Vanguard PVP tanking

[Gladerunner]

I use the word "tanking" very lightly. Against a mediocre enemy, you could survive for a pretty long time if you're team mates are decent dps and you're healer concentrating on you. Against a well versed enemy, you become a lightning bolt and every single tech and force power not only bypasses you're armor, but any shielding you have. So as a Vanguard PVP tank, you are reduced to below average damage, with you're useful only as Storm, Harpoon and Taunt spam.

 

Im not saying Vanguard tanking is impossible, I have done decently well and I have a decent amount of Battlemaster pieces. Im saying that our passive damage mitigation becomes questionable when we cannot parry and rely on defence chance more.

 

As a suggestion to the Devs, we should be able to shield against Tech and Force attacks given enough investment into the Shield Specialist tree. My idea is that for every stack of Power Screen you have, you gain a 20% chance per stack to remove 1 stack to make your shield intercept force and tech powers for maybe 10 seconds, applicable every 10 seconds. Even with 60% shield and 60% absorbtion, that's at most a 60% reduction with an overall 36% damage reduction over time.

 

Force/Tech will still ignore armor, and you will still have to build up a decent amount of Power screen for this to work. Also, you would also have to invest at least 26 points in Shield spec, even more if this was attached to a skill such as Counter-attack (2nd from the top that increases shield chance by 2%, 3/3)

 

tl:dr, PVP tanking is not really tanking, vanguards would appreciate a mechanic to reduce force and tech damage.

[Rassuro]

Storm and Guard are indeed the main two reasons to spec as Vanguard tank in PVP. Improving shield would make us more difficult to kill, but it wouldn't really do much to change the role IMO. Tanks are there to keep other players from dying, Storm makes us decent ballcarriers.

 

I agree that something should be done to change Shield though, either by making it also work at least somewhat against Force and Tech abilities, or by having the Shield and/or Absorption stats also do something else (for example it could be by having them give increased armor, increased duration or effectiveness of defensive abiliities, or decreasing their cooldowns, for Assassins it could make sense to have e.g. Absorption give increased self healing, and so on)

 

BTW, just to clarify:

Against a well versed enemy, you become a lightning bolt and every single tech and force power not only bypasses you're armor, but any shielding you have.

With armor, it does not matter if the ability is tech or force or something else, that matters is the type of damage it does.

 

Armor works against energy and kinetic damage (sometimes just referred to "normal" or "weapon" damage) but does not work against elemental and internal damage.

[-ThEoNe-]

Yeah, the whole passive mitigations may be awesome in PvE, but in PvP its terrible. And since we only have one true CD (which isn't the greatest to begin with) its really hard to tank all that burst damage in PvP. I play all three, and even though the my shadow has way lower armor/shield/absorption than my VG, he stays alive way longer.

 

I think there needs to be a change to AR and give us another true cd, maybe one that allows our shields to absorb yellow and white damage for a certain amount of time. Anything really to cushion some of the beating that is dished out from the sorcs and pyrotechs out there.

[Gladerunner]

Yeah, passive mitigation seems to easy, so they give the better CDs to Guardians and Shadows, who have far more utility in PVP. Kinda unfair.

 

Im beginning to wonder whether there is actually any endgame advantage to rolling a vanguard. Our only benefit compared to Shadows or Guardians is that we have decent 30m attacks and a lot of good 10m attacks. But with all the slows and leaps in this game Im not sure if our overall ranged ability is enough.

 

For now I guess Tactics and Assault are more useful, but Im already too far into tanking gear, no turning back. At least Storm and surge has some use, and Harpoon is pretty nifty.