DDO, Land of the Meme-Tank

[Bjond]

IMHO, DDO made a serious mistake by focusing on trinity play. The trinity is an MMO concept. I want to see DDO return to it's D&D roots and support ALL melee tanking.

Tanks should not need to be too fat to DPS. So fat, they just cower behind a shield. The DDO tank is so meme'ish, players could probably choke a thread with "Your tank is so fat .. " jokes.

Every player that tries a tank a second life in DDO has pretty much one goal: how do I make this fun? Tronko has "fun tank" as the headline in one of his tank builds. Strimtom has an entire set of builds that try to make tanking fun. Tilo has his debuffing sorc tank.

It should not be that hard. In D&D, all melee can tank WHILE THEY DPS. And, every one has the same mitigation, too -- AC values vary by maybe 1~2 AC between Light, Medium, & Heavy. Armor weight is thematic in D&D, not indicative of tankness.

DDO is an MMO, so there does need to be some differential, but it should not be the 10~100x difference in DPS between tanking and dps'ing that it is. Nor should it require veteran builders to work so hard to add "fun" into one of the major styles of play.

I'm not advocating an instant wholesale rewrite of DDO. That would be too easy compared to what I really want to see happen: a new attitude.

If SSG can flush the unhealthy stalker-like fixation on tanks in Plate Armor cowering in fear behind a Shield, they will slowly over time make changes that make tanking MUCH more fun and greatly improve the health of the game.

morder-tank-meme-2.jpg
Since When?

[GoldyGopher]

If you go back to D&D roots you are going back to the Holy Trinity design. It just wasn't called the Holy Trinity in 1973. The Holy Trinity, some time referred to as Tank and Smash, predates MMOs, while it was codified in 1991's release of DikuMud, it had been a stable of RPG going back to Dave Arneson's Blackmoor Campaign, prior to it being incorporated into D&D in the mid 1970's. It is not an MMO thing. The Holy Trinity has been used in games like Soccer (Football to our EU friends) since 1863 which is accredited by FIFA as the birth of modern soccer. In soccer you have Defense, Midfielders, and Strikers instead of Tanks, Support and Damage Dealers.

The root of the Holy Trinity is specialization in a role to help the team/party achieve the objective. Are you defender, damage dealer or supporting character?

Beginning with 2nd Edition AD&D the development team at TSR wanted to get away from the party of three and move to a party of five, it was an attempt to create more or different roles for characters to fill, so they added the scout and the controller. These five roles comes from military theories of combined arms.

DDO was originally designed with the idea of the five roles being important to the party, Tank, Damage Dealer, Cleric, Rogue and Wizard. The problem is it is very hard to design and build a game around this. I mean who remembers sitting around an hour waiting for a cleric to join you party to run VON5. Or begging a rogue to jump into you Shan-to-Kor group.

The Dev team made a clear decision to move away from the D&D party design because it could not be supported by the player base. In this change the development team didn't actually adopt the Holy Trinity in mmo design, the players did. The players did so because no matter how much players hate the holy trinity of design, it is the most effective solution for game play. Continual changes to game play have been made based upon player feedback, remember the PJ wearing Monk Splash Tanks or the TWF Paladins or Battle Bards or ... All of which were removed based upon player feed back of being too good at what they did.

The current game design for DDO is more about the Mary Sue, perfect characters devoid of flaws capable of doing anything. This is part of the everything in game design from crafting to random loot to named loot and proposed game designs, Double Attribute Augments anyone? If it goes full Mary Sue I am not sure DDO will be fun to play.

I wish the development team went back to the principals of the party of five for game design. With the complexity of designing for the Party of Five I don't expect that to happen.

As for the Holy Trinity and Big Fat Pallys sitting behind Shields, it is still the players driving the boat.

[jirksa]

Hi,

I am also quite concern about melees survivability, but I have different opinion on the topic. What part af the game are you talking about? Leveling? High reaper? Raids? You see, there are many different things you can do in DDO that all requires different builds.

For leveling? Sure anybody can tank anything, just as you said.

Raids? You need some 'fatter' build but any 'decent' melee can tank most raids on hard with dedicated healer.

High reaper? When reaper was created, the idea was to give players a big challenge. The Devs thought It will take a whole party of elite players to do mid reaper. R8-10 was added as a 'buffer' and R10 was meant to be crazy impossible hard. But look at the comunity now... everybody running R4 at least. R8-10 being a norm with full party. If you want to step into R10 and tank, you surely need the fattiest dwarf with the biggest shield for that. High reaper should have been an 'impossible' challenge. I agree that they should introduce a mechanic to balance melee and range play in high reaper, but you should not be able to take more than a few hits in high reaper if you are not the tankiest tank IMO.

(I am saying that as an Melee player)

[slarden]

I would like to see sword and board offense boosted a bit. When I went sword and board KOTC I could clear mobs faster than vanguard due mainly to the Tier 5 KOTC being so good. It wasn't bad at heroic or low epic levels. It's garbage dps at 30.

It's kind of an easy playstyle so I can see alot of people going that direction for leveling with just a splash if the dps is too close to other forms, but there is definitely room to boost it.

[adamkatt]

I did a full bladefordged pally tank, the numbers were impressive at 32 but he was all defence and a bore to play, with a decent healer r10 was easy to tank but dps wise he had basically none.

[Bjond]

DDO is more about the Mary Sue

LOL .. that's a great way to put it, but in practice a JOAT build in DDO ends up doing 1 thing well, and maybe 1~2 extra things "good enough"; eg. DPS + (heal or tank) + trapping is usually what I aim for. I've done the Tank part as a primary and found that if you go big on the defense, pretty much everything else fails. Trapping is moderately easy to bolt onto anything, but it kills any chance at a pure build.

I wish the development team went back to the principals of the party of five for game design.

I wish the underlying game supported that. It's not combat or build trees. It's population versus a population-splitting mechanic: Levels X Difficulties. More party needs not just more people, but more people that are capable of grouping together.

DDO would need to make two changes for that: mega server to maximize the population is the easy one. Then it needs to go after the divisors. Eliminating levels for grouping would be possible using something like FFXIV's stat-caps, but difficulties are rather baked-in at this point.

I don't think it would ever do mixed level grouping, though. It would mean undoing the duplicated heroic/epic split from a content standpoint and require a huge balance/testing phase -- kryptonite for SSG.

Mega-server alone likely wouldn't be enough for a full 5x style, but it would probably be enough to support more group-focused building in general.

Holy Trinity and Big Fat Pallys sitting behind Shields, it is still the players driving the boat.

It's not the players. Look at the trees. US is the tanking tree. It basically screams "Paladin S&B Epic Tree". The further you stray from that meme, the harder it is to build a tank. There's nothing at all for caster, ranged, or non-shield (dodgy) tanking.

FOTW is the only other semi-tanking tree, but with PRR-4 and HP-5~15% and no agro management. It's also solidly melee-only with nothing for caster or ranged styles (and much less HP for non-primal bases).

IMHO, the lock on the S&B meme stems from an unwillingness to fix threat & risk. If ranged and casters WITH AGRO faced the same level of incoming damage as a melee, there would be zero problem with expanding US a little to support non-S&B tanking. The fundamental imbalances exacerbated by scaling difficulty via incoming damage would vanish, too.

[Raithe]

It's not the players. Look at the trees. US is the tanking tree. It basically screams "Paladin S&B Epic Tree". The further you stray from that meme, the harder it is to build a tank. There's nothing at all for caster, ranged, or non-shield (dodgy) tanking.

There's nothing in Undying Sentinel for other classes that want high survivability? Completely false. In times past, I noticed all sorts of new players running around in Undying Sentinel (it used to be listed in the examine window). They did it to increase their hit points to the level they considered safe.

The whole tank think is completely in the mind of the players. Take Miior in Haunted Halls of Eveningstar, one of the only mobs in the game that I consider actually needs tanking. The only thing you need to tank Miior is a high reflex save and Epic Reflexes. I could wand whip any rogue in the game to full health while tanking Miior if they have those 2 things.

Back in the ancient days of Heroic Shroud, I went on countless all-ranged Shroud runs that were a complete walk in the park. No one tanked Arraetrikos, we were all ranging him from a distance both in part 4 and part 5. The completion times were faster with those groups.

And GoldyGolpher's analysis of tanking in 1970s D&D is a complete hoax. Gygax and others didn't treat D&D like a video game at all, it was simply a mechanism for creating stories. The emphasis was on realism, and a single man in a suit of armor has never been a "tank" in the modern day vehicle sense. Nor did anyone try to "gather all the aggro" to a single character. If you played Baldur's Gate like that, you played it very poorly.

[LurkingVeteran]

Some out-of-the-box thinking from somebody that barely plays DDO any more:

I think the entire AC vs. atk is a bad mechanic for a modern action game like DDO:

• It doesn't translate well to a CRPG: Players hate when attacks whiff. It also looks silly when monsters surround a plated tank and they just whiff.
• AC currently doesn't work well: You need an obsence amount of AC for raid bosses to miss (specifically, for some unknown design reason), and further, the way they allowed AC enhancements to stack made weird splashes mandatory for AC builds.
• AC is not needed anyway: The introduction of PRR and Dodge made it redundant (what is AC supposed to represent that isn't covered by damage mitigation or dodging?). It's just needless complexity.

At this point it would be a much better experience and easier to understand game if you just merged AC and PRR into a general mitigation stat. Then give heavy armor some innate bonus that isn't just a flat % that quickly becomes irrelevant due to power creep.

Tangent: I would also argue the same for damage spells. Just remove reflex saves on pure damage and turn it into mitigation. The idea behind reflex in PnP is that a fast monster will actually dodge it, but the way it works in DDO is that they stand in the middle of the fireball and just take no damage like they are ghosts. This is a very bad translation of D&D rules for an action CRPG.

[Duskofdead]

The main thing that gets me is, why is it so difficult for DDO to find or strike a balance where damage is threatening but where the entire threat doesn’t hinge on massive spike damage that consigns anything but a purpose built tank to stay very much on the sidelines or else experience nonstop soul stoning. So many other games do this successfully and while I’m sure there’s a hundred layers to this problem, a basic element seems to be that healing is too potent and has been outsourced into almost every build and class in too many ways. The amount of healing you can pack today per cast is enormous and generally building any kind of pure healer is wasted overkill. As a result of that it seems like they didn’t know how to actually threaten players anymore other than adding tons of procs for monsters to one shot you out of nowhere on spikes. This is a very, very common observation about the game by new to mid experience players because it isn’t the general norm in how most rpgs and mmos present threat to the party.

As a second observation, I feel that the stuff I was really afraid of in the game years ago is not scary at all now. Beholders, instant death casting, etc. our saves have bloated into the skies as has every kind of itemization option to defend and prepare for just about anything. So all that’s left is throwing walls of damage in spikes at players. Which forces us into a hide behind a tank play style. It’s definitely not as interesting as earlier ddo, even if it’s the direction players pushed the game or was easier and simpler to design for.

[Cordovan]

Closing the thread as the OP is clearly looking to start a fight by using insulting language.