapping a motivating speech equivalent on Beornings certainly boosts how competitive they are but it doesn't fit with the spec at all and you'd just wind up comboing yellow Captain and Beorning in that situation.

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

Please, for the love of god explain to me how nerfing Captains makes Champion tanks viable for Remmorchant Tier 5. Please, I would just love to know.

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Depends in how you adjust them. Migrating shield of the dunedain over to blue and improving blues single target healing thus bringing it in line as a competitive healer would notably improve the viability of other tank specs. They do need to sort out the motivating speech issue, stripping it from blue/yellow and making it raidwide in red would probably work as a moderately effective band-aid solution until they can come up with something better that doesn't force you to absolutely need a Captain in every raid group. No class should be that singularly required after all.

Certainly Chank wouldn't be totally ok with that change alone. The spec is pretty messy all round and needs some trait adjustments but...it doesn't need random totally new powerful support abilities added. It's an aggressive tank built around managing defensive cooldowns, the fact that a few of them aren't quite potent enough to warrant the long cooldowns they currently have doesn't mean they should be getting totally unrelated buffs.

What do you even want to add to these other specs to make them compete with current yellow captain? You want to give Chanks a double rez? Give Beornings a raidwide version of sacrifice that just deletes incoming damage instead of redirecting? You're insisting that these specs would be fine if they were buffed but you don't seem to have any real clue would those buffs would look like. Some people are at least offering a solution that would result in tanks being on a more even footing but you're just waving your hands and saying there's a magic solution whilst being careful to never mention what that magic solution is.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Ergo, there is either a problem with the other 4 classes, or there is a problem with the content, so which is it? Hmm?

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Defensively blue guardian/Beorning are borderline on the same tier as yellow Captain. If you have a scenario where a yellow Captain can tank something but a blue beorning/guard can't then you probably have some silly groupwide damage mechanic that healers can't cope with. So I guess content is a little poorly designed. The thing is...Captain is quite probably the cause of this bad design. They have to balance high tier content around the best players can bring after all so naturally they'd need to overdo fellowship-wide damage if they were to have any chance of stressing a healer playing in a yellow captain group. The longer this imbalance goes on the more content they'll design around the overpowered spec.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Except that isn't true of the situation at all? Everything you are asking to happen (being easier to nerf one class and then address the others) is EXACTLY what happened with RKs in this past year.

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Current yellow RK is moderately balanced. It's not a strong option in terms of pure DPS but it still has access to very powerful support abilities. People just aren't being pushed to need those support abilities right now so naturally they take higher DPS options.
Nerf the support and sure, they can go bump it back up to being competitive DPS. It's not really hard to grasp that a spec that has a double rez and the ability to grab a fairly notable raidwide defensive cooldown...probably shouldn't be that close to topping the DPS charts.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Very few Captain skills matter in regards to when you press them

They...are viable though.

Depends in how you adjust them. Migrating shield of the dunedain over to blue and improving blues single target healing thus bringing it in line as a competitive healer would notably improve the viability of other tank specs.

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Losing the will to keep responding to you as you just continually spout nonsense. Captain skills don't matter when you press them? Okay... Next T5 Remm I run I am going to pop every single skill on my bar the moment the fight starts and then AFK. "Joedangod on the forums said that's all I have to do" will be my excuse when we wipe 40 seconds later because I wasn't rotating my defensives properly.

They are not viable, hence why they are unable to complete the difficult content that currently exists. I don't understand how you can just ignore these glaring facts time and time again? And again, and again... And... Again.

Your suggestion is not to buff any tanks, but only nerf Captains, and that makes Chanks viable because Captains can then come into a raid as a blue-line healer and use its cooldowns on the Chank? lol. So your perfect world with nasty OP Captain tanks out of the equation sees all the other tank classes only viable if they rely on the tanking CDs of another class under the guise of Captains being accepted as healers but not tanks.

Next up, a Joedangod thread: "Nerf Captains, they've taken the spots of Minstrels with their bubble!!!!"

There is absolutely no doubt that if they buffed ST healing and gave us a bubble in blue-line Captains would be the highest parsing and strongest healers of any class. I can already sustain 250-300k HPS and it peaks at nearly 400k in ideal scenarios. Clearly you're a main captain since you've shared so much rotational knowledge on these forums, and you already know this. So you're not advocating for turning Captain into the most OP healer instead of tank, are you?

i suppose people are missing the original point of this thread. i never said all the other tanks should stay as they are, only captain tanks need a nerf.
as a matter of fact, not only do i think the other tanks need serious buffs (with main priority on guard since they have nothing else than tanking... being a mediocre second choice doesn't help them at all), i also think that there needs to be a serious change in content, cause atm most boss fights just screw over the non cappy tanks with mechanics like tactical stuff that just ignores bpe to begin with and high mit debuffs, which hurt mitigation tanks much more than morale tanks, among other things.

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

Losing the will to keep responding to you as you just continually spout nonsense. Captain skills don't matter when you press them? Okay... Next T5 Remm I run I am going to pop every single skill on my bar the moment the fight starts and then AFK. "Joedangod on the forums said that's all I have to do" will be my excuse when we wipe 40 seconds later because I wasn't rotating my defensives properly.

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You've only really got two that aren't 100% uptime and those aren't big enough magnitude to cause you to wipe. Just don't press the blue buttons and you're good. Pressing everything else off cooldown is perfectly fine. Yellow Captain has a whole lot of filler. Granted if you do go into that run please tell them that "Yellow Captain is a high skill ceiling specialisation". I think they could do with a laugh.

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

They are not viable, hence why they are unable to complete the difficult content that currently exists. I don't understand how you can just ignore these glaring facts time and time again? And again, and again... And... Again.

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It's already been pointed out they're fine in Stairs. They're technically not going to struggle that much in Remmorchant, they can execute the tanking part reasonably well but people have this weird expectation that your tank should be able to halve the damage everyone receives during things like blood surge. Not that anyone is gonna try that out since Captain makes things so much easier and nobody really wants to put more effort into doing a run than they have to. Same reason why you won't really see anyone other than Captain boss tanking AD, it's not that they definitely can't...it's just people don't want to take anything less than the broken OP spec. Heh, block people from speccing yellow Captain and the progression race for T5 might even last longer than a day.

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

Your suggestion is not to buff any tanks, but only nerf Captains, and that makes Chanks viable because Captains can then come into a raid as a blue-line healer and use its cooldowns on the Chank? lol. So your perfect world with nasty OP Captain tanks out of the equation sees all the other tank classes only viable if they rely on the tanking CDs of another class under the guise of Captains being accepted as healers but not tanks.

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Technically a yellow bear would also work for external defensives, yellow sacrifice being fairly powerful and all. But you know, heaven forbid healers use cooldowns on tanks to help them survive. We are totally better off just having tanks be entirely self sufficient and ensuring healers having nothing outside of rotational heals to bail tanks out in tricky situations. That scenario feels great for all involved!

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

[/I]There is absolutely no doubt that if they buffed ST healing and gave us a bubble in blue-line Captains would be the highest parsing and strongest healers of any class. I can already sustain 250-300k HPS and it peaks at nearly 400k in ideal scenarios. Clearly you're a main captain since you've shared so much rotational knowledge on these forums, and you already know this. So you're not advocating for turning Captain into the most OP healer instead of tank, are you?

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Yeah, I know that Blue Captain has the highest sustained AoE hps of any spec. I mentioned that earlier:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

It's not that blue captain is bad, in fact it's straight up the best healer for what it does (massive sustained AoE HPS). Yeah, the damage profile of content doesn't typically match that specialisation but giving them the strongest external defensive in the game for ST situations is a big ol' bump to viability. Most of the danger comes in a short window anyway so it...might make them a solid option?

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Have another post somewhere mentioning that their AoE healing does need some adjustments but you do get overly upset at the mention of the word "nerf" so I thought it would detract from the point at the time to go into detail about all the changes blue Captain probably requires. My bad I guess, although said changes likely mentioned removing revealing mark so you probably would've begun to froth at the mouth.


You know, I can't help but notice you didn't explain what these miracle buffs for all the other tanks that make them competitive with Captains would look like. Makes me wonder if you thought about what would be required to level the field...and realised that such buffs sounded utterly ridiculous.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Depends in how you adjust them. Migrating shield of the dunedain over to blue and improving blues single target healing thus bringing it in line as a competitive healer would notably improve the viability of other tank specs. They do need to sort out the motivating speech issue, stripping it from blue/yellow and making it raidwide in red would probably work as a moderately effective band-aid solution until they can come up with something better that doesn't force you to absolutely need a Captain in every raid group. No class should be that singularly required after all.

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Firstly, your proposed "nerf" to yellow captain is a "buff" to blue line Captain (I thought you were against buffs?), secondly, this automatically invalidates either Beorning or Minstrel, neither of which can BE invalidated in group selection either, considering their offensive support is too great to lose.

Secondly the problem is also not just Motivating speech, it's the tactics buff, it's to arms, it's having two banners, it's having more rezzes, 2 Captains are the bedrock of any raid, and unless you plan to completely redesign the class from the ground upwards, this will not change.

Thirdly, it isn't the only class that has an absolute requirement in raids, Lore-Masters, YBurgs, and I would even argue now that a Beorning (due to the nature of their offensive support) are all required.

Lastly, you also just exacerbate the problem onto the Healers as well, whereby you now have 4 Healers (with RKs already struggling to even get taken for ANY role in the first place) competing for 2 spots, where 2 of those classes are still clearly the "right" choice, and you still have 5 tanks competing for 1 (ONE) spot.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Certainly Chank wouldn't be totally ok with that change alone. The spec is pretty messy all round and needs some trait adjustments but...it doesn't need random totally new powerful support abilities added. It's an aggressive tank built around managing defensive cooldowns, the fact that a few of them aren't quite potent enough to warrant the long cooldowns they currently have doesn't mean they should be getting totally unrelated buffs.

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"Aren't quite potent enough"? What dreamland are you living in, really? It does need new abilities, or the old ones need to be heavily reworked, the ONLY current cooldown that a Blue Champ has is Sudden Defence (and perhaps to an "extent" Adamant); the Dire Need heal, due to it's relation to power, is garbage, Unbreakable, is garbage, Fight On, is garbage, Bracing Attack, is garbage. The spec needs an entire overhaul.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

What do you even want to add to these other specs to make them compete with current yellow captain? You want to give Chanks a double rez? Give Beornings a raidwide version of sacrifice that just deletes incoming damage instead of redirecting? You're insisting that these specs would be fine if they were buffed but you don't seem to have any real clue would those buffs would look like. Some people are at least offering a solution that would result in tanks being on a more even footing but you're just waving your hands and saying there's a magic solution whilst being careful to never mention what that magic solution is.

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You are very narrow-minded in your approach to how you think other tanks should be buffed to be brought up to par with Captain, you focus simply on the Captain cooldowns as the "foundation" of your suggestions. Fundamentally content should be designed for two tanks; all tank classes should offer their own brand of support utility to the group whilst having sufficient enough defensive cooldowns.

Because of the way Captain is designed, at present, a YCaptain spot is non-negotiable (this is a product of the changes to Oathbreakers at 120 as well as the necessary requirement of having Motivation + Support Heals + Banners + More rezzes in both groups, it is not necessary to bring two red captains, so 1 red and 1 yellow is the approach).

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

You're insisting that these specs would be fine if they were buffed but you don't seem to have any real clue would those buffs would look like.

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I can offer you plenty of suggestions on what these buffs should look like, but based on your track record, none of them fit into "your" view of what a tank should be (an aggro-bot). So you'd discount them straight up anyway. *Shrugs*

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

The thing is...Captain is quite probably the cause of this bad design.

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In YOUR opinion, you don't know that, you can't know that. Nor does that change the fact the content IS poorly designed, it doesn't matter what the reasons are. The content is badly designed, THIS is the first problem stopping other tanks from getting into the content, the fact that the content itself doesn't allow them to.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Current yellow RK is moderately balanced.

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Lol, what? Being 30% behind every other DPS class and not being picked at all for end-game high-tier content, is, balanced?? Who knew.

Does this mean Guardians are balanced too? xD

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

You know, I can't help but notice you didn't explain what these miracle buffs for all the other tanks that make them competitive with Captains would look like. Makes me wonder if you thought about what would be required to level the field...and realised that such buffs sounded utterly ridiculous.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

You're insisting that these specs would be fine if they were buffed but you don't seem to have any real clue would those buffs would look like.

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Ok.

Firstly, all raid based content needs to be designed so that you are REQUIRED to have two tanks, and there is a multitude of ways this can be done, twin fights that require targets to be separated, twin fights that debuff you to the other bosses damage (Boss 3 Anvil), requiring tank swapping due to some kind of stacking debuff/bleed, main boss + adds, or either by it not being possible to tank the main boss alone (Durchest threat mechanics come to mind).

Secondly, BPE needs to become relevant again, for ALL tanks.

Thirdly, the tactical mitigation cap should be more readily achievable, vitality should offer 1 point of tactical mitigation to all tank specs.

Lastly, mechanics, in any raid, should not be able to be completely ignored or bypassed by a tank (or by ANY class) using a "Cooldown" skill, that is garbage content design.

Without requiring two tanks, regardless of any changes you make to YCaptain, it will not remove the fact that one captain per group is "required", making them viable healers will either make a minstrel or a Beorning lose their spot, granted if Beornings become viable tanks you could drop the Beorning healer for an RK or Cappy anyway (it would have to be captain, again, for the buffs).

Morale:

In lieu of the fact that Captains get such a high passive morale % gain (even with a suggested 8% reduction), all Tank specialisations, bar Yellow Captain should have Vitality:Morale at 1:5. Captains should maintain their lower 1:4.5

Blue Guard:

• Blue Guardians is the only "Main tank" specialisation that doesn't offer a +% morale buff, this was in lieu of the fact that they are the only tank spec that gets such a high +% mitigation bonus. This was fine, when the trait trees were first introduced and the morale ceiling was much lower than it is today. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case, and as such they need a +10-15% morale bonus by being in Blue, and a +20% bonus for being in Yellow (as a result of forgoing fortification).
• Litany of Defiance, should, as it does now, redirect 50% of the fellowships taken damage to the Guardian, however, for every stack of fortification you have when you use LoD, you should negate 10% of said damage per stack (thus, redirecting 50% of the fellowships taken damage, and negating 50% of it).
• Litany of Defiance should also place a -20% incoming damage buff on the fellowship, (5s base duration, increased by 1s per stack of fortification).
• The fortification bonus applied to the fellowship should be increased to 5%, however, this should NOT stack with the Captains Herald of Hope 3% (+8% passive mitigation gain for the entire group, tanks included is too much).
• Shield wall should redirect all incoming damage to the Guardian as it does now, however, similarly to Litany, it should negate a certain % based on your stacks of fortification.
• Defensive Expertise should be +7.5% (up from 5%).
• Guardians Ward: Tactics should offer +% tactical mitigation (Perhaps +2-3%) rather than +x tactical mitigation rating.
• Combat state immunity should be stripped from Reversal.
• Disorientation reworked, so instead of reducing the targets B/P/E you reduce the targets armour value / or mitigation by -5%.
• Warriors Heart should offer a -20% incoming damage reduction for the entire duration of the skill not just for the length of the bubble.
• Break Ranks should be it's own skill and it should offer a 15% damage buff for 25s, with a 1m cooldown (mirroring Captains to Arms in some way).
• Bolstering Blocks should heal 2%.

Guardians main issue is they fail in providing any meaningful support (offensive or defensive), the suggested changes to disorientation, litany and break ranks will now mean they offer considerable support, offensively and defensively, that can now begin to rival a Captain, whilst also boosting them slightly defensively.

Wardens:

• Morale Taps and self HoTs should have their effectiveness increased by 25% (not final).
• Close Call should heal 2%.
• Revel in Combat should be reworked; instead, all defensive line gambit buffs used/active on the Warden should apply 50% of their effect to the fellowship. This would deal with one glaring issue facing Wardens, which is lack of defensive support.
• For every target affected by Conviction +2% damage buff to the fellowship (totalling at +12%).
• Counter-Attack should be extended to parry as well.
• Never Surrender should be reduced to 3m in Blue, it should also be reverted to its old version whereby it can prevent 1-shots.
• Fellowship Protector should apply a +1% mitigation buff to the Warden for every member of the fellowship affected by Conviction (totalling at 6%).
• Stand your Ground should increase your Block and Parry by 5% (up from 2%).
• Wardens NEED another cooldown skill of some kind, my suggestion would be a 100% evade buff for 15s with a 3min cooldown, also making them cc immune (mirroring Guardians Juggernaut).
• Restoration should be an AoE HoT.

Wardens lag behind in all areas, these changes allow Wardens to offer a wealth of defensive and offensive support to their group, whilst also making them much much sturdier with more self/group healing capabilities and an added cooldown.

Beorning:

• Counter should be a 20% evade chance.
• Worthy Adversary should also offer 10% crit defence along with it's other buffs.
• Down but not Out should offer a 50% morale heal (In man Form) if you drop below 10% Morale.
• All on the Line should redirect 40% and you should mitigate 30% (Up from 30% and 20% respectively).
• Recuperate should become an AoE HoT.
• Thickened Hide duration should be increased by +5s and the heal should also be increased to 2%.

Beornings already offer an absolute wealth of support (albeit offensive support rather than defensive), so unlike with Guardian and Warden, the goal here was to make them sturdier, I also never understood why Recuperate was only able to be used on the Beorning, this change will allow Beornings to more readily help another target with additional healing, and also potentially provide another heal for Yellow Beornings (which lack skills anyway).

Blue Champ:
I had already made a Blue Champ proposed rework thread on the bullroarer forums some time ago, so I'll just list the main changes below.

• Lower the cooldown of Challenge from 30 seconds to either 15 or 10 seconds.
• Increase Riposte Damage, by around 50%.
• Either, allow Riposte to be used without a parry response OR allow it to always critically hit, either change would help with threat.
• Masochism rework, increase the % chance for the effect to apply from 20% to 50%, but lower the reflect from 30% to 15%-10%, and make it generate more threat than it does currently.
• Bracing Against Defeat, make the trait transform Bracing Attack into a morale % based heal either 15% with a 30-second cooldown or 25% with a 1-minute cooldown either would work.
• Exalted Combatant, make this mirror down but not out on Beornings, so, something like 50% morale at 10-15% health?
• Quick with a Blade should make Merciful Strike apply a debuff to the target that increases incoming damage by 5-10%. Also transform the skill into a force taunt.
• Adamant has a way too short base duration, being only 10 seconds and max 15 with a legacy. The standard base duration should be increased by +5 seconds.
• Dire Need should be a flat 50% morale heal.
• Unbreakable should offer both Physical and Tactical mitigation percentage instead of only Tactical Mitigation rating (capping out at +10% phys/tact mit and +20% morale, 30s duration, 2min cooldown).
• Fear Nothing should have a base cooldown of 10s.
• In my opinion, Continuous Blood Rage makes no sense as a red trait, and it should be moved into Blue, which would significantly improve Blue Champs tanking against tactical opponents due to the increase in resistance. I would even go so far as to say as a result of this trade off CBR should also pick up one of its former effects whereby it costs morale to use (either in the form of a bleed or, using 1% morale per second).

These changes immediately deal with the fact that Champs are by far the weakest tanks, this allows them to retain their niche whilst also making them a viable choice based on the support they can provide (-% damage in Blade Wall, Champions Challenge and Horn of Champions, as well as an incoming damage buff attached to Merciful Strike).

Captain:
Contrary to belief, I have never been opposed to Captain nerfs, but, at the RIGHT time, and the RIGHT changes, as such my suggestions, are below.

• Reduce two-handed prowess morale % buff by 8-13%.
• Remove the force taunt from Blade of Elendil.
• Reduce the LS Heal to 10% (Absolutely get rid of the Remmo set bonus too).
• Reduce the muster self-heal by 50%. In fact, reduce all healing output from the Yellow Captain by 30-50%.
• Shield of the Dunedain should only be useable on another target.
• Revealing Mark needs a rework (I even said, during the Captain Revamp that this was going to be a bad change, and that people were not considering the long-term effects of our ever-increasing morale pools).

Such changes would effectively reduce the Captains survivability, especially their ability to "solo / self-heal" content, whilst not completely destroying their support.

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None of my suggested changes makes any of the other tanks god-mode, it also in facts brings Captains down to a very moderate level in relation to other tanks, none of the changes makes them mere copies of captains, they all retain their niche, and are true to their core trait lines. All I have done is attempted to make suggestions to make them sturdier where required as well as to make each tank offer their own individual support that makes them as viable as any other tank, however, I know you hate tanks that offer support and believe they should be aggro-bots, so, I doubt we'll ever agree anyway.

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Originally Posted by Kotal

i suppose people are missing the original point of this thread. i never said all the other tanks should stay as they are, only captain tanks need a nerf.
as a matter of fact, not only do i think the other tanks need serious buffs (with main priority on guard since they have nothing else than tanking... being a mediocre second choice doesn't help them at all), i also think that there needs to be a serious change in content, cause atm most boss fights just screw over the non cappy tanks with mechanics like tactical stuff that just ignores bpe to begin with and high mit debuffs, which hurt mitigation tanks much more than morale tanks, among other things.

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So you're saying:

1. No more tactical attacks from mobs
2. BPE should matter most
3. no mit debuffs during fights

Not with you. Why dumb the game down like this?

BPE should work and should work right, a BPE essence should be giving a person a good 1% or more per essence. And there should be no secret block activation that works for skills but doesn't actually block damage. But that seems to happen with guardian right now. If you want to disconnect block from skills then redo the class to depend on something else, or just make the skills active all the time, and give a cooldown only.

Mit debuffs should be removable with draughts or should be temporary enough to allow for someone to bubble you, not just deux x machina, that much I agree with. It's not a game if I can do nothing about it.

But tactical attacks are obviously not something someone can block, parry or evade. And they've always been part of the game. Maybe they need adjustment but not disappearance.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Firstly, your proposed "nerf" to yellow captain is a "buff" to blue line Captain (I thought you were against buffs?), secondly, this automatically invalidates either Beorning or Minstrel, neither of which can BE invalidated in group selection either, considering their offensive support is too great to lose.

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I've written so many posts where I point out that buffs/nerfs are just two ways to reach the same goal that it's getting tiring. I'm all about adjusting outliers to match the average. Yellow Captain far exceeds what everyone else can do therefore a nerf is what would result in it becoming balanced. If Yellow Captain was way behind the other tanks I would be suggesting buffs. Blue Beorning/Wardens/Guardians are all in roughly the same place, they are the metric I am using to determine what is and is not an outlier.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Nor does that change the fact the content IS poorly designed, it doesn't matter what the reasons are. The content is badly designed, THIS is the first problem stopping other tanks from getting into the content, the fact that the content itself doesn't allow them to.

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You can't complain about content and request content be changed whilst also advocating buffing specs up to match the content. I am aware that nerfing Captains down to a similar level as other tanks would make the current content more difficult, it wouldn't be impossible but it would be pretty rough. That rough period would only last until Gundabad though, new level cap means a fresh start to content design as you don't have to balance around busted outliers. Is it an imperfect solution? Yeah, but it's an imperfect world.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Lol, what? Being 30% behind every other DPS class and not being picked at all for end-game high-tier content, is, balanced?? Who knew.

Does this mean Guardians are balanced too? xD

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Read the rest of that paragraph in future. Yellow RK would be totally unbalanced if it pulled competitive DPS whilst maintaining that amount of support. They would effectively count for being 100% of a DPS spot...whilst offering 30% of a support specs power, effectively making them worth 1.3 spots in a raid group. You don't balance a specs power budget based on what it brings to a singular role, you balance what it brings to the group overall. If you bump a competitive DPS specs support value you must then nerf it's DPS so it doesn't exceed the value of other competitive DPS.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Blue Guard:

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Overall you want to give the tank that takes the least tactical damage...more tactical mitigation. Your shield wall change is funny because it guarantees two guardian tanks in all situations, they just shield wall each other and halve all incoming damage. Hooray. You complain about panic skills bypassing mechanics and then you suggest making warriors heart even stronger than it currently is despite the fact that it already operates as an effective recovery from a near death situation. You want litany to be a stronger group defensive cooldown than any healer has access to, yes it matches IHW/LS but whether or not Captains should even have IHW in its current state is contested. Your disorientation change is fine so long as it doesn't stack with other % phys mit reductions (which need to be lower) and your non-stacking fortification bonus is reasonable...but probably should just stick to being 3%. Alternatives > Replacements.

You've not really given it any support that rivals Captain AoE HPS (even with revealing removed) or anything that matches their defensive support in terms of rez/banner/to arms. You also entirely ignored Yellow Guardian.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Wardens:

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Yeah, you miiiight want to look at the effectiveness of morale taps a bit more. Resolution already lets you push up to ~65k hps. ST HoTs could do with the bump though. Revel in Combat change is weird, you're just adding random minor % mit buffs to the fellowship as I doubt your healer cares to receive a bunch of BPE bonuses. You're also buffing mits a bit randomly, we don't need 76% mits Wardens. Dunno why Restoration needs to be AoE, it's a tank not a healer, why does it need multiple AoE HoT's? If you wanna bump Warden survivability in terms of defensive cooldowns you really should focus more on letting healers have externals, 1 decent panic button per tank + healer with external defensive both bumps the amount of communication and gives healers the potential to actually stop a tank from dying.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Beorning:

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Ha, yellow beorning is now king of the healers with access to a ~18k HPS fellowship-wide HoT and a 100% damage redirect with 55% mitigation. I recommend trying a Bear tank at least once before commenting, the class primarily lacks mechanics, not power. If your goal was making them sturdier you probably should have been looking at adding some mechanic for reduced tactical damage because they outright take the least physical damage on average. Preferably you make their physical/tactical mits something they actually have to think about maintaining rather than have them be passive effects.

If you wanna buff yellow beornings then probably start looking at giving them some ST man form HoT's to spread so they actually have something to do that tides them over between burst heals (and gives man form real value). Oh and maybe give them a fellowship-wide defensive cooldown instead of bond.

Still don't know why you're buffing buttons that already effectively make a character invincible for up to 20s. You're just making them better at bypassing mechanics.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Blue Champ:
I had already made a Blue Champ proposed rework thread on the bullroarer forums some time ago, so I'll just list the main changes below.

These changes immediately deal with the fact that Champs are by far the weakest tanks, this allows them to retain their niche whilst also making them a viable choice based on the support they can provide (-% damage in Blade Wall, Champions Challenge and Horn of Champions, as well as an armour value reduction / mitigation debuff attached to Merciful Strike).

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Can't say I've played Chank any time recently so I'll just have to shrug and hope none of your suggestions here are equivalent to any of your suggestions for other classes. Technically Chank isn't the weakest tank though, Yellow Guard can probably take that title (although I guess they have a better defensive cooldown).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Captain:

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Shield change is a little odd, give it to Blue Captain if you're gonna do that. Healing change is fine in theory but not correctly weighted, reduce inspire to blade-bro levels of healing instead of keeping it at song-bro levels (effectively halving it). No other heals really need a nerf as removing revealing mark from yellow captain entirely neuters the bulk of their raid healing. 0 mention of adjusting the double rez. Does absolutely nothing to help with Captain threat generation. Also, for a guy who keeps saying he's against being able to bypass mechanics you really do like to leave in mechanic bypassing abilities. 17s Last Stand will forever be a mechanic bypass, especially with IHW. You've also not removed Motivating Speech. It. Has. To. Go. From. Yellow/Blue....And. Give. Other. Support. Specs. An. Equivalent. Ability.


You can quit with the "aggro bot" line. It's completely incorrect. I want to see tanks taking an active role in maintaining their own defences and aggro management. Right now the difference in damage taken between a Beorning pushing buttons and one that doesn't push any buttons is effectively 0 as the mit buffs apply passively and have no costs. I'd prefer to see a system in which a tank who is actively monitoring and maintaining their defences takes at least 50% less damage than one that doesn't press anything. It's a similar situation with aggro, right now the only thing that truly matters is when you time a taunt. You have little to no ability to hold aggro outside of taunts. I'd prefer to see tanks get damage buffs/adjusted threat modifiers than maintain a system that totally devalues the tanks contribution to building threat.

This is why I object to Yellow Captain support. The vast majority of it is passive effects. You don't really take an active role in deciding where to apply buffs/what buffs to apply. A Yellow Captain is a buff bot.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Read the rest of that paragraph in future. Yellow RK would be totally unbalanced if it pulled competitive DPS whilst maintaining that amount of support. They would effectively count for being 100% of a DPS spot...whilst offering 30% of a support specs power, effectively making them worth 1.3 spots in a raid group. You don't balance a specs power budget based on what it brings to a singular role, you balance what it brings to the group overall. If you bump a competitive DPS specs support value you must then nerf it's DPS so it doesn't exceed the value of other competitive DPS.

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RKs should be with 10-15% of other DPSers as they were during Anvil, and during Anvil in T3 raids you would normally only find 1 RK, why, because every other class did more DPS and you only needed RKs for their fire debuffs. We are now in a position with Yellow RKs which provide NO offensive support to the group and only bring DNF, as such I'd argue they should be with 5-10% of all other DPS classes.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Overall you want to give the tank that takes the least tactical damage...more tactical mitigation.

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Wardens rival their mitigation % for tactical, so again, that isn't true, and in my experience ratings based buffs are inherently flawed considering they struggle to scale and stay relevant, making buffs apply % instead ensures their longevity.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Your shield wall change is funny because it guarantees two guardian tanks in all situations, they just shield wall each other and halve all incoming damage. Hooray.

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Well, shows how much you know about Guardians considering this isn't possible, so good job.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

You complain about panic skills bypassing mechanics and then you suggest making warriors heart even stronger than it currently is despite the fact that it already operates as an effective recovery from a near death situation.

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Warriors Heart does not match Captains Last Stand in any situation at all.

*Furthermore, mechanics need to be better designed so that simply using a cooldown skill on a tank doesn't guarantee you success, for example introducing more 1-shot mechanics if you fail a certain thing, if you fail an interrupt if you fail a corruption removal, if you fail to CJ a target, if you fail to divide bosses from one another, if you drop a puddle in the group which causes 25-50% morale damage a tick, there are so many mechanics that can be used in content that are currently not being used, mechanics that would invalidate using a cooldown skill because you cannot survive failing the mechanic in the first place, and this is all a product of BAD CONTENT DESIGN.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

You want litany to be a stronger group defensive cooldown than any healer has access to, yes it matches IHW/LS but whether or not Captains should even have IHW in its current state is contested.

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It matches IHW, that is the point. It opens Guardians up to being able to perform the role of absorbing damage from the group as and when necessary, and it also means it's NOT something that is only available on one class.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

You've not really given it any support that rivals Captain AoE HPS (even with revealing removed) or anything that matches their defensive support in terms of rez/banner/to arms. You also entirely ignored Yellow Guardian.

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Are we supposed to give Guardians healing capabilities now too? And Yellow Guardians are hardly if ever used in progression high tier content, plus I don't play the spec enough to suggest coherent changes.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Yeah, you miiiight want to look at the effectiveness of morale taps a bit more. Resolution already lets you push up to ~65k hps.

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Resolution is not relative of Exaltation of Battle and Fierce Resolve (I'm aware resolution is classified as a morale-tap, but it's an instant heal rather than a HoT as the other 2 gambits are which is primarily what I was focusing on).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Revel in Combat change is weird, you're just adding random minor % mit buffs to the fellowship as I doubt your healer cares to receive a bunch of BPE bonuses.

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It's not just +% mits, it's +mitigation rating, it's +evade its +parry, it's +% incoming healing, there are a wealth of bonuses on Warden defensive gambits that if they were rolled out onto the fellowship would be almost a level of unrivalled defensive support. It ALSO allows Warden to rival the fortification/herald bonus.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

You're also buffing mits a bit randomly, we don't need 76% mits Wardens. Dunno why Restoration needs to be AoE, it's a tank not a healer, why does it need multiple AoE HoT's?

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Because it begins to rival Captain Healing, and in which case, cap it out at +3%.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

If you wanna bump Warden survivability in terms of defensive cooldowns you really should focus more on letting healers have externals.

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No, I shouldn't. The class has one defensive cooldown, that cannot even be relied upon anymore.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Ha, yellow beorning is now king of the healers.

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They are kings of BURST healing. They suck as sustained healers, it wasn't so much an issue with Thrang at this level-cap as the way he scaled from 120 was a joke. However the 120 version of Thrang was a difficult feat to do on Beorning simply because they lack sustained healing.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

I recommend trying a Bear tank at least once before commenting, the class primarily lacks mechanics, not power. If your goal was making them sturdier you probably should have been looking at adding some mechanic for reduced tactical damage because they outright take the least physical damage on average. Preferably you make their physical/tactical mits something they actually have to think about maintaining rather than have them be passive effects.

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And again, the chances of SSG changing the class fundamentally at this point, is unlikely, so I went for what IS likely, AND they also do need to be sturdier.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Still don't know why you're buffing buttons that already effectively make a character invincible for up to 20s. You're just making them better at bypassing mechanics.

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*See my above comment about mechanics.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Can't say I've played Chank any time recently so I'll just have to shrug and hope none of your suggestions here are equivalent to any of your suggestions for other classes. Technically Chank isn't the weakest tank though, Yellow Guard can probably take that title (although I guess they have a better defensive cooldown).

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Chank is the weakest, by far. A Yellow Guardian is more than capable of solo-healing / surviving themselves through Harrowing or Roost T5, so is any other tank mentioned, all except for a Blue Champ (At least this was the situation prior to 3-peaks, idk about now). Ergo, the weakest. If you want to talk about damage taken on paper, no, it isn't the weakest, but damage taken on paper isn't relative to how the class ACTUALLY plays.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Shield change is a little odd, give it to Blue Captain if you're gonna do that.

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No, simply because Blue Cappies don't need it, and it's a defensive cooldown, that belongs on a tank. Sacrifice with Beornings is an enigma, considering it's available in all 3 lines, and it's effectiveness changes based on traits, so unless you plan to do something similar with SoD, it is fine in Yellow, the point is, Captain has too many cooldowns, and this allows it to offer a high-level of defensive support to its fellow tank.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Healing change is fine in theory but not correctly weighted, reduce inspire to blade-bro levels of healing instead of keeping it at song-bro levels (effectively halving it). No other heals really need a nerf as removing revealing mark from yellow captain entirely neuters the bulk of their raid healing.

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Muster self-heal needs a nerf. As a Yellow Captain in a raid, I can maintain 110k+ HPS, granted 50k HPS comes from Revealing Mark alone, BUT, a Tank should not be outputting 60k HPS on its fellowship. Thus, realistically all healing needs a relative nerf of between 30-50%, it just makes it easier to reduce YCaptain outgoing healing across the board.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

0 mention of adjusting the double rez. Does absolutely nothing to help with Captain threat generation. Also, for a guy who keeps saying he's against being able to bypass mechanics you really do like to leave in mechanic bypassing abilities. 17s Last Stand will forever be a mechanic bypass, especially with IHW. You've also not removed Motivating Speech. It. Has. To. Go. From. Yellow/Blue....And. Give. Other. Support. Specs. An. Equivalent. Ability.

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As I've mentioned before, believing that at this stage in the game SSG is going to begin fundamentally reworking classes from the ground up is not something that is likely ever going to happen - so I focus on the likely. Furthermore, see my above comment (again), in relation to mechanics.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

I want to see tanks taking an active role in maintaining their own defences and aggro management. Right now the difference in damage taken between a Beorning pushing buttons and one that doesn't push any buttons is effectively 0 as the mit buffs apply passively and have no costs. I'd prefer to see a system in which a tank who is actively monitoring and maintaining their defences takes at least 50% less damage than one that doesn't press anything. It's a similar situation with aggro, right now the only thing that truly matters is when you time a taunt. You have little to no ability to hold aggro outside of taunts. I'd prefer to see tanks get damage buffs/adjusted threat modifiers than maintain a system that totally devalues the tanks contribution to building threat.

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And again, you are asking for things that are unlikely never going to happen, accept the limitations of the company who will be implementing the changes and suggest realistic changes that are LIKELY to happen.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

This is why I object to Yellow Captain support. The vast majority of it is passive effects. You don't really take an active role in deciding where to apply buffs/what buffs to apply. A Yellow Captain is a buff bot.

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Captains, regardless of line, are buff-bots. Case and point, that is the class.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

RKs should be with 10-15% of other DPSers as they were during Anvil, and during Anvil in T3 raids you would normally only find 1 RK, why, because every other class did more DPS and you only needed RKs for their fire debuffs. We are now in a position with Yellow RKs which provide NO offensive support to the group and only bring DNF, as such I'd argue they should be with 5-10% of all other DPS classes.

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And then they release some content where a bit more defensive support is required and suddenly everyone brings multiple Yellow RKs for DNF + EoE. Quit looking at singular aspects in isolation, look at the whole. Red/Yellow RK has a ton of power tied into defensive support, the fact that that support isn't required at the present moment does not matter.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Wardens rival their mitigation % for tactical, so again, that isn't true, and in my experience ratings based buffs are inherently flawed considering they struggle to scale and stay relevant, making buffs apply % instead ensures their longevity.

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You're not accounting for redirect.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Well, shows how much you know about Guardians considering this isn't possible, so good job.

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Can't say I've ever had 2 guards in a raid before. Sacrifice + Shield Wall can be cross applied (and litany + IHW although none of this stuff redirects the redirect), wasn't sure on shield wall/shield wall. You're still creating a scenario where a Guardian could reasonably be brought along to just cancel 50% of the damage going into a particular target. Bonus points for the guard using that shield wall mitigates 33% more damage to nullify 83% of the damage coming through.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Warriors Heart does not match Captains Last Stand in any situation at all.

*Furthermore, mechanics need to be better designed so that simply using a cooldown skill on a tank doesn't guarantee you success, for example introducing more 1-shot mechanics if you fail a certain thing, if you fail an interrupt if you fail a corruption removal, if you fail to CJ a target, if you fail to divide bosses from one another, if you drop a puddle in the group which causes 25-50% morale damage a tick, there are so many mechanics that can be used in content that are currently not being used, mechanics that would invalidate using a cooldown skill because you cannot survive failing the mechanic in the first place, and this is all a product of BAD CONTENT DESIGN.

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Yet you promote last stand. A skill that by definition would bypass all the mechanics you've listed. Warriors Heart is a good example of a panic skill. It brings you up to full and makes you ~60% tankier for a short duration. Last Stand is a bad example of a panic skill, it makes you invincible for 17s so no amount of mistakes can result in you dying and you don't get penalised for taking massive damage during that time either. If Last Stand created a heal absorb equal to all damage you took during those 17s it might be balanced, it does not do that (and the duration is too long regardless).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

It matches IHW, that is the point. It opens Guardians up to being able to perform the role of absorbing damage from the group as and when necessary, and it also means it's NOT something that is only available on one class.

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Gonna throw this out there...real crazy thought but...you COULD prevent IHW from being a thing that exists solely on one class by reducing it to be equivalent to the healer cooldowns such as fates OR...by giving healers the damn defensive cooldowns. It's their job to keep the people alive through incoming damage after all.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Are we supposed to give Guardians healing capabilities now too? And Yellow Guardians are hardly if ever used in progression high tier content, plus I don't play the spec enough to suggest coherent changes.

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Nope, but you're the one trying to make guard competitive via buffs to support so I guess you need to figure out a way to make them compete in that regard as well. You could've just gone for a DPS buff that allows it to give value to offence that is equivalent to the defensive value of Captain heals.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

It's not just +% mits, it's +mitigation rating, it's +evade its +parry, it's +% incoming healing, there are a wealth of bonuses on Warden defensive gambits that if they were rolled out onto the fellowship would be almost a level of unrivalled defensive support. It ALSO allows Warden to rival the fortification/herald bonus.

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They're mostly outmatched by motivating speech alone. 2.5% fellowship wide mits and 5% incoming healing just don't compete with 10% more morale + a bunch of other stats. You're also just tacking support abilities on to the spec for the sake of it. It's gonna be essentially passive as you're sharing your own buffs here and for obvious reasons you'd have been putting those up anyway. If neither class is going to actively think about the buffs you might as well remove them entirely. Same net result.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Because it begins to rival Captain Healing, and in which case, cap it out at +3%.

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That's predicated on the argument that Captain AoE healing should be standard for tanks. It shouldn't. Captain is the support tank, let it be the one with more defensive support. Other tanks can stick to having higher DPS.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

No, I shouldn't. The class has one defensive cooldown, that cannot even be relied upon anymore.

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And healers having externals give tanks access to a second defensive cooldown. It literally does the same thing but without the danger of letting tanks coast from cooldown to cooldown in order to complete content entirely without a healer. Tanks and healers are supposed to be working in concert, you shouldn't just relegate healers to doing nothing but blast out large heals constantly.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

They are kings of BURST healing. They suck as sustained healers, it wasn't so much an issue with Thrang at this level-cap as the way he scaled from 120 was a joke. However the 120 version of Thrang was a difficult feat to do on Beorning simply because they lack sustained healing.

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And you've just promoted giving them borderline Captain levels of sustained healing to go with that burst with little to no effort required to maintain it. They definitely need some options for sustained healing between burst windows but not like that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

And again, the chances of SSG changing the class fundamentally at this point, is unlikely, so I went for what IS likely, AND they also do need to be sturdier.

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Not in terms of physical damage and stop arbitrarily deciding "that's not likely". They're literally making an entirely new class right now, large class efforts are clearly not entirely out of the realm of possibility. And I really don't want to advocate for blind numerical buffs to classes, I argued against those when they did them to Beornings before and I'll argue against them here. If a class has no mechanics it does not deserve to be useable, it might as well be an AI at that point.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

*See my above comment about mechanics.

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*See the multiple mentions that allowing for long duration "I cannot die" buttons to exist lets you bypass mechanics. If you don't want mechanics bypassing to be a thing quit asking for tanks to have abilities that are so strong you can bypass mechanics.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Chank is the weakest, by far. A Yellow Guardian is more than capable of solo-healing / surviving themselves through Harrowing or Roost T5, so is any other tank mentioned, all except for a Blue Champ (At least this was the situation prior to 3-peaks, idk about now). Ergo, the weakest. If you want to talk about damage taken on paper, no, it isn't the weakest, but damage taken on paper isn't relative to how the class ACTUALLY plays.

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Those classes have fairly equitable amounts of self healing. Chank is not the weakest by far, it just happens to be the one you play.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

No, simply because Blue Cappies don't need it, and it's a defensive cooldown, that belongs on a tank. Sacrifice with Beornings is an enigma, considering it's available in all 3 lines, and it's effectiveness changes based on traits, so unless you plan to do something similar with SoD, it is fine in Yellow, the point is, Captain has too many cooldowns, and this allows it to offer a high-level of defensive support to its fellow tank.

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It's an ability that lets you save a single target from taking heavy damage, it's pro-active healing. Healing isn't purely about throwing out green numbers, it's just a catch-all for any kind of ability that helps keep a target alive. Or do you want to argue that fates entwined isn't a healing cooldown because it doesn't make green numbers?

And boy oh boy do Blue Captains need something ST focused.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Muster self-heal needs a nerf. As a Yellow Captain in a raid, I can maintain 110k+ HPS, granted 50k HPS comes from Revealing Mark alone, BUT, a Tank should not be outputting 60k HPS on its fellowship. Thus, realistically all healing needs a relative nerf of between 30-50%, it just makes it easier to reduce YCaptain outgoing healing across the board.

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Not necessarily. Yellow Captain is far and away the weakest tank in terms of damage output, instead of damage it does heals. You may be doing 60k HPS outside of revealing mark but a large chunk of that is healing on yourself + pet. Individual targets are receiving closer to 13k HPS each. A decent amount but not staggering. With inspire reduced that would be closer to 10k. It's a trade-off in damage for healing and whilst that healing potential skews things mildly in favour of Captains for defensive scenarios it is equally skewed against them in offensive situations.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

As I've mentioned before, believing that at this stage in the game SSG is going to begin fundamentally reworking classes from the ground up is not something that is likely ever going to happen - so I focus on the likely. Furthermore, see my above comment (again), in relation to mechanics.

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I really don't care what you think is likely, it's demonstrably not accurate. They are making a new class, they clearly don't mind in-depth class work.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Captains, regardless of line, are buff-bots. Case and point, that is the class.

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And that's problematic. Make buffing an active role and you massively improve the class design here. Hilariously removing all of the passive buffs and some notable overpowered support abilities (double rez/IHW+LS combo) brings Captains to a fairly even level with the other tanks. From there giving them active buffs that let them boost others whilst siphoning threat would help fix the main flaw of Yellow Captain and actually let people have that support tank playstyle that they seem to care about.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

And then they release some content where a bit more defensive support is required and suddenly everyone brings multiple Yellow RKs for DNF + EoE. Quit looking at singular aspects in isolation, look at the whole. Red/Yellow RK has a ton of power tied into defensive support, the fact that that support isn't required at the present moment does not matter.

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It DOES matter. ANY competent raid composition will use one of each DPS class because of the way in which they support each other (Bar RKs), to get the maximum DPS from your group, you will hardly, if ever, stack, secondly, I'm not talking about Red, I'm talking specifically about Yellow. Yellow, as it stands, even with its defensive support, is not even on the table, it is not considered an option, at all. Therefore there is something wrong. It's not considered because it cannot compete on a DPS level. It needs to be within 5-10% of the other DPS class, and Red-Line, as a result of having greater support should be within 15%. More to the point at 120 - Red RKs WERE within 15% of the rest of the DPSers (Pre-burg buffs), and in the high-end groups, you never saw RK stacking.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

You're not accounting for redirect.

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No, I'm not accounting for buffs that don't have a 100% uptime.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Joedangod

Can't say I've ever had 2 guards in a raid before. Sacrifice + Shield Wall can be cross applied (and litany + IHW although none of this stuff redirects the redirect), wasn't sure on shield wall/shield wall. You're still creating a scenario where a Guardian could reasonably be brought along to just cancel 50% of the damage going into a particular target. Bonus points for the guard using that shield wall mitigates 33% more damage to nullify 83% of the damage coming through.

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I never suggested SW damage negation should be 50%, you inferred that based on my LoD suggestion, reasonably it should be somewhere in the 25% range (there was a set bonus from Abyss that already did this and it put the SW redirect at 66% and it was never once used in the way you are suggesting.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Yet you promote last stand. A skill that by definition would bypass all the mechanics you've listed. Warriors Heart is a good example of a panic skill. It brings you up to full and makes you ~60% tankier for a short duration. Last Stand is a bad example of a panic skill, it makes you invincible for 17s so no amount of mistakes can result in you dying and you don't get penalised for taking massive damage during that time either. If Last Stand created a heal absorb equal to all damage you took during those 17s it might be balanced, it does not do that (and the duration is too long regardless).

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Not if they designed one-shot mechanics that went through Last Stand, as in instant-kill/defeat mechanics, as opposed to taking X amount of damage to kill you.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Joedangod

Gonna throw this out there...real crazy thought but...you COULD prevent IHW from being a thing that exists solely on one class by reducing it to be equivalent to the healer cooldowns such as fates OR...by giving healers the damn defensive cooldowns. It's their job to keep the people alive through incoming damage after all.

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Yes. By healing. Not by using defensive tank cooldowns.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Nope, but you're the one trying to make guard competitive via buffs to support so I guess you need to figure out a way to make them compete in that regard as well. You could've just gone for a DPS buff that allows it to give value to offence that is equivalent to the defensive value of Captain heals.

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Not all classes will support exactly the same amount, and where they support less they will be tankier, (which the aforementioned changes to Guard probably would result in).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

They're mostly outmatched by motivating speech alone. 2.5% fellowship wide mits and 5% incoming healing just don't compete with 10% more morale + a bunch of other stats. You're also just tacking support abilities on to the spec for the sake of it. It's gonna be essentially passive as you're sharing your own buffs here and for obvious reasons you'd have been putting those up anyway. If neither class is going to actively think about the buffs you might as well remove them entirely. Same net result.

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It is actively thinking about them, considering you need to be able to rotate them well enough so that none of them expire, whilst also keeping up your own HoTs, and helping to DPS here and there. It is not as black and white as you are suggesting.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

That's predicated on the argument that Captain AoE healing should be standard for tanks. It shouldn't. Captain is the support tank, let it be the one with more defensive support. Other tanks can stick to having higher DPS.

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All tanks should offer support, and they already all do, Captains just offer more support than the rest of them, it doesn't make it the "support tank" - it just means the other tanks need to offer more support. You aren't taking a tank for DPS, and more to the point the level of DPS being put out by a Tank is a version of "Support".

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

And you've just promoted giving them borderline Captain levels of sustained healing to go with that burst with little to no effort required to maintain it. They definitely need some options for sustained healing between burst windows but not like that.

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And your suggestion would be what? An AoE HoT effect is the best way to bridge the gap as its sustained healing. Apart from the fact that the way recuperate trait works by increasing the initial heal at a cost of the HoT itself means the HoT is also significantly weaker than a Captains, but it helps to fill a gap in both Yellow and Blue beorning.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Not in terms of physical damage and stop arbitrarily deciding "that's not likely". They're literally making an entirely new class right now, large class efforts are clearly not entirely out of the realm of possibility. And I really don't want to advocate for blind numerical buffs to classes, I argued against those when they did them to Beornings before and I'll argue against them here. If a class has no mechanics it does not deserve to be useable, it might as well be an AI at that point.

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I'm not arbitrarily deciding anything, I'm looking at a 13-year track record, something you might want to try doing at some point - and if they are looking at making a new class, what does that say about their view/opinion of the old ones?

*FURTHERMORE, it was announced at the start of the Class Revamps during Mordor, that once each class received its balance pass (finishing with RK at the release of MM), they would simply like to tweak classes from update to update to keep them competitive, so no, fundamental changes to the core designs of the classes are NOT going to happen, and they've already confirmed this. So yes, focus on what's LIKELY to happen. On top of that a new class means more money, it means people have to buy the class, it means valars, it means mithril coins, it means people buying boosts for VXP, ILI's, the list goes on, it's about money.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

*See the multiple mentions that allowing for long duration "I cannot die" buttons to exist lets you bypass mechanics. If you don't want mechanics bypassing to be a thing quit asking for tanks to have abilities that are so strong you can bypass mechanics.

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As above: Not if they designed one-shot mechanics that went through Last Stand, as in instant-kill/defeat mechanics, as opposed to taking X amount of damage to kill you.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Those classes have fairly equitable amounts of self healing. Chank is not the weakest by far, it just happens to be the one you play.

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You really need to get your head out of the ground, sorry, Chank self-healing is nowhere close to Yellow Guard, absolutely nowhere close.

Bracing attack is a 20k heal on 30s cooldown.
Dire Need is 18k on a 1min cooldown.
Fight On is 30% on a 3min cooldown.
Exalted Combatant is a 25% heal (WHEN you go below 30% morale), on a 1m 30s cooldown.

How is any of this comparable to the amount of healing a Yellow Guardian is capable of, which can reach sustained levels of 15k+ HPS? Please. Explain.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

It's an ability that lets you save a single target from taking heavy damage, it's pro-active healing. Healing isn't purely about throwing out green numbers, it's just a catch-all for any kind of ability that helps keep a target alive. Or do you want to argue that fates entwined isn't a healing cooldown because it doesn't make green numbers?

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Its not a healing cooldown, its a defensive cooldown.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

And boy oh boy do Blue Captains need something ST focused.

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Sure, because giving the Healer with the highest AoE Healing the second-best ST cooldown in the game is a good idea?

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

I really don't care what you think is likely, it's demonstrably not accurate. They are making a new class, they clearly don't mind in-depth class work.

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*As above.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

And that's problematic. Make buffing an active role and you massively improve the class design here. Hilariously removing all of the passive buffs and some notable overpowered support abilities (double rez/IHW+LS combo) brings Captains to a fairly even level with the other tanks. From there giving them active buffs that let them boost others whilst siphoning threat would help fix the main flaw of Yellow Captain and actually let people have that support tank playstyle that they seem to care about.

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*As above.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Severlin

One of the longer-term requests we have heard from you is a desire to take a holistic look at our ten classes. This is a challenge for our relatively small team, so we had to take a look at how best to bring this to you. Instead of a comprehensive overhaul of each class, one at a time, we will instead make targeted adjustments to many classes at once, and continue these incremental improvements over future updates. This allows us to improve all of our classes in a shorter time frame and better balance power and group utility in a more responsive way. You can expect the first wave of class adjustments to happen in the coming months, and continue for some time to come.

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As I said.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

It DOES matter. ANY competent raid composition will use one of each DPS class because of the way in which they support each other (Bar RKs), to get the maximum DPS from your group, you will hardly, if ever, stack, secondly, I'm not talking about Red, I'm talking specifically about Yellow. Yellow, as it stands, even with its defensive support, is not even on the table, it is not considered an option, at all. Therefore there is something wrong. It's not considered because it cannot compete on a DPS level. It needs to be within 5-10% of the other DPS class, and Red-Line, as a result of having greater support should be within 15%.

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It's not considered because people don't need the added defensive value of a yellow RK. Add more frequent burst raidwide damage and/or a scenario in which deaths become increasingly more likely and the value of yellow RK increases. Consider the whole, stop fixating on individual aspects. Totally fine for Yellow RK's to become a competitive DPS...but DNF/EoE needs to change in the same update. Rebalance the power from defensive support to DPS. Given the option of pulling competitive DPS or being non-competitive but able to tag a person every 150s with DNF...I think most people would prefer to be a competitive DPS.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

No, I'm not accounting for buffs that don't have a 100% uptime.

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...then start accounting for that because it's incredibly relevant.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

I never suggested SW damage negation should be 50%, you inferred that based on my LoD suggestion, reasonably it should be somewhere in the 25% range (there was a set bonus from Abyss that already did this and it put the SW redirect at 66% and it was never once used in the way you are suggesting.

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Abyss set is 33%. Either way giving a permanent 100% redirect a mitigation component is bad design, it's free deletion of damage, 0 cost. If it's gonna mitigate give it a duration/cd. Sacrifice is a tolerable example of this being done reasonably well. Or just leave it as is, permanent 100% but no mitigation.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Not if they designed one-shot mechanics that went through Last Stand, as in instant-kill/defeat mechanics, as opposed to taking X amount of damage to kill you.

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Now you're adding mechanics that you just can't recover from.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Yes. By healing. Not by using defensive tank cooldowns.

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You have a very strange view of the role of a healer. Proactive healing is healing, green text isn't the be-all, end-all.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Not all classes will support exactly the same amount, and where they support less they will be tankier, (which the aforementioned changes to Guard probably would result in).

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Bad design. Tanks should be generally equal in terms of tankiness/aggro. These are the core pillars of tanking after all. Where they can differ is in terms of what else they bring. Some might offer group healing, some might offer more damage and some might offer crowd control. If a tank is inferior defensively it'll usually end up being dropped out of favour the moment that defence is emphasised. You should generally be able to accomplish the goal of your role at a bare minimum.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

It is actively thinking about them, considering you need to be able to rotate them well enough so that none of them expire, whilst also keeping up your own HoTs, and helping to DPS here and there. It is not as black and white as you are suggesting.

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Except you were already rotating those abilities for yourself, now they just apply to everyone. Only reason you are suggesting it is because you're trying to match Captain toolkit of passive auras...but the whole discussion is began with the idea that Captains shouldn't have that level of passive support. At best this has the same net goal as removing Captain auras but with less performance benefits, at worst it just becomes another randomly added variable to balance around.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

All tanks should offer support, and they already all do, Captains just offer more support than the rest of them, it doesn't make it the "support tank" - it just means the other tanks need to offer more support. You aren't taking a tank for DPS, and more to the point the level of DPS being put out by a Tank is a version of "Support".

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All tanks should be support tanks? Crack out the rezzes, heals and buffs! Tanking isn't aggro and self defence, it's fellowship healing and buffing now! Step aside healer, you have to share all of your duties now, nothing unique for your role!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

And your suggestion would be what? An AoE HoT effect is the best way to bridge the gap as its sustained healing. Apart from the fact that the way recuperate trait works by increasing the initial heal at a cost of the HoT itself means the HoT is also significantly weaker than a Captains, but it helps to fill a gap in both Yellow and Blue beorning.

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Nah, ST man form HoT replacing natures mend (possibly tweak mend into being a longer cooldown triage heal). They can weave it into their man form rotation to cover everyone or they can just focus it on tank, whatever they like. Just gives them something to pre-empt burst with. I'd rather rework man form to focus on HoTs entirely and leave all the burst/dps to bear but this isn't the place to go into major detail on healer revamps.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

I'm not arbitrarily deciding anything, I'm looking at a 13-year track record, something you might want to try doing at some point - and if they are looking at making a new class, what does that say about their view/opinion of the old ones?

*FURTHERMORE, it was announced at the start of the Class Revamps during Mordor, that once each class received its balance pass (finishing with RK at the release of MM), they would simply like to tweak classes from update to update to keep them competitive, so no, fundamental changes to the core designs of the classes are NOT going to happen, and they've already confirmed this. So yes, focus on what's LIKELY to happen. On top of that a new class means more money, it means people have to buy the class, it means valars, it means mithril coins, it means people buying boosts for VXP, ILI's, the list goes on, it's about money.

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Plans change, 3 year old plans that didn't work are also capable of being changed. The original plan was to have a class = role system, they threw that out 5 years in. You're still essentially arguing against doing things properly on the grounds that you don't think they would be willing to do things properly.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

As above: Not if they designed one-shot mechanics that went through Last Stand, as in instant-kill/defeat mechanics, as opposed to taking X amount of damage to kill you.

*As above.

*As above.

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*As above; instant kill mechanics eliminate any possibility of recovering from slight mistakes. It's...........poor game design.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

You really need to get your head out of the ground, sorry, Chank self-healing is nowhere close to Yellow Guard, absolutely nowhere close.

Bracing attack is a 20k heal on 30s cooldown.
Dire Need is 18k on a 1min cooldown.
Fight On is 30% on a 3min cooldown.
Exalted Combatant is a 25% heal (WHEN you go below 30% morale), on a 1m 30s cooldown.

How is any of this comparable to the amount of healing a Yellow Guardian is capable of? Please. Explain.

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Ha, now why would you not mention Sudden Defence? Why are you avoiding traiting either blades of courage or killing spree? If you want to compare based on self sustain then do build for self sustain.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Its not a healing cooldown, its a defensive cooldown.

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All falls under the same bracket sadly. It's proactive healing.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Sure, because giving the Healer with the highest AoE Healing the second-best ST cooldown in the game is a good idea?

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Technically it's highest sustained. Their burst is mediocre. More adjustments would of course be required but why would you be giving a tank the ability to massively bump the effectiveness of another tank? Kinda guarantees Captain is always one of the 2 raid tanks. Externals should be on healers, fits comfortably within their role so all specs can reasonably be expected to get one.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

As I said.

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As mentioned; it's not working, plan has to change.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

It's not considered because people don't need the added defensive value of a yellow RK.

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It's not considered because it's a DPS loss to bring one, as a result, they have no spot.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Abyss set is 33%. Either way giving a permanent 100% redirect a mitigation component is bad design, it's free deletion of damage, 0 cost. If it's gonna mitigate give it a duration/cd. Sacrifice is a tolerable example of this being done reasonably well. Or just leave it as is, permanent 100% but no mitigation.

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Yes 33%. Which means you only take 67%, as I literally, just, said? And it still wasn't used in the way you have suggested.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Now you're adding mechanics that you just can't recover from.

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When you have the skill set we have with the classes we have, you need unforgiving mechanics, of course, not ALL mechanics should function in this way, but they SHOULD exist. You should be punished for failing the mechanics, you shouldn't be able to ever avoid them. The whelping on boss 1 Anvil was the perfect example of said mechanic, if it wasn't CJ'd in time, that was it, you wiped.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Bad design. Tanks should be generally equal in terms of tankiness/aggro. These are the core pillars of tanking after all. Where they can differ is in terms of what else they bring. Some might offer group healing, some might offer more damage and some might offer crowd control. If a tank is inferior defensively it'll usually end up being dropped out of favour the moment that defence is emphasised. You should generally be able to accomplish the goal of your role at a bare minimum.

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I've not suggested that any one of the classes would be incapable of tanking the content, all of the classes with these changes probably would be able to, but the classes that are less tanky offer more support, and the tanks that offer less support make up for that fact because they are stronger defensively. The choice of tank will depend on the group. A weaker / low-dps group might take a Captain because it has generally superior defensive support by comparison, however a better group would be better suited to taking a Beorning which offers greater offensive support.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Except you were already rotating those abilities for yourself, now they just apply to everyone. Only reason you are suggesting it is because you're trying to match Captain toolkit of passive auras...but the whole discussion is began with the idea that Captains shouldn't have that level of passive support. At best this has the same net goal as removing Captain auras but with less performance benefits, at worst it just becomes another randomly added variable to balance around.

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I genuinely don't understand what you expect the classes to look like, all classes (bar healers) follow a rotation except for when #### hits the fan and you need to improvise, or are you suggesting to just throw out MMO logic completely and get rid of each classes rotation?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

All tanks should be support tanks? Crack out the rezzes, heals and buffs! Tanking isn't aggro and self defence, it's fellowship healing and buffing now! Step aside healer, you have to share all of your duties now, nothing unique for your role!

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"Support" can mean a MULTITUDE of things. To suggest that support is only confined to "rezzes, heals, and buffs" is narrow-minded. All tanks already offer support, just at varying levels. Break ranks, is support, the fortification fellowship buff, is support, bee swarm / armour crush, is support, the mit debfuffs available to blue warden, is support. Anything that "helps" the group with some kind of utility is classified as support. Captains just have the MOST. Tanks should ALL offer varying levels of offensive/defensive support, and varying levels of tankiness based on the support they offer, with the most tankiest offering the least levels of support.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Plans change, 3 year old plans that didn't work are also capable of being changed. The original plan was to have a class = role system, they threw that out 5 years in. You're still essentially arguing against doing things properly on the grounds that you don't think they would be willing to do things properly.

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I'm not arguing on the grounds that I don't think they would be willing, I'm arguing on the grounds that it's not going to happen per what they've said.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

*As above; instant kill mechanics eliminate any possibility of recovering from slight mistakes. It's...........poor game design.

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You use both. Mechanics should be punishing. There should be mechanics that if you fail, they will wipe you, and there should be mechanics that if you fail, they will be punishing, but recoverable.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Ha, now why would you not mention Sudden Defence? Why are you avoiding traiting either blades of courage or killing spree? If you want to compare based on self sustain then do build for self sustain.

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Sudden defence is not enough, and it's temporary morale, not a heal.
Killing Spree only works if YOU get the killing blow, you can also NOT trait blue-red if you are fighting against trash, as you will NOT be able to maintain the aggro, furthermore, again, it requires YOU to get the killing blow to get the heal (something which also isn't going to work in boss-fights with no adds).
The Blade of Courage proc % is not high enough to be a reliable source of healing.

ALL of which is still less than Yellow Guard. So, again, get your head out of the ground. I have tanked the T5's on both Chank and YGuard, a YGuard does not need a healer, a Chank needs an LM at minimum.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Kinda guarantees Captain is always one of the 2 raid tanks.

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That fact is guaranteed regardless.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

As mentioned; it's not working, plan has to change.

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Severlin

This is a challenge for our relatively small team, so we had to take a look at how best to bring this to you. Instead of a comprehensive overhaul of each class, one at a time, we will instead make targeted adjustments to many classes at once, and continue these incremental improvements over future updates..

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What part of this don't you understand lol?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

It's not considered because it's a DPS loss to bring one, as a result, they have no spot.

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...and they don't get to have competitive DPS because a chunk of their power budget is tied up in defensive cooldowns. No, you don't get to have all singing and dancing DPS specs that rez, bubble, debuff and buff all at the same time without drawbacks. That's just silly.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Yes 33%. Which means you only take 67%, as I literally, just, said? And it still wasn't used in the way you have suggested.

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It wasn't warranted. Didn't need the defence.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

When you have the skill set we have with the classes we have, you need unforgiving mechanics, of course, not ALL mechanics should function in this way, but they SHOULD exist. You should be punished for failing the mechanics, you shouldn't be able to ever avoid them. The whelping on boss 1 Anvil was the perfect example of said mechanic, if it wasn't CJ'd in time, that was it, you wiped.

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This is why we shouldn't have the skill set we have. No "invincibility" buttons, remove them. Panic button should be short duration recovery skills, not mechanic ignoring ones. You're trying to adapt content to poor design, fix the design instead.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

I've not suggested that any one of the classes would be incapable of tanking the content, all of the classes with these changes probably would be able to, but the classes that are less tanky offer more support, and the tanks offer less support make up for that fact because they are stronger defensively. The choice of tank will depend on the group. A weaker / low-dps group might take a Captain because it has generally superior defensive support by comparison, however a better group would be better suited to taking a Beorning which offers greater offensive support.

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They shouldn't be making tradeoffs on their primary role. The primary role of a yellow Captain is tanking, the primary role of a Blue Beorning is tanking. They should be equally effective at tanking. What they bring beyond tanking can be variable but shouldn't skew too heavily towards one option over another. There shouldn't be any intended case of a particular tank being weaker at something core to their role, that's poor design. This is literally the case with Yellow RK right now; it's got inferior DPS because it has strong defensive support options and guess what? That feels bad for RK's to have so much of their power budget tied up in something secondary to their role.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

I genuinely don't understand what you expect the classes to look like, all classes (bar healers) follow a rotation except for when #### hits the fan and you need to improvise, or are you suggesting to just throw out MMO logic completely and get rid of each classes rotation?

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I expect class design to be logical and not just bestow random numerical improvements in places where it doesn't make sense. A wardens defensive rotation is just that, it's their defensive rotation. It's not a defensive rotation they're looking to apply to the group, they're applying it to themselves because as a tank they need to be able to survive the damage that's incoming. Suddenly making those abilities fellowship-wide is totally random. You're arguing that Warden needs these things to compete with Captain but it doesn't even make sense that Captain functions in this way. The fellowship-wide aspect is totally incidental, they maintain those buffs because it's their form of active mitigation not because they're specifically looking to improve the defence of the group. If a red warden fires off adroit manoeuvre and wardens triumph...should those abilities be fellowship-wide as well? For all intents and purposes they are the same thing, dance of war is a buff you apply to bump your defence whilst tanking, adroit manoeuvre is a buff you apply to bump your DPS whilst dpsing.

Just passively making class buffs apply to everyone is really weird.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

"Support" can mean a MULTITUDE of things. To suggest that support is only confined to "rezzes, heals, and buffs" is narrow-minded. All tanks already offer support, just at varying levels. Break ranks, is support, the fortification fellowship buff, is support, bee swarm / armour crush, is support, the mit debfuffs available to blue warden, is support. Anything that "helps" the group with some kind of utility is classified as support. Captains just have the MOST. Tanks should ALL offer varying levels of offensive/defensive support, and varying levels of tankiness based on the support they offer, with the most tankiest offering the least levels of support.

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Why are you restricting tanks to only being able to do support as a secondary role? Why shouldn't they be pulling statistically significant yet no competitive DPS instead? If a Champ pulls 400k DPS in AoE why would it be so wrong for a tank to pull 250k in that same situation? You'd never take a tank as a DPS, they're not competitive in that role but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be capable of performing it to some degree. You're basically looking at Captain and saying "Ah, this is the quintessential example of what all tanks should be" and are now trying to shove every single other tank into that mould. They don't fit, it's not their design.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

I'm not arguing on the grounds that I don't think they would be willing, I'm arguing on the grounds that it's not going to happen per what they've said.

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Things can and should change. If someone were to write a perfect fix for all class balance issues it would be a very large amount of work to do but they would absolutely be able to implement it. Not in one single patch but gradually over a few years. Funnily enough taking into account that they have several years over which they can implement changes massively broadens the potential size of those changes.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

You use both. Mechanics should be punishing. There should be mechanics that if you fail, they will wipe you, and there should be mechanics that if you fail, they will be punishing, but recoverable.

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No. Each encounter shouldn't include a mechanic that is entirely unrecoverable. It should be a slippery slope situation. The more mechanics you screw up the faster the faster you move towards entirely wiping. Last Stand breaks that as it essentially gives you a massive window in which you can totally reset the direction the group is headed.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Sudden defence is not enough, and it's temporary morale, not a heal.
Killing Spree only works if YOU get the killing blow, you can also NOT trait blue-red if you are fighting against trash, as you will NOT be able to maintain the aggro, furthermore, again, it requires YOU to get the killing blow to get the heal (something which also isn't going to work in boss-fights with no adds).
The Blade of Courage proc % is not high enough to be a reliable source of healing.

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Good grief you need to revise your definition of healing. It doesn't include damage reductions or external cooldowns and now it excludes bubbles?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

That fact is guaranteed regardless.

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...so why would any proposed changes not aim to address that? Even if it's a dumb stopgap of "Motivating Speech is now raidwide"?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

What part of this don't you understand lol?

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Read the rest of that line:
"so we had to take a look at how best to bring this to you. Instead of a comprehensive overhaul of each class, one at a time, we will instead make targeted adjustments to many classes at once, and continue these incremental improvements over future updates.."

They acknowledge that class balance is a challenge so they opted to go down the route of targeted adjustments to many classes at once instead of one at at time. It's not a confirmation that they will never do it, merely a mention that they're choosing to go a different route which as mentioned isn't working. Hence the proposal that they change the plan up a bit.

You know what, I'm done replying to you.

I understand you have a very finite view of the way you believe the game should be, no doubt, we all do. Unfortunately, the rest of us live in the real world and understand what is and what isn't likely going to happen with SSG developing this game, I even brought you a direct quote, in their own words, from the Executive Producer, which says what you want to happen, is not going to happen, because they don't have the team to do it. The sooner you realise that, and accept that fact, the sooner you will start asking for realistic changes.

You're holding up a quote that doesn't really disprove anything as some kind of fact when it's basically just a "We think we're better off doing it this way" kind of thing which so far we can prove has not worked. They are capable of changing the plan. They are not limited to small changes. They are making an entirely new class, that alone goes right against the scenario you are suggesting.

Any change can technically be "realistic" so long as it the time-frame for it works out. Expecting a class revamp every dot update is indeed foolish. Expecting one every 4 months? That would be reasonable. Certain classes would be easy to tune within 4 months, RK being a prime example of that, it mostly needs its power in yellow/red budgeted properly. Captain admittedly needs more work as neither yellow/blue are properly conceptualised but all in all a 3-4 year timescale would be "realistic" here. They just need to be convinced to plan for that 3-4 years of work rather than randomly jumping between specs as they do now.

Heph, I'd just give up at this point to be honest. We've both given him so much solid information and he still disputes the painfully obvious. Given his distinct lack of knowledge of literally any class he's mentioned yet (Guardian, Champ, Captain, Warden) outside of Beorning (and that's not even certain, I just don't play it so can't tell if it's BS or not) I'm left wondering what class he actually plays. I really liked your class change suggestions for other tanks, I think they'd be excellent for the most part and actually got excited about dusting off my Guardian again when reading some of them until I remembered they're unlikely to come to fruition sadly.

Anyone that can possibly take the stance that Chanks are perfectly viable in their current state is not someone worth wasting your time on. I could write another 32 paragraphs on it but that's as plain as it need be.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

Heph, I'd just give up at this point to be honest. We've both given him so much solid information and he still disputes the painfully obvious. Given his distinct lack of knowledge of literally any class he's mentioned yet (Guardian, Champ, Captain, Warden) outside of Beorning (and that's not even certain, I just don't play it so can't tell if it's BS or not) I'm left wondering what class he actually plays. I really liked your class change suggestions for other tanks, I think they'd be excellent for the most part and actually got excited about dusting off my Guardian again when reading some of them until I remembered they're unlikely to come to fruition sadly.

Anyone that can possibly take the stance that Chanks are perfectly viable in their current state is not someone worth wasting your time on. I could write another 32 paragraphs on it but that's as plain as it need be.

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Yes, his lack of knowledge was also glaringly obvious for someone who claims to play those classes. I sincerely believe my suggested changes are not only viable but within SSGs power to do so, however, it's SSG, so chances are slim anyway.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ethrildar

Heph, I'd just give up at this point to be honest. We've both given him so much solid information and he still disputes the painfully obvious. Given his distinct lack of knowledge of literally any class he's mentioned yet (Guardian, Champ, Captain, Warden) outside of Beorning (and that's not even certain, I just don't play it so can't tell if it's BS or not) I'm left wondering what class he actually plays. I really liked your class change suggestions for other tanks, I think they'd be excellent for the most part and actually got excited about dusting off my Guardian again when reading some of them until I remembered they're unlikely to come to fruition sadly.

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You've swapped to ad hominem attacks now huh. You're right on one front and that's the fact that I haven't played champ in years...although I did mention that explicitly within this thread soo....half merit for that?

May I recommend you two try a few other games. Why don't you both give WoW a shot? Heph might learn some basics about proactive healing, externals and damage absorbs and Eth might discover what it means to play a tank that can live or die by a single global. You both seem way too wrapped up in the current meta of LOTRO and I think you need the perspective.

I commend your efforts Eth and Heph. The absolute tripe that’s been written is unreal.

The lack of experience of raiding at the top level in this game shows through in his/her (given he/she is anonymous and doesn’t want to let us know which server and kin he/she is part of) every post. Most of the suggestions would render the content undoable for a large percentage of raid groups, further alienating the content and the players.

Let’s not forget this is specific to Remmo as we all know, Threshold has now been completed by GRDs, Bears and even WRDs main tanking, I know this because my kin is doing it and the underlining reason for it, because the CONTENT caters for it. Imagine.

It’s glaring obvious the previous suggestions would create another GOD class, which will appear in another section of the forum, with XYZ needs to be nerfed.

Funny how people who know the least have the most to say.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

May I recommend you two try a few other games. Why don't you both give WoW a shot? Heph might learn some basics about proactive healing, externals and damage absorbs and Eth might discover what it means to play a tank that can live or die by a single global. You both seem way too wrapped up in the current meta of LOTRO and I think you need the perspective.

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Newsflash, this isn't WoW, and I'm glad it's not because if it was, I wouldn't be here, and I'm sure half the people playing would say the same thing. LOTRO is its own game that does things its own way.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Newsflash, this isn't WoW, and I'm glad it's not because if it was, I wouldn't be here, and I'm sure half the people playing would say the same thing. LOTRO is its own game that does things its own way.

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That's abundantly clear.

One should always take some notes from the leaders in ones field. If WoW has managed one thing well it's solid game design principles, LOTRO's game design in regards to group content is pretty poor in comparison. I would never argue to make LOTRO into WoW but I would argue that they need to take some inspiration from a game that manages to do things well, they could also take inspiration from GW2/ESO or even Destiny in some areas and it would result in an all-round better game. Don't be so close-minded.

Primary reason I suggested it to you is that it has perhaps the most well-documented/elaborated role of a healer in any MMO. Your exceptionally narrow-minded view of what constitutes healing is harmful, go educate yourself.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

That's abundantly clear.

One should always take some notes from the leaders in ones field. If WoW has managed one thing well it's solid game design principles, LOTRO's game design in regards to group content is pretty poor in comparison. I would never argue to make LOTRO into WoW but I would argue that they need to take some inspiration from a game that manages to do things well, they could also take inspiration from GW2/ESO or even Destiny in some areas and it would result in an all-round better game. Don't be so close-minded.

Primary reason I suggested it to you is that it has perhaps the most well-documented/elaborated role of a healer in any MMO. Your exceptionally narrow-minded view of what constitutes healing is harmful, go educate yourself.

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Just because another game has done something well, does not mean it will work "well" in a different game, with an entirely different player base, with an entirely different class design to boot. I play plenty of other MMOs thankyou, and aside from healers having the odd cooldown, 1, maybe 2 at most (unless they are also heavily tank-specced (isn't that ironic?)), the cooldowns are on the tanks, as they should be, LOTRO also does exactly that.

I'm not close-minded, but LOTRO is its own game, and it needn't copy from others, they tried that in the past and we ended up with the trait trees, and the Legendary Servers, I prefer they stick to what they want to do and not try to copy from others in the industry when they don't have the manpower to replicate the results.

If you want to play WoW, go play WoW, or any other game for that matter, it seems you can't praise them enough - LOTRO needn't do what another game is doing just because 'you' deem it successful. Different games, different styles, different artistic direction for that matter, different communities and playerbase.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Just because another game has done something well, does not mean it will work "well" in a different game, with an entirely different player base, with an entirely different class design to boot. I play plenty of other MMOs thankyou, and aside from healers having the odd cooldown, 1, maybe 2 at most (unless they are also heavily tank-specced (isn't that ironic?)), the cooldowns are on the tanks, as they should be, LOTRO also does exactly that.

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The group defensives aren't and funnily enough most healers still have at least one external. Right now only Beorning has an external defensive for the tank.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

I'm not close-minded, but LOTRO is its own game, and it needn't copy from others, they tried that in the past and we ended up with the trait trees, and the Legendary Servers, I prefer they stick to what they want to do and not try to copy from others in the industry when they don't have the manpower to replicate the results.

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Don't need to copy, do need to learn from. They exist within the same genre, of course there are lessons to be learnt. Insisting that they should bury their head in the sand and not look at what the competition is doing is indeed close-minded.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

If you want to play WoW, go play WoW, or any other game for that matter, it seems you can't praise them enough - LOTRO needn't do what another game is doing just because 'you' deem it successful. Different games, different styles, different artistic direction for that matter, different communities and playerbase.

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I don't really think I'm the one "deeming" WoW as successful. The entire gaming community would consider WoW a success. It's the most popular MMO and it totally changed the genre inspiring a bunch of copycats. LOTRO is even one of those copycats in several regards. Your personal opinion on it is irrelevant, it was merely an example of well-documented division of responsibilities by role.


You really, really need to adjust your view on healing. Functionally there is absolutely no difference between a HoT effect that heals 50% of the damage taken over 8 seconds vs an external damage reduction that reduces incoming damage by 50% over that same 8s. A heal that restores 200k morale is functionally no different from applying a 200k temporary health bubble to the character, the only difference is whether that full 200k gets consumed before it expires. The complete contempt you have for the healing role is awful, you are effectively dialling back the impact of healers in order to improve tanking support capability...when you could just not do that and instead stick to giving tanks tank-related stuff to do. Quit focusing on one aspect and focus on the whole.

You have proven to have a complete lack of understanding and knowledge for half the classes in this game, even classes you apparently "play", I am beginning to wonder if you even do, actually, play this game.

You aren't happy with the way healing works in this game so you want to do tear down the tanks to buff healers (that's not the way THIS game works), gotcha.

Still not going to happen.

Bye.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

You have proven to have a complete lack of understanding and knowledge for half the classes in this game, even classes you apparently "play", I am beginning to wonder if you even do, actually, play this game.

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Guess the same works in reverse. Who knows how a chank forgets sudden defence or a guard forgets redirect.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

You aren't happy with the way healing works in this game so you want to do tear down the tanks to buff healers (that's not the way THIS game works), gotcha.

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Oh no, I'm recommending buffing healers and nerfing one tank who happens to have too much support. Considering 5/6 tank classes don't emphasise absurd groupwide support we can kinda observe that it is in fact not how tanks in this game work. It is the way one of them works and it's fairly disputed whether even that one should be capable of what it does. So go get some perspective.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Guess the same works in reverse. Who knows how a chank forgets sudden defence or a guard forgets redirect.

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They weren't forgotten, they were omitted, neither of which were relevant to the point I was making, and as you have been proven wrong already on both counts, you keep referencing them, in the hope of, what exactly? Yes, I'm sure Sudden Defence will save a Chank who's most reliable source (notice how I said RELIABLE and not ONLY) of healing amounts to a total of 20k morale on a 30s CD and 18k morale on a 1min CD.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Considering 5/6 tank classes don't emphasise absurd groupwide support we can kinda observe that it is in fact not how tanks in this game work. It is the way one of them works and it's fairly disputed whether even that one should be capable of what it does.

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All tanks in this game offer varying levels of "support", that is something you cannot dispute, however hard you might try. One of the 5 offers more support than the rest of them. We disagree on principle alone - I and others believe all tanks should offer more support in their role, and Captain should be tuned down in its level of survivability, as well as hoping for better content design which has prevented other tanks from participating - you on the other hand don't believe tanks should offer any support at all, which is in direct contradiction with almost every single spec in the game, tank, dps, healing or otherwise (I can think of maybe 3 who do not offer some form of group wide support) - and that the content is completely fine as it is (which everyone but you seems to disagree with).

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

It is the way one of them works and it's fairly disputed whether even that one should be capable of what it does.

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So no, it isn't the way "one of them works" and its working this way is not disputed, you dispute it.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

So go get some perspective.

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I have perspective. You on the other hand need to recognise what game it is you're playing and become a realist.