Fixing New World

So… this post is a lot and I apologize for that ahead of time. I started writing this yesterday and the end result is roughly four or five times the length of one of my normal posts. However I am rolling with it because come Friday I want to get this game out of my system so I can move forward with enjoying Endwalker completely. If you make it through this post… you have my admiration because it is an awful lot. This topic was originally going to be called “Unfucking New World” which on better judgement I walked back.
This morning I thought I would tackle something that has been kicking around my mind for a while.  As we stand on the cusp of Endwalker, I still feel like I want to talk some more about the game I will be walking away from…  New World.  Ultimately there is something there that is compelling and no one spends over five hundred hours playing a game unless there is some gameplay there that is meaningful.  However I also think that the game itself is in a really bad state.  Over three hundred thousand players have quit the game or at least stopped playing it temporarily since the release of Patch 1.1 back on November 18th.  At its peak New World had almost one million concurrent players, and now they are doing well if they can muster one hundred fifty thousand. I think the challenge with New World is that ultimately it is a game that does not know what it is.  It is a game that probably works well under specific spreadsheet conditions, but does not take into account the psychology of how players actually consume and enjoy content.  It is a game designed for players to be participating in all aspects of the game…  but the truth is folks are not going to be interested in everything.  Not everyone wants to be a crafter or wage wars or even farm for gear.  For example I personally have a great distaste for PVP and PVP mindset players and would love to be able to completely avoid them on a PVE ruleset server.
The problem however is within the first thirty levels of gameplay, you can pretty much choose your own path and level through doing anything.  That first month of gameplay was amazing, because crafters who only wanted to craft could level themselves through just gathering or the use of the very prolific town board quests.  If you wanted to PVP there were a lot of very open early Wars taking place as well as a fair number of open world battles.  If you were into exploration and PVE questing, that existed as well and while it was repetitive it felt rewarding.  However you begin being funneled down a path where it is very clear that Amazon Game Studios expected every player to be that rare unicorn that enjoys all aspects of the game. The game honestly still feels pretty reasonable until you get all of your tradeskills past level 100 and have pushed your level up to around 50…  and even then the drag doesn’t really kick in until you have dinged 60.  The “endgame” really is where the problems start to set in along with the constant grind of unwinnable invasions and constant drumbeat of wars taking place and ruining otherwise great crafting hubs.  You are put into situations like for example, right now no one on my server can craft Ironwood, because not a single town currently has a Tier 5 Lumber Mill because bad luck struck and all of the towns that had one got that specific piece of machinery downgraded in the last week. The thing is…  there is a core in this game that I think is enjoyable and with some specific changes I think it could STILL be enjoyable at the end game.  Patch 1.1 was a step in the wrong direction.  It was a knee jerk reaction by a freaked out developer that panicked and tried to do everything in their power to slow the players down.  In doing so they created a scenario where there really isn’t anything enjoyable left to do, and those of us still kicking around are drifting on the fumes of copium because we remember slightly better times.  Most folks are waiting on server merges and farming resources for that magical day when it finally occurs, but I don’t think any of that fixes the core problems.  So here I am going to play armchair developer and present some solutions to problems.

Late Game Crafting is Awful

Crafting in the game up to level 100 is pretty enjoyable overall.  You gather some resources in what seems like a reasonable quantity and then you craft them into usable items.  However your player level will rapidly outstrip your crafting level unless you have done NOTHING but craft in the game.  Once you move into Tier IV and Tier V of crafting, everything falls off the rails because the sheer volume of resources needed to make progress becomes exponentially larger.  Ironically it is not the Tier V or even Tier IV resources that are the problem… it is the fact that every Tier V item requires Tier IV, Tier III, Tier II, and Tier I items to craft.  Let me put this into easier to follow logic by starting with the recipe for an Orichalcum Ingot, the base item for Tier V Smithing and Engineering:
  • Orichalcum Ingot
    • 8 – Orichalcum Ore
    • 2 – Starmetal Ingots
    • 2 – Charcoal
    • 1 – Flux
So initially that seems pretty reasonable, until you get to the Starmetal Ingot and realize that every Starmetal Ingot requires 2 Steel Ingots, and every Steel Ingot requires 3 Iron Ingots, and every Iron Ingot requires 4 pieces of Iron Ore.  So the actual cost of a single Orichalcum Ingot looks a little something like this:
  • Orichalcum Ingot
    • 8 – Orichalcum Ore
    • 12 Starmetal Ore
    • 48 Iron Ore
    • 10 Charcoal
      • Which is actually 20 Green Wood
    • 9 Flux
In order for me to go from level 180 to 181 in Engineering for example I would need to craft 13 Mining Pickaxes which would require me to gather up 195 Orichalcum Ingots along with 39 Timber and 26 Coarse Leather if I am crafting them as cheaply as I can possibly make them.  So that same checklist now looks a little something like this.
  • Level 180 to 181 Engineering via Orichalcum Mining Pickaxe
    • 1560 – Orichalcum Ore
    • 2340 – Starmetal Ore
    • 9360 – Iron Ore
    • 4056 – Green Wood
    • 1755 – Flux
    • 78 – Rawhide
So the concept of it taking 13 Pickaxes per level itself is a little bit madness.  Generally speaking I would expect at worst it to take 10 crafts per level pending you are actually crafting level relevant items.  However even if we drop those numbers down to only what represents 10 crafts instead of 13…  it is still madness.  I think the core problem with the design of New World crafting is the fact that a maximum tier item…  requires you to craft everything from skill level zero items up through skill level 150 items in order to create a single material.  This also causes the problem that Iron Ore is among the most expensive materials on the trading post, and Orichalcum among the cheapest. A first step that I would like to see is for them to radically change the formula for an ingot, and I am using ingot as the representative for ALL high tier crafted items because the same is true for ironwood planks as it is for wire fiber cloth as it also is for infused leather.  Were I tweaking this system I would change the Orichalcum Ingot to look a little bit like this:
  • Orichalcum Ingot
    • 8 – Orichalcum Ore
    • 4 – Starmetal Ore
    • 2 – Charcoal
    • 1 – Flux
It does not make sense to require a refined ingot if you are going to try and make an alloy as a result.  If you want to dip down into lower tiers then fine…  just dip down into the raw resources and not the finished materials.  This one tweak alone changes the above recipe list for 13 Orichchalcum Mining Pickaxes to look something like this.
  • Level 180 to 181 Engineering via Orichalcum Mining Pickaxe
    • 1560 – Orichalcum Ore
    • 780 – Starmetal Ore
    • 936 – Green Wood
    • 195 – Flux
    • 78 – Rawhide
If you take this same change and apply it to all of the materials that require exponentially more materials as you go up in tier, then I think this would go a long way to making the entire crafting system feel less punitive to the players.

Dungeon Keys are an Awful Idea

Dungeons in the New World require a specific key to grant access to them.  While only one player consumes a key to start a dungeon, you have to craft one for every dungeon that you want to run past the few keys that you might get given to you as part of a quest chain.  The concept of requiring a key to unlock a dungeon itself is not that horrible of an idea, but what is madness is the cost of crafting one.  Lets take for reference the very first dungeon Amrine Expedition and break down the cost of crafting one of the keys.
  • Amrine Tuning Orb
    • 10 – Corrupted Slivers
    • 1 – Iron Chisel
      • 500 Faction Tokens
      • 50 Gold
    • 50 – Stone Blocks
      • 200 Stone
    • 1 – Eternal Heart
      • 50 – Death Motes
      • 50 – Life Motes
      • 50 – Soul Motes
The item that is created is a bind on pickup key, which means that you can’t acquire one unless you have the requisite level of stonecutting.  There are a few sticking points to this item, namely the 10 Corrupted Slivers which require the player to farm corrupted portals, or more specifically the greater variants as they are the only ones that drop slivers.  At any given moment there are only usually one or two greater portals up in a given zone, and each of these only drops one or two silvers at a time.  The other big task is 50 of three different kinds of motes, which requires a questionable amount of farming to get.  Amrine however is a cakewalk as compared to the later game keys.
  • Genesis Tuning Orb
    • 2 Corrupted Lodestone
    • 1 – Asmodeum Chisel
      • 7000 Faction Tokens
      • 500 Gold
    • 5 – Runestone
      • Requires the gathering of all tiers of stone to craft similar to the ingot problem
    • 1 – Genesis Core
      • 3 – Elemental Heart
        • 150 – Water Motes
        • 150 – Earth Motes
        • 150 – Fire Motes
        • 150 – Air Motes
      • 3 – Eternal Heart
        • 150 – Death Motes
        • 150 – Life Motes
        • 150 – Soul Motes
      • 3 – Corrupted Rune
        • Daily limit of 2 per day from elite chests in Mangled Heights
      • 3 – Molten Rune
        • Daily limit of 2 per day from elite chests in Upper and Lower Svikin
Garden of Genesis is one of two end game dungeons that currently exist in the game that are capable of dropping gear that scales up with your watermark.  So lets break down the problem with this key.  Firstly we go back to the Corrupted Lodestone which is a legendary quality version of the Slivers from above.  These still only drop from Greater Corrupted Portals and while I have farmed hundreds ot level 65 portals…  I have yet to see a single legendary quality shard.  Instead most of the time I get either green quality or white quality, with blue and purple on super rare occasions.  You can however combine shards up and if we take a worst case scenario, crafting the 2 needed Corrupted Lodestones would require 240 white quality Corrupted Slivers.  That is legitimately hours of endless portal farming for a single key. Next let’s move to the five Runestones.  These have the same problem as Ingots which means you are required to essentially make every kind of stone item available to ultimately roll up into a single Runestone.  I am not going to do the math this time but it is a lot of materials and sandpaper which is the resource consumed by stone cutting.  Then we roll into the Genesis Core which is made up of 3 Elemental Hearts, 3 Eternal Hearts, 3 Corrupted Runes, and 3 Molten Runes.  The hearts would require you to gather up 1050 assorted motes, but the more painful part is the Corrupted Runes and Molten Runes.
These are only obtained by farming chests in elite areas in Great Cleave and Shattered Mountain and have a daily limit of only being able to find two of these per day.  So this means even under the best possible circumstances it will take you two days to gather the materials for a single key, and realistically if you are wanting to farm the dungeon regularly…  you are going to want to be looting the elite chests in this area daily to make sure you have a backlog of materials.The worst part about all of this…  these are the “lowered” requirements down from what it used to be until 1.1. Why this matters so much currently, is that Patch 1.1 also screwed up most of the outdoor boss farms to where they are either no longer doable with a single group of five players, or they are no longer dropping upgrades.  This means players are being pushed into running dungeons as their primary source of watermark upgrades.  This also means due to the difficulty of crafting one of these stupid keys…  that players are now charging upwards of 1000 gold per player for the privilege of using their key.  This has led to a pretty degenerate climate around running these dungeons, especially if for some reason a player cannot complete one.  Once consumed the key is gone regardless if you manage to make it through the dungeon or not. One of two things needs to happen, either lower the price further to make these extremely easy to craft…  which I do not think is in the cards.  The other option would be to give every player the ability to start a dungeon every X number of hours.  I would lean towards every 48 to 72 hours, but even if you did it weekly that is at least better than the current state of affairs.  Then I would change the way keys work as a method of getting additional attempts at a dungeon.  They become a method of entering dungeons while your timer is on cooldown.  I think the entire concept of a dungeon key is a horrible idea, but this would at least take this already bad situation and make it better.

The High Watermark System is Awful

In Destiny there is this weird system where you need to grind drops in order to get slightly higher items… which then skew your blended average item level and ultimately make it so the base drops you are getting are higher. There are specific encounters that guarantee a higher item level than what you currently have and some of these have a minimum item level gain that is predictable. Each rarity of item has a soft cap that you hit so that blues for example can only take you to a certain point, purples to another level, and then after that you have to do what are considered “pinnacle” activities to get further item level gain. This system is frustrating as hell, but it is at least predictable and something you can manage… but the pinnacle activities ultimately slow down how much progress you can make in a given week. New World took the general smell of this system… but without any understanding of how finely tuned it was to both feel like you are progressing but also limit your total progress in a given week. To be truthful there are a lot of things in New World that seem like they once heard about a system in another game and tried to create their own version of it without actually understanding how any of it worked. If you want the “from the horses mouth” version of this system, it was confusing that they had to release a multi-part Developer Blog post about it. Essentially each time you kill anything over level 60, you have the chance of getting an item that increases your “Watermark”.
Your next question should be of course “What the hell is a Watermark?”, and ultimately this is a number that is kept for every item slot that remembers what the highest drop you have seen for that given slot. Imagine there is a number line that goes from 500 to 600 and a floating scale above it that I have labelled with “drop range”. For example if you get an item to drop that is 510 item level, this sets a new watermark for item slot and the drop range in theory moves up as well centering over that new watermark, granting you access to anything +/- a number of levels above or below your current watermark. The first problem is we don’t exactly know how big this floating scale is but based on my personal experience it seems to be about +/- 5 levels. This however can backfire like everything in New World does and drop you items all the way back down at Item Level 500 again. This is because each level of encounter over 60, has its own built in maximum level range that it is capable of dropping. Once again this is not documented anywhere so in the absence of knowledge… people make shit up. Far as we can generally tell the caps seem to align to something like this, but I am uncertain how hard the boundaries actually are because not all mobs are created equal.
  • Level 60 – up to 515 Items
  • Level 61 – up to 530 Items
  • Level 62 – up to 560 Items
  • Level 63 – up to 590 Items
  • Level 64+ – up to 600 Items
Again I think it is possible for higher level items to drop off lower level encounters, but the likelihood of this occurring seems exceptionally rare. Recently I have been farming a pair of silver elites that are level 60, and I have seen an item that dropped at 518 but the vast majority of items align cleanly to the 500-515 level range. Up to this point all of this probably sounds pretty sane, but remember the part where I said this watermark was tracked based on individual item slot. Another important concept that you need to know is that the only things that increase watermark are items dropped from encounters. So this excludes every single piece of crafted gear and every single piece of gear that comes from a quest reward like the 580 weapon quests in Shattered Mountain or the 520 faction armor sets. Additionally any item that is named and drops at a specific item level… does not count either so the 600 sword or 590 great axe that can drop in Ebonscale, do not count for bumping up your watermark quickly.
The other thing that is really worth discussing is how many slots there are with their own individual watermarks. There are 21 total “slots” that need to be “leveled up” here is the full listing.
  • Helmet
  • Chest
  • Gloves
  • Pants
  • Boots
  • Shield
  • Ring
  • Earring
  • Necklace
  • Great Axe
  • Rapier
  • Bow
  • Sword
  • Hammer
  • Spear
  • Ice Gauntlet
  • Fire Staff
  • Hatchet
  • Musket
  • Life Staff
  • Void Gauntlet
Notice that every single weapon is listed as its own slot… and that you don’t just have a single weapon slot that you are leveling up. Also think back to loot drops in video games… and how often you actually saw a specific slot or specific weapon type drop. You could in theory go days without seeing a Fire Staff drop for example, because every time an item drops it rolls against a large loot table for all of the possible drops. Encounters have specific items that can drop… but remember that named items for the most part don’t count towards leveling up your watermark. So the end result is the need to blindly grind for countless hours in a vague attempt to push your watermark higher… so that you can get into the dungeons and get the best possible drops… at levels that are actually worth holding onto.
Players will always find the most efficient route to do things, even if the things they are confronted with are awful in the first place. As a result the players went out into the world and carved the open world elite areas into “camps” and then farmed them 24/7 for drops. I wrote about one of these, the “Priests” camp in Myrkgard, and spent a fair amount of time hanging out with various members of the community slowly pushing that watermark level up. Unfortunately Amazon Game Studios saw this, and saw players grinding their way to item level 600… and decided to put a stop to this. In a move of sheer desperation they released patch 1.1 that effectively nerfed into the ground every single major open world camp, trying to push players into the dungeon system. Remember how awful creating keys for dungeons is? I think this is in part why over 300,000 players have left the game after the release of Patch 1.1. Before this the server was thriving and had constant calls out to recruitment and faction chat with folks looking for elite farm groups. Now it is nothing but the occasional trying to sell access to a Garden of Genesis or Lazarus Instrumentality key with the average price of admission being 1000 gold or your own reciprocal key. Taking away the method that folks were fighting back against this horrible system design, effectively drove the final nail in the coffin for this game for many players. I know I personally uninstalled the game and took a little over a week off before ultimately popping back in to check out the results of another patch.
What makes this all even more damning… is the Watermark is a number that exists only in the ether. There is no way for us to determine what our actual watermark is. On the character screen you can see a “Gear Score” and this number is a dirty lie. I mean technically it is a blended average of the item levels of whatever you currently have equipped, and unlike other games bears no real resemblance to the actual “progression” of your character. So the absolute first step that I would make… is tell the player what the current watermark is for every item. Let us know when the watermark goes up, and what the current drop range is at any given moment. Destiny had clear systems in place and you had a way to see what your base item level was at any given moment, so you knew what to expect drop wise.
Next if you are going to copy Destiny’s homework, at least do a competent job of it. Destiny’s system works the way it does because there are a lot of other systems backing it up. Firstly there is the entire concept of infusion, where you can use an item of a specific slot that you don’t care about as fodder to increase the item level of an item that you DO care about. Throw away the single slot watermark madness and replace it with a blended average based system. If you don’t want crafted items to count, then fine be assholes… but give the players a single number to increase instead of twenty one of them. It felt really freaking bad when the Void Gauntlet went in with 1.1 and everyone who had been farming up their weapon watermarks now had one item that started back at 500. Destiny gives you clear indications of when an activity can increase your item level, so it it would be really freaking nice if there was an icon or something out beside the name of mobs that are capable of increasing your actual watermark. Maybe differentiate between the activities that guarantee an increase in your item level, and ones that have a chance of increasing it. Remember in the absence of knowledge people will just make shit up, and the number of conspiracy theories that are circulating about the watermark are extreme. For example there are folks completely convinced that you can only get one watermark raise per slot per day, but I have seen evidence to the contrary. My own personal conspiracy is that any time you are rewarded chests, the item level does not increase correctly if you open them back to back, so I exit out of the UI between every single Corrupted Portal Chest as part of my own little tinfoil hat ritual.
Lastly restore the damned elite camps, because the way loot works in your game means that players are going to spend countless hours farming even AFTER they have hit the maximum item level. The above image is one I have posted before and it is a sequence of five legendary drops that are item level 600… that are all complete hot garbage. The items that your game generates mean that most everything that you loot is going to be useless and not even worth selling. So maybe fix your item generation system so that the perks that roll on an item actually make sense for the attributes the item increases. A Strength item should not have perks for Bow users, because Bows do not scale on Strength.
Another lesson that you need to learn from Destiny is that in order for players to play your game it needs to feel rewarding and enjoyable, and under the right conditions they will grind their faces off seeking out that one perfectly rolled item. In New World Legendary items have 3 perks and a gem slot… and I am not going to do the math here but it is exceptionally hard to get an item with exactly the perk combinations that you are wanting. Hell it is nigh impossible to actually craft one, and you can influence the item level and set one single perk through the crafting process making it so only two slots are randomized. Getting that perfect drop in the world is a rare Unicorn and it is the sort of thing that builds stories around your game. The chase for perfect loot is way more engaging than closing the pool because the fun police freaked out that someone was swimming in it too much. So my advisement is to open that pool up again. Let players grind their faces off because it was fun and engaging and built a sense of community. Normalize the watermark into a single score and make it easy to track so we as players know where we stand in the grind. Finally fix the damned drops so that weapon perks cannot drop with useless stat combinations that make no sense and ultimately invalidate the weapon. Clearly indicate which activities can give you watermark increases and then set back and let players play your damned game. Have you so little faith that what you built was enjoyable that you are scared to death that we are actually going to play it?

Final Thoughts

I know this post is way the hell too long, but the thing is… I care about New World. There is some spark in this game that is clearly evident by pretty much every player that spends any length of time with it. Amazon Game Studios however needs to get the fuck out of the way and let people play the game in the manner that they enjoy. Firstly they come across as a studio who has spent zero time actually playing their game. They also come across as a studio that has no idea how players actually interact with large persistent worlds, more specifically the way players interact with MMORPGs. You may not have intended to build one, but that is what you have and as a result you need to figure out how we WANT to play your game rather than trying this hamfisted routine of trying to FORCE people into playing it the way your spreadsheets intended. If anyone from Amazon actually reads this… and I sincerely doubt they will. You are killing your own game. This is a game that almost broke one million active players at launch and last night we had less than one hundred thousand players. Your stewardship of this title has been negligent at best, and purposefully adversarial at worst. The first step to getting things back on track is to stop breaking things that are working and actually enjoyable by the player base. Next you really need to take a step back and analyze the things that players actually want to do in your game, and embrace those… or at least stop trying to make them actively worse. There is still an enjoyable core there, but you are slowly removing all of the reasons for actually logging in. Also remember… that you don’t sit down and write a post this long if you don’t also have a lot of love for the game. The post Fixing New World appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Preparing for Endwalker

Good Morning Friends! Last night I got my last ten mogrocks and picked up the nifty satin jacket thingy. It was really the only thing on the list of available items that I felt like I had to get, and even then it waas mostly because I wanted to use it for a new Monk Glamour shown above. Essentially I ground it out mostly through repeated runnings of Praetorium which were worth 10 mogrocks each. I tried some PVP grinding but given that my heart is never in PVP and I just don’t really care about winning or losing… and clearly some people really care… it felt like a waste of time. Praetorium sure is like 50 minutes, but at least I can be watching a YouTube video or even farming things in New World while waiting through the cutscenes.
The last thing that really needs to happen before Endwalker is to clean out all of my retainers. I have ten of them because I have a problem with stuff… and on those there are a bit over 1600 items… most of which is now useless given that I leveled everything to 80. In theory I need to have a grand spring cleaning and turn in for Grand Company Seals. I also need to sift through the vaults and outfit my retainers in some proper gear while I am at it. Given how hard I am putting this off… I am uncertain that I will actually get it done by Friday. Have I mentioned how much I really hate inventory management and how I prefer to just keep digging new holes to stuff items in? If the game allowed me to have more retainers… I probably would have twenty vaults full of crap.
While prepping for Endwalker, I want to break out Super Dungeon Friends again and remind folks that it exists. If you want a long form understanding of what exactly it is… you can check out my original post on it. The short of it is that with cross server opening up at some point during the 6.* patch cycle, I wanted to get a jump on creating a community while folks can look to find groups and do things. This has worked to some extent and has at least allowed folks from certain server communities to meet new people. If nothing else it has served as a great place to ask questions and get friendly answers because we all remember what it was like to try and learn all of these systems. If you are reading this you are welcome to come hang out and join in the nonsense.
Lastly if you are unmoored and sitting on a server without an existing friend group, or starting the game fresh and need a good home… I welcome you all to Cactuar. I’ve been on the server since the launch of A Realm Reborn in 2013 and it is a pretty great place to be. There is just something special about the server and not even an influx of some of the most popular streamers could really tamp down the community spirit. If you need a good home, ping me and we will talk. Using this also as a reminder that if you are trying to create a character on a server, you really need to be doing it during off peak hours… preferably early in the morning. Last night most of these servers were locked to new character creation, but as of this morning they are all back open again. You can check the status of servers via the official page and it will show you if it is safe to transfer characters… which for those curious costs $18 and is started through the MogStation. Last reminder is to get everything done that you need done by Wednesday, because that is the last full day of play that you are going to have. The servers are going down on Thursday in preparation for the launch of Endwalker on Friday. You can check out the official announcement here, but essentially wrap everything up Wednesday night that you want done before the expansion launches. The post Preparing for Endwalker appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Ethos of Tanking

Hey Folks! This morning I am going to try and write something that I have largely avoided writing for a very long time in part because I was always afraid I would fail to do it justice. I am mostly known as an MMO Tank, and in fact this blog began as a very specific Warrior Tanking blog dedicated to World of Warcraft. Over the years I have tanked in pretty much all of the MMOs that come out because I gravitate towards that style of game play at the core of my being. When I was leveling all of the classes recently in World of Warcraft, I saved a tank as my victory lap because I figured it would be the most enjoyable thing for me to level… and was absolutely correct to do so. That said when my friend asked me last night if I had any primers on my blog to MMO Tanking… I had to honestly say no. As far as I know it is a topic I have talked around the edges of quite a bit but never really focused on as a proper discussion. I could of course explain how a player tanks in this game or that game, but in reality tanking is more of an ethos and a particular state of mind. Once you have the concept of tanking down, it can pretty much be applied to any game just swapping in various abilities to meet the goals of a tank. To keep it simple I have broken down the role of a tank into five core concepts.
  • Aggro – This one is pretty straight forward. You want to make all of the mobs in a specific pull angry at your character and as a result focused on attacking you while the rest of the party kills them.
  • Place – When you pull an encounter you want to place it in such a way as to keep your party out of harm and also allow your DPS to kill the target with as little downtime as possible. Generally speaking this is turning the pack of mobs away from the party and giving easy access to the backside of each enemy for extra damage potential.
  • Avoid – You want to avoid any damage that you don’t have to take, which means you need to understand the attacks and which ones you can move out of safely without causing damage to the party. It is a juggling act of trying to maintain DPS uptime while also trying to avoid making your healer mend damage that you didn’t need to take in the first place.
  • Mitigate – One of your key responsibilities as the Tank is to be sturdy and this means not only gearing in a way so that you have a hefty health pool, but also using any active abilities at your disposal to normalize the incoming damage as well as strategically using your “Oh Shit” buttons to avoid fatal damage.
  • Pace – The tank controls the pace of the party and bad tanks drag their party through the dungeon kicking and screaming. Essentially you need to use the tools that you have at your disposal to figure out how fast you can move through the dungeon and the best path to reach the end objective safely.
I wish that it spelled something clever, but alas at 6 am in the morning I am doing good to have boiled them down to simple concepts. You have to understand that for most MMO Tanks, this is all committed to muscle memory and nothing that we really think about. You can always tell a seasoned tank because it is their instinct to turn the mobs to face away from the party. You can always tell a sloppy tank by them haphazardly trying to fight things in place as the chips fall. What I am hoping I guess with this discussion is to help you develop that instinct of how to navigate a dungeon in such a way as to get to the rewards at the end safety and effectively. After all the entire name of this blog “Aggronaut” was me trying to be clever and coming up with a word for one who navigates aggro.

Aggro

This mechanic may work differently in your target game, but all of them have some sort of concept of a “threat list”. Essentially imagine a spreadsheet with a bunch of names on it, and each encounter is going to focus their attacks on whatever name is at the top of that list. Your goal is to use the abilities given to you to keep your name with as many “threat points” beside it so that monster keeps focused on you. Different games work in different ways, the aggro make swap between targets if a single point of threat is higher than its previous target, and in other games you might need to gain a certain percentage more threat in order to shift targets. Whatever the case your goal is to do as much as humanly possible to keep your name at the top of the list of ALL of the mobs that you are engaged with. In a game like Final Fantasy XIV or modern World of Warcraft, this is pretty straight forward and you are given tools that cause all of your actions to generate way more threat than any other player on the list. If you have your tank stance buff up in FFXIV and you touch a mob, chances are it is going to be glued to you for a period of time. Other games are more tricky like in World of Warcraft Classic, you have to keep swapping between targets and trying to build threat equally on them all to make sure that your aggro does not “decay”. Many games have a concept of aggro falling off over time, and even if they don’t things like healing the party generates threat equally for your healer on all of the encounters meaning that you need to keep touching the mobs in order to ensure that they are glued to you. Hard Taunting Many games have the concept of an ability known generically as a “Taunt”. How this functions depends greatly upon the game, but generally speaking this will raise your threat level to 1 point higher than the highest on the list. Often times there is a debuff applied to the target that will make it focus you for a period of time, and if you have not regained a stable footing by the time this buff fades the mob will revert to the highest threat target. Generally speaking you do not want to rely on taunts because over time a lot of encounters become “taunt immune”, so your goal is to generate threat naturally and save what we often refer to as a “hard taunt” as your ace in the hole for when things are going really south. Initial Threat Another concept that is worth exploring a bit is that of initial threat. In some games there is a stickiness applied to the person who generates threat first. Generally speaking you want to always be that person, but often times you are going to have overeager dps hitting the mobs before they can get to you. In older games like Classic WoW, this could mean a death sentence because threat is harder to generate and harder to hold. After all this is the reason why we used to have the “Three Sunder Rule” before the DPS opened up on a boss fight. Even if the game is not that extreme, the fight will go more smoothly if you can be the one pulling the encounters because the entire pack will default to attacking you rather than running around like mad for awhile until you get things under control.

Place

Generally speaking as I stated in the breakdown of these concepts, this is making sure that you are fighting the encounters in a way that keeps the party safe and lets your dps have as much uptime on the boss as humanly possible. Unless there are specific reasons in a given fight, you want to run in and generate aggro while spinning the encounter 180 degrees away from the party. If possible you want to also park your back against a wall or some sort of object that blocks movement. If there is a knock-back, this will mean you are knocked back against something and can rapidly return to the same position you were tanking in previously. Your goal is to hold that encounter still as much as possible which allows the DPS to place themselves in the most optimal way to deal the maximum amount of damage. Positionals Often times your DPS may get a bonus to attack when attacking from a certain arc surrounding the encounter. I first saw these in Dark Age of Camelot, but modern games like Final Fantasy XIV heavily rely on attacks that deal bonus damage or produce a combo of attacks when done from a specific axis. It helps greatly if you understand the types of attacks that your party can do, and as a result how best to place the targets so that you can enable the DPS output to be as optimal as possible in the situation. Line of Sight Place is not just a concept of turning the mobs but being aware of the specific needs of that encounter. For example if you have a pack of mobs that includes a number of casters or physical ranged, they are not going to clump up neatly giving you easy access to generating threat on all of them. At moments like this you might need to utilize Line of Sight mechanics to generate aggro and then duck around a corner forcing the pack that you just generated threat on to chase you. Breaking Line of Sight will force the encounter to seek you out, and if you utilize this correctly you and your party can set up an ambush spot creating a tight “murder ball”. Environmental Damage Another concept of place is being aware of your surroundings. As you move through a dungeon there are often times traps that are set for the players that consist of some sort of avoidable damage or open ledges that the party can be knocked off. When deciding where to fight the encounter, you need to take all of these parameters into account and do your best to find a spot where it is safe for the party to engage the mobs. Again your role as the tank is to limit the damage being dealt to the party, and a big part of this is trying to keep them from having to fight in bad situations. This might mean needing to move the encounter from time to time to get out of acid puddles or something similar. As such while fighting you are often times keep your head on a swivel looking for changes in the field of battle.

Avoid

As I said in the last point, part of your role as a tank is to limit the damage dealt to the party. This also means that you yourself need to take as little damage as possible. This is pretty straight forward in a game like Final Fantasy XIV where clear visualizations are placed on the ground with hard edges allowing you to very easily tell if you are going to take damage or not. This is less easy in games without that predictable level of advisement. Some of this is honestly just learning the encounter, because at the end of the day every boss that you are fighting is following some sort of script. It often helps to think of it in terms as a flow chart and the boss will perform a certain attack under a certain set of circumstances. It may be as simple as learning a dance or it may be as difficult as looking for a specific tell that a boss performs before making an attack. Whatever the case you are seeking out any ways that you can avoid taking damage that you don’t need to take. Animations Like I said, life is pretty simple if you are given clear visualizations as to what the attacks do. However even in the scenarios that you won’t be given a clear marker, there are almost always some sort of tell in the animations being performed by a mob. I have to say that learning to play Monster Hunter Online greatly improved my ability as a whole to spot these tells, because that game was entirely about predicting the movement of these gigantic monsters that you were fighting. As you dive further into the tanking mindset, you are going to find yourself drawing inspiration from unlikely sources and another great one is Dark Souls.

Mitigate

One of your jobs as a tank is to be well… Tanky. This means stacking gear that makes you harder to kill and often times just increases your sheer health pool. The more health you have, the more damage you can take before putting yourself into a situation where you are burning out your healer. Tanks need to be cautious of how they are gearing and instead of favoring dealing extra dps, you want to favor reducing the incoming flow of damage. How you do this depends greatly upon a specific game, but often times there are stats to reduce specific kinds of damage, or mechanics like block, dodge and, parry that either decrease incoming damage or cause you to avoid it entirely. The negative is gearing out as tank means you are going to chew through content solo extremely slowly, but it is the price you pay for your chosen vocation. Active Mitigation So please note I am using “mitigation” here in the most generic form because technically a block is mitigation, but a dodge is technically avoidance. However generally speaking your character as tank will be given abilities on a cool-down that allow you to reduce your incoming damage. Again this depends greatly upon the game but often times you have weaker abilities on shorter cooldowns and very powerful abilities on long cool-downs. As a tank you want to figure out the best time to use your shorter cool-downs while strategically saving your big ones… aka the “Oh Shit” buttons for times that can save a fight because you are going to take fatal damage or needing to hold on while your party recovers from a particularly damaging sequence. Tank Busters Often times there is one specific attack that is designed to kill any character that is not specifically a tank. Tanks even often times need to specifically time a short cool-down ability either directly before or directly after the attack in order to survive. One of your jobs as a tank is to get to know these and learn how to navigate them correctly, and more specifically make sure that the encounter is facing away from the party when they are firing off… because often times tank busters “cleave”. Cleaving is a term for an attack dealing damage to more than one target in the vicinity of the focus of that attack. Final Fantasy XIV made our jobs easier because generally speaking the first big attack that takes place after a pull is going to be your tank buster, so you can memorize that name and then be looking for it to fire at pretty regular intervals throughout the fight.

Pace

The tank is part battle tactician and part cruise director when it comes to leading the party through the encounters that make up a dungeon or raid. Right or wrong the tank sets the pace for the party, but one of the key parts of learning how to be a “good” tank is understanding that this is a symbiotic relationship. A bad tank will run off without paying attention to the party and expect to force their way through a dungeon as fast as possible, often times pulling way more than the party can handle at a given moment. A good tank will pay attention to how well the DPS is performing, how taxed the healer is and the current state of their mana, and then set a pace that is brisk but manageable. The goal is to get to the end of the dungeon in a swift but safe fashion, so that everyone gets good loots and has a low repair bill. Multi-Pack Pulls Over the years it has become out of vogue to carefully move your way through a dungeon and to just go haywire pulling everything in sight. One of the responsibilities of the tank is to know when a group can support this sort of play style, and resist doing it when you know that they can not. Generally speaking when tanking pick up groups or “PUGs” I will test the water with a single pack, and pay attention to how quickly it is being dealt with. If it goes well I will start pulling two packs at a time, and if that goes equally well move up to three and so on. Essentially it is better to ramp up than to slam into a brick wall less than five minutes into the dungeon because you got careless. While you might have demands to “Pull Big”, you need to be the adult in the situation and realize when the party just can’t tackle that much at once. Respect your Healer There is a lot of focus placed on the tank, because they are the one setting the pace of the group and navigating it through the obstacles of the dungeon. However you have to realize that the healer is actually what enables us to do all of this. Tanks are mostly useless on their own without a good healer backing them up, and as a result you need to pay attention to what your healer is actively saying… and also attention to what they are not saying. If they are pulling their punches and not keeping you topped off, it might be that they are struggling to keep up with the pace you are moving at and should maybe pay a little closer attention to that blue bar if they are struggling. Additionally if they are spending all of their time DPSing, then maybe you should speed up a bit because clearly they are not being fully utilized. The entire party is an ecosystem, but none of the relationships are as symbiotic as that of the tank and the healer as they are effectively two sides of the same coin.

Final Thoughts

There it is folks, my general thoughts on tanking. While certain aspects may not apply to all games… it represents the general mindset that I think is required for a successful tank. For most tanks I know, a lot of these things are just so ingrained in our personality that it has become a sort of instinct or muscle memory at this point. The truth is however that the only real way to learn to tank… is to get out there and force yourself into the tank role. I think keeping all of these things in mind is important, but it is a learning experience and once you fall into that role it will be with you from that point moving forward. I am sure there are some finer points that I have missed, but I was shooting for the most generic take on MMO tanking that is applicable to pretty much any game you might pick up from this point forward. If you have specific comments however I would love to hear them. The post Ethos of Tanking appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #369 – Become The Big Bad

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks!  Tonight we are down Grace and Ammo but push on with our ever growing list of topics.  We start with some discussion about the Stellaris expansion where you can become the Crisis at the end of the game featuring some interesting asymmetrical gameplay.  From there Bel talks a bit about the current failed state of New World and the degenerative gameplay of “pay for dungeon runs”.  From there we talk about the importance of numbers and whether or not we as players should actually see them.  We wrap things up with a discussion about Game Dev and how what is meant by a beta has changed over the years, specifically with the “very alpha” Star Citizen.

Topics Discussed

  • Stellaris
    • Becoming the Crisis
    • Aquatic Races
  • New World
    • Failed State of the Game
    • Buying a Seat in a Dungeon Run
    • Patch 1.1 Lost the game over 200k players
  • The Importance of Numbers
    • When you want to see them
    • When you maybe don’t
  • Game Dev
    • Star Citizen
    • Betas and Alphas
    • Gamer brain vs Dev brain
  • Kodra Streaming Speed Runs
  • Bel Revisiting Cyberpunk 2077
The post AggroChat #369 – Become The Big Bad appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.