@VaranisArano First, your argument is ad hoc. You are trying to establish a reason afterwards. This was a decision for PvP health. There is simply no way they did this as a calculated move to bring dungeon fights more in line with their original vision.

Second, it doesn’t change what it does to PvE dungeon tanking which you acknowledge sucks for tanks. Also, your strategy instincts are spot on. Individually taunting every mob is going to be the only way to control the fight now. But consider that statement. It means they have destroyed the crowd control aspect of tanking.

Third, NOBODY has ever posted a complaint saying, “these awesome tanks who are so good at crowd control ruined my enjoyment of that dungeon.” Rather, they LOVE when they get tanks like that.

This is a total loss for the PvE side of the game. Any other suggestion is just searching for a silver lining on an undeniably rainy day.

As a main tank I really disagree with most of this. Your inability to tank in a different way and shift to the new meta is not a sign that the meta is bad, but rather that your ability to shift to it could be improved. Far too much of the community just wants to have massive amounts of dps that downs all the enemies quickly and speeds through content, rather than using a more intelligent or cohesive strategy.

Maybe the damage dealers could focus weak mobs down before ganging up on the boss so you don't need as much CC. Maybe you SHOULD hunt everything down and keep a rotation of taunts up on enemies, rather than relying on broken CC spam. Maybe *gasp* tanks should be part of the team strategy instead of playing a solo minigame while the rest of the team plays the game.

ZOS doesn't want an AOE taunt in the game, because they want tanks to have a more interesting gameplay loop than they have in most games. This is part of why I like tanking in ESO, specifically because it's NOT every other MMO.

BejaProphet wrote: »

@VaranisArano First, your argument is ad hoc. You are trying to establish a reason afterwards. This was a decision for PvP health. There is simply no way they did this as a calculated move to bring dungeon fights more in line with their original vision.

just curious, is there actual proof of this or is it just conjecture? i'm just curious whether they actually said anything about it.

Marginis wrote: »

As a main tank I really disagree with most of this. Your inability to tank in a different way and shift to the new meta is not a sign that the meta is bad, but rather that your ability to shift to it could be improved. Far too much of the community just wants to have massive amounts of dps that downs all the enemies quickly and speeds through content, rather than using a more intelligent or cohesive strategy.

Maybe the damage dealers could focus weak mobs down before ganging up on the boss so you don't need as much CC. Maybe you SHOULD hunt everything down and keep a rotation of taunts up on enemies, rather than relying on broken CC spam. Maybe *gasp* tanks should be part of the team strategy instead of playing a solo minigame while the rest of the team plays the game.

ZOS doesn't want an AOE taunt in the game, because they want tanks to have a more interesting gameplay loop than they have in most games. This is part of why I like tanking in ESO, specifically because it's NOT every other MMO.

As a main tank you should know then that when a group of 10 to 20 adds run at you there is no way to taunt them all. I'm not even saying we should have an aoe taunt that taunts all the adds. Even one that atleast taunted adds your able to talon. That is just the trash that gets bad when they swarm you. As a tank I work and use strategy thru every aspect of what I run. And I expect my tanks to run similar. That is a giant aspect of tank testing is crowd control. Which now becomes nul and void. When it is stated that's a tanks role and you remove the ability you are going against what you say. For instance hel ra on vet there is a giant add pull. With almost no cc the ads run wild. The tanks role keeps getting dimished.

@marginis you made about a dozen ungracious assumptions about who I am and what I want based, apparently, on things that have irritated you from other people in the past. I’d love to hear your perspective but you are going to have to articulate some thoughts that are more concrete and to a point.

BejaProphet wrote: »

@VaranisArano First, your argument is ad hoc. You are trying to establish a reason afterwards. This was a decision for PvP health. There is simply no way they did this as a calculated move to bring dungeon fights more in line with their original vision.

Second, it doesn’t change what it does to PvE dungeon tanking which you acknowledge sucks for tanks. Also, your strategy instincts are spot on. Individually taunting every mob is going to be the only way to control the fight now. But consider that statement. It means they have destroyed the crowd control aspect of tanking.

Third, NOBODY has ever posted a complaint saying, “these awesome tanks who are so good at crowd control ruined my enjoyment of that dungeon.” Rather, they LOVE when they get tanks like that.

This is a total loss for the PvE side of the game. Any other suggestion is just searching for a silver lining on an undeniably rainy day.

Its true I'm looking to see why ZOS changed this for PVE as well as PVP. Like with the damage shield changes, ZOS could have made the changes for PVP only...and didn't. So I think its worth looking at what the PVE impacts are and why ZOS might think those are beneficial[ for the game as a whole.

Your argument that players love CC tanks so therefore ZOS shouldn't change them because no one complained is an error I often see in these type of arguments over PVE nerfs. PVEers generally don't complain when they are too powerful or something makes fights easier. What they do complain about is when things are too easy...and base game dungeons have been too easy compared to the current player power levels for a long time, especially if we judge by DPS power creep and the devaluation of dedicated healer builds. The players don't see power creep as a problem. On the other hand, ZOS definitely does see power creep as a problem when content becomes too easy.

It benefits ZOS to keep PVE content from becoming too easy. That usually means nerfs of various kinds when PVEers are outstripping the PVE content difficulty.

There are a lot of factors that go into making group content too easy. We saw ZOS tackle some of those in #Nerfmire with damage shields and passive dodge. My theory here is that tank CC enables Stack & Burn tactics that, together with AOE DPS rotations, makes mob fights simple And less dangerous, particularly in base game dungeons. It also has the benefit of impacting all levels of PVE group content, from normal dungeons to trials. If that's the case and ZOS is still trying to adjust difficulty via more roundabout ways than simply nerfing DPS, then I don't expect any reversion to this tanking change.


I will not be individually taunting everything in dungeon mobs. I found that boring AF when I used Swarm Mother. It might work if you enjoy that, but ESO tanking is not well designed for taunting everything and so I think that's not going to be a very workable tactic.

Instead, I'll be shifting back to my earlier tactic of Tank+ AOE DPS. 1. Taunt the boss. 2. Taunt the dangerous priority adds or minibosses. 3. Then, use minimal CC and mostly AOE damage so I'm helping to kill the adds, since I can't control them as well. And the healer and DDs are just going to have to adapt, with greater self-heals, less min-maxed builds, or more reliance on a dedicated healer so they can deal with mobs that have uncontrolled adds.

@VaranisArano I disagree with your conclusion that this is a plus but you helped me understand your points much better in that post. Thx.

Btw, this change is going to be double rough on damage dealers that can’t keep up. Because when trash instant dies a good leash or chain is sufficient. It’s when things die slowly that it’s going to frustrate the entire group even more than before.

BejaProphet wrote: »

@VaranisArano I disagree with your conclusion that this is a plus but you helped me understand your points much better in that post. Thx.

Well, I'm glad I could clarify!

I think it sucks for PVE tanks like me who enjoyed battlefield control and makes mob fights less predictable (yet still tedious). Its undeniably a tanking nerf and a PVE group content nerf.

I liked being able to Stack & Burn effectively

I just suspect that ZOS thinks its a good thing that its going to make PVE group content harder, so I'm resigned to the nerf sticking around.

@BejaProphet I agree. I am also a fan of your tanking style that you so eloquently lay out in your guide on this forum.

I do have a fairly classic DK main tank but rarely play the character anymore since the character, though nearly unkillable, simply lacks the ability to control fights to my satisfaction. I'm not talking about gathering an entire crowd; rather I'm talking about roots that are too short and bosses that ignore taunt. I have not tanked since the nerf you are talking about but if it decreases my tank's ability to hold those he has managed to pull in, then I guess I'll be tanking even less.

At the end of a root, the creature gets a 3 second root immunity. Plenty of time to move out of the pile. But the real rub is how this combines with snare nerfs. Razor caltrops list the brief 70% snare and frost staff wall was nerfed to 30% (if my numbers aren’t off).

30% snares are utterly pointless. They barely slow the mob before they are out of the snare. Point being they have also taken any tool we might have used to cover that 3 second gap.

Now this is not to say we can’t do it at all. We can still stack some. But if dps doesn’t kill them quick they will go away and you can’t stop it. For melee you can bring them in then taunt. That’s the most dependable crowd control now.

BejaProphet wrote: »

@marginis you made about a dozen ungracious assumptions about who I am and what I want based, apparently, on things that have irritated you from other people in the past. I’d love to hear your perspective but you are going to have to articulate some thoughts that are more concrete and to a point.

I apologize if I came across as making assumptions about you personally. I probably should have made it more clear when I was talking about the community as a whole or about hypotheticals. It may help if I address your original post point by point.

I don’t know if anybody who matters actually reads these but I can hope. You have done something dramatically bad for the PvE tanking community this time in how you have changed snares and adding the root immunity.

I disagree, and while I think that's pretty much just my opinion, I do also think it's a bit unfair to implicate the entire ESO PVE tanking community.

For a bit of context I want you to know I’m not a chronic complainer. I have in many threads defended your changes to blocking and other things that enraged tanks. I didn’t like your one hand enchant changes but I adjusted.

This time however you have majorly damaged a central aspect of tanking.

I want to speak reasonably with you about this and I seriously ask you to consider my points.

Point one: The majority of encounters are trash packs when tanking dungeons

This point is just statistically verifiable and I need not elaborate.

I'm not disagreeing with the point that trash mobs are most encounters, but considering the time spent in dungeons or trials, mob encounters don't take up near as much time as you imply. The statistic may be true (I don't know or care enough to compile evidence), but I think the overarching point is fallaciously achieved. Of course, this is mostly irrelevant to the discussion, as mob encounters playing SOME role is all that is necessary to have a reasonable discussion on the topic. I would argue however that because mob fights play a more minimal role than you suggest, at least to myself and the lay population, your exclamations on how tanking is forever damaged because of this change is a bit... hyperbolic.

Point two: Our key job in these fights is crowd control.

I’m not sure whether or not this was the original vision for these fights, or if the game just evolved that way. But it HAS evolved that way. Excellent tanking in the game on trash fights (the most common fights), is about setting up the creatures like bowling pins so your damage dealers can wreck them. But it’s more than just excellent tanking, it’s almost the only thing we have to do in those fights. Yes there is the occasional threat included in the trash pack, but overwhelmingly if we can’t do crowd control then we have no point in those fights. Let me say that again, if we can’t do crowd control, then we have no point in the most common fights in dungeons.

Don’t get me wrong, tanking will never go away, but we will hate being a tank in most of the fights. We will simply be tagging along until reaching the few fights that justify our existence.

I don't think CC is the primary role of tanks, with the exception of it playing a much more significant role in PVP. A tank can very easily be the primary source of team buffs, can gather enemies around themselves without locking the enemies in place, and even off-heal or off-dps with the proper build. The refusal to break out of the mold of traditional tanking is what holds this belief in place, not that tanks can't do these other things.

Furthermore, the fact that the game has evolved to be played a certain way, while definitely something to consider, is by no means reason to not change things. Some things, in fact, NEED to be changed in order to do different things people want, like adding new abilities or new dungeons. Consider if you will how broken good and how broken bad certain abilities or armor sets would be if they had their old effects still now that the Warden and Necromancer are out.

Point three: If we can not pin mobs down, leashing and chaining is often irrelevant.

All of our dragging creatures in will not matter if they immediately leave. So when you destroy are ability to keep mobs stacked, you also have destroyed the point of stacking them in the first place.

Taunt them. Taunts are meant to be what keeps mobs aggroed on you. ZOS has stated that they do not want or intent to add an AOE taunt in the game. Presumably there is a reason for this. I highly doubt ZOS just wants to be jerks to their players for the fun of it. CCing mobs like this is just an AOE taunt ZOS did not intend.

Point four: The Role of Tank is Inherently Unfair

This may be my most important point. I appreciate and applaud your desire for our abilities to function the same in both PvP and PvE. But it is important that you recognize that what a tank does is unfair in its very concept.

Consider taunting. The very idea is that we remove choice from the thing we taunt, and force them to do the stupidest thing it could do. We make them attack the most difficult target to kill and the target which yields the least reward since we are actually the smallest threat.

To a lesser extent every way we control the fight is inherently unfair and unfun for the victim. Our job at its most fundamental level is to force the enemy into unwinnable positions and strategy.

But the NPC’s can’t complain. If the could they would tell the developers that tanks are unfair. But the PvP players can complain and do, and they should! Because what we tanks are built to do is unfair and unfunny for the victims.

Aside from this being an argument one could make for any role ("healers don't even fight, they just sit in back and keep their own people from dying so the fight goes on forever" or "DPSes just do damage at you and don't even use strategy, they just attack and kill you too quick"), tanks have a fundamental role in PVP you touched on - forcing enemies into disadvantageous positions. A tank runs through a crowd in a keep under seige, at least some players will break off and chase the tank, for example. This is a great legitimate strategy, rather than solely "unfair and unfunny" for the victims.

To be completely honest, sometimes it's incredibly funny for all involved, to see a wacky naked khajiit bunny hopping into the thick of a fight with a bunch of players chasing his tail.

But here is the catch, what we do isn’t that way because it needs balanced, it is unfair in its very concept. So when you try to balance something like the ability to pin somebody in place, you can’t balance that. But you tried! And you know what the balance turned out to be? You made it so we can’t! Because us doing that is unfair! But now in PvE, you didn’t balance our jobs, you destroyed it! Because now we can’t keep the creatures in place! Our task is unfair to the victim and we can either do it or not.

In this one area you can not treat PvP and PvE the same. Because to make what we do fair is to destroy it. Because what we are suppose to do isn’t fair.

This is a difficult thing in any game, and I think that as far as human minds can balance videogames, ZOS has done a pretty good job, even if I wouldn't have personally done things the way they have. There is an important element to game design that relies on consistency. Things should work the way players, especially new players, expect. When they don't, and players don't have control over what their in-game avatar does, players get frustrated. Just imagine how you might feel if you hopped into Call of Duty wanting to play with your friends and then half the time your gun shot daisies instead of bullets. It's more similar than you might think when players transition from PVE to PVP. The abilities should, by this philosophy of game design, behave the same, so the player knows what to expect. If they don't, they're likely to get frustrated and leave.

This isn't the approach all games take, but it is a very common and very fair philosophy to have, and it helps ESO remain one of the more accessible MMOs on the market today, which is what it owes at least some of its success to. One might say it caters too much to casuals, or it results in a worse balanced game, but these are tradeoffs for other benefits.

I do also disagree that this destroys games, or even just tanking, or even just PVE tanking. Saying that I think unfairly diminishes the immense care and work put in by the ZOS devs who balance the game and do their damn best (which is really good especially looking at most other popular games) to make sure that no one is fully left out. Even though I disagree with PVP faction locks ZOS implemented them, because so much of the community cared. But, they didn't leave players like me out and left some unlocked campaigns. A middle ground is rarely everyone's first choice, but when considering everyone, compromise is usually the most agreeable option.

I should also say this - and I know many won't agree with me - but PVPers matter too. There, I said it.

Please please revert the crowd control changes in PvE. You have destroyed the fun of tanking in countless fights. I’m not saying to abandon keeping PvP and PvE consistent. I’m saying to recognize that just like a taunt, there are some aspects of tanking that need to be exempt. Because the task demanded of us in PvE is an unfair thing to do to players and the only way to balance it is to destroy it.

I think fights are more fun without relying on a broken mechanic being spammed, but I recognize that you're having less fun. The fun of other players matters as well however, and balance is a very important factor in other players' fun. PVE and PVP.

It is also important to note that I think consistency is an all or nothing thing. Either you make everything consistent, or nothing is. The goal of consistency is so that new players can learn one to know both, and in saying that any exceptions need to be made, you're saying players need to learn about any exceptions individually as well as learning the game the first time. ZOS is trying to eliminate all these weird ways abilities work and are applied that aren't mentioned in tooltips or aren't immediately obvious, because it makes the game less consistent and harder on new players (and let's face it, even some older players) when they try to understand how the game works.

This is why most randoms in dungeons suck, and endgame is so notoriously hard to get into for most players - because knowing how everything works as is is going through a giant spreadsheet as is. It's not that your suggested CC fix is one exception, it's that it's a change in the direction opposite of ZOS's, and that it only serves to cheapen the gameplay experience as is.

Hope that clarified things.