Tanking

som1elsehsmyname · March 2013

Hello everyone

I have a question for all you Guardian Fighters out there.

Over BW3 I had to work so I didn't get to high a level, but my question is this.

Can you hold threat over a cleric?

I found it near impossible to "Tank" in the WoW sense of the word, Its obviously a different system to WoW.
I have not been a WoW'er for many years I'm just putting terms in place that people can relate to.

I would love some feedback on this as I love to "Tank" but over the last weekend doing a few dungeons I just couldn't keep a cleric safe.

Thanks.

tibberton1 · March 2013

I spent a lot of time working through the early game, for my website research. I was able to keep our cleric safe through the first two dungeons with little to no difficulty. My understanding is that it's 30+ where the real problems start.

dtrain69 · March 2013

tibberton1 wrote: »

I spent a lot of time working through the early game, for my website research. I was able to keep our cleric safe through the first two dungeons with little to no difficulty. My understanding is that it's 30+ where the real problems start.

Let us in on your secret, As i would use every high damage/taunt ability i had to try and keep the agro from the healer and no luck.

How did you do it?

som1elsehsmyname · March 2013

Yea I was level 35 and it was just silly...

I'm sure I'm doing something wrong. but it was near impossible.

healhamsta · March 2013

dtrain69 wrote: »

Let us in on your secret, As i would use every high damage/taunt ability i had to try and keep the agro from the healer and no luck.

How did you do it?

Be the first one in.
Just do a high enough spike AoE DPS in order to buy your clerics enough time to juggle damage between you and the Cleric.

vanderhelm · March 2013

I did botch Skirmishes and Cloak Tower and found it extremely hard to tank. The Cloak Tower and the Pirate bosses are not meant to be tanked anyway because they teleport all over the place. The only way to get them to you is if you use Knight's Challenge on them which works very nicely and hope for the best after you mark them.

They really need to work on the aggro mechanics for the GF, some people claim that they can tank and hold aggro, if that's true then that means the system has little to no room for error because I was trying my best and could not hold aggro on elite or bosses whenever my AoE taunt or Knight's Challenge wore off.

I tried following some of the advice posted here in the forum on how to tank and I found stab to be a complete waste of time, the only way for me to hold aggro was to not block in lieu of DPSing but that meant I was getting hit very hard by MOBs while I had aggro.

xaz1 · March 2013

Just curious...has anyone tested if the health pots add healing threat? I haven't seen any mention of this(maybe I missed it if so) but if heal pots contribute to threat this could possibly be the culprit behind some of the threat issues.

One scenario off the top of my head to better manage threat under those circumstances is have the tank use a pot on the pull when he drops in health a bit, then the cleric and tank trade off in healing/healing pots for more moderate threat increases.

tibberton1 · March 2013

I posted it in another thread. Healing pots didn't seem to do anything about increasing threat - neither did Fighter's Recovery, nor did a cleric companion.

It's a moot point now, since the weekend is over and they talked in the AMA about fixing the threat.

But to answer the question: I had to give up on holding aggro on everything. I let the small, easily killed trash go free, and locked down the 1 to 2 big threats on each pull. I would charge in, AoE taunt (6 seconds with everything on me, 6 seconds for the DPS to kill the small stuff), Tide of Iron the big threats to weaken them, and then guard up and stab back and forth between the 1/2 threatening targets. Since that's the only ability that we have that directly says it taunts in the ability description, repetitive stabbing worked. 6 seconds after casting Enforced Threat, they didn't much seem to care about me anymore, no matter what I did. I fluctuated between Knight's Challenge for an extra 'taunt' and the stun for an interrupt. I never found a third skill that I could 100% get behind.

Edit: And it's funny - I could never hold aggro based on pure DPS, as posted above. The complete inconsistency between what worked for different tanks is problematic. It's possible that his gear was heavily weighted towards power, which helped - I didn't have much power gear in the instances I ran.

kalbren · March 2013

I too experienced tanking woes. One thought I had is it'd be nice if they could make you generate significant threat when you do block an attack. That would both give us incentive to block, and require a little skill (or block all the time) to get the blocks off.

tibberton1 · March 2013

It smoothed out tremendously when I got the generate more threat feat. You also have the feat that generates action points on blocking, which gives you more access to dailies, which does (I think) a good enough job - when coupled with not taking large chunks of damage - of making us want to prioritize blocking.

vanderhelm · March 2013

tibberton1 wrote: »

I posted it in another thread. Healing pots didn't seem to do anything about increasing threat - neither did Fighter's Recovery, nor did a cleric companion.

It's a moot point now, since the weekend is over and they talked in the AMA about fixing the threat.

But to answer the question: I had to give up on holding aggro on everything. I let the small, easily killed trash go free, and locked down the 1 to 2 big threats on each pull. I would charge in, AoE taunt (6 seconds with everything on me, 6 seconds for the DPS to kill the small stuff), Tide of Iron the big threats to weaken them, and then guard up and stab back and forth between the 1/2 threatening targets. Since that's the only ability that we have that directly says it taunts in the ability description, repetitive stabbing worked. 6 seconds after casting Enforced Threat, they didn't much seem to care about me anymore, no matter what I did. I fluctuated between Knight's Challenge for an extra 'taunt' and the stun for an interrupt. I never found a third skill that I could 100% get behind.

Edit: And it's funny - I could never hold aggro based on pure DPS, as posted above. The complete inconsistency between what worked for different tanks is problematic. It's possible that his gear was heavily weighted towards power, which helped - I didn't have much power gear in the instances I ran.

I find this odd too; a lot of people keep saying that stabbing was a great way to hold threat but I ran a whole Storming The Keep skirmish stabbing every elite and boss and was not able to hold threat at all!

I mean, I literally was using nothing but stab while my AoE taunt was on cooldown and it was the worst run I had because I wasn't able to hold threat at all like I could just face tanking (Which was horrible, but at least a little more effective for me)

As for gear, my main stat was defense, AC, constitution and STR. Most of the runs I did were without using stab even once; I would just make sure the bosses/elites were always marked, use AoE taunt as soon as it was up, lots of Tide of Iron to weaken MOBs for easier takedowns and using the daily as soon as it was up.

angelblade80 · March 2013

Besides Enforced Threat (AoE taunt) and Knight's Challenge (Single taunt), you wont hold aggro against healers and dps 3+ levels over you.

The people who claimed they can hold aggro over their dps and healers were at least 2+ levels above them.

Stab works in most cases where your tank and rest of the grp is at the same level. If the tank is lower level in the grp stab wont work properly.

Buttom line is that level plays great impact on threat.

Tanking

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