User:Quizzical/Tanking

Veterans of other MMORPGs know what tanking is: one or a few heavily armored characters with high max health (the "tanks") use some skills to grab the attention of all of the mobs. The mobs then pound on the tanks and don't do a whole lot of damage, because of their high armor and high max health. The healers can then heal the tanks, and readily keep up because of both the low total damage output and the long time that it would take to kill a tank entirely. The rest of the group pours on damage while being ignored by the mobs. Most importantly, group members other than the tanks may actually be rather fragile, but it doesn't matter so long as mobs focus on the tanks.

Nice theory, wrong game.

Isn't it rather insipid when Bob the Really Big Dragon could beat you to a pulp in 3 seconds flat, but doesn't because the tank in your group has a super-duper aggro grabbing skill? Especially when Bob doesn't notice this for the entire ten minutes that it takes to kill him? ArenaNet apparently thought so, and made mobs smarter than that. Given a choice between attacking a heavily armored tank or a lightly armored healer, all else equal, the mobs will go for the healer. The simple reason that the healer will die much faster is justification enough.

Warriors here don't get super-duper aggro grabbing skills. They thus can't be relied upon to keep the rest of the group clean. But that doesn't mean that you can let mobs run free to kill whoever they want willy-nilly. Something analogous to tanking must still apply.

In the initial analysis, tanking had two goals. One was to dampen the damage that mobs do enough that it can be healed in spite of the resulting drain on healers' energy. The other is to prevent damage spikes in which, even though the total damage done may be manageable, a character in your party dies before the healers have time to recognize what is going on and react. Both goals are vital in Guild Wars.

For the goal of net damage reduction, it is often possible to at least partially incapacitate some mobs. Depending on the class, blindness, weakness, and interrupts (including dazed) are the most common means. This is analogous to crowd control in some other games, however, and it is not possible to stop all mobs all of the time by such means. Some attacks are going to get through, and you'd better be able to survive them.

It often helps to have some characters with high armor capable of eating a lot of damage. Tank grade armor is 110+ against whatever it is you're facing, and includes base armor, insignias, weapon mods, enchantments, stances, and other skills. Warriors and paragons can easily get there, as can dervishes with avatar of Balthazar. Rangers can get to 110 against elemental damage, and mesmers (physical resistance and elemental resistance), elementalists (armor of earth, kinetic armor, etc.), and assassins (critical agility) can do so in at least some situations. That a character can get to such high armor doesn't automatically mean that he should, but it is useful to try to get mobs attacking party members that won't take very much damage from the attacks.

Characters with such high armor should often try to get mobs attacking them, rather than letting mobs go after more fragile members of the group. While mobs prefer to attack more fragile characters rather than more durable ones, you can often overrule this with other preferences of mobs. Mobs prefer to attack targets that are in range over those that are out of range. For melee mobs in particular, it is often easy for tanks to stand in range while more fragile characters are well out of melee range without needing to be out of the fight entirely. It works especially well to pin several mobs against a wall or in a corner so that they would have to back up to go around and get at other party members.

Further, mobs prefer a target that is attacking them over one that is not. A tank typically can't attack everything at once, but to hold one relatively powerful mob for the duration of combat is often enough. If you try to grab a few mobs at once and some run off to attack someone else, don't chase them or you'll also lose the attention of whichever were still attacking you.

It can also help to have some disposable tanks to turn mobs' preference for attacking weaker opponents against them. Minions tend to be fragile, so that mobs that focus fire on minions may kill them quickly, but in the meantime, those mobs aren't damaging party members. Minions are only situationally useful, of course, and should not be brought to missions that require especially careful pulling, against mobs that don't leave exploitable corpses, or against mobs that steal minions (Verata's gaze).

Ranger pets can fight in any of these circumstances, though they should be left behind in cases where frequently having to set them to avoid combat in careful pulling areas can be an excessive burden. However, pets are often more durable than some party members. Still, ranger pets are easily resurrected, so any damage they can absorb is helpful, even if they die.

Still, the above advice will only absorb some of the damage that mobs will dish out. Often the most important part of tanking is not what the tanks do, but what the rest of the group does. That you can't or won't get to 110 armor yourself is no excuse to come to battle with 60 armor and 405 HP. Many mobs can find and attack the weakest party members, and being so fragile is practically begging to be killed. If you come in with such a fragile build and die, it's your fault. It's not your healers' fault and not your tanks' fault, but your own.

All characters can easily get to at least 75 armor most of the time from weapon mods and insignias, as well as a maximum of over 500 HP. All characters can likewise bring some defensive skill(s), whether a blocking skill, extra armor, a self-heal, or whatever. This can both buy healers extra time to react before you die in a damage spike and also make save them energy. A more durable character requires less healing to repair the same blows, as well as less need for preventative heals if one fears a damage spike that may not be coming.

Some players protest that they can avoid a lot of damage by dodging. Against projectile attacks, this is true and useful. And you could dodge such attacks just as well with a more durable build. But many spells cannot be dodged, and trying to run away from melee may well just hand mobs free critical hits--especially in hard mode, when they run much faster than you. You also certainly won't be casting or attacking while running for your life.

Furthermore, for one relatively fragile party member to shed mobs onto another equally fragile party member is not necessarily a good thing. If five mobs attack five different members of your party, it will likely take quite a while for any of them to die, during which time your party can heal as needed and kill enough mobs to make the situation manageable. If those five mobs all focus fire on the same fragile party member, he will have much less time before he dies--and if unduly fragile, perhaps less time than it takes to get healed.

It is sometimes well and good to try to get away when most of the mobs attack you and you're not a tank. But it shouldn't be necessary to do so as soon as a single mob attacks you, unless it is an unusually strong mob such as a boss. It is highly useful for even the "squishies" to be able to tank one mob when called upon, rather than jumping around like a heket and creating general chaos. Stand there, take the hits, and keep casting or attacking or whatever it is that you're doing.

Some players will protest that they're plenty durable enough because they're typically one of the last to die. This proves nothing: a player could be the very last to die if he stands at the beginning of the mission and does not move. Party members that are taking a good fraction of the hits that mobs dish out and surviving without needing special precautions from other party members may well be sufficiently robust. But it is entirely unacceptable for such survival to depend on extraordinary measures to avoid getting hit at all. If you're surviving by running around and getting other party members killed, that's a major problem.

Some healers go so far as to not attack at all; if all of the healers in a typical group did this, it would often reduce party damage by 15%-20%. That keeps more mobs alive and doing damage for longer, which can be a problem. While I'm usually of the opinion that damage really doesn't matter that much, there's no excuse to give up so much damage and get reduced defensive capabilities in return.

The proper understanding of tanking here is distributing mobs' damage among your party members in such a way that no one in your party dies. Having more characters sufficiently sturdy to absorb more damage without dying makes this dramatically easier.