Healers need help! An idea to make them better without making them mandatory

Secret World Legends General Discussion
156

And they’re right.

I’ll try to explain why the non-crit glyphing is inferior to defense glyphing one last time, based on your statements.

A secondary’s power move is an EXTREMELY poor active ability usage because of its opportunity cost (also, who wants to level up 2 weapons? really?). Let’s take the example of a hammer/chaos build where you’re using Immutable, Twist Fate and Distortion (so you remove Pain Suppression from the build). You now have 4+2=6 energy consumed every 20s where you’d use Immutable and Twist Fate (without considering cooldown reduction for Immutable, so things would actually get worse if you do). Since you get 10 energy regenerated in 20s, this means you’ll only be left with 4 energy to play with, which is 1.33 Distortions every 20s, which would bring a CP gain of (2.525 x 1.2875 x 1.33) - (0.59 x 2.1121 x 1.33) = 4.32 - 1.66 = 2.66 CP every 20s or 0.133 CP/s (because you replace 1.33 basics by 1.33 Distortions). This is a very bad performance coming from 1 active ability slot.

Meanwhile, a crit-glyphed sustain-tank will actually have way more damage (so aggro) than what Distortion would bring to a defense tank (and since their energy regen would be very high, the amount of Pulverises used would be higher than the amount of Pulverises and Distortions used by a defensive glyphing combined) , and he would be able to remove Distortion and take Pain Suppression. In the process, the crit glyphed sustain tank will have immensely more aggro than a defense tank, and will actually have more survival because of 1 extra cooldown compared to what the defense tank has. As an example, the standard sustain-tanking build having 4 cooldowns, Twist Fate isn’t even needed in NY E10 and just serves as extra insurance in case the tank screws up other cooldowns, so there’s actually a big room for mistakes here (there’s no such room if you remove one cooldown and take Distortion instead).

Now, i’ll bring an example myself. I’ve been at some point doing regionals with a defense + evade tank, who was around nearly maxed IP. During literally every single summon, i’ve been taking aggro, no exceptions. On some of the summons, someone else that has had a better RNG from their burst got aggro as well, but the defense / evade tank had to rotate 3 force provoke cooldowns to keep aggro.

There’s no argument that could ever make the defense and evade glyphing better than the sustain tanking with crit glyphs. I myself sometimes still have trouble with aggro as a fully maxed crit glyphed sustain tank over maxed out DDs who burst the sh.t of their lives. Good luck keeping aggro over a hammer DD that manages to start the fight with a 180k Eruption and several 100k Demolishes (because Opening Shot and/or Savagery are also a thing :slight_smile: ).

So to stay accurate in my arguments: i understand you guys being upset about the state of the tanking in the game, the fact that healers get screwed up in this situation, etc… But when it comes down to getting to the high-end levels of the game and optimizing yourselves, there is 1 SINGLE PLACE where defense / evade glyphing is better than crit glyphing (with the same build, so no 2nd power ability or inefficient similar choices, but a proper additional mitigation or healing cooldown), and this is NY raid, and it is the case simply because of the fact the Lurker’s aggro is locked on the tanks and DDs cannot steal it (aggro on birds is still stealable though, so be careful on that). For everything else, defense and evade glyphing is simply exhaustingly BAD. It has been a fact for a year by now, there has been a lot of arguments and people acknowledging this fact, so there’s no need to try to invent inaccurate arguments to put the defense glyphing somehow better than the crit glyphing.

Again, it doesn’t mean one shouldn’t choose to play how they want, it just means you have to be aware about how limited your choice would be in terms of:
1: flexibility in roles: your healing and DPS roles would suffer from the defense glyphing
2: flexibility in builds: good luck trying to cleansetank in HR E10 with defense glyphing (it’s an extreme example, but there are others, the fact that you don’t ever need to put a force provoke in the build because of “no aggro issues” makes suddenly life easier).
3: pure performance: aggro and selfhealing are gigantic amounts behind the crit glyphed tanking

It’s really the same kind of argument when someone wants to play elemental mainhand. People play what they want, but someone playing elemental should acknowledge that they won’t be as competitive as a rifle / hammer / blood / blade DD. It’s just pointless to foul yourself with fake arguments about something being competitive when it isn’t, just be aware about your choices eventually being less good than actual OPTIMAL choices and live with it.

157

Too long; Heard it all before.

I never said differently :slight_smile: You seem to have missed that. I have never, ever, not once, said that defensive glyphed tanking is The Be All And End All. What I have said, repeatedly, is it works, it is viable, and it is. I’ve also mentioned several times that sustain tanking has to be played extremely well or else you get smacked—I know this from watching other tanks and I know this from hearing acouple people give it up because they die all the time trying.

So, in order to save you typing next time, please don’t assume just because I know defensive glyphing to be viable that I mean it is The Be All And End All!

158

If you stop bringing up your anecdotal arguments about your other crit glyphed tank mate dieing when you manage to survive in the same conditions “because of your defense glyphing”, then i won’t need to type a wall of text to inform people correctly about what is the best option.

Not sure you heard about how bad it is to use a secondary power ability since you throw it out as a potentially good idea when it isn’t.

While you have a point, there might still be a misconception here. Tanks in your example die because of the fact they have no backup healer when they’re learning and make mistakes, not because they have less mitigation than defense tanks. There’s a clear nuance here. A defense tank would die even faster than a sustain tank without healer. Put a healer, and here you go, the person can still play and be crit glyphed and not die at all (until the healer gets bored because there’s nothing to heal XD).

159

Rocket Pods and Pulverize are fine as a 2nd power move because both of them are as strong mitigation as any other active ability (in effective hp anyway). It’s just distortion that stands out because it’s got 10% as much mitigation as the other two so you lose mitigation by taking it over a cooldown.

So really the 2 moves to compare are offhand rocket pods and offhand immutable. I believe they end up within a margin of error of each other’s aggro unless you have the generic power moves signet which leans it toward rocket pods.

160

Yea, Distortion is…not that great. I use Pulversize as my off-hand power skill, so it’s certainly useful.

161

Don’t forget the opportunity costs of Rocket Pods. The ability requires a passive to do anything mitigation-wise. Which isn’t the case for Pulverise which provides mitigation as baseline.

162

Ha! Well, yes, that’s kind of the point :slight_smile: Anyway, fair enough on the learning aspect, though defensive tanks aren’t often going in without healers.

I did go back and read a bit of your argument vs 2nd power skill…and yeah, Distortion sucks. Pulverize doesn’t, which is why it’s my 2nd. (Before the why chaos/hammer—pure unadulterated “hammer animations drive me :bat::poop:”)

Also, admittedly, most of my anecdotes about crit glyphed mates are from NY Raid, where defensive glyphing has a chance to shine because of the fast, frequent hits.

163

To add to your statement, “where aggro doesn’t matter”. We can end up in an agreement on this one.

Rocket Pod sucks the same. Instead of wasting the passive to get extra prot (which isn’t even maintainable with an offhand), the best way to go is to remove the ability entirely and put an extra defensive cooldown with its passive.

1 Like
164

No, it stays at 2-3 constantly unless the boss has a particularly bad on/off cycle. (like HE2, he’s never around long enough to stack it efficiently) With my current gear it costs 2.31 energy which is 4.6 seconds of passive regen so an average of 3 seconds with 3 stacks, then 1.6 seconds with 2 stacks the entire fight. (due to practical reasons it sits at 5 seconds matching Combat Reload until rng lets me reload dragon’s breath)

165

That means you don’t use Kneecapper or any other shotgun’s ability? Because otherwise you’d only be left with 6 energy out of the natural 10 energy every 20s without cooldown reduction. With 6 energy every 20s, you definitely cannot keep up the Reinforced Rockets stacks. If you don’t use any other shotgun ability, than it means you have just 2 hammer cooldowns (or 3 if you get Unstoppable Force + passive, but this variant is highly aggro inefficient).

Besides that fact, at 2 stacks, you’re just having 5720 protection, or 8580 at 3 stacks during the time you happen to get them (at the beginning of the fight when you start at 15 energy). It looks horribly inefficient for a cost of 1 active AND 1 passive ability, whereas with a chaos offhand, you could have Twist Fate + Backlash instead (Twist Fate alone is more “average” protection than RP + passive already, and Backlash just nails it down because of how powerful it is). I’ve been bufftanking with Opening Shot + Kneecapper (or Glutton for Punishment), and i’d still rather take Opening Shot or Glutton and have a free passive than Rocket Pods, because of how inefficient it is.

166

I don’t use any shotgun moves except Rocket Pods, correct.

I pretty much stick to 2 mitigation rotations, either Thick Skin + gadget (95% of bosses) or UF + gadget (for the WBs where immune to knockback 100% of the time is cool) The odd ones out are ones where Pain Suppression’s nice because you take such fast damage (klein, he2)

UF is 8 seconds of 20% more hammer damage so it should be near aggro neutral depending on your basic ratio. It only costs 1.3 pulverizes and if you do 8 pulverizes while the buff is up they’re worth 9.6 without it. More likely you only do 4-6 and get ~1 extra worth of aggro.

167

Noticing a pattern whereby sustain tanks are signing up through activity finder as healers.

I can understand because a sustain tank may not need/want a healer and/or drama explaining this to a healer, thus removing this role from the group dynamic entirely.

If however the signed-up tank is not a sustain tank and needs a healer, they do not have one.
At which point they are asked to go dps by the healer who happens to be sustain tank.

Effectively this has stopped a queued healer from entering a dungeon and stopped a queued tank from tanking.

170

A lot of that is actually incorrect. Aside from the part about finding a cabal that lets you heal. That part makes sense. Otherwise there’s actually no content that absolutely needs healers unless your making up for the mistakes of bad dps. The same applies to sustain tanking, the smart tanks know that the rotation never fails unless you make an error in timing your cool downs and if your in a higher level of difficulty no healer is gonna pull you out of that mistake. (Well that’s not true if you have Anima Suffusion or some wicked barriers then maybe).

171

TBH I can’t sustain a few high level dungeon fights but it’s just from not having the patience to work out the ‘real’ rotation (eg. DW4 is almost always a cluster-party cause I don’t have anything to taunt with, it hits hard enough I can’t leave anything out of the rotation but if I started on the right ability Thick Skin’s cooldown could end at the right time) if the 4 dps combined can’t get it down quickly. A healer who knows how that fight works and puts themself above the one-shot threshold and self-heals when adds spawn makes it go smoothly round after round.

Mainly I prefer non-sustain so I can handle all mandatory impair/taunts instead of the 1 I feel like and dps do the rest. Especially in fights where a single ability requires multiple impairs it’s nice to just know it’ll happen (like primordial dweller’s spasm attack - if I know for certain it’s being impaired I can spend 80% of that fight with no mitigation active)

172

I don’t think I’ve ever needed a taunt for DW4, the boss just comes to me after resurfacing. You can generally get the adds to come to you with Thick Skin due to the barrier heal aggro. Fights like DW6 where you do want an impair and a taunt however I use Evulsion for the force taunt and a gadget for impairs. 3 cd sustain tanking does have some tendency to leave a gap between defensive cds where you are vulnerable however that can be overcome with either the Tachyon head tali or when you have bosses with slow attacks timing the cool downs so that you use them only when absolutely needed and not just when the previous one falls off. Anyhow, Im gonna get yelled at now for taking this topic off-topic so ill leave it at that.

1 Like
173

Yeah, I would use Thick Skin to taunt but it’s on cooldown for 5-10 seconds by that point most attempts and that’s enough time for it to kill 1-2 dps.

DW6 I run without an impair it’s really no problem. If other people impair fine, if not just aim the cone each time. I can do it with 3 cooldowns but it’s a losing game, 4 makes hp fixed at max.

175

But tanks are healers. So good healers that they dont even need healing power.

176

Hey there and sorry if this was covered, You can tab target friendly targets by going into you settings, F1-F5 in a group works. F1-F5 works in a raid for the group you are in and scrolling for the rest. I still heal sometimes in dungeons depending on the rest of the group, i perv. I leech heal now also.

I am/was frustrated at the downgrading of healing but can’t see it changing anytime soon!