SK Raiding Ideas: Defense

[Darkc]

<p>Defensive: To be fair, with our AA Lines + 80 AT I feel our ability to OT and take on multiple encounters is pretty good. As mentioned, our Defensive stance can be a little better but it's more of a cushion than a necessity.  Yes, we have to be pretty well equiped ... but that goes for every other fighter as well. </p><p>Specifics: Our Durability from the comments I've seen on these boards is a tad bit underrated.  Pools of Blood, Self Healing, Bloodletter, Despoiling line... all great abilities that make us tough to kill.  Once again, I think we suffer more from "perception" since our extra durability depends on us approaching death or dying... but I tank stuff every night using my 2h'er and Offstance Mostly.  On raids the problem that we have is mostly being stuffed in DPS groups with one healer (not to mention we have our DPS gear on and 2h'er in Offstance hopefully)... of course we're getting creamed if we get aggro.  Several Raid guilds do use SK OTs effectively.  </p><p>In my opinion, and free free to respond if you disagree, is that we have more issues with aggro than anything.  If we go defensive, yeah we can take hits... but we can't hold aggro to save our life.  Best idea I've seen is to add Riposte to the Defensive Stance.  </p><p>Suggestions:</p><ul><li>Defensive Stance - Needs more "Avoidance" type stats... maybe +Agi, +Block, etc. </li><li>Lifetaps that turns into wards sounds like a great idea, not sure how it would work out coding wise... An ability that acts like "roll over minutes" and maybe turns 2k - 3k of your lifetaping at full health into a ward would be great though. </li><li>Increase the strength of lifetap Heals to match the damage inflicted.  </li><li>Heal Crits - They should effect healing AFTER our spell crits.  Give us some use for it. </li><li>+Heal - Many Crusader items have +Heal, so wouldn't it be fair if it affected our lifetaps healing portion and scaled up with Crits?   </li></ul>

[Shirodan]

I definetly agree that we should get some use out of the heal crit line of AAs we have available and the +heal gear that we tend to wear. Its a shame that it goes to waste when it would make sense to work on lifetaps as well.

[rabid.pooh]

<cite>Darkc wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>Defensive: To be fair, with our AA Lines + 80 AT I feel our ability to OT and take on multiple encounters is pretty good. As mentioned, our Defensive stance can be a little better but it's more of a cushion than a necessity.  Yes, we have to be pretty well equiped ... but that goes for every other fighter as well. </p><p>Specifics: Our Durability from the comments I've seen on these boards is a tad bit underrated.  Pools of Blood, Self Healing, Bloodletter, Despoiling line... all great abilities that make us tough to kill.  Once again, I think we suffer more from "perception" since our extra durability depends on us approaching death or dying... but I tank stuff every night using my 2h'er and Offstance Mostly.  On raids the problem that we have is mostly being stuffed in DPS groups with one healer (not to mention we have our DPS gear on and 2h'er in Offstance hopefully)... of course we're getting creamed if we get aggro.  Several Raid guilds do use SK OTs effectively.  </p><p>In my opinion, and free free to respond if you disagree, is that we have more issues with aggro than anything.  If we go defensive, yeah we can take hits... but we can't hold aggro to save our life.  Best idea I've seen is to add Riposte to the Defensive Stance.  </p><p>Suggestions:</p><ul><li>Defensive Stance - Needs more "Avoidance" type stats... maybe +Agi, +Block, etc. </li><li><span style="color: #cc0066;">Defensive stance needs some extra defense to make up for avoid short comings for sure, +parry, +block, the +wis does absolutley nothing for the Sk except brings up the magic resists a tad.</span></li><li>Lifetaps that turns into wards sounds like a great idea, not sure how it would work out coding wise... An ability that acts like "roll over minutes" and maybe turns 2k - 3k of your lifetaping at full health into a ward would be great though. </li><li><span style="color: #cc0066;">The lifetap ward should give back a raw % from the hit you recieve, this would make it not overpowered in solo/heroic/epic content.</span></li><li>Increase the strength of lifetap Heals to match the damage inflicted.</li><li><span style="color: #cc0066;">Base the heal back on %'s, or targets.</span></li><li>Heal Crits - They should effect healing AFTER our spell crits.  Give us some use for it. </li><li><span style="color: #cc3366;">Good lord no, SK's are already forced to work on so many other stats, leave it on spell crits and be done with it.  If they give you heal crit, then they'll think that is something that's adding to balance and it won't be, besided if you get to 100% spell crit, what difference does that heal crit make?</span></li><li>+Heal - Many Crusader items have +Heal, so wouldn't it be fair if it affected our lifetaps healing portion and scaled up with Crits?</li><li><span style="color: #cc0066;">Right now the +spell damage is divided in two, half is added to the spell damage and half is added to the heal, again lets keep it at that.  You may have one or two pieces that incidentally have +heal on it, but again if they add the +heal they'll count that towards some sort of balance, and really that's the gear we don't want.  Leave the +heal to the pally, we'll take the +spell damage.</span></li></ul></blockquote>

[Razlath]

<cite>Toesmash@Oasis wrote:</cite><blockquote><blockquote><ul><li><span style="color: #cc0066;">Right now the +spell damage is divided in two, half is added to the spell damage and half is added to the heal, again lets keep it at that.  You may have one or two pieces that incidentally have +heal on it, but again if they add the +heal they'll count that towards some sort of balance, and really that's the gear we don't want.  Leave the +heal to the pally, we'll take the +spell damage.</span></li></ul></blockquote></blockquote><p>Well that explains why I couldn't get a good test done on my spell damage add (I wasn't watching the heal side as I was checking spell damage for someone or I might have noticed).  It kept seeming to be half of what I expected.  I would request that they change this to have the full +spell amount to both sides of the spell.  It would certainly help a lot with surviveablity.</p><p>I actually would like to see the heal side of our lifetaps stop being different numbers entirely (except for the special AA ones attached to HT, and grimcoil which should be percentages based on points).  If they were changed to be equal to the damage done it would help quite a bit.  Would this be too much healing output?  It seems like it might be the key to making up for our lower avoidance due to forced stat choices.</p>

[Darkc]

<p>I agree with you Toe, I'm not saying to replace the way Spell Damage is currently split.  It actually makes sense for us.  I mean for it to have a "Compound" effect.  For example.</p><p>Lets say Siphon hits for 1000 and heals for 500.... </p><p>on a 500 heal you can have up to 250 +heal to cap it at 750</p><p>on top of that, it checks your +heal crit (which a few classes have group buffs that provide heal crit) and you can now heal for 1k on a crit.  </p>

[Nole]

<p>Hmm... my personal thought is rather than trying to give us more avoidance, they should try to make high mitigation tanking more viable for us. This would allow us to have fewer stats to focus on as well as make SKs different (potentially in a way that we'd be better tanks on certain fights, worse on others).</p><p>My thought is that for this to happen, we'd need some way to become immune to double attacks and crits (or at least DAs). Maybe add DA immunity to our defensive stance, maybe put it somewhere in the WIS or AGI lines to make those lines more desirable? Are there other types of damage spikes that would need to be absorbed?</p><p>My second thought is that maybe they should give reaver to every SK free at level 40 or 50 or somewhere like that (maybe earlier), and replace it with a passive ability that increases the effect of incomming heals and lifetaps by 25%.  This would make up for the fact that we get hit a lot more. (It might be overpowered in solo/small group situations, so maybe just a big bump to heals and not lifetaps? In that case it belongs in a different tree.)</p><p>Final thought, maybe it might make sense to have Reaver's heals depend on the type of mob. Make it heal like 1% for a regular, 2.5% for heroic, 5% for epic? (Maybe less dramatic scaling). The idea would be to have the heal from reaver be significant in raids without overpowering solo content.</p><p>The end effect of all this would be to leave the SK as a low avoidance tank, which makes up for the lack of avoidance through a combination on +mitigation type abilities, increased effect of incomming heals, and lifetaps. If balanced, right I think those mechanisms would be a suitable alternative to avoidance, and would lead to a style of tanking that leaves less to chance. Healers would have to keep a steady stream of healing on the SK, but if they can keep him up normally, they wouldn't have to worry that at some point he'll get an unlucky string of failures to avoid damage.</p>

[hukikatlok]

I concur on the basic premise of increasing mitigation over avoidance. To a certain extent we want to get hit. It helps with our agro control and our damage output.If you consider the difference in the solo, heroic, and epic encounters if we were retooled to get hit more and survive as a viable option it would have to be an extremely large change in our mitigation of damage and the only way I see a way to do this well is percentage based. If it's a solo encounter our debuffs/damage mitigation could be a certain %, higher for heroic, and much higher for epic encounters. Also we would need more focus of some type. Our heal type abilities would seemingly also have to scale more on a percentage basis for tougher encounters. So that we could stand and take a beating for a substantially longer time; even versus an epic encounter. Now that would increase our usefulness as off tanks as well as giving raid leaders a reason to bring us along.  The same argument can be made for much of our damage spells and combat arts. I think it would be a great improvement. Although, making most of what an SK or Crusader does percentage based has it's own new set of balancing issues. Everyone would want increased offense and defense versus tougher encounters. Just maybe  it could be done in a way that it would truely set the Crusader class apart and make them desirable without causing havoc. Perhaps our offensive and defensive stances could make this a reality, instead of leaving our stances sub par put a percentage based damage mitigation on our defensive stance and a percentage based damage increase on our offensive stance; the percentage being based on encounter difficulty.This has been thinking out loud for me but I'm liking this idea more and more.

[Phelon_Skellhound]

<p>Don't forget that if we increase our avoidance.... then our Caress line becomes null... I must agree that we need to be able to handle spike damage as this is one of our biggest weaknesses as a crusader.  We NEED to be hit to increase agro... so what options can we throw in?</p><p>Increase agro if we can successfully avoid if increase to avoidance on defensive stance?</p><p>Increase Mit to better handle spike damage coupled with an upgrade to our Caress line that would add more threat/agro?</p><p>Upgrade Caress spell line to increase threat if successfully blocked by shield or parried by weapon?</p><p>Defensive stance to add more threat if successfully parried and/or blocked by shield?</p>

[Margen]

<p>As far as I know every tank class has a agro proc when they get hit, but they don't have the agro problems we do.</p><p>We need some form of avoidance in defensive, when your fight a mob that hits for 4-6k, a couple misses can make a huge diffrence in a epic encounter.  Mitigation is no longer king in tanking, due to it just doesn't mitigate enough damage anymore.  Avoidance is where tanking is at, every MT Guardian has every avoidance proc they can get there hands on now (and they also have a agro proc on getting hit)</p><p>one they need to drop the Wisdom idea, it just doesn't work any more, we aren't going to resist spells and a couple hundred wisdom means nothing on mitigating the damage.  We also need better dps while in defensive, the hit we take is huge when switcing stances (also want better base dps, we should own Guardians and pallys, but Guardians kick our butts and we are barely a head of pallys).  If we are defensive maybe have something that every time we hit the mob it adds a couple hundred hate, which also would help us in the OT role.</p>

[Gehemnishthex]

<cite>Toesmash@Oasis wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Darkc wrote:</cite><blockquote><ul><li>Heal Crits - They should effect healing AFTER our spell crits.  Give us some use for it. </li><li><span style="color: #cc3366;">Good lord no, SK's are already forced to work on so many other stats, leave it on spell crits and be done with it.  If they give you heal crit, then they'll think that is something that's adding to balance and it won't be, besided if you get to 100% spell crit, what difference does that heal crit make?</span></li></ul></blockquote></blockquote>Well. in EQ1 your lifetap would do 50 normally, spell crit could make that 100, then heal crit could make the heal component go up to 200. it would be another multiplier that would work on top of previous crits, or if your damage portion failed to crit. I would LOVE this to work on our taps.