With the 10% armor nerf to the 200 con perk (and rightly so), tanks received no compensation for stacking CON in place of their damage. Con stacking only works if there is some added mitigation elements.
IMO there is a simple solution to this.
REMOVE
250 con - 60% dmg reduction at 100% hp (60s cd)
ADD
250 con - 5% increase to armor and 10% Magic reduction
300 con - give grit on light and heavy attacks (and keep the 20% increase to CC duration that is already there)
This will make more con builds viable that want to play more of a “controller” spec and less of a damage dealer. Grit shouldn’t be exclusive to STR users, it punishes any other melee weapon that isn’t STR based. 300 con / 200 int heavy void gauntlets will be able to be more competitive in wars along with the more typical tanks, SNS + Warhammer who run 300con / 200 str.
Give tanks some love, give some diversity to this gaxe/warhammer war meta!
First thing they need to do is fix shields by removing the attributes on them and giving swords full attributes, then increase the armor value of the shields, particularly Tower shields.
Tanks are already handicapped enough due to the nature of their build, there is no reason to make attributes from the shield unavailable when they are using their off hand weapons.
The 250 CON perk is horrible. It is grossly underpowered compared to other perks at that level, especially with a 60s cooldown. It should be a straight reduction in base damage, or a resistance to debuffs such as poison and burning, permanent.
They are supposed to be tanking, not attacking constantly to have grit active.
If they need to build up threat, then they need to time their attacks and taunts, not just spam click the enemies and also be the thiccest hardest thing to kill in the game.
If want grit, they can run 300/200 and heavy armor and still be a very effective tank.
There’s no reason they should get the best of both worlds and be 200/300 with grit and the all the con perks.
Have you played a tank? Try do it in a war, you are constantly being disrupted. Tanks should be able to fill a tank / crowd control role, but you end up being the one being crowd controlled.
There is no negative to giving a tank grit, their damage output is minimal. Attacking is part of control, have you seen the SNS tree talents? Literally snares on attacks. Some of the best tank weapons have refreshing move and life leech, which help you tank longer and give you more uptime on defiant stance (a pure tank ability).
Who slots tanks in wars? I haven’t seen one in a month.
You can tell by my post that I was talking about tanking in PvE.
You cant taunt players, so that would be a big hint.
If we’re going to go down the pvp tank route, heres the real fun part:
YOU DONT NEED TO GENERATE THREAT IN PVP.
There’s actually no reason for you to ever be doing light and heavy attacks with grit, in pvp, as a tank in a war. You don’t need to maintain threat, so you can get by purely on defiant stance for defenses, and shield bash for lockdown, and leap stab for chasing and surprise movement.
If you’re a tank in a war, your job is to be running up a little circle on a point and swinging your sword does not do that. Standing there blocking does. Being there just living does the trick.
You should be focused on surviving for a long time and occasionally using shield bash to lock someone up who is busting through your stamina (and thus your survival).
I play tank in PvE and heavy bruiser in PvP. Tanks in PvP are currently superfluous.
We’ll see if they manage to change the stamina damage correctly to make tanking and blocking in pvp a thing worth slotting some time in the future.
Grit won’t change that at all. You aren’t supposed to be running up damage numbers or getting kills. Thats for actual DPS builds. All grit would get you is a chance to occasionally put a slow on someone and that’s not a game changer.
It’s not about threat generation. Some of the BIS tanking swords have refreshing move on them. Refreshing move + reverse stab reduce your LONG cds like defiant stance (40s) dramatically. Heavy attacks can also remove debuffs when specced and the sword itself has snare perks if specced, helping with crowd control. Shield rush needs grit as well, as its a great counter to grav wells. Shield rushing into a grav well to interrupt the shockwave / maelstrom combos then holding up block for your team who is trapped is huge.
And don’t get me started on how our end tier talent in the defense tree gets DISPELLED by void gauntlets. You have to drop your shield and re apply it. Not sure if it was fixed on PTR now that VG can’t dispell sacred ground, but the fact it was able to do that felt terrible.
No. Normal attacks should not have passive Grit. That is just terrible design because it promotes bad and boring gameplay. They should rework the 300 strength to something else instead, but also rework the 300 con to something more interesting and useful.
If you absolutely want the Grit effect for tanking I would suggest reworking the 300 con perk to give Grit on the next attack followed after a Block (within a short time period of 2-3 sec). That would be way more interesting and make you switch up you playstyle by blocking then attacking instead of just swinging while being immune to stagger.
reverse stab alone gives a whopping 25% cooldown reduction on everything and it has grit already. I’m not sure anything in the game gives that big a reduction for one poke.
Abusing the 3 swing light attack combo with refreshing move is probably fun, but it’s definitely not needed to be a tank and have your cooldowns up.
Shield rush feels terrible. Its like you get self staggered when it lands and the results aren’t worth it so I never use it.
Depending on my setup I’d deal with that situation of my team being in danger by leap stabbing in and blocking, or just walking in and saving the cooldown… The other option is using your offhand weapon in that situation. I usually have either hammer or axe for CC so I’d either toss a grav back on them to disuade them from clumping, or throw path into them to stagger and ruin their timing.
There are better options that just flailing at the enemy with your sword while soaking hits in your face because you have grit up. That just turns tanks into a build to stand there and click and removes any sort of sense of timing or even urgency to actions, since youll have twice as much health as some other guy AND 3 times as much armor, AND not be able to be staggered.
Add in refreshing move and some leech and you’d just stand there left clicking and popping off cooldowns over and over and occasionally blocking if something really spicy is coming in. That would be really boring gameplay.
I disagree. I rock both RS and a shield with RM. Having your skills up all the time helps alot. For my off hand I usually run a WH so I can AoE taunt again.
Taunting in this game is a bit broken. Often times the boss doesn’t even really attack you and there are scripted attacks that taunt doesn’t work on.
Being a tank is thankless job, esp since most players don’t even really know the boss mechanics and then blame you for dying LOL.
I literally had a dude blame me for not tanking well enough cause he just stood in nesh’s fire circle LOL.
Sadly this is one of the best ways I’ve found to tank in PvE imo LOL.
taunting doesn’t work in a non tab clicker that cant force an enemy to directly assault you.
it should be the case that threat should lower the dps of enemies within a certain range against anyone except you. and it need to be strong enough that you need to deal with it.
The tank I play with reckons taunt should change the enemy’s target in PvP. So, for e.g. Fire Mage has the healer lined up for a fireball, tank taunts and the target resets so that the fireball hits them instead. It would be interesting at the least, adding some confusion to PvP but tricky to time perfectly so not overpowered.
I’d prefer to see some changes to armor in general and possibly increasing the fortify cap so that tanking in pvp would be considerably more effective. You have a lot of sources of potential fortify as a tank in a group of players and some of it is overkill since it runs over the cap.
I feel like the actual armor values could stay the same as they are, and this small bonus on top would just further refine what armor weight means. Unless I change my phys armor by 750 points or so I can barely even notice the difference in damage I’m taking because of just the armor values and the time I stay alive from medium to heavy is not hugely different.
What if each armor piece gave a small percent fortify based on it’s weight class, and not your total weight?
Clothing/Skill pieces - 0% fortify
Light armor - 0.75% fortify
medium - 1% fortify
heavy - 1.5% fortify
Just values I made up for the example, probably would need to be better balanced in reality.
This would make a full heavy set considerably better at mitigating damage without using any other perks or skills, while making light sets not complete paper armor. Medium would stay in the middle somewhere, being good mitigation but not so close to what heavy does.
It would be a buff to everyone and combat would have a slightly lower TTK all around which I think some people might enjoy.