Problems for Tanks in Update 14

Greydir

Good Day/Morning/Evening
After Reading the Patch Notes late in the Evening Yesterday, i got quite a Headache thinking about the future of Tanking in Update 14. Therefore i choose to express my worries with the Recent Changes. Mind that I had no chance to get on the PTS and do some tests, so my worries are as of now, in a theoretical state, but please listen nonetheless and maybe add some actual input if you had the chance to Test already.

The new Update will bring quite sgnificant Changes to the Game in the departments of Resource sustain and Mitigation. Also factually the Costs for Blocking in Groups are roughly doubled. The Developer Comment about this is, that they want Tanks in PvE to Block more Strategic. This might work in an Environment where the Telegraph for the Heavy hitters is long enough and the game gives you a Sporting chance to use other options rather than Blocking. Unfortunately this is not the case with ESO. Lets Talk about Some Areas where the new Hightend Blockcosts combined with the lower Resource Sustain will hurt Tanks and by extension the Groups they are Playing with big time.

Baseline: Strategic Blocking
Strategic Blocking as seems to be Imagined is Used to Block selected Hits and let the Shields down between them to be able to Regenerate your Stamina. This has Multiple Problems. First is the fact that your Resource Regeneration does not start immediately after you drop the Block. It takes two Seconds. This is Approximately the Same time a Heavy Hitter Takes, to start their next Heavy Attack, which in Turn you will have to Block to survive. So Strategic Blocking is useless if the Strategic Value is neglected by a Cooldown, that may as well force you to uphold the continuous block. The Second Reason are the Telegraphs of Specific Attacks combined with performance issues. One of the options is to Dodge Specific attacks which remove your Damage Mitigation by Armor to be able to Tank other Attacks without Blocking. This in turn does not work if the Telegraph / Hit do not coincide. Best example here is the Twohanded Mob in vMoL. It is possible to Dogeroll the Armorbreaker of this enemy, but not if you start your Dogeroll in The moment the Telegraph for the hit starts. The Dogeroll must start a moment before the hit, which is only Possible if you are a) quite experienced and b) have a perfect Performance. I am fine with a, since experience can be acquired but point b is to much of a hit and miss in case of an Action in which milliseconds decide if your attempt to evade is successful. Other enemies have similar hits, which would need Perfect performance to be able to evade or Block on a skillbased basis.

Fast Hitting High Damage Bosses:
Boss enemies like Rakkhat have a Mechanic that hits very Fast and very Hard. The Gatling of Rakkhat will be emptying Staminapools very Fast. Likewise the Warrior with his Continued Hits, which will now all 4 drain your Stamina. To Survive those hits it is nearly Standart Practice to continuously Apply your Shield as a DK tank. This will eat your Magica very Fast which in turn means that most of the Time with the Change to the Resource Regain by Orbs and Shards it has a good chance to Refill the wrong Resource, as as Tank it is in such a moment more improtant to Refill your Stamina, since your Magica will refill over time. Furthermore it is very Dangerous to Drop the Block on Enemys like Rakkhat and the Warrior since all Unblocked hits will make Short work of you. This is even more important since The Change in the Championpoints mean we get hit by approximately 10% more Damage. Something which for example will change a Hit of the Warrior from a "Survivable 27k" to a Deadly 30k hit.

Special Attacks that reduce or remove the Mitigation of your Armor:
Enemies, be they Boss enemies or not, that reduce or outright Remove the Mitigation provided by the Armor of the Tank result in the Tank being forced to use the only other Method directly Mitigating incomming Damage, which is Blocking. Shielding may help you survive, but in a Real Sense it is not mitigation but a Cheap Shorttime Health addition. It does not reduce the Damage you Take, it just spreads it out.In case of Resource Problems, you might not even be able to do this. If you are Forced into such a State the Tank will have significant Problems to Survive. As discussed earlier, some of these Armor Penetrating or Breaking hits can be evaded but the Timing for this is very fickle.

A Significant number of Heavy hitters in Groups:
This is one of the more Dangerous Scenarios. If you are Confronted by a Group of Multiple Heavy Hitting Enemies you need to Aggro all of them to let your Teammates Survive. This in turn Makes it nearly impossible to Strategicly Drop your Blocking Stance. Best examples would be the Axes in vAA, which not only, will be Draining your Ressources (which you cant regain as efficiently) twice as fast, but also Stun you on an Unblocked hit. To Remove the Stun it would be needed to Break free, which not only Requires Stamina but also forces you into a Short Blocking Animation, which will in turn negate your Stamina regeneration. Other Examples of this Category are the additional Enemies in the fight with Ozara, The Enemies in the Twin Fight in MoL and Some Groups in Mazzatun and Cradle as well.

All this Combined makes Tanking look rather bleak. Tanking was already the most Resourcemanagement Heavy Role in the game, something that seems to be driven over the Top with this Patch. So Please rethink some of your recent Changes to make Tanking a Challenging but not Punishing experience for the Players.

LorDrek

ZOS hate tanks.

SublimeSparo

Very well summed up.
All i can think of is 5p black Rose/ vo 2p engine guardian 5p witchmans at the moment.
Not even sure heavy armour tanking will be viable anymore, 6 med 1 light might be the way to go

Greydir

In Addition I would be quite Happy to get some Developer Feedback in General to know in which direction the Target for Tanking (and the other roles as well) lies. It would be amazingly helpfull to know your Vision of the game to further understanding on our Part. The Description on "Strategic Blocking" Leaves me quite worried.

Niaver

Agreed on every point.

They make it very hard to tank with shield (seriously, ZOS?).
Now there's another side of the coin - they want you to take the frost staff, go magicka build and stack shields.
These shiels are not nerfed, they don't turn off magicka recovery, they don't need "tactical use" - just reaply them every 6s.

And - what a surprise - there is the new class which is designed for this and which is hidden behind the paywall.

Greydir

Yes you can argue in this Direction, as well as you can argue in that direction for the Healers (major Mending anyone?). But I think this would be a Gamble which is quite Risky to take, since it will alienate a siginificant portion of the Playerbase.

aeowulf

SublimeSparo wrote: »

Very well summed up.
All i can think of is 5p black Rose/ vo 2p engine guardian 5p witchmans at the moment.
Not even sure heavy armour tanking will be viable anymore, 6 med 1 light might be the way to go

Constitution is also reduced by nearly half & black rose was reduced in effectiveness last patch

thing is, it's not like you can get away with not blocking on most normal content, I pull a group of mobs, I can either block or watch the healer have a heart attack. I obviously don't want the latter as it means finding a replacement healer every few minutes and group finder is broken

Valencer

They envision tanks only blocking heavy hits but good luck doing this when youre tanking the axes in vAA or tanking the 1st boss in vMOL. Permablock is pretty much required and people will simply find ways to keep doing that imo. The content simply isnt designed for tanks to do anything else then permablock.

Woeler

Valencer wrote: »

They envision tanks only blocking heavy hits but good luck doing this when youre tanking the axes in vAA or tanking the 1st boss in vMOL. Permablock is pretty much required and people will simply find ways to keep doing that imo. The content simply isnt designed for tanks to do anything else then permablock.

With full sturdy and cp you can get a block cost of 88 stamina I believe. So whatever fight you can imagine, permablocking will still be a thing.

Valencer

Yeah, of course it's going to be possible. Im just commenting on the developer comments in the patch notes.

It's just going to require some gear changes.

Lightspeedflashb14_ESO

aeowulf wrote: »

show previous quotes

SublimeSparo wrote: »

Very well summed up.
All i can think of is 5p black Rose/ vo 2p engine guardian 5p witchmans at the moment.
Not even sure heavy armour tanking will be viable anymore, 6 med 1 light might be the way to go

Constitution is also reduced by nearly half & black rose was reduced in effectiveness last patch

thing is, it's not like you can get away with not blocking on most normal content, I pull a group of mobs, I can either block or watch the healer have a heart attack. I obviously don't want the latter as it means finding a replacement healer every few minutes and group finder is broken

As a healer, this is 100% right.

Alanar

It seems to me that shields are going to be very strong in Update 14 as currently designed. I've run a DK tank lately with ~72k health, which comes out to ~28k personal shields and ~13k group shields. Since shields do not benefit from armor or block mitigation, blocking does become a timing game, but you only have to block CCs, not CCs and hard hits. In addition, helping hands will give back more stamina with a small stamina pool than currently and the Minor Toughness buff will give an extra 10% health, which means 10% bigger shields. Add in spell symmetry for Magicka sustain (which is much safer with a 30k shield up), and the result is a tank build that actually got buffed by all the changes.

Ivan04

In DB patch we got a special response explaining to us how blocking is still gonna be OK. I expect to see something like that soon, because believe me, not many people play a good PVE tank.

MaxwellC

ZOS can't seem to comprehend that if you're tanking trial bosses you will definitely need both resources from orbs and shards being separate in order to sustain long boss fights. These changes were clearly never tested in PvE before being implemented because if they were I'm confident there would be little to no changes unlike the drastic nerfs we've seen.

I'm trying to figure out how I will regain resources remotely good when helping hands just got shut down alongside shards being iffy instead of consistent while it also sharing a global cooldown with orbs which I rely on especially on the mage's boss in vet AA (Since tanking all those axes is a resource hog because block needs to be up 100%).

Greydir

@Alanar The Main problem with that build is going to be the fact, that your ability to support a Group with usefull buffs and debuffs, be they applied via skill or via Setproc, will be nearly noneexistant. To call this a buff is a euphemism at best.

Brrrofski

Rip my saptank

Valencer

MaxwellC wrote: »

ZOS can't seem to comprehend that if you're tanking trial bosses you will definitely need both resources from orbs and shards being separate in order to sustain long boss fights. These changes were clearly never tested in PvE before being implemented because if they were I'm confident there would be little to no changes unlike the drastic nerfs we've seen.

I'm trying to figure out how I will regain resources remotely good when helping hands just got shut down alongside shards being iffy instead of consistent while it also sharing a global cooldown with orbs which I rely on especially on the mage's boss in vet AA (Since tanking all those axes is a resource hog because block needs to be up 100%).

On Live tanking all the axes without shard support is quite doable.

LadyDestiny

I sometimes wonder if these developers ever play anything but a magic class. DK tank has been scre*ed ever since they nerf stam regen while blocking. RIP Tanks. They are going to need to do a serious nerf on end game content to make it playable. Everyone will be scrambling to do Vmol, Vma, trials etc..before morrowind hits.

SublimeSparo

Valencer wrote: »

show previous quotes

MaxwellC wrote: »

ZOS can't seem to comprehend that if you're tanking trial bosses you will definitely need both resources from orbs and shards being separate in order to sustain long boss fights. These changes were clearly never tested in PvE before being implemented because if they were I'm confident there would be little to no changes unlike the drastic nerfs we've seen.

I'm trying to figure out how I will regain resources remotely good when helping hands just got shut down alongside shards being iffy instead of consistent while it also sharing a global cooldown with orbs which I rely on especially on the mage's boss in vet AA (Since tanking all those axes is a resource hog because block needs to be up 100%).

On Live tanking all the axes without shard support is quite doable.

Yes it is, i even do it without a healer, however with the increased stamina drain from blocks every 0.25s instead of 0.5, the increased cost of taunt, increased cost of buffs/ igneous, dragon blood etc, reduced return from constitution helping hands and battle roar. Plus taking more damage due to diminished hardy value, it's about to get a massive spike in difficulty
Edit not too mention reduced group dps, therefore potentually more axes to tank

aeowulf

bigger question, what changes are being made to make more folks want to play tanks rather than the current changes that appear to all be about making it tougher than it already is? I can't see anything here that will make more people want to play tanks. They are already the most sought after class in finder, and as a tank I NEVER have to wait in the queue. oh hang on, i did, once, just before xmas. Took me about 3 minutes, just long enough to complain in guild chat about waiting too long.

So what's happening now is the queue for a non-tank will become worse, making more non-tanks flag the tank option in finder - which really doesn't help when you can't kick them as finder is broken and you can't get a replacement.

Valencer

SublimeSparo wrote: »

show previous quotes

Valencer wrote: »

MaxwellC wrote: »

ZOS can't seem to comprehend that if you're tanking trial bosses you will definitely need both resources from orbs and shards being separate in order to sustain long boss fights. These changes were clearly never tested in PvE before being implemented because if they were I'm confident there would be little to no changes unlike the drastic nerfs we've seen.

I'm trying to figure out how I will regain resources remotely good when helping hands just got shut down alongside shards being iffy instead of consistent while it also sharing a global cooldown with orbs which I rely on especially on the mage's boss in vet AA (Since tanking all those axes is a resource hog because block needs to be up 100%).

On Live tanking all the axes without shard support is quite doable.

Yes it is, i even do it without a healer, however with the increased stamina drain from blocks every 0.25s instead of 0.5, the increased cost of taunt, increased cost of buffs/ igneous, dragon blood etc, reduced return from constitution helping hands and battle roar. Plus taking more damage due to diminished hardy value, it's about to get a massive spike in difficulty
Edit not too mention reduced group dps, therefore potentually more axes to tank

Sure, it'll be more difficult but still very much doable with some gear tweaks. Probably even with the same gear sets.

Like Woeler said going full sturdy should already help a ton. Since ability cost reduction CP arent a thing anymore there's now no reason to not go 100 into Shadow Ward for the full 25% block cost reduction and you can even go 100 into Arcanist for maximum magicka regen.

Helping Hands has been nerfed by about, what, 35% for the typical PvE tank build? It now restores 990 stamina no matter what your stamina pool is. Im running 30k stamina so that's going down from 1500 to 990.

Battle Roar ate a slight nerf. With 30k max stamina you lose about... 13-14% of the amount of stamina restored but you gain some magicka because it's very likely you wont reach the 26k magicka threshold.

Constitution nerfed by 42%.

With full sturdy and full shadow ward you can drop your block cost to exactly 88. I know Im sitting at 520 at the moment (no sturdy, 15% shadow ward) so my block cost could be almost 6x lower. Should compensate for stamina being drained at 2x the frequency under high pressure situation and the other block sustain nerfs. The only question is how low can you push your block cost until it's unnecessary.

As for Hardy getting nerfed... yes, it's down to 15% and stacking 100 into it isnt very beneficial BUT they added a "new" CP star that reduces direct damage taken that should stack with it. Spreading your red CP over Hardy, Elemental Defender, Ironclad and Thick-Skinned should be very viable with how harsh the diminishing returns are now and should make you just as tanky as before.

Durham

Alanar wrote: »

It seems to me that shields are going to be very strong in Update 14 as currently designed. I've run a DK tank lately with ~72k health, which comes out to ~28k personal shields and ~13k group shields. Since shields do not benefit from armor or block mitigation, blocking does become a timing game, but you only have to block CCs, not CCs and hard hits. In addition, helping hands will give back more stamina with a small stamina pool than currently and the Minor Toughness buff will give an extra 10% health, which means 10% bigger shields. Add in spell symmetry for Magicka sustain (which is much safer with a 30k shield up), and the result is a tank build that actually got buffed by all the changes.

Yes but PVP tanks are now trash... in PVE with multiple mobs on you you will wish you had a larger stam pool then 18k by the way after 18k it's stam return nerf... multiple mobs now cost more stam blocking was changed lol....

SublimeSparo

Valencer wrote: »

show previous quotes

SublimeSparo wrote: »

Valencer wrote: »

MaxwellC wrote: »

ZOS can't seem to comprehend that if you're tanking trial bosses you will definitely need both resources from orbs and shards being separate in order to sustain long boss fights. These changes were clearly never tested in PvE before being implemented because if they were I'm confident there would be little to no changes unlike the drastic nerfs we've seen.

I'm trying to figure out how I will regain resources remotely good when helping hands just got shut down alongside shards being iffy instead of consistent while it also sharing a global cooldown with orbs which I rely on especially on the mage's boss in vet AA (Since tanking all those axes is a resource hog because block needs to be up 100%).

On Live tanking all the axes without shard support is quite doable.

Yes it is, i even do it without a healer, however with the increased stamina drain from blocks every 0.25s instead of 0.5, the increased cost of taunt, increased cost of buffs/ igneous, dragon blood etc, reduced return from constitution helping hands and battle roar. Plus taking more damage due to diminished hardy value, it's about to get a massive spike in difficulty
Edit not too mention reduced group dps, therefore potentually more axes to tank

Sure, it'll be more difficult but still very much doable with some gear tweaks. Probably even with the same gear sets.

Like Woeler said going full sturdy should already help a ton. Since ability cost reduction CP arent a thing anymore there's now no reason to not go 100 into Shadow Ward for the full 25% block cost reduction and you can even go 100 into Arcanist for maximum magicka regen.

Helping Hands has been nerfed by about, what, 35% for the typical PvE tank build? It now restores 990 stamina no matter what your stamina pool is. Im running 30k stamina so that's going down from 1500 to 990.

Battle Roar ate a slight nerf. With 30k max stamina you lose about... 13-14% of the amount of stamina restored but you gain some magicka because it's very likely you wont reach the 26k magicka threshold.

Constitution nerfed by 42%.

With full sturdy and full shadow ward you can drop your block cost to exactly 88. I know Im sitting at 520 at the moment so my block cost could be almost 6x lower. Should compensate for stamina being drained at 2x the frequency under high pressure situation and the other block sustain nerfs. The only question is how low can you push your block cost until it's unnecessary.

As for Hardy getting nerfed... yes, it's down to 15% and stacking 100 into it isnt very beneficial BUT they added a "new" CP star that reduces direct damage taken that should stack with it. Spreading your red CP over Hardy, Elemental Defender, Ironclad and Thick-Skinned should be very viable with how harsh the diminishing returns are now and should make you just as tanky as before.

I hope so, i'm on console so i can't test to exact pts standards only based roughly on patch notes.
Do you know what the cost of pierce armour is on pts? The constant retaunting of all the axes is usually the biggest drain of stam in that particular instance, although buff/debuff timers should help a little with that on console at least.
One day there will be patch notes where tanks don't get massive changes but instead some new and interesting sets to play with lol

Asardes

Taking into account the fact that DK passives will have diminishing returns after you hit about 19K in magicka/stamina resource pools as stated in the patch notes, it will actually make sense to leave those pools at ~19K and instead stack all remaining attribute points and/or consumable bonuses into health, bringing it to 35-40K or more for a race that has 9/12% maximum health bonuses. Also the fact that the synergies restore a flat value, instead of percentage (in case of shards) means that stacking more stamina or magicka is not optimal.

Depleting stamina and magicka pools at the same rate trough skill usage and/or blocking, and keeping the deffcit just below the restored value will be more effective, because activating synergies from support skills will now fill the lowest by a flat value. The trickiest part is that orbs and shards will now share synergy cooldowns and you won't be able to activate them quite as often as now. This is also a small indirect nerf to sustain from Undaunted Command passive, and also means a lower uptime for Roar of Alkosh set which has been quite popular with tanks. It's debatable if this set will be worth using after the patch, considering the uptime from tank will be lower, it doesn't inflict critical damage in the current patch. Also the extra penetration from this set mostly benefited stamina DDs and stamina is already weak in the current patch, but it will be comatose due to CP change and morph cost increases, because magicka already has 4.8K penetration from Concentration passive.

With the elimination of CP cost reduction for stamina and magicka abilities it will make even more sense to stack magicka recovery above 2K. This is quite doable even now, but will become more critical next patch so you can sustain the shields and the burst heal from dragon blood trough certain heavy hits and channels, even with the elimination of cost reduction and the reduction of recovery from CP, and also the slight reduction of cost reduction from Worm's Raiment set. Major mending will only be active while a shield is actually active so spamming Ingenous Shield in order to have a high uptime will be required to get the most from dragon blood and vigor. The latter will become less viable for tanks due to increased cost, coupled with elimination of CP stamina cost reduction and reduced stamina pool so I will probably use it less when tanking.

When it comes to gear Bloodspawn is already lackluster (wasted resistance bonus, small ult gain) and even more so next patch (because smaller resource recovery from ults) so I will probably switch to Chocklethorn + Shadowrend for most content in order to buff magicka recovery to the highest possible value. Lord Warden is quite situational even now because most DDs will not be near you when you receive the hardest hits so they will be outside of the proc area which is quite small. Mitigation from evasion (shuffle) and minor protection (ring or preservation) will become more important since the CP mitigation is reduced to a maximum 15%, down from 25% so I will still be wearing Tava's Favor in order to take the full advantage from those. On the other hand heavy armor focus CP stat has been buffed a lot, which means that some of the CPs could be shifted there, in order to close in to the physical resistance cap - the spell resistance is much easier to reach due to DK class passives.

In short, what I will do if the changes will be implemented on live largely the same way they are now proposed on PTS
- buff my health from 28K to 35-40K by shifting some of the points I have allocated in stamina, down from 24K to 19K - I'm full stamina build now. I still think that "health" build is overkill and ineffective in end game content due to low resource pools.
- buff my magicka recovery from 1.5K to over 2K by using different monster sets and allocating some CPs (see above)
- block less, but shield more, both in frequency and size - higher health will mean bigger shields for me and the group
- manage my resources and time the synergies more carefully in order to achieve maximum returns

In conclusion tanking is neither dead but tanks will have to adapt, just like the other roles will.

amasuriel

Not dead, but more boring. The original change to prevent stam recovery while blocking was for "more dynamic gameplay", which of course was not the result. This will just enhance that. Since perma blocking is still absolutely required on the hardest content, it just means tanks will have less ability to do anything else but taunt (as close to the timer as possible to avoid waste) and keep block up.

It also means non DK and Warden tanks will be truly nonviable, since NB and Templar tanks already had issues with resources on hard content. I mean for hard content, sure you can tank vFG1 on your 7 light shield sorc still if you want.

BuggeX

the biggest enemy is the lag itself.


try to time blocks...

wimhwimladimf

Tanks can be very easily fixed by adding Enchants which greatly reduce dmg taken in pve based on your max HP (to prevent everyone using it, since dps will go for main stat/resource)

ptthor

right now I use 3 stat glyph's with infused
if I change to sturdy on all gear would I still want to use the three stat or is it a waste

p.s
thanks for this post it has been very helpful to understand all the new stuff

casparian

Alanar wrote: »

It seems to me that shields are going to be very strong in Update 14 as currently designed. I've run a DK tank lately with ~72k health, which comes out to ~28k personal shields and ~13k group shields. Since shields do not benefit from armor or block mitigation, blocking does become a timing game, but you only have to block CCs, not CCs and hard hits. In addition, helping hands will give back more stamina with a small stamina pool than currently and the Minor Toughness buff will give an extra 10% health, which means 10% bigger shields. Add in spell symmetry for Magicka sustain (which is much safer with a 30k shield up), and the result is a tank build that actually got buffed by all the changes.

Yup, this is the direction my Imperial will go. I'm actually excited to try it, as it will be a much more active playstyle than my current turtle-up-and-blockast-till-Sunday tanking style. I am worried about how certain trials will go (doesn't Rakkhat have some kind of mechanic that scales with your max health?), but figuring out how to make new things work is one reason I play this game in the first place!

UppGRAYxDD

So what you are saying is that Templar Tanks might be BiS for once?

lunalitetempler

Tanking in pve is too easy. Don't even use an ultimate for tanking or any gear. They use warhorn and group buff sets. Zenni simply wants tanks to tank. I personally loved tanking until this silly meta came out. Hopefully we will be able to actually tank in the next patch.