It's not just your opinion that dark cloak sucks. It is a fact that it sucks.

This game requires you to be mobile, not stand in one spot. If someone is standing still and tanking, they're probably playing the game with one hand... I don't want to know what they're doing with the other hand and what their focus is on.

Jaraal wrote: »

How could the change be made for PvP? Nobody in their right mind will give up mobility vs players. The only PvP use case for the new Dark Cloak is troll tanking 20 people with Mara’s Balm.

The only people that would even complain about Dark Cloak's heal would be in PvP? You think the DPS or healer in my dungeon group are upset that I'm healing myself?

Jaustink wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

How could the change be made for PvP? Nobody in their right mind will give up mobility vs players. The only PvP use case for the new Dark Cloak is troll tanking 20 people with Mara’s Balm.

The only people that would even complain about Dark Cloak's heal would be in PvP? You think the DPS or healer in my dungeon group are upset that I'm healing myself?

The only playstyle this satisfies is really one where specifically a magden is healing and demands that the tank stand in one spot and refuses to use any sort of "sticky" heal and wants you to stand in their many aoe heals.

Troll tanking is dumb. If only armor durability lowered the more hits you took and you couldn't repair with battlespirit up, that could fix the issue and make the game more realistic (but alas, people would complain). I don't care how strong your armor is or if it was forged from the eyeballs of hermaeus mora, teeth of molag bal, and with metal plating melted down from the Star of Azura as its plating, it isn't going to survive 10,000 hits including giant flaming boulders and ballistas from coldharbour being thrown without needing to be repaired several times. ZOS could add in skills that help repair your armor after PVP combat and this would solve a lot of issues (specifically the ones where you have ball groups running around in keeps for 2 hours with a scroll on them farming thousands of kills on peoples spawn points, or people like that one AD necro who spam purges himself outside of keeps or at the alessia bridge while getting hit by 2 dozen players and laughing it off), but again people will complain about how they need to repair their armor or that they need to spend skill points to repair their armor after prolonged combat and how the changes "ruined" the game for them. I find it highly unusual that impenetrable is looked at as a PVP trait as it reduces critical damage done BUT ALSO durability decreases by 50%, but durability is not lowered in pvp combat. I play PVE and PVP in about a 40/60 split over the past 3 months, and I never heard of someone running impen as a choice in PVE.

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sorry for getting off-topic OP.

disclaimer, i mostly use a tanky sorc tank with my pet that offers ungodly amounts of self-sustain

Healthy offering isn't the best heal as you may already know, you might heal someone else and it also damages you further- so you may need to follow it up with a heal over time like vigor. If you're running vigor, I would keep this as a backbar set and combine it with powerful assault to help your team's dps out. You may also want to think about the yoln set unless you have people running oakensoul, which renders the 5 piece bonus useless to them.

I am a strong advocate of frost staff front bar and s&b backbar, vampiric drain is only good for the ulti gen morph imo- so get it if you want more ulti, but there's also the stam draining morph so get it if you need more stam (I run sorc and we have a pretty good deal (sorry for the pun)). you also have mage's guild health for magicka line on top of this.

to elaborate more on the vampiric drain, at base value it restores 25% of missing health- so assuming no criticals or healing passives, and you are at 60% hp, it will restore 10% of your hp over 3 seconds if you do not interrupt the channel (by blocking). It's not too stellar, and the stamina drain is only 10% of your missing stamina- so you have to be pretty low to get much benefit from that one too (i'm unsure if that is affected by healing passives). you do, however, get the scion ult as a vampire, which can be pretty clutch for tanking as it is a complete heal + raises the cap on your resources by 10k, and gives you an extra 10k hp for 20 seconds- just remember that higher stages of vampirism come at an ability cost increase to non-vampire abilities. When you are powering down you are vulnerable and unable to block in my experience, though.

similarly you ask about the psijic channeled self-heal- you mitigate 30% with the passive so long as you are channeling it, but the real power comes from the ultimate that mitigates 5% just by being slotted. The heal is not too viable but it can help you get some quick resources back in some situations between battle.

I don't really factor in the 30% damage mitigation from vampirism- undeath passive, but it exists (i assume the way it works is that it mitigates 1% damage received from non-oblivion damage sources per 3.33% missing hp, but I may be totally wrong on that)

there is a destructive reach morph used with an ice staff which can root an enemy, taunt, and apply major maim, and you can use this as a ranged taunt instead of the undaunted one (i believe their range is both 28m, despite the tooltip not showing this until you actually have the staff in hand and check it). Additionally, ice staff heavy attacks give you a damage shield and magicka back if you don't want to use equillibrium to get more mana back. I see less logic in running a resto staff backbar unless you are using it to get the maximum amount of magicka back for your frost staff that you are tanking with with the use of heavy attacks. S&B will always be superior for tanking damage due to slotted passives though and puncture is a great way to apply major and minor breach so your team can do more dps, as well as taunt, but it's always nice to have two pools of resources to tank from (ice staff being magicka and s&b being stam) due to synergies restoring both.

when the boss is not damaging (or is getting ready to damage) you are able to put a heavy ice attack on them, swap to your s&b and apply your other damage shield and can mitigate a good portion of their next attack with minimal resources used.

you CAN consider the undaunted healing ball on one of your bars to help with resources while running blade of symphony helm set, but you would probably not run this for random dungeons- maybe with people you know who parse high. Lady Thorn helm set is probably better in these cases with the blood altar as you can self-proc that every 20 seconds and give yourself more resources from undaunted passives.

with a hand picked/pre-built team, i think a NB has a spectacular tanking kit especially with refreshing path and other synergies in your kit that will increase group dps overall. Just a word of warning about vampirism and the stages- don't go to stage 4 unless you have multiply purifying blood of mara handy, the cost of doing anything begins to outweigh the benefits, even if the benefit is a cheaper ult.

dmnqwk wrote: »

I think too many people are going crazy in how much you have to move as a tank.
It's very rare that you, as a tank, need to move AND take serious damage. It's generally a case of roll dodge out the way, then stand still! So in PvE terms, since Dark Cloak was supposed to be nerfed in pvp, I don't think there's anywhere near the problem people think there is.

In trial encounters, it is true that you want the tank to stand in a spot for a certain amount of time otherwise the overall dps of everyone suffers, even if it means tanking a hit instead of roll dodging out of it, however this is not how I think the game should be played. I'm reminded of nSS where you have the tank standing at one side of the dragon, and the dps on the other side. We want people to move around, there needs to be more active gameplay. If a tank stands in an AOE instead of moving, he should die. Similarly, so should the DPS. We as players shouldn't be simplyfying the game through using sets and abilities that incentivize never moving around, and the devs shouldn't be releasing sets and abilities that encourage not moving, even if it "can" be useful for one or two encounters- it gives people the wrong idea and further trivializes older content.

even early group content supports moving around- think of using a stand-still set in even the DCII pledge's bosses, but all the fights leading up to it? snore fest- except for grobull, screw grobull! But Grobull, in his own way, is pretty much the type of fight that incentivizes this playstyle. He falls on the ground and gets hit during a vulnerability phase, while reflecting and being invulnerable during all other phases. A simple fight, in concept, but really just bad for later content. His adds and the fact that he teleports behind you like the slender man, with that sound effect that sounds like you're in a factory hearing metal get hit, is what makes the fight more interesting, but otherwise he is a terrible template to work off of.

The problem I really dislike about some of the early trial content is that you can indeed stand in one spot and burn the bosses if you have enough dps, even on vet. The rewards from these trials are not too stellar, which is why people likely don't run them, but every "burn phase" is due to the fact that there's a window of opportunity where the boss is standing still, someone blows a horn, and people begin to stand still (around 80% of the time usually on the tail of the boss or not next to the tank) on top of aoe heals and wail on the boss until the next phase which is usually at a certain % of health. Devs have attempted to shorten the amount of time a burn phase lasts by adding more invulnerability phases, fakeouts, etc, but players still focus these windows of opportunity to get all their dps in. It is my belief that standing on the safe corner of a boss and treating it like a trial dummy needs to be phased out of existence as a playstyle entirely.

I'm reviewing my logs of my self-healing this patch versus last patch. I'm looking at raw HPS (so this includes overhealing).

All figures are U35 (first number listed) vs. U34 (second number listed) and are the average heal size per tick over the course of the fight (so this takes into account healing done/received bonuses as well as crits).

For Coral Aerie's final boss HM, which is a moderately mobile fight, it's 5.6K vs. 6.1K. If I zoom in on the most mobile part of the fight (when Kargaeda is up, because I like to hold Kargaeda in the middle of the room and rotate around her, following along with the rotation of the lightning), it's 4.6K vs. 6.2K.

In Shipwright's Regret HM, it's 5.6K vs. 5.1K for the first boss, it's 4.4K vs. 5.7K for the second boss (this is the fight where I most acutely felt the Dark Cloak change, since the fight is exceptionally mobile as I must constantly drag the boss out of her circle spam, all the while dealing with the Lurcher's high DoT; this is one fight where I needed to adjust, by adding Puncturing Remedy), and 4.6K vs. 4.5K for the final boss (you can see the effects of his defile here).

Looking at Yolnahkriin HM, which has some movement as I am pulling the fire atros under the dragon, I get 5.7K vs. 5.3K.

In Cloudrest, where I need to move to kite Crushing, I get 4.7K vs. 5.0K.

I've mostly spent my time in the new dungeons, where there isn't any data to compare to from Update 34. But on the relatively static Zelvraak HM, Cloak averages a delicious 7.3K per tick.

As I've said, in the majority of cases, it's about the same or even a little better. Yes, there are specific cases where it's bad (Nazaray HM is one such case), but in the majority of cases, it's just fine. It remains my primary self-heal just as before.

For the people complaining about Cloak, I ask, have you actually tried it in content to see how it feels? In any case, what we got for U35 Live is miles better than the crap that was in U35 PTS 1-3, where Cloak was scaled off of missing health. Now that would have been a legitimately bad change if it had gone live.