Saturday, October 23, 2010

Confessions of a 2H DPS Tank

Hi. My name is Tarelther, and I'm addicted to Focused Offense.

The big Ether Dance and Blurring Shock crits give me a rush. There's nothing quite like being able to take the big hits, shrug them off, and give back as good as you take. There's just something about watching that sword and board tank hitting on my healers run like a girl when my blade rips through his armor like it isn't even there. Yes, it cuts into my survivability, but I'm no more difficult to heal that a typical MDPS at that point. If the healer can keep a MDPS alive, he can keep me alive no problem.

It's even better with my pocket DPS class next to me assisting me. Then not only am I ripping through noobs like butter, I give him 65% damage mitigation so they can't even kill him easily. It's true that only works if I'm allowed to stay within 30 feet of him and they ignore me completely and only on enemies in Challenge range when I fire it. The enemy could very easily negate all that by hitting me a couple times before punting me away instead of wasting their time doing 35% damage to my guarded friend. Alternately, they could simply just do 100% of normal damage to me instead. So what if I take advantage of the social programming embedded into the player base? "ZOMG noobs! Quit beating on tanks!" If you don't deal with me, you'll never kill my group. Most will simply choose to ignore me and then wonder why my group rolled them.

Yeah, I take extra damage from using Guard since I can't block, but if I have a WP group healing anyway, I might as well make use of that healing and not let it go to waste.

The real question is it overpowering to take advantage of the natural tendency of the enemy? Or it is simply smart play?

Can I quit using Focused Offense whenever I want? Probably. But why would I want to? If my group can keep a melee DPS up under focus fire, they can keep me up. Why not go for the extra damage? After all, a dead enemy deals no damage. Death is the ultimate debuff.

Hi. My name is Tarelther, and I'm addicted to Focused Offense.

2 comments:

  1. Andy Belford says that they'll add the shield dependency to guard after they have reviewed (balanced?) the utility of the tanks.

    With your experience of the 2H playstyle, what utility would you add to the SM if you were dev for a day?

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  2. Well, that's another post in and of itself. Let me post that real quick.

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