Paladin Aggro Thread

[Rorne]

Paladins were good, things changed, goal posts moved, now they are not as good. Is this indicative of a flawed system?

 

[Zaela]

Isn't this a little sensational?

It's been every 6 months for as long as I can remember, before Ikisith was ever a thing, so not really. It's like clockwork. And it's rarely about new spells; if it were, we wouldn't be talking about changing old spells every single time.

 

[Moraelintz]

High end paladins are pretty gross esp with how well they heal, they blow both other tank classess out of the water. The only thing warriors have on them is dps and that resilience button. Sks get better aggro spells, but don't get near enough tanking bonus to come close to make up for te heal power. Also, it is not as much the paladins concern about aggro as it is the dps. We need to learn to adapt to the tanks and not just full burn immediately. If agro is a concern just wait a bit longer before launching big dps again it shouldn't be on the tank to manage dps aggro. Dps has to know the tanks better and not be bad.

 

[booster]

i never understood why the agro component to paladin heals was removed

 

[Zaela]

At first hardly anyone played Paladins. Then they were given melee crits, bonus melee damage to more or less everything from an AA, and self-heals.

Then people realized that Paladins had been primo AE tanks the whole time--it just hadn't been a thing before people started playing pallies and getting good enough gear to tank multiple things outside of Eldenals. Eventually it was discovered that group heal aggro was more reliable than the resistable AE blind, so group heal aggro was reduced a lot.

Then aux tanking was introduced and made to apply to players, so tank melee damage was always reduced, but especially when AE tanking.

Then aggro from weapons was improved to make Warrior aggro more reliable in general and to make one of their AAs better.

Then knight 1h weapon ratios were nerfed (hi) to be in line with regular 1h as a general itemization improvement and people stopped playing knights forever. And they were also given a damage boost when having a shield equipped and an aggro boost on bash soon after.

Then Hexdoll and other ammo slot pulling items were nerfed and everyone stopped playing Warriors forever.

Then Warriors were given foelock to make their snap aggro more reliable.

Then knights were given a damage bonus to 2h weapons from their 2h AA to make melee dpsing slightly closer to a real option.

Then Shadowknights got a buggy restrictive AE aggro thing from Cyzaine cuz why not I guess.

Then Shadowknights got a new tap and new line of mostly crappy reverse DS things from me cuz why not I guess.

Then Shadowknight aggro spells were changed to save their fingers and spell slots somewhat, and because Cyzaine isn't very thorough I think the stacking/overwriting can be abused to get more aggro early on than intended at the cost of not really saving spell slots but who cares cuz SKs were always about not having to worry about aggro.

Then maybe some other stuff I can't remember.

Then Warriors got a new system cuz they were boring and I'd been wanting to change all of the tanks anyway and the warrior idea was the least radical. Warriors got some AE aggro and DPS power out of it that they hadn't really had before, slighting Paladins.

Then Paladins got a slight boost to a couple spells for aggro.

Then here we are again.

I might not have remember everything in the right order but you get the idea. I guess some of that is from new content but not much. Some is also from quality of life changes that might not have been necessary. But most of it, I think, is from the fact that the tanks were never balanced against each other to begin with, and even if we never made new content every bump would have led to the next bump because balancing self-healing against group healing against super aggro against melee DPS against spell DPS against shields against dual wielding against enemy ripostes against resistibility against unresistibility does not work. Especially when everything is ad hoc and just about how things are now and not how they might be later.

 

[Salarus]

High end paladins are pretty gross esp with how well they heal, they blow both other tank classess out of the water. The only thing warriors have on them is dps and that resilience button. Sks get better aggro spells, but don't get near enough tanking bonus to come close to make up for te heal power. Also, it is not as much the paladins concern about aggro as it is the dps. We need to learn to adapt to the tanks and not just full burn immediately. If agro is a concern just wait a bit longer before launching big dps again it shouldn't be on the tank to manage dps aggro. Dps has to know the tanks better and not be bad.

Small list of things you arn't considering:

1. How many paladins are high end? I can't speak for them, but I the last I saw a lesser geared Stryda was putting a better geared/tomed Bango to shame.
2. The biggest fuck up this server has ever had, was during the first series of paladin nerfs where everyone used Ringo as a bench mark for all paladins. I cannot stress enough how classes need to be balanced not just off the best of their potential, but the entire way up as well.
3. I can’t confirm this personally, as I no longer play a SK at all, but last I checked they out dps paladins, are a better option for duoing due to the MAJOR utility of FD, and unless you are horrible at this game, can easily lock down agro on 2-4 targets unless you horrible at pressing buttons.
4. In the interest of sheer balance, as I said before, I think both knight classes need DPS added. Beyond that, paladin heal agro coming back, and why not just see how it works?

 

[Salarus]

Zaela, in terms of content, Ringo put people to shame in zones like HHK pre iksith, when AOE aggro was actually a thing that was useful to maximize something. Show me an xp zone where AOE aggro on 6 targets is used, and i'll show you another where you can get more xp doing just 2-3 at a time =\

 

[Zaela]

Show me whether AE aggro was ever a good concept to support to begin with (seeing as it has and had unequal application between exp and raids and from zone to zone, and it hurt CC, especially enchanters), especially since it seems to have come about unintentionally, unless I'm misremembering.

We should decide what all the tanks should be able to do and how they should balance out against each other, for exp and raids, before making adjustments, not after. But to do that, we'd have to wipe out all the precedents and start them all from scratch. But that will never be an option. So I'm not interested!

 

[Salarus]

In terms of XP i'd argue taht one zone, HHK, was good before it, and paladins, got the nerf bat.

If we arn't goign to care, we shoudln't have nerfed the hell out of one tank class, then buffed the other two to begin with!

 

[Zaela]

Which nerf are we talking about btw. I clearly don't remember it.

 

[Salarus]

/s 4 nerf. Or Heal aggro nerf. Really either of those. We can also go in with the 1 hander nerf. which hit both knights pretty hard.

 

[Zaela]

If we arn't goign to care

PS I'm not sure what you mean by this. I care, but too much to work within a crappy system--with dozens of parameters that come into play, hardly any of which can easily be compared to each other, and where we don't even have a clear picture of what balance between the tanks should look like--which I think should be replaced as step 1 to any plan for improvements.

 

[Zaela]

Or Heal aggro nerf.

The one five (six?) years ago or a more recent one?

 

[Salarus]

Whichever one pulled the aggro off heals. I thought it was only 3 years ago but my sense of time is kinda whacked in terms of how long i've been on this game heh.

Do not take me wrong, I'm not implying you personally don't care, but I mean in terms of caring enough to impliment changes, I think if we make any changes (which we have) we should follow it up and try to keep balancing each class.

 

[Mythryn]

We should decide what all the tanks should be able to do and how they should balance out against each other, for exp and raids, before making adjustments, not after. But to do that, we'd have to wipe out all the precedents and start them all from scratch.

This needs to be discussed. There needs to be some sort of standard, design documentation or goal for each class, and how they compare to one another. They need roles, rankings, etc. Things have changed a ton since I did any (shitty, admittedly) dev work, but there wasn't anything like this back then.

Since no dev actually plays, ask for input from people that actually play these classes multiple hours every day/week, take their suggestions and do what you guys do best: role with them, make them better.

 

[Dinadass]

I think most people that have played for any length of time here know what the supposed rankings are for the various tanking metrics. It's just that in some situations the gap between them when it comes to AOE aggro or single target aggro or DPS or whatever can get to be out of balance.

 

[cian2]

adding smaller aggro mods to non-cleric yaulp spells would fix the problem pretty easily

ie. yaulp iv - aggro generation 150%

but the game was beaten even pre-r2 change with (mostly) a paladin main tanking. however, not having to worry so much about aggro allows paladins to heal more, improving the class substantially.

 

[stral]

 

[Mythryn]

I think most people that have played for any length of time here know what the supposed rankings are for the various tanking metrics.

The only ones that have ever been stable are WAR>SK>PAL as far as pure mitigation goes. Other than that, things have been in a pretty constant state of flux.

 

[Salarus]

Recently, warrior dps has skyrocketed from what i've seen. I'd love to see some solid on tier parses since I don't have access to comparable toons anymore - but it seems this is generally accepted.