Tanking classes (if they’re build to be good tanks in NON-pvp) suck in PvP situations. They don’t do enough damage to take guys down, and all their cool tanking abilities don’t do squat.
In PvE: You can taunt a bad guy, forcing it to attack you, so that other people in your group can do their job while you soak all the big nasty hits.
In PvP: Your taunts have zero effect, and any opponent with half a brain will attack the wimpy little mage that does BIG damage first, then come back and whittle through your health at their leisure.
((Note: you can reconfigure a tanking class to do very good damage… at which point their ability to tank starts to suffer.))
Warhammer has come up with an elegant solution that’s vaguely like DnD 4th edition: in PvP, if you taunt an opponent, they can still attack whoever they want, but *if* they attack someone else, they do less damage and their chance of missing is higher. This gives your opponent a choice: take out the tank to get rid of the penalty, or try to take out the squishy mage anyway… even with the penalty, knowing you’ll miss more and won’t hit as hard?
Either way, you as the tank are still doing your job — protecting the group.
I think it’s a genius way of handling it, and I really hope that this kind of idea finds its way into games like LotRO, WoW, and CoH.
One comment
Comments are closed.
That is, in fact, a fine idea (“I hate it — you’re making Warhammer just like a table-top game!”). Indeed, I’d recommend adding it even in PvE (weaken the taunt hold, but create a debuff when ignored).