Tank Survivability: Are Defensive Builds Rewarded Enough?

[chook06]

Are there any plans to review defensive tank gear and tank survivability in general?

I would like to ask the dev team whether defensive tank itemisation, and more generally the reward for building a truly defensive tank, could potentially be reviewed in the future.

At the moment, going full defensive comes with a very significant trade-off: you sacrifice most of your damage in order to maximise survivability. In theory, that seems perfectly reasonable.

The problem is that with the current level of offensive power available to DPS classes, I sometimes feel that this trade-off is no longer sufficiently rewarded. Even when investing heavily into defensive stats, a tank can still be destroyed extremely quickly under pressure.

And this raises a more general question about the role of tanks in the game.

If a player accepts the constraints of playing a fully defensive tank very low damage, less solo killing potential, and a build almost entirely dedicated to protecting other players shouldn't the result be significantly greater survivability?

I am not suggesting that tanks should be immortal or survive indefinitely against several enemies. Obviously, a tank caught alone against 2, 3 or more properly played opponents should eventually die.

But in my opinion, a properly built full defensive tank should be extremely difficult for a single DPS player to kill. The same general philosophy could arguably apply to healers: these support roles should be very difficult to defeat alone, while coordinated pressure from multiple players remains the answer.

This would also reinforce the identity of these roles.

Tanks and healers are permanently needed in groups, warbands and scenarios, yet there is often a shortage of players willing to play them. If choosing a pure defensive/support build involves significant offensive sacrifices, perhaps the game should reward that choice more strongly through survivability.

So my questions are:

- Do the developers consider current full-defensive tank survivability to be where they want it?
- Is defensive tank gear/itemisation something that could be reviewed?
- And more generally, should specialising heavily into defence provide a stronger advantage against the current offensive power available to DPS builds?

I would be interested to hear the developers' philosophy on this.

[rrrutsss]

You want to survive whitout a healer or whats going on here?

You literally see bunch on unkillable tanks punting people back and forth every night and day.

I would say tanks are too hard to kill and defences should be reduced.

[gyps]

You want to survive whitout a healer or whats going on here?

You literally see bunch on unkillable tanks punting people back and forth every night and day.

I would say tanks are too hard to kill and defences should be reduced.

Thats been going on for a while now afaik, I've been loosing % in avoidances over time so we understand that they've been nerfed a bit on their defensive capabilities.

For Swordmaster the only thing I'd ask is the fact that some sets still use Weapon Skill for their parry values (which now relies on initiative) and its almost useless in this class, changing it to some other stat would be great to start using some other sets (like warlord for example)

[lumpi33]

You literally see bunch on unkillable tanks punting people back and forth every night and day.

I would say tanks are too hard to kill and defences should be reduced.

I second this.

End gear tanks with defensive builds are really hard to kill. For my taste a bit too hard in regards of how much control they have over the fight and how strong healing, guard or defensive morals are.

They should at least at these points:

#1 revert the change of willpower contributing to disrupt and the "can't pierce more than half of the disrupt" non-sense. These two changes just had lots of negative side effects and need to be reverted.

#2 the tanks high parry rates that is being used to defend guard damage. Tanks were never meant to have such high defend rates on guard damage. It was initially on "block" chance that was used to defend guard damage, not "parry". Block is usually much lower than parry, therefore it has created an imbalance. The intention for 2h tanks was good but the side effects are again bad. Change guard damage defense to a combination of block and parry where block contributes 50% and parry 50%. A 2hand tank should be a worse guard than a shield tank. If they can pump their parry to over 70% than 50% of it is more than enough.

#3 the cheap renown abilities for parry/block/disrupt. It's one of the reasons that stealthers are such a pain. They have base parry, immunity abilities and can stack defense with these cheap renown abilities on top. It also made def tanks too defensive. Beside that there are no renown abilities to counter/pierce the defensive renown abilities.