[Review] [Tank] Focused Offense

[altharion1]

Lets discuss this poorly designed tactic shared by all tanks.

Current Tactic

+15% damage, -15% hate and -33% armour

Issues:

High Risk v Low Reward. Slotting this tactic makes the user far less survivable, while not offering an increase in damage that makes it a worthwhile trade off. The existence of this tactic shows there was some intention for tanks to have a "DPS" spec/role while sacrificing their primary role, but at the moment this tactic doesn't properly satisfy this idea.

The fact that every tank has this completely worthless tactic should put it for some discussion.

Solutions

This tactic should operate in a similar way to a healer's "Divine Fury", ie reducing the effectiveness of their primary role, but increasing base damage. The following solution assumes that the tanks primary role is guard. And guard > CC+survivabilty. As almost all DPS classes have CC, I don't believe restricting CC while gaining the damage increase is necessary.

1. +25% damage. 33% reduced armour. Half guard effectiveness.

2. +30% damage. 50% less armour. Half guard effectiveness.

3. +30% damage. 50% less armour. Prevents use of guard.

4. +35% damage. 66% less armour. Prevents use of guard.

Benefits to the game

By making this change the main benefits to the game would be:

- Removal of a pointless tactic
- More varied group compositions
- Alternative ways to play tank classes
- May helps situations where there are too many tanks in a scenario
- Leveling/questing in PVE would be faster for tanks, as mobs can be killed faster.

Possible negative impacts?

- OP tank damage?
- Less tanks use guard to its full potential
- High avoidance DPS tanks (S+B BO, Parrymaster) could be unbalanced 1v1.

[Penril]

Moving to Discussions.

I think we can all agree that Focused Offense is a pretty bad tactic, with high risk and low reward (issue raised by OP). However, I'm not sure I like the idea of changing it by having its effectiveness tied to, for example, Guard. And we don't really want to make them mDPS; some tanks do enough damage already.

Therefore, my suggestion would be to keep the damage bonus the same, but reduce the armor penalty.

[peterthepan3]

A flat-out 15% more damage without any drawback (especially on the SM/BO) would be overkill, imo (as a BO). There should be some penalty if there is going to be given a damage buff of that value. my 2c

[Toldavf]

i agree with jono on this thats a huge amount of damage. Some tanks can already get some very gnarly crits as it is so while the tactic is bad are they really in need of more dps? Perhaps an additional effect not related to damage would make it better.

[Penril]

A flat-out 15% more damage without any drawback (especially on the SM/BO) would be overkill, imo (as a BO). There should be some penalty if there is going to be given a damage buff of that value. my 2c

Hmmm not really. What tactic would you replace? Big Brawlin and YSMBD (maybe GWS as well for more block = more YSMBD procs) are kinda mandatory. That leaves room for 1-2 tactics, and you have Gork Smash, SYG, GaBC, FO, CYHMN.

I agree that any damage higher than 15% is a no-no, and yes: there should be a drawback to FO. I was thinking of keeping the 15% damage buff, and reducing armor by 15-25% instead of 33%. Or some other kind of drawback not as harsh as a flat-out 33% armor reduction.

[TenTonHammer]

Reducing the effectiveness of guard alone is a crippling downside, a 1/3 or more reduction in the effectiveness of armor is not necessary

Making a tank have the armor levels of an MDPS while having nowhere near the dmg is not a valid trade off

From the perspective of 6v6 or higher, weaker guard effectiveness is pretty dam huge

[GodlessCrom]

Keeping damage the same while reducing the armor penalty is good imo. Let's play with some numbers. My 2h Ironbreaker does decent damage already: not mdps level, but it's not hard for me to top the dps chart in an sc, or the dbs chart either. Which is a poor metric, but it is at least a metrc. And I am far from the best IB either. Volgograd f'rex does about 150% the dmg I do, at least.

Anyways, I have 4500 armor without buffs, give or take. That is 102.7% mitigation. Phys mitigation caps at 75% so anything above that is just padding to help against high WS and armor debuffs. With my self buff, which is 940 armor and very easy to keep at 100% uptime, I have 5440 armor, which is 120% mitigation, just about. With 5440 armor I can get armor rebuffed by a Mara and still maintain 75% mitigation. Now, I still lose mitigation due to weapon skill, tactics, potentially Demolishing Strike, etc. But typically, I can maintain a high level of armor while doing significantly more damage than a shield tank.

Now, with the current focused offense, my 4500 unbuffed armor gets debuffed to around 3k. Which is below 75% mitigation already, even without armor debuff or WS. Even with my hefty self buff, I'd still be below 3k armor once a Mara or a BG debuffs me. Since as a 2h tank im already vulnerable to rdps because I cannot block and my dodge/disrupt doesn't benefit from HtL, my niche is that I can murder my fellow melee pretty damn well. A big part of that is the armor i can stack, so getting debuffed to non-berserk slayer-level armor percentages is a terrible tradeoff for a flat 15% damage increase.

So the balancing becomes what level of armor debuff is worth a 15% damage increase, and also, what is the point of focused offense? Am I still supposed to be a tank, with guard up and so on? Or do I now take on a mdps role, similar to torture dok/wrath wp with divine fury slotted? If so, what is the trade off, and how viable is this supposed to be? Dps dok doesn't have the debuffs of a Mara or the daamage of a choppa but it does have self sustain and feeds the proc meta while still doing respectable damage. What niche will a focused offense tank fill that a non-fo tank, or a mdps, does not?

To return to the numbers, a significant buff to focused offense would be making it debuff armor by only 20%. On my 4500 armor IB, that,s 900 armor, which means with my self buff, I again have 4540 armor, leaving me at 103% mitigation, or there about. Of course, I also have to consider the tactic I must give up to slot FO. It can't be 15% crit or the 5 grudge on hit, since those are necessary for doing damage and if I'm going FO, it makes no sense to lose those. So it's either gonna be Rugged, or Ancestral Inheritance. So I'm losing 160 toughness (in effect buf buffing all enemies attacking me with 160 str/int/etc) or I'm losing 660 armor, which further increases the armor i lose, and therefore the phys mitigation I lose, by slotting FO.

So, is it still worth it, even with only 20% armor lost? The issue isn't only the tactic itself, but the opportunity cost of losing other tactics that could go in that slot.

So uh, I'm not sure how helpful any of that is, but I guess the tl;dr is that we gotta decide what role an FO tank is gonna take, what other tactics do we sacrifice to take that role, and balance the tactic accordingly.

[blaqwar]

I believe that part of the issue is how one-dimensional the drawback part of the tactic is. In an environment where there's not a lot of physical damage the drawback will be almost a non-issue, making the tactic too powerful, while In a situation where there's a lot of physical damage flying around the drawback far outweighs the benefits on a tank career, making the tactic near useless.

Not to mention there's a disparity between the amount of magical/physical damage between the two sides, possibly making the tactic better on average for Order.

A way to normalise the drawback would be to change the armor penalty to a toughness penalty (a % one, not a flat value naturally).

For pure toughness tanky tanks running FO would still not be viable, while damage focused tanks who will not be stacking toughness much above 400/500 could compromise without turning into renown piñatas.

It also means tanks can run FO and still effectively guard since guard damage ignores toughness anyway.

With these improvements the damage benefit might need to be scaled back a bit though.

[Zhentarim]

I thought it was a tactic for tanks that have gone full-retard dps and completely abandoned their tank role. I know black orcs would slot it to achieve as high juicy spikecrits as possible, so I wouldn't call it a pointless tactic.

[GodlessCrom]

I don't know anyone who slots it on RoR. On live at rr100 you could slot whatever and still never die, but live is live and RoR is RoR