Intim tanks

[taospark]

Can be switched off situationally IIRC

It's only a 25% bonus if you dump 10 enhancement points into it and turning it on doesn't time out or override other combat modes.

[lugoman]

According to dev's response, the goal was to move the agro managemnt from one person to the whole group, using the initmidate/diplomacy combination. But why doing it in a way that completely destroys one fo the only 3 tank builds and merges the other two, I do not know.
Someone at Turbine must really hate turtles...

Oh, I see - no one at Turbine actually plays the game. No one will bother controlling their agro, they will just not use intimi tanks anymore. Why worry about controlling your agro when you can just let a hate tank hit it for a few seconds before everyone else jumps in. Only guild runs will use intimi tanks now.

[Grimmerig]

Thanks all for the responses, and I guess that was what I thought. Just seems a shame somewhat that the intim side of play has been sacrificed, as someone mentioned earlier, why spend time and effort building a skill, if you need to be more threat/dps focussed as well, may as well just forget intim and focus on the hate tank approach. As I mentioned, I am currently refocussing, and trying to get all my tank/incite gear (bracers left to get) so I guess I will see how things go after that

[J1NG]

Technically speaking, Turtling is not dead, but confined to a very select few only.

Shades thread here:

http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=312867

Picture 1679

That's a Turtle Intim there in front of Varath, holding off eSoS users and other casters. Multiple examples of that during that event, only stuff that wasn't able to be intim'd was doing other stuff and ignoring the Turtle (Epic Velah, Epic Arraetrikos etc).

J1NG

[sirgog]

I'm kind of a newbie at this game, but maybe I'm missing something. If the barb is wearing +threat gear, how is pulling threat not the barbarian's fault? I mean, he's basically giving you -threat there. I get that some threat increasers have damage increase on them as well, but it seems like a unwise thing to wear if you don't want bosses punching you in the face.

It is solely the barbarian's fault. However, the person that will be abused for the wipe is most likely the party healer(s), and/or the 'low DPS of the group'.

This game has never had encounters that have absolutely required tanks (Horoth, Suulomades and Turigulon sort-of come close, as does the red and white forms of the Cojoined Abashai Devastator). Most people have little or no experience of playing with a tank and controlling threat.

[Tirisha]

Well My intim tank did elite Horoth recently and instead of shield blocking like the norm I was forced to S&B Horoth. Because I have a lot of gear/threat on my tank I wasn't extremely worried about losing aggro with a +5 silver holy scimitar and I did hold aggro *kept my finger on my half elf Dilly intim just in case* Also because of the changes to shield master and improved shield mastery it was easier to heal me meat tanking *no AC cause I went max threat knowing my AC isn't high enough for elite* then it used to be pre U9 when I was AC tanking on hard horoth. As it stands it seems Shield Mastery decreases all incoming damage including badges, meteor shower, DBF, Disintegrate, etc. Add in some healing amp and the healer was keeping me up on elite horoth using little more than heal scrolls.

My biggest obstacle is my low +hit when trying to tank epic bosses, because I am a 18fighter/2 pally split that went more Cha than STR. I may have to LR for more STR or start carrying destruction/improved destruction wpns if they ever come out with an epic fight that requires a tank *not just dps guy with 500 hp and displacement who can hold aggro*.

[Leadsides]

Is it just me or does anyone else miss being able to use an intim tank's ability to manage mobs and names?

I enjoyed playing my Intim tank, and took pride in developing his skills, and equipment to make sure he could do the job, now I have to determine what I want to reroll him into because intimidate is beyond broken.

So now we are back to hate tanks for all aggro management, I cannot believe that the changes they made were so extreme to actually break a valid build.

Ok, I vented and would appreciate some feedback.

/signed

I'm still building my intimitank, and it went from fun to almost worthless overnight. It seems that every time the players develop characters that make the most of the game mechanics, the devs cry "foul!" and nerf the game. Why don't they just remove all skills, all enhancements and get it over with. When they've removed everything a player can do to make their characters better, when every tactical advantage a player can get is gone, then perhaps they will feel that they have made the game unerringly challenging at all times and be satisfied.

Really not sure what I'm going to do with my intimitank. I was really enjoying the building of this character and I'm not sure I can change his focus mid-stream and still be happy with the end result. I may just continue to build him according to the original intimitank plan and then shelve him when he's capped in the hope he may become useful again someday.

[Illiain]

Turtle tanks have always been a waste of a party slot...
All U9 has done is force the intim builds to contribute to the party.

yuda

Not entirely. They were a waste if they were fighter/paladin.

There were quite a few good turtletank builds built on casters, especially Cleric/FvS. The ability to intim/turtle and keep a raid healed had the ability to bring more dps into a group, (loose the tank fighter/pally get the dps fighter/pally) and giving a more active role for the healers. (I hate healers that stand around doing jack squat when they're not healing. Good healers should be able to contribute to damage or CC while keeping a group healed.)

This concept is now pretty much dead. To maintain agro, we need to use most if not all of our sp for damage spells, preventing us from being primary healers.

[Bilger]

Seriously intim tanking is not dead you just have to be decent dps and have a lil bit of hate generation.

I have a 18/2 Pali/Fighter who has tanked horoth with a frenzied barb on his back using intim and dps with S&B. With Divine right, tower shield bonus and other hate gear and mid 80+ ac have held and kept him with np at all.

They are not dead just a different style of play now.

Only ones that are dead are the pure turtles who have no dps and just turtled they have been killed and made to lesser to get some dps and hate.

[sephiroth1084]

This might also be working for you because you are lower lvl... at lvl 20.. even with 500+ pt smite evils.. divine might, divine sacrifice, 44 STR, 2- Min 2, Full TWF line, 50% from intim, +15% hate from Sibrys set... No deodorant and a mouth like a longshoreman.. you WILL not keep aggro from a frenzied Barb (who is probably wearing some kind of hate bump as well) even with two Lightning Strike Guards, Good Guard, Lightning Guard, Magama Surge Guard, Crashing Wave Guard and Earth Grab Guard... I might have more but not sure...

This is almost patently false. Before the intimidate change I could, in semi-DPS mode (a mix of DPS and AC gear on) start DPSing Nytherios in ToD 2 at the same time as everyone else and grab aggro after 2-4 smites and then hold it for the entire fight, even against some very high damage characters. Now, sure, if the barbarian or fighter is wielding an ESoS that bypasses DR, an Epic Claw set, Epic Marilith Chain, and is spamming out all of their boosts to damage, then I will likely not gain or retain aggro, but that's basically a worst case scenario--no lead time, no cooperation from the rest of the party and no trash for high DPS to break off and wipe out in order to help manage aggro.

With the new intimidate, I imagine I'd be able to gain and hold aggro even vs. those guys much of the time, and my tank's DPS is kind of mediocre.

Turtle tanks have always been a waste of a party slot...
All U9 has done is force the intim builds to contribute to the party.

yuda

This. ^

I agree with all said, so I get to farm for a heart of wood and other items to change things around becuase Turbine took the easy way out of balancing Intim.

Oh? What better solution would there have been to

• remove the non-interactive functionality of intimiblocking wherein such tanks basically ignored everything going on around them?
• make the features besides more blocking DR and intimidate of a Stalwart Defender (Str, hate, AC, passive DR) at all worthwhile?
• make intimidate relevant for those tanks that were already using threat tanking?

I like the changes. They marry the various skills intimi-threat-tanks have into a package that actually functions with each other part of the same package and it forces players to build characters that can actually contribute to the quests they're running, both when tanking and when they're not. On top of that, it makes some situations easier, where you now only need a single successful intimidate, rather than having to hit the button every six seconds.

[Ralmeth]

According to dev's response, the goal was to move the agro managemnt from one person to the whole group, using the initmidate/diplomacy combination.

Have you seen the new diplomacy animation? I can't wait to laugh at (I mean with) someone who actually uses that in combat

[Ralmeth]

I agree with most of this. My Intim turtle tanks are dead in the water on one hand, but now I get to contribute more on the other.
I have to rethink everything now. Am I happy about that? Not really. Will I do it? Yeah. I invested a lot in those characters, too much to turn my back and reroll.
I have said it once and I will say it again, there is more than one way to play DDO. For some it's the journey, for others, the endgame. I was tired of tanks being considered "useless" unless they did X/Y/Z anyway.
I love that slight shift on thought and strategy and pecking order that happens subltley around level 10ish and then not-so-subtley after level 14-15. After that... good luck making yourself matter as a tank standing next to Maxed out firewalls and forcemissiles and whatever else it is casters throw. (I woudn't know, I don't swing that way.) It was hard enough keeping the heat off those boys then. I have only begun to experiment with the new system and I am not sure I like it yet, but I am giving it the old college try.

However... Thanks powers that be for making me spend points to respec etc when you were the ones who changed things. How many times has that happened now?

Thanks for the comments...Again, after I've playtested the new intimidate further and my view has become a lot more positive. I think it's even easier to tank large groups of mobs, but the trick is that your fellow party members have to work with you in order for this to work well. If a caster in your group is spamming AOE spells while you are trying to grab aggro it's not going to work. When this happens, I just go to DPS mode and let the caster fend for themselves. On the other hand if you work together it can work really well. For example, you could agree that the caster will throw down a big AOE or two spell to blast the heck out of the bad guys and then you use intimidate to pick up all of the aggro of anything left alive, then the caster switches to single target spells.