Arsen
09-15-2005, 09:26 PM
Instead of general ranting, I'd like to take a look at some specific affects that the changes had on us. 1. Its harder to travel. Training is now dangerous, even with green solo monsters if there are enough of them. More things seem to stun and everything seems to have little problem keeping up with my medium tier horse. Zones I used to run through afk with no problems now require me to pay close attention and still carry the risk of death if I get unlucky. (Mages and scouts say, welcome to our world it has always been this way for us. I say, Fine - where is my invisibility spell?) 2. Overland content was changed to heroic in places. This was an intentional change and I agree in principle that there should be some more group content in overland zones. But I am baffled as to why they did it in some of the places they did. Is it supposed to be a vicious struggle to get off the docks in EF? Did the devs decide that the main paths through a zone should now be group based hunting grounds? IMO, they should keep the zone entry areas and main passage ways free of heroic aggro monsters. No one likes to be restricted to travel and it is just plain frustrating. 3. Aggro generation. We have about half as many taunts as we used to and we lost our buff aggro. Even with MD, our ability to hold aggro on a single target seems to be significantly diminished... just about any class in the group seems able to pull aggro if they are not careful. Once we loose aggro, it is very difficult to regain it without using Rescue. 4. Ward/Reactive/Procs aggro. Is now assigned to the caster and not the target. We are now realizing how big of a crutch this was for some tanks. If any of these buffs are up and running prior to combat starting, there is a good chance of the caster immediately getting aggro. This is especially bad for us now since it is a lot harder to take aggro from someone than it is to maintain aggro during the course of a fight. Not being able to pre-cast these buffs before a fight starts is fairly annoying but I think it is something that everyone is going to have to get used to doing. Too bad we don't have a skill like this to immediately give us a leg up on the aggro at the start of a fight. 5. Resisted taunts. If you have a couple of taunts resisted at the start of a fight, things can go bad fast. I've been thinking about adding a macro to notify group chat to give me more time at the start of the fight if this happens. I'm not sure why they did this but it makes fighting orange and red monsters significantly harder. 6. More Stuns. With the our loss of avoidance, we now get stunned more. If this happens at the beginning of a fight, the problem is similar to having a taunt resisted. If we get our taunt resisted and then stunned shortly after... well, I hope that wizard can tank <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> 7. Root taunt procs, Root mitigation buffs. Being rooted is practically a necessity for a Guard to tank effectively. This is highly annoying and when something goes wrong that requires you to drop these buffs and move. The 2 seconds it takes to remove these buffs are valuable time lost and it also means we drop a significant amount of hate and mitigation to become mobile. Taking the time to setup the encounter so that we can remain rooted through the entire fight is now extremely important. This lack of mobility is a high price to pay and it will mean that certain situations greatly favor other tanks who are not restricted in their mobility. 8. XP seems slow. I'm not sure if this is a steeper curve for 50+, a result of the new combat system, or a combonation of both. But XP is very slow. Steadily killing streams of orange heroics with vitality is not what I would consider "good" xp compared with pre-patch. It seems like they have slowed things down. I think this is affecting people's feeling that they were 'nerfed' because they feel like they are not as effective as before. Even with all these issues, I do think that there are certain things that are actually easier now though. The removal of the "avoidance" factor also seems to apply to monsters. At level 50 I may not be able to avoid as many attacks from a level 40 mob, but at the same time if I fight a level 60 mob, he doesn't avoid as many of my attacks either. In the right situations, Maddening Defense is uber. Last night I pulled a heroic group of 4 monsters (lvl 54) - we immediately got two additional social adds of the same type of encounter. Ooops. 12 yellow heroic mobs, 3 different encounters, 2 healers spamming nonstop, I was stunned for at least half the fight - I never lost aggro on any of them. Our broken skills now work - use them! We can actually GUARD people. Reduce the amount of hate someone is generating by 20% (or whatever it is), increase the chance of avoidance on someone and absorb their damage. These abilities are very valuable and if an encounter starts to break down, they can easily be the difference between survival and a group wipe. Overall, not looking just at Guardians - a lot more things now work that didn't before. Last night we were fighting level 60 heroic raptors - we got an add (2 mobs in the add encounter) and I was sure we would be toast. The coercer in the group mezes one of the adds, and charms the other to help us kill the first encounter. We ended up killing both encounters with ease. If you are in a group where everyone understands all their new capabilities, there are now so many more options. Exceling in the old combat system meant buff stacking, avoidance and DPS - the new combat system is a lot more intricate and there are many more different ways to excel depending on the combonations of classes you are working with. <div></div>