Captain tanking needs a nerf!

[Kotal]

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.

[HolyDuckTape]

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.

[Joedangod]

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.

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.

[Kotal]

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

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...

[Joedangod]

i disagree on that one.

Equal with the other tanks, not equal with Captain.

[Kotal]

Equal with the other tanks, not equal with Captain.

oh that immediately makes more sense lol