Conditional Tanks

Mionikoi

So I know the meta is changing and I understand that in PVP tanks seem to get a lot of hate. I had a few ideas to make them fun to play and kill. Conditionals. I'll make a short list.

1. 'Thorn Tank'
2. Reflective Tanks
3. Netter

So with every single one of these, max health should be what they scale from.

I'll start with thorn tanks. On their own attacking someone you should be able to ignore them. When you attack them however, is where you find yourself in a prickly situation.
Damage over time but it scales. Take x damage per tick and multiply the longer you are in combat AND attacking the thorn tank.

How to counter them is thwle 'simple' burn them down quickly burn strategy. So you can expect this to be even worse when fighting in a group. Siege should not trigger the 'thorn debuff.'

How to balance this? The debuff also slows down the tank, so they become more vulnerable. A give and take.

Next, reflective tanks. These are easy. See that guy with 50k health? Light attack him once to probe. Did he just shoot back half the damage you hit him with? That's a reflector. It makes gankers consider their tarkets a little more thoroughly.

Balancing? Again, they sacrifice weapon and spell damage for this gimmick. But maybe rhey could also sacrifice resistance as well every time they use their skills. And that reflector better be either always spamming the skills or quick on the draw. I don't think it would be fair to force the reflection skill to have a cool down either after a successful reflection, but maybe a brief cool down between having it up. Make reflective tanks a game of cat and mouse.

Netters. Netters are designed as field control. Their entire purpose is to slow down their enemies and hope their buddies will mow down the opposition. Essentially a walking sticky trap. Can't do much damage. Make annoying ball groups 'reeeeee!' Until they burn it down.by then hopefully you have killed the ball group with siege.

'Well Mio,' some figment of my imagination might say. 'Wouldn't this compliment gankers?'

Well yes figment of my imagination. Yes it would. In theory. One person to sticky trap a group of people, and another to bomb them. Gank city would just get gankier!.... Unless they encountered a thorn tank with a couple of healers.... oof.

Well, that's all I have to say about that. I just had some ideas that could possibly be used in the future. Or not.

What do y'all think?

BXR_Lonestar

The thorn tank was already in existence before they made it so proc sets couldn't proc other proc sets. I ran Thunder Bug, Grothdar, and some other set (the medium set from Stormhold) which procced poison damage on an attacker and I could just sit there and let mobs kill themselves on me. Was great fun until they changed how proc sets worked.

Mionikoi

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

The thorn tank was already in existence before they made it so proc sets couldn't proc other proc sets. I ran Thunder Bug, Grothdar, and some other set (the medium set from Stormhold) which procced poison damage on an attacker and I could just sit there and let mobs kill themselves on me. Was great fun until they changed how proc sets worked.

In this case, the 'Thorn Tank' type would be one set\skill that would cause damage over time and the damage would scale up. think 1k, 2k, 3k, etc up to maybe 10k and making it impossible to out heal. On the other hand, the tank themselves would essentially be able to do little to no damage. Like attacking a thorn bush that just gets worse until you burn it down.

I heard Stormknight plate was pretty good once upon a time. Thunderbug is like Stormknight, just activated differently. I think it is a bit of a shame they are nerfed so much. I would like the idea of buffing crimson twilight and leeching plate. More sets that scale with health.

Zap if hit with x sets scales with weapon\spell damage. I know why they did it. Essentially, anything that can be used against annoying ball groups have been used by annoying ball groups.

PVP is a complex endeavor to tackle. You don't want things nerfed to much or buffed too much. I just think things need a counter to a counter in a triad of counters for counters for counters. Like, in PVP what is a counter to a PVP DPS? PVP Healers? PVP Tanks? I know it isn't as simple as that. I just want to offer ideas. Anti zergs used by zergs. xD And anti ball groups used by ball groups.

It is a conundrum.

Edit: Just realized I didn't mention it.
I wanted to add that none of the conditions should be allowed to proc or activate when siege is used against them. Maybe AOE's against reflective tanks as a hard counter.

Foxtrot39

Id like to feel like a tank beforehand, currenlty a DD with high damage can out tank me because all he's HoT scale with damage while there aren't 2 reliable max HP based heal for each class (and they usualy scale horribly bad with battlespirit on) without any of a tank's drawbacks

The problem is PVP being so DPS centric to the point high weapon/spell damage allow you to perform all 3 roles at once

Mionikoi

Yeah, that isn't cool. Where I don't think tanks should be indestructible unless you are tanking via other means, a DPS should not be able to tank. Then again, maybe that could be the new meta. Magicka tanks... Though, speed tanks would be a cool concept to explore too.

Soarora

Admittedly, I’m not a huge pvper so take my thoughts with a grain of salt… but wouldn’t this make tanks—at least in BGs—even more of a pain? I did chaosball yesterday where one team had 2 tanks… they were killable but barely and they won by a small margin. I worry these concepts would make them unkillable unless all 8 enemy players focus on the one person since people alone can just… die by trying to chase them down…

I don’t mind the tanks as-is but if they can gravely injure me while I’m already trying my best to stop them from healing I would like pvp a lot less.

Mionikoi

Soarora wrote: »

Admittedly, I’m not a huge pvper so take my thoughts with a grain of salt… but wouldn’t this make tanks—at least in BGs—even more of a pain? I did chaosball yesterday where one team had 2 tanks… they were killable but barely and they won by a small margin. I worry these concepts would make them unkillable unless all 8 enemy players focus on the one person since people alone can just… die by trying to chase them down…

I don’t mind the tanks as-is but if they can gravely injure me while I’m already trying my best to stop them from healing I would like pvp a lot less.

I think the way to balance this is that the thorn tank is being forced to actively stay alive while they are hoping to damage other players long enough to either kill them or make them retreat. You do bring up a good point. A single DPS will have trouble with a conditional by design. But this does not mean 4 v 1 should be the case. 8 v should be overkill even with 3 healers on a tank.

Besides, a conditional tank should not operate like a troll tank. Maybe a large health pool but lower resists? Make these conditionals have to co-op with a team for optimization.

A third for a thorn tank in particular is a 'netter tank' which will essentially prevent them from moving at all.

Reflective tanks could be balanced so that AOEs don't proc them.

Netters can just be kicked in the face until they die. They are made to be a glue trap. They don't necessarily need to be deadly ontop of that. But field control can be very useful and also very annoying to fight against.

etchedpixels

Mionikoi wrote: »

Yeah, that isn't cool. Where I don't think tanks should be indestructible unless you are tanking via other means, a DPS should not be able to tank. Then again, maybe that could be the new meta. Magicka tanks... Though, speed tanks would be a cool concept to explore too.

Speed on a PvP tank is definitely useful. If you've ever watched a sorc troll tanking using streak round and round the terrain for example. Gap closers are also a very effective speed technique for a tank in PvP (and sometimes in PvE when dealing with mr godmode runahead dps). In particular you can use a gap closer to get out of a situation by jumping on some random enemy who happens to be in range and away from the mob. It's also possible to use mythics, stack CP and jewellery speed buffs etc.

So speed tanking IMHO is already a thing and already exists.

Mionikoi

Netters would end up the counter to speed tanks though. Also, thanks for the insight.

Nothing like playing as a sticky glue trap.

etchedpixels

Mionikoi wrote: »

Netters would end up the counter to speed tanks though. Also, thanks for the insight.

Nothing like playing as a sticky glue trap.

Void bash, dark convergence, chains, plus all the cc and stuns. There are a bunch of existing counters, and the void bash arena stuiff is very much like what you are thinking of I suspect ?

Mionikoi

Yes and no. More like a set or champion point that lets a toon become a central point of an AOE that slows or temporary halts enemies, but at the sacrifice of doing little to no damage.

The real goal is to have more things that scales with health in a give in take way.