Long time no blog! I'm here to break the silence with a little post from Minsc, a Templar in my Legion. Every Tank you've run with has wanted to say this at some point, so take it on board, seriously.
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Your Guide to "What The Hell Is The Tank Doing" (1-35)
So you're in a group, and that Templar (Or Gladiator) is strutting around like he owns the planet, despite being able to do less damage than Tutty on a bad day. You think to yourself "Heh, but this guy can't hold agro either". Doesn't he have taunt?
Odds are, from a Tank point of view - you're a liability because you probably don't understand how Templar threat works. Tanking in Aion isn't like most other games. Also note: "Agro/Threat" in Aion is referred to as "Enmity".
Note: This is a guide only up to level 35 or so. Things do change after this
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The Tools Of The Trade
A Templar (as at Level 35) have two basic Enmity generating moves.
> Provoke: medium range non-damaging Enmity ability. Cool down 12 sec.
> Provoking Slash: melee attack with extra Enmity. Cool down 12 sec.
They have access to two subjective Enmity generators.
> Provoking Shield Counter: Shield "bash", only usable immediately after successful block. Does NOT stun enemy. Cool down 24 seconds.
> Divine Chastisement: DP ability. Costs 2000 DP.
They have access to three Stigma stones which are Enmity generators.
> Inescapable Judgment: Ranged "pull" ability bringing enemy directly to you. Also reduces their movement speed for 10 seconds. Cool down 30 seconds.
> Provoking Roar: 10m PBAoE which generates some threat on up to five monsters. Cool down 30 sec.
> Incite Rage: 15m 1 minute CD Provoke clone with a mana cost added.
> (Remember they may not have one or both of these.)
More come as levels progress, but I don't know my way around the full list yet. There are more Stigmas out there, but for now we'll stick to the level range we know well, and the level range of what we are seeing day-to-day.
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Things to know:
First, none of these are a "top of the stack" enmity/threat/agro generator.
They generate a set amount, period. If you've pulled agro, and you're a DPSer... STOP. There is nothing a tank can do if you're still going berserk on a creature that is attacking you. You'll stay ahead of him/her for a lot longer. If you're a healer, all you can do is try to heal through it as best you can and hope the tank can pull agro back off you.
Secondly, a Templar relies on blocking attacks to generate a lot of threat.
He has three abilities at his disposal on a successful block - (a) a shield bash stun, (b) the aforementioned Enmity generator, and (c) a retributive strike (which is their highest damage dealer). If you pull agro, you are going to take away roughly half of his bag of tricks that he can use to keep agro on himself, and some of his damage mitigation to boot. So if he's not got agro on himself, his ability to get it back is depleted, and he'll start to fall behind the healers - and that's wipe territory.
Thirdly, a Templar is not a Gladiator.
He does not have an appreciable ongoing "multitanking" capacity like a Gladiator - he traded it in for mitigation. If there is more than one creature out there, he will be switching between them and spreading his basic Enmity generators around, which means the DPS troops have to scale back their output so they don't pull agro. Healers have to "suck it up buttercup", and hope the chainmail will stop any errant hits if one gets away briefly.
This goes double for if there are crowd-controlled creatures. If one is 'slept', a good tank will switch to that target every time Provoke cool down is up and throw it at that creature (from out of melee range so he doesn't break CC). This prevents the creature from running after the CCer or a healer if it breaks/resists CC. So, if one creature is slept, be sure not to still go absolutely gangbusters on the one you're DPSing at first - give it a grace period of 20 seconds or so (enough for two rounds of the 12 sec cool down taunts) of light DPS after the tank finally has the creature in melee range before you start really unloading with the pointy stuff.
Lastly, a Tank may have to go "Defensive".
One thing a Templar can do is go into "Shield Defence/Steel Wall Defence". This puts his mitigation up quite a fair bit, but he cannot use any abilities while in this mode - this includes any Enmity generators. It gives the healers a chance to catch up if he's dropping below, but in turn stops his Enmity output. So if you see or hear of the Tank going into 'Block Mode' or 'Going Defensive' or 'Putting Up A Wall' or any such thing for any length of time to let healers catch up - dial back the juice or you'll wind up with the bad guy cleaning your clock for you, and it'll give new meaning to "Spray 'n' Wipe + Mr. Muscle".
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So to recap:
If a Templar loses agro, wind back the DPS, even if it's not you the guy is coming after. The longer the Tank doesn't have agro, the more he falls behind.
If there is more than one bad guy, give the Tank some time to really get rolling, he'll be behind for a while. Ease the DPS for 10-20 secs at the start.
If a Templar is going all defensive mode, lay off. He's not generating as much threat.
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I hope this clears up tanking. Without a specific "automatic Top-Of-The-Stack" agro/taunt skill, Tanks have a lot harder time actually regaining agro, so take care when you're out there. If you pull agro, you put the whole group at risk here, not like several other MMO's where the tank has an "Oh Shit" button. Some tanks are very good at their job, and can honestly just output threat like it's nobody's business, and a lot of the previous stuff may not apply as much, but these basics ought to give everyone a rough understanding of what is going on.
Cheers!
~ Minsc and Boo.
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Thanks, Minsc!
Watch this space for upcoming posts delving deep into the Stigma system (for Templars, of course!) and a look over of the Templar DP abilities we'll have lined up for level 50 content.
Showing posts with label shining slash. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shining slash. Show all posts
Friday, October 23, 2009
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Shining Slash: On Fire
Not really a Tanking guide, but like all dungeons, basic knowledge of the dungeon will help everyone out.
Once Nochsana becomes unavailable at 29, you might be feeling the lack of dungeon running fun. Look no further, because the elusive Fire Temple is available within a level, and will tide you over for a good 8 levels (at the outside).
At level 30, you can enter the Fire Temple. No quests mention it until 32, so you'll need initiative or friends in the know to even find out about it in the first place. From the little I can gather on the Asmodian entry quests, there's a fairly obvious entry chain that leads you around a bit and requires a group. There's a guide on that quest chain here. For the Elyos, it's even less obvious and almost feels like an afterthought. At level 32 there's one quest, starting from Hannet, that gets you to run around Elysea tracking down her lost love. After traveling to the Verteron Observatory, and talking to a few people in towns in the Eltnen desert, you travel back to Hannet, who sends you to the never before mentioned Fire Temple. Following a few blue links in your quest journal will tell you that the Fire Temple's entrance is beneath Kyola Temple, a high difficulty mob area a short run south of the Golden Bough Garrison.
Kyola is under the ground, with a single staircase heading down to a central chamber that branches into three rooms all filled with mobs that most people won't be able to solo effectively until 32+. A bit of exploration will reveal a door in the right hand room, at the far end. You might get lucky, but odds are you'll have a party and be at the door before it becomes apparent that you can't actually get in without being attuned. But all is well, for attunement is within your grasp! Fire Temple Keys drop from all of the mobs underground in the Kyola Temple, with a very low drop rate. Each drop can only be looted by one person, so you need one each. Expect to kill 30-50 mobs before seeing one. That said, spend an hour in there with a full group and you'll likely get one key for each party member. At night time, the Raging Obscuras outside around the entrance drop keys too, at what appears to be a higher drop rate.
Once you have your key, use it in your inventory to receive a quest, that leads you back outside the Kyola Temple to the cluster of NPCs just outside. Hand it in, and wham bam you're attuned to Fire Temple. With this quest completed, you can dart back inside to the Fire Temple door in the right hand room, use it, and zone into the dungeon!
Fire Temple is different from Nochsana in a few ways. Instead of having set bosses, only two bosses show up every run, and several bosses spawn randomly throughout the dungeon. Which bosses show up is determined when the first person in your party zones into the dungeon. Secondly, it's possible to skip a large number of the pulls in the Fire Temple. It's entirely possible to sneak through at higher (much higher) levels only fighting one or two mobs on your way to the final boss. Additionally, the last boss has a 100% chance to drop at least one green item, which is at least an improvement over the Nochsana General's disappointingly small chance to drop anything at all.
Finally, the dungeon's lockout timer is 30 minutes, instead of 18 hours. Kill the boss, walk back out, disband your group, reform it, walk back in and everything will be reset. Kill the boss again, repeat. Thus, you can actually farm the Fire Temple for xp, if you get a dedicated group.
Inside the dungeon, you get a quick warm up in the form of two fire elementals, one large and hard hitting, one small and not so strong, with a third patrolling back and forth down the corridor they're blocking. A bad pull will see you fighting all three, while it's possible to take down each one on their own without any real difficulty. As I've mentioned in the past, the Tank should always initiate each pull. The mobs in the Fire Temple hit particularly hard, and with the amount of healing going on, your Healer will build a lot of Enmity, which can be hard to deal with if your Tank hasn't got the bonus Enmity from being the person to pull. CC is worth it in here too, making pulls smaller for a time, easing the load on both the Healer and the Tank, and generally providing practice at not breaking the CC for your party. Hit a mob that's been turned into a tree or is asleep, and it'll hop up and start hitting people again, so be careful.
The first room looks intimidating at first. It's possible to run through without pulling anything, but that requires some luck and good timing for each member of your party, which you can't guarantee, so pull the two elementals just to the left, then the patrol in the middle. That clears the path to the end of the room, which is being guarded by two large elementals and a patrol. If you're unlucky, then one of the two guaranteed bosses in the dungeon, Silver Blade Rotan, will be patrolling rapidly up the corridor as well. Try to get him alone, since he hits hard and takes a while to kill. It's possible for Rotan to be here, but there are two other paths he can take, which are determined when the dungeon is loaded.
You can hug the wall around corners, pull mobs back to you to avoid fighting them with patrols, and generally be sneaky down the passage in front of you. There's an opening in the wall to the left, which can be used to skip some parts of the dungeon, but there's the ever present chance that if you attempt to cross the floating rocks that lead that way, you'll fall into the lava, which forces you to travel left down the lava path until you reach the way up or die horribly. At the first fork, the left path leads to the rest of the dungeon, while going forward and then right takes you to two dead ends filled with rock elementals, with a Shugo who to my Elyos eyes looks like he might be an Asmodian quest NPC, and two rare-spawn elemental bosses. Scour your minimap if you go down that way, and look for the mob with the unique name. Good luck. It's entirely possible that Silver Blade Rotan will instead be here, moving about rapidly, so keep an eye out.
To the left, a few gargoyle pulls and a couple of mugolems lead you to a large room with paths leading to (to the left) a room crowded with mobs that you should proceed carefully through, skipping as little as possible (since at low health the mobs try to run away and call their friends to help), (in front of you) a room where you'll find Denlavis, Hannet's missing immortal love and a variety of nasty pulls (avoid pulling the mugolem in the center, as it'll pull two out of sight gargoyles with it, as well as the two patrols left and right), and (to the right) the main path.
After that travesty of a paragraph, you have to clear your way to the right, or whichever direction you choose. As the two mugolems in the middle of the room make sneaking around without pulling rather difficult, clear out the gargoyle just around the right corner, then rush into the middle, CCing one of the mugolems or the patrolling gargoyle as necessary, and nuke them down. Silver Blade Rotan can be pathing through the room as well, so be sure to rush in at a point where you're going to have some free time before Rotan shows back up. Clear down the right hand path, being careful to pull mugolems back to your group (Inescapable Judgment is the only way, since they're immobile) when possible, and watching patrols. Again there's a room to the right, which houses a rare-spawn gargoyle boss, but the main boss is to the left, in a final large hall filled with caryatids and patrolling gargoyles. Kill as many as you have to in order to clear to and wipe out one of the sides of the room, then when there's no patrol near her, aggro the boss and run her back to a safe corner. Incoming fun.
Kromede the Corrupt is a level 37 Ranger boss (which means that if you go in at 30, she'll be resisting your abilities a lot), who does comparable damage to her main target as well as high AoE damage to your melee on a regular basis. Her Area Cause Wound (loving the Engrish) is a fairly straight up cast time point-blank AoE. It hits everyone around her for pretty high damage, but is easily healable. Kromede also, however, drops traps. They can be destroyed by group members who are quick (Gladiator AoE works great), but if they go off they do particularly high damage to everyone in range, which pretty much again amounts to your melee players. Finally, at low health she'll cast another ability (forgive me, but the name escapes me) which has a cast time, and hits for quite literally massive damage. From what I can tell, she targets the closest person who doesn't have aggro (the aforementioned Gladiator, probably!) and hits them for about 2.5k damage, maybe a bit more. If followed up by a trap, or an Area Cause Wound before a heal can get off, then it's a guaranteed death for at least one person. This is the most important time in the fight to be taking out traps. I think she can cast it again, so be quick at this point. She'll die soon, and you'll get loot (it's polite to resurrect anyone who's died before looting!), which in my experience is limited to a couple of green helms and a blue crafting item that can be used to make a handful of items (I'll update this post with links once I remember what it's called :P). There is, however, a slim chance that gold quality weapons will drop, which is fantastic. At level 30 it's easy enough to clear to her and win inside an hour, which then allows you to head back out and reset the dungeon, and clear to her again. Good xp and a chance at golds. Good luck!
Apologies for the serious lack of updates. In the mean time, enjoy this video of the boss fight, courtesy of Zot:
Do you like his videos? I like his videos. I wonder if he'll do voice commentary at some point? Who can tell.
Once Nochsana becomes unavailable at 29, you might be feeling the lack of dungeon running fun. Look no further, because the elusive Fire Temple is available within a level, and will tide you over for a good 8 levels (at the outside).
At level 30, you can enter the Fire Temple. No quests mention it until 32, so you'll need initiative or friends in the know to even find out about it in the first place. From the little I can gather on the Asmodian entry quests, there's a fairly obvious entry chain that leads you around a bit and requires a group. There's a guide on that quest chain here. For the Elyos, it's even less obvious and almost feels like an afterthought. At level 32 there's one quest, starting from Hannet, that gets you to run around Elysea tracking down her lost love. After traveling to the Verteron Observatory, and talking to a few people in towns in the Eltnen desert, you travel back to Hannet, who sends you to the never before mentioned Fire Temple. Following a few blue links in your quest journal will tell you that the Fire Temple's entrance is beneath Kyola Temple, a high difficulty mob area a short run south of the Golden Bough Garrison.
Kyola is under the ground, with a single staircase heading down to a central chamber that branches into three rooms all filled with mobs that most people won't be able to solo effectively until 32+. A bit of exploration will reveal a door in the right hand room, at the far end. You might get lucky, but odds are you'll have a party and be at the door before it becomes apparent that you can't actually get in without being attuned. But all is well, for attunement is within your grasp! Fire Temple Keys drop from all of the mobs underground in the Kyola Temple, with a very low drop rate. Each drop can only be looted by one person, so you need one each. Expect to kill 30-50 mobs before seeing one. That said, spend an hour in there with a full group and you'll likely get one key for each party member. At night time, the Raging Obscuras outside around the entrance drop keys too, at what appears to be a higher drop rate.
Once you have your key, use it in your inventory to receive a quest, that leads you back outside the Kyola Temple to the cluster of NPCs just outside. Hand it in, and wham bam you're attuned to Fire Temple. With this quest completed, you can dart back inside to the Fire Temple door in the right hand room, use it, and zone into the dungeon!
Fire Temple is different from Nochsana in a few ways. Instead of having set bosses, only two bosses show up every run, and several bosses spawn randomly throughout the dungeon. Which bosses show up is determined when the first person in your party zones into the dungeon. Secondly, it's possible to skip a large number of the pulls in the Fire Temple. It's entirely possible to sneak through at higher (much higher) levels only fighting one or two mobs on your way to the final boss. Additionally, the last boss has a 100% chance to drop at least one green item, which is at least an improvement over the Nochsana General's disappointingly small chance to drop anything at all.
Finally, the dungeon's lockout timer is 30 minutes, instead of 18 hours. Kill the boss, walk back out, disband your group, reform it, walk back in and everything will be reset. Kill the boss again, repeat. Thus, you can actually farm the Fire Temple for xp, if you get a dedicated group.
Inside the dungeon, you get a quick warm up in the form of two fire elementals, one large and hard hitting, one small and not so strong, with a third patrolling back and forth down the corridor they're blocking. A bad pull will see you fighting all three, while it's possible to take down each one on their own without any real difficulty. As I've mentioned in the past, the Tank should always initiate each pull. The mobs in the Fire Temple hit particularly hard, and with the amount of healing going on, your Healer will build a lot of Enmity, which can be hard to deal with if your Tank hasn't got the bonus Enmity from being the person to pull. CC is worth it in here too, making pulls smaller for a time, easing the load on both the Healer and the Tank, and generally providing practice at not breaking the CC for your party. Hit a mob that's been turned into a tree or is asleep, and it'll hop up and start hitting people again, so be careful.
The first room looks intimidating at first. It's possible to run through without pulling anything, but that requires some luck and good timing for each member of your party, which you can't guarantee, so pull the two elementals just to the left, then the patrol in the middle. That clears the path to the end of the room, which is being guarded by two large elementals and a patrol. If you're unlucky, then one of the two guaranteed bosses in the dungeon, Silver Blade Rotan, will be patrolling rapidly up the corridor as well. Try to get him alone, since he hits hard and takes a while to kill. It's possible for Rotan to be here, but there are two other paths he can take, which are determined when the dungeon is loaded.
You can hug the wall around corners, pull mobs back to you to avoid fighting them with patrols, and generally be sneaky down the passage in front of you. There's an opening in the wall to the left, which can be used to skip some parts of the dungeon, but there's the ever present chance that if you attempt to cross the floating rocks that lead that way, you'll fall into the lava, which forces you to travel left down the lava path until you reach the way up or die horribly. At the first fork, the left path leads to the rest of the dungeon, while going forward and then right takes you to two dead ends filled with rock elementals, with a Shugo who to my Elyos eyes looks like he might be an Asmodian quest NPC, and two rare-spawn elemental bosses. Scour your minimap if you go down that way, and look for the mob with the unique name. Good luck. It's entirely possible that Silver Blade Rotan will instead be here, moving about rapidly, so keep an eye out.
To the left, a few gargoyle pulls and a couple of mugolems lead you to a large room with paths leading to (to the left) a room crowded with mobs that you should proceed carefully through, skipping as little as possible (since at low health the mobs try to run away and call their friends to help), (in front of you) a room where you'll find Denlavis, Hannet's missing immortal love and a variety of nasty pulls (avoid pulling the mugolem in the center, as it'll pull two out of sight gargoyles with it, as well as the two patrols left and right), and (to the right) the main path.
After that travesty of a paragraph, you have to clear your way to the right, or whichever direction you choose. As the two mugolems in the middle of the room make sneaking around without pulling rather difficult, clear out the gargoyle just around the right corner, then rush into the middle, CCing one of the mugolems or the patrolling gargoyle as necessary, and nuke them down. Silver Blade Rotan can be pathing through the room as well, so be sure to rush in at a point where you're going to have some free time before Rotan shows back up. Clear down the right hand path, being careful to pull mugolems back to your group (Inescapable Judgment is the only way, since they're immobile) when possible, and watching patrols. Again there's a room to the right, which houses a rare-spawn gargoyle boss, but the main boss is to the left, in a final large hall filled with caryatids and patrolling gargoyles. Kill as many as you have to in order to clear to and wipe out one of the sides of the room, then when there's no patrol near her, aggro the boss and run her back to a safe corner. Incoming fun.
Kromede the Corrupt is a level 37 Ranger boss (which means that if you go in at 30, she'll be resisting your abilities a lot), who does comparable damage to her main target as well as high AoE damage to your melee on a regular basis. Her Area Cause Wound (loving the Engrish) is a fairly straight up cast time point-blank AoE. It hits everyone around her for pretty high damage, but is easily healable. Kromede also, however, drops traps. They can be destroyed by group members who are quick (Gladiator AoE works great), but if they go off they do particularly high damage to everyone in range, which pretty much again amounts to your melee players. Finally, at low health she'll cast another ability (forgive me, but the name escapes me) which has a cast time, and hits for quite literally massive damage. From what I can tell, she targets the closest person who doesn't have aggro (the aforementioned Gladiator, probably!) and hits them for about 2.5k damage, maybe a bit more. If followed up by a trap, or an Area Cause Wound before a heal can get off, then it's a guaranteed death for at least one person. This is the most important time in the fight to be taking out traps. I think she can cast it again, so be quick at this point. She'll die soon, and you'll get loot (it's polite to resurrect anyone who's died before looting!), which in my experience is limited to a couple of green helms and a blue crafting item that can be used to make a handful of items (I'll update this post with links once I remember what it's called :P). There is, however, a slim chance that gold quality weapons will drop, which is fantastic. At level 30 it's easy enough to clear to her and win inside an hour, which then allows you to head back out and reset the dungeon, and clear to her again. Good xp and a chance at golds. Good luck!
Apologies for the serious lack of updates. In the mean time, enjoy this video of the boss fight, courtesy of Zot:
Do you like his videos? I like his videos. I wonder if he'll do voice commentary at some point? Who can tell.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Shining Slash: Brands
As I've mentioned in the past, co-ordinating a group's attacks is vital to success in both PvE and PvP. The combined firepower of 24 people on one Cleric is going to bring him down before any other Healers in the vicinity even have time to start casting. But how are you going to make that elusive magic happen? Yelling over Ventrilo doesn't do the job, isolating people with Inescapable Judgment helps, but the final word in getting people to hit the same bloody target is Branding.
While leading a group of any kind, or as the vice captain of a raid, you can mark targets with Brands: bright, obvious icons that stick above the player or mob you put them on until you "unbrand" them. Calling for people to kill the "yellow two" actually gives them a blatant target to hit.
In dungeons, marking targets is the obvious way to go, as it provides dps with a clear kill order, practically guaranteeing that your party will focus fire each mob down in turn, allowing for much easier Tanking and Healing, as well as throwing the dps an easy way to physically select their targets. It also can be used to mark dangerous mobs like patrols, so people can keep an eye on them, or targets for CC (the Zzz Brand is not only funny, but logical!).
In group PvP, it provides the same utility, but as PvP tends to move a lot faster, the prime uses of Brands are to mark up the enemy Healers for quick takedowns, and to mark your own Healers/Tanks, so people know who to stay within range of if they want to live, and who to run to when in danger.
Utility aside, there is one element of skill in Branding, and that is speed. The faster you can do it, the more effective it is. In Nochsana the last two days, I've pulled like lightning (haha, because Inescapable Judgment is a lightning bolt...), leaving barely seconds between most fights. I'm only Branding the primary dps target (Zot is good with CC, and generally trees then sleeps the secondary or tertiary target, or the Nochsana Doc if we're fighting one, since they dispel CC on other mobs), but I still have to be quick about it. As such, I use keybinds.
In your keybind options, you can set any key you want for any Brand. Not only that, but you can set keys to select Branded mobs. I use my Num Pad (1 through 9) to Brand targets, and I use Ctrl-Num Pad (1 through 9) to select the same targets. This is quick, easy, and allows marking of up to nine targets; more than enough in most fights.
Basically? Get some practice using them. If you're leading a group, get used to marking for dps or CC, and if you're not, then why not go bind some keys to select specific Brands that your leader is fond of using, so you can select your target in the blink of an eye. Either way, learn to love them, because you'll be using them in every situation imaginable while in a group.
While leading a group of any kind, or as the vice captain of a raid, you can mark targets with Brands: bright, obvious icons that stick above the player or mob you put them on until you "unbrand" them. Calling for people to kill the "yellow two" actually gives them a blatant target to hit.
In dungeons, marking targets is the obvious way to go, as it provides dps with a clear kill order, practically guaranteeing that your party will focus fire each mob down in turn, allowing for much easier Tanking and Healing, as well as throwing the dps an easy way to physically select their targets. It also can be used to mark dangerous mobs like patrols, so people can keep an eye on them, or targets for CC (the Zzz Brand is not only funny, but logical!).
In group PvP, it provides the same utility, but as PvP tends to move a lot faster, the prime uses of Brands are to mark up the enemy Healers for quick takedowns, and to mark your own Healers/Tanks, so people know who to stay within range of if they want to live, and who to run to when in danger.
Utility aside, there is one element of skill in Branding, and that is speed. The faster you can do it, the more effective it is. In Nochsana the last two days, I've pulled like lightning (haha, because Inescapable Judgment is a lightning bolt...), leaving barely seconds between most fights. I'm only Branding the primary dps target (Zot is good with CC, and generally trees then sleeps the secondary or tertiary target, or the Nochsana Doc if we're fighting one, since they dispel CC on other mobs), but I still have to be quick about it. As such, I use keybinds.
In your keybind options, you can set any key you want for any Brand. Not only that, but you can set keys to select Branded mobs. I use my Num Pad (1 through 9) to Brand targets, and I use Ctrl-Num Pad (1 through 9) to select the same targets. This is quick, easy, and allows marking of up to nine targets; more than enough in most fights.
Basically? Get some practice using them. If you're leading a group, get used to marking for dps or CC, and if you're not, then why not go bind some keys to select specific Brands that your leader is fond of using, so you can select your target in the blink of an eye. Either way, learn to love them, because you'll be using them in every situation imaginable while in a group.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Shining Slash: Open Beta Edition, Part 5!
Featuring Tanking stats in Aion!
I've been intending to make a post on the gear choices a Templar will make from a Tanking perspective for some time, but have had insufficient information at my disposal. That has changed. Since experiencing more of the game in OB, and spending time scouring the web for information on various stats and their effects in game. See, Aion doesn't give much up to the casual observer. Mousing over stats in your character pane will tell you how much of that stat is gained from gear, and that's about it. No readouts on crit percentage gains, block chance, damage reduction. As such, large amounts of testing have been done by various players, and from one French player in particular, we now know the following:
Avoidance stats are dealt with interestingly. When you're hit by a blow, the game rolls for your Evade chance. If that roll fails, then it rolls for Parry. If the blow gets through again, it rolls for Block. If Block fails, the hit lands for full damage (minus physical defense).
Furthermore, Evade, Parry and Block all give 1% chance per 10 points. I don't know about you, but I had over 1200 Block value at level 25, with a few manastones in that direction, giving me, theoretically 120% Block Chance. Of course, two things bring that idea low:
If all that is true, then, my mind asked, what if you removed Parry from the equation? With some quick math, it appears that:
Definitely worth noting (although hard to do anything about) is that physical defense reduces incoming physical damage by 1 point for every 10 points of phys. def. An Assassin hits you for 500 twice, once with each Dagger. You have 1000 physical defense, and so you take 100 less damage on each hit, resulting in 800 damage all up rather than 1000. Plate has huge amounts of phys. def. on it, with low Magical Resist numbers (while Cloth has the opposite). What I found interesting was that Shields don't tend to give physical defense (I haven't seen one that does, but I'm hoping), meaning that without sufficient Block to carry you over your opponent's Accuracy rating, your Shield is nothing but a liability.
I've said it before, but here's a quick tip. Against opponents in PvP with high Accuracy, you can't expect to have good avoidance chances. As such, use Steel Wall Defense while trying to mitigate damage, then switch to your Greatsword for actual hits! Your Shield is obviously also useful for stuns and the such, but without Steel Wall Defense up (1000 extra Block, still capped at 50% to the best of my knowledge) you can't expect any reactive abilities to come up.
With all of that said, I'm writing a column for Templars. Gladiators and Chanters, who actually use reactive Parry abilities, have great use for Parry as a stat, and so should still stack it by all means. This is especially true as Gladiators have the same physical defense as Templars, meaning that they essentially mitigate the same amount of damage. The differences lie in the greater innate HP of a Templar and the vast number of Tanking abilities (for Enmity and defense) that Templars get.
Finally, I haven't found any real use for Attack so far, despite the fact that it would increase Enmity generation. With my largest apparent Enmity ability being Provoke, which does no damage, and with no solid word on whether or not even Provoking Severe Blow/Provoking Shield Counter actually increase their boosted Enmity based on damage done. Damage does Enmity on its own, yes, but if you're struggling with Enmity gen, then you should probably pull less, talk to your dps, take less damage (and so require less healing), make sure YOU are pulling, and not someone else, OR:
socket for Crit.
As one of us may post about in detail later, Crit is excellent up to about 440 rating. If you desperately need more damage or more Enmity, it looks like Crit is the way to go until you're at 440 or so. Attack might help then.
With Live slouching towards us, I'll find myself caught up in the whirlwind of leveling, crafting, Rifting and standing in Sanctum showing off my collector's edition wings. As such, expect a short break from Shining Slash until (at latest) Thursday this week. Perhaps I'll see some of you on Nezekan, whether friend, or furback foe.
Enjoy your weeks, Lewin out!
I've been intending to make a post on the gear choices a Templar will make from a Tanking perspective for some time, but have had insufficient information at my disposal. That has changed. Since experiencing more of the game in OB, and spending time scouring the web for information on various stats and their effects in game. See, Aion doesn't give much up to the casual observer. Mousing over stats in your character pane will tell you how much of that stat is gained from gear, and that's about it. No readouts on crit percentage gains, block chance, damage reduction. As such, large amounts of testing have been done by various players, and from one French player in particular, we now know the following:
Avoidance stats are dealt with interestingly. When you're hit by a blow, the game rolls for your Evade chance. If that roll fails, then it rolls for Parry. If the blow gets through again, it rolls for Block. If Block fails, the hit lands for full damage (minus physical defense).
Furthermore, Evade, Parry and Block all give 1% chance per 10 points. I don't know about you, but I had over 1200 Block value at level 25, with a few manastones in that direction, giving me, theoretically 120% Block Chance. Of course, two things bring that idea low:
- Evade is capped at 30%, Parry at 40% and Block at 50%. No matter how high your stats, they cannot go higher without the use of specific abilities.
- Accuracy, a very common stat, reduces the target's Evade, Parry and Block point for point. My 1200 Block against someone with 1000 Accuracy would only be 200 Block: 20%.
- Evade caps at 30%, being 30% total damage reduction in a purely physical damage fight. 70% of damage slips through.
- 40% of 70% is 28%, thus capped Parry and Evade proceed to allow 42% of hits through, mitigating a total of 38.4% of damage so far.
- 50% of 42% is 21%, so with all avoidance stats capped, 21% of all hits get through unmitigated. Assuming 65% damage reduction on a block, 13.65% of all damage is mitigated by Block, and 52.05% damage is mitigated all up.
If all that is true, then, my mind asked, what if you removed Parry from the equation? With some quick math, it appears that:
- 30% Evade lets 70% of all hits through, to be mitigated by Block 50% of the time, so you Block 35% of the time with 0% Parry.
- With max DR on your shield, that mitigates 22.75% of all damage through Blocks.
- Total DR comes to 52.75%, with 35% of all hits doing full damage.
Definitely worth noting (although hard to do anything about) is that physical defense reduces incoming physical damage by 1 point for every 10 points of phys. def. An Assassin hits you for 500 twice, once with each Dagger. You have 1000 physical defense, and so you take 100 less damage on each hit, resulting in 800 damage all up rather than 1000. Plate has huge amounts of phys. def. on it, with low Magical Resist numbers (while Cloth has the opposite). What I found interesting was that Shields don't tend to give physical defense (I haven't seen one that does, but I'm hoping), meaning that without sufficient Block to carry you over your opponent's Accuracy rating, your Shield is nothing but a liability.
I've said it before, but here's a quick tip. Against opponents in PvP with high Accuracy, you can't expect to have good avoidance chances. As such, use Steel Wall Defense while trying to mitigate damage, then switch to your Greatsword for actual hits! Your Shield is obviously also useful for stuns and the such, but without Steel Wall Defense up (1000 extra Block, still capped at 50% to the best of my knowledge) you can't expect any reactive abilities to come up.
With all of that said, I'm writing a column for Templars. Gladiators and Chanters, who actually use reactive Parry abilities, have great use for Parry as a stat, and so should still stack it by all means. This is especially true as Gladiators have the same physical defense as Templars, meaning that they essentially mitigate the same amount of damage. The differences lie in the greater innate HP of a Templar and the vast number of Tanking abilities (for Enmity and defense) that Templars get.
Finally, I haven't found any real use for Attack so far, despite the fact that it would increase Enmity generation. With my largest apparent Enmity ability being Provoke, which does no damage, and with no solid word on whether or not even Provoking Severe Blow/Provoking Shield Counter actually increase their boosted Enmity based on damage done. Damage does Enmity on its own, yes, but if you're struggling with Enmity gen, then you should probably pull less, talk to your dps, take less damage (and so require less healing), make sure YOU are pulling, and not someone else, OR:
socket for Crit.
As one of us may post about in detail later, Crit is excellent up to about 440 rating. If you desperately need more damage or more Enmity, it looks like Crit is the way to go until you're at 440 or so. Attack might help then.
With Live slouching towards us, I'll find myself caught up in the whirlwind of leveling, crafting, Rifting and standing in Sanctum showing off my collector's edition wings. As such, expect a short break from Shining Slash until (at latest) Thursday this week. Perhaps I'll see some of you on Nezekan, whether friend, or furback foe.
Enjoy your weeks, Lewin out!
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Shining Slash: Open Beta Edition, Part 4!
Part 4, featuring experiences in Rifting and low level PvP!
Apologies in advance for a long post, yet again in wall-of-text format. I might update with pictures to illustrate points and break it up at a later date, but for now, please read on. There's a lot of useful information for new players in this post, as well as some good insights for even experienced Templars, and two handy links for rifting. Enjoy!
In OB one of my aims was to join my Legion in PvP, as I missed out last time around. I rifted several times in this beta, and every time was a blast.
Rifts are portals leading to either Asmodae or Elysea, allowing a set number of players in a certain level bracket to pass through. Although there are [Spy] quests that you can do in enemy zones, the main reason for going through rifts is to PvP the other faction on their home ground, which allows for many exciting encounters. One reason people might not like rifting is that it's difficult if not impossible at times for players on the receiving end to defend themselves from a large rifting group suddenly appearing in their zone. In my opinion, this is a great opportunity for you to team up with your faction and drive out the intruders. Form an organized resistance in General chat and fight them back. Only one rift is up at a time in any given direction, and only a set number of people can get through, ensuring that they will always be outnumbered by the defenders.
While questing in Eltnen, you will occasionally see zone messages that say "A Rift has opened to Asmodae!" or "to Elysea!" At this point a large portal can be seen in the sky above the zone, and the direction it is pointing will give you an idea of where the rift itself actually is.
This entry on Aionic Thoughts has extremely useful in depth information on the nature of each rift, and should be required reading for anyone leading a rift raid.
Similarly, this post on AionSource is useful for anyone looking for a rift. Copy the script quoted into your in game memo pad, and use the links once in game to show each possible rift location on your map, making the zone easier to scout.
It's important to note that you can only pass through rifts leading out of your zone. The rift leading from the corresponding enemy zone to yours can't be entered by you. Rifts are a one way trip.
A few times the three of us (Zot, Tora, myself) ran into groups of Asmodeans in Eltnen, and, being organized (over Vent) we were able to roll straight through them. Tora used her sleeping shot that she gained from a Ranger Stigma, I used Inescapable Judgment to snare and force them in, and Zot called targets. We found CCing the group's healer, then focusing on their squishy dps (Rangers/Assassins are easy targets) we were able to bring them down without any dramas. Against larger raids, we teamed up with our Legion and with other Elyos in the area, drove the invaders to make a stand against us, used Brands (will post on them in a few days) to mark up their Healers for our Alliance (Aion's version of a raid group; can contain up to 24 players from what I've seen), and call for focused fire on specific enemy players (take down yellow 1, etc).
Throughout our defeats and our successes, one truth rang clear. The defining factor in a PvP victory is, above all others, organization and communication. Levels, proper class balance, swift and accurate Branding, individual levels of gear, and individual levels of skill and awareness all play large parts, but even with them all, without communication all will fail. Our organized raid group of only twelve players (with only one Cleric and one Templar) was capable of driving the Asmos in Morheim back to their village and repulsing all their efforts at driving us back for upwards of an hour, until the fact that we were blocking off almost all transportation around their zone bottle necked their entire population towards us, and we were zerged by upwards of three times our number of players. Similarly, we were capable of bringing down larger, better geared, higher level, organized raids in our own territory by playing strategically, and using our superior knowledge of our own zone.
All of that said, there is a key item that is used in rifting (and, from what I understand, Fortress battles). That is the Kisk. Kisks are minature, portable Obelisks that allow you to bind at them, and then respawn at them when you die. Kisks can be limited to only one person, a group of six, or an entire raid of 24. They have a duration, and when it runs out, they disappear. They can be destroyed by the opposing faction if found, cannot be moved once placed, and have a limited number of respawns per Kisk.
Placing your group's Kisks in secure, out of the way locations is particularly important, and failure to protect a Kisk (through misdirection mostly, as once the enemy faction knows its location, the game's up) can usually mean the end of your raid. This is especially true since Rifts only stay open for a few hours, meaning that it's unlikely your raid will be able to return immediately if forced back to their home territories.
Another key thing concerning rifting is that after a set time in enemy territory, your players show on enemy maps as skulls, and can thus be hunted down with almost ridiculous ease. At this stage it is key to get your raid moving as fast as possible if you are killed and respawn at your Kisk, as failure to do so will ensure that your Kisk will be found and destroyed.
With that out of the way, I'll get to the point. Templars are awesome fun in PvP.
There you go. Basically, my role in the raid was thus: to assist with marking the enemy's Healers (Assassins and Rangers, with their stealth abilities, are better suited to this), and to ensure that they were exposed and unprotected for our raid to focus fire down.
I was able to accomplish this by binding my Brands to my numpad, and by using Inescapable Judgment to drag Healers out of the enemy's blob and into the open. Inescapable Judgment is a Stigma ability I've mentioned a few times now, and if you don't know what it is, I hope it's not my fault. It has a 15 meter range, and uses an energy beam to practically instantly drag your target to your location, stunning them briefly and then slowing them for 10 seconds. It can also be used to trap fleeing enemies, or bring ranged dps into the middle of your front line. Incredible ability. With its 30 second cooldown, using it at the wrong moment can and will prove fatal, but correct use of it makes you indispensable in any group.
While I don't do a great deal of damage as a low level, Block socketed Templar, I also don't take a lot of damage, and have abilities that make me immune to most CC, which allows me to rush the enemy lines and drag out key targets into dps range, if backed up by a quick dispeller and Healer. In addition to this, I made my Templar big. He's pretty huge compared to most characters, and thus is often targeted first, since he's obvious, and since I stand in front, which means that I block line of sight to the players behind me. While this won't help against a determined Tab-targeting player (too slow for effective PvP, but sometimes necessary to get a specific target) or if the player in question has been Branded by the enemy, it works more often than not, and makes me a prime target.
Inescapable Judgment doesn't just make the enemy's raid vulnerable on an individual level, it also can break their confidence, and force the enemy raid back. Furthermore, it is incredibly threatening, and the simple knowledge that I'm running up to drag their Healers out is enough to get most raids to focus fire on me. That doesn't help them much, since I'm ridiculously hard to kill when backed up. High physical defense and a good block value mean that, when kept healed, their damage is wasted on me, allowing dps to move up in my wake and quite literally destroy their front line.
I was able to augment the facts that I was a large target and an obvious and immediate threat by taunting the enemy. While they tried to taunt us with their cross-faction communication (player store messages can be read by both factions, make good use of them), ultimately I was able to goad a large number of their more touchy players into attacking me first regardless of the situation, simply by insulting them on a personal level. Instead of responding to their insults, I attacked their cowardice (hiding around high level npc guards) and in general called them out.
All of these methods and more can be used by a Templar to Tank in PvP. Awesome.
At higher levels, Templars can also use a Stigma that causes all damage done to one friendly target to be taken by them instead. Save your Healers. Your mitigation doesn't help, as you take damage at the rate the original target would've, but with your undoubtedly larger health pool you can save Healers who pull aggro in PvE, and save pretty much anyone you like in PvP. You have to stay close to them, but it's a small sacrifice. You're a human (or Daeva, I suppose) shield, get used to it.
In duels, I found Templar performance to be a little different. As a class we simply don't have the abilities to take some other classes down efficiently one on one. Good, max level Templars are practically the hardest class to kill, but a similarly skilled Ranger or Sorcerer will be able to kite you almost infinitely (although you can counter this to some extent). On the other hand, duels are one on one fights to the last point of health, and so are very different to world PvP, where you don't know your opponent's level, playstyle, Stigmas, gear, skill level, knowledge of the area... so on.
I've found that Assassins and Gladiators are fairly easy kills for a Templar in duels. They can't realistically escape from you to heal (and if they do, then they leave you a chance to heal as well, and believe me when I say that each point of your hp is more valuable than each point of theirs), and they don't have any significant ability to bring down a high armour melee class. Assassins hit fast, and with two weakish weapons, and so your physical defense is counted once per hit as usual, resulting in even less damage taken than against a Gladiator with a two-hander. The downside is that Assassins tend to have high Accuracy, and as I'll discuss in a future post, Accuracy reduces your Evade/Parry/Block stats -point for point-, meaning that you're down to your physical defense (the same as an equally geared Gladiator, by the way) to protect you. Good thing it's high.
One ability you'll find indescribably useful is Steel Wall Defense. Learned as early as level 22, it increase your Block value by 1000 points (very good for getting around your enemy's Accuracy rating), your physical defense by 15% (obviously useful against Rangers, Assassins, Templars, Gladiators and Chanters), and most importantly your Stun, Knock Back, Stumble, Rotation and Aether's Hold resistances by 100%. It decreases your attack speed by 50%, but who cares. What's important is that it is canceled the moment you use any other ability. Nevertheless, while up it turns you into some kind of god of resistance values, making you ridiculously hard to kite and immune to most CC.
Learn to use it effectively and you've got a real winner on your hands (combine with Inescapable Judgment and Shield Bash, a short term stun, for extra win).
Finally, use a greatsword. Not all the time, your shield and its abilities are what make you special. But suppose you're being kited by a Ranger. You finally manage to close to melee by using Steel Wall Defense and Inescapable Judgment, but you do small amounts of damage with your one-hand weapon, and are unlikely to get a reaction ability from a block off before the Ranger escapes. Hit swap weapons (default shift-z, though it can be put on your action bar or re-bound) and slam them a few times with your greatsword before swapping back to your shield the moment they pull away from you again. Keep this up and, in a duel at least, they might just die eventually.
Every class in Aion is great fun from what I've seen, but they aren't balanced for one on one viability against every other class. Don't expect to be able to always beat everyone else, and expect to be significantly weaker against some classes than others. Just practice, constantly PvP in defense of your leveling area (or offensively!), and you'll learn your own strengths and weaknesses, and by the time you hit the Abyss at 25, you'll be skilled enough to hold your own against most players. Just don't expect to get many kills in Abyss PvP while solo. Templars are hard to kill, but they have serious difficulty chasing people down. So Templars in PvP face the same problem as late game Chanters in PvE: they need to group to be effective.
There you go. Do with that what you will, but remember that Aion is a PvPvE game, and at the very least, to survive in this game you'll have to understand and enjoy your role in PvP combat. Go for it, young Templar. It's a fun world.
Apologies in advance for a long post, yet again in wall-of-text format. I might update with pictures to illustrate points and break it up at a later date, but for now, please read on. There's a lot of useful information for new players in this post, as well as some good insights for even experienced Templars, and two handy links for rifting. Enjoy!
In OB one of my aims was to join my Legion in PvP, as I missed out last time around. I rifted several times in this beta, and every time was a blast.
Rifts are portals leading to either Asmodae or Elysea, allowing a set number of players in a certain level bracket to pass through. Although there are [Spy] quests that you can do in enemy zones, the main reason for going through rifts is to PvP the other faction on their home ground, which allows for many exciting encounters. One reason people might not like rifting is that it's difficult if not impossible at times for players on the receiving end to defend themselves from a large rifting group suddenly appearing in their zone. In my opinion, this is a great opportunity for you to team up with your faction and drive out the intruders. Form an organized resistance in General chat and fight them back. Only one rift is up at a time in any given direction, and only a set number of people can get through, ensuring that they will always be outnumbered by the defenders.
While questing in Eltnen, you will occasionally see zone messages that say "A Rift has opened to Asmodae!" or "to Elysea!" At this point a large portal can be seen in the sky above the zone, and the direction it is pointing will give you an idea of where the rift itself actually is.
This entry on Aionic Thoughts has extremely useful in depth information on the nature of each rift, and should be required reading for anyone leading a rift raid.
Similarly, this post on AionSource is useful for anyone looking for a rift. Copy the script quoted into your in game memo pad, and use the links once in game to show each possible rift location on your map, making the zone easier to scout.
It's important to note that you can only pass through rifts leading out of your zone. The rift leading from the corresponding enemy zone to yours can't be entered by you. Rifts are a one way trip.
A few times the three of us (Zot, Tora, myself) ran into groups of Asmodeans in Eltnen, and, being organized (over Vent) we were able to roll straight through them. Tora used her sleeping shot that she gained from a Ranger Stigma, I used Inescapable Judgment to snare and force them in, and Zot called targets. We found CCing the group's healer, then focusing on their squishy dps (Rangers/Assassins are easy targets) we were able to bring them down without any dramas. Against larger raids, we teamed up with our Legion and with other Elyos in the area, drove the invaders to make a stand against us, used Brands (will post on them in a few days) to mark up their Healers for our Alliance (Aion's version of a raid group; can contain up to 24 players from what I've seen), and call for focused fire on specific enemy players (take down yellow 1, etc).
Throughout our defeats and our successes, one truth rang clear. The defining factor in a PvP victory is, above all others, organization and communication. Levels, proper class balance, swift and accurate Branding, individual levels of gear, and individual levels of skill and awareness all play large parts, but even with them all, without communication all will fail. Our organized raid group of only twelve players (with only one Cleric and one Templar) was capable of driving the Asmos in Morheim back to their village and repulsing all their efforts at driving us back for upwards of an hour, until the fact that we were blocking off almost all transportation around their zone bottle necked their entire population towards us, and we were zerged by upwards of three times our number of players. Similarly, we were capable of bringing down larger, better geared, higher level, organized raids in our own territory by playing strategically, and using our superior knowledge of our own zone.
All of that said, there is a key item that is used in rifting (and, from what I understand, Fortress battles). That is the Kisk. Kisks are minature, portable Obelisks that allow you to bind at them, and then respawn at them when you die. Kisks can be limited to only one person, a group of six, or an entire raid of 24. They have a duration, and when it runs out, they disappear. They can be destroyed by the opposing faction if found, cannot be moved once placed, and have a limited number of respawns per Kisk.
Placing your group's Kisks in secure, out of the way locations is particularly important, and failure to protect a Kisk (through misdirection mostly, as once the enemy faction knows its location, the game's up) can usually mean the end of your raid. This is especially true since Rifts only stay open for a few hours, meaning that it's unlikely your raid will be able to return immediately if forced back to their home territories.
Another key thing concerning rifting is that after a set time in enemy territory, your players show on enemy maps as skulls, and can thus be hunted down with almost ridiculous ease. At this stage it is key to get your raid moving as fast as possible if you are killed and respawn at your Kisk, as failure to do so will ensure that your Kisk will be found and destroyed.
With that out of the way, I'll get to the point. Templars are awesome fun in PvP.
There you go. Basically, my role in the raid was thus: to assist with marking the enemy's Healers (Assassins and Rangers, with their stealth abilities, are better suited to this), and to ensure that they were exposed and unprotected for our raid to focus fire down.
I was able to accomplish this by binding my Brands to my numpad, and by using Inescapable Judgment to drag Healers out of the enemy's blob and into the open. Inescapable Judgment is a Stigma ability I've mentioned a few times now, and if you don't know what it is, I hope it's not my fault. It has a 15 meter range, and uses an energy beam to practically instantly drag your target to your location, stunning them briefly and then slowing them for 10 seconds. It can also be used to trap fleeing enemies, or bring ranged dps into the middle of your front line. Incredible ability. With its 30 second cooldown, using it at the wrong moment can and will prove fatal, but correct use of it makes you indispensable in any group.
While I don't do a great deal of damage as a low level, Block socketed Templar, I also don't take a lot of damage, and have abilities that make me immune to most CC, which allows me to rush the enemy lines and drag out key targets into dps range, if backed up by a quick dispeller and Healer. In addition to this, I made my Templar big. He's pretty huge compared to most characters, and thus is often targeted first, since he's obvious, and since I stand in front, which means that I block line of sight to the players behind me. While this won't help against a determined Tab-targeting player (too slow for effective PvP, but sometimes necessary to get a specific target) or if the player in question has been Branded by the enemy, it works more often than not, and makes me a prime target.
Inescapable Judgment doesn't just make the enemy's raid vulnerable on an individual level, it also can break their confidence, and force the enemy raid back. Furthermore, it is incredibly threatening, and the simple knowledge that I'm running up to drag their Healers out is enough to get most raids to focus fire on me. That doesn't help them much, since I'm ridiculously hard to kill when backed up. High physical defense and a good block value mean that, when kept healed, their damage is wasted on me, allowing dps to move up in my wake and quite literally destroy their front line.
I was able to augment the facts that I was a large target and an obvious and immediate threat by taunting the enemy. While they tried to taunt us with their cross-faction communication (player store messages can be read by both factions, make good use of them), ultimately I was able to goad a large number of their more touchy players into attacking me first regardless of the situation, simply by insulting them on a personal level. Instead of responding to their insults, I attacked their cowardice (hiding around high level npc guards) and in general called them out.
All of these methods and more can be used by a Templar to Tank in PvP. Awesome.
At higher levels, Templars can also use a Stigma that causes all damage done to one friendly target to be taken by them instead. Save your Healers. Your mitigation doesn't help, as you take damage at the rate the original target would've, but with your undoubtedly larger health pool you can save Healers who pull aggro in PvE, and save pretty much anyone you like in PvP. You have to stay close to them, but it's a small sacrifice. You're a human (or Daeva, I suppose) shield, get used to it.
In duels, I found Templar performance to be a little different. As a class we simply don't have the abilities to take some other classes down efficiently one on one. Good, max level Templars are practically the hardest class to kill, but a similarly skilled Ranger or Sorcerer will be able to kite you almost infinitely (although you can counter this to some extent). On the other hand, duels are one on one fights to the last point of health, and so are very different to world PvP, where you don't know your opponent's level, playstyle, Stigmas, gear, skill level, knowledge of the area... so on.
I've found that Assassins and Gladiators are fairly easy kills for a Templar in duels. They can't realistically escape from you to heal (and if they do, then they leave you a chance to heal as well, and believe me when I say that each point of your hp is more valuable than each point of theirs), and they don't have any significant ability to bring down a high armour melee class. Assassins hit fast, and with two weakish weapons, and so your physical defense is counted once per hit as usual, resulting in even less damage taken than against a Gladiator with a two-hander. The downside is that Assassins tend to have high Accuracy, and as I'll discuss in a future post, Accuracy reduces your Evade/Parry/Block stats -point for point-, meaning that you're down to your physical defense (the same as an equally geared Gladiator, by the way) to protect you. Good thing it's high.
One ability you'll find indescribably useful is Steel Wall Defense. Learned as early as level 22, it increase your Block value by 1000 points (very good for getting around your enemy's Accuracy rating), your physical defense by 15% (obviously useful against Rangers, Assassins, Templars, Gladiators and Chanters), and most importantly your Stun, Knock Back, Stumble, Rotation and Aether's Hold resistances by 100%. It decreases your attack speed by 50%, but who cares. What's important is that it is canceled the moment you use any other ability. Nevertheless, while up it turns you into some kind of god of resistance values, making you ridiculously hard to kite and immune to most CC.
Learn to use it effectively and you've got a real winner on your hands (combine with Inescapable Judgment and Shield Bash, a short term stun, for extra win).
Finally, use a greatsword. Not all the time, your shield and its abilities are what make you special. But suppose you're being kited by a Ranger. You finally manage to close to melee by using Steel Wall Defense and Inescapable Judgment, but you do small amounts of damage with your one-hand weapon, and are unlikely to get a reaction ability from a block off before the Ranger escapes. Hit swap weapons (default shift-z, though it can be put on your action bar or re-bound) and slam them a few times with your greatsword before swapping back to your shield the moment they pull away from you again. Keep this up and, in a duel at least, they might just die eventually.
Every class in Aion is great fun from what I've seen, but they aren't balanced for one on one viability against every other class. Don't expect to be able to always beat everyone else, and expect to be significantly weaker against some classes than others. Just practice, constantly PvP in defense of your leveling area (or offensively!), and you'll learn your own strengths and weaknesses, and by the time you hit the Abyss at 25, you'll be skilled enough to hold your own against most players. Just don't expect to get many kills in Abyss PvP while solo. Templars are hard to kill, but they have serious difficulty chasing people down. So Templars in PvP face the same problem as late game Chanters in PvE: they need to group to be effective.
There you go. Do with that what you will, but remember that Aion is a PvPvE game, and at the very least, to survive in this game you'll have to understand and enjoy your role in PvP combat. Go for it, young Templar. It's a fun world.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Shining Slash: Open Beta Edition, Thoughts on Tanking Nochsana
As an addition to my earlier post on the Nochsana Training Camp, I'd like to discuss a few of the challenges my group and I faced in the dungeon.
While the Training Camp is far from difficult, we still stumbled a few times, for a variety of reasons. While the first few pulls of the dungeon were completely trivial non-elites (soloable, even), the first serious pull was two hard hitting elite Balaur on the hill up to the Artifact. It's not a significant challenge in its own right, but the patrol that heads up the hill from the left may throw people off, as it's well timed to hit your group right as you're in the middle of fighting. We cleared the patrol before the stationary pull, but we missed one mob. There's another elite, just outside of the immediate pull range on a rise to the right. It appears to pull if you make a wrong move or fight too close to it, so be aware and either pull it by itself (will test on Live, with Inescapable Judgment) or pull the other two left in the direction the patrol came from and kill them there.
A few of us died at the Artifact when I ran forward and activated it, to test if the mobs guarding it aggro when you do. Surprise, they did. We also found that anybody not participating in the combat won't be pursued by the mobs, even if everyone who is dies. We could have guessed both things, but it's valuable to know for sure, rather than always play it safe and never know the true nature of the pulls. That said, if you're insistent on testing something like that for yourself and your group, have them stand back out of range, go test it, and if something goes wrong, run back out of their initial pull range so that when you're resurrected by your healer, you don't pull the mobs back on you immediately.
In general in Aion, mobs aren't chained together. In World of Warcraft, very often two guards on opposite sides of a doorway would both pull at the same time, no matter how far apart. In Aion, the norm appears to be that mobs will only pull together if they are within actual aggro radius of eachother (you check this by clicking them and looking for the orange circle around them in your minimap). There ARE exceptions to this, such as Chieftain Kraka, who when pulled drags all mobs not already dead in his area into combat as well. We suspected that the Nochsana General would, but the only conclusive evidence I can submit in that regard is that the Nochsana Teleporter will pull with him. Killing her might be all that is needed.
The only other wipes were at the hands of the guards atop the wall of the last gate leading to the fortress, where you fight one of the minibosses. A single mob patrols back and forth across the top of the gate, and if pulled accidentally (as it was the first time, by dps standing in its path, and the second time by the aggro radius of the Doc we were pulling down the ramp), or at the wrong time, can and will drag four extra hard hitters onto your party. The only ways to reliably deal with it are to have your party sprint up the ramp as it reaches the end of its patrol (at your end of the gate), and engage it and the Doc at the same time, or to prepare for it pulling adds and have your group ready to use CC.
One serious negative about CC in Aion however is that it causes -significant Enmity-, resulting in the class that used the CC move almost certainly getting aggro after it wears off, even if the Tank repeatedly uses Provoke (a non-damaging Enmity move, which doesn't break CC). It can be used to save your group in the nick of time, or to make a large pull temporarily smaller, but it must be prepared for by your group, so you can deal with the fallout properly.
Another Enmity related concern that I haven't mentioned yet (shame on me) is that the person that has initial aggro (starts the pull, or accidentally pulls an add) gets what appears to be a multiplier to all of their Enmity generation. If the Tank pulls, that's great and makes Tanking much easier. If a dps class pulls, it can make everything more dangerous, as the Tank's lower Enmity generation can mean that the Healer is more likely to pull aggro. If the Healer pulls (ask Zot to heal for you, go on, do it) then you're in trouble, one way or another.
Very often through the run our group members would pull, rather than let me start the combat, and this resulted in Zot (healing) getting aggro more than once. I also found myself struggling to hold aggro off of the Gladiator in the party, as he initiated the pull several times, and had higher base Enmity gen than anyone else (other than me) to start with. Fighting for aggro with him on the secondary target meant that I wasn't doing enough Enmity against the primary one, and again, that sometimes meant that Zot got aggro (although I was able to get it off of him fairly quickly, and he's not exactly squishy). This was largely a problem with communication, as our Gladiator was often off Tanking when we had extra mobs. If we'd communicated better, we wouldn't have had this problem at all.
That said, having an off Tank in Aion is regularly a godsend. As healing does a LOT of Enmity, having another Tank in the group means that, against multiple targets, the group's Tanks Enmity gen goes up significantly, allowing for more healing to be done before pulling aggro, which is never a bad thing. In addition, you now have more Enmity abilities that can be used in a short period of time (two Provokes, for example), which allows you to pick up groups of adds much, much faster. The only real downsides are: you're splitting your dps, so the first mob dies slower (which causes more damage to be dealt in the long run), and you now have two targets that need healing, which doesn't actually increase the amount of healing that needs to be done by a lot, but the Healer will need to constantly change targets, which puts the un-targeted Tank in danger.
As I mentioned in my last post as well, once the Fortress's main door is broken down by your siege weapons, a group of mobs charges at you. This is easily fixed by standing back, as they don't come out very far, and could probably be pulled in twos rather than all at the same time. That said, even pulling all of them at once wouldn't be bad if your group was prepared. CC or an off Tank would help too.
The first pull immediately inside the door might challenge you as well, as while by itself it is nothing special, but with the addition of three patrolling mobs walking around separately, in a crowded chamber, a good eye for distance is key.
Ultimately the dungeon isn't difficult, but what I've talked about above are some of the standard challenges that all groups in all instances will face. Mastering basic Enmity rotations, the art of pulling, using your minimap or your camera to locate any possible adds or patrols. All of these are necessary to complete any dungeon in a reasonable amount of time, and enjoy the experience. Practice makes perfect in all situations, so just reading about the challenges won't make a Tank out of you, but knowing what you'll face in advance is a huge help. Good luck, and enjoy yourselves.
PvP coming up!
While the Training Camp is far from difficult, we still stumbled a few times, for a variety of reasons. While the first few pulls of the dungeon were completely trivial non-elites (soloable, even), the first serious pull was two hard hitting elite Balaur on the hill up to the Artifact. It's not a significant challenge in its own right, but the patrol that heads up the hill from the left may throw people off, as it's well timed to hit your group right as you're in the middle of fighting. We cleared the patrol before the stationary pull, but we missed one mob. There's another elite, just outside of the immediate pull range on a rise to the right. It appears to pull if you make a wrong move or fight too close to it, so be aware and either pull it by itself (will test on Live, with Inescapable Judgment) or pull the other two left in the direction the patrol came from and kill them there.
A few of us died at the Artifact when I ran forward and activated it, to test if the mobs guarding it aggro when you do. Surprise, they did. We also found that anybody not participating in the combat won't be pursued by the mobs, even if everyone who is dies. We could have guessed both things, but it's valuable to know for sure, rather than always play it safe and never know the true nature of the pulls. That said, if you're insistent on testing something like that for yourself and your group, have them stand back out of range, go test it, and if something goes wrong, run back out of their initial pull range so that when you're resurrected by your healer, you don't pull the mobs back on you immediately.
In general in Aion, mobs aren't chained together. In World of Warcraft, very often two guards on opposite sides of a doorway would both pull at the same time, no matter how far apart. In Aion, the norm appears to be that mobs will only pull together if they are within actual aggro radius of eachother (you check this by clicking them and looking for the orange circle around them in your minimap). There ARE exceptions to this, such as Chieftain Kraka, who when pulled drags all mobs not already dead in his area into combat as well. We suspected that the Nochsana General would, but the only conclusive evidence I can submit in that regard is that the Nochsana Teleporter will pull with him. Killing her might be all that is needed.
The only other wipes were at the hands of the guards atop the wall of the last gate leading to the fortress, where you fight one of the minibosses. A single mob patrols back and forth across the top of the gate, and if pulled accidentally (as it was the first time, by dps standing in its path, and the second time by the aggro radius of the Doc we were pulling down the ramp), or at the wrong time, can and will drag four extra hard hitters onto your party. The only ways to reliably deal with it are to have your party sprint up the ramp as it reaches the end of its patrol (at your end of the gate), and engage it and the Doc at the same time, or to prepare for it pulling adds and have your group ready to use CC.
One serious negative about CC in Aion however is that it causes -significant Enmity-, resulting in the class that used the CC move almost certainly getting aggro after it wears off, even if the Tank repeatedly uses Provoke (a non-damaging Enmity move, which doesn't break CC). It can be used to save your group in the nick of time, or to make a large pull temporarily smaller, but it must be prepared for by your group, so you can deal with the fallout properly.
Another Enmity related concern that I haven't mentioned yet (shame on me) is that the person that has initial aggro (starts the pull, or accidentally pulls an add) gets what appears to be a multiplier to all of their Enmity generation. If the Tank pulls, that's great and makes Tanking much easier. If a dps class pulls, it can make everything more dangerous, as the Tank's lower Enmity generation can mean that the Healer is more likely to pull aggro. If the Healer pulls (ask Zot to heal for you, go on, do it) then you're in trouble, one way or another.
Very often through the run our group members would pull, rather than let me start the combat, and this resulted in Zot (healing) getting aggro more than once. I also found myself struggling to hold aggro off of the Gladiator in the party, as he initiated the pull several times, and had higher base Enmity gen than anyone else (other than me) to start with. Fighting for aggro with him on the secondary target meant that I wasn't doing enough Enmity against the primary one, and again, that sometimes meant that Zot got aggro (although I was able to get it off of him fairly quickly, and he's not exactly squishy). This was largely a problem with communication, as our Gladiator was often off Tanking when we had extra mobs. If we'd communicated better, we wouldn't have had this problem at all.
That said, having an off Tank in Aion is regularly a godsend. As healing does a LOT of Enmity, having another Tank in the group means that, against multiple targets, the group's Tanks Enmity gen goes up significantly, allowing for more healing to be done before pulling aggro, which is never a bad thing. In addition, you now have more Enmity abilities that can be used in a short period of time (two Provokes, for example), which allows you to pick up groups of adds much, much faster. The only real downsides are: you're splitting your dps, so the first mob dies slower (which causes more damage to be dealt in the long run), and you now have two targets that need healing, which doesn't actually increase the amount of healing that needs to be done by a lot, but the Healer will need to constantly change targets, which puts the un-targeted Tank in danger.
As I mentioned in my last post as well, once the Fortress's main door is broken down by your siege weapons, a group of mobs charges at you. This is easily fixed by standing back, as they don't come out very far, and could probably be pulled in twos rather than all at the same time. That said, even pulling all of them at once wouldn't be bad if your group was prepared. CC or an off Tank would help too.
The first pull immediately inside the door might challenge you as well, as while by itself it is nothing special, but with the addition of three patrolling mobs walking around separately, in a crowded chamber, a good eye for distance is key.
Ultimately the dungeon isn't difficult, but what I've talked about above are some of the standard challenges that all groups in all instances will face. Mastering basic Enmity rotations, the art of pulling, using your minimap or your camera to locate any possible adds or patrols. All of these are necessary to complete any dungeon in a reasonable amount of time, and enjoy the experience. Practice makes perfect in all situations, so just reading about the challenges won't make a Tank out of you, but knowing what you'll face in advance is a huge help. Good luck, and enjoy yourselves.
PvP coming up!
Monday, September 14, 2009
Shining Slash: Open Beta Edition, Part 3!
Part 3, featuring the Nochsana Training Camp!
While I didn't get much playing done today, what little time I spent in the game was spent in the Nochsana Training Camp with a group of 5 (Templar, Ranger, Gladiator, Assassin, Cleric). With two hours to go until the end of the Beta, we rolled into the Abyss and finished the quick fed-ex quest that let us enter the dungeon, picking up several quests to kill bosses and obtain "Prototype Weapons" along the way. The entrance to the dungeon is far from obvious, and can't be seen from a distance. It's a relic buried halfway into a floating chunk of land, just north-west of the Terminon Landing. Double click on the relic, and you'll be ported to the Training Camp!
The Nochsana Training Camp is the first instanced dungeon in Aion. Instances are zones which are loaded for just you and your party. If another group were to go to the Training Camp while you were in there, they would start in their own version of it, completely separate to you. The moment you enter it, your re-entry timer starts ticking down. Type the /checkgroupentry command to show the re-entry timers of everyone in your group for every dungeon in the game. If you have a countdown (18 hours for the Training Camp), the dungeon will reset once the countdown is over, allowing you to do the dungeon again. The /checkentry command will tell you your own countdowns.
The Training Camp is, in essence, an Abyss Fortress guarded by level 25 Balaur. There's an Artifact outside the walls to the right that gives you a buff for a short time when you use it. There are a couple of trivial non-elite pulls between you and it, followed by around three elite Balaur and an elite patrol that comes up the road ahead of you. Marking with Brands is useful, and CC can seriously help, but it's a slow start compared to what you're going to go up against later. Once the elites are cleared you'll reach the Artifact, guarded by a 6 or so elites, including a miniboss and a patrol that walks around the back. They will all pull if you use the Artifact (as I found out; on purpose, I swear), so clear them methodically, and take out the miniboss for your quest.
Moving back down the hill, head towards the huge obvious fortress, clearing or avoiding patrols and stationary groups as you go. There's a miniboss on the road up, right in your path, but as with the first one it doesn't really do much special. After you pass through the second gate, take a right and go up to the top of it. There's a miniboss at the other end of it, but you'll have to clear through the mobs on the rampart to get to him. One patrol moves through the middle of them all, and it's key to wait for it to get to the end of its patrol (at your end of the wall) before you run to the top, pulling it and another mob at the same time. Any other position will pull several adds at the same time, which can spell doom. As a side note, any mobs named "Doc" should be killed first, as they heal their allies.
The two mobs in front of the boss can be pulled alone easily, so once everything's down, pull the miniboss. It has one ability worth noting, that gives it a very, very powerful energy shield. Don't be discouraged, as the shield will go down eventually (I believe it has a duration).
Back on the main path, use your the training siege weapon you got from one of the quests, and then use the pet commands that pop up near your health bar to order it to attack the fortress gate. The moment the gate goes down, a number of mobs pull from inside the doors, so hang back and mark them up/prepare as they run to you.
Once you're inside the fortress, clear every mob in the area, watching patrols and avoiding them until last as necessary, then proceed up the ramp to the right, ignoring the cool looking Nochsana General in the middle of the dais. There are Weapon Chests throughout the fortress, and every player will need 4 for their quest. Clear and collect them as you move around the top of the fortress towards the Nochsana Teleporter miniboss. The Teleporter summons additional mobs to the fight, which should be tanked, but killed last. Once everything's dead, move back down, and charge the Nochsana General. If you can't see in the video below, he opens the fight with an Inescapable Judgment style move, then throughout the fight spawns an energy shield, and regularly knocks down everyone in melee range. Have your healers stand back. While he had other abilities, none of them felt worthy of note, and ultimately he was just a higher damage elite mob that can knock down your melee classes. Fun nonetheless.
Enjoy this video, courtesy of Tora:
From testing my Legion did, I have heard that if the Teleporter isn't killed before the General is pulled, it will teleport a lot (and we mean a lot) of mobs to your group, wiping you. While we didn't get much loot from the dungeon (two of the minibosses dropped greens, and the mobs in front of the General dropped a blue chest item randomly), the experience gain was phenomenal. We got about 3/4 of a level from killing most of the mobs in the dungeon, and the quest hand ins brought us almost the rest of the way. Since the dungeon resets every 18 hours, and it only takes an hour and a half to complete with an organized group (and we were only a 5 man, not a full 6 man group!), it's possible to do it once every day, which will speed up leveling and gives some good grouping/dungeon experience, possibly some loot, and lets you get to know your group so that in future dungeons you'll work together even better.
Yet to come in the Open Beta Edition, Rifting, basic low level PvP, and Tanking stats in Aion!
While I didn't get much playing done today, what little time I spent in the game was spent in the Nochsana Training Camp with a group of 5 (Templar, Ranger, Gladiator, Assassin, Cleric). With two hours to go until the end of the Beta, we rolled into the Abyss and finished the quick fed-ex quest that let us enter the dungeon, picking up several quests to kill bosses and obtain "Prototype Weapons" along the way. The entrance to the dungeon is far from obvious, and can't be seen from a distance. It's a relic buried halfway into a floating chunk of land, just north-west of the Terminon Landing. Double click on the relic, and you'll be ported to the Training Camp!
The Nochsana Training Camp is the first instanced dungeon in Aion. Instances are zones which are loaded for just you and your party. If another group were to go to the Training Camp while you were in there, they would start in their own version of it, completely separate to you. The moment you enter it, your re-entry timer starts ticking down. Type the /checkgroupentry command to show the re-entry timers of everyone in your group for every dungeon in the game. If you have a countdown (18 hours for the Training Camp), the dungeon will reset once the countdown is over, allowing you to do the dungeon again. The /checkentry command will tell you your own countdowns.
The Training Camp is, in essence, an Abyss Fortress guarded by level 25 Balaur. There's an Artifact outside the walls to the right that gives you a buff for a short time when you use it. There are a couple of trivial non-elite pulls between you and it, followed by around three elite Balaur and an elite patrol that comes up the road ahead of you. Marking with Brands is useful, and CC can seriously help, but it's a slow start compared to what you're going to go up against later. Once the elites are cleared you'll reach the Artifact, guarded by a 6 or so elites, including a miniboss and a patrol that walks around the back. They will all pull if you use the Artifact (as I found out; on purpose, I swear), so clear them methodically, and take out the miniboss for your quest.
Moving back down the hill, head towards the huge obvious fortress, clearing or avoiding patrols and stationary groups as you go. There's a miniboss on the road up, right in your path, but as with the first one it doesn't really do much special. After you pass through the second gate, take a right and go up to the top of it. There's a miniboss at the other end of it, but you'll have to clear through the mobs on the rampart to get to him. One patrol moves through the middle of them all, and it's key to wait for it to get to the end of its patrol (at your end of the wall) before you run to the top, pulling it and another mob at the same time. Any other position will pull several adds at the same time, which can spell doom. As a side note, any mobs named "Doc" should be killed first, as they heal their allies.
The two mobs in front of the boss can be pulled alone easily, so once everything's down, pull the miniboss. It has one ability worth noting, that gives it a very, very powerful energy shield. Don't be discouraged, as the shield will go down eventually (I believe it has a duration).
Back on the main path, use your the training siege weapon you got from one of the quests, and then use the pet commands that pop up near your health bar to order it to attack the fortress gate. The moment the gate goes down, a number of mobs pull from inside the doors, so hang back and mark them up/prepare as they run to you.
Once you're inside the fortress, clear every mob in the area, watching patrols and avoiding them until last as necessary, then proceed up the ramp to the right, ignoring the cool looking Nochsana General in the middle of the dais. There are Weapon Chests throughout the fortress, and every player will need 4 for their quest. Clear and collect them as you move around the top of the fortress towards the Nochsana Teleporter miniboss. The Teleporter summons additional mobs to the fight, which should be tanked, but killed last. Once everything's dead, move back down, and charge the Nochsana General. If you can't see in the video below, he opens the fight with an Inescapable Judgment style move, then throughout the fight spawns an energy shield, and regularly knocks down everyone in melee range. Have your healers stand back. While he had other abilities, none of them felt worthy of note, and ultimately he was just a higher damage elite mob that can knock down your melee classes. Fun nonetheless.
Enjoy this video, courtesy of Tora:
From testing my Legion did, I have heard that if the Teleporter isn't killed before the General is pulled, it will teleport a lot (and we mean a lot) of mobs to your group, wiping you. While we didn't get much loot from the dungeon (two of the minibosses dropped greens, and the mobs in front of the General dropped a blue chest item randomly), the experience gain was phenomenal. We got about 3/4 of a level from killing most of the mobs in the dungeon, and the quest hand ins brought us almost the rest of the way. Since the dungeon resets every 18 hours, and it only takes an hour and a half to complete with an organized group (and we were only a 5 man, not a full 6 man group!), it's possible to do it once every day, which will speed up leveling and gives some good grouping/dungeon experience, possibly some loot, and lets you get to know your group so that in future dungeons you'll work together even better.
Yet to come in the Open Beta Edition, Rifting, basic low level PvP, and Tanking stats in Aion!
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Shining Slash: Open Beta Edition, Part 2!
Part 2, featuring Tanking as a Templar, the Krall Garrison, and leveling in groups!
When I roll a character in an MMO, I do it to Tank. I play Aion for a variety of reasons, but there has never been any doubt that my main and true love would be the Templar class. It is with great pleasure then that Templars are not only fun to play, but also incredibly fun to Tank with. In Aion, I play almost exclusively with a group of players. The moments where I have been soloing have been few and far between. As such, I find myself in a Tanking position frequently, even while doing normal quests or grinding.
From level 10, Templars are capable of holding aggro with some success, as is to be expected. Provoke might have a 12 second cooldown, but the sheer level of Enmity it causes is to be respected. Even with repeated applications however, it won't hold a single mob forever. Not against the mighty dps of Tora's Ranger. It is not until 13 (Provoking Shield Counter) and 16 (Provoking Severe Blow) that you obtain more Enmity abilities, and so rotating through the mobs you're tanking with basic abilities like Ferocious Strike or Weakening Severe Blow is the only effective way to keep the Healer from getting aggro and dying (protip: if the Healer dies, you die).
As at extreme low levels Templars have no real way to generate enough Enmity to Tank everything, concessions must be made. My role, before level 16 (PSC can't be relied on, as it requires aggro and blocks to be used in the first place), was thusly one of tanking -everything I could-. Picking up adds on the fly, making sure nobody died through the stun on Shield Bash, just generally giving the squishies an easier time of it. It's all valuable. As I moved on through Verteron, I became able to tank everything for the group. The addition of PSB to my arsenal meant that I could gain extra Enmity on the main target, or get high Enmity on multiple targets. Easy stuff, all in all.
The first real test was the Krall Garrison at the end of Verteron. A level 17-20 elite area, it contains almost all of the quests, campaign or otherwise, for the end of the zone. While it has been conveniently nerfed since CBT6, it is still challenging without the right class knowledge.
Before going into detail, I will note that our group for it (Templar, Ranger, Gladiator, Gladiator, Assassin, Cleric) never used crowd control. The only CC we applied was the physical, walking kind. Our Gladiators off Tanked from time to time, ensuring that I wouldn't die in a flurry of stuns or blows too fast for our Cleric to respond to, and that was it. We did get wiped twice, but both occasions were caused by Dukaki Flagmen: small non-elite mobs that wander throughout the camps, and, if aggroed, run off screaming bloody murder, and pull every remotely nearby elite down on your group. Even if I died, quick Evasion abilities, emergency off Tanking, and a quick in-combat rez so I could get back in the game were all it took to keep the group going.
This was accentuated by the fact that we were all in Ventrilo, talking as we went. Communication with your group is crucial to enjoying yourself, and actually surviving. Voice chat software is so useful as to be a virtual requirement for grouping in both PvE and PvP.
Various Tanking methods that are only necessary near the end of the game in World of Warcraft (line of sight pulling, causing packs of mobs to evade allowing smaller pulls, organised wipe recovery) are used frequently in the Garrison, which impressed me, but made it little harder for anyone in our group of veterens.
Ranged mobs with a tendancy to retreat at high speeds and pull adds to us had to be line of sight pulled (putting a physical object between them and the tank, so they are forced to move around it to attack) back to a safe place, and can be snared by most classes if they still attempt to flee. Patrol adds must be picked up rapidly by a Tank, but foresight and planning can ensure that they'll never be pulled by accident anyway.
There are a variety of quests leading in and out of the Garrison, and repeat trips are necessary. Sneaking around mobs (remember, you can select a mob to see its aggro radius, and just skirt around the edge of it) allowed for faster progression, and in some cases basic survival. It certainly allowed us to recover from complete wipes faster (though a Kisk would've been even better).
All roads, however, lead to Kraka. Tora posted a video earlier of us killing this boss in the area behind where he normally stands. Kraka is the first boss in the game, and more than a light challenge for a group of level 17s. The first pull is relatively simple. The entire area must be cleared of mobs first, as any left over will aggro the moment the boss is pulled. There are ranged, fleeing mobs in the packs; don't let them pull adds. There are ranged, magic damage users (Shamans, I believe). They won't run, but they are harder to Tank as Evade/Parry/Block and Physical Defense don't affect incoming magical damage, only Magical Resist does, and Plate gear has very little of it. Kraka may pull as part of the last group. If this happens, retreat until the mobs give up the pursuit. Try and try again. You'll get them without the boss eventually, with no loss of life.
The fight itself can prove troublesome. Kraka hits hard, and a good many of his attacks are magical, so fleeing from him once in range of his attacks is impractical, and the same mitigation/avoidance problems mentioned above for the Shamans apply again. This is unimportant, however, compared to his main abilities. Every 25% health, Kraka puts your party to sleep. While you're asleep and unable to heal or escape, he charges up an area of effect fire attack, and nukes your entire group with it. While its initial damage will take off maybe half of a dps player's health bar, it also has a damage over time component, so your healer has to be aware that people are losing health for a period after the initial hit.
This is all compounded at the final 25% health, where instead of the fire blast Kraka casts Faithful Servant, another AoE with a DoT component that can literally instantly kill level 19 players unless they have HP manastones, or luck. When it hits, one of the most important things is that your healer must top the Tank up first. If the Tank dies, on the Kraka fight, everyone dies. Let dps die if you must, but don't let the group wipe because of confused commands. The Tank must stay alive, at least until the last 5% (where if there are enough dps alive, the boss can be taken down reasonably safely, Tank or no Tank).
One key feature of the fight that most people won't find is that all of his AoE attacks are line of sight dependant. Hide behind a particularly large rock as the cast goes off, and you'll be unaffected. Furthermore, specific scrolls can be used to absorb the AoE hits, allowing even a low HP group to survive the final blast, and certain potions can be used to dispell the sleep effect, allowing a slept person to still get out of line of sight for when Faithful Servant hits.
Consumables are big business in Aion.
Loot the boss, get your green items and, if you're lucky, your blue. The fight's about to get a bit harder.
The first note for Kraka is that he is on a 4 hour or so respawn timer. If he is not there in your channel when your group arrives, he may or may not be up in other channels. This is because there is a large open area behind Kraka, where groups can go to change channel after they have killed Kraka, and fight him again. And again. And again. Until Kraka is dead on all 10 channels.
Engaging Kraka from behind, if it comes to that (as seen in Tora's video, where we managed to kill Kraka in 7 channels before leaving), is easier due to the large number of large objects to hide behind to get out of the LoS for his AoEs. As you may have guessed, it's also harder, because if the mobs in the area in front of him are still alive, then he pulls them with him.
Thus, pulling Kraka is an art. As a Templar, I ran up and Provoked him from a decent range, turned tail and fled. As you can see in the video, I run far enough to cause the other mobs to give up pursuit, then rapidly turn and hit Kraka a few times to keep him interested, before again running behind a pillar, causing Kraka to move closer to hit me (line of sight pulling, again). This is because if you fight him while in his tunnel, adds can and will pull. With an off Tank they aren't the death of your group, but they'll still hurt, and avoiding them is ideal at every stage.
Moving along, I've now grouped from levels 1 to 23, and I'm finding the experience gain to be slow going compared to what I'm seeing from solo levelers, particularly in that as a group, you're likely to literally run out of quests at 24, once the early Eltnen and Theobomos quests are finished, requiring your group to grind from about 24 to 28 (the higher level, the better).
This is balanced by the extra fun there is to be had in a group. More powerful mobs, less downtime, PvP viability (take THAT invading Asmos!), financial security, information sharing, and the ability to check multiple areas of the map at the same time? Yes please. I'm playing a Massively Multiplayer Online game. Let keep it Multiplayer.
Yet to come in the Open Beta Edition, Rifting, basic low level PvP, and Tanking stats in Aion!
When I roll a character in an MMO, I do it to Tank. I play Aion for a variety of reasons, but there has never been any doubt that my main and true love would be the Templar class. It is with great pleasure then that Templars are not only fun to play, but also incredibly fun to Tank with. In Aion, I play almost exclusively with a group of players. The moments where I have been soloing have been few and far between. As such, I find myself in a Tanking position frequently, even while doing normal quests or grinding.
From level 10, Templars are capable of holding aggro with some success, as is to be expected. Provoke might have a 12 second cooldown, but the sheer level of Enmity it causes is to be respected. Even with repeated applications however, it won't hold a single mob forever. Not against the mighty dps of Tora's Ranger. It is not until 13 (Provoking Shield Counter) and 16 (Provoking Severe Blow) that you obtain more Enmity abilities, and so rotating through the mobs you're tanking with basic abilities like Ferocious Strike or Weakening Severe Blow is the only effective way to keep the Healer from getting aggro and dying (protip: if the Healer dies, you die).
As at extreme low levels Templars have no real way to generate enough Enmity to Tank everything, concessions must be made. My role, before level 16 (PSC can't be relied on, as it requires aggro and blocks to be used in the first place), was thusly one of tanking -everything I could-. Picking up adds on the fly, making sure nobody died through the stun on Shield Bash, just generally giving the squishies an easier time of it. It's all valuable. As I moved on through Verteron, I became able to tank everything for the group. The addition of PSB to my arsenal meant that I could gain extra Enmity on the main target, or get high Enmity on multiple targets. Easy stuff, all in all.
The first real test was the Krall Garrison at the end of Verteron. A level 17-20 elite area, it contains almost all of the quests, campaign or otherwise, for the end of the zone. While it has been conveniently nerfed since CBT6, it is still challenging without the right class knowledge.
Before going into detail, I will note that our group for it (Templar, Ranger, Gladiator, Gladiator, Assassin, Cleric) never used crowd control. The only CC we applied was the physical, walking kind. Our Gladiators off Tanked from time to time, ensuring that I wouldn't die in a flurry of stuns or blows too fast for our Cleric to respond to, and that was it. We did get wiped twice, but both occasions were caused by Dukaki Flagmen: small non-elite mobs that wander throughout the camps, and, if aggroed, run off screaming bloody murder, and pull every remotely nearby elite down on your group. Even if I died, quick Evasion abilities, emergency off Tanking, and a quick in-combat rez so I could get back in the game were all it took to keep the group going.
This was accentuated by the fact that we were all in Ventrilo, talking as we went. Communication with your group is crucial to enjoying yourself, and actually surviving. Voice chat software is so useful as to be a virtual requirement for grouping in both PvE and PvP.
Various Tanking methods that are only necessary near the end of the game in World of Warcraft (line of sight pulling, causing packs of mobs to evade allowing smaller pulls, organised wipe recovery) are used frequently in the Garrison, which impressed me, but made it little harder for anyone in our group of veterens.
Ranged mobs with a tendancy to retreat at high speeds and pull adds to us had to be line of sight pulled (putting a physical object between them and the tank, so they are forced to move around it to attack) back to a safe place, and can be snared by most classes if they still attempt to flee. Patrol adds must be picked up rapidly by a Tank, but foresight and planning can ensure that they'll never be pulled by accident anyway.
There are a variety of quests leading in and out of the Garrison, and repeat trips are necessary. Sneaking around mobs (remember, you can select a mob to see its aggro radius, and just skirt around the edge of it) allowed for faster progression, and in some cases basic survival. It certainly allowed us to recover from complete wipes faster (though a Kisk would've been even better).
All roads, however, lead to Kraka. Tora posted a video earlier of us killing this boss in the area behind where he normally stands. Kraka is the first boss in the game, and more than a light challenge for a group of level 17s. The first pull is relatively simple. The entire area must be cleared of mobs first, as any left over will aggro the moment the boss is pulled. There are ranged, fleeing mobs in the packs; don't let them pull adds. There are ranged, magic damage users (Shamans, I believe). They won't run, but they are harder to Tank as Evade/Parry/Block and Physical Defense don't affect incoming magical damage, only Magical Resist does, and Plate gear has very little of it. Kraka may pull as part of the last group. If this happens, retreat until the mobs give up the pursuit. Try and try again. You'll get them without the boss eventually, with no loss of life.
The fight itself can prove troublesome. Kraka hits hard, and a good many of his attacks are magical, so fleeing from him once in range of his attacks is impractical, and the same mitigation/avoidance problems mentioned above for the Shamans apply again. This is unimportant, however, compared to his main abilities. Every 25% health, Kraka puts your party to sleep. While you're asleep and unable to heal or escape, he charges up an area of effect fire attack, and nukes your entire group with it. While its initial damage will take off maybe half of a dps player's health bar, it also has a damage over time component, so your healer has to be aware that people are losing health for a period after the initial hit.
This is all compounded at the final 25% health, where instead of the fire blast Kraka casts Faithful Servant, another AoE with a DoT component that can literally instantly kill level 19 players unless they have HP manastones, or luck. When it hits, one of the most important things is that your healer must top the Tank up first. If the Tank dies, on the Kraka fight, everyone dies. Let dps die if you must, but don't let the group wipe because of confused commands. The Tank must stay alive, at least until the last 5% (where if there are enough dps alive, the boss can be taken down reasonably safely, Tank or no Tank).
One key feature of the fight that most people won't find is that all of his AoE attacks are line of sight dependant. Hide behind a particularly large rock as the cast goes off, and you'll be unaffected. Furthermore, specific scrolls can be used to absorb the AoE hits, allowing even a low HP group to survive the final blast, and certain potions can be used to dispell the sleep effect, allowing a slept person to still get out of line of sight for when Faithful Servant hits.
Consumables are big business in Aion.
Loot the boss, get your green items and, if you're lucky, your blue. The fight's about to get a bit harder.
The first note for Kraka is that he is on a 4 hour or so respawn timer. If he is not there in your channel when your group arrives, he may or may not be up in other channels. This is because there is a large open area behind Kraka, where groups can go to change channel after they have killed Kraka, and fight him again. And again. And again. Until Kraka is dead on all 10 channels.
Engaging Kraka from behind, if it comes to that (as seen in Tora's video, where we managed to kill Kraka in 7 channels before leaving), is easier due to the large number of large objects to hide behind to get out of the LoS for his AoEs. As you may have guessed, it's also harder, because if the mobs in the area in front of him are still alive, then he pulls them with him.
Thus, pulling Kraka is an art. As a Templar, I ran up and Provoked him from a decent range, turned tail and fled. As you can see in the video, I run far enough to cause the other mobs to give up pursuit, then rapidly turn and hit Kraka a few times to keep him interested, before again running behind a pillar, causing Kraka to move closer to hit me (line of sight pulling, again). This is because if you fight him while in his tunnel, adds can and will pull. With an off Tank they aren't the death of your group, but they'll still hurt, and avoiding them is ideal at every stage.
Moving along, I've now grouped from levels 1 to 23, and I'm finding the experience gain to be slow going compared to what I'm seeing from solo levelers, particularly in that as a group, you're likely to literally run out of quests at 24, once the early Eltnen and Theobomos quests are finished, requiring your group to grind from about 24 to 28 (the higher level, the better).
This is balanced by the extra fun there is to be had in a group. More powerful mobs, less downtime, PvP viability (take THAT invading Asmos!), financial security, information sharing, and the ability to check multiple areas of the map at the same time? Yes please. I'm playing a Massively Multiplayer Online game. Let keep it Multiplayer.
Yet to come in the Open Beta Edition, Rifting, basic low level PvP, and Tanking stats in Aion!
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Shining Slash: Open Beta Edition, Part 1!
Part 1, featuring rough rotations for Warriors and mid-level Templars!
While the previous Shining Slash posts have been about the extreme basics of Tanking and group organization, from here on out we'll be delving into the Templar class and it's role in everything Aion has to offer.
1 to 10, the Warrior class doesn't have much up its sleeve that can drastically change the flow of combat. Players are, however, rapidly introduced to two important concepts: chain skills, and the Warrior's Shield Defense. Chain skills are prevalent throughout Aion, and knowing which path to choose through the initial Warrior chain in different situations is a simple skill, but something that must be learned early.
Starting with the purely damaging chain Ferocious Strike -> Robust Blow at level 3, the second option (Ferocious Strike -> Rage) is introduced a fair bit later, at 7.
Rage is a magical shield that absorbs a small amount of damage (lasting up to 10 seconds or until enough damage is done to you), and slightly increases physical attack for the same amount of time.
A basic rotation can be devised through use of these abilities, as Ferocious Strike's 10 second cooldown coupled with Rage's (24 seconds) gives ample time to hit FS -> Rage -10s> FS -> RB -12s> FS -> Rage. Easily rotated, this is the basis for more to come at higher levels.
The other early ability, Shield Defense (effectively replaced by Steel Wall Defense at level 22 for Templars) is an active ability, that once activated, remains until removed. SD raises both Block chance and Stun Resist by 500, and Physical Defense by 10%. The catch is that you can only auto-attack while it is active (using an ability cancels it), and onced canceled it has a 12 second cooldown.
Another ability is gained at level 5, being Weakening Severe Blow, an ability that lowers the target's physical defense by 100 for 6 seconds, and has a 12 second cooldown.
At level 9, Shield Counter becomes available, a damaging ability usable immediately after a successful block. This can be, with a little luck, forced to proc by Shield Defense.
Thus, for maximum effect, a low level Warrior should buy a shield (or a greatsword, if it takes their fancy), and use: WSB -> FS -> Rage -> WSB -> FS -> RB -> SD -> SC (if using a shield, of course). This should provide the best damage to defense ratio, but must be altered as the conditions of a fight change. If there is an overwhelming need for damage output, WSG -> FS -> RB is a sufficient rotation, while if pure survival is required, SD should be kept up as often as possible, with Rage applied as it cools down.
Leaping forward on the same track, as a level 23 Templar, I've found that the basic Enmity generation abilities (Provoke, Provoking Severe Blow, Provoking Shield Counter, even Inescapable Judgment if you won't have any other use for it in the next 30 seconds) are more than enough to hold aggro on single targets against even higher level dps classes. As this extends to boss fights, a logical move is to use Provoke -> IJ (as available) -> WSB (assuming PSB causes Enmity based on damage) -> PSB -> Steel Wall Defense, and then just before Provoke comes off cooldown, PSC to break the Steel Wall. After the rotation is complete again up to Steel Wall, you'll find the ability to be on cooldown, and so the original FS -> Rage can be applied, along with any other defensive abilities you have while you wait (the stigma Holy Shield comes to mind), then begin the rotation again from the top.
So far, this gives excellent Enmity, and satisfactory defense, which is a good mix, as losing aggro on a boss is about as bad as dying to it.
Yet to come in the Open Beta Edition, Tanking as a Templar, the Krall Garrison, leveling in groups, Rifting, basic low level PvP, and Tanking stats in Aion!
While the previous Shining Slash posts have been about the extreme basics of Tanking and group organization, from here on out we'll be delving into the Templar class and it's role in everything Aion has to offer.
1 to 10, the Warrior class doesn't have much up its sleeve that can drastically change the flow of combat. Players are, however, rapidly introduced to two important concepts: chain skills, and the Warrior's Shield Defense. Chain skills are prevalent throughout Aion, and knowing which path to choose through the initial Warrior chain in different situations is a simple skill, but something that must be learned early.
Starting with the purely damaging chain Ferocious Strike -> Robust Blow at level 3, the second option (Ferocious Strike -> Rage) is introduced a fair bit later, at 7.
Rage is a magical shield that absorbs a small amount of damage (lasting up to 10 seconds or until enough damage is done to you), and slightly increases physical attack for the same amount of time.
A basic rotation can be devised through use of these abilities, as Ferocious Strike's 10 second cooldown coupled with Rage's (24 seconds) gives ample time to hit FS -> Rage -10s> FS -> RB -12s> FS -> Rage. Easily rotated, this is the basis for more to come at higher levels.
The other early ability, Shield Defense (effectively replaced by Steel Wall Defense at level 22 for Templars) is an active ability, that once activated, remains until removed. SD raises both Block chance and Stun Resist by 500, and Physical Defense by 10%. The catch is that you can only auto-attack while it is active (using an ability cancels it), and onced canceled it has a 12 second cooldown.
Another ability is gained at level 5, being Weakening Severe Blow, an ability that lowers the target's physical defense by 100 for 6 seconds, and has a 12 second cooldown.
At level 9, Shield Counter becomes available, a damaging ability usable immediately after a successful block. This can be, with a little luck, forced to proc by Shield Defense.
Thus, for maximum effect, a low level Warrior should buy a shield (or a greatsword, if it takes their fancy), and use: WSB -> FS -> Rage -> WSB -> FS -> RB -> SD -> SC (if using a shield, of course). This should provide the best damage to defense ratio, but must be altered as the conditions of a fight change. If there is an overwhelming need for damage output, WSG -> FS -> RB is a sufficient rotation, while if pure survival is required, SD should be kept up as often as possible, with Rage applied as it cools down.
Leaping forward on the same track, as a level 23 Templar, I've found that the basic Enmity generation abilities (Provoke, Provoking Severe Blow, Provoking Shield Counter, even Inescapable Judgment if you won't have any other use for it in the next 30 seconds) are more than enough to hold aggro on single targets against even higher level dps classes. As this extends to boss fights, a logical move is to use Provoke -> IJ (as available) -> WSB (assuming PSB causes Enmity based on damage) -> PSB -> Steel Wall Defense, and then just before Provoke comes off cooldown, PSC to break the Steel Wall. After the rotation is complete again up to Steel Wall, you'll find the ability to be on cooldown, and so the original FS -> Rage can be applied, along with any other defensive abilities you have while you wait (the stigma Holy Shield comes to mind), then begin the rotation again from the top.
So far, this gives excellent Enmity, and satisfactory defense, which is a good mix, as losing aggro on a boss is about as bad as dying to it.
Yet to come in the Open Beta Edition, Tanking as a Templar, the Krall Garrison, leveling in groups, Rifting, basic low level PvP, and Tanking stats in Aion!
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Shining Slash: We'll be right back after these messages
Brief hiatus. With the Aion Open Beta coming up in the next few days, I'm going to hold out for it, and post regarding initial leveling, elite zones, both Abyss and Rifting PvP (albeit at low levels) and low level tanking in general, all from the perspective of an Asmodian Templar. I'll be playing with Tora, Zot and a few other people, and will report with findings and low level guides for the Templar class.
Not long until the actual release, and then I can get into the meat of the Templar.
Not long until the actual release, and then I can get into the meat of the Templar.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Shining Slash: Stigmas
Enjoy this Stigma Builder. I'm thinking that this looks good for PvE Tanking so far, but I'll test various builds once max level.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Shining Slash: Biting off more than you can chew
Part 3
This column will aim to help new players or people not acquainted with the fine arts of Tanking to gain an understanding of the mechanics, ideas and application of a Tanking class.
If you've ever attacked a mob in an MMO, you've experienced Aggro firsthand. As the gargantuan snake monster bore down on your avatar, the thought that it would be nice if you could kill it without it attacking you likely passed through your mind. Tanks are there to scratch that itch.
The most important role a Tank fills for their group is, of course, letting the group do its thing without the big bad guy chop them into bite sized pieces.
It is unfortunate then that many players, even as they attempt the highest tier of PvE content available to them in a game, fail to understand the basic principles behind Aggro.
When a damage dealing player prides themselves on never falling for a boss's tricks, and never hurting their raid's performance, but regularly gets the attention of said boss, they have failed to understand a thing that they had supposedly had to learn to get to that point.
The person who "has Aggro" is generally the person with the most Enmity. Enmity is a representation of how much of a threat you are to the mob in question. When you attack a mob, its Enmity towards you increases by an amount presumably equal to the amount of damage you did in that hit. Similarly, Healing will generate Enmity. It is important to note that Enmity is invisible in Aion. You have to take a guess as to how close you are to pulling Aggro off of the Tank (I would advise playing regularly with the same Tank, to get a feel for how much Enmity they generate, so you know what you can pull off without killing yourself). While some classes have defensive abilities that reduce a mob's total Enmity against them (permanently or temporarily), others have abilities that generate more Enmity than usual.
In Aion, the Templar class has, inside the first ten levels, access to four abilities which are designed to help them hold Aggro. These abilities all generate high levels of Enmity (one is passive, and increases Enmity done by all attacks!). By using these abilities as soon as possible and as regularly as possible a Templar will generate enough Enmity to hold Aggro, and keep their group safe.
Of course, it's rarely that simple. If every Tank could just keep Aggro without a worry, it would be unimportant and boring, not to mention far, far too easy. As is immediately apparent, gear plays a large part in Enmity generation. Luck, high damage dealing stats and higher quality gear than their Tank can easily cause a damage dealer to pull Aggro, especially with a Tank they are unfamiliar with.
Most pulls in PvE group content aren't single monsters, either. Pulls of two, three or even more mobs are commonplace. Tanking them all with one Tank can be impractical (multiple spellcasters at opposite sides of a room), impossible (the collective damage output of the monsters vastly outweighs the collective healing output of the group's Healers), and at times merely challenging. Yet most content is designed to be attempted with a single Tank, and so all Tanks must know how to keep Aggro on multiple targets at the same time.
Step one: have the damage dealers all attack the same target
This is usually the most practical way to help keep Aggro controlled. Enmity is not cumulative between players, and so the Tank need only stay ahead of the damage dealer generating the most Enmity. This is vastly, vastly more practical than having the damage dealers attack targets of their choice, which will require the Tank to generate high amounts of Enmity against all targets in a pull, which is, at times, impossible. It is also vital to let the damage dealers know in what order to kill all of the mobs in the pull, not just the first.
Step two: use crowd control
While the Tank is an avatar of crowd control, more direct methods are advisable if the collective damage output of a pull is too much to handle, or if there are simply a vast number of mobs in the pull, regardless of damage output. Assigning damage dealers to CC specified targets by sleeping, entangling, stunning or kiting them (or anything else that comes to mind) can put individual dangerous mobs out of a pull entirely, allowing the group to leave them last.
Unfortunately, as Aion appears to lack an "instant Aggro" button (Taunt in World of Warcraft made me soft!), and as Healing generates Enmity on all targets, including CC'd enemies, the moment that the CC breaks on a target it is likely to run off and pummel the Healer. Immediately apparent solutions include leaving the mob 'til last and kiting it while the Tank builds Enmity, or having the Tank use a non-damaging high Enmity ability (damage often breaks CC, be warned) while Tanking the other mobs. A similarly immediately recognizable flaw is that this means the Tank will generate less Enmity on the main targets as they are using an ability regularly on a CC'd target. This leads me to...
Step three: have the damage dealers hold back
If a Tank has trouble with generating enough Enmity, one quick fix is to have the damage dealers just CC for the first, say, 10 seconds of a fight, giving the Tank ample time to generate Enmity on all necessary targets. Which leads logically to: if you pull Aggro, don't keep attacking the target until the Tank has re-established Aggro.
You'll be signing your own death warrant, and nobody will miss you.
Step four: break up your abilities intelligently
The primary target is going to be the one that the Tank needs to generate the highest Enmity against to hold Aggro, naturally. Thus, the Tank need only generate enough Enmity against all other targets to keep them off of the Healer. As a Tank, figure out how few abilities you can use and still hold Aggro on all secondary targets. Many games use the Tab button to cycle through nearby enemies. This is usable, but unreliable and usually too slow. It also encourages laziness. As a Tank know all your enemies, know which ones to hit when, and target them manually. Thanks to the fact that each attack takes time to occur, clicking on each target in turn is hardly too slow. Be fast, be accurate, be prepared to break off and get a mob back if it goes after the Healer.
Thus, if you take nothing else away from this, remember that Tanking is not a one man job. For a dungeon run to go as smoothly as possible, the entire group must work in concert to that end.
Formal Apology:
That was too long. Oops. I'll likely make this easier on peoples eyes once Aion is in full swing. Videos and the like. Fun for the whole Legion. That and more in depth, specific guides. How to Tank specific dungeons, bosses, pulls. Templar leveling guide.
One last thing, though. As noted, Enmity isn't cumulative between players. One thing to remember while playing Aion is that there are multiple quests that require you to get a mob to follow you to the questgiver. This is supposed to, presumably, teach players that doing more damage to mobs gets them to chase you further (so higher Enmity means they'll follow you more).
What a few people don't seem to have taken away from this is that, in groups, only one person should ever hit the mob. Anyone else hitting it is wasting everyone's time. They aren't helping, and they're making it more likely that the mob will die before reaching its destination.
Please take that on board.
This column will aim to help new players or people not acquainted with the fine arts of Tanking to gain an understanding of the mechanics, ideas and application of a Tanking class.
If you've ever attacked a mob in an MMO, you've experienced Aggro firsthand. As the gargantuan snake monster bore down on your avatar, the thought that it would be nice if you could kill it without it attacking you likely passed through your mind. Tanks are there to scratch that itch.
The most important role a Tank fills for their group is, of course, letting the group do its thing without the big bad guy chop them into bite sized pieces.
It is unfortunate then that many players, even as they attempt the highest tier of PvE content available to them in a game, fail to understand the basic principles behind Aggro.
When a damage dealing player prides themselves on never falling for a boss's tricks, and never hurting their raid's performance, but regularly gets the attention of said boss, they have failed to understand a thing that they had supposedly had to learn to get to that point.
The person who "has Aggro" is generally the person with the most Enmity. Enmity is a representation of how much of a threat you are to the mob in question. When you attack a mob, its Enmity towards you increases by an amount presumably equal to the amount of damage you did in that hit. Similarly, Healing will generate Enmity. It is important to note that Enmity is invisible in Aion. You have to take a guess as to how close you are to pulling Aggro off of the Tank (I would advise playing regularly with the same Tank, to get a feel for how much Enmity they generate, so you know what you can pull off without killing yourself). While some classes have defensive abilities that reduce a mob's total Enmity against them (permanently or temporarily), others have abilities that generate more Enmity than usual.
In Aion, the Templar class has, inside the first ten levels, access to four abilities which are designed to help them hold Aggro. These abilities all generate high levels of Enmity (one is passive, and increases Enmity done by all attacks!). By using these abilities as soon as possible and as regularly as possible a Templar will generate enough Enmity to hold Aggro, and keep their group safe.
Of course, it's rarely that simple. If every Tank could just keep Aggro without a worry, it would be unimportant and boring, not to mention far, far too easy. As is immediately apparent, gear plays a large part in Enmity generation. Luck, high damage dealing stats and higher quality gear than their Tank can easily cause a damage dealer to pull Aggro, especially with a Tank they are unfamiliar with.
Most pulls in PvE group content aren't single monsters, either. Pulls of two, three or even more mobs are commonplace. Tanking them all with one Tank can be impractical (multiple spellcasters at opposite sides of a room), impossible (the collective damage output of the monsters vastly outweighs the collective healing output of the group's Healers), and at times merely challenging. Yet most content is designed to be attempted with a single Tank, and so all Tanks must know how to keep Aggro on multiple targets at the same time.
Step one: have the damage dealers all attack the same target
This is usually the most practical way to help keep Aggro controlled. Enmity is not cumulative between players, and so the Tank need only stay ahead of the damage dealer generating the most Enmity. This is vastly, vastly more practical than having the damage dealers attack targets of their choice, which will require the Tank to generate high amounts of Enmity against all targets in a pull, which is, at times, impossible. It is also vital to let the damage dealers know in what order to kill all of the mobs in the pull, not just the first.
Step two: use crowd control
While the Tank is an avatar of crowd control, more direct methods are advisable if the collective damage output of a pull is too much to handle, or if there are simply a vast number of mobs in the pull, regardless of damage output. Assigning damage dealers to CC specified targets by sleeping, entangling, stunning or kiting them (or anything else that comes to mind) can put individual dangerous mobs out of a pull entirely, allowing the group to leave them last.
Unfortunately, as Aion appears to lack an "instant Aggro" button (Taunt in World of Warcraft made me soft!), and as Healing generates Enmity on all targets, including CC'd enemies, the moment that the CC breaks on a target it is likely to run off and pummel the Healer. Immediately apparent solutions include leaving the mob 'til last and kiting it while the Tank builds Enmity, or having the Tank use a non-damaging high Enmity ability (damage often breaks CC, be warned) while Tanking the other mobs. A similarly immediately recognizable flaw is that this means the Tank will generate less Enmity on the main targets as they are using an ability regularly on a CC'd target. This leads me to...
Step three: have the damage dealers hold back
If a Tank has trouble with generating enough Enmity, one quick fix is to have the damage dealers just CC for the first, say, 10 seconds of a fight, giving the Tank ample time to generate Enmity on all necessary targets. Which leads logically to: if you pull Aggro, don't keep attacking the target until the Tank has re-established Aggro.
You'll be signing your own death warrant, and nobody will miss you.
Step four: break up your abilities intelligently
The primary target is going to be the one that the Tank needs to generate the highest Enmity against to hold Aggro, naturally. Thus, the Tank need only generate enough Enmity against all other targets to keep them off of the Healer. As a Tank, figure out how few abilities you can use and still hold Aggro on all secondary targets. Many games use the Tab button to cycle through nearby enemies. This is usable, but unreliable and usually too slow. It also encourages laziness. As a Tank know all your enemies, know which ones to hit when, and target them manually. Thanks to the fact that each attack takes time to occur, clicking on each target in turn is hardly too slow. Be fast, be accurate, be prepared to break off and get a mob back if it goes after the Healer.
Thus, if you take nothing else away from this, remember that Tanking is not a one man job. For a dungeon run to go as smoothly as possible, the entire group must work in concert to that end.
Formal Apology:
That was too long. Oops. I'll likely make this easier on peoples eyes once Aion is in full swing. Videos and the like. Fun for the whole Legion. That and more in depth, specific guides. How to Tank specific dungeons, bosses, pulls. Templar leveling guide.
One last thing, though. As noted, Enmity isn't cumulative between players. One thing to remember while playing Aion is that there are multiple quests that require you to get a mob to follow you to the questgiver. This is supposed to, presumably, teach players that doing more damage to mobs gets them to chase you further (so higher Enmity means they'll follow you more).
What a few people don't seem to have taken away from this is that, in groups, only one person should ever hit the mob. Anyone else hitting it is wasting everyone's time. They aren't helping, and they're making it more likely that the mob will die before reaching its destination.
Please take that on board.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Shining Slash: Announcement?
I'll post more Shining Slash on a weekly basis. These opening posts are generic to introduce non-Tanking players to the concepts, or to help new Tanks, as the first Shining Slash states. More in depth concepts will be discussed as time goes on.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Shining Slash: Making the best of what you've got
Part 2
This column will aim to help new players or people not acquainted with the fine arts of Tanking to gain an understanding of the mechanics, ideas and application of a Tanking class.
Furthermore, the Tank is, without exception, expected to be aware of the entire situation at hand at all times. The Tank must have an eye on all of the monsters that may become a threat at any time in the future. They must be aware of their group's mana and health pools. They must have foreknowledge of every encounter, of every patrolling mob that travels through the area, and of every enemy's abilities and how to deal with them. A Tank who is unaware of the challenges ahead severely limits their group's potential, and at many times is a severe liability. This inherent responsibility to know what is coming, and what to do when, is something that no other class is saddled with. In some encounters it is necessary for each member of a group or raid to perform individual tasks, which require immense knowledge and more than a bit of practice. This is not present in most content. Regardless of the level of content, the Tank must always know what to expect.
This requirement means that any Tank intending to be proficient at his or her job must strive for perfection and understanding of the game environment, which usually means that a Tank is more knowledgeable about the challenges that Player vs Environment content poses, which places them in a position of knowledge and power inside a group.
The planning stage of every pull is often overlooked by new players of any class and role. Marking up targets for CC, and the kill order, is crucial in most situations. The group leader, whose role this is, must make sure that the entire group is aware what marks mean what. Any possible patrols must be noted during planning as well, and carefully avoided, or pulled and cleared first if possible or necessary. Any additional mobs joining combat during a pull are issues a group doesn't want to have to deal with.
If additional mobs do pull, however, the Tank's list of jobs grows again, as they must without pause establish Aggro on all incoming targets, while also being aware of any players within their group attempting to CC an incoming target. If the Tank breaks CC accidentally by hitting a mob, the results can be disastrous. This is true for any member of the group, but it is more likely that the Tank will do this, as a good group of damage dealers will always attack the marked target, and leave crowd controlled targets alone.
It is imperative that while planning, pulling and picking up any adds, the Tank is aware of their limits. They must know at all times how many mobs they can hold Aggro on before they become stretched too thin to keep all targets attacking them. They must know at all times how many mobs they can hold Aggro on before the incoming damage is too high for the healer to heal through. If they lose Aggro and are unable to get it back immediately, or if they take a burst of damage too high to survive irrespective of healing, they have not performed optimally, and have put their group in great danger.
In addition to the above, a Tank may also perform class specific roles that other group members may also be required to perform. Spell interruption, kiting (keeping Aggro on a mob while staying out of its reach until either a defined point or its death, which is Tanking anyway!), stunning an enemy to save another group member who would die otherwise. These are but the start, and while all classes and roles have demands upon them, many players are unaware of what a Tank must do in order to give their group the best run possible, and even at times finish an encounter at all.
This may give the impression that vast responsibility rests on the shoulders of a group's Tank, and that is indeed the case.
A Tank must be skilled and knowledgeable beyond reproach. Thus, a new Tank must either play with understanding, greatly knowledgeable players, or must put great effort into learning and understanding the challenges they will face in the future. Legions and even the smallest group of regular players often have set groups of Tanks who have been in their groups for long periods of time. Thus, a new Tank is at an immediate disadvantage when looking for a role within a Legion or even a group for a dungeon. Be prepared to not see LF1M Tank very often. Despite the seeming rarity of Tank players in an MMO environment, established groups of players almost always have Tanks they always work with.
Not all hope is lost, a new Tank who understands all of this, and who has prepared accordingly (practice, study, have the best gear you can get at your level of content) can find a good group of players in need of a skilled and aware Tank.
This column will aim to help new players or people not acquainted with the fine arts of Tanking to gain an understanding of the mechanics, ideas and application of a Tanking class.
While the first post in this column should have helped players without an idea of what a Tank is get a grip on the concept, it only touched upon the many roles that a Tanking player can accomplish within the capacity of a Tanking position.
The first and from some perspectives most obvious (while from others, least!) is that the Tank of a group is often its de facto leader. A group's Tank is in a natural position of power, literally pulling the group forward as he or she chooses, plans and executes every pull. While a Healer or damage dealer can lead a group, they lack the class mechanisms for physically leading their fellow players onwards. Any class can pull, but it is rarely effective or useful, as it greatly endangers their lives in the first few seconds of the pull, while the Tank attempts to gain Aggro on a number of moving mobs (all chasing after the player who pulled, who is during this time also unable to do any damage or healing without further endangering their life).
The first and from some perspectives most obvious (while from others, least!) is that the Tank of a group is often its de facto leader. A group's Tank is in a natural position of power, literally pulling the group forward as he or she chooses, plans and executes every pull. While a Healer or damage dealer can lead a group, they lack the class mechanisms for physically leading their fellow players onwards. Any class can pull, but it is rarely effective or useful, as it greatly endangers their lives in the first few seconds of the pull, while the Tank attempts to gain Aggro on a number of moving mobs (all chasing after the player who pulled, who is during this time also unable to do any damage or healing without further endangering their life).
Furthermore, the Tank is, without exception, expected to be aware of the entire situation at hand at all times. The Tank must have an eye on all of the monsters that may become a threat at any time in the future. They must be aware of their group's mana and health pools. They must have foreknowledge of every encounter, of every patrolling mob that travels through the area, and of every enemy's abilities and how to deal with them. A Tank who is unaware of the challenges ahead severely limits their group's potential, and at many times is a severe liability. This inherent responsibility to know what is coming, and what to do when, is something that no other class is saddled with. In some encounters it is necessary for each member of a group or raid to perform individual tasks, which require immense knowledge and more than a bit of practice. This is not present in most content. Regardless of the level of content, the Tank must always know what to expect.
This requirement means that any Tank intending to be proficient at his or her job must strive for perfection and understanding of the game environment, which usually means that a Tank is more knowledgeable about the challenges that Player vs Environment content poses, which places them in a position of knowledge and power inside a group.
The planning stage of every pull is often overlooked by new players of any class and role. Marking up targets for CC, and the kill order, is crucial in most situations. The group leader, whose role this is, must make sure that the entire group is aware what marks mean what. Any possible patrols must be noted during planning as well, and carefully avoided, or pulled and cleared first if possible or necessary. Any additional mobs joining combat during a pull are issues a group doesn't want to have to deal with.
If additional mobs do pull, however, the Tank's list of jobs grows again, as they must without pause establish Aggro on all incoming targets, while also being aware of any players within their group attempting to CC an incoming target. If the Tank breaks CC accidentally by hitting a mob, the results can be disastrous. This is true for any member of the group, but it is more likely that the Tank will do this, as a good group of damage dealers will always attack the marked target, and leave crowd controlled targets alone.
It is imperative that while planning, pulling and picking up any adds, the Tank is aware of their limits. They must know at all times how many mobs they can hold Aggro on before they become stretched too thin to keep all targets attacking them. They must know at all times how many mobs they can hold Aggro on before the incoming damage is too high for the healer to heal through. If they lose Aggro and are unable to get it back immediately, or if they take a burst of damage too high to survive irrespective of healing, they have not performed optimally, and have put their group in great danger.
In addition to the above, a Tank may also perform class specific roles that other group members may also be required to perform. Spell interruption, kiting (keeping Aggro on a mob while staying out of its reach until either a defined point or its death, which is Tanking anyway!), stunning an enemy to save another group member who would die otherwise. These are but the start, and while all classes and roles have demands upon them, many players are unaware of what a Tank must do in order to give their group the best run possible, and even at times finish an encounter at all.
This may give the impression that vast responsibility rests on the shoulders of a group's Tank, and that is indeed the case.
A Tank must be skilled and knowledgeable beyond reproach. Thus, a new Tank must either play with understanding, greatly knowledgeable players, or must put great effort into learning and understanding the challenges they will face in the future. Legions and even the smallest group of regular players often have set groups of Tanks who have been in their groups for long periods of time. Thus, a new Tank is at an immediate disadvantage when looking for a role within a Legion or even a group for a dungeon. Be prepared to not see LF1M Tank very often. Despite the seeming rarity of Tank players in an MMO environment, established groups of players almost always have Tanks they always work with.
Not all hope is lost, a new Tank who understands all of this, and who has prepared accordingly (practice, study, have the best gear you can get at your level of content) can find a good group of players in need of a skilled and aware Tank.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Shining Slash: It's dangerous to go alone, take this with you
This column will aim to help new players or people not acquainted with the fine arts of Tanking to gain an understanding of the mechanics, ideas and application of a Tanking class.
Tanks. A character archetype and group role common through MMOs, Tanks hold the front line in combat. Their role is, first and foremost, to soak damage. The one trait of a class capable of Tanking, across the board, is that they have a way to mitigate incoming damage in a serious way. This can be represented by high damage resistance, a high chance to avoid damage altogether (evade, dodge), or a way to stay out of the enemy's reach, and so avoid damage.
This in and of itself does not make a Tank (the last example especially).
The second trait a Tank must have is the ability to keep the enemy focused on them. Aggro, as it is most commonly known, refers to the act of an enemy creature attacking a specific target. When you "have Aggro", the enemy in question is attacking you.
Thus: a Tank is a character who is both capable of a) keeping enemies attacking them, and nobody else, and b) significantly reducing or completely removing all incoming damage to themselves.
Tanks are important to groups for a number of reasons, but most obviously the fact that they don't take as much damage as other players, and so are less likely to die before a heal cast reaches them, and that they will need less healing than any other player. Tanks are meat-shields, at the most base level.
By having a Tank in your party your Healers will take longer to run out of mana, your group will be able to take on more opponents at a time, and you'll be able to challenge and defeat bosses or elite monsters that you wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
At first glance they seem useful, but in many situations they are close to necessary. Consider an elite mob in Aion. It has a particularly large health pool, and will take around a minute to kill for a solo Sorcerer, if they are using their CC (Crowd Control) abilities appropriately. Things get complicated when a CC ability gets resisted, or a second elite is alerted. The presence of lone Healer, or indeed a lone Tank, won't improve the Sorcerer's chances of surviving. A heal or two would be nice, but when the Sorcerer dies in one or two hits from even one elite, no amount of healing is going to save his life.
Add a tank AND a Healer, and suddenly the group can chew through elites in half the time it would've taken for the lone Sorcerer, and can take on groups of two or more! With a Tank up front taking the hits, the Healer keeping him from dying, and the Sorcerer dealing enough damage to kill the elites before the healer runs out of mana as well as CCing a third elite as necessary, this group is ready for just about any challenge the game can throw at them. More damage dealers would help, and in rare situations more healers or more tanks, but this three man group is more than capable of, with some smart maneuvering and an eye on surrounding enemies, clearing through elite monsters without too much difficulty.
A Tank can even help speed up grinding or questing in non-elite areas, as they can ensure that even with unluckily pulled additional monsters, there will be no deaths among his or her teammates. This is the role of a Tank, before all others: to protect other players by putting themselves in between the others and those who would do them harm.
Tanks. A character archetype and group role common through MMOs, Tanks hold the front line in combat. Their role is, first and foremost, to soak damage. The one trait of a class capable of Tanking, across the board, is that they have a way to mitigate incoming damage in a serious way. This can be represented by high damage resistance, a high chance to avoid damage altogether (evade, dodge), or a way to stay out of the enemy's reach, and so avoid damage.
This in and of itself does not make a Tank (the last example especially).
The second trait a Tank must have is the ability to keep the enemy focused on them. Aggro, as it is most commonly known, refers to the act of an enemy creature attacking a specific target. When you "have Aggro", the enemy in question is attacking you.
Thus: a Tank is a character who is both capable of a) keeping enemies attacking them, and nobody else, and b) significantly reducing or completely removing all incoming damage to themselves.
Tanks are important to groups for a number of reasons, but most obviously the fact that they don't take as much damage as other players, and so are less likely to die before a heal cast reaches them, and that they will need less healing than any other player. Tanks are meat-shields, at the most base level.
By having a Tank in your party your Healers will take longer to run out of mana, your group will be able to take on more opponents at a time, and you'll be able to challenge and defeat bosses or elite monsters that you wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
At first glance they seem useful, but in many situations they are close to necessary. Consider an elite mob in Aion. It has a particularly large health pool, and will take around a minute to kill for a solo Sorcerer, if they are using their CC (Crowd Control) abilities appropriately. Things get complicated when a CC ability gets resisted, or a second elite is alerted. The presence of lone Healer, or indeed a lone Tank, won't improve the Sorcerer's chances of surviving. A heal or two would be nice, but when the Sorcerer dies in one or two hits from even one elite, no amount of healing is going to save his life.
Add a tank AND a Healer, and suddenly the group can chew through elites in half the time it would've taken for the lone Sorcerer, and can take on groups of two or more! With a Tank up front taking the hits, the Healer keeping him from dying, and the Sorcerer dealing enough damage to kill the elites before the healer runs out of mana as well as CCing a third elite as necessary, this group is ready for just about any challenge the game can throw at them. More damage dealers would help, and in rare situations more healers or more tanks, but this three man group is more than capable of, with some smart maneuvering and an eye on surrounding enemies, clearing through elite monsters without too much difficulty.
A Tank can even help speed up grinding or questing in non-elite areas, as they can ensure that even with unluckily pulled additional monsters, there will be no deaths among his or her teammates. This is the role of a Tank, before all others: to protect other players by putting themselves in between the others and those who would do them harm.
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