Feldon You’ve probably heard a lot about the tanking changes which were put on hiatus. The cancelled Game Update #51 – Lucan’s Art of War was split into a couple of hotfixes and the fighter revamp got put on hold.
Currently, fighters hold agro through a combination of taunts, hate transfers from Assassins, Coercers, etc., and by putting out superior DPS. In the current situation Shadowknights are putting out more DPS in multi-target fights than some “DPS” classes.
The intention of this well-intentioned fighter revamp is for fighters to be able to hold agro in a fight entirely by taunting and taunt-based attacks. The theory is a fighter should be able to hold agro against classes doing 3-5 times as much damage entirely through taunting.
The issue with this is that taunting is not very exciting. And spam taunting defeats the current mechanism of timing autoattacks. It is well known that a substantial percentage of fighter and scout damage comes not from casting Combat Arts, but the gaps between your Combat Arts when “auto attacks” go off. Those occasional swings, whacks, or arrow volleys can account for 40-50% of your DPS if timed properly.
As proof of just how boring tanking might be under these expected changes, steelbadger has created a single Macro entitled “Tank” which, when pressed repeatedly during a battle, generates more hate and holds agro better than the most masterfully played combat.
Tank Macro
To quote Dasein:
Tanking in its current form is like chess —
the proposed changes reduce tanking to tic-tac-toe.
The response from EQ2 Dev Rothgar was startling:
I’m already seeing people do similar macros and this can’t be good for server performance, spamming it with so many commands in a short period of time.
If the trend moves more towards this type of play style we will be forced to limit the number of spells and command steps you can add to a macro.
Talk about treating the symptom and ignoring the disease!
From EQ2 Forums.
any macro in eq2 is for slackers and its much less effective then “manual” clicking. macro dont know if u fight with encounter/single/heroic/epic if u need to use single taunt for interupt not for hate or pbaoe taunt for incoming add without retargeting etc. so using multiple spell/ca macros are absolutely lame and it says that this player dont know how to play his toon.
Was that in English?
The fact that mobs can be tanked by clicking ONE button repeatedly confirms the fears of the fighter community that tanking was being reduced to a very boring, simplistic game.
In fairness to Rothgar, he is not the dev involved in the fighter changes, but he IS the dev working on trying to reduce lag, and he had already noticed that macros were a contributing factor. So his response was coming from that point of view.
I already use macros, simply because I already have more combat arts than I can comfortably hotkey — so, I have one for taunts, one for ‘swords’, and ‘fists’, and so on as well as a few others for convenience — though none are more than about 4 actions.
u can tank mob with such a macro, but is it effective? what about fights where u need use specific ca/ability during combat in exact time? like varsoon, absatalius, zarxh etc. using macros like this is useless for skilled player but helps someone who dont care what ca/spell/taunt is firing off because he just spams his hotbar.
Once again you’ve missed the point.
Tanking should never have gotten to the point that it required tanks to do high amount of DPS to hold agro. It wasn’t like that at launch and got worse with every level cap increase. They are fixing a problem that should have been resolved years ago, but instead they kept just adding band aids with hate transfers. Now, the success or failure of a group is determined by other classes feeding the tank agro. This isn’t a problem in a raid because you have 24 slots to fill and 24 classes. But when you reduce it to 6 slots and 24 classes, all dps classes without hate transfer suddenly get screwed when looking for groups. In my opinion, that is not a working mechanism. Tanks should be focusing on survivability and agro control, not who they can beat in the parse.
Does that mean that this is the best fix? Maybe not, but I would prefer to have a working mechanism than a broken one. They should add something in the game to make tanking more fun to get their eyes off of the parse.
And anyone who thinks that this fully loaded macro will be just as effective as a tank doing it on the fly is an idiot. One macro will not work in all situations.