Solution to Avoidance Tanking

[Quicksilver74]

<p>Avoidance tanking is great for groups, but really not a good idea for raids.   Brawler tanks generally are not consistent enough to stay alive while being the main tank for a raid.  There are exceptions, usually those brawlers who have an abundance of experience and very high-end gear; however, the majority of brawlers are not suited to tank for raids with the current system for avoidance tanking.  </p><p>   I propose a change to how Avoidance tanking works versus epic targets.  Grant brawlers a much higher chance to avoid attacks from epics with a drawback.  If the avoided attack is the result of deflection or parry, some of the damage can actually leak through to the fighter.  This leaking of damage would only apply to Epics: they are meant to be much stronger mobs and hit with more force.  </p><p>   </p><p>   For example, lets say EpicmobX attacks 3 times, and lets say he would hit a guardian for 1,500, 1,300, and 1,400.   Now lets say a brawler is able to avoid 1 or 2 of these attacks.   Due to less mitigation the brawler might take 2,000 from the 1st attack, deflect the second attack, and suffer deflection trauma for 250 points of damage, and then get hit again for 1,900 on the 3rd attack.   </p><p>   A system like that could allow for avoidance to be more effective versus epics, without making brawlers overpowered.   </p>

[Kaycerzan]

You are not the first, nor will you be the last, to come here with a proposal on how to make avoidance tanking "work."Nor will you be the first or last to have one of two things happen to your thread... 1) Nobody will care. 2) It will turn into a 15 page tangent that starts off meaning well, but eventually turns into a troll feeding frenzy.Basically it boils down to the same old story. Half the brawler community wants to be tanks.... half the community want to be dps.  A few hicks in the middle believe we should be both.  The fact remains that all 'fighters' should be the same at the core. The same uncontested avoidance, base defense, and mitigation. Then you slap on the attributes and armor of the path you choose.  Higher defense in some cases, higher avoidance in others. Better mitigation for plate, better dodging for those in lighter stuff. At the core we should be the same, and none should suffer absurd penalties compared to others in their respective stance. If you fix those things, so at the core we are the same, but at the end we are not just cookie cutters... then you will have fixed avoidance tanking, and the only thing left to overcome is the mentality of others that we can not tank it. It will always be <b>harder</b> to heal an avoidance tank, and that is why, unless we were 'repaired' in a way that will only make the mit tanks complain we're overpowered, we would still never tank epics even if our abilities were given the proper tweaks.  When you imagine yourself tanking an epic, you imagine it going down the same way as a guardian does... but it won't be that way. Even 'fixed' we would still take  burst damage, and that would require the utmost concentration and attention from the healers to be prepared to keep you alive without wasting pointlessly large amounts of mana. And no raid leader is going to care that you can tank it when he can assign fewer healers to a mit tank and achieve the same result.

[Bladewind]

<p>In an epic encounter, the baseline percent of incoming damage received is equal to the chance that the player is hit (1-avoidance%) multiplied by the amount of unmitigated damge received on a hit (1- mit%).  In other words:</p><p>% of incoming damage received = [1-(uncontested avoid% + effective contested avoid%)] * (1- mitigation %)</p><p>Make this figure equal for equal general tanking ability.</p><p>In my calculations, I treat effective contested avoidance as (total avoid- uncontested avoid)/10.</p><p>If you sub the current numbers in, you will find that brawlers take roughly double the incoming damage of plate tank at a baseline level.  All sorts of things like temporary self buffs, group buffs, and the debuff state of the mob(s) attacking the player will skew this.  As the above poster mentioned, it would make sense to balance this figure at the base level, then build a system up from there...</p>

[Quicksilver74]

<cite>Kaycerzan wrote:</cite><blockquote> we would still never tank epics even if our abilities were given the proper tweaks.  </blockquote><p>Well you see we can tank epics now.  It's not easy, but bruisers can indeed tank most raid content.  </p><p>  But yeah I know avoidance tanking is broken.  When I first made my bruiser I read the description, and figured it was a dps machine, kicking through walls like the kool aid man.  Well it pretty much is.  But then once I learned the game better I realized that bruisers were also a tank, though many believed tanking as a bruiser was stupid... I aimed to prove them wrong.  Since then I've made it my mission to have the capability to tank all raids, as well as be in the top 5 parsing on DPS.  </p><p> I'm not complaining about our class at all, I love it.  I just wanted to offer a suggestion.  </p>

[ganjookie]

:p Crabbok, seems some people don't know how long youve actually been around these parts :pI dig the idea.  Did you reporst this on Eq2flames? I know the devs respond over there more often to issues then over here.

[Raidi Sovin'faile]

I remember a long time ago when we all first started realizing the issue with streaky Avoidance rolls and high Epic damage spikes, people had suggested that avoidance work like mitigation and "deflect" portions of the damage.It was shouted down by most of the people playing because it "basically makes Avoidance and Mitigation the same thing. I don't wanna be a mitigation tank, I wanna avoid, blah, blah".I personally see no problem with doing it this way. Although, while high end Brawlers might be able to tank things well enough without dying straight out (only straining healers)... a normal geared Brawler with a pickup group in an instance you might not have done before, well... some of those instances [Removed for Content] those Brawlers. While a Plate tank in the EXACT SAME SETUP, will have an easier time and not necessarily die outright.What I'm trying to say is that it might be a good idea to simply make it so that the higher "quality" the mob, and thus the more avoidance being "ignored", the more avoidance will partially deflect. That way a lvl 74 Heroic Named mob won't [Removed for Content] the average Brawler like he does now when he tries to save the day and pull aggro off a wizard who took a couple hits on his manashield, etc.

[Quicksilver74]

I did post this on eq2flames, and I only suggest that the damage leaking through on deflection should apply to EPIC mobs, not heroic or lower.  If brawlers want to be an avoidance tank, they can for heroic mobs.   But any brawler who wants to tank epics... and has tried... will know the difficulty of the current system.