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GF Threat Issues - My take on it
rokuthy
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 179 Bounty Hunter
I've been playing MMO's since 1996 - I've been a part of top end progression raiding for the majority of that time, and have been extremely successful in PVP in multiple games as well. So, after playing the GF up to 25 this weekend (apparently threat wasn't too bad the previous weekends), I think I've found a few of the issues.
First, it's not just a cleric / healing issue. Any damage, any healing, anything that generates threat can pull aggro rather easily off a GF.
Here's what I'm thinking is happening:
There's no static threat table being produced in the game, or if there is, it isn't functioning properly. In other words, if I open up with the AE taunt, I'll get aggro on all mobs while that taunt is active. This is indicated by the "X" on the mob (meaning they're taunted), and the "!" above their heads (meaning they're aggroed on you while they're taunted). As soon as you lose the active taunt effect, your aggro is basically reset to 0. Whatever static threat table they have in place basically isn't saving any gained threat properly.
What this basically means is if I taunt a mob - beat on that mob for the duration of the aggro/taunt effect, then that effect wears off, everyone is on equal ground with that mob threat wise. If I land a few big hits after the taunt effect has worn off, awesome - but if anyone else in the party lands more damage, they're going to pull aggro.
I'm not sure if there's a small threat table that resets every 6 seconds (just an arbitrary number), or none at all, but something has to be in place that keeps a running threat table for mobs, otherwise you're just chasing around mobs endlessly while taunts are down.
It's also painfully obvious something is broken with threat generation / tables when the GF uses their tab ability - this is basically just a taunt, but more often than not, you can "mark" a mob and it's not going to change its current target. You'll see the "X" on the mob indicated they're marked / taunted, but nothing beyond that is typically going to happen. The AE taunt we have works functionally at the very least, but with the threat tables not functioning properly, you only have about a 6 second window where you're going to be holding aggro.
So right now in the current state of the game, tanking basically comes down to:
Hit AE taunt (first if you want, it really doesn't matter) - hold aggro for 6 seconds
Lose aggro
Hit the ability that 'forces a mob into a 1v1' (can't remember specific ability names) - use this time to put out as much damage as you can
Lose aggro
Use the tab mark / taunt - will typically do absolutely nothing
Chase mobs around trying your best to at least put out some damage
AE taunt - hold aggro for 6 seconds
Lose aggro
Huge gap here - filled with running around feeling useless due to no static threat table
Repeat
Anyways, that's a long winded version of me just saying static threat tables are completely broken, and GF threat issues right now go beyond clerics putting out too much healing aggro. Hopefully this can be looked at.
First, it's not just a cleric / healing issue. Any damage, any healing, anything that generates threat can pull aggro rather easily off a GF.
Here's what I'm thinking is happening:
There's no static threat table being produced in the game, or if there is, it isn't functioning properly. In other words, if I open up with the AE taunt, I'll get aggro on all mobs while that taunt is active. This is indicated by the "X" on the mob (meaning they're taunted), and the "!" above their heads (meaning they're aggroed on you while they're taunted). As soon as you lose the active taunt effect, your aggro is basically reset to 0. Whatever static threat table they have in place basically isn't saving any gained threat properly.
What this basically means is if I taunt a mob - beat on that mob for the duration of the aggro/taunt effect, then that effect wears off, everyone is on equal ground with that mob threat wise. If I land a few big hits after the taunt effect has worn off, awesome - but if anyone else in the party lands more damage, they're going to pull aggro.
I'm not sure if there's a small threat table that resets every 6 seconds (just an arbitrary number), or none at all, but something has to be in place that keeps a running threat table for mobs, otherwise you're just chasing around mobs endlessly while taunts are down.
It's also painfully obvious something is broken with threat generation / tables when the GF uses their tab ability - this is basically just a taunt, but more often than not, you can "mark" a mob and it's not going to change its current target. You'll see the "X" on the mob indicated they're marked / taunted, but nothing beyond that is typically going to happen. The AE taunt we have works functionally at the very least, but with the threat tables not functioning properly, you only have about a 6 second window where you're going to be holding aggro.
So right now in the current state of the game, tanking basically comes down to:
Hit AE taunt (first if you want, it really doesn't matter) - hold aggro for 6 seconds
Lose aggro
Hit the ability that 'forces a mob into a 1v1' (can't remember specific ability names) - use this time to put out as much damage as you can
Lose aggro
Use the tab mark / taunt - will typically do absolutely nothing
Chase mobs around trying your best to at least put out some damage
AE taunt - hold aggro for 6 seconds
Lose aggro
Huge gap here - filled with running around feeling useless due to no static threat table
Repeat
Anyways, that's a long winded version of me just saying static threat tables are completely broken, and GF threat issues right now go beyond clerics putting out too much healing aggro. Hopefully this can be looked at.
@rokuthy on Mindflayer
Play my foundry campaign, Vermilion: Spirit of Gevaudan. The first quest, The Desperate Messenger is now available @ NWS-DM44FZM2W
Post edited by rokuthy on
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The threat really needs to be close to what the highest "average" dps class can pull out on a single target. Obviously there should always be a little room for the dps to "think", hence if they overdo their dps they should get agro and die because of it. But in the end it usually falls back on the tank that it's his fault. Well, that's how it usually goes these days with mmos.
At its current state I foresee very many frustrated tanks not wanting to tank dungeons while leveling because you're not really tanking if all you do is hitting the taunt every xx sec and waiting on it to refresh.
It kinds reminds me of wow back in wotlk during a patch where they buffed dps but ignored the tank threat. It wasn't a pretty sight. This game is worse tho, in that regard.
Here is what I did:
It seems mostly important to hold the big bads, and not all the little trash. I started letting the garbage mobs run around, and focused solely on the tougher mobs. As currently constructed, we are not built to hold aggro through damage. Spending points in increased threat generation gives us a little bit more oomph here, but not much. Our aggro is going to have to come from somewhere, but where?
Enforced Threat? I think you've got the right of it, based on the behavior I'm seeing with Enforced Threat. Once the duration is done, they don't seem to care about hitting me anymore. However, during its duration, E.T. does everything you would want it to do.
Mark? Please don't take my upcoming use of repetition as condescending. Tab isn't a taunt, tab isn't a taunt, tab isn't a taunt. The sooner we drill that into our heads, the better it will be. Tab could use some help, for sure, because it's pretty lackluster. However, anybody using it as a taunt isn't using it correctly. Let's quickly explore what tab does: lowers damage resist (which helps your DPS do more damage), and gives the enemy more incentive to hit you (once they hit you, the mark is gone and they are off doing whatever else it is that they want) - the only way to stop this is to guard the attack. That will not remove the mark. So if you are going to use tab for its pseudo-taunt capabilities, you need to be flipping over into guard quickly. Which is actually a really good thing, because...
Stab!! Replaces your left mouse at will while guarding. Stabs over your shield, HARD TAUNTING your opponent to attack you. This is your primary source of aggro gain. This keeps the mobs locked on you. This was the only thing I found that reliably kept my healer safe.
So now you have to play the waddling game. You need to guard to generate threat. But you can't guard so much that you break your guard meter... because you can't generate threat.
My standard pull:
Into The Fray - movement speed, everybody gets temporary HP, everybody gets increased action point generation.
Lunging Strike - on the biggest threat to my party.
Enforced Threat - to buy my party enough time to cleanly start killing garbage mobs
Tide of Iron - weakens the enemy
Shield Up and Stab - hard taunt
Shield Up and Stab - hard taunt on secondary targets, as needed
The rest of the pull is weaving Tide of Iron (debuff + guard meter regen) and Stab.
It's very active, it's very hectic, but it worked very well. Holding aggro is not the faceroll that it was last beta weekend. Standard damage moves aren't cutting it right now. Whether or not that's intended, adjustments can definitely be made.
guardianfighter.com
Knight's Challenge basically locks you into combat with the biggest threat to your party. You do twice as much damage to each other, and half damage to everything else. It doesn't last very long, and if you miss a guard because other things are going on, you have the chance to take massive damage. I didn't like the feel of it, and took it off my bars.
Knight's Valor reduces damage that your party takes. It's on a fairly short cooldown. If you can't keep threat, you can at least reduce the damage everybody is taking. It might work for somebody struggling to keep everything under control.
I found some success with my above build, and I don't want to sacrifice charge (mobility is too great), enforced threat (good for its duration), nor increase AP generation / movement speed. But that's just me, and I could see others taking either of the Knight talents.
guardianfighter.com
And once again, the reason for that is a lack of a static threat table. If we could build up a huge aggro lead on the main boss, and then break off to collect adds, ae / burn them down, then switch back to the boss, then awesome - that's the way ideally it should work, but in the current state of the game, that isn't possible. It's one or the other, and no matter which you choose, someone's going to be hurting in the end. The higher level areas only exacerbate this threat table issue.
Like I said in the other thread, it's all a moot point. They know there's an issue, they've said there's an issue, and I imagine it's getting fixed. I'm just trying to help people get through the rest of today without pulling their hair out.
guardianfighter.com
I agree with the OP's observations about threat: something needs to be tweaked or added.
Threat generation in this patch is broken. There's many long threads complaining about clerics pulling too way much aggro.
I also ignore the trash mobs as DPS can usually handle them just fine. Here's the rotation I use:
Non-Boss encounters:
1. Mark one of the elites (If there is more than one) this serves as a pull more than anything.
2. Into the fray on the one I didn't mark (Same one if only one)
3. Enforced Thread (Usually I charge the elite when it's close to the trash)
4. Guard + Stab
5. Tide of Iron on Elite
6. If the elite performs a special attack I can stop guarding and move out of the way for I do just that just so I can safely use Tide of Iron again to build up my shield meter.
6. Re-Apply Tide of Iron, re-apply into the fray if needed
Bosses
I replace Enforced Threat for Knight's Challenge.
1. Into the fray (Keep it up through the fight for the Action Point build-up boost; it helps DPS take down the boss faster).
2. Mark
3. Knight's Challenge (It seems redundant after mark, but I do it for the damage boost)
3. Lunging Strike immediately after so I can do twice as much damage.
4. Guard and move if next attack allows it, then Tide of Iron to weaken and build up block meter.
5. If I lost aggro at this point I use my mark, if nothing else so DPS can do more damage.
6. If teleporting boss follow it around re-applying Tide of Iron to build up block meter. Otherwise move around as needed to avoid special attacks, using Tide of Iron for block build-up.
As soon as my Daily is up I wait for Knight's Challenge and Lunging Strike to be off the cooldown. I pop Villain's Menace, immediately followed by Knight's Challenge, immediately followed by a Lunging Strike for massive damage; even without Knight's challenge that's a big hit and the boss usually likes to stay on you for a few seconds after Knight's Challenge wears out.
I personally find stab worthless; I just tried it again after reading this thread on the Storming The Keep skirmish and I was not able to keep up aggro at all even on single targets. I find that marking works for me because it forces the mob to eventually come for you and in the meantime the DPS are doing a lot of damage. I also find that instead of stabbing, taking hits and using regular attacks has works better for holding aggro because of the extra DPS.
I agree that holding aggro on the GF is extremely challenging, and I have yet to have a single fight where I don't lose aggro throughout the whole encounter.
Taking back agro is not something easy to do and several time I died because I was not receiving any heal while trying to help the running healer and tanking all mobs who were on me as well...
Hope something will be done for the open beta
Later
Remember that clerics have mail armor for a reason.
Also the BIGGEST fault is that players approach tanking like in wow where a tank should stand there and hold aggro of all mobs while healer heals only the tank... THIS IS NOT WOW and WOW SUCKS atm. Here is about position-cleric coordination and right rotation of treat-aggro skills. In some fights ITS UNAVOIDABLE that the cleric tanks some mobs. After all if this was easy it would suck. Cleric would just stand still throwing his heals...
Nuff said. I suggest to players to not think tanking as wow-tank n spam... Just fix the KV bug and its ok. Learn to play with a good-skilled grp and everything is smooth. Tanking is awesome cause its challenging as well.
1) Marked enemies should be marked for a fix period of time (10sec?!)
2) increase Guard meter to 3x of current guard meter
3) increase regneration of Guard meter by 200%
4) TAB-Skill should be changed to a taunt which marks all enemies around the GF. Cooldown for TAB-Skill (20sec?). TAB-Skill is working like an interrupt: each enemy which got a mark by the TAB skill is forced to attack the tank once !
5) increase Armor points gained by Con from 1% to 2-3%
6) Increase Damage bonus by strength from 1% to 1,5%
7) Changes in Dungeons: change most AoEs of bosses! No more circles or only a few of them! Most AoE should have a direction so that that tank is usefull because the tank is able to position himself in a way that the AoEs of the bosses cant hit the clerics.
Changes 1-6) are possible by very small changes in the configuration file of each class (okay, this is depending to the skills of the programmers). If the GF would be too strong after these changes: downgrade some of them.
And here is the reason:
Actually my Guardmeter is useless: 1 Boss, 2-6 Adds. 2 Hits by Adds or one hit by Boss and my guard meter is empty. I compare guardmeter with dodging like TR: The TR is able to dodge 2-3 Attacks. The GF cant dodge. Because of this the guard meter must be improved. The GF has to block most strong attacks. The guard meter should be able to block at least 3 hits by bosses! to block 3 hits, the guard meter hast to be inreased by 100-200% -> 2x-3x.
Just a taunt, no damage.
Actually TAB is useless in PvP and PvE. Threatening rush is much better to mark enemies. So the TAB-ability has to be changed in a way that it is useful. An AoE taunt would be very useful. It wouldnt be OP by adding a cooldown.
you say "lern2play" and i say: learn to read! Con increases armor already. this value should be increased slightly so that a tank is able to tank damage.
All of these debuffs should last X seconds. maybe 10, maybe 2 but NOT until the first hit! I'd add the cooldown of the TAb ability because it would be imba if it is possible to spam an interupt and debuff. The debuff of threatening rush could use another duration as the debuff of the TAB ability.
Well in my opinion:
GF has problems to keep aggro.
GF has problems to keep the enemies marked.
GF has problems to stay allive if he has aggro.
All the 3 problems would be solved by my changes. Maybe(!) they're to strong, but the TAB ability has to be redesigned and all other changes could be tested and changed until its not "imba".
And here is the reason:
Suppose you and a cleric are in a party and are fighting 5 mobs. Let's also assume that you are able to consistently hit all 5 mobs with cleave for 500 damage. Assume the mobs are dealing half that amount to you. You would be doing a collective 2500 damage/threat or 500 damage/threat per enemy while the enemy is only dealing a total of 1250 damage to you. Sounds like a pretty good trade off until your cleric heals you for those missing 1250 hit points and subsequently generates 1250 threat on EVERY enemy for a collective 6250 threat dwarfing your measly 2500. If threat really does work this way it's obvious why, in a party of 5 people, the cleric does most of the tanking. Even if all mobs were marked (for an extra 100% threat generated) the GF still wouldn't be able to hold agro on any of the mobs. This is a very simple example and leaves out a lot of factors, but it still illustrates how I believe threat works.
If I am wrong please correct me. Is this really how threat mechanics work in this game? If so they're seriously some of the worst I've seen and I have no idea how a game as polished as this one would employ something so ***-backwards.
Just out of curiosity, I went to look at how threat mechanics for WoW operate. I know NW is a totally different style of game than WoW, and as much as I'd love to see another game give WoW a run for its money, there's no denying its success; it is easily the most successful MMO ever released, so humor me as I make the comparison.
To start with, all WoW's tanking classes get a BASE 200% threat modifier. That means they're effectively dealing 300% damage as threat. In addition heals generate 50% threat that damage does. If I'm correct, this would mean amount healed would have to be SIX times the amount of damage dealt by the tank in order to pull agro. This is just baseline. This doesn't even factor in things like having a REAL taunt on a relatively short cooldown. I know many of you would argue that tanking in WoW is hilariously easy and shouldn't be something to strive for, and I would be inclined to agree with you. However, just for the sake of argument compare the two systems.
Healing in NW can have it's threat reduced by 26% through feats and class features, roughly half of what is baseline for healers in WoW.
Tanks in NW can increase their threat by 215% through feats, class features by and maintaining mark on enemies. Only 15% more threat than tanks in WoW generate baseline.
Threat needs to be seriously reworked. Honestly, it's not even a problem with GFs. Threat in this game is simply terrible and should really be priority number one on Cryptic's "To Do" list if they ever hope to make a game with decent gameplay.