Juggernaut Tank -- Not Viable?

[Noirani]

Hey guys.

 

I've just rolled a Juggernaut and was planning to level as a tank.

 

I've got a level 50 Vanguard on the republic side who I leveled as a tank and who still is. I can't remember _ever_ losing aggro after getting it on that character. I did all the heroic missions I came across as well as every instance at least once up to 50, the only times I ever used my taunt abilities were in situations where boss mechanics made me lose aggro or if somebody in my group ninjapulled. My damage output while in threat stance was doing the job for me.

 

Up until I rolled my Juggernaut I figured BioWare had just made tanking easy so that more people would play them and therefore avoid the lack of tanks issue present in many other MMOs. This impression drastically changed once I tried to tank a heroic 4 mission on my Juggernaut.

 

Granted, my Juggernaut is only level 17 at the moment and I realize that I'm missing many good abilities that I will get later on. Also it's a pretty big readjustment going from a ranged tank to a melee tank. However, when I see this many people are struggling it makes one think if it's gonna be worth leveling the Juggernaut up. They are cool-looking though.

[TheOneCanadian]

ok so i am a lvl 28 jugg and have no real issues holding threat on 3+ mobs as long as dps focuses down the 1 i am... if u spam smash u can most fo the time keep the attention of the mobs that are not being hit yet..

the problem for me is not a actuall aoe threat move and stupid pug dps who dont know *** they are doing..

[Tyranix]

I agree with this. When our Jugg tank is doing the tanking, I have to slow down a bit. The power tech seems to do just as much dps as I do.

 

Also agree on this I'm finding because my Juggy is slower on DPS it's harder to meet rage timers.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love my Juggernaut, love the challenge of tanking with him. But the issue is BH tanks are just so much easier to play.

 

My friend in game is a tank BH and when we group together I normally main tank, but at end game I can't main tank, even using all my taunts, he using none of his taunts or aggro pulls, he'll steal threat from me on just about every fight.

 

Alittle more DPS would be nice.

[Frostbird]

Listen up, there are to ways and its not dark vs light.

 

The ways are : skill and chalange + fun, or WoW. In wow, except very few encounters , all tank-classes are able to tank, all tank-classes have same "sith" in diferent names, all tank-classes boring. Trust me.

 

I was there when Warriors where only tanks, and Paladins wanted to take they share, not only as AOE tanks. SO they got tanking skills. Then Bear-Druid came in, and shouted we want AOE tanking, and they got swipe adjustments and so on and so on. You dont want to go that way.

 

Jug is fine, it takes skills, its not easy and like above me mentioned : pug's need to adapt also. Right now everybody starts with biggest skill they got.. that will change.

 

Ps. That reminds me when I explained to my mate why its not a good idea to pull with Aimed shot or similiar skill in World of Worstcraft.

 

...Wat?

 

If a class is substantially harder to play than another, than it is imbalanced and needs to be fixed. Reason being that if you need to be more skilled than another player to be on equal footing due to your class, then you will never be equal to a player as good as you.

 

From everything I've heard SW/JK tanking is awful and they are being turned away en-masse from guilds doing progression content.

[Katumaui]

I'm glad its not just me having a tough time holding aggro.

[Heith]

Also agree on this I'm finding because my Juggy is slower on DPS it's harder to meet rage timers.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love my Juggernaut, love the challenge of tanking with him. But the issue is BH tanks are just so much easier to play.

 

My friend in game is a tank BH and when we group together I normally main tank, but at end game I can't main tank, even using all my taunts, he using none of his taunts or aggro pulls, he'll steal threat from me on just about every fight.

 

Alittle more DPS would be nice.

 

yeah but you guys get better mitigation talents so it all evens out in the end.

[Kojiyama]

The mitigation evens out in the end--due to the slightly different mechanics and numbers involved--yes.

 

The health and DPS differences don't.

[Kojiyama]

There are a lot of posts in here about increasing the damage of moves, or adding extra aoes or who knows what - these are definitely not the solution. In PvE, as a jugg tank, I absolutely destroy people. Even against other geared 50's, I will win out in a 2v1 every time. Against lower levels in wz's, I can easily take 4v1.

 

First, I assume you mean PvP and not PvE.

 

Second, I'd love to see videos/screenshots of your spec and how you are 'destroying' other geared level 50s with an Immortal tank spec.

 

I'm in full Centurion gear with an Immortal spec, and while I can kill people and be useful I certainly come nowhere near 'destroying' people, beyond level 15 players with no HP than get crit every other attack.

 

If I see some Youtube video of an Immortal Jugg killing players in seconds as Assassins, Operatives, or Sorcs can do, perhaps I'll believe you. But I've never seen anything to indicate that tank-spec'd Juggernauts bring anything unique to the table outside of Huttball leap abuse.

[drkieros]

yeah but you guys get better mitigation talents so it all evens out in the end.

 

There is a problem with better mitigation for us too. When you go on a good parry/dodge string you get the issue where all your abilities start going on cooldown halfway through casting them because the defensive animations took over. This can really suck when you are tanking multiple mobs.

[JLeezy]

Alright. Just finished reading the thread. I am a level 50 Jugg and I've been 50 since the 23rd. Now onto the issues at hand.

 

Tank DPS: This to me is the biggest issue at hand. Since the heroic dungeons have such tight enrage timers, Juggs are an inherant handicap. Since we have no meters yet we aren't sure the true extent of this. This is purely anicdotal and is subject to proof and I know it, but I have guildies who ran almost exclusively with a PT and didn't know heroics even had berserk timers until they partied with me. Now I'm not doing my rotation wrong and they know that. I simply do a lot less DPS. Solution: Not very easy at all since amping my dps might make me OP in pvp.

 

Threat: Aoe is bad, nuff said. Single target, initially it is very hard to keep threat, over time it's pointless as no one can take it. Only fix needed is the ramp up time needed is a bit much. Solution: Make a few abilities do slightly more threat.

 

PVP: We are good at many things, just like everyone else. Any non-tank can kill me in a 1v1. So? I can get a ball across the line better than anyone!

 

Mitigation: Non-issue. All tanks have been theorycrafted to be within a few % of each other. Again NON-ISSUE!

 

Leveling: It was the most painful thing I have done since beating Ninja Gaiden Black. Granted that's cause I refused to use the healer companion 100% of the time. Solution: Use the healer companion and like it, or just do side content until you over level the content.

 

Juggs need some love, but not to the level people demand. The real issue that has been adressed here is the perception. If the community thinks jugg tanks suck we all lose. Right now it's not that big a deal as most servers are just now building a base of 50s and people will take virtually anyone just so they can do content. However if juggs remain this way for too long, then people will have choices and choose to not take us.

 

I'm not crying doom as I am in a guild that would rather work together than QQ about how much easier the content is with a different class. But not every other jugg is in my position. Just a little love BW...but NOT too much. I hate FOTM!

 

well said, totally agree with this post as I am also in a guild who approaches FP/HM as a challenge and strive for good team work over QQin'g over how classes are broken...and as you say, "JUST A LITTLE LOVE BW.....JUST A LITTE, but NO FOTM please!"

[Russianzombie]

The big problem is they gave Taunt such a long cd, they either need to fix that or give Soruso Form give 100% threat chance instead of 50%. Its really had to tank right now... my dps keeps dying because all my threat abilities are on cd...

[DarthFletcher]

You right there is something wrong with the Juggs i started one recently because I was missing my tank spec char which I have done in previous MMOs for the guild

 

I was told I S*** tank in an heroic because I couldn't hold agro, this didnt come as a suprise when we had no CC and the healer well lets say he/she must have been on vacation, so I was left with the world worse AOE which does little damage and can stun none strong / elite mobs.

 

BioWare need to look at the class properly and start to add a threat value to moves, I don't mind going through a rotation as long as it is clear that our class can do the job its made for! You really shouldn't need to taunt constantly to keep a mob, Sunder should have the 5 stack of reduce armour changed to 1x Stack = 20% threat and lower cool down on it and lower the initial damage it does too therefore we get a agro building move that will keep up at 100% agro on a mob.

 

Slam? god I can't remeber but its the one you jump in air and can stun targets around you needs to be altered to give threat to multiple mobs because its the 1st move you will be landing to give you a chance to start tanking should be 150%-200% therefore by time the aoe hailstorm comes your already comfortable with the mobs, use taunt or the mass taunt to keep mobs in line.

 

In an happier note I am glad its not just me that found this lack of threat to be demoralising.

[Midichlorien]

The big problem is they gave Taunt such a long cd, they either need to fix that or give Soruso Form give 100% threat chance instead of 50%. Its really had to tank right now... my dps keeps dying because all my threat abilities are on cd...

 

The base threat should be higher (be it by stance or be it by a higher threat value of some of our attacks) and it should come along with some more dps even in tank builds. Taunt is and should be just an "oh **** button".

 

It's not only the threat thing. Ok, there are no dpsmeters right now in the game, but I strongly believe that our dps output in tanking spec in compare to PTs and Assassins is lacking. Dps just plays a too big role in the content of this game to ignore this fact.

Edited February 13, 2012 by Midichlorien

[VelnikSP]

I keep hearing this whole thing about 'tell your team to lay off the dps until you get aggro' and similar stuff.

 

The question is, why? why should the rest of the team have to gimp their damage or play careful aggro games just to give a tank a chance to do their job?

 

There's no LOGICAL REASON you should have to tell players to lay off their attacks. Only the requirements of a distinctly odd aggro mechanic, where someone shooting at you from behind cover 30 meters away is somehow more important than the guy sticking a lightsaber in your FACE, make this neccessary.

 

Bear in mind, I come from a city of heroes background. To me, a tank should be able to hold 100% aggro, all the time. You would have to do something astonishingly stupid to steal aggro from a true tank, something like aggroing another mob far away from the ones the tank is controlling.

 

I say, Juggs (and all tank classes, for that matter!) should have their aoe aggro generation cranked through the roof. Let a tank actually INCREASE your team's dps generation instead of decreasing it due to weird aggro mechanics and counterintuitive tactical requirements.

[slelfief]

Unlike WoW, you are not supposed to tank everything in a pack.

 

Your job is to build aggro on the strongest mobs in a pack and work your way down if necessary. DPS are supposed to pick off the weak mobs first and work their way up. If your dps are attacking the strong mobs before killing off the weak guys then let them die until they learn otherwise.

[AKfourtyseven]

 

Bear in mind, I come from a city of heroes background. To me, a tank should be able to hold 100% aggro, all the time. You would have to do something astonishingly stupid to steal aggro from a true tank, something like aggroing another mob far away from the ones the tank is controlling.

 

 

Ahhh,but as a fellow CoH man i can honestly tell you that the dynamics from that game wont be remotely replicated here. CoH was designed from the ground up for team synergy, for each role to be needed and for those who perform that role to be clearly better than anyone else at it. In this game it seems to me that they designed classes to stand alone first (as in make sure everyone can DPS) and then looked at group roles and synergy after.

[Creed_Buhallin]

I keep hearing this whole thing about 'tell your team to lay off the dps until you get aggro' and similar stuff.

 

The question is, why? why should the rest of the team have to gimp their damage or play careful aggro games just to give a tank a chance to do their job?

 

There's no LOGICAL REASON you should have to tell players to lay off their attacks.

Maybe because if the DPS/Healers can never overwhelm your threat generation, there's not even really much of a point to the entire concept of tanking/aggro?

 

Really, what you're asking for might as well be EVE's "Whoever hits it first gets the aggro, and it never changes" AI. Trust me - it sucks.

 

Giving DPS enough damage potential to pull aggro from you keeps them in the threat management game, and makes the game deeper for everyone. If everyone goes all out and the end result is DPS can never take your aggro, then there's no choices - you pick your rotation, and press your buttons, and that's that. Where's the thought in that?

 

I honestly don't understand this argument that so many people are making that if the DPS can ever pull aggro from the tank it means something's wrong with one or the other (usually the tank). I'll admit that I abandoned WoW years ago, but is this really how it is for most people now? That DPS don't have to try to moderate their output at all? That whole idea just seems completely alien to me.

 

So yes, there's very much a logical reason to require DPS'ers to have to lay off their attacks.

[Creed_Buhallin]

Ahhh,but as a fellow CoH man i can honestly tell you that the dynamics from that game wont be remotely replicated here. CoH was designed from the ground up for team synergy, for each role to be needed and for those who perform that role to be clearly better than anyone else at it. In this game it seems to me that they designed classes to stand alone first (as in make sure everyone can DPS) and then looked at group roles and synergy after.

I know it's off topic, but this is a deeply wrong reading of CoH.

 

More than any other game I've ever played, CoH did NOT require you to have each role. My family and I played very successfully in different groups, often without a tank and never with a healer. (First was Kinetic Defender/Grav Controller/Katana Scrapper, second was Ice Controller/Archery Blaster/Shield Tank). CoH tactics only really required two things - damage mitigation and damage output. Tanks may have been a classic method of damage mitigation, but Controllers or good solid Defenders could provide the same thing. Honestly, we quit the game from each group because it was too boring - we had a pattern that would just shred groups. And never with a tank.

[AKfourtyseven]

I know it's off topic, but this is a deeply wrong reading of CoH.

 

More than any other game I've ever played, CoH did NOT require you to have each role. My family and I played very successfully in different groups, often without a tank and never with a healer. (First was Kinetic Defender/Grav Controller/Katana Scrapper, second was Ice Controller/Archery Blaster/Shield Tank). CoH tactics only really required two things - damage mitigation and damage output. Tanks may have been a classic method of damage mitigation, but Controllers or good solid Defenders could provide the same thing. Honestly, we quit the game from each group because it was too boring - we had a pattern that would just shred groups. And never with a tank.

 

Shield tank? See, now we are talking late CoH, i was in from beta and played for a few (well 5 on-off) years, trust me, especially early on it was designed specifically around group synergy.

 

Also i know exactly what troller could do, i had 5 at level 50. What you missed was that Coh had more than 3 roles and in addition to this the troller had the defenders role as its secondary. Also, scrapper could tank, i know this because i had a invuln scrapper (which were so good at tanking we got nerfed...)

 

So, in effect it was still based around roles but the roles where:

 

Tank

DD

Support : healer, buffer, debuffer, crowd control

 

Edit: the key word is something this game lacks: synergy. The purposeful design for things to work together and force-multiply when grouped.

Edited February 13, 2012 by AKfourtyseven

[dutch-master]

I think Juggernauts get a LOT of bad press. Mainly due to the fact that they actually become tanks at 14 and they really start to shine at the 32 when they get spammable AoE (Sweeping Slash). I imagine people give up and roll a Powertech by then...

 

I tanked nearly everything while leveling using a soresu based vengeance spec without issues. That is probably not ideal but it worked well for me at the time. Allowing me to kill things in PvP while guarding whatever was convenient. I also didnt really have the rage issues you might expect, though I did have to keep an eye on things.

 

I think that going into Immortal to early is a waste of time and really only becomes viable later on.

 

Also I think that anyone losing threat is doing it wrong. The only issues I had were jerk sorcerers using overload to spread everything out of my AoE range. Sooooo annoying.

 

TL;DR They are viable, hang in there.

[angrydurf]

Jugg/Guardian tanks can hold aggro just fine IF DPS learns to keep it in thier pants and not blow their entire resource pool on AOEs in the first three seconds of the fight.

 

Good CC, Good Target management, DPS playing for sustained DPS not burst. All of this make Juggs/Guardians work fine.

 

The problem could be declared to be a problem with DPS needing to L2P. But for one thing. The other tanks (or at least Powertechs/Vanguards) don't need any of that.

 

No PT's/Vanguards complain about holding aoe threat, or threat in general outside of poor tanks and DPS REALLY pushing.

 

It's the comparison that is the problem, why bring a jugg/Guard if you can get a PT/VG and not have to play so tight a game?

[Creed_Buhallin]

Shield tank? See, now we are talking late CoH, i was in from beta and played for a few (well 5 on-off) years, trust me, especially early on it was designed specifically around group synergy.

 

Also i know exactly what troller could do, i had 5 at level 50. What you missed was that Coh had more than 3 roles and in addition to this the troller had the defenders role as its secondary. Also, scrapper could tank, i know this because i had a invuln scrapper (which were so good at tanking we got nerfed...)

You missed the first group for the second. We were there from Day 0, and played very successfully without a tank at all. Again, you fundamentally misunderstand the system CoH presented.

 

There were no "roles" - there were things that needed to be done. Really only two: Damage infliction, and damage mitigation. You didn't need a tank - controllers could function just as well for damage mitigation. It's not an uncommon mistake - my best friend never could quite wrap his brain around the idea that our group could be successful without a healer. We never needed it - our crew could drop groups so fast we never took any notable damage. Like I said, it got boring. It didn't work so well for the endgame, but we weren't especially focused on that.

Edit: the key word is something this game lacks: synergy. The purposeful design for things to work together and force-multiply when grouped.

This I actually agree with. The abilities in SWTOR tend to be very direct. Given the history of CoH though, I'm not sure you can really hold it up as "better". Were there more combos? Yes, but I'd question whether Wormhole+Fulcrum Shift+Cuisinart on every group you come across necessarily makes for a better game. The later-day farming missions from the AE showed just how little grasp of their own combo ability the devs had.

[VelnikSP]

I am not really trying to hold up CoH as 'better'. sheer sales numbers, and the cold hard fact that the game was struggling to make ends meet through nearly it's entire history, would make such an attempt the height of foolishness.

 

but, there were lessons that could have been learned from CoH, and many many mistakes that could have been learned from as well.

 

Synergy is key. having players be each other's force multipliers is a lot more fun than playing a team full of soloists.

 

Meaningful difficulty sliders (Let the people that are into true challenge have that opportunity from the beginning... if you are that tough, filling BT with champions at level 12 could be an option)

 

Gear is seriously overrated, and in fact making SWTOR gear-driven I think was a huge mistake. Luke Skywalker wasn't wearing magic robes of willpower, Han Solo wasn't wearing magical pants (although apparently Leia was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt). Some people thought Princess Leia's slave outfit multiplied her charisma, but it WAS an enhancement, it didn't contain them.

 

Roles were only loosely defined, but you could build to be supreme within those roles. Virtually any group of 3-5 characters could work out tactics to be wildly successful.

 

Don't get me wrong, I think SWTOR is a decent game. or I wouldn't be throwing money at EA, but I would have thrown the same money at Mass Effect Online, and I would have felt the universe suited the game mechanics much better. SWTOR bears the same relationship to the 'Star Wars' universe that the most recent three musketeers movie (with Mila Jovovich) bears to the original Dumas novel.

[thorizdin]

 

Gear is seriously overrated, and in fact making SWTOR gear-driven I think was a huge mistake. Luke Skywalker wasn't wearing magic robes of willpower, Han Solo wasn't wearing magical pants (although apparently Leia was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt). Some people thought Princess Leia's slave outfit multiplied her charisma, but it WAS an enhancement, it didn't contain them.

 

Gotta agree with this, gear based progression blows chunks and is the 2nd worst form of laziness in game design.

[Xaero]

In WoW 90% of trash were MELEE. In SWTOR 90% trash are RANGED.

 

We lose time running around.