Why the hate for plate wearers #savethetanks

First tanks are useless because they cannot hold aggro at all currently. Second the way that SOTAs combat is structured encourages all out maximum spam dps. There are plenty of ways to make a tank viable and force breaks in dps through natural gameplay.

Example: Have the dragon whip his tail and do a large radius 6 second aoe stun. This would cause a natural break in dps while also allowing the stun resistances in the heavy armor and shield trees to shine and have a purpose. It would also encourage healers to use chainmail for this fight since they would likely want to benefit from stun resistance as well.

Also because im sure someone will bring this up when looking at changes like this the dev team really needs to make the light/heavy armor tree skills only accessible when a player is wearing all of one or the other. Or at the very least more of one than the other to prevent mages and archers from tanking and to more clearly define roles within a group.

 

Over a year past final wipe, launch in a few months. Why would you possibly think you are playing an alpha??

 

Ehm...sorry but that's not really correct

1) Quicker hits generate more aggro than bigger hits.
2) Taunt works and it works as expected.
3) And if you want to be a tank better go with Swords since Rend is an absolute must have for seriously holding aggro (but it can also work without Sword/Rend).
4) And to be really sure, stack Rend with Trip for an extra Super Rend to totally hold the aggro

 

My group has actually been having success using a standard tank, healer, dps group configuration.

I tank in full plate with a shield and a long sword

• I run in first and solo the boss for a bit to build aggro.
  
• I hit the taunt every 2nd or 3rd skill
• I use rend, double strike, quadruple strike, and thrust a lot (I cant hold aggro unless I spam dps along with the taunt)

dps comes in after I have been on the boss for 30s or so.
If they are in light armor it works best if they use escape in their rotation

Boss usually stays on me for the whole fight unless...

MAIN PROBLEM
I spend about 50% of any given fight flat on my back (Yes I jump to miss dragon tail swipes and demon jumps.)
The demon charge and dragon wing attacks still mean Im knocked down doing nothing a lot of the time. Sometimes dps has to stop dpsing so they don't pull aggro if I have been knocked down over and over and over.... because I cant generate aggro when I am laying on my back.


The constant knock downs in boss fight are fairly frustrating

• Knights grace does nothing to help you recover from these (they aren't stuns)
• Evasion and block don't stop them knocking you down
• You cant jump/move to avoid many of the attacks
• The shield and heavy armor passive don't help vs knockdowns
• Using the shield tree skill that says it helps vs knockdowns isn't reliable enough. (I took it off my skill bar because I couldn't tell that it made a noticeable difference in how much time I spent laying on the ground)

 

Add Rend&Trip combo like i mentioned above (Hamstring).
And if you manage to land a Stacked 3x Hamstring or even 4 or 5 nobody will steal your aggro (but even just 1 hamstring will be enough).
And don't forget, you can apply both Rend and Hamstring to a mob!

Make sure to level Trip to 80, that's more than enough

 

Don't take this the wrong way but I would love to test this by trying to steal aggro. Meet in game sometime? I know some people that looking for better ways to tank.

 

I believe Starr correctly stated the design of tanks vs DPS that matches every MMO out there. Tanks can keep agro as long as the DPS class isn't sitting back dumping their full load of focus into a mob. DPS class's have always had to meter out their damage to not steal agro. Starr correctly noted that an archer cant just sit back and chain spam multishot and not grab focus from the mob.

healing is no different, a healer cannot spam heals and not take agro, they also have to meter out heals.

However, SOTA does need to fix a lot of mechanisms. A tank ends up knocked down or confused constantly (as we are when we solo higher end boss's like the monkey room).

Tanks could probably get more benefits to not being knocked down or confused via their wep classifications or heavy armor to help

 

I'm not arguing that tanks can hold aggro or that taunt works, I'm arguing (and mirroring @DarkStarr 's opinion) as to why taunt shouldn't out-aggro DPS. Those are two very distinct concepts.

I was under the impression that Trip was frowned upon in groups due to how it overrides CC (or used to in any case).

 

The problem with tanks being unable to hold aggro in boss fights is mechanical. You can't make bosses so hard that plate/constant defense is needed AND a separate party for dps and healing is necessary.

So you end up with either parties of avatars which can defeat bosses individually anyway, or an encounter which is constant whack-a-mole with combat res. Neither are compelling gameplay.

For example: Even doing 1500 heals, I can't take a single hit from the clockwork dragon, so my options are either let people die so I don't pull aggro, and res them the whole time, or die myself. Or I could be a jack of all trades polymath. It's much more fun being a healer though, imo.

 

Sure, we can do some tests sometime. Why not.

 

Trip increases the dmg dot of Hamstring. Atleast it did it for me.

 

This is a critical game play topic, for which I agree with the opening post.

I get the old school thought that DPS dealers should manage their agro if they don't want to be clobbered. I want to believe that this should somehow cause DPSers and healer spammers to self regulate. However, as someone whose played MMOs for 20+ years, I've not seen this be truly all that effective at changing DPS behaviors in older games. More modern games that improved upon the mechanic to provide clearer group utility for melee players (utility that group members actually appreciate) produced better melee play experiences, for me at least.

And its not really about agro, it is about game play experience. As a melee player who already knows I am at some DPS disadvantage to ranged player, it can be kind of demoralizing to then have to have to follow every target I taunt to a spamming healer or archer. That just tells me that I either don't have a job to do, or cant do my job. Honestly that leads me to want to solo melee by myself much more rather than spend times in groups where I dont feel I can contribute. Advertising taunt as being largely ineffective with DPSers in a group -by design - doesn't help that perception.

I'd offer that melee crowd control should not be an after thought taken for granted. Its a game mechanic that needs as much ingenuity applied to it as has been applied to deck combat, etc. Please come up with something better that changes the equation, not uses an old worn one. This is a basic game function that deserves rocket science attention more than a food system does IMHO.

 

But isn't this the same as an archer with high avoidance firing arrows at point blank range into the mob? I didn't realize it at the time but our lead (archer) was tanking.

 

If the highest dps Avatar can also take all the damage, it is basically him soloing with some bolt-on party members.

I don't see how that is any less trivial than a specialized tank role.

 

First, I agree entirely with the OP. What I wish the devs would do is what I suggested a few months back and at least try removing the range limitation on Escape. Then let us ranged DPS try putting Escape in our rotation to help manage aggro and keep the boss on the tank. What isn't logical is the current setup where we're either supposed to stay within the usable range of 10 or use it when the boss pingpongs to us instead of have it be like most MMO games where skills that reduce aggro work regardless of your range from the mob in question. We're ranged, we don't feel like standing under the boss's ass just to make this work...we'd like to use the other game mechanics like higher ground, stand out of the boss's spell range, etc.

Just remove the "range 10" on Escape for a while and let us all try it out. We'd like our tanks to be able to tank - they feel completely useless, and rightly so.

 

Plain and simple because the devs still adding core elements to the game that are needed/planed for a release and as long as this is happening it is an alpha. (And by the way also because SotA still says it is an alpha. )

 

I tank a lot as a leather wearing archer.

 

Im melee and havent met anyone yet that i dont pull aggro off of.

I think a good change would be to make escape and taunt have 0 global cooldown so that you can use them without interrupting your other skills or auto attack

I constantly draw aggro because i dual wield and do alot of small/moderate dmg hits quickly

 

There's a distinction to be made between something that is working as intended and something that is intended.

The OP is discontent by the fact that DarkStarr doesn't want Taunt to out-aggro DPS... something that, in my mind, sounds perfectly reasonable.

It's pretty safe to say that DarkStarr doesn't want players to tank in light armour in a group environment either.

That's the only argument I'm making.

 

Hello everyone, I am an archer and relatively new to the game. I have been trying to figure out why some things are the way they are that simply do not make sense. Aggro is one of them.

I have noticed that if I as a ranged player am behind a target and i give a 2ooo HP lead to someone trying to hold the aggro sometimes more, situation depending, still can pull agro from that person by simply using auto attack. I realize that the intent is to not make an aggro/taunt skill out pace dps but if this is true then why is it that you can do 1/3 the dps of someone else but simply hit quicker and pull the aggro? If the intent is to keep DPS higher on the aggro scale why is that I can then slow my rate of fire down smack the same mob for 1000x the damage per hit and not pull aggro? This may be a dramatic example but seems to be the case. Also what is the difference between a tank type person using a skill called taunt or snap aggro that does very little damage but pushes their aggro up VS using DPS to do it? Are they not both skills in the game? At the end of the day it is still a player pushing buttons linked to a skill in the game in a rotational fashion to produce the most desirable outcome to their current situation? If being a higher skilled player is what you want then wouldn't a MORE dynamic AGGRO mechanic cause MORE skillful players to master versus slow your rate of fire down and hit as hard as possible per hit to not pull aggro? (Forgive me if I have missed something I am still trying to learn all this wishy washy stuff that makes no sense).

Simply to say this aggro mechanic is not based on DPS at all but rather rate of fire and speed of attacks. The question I have is THIS the INTENT or the INTENDED result of the aggro mechanics design or is this a by product of simply wanting to be different to the fault of being different?

I may be missing something but why would you make a game that is ONLINE call it an MMO and then built it completely around solo play with no intent on making group based stuff but yet make group based stuff? So many things seem like an oxymoron. You want many people to play but you want them to play alone. You want people to build relationships and enjoy group play but not create group mechanics for them to enjoy it? You want people to party yet there is very little reason to party since partying usually results in a mass chaos because people are used to soloing everything then they complain because they are spread out like Lord of the Flies.

I am just slightly confused on so many things. Crafting is desired to be the best items in the game BUT those items come as a random DROP off of yourself the crafter because you cannot control what you make. Just another example of an Oxymoron

Thanks for reading!