Dev Discussion #44 - Tank Participation

To me a tank's tasks are positioning and mitigation, how exactly they achieve the mitigation is variable.

If a Tank can just 'do basic rotation and not lose threat against most DPS', I don't usually like the game. If coordination (not necessarily about holding back overall but at least in terms of timing your damage with the Tank's abilities to spike their own threat or absorb yours or Cover you or whatever) isn't necessary, then what's the point?

If Tanks are very CC heavy and their CC is reliable, even if only on mobs, I don't like this generally either. I see Tanks as those cool people who stand in front of the mob and take MOST of its hits and control 'when it finally hits someone else'.

If it never hits anyone else at all, don't like it, even if the tank is a badass, it should just mean DPS can be more badass. If it tries but can always be forced to fail by tank CC, same issue, except that now the added problem is that both 'Multi-enemy PvE' and 'certain PvP' is either unbalanced or braindead (for me).

There should be ways to make Tanking 'easy enough for those who want to do it but aren't top-tier gamers' without 'making it so they hit a rotation and never lose the mob' or 'can just always CC everything'.

I also greatly like abilities that allow the tank to positionally block either the advance of the enemy, or actual attacks from the enemy, on allies positioned a certain way relative to them, and prefer these in PvP/PvX games even without the 'my Taunt forces you to detarget/target me' dynamic (which I also like).

Also I don't like when Tanks do terrible damage consistently (i.e. when not as a tradeoff for mitigation).

Thanks as always for listening, Intrepid.

I would love a huge shift in the mere concept of tanking. Instead of just standing in one place and agroing mobs/bosses I'd love to see an active defense of all raid members (especially when we consider action part of the combat system). The boss would move around more (maybe even randomly), which would make the encounter more difficult, and the 5 tanks (cause we're talking 40-man raids of 5 groups that each have all 8 archetypes, right ?) run around defending their party members or raid members.

The threat build up could be shifted to something like "a bond with the mob", where tanks would see who the mob gonna agro onto before it does and which ability it'll use. This would allow for randomized ability use instead of pure scripting and would put the shotcaller job onto tanks, because they'd be the ones reacting to boss mechanics first.

And if you add different synergistic abilities to the skillset of all classes, tanks could have some anti-wipe buffs/skills/creations that would require top lvl cooperation between all 5 tanks.