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The Daily Grind: What kind of tank do you like to play?
All right, people, today's question is for tanks. Yes, just the tanks. DPS, healers, you're excused. I'm glad you play World of Tanks too, but this also isn't about that. Just the tanks, please. So what kind of tank do you prefer? We've gotten a few archetypes that keep cropping up over and over. You've got the Wall, always, the class with the most hard mitigation and defensive cooldowns that just sits back and is unkillable and usually becomes the default. Then you've got the Dodger, slipping past blows in lighter armor, and the Sponge, who doesn't have a whole lot of mitigation or avoidance but has a huge health pool to chew through. From World of Warcraft to Star Wars: The Old Republic, there are a lot of kinds of tanks. And there are some that don't even fit these archetypes or blend several of them together. So which kind of tank do you like to play? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Officers' Quarters: Tanksplosion
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. A good tank is a precious resource to a raid team. Few players want the responsibility and the pressure. Those who not only want it, but thrive in it, are rare indeed. This week's email asks, what do you do as a guild leader when your tank goes off the deep end? Hello Scott. Im a long time reader and I have implemented a lot of your suggestions in my own guild and it has helped sort out many of the issues, but I once again find my self at a crossroad and I have many doubts on which road to pick. In many of your blogs, you talk about the behaviour of one member within a guild, that is having a very negative effect on the guild as a whole, and Im sorry to say, that my problem concerns one such individual. [...] This guy is our guilds main tank, and he does suffer from the old: "I'm a tank, so therefor I AM GOD!" complex, but we can deal with that, since it has been contained to his tanking and not spread to the rest of the guild. That was untill a few months ago, when things suddently took a turn for the worse.
The Mog Log: Final Fantasy XIV's dungeons
My interest in Final Fantasy XIV is not purely about racing to the endgame, but I am well aware there is an endgame. And while I'm easily distracted by the pursuits of other goals such as leveling Arcanist, I'd rather be on the early side to the party. There's nothing wrong with not being the first at endgame, but I'd prefer to beat the rush, if you know what I mean. So my playtime has been focused a bit more toward getting to the end of the story quick-like. This also means going through a lot of Final Fantasy XIV's dungeons. I'm not quite up to the last rush, but considering a lot of people I see are still moving into stuff I left behind a while ago, I'm still a bit ahead of the parabola. So let's take a look at the dungeons along the path from level 1 to level 50 after the initial set (which I covered back in beta).
EVE Evolved: Odyssey 1.1 and PvP balance
It's been just under three months since EVE Online's exploration-focused Odyssey expansion went live, bringing in a new hacking minigame and significantly buffing the underused tier 1 and tier 2 battleships. With a complete rebalancing all of the tech 1 sub-capital ships now complete, CCP has turned its attention to some of the oldest tech 2 ships in the game: Heavy Assault Ships and Command Ships. Developers have been testing out changes to these ships on the test server and hitting up players for feedback since Odyssey went live, and the results are finally ready to deploy. Odyssey 1.1 will go live in two days time on September 3rd and contains some pretty big changes that are sure to shake up the PvP landscape. Medium-sized long-range weapons have been buffed beyond all recognition, and a buff to active tanking may soon make it viable in PvP. Heavy Assault Ships and Command Ships have been beefed up, the Dominix is getting a small nerf following its absolute dominance in the Alliance Tournament, and the Nosferatu energy vampire module may be about to make a return to PvP setups. In this week's EVE Evolved, I analyse the upcoming Odyssey 1.1 patch and what the new ship balance changes mean for the average player.
EverQuest Next groups will function without 'the stereotypical tank'
The holy trinity has been a hot topic ever since SOE introduced EverQuest Next at last week's SOE Live convention in Las Vegas. The firm is clearly trying to move away from traditional MMO combat, and more evidence of this comes courtesy of a USGamer interview with producer Terry Michaels. "The dedicated roles of the holy trinity are not going to be present in Everquest Next. There will be different classes and different builds that are angled towards some of the roles," Michaels explains, "so there might be a class or a build that is more tankish but you don't need that person to accomplish that goal and content. You can go in there without having somebody who is the stereotypical tank." Not only that, but EQN is attempting a new spin on aggro in general. "The combat's very different. There's not the common threat mechanic that people see in MMOs where there is somebody who can generate enough aggro that the NPC will never ever turn away from them," Michaels says. [Thanks bardamu1999!]
Patch 5.4 PTR: Vengeance changes
If you're a tank in World of Warcraft you know what Vengeance is. Originally intended to allow tanks to keep up with increased DPS from improved gear with DPS stats on it while accumulating tanking gear that generally lacked those stats, it's turned into a means for tanking players to do chart topping DPS on some pulls (especially AoE ones with multiple tanked mobs). There's been a lot of discussion about what might happen with Vengeance in patch 5.4, and now we have our first look at what Blizzard is contemplating for the tanking specialization. Rygarius - 5.4 PTR Patch Notes - August 2 Vengeance has received several changes. Vengeance now grants Attack Power equal to 1.5% of the damage taken, down from 1.8% (The tooltip said 2% but it was actually 1.8%). Tanks no longer receive Vengeance from many persistent area damage effects (standing in the fire) or from missed attacks (dodging and parrying an attack will continue to work as it has before). There are now diminishing returns on Vengeance gains while tanking multiple targets. Each additional target grants progressively less Vengeance. source These changes are almost certainly aimed at reducing the very high DPS that we can see on trash pulls and boss fights with a great many streaming adds (such as Tortos' bats or the packs before Iron Qon) especially as we head into the final tier of gear for Mists of Pandaria, which would inflate these numbers even more. Raids that use tanks with the highest DPS tanks will probably feel these changes the most. As always, this is the PTR, so if you have an opinion on these changes getting on the test servers and testing them out is useful so you can give proper feedback.
Breakfast Topic: Joined at the hip
A couple of months ago, my tanking partner of over a year decided to take a break from WoW to focus on real life. In my guild, our policy has always been real life over the game, so there were no hard feelings. Although I was happy for my raiding buddy, I wasn't looking forward to recruiting a new tank. After tanking together for so long, we could predict what the other would do and we worked very well together. I eventually recruited another tank, but didn't feel as comfortable as I was with my old partner. "It will take time," I told myself. I was just making myself feel better, and to be honest, I still don't feel a connection with my new tank partner. I've not had fun raiding lately and that's a bad sign. The social interaction in WoW is as big a factor in why I play as the content is. How about you? Do you have an in-game friend that you team well with? If you raid, how important to you is having a connection with others in your group? How do you feel when that dynamic changes, and what do you do if it does?
The Summoner's Guidebook: Anything except solo top in League of Legends
It's really no surprise that I'm not an amazing Summoner's Rift player. I feel like I perform decently as support, do fairly well as jungler and ADC, and play solo mid somewhat poorly. Aside from those roles, there's one I haven't talked about, and that's solo top. The solo top lane is the bruiser lane in League of Legends. It's most typical to see melee fighters and tanks there, and it tends to be a little more chaotic than the other lanes. I dislike playing solo top largely because it is the one lane where players are really encouraged to fight each other, and we all know that I prefer to farm peacefully and dislike being aggressive. However, for whatever reason, I have a lot of successes there. I'm nowhere near as good in top lane as in bottom lane (in either role), but it's a place I can go and not feel like dead weight.
The Summoner's Guidebook: League of Legends isn't just one gametype
After last week's edition of the Summoner's Guidebook, I realized that one of the things I sort of take for granted is the advantage of taking many of LoL's different gametypes into account when I value a particular item. For instance, last week we talked a lot about Rabadon's Deathcap, but it (and its sister item Wooglet's Witchcap) has drastically different values in different game modes. It's a lot easier to justify buying a Deathcap when you have easy sources of gold and a lot of time when you're trying to gather it. If you have to fight, more defense becomes an imperative. If you don't play a lot of Dominion or Twisted Treeline, you might not realize that Bloodthirster and Infinity Edge are hard to buy when fights can erupt faster than ultimate skills can recharge. Expensive items like a Needlessly Large Rod or BF Sword are hard to justify when you can get some interim item that provides more balanced stats and will help win the fights you're fighting now. Playing other game modes also gives you a broader look at League of Legends. You don't see the value of certain stats -- particularly HP -- until you realize that an extra 200-500 HP can cause a huge swing in the course of an engagement.
The Light and How to Swing It: The problem with tanks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Last Thursday, Ghostcrawler tweeted something which caused a bit of a stir within the tanking community. In it he revealed that the devs were looking at some strict caps for Vengeance levels (30% of health for 10s, 50% for 25s) that would prevent tanks from using Vengeance to pursue unintended things like solo tanking a two-tank raid boss or standing in fire to stack really obscene amounts of attack power. Now, this isn't another column about the virtues or not of Vengeance. That's a pretty mutilated horse at this point, and from the looks of it, the mechanic is not going anywhere any time soon. However, the brief rekindling of the Vengeance debate did once again shine some light on what is a continuing problem in WoW: what should tanks be allowed to do (in terms of damage output) and what can be done to keep players from parlaying excessive survivability into unintended advantages? What do you do when one third (arguably two-thirds, a lot of this can apply to healers as well) of your players' roles revolves around the mitigation and prevention of damage, and the primary means you have of creating barriers or challenges for players is the threat of character death?
Ghostcrawler on Vengeance and patch 5.4
Yes, patch 5.3 isn't even out yet, and we're already looking towards patch 5.4. Thanks to Ghostcrawler, we have this to think about for the future, namely that Vengeance is getting capped at a significantly lower threshold in raids in the future. If you remember back at August of last year, Vengeance saw some significant changes that increased how fast it could ramp up in raids and also gave it a far larger maximum potential. It's been adjusted over time, but in general what GC said back last August has held true -- tank DPS in raiding really did go up. To the point where on some pulls it's not unusual to see tanks leading the DPS, sometimes by extremely large numbers. Since this is a big change that will drastically lower tank damage output (25-man tanks with their 600,000 or more health buffed will lose roughly 300,000 AP on fights where Vengeance was capping at 100% of their health) I'm not surprise it won't be coming in 5.3 -- I am a little surprised it's happening at all, because we all knew Vengeance and tank damage would do exactly what it has done when it was changed. Still, I wait to observe if it has much practical difference since aside from AoE tanking where a multitude of hits can roll in a short window of time (that 20 second ramp up period) and the tanks can make effective use of all that AP I'm not sure it will matter. 5-mans and scenarios were not mentioned, so for now I'm assuming this is only for the raids mentioned.
Drama Mamas: Time to stop tanking?
Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm. Our email address is having technical difficulties. If you would like to send us a letter to be answered in our column, please email to dramamamas@gmail.com for now. On to this week's letter. Your recent article on Time Management has me considering if I need to change roles in the game. I'm the main tank for my small 10 man guild. We raid two nights a week. We are currently working on Horridon one night, and going back to HoF/ToES the 2nd night to help some members get better gear. If I don't play, 9 other people don't get to have fun. I also feel a certain responsibility to my guild to have the best gear I can get which means putting in a ton of time into WoW on our non-Raid nights. The thing is I love playing WoW. I love my guild. I love tanking. It's a blast and a great way to shake off the stresses of my day.
Lichborne: The hidden skills of of the tank
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. DPS guides are usually pretty straightforward. You have your damage rotation, your stat priorities for gear, and maybe an extra section with some tips on using some of your more esoteric abilities. Tank guides get a little bit more slippery, though. Sure, you can cover some of the same stuff you cover in a DPS guide, included stat priorities and tips and tricks for using specific abilities, but a tank will operate on a different level. They need to know when to use their defensive cool downs. They need to know when specific boss fights may require them to switch up gear. In some cases, they need to know certain intangible things about a boss and about raiding or grouping that it doesn't seem like DPS quite need to deal with. These aren't things that will ever really involve using Death Strike, but they may be just as important to being a successful tank as Death Strike ever will be. This week, we'll take a look at some of these intangible things and discuss ways to make sure you're on top of them. Most of this will apply primarily to pickup groups, since at the raiding level, it's easier (or at least necessary) to make sure even healers and DPS know this stuff. But if you're in Raid Finder, boy howdy will you want to keep this advice in mind.
Pro Tip: Damage meters don't tell the whole story
Some people /ignore others in random raids or dungeons for language or bad play. I add to my instant /ignore list those who spam the meters in raid chat. Anyone who cares about whose bar is the longest is already measuring on their own screen. Not only is the reporter almost always on the top (and conveniently never reports when s/he is below), but displaying the damage done for a fight to the same raid who's on the meter is just pure epeen spill. Asking for a damage meter is just laziness (or, in rare cases, a really crappy computer paired with a log-intensive fight). Let's not forget that problem of boiling a player down to a single number. All three roles of the holy triad have a complex set of abilities for every encounter.
Tanks to have some hope of getting DPS gear in LFR
Ghostcrawler tweeted an interesting reply today concerning the ability of tanks to get DPS gear through LFR: @jkoviack We hope to provide a better option next patch or two. - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) March 18, 2013 This is a major problem for tanks -- they're not able to gear up effectively in LFR for anything other than tanking. And with the daily-centric approach to MoP this leaves those that choose the best spec to be left on the side of using blues and whatever other scraps of gear they can get. For people who raid normal/heroic modes all the time it's not a huge issue thanks to getting off-spec gear, but it's still a problem. Hopefully this option Ghostcrawler is speaking of applies to all off-spec gear, but we don't want to speak for him. Of course as with everything you hear on Twitter and everywhere else about future WoW stuff, take it with a grain of salt. Things can and do change, features get pushed back and discarded for whatever reason. And just because Ghostcrawler and his team want to do something, it doesn't mean they'll be able to do something. Don't go nuts if it doesn't happen -- but keep in mind something might happen. Keep your fingers crossed with me.
Blood Pact: A pewpewer's notes from tanking and healing
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill muses about tanking, healing, and why she really does play a DPS. I have a confession: I was once a tank. Technically I could have been half a tank, because I think I healed just as often, but once upon a time I rolled a druid with the intent of getting a melee DPS perspective. One night in Wrath of the Lich King, my first guild had some trouble with kiting the adds on Gluth. So we upped the tank count to 3: the paladin tank moved to the back for holy tag with the undead while the former-bear warrior walked me through my feral spellbook as I sat in bear form on that pipe. I think it was the extra Mauls that hooked me. I became a bear tank with a branch-waving offspec. I have fond memories of alt or PUG raids where I had cooldown-busting health pools and hero-bear resurrections between Gormok's death and the arena entrance of Acidmaw and Dreadscale. But as my guild tore apart in the beginnings of Icecrown Citadel, I've been back to pewpewing from the back as a warlock. My bear is merely an alt. But my bear has made my warlock a little stronger.
EVE Evolved: New Ancillary Armor Repairers aren't up to the task
EVE Online's Retribution 1.1 patch went live this week, overhauling armour tanking and rebalancing some ships that traditionally fit armour tanks. Last week I looked at why people usually choose passive buffer tanks for PvP over active tanks and how the Ancillary Shield Boosters changed all that by giving shield users a huge free burst tank that can often outperform a front-loaded buffer tank. The new Ancillary Armor Repairers look similarly amazing on paper with their ability to consume nanite repair paste to triple repair output, but how do they stack up against their shield-based counterparts? Now that the patch is out and I've finally got my hands on the Ancillary Armor Repairers, I'm not sure they're any good. They're limited to one per ship even though most active armour tanking ships use dual or triple repairer setups, and they can run for only eight repair cycles before running out of paste. They're also only 68.75% more effective than tech 2 repairers and still require the same amount of capacitor. Ancillary Shield Boosters may provide a slightly smaller 63.33% repair boost over tech 2 boosters, but they can cycle at double the rate of Ancillary Armor Repairers and don't require any capacitor. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at what makes Ancillary Shield Boosters a strong contender in PvP and show that the new Ancillary Armor Repairers just aren't up to the task.
EVE Evolved: Retribution 1.1 and armour tanking
While MMO characters typically fall into specialised tank, healer, and damage-dealing roles, most ships in EVE Online are a combination of all three. Fitting a ship for PvP is a careful balancing act between survivability and damage, as it doesn't matter how much damage you can deal if you don't stay alive long enough to apply it. Active tanking setups that focus on repairing damage have unfortunately seen very limited use in PvP, being effective only in solo fights and very small-scale gang warfare. In most fights, a passive buffer tank that just maximises effective hitpoints will last longer than any active setup. The Inferno expansion helped to solve this problem with its new Ancillary Shield Boosters that consume cap booster charges for a huge burst of shield hitpoints. Tuesday's Retribution 1.1 patch now aims to level the playing field for armour users with the introduction of new Ancillary Armor Repairers and a series of balance changes to armour plates, rigs, and standard repairers. The patch should hopefully give gank battlecruisers and tech 2 cruisers the speed they need to compete in PvP and may even make some interesting active armour tanking setups viable. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at the role of tanking in PvP today and the tanking changes coming in Tuesday's Retribution 1.1 patch.
Six simple tips for getting started in tanking
Tanking is arguably one of the more stressful roles in WoW, particularly in the raid finder. You can't just waltz in and hit some things or heal some things and everything will turn out rosy, you do actually have to know the fights. Not that healers and DPS don't, it's just that they can generally get along a bit easier if they aren't exactly sure what's going on. The same is, alas, not so true for tanks. The fact that there's only two tanks, and that, even in the heady days of Dragon Soul, they had to be relatively co-ordinated on some, if not all the fights, puts the spotlight firmly on their performance. Some groups are forgiving, some less so. The same applies in smaller dungeons, tanks are expected to lead the pack, to take control. Of course, there are exceptions to this, it's a generalization which is not true 100% of the time. But I don't think it's unreasonable. All this makes it a little harder to get started in tanking. So, WoW Insider has put together some tips for the novice tank. Pulling Pulling is the term given to getting a group of mobs to hit you, instead of that mage over there. For most early dungeons, and several of the later ones too for that matter, the pull is half the battle. As long as you can get those baddies latched on to you, you're doing alright. So how do you do it? Well, that is, of course, highly dependent on your class, but there are a few kinds of pull that I can run you through here.
EVE Evolved: Fitting Minmatar cruisers for PvP in Retribution
Ever since EVE Online's PvP-focused Retribution expansion landed last month, I've spent most of my play time hunting for kills in cheap PvP cruisers and loving every moment of it. The standard tech 1 cruisers used to be underpowered ships that new players used as a stepping stone into more capable battlecruisers or tech 2 cruisers, but Retribution buffed them to ridiculous proportions. Every tech 1 cruiser was given extra module slots and stats, and the low-tier cruisers were buffed up to the same level as the highest-tier hulls. Believe it or not, these cheap ships that new players can comfortably fly with just a week of skill training have become competitive PvP ships. In the first two editions of this ship fitting series, I put together new ship setups for each of the Amarr and Gallente tech 1 cruisers. This week, I've been zipping about the universe at high speed in the Minmatar cruisers and putting together effective ship setups that can take down some huge prey. The Stabber has been transformed into a competent miniature Vagabond that can keep enemies at arm's length and nibble them to death, and the tanky Rupture remains a highly effective close-range brawler. The Bellicose now excels in an anti-tackler role, and the Scythe is a throwaway remote repair platform that uses speed to stay safe on the battlefield. In this week's EVE Evolved, I give PvP setups for the four recently revamped Minmatar tech 1 cruisers.
