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malistaire
Member Posts: 50 Arc User
TLDR: Tanks need an increase to threat generation: I suggest increasing the base 4x multiplier to an 8x multiplier. Dps currently generate 50-60% of the threat they do on live. Tanks only generate a 25-30% of the threat we do on live.
Barb Sentinel needs improvements. Remove the Sliding Scale damage of Primal Fury or give sentinels a way to empty their block when they want to. Let rage be generated outside of combat (at least for Sentinels) like it did prior to mod 18 or alternatively let Sentinel's start combat with full rage like how paladins start combat with full divinity. Increase the rage generation of powers on the sentinel path. Increase the magnitude of Challenger's Slash so that spending rage on Unstoppable + Challenger's Slash is a viable alternative to spending rage on Primal Fury. Add the ability to stop Unstoppable by pressing Tab again. Decrease the cooldown on Enduring Shout from 29 seconds to 25 seconds.
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As we start getting closer to finalizing the combat changes, I wanted to bring up the issue of aggro specifically from the pov of a Barbarian Tank.
It's well known by players that barbarian tanks have the worst threat generation of the three tanks. Interestingly enough, barbarian sentinels actually have the most number of threat multipliers available out of all the tanks.
Paladins have 2 sources of threat multipliers: Oath of Protection (4x multiplier), and Increased Threat (8x multiplier).
Fighters have 3 sources of threat multipliers: Path of the Vanguard (4x multiplier), Increased Threat (8x multiplier), and Tide of Iron (1.2x multiplier).
Barbarians have 5 sources of threat multipliers: Will of the Sentinel (4x multiplier), Increased Threat (8x multiplier), Sentinel's Slash paired with Frustrating Slash (1.2x multiplier), Threatening Presence (1.2x multiplier), Rage and Rally (1.2x multiplier when Unstoppable is active).
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THE PROBLEM
So why then does Sentinel have the worst threat generation? Sentinel has only 1 encounter power that has the Increased Threat effect: Primal Fury.
We also have the At-Will Challenger's Slash, however the low magnitude makes it pretty ineffective.
Paladin's also suffer from having a low magnitude Increased Threat at-will.
Primal Fury is our primary threat generating power. Unfortunately, the magnitude of Primal Fury is not always 750. Depending on how much block you have, the magnitude varies. If your block is full, Primal Fury is only 100 magnitude. As your block is used up, that magnitude increases up to 750 when your block is empty. By itself this sliding scale damage mechanic wouldn't be a problem if we had some way to empty and refill our block, however Primal Fury does not have any synergistic power to work along side of. We don't have a way to empty our stamina and so we don't have a good way of controlling the damage of Primal Fury.
My threat generation is at the mercy of the enemy and how hard + fast they can hit me before I lose aggro. In general, only in ToMM and Zariel's Challenge are the enemy attacks strong enough to generate 10 rage per hit. Meaning I can use 1 primal fury once the boss has hit me 4 times. If I don't take any damage, it takes 8 seconds to generate the 40 rage I need to use Primal Fury. This 40 rage is generated using 1xPunishing Charge, 1x Sentinel's Slash,1x IBS, 6x Challenger's Slash. In those first 8 seconds, Zariel or Halaster may have already killed 2-3 party members while I struggle to establish a threat lead. If for any reason I lose aggro, I have almost no chance of getting aggro back until my hard taunt comes off cooldown. Punishing Charge has a cooldown of 17 seconds. In that period Halaster and Zariel, with their current damage output can easily wipeout half of your party.
The main problem of tanking as a Sentinel becomes obvious when playing Zariel's Challenge. To be able to effectively play a sentinel as the main tank, you have to work around how the game is designed. I have to actively keep track of when the boss is about to phase so I can ensure my stamina is drained. Then I have to hold my block up to prevent stamina regen. In addition I need to ensure that my rage is full or mostly full so that I can start of by using Primal Fury. Additionally, I need to have my Action Points full so I can use a high magnitude daily. If all of this setup work is not done properly before the start of phase 2 and 4, there is a very high chance I am not holding aggro. The exception to this is if the dps I am running with are extremely weak. But in that case, the run will end in a failure because we won't be able to pass the dps check.
How I work around the aggro problem: This video is from a Zariel run on the live server.
https://youtu.be/ZQVd9ldE19g
If I hadn't drained my stamina before phase 2 started, I would have lost aggro the second the dps activated their artifacts. You may ask: Why don't you just swap in Threatening Presence and IBS to help generate more threat. I can't swap out Mighty Vitality to Threatening Presence and Enduring Shout to IBS because then I can't survive the tank buster. On preview this is actually worse. Because the tank busters can crit.
Here are my stats on the live server:
As you can see, I have every relevant stat capped and have 1.1 million HP that can go up to 1.2 million HP once I swap Threatening Presence to Mighty Vitality.
Here are my stats on the preview server:
Both the live and preview images are fully buffed and in combat. As you can see in the preview server build, I have pretty good defensive stats, but my offensive stats are low. This is fine since the whole point of this combat rework is so that we can't cap out every stat like I did on the live server.
The problem here is that holding aggro is now exceptionally difficult. On live my sentinel has an average enc dps of 60.5k. This is just barely enough to hold aggro against endgame dps. Currently on preview with the above build, I have an average enc dps of 20.2k.
On the dps side of things, on live I have an average enc dps of 500k. On preview my average enc dps is 250k.
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WAYS TO FIX SENTINEL
So overall with the new combat rework, an endgame dps generates about 50-60% the threat that they do on live. Meanwhile my tank generates about 25-30% of the threat that it generates on live. The easiest way to address this would be to increase the base 4x threat multiplier that all tanks have to an 8x multiplier.
Remove the Sliding Scale damage of Primal Fury and give it a Fixed magnitude. Take the rng out of holding aggro. Fighter's retaliate is a good example of how enemy damage can influence your threat generation. Regardless of how much damage the enemy does to you, by executing the mechanic properly, you always generate a solid 600 magnitude of threat. The Sentinel's sliding damage on Primal Fury is a bad example of how enemies influence your threat generation. Your threat generation capabilities depend entirely on how much the enemy feels like damaging you. This is the primary reason why barbarian Tanks have trouble holding aggro.
The above 2 changes would be sufficient to address the aggro issues of the Sentinel.
If you wanted to do a full rework of the sentinel, here are some of the other changes I would like to see:
FULL SENTINEL REWORK
Rage
Prior to Mod 18, Barbarians (both dps and tanks) could generate rage outside of combat. This let us enter combat with a full rage bar. On the tank side, this meant that we didn't need to waste time building rage while trying to establish aggro at the start of the fight. We just had to start the fight by grabbing aggro, using a daily to establish a small threat lead and then take 1 or 2 hits. That was sufficient to then use Primal Fury 1 or 2 times and that was sufficient to create a solid threat lead on the dps. Let rage be generated outside of combat (at least for Sentinels) like it did prior to mod 18 or alternatively let Sentinel's start combat with full rage like how paladins start combat with full divinity.
Unstoppable
Using Unstoppable doesn't make you unstoppable; In fact it leaves you worse off than if you hadn't use it at all.
In the current version of the preview server build, Unstoppable increases block from 40% to 50%, increases our attack speed for at-wills and it blocks attacks from all directions. While you are Unstoppable, stamina regeneration is greatly reduced. This makes it useful to take bigger tank buster attacks, but if I am main tanking, Unstoppable sits unused on my tank in any hard content except for when I accidentally use it out of habit from playing as a dps. In general using Unstoppable actually makes us less tanky because if we use Unstoppable and the enemy damages some of our block and then the enemy uses a big hit before Unstoppable has ended, we have less block available to take the hit. Since there is no way to stop Unstoppable without using the Blood Fury feat, I don't use Unstoppable at all. Why would you use the Blood Fury feat which uses 100% of your rage for 1 Primal Fury, when you an cast 2 Primal Fury attacks using just 80% of your rage? Unstoppable needs to be able to be stopped by pressing Tab a second time. Maybe add a 20 rage penalty whenever you stop unstoppable.
Another problem with Unstoppable is that it uses rage, a resource that we need to save to use Primal Fury. The total threat generated by using 2 Primal Fury attacks with 80 rage is significantly more than the threat that is generated by using Unstoppable, 1 Primal Fury and attacking with Challenger's Slash or by using Unstoppable and spamming Challenger's Slash for the next 12 seconds. Doubling the magnitude of Challenger's Slash to 50 should be sufficient to make Unstoppable + Challenger's slash a viable alternative to using rage just on primal fury. Another option is to increase the threat multiplier of Rage and Rally from 1.2x to 2x. There is also a bug with Unstoppable where if you use Primal Fury while Unstoppable is active, even if you run out of rage, Unstoppable will not end until some internal timer runs out. By this I mean that if I start with full rage, I get 12 seconds of Unstoppable. If I use primal fury, I should lose 40 rage and the Unstoppable timer should be reduced by 4.8 seconds.
Group Damage Mitigation
Barbarian Sentinel’s bring less to the table when it comes to group utility in the form of damage mitigation. If we use the feat Crushing Advance paired with Savage Advance, we can place a 5% damage debuff on a single enemy. This power is only useful if there is an enemy that you can hit. In the transition from phase 4 to phase 5 of Zariel’s Challenge, there is no enemy that you can hit with Savage Advance and so there is no damage mitigation that you can provide to help your party survive one of the hardest hitting AoE attacks in the game.
Compare that with the Fighter’s Phalanx (20% damage reduction to everyone standing in the area) and Paladin’s Shield of Faith (5% damage reduction) paired with Divine Palisade (10% damage reduction to everyone standing behind the tank). Because these powers can be cast without an enemy target being present, they provide both Fighters and Paladins greater group utility than Barbarians can provide.
Because the theme of barbarian tanks is buffing HP, one possible way to address this discrepancy between tanks would be to add a secondary effect to Battle High which increases allies HP by 15% - 20% for the duration of the effect. Of course with players who have less health, this would be less effective, but compared to having no group utility when there are no targetable enemies, even a small HP buff for the group would be better than nothing.
Blood Fury
Blood Fury, the feat which lets Primal Fury heal the player is not particularly effective with the combat rework. On live a full magnitude Primal Fury deals 200k-300k damage on a critical hit. Blood Fury heals you for the damage dealt. This means you get healed 200k for each enemy hit. It is one of the best power/feat synergies in the game for tanking in AoE situations. On preview, because our damage and offensive stats were reduced, Primal Fury hits at max for 35-40k damage. This makes the heal from Blood Fury virtually non-existent. I would suggest changing the effect to heal for up to 10% of our total HP for each enemy hit. Not quite as strong as it is on live, but also not so weak that the heal is unnoticeable. This is an example where a sliding scale would be good to have. If I have full block, I only get a 1% heal per enemy hit. If I have no block left, I get a full 10% heal per enemy hit.
Enduring Shout
Rework the effect of Enduring Shout with a new power that transfers the full amount of stamina to the player’s HP and gives 20% damage reduction for 12 seconds. In other words, for 12 seconds, the player has 0 block, their HP is increased by their maximum stamina (either 40% or 60% while Unstoppable is active), and they get 20% damage mitigation. While this power is active, stamina does not regenerate. Reduce the cooldown from 29 seconds to 25 seconds.
This rework makes Enduring Shout more in-line with the damage mitigation encounter powers the other 2 tanks have. This gives barbarians a damage mitigation buff that is useful beyond taking a single hit, that also allows for the player to use Unstoppable without the risk of losing survivability. Additionally, because during the duration of the effect, the player doesn’t have any block, they can use Primal Fury at max damage. This rework also keeps the power in-line with how barbarians are supposed to tank in D&D, having large health pools.
If Sentinel’s can start combat with a full rage bar, just this rework to Enduring Shout would address both the threat generation issue and the damage mitigation issue.
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Barb Sentinel needs improvements. Remove the Sliding Scale damage of Primal Fury or give sentinels a way to empty their block when they want to. Let rage be generated outside of combat (at least for Sentinels) like it did prior to mod 18 or alternatively let Sentinel's start combat with full rage like how paladins start combat with full divinity. Increase the rage generation of powers on the sentinel path. Increase the magnitude of Challenger's Slash so that spending rage on Unstoppable + Challenger's Slash is a viable alternative to spending rage on Primal Fury. Add the ability to stop Unstoppable by pressing Tab again. Decrease the cooldown on Enduring Shout from 29 seconds to 25 seconds.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As we start getting closer to finalizing the combat changes, I wanted to bring up the issue of aggro specifically from the pov of a Barbarian Tank.
It's well known by players that barbarian tanks have the worst threat generation of the three tanks. Interestingly enough, barbarian sentinels actually have the most number of threat multipliers available out of all the tanks.
Paladins have 2 sources of threat multipliers: Oath of Protection (4x multiplier), and Increased Threat (8x multiplier).
Fighters have 3 sources of threat multipliers: Path of the Vanguard (4x multiplier), Increased Threat (8x multiplier), and Tide of Iron (1.2x multiplier).
Barbarians have 5 sources of threat multipliers: Will of the Sentinel (4x multiplier), Increased Threat (8x multiplier), Sentinel's Slash paired with Frustrating Slash (1.2x multiplier), Threatening Presence (1.2x multiplier), Rage and Rally (1.2x multiplier when Unstoppable is active).
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THE PROBLEM
So why then does Sentinel have the worst threat generation? Sentinel has only 1 encounter power that has the Increased Threat effect: Primal Fury.
We also have the At-Will Challenger's Slash, however the low magnitude makes it pretty ineffective.
Paladin's also suffer from having a low magnitude Increased Threat at-will.
Primal Fury is our primary threat generating power. Unfortunately, the magnitude of Primal Fury is not always 750. Depending on how much block you have, the magnitude varies. If your block is full, Primal Fury is only 100 magnitude. As your block is used up, that magnitude increases up to 750 when your block is empty. By itself this sliding scale damage mechanic wouldn't be a problem if we had some way to empty and refill our block, however Primal Fury does not have any synergistic power to work along side of. We don't have a way to empty our stamina and so we don't have a good way of controlling the damage of Primal Fury.
My threat generation is at the mercy of the enemy and how hard + fast they can hit me before I lose aggro. In general, only in ToMM and Zariel's Challenge are the enemy attacks strong enough to generate 10 rage per hit. Meaning I can use 1 primal fury once the boss has hit me 4 times. If I don't take any damage, it takes 8 seconds to generate the 40 rage I need to use Primal Fury. This 40 rage is generated using 1xPunishing Charge, 1x Sentinel's Slash,1x IBS, 6x Challenger's Slash. In those first 8 seconds, Zariel or Halaster may have already killed 2-3 party members while I struggle to establish a threat lead. If for any reason I lose aggro, I have almost no chance of getting aggro back until my hard taunt comes off cooldown. Punishing Charge has a cooldown of 17 seconds. In that period Halaster and Zariel, with their current damage output can easily wipeout half of your party.
The main problem of tanking as a Sentinel becomes obvious when playing Zariel's Challenge. To be able to effectively play a sentinel as the main tank, you have to work around how the game is designed. I have to actively keep track of when the boss is about to phase so I can ensure my stamina is drained. Then I have to hold my block up to prevent stamina regen. In addition I need to ensure that my rage is full or mostly full so that I can start of by using Primal Fury. Additionally, I need to have my Action Points full so I can use a high magnitude daily. If all of this setup work is not done properly before the start of phase 2 and 4, there is a very high chance I am not holding aggro. The exception to this is if the dps I am running with are extremely weak. But in that case, the run will end in a failure because we won't be able to pass the dps check.
How I work around the aggro problem: This video is from a Zariel run on the live server.
https://youtu.be/ZQVd9ldE19g
If I hadn't drained my stamina before phase 2 started, I would have lost aggro the second the dps activated their artifacts. You may ask: Why don't you just swap in Threatening Presence and IBS to help generate more threat. I can't swap out Mighty Vitality to Threatening Presence and Enduring Shout to IBS because then I can't survive the tank buster. On preview this is actually worse. Because the tank busters can crit.
Here are my stats on the live server:
As you can see, I have every relevant stat capped and have 1.1 million HP that can go up to 1.2 million HP once I swap Threatening Presence to Mighty Vitality.
Here are my stats on the preview server:
Both the live and preview images are fully buffed and in combat. As you can see in the preview server build, I have pretty good defensive stats, but my offensive stats are low. This is fine since the whole point of this combat rework is so that we can't cap out every stat like I did on the live server.
The problem here is that holding aggro is now exceptionally difficult. On live my sentinel has an average enc dps of 60.5k. This is just barely enough to hold aggro against endgame dps. Currently on preview with the above build, I have an average enc dps of 20.2k.
On the dps side of things, on live I have an average enc dps of 500k. On preview my average enc dps is 250k.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WAYS TO FIX SENTINEL
So overall with the new combat rework, an endgame dps generates about 50-60% the threat that they do on live. Meanwhile my tank generates about 25-30% of the threat that it generates on live. The easiest way to address this would be to increase the base 4x threat multiplier that all tanks have to an 8x multiplier.
Remove the Sliding Scale damage of Primal Fury and give it a Fixed magnitude. Take the rng out of holding aggro. Fighter's retaliate is a good example of how enemy damage can influence your threat generation. Regardless of how much damage the enemy does to you, by executing the mechanic properly, you always generate a solid 600 magnitude of threat. The Sentinel's sliding damage on Primal Fury is a bad example of how enemies influence your threat generation. Your threat generation capabilities depend entirely on how much the enemy feels like damaging you. This is the primary reason why barbarian Tanks have trouble holding aggro.
The above 2 changes would be sufficient to address the aggro issues of the Sentinel.
If you wanted to do a full rework of the sentinel, here are some of the other changes I would like to see:
FULL SENTINEL REWORK
Rage
Prior to Mod 18, Barbarians (both dps and tanks) could generate rage outside of combat. This let us enter combat with a full rage bar. On the tank side, this meant that we didn't need to waste time building rage while trying to establish aggro at the start of the fight. We just had to start the fight by grabbing aggro, using a daily to establish a small threat lead and then take 1 or 2 hits. That was sufficient to then use Primal Fury 1 or 2 times and that was sufficient to create a solid threat lead on the dps. Let rage be generated outside of combat (at least for Sentinels) like it did prior to mod 18 or alternatively let Sentinel's start combat with full rage like how paladins start combat with full divinity.
Unstoppable
Using Unstoppable doesn't make you unstoppable; In fact it leaves you worse off than if you hadn't use it at all.
In the current version of the preview server build, Unstoppable increases block from 40% to 50%, increases our attack speed for at-wills and it blocks attacks from all directions. While you are Unstoppable, stamina regeneration is greatly reduced. This makes it useful to take bigger tank buster attacks, but if I am main tanking, Unstoppable sits unused on my tank in any hard content except for when I accidentally use it out of habit from playing as a dps. In general using Unstoppable actually makes us less tanky because if we use Unstoppable and the enemy damages some of our block and then the enemy uses a big hit before Unstoppable has ended, we have less block available to take the hit. Since there is no way to stop Unstoppable without using the Blood Fury feat, I don't use Unstoppable at all. Why would you use the Blood Fury feat which uses 100% of your rage for 1 Primal Fury, when you an cast 2 Primal Fury attacks using just 80% of your rage? Unstoppable needs to be able to be stopped by pressing Tab a second time. Maybe add a 20 rage penalty whenever you stop unstoppable.
Another problem with Unstoppable is that it uses rage, a resource that we need to save to use Primal Fury. The total threat generated by using 2 Primal Fury attacks with 80 rage is significantly more than the threat that is generated by using Unstoppable, 1 Primal Fury and attacking with Challenger's Slash or by using Unstoppable and spamming Challenger's Slash for the next 12 seconds. Doubling the magnitude of Challenger's Slash to 50 should be sufficient to make Unstoppable + Challenger's slash a viable alternative to using rage just on primal fury. Another option is to increase the threat multiplier of Rage and Rally from 1.2x to 2x. There is also a bug with Unstoppable where if you use Primal Fury while Unstoppable is active, even if you run out of rage, Unstoppable will not end until some internal timer runs out. By this I mean that if I start with full rage, I get 12 seconds of Unstoppable. If I use primal fury, I should lose 40 rage and the Unstoppable timer should be reduced by 4.8 seconds.
Group Damage Mitigation
Barbarian Sentinel’s bring less to the table when it comes to group utility in the form of damage mitigation. If we use the feat Crushing Advance paired with Savage Advance, we can place a 5% damage debuff on a single enemy. This power is only useful if there is an enemy that you can hit. In the transition from phase 4 to phase 5 of Zariel’s Challenge, there is no enemy that you can hit with Savage Advance and so there is no damage mitigation that you can provide to help your party survive one of the hardest hitting AoE attacks in the game.
Compare that with the Fighter’s Phalanx (20% damage reduction to everyone standing in the area) and Paladin’s Shield of Faith (5% damage reduction) paired with Divine Palisade (10% damage reduction to everyone standing behind the tank). Because these powers can be cast without an enemy target being present, they provide both Fighters and Paladins greater group utility than Barbarians can provide.
Because the theme of barbarian tanks is buffing HP, one possible way to address this discrepancy between tanks would be to add a secondary effect to Battle High which increases allies HP by 15% - 20% for the duration of the effect. Of course with players who have less health, this would be less effective, but compared to having no group utility when there are no targetable enemies, even a small HP buff for the group would be better than nothing.
Blood Fury
Blood Fury, the feat which lets Primal Fury heal the player is not particularly effective with the combat rework. On live a full magnitude Primal Fury deals 200k-300k damage on a critical hit. Blood Fury heals you for the damage dealt. This means you get healed 200k for each enemy hit. It is one of the best power/feat synergies in the game for tanking in AoE situations. On preview, because our damage and offensive stats were reduced, Primal Fury hits at max for 35-40k damage. This makes the heal from Blood Fury virtually non-existent. I would suggest changing the effect to heal for up to 10% of our total HP for each enemy hit. Not quite as strong as it is on live, but also not so weak that the heal is unnoticeable. This is an example where a sliding scale would be good to have. If I have full block, I only get a 1% heal per enemy hit. If I have no block left, I get a full 10% heal per enemy hit.
Enduring Shout
Rework the effect of Enduring Shout with a new power that transfers the full amount of stamina to the player’s HP and gives 20% damage reduction for 12 seconds. In other words, for 12 seconds, the player has 0 block, their HP is increased by their maximum stamina (either 40% or 60% while Unstoppable is active), and they get 20% damage mitigation. While this power is active, stamina does not regenerate. Reduce the cooldown from 29 seconds to 25 seconds.
This rework makes Enduring Shout more in-line with the damage mitigation encounter powers the other 2 tanks have. This gives barbarians a damage mitigation buff that is useful beyond taking a single hit, that also allows for the player to use Unstoppable without the risk of losing survivability. Additionally, because during the duration of the effect, the player doesn’t have any block, they can use Primal Fury at max damage. This rework also keeps the power in-line with how barbarians are supposed to tank in D&D, having large health pools.
If Sentinel’s can start combat with a full rage bar, just this rework to Enduring Shout would address both the threat generation issue and the damage mitigation issue.
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Post edited by malistaire#9098 on
9
Comments
Barb Sentinel, Rogue Whisper-knife, Wizard Thaumaturge and Fighter Dreadnaught are all underperforming to some extent. I can't speak to the other classes, but barb tank has been in need of a partial or full rework since mod 16.
I am afraid that barbarians will not get buffed, instead the other two will get nerfed.
It's nerf or nothing it seems.
Have mentioned other places, but simple fixes:
Have rage maintained at 50% outside of combat, works well with the theme of barbs, always on the verge and allows 1 use of primal fury as an opener.
Make primal fury 375-750, base it off remaining HP (375 at max, 750 at 50%). This would be similar to how dig-in's retaliation works in reverse, 600 magnitude at full stamina, 300 at empty (plus increase magnitude that it may have gotten).
Give barbarians a 25% hp buff daily for party, 15-20% is too low compared to what the other two tanks can do with damage reductions and gives them a nice place in any trial. The issue with battle high having this tied to it, is that the other two tank's dailies/reductions for parties are same for them and the tank, so something else should be replaced that the barb tank also only gets 25% hp from this daily, while having battle high for themselves.
At wills on barbs are...laughable... I hope that gets a full rework.
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These are what I consider minimum improvements to the barb to make them viable, without having a full overhaul which would take likely mods before its ready.