Istaril

Avoidance won’t work as a primary means of limiting damage intake. Avoidance HAS to be limited, and mitigation’s effects increased to allow item progression, meaningful healing, and viable raiding in general. Why? Because it’s “all or nothing”. Either you avoid the damage entirely, or you take a regular hit – which means that the RNG has complete control over the potential of your tank dying. Thrown in with the “chance” to double attack (or crit, as it used to be) – it’s just too random.

I’m not complaining about the tank dying. Having a chance of the tank dying despite your best efforts can be the key to an encounter or two (smooth tank switches) – but shouldn’t be the rule. And the way the system is currently set up, either the mob hits for too little and is laughable, or hits for a lot and has a chance to annihilating your MT in a single hit. Mitagation is almost a joke – and certainly the increase from item progression into RoK is worthless.

Let’s take Templar/Dirge/Item stoneskins. They don’t quite stack, because of the way they proc, but you’re consistently going to get over 20% stoneskin. That’s over 20% of hits which will do nothing. Why not reduce their effect and make them reduce melee/spell etc (depending on which) damage by a percentage – a flat out reduction to damage. Suddenly you’ve elminated one variable from the game – whether the hit is absorbed or not – while still keeping some spells true-to-form and useful.

What about Block? The single largest source of damage reduction – blocking from Avoidance Buffs (Templar/Pally) and the MT’s own accounted for 30% of swings from Silverwing. Why not have a % chance to reduce the damage by a fixed value? It’s not all or nothing anymore – it’s “having a block helps mitigate spikes”. I’ll take this Towershield – I’ll have a 60% chance to reduce incoming hits by 800! That sounds good! Still random – but a randomness that doesn’t single handedly determine whether you live or die. And it makes sense – if he’s hitting your shield he’s still shaking you up, like hitting the rest of your armor – just an additional layer of protection.

And while you still have parry, deflect (Act as a mit?Glancing Blows?), dodge, and avoid (Leave as is) – you’ve already mitigated a huge part of the spikes due to player involvment. You’ve made it impossible to rely almost entirely on avoidance to survive a mob. Sure, you’d have to nerf mob damage output… a fight like Silverwing would now be completely impossible, as you’ve basically ensure that the tank is being much more often (you’ve reduced MT avoid from 70 to 20) and for some amount less (let’s say an average of 20% less, from the Block/Stoneskins, but that’s just a guess). 20% less sounds like a lot – but on 13k hits, it won’t save your tank from two hits in a row…

So nerfing avoidance isn’t sufficient. Mitigation has to mean something again – if you want progression to be meaningful, mobs have to hit harder and harder as you move deeper into an expansion – and tanks have to have some way of counteracting that with gear that DOESN’T increase the spikyness of the damage. The mobs hit harder and harder… but your mitigation gets better and better. A tank should look at a piece’s mit first of all. Will these changes, even if done promptly, make healing trivial? Depends on balancing, of course. But there are many was to make healing more interesting that don’t involve an increase in frequency of mobs that can make 3 MT healers’ best job, best gear, and best efforts worthless, just because of a likely 2 bad rolls on the RNG. Power Limitations (A la Venril), Timing limitations (A la Phara'Dar), damage types that ignore certain kinds of heals (wards?), damage that can't be healed up which accumulates to increase the difficulty of the fight as time goes on, damage targeted to non-mt targets... and that's just with 10 seconds of cooking 'em up.

These changes WOULD make item progression and raid progression viable, and mob output damage MUCH easier to balance. No more "I'm either retardedly easy or I have a chance to 1 shot your tank".

SOE - think carefully - there's a reason Monks/Bruisers have fallen behind in tanking - because avoidance based tanking is based on spikes, and makes encounters harder to design/balance. Avoidance in the all-or-nothing sense CAN exist, but can't be the most important component of tanking. That doesn't mean brawler tanking has to be scrapped - but simply that their avoidance has to mitigate spikes, not cause them. They can dodge a blow? Maybe they can take the hit and roll with it so that it hurts them less... acting as a unique form of a "shield block" as mentioned above. They can dodge many swings? Sure - give them a temp buff where they avoid/riposte negate the next ten swings - but make it (more) predictable. You'll be doing your raid-designers and raiders a huge favour.

Faxon

i didnt even read your post but i can still tell you for sure that tehy wont do it

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the_mo

ive read like the first half of it... where i realized how amazingly awesome the lv 80 zerker special is (reducing all incoming damage by 50% for ~30sec on 90sec reuse).

because the spell does what nothing else that you get from equip can do: reduce the amount of damage taken.

changing some luck-effects to a permanent damagereduction sounds pretty awesome... i can only hope some of these will indeed be implemented

Raistin

the problem boils down to the curve on mitigation...making mitigation mean NOTHING. All they do is drop the return curve on that, give mitigation flat numbers...and give gear progression, problem solved. This problem started in EoF when they started making avoidance much more important for a lot of classes (like paladin shield block). The days when high mitigation was key was better. I remember in KoS sacrificing stats to get the +c/s/p mitigation jewelery, and thats the way it SHOULD be for tanks. A ring with 20str/sta/agi 150hp/power and +50c/s/p should be more valuable to a tank then a 25str/sta/agi 200hp/power because of the extra protections...but atm its not.

Granted those numbers are of but u get the idea.

IMO a plate tank of a raid should be just that...a tank...not a fucking ballerina trying to avoid hits and praying the ones that do hit dun double attack for 13k a pop. They should stand there and take multiple 5k hits to the face that the healers have to try and keep up with.

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Lizerd Keng

imo they should fix the mitigation curve and make it more meaningful. In other words, if avoidance type tanks can reach near cap on avoidance then plate tanks should be able to reach near cap on mitigation. As it is now, everyone just shoots for avoidance since that is easier to get (for all classes including plate) and the curve doesn't seem nearly as sharp (for avoidance). Mitigation was broke before, so yea it had to be fixed. But a plate tank that now ignores mitigation for the most part and achieves 75+% avoidance? ~40% block?
I don't exactly like the random one shots that fully buffed, raid geared tanks are taking, but take these out of the game, and it seems the game would be too easy in it's current state. Make mitigation worth something (aka fix the steep curve + put more in wisdom line aa) and force plate tanks to want to go this route. Let the avoidance tanks go the route of avoiding a little more hits.

As a plate tank I'd much rather mitigate the hits than avoid them, but with the way soe has it, it's just far more rewarding to up your avoidance. And plate wearers can get their avoidance just as high as avoidance tanks.

hennyo

Honestly, the mitagation curve works very well, and was a well thought out idea. Now the problem with it, is not the curve itself, its that they need to have 1000 mit plate pieces in high end raid progression. It needs to be understood, ok you fixed the issue where it was hard to tell exactly how worthwhile this item would be by making the scale much larger. Now you need to adjust the items to match the new scale, you always have to think of mitagation from the design team in terms of percentages, if all your allowing is a 5% window of change in different fabled items, then you really are destroying your window of progression.


So do what was intended and allow tanks to climb the mitagation ladder once more.

Daal

Kinda disappointed tbh in what I'm seeing with the mit on drps from legendary to fabled considering how hard shit is hittin now....fucking disgrace tbh.

Fantom3X

Curiously in multiple instance runs I've seen alot of deflection items that plate wearers can use or get, deflectio used to be a brawler only thing. It seems to me they're possibly working out avoidance tanking and turning it into a block and counterstrike type thing now since avoidance tanking is completely borked.
Thats all they ever had to do with brawlers, avoiding really is for pussies, block, deflect, counterstrike is what real brawlers do the most of. It still amazes me bruisers who are meant to take a blow to the head still dance like ballerinas to avoid blows.

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Traxor

Its the way the game should be. everyone agree's, Basicly.

Mit tanks get hit more. For less damage.( Reactives+HoT's = Happy tank)
Brawler tanks get hit less. For more damage. ( Wards + HoT's= Happy tank)

brawlers wont become some juggernaut class that can out dps everyone and never die from Any mob in the game.

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Istaril

You're missing the point. Currently the ONLY way to improve your tanking is to increase your avoidance.

Plate tanks are sitting at >70% avoidance vs *orange* mobs.

Which means that spikes have become the only form of damage - all tanks are avoidance tanks.

And this means that either mobs are trivial, or they can one shot the tank. No in-between.