Would purges be the counter to sustain tanks?

Secret World Legends General Discussion Orochi Labs
1

So sustain tanks aren’t the greatest thing in game if you’d like to play a healer. Atm there are relatively few fights where a healer is useful, because the tank’s defensive cds are so strong.

This got me thinking, what if bosses could purge the tank? If it’s not as easy to maintain a damage absorbing rotation, would that open up the field for healers again?

I’d say that having basic attacks purge would be potentially OP, because most have attack speeds that would be able to get rid of pretty much everything. Making it so that critical hits purged might be interesting. It’d mean that stacking def (reducing chances of incoming crits), or evade (don’t get hit, don’t get crit), could make those stats more attractive to tanks again, though that would also reduce their hate gen, (from lack of crit gear themselves) which I think might be problematic.

It’d give the healers something to do - keep stuff rolling on the tank so that there’s a chance defensive cds aren’t purged, or to have the heals there for when the def cd gets removed.

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There appear to be 2 types of purge, one that’s bad for tanks, one that’s really bad. The normal kind just ends the abilities, the special kind ends them without triggering any “at end of cast” effects. Difference being “immutable ends and you get 40% heal” vs. “immutable ends and you stay at 1% hp”. The Dark Agartha gatekeeper has the second one and it makes all the tank defensives pointless cause they’re purged before they prevent any damage.

It would not open the field for healers though, it would just be unplayable at intended difficulty because tanks rely on cooldowns to make single hits viable (which def/evade doesn’t help since they’re percentages, 70% chance to die every 3 seconds is still too much to complete a fight) E10 bosses are hitting for about 30k a shot for reference and an E10 tank has 21000 hp without buffs (maybe up to 22.5 or 23 with all hp agents). I think a maxed out 1650 ip player can just barely squeak taking a hit, minimum ip maybe in the 1300s but then you need a healer capable of 20k/sec heals… and that’s not cumulative it’s “in the next 2 seconds you need to heal for 20k at least once”

For reference no enemy in the game has enough crit chance to crit a tank, that only happens when they have a +crit buff (eg. BF vampires)

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That’s a shame :slight_smile:

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We have great ‘EHP & Hit Calculator’ thread on forum :). Numbers for my character with IP~1200:

  • boss hits on E10 for 47000
  • my EHP (HP pool of 25K + protection) ~50000
  • I can barely survive 1 hit if I get lucky. But as I remember there is variation of hits (both us and mobs) of ±10% of dealt damage. So I also can get unlucky.
  • in my 1-2 attempts to tank E10 and E10 NYR I understood that without shield I am oneshotted.

I don’t heal so maybe healers in swl can output those 25K hps but I would still die (and died) to one additional tick of dot or pebble on the road.

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Making sustain tanking nonviable would be a really bad idea even if it was practical to survive a hit without tanking abilities. For one thing: what are tanks supposed to actually do if tanking abilities no longer work? :v:

The more serious issue though is that it probably wouldn’t be good for the game’s community if Funcom just suddenly decided that all the tanks needed to grind out an entirely new set of glyphs just to appease healers. Buffing non-sustain tanking and fixing the groupfinder so it can accomodate two different kinds of group is a much better idea.

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I haven’t had much occasion to heal either but they have the same crit dependence as dps do… when you’re at 170%+ crit power, your crits are the only meaningful part of your output and it’s not at all reliable. Eg. I have about 40% crit chance, 160% base crit power (including weapon expertise & some ability/gear stuff it’s as much as 250%), so I do 2/3 of my damage with crits. The result is you need at least 10 casts to have decent odds of averaging out, more is better… it’s very easy to have a run of non-crits leading to doing 1/2 as much dps or healing.

7

This is a misunderstanding of the tank/healer problem, in that it is not a tank/healer problem at all.
It is a scaling problem.
If higher tiers didn’t randomly not only one shot but vastly over one shot tanks that did not have a CD up, then healers could and would be useful.

High end groups have always looked to speed up fights, which even in TSW generally meant not having a healer.
However completing the content with a normal setup was actually viable, and the “lets push max speed” way was generally more prone to failing if not done correctly.

The opposite is true in SWL.
While a healer/tank can theoretically function in the high end tiers, the higher you go the less stable it is, and in 9s and 10s its basically a roll of the dice if the tank is going to just fall over.
Honestly sometimes it can even be a roll of the dice even with a sustain tank if timing is off.

Which actually brings in another negative of the current situation.
With sustain tanking being largely “the way to do it”, even in lower tiers where its not really as necessary, it does somewhat limit the number of people tanking.
While it seems relatively simple to me, I am aware not everyone is super comfortable having to constantly rotate their cooldowns with precise timing, on top of the other normal things a tank has to do. Those tanks that would like to run with a healer often run into a wall, and that can be frustrating and cause people to just stop tanking (or even playing).

However the solution is to fix the scaling issues, not introduce further complications.

As I understand it the current biggest issue with actually fixing the scaling problems is that, barring a different scaling solution entirely, they would have to be hand tweaked, probably per encounter per dungeon, which… ugh… understandable why that method has not been done.

That said, hand tweaking to the scaling has already happened on certain fights, both during beta of the dungeons and after. Mostly adds.
Because if you think the boss encounters suffer from linear scaling issues, holy crap the adds scaling was so much more broken.

Even to this day it often feels like the 2 adds between DW1 and DW2 are more of a boss encounter than the bosses.

I completely understand and sympathize with the healers dilemma, but the tank is not your enemy.

… well …
maybe the tank commander is.

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8

Personally I much rather my with-healer tank build for a lot of reasons (for one it’s just plain better at TSW tanking role stuff, ie. aggro, take less damage, and impairing) but unlike TSW you’re very firmly locked into tank/healer specific abilities which cannot do dps. In TSW there was some flex cause you could have a leecher doing 100% as much dps as the rest of the party and work with a tanky-tank, or a tank doing 80% as much dps and work with a full healer. I’m not sure what the best dps a tank can pull off in SWL is but I don’t think I can say for sure it’d be over 30% of a regular dps player even optimized for that purpose (just to hold aggro you need to be at 10% and some tanks struggle to hit that target) so having a better healer is not really compensated by getting more dps, you just… overheal.

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To me, having the most reliable method for tanking be one which precludes healers is a worse idea. I wasn’t suggesting that tanks should not be using their cds, because tanks do need to have stuff to do too :slight_smile: Hopefully there is a middle ground to be found, where tanks have to use their cds and bring a healer!

It’d be nice if tanks were saving cds for big hits (rather than just having all attacks be big hits) instead of just rotating them. If a tanking cd was unpurgeable for the first 2 seconds, but then couldn’t be relied on to last the full duration, that’d mean that def cds might then be more reactive than proactive. Ofc if tanks are taking oneshot hits with every swing, then the problem is not just with the tank abilities, but with the boss attacks.

I think that the sustain tank dilemma is going to need something which addresses both problems. If boss damage is reduced without changing the def cds, then sustain tanks will just become even more OP, and I’d quite like to do some healing in the future :slight_smile:

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Shotgun (main) tanks without chaos. Well I played with only one of them in higher tiers so my selection is limited but he could not survive without heals. But he still needed to keep up CDs rotation to survive incoming damage.

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Also don’t forget that to keep aggro from overblown dps endgame tanks go with 20-50% of AA in dps. So it all comes together: sustain, insane incoming damage, KSR, hammer dps spikes, KSR, immutable, KSR, etc.
Did I mentioned KSR?

Sidenote: damage scales rather regulary from e3 to e9 with increase of 20-25% but from e9 to e10 it is +40% increase.

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Upsetting the majority of the playerbase just because you don’t like sustain tanking is never going to be a good idea. Lots of people prefer being self-reliant through sustain tanking, lots of people prefer faster groups (both in terms of finding them and completing dungeons) with 4 dps. The correct solution is to find a way to accomodate all players, not upend the literal months of work people have put into their gear just because.

Trying to rebalance the way tanking works and retune every encounter in the game is the long, hard way around this problem and honestly I’d rather see some radical solutions. Make tanking glyphs also multiply your maximum health. Give healing weapons group wide damage buffs that scale with their healing power. Give us an agent that multiplies threat. Instead of certain abilities giving bonus threat, have threat scale with anima allocation. Go nuts. As long as no nerfs are made to the status quo, there’s not much risk involved in pushing the boat way out in terms of fixes.

The KSR is another bell that can’t be unrung but like sustain tanking, it exposes a flaw in the original design of the game and the solution is not to try and paper over that crack. Just alter the base grenade timer to fully cook after one second instead of three or something radical like that and then go around buffing other weapons (and their gimmicks) to try and catch up. :v:

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I think that a creative solution would be great, but that’s really going to be about changing the healer role to support. If you’re looking to maintain the trinity including a healer who keeps people alive, then having them squeezed out at higher levels isn’t very maintainable.

If changes to the status quo aren’t made, and all the other options will produce inferior results, then nothing will change. Tanks will still just tell anyone trying to heal to go DPS, and you’ve spent a lot of effort with little effect. Having a tank that simply can’t be killed and requires zero support is a really tough act to beat.

I think that there’s a lot of potential for doing interesting things with tanking glyphs, or for turning healers into support members instead, but that would also require more work than just adding purges to bosses (which I fully acknowledge isn’t going to work given the reasons above).

If grenades cooked after 1 second, you wouldn’t need to buff the other AR effects necessarily, as their existing effects would effectively be on top of the KSR’s. Using the higher rate of grenade fire would mean all ARs would just become OP.

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Like I said earlier, you’d need to change the groupfinder to accomodate both kinds of group (trinity and sustain). There are plenty of tanks who aren’t happy with the “sustain build only” meta. Nerfing sustain tanking is going to cause way more problems than it could possibly solve and also, for the record, it doesn’t actually solve any problems. :v:

Tank and healer needs to be made viable but “removing the ability for 90% of players to run groups by breaking the one reliable tanking setup” isn’t any kind of solution.

I know, which is why I didn’t suggest that. When I said “other weapons” I meant like, the 8 weapons that aren’t assault rifle. :v:

The problem exposed by the KSR is that the grenade cooking gimmick is really clunky and awkward and using it is probably a net dps loss under non-KSR circumstances. It’s not the only weapon gimmick that could stand to be looked at either. Buffing is almost always going to be a better option than nerfing, especially in a game where your gear is such a major time investment.

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AFAIK it is not. AR was already overpowed before KSR came into game. I took break about 5 moths after relaunch (right after anima allocation) and at that time our cabal dps already were on AR+something setup because of massive convinience of AR. Best range, no channeling, no cast times, no reload, almost no rng, good heals and great dps. I could barely compete with Ham/SG with them.
I probably misinterpreting numbers in ‘gear and theorycraft’ google table but I think AR there is about 30% better then hammer damage/energy wise. And hammer better then anything else.
Problem with KSR is of another kind. AFAIK It is the only weapon that removes weapon specific gimmick (or makes it almost invisible). Basically we have another elemental force in game again. This time it is weapon specific.

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I can tell only from my point of view but I think you are overestimating sustain tanks. It is way easier to be killed then with healer (I know because I played tank before sustain became a thing). Sustain is not about CD. It is about 2 abilites: pain suppression passive and immutable. Both heal you. Nerf them and sustain will go away. It is just more effective today to run ham/chaos.
Support healers would work I think if along with hps they also gave something like ‘protection per second’. So incoming damage became managable with hps.

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Don’t completely agree with the first part at E9+ due to the nature of one shots (especially if your not hammer main) however they idea of HPS translating to protection is a very interesting idea. Of course with this change alone most groups would still run sustain for the extra DPS but at least there would be the option not to.

18

Agreed with everything you’ve said, except this part. Rifle, alongside chaos, are likely the most RNG dependent weapons since they rely on double-layered RNG (grenades / doppelgangers, and crits).

Hammer DPS build sim: 10 minutes, Pneumatic Maul / Voltaic Shunt, no group buffs:
34905 DPS
Rifle DPS build sim: 10 minutes, KSR-43 / Inverter, no group buffs:
40086 DPS

Both sims were run with a maxed out gear, bis agents (no druid agents though). This is more of a 15% overall damage difference, not 30%, let’s not twist the numbers more than necessary here.

Part of the problem with rifles is the base damage of incendiary grenades which is clearly too high, and now, the signet of Nemain’s damage increase (which, by itself, improved the KSR/Inverter’s single target DPS by 11%, compared to a 5% increase for maul/shunt). The Nemain’s damage increase honestly needs to go, it introduced nothing but power creep and increased the performance gap between rifles and other weapons even more.

About sustain tanking, didn’t we already have like 3 threads in the past about it? Also, side note: enemies cannot crit you, unless they’ve got a specific buff which allows them to (rare Jinn boss in HE).

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19

Purges might counter sustain tanks, but they’d also counter healers too. Blood magic, with its focus on barriers would be rendered almost useless as a healing weapon. And healing abilities from the others would be severely hit (e.g. unveil essence, the passive for the fist Invigorating wrath one whose name I forget).

I’d find it a lot more difficult to heal with a lot of boss purges in place.

20

It’d depend on if the purge effect was applied before or after the damage. Before would be a problem for blood, I agree, but as long as it wasn’t every hit purging then it wouldn’t cripple healers. AR would lose the leech effect from anima grenades, but UE is applied to the target, not the def target.

Tbh, if tanks are taking hits that big, then healing would need to be buffed to have enough hps to be able to counter it.

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