Feedback for ongoing Tank mitigation and balance for 1.6

[Atrius]

Hello everyone, we have put up our initial changes for the Warrior tanks and are looking for your constructive feedback on these changes. We are creating this thread to consolidate beneficial feedback in one place, so it does not get lost amongst the other feedback. This will be the thread that devs are looking at for your thoughts and concerns so if you have something to bring up, be sure to post here. We are aware that there are other concerns, especially regarding Power starvation and Physical DPS in PVP, but we would like to keep this thread limited to the Tanking balance feedback so that we can make sure none of your great thoughts and concerns get missed. This means that any posts not relating to Tank Mitigation and Threat, or any posts that are not constructive will be removed. We will be continuing to put updates for balance numbers up on the Test shard and will be checking this thread for your feedback on each of those changes.

Thank you all for your continued feedback.

[tordana]

First off, thanks for making this thread, we hope our views get taken into account. Second, I'm going to copy two extremely useful posts/suggestion from other threads:

Ok, I'm going to trust what Atrius has said about the changes being preliminary and that they WILL change. I don't know why; Trion has bit us many times.

As far as the PTS changes go, here's a quick break-down of my opinion on the matter:

PROS:
1) Threat scaling based on endurance
2) The beginnings of mitigation boosts for deep point investments into trees
3) The attempt at making each of the warrior trees stand-alone; or viable @ 51pts
4) Removing Ravenous Defense (More on this later)
5) It seems like you listened to us; that we want Reaver to be good - maybe you didn't expect backlash since a tree that's long been dead was being resurrected?

CONS:
1) Still too much mitigation with low point investments in trees (13-14 paladin, 21-25 reaver); Paladin is the biggest offender. You get so much average mitigation with so few points in this tree that it feels pretty mandatory.
2) OVERWHELMINGLY MASSIVE nerf to warrior physical mitigation with the removal of Ravenous Defense (Still more on this later)
3) Vague tooltips; if you want people to test things and give you feedback, help us understand what is going on by updating tooltips in a timely fashion (Surge, I'm looking at you)
4) The toppling of our most effective tanking build (51VK)
5) Lack of effectiveness in the "improved" Hardened Will and Crest Mastery talents. Even if you got 0.35% mitigation for EVERY point in the tree once you got over 30 (aka 51x0.35% @ max), you'd still only get a total of ~27% magic mitigation from them. For Reaver, that's fine - but for Paladin, that would still leave them pretty far behind any other 51pt build for magic mitigation - and they don't have the physical mitigation to justify it.
6) The Warlord tree feels completely ignored; yes, there are some changes that didn't show up in your notes - but the Warlord tree can pretty much be ignored now. I'm sure that's not your intent.
7) Touch of Life and Life's Rapture still sharing a CD - even worse, if you use Life's Rapture (10 min CD), Touch of Life (5 min CD) goes on a 10min CD. It will say 5 min, but when the timer is up, it will not be usable for another 5 min. How rewarding is it to go 51 pts into a tree when you're pinnacle ability essentially cannot be used? This didn't matter when going 51 paladin was an obvious joke, but since you're trying to fix it, please remove this shared CD or give Paladins a new 51 pt ability.
8) Singularity becoming a physical mitigation tool as well. This is a personal preference because I really want the trees to have some sort of unique flavor and this goes against the idea that Void Knights are magical mitigation warriors. Please revert this.
9) Warlord calls. They serve no purpose for us. If Call of Battle gave us a stat buff instead of AP, it would make quite a bit more sense. Like 50 strength - something like that. That would help us with mitigation and threat; whereas call of battle right now just screws up Bard buffs and gives us a negligible amount of threat via AP. Honestly, the calls have been out of the equation since launch. Everyone's got a bard; no one needs a warlord for his buffs.

BUGS:
1) I noticed that the new Wasting Away stacks indefinitely. I got it to 103 stacks before I LOL'd and just stopped.
2) The new Flesh Rot gives you a weird debuff on the player with no description for each DOT on the target (I assume this is supposed to be the mitigation?). It's odd.
3) The aforementioned Life's Rapture/Touch of Life bug.

NOTES/REQUESTS:
1) I've asked this before, but it would be great if you'd provide a list of the new threat modifiers and how they are affected by the endurance scaling that's been added.
2) Please have a more open discussion with us. It sort of feels like you came in here to appease us when the firestorm of anger occurred with the release of 1.6 notes - then basically walked away.
3) Please read this

RAVENOUS DEFENSE:
This was a crutch to us. I've made suggestions on ways to alleviate this, and I'm going to keep pushing for this to basically be a static buff for all warrior tanking specs. I'm glad it's gone, because now I won't feel like a moron if I don't have Void Knight in my specs. On the other hand, I'm very worried that it will not be compensated. Should be a baseline mitigation tool, in my opinion. The link above has more info on that.

Yeah, I'm probably getting annoying. Sorry, but I really don't want to become obsolete. You can beat me down eventually, but I'm going to put up a fight.

Suggestion from Sebb:

Gift of the Void Knight: Increases HP by 0.45% per points, and Armor by 1% per point (RD then augments magical mitigation)
Gift of the Paladin: Increases HP by 0.75% per point, Armor by 0.5% per point and block by .25% per point.
Gift of the Warlord: Increases HP by 0.75% per point, Armor by 0.5% per point, and dodge/parry by 0.25% per point.
Gift of the Reaver: Increases HP by 0.45% per point, Armor by 0.5% per point, and Reduces Damage Taken by 0.2% per point.

This suggestion would fix the current armor issue that forces everyone to go 18 into Void Knight at minimum.

Neither of these are my original posts but I agree with both fully and wanted to move them into the spotlight in this thread.

[propapili]

First off, the goal of this post is not to bash the developers or start flame wars. I've already posted my thoughts to some extent as it pertains to warrior tanking. Right now, though, I'm up in arms trying to help the developers balance warrior tanking trees. I want them to succeed, because I want warrior tanking to not only be good now, but scale well in the future.

I'm not going to break down every talent and what they should do. Instead, I'm going to try to bring the tank trees back to their fundamentals and use Atrius' examples to illustrate their goals a little bit.

What are our goals?
1) Increase threat generation among all specs for all situations
2) Balance mitigation out so the four souls are not equal but highly competitive with one another; with slight variations in overall mitigation
3) Not force you to play a specific spec to succeed
4) Allow you to play what you enjoy without sacrificing mitigation to do it

Those goals are basically what I gleaned from what Atrius has said to us. To that end, here are my suggestions. These suggestions are essentially fundamental tree structure changes:

Warrior Gift Abilities:
Now: Increases Maximum Health by 0.46% for each point spent in the ____ tree. Stacks with other warrior gift abilities.
Proposed: Increases Maximum Health by 0.46% and Armor by 0.75% for each point spent in the ____ tree. Stacks with other warrior gift abilities
Summary: This is designed to give warrior tanks a good BASELINE mitigation number. It removes the
Ravenous Defense crutch as well as allowing for great scaling.

Fundamental Tree Structure:
Low Investment Now: Paladin mitigation is front loaded; you get 25% block, 10% armor and 9% mitigation for 13 points. Void Knight is middle-of-the-pack; you've got to spend at least 18, but are better off with 25 points in the tree. Reaver gives you literally all of its mitigation in 21 points. Warlord mitigation is almost non-existent, so I will defer on this one.
Low Investment Proposed: Threat tools, small boosts to avoidance, HP boosts, and micro-cooldowns should exist in the pre 25 point range for all tank trees. With the baseline mitigation established through the Warrior Gift abilities, if you choose to play a hybrid role, you will not be overly good in any one area (much like Reaver Hybrid is today with magic damage), but you will have several tools and micro-cooldowns to play with. This encourages Hybrid specs for advanced players (at the cost of base mitigation) and 51 or other high investment builds for pure mitigation - which I will explain in a minute.

High Investment Now: As it stands, the only tank tree worth investing lots of points into is Void Knight. I think this is very well known. The reason is: you get a handful of tools, a handful of cooldowns, and you actually gain mitigation with your 51st point. Every other tank tree is literally wasting points if you're going over 25 (26 in paladin). This is a fundamental structure flaw.
High Investment Proposed: As noted earlier, the low point investment in trees would be giving micro-cooldowns but no significant mitigation boosts. However, if you choose to spec deeply into a tree, you should be rewarded with mitigation comparable to the 51VK. To some extent, it will feel like homogenization, but how you mitigate that damage is what will vary. An example that they have implemented is Flesh Rot. I think they're heading in the right direction; you get 2% mitigation per DoT on the target up to 5. They also made an attempt at this by giving you passive increases to Hardened Will and Crest mastery when going over 30 points. The effort is great, but the end result is minimal. The return for points invested needs to be much higher to put these specs in the same ballpark as 51 VK.

How does Trion do this in a way that's easy to balance?
My suggestion is that they set simple goals for levels of investment in trees. For example, one goal could be: We want all tank trees to give roughly 10% mitigation with 15 points invested. How you acquire that is a matter of preference; and how you hide the homogenization is up to the developers.

Summary
What I'm really getting at is that if they put their thinking caps on and figure out a baseline level of passive mitigation, they can then utilize Soul-Specific abilities/talents to bridge the gap they create. As I've noted, armor is your base damage reduction. If you do not base your fundamentals on armor, then scaling between trees will always be a problem. The high armor/armor multiplier talents will always be coveted; same with block. If you have 80% block, and you take a talent that increases block by 1%, you're actually blocking 5% more attacks than you were previously.

Notes
As a side note, putting threat tools and micro-cooldowns lower in trees gives a tank the OPTION of sacrificing some of the mitigation high up in his tree to help with his threat or burst damage; which may be that players weakness. It also limits the reliance on any one soul to be the secondary soul to your deeply invested tree. If one tree has a boatload of front-loaded mitigation (Paladin), it's always going to be part of your high investment tanking builds. This is part of the fundamental flaw.
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Atrius wants to balance 51 pt builds. A good start would be to find disparities.

*Using LIVE server values - Including all buffs available to the spec*

Test sample numbers: 10,000 health 10,000 base armor, 10% dodge, 10% parry, 30% block (45% absorb)

51 VK:
Magic Mitigation: 28% - 50% Spell Damage reduction for 10 sec, 1 min CD; 20% heal upon spell damage, triggers 5 times, 3 min cd.
Physical Mitigation: 75.81% base, 83.26% avg, 20% avoidance, 44% combined avoidance - 20% Accord of Emptiness - No Cooldown
Effective Health: 41,346 <------- The GOLD standard

51 Paladin:
Magic Mitigation: 9% - No Cooldown
Physical Mitigation: 63.90% base, 79.70% avg, 20% avoidance, 64% combined avoidance (block) - 100% block for 10 seconds, 1 min CD
Effective Health: 27,700 <------- Huge Disparity

51 Warlord:
Magic Mitigation: 3% (not considering the 5% from Entrench; only the 3% exclusive number) - Killing Blow heals to 50% 3 min. CD
Physical Mitigation: 64.98% base, 77.87% avg, 25% avoidance, 51.25% combined avoidance (block) - 3% Entrench - Killing Blow heals to 50% 3 min. CD
Effective Health: 28,557

51 Reaver:
Magic Mitigation: 22.2% - Shroud of Entropy 35% damage reduction for 10 sec, 1min CD
Physical Mitigation: 66.96% base, 77.14% avg, 20% avoidance, 44% combined avoidance (block) - 5% Imbued Armor, 10% Power from the Masses - 35% damage reduction for 10 sec, 1min CD
Effective Health: 30,265

Comparisons
Base Damage Reduction:
75.81% VK
66.96% Reaver
64.98% Warlord
63.90% Paladin
Analysis: The three red numbers are understandable. A three percent disparity in base physical damage taken is fair; Reaver has the highest of the three; and is penalized by having less avoidance. Paladin has the lowest, but has the best avoidance... Warlord is just terrible.

Avg. Damage Reduction:
83.26% VK
79.70% Paladin
77.87% Warlord
77.14% Reaver
Analysis: Again, the three disadvantaged trees are within acceptable ranges based on their base damage reduction; however, VK is still far and away the best - because the base damage reduction is so good. This also does NOT include Ravenous Strength, which would push this number even higher for VK.

Magic Damage Reduction:
28% VK
22.2% Reaver
9% Paladin
3% Warlord
Analysis: this is where a decision needs to be made. Obviously, VK is just the cream of the crop overall; but what do you want the tanks to be able to do? Based on what you have said recently, you don't want a spec to be REQUIRED to complete content. Alright, then you need to improve these numbers to be within ~8% of eachother so they are all competitive. Warlord and Paladin are in need of serious love.

Trion, please ask yourselves... what do we want each tank to do? Set some goals! For example...

MISSION
"We want reaver to be +5% innate magic damage vs. the three other souls; but is limited on cooldowns at 51 points. We want Paladin to be 5% better average mitigation than other tanks, but 5% less base mitigation (aka block tank). We want Voidknight to be average mitigation with great magical cooldowns. We want Warlord to be +5% innate physical mitigation, with average magic mitigation and limited cooldowns across the board at the expense of group buffs."

I'm not telling you that's how it should be, but that's a good fundamental start. If you truly want the 51 point trees to work, you MUST rid us of all of the front-loaded talents. Almost all of the talents that give Paladin any form of mitigation are located a whopping 13 points into the tree. All of the warlord mitigation (lol) is 16 points into the tree. All of the reaver mitigation is 21 points into the tree. Most of the VK mitigation is 25 points into the tree. Until you close these gaps, this will not work.

Every small percentage point becomes a larger and larger deficit for the lesser trees as you get better gear.

SOLUTION!
Baseline Mitigation; an absolute bare minimum that is determined by a shared branch or root. This will determine a the minimum amount of PHYSICAL mitigation and/or MAGICAL mitigation. Then you can evenly distribute the mitigation; but back-load more of it so you are not obligated to take X points of Y to be competitive.

I'm sure I've drilled the Warrior Gift adjustment idea down your throat enough; but I want you to tell me that you're working on something. Because if you don't, I will just keep coming with this data and analysis.

Each point spent in the ___ tree increases health by 0.46%, armor by .75% and reduces spell damage taken by .01%.

Each point spent in the ___ tree increases health by 0.46%, and armor by .75%.

Each point spent in the ___ tree increases health by 0.46%, armor by .75% increases all resistances by 1%.
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Please don't disappoint us.
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^ Are two posts that I put a lot of time into to try to get your attention. This is very important to the warrior tank community; we want to remain competitive.

[batou079]

^^ so far everything they pretty much coincides with the mass majority of the warrior tank community.

as much as you wanna keep it seperate, ENERGY regen is a part of this. Upping the regen rate even a slight amount would give us the half second benefit of using that CD when it is absolutely vital. Other times. Yes even as tanks we often get energy starved quite quickly...

[Kalgareth]

My major concern with the latest proposed mitigation changes is the lack of scalability. If our mitigation is not tied in a major way to progressive gear improvements then our long term viability as tanks becomes questionable.

I like having threat generation tied to endurance and think that is a first good step, but by taking away the % armor and strength scaling of Ravenous Defense and Strength and fixing said loss of mitigation through purely percentage based increases throughout the various souls you are taking a step backwards. What happens when the next tier of gear emerges and we only see minor improvements through gearing? This is one element of what happened to rogues when Hammerknell was released.

If you are going to remove RS/RD then please add new abilities that will compensate and scale our base mitigation statistics. % increases not based around gearing may fix any short term gaps due to the RS/RD removal but will compromise our long term viability.

Thanks for making this purely tanking focused thread and I appreciate the opportunity to provide feedback and hope to provide more after some further testing on PTS.

[Gomba]

@atrius Can this thread be Stickied plz.

I agree with Sebb in the idea that our Base line avoidance should come from the Gift abilities.

Gift of the Void Knight: Increases HP by 0.45% per points, and Armor by 1% per point (RD then augments magical mitigation)
Gift of the Paladin: Increases HP by 0.75% per point, Armor by 0.5% per point and block by .25% per point.
Gift of the Warlord: Increases HP by 0.75% per point, Armor by 0.5% per point, and dodge/parry by 0.25% per point.
Gift of the Reaver: Increases HP by 0.45% per point, Armor by 0.5% per point, and Reduces Damage Taken by 0.2% per point.

There are two reasons for this.

1) the Base line mitigation comes from points spent in tree's.

2) Flavor is given from each gift. Gift of the Paladin raises block and block reduction. This furthers the flavor of the tree's

I will dis-agree with the idea that Each tanking soul should be able to perform equally for each encounter. This defeats the purpose of having 4 tanking souls. I like the ability to Tailor my spec to the challenges of the encounters. I will agree that a Base line mitigation must be established for all trees. The Gift abilities are the logical place for these base line mitigation talents. I will also agree that before we start tweaking these "gifts".... A Mission statement or objective for these Trees should should be established. What is your Vision Atrius ... What is the vision of the community. What Flavor should each tree provide ? Should these tree's have DPS kick backs and synergies ?

One side note...

While we are looking at the tree's and redesigning the tree's .... Can the Synergy crystals be addressed? The flavor of the tree's are going to be completely changed. With that Synergy crystals like the Reaver crystal is not bringing the same level of mitigation as the warlord crystal.

[Vindicit]

Kinda hard to come up with concrete threat data when we have nothing to work with... All people have are the events when dps/healers pull aggro... thats it. Trion needs to give us threat data or feedback is all guessing.

[Gomba]

Kinda hard to come up with concrete threat data when we have nothing to work with... All people have are the events when dps/healers pull aggro... thats it. Trion needs to give us threat data or feedback is all guessing.

I will agree with Vindicit in regards to a disclosure over how our current threat is generated is required if we are going to be able to add any valid input.

The only data we have is provided by Cinderhelm's trial and error. Battle Field Awareness was yielding 6x endurance upon the use of a call.

I think the amount of TPS we have at this given moment is Decent... DPS Should be able to pull off of a tank if they are not intelligent in their play. With out actual numbers right now everything is shooting in the dark.

[Gomba]

In regards to the Diminishing returns provided by Block.

Can we please get a Polynominal diminishing return until we reach the Hardcap. This would provide a Much different scaling of gear. In addition this would provide much more intuition in regards to the diminishing return.

Other then when you hit 45 % block ... Block ratting is now 5 times less effective until you hit 65 % This would provide a gradual curve of the usefulness of the stat.

If this were the case .... Disclosure again would be much appreciated in regards to formula used.


An Example of a Polynominal curve

y = -0.8631x2 + 10.887x + 30.429

[intrinsc]

I do not favor "tailoring" specs for encounters unless we are given more role slots. At the time, with 4 tanking souls, 5 roles is simply not enough. Sure, it could be if you are 100% a tank, but this game far from favors a class that focuses on one single thing. Almost everyone dabbles in DPS, PVP, Tanking. I feel bad for the clerics that want to do everything, because they run out quicker than any of us. I'd hate to need to build a spec while adjusting on a progression fight and have to go to sanctum, sacrifice a role, rebuild it, etc. Meanwhile, your raid is stalling, losing momentum.

[Angelamongus]

I have throw this in, as I am not even sure 100% of people's mitigation numbers are correct anyway. Part of the biggest problem of your Average person makeing tank choices is that all that mitigation and control of your spec comes at such a confusing level. People aren't makeing decsions based on what they think but trusting that you have already balanced it out, which sadly is not the case. An example is the Ravenous Defense and Ravenous Strength buffs. I have talked to so many people already that have gotten the match wrong and are QQing that the numbers are so small until i explain how it scales properly.

Atm we also can barely tell how much this stuff effects without going through VERY stringet testing and even then we only get an idea. Some of your information for things tanks really should and like to know are completely hidden. What is the actual hit table? What is the combat table? I have 82% chance to hit + talents as a tank and still get dodged and parried in HK on bosses, whats up with that? I have 81% chance to block raid buffed in HK and 20% dodge and 14% parry. Yet I still take regular non affected by avoidance or mitigation attacks, How does your combat role system overlap or does it at all? Some talents seem to mitigate RAW damage which is on the same level of mitigation as armor. Some does not. Can you be more clea with us on When certain talents or other abilities are addative or multiplictive or if they are applied before raw dmg or simply mitigating whats left after armor. I mean these are small examples. But until we fully understand your core and what your intentions are for each ability, we are only theorizing and guessing.
Which does not help you at all cause we can't help you either.

Basically I would just like to say that if we got more information on what you think the totals should be and be a little more clear with us on inside stuff that is not gamebreaking informationm, you would get a lot more people to not make mistakes and be much more helpful to you in the end. The fun of the game Is figureing out the complicated stuff and being the best at what you do to because you are smart enough to figure those out, but to the same end don't make it so complicated that we think things are bugged and broken when they really aren't all the time. Your information has been a bit lacking in a lot of things not just tanking. How many forum bug lists are replied to by your guys as saying *thats not a bug its intended, we will reword the tooltip to help you better understand it*. So many QQing Bug threads and QQ threads in general could be avoided if you were more open.

Please keep going on this idea of yours for tanking though, I absolutely love it and want all souls to be viable to magic tank or phys tank or w/e I want to do with it just because its fun to play. I love this game and Definatly think you are on the right track, good luck to each and every one of you developers.

P.S.

I think even if you aren't going to change strength and Dex for warriors or you are, You should let us know soon even if you don't change it soon, as to what your goals are so we can better prepare ourselves for when the time comes, there are very very expensive essences coming out and talents and builds we are takeing for one direction, not knowing if its changeing anytime soon. Thank you.

Angel

[Kyria]

In addition to the great suggestions that have been mentioned above: the big/obvious reasons that everyone is saying "homogenization of tanks":

- the AE threat abilities that you added/modified are essentially the same for each class
- each class has effectively the same single target taunt, particularly now that sergeant's shares CD and travel times have all been removed
- each class has the same AE taunt; in PvP, this is even more annoying, since we're apparently pretending that Incite isn't a taunt and shouldn't proc Subdue (when it works), even though it's a taunt by any reasonable definition
- each class has exactly the same passive Gift bonuses (see suggestions above)

Any differentiation and flavor that you can add for these will help fight off that feeling that everything is the same soul, different wrapper. I get that it's probably easier to balance that way, but it takes away a huge part of the charm that is Rift's soul system.

Other stuff to look at: shared CD on the 51 pally ability with ToL, VK mana drains being completely pointless, Reaver self healing kind of sucking, Warlord buffs being pointless outside of Aid and Rallying commands. Leader's Mark getting overwritten by lesser armor debuffs. Tons of caster bosses that don't have mana bars, severely limiting Catalyze. That's pretty much a Greatest Hits list of stuff that's been out there forever, though.

[Carinae]

One major issue that needs to be addressed is the difference between RNG mitigation and passive mitigation.

To some extent there is a trade that needs to be made with RNG mitigation (block/parry/dodge) and basic passive mitigation (armor/flat reduction). This also impacts encounter design, since abilities that are un-blockable will tilt heavily to passive mitigation, which is why 51VK is the build of choice.

Trees, such as paladin, need a way to effectively survive the un-blockable hits, while still offering a difference advantage.

One way to accomplish this is by changing the health pools of the different trees. That way builds that rely on block/parry/dodge could have a potential advantage by soaking large hits, as opposed to mitigating them.

[Atrius]

I have not yet had a chance to read through all of this feedback, but thank you, these are exactly the kinds of discussions I wanted to encourage.

I wanted to let everyone know that there are some new balance values for the Void Knight that should be coming soon to the PTS.

[intrinsc]

I have not yet had a chance to read through all of this feedback, but thank you, these are exactly the kinds of discussions I wanted to encourage.

I wanted to let everyone know that there are some new balance values for the Void Knight that should be coming soon to the PTS.

Thanks for starting the thread.