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Threat problems in hardmodes


Thelodian

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Last night i ran the Battle of Ilum hard-mode and throughout the flashpoint i was having issues with my threat. i don't know what it was, my Cd's were kept on Cd i was making use of every stock strike but yet the guardian in my group constantly stole aggro especially on the third boss. i know the boss resets aggro from time to time so i figured it was just him not letting me get the first punch but every single time we did that boss he would pull aggro. i guess I'm just wondering what i could do better so as to not have this happen again. I'm not a newb to tanking, for the last 7-8 years Ive MT'd in wow, lotro, and war hammer with 0 issues.
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Last night i ran the Battle of Ilum hard-mode and throughout the flashpoint i was having issues with my threat. i don't know what it was, my Cd's were kept on Cd i was making use of every stock strike but yet the guardian in my group constantly stole aggro especially on the third boss. i know the boss resets aggro from time to time so i figured it was just him not letting me get the first punch but every single time we did that boss he would pull aggro. i guess I'm just wondering what i could do better so as to not have this happen again. I'm not a newb to tanking, for the last 7-8 years Ive MT'd in wow, lotro, and war hammer with 0 issues.

 

 

I suspect he was using his high threat toys. Dont guardians get "high threat" abilities like Vanguard gets? Failing that he may have been in his tank stance(although I'd hope not). I've found my threat is really good long term but the bursty dps classes are great at ripping it back off me early on. It's more a lesson for him to learn as a high crit class to manage his threat as it is for you to improve your skills. I believe you're doing the right things given your tanking experience. The fight where threat resets is always going to work against you because it does not reset the dps rotations and if you're chasing a dps on threat after a reset they're at 100% output and you are not.

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I suspect he was using his high threat toys. Dont guardians get "high threat" abilities like Vanguard gets? Failing that he may have been in his tank stance(although I'd hope not). I've found my threat is really good long term but the bursty dps classes are great at ripping it back off me early on. It's more a lesson for him to learn as a high crit class to manage his threat as it is for you to improve your skills. I believe you're doing the right things given your tanking experience. The fight where threat resets is always going to work against you because it does not reset the dps rotations and if you're chasing a dps on threat after a reset they're at 100% output and you are not.

 

thats exactly the conclusion i came to aswell, but he insisted that my threat sucked, so i had to find out for myself since there wasnt anything i can think of other than him not watching his dps/threat gen considering i had him guarded, was using all of my high threat abilities as soon as there CD's were up and taunting when i needed to. of course every good tank should question his/her self just as much as an other player. i hope they include this in a patch once enough data is compiled for them to know how to fix it. i dont have a problem 90% of the time and honestly the other 10% i suspect is the dps's fault or a combination of the two.

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Just so we are all on the same page here let me explain. We currently hold threat through sheer damage. As vanguards we have ONE high threat ability. You were losing aggro because you gear for survivability and he gears for damage. Now stop with all these " he must have been using high threat abilities" nonsense. Threat in this game is going the way of warcraft.

 

Edit - I have been taking stock of my gear and will be replacing some of the excess with more damage friendly pieces. Implants and earpieces seem to be the best spots for this.

 

To give you an idea where I sit currently here are my tank specs.

 

Health - 18870, Defense - 12%, Mitigation from armor and skills - 51%, Shield chance - 48%, Shield absorb - 43%.

Edited by Gertbeefrobe
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last poster has it right. threat generation is an important concern for a tank. in some MMOs like eq2 it was the #1 concern in high level guilds. if your last mmo had easy aggro like threat meters or threat wasn't a concern at all.. enjoy not being bored!

 

you should gear enough to survive and the rest should be in damage to keep your threat, and also to make the encounters go faster. more dps is always a second concern, right? carry a variety of gear, and change as needed.

Edited by ururururu
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If you're not having threat issues on the vast majority of your runs but you do when playing with this one guy, it's his problem not yours. If he's a Guardian, I'm going to speculate he was running in tank stance or using high-taunt abilities. (YES, they do have some, as do we- check the tooltip for Harpoon, for example.)
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If you're not having threat issues on the vast majority of your runs but you do when playing with this one guy, it's his problem not yours. If he's a Guardian, I'm going to speculate he was running in tank stance or using high-taunt abilities. (YES, they do have some, as do we- check the tooltip for Harpoon, for example.)

 

Grats you found our ONE high threat ability which just happens to be on a 30+ second cool down. I am curious to know where all you folks with 2 cents are coming from. It doesn't seem to be hard flash points.

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Grats you found our ONE high threat ability which just happens to be on a 30+ second cool down. I am curious to know where all you folks with 2 cents are coming from. It doesn't seem to be hard flash points.

 

Not to mention harpoon has to be used in range and if you are melee heavy they will hate you for doing the DK move.

Edited by Paralassa
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Just so we are all on the same page here let me explain. We currently hold threat through sheer damage. As vanguards we have ONE high threat ability. You were losing aggro because you gear for survivability and he gears for damage. Now stop with all these " he must have been using high threat abilities" nonsense. Threat in this game is going the way of warcraft.

 

Edit - I have been taking stock of my gear and will be replacing some of the excess with more damage friendly pieces. Implants and earpieces seem to be the best spots for this.

 

To give you an idea where I sit currently here are my tank specs.

 

Health - 18870, Defense - 12%, Mitigation from armor and skills - 51%, Shield chance - 48%, Shield absorb - 43%.

 

im using a dps relic belt boots and ears so its not like im not trying to gear for threat and defense stats. right now i think i have 15% crit 38% shield 36% absorb 50% dr 12% defense

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http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=189567

 

It's not just you. The above is a thread I posted. Geared dps will be able to pull off of you. Single-target fights are still o.k. However, the more mobs you add in the worse it becomes. Threat is a very tight line in SWTOR. If you spend a global cool down or two on another mob, nearly all skilled, dps players will be able to pull off of you. This is a design issue and will hopefully be addressed.

 

Rast

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Not sure how hard mobs hit in hardmodes - just dinged 50 last night and now waiting for my healers to catch up.

 

I know it was said/shown throughout development that tanking in this game was a little more lax in terms of clumping and holding threat on all mobs vs. weaker mobs being offtanked by dps.

 

I think that this may be the case, and we're all in the learning curve from wow, where every dps gets two-shot by trash.

 

From what I can see, nearly every class has either a cooldown (saber ward, force bubble) or an ability (like cover) that they can use to keep themselves up while dps burns down a weaker trash mob.

 

The lack of any positioning tools on the Jedi Guardian is sort of indicative of this philosophy as well.

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Geared dps will be able to pull off of you. Single-target fights are still o.k. However, the more mobs you add in the worse it becomes. Threat is a very tight line in SWTOR. If you spend a global cool down or two on another mob, nearly all skilled, dps players will be able to pull off of you. This is a design issue and will hopefully be addressed.

 

Rast

 

Get used to it. See all those nifty tank stats? See any damage stats? This problem will persist until BW adds some +threat to an ability or two.

 

I've recently found myself hoping for this exact thing. I've been running hardmodes for about a week and my only serious gripe is with threat. I run with my friends: a shadow and a dps commando, and they are both very very good so if I skip or just mis'time 1 ability there's a good chance one of them is going to pull aggro. When mobs stun me (and tenacity is already on it's 2 minute cooldown) there's a good chance one of them is going to pull aggro.

 

We haven't had trouble clearing any of the hardmodes but it'd be nice to not feel like I'm constantly riding the edge of holding mob aggro and not holding it.

 

My stats are close (not quite there, but close) to what Gertbeefrobe posted. I'll probably try swapping in some more damage pieces for more threat; though the fact that I have to consider this is annoying to say the least.

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Update: I have since respecced for DPS, and sadly find that I actually have a much easier time holding threat on targets using an Assault-hybrid spec than I do as a Shield spec (both using appropriate Columi gear etc). This is across all flashpoint HM's, haven't done EV that way yet, but no reason to think it would be different from a threat perspective... probably easier even, given the length of the fight and the DoT heavy rotiation. I gather this is something that is going to be looked at by the devs as it is a bizarre situation and reminds me of the neverending Champion-Tank flip flopping from the devs in LOTRO.

 

---

 

I have also been experiencing a few issues in recent hardmodes now that my DPS guildies have started getting the best gear. Leading up to that, threat has been a complete non-issue in the game, where a single Neural Jolt and the occasional Hammer Shot has been enough to hold agro on just about anything, including normal mode bosses. So this recent experience of high DPS classes getting threat on things like Elites and Bosses, basically anything where there is enough time for their DPS to overtake mine+taunts, is something that stands out as being very different to everything you learn while levelling.

 

I'm not saying that I want the threat to be trivial, but it makes a mockery of the tank-spec idea if you also have to somehow spec for more damage just to keep threat up. If you look at the roles, DPS only has to spec for DPS. Healers only have to spec for healing output. But tanks are being asked to spec for both defence *and* damage at the same time? No thankyou! If you are running in your Threat stance (e.g. Ion Cell), then in that case your threat holding should be reasonably easy. That then frees you up to be doing a more interesting job than just being a meat shield, and can take advantage of your other skills to better control the fight. This is especially true for Vanguards, who have quite a lot of CC and are clearly supposed to be more "active" tanks, using their mobility as an advantage, rather than just standing there spamming Stockstrike and HIB every time they are up.

 

Having said all that, we've still completed all the hard modes in the game, but only because our team is good at rotating threat between all people in the group and using each other's health pools as soaks until the taunts are available again. Hardmodes being as they are with Enrage timers means you cannot ask a DPS to ease up on the damage, that's just not an option, so we just work with the system as is and as a shield spec tank that is fairly depressing, lol.

 

As a side note, it's hard to judge in boss fights because a lot of them have scripted threat mechanics, such as wiping threat on their stun skills, or favouring melee range targets for threat etc. Personally, I don't mind those types of things because they are part of the boss mechanics and can be adapted to. I mention it only in case some folks have come from games that don't have that type of thing and wonder why some bosses in particular seem to have such odd seeming threat conditions :)

Edited by ElTorqiro
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