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Rift: Is tanking hard or do people just suck?
No joke. I just started paying Rift again and never realy made it very far the first time. I was in a group in the first dungeon and the Tank could not hold aggro for shit. I mean mobs were running all over the place the entire time. I suggested some CC and this guy kept saying it is straight tank and spank. We did little to no tanking and got spanked way to much. Not sure if tank and spank means what he thinks it means.
The healer just dropped and the group fell apart.
Is the entire game like that? Is tanking that hard or was that guy just a clown or is it a little from A and a little from B. Is that kind of expereince I have to look forward to in Rift?
The game is kind of fun and it was fun to laugh a little at the cluster that was going on, but man it was pretty damn sad.
Any info would be greatley appreciated.
--John Ruskin
Comments
I remember having a tank in Rift and a similiar thing happened. Lost control of some mobs and one of our party members became obnoxious and suggested using aggro skills. I checked and I was pretty much using what I had but nothign taht seemed to be a universal taunt.
This was lower in level so maybe there is something that tanks get higher up. Or maybe, at least at the time, it wasn't apparent.
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If you're talking about the first dungeon instance on the Defiant side there is an area where you do almost no attacking and let items in the room do the killing when you run to them.
Tanks have aggro controls that they must use in order to be effectie. DPSers and healers can do things to steal that aggro just like most other games.. In rifts you can even see boss mobs switch between tanks when they use their individual aggro actions.
No this is the farie dungeon that is from level 15-22 I think. It is a large forest area. We had pulls of 2-4 mobs and we were lucky if any of them were ever tanked for more than a minute. The tank was a 22 and he was using a 2hander.
I have a mage with a rock pet and I started using him and becuase it made things much smother.
--John Ruskin
That guy was a clown. Tanking is not harder than in other games, you just have to know what and when to use. He was most likely not using a tank spec.
OH for jesus jumping on pogo sticks... tanks are hard.
i didn't find tanking difficult at all in rift. played the all of the early and mid-level instances (all of them up until around level 45-ish) with a paladin / warlord / void knight setup, and never had problems. you get a perfectly fine capability to hold aggro quite easily, complete with AoE taunts. it's the usual fool-proof tank skillset.
sometimes you get people who join matchmaking, and drop just enough points in a "tank" soul tree to queue as a tank. You get the same thing with chloromancer mage "healers". be weary of rogue 'tanks' as well. i dont remember which soul it is, but they can join matchmaking as a tank if they drop enough points into it (riftstalker, i believe). you used to, anyway, it may have changed since i've played.
Well don't know how it is now but I remember that back when I played keeping aggro on packs could be sometimes some problem BUT it was only during experts and only if tank had let say T1 or T2 experts gear while dps (who was in that case usually melee cleric + off heals) was raiding RoS or HK on regular basis. Other than that as long as group was paying attention to what they do it was never an issue at all.
And yeah... tank with 2h weapon says everything you need to know... I just should probably say gl to him during next dungeons after fae. The only tanks that are not supposed to use shields were bac then riftstalkers and I believe that it didn't change that much since that time.
as a full tank time myself on rift (Warrior / rogue) , well tanking Isnt "hard", but depends a lot
i was a great tank 1 run (the healer said it , good tanking , dpsers said the wait was worth it) i was ^o^
next run , i did a wrong pull (planeshifted by mistake, got 2 pulls + patrol ) used all my Cds all my tricks but wiped....healer and 1 random dps dropped , i was wth.....?¿?
a mistake is a mistake...if your tank (rogue/cleric is having agro problems check the buffs probably in wrong stance?)
if its a warrior....i dont know, jm using reaver/paladin/warlord for trash , the only thing i need for agro is tossing my "dots" around and is just 2 button press , even have a yank + taunt as warlord :S
ppl suck? yes , a lot of ppl do, but if the tank sucks u can offer advice, drop the group. or kick it and tank yourself
You got a bad tank, simple as that. The Dungeon is very easy.
That's pretty much a whole idea of tanking as a reaver. If your warlord or palading offer some help with aoe then at least considering those skills in aoe rotation is a good idea too. Other than that if anyone has problem with tanking then I suggest revising rotation and working on macros (no matter if you like them or not they can make tank's life much easier in Rift). That includes also macros for rotation and pulls as later on there are several skills that can be useful while others are on cd.
Tanking as a Cleric used to be not so easy, at least back when I was still playing. Cleric tanks were TOO gear-dependent. IF you had the gear for it, then great. If not, then absolute. Freaking. Nightmare. Although I did manage to hold my own with a decent healer at my back. That may have changed, though.
As for Warrior and Rogue tanks... if well played, chances are they will nearly never lose aggro, unless they are undergeared compared to the rest of the group. Rogue tanks are a bit harder to heal, but that's okay. I remember smiling whenever I was the healer and the Warrior tank dumped points in Void Knight... made them pretty damn much invincible most of the time. I even had time to toss a few dots in here and there.
Not enough information to go on. For all we know the dps were starting their dps before the tank had time to build enough agro. I am leaning towards that because you came to a third party site to complain and gave very little information other than it was the tanks fault.
were the ads going directly to the healer? did the tank have them and then lost them? tanking with 2 hander, dont know about that.....
not enough info. i have a rogue tank and a warrior tank, and sometimes ill lose mobs to healers because of hots. sometimes;)
Now if he would have been lvl16 i would have understood, you're not really deep enough into the TANK TREE to have all the right utilities. (Rogue Tanks with Guardian Phase). So this Warrior Tank, tanked with a two hand? Uh....well....
Sounds to me like a DD warrior randomly sparkled a few points into the Tank tree (if any) and thought i'm 22, i have plate i can tank this(!)....
While this may work for magic based damage with Voidknight it certainly won't work for physical damage.
...
sounds to me your tank wasn't a tank, neither in spirit nor in gear / skill.
Well can't say from justicar's perspective as I never tanked as justicar, at least not experts or higher. My main was warrior dedicated 100% to tanking for my guild.
However I had cleric melee dps + off heals (shaman/justicar/inq). All I have to say is that as much as in groups with cleric tank keeping cleric alive on some bosses or (also only on some stuff) holding aggro by this tank from groups perspective was a bit bigger problem, still I found it much easier to dps than when warrior was tanking as for example I didn't need to spend that much time on helping tank to survive even if healer wasn't really the best in the world.
As for my warrior you just reminded me one thing with that VK. There was a cleric healer in my guild that whenever I was tanking he tended to go in all experts as melee with passive heals + some heals from third soul. Problem was that as much as I had no problem with staying alive myself, on some pulls even just on my own and with no pots, he was using cleric weapon from Greenscale while I still had no luck even with the one from DSM. Have to say that it was possible to tank there although even despite my "full aggro & survivale" build, even with all threat reducing/stealing skills used on that guy it was still challenging by comparison:D
Low level tanking can be frustrating until you have a spammable AoE/cleave ability.
Otherwise, keeping threat on multiple mobs can be difficult especially when DPS decides to AoE everything down or attack whatever they feel like.
Also, low level tanking can be a crap shoot if you have a Warrior tank. Rogues and Clerics both only have 1 tank soul so the player is probably more group minded because of the specificity of their spec choice.
A Warrior on the other hand could spec into tank without knowing it because half the souls are tank.
I found that if the tank is a Warrior, is using a 2 hand weapon and has a pet I leave. Because Ive run into this more than a few times and each time ended in failure.
well when a group is shit its always the tank or healers fault.everyone knows that.
We had some good tanks in our guild who did a brilliant job. Not every encounter went to plan but that was not usually the tank's fault.
If your dps opens up before the tank has a hold on the situation, things can get awkward.
I have contributed to this myself by accidentally hitting a taunt ability in the heat of things.
PUG's are difficult to control, but I think you'd find a well organised group or guild should have no problem with the tank holding aggro.
There are of course dungeons in which the tank will lose aggro for a short period of time. That's built in the mechanics of the encounter. You have to learn these things, watch videos, use the right tactics at the right time.
Rift doesn't have a problem with tanks keeping aggro. It's a player problem.
I never had any problems holding aggro on my Justicar spec. Lots of taunts and stuff... it's the 'staying alive' part that made it hard on me. And on pretty much all the other Cleric tanks I talked to, at least compared to Warrior and Rogue tanks of similar gear levels. So much that -when- the top guilds of my server used Cleric tanks at all, they had them be off-tanks, and nothing else. I heard they somewhat fixed that, but since I haven't played in a while, I can't really tell you how, or even if that information is true.
One thing I did love, though, is how Clerics could do pretty much everything competently. My Cleric main had two healing specs, one ranged DPS, one melee DPS/off heal and one tank spec. Was pretty fun being that versatile, even though it meant carrying a hundred different items in my bags.
I am late in this thread but I made a Warrior/Paladin, sword and shield, had no problems tanking 20-50.
Had a reaver tank build, cant really remember how I had it set, and it was easy too- But I changed this build up from 2HD to Swd/Shd
depending on group.
I wish I knew my builds I'd just post em....
Aggro was cake, never lost it unless I got a fear and couldnt cleanse it or some bs :P
Well. a level 14-16 warrior / tank can have a lot of trouble holding aggro in there, but a level 22 tank should own that dungeon. A 4 man group would be a bit more challenging in the latter case.
It takes one to know one.
Lol with all the negativity on these forums I thought the "tanking hard" in the thread title was speaking about plummeting sub numbers.
This forum has messed up my reading skills.
On-topic, tanking isn't hard but it does require a skill-set that not all players posess, and most of that is a keen attention to detail & situational/environmental awareness.
However I think that "tight" gameplay should be the reserve of the toughest group & raid content with the rest allowing room for errors, perfect execution as a requirement is silly & artificial and not how humans function, humans are adaptive & this adaptive nature is there because we make mistakes but can usually find a way to work around or do somthing differently to compensate, games not allowing for that lack soul.
I had tank in Rift. Lvl 50, from my point of view the tanking in normal dungeons is maybe the easiest one what I saw since now, but the heroic dungeons, that is little bit stronger cofee
Without relly good gear no chance to hold agro.
Update:
I have done a few more dungeons as a healer and DPS and come to the conclusion that the tank in question was just horrible. Outside of that group I have not had a problem at al. I did another run with a 18 and we were fine.
I have now seen both Clerics and Rogue tanks hold aggro very well at the early levels. I think I was just unlucky and was put in a fail group my first time in. I think I have done 4 or 5 more runs of dungoens and they have all gone much better.
Well we did have a mage who kept wondering off and pulling extra mobs, but he went AFK and ended up getting kicked. I have a feeling that player may have been 5.
--John Ruskin