Heavy Armor changes, a tank’s perspective

BejaProphet

Main Idea: The penalty causing extra damage taken from magical attacks is fundamentally a mistake.

Clarification 1: I am NOT saying they have broken tanking, the sky is NOT falling.

Clarification 2: I am writing from a PvE perspective.


I can see the appeal of creating an “every-build-has-its-counter” approach from a PvP perspective. But it’s a crucial mistake for PvE.

In PvP a tank rolls up and there has to be counterplay, got it. But in trials and dungeons, the tank has to be able to tank everything. This is self evident. We can’t have our tank be solid in first room and then in the next, “well these deal X type of damage, you need a different kind of build.” That’s just not an option for PvE.

Now some actual numbers. I’ve been crunching data a lot, and let me give my character’s effective health to illustrate what I’m seeing. But first let me define my terms. Effective health is the amount of raw damage a creature must throw at me in order to get enough damage through my mitigation to take my actual health from full to zero.. So if I have 50% mitigation and 50k health a creature must throw 100k damage at me to kill me, because I will mitigate half of it. So I say my effective health is 100k.

Now for real numbers. Not factoring in block. Assuming my max health doesn’t change from CP 1.0 to CP 2.0. (That of course will not be the case.)


CP 1.0 my effective health is 133k.

This is for both physical and magical damage.

CP 2.0

135k against physical damage.
117k against magical damage.
The difference being due to armor passives.


Now my conclusions I draw from this...

1. This is not so dramatic as to break tanking in PvE. This doesn’t factor in blocking which is more powerful in CP 2.0, this doesn’t factor in the actual health increase I’m expecting to experience in 2.0. Life will go on.

2. But nonetheless this is a step in the WRONG direction. They have created a situation where I have a 15.38% higher effective health against half the damage in the game as compared to the other half.

With this strategy, ZOS walked into a path that they can not venture far on without breaking PvE tanking. Because in PvE your tank can not be facing a rock paper scissor scenario. He has to be able to be your tank in every fight.

So again to clarify, this is not going to break the game but it is a design decision that is fundamentally flawed for PvE tanks.

ZOS, please take no further steps down this path.

etchedpixels

The new meta appears to be tanking in mostly light armour. This also has the advantage that you can mix a healing/buff set and a tanking set to deal with the fake healer problem and to use heal/shields to counter the fact heavy armour is now mostly scrap.

I'm not sure it's what ESO intended however.

BejaProphet

I don’t think that is going to happen. First, the mitigation you gain from the light armor passive will be negated by the actual resistance loss. Even with these passive my heavy armor tank will still out mitigate a light armor tank against magic.

Second one of the big boosts for tanks in CP 2.0 is going to be how much more damage is mitigated by block. The biggest source of that (by a small margin) is looking to come from heavy armor passives.

So there is more to the story than just my one complaint here and the net sum is going to be a good story for tanks I predict. But this one design decision is just fundamentally flawed even if they didn’t take it far enough to break tanking.