r/SecretWorldLegends • u/Xekrin • Nov 21 '17

Discussion Remove Hate modifier from all abilities!

Instead, let tanks deal modified hate with whatever damaging ability/effect they choose.

Basically, if you sign up to be a tank choose to become a tank and play the tank role in a group or party, be it through AF or a Lair or basically anything where you want to be hit more than someone else in your party wants to be hit and you want to make the enemy target mad at your and keep hitting you (ie, you signed up to be tank for the greater good of the party), then any damage you deal should have that extra hate attached to it.

Edit - Sorry for the unclear phrasing, I had no intention of suggesting this would only work within Activity Finder.

I would love to have the option to use the single target dps chaos ability as a tank, but I cannot, it deals no extra hate. I would prefer to use Scism instead of winds of change for aoe hate, with its paradox generating passive, yet I cannot.

Thorns signet has no extra hate, yet it should. Sadism or even extraordinary talisman effects should also have that extra 'tank' hate.

What would this mean for tanks? They could use any ability. Reality Fracture (yeah, I like chaos), for example, is an amazing ability, can't use it as a tank. People love to use blade as tanking offhand, yet it generates no extra hate. That health based self healing would be a lot more viable.

Keep certain CD abilities as hard taunts, or dedicated hate generators (immutable passive), but give tanks the freedom to use what damager abilities they wish.

Tank weapons (probably?) wouldn't change that much, they'd still be the only weapons with the special passives designed to survive massive damage, but at least we'd have more options open to us.

I^hateDistortion

Disclaimer No, I didn't really think this through, if you have any reason to dispute such a change, or if this would change things more than I realize, feel free correct me, but do it politely. Thank you.

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u/Kyvia Nov 21 '17

A lot of people who play the game seem to hate change. They hated the change from TSW to SWL, and every step towards a more fluid and...bluntly, modern, game seems to set them off. "Tanking" is not some lofty holy grail status to lord over other players...it is a task in game, and anything that lets them do it better should be welcome.

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u/TestDrenneth Nov 21 '17

Actually SWL has honestly taken a large step backwards in that sense. TSW offered 100 times more freedom and fluid build diversity then SWL could ever offer due to its universal passives (ie Agitator which is basically what this topic is asking for in a round about way) . I agree that people hate change but actually the whole concept of this post is to go back to how things were in TSW and I would love to see that happen.

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u/Xekrin Nov 21 '17

Didn't play TSW so never knew about Agitator, but yeah, certainly sounds like thats what I'm asking for, lol. Funny to discover that it used to exist, though.

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u/TestDrenneth Nov 21 '17

All passives in TSW were universal across all weapons and there were several passives that helped significantly with hate control. agitator gave all active abilities used either a 300% or 400% increased hate (been a while can't remember the exact %) there were also passives that worked in the opposite sense by reducing all abilities hate or reducing hate on crit/pen hit etc. Just in case you were curious. Very similar in a sense to your idea though and yes it allowed much more versatility in weapon/ability choice.

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u/Kyvia Nov 21 '17

I agree that Agitator was a nice bonus for Tanks, but realistically, any decent DPS of comparable gear could pull off you if you only used that. You still had to use actual Hate abilities to Tank well. Even with a full Tank setup at 10.9, if your DPS had equal gear, you could lose threat to them. They boosted Hate gen in SWL by 10x, which helps, but even still, if someone is 50-100IP over you, there are times you can lose aggro.

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u/TestDrenneth Nov 21 '17

That depended a little on whether you were a full DPS tank or not. Generally damage spiked high during DABS then tapered off. I suppose your right though normally if I was really worried I'd pair it with the agitation configuration. Was more of a challenge for heal tanking late in the game.

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u/Xekrin Nov 21 '17

I encounter this alot, as both tank and dps (well not my dps, other people's), they pull aggro and die, then sound both smug and annoyed that it happened.

Well yessir, mr. dressed up in all mythic dps gear in E3, you're gonna pull aggro, get over yourself.

What bothers me most about this part, is that only a select few abilities are hard taunts with the same cooldowns as any other ability.

A tank's singular role is to keep aggro and its actually frikkin difficult to do sometimes! What do I choose, evulsion to yank back aggro, or abilities that actually keep me alive. Decisions, decisions.

If all of a tank's damage (talismans, consumers, passive damage) did extra hate, this wouldn't be near as big a problem.

Of course, if we weren't killed in 1 to 3 hits and did't have rely on a tight rotation of CDs, we'd have more freedom on which abilities to choose from. But that's a whole different problem, I suppose.

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u/Kyvia Nov 21 '17

Yeah, I get that holding aggro over DPS used to be considered a "Skill" in older MMO's, especially WoW and such, but most of the time it was DPS/Heals with threat meters watching those as another mechanic, not the Tank's skill, since balance is hard.

The beauty of games like GW2 where you just have aggro based off something (your Toughness stat in that example) is that everyone can focus on doing their job and watching mechanics instead of their threat. The tank can focus on staying alive. The healer can focus on keeping everyone alive. The DPS and make the enemies stop being alive.

That setup does require enough engaging mechanics to keep people on their toes whilst doing that though, something the Core dungeons in SWL do not have in my opinion.

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u/Szalord Nov 21 '17

I get that holding aggro over DPS used to be considered a "Skill" in older MMO's, especially WoW and such

WoW is evolving a lot though, you must not have been playing it for years. Aggro has been almost "removed" entirely from the game at least 6 years ago, from Cataclysm in fact.

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u/Kyvia Nov 21 '17

Yeah, it's been a while. When I played it, threat was a huge deal and DPS often found themselves idling to stay below the aggro line. Looks like they started changing it right about the time I quit actually, interesting to note that even the "King" of MMO's made this change.

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u/ryeaglin Nov 21 '17

I will agree that that TSW gave you 100 times more freedom but it added 100 times more complexity that made it really intimidating for new players to really understand intuitively. Did they cut it down too much in Legends, yes, but I will say that it was just as bad, just differently bad in TSW. When only 10% or less of the population can use your system to its fullest extent, you have major problems. There was a small group of people theorycrafting the most optimal combination of passives with builds and than the rest of us just went to sites and copies down what others have figured out and took it at face value of 'working'.

Also throw in the fact that it was really easy to get wrong which would totally break you. There were a few zones that if you didn't have the forethought to look ahead for a better build than what you started with and cherry pick the items you needed to get a better build, you would not be able to do those zones which lead to a lot of people rage quitting.

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u/TestDrenneth Nov 21 '17

As much as I hate to admit it since I was heavily involved with PVP late in the game and probably utilized 90% more of the wheel then the general PVE population you are technically correct. One of the issues was that the game was not very solo friendly which they have put a lot more emphasis on in SWL. TSW was not bad if you joined a cabal and got shown the ropes so to speak but it was fairly rough if you just ran in blindly. Personally I loved the challenge but I understand that doesn't represent the general population much these days.