Consolidated Tanker Improvement Ideas

There is another thread going on right now about the Dev team possibly looking into Tanker issues, and possibly doing some improvements/changes to them. While we have no timeline for this right now, the other thread got a little out of control and vastly off-focus. As such, it was pointed out to me that having a single place to put suggestion feedback for Tankers would be a good idea, much as some other ATs have a consolidated thread that is stickied.

I am going to try very hard to stay impartial in this thread, and put ideas in the correct posts regardless of whether I think they are needed or have merit. However, as this may be a stickied thread, I would ask that you not post ideas in here that YOU don’t think have merit. I will not add any items that are obviously jokes into the consolidated ideas posts, and may reach out to you through PMs if I can’t tell. Also please keep in mind that there is no imperative on the Dev’s part to implement any of the changes brought up in this post. If we can follow those rules, I will try to keep the front posts as up to date as I can.

I also don’t want this thread to turn into an argument thread. While I certainly expect some discussion to happen in this thread, if an argument about a certain topic is springing up, please take it to a new thread, and post the results of that discussion here. I just want to keep the signal to noise ratio high here if at all possible.

That being said, I am going to be putting up four posts below to highlight various issues that people feel Tankers have. I have separated out current ideas for Tankers that I have seen recently into four categories: Defensive, Offensive, Crowd Control, and Inherent Changes. I feel that those four categories should include most, if not all, of what I have seen on the Tanker boards recently. In each post, I will try to include the basics of arguments for the area needing to be changed, along with ideas that have been posted to help fix it.

Tanker Defensive Issues, a summary:
Some people feel that with the rise of IOs, other ATs can match the defensive capabilities of Tankers, making Tankers less needed in the high-end game. While the majority of the game is still balanced around SOs, it would be stupid to not address IO potential in the game as well. As Tanker’s primary set is defensive in nature, a Tanker should be the hands-down toughest AT in the game, and this may not be the case. Certainly, Tankers are tougher than other ATs, but not by as much as they should be, to some.



Suggestions for improving Tanker Defenses:

1) Give Tankers a small boost to Base HP, or further increase their max HP cap.

2) Increase Tanker Defense and Resistance caps slightly, to 47.5% and 95%, respectively.

3) Make Tanker “Godmode” powers crashless or at least lessen the crash.

4) Increase Tanker defense powers such that taking Tough/Weave isn’t necessary to hit respective caps for like sets (i.e., resistance sets shouldn’t need Tough to get to the S/L resistance caps, and Defense sets shouldn’t need Weave to get to the Defense softcap).

5) Make Tankers able to resist “unresistable” damage gimmicks.

6) Give Tankers more comprehensive protection, both in terms of status effects and to the rarer damage types. Toxic and Psychic damage are becoming more commonly used, but most Tankers still do not have good protection to those types of damage.

7) Give Tankers more active defenses.

8) Reexamine Tanker status protection. With the addition of more and more mobs that can cause status effects like confuse and fear, Armor sets have not been reexamined to handle them.

9) Change Tanker "Godmode" Tier 9s into either high-endurance toggles, or short click-based powers with lower duration and less crash.

10) Standardize Tanker armor sets more. As enemies have changed, Armor sets have remained largely static. For instance, many pre-level 18 enemies use energy attacks, but Stone Armor and Ice Armor don't get their E/NE armors until level 18. Readdressing the armor sets individually to balance them more would allow for more changes to the AT as a whole.

11) How about having the tier 9s be like a "short surge of defiance" of sorts?

Something like:
120 second duration (2 minutes)
Minor crash (-25% Endurance)
Base refresh of 600 seconds (10 minutes) - unaffected by Recharge
Amplifies Gauntlet Radius (Tankers Only)

12) Look at the Tanker Primaries with an eye towards balancing them before doing any wholesale changes to the AT. The terminal crash on Invul and the pigeon-hole nature of Granite especially.

13) Look at those powers like Soul Transfer and Rise of the Phoenix which you can only use after your dead. Having a T9 that ONLY works when the tank is dead seems odd. I would keep the rez but also make a power that works when you are alive something like Howlight Twilight. Sure you can use it as a rez power but its also a pretty good debuff as well.

14) Some sort of global resistance to debuffs might be nice. Primarily debuffs that hurt our ability to tank. Def, Res (if that's possible without breaking something), To-Hit, and Regen debuffs jump to mind. Make it something nice and modest, maybe 20-30%, perhaps scale with team size or something. This way the Tank might withstand debuffs that would shut down a Brute/Scrapper etc.

Tanker Offensive Issues, a summary:

Brutes and Scrappers, the other two melee ATs that tend to get compared to Tankers most often, are seen as having enough survivability to do a Tanker’s job on occasion, while also pumping out significantly more damage. Since Tankers already have more survivability than these two ATs, increasing their damage potential - either across the board or just at the top end - would help to strengthen the AT as a whole. Scrapper and Brute survivability at the cap is between 75% and 90% of a Tanker’s, but Tankers do only about 60% of the damage of these two ATs with similar builds at their offensive caps.



Suggestions for Improving Tanker Offensive Potential

1) Increase the damage cap for Tankers from +300% to +400%.

2) Add more options for Tankers to improve their offense, including, but not limited to pool powers and Ancillary/Patron pool powers.

3) Create a mechanism for Tankers to temporarily trade off survivability for damage.

4) Standardize Tanker Tier 1 attacks. Considering that Bruising is attached to this attack, all Tankers should be able to use it just as well.

5) Give Tankers’ offensive AoEs larger radii.

6) Tanker sets with only one AoE attack should be fixed so that the single AoE is good.

7) Give Tanker attacks a “cooldown” period, where if you use it outside of this period, it causes much more damage than if used within the cooldown period. This would increase their burst damage, but not their overall DPS by the same amount.

9) For each enemy on the Tanker aggro list, they give their league a 1% damage boost (or, they give just themselves a 2% damage buff).

10) What if Tankers had inverse fury? Call it: ANGER

Power Description: The Tanker LOVES to be the center of attention, when he is not he is mad, so mad that his attacks will hit MUCH harder until he regains that aggro.

The Tanker has a bar that is just like Fury, only its filled up. When its filled up it gives a huge damage boost. NOTE: For this to work the Tanker damage cap would have to be raised an additional 200%. At full bar, the buff gives 200% more damage. *HOWEVER* as the Tanker is attacked the bar begins to deplete, very fast the more attacks made against the Tanker. Even if the Tanker is tanking a single opponent the bar will begin decreasing, if the Tanker aggros a group he will only have the damage bonus for the first few attacks and after that the bar will be nearly depleted. If the Tanker is not being attacked the bar begins to refill at a steady rate.

11) ALL tanker attack powers that do zero damage should have a damage component, and allow damage sets to be slotted. Touch of Fear, Lightning Clap, Ice Patch, Fault, and Hand Clap. Touch of fear gains a big dose of toxic DOT damage, lightning clap gets a little energy damage, ice patch gets some cold damage, fault gets smashing damage, and hand clap....well. Hand clap might get left the same, super strength is already REALLY good. If it gets boosted too, then smashing damage ftw.

The BIG boost here, is Taunt. The Tanker's Taunt power needs to do psionic damage. And then it needs to accept damage IO sets. Heck, I'd even see a strong argument to raise the target cap for Taunt to 15, same as any other ranged AOE attack.

12) When using Taunt, a temporary buff is given to the Tanker where all secondary attacks are given a chance to proc damage. However, the proc will only work on mobs with a taunt effect (be it from the Taunt power, guantlet, aura, from either the user or another taunting pc).

Tanker Crowd Control Issues: a summary:

For some, Tankers are viewed as melee Controllers, able to do what they do by controlling the actions of the enemies. Instead of shutting down the enemies’ ability to attack, however, Tankers direct their attacks onto themselves, since they can take it. However, Threat in this game is multi-dimensional, and as such, other ATs can do as good a job at managing aggro as Tankers can.



Suggestions for Improving Tanker Crowd Control Abilities

1) Give Tankers the ability to exceed the current aggro cap, raising their cap to anywhere between 20 and 34. Maybe a scaling effect depending on team size or team health.

2) Increase the Gauntlet Aura effect so that Tankers can easily strip aggro from Scrappers and Brutes.

3) Increase the Tanker AT Threat modifier to 5, increasing their ability to hold aggro by 20%.

4) Increase the radius of Tanker AoE attacks, to allow them to hold aggro on enemies further away.

5) Allow Tankers to slot the Taunt set IOs in their auras again. A single broken IO should not mean we can’t slot any of these in our auras.

6) Make Taunt hit more targets for Tankers.

7) Make Gauntlet stronger versus AVs.

8) Standardize the aggro auras on Tankers. WP and SR have significantly reduced aggro abilities.

9) Boost the range and area of Taunt, aggro auras, and gauntlet.

10) Reduce the aggro caps for Brutes and Scrappers so the expensive builds for Defense don't get hosed. Raise the aggro cap for Tanks so they can once again shine in this one area. Slave a Tank's Gauntlet to the team size like Vigilant is for Defenders. The more people on the team, the more the Tank's Taunt aura increases.

11) Add a Defense debuff to Tanker Taunt powers. The additional debuff will provide more Threat.

Tanker Inherent Ability Issues: a summary:

In this area, I will be discussing not only potential changes to the actual inherent power(s) of a Tanker, namely Gauntlet and Bruising, but also any other factors outside of damage, defense, and crowd control that are part of what makes a Tanker a Tanker, such as their DPE issues, debuff mods, perception of Tankers, etc. Basically, anything that falls under the tanker purview that isn’t really addressed in the topics above.



Suggestions for Improving Tanker Inherent Abilities:

1) While the current Tanker inherent of Gauntlet allows the tanker to do his job, there is no tangible reward for doing so. The Tanker needs something as a reward for doing his job, much like other ATs are rewarded by their inherents for doing theirs. For instance, Controllers do bonus damage to enemies that are being controlled, Blasters do more damage the more they do damage, etc.

2) Add a –DMG component to Gauntlet and Tanker Taunt.

3) Give Tankers the old Defiance…as they take damage, they do more damage.

4) Reduce Tanker armor/toggle endurance costs.

5) Allow the Bruising effect to stack from multiple Tankers.

6) Stop Gauntlet from affecting the streakbreaker.

7) Find some way to fix the Tanker stacking issue, where multiple Tanks on the same team are fairly irrelevant. Example suggestions: for each additional Tanker on the team, the team gets a Damage buff.

8) Allow a single Tanker to stack multiple Bruising effects on the same enemy.

9) Tankers currently get very little benefit for doing less DPE with sets they share with Scrappers and Brutes. While Defenders/Corrs/Blasters get varying degrees of damage/secondary effects based on their damage and debuff mods, Tankers share the same debuff mods with Scrappers and Brutes. This means that while they are doing less damage, they do not have stronger debuffs. Increase Tanker debuff Mods so that they have stronger secondary effects on their attacks.

10) Or, allow the Tanker attack secondary effects to pass through Gauntlet on single-target attacks, allowing Tankers greater control/debuffs through AoE mitigation measures.

11) Reduce Bruising's -20% resistance base to 18%. Still enough to make it viable solo. Secondly take that "missing" 2% and allow it to stack 6 times. This way with multiple tanks you can push the -resistance to 30%. This would make it so that tanks, like all the other ATs, would become a force multiplier when you bring more tanks onto a team instead of being redundant. The debuff time length might need to be shortened to keep a single tank spamming it's tier 1 attack to reach that level of -resistance.

12) Keep Bruising's -20% resistance base as it is. Add in a minor secondary -regeneration component that would stack. This would do two things. One, as was mentioned in Option A, it would make having a second tank on a team be a "threat modifier" and Two, adding in the debuff would also up the threat generation and make it easier for a tank to keep a single target's aggro.

13) Give Tankers an inherent "Block" ability, that would allow a Tanker to get a temporary boost to DamRes and/or Defense at the expense of not being able to make attacks.

14) Tankers gain a new inherent called "Battle Mastery". The reasoning is, Tankers are undeniably the AT most comfortable in a fight, and that familiarity with conflict lets them alter how they fight to match the situation they find themselves in.

Battle Mastery gives them two click powers, (they could unlock at level 20-ish, maybe?). One of these is called Onslaught, the other called Guarded. These two powers are mutually exclusive and share a recharge interval. Uptime/downtime ratios to be decided, but I'd vote for 30 seconds up, 90 second recharge, unslottable but affected by Incarnate and global recharge.

Clicking Onslaught raises the damage cap by 100 percent, adds a 50 percent global damage enhancement boost, a 50 percent global recharge enhancement, and 50 percent global endurance enhancement reduction. It also lowers all defense and resist powers by a global 30 percent enhancement penalty. When required, the Tanker can attack with greatly improved strength by throwing caution to the winds. (Note, as global enhancement boosts, these are unaffected by ED.)

Clicking Guarded lowers the damage cap by 100 percent and lowers damage by a global 50 percent. It raises the Tankers Threat rating to 5, increases taunt durations by a global 100 percent, adds a global 50 percent enhancement to all defense and resist powers, doubles the Tankers aggro cap, and adds a mag 6 global status effect defense. When required, the Tanker can use their 'battle smarts' to overawe, out-maneuver, and confound the enemies advances.

15) Give Tankers a reverse of the MM inherent, Supremacy, where the Tanker will take a portion of the damage taken by nearby teammates.

16) "Streamline" the Tanking ATs:

- Streamline all the Tanking AT's, Tankers, Brutes, Warshade, Peacebringer, giving them all the same HP cap, Resistance Cap, and Defense Cap.
- Make each Tanking class bring something unique and fun in terms of gameplay to the table. Brutes would bring more damage, Warshades would bring pets, flexibility in terms of forms, big AOEs, etc, Peacebringers would bring flexibility, heals, big AOEs, etc.
- Tankers could bring higher Def/Res Mods, Higher base HP, and also bring debuffs/buffs similar to bruising. Ideas would be a shout power debuffing enemies or buffing teammates, ammo swap type ability for applying different debuffs via melee attacks, etc.

17) Give Tankers an "Alpha Strike" power, which raises their resistance for a short period, allowing them to easily take the alpha hits.

18) "Stalwart Strike" - a bar similar to domination that fills up like Fury, but once full, would allow Tankers to hit their Stalwart Strike, doing massive AoE damage.

19) A change in the gauntlet mechanic from a constantly on inherent power to a toggle that makes all of a tanker attacks AOE's that deal 7-15% of the attacks normal damage to 5 nearby targets. Essentially I'm talking about turning gauntlet into a damage mechanic.

20) Reduce a tanker's baseline by removing gauntlet, bruising and lowering their HP by 10%.

Then introduce two exclusive toggles. The first TANK for lack of a better name boost Tanker HP by 10% improves baseline defense and resist by 5% and reduce tanker damage by 5%. This trade off is more than fair for a tanker on a large team.

The second exclusive toggle POWERHOUSE makes all attacks from that tank apply a non enhancable, non stacking 15% resistance debuff and lowers tanker resistances by 10%. This would allow a tank to solo better and a second tank on a team to act as a force multiplier giving them a role in the group.

21) For each foe affected by the taunt affect on attacks, give the Tanker a 2% Damage buff.

22) Have gauntlet apply a -special or low grade general debuff effect on all affected foes. Less def, less -def, less -tohit, a little bit of - regen, whatever. Make the effect small but stackable, such that 2-3 tanks could impose a fairly meaningful level of debuff on one, or a few enemies and protect the entire team, possibly making a significant dent on the survivability of a handfull or less particularly irritating mobs... Not so much of a debuff that you'd meaningfully kill off large numbers of foes faster, or make tanks solo much better than they do now.

23) Make gauntlet a slottable power. Give it equal measure of enhanceable debuff and unenhanceable -debuff of many types, and let tanks slot the debuff type they'd like to particularly specialize in. WP/DM tanks might choose tohitdebuff, you could slot damage, for -damage and SD/KM tanks could potentially stack a fair bit of this. slot resistance for -res, heal for -regen, def debuff... more -range... all applied in small amounts to those caught in gauntlet. Not enough to make THAT much difference with one tank, but again, let it stack. For added entertainment, let the alpha slot modify this.

24) Tankers get a click power called "Charge", which gives a very short period of invincibility and increased movement. It has a very long recharge solo, which shortens based on team size.

25) How about a power called, for arguments sake "Resolute." This has similar mechanics to Fury, but it builds as foes attack the Tank not when the Tank attacks. As foes attack, the Tanker gains 1) A damage buff (obviously not as much as Fury on a Brute), and 2) Each mob attacking has a -to hit applied to it (whether this is solely when attacking the tank or also other team members?)

26) New Tanker Inherent : Demoralize

Tankers are a force of might who not only inspire their team, but demoralize their foes who are unable to break their iron will. (Or something like that)

PbAoE aura with increasing effects the longer foes remain in it, strength of effects is determined by team (including Tankers) HP much like vigilance is tied to end discount. Effects do not stack from multiple applications of demoralize (No tanker super team, srry) however foes subjected to multiple auras (more than 1 tank on the team) see increased rate of demoralized effects.

Random numbers for an idea of the effects.

At 100% health

2-5 Seconds : - 3% to hit / -10% defense / -5% Resists

5-10 Seconds : -5% to hit / -15% defense / -10% resists

10 - 30 Seconds : -10% to hit / -25% defense / -15% resists / -20% Runspeed

30-60 Seconds : -15% to hit / -35% defense / -20% resists / -40% Runspeed/ -50 Regen

60 + seconds : -20% to hit / -50% defense / -30% resists / -60% runspeed /-100 regen / Small -Special

If any 1 member of the team is defeated, the effects dissapear and any timers on foes reset. (Reward tankers for maintaining aggro)

If a tankers health dips below 20% effects dissapear and timers reset. (Reward Tankers for being Tanky)


27) Give Tankers an inherent click that functions like Burnout.

-But it only works on their Secondary power set and excludes Build Up and Rage type powers.
-Has a fixed recharge of 1 minute.

28) Temporary (or extended) try invulnerability if a tank dies, then rez's. Gives you time to armor up and use your many, many clicks and toggles. If its a tier 9 rez, greatly increase its invulnerability time.
------Personal peeve. Dying on an incarnate trial, trying to rez to help regain control and give other team members breathing room. Reality is, click rez, and before I can hit a breakfree/green/purple/blue/etc, I'm dead (again).

29) AOE nullification. Basically, if an enemy targets a tank (aggro control) with an aoe, the aoe ONLY affects the tank. Basically, teams will love tanks to keep those AOE's off of them, and multiple tanks are multiple targets for AOE's. Tank still takes normal damage.

30) My new idea is that the Taunt Aura power (Against All Odds, Invincibility, etc) also applies a debuff to all foes in range based on the Primary powerset. Based on this my idea is that Defence based Primaries would apply a 10% Def Debuff on all foes in range of its Taunt aura. Resistance based would apply a -10% Resistance Debuff.

This would not stack from the same tank but multiple Tanks aura's would stack.
Now maybe 10% is not enough or is too much but the number crunchers can work this out better than me

For WP it could be either:
-50% Regen
or
-7.5% Res AND -45% Regen.

For Stone Armor either:
-7.5% Res AND -7.5% Def
or
-5% Res/Def and -45% Regen

**Actual numbers to be balanced.

These numbers are non-enhanceable/resistable and last for the standard Taunt duration (slotting Taunt ENH will not increase the Debuff durartion).

This could also be applied to the TAUNT power itself (not sure if a powers effects can be based on a different powerset?).
So on a SD Tank TAUNT would apply a -10% DefDebuff to all affected foes - not stacking from the same Tank but DOES stack with the taunt Aura. Again these numbers are non-enhanceable/resistable and last for the standard Taunt duration (slotting Taunt ENH will not increase the Debuff durartion).

From the other thread:


- Increase the Tanker damage cap to be slightly lower than the brute damage cap (thereby enabling, with an arbitrary number of buffs, both Brutes and Tanks to have similar defensive and offensive numbers, but Tanks to have slightly more HP and Brutes slightly more damage); I believe Johnny Butane suggested 440% as a round figure (I haven't checked the maths myself)

- Slightly increase threat generation modifiers for Tanks to at the very least compensate for Brute higher damage (I'll leave discussion as to whether it should be equal or higher for another time).

Bruising:
Currently Bruising does a 20% resistance debuff through the tier 1 attack that does not stack.

From what I understand you can either have an effect, such as bruising, renewed or set to stack and you can limit the stacking. You can also have a portion of an effect set to renew and a portion set to stack. With the third mechanic in mind, here's what I would suggest as a couple of changes to Bruising.

Concept A: Reduce the -20% resistance base to 18%. Still enough to make it viable solo. Secondly take that "missing" 2% and allow it to stack 6 times. This way with multiple tanks you can push the -resistance to 30%. This would make it so that tanks, like all the other ATs, would become a force multiplier when you bring more tanks onto a team instead of being redundant. The debuff time length might need to be shortened to keep a single tank spamming it's tier 1 attack to reach that level of -resistance.

Concept B: Keep the -20% resistance base as it is. Add in a minor secondary -regeneration component that would stack. This would do two things. One, as was mentioned in Option A, it would make having a second tank on a team be a "threat modifier" and Two, adding in the debuff would also up the threat generation and make it easier for a tank to keep a single target's aggro.

I'm not sure if these are the best ways to change bruising, but from my perspective these wouldn't be bad places to start.

My concern with Bruising is actually how it is implemented. It's not the Tanker giving a -20% Resistance debuff. It's actually the Tanker forcing the target to give itself a -20% resistance debuff. This is one of the reasons it works so well against higher-level targets, since there's no purple patch to apply.

Because of this, I wonder how easy it would be to get it to stack, since it's all coming from the same target (your enemy).

Still, I think your ideas have some merit, and I'll add them to the list.

I think that looks good Aett, I hope a Dev appreciates such an effort and it could be the way forward for players of all ATs to lay things out and save Dev time.

I'd like to say "Thanks for the effort on behalf of us all." incase nobody else does.

Nice job consolidating the ideas Aett, not an easy task by any metric. I'll send a pm to see if we can get this stickied.
Ah there we go, thank you Avatea.

-> TT MA Arc ID 1755 -> Join TankHQ -> Media -> @AceMACE

Another "thank you" post to Aett for doing such a great job. Not only did you clarify the mess we boarders made of things, but you actually read through a gazillion nerdrage rants to extract the substance of it all. I salute you. Now tell me : after gazing into the forums' abyss of madness for so long, how comfy do you find your padded room?

Interesting thread. These are EXACTLY the kind of consolidated chunks of feedback we like to see. Great job! Definitely some things to chew on in here.

Synapse

For survivability, I think I'd like to have some kind of inherent block power for that ability to resist unresistible damage/boost survivability. The problem other MMOs have with their blocking, is that you can just hold it down as long as you want. I think something more in line with a max ten second up/ten second down toggle that locks out your attacks (but not pbaoe toggles) with an unmodifiable recharge could help.

Just to throw numbers out, activating it could give you something like 20% resistance, 10-15% defense, and 33-50% defense buffing buff (that buff that some versions of Power Boost offer that makes your defense abilities stronger). I assume the lessened damage on unresistible attacks could function the same way it does for pets; just cut it in half. I would say make it unsuppressible, but I understand that would ruin the mechanics for some iTrials like the Anti-Matter fight.

This would let less survivable sets have a means of holding out for a heal, or in the case of Super Reflex/Shield/Ice throwing their defense through the roof and beyond the iTrial soft cap level. Meanwhile, more survivable sets like Stone can use it less often and continue fighting, raising their DPS to approach what the lighter, faster armors can do.

It would also help lower level Tankers survive what sometimes winds up as damage they just aren't yet prepared for.

As for damage, I think what was said about Gauntlet is absolutely right. There's no intensive for being a tank. I would say keep the damage cap where it is, but offer a damage boost for each target aggroed (or in the case of multiple Tankers, each target attempted to be aggroed).

Thanks for the response and for listening, Synapse!