Tanks take too much durability damage and Heavy armor skills are partially to blame.

Discussion in 'Feedback Archive' started by runicpaine, Apr 11, 2020.

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  1. Numa

    Numa Avatar

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    I'm leveling up a heavy armor paladin alt-char so have a sizable stake in how this debate and it's outcome turns out.

    Would love to have the warding system tweaked so it somehow reduces durability loss when hit by an opponent against which that particular ward guards against. Maybe a spell cast on a shield that reduces damage and dura loss when tanking the undead for example if you have the death ward in the life tree .

    The ability to permanently engrave a sigil on a shield would also be nice since the effect would be permanent. Should still require the equivalent warding skill though on the wielder's part to be truly effective.

    And let the shield skill dig-in expand the warding effect to party members & pets within the radius.
     
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  2. runicpaine

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    Heavy armor needs some tweaks for sure mainly just in durability of armor in my opinion.
    Mainly I'd just like to see Absorb Impacts to lose the durability penalty
    Then I'd like to see specialization add a durability bonus. Being a specialist should grant better ability to wear the armor without damaging it.

    Secondly for tanks, Shield tree needs a few skills re-worked or just completely replaced with something more useful. Not necessarily because shield tree is bad overall, just that half of it is useless and the specialization bonuses are garbage.
    Shield Bash and Charge are horrible for group content, the stun doesn't scale and so effectively all it really does is add CC resistance that makes the Bludgeons/stunners job harder. I opt for engage opponent for closing distance so I don't trigger CC resistance.
    Dig-in is terribly under-powered for being a sustained ability. It either needs to be much more powerful or not need to be sustained. Personally I like the idea of a shield wall though so would like to see it be able to instead have an 'intervene' aspect to it to allow tanks to block on behalf of nearby party members, unblocked and mitigated damage still continues to original target but tank gets that chance to block/deflect some of the damage w/their shield, keep it a sustained skill, and make it cumulative the more users are using it. Similar to how Testudo scales based on number of shields in the group. This would allows devs to add more interesting mechanics on boss fights and scripted encounters ex: for party survival at certain points, everyone has to group up and 2-3 people form a shield wall with dig-in. EX: a boss uses some sort of barrage type ability where a large number of small/medium attacks hit everyone in the area (something like a blizzard or sustained damaging gust spell) Tank and a few shield wielders group up and activate testudo and dig-in and the party piles in behind them allowing the tank(s) to mitigate the party damage and healers to pump out aoe heals.
    Lastly, shield specialization doesn't really offer anything that valuable. It offers a slight bonus to deflect 'large bonus' duration but I time my deflects anyway so this doesn't offer me any huge advantages. Pure tanks are better off probably choosing Bludgeon or Tactics Specialization along with Heavy Armor imo, though I'm more inclined to lean towards tactics since usually we run with a dedicated bludgeon anyway and 2-hand/dual-wield w/MW will be more effective at stun/debuff than a tank w/bludgeon ever could be. Plus with tactics you can easily swap over to DPS and still be viable and the Parry bonus works regardless of if you have a shield or not so it's applies to all melee builds making it a more favorable option imo.That's why my build is heavy armor/tactics. If they re-work shield tree though I'd happily swap tactics for it, but right now I get everything I need/want from the tree without the specialization.
     
  3. AoiBlue

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    There is a tactics skill "Armor Durability" that helps with this.

    That said, maybe there should be an additional skill for armor durability that is specific to heavy armor.
     
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  4. Violet Ronso

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    Linked to Heavy Armor Spec, it would make sense, and I agree with this bit, but just making heavy armor more durable when the user gets bashed in by 15 mobs+ wouldn't be the right thing to do. Yes, if you use Heavy Armor Spec, I'm all in making it more durable + reducing the negative impacts from skills to a minimum, that would be fine!
     
  5. AoiBlue

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    One of the issues is how damage to armor is calculated.

    Damage to armor is calculated by absorbed damage, and tank absorbs a lot of damage. Maybe the problem is in how this armor damage is being calculated. Maybe adding a coefficient based on the type of armor would help make plate armor more resilient.
     
  6. Lazlo

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    I agree that tanks take too much gear damage, but I think the fault is a lot more in how combat in SotA works than the heavy armor tree.

    I think absorb impacts sucks and I never use it, but overall the tree is very good and you gain quite a lot from it without necessarily taking any additional gear damage. Body slam penalty is very short duration and is pretty reasonable for 3-in-1 damage + engage + stun, especially when spec massively increases stun length. You still get quite a lot out of it even when you're only using it when you can finish opponents before taking any more damage. Wearing heavy armor also gives defensive stance bonus, spec gives innate DR, and you get a bunch of strength. I wouldn't mind if absorb impacts was improved, but I don't see it as a significant factor in the first place.

    To me the real problem is that a lot of content is just a continuous torrent of gear damage, and that problem is further amplified in groups where that gear damage isn't distributed evenly. It's dumb that you can fight trolls all day without ever getting hit, but your gear gets eviscerated by fodder mobs. If that were somehow reworked, I think that could mostly solve the problem.
     
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