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Important Tanking Mechanic For Guardians!
xirri
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 27 Arc User
Any would be and current guardian is soon to find this out I hope, as I just did running a few skirmish yesterday. Tanking the boss relies on your Mark - there are many ways to put a mark on but one must realise, if the boss/mob hits you (that meaning if you take actual hitpoint damage, blocking things is a-okay) you lose your mark. I was able to keep bosses on me indefinetly if I just slapped on a mark and focused on blocking and replenishing my guard meter - whenever they go for a backstab its important you stop attacking immediately and reposition your shield right way to block it or otherwise you get hit for one fifth of your health and drop aggro. Granted, you'll lose your guard meter fast in some cases, and then only positioning and kiting is gonna keep you on the aggro charts at all until you can go back to taking a beating with your shield.
Now I dont know is this a gamewide feature, I would assume its not and there are bosses somewhere that break the chain, but its one of the reasons companions tank so well. They have the ai holding up that shield like a pro and it seems can take indefinitive amount of punishment without breaking marks and doing actual damage to the boss.
And yes, the sad fact is that we are at the bottom of the dps chart, heal chart and even tanking chart.
However, the best guardians should always have the least damage received, if they can block 90% of it.
Another important thing most will soon find out that while you CAN block an aoe and its damage just by holding up your shield, unless you position yourself behind the centerpoint of the aoe diagonal to the monster thats casting you will still be knocked down/stunned/dazed/generally abused in unpleasant ways. Which often also breaks your mark and you lose aggro faster than a wet paper tissue bag folds.
Bad case scenario:
MMM - - - - - - - /
\
MMM - - - - - - - |---G-o
|
MMM - - - - - - - \__________/
Good case scenario:
MMM - - - - - - - /
\
MMM - - - - - - - |
o-G---|
MMM - - - - - - - \__________/
M is for monster, o is for centerpoint and G is for guardian.
Remember kids, there is no tanking when it comes to damage over times. If you have the mark on and boss is focused on you, its a-okay to let him come to you instead of you lunging at him and standing in the aoe like a pro dwarven tank.
Not all of us are dwarven!
Also, Tactician's ultimate which lets you regen action points when being beat on even if youre not blocking is ****ing overpowered. Villains Menace all the time!
Now I dont know is this a gamewide feature, I would assume its not and there are bosses somewhere that break the chain, but its one of the reasons companions tank so well. They have the ai holding up that shield like a pro and it seems can take indefinitive amount of punishment without breaking marks and doing actual damage to the boss.
And yes, the sad fact is that we are at the bottom of the dps chart, heal chart and even tanking chart.
However, the best guardians should always have the least damage received, if they can block 90% of it.
Another important thing most will soon find out that while you CAN block an aoe and its damage just by holding up your shield, unless you position yourself behind the centerpoint of the aoe diagonal to the monster thats casting you will still be knocked down/stunned/dazed/generally abused in unpleasant ways. Which often also breaks your mark and you lose aggro faster than a wet paper tissue bag folds.
Bad case scenario:
MMM - - - - - - - /
\
MMM - - - - - - - |---G-o
|
MMM - - - - - - - \__________/
Good case scenario:
MMM - - - - - - - /
\
MMM - - - - - - - |
o-G---|
MMM - - - - - - - \__________/
M is for monster, o is for centerpoint and G is for guardian.
Remember kids, there is no tanking when it comes to damage over times. If you have the mark on and boss is focused on you, its a-okay to let him come to you instead of you lunging at him and standing in the aoe like a pro dwarven tank.
Not all of us are dwarven!
Also, Tactician's ultimate which lets you regen action points when being beat on even if youre not blocking is ****ing overpowered. Villains Menace all the time!
Post edited by xirri on
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And not getting hit in the first place with hp damage. Funny how the tanking class that traditionally is supposed to take all the damage for the group actually suffers when it tries to do that at its intended role, and instead needs to actively AVOID damage. =P
BTW I have been playing GF and I honestly prefer protector or conqueror tree
Is that both your tab mark and your taunt mark?
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Is that both your tab mark and your taunt mark?
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
I knew that targets lost mark if you hit them with any damage skills other that when your behind your shield (Guarding) but I did not know mark was removed in a mob hits you and causes HP damage.. seams rather odd to me.
Skirmish and dungeons, i just along and wack stuff. I'm not even bothering about trying to take agro, loose it few seconds later or my guard is broken when 3+ mobs hit me. At the end, i should have made a rogue, but now im just a rogue with a sword and a shield
What doesn't compute? All damage causes threat, this isn't the only class in the game.
He says keep your shield up to maintain the most threat.
It's SUPPOSED to work where if you hit a marked target with any other attack other than a Guarded attack (which you get at 10 in your At-Wills while guarding) the Mark is supposed to come off. Unfortunately it's bugged or they changed it and never updated the tool tip and you lose your Mark the second the mob hits you with an attack.
This basically creates a mini game of managing your Guard Meter to continue to generate threat (which when fully spec'd into with other passives up your Mark will allow you to generate 300-500% threat).
Said mini game is actually quite difficult later on because you will run into bosses who will instantly break your Guard Meter even with +15% onto the meter. It also makes it difficult because when you taunt you will pull too much threat and also break your Guard Meter very fast if you're tanking the right kinda mobs that deal a lot of base damage. There's also virtually no way to regenerate your Guard Meter except like 10% at a time which is pretty bad and no where near enough when every hit out of a boss will drop your Guard Meter to nothing. While you can certainly take the hits still with a large amount of HP and Defense...the problem is you now stop generating extra threat.
I have a couple of videos I'm compiling from a pretty good run I had in Cragmire Crypts (it's 45 minutes long so I split it up) that I should have done compiled and uploaded to Youtube later today that I will link in this post. I don't think I'm "MLGPRO420" or anything but I do a pretty decent job at keeping the big baddies off my allies.
If fighting 1 boss and want to keep your ret focused on the boss, just put it on boss and hold down the ctrl key. While the control key is held, you will stay locked onto that boss.
Exactly. AOE taunt helps to replenish guard as well.
Video series of me tanking in Cragmire Crypts as promised.
I like that the guard system is similar to tera and I think the act of blocking should gen higher than normal threat. The mark system could be improved to include aoe marks that gen threat. Some have already posted about how regen on guard is problematic and I agree. It's painfully lacking in this area. I could go on about my little gripes with the class but I'll play whatever is most fun at the moment which happens to be my CW and Rogue. They will eventually get around to it as end game seems to be a priority (good) with them. GF's being able to tank one mob reliably most of the time and losing guard on the rest after one hit won't stay forever.
The big problem with generating high amounts of Guard is PvP basically. As it stands I'm virtually unstoppable against most classes who have it easy in PvP because I block all their big moves/CC. Giving us more ways to generate Guard would basically make us unkillable without having 3+ people on us as it's almost too easy to tank 2 people as is (but generally you still go down).
What I would like to see them do is make Mark stay on the target with a small duration (5 seconds with a 5 second recast) and using "Aggravating Strike" and "Shield Slam" (basically the two At-Wills while Guarding) refresh the duration on the ability. This would allow us to continously generate threat while still relying on the Guard mechanic heavily not only for survival but also still for continued threat generation. Aggravating Strike is still our hardest hitting At-Will (and supposedly generates more threat according to the description) so it's not like we could just taunt and stay out the entire time but it'd instead offer a smoother play style that isn't 100% reliable on your Guard Meter which can disappear super fast against certain bosses/encounters.
However given the descriptions of a lot of our abilities there are either a lot of undocumented changes that they never bothered to update the tool tips for or the skills are just flat out broken at this stage. I'm kinda hoping the later but expecting the former.
What makes the Companions so good, especially the rock guy, is they have Hard taunts that force the target to attack them regardless of threat. That basically wipes out everyone else's threat table when it taunts and pulls the mob onto them. If I didn't think control wizards were due for a heavy nerfing I'd be pretty tempted to make one and drop the $30 on the stupid OP golem tank.
Aggravating Strike is like a small taunt, not per ce a high threat one. Or so I understood myself playing around with a friend playing a cleric and doing some hard-ish Foundries with him, testing the tank mechanics. I must say that I noticed also this, that the mark + block system seemed to be the only way to keep aggro reliant, but I do think it's a bit odd then.
Admittedly GWF:s are supposed to help add-tank in dungeons or so is their not so official description but I'd still like to be able to do something else than keep my shield up as a -main tank-. There are so many useful moves after all + I refuse to accept, that the 5/10/15% Threat feat would be totally useless. I can keep aggro on me with some good power and really learning and trying my best to "dps" everything in sight, but not enough sadly.
I really personally as a tank, would wish they'd give us "more". Or, for me to learn better to use my skills to my own, and my friends / parties advantage.
Edit: then again, that is why GWF:s are around and why certain aspects work with this so well. You can have a control wizard stun etc so you can regain your shield counter and so forth. The more and more I think on this, the more and more I begin to understand it, but somehow not like it so much. I liked Teras Lancers fex, even if the game itself was a horrid fest of ... well, not so nice words.
Well so far the only trouble I have keeping aggro on anything big/medium no matter the group is when people are going crazy, playing wrong or bring out the Tank Companions. In any and all of those cases I respond by basically removing Enhanced Mark and just going DPS myself because there's basically no point in trying to tank at that stage.
However I will say I've run more than a few groups who kinda follow my lead and the runs turn into super smooth and fast runs where I'm pulling (Mark has like FOREVER range) to the group and tanking the big stuff so it doesn't get on the squishies. In these kinds of groups I have literally no problems holding aggro what so ever on anything I want.
Kinda hoping that later on with Shield Master and either "Into the Fray" or "Iron Warrior" will be sufficient to keep Guard going so we can keep dealing enhanced threat as well as that the Man at Arms companion stops being so effective at holding threat later on and just dies off so I can actually do my role. Of course then I'll be hoping no one has that ridiculous Golem companion
guardianfighter.com
for the night is dark and full of terrors
Good read tho, OP delivers. And for all the GF out there, Marking target is your friend!
I'm with you on playing the lead role. As a Dwarven GF since Alpha, I've learned that GF's should be the ones to lead Raids. Reasons? We have Into The Fray, Frontline Surge and all the Defense to take on the mobs.
With "Into the Fray" GF's immediately give that HUGE +4 speed and +10% AP bonus to all party members, which makes a massive and quite noticeable improvement to players. People are willing to let GF's lead just to get that alone it seems... It's a drug people want more of.
With "Frontline Surge" GF's can knock over swaths of enemies, making it easy pickings for Rogues and Wizzies. Thus, breaking the ice into combat and really kicking it off.
Referencing "Iron Warrior", I find it useful versus bosses when they are <50% and dishing out AOE, but utterly lacking versus mobs. I'd suggest swapping it in/out only for bosses.
FYI: I don't have Galeb the Golem (She's awesome though), but I do have a Honey Badger :P
Iron warrior so far i have found to be far subpar compared to example into the fray or (god name just skips me, but the one mitigating 50% of dmg taken by party).
What builds do people tend to go with , so far been using: features: shield talent - enhanced mark | encounter: Enforced Threat - Frontline Surge - the 50% mitigation one - at will : cleave + (threatening rush?) - daily: villians menace - terrifying impact
The overall prone control stacked with the aoe marking from the rush, makes it a good starter to build the threat fast, so i have a stable advantage early, so i can dodge more without fearing to lose the mobs, plus the mitigator, builds a fair share of threat and makes sure the stupid TR dont get gibbed ^^.