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GF Just doesn't feel right
ravenlock99
Member Posts: 68 Arc User
I have played all the classes and they all felt "right" to me. When I say right, I mean they played smooth, at-wills, encounters, etc all weaved together nicely in combat. They never felt slow and sticky.
Since I started playing the GF it just feels clunky to me. The whole blocking and marking mechanic just throws off the flow of combat. The AoE taunts are slow, marking a target seems futile and a waste of time. The transition from blocking to your at-will is not smooth at all and sometimes I have to click multiple times to start swinging.
Now this isn't a pure rant or knocking the class, I really do like being the main tank, I just feel the at-wills, encounters, taunts, blocking, marking could use some tweaking to speed up the GF's game play.
Since I started playing the GF it just feels clunky to me. The whole blocking and marking mechanic just throws off the flow of combat. The AoE taunts are slow, marking a target seems futile and a waste of time. The transition from blocking to your at-will is not smooth at all and sometimes I have to click multiple times to start swinging.
Now this isn't a pure rant or knocking the class, I really do like being the main tank, I just feel the at-wills, encounters, taunts, blocking, marking could use some tweaking to speed up the GF's game play.
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Some GF playstyles are very fluid, for example if you play Iron Vanguard Conqueror mobility tank playstyle, almost as fluid as GWF.
One of the problems with GF while levelling is that you do not get Threatening Rush until much later levels. This is your main source of marking by far, for both aoe and single target. In addition, it's main use is to dramatically increase the mobility, positioning and re-positioning capability of the class. So, examples,
Aoe tanking:
- Dailies: Villain's Menace, Fighter's Recovery
- Features: Combat Superiority, Enhanced Mark (or Trample the Fallen if your damage and experience is high)
- Encounters: Lunging Strike, Frontline Surge, Anvil of Doom/Enforced Threat.
- At-Wills: Cleave, Threatening Rush.
Your main source of aoe damage and threat comes from Cleave, via initial Cleave on Marked targets after you Lunging Strike, then Threatening Rush into them. This is also why your third Encounter does not have to be an aoe or Enforced Threat, which is both weak damage and unnecesary for threat.
Move to next pack via Threatening Rush, then Cleave once or twice. Repeat or Special Power Mark a single enemy from next pack. Repeat Threatening+Cleave the pack once they come close enough. Once you have collected enough enemies by moving through packs, done some damage and used your Guard temporarily against them to generate AP, using Villain's Menace followed up by Cleave is massive unlimited aoe threat and damage. NOTHING is getting away from you once you use VM, especially with Enhanced Mark.
As you can see, the fluidity of this playstyle is very high. This is because you are not sitting there with Guard up, nor using clunky and slow Blocking At-Wills like Aggravating Strike, nor need to use clunky aoes like Enforced Threat, yet the result is the same or better: massive threat, good or superb damage (depending on rest of your build) and full benefit from high battlefield awareness and positioning.
Later, as you become more comfortable with the class and become very adept at controlling huge packs of mobs and protecting your guard, you can use AP generation/non-marking playstyles such as Knight's Valor+Into The Fray+Supremacy of Steel/Villain's Menace to achieve even better results from a tanking or kiting perspective in some or many circumstances (*), with minimum repositioning, but still fluid playstyle because you do not have to rely on marking or At-Wills for threat or limiting aoes like Enforced Threat (almost) at all - though marking with Threatening Rush is still recommended then if Enhanced Mark is slotted.
(*) It is NOT recommended to use Knight's Valor in all tanking circumstances, unless perhaps you are Swordmaster paragon due to its immunities, because it can result in your health being taken dangerously low or even being-one shot during the wrong type of fight or a bad party not good at avoiding damage.
A proud member of "mythical horde of DPS GFs"
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I look forward to threatening rush, it sounds like a great ability!
I have all 5 classes except ranger, without doubt when playing GF I feel like I need to just push it to be working as intended. Only class I don't have is HR but sure as hell they are less clunky than a GF.
No matter what people tell u GF are not as fluid as the other class, I only feel clunky when i play my tr use duelist fury and wicked reminder in PVE boss fight, otherwise GF hands down is clunky, one of those things u either love it or hate it.
But by being a very exp GF you can bypass it all, practice makes perfect... You just need to put effort but if you don't feel right don't waste time on a class.
Try GWF would be my advice it is one of the most fluid class in game and fun as hell, once I pick up GWF i NEVER pve with my GF anymore, and only do PVP if I am in a good premade group. Because there is just pointless. GWF owns.
The reason GF feels clunky to play is because he's low mobility compared to GWF and his attack speed and attack animations are comparatively slow.
Enforced Threat should be almost instant with no slow down of melee swings, spreading your arms for two seconds to get threat and marks is just silly.
Animation times: Many important powers have painfully long animation times, that can get you killed because you simply can not react fast enough to use them when you need to. One alternative to speeding them up though, is to make guardian fighters effectively guard during those animations - so if you have guard meter left, you are effectively invulnerable during these overly long animations.
Taunt: This needs to not go away just because you got attacked, and if the monster attacks someone else and is within a modest range of you, the monster needs to take say 20pct weapon damage. Enhanced Mark passive can bump this 10pct per level.
Hit Cap: Needs to be looked at. We've few AoEs really, so in truth this comes down to Enforced Threat. Actually what I would do here is unhook the taunt from the damage, and let this power taunt everything in a larger area, no hit cap. Leave the damage as is.
Block: This has a habit of being horribly unresponsive, probably because I play from Australia. Yay latency. Making power animations include being guarded would probably make up for this. The other problem though is, how flaky the protection is against many effects, that seem to be able to get you sometimes, and not others, depending on where you stand. Like the charge attack of the first boss in Spellplague. One way to address that might be to have block also give you a chance equal to double your deflect rating to simply ignore a control effect of any kind, from any angle, as well as a resistance to reduce the duration of control effects equal to your defence percentage, or something. Look lets face it, the game is packed full of waaaaaay too many CC effects that can only really annoy melee characters that are in front of the bosses. So lets give the once class that has to be there some extra protection yah?
Guard Meter. Well - I would like to see this - when it is first broken, you immediately get a 2nd meter worth of 'partial block' that effectively functions at half strength, cutting damage in half rather than negating it, still giving you the resistance to CC effects (and half of the previous point if that were also added). If your guard recovers, you immediately convert remaining 'half meter' to full meter, potentially having a much bigger pool of full block to start using. Again, GFs can not simply get out of the red areas like everyone else can, and there is far too much chain knockdown death waiting for you, so cut the class some slack here.
As for more damage? Sorry, I think the GF is not a DPS class. By all means, give us tools that make mobs want to attack us (my taunt suggestion - the enemies take damage for not attacking us - for example) but at the end of the run, the GWF, TR, and HR should all be feeling good about themselves for having posted higher damage than the tank.
One last suggestion - could the game track and report the amount of damage that could have happened, but didn't, because the GF blocked it or mitigated it or what ever? That's a stat I would love to see.
Clunky Stuff:
Tabbing . Stops us dead on our tracks. Pile it with latency (im from SEA) and it becomes almost impossible to juggle block, run to evade and re-mark targets without eating an interrupt/stun attack from mobs. Its way easier to mark using Threatening Rush.
Cleave. Kinda slow on the second, specially third hit. Makes it hard to time with blocking or moving then attacking once. (Again, latency tends to make my GF's cleave go into second swing. On bad hours/peak hours, it continues to complete the 3 cycle swing making me eat a huge RED CIRCLE attack. *Suggestion* : make a smoother transition, like making the end animation of the swings faster/shorter so we can time the second swing and the third, it will also look a lot better and not so clunky.
Enforced Threat. please make us able to guard during Enforced Threat animation or make the animation SHORTER. It just makes sense. The interrupt time is too long for a taunt. Its like the supposed animation time of a REALLY BIG HUGE SWING SMASH OP POWER LAZERS, buuuuut its just a taunt and mediocre damage. (no I'm not asking for a buff, its just that wind up animation)
Blocking . Well blocking is fine, it just feels too penalizing sometimes, specially on packs of dungeon mobs. Maybe put a cap on the maximum amount of block meter removed by mobs per hit, sometimes mobs deal waaaaay more damage to block meter compared to if i straight up eat the attack face-on (but I can't unblock cause im tanking OTHER mobs and i can't afford to get stunned/interrupted (Bosses can be an exception, they're Bosses!)
Think about it, other classes have full on immunity during their SHIFT mechanic, granted that its only for a short time, but for Kelemvor's sake, ours break way faster and regenerates waaaay too slowly. Yes, dodging manually is BETTER, but guard meter just feels so frail.
(I noticed I dont gain block by using guard restoring skills when my guard's broken, maybe make the guard restore skills actually RESTORE meter during broken guards? It's not like I don't have a shield, my character's strong arm probably just got tired.)
*Suggestions* - these suggestions are just my opinions (and may be some others') and are in no way fully balanced. My focus would be on the PVE side since some of these might look like broken on PVP.
Another block meter? (Auzfire's idea) please? make the first block meter kill all damage at the expense of its hp, then the second meter mitigate only 50%? The point of this is to prolong CC immunity (pve-wise) when under fire from gazillions of mobs. Or yeah that cap I was talking about earlier should work too. [PVP - second meter won't block CC, or just disable second meter from PVP]
Enforced Threat locking aggro for a duration. 5 seconds? 3 seconds? just enough to interrupt those semi-far-ish mobs from chewing my party. Anything to get their grubby hands off my healer (which most of the time, pushes mobs away when i've perfectly lined them up for the AoE's :P). For balance, it shouldn't interrupt mob casts or big swings.
Remove movement penalty to Blocking, make it damage reduction (should still be a high percentage, maybe 70%? 50%) instead of fully blocking, CC immunity stays the same (some CC's should still pass through). For balance, make the meter regen faster, allow meter restoring abilities to function during broken guard. ~OR~ Full damage block when immobile, damage reduction when moving while guarding, CC immunity stays, reduce movement penalty when blocking.
SHIFT MECHANIC IDEAS
New SHIFT Mechanic - counter attack, SHIFT+any run direction. Anticipates your opponents next attack which allows you to counter their next swing (as a small interrupt, like 0.1 seconds?) for a brief period of time (0.5 - 1 second window maybe). Failure to counter will deflect the damage instead. Consumes STAMINA. Yes, we will also have a stamina bar.
Since this change would place Block as a TAB Mechanic, an alternate SHIFT Mechanic during Block will also be available - PUSH or PRESS or anything appropriate . A short dash while Blocking. Just to give a little mobility during Boss Fights and those pesky circles, give it a really short range that would not be comparable to other classes' SHIFT mechanics but enough to give it that extra mobility push just to avoid most reasonably sized red circles. NOTE: Using an Encounter Skill will make your stance back to normal . I thought of this to add convenience so we can still cast Encounters on demand and on time.
Well those are some of my thoughts for now, I like the current playstyle of the GF as the game requires you to keep mobile. IMO, GF's shouldn't tank by standing off on a side but by proactively mixing cc's, kiting and blocking while at the same time not losing so much mobility. For now, were still a bit clunky but I hope we get tweaked up soon (Not a BUFF, more of a mechanical tweak)
As a new player, the TAB mark thingie is very off putting. It's very slow, seems like you have to wait forever for it to happen. I got very disappointed when I got it, since by reading some abilities I got the feeling that it's a core mechanic of generating extra threat. Since I've gotten Threatening Rush I haven't used TAB thing at all.
Also, staying there and eating all the attacks seems fun at first but I've fallen into two scenarios more than a few time. One, once being knocked down by a mob I get chain knocked down by another and then the first and so on and I just can't get off the floor. And two, so many ground effects that have you locked in guard at once, guard breaks and you're dead because you just cannot get a second or two to actually move from there. If you try, you get into situation one where you just can't get off anymore.
I'm pretty sure it will be better with more experience but sometimes it's fun, sometimes it really isn't.
What Class Are You?
As someone who plays all six classes, I love my GF. Maybe because i made sure she looks amazing, but i still love playing her.
It is slower and clunkier than the other classes, but that's if you are coming from GWF (fast as anything) or any of the lighter classes, they have to move to get out of things. They can't block.
GF has a firmness to playstyle, that is awesome. When you pull aggro, you actually pull and hold it. This makes kiting incredibly effective and facetanking incredibly effective.
When I brought my GF to draco, draco became my little puppy, and the CWs could easily position themselves to control adds for a very smooth kill.
That said, maybe this feeling comes from clearing trash, where GF i guess does feel a bit slow and underpowered, but who cares about killing trash? I think we should judge our classes on when we push ourselves, not when we are doing something we'd face
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