Off Tanking

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

Do you have a source for this?

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

What you are you basing the part about Rank 3+ Active Skills on? Could you give me a timestamp for that? The video is pretty long.

We have not received permission from CROW3 to share the quoted post.

Indeed, this is a problem that comes up in competitive games really often, and the solution to it is often difficult to handle, but given the design philosophy of Ashes I'm not terribly worried. My understanding was that Jeff intended people to adjust strategy based on enemy, so there will probably be things that the Tank/Tank is best at Tanking outright, where the simplistic 'all-in' form works optimally, and then there will be other things where that's not the case.

That fight with It Who Sunders the Land and It Which Rends The Sky (I might have the names wrong) was a pretty good indicator of that sort of thing, I think. I can see multiple ways to tank those, but I feel that a Spellshield of a certain build would have the 'easiest' time of it (think Teleportation Augment on something).

That fight might not be the simplest thing for a Tank/Tank to do, but in terms of actually 'just tanking' and protecting their group, I feel like they would still do the best, whereas the Spellshield would do things 'differently' and be able to do more overall.

It's hard to stop people from going 'well if you're not doing the most DPS while tanking and also protecting everyone perfectly, clearly you're not pulling your weight'. At least with the 'all classes use Mana' decision, the overall 'how good you are' effect may not be so hard to balance.

We have not received permission from SirChancelot to share the quoted post.

Maybe so, but remember that no matter what, what is true is what people have been saying all this time about relying on Primary abilities. In other words, all Tanks will do all of those things. The main benefit a Guardian gets over anyone else is PROBABLY that they generate more hate and mitigate more damage when they do those things.

Maybe this might let them spend Skill Points in another different ability, so I actually see it in the opposite way. I expect Tank/X to need to take more different abilities in order to maintain the same level of Threat and get more use out of their augments, whereas Tank/Tank could focus more strongly in other ways, perhaps improving DPS, or similar.

I wouldn't call that 'easier', at all, actually, except in the 'number of actions or decisions you have to make within the battle'. It might just shift your strain to 'decisions in kit'.

We have not received permission from SirChancelot to share the quoted post.

I'm moreso theorycrafting that while it would be easy to pick up and get used to tanking this way, the 'top level of skill' might be those Tank/Tank that know exactly how much threat and mitigation they need, and therefore skip certain ability upgrades entirely in favor of additional passives or Weapon Skill options. Basically, using the fact that their Secondary allows them to strengthen their Tankiness, to then 'not upgrade all of the abilities as much', or not unlock any abilities that don't suit their Node's enemies.

We have not received permission from SirChancelot to share the quoted post.

That's the point I'm making actually. That the skill required to play Tank/Bard might involve all that optimization from the beginning because without it, one might fail at Tanking, but Tank/Tank would not fail at Tanking as most people understand it, either way. They would actually 'Tank way harder than they need to' if they just took all abilities to max rank the way a Tank/Bard MIGHT need to do.

And then as they gained experience with Tanking, would be able to learn where they could cut back to get other things.

That would give the 'Guardian is easy to Tank with, but to be most effective at doing other things beyond a basic rotation, you have to learn something and improve' that I would expect most people would hope for, while still not making them suboptimal compared to Tank/X, once the player did improve.