Tanking, Combat and Challenging the Convention of MMOs everywhere

Dane

Cadet
To start, I hate the concept of tanking. It is a very unrealistic means of combat. Imagine your group of five friends was fighting another group of five friends. Your biggest friend runs into the fray and while the enemy group was wailing on him, you and your pals would proceed to circle them and beat on their backs, usually uninterrupted until they died.

Unrealism aside, the entire concept requires that you always have a tank and a healer and makes anything else secondary (devaluing other options) because of their sheer abundance in comparaison.

Mind you, this is all based on the agro/hate idea of monster targeting; the concept that a monster will attack a player with the highest DPS on them. Every so often for fairly stupid creatures, this wouldn’t be such a bad problem, but for creatures that are supposed to be as smart as us? Not so much. This was all pioneered by the first incarnation of everquest (to my knowledge) and for the time was a rather intelligent way of handling a self regulating targeting system. It was elegant for the times, but expectations and ideas have evolved and changed since then.

Ideally, sentient enemies would attack in groups, target casters and healers, and avoid the tank if possible. Perhaps if you killed the enemy group leader, they would either resort to hate/agro or simply flee for their lives. Other options include a frenzy mode, where an animal simply attacks on sight and will not let up.

This means that if players had tangible hit boxes to enemies (hostiles could not run through you and vice versa) you would have to intercept and interpose yourself in between enemies and the casters/healers. This also means that positioning is important and having attacks that knock enemies aside or back have very important value. Then anyone could tank/off tank, especially if healing is effective. However, this is assuming a head on approach always. Each class has its own means of combat and mitigating damage, which is really just the whole reason for tanking.

Rangers have kiting (and pets?)
Rogues have stealth
Mages have boom (gogo glass cannon)
Warriors have armor.
Et Cetera…

When all in a group, you can rely on other tactics; especially since positioning and formations are important under this model (think flanking bonuses as well). Tanking requires cooperation, but in order to have a dynamic, and adapting combat experience, you would need to offer more options than the Tank and Spank concept. WoW has been deviating from this model a lot because it isn’t a very fun thing to do –every- time. But they can’t get rid of it because it has become too integrated with their own game, so they simply try to make tanks more abundant, change the fights a little, etc…
 
This is one of the things that I really like about Darkfall. Shield walls work against arrows and a big guy in heavy armor can physically impose himself between an enemy and his caster friends. Battle formations matter since your ranged combat allies can't fire arrows or spells through you because friendly fire is very real and you even take extra damage from behind. That means proper positioning of your group, accurate manual aiming (no click targeting), and use of terrain to get the maximum use of your party's abilities.

You can engage enemies at range from up on a rooftop or a wall or in a tree and thus avoid close combat entirely.

I haven't participated in the beta though so it's up to someone else to say how satisfying the experience actually is in the game.
 
Heyyy this game looks amazing! However it could have used a little better art direction. Some of these screenshots aren't exactly awe-inspiring... or even good. The locations look fine but the Character models look hideous in some cases and no one wants an ugly avatar.

But this game looks almost totally PVP. I wonder how they implement enemy AI to mesh with this combat system.

The idea of -real- camouflage and mounted combat is also enticing.
 
I hate shield walls. They're dumb. Barrier/Containment spells, on the other hand...

Wrap your brains around this one. Let's say we have encumbrance in HJ. I think that's a fair assessment. Now, in DR, if your encumbrance reached a ridiculous amount (something like a half ton for a Gor'tog, or a half dozen bagels for a Gnome.), you were no longer able to move without extreme difficulty. Taking this mechanic in mind, I propose...encumbrance attacks!

Say you're a warrior. You tackle someone, your entire body weight plus all your felgercarb gets tacked on to their encumbrance (relevant skill levels serving as multipliers), slowing them down or possibly stopping them. Gearknights would be better at it. In a blatant rip of Twilight Princess, Gearknights would get clawshots to directly tether their opponents, at worst slowing them down, and at best stopping them or even dragging them back towards the Gearknight. I'd give them iron boots too, but presumably that's standard gear already.

Edit: I don't actually hate shield walls, but they shouldn't be the only option.
 
I agree, shield walls should not be the only option. This idea isn't refined and I appreciate that you are suggesting rather than just denouncing without any attempt to help or improve. =D=

I believe the Gear Knights already have a magnatron that gives him a personal gravity well. However! I think that a claw shot would definitely be more motif oriented. It's just more mechanical than the magnatron! I think more physical mechanisms and steam power (or the equivalent thereof) than electronics and magnetics. Maybe once it latches on, the two characters are linked by the range. if the mob wants to move, it has to drag the gearknight's heavy butt with him/her.

Mages already have a fire wall that enemies will try to go around and other ranged fighters will have means of damage mitigation such as some kind of knockdown or trip shot. But let's break it down:

Really, "tanking" is just about damage avoidance; Controlling who gets attacked.

Avoidance can include dodges, knockdowns, dazing effects, slows, and just general kiting.

Examples:
- Mages: Telekinesis. walls of fire/ice/earth, summoning intervening minions, stunning lightning, hypnosis?, charm effects, illusions, fear spells, mind attacks that stun, Steel skin

- Rogues: Blinding, invisibility/stealth magic, throws (as in grabbing them and tripping them), hamstringing, plain ol' dodging, sprinting away, traps?, paralytic poisons, dirty fighting (might include moves that keep you down)

- Rangers: also dodging but better armor than rogues, pets that can maul (dogs can chew on legs), knockdown shots, Traps, decent parry, bolas?, some stealth, sprinting, leg shots to slow movement, disarming

- Heavier Fighters: Big armor, Shield wall, parrying, ringing head blows to stun, knockdown blows, large HP, Tackling (to buy others time), polearms to keep people at bay, sunder weapons, et cetera.

Shield wall is not your only option and I agree it should not be. You can combine all of these into an effective means of keeping the heat off. Technically, a wizard can "tank" for you and be responsible for making sure the enemy can't hurt you.

I think encumbrance is a good idea. It keeps people from carrying 50 swords around. It just has to be practical. I know in WoW, warriors keep several weapons on them (dps weapon and 1H sword and shield) in case they need to tank in addition to the hoards of junk they have lying around. If you deny them that, the game gets needlessly annoying.

Encumbrance can be something that is varied too. Lets say a weight spell triples your encumbrance. If you are naked, you're pretty much ok (ie another wizard). But if you are a warrior in full plate. Not so much.
 
It's late and I'm tired so I can't post out a detailed response but I really dislike the whole tank n'spank system. It gets people mutating classes into something they should never be. For example warriors (tanks) looking for any means to possibly avoid damage even evasion and end up having higher agility than rogues. Than the rogues completely disregarding anything besides more more more STR. It just ruins the game, and to make it all worse then devs start making all the equipment for the classes that way so people who don't want to be lemmings are forced to be...

Ok... I might just be ranting because I hate where eq2 is going but I think you get the idea. People shouldn't be so completely obsessed of one aspect of their class that they forgo everything else since there's someone else to do it for them.
 
Ok... I might just be ranting

No, that's a perfectly legitimate argument and I agree with you 100%. Class stereotypes and getting fed up with the smothering role restrictions is why I quit WoW twice (second time for good).

Like oh so many of us here we really want some freedom to play our characters like we imagine them instead of the way we "should."
 
The first MMO that I played that seemed to at least reduce the value of the tank, healer, dps concept was CoH. It is quite feasible to complete AV fights without a tank, healer (in CoH it's a bit different) or dps although the healer is probably the most difficult to replace.

The reason behind this is, the devs allowed significant buffing/debuffing and crowd control from multiple archetypes, specifically defenders and controllers. In fact, it has been noted that all defender/controller teams were almost unbeatable in any situation.

I've always wondered if game designers could just do away with tank, healer, dps classes and make all classes hybrids. And allowing synergy within a group to cover the perceived weaknesses.

No frontline guy to take the blows and form a blockade? The others in the back buff him or debuff the enemy so bad, he essentially becomes like a tank even though he started out like a melee dps (happens in CoH all the time with scrappers).

If every class had some buff/debuff, crowd control ability then the idea of specific tanks, healers, dps could theoretically be removed. CoH tried to remove some of the conventions but I'd love to see a new MMO take it even farther. Here's hoping Champions Online does go farther.
 
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