[Discussion] Should we have more use for tanks?

[CrownOfSorrow.6137]

Aside from a couple raid fights where the highest toughness gets to tank, it seems building defensively has little to no use in general GW2 PvE. I find this is such a shame, since some classes have some really cool venues for "tanking". For example, the new warrior elite "spellbreaker" has great tank potential with full counter and mace/shield. But without the utility of the chronomancer, tank spellbreaker will never be accepted.

Should GW2 have more instances where people can "tank"? Like an update to certain dungeons or to fractals? Would people actually enjoy filling this niche?

[UnbentMars.9126]

The issue for that is that fractals and dungeons (as well as the game in general, raids notwithstanding) are balanced around everyone being in some form of damage. In order to make these changes, fractals and dungeons would need 2 things:

1; lower mob health to make up for decreased damage2; massively increased damage and/or other mechanics to incentivize support/tank character play rather than just rolling through everything in DPS builds. That said, as even DPS builds have active defenses, this doesn't stop people from just trying to kill everything faster to avoid the effects, further increasing reliance on the zerker/viper meta.

To be perfectly frank, I don't think this is feasible for GW2 as a game. The changes required wouldn't be very effective unless sweeping, game-wide changes were also made which i don't really think would be worth the effort. Furthermore, most of the reason many people like this game is because there's no distinct trinity like almost every other MMO out there. Many people were salty about the raids forcing a sort of reliance on the trinity in the first place.

That said, I do think there's a lot of room for tank-specific things. If ANET were to put some new instanced group content that made it useful, I'd absolutely create a character build specifically for that because I think its fun. I just don't think it's useful to go back to old content and make those changes because I don't think it would work.

[CptAurellian.9537]

I dare question whether the current "tanking" in raids really is tanking or whether it's just controlling the respective boss.

But anyway, a "tank" role should not be introduced into more PvE content. It is at odds with the basic gameplay systems of active defense for every character and with the current flexibility of group composition for any 5-man content. Furthermore, it offers little benefit to the game.

[DreamyAbaddon.3265]

I bought into this game because there are no holy trinity. If I wanted a combat system that had such roles I wouldn't be playing GW2. This game is unique and I want it to stay that way and I hope it stays that way. If you want to tank traditionally then there are many other games that do exactly that. We don't need it here. What makes this game so special is how different it is from it's competitors.

[Chadramar.8156]

I badly miss tanking and from what I heard this game doesn't really allow it because there's no active aggro control. What I would like to see though is for more defensive playstyles to become more accepted and accessible to more professions, especially the heavy classes. It's sad that people hate so much on two parts of the trinity while elevating the third sky-high. DPS gameplay isn't "objectively" "superior" in some way.

[Ellisande.5218]

No. All you'd is return to the horrid holy trinity where you have someone who does nothing but get hit, a large number of people who do nothing but spam attacks, and some people who do nothing but play whackamole with the hp bars because the boss was designed to deal too much damage to force players to take along healers.

I already hate the pointless buff stacking. If my character is supposed to have a complete set of stacked buffs to achieve a certain stat threshold then those buffs are pointless. The existence of those buffs means that my normal stats were nerfed to force me to get those buffs just to return to having normal stats. I would be much better off if Anet simply removed the buffs and returned my stats to normal.

[Khisanth.2948]

Given the direction of mob designs a tank like in other games will be forever useless. I am referring to the large number of "cover the whole area in AoEs" and now "dash around the area while leaving AoEs" style of design.

[Haishao.6851]

There was never proper tanking in GW and I hope there never is.

[joneirikb.7506]

GW2 is build around three roles: Damage, Support, Control. And each class can do each (to various amount). In this case, "Tanking" would be to "Control" the enemy. Honestly in before the whole breakbars got introduced a party of 5 could cycle through various CC and other control abilities, to deny an enemy to actually get to grips with you. Nowadays it's basically just "kill the break-bar" in PvE.

There isn't any "Aggro control" like people are used to from other games, but most enemies can be "Controlled" by multiple players. In this way the game was designed around multiple people wanting to play together, preferably organize themselves a bit, and then basically "share" the tank role between themselves. Well, it didn't turn out that way, since it seems a majority of players prefers to just zerg up and press 1, and have others rez them if they get hit. :(

Ironically you see this a lot more in PvP (and arguably in WvW), where people try ot organize themselves more for fights. In PvP for example, a single Guardian can stand on the capture point, and defend for a long time, denying enemy the capture, until his own team can come back to help him clear out the attackers again. So "Tank" in this game is "Control", and can come in many different ways and shapes, in the case of Guardian it's actually through Aegis, Blocks, Invulnerable, Knockback, etc.

ANet didn't want to make it so you could camp enough armor that you stood there for 10 minutes just not dying, but not really doing any damage either. Since they want to encourage an Action Combat system, as opposed to the "Passive Percentage" systems that traditional MMORPG's uses.

[Ganpot.3879]

While getting rid of the holy trinity sounds nice in theory, in practice the trinity is one of the easiest and most effective ways to structure group content in a way that creates a lot of depth while avoiding chaos and a singular min-max player philosophy. Guild Wars 2 proved that itself. Back at launch it really had no tank or healing characters, and the entire game suffered heavily for it. All group content was a chaotic mess. ALL OF IT. In response, players ignored the majority of possible stat combinations, builds, and even professions (I played a Ranger at launch, I should know) in favor of a pure zerker DPS warrior meta. Almost every dungeon or world boss became a meat grinder, as players jumped in, inflicted as much damage as possible, got 1-shot, resurrected at the nearest waypoint, ran back, and repeated the cycle. I still consider the lack of dedicated roles to be GW2's biggest failure in core design, and it is the reason why I left the game after playing it for only 2 months at launch.

People seem to be under the impression that a holy trinity kills build diversity or pigeonholes certain classes into singular roles. But first of all, that already happens in GW2 anyway (raid groups heavily pressure mesmers to go support chrono, and ranger players get treated similarly with the druid healer role). Second of all, I've played MMOs which possesses a holy trinity setup and still allowed for more customization than GW2. My favorite of the bunch was The Secret World (the defunct version, not the soulless cash-grab relaunch). That game had tanks, healers, and DPS, but it also had dedicated support players, heal-tanks, and other weird setups. Crucially, players weren't locked into a single role via their class, because players could essentially switch classes at any time (out of combat) with the press of a button (build templates!). Moreover, each class also inherently possessed the ability to do competitive DPS, while also specializing in some other task (pistols were DPS/support, hammer was DPS/tank, rifle was DPS/heal, etc.). The system worked beautifully and allowed the developers to design fights that were very intricate and unique (assuming the group wasn't too well-geared and bursted the boss down before experiencing its mechanics, which I admit was often a problem). Quite frankly, I would never have given GW2 a second chance if The Secret World hadn't gotten a complete reset and become arguably P2W (oh, and by the way, fuck you for that Funcom).

I will say that GW2 has gotten far better since launch. Boss fights have more unique mechanics, and the devs have added healer and support oriented elite specializations. Those changes were a long time coming, and things still aren't perfect. The lack of dedicated tanks is still a massive detriment to the combat system, because it means bosses can't really be controlled with any degree of precision (and therefore their attacks must be scaled down to compensate). Some professions still face discrimination in group content due to perceived uselessness (sorry Necromancers). Players still ignore 95% of stat combinations, runes, etc. at high level because a handful are clearly superior to everything else. And there is still an overarching meta, only now it is viper condi instead of zerker. Ideally, I would love for GW2 to add dedicated tanks (and finally give more of a use for defensive stats), but at this point it probably isn't going to happen.