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We seem to have a bit of a problem, folks. A problem that goes a little something like this...



Yes, the ratio of tanks in our guild, especially among people at or approaching 50, is skewed pretty heavily. As a tank myself, I keep seeing threads about operations groups go up, and I feel like a guy showing up dressed as the red ranger to this party:



This isn't something that has been discussed officially at the officer level, but it's clear to me that it could be something that causes organizational issues for the guild's end-game efforts. So I'd like to hear what you guys have to say. What are your thoughts on our tank surplus? What do you think could be done to help the problem without telling anyone they can't play a certain way?

I'd personally recommend, for the time being, that our end-game ops tanks be willing to rotate that position if need be. I certainly would be, and it seems to be the most fair way to allow the most people to experience that style of play without having 6 different groups that have to look for out-of-guild pick-ups every week.

Let thy opinions be heard!

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Jedi Master Tir-Jin Meteos, The Order of 66
PC GAMER - T.J. Hafer

You know I was just talking with Gisben about this this afternoon. You know most tank specs do offer a dps spec as well. And as i was saying to him I know personaly im able to spec back and forth between the dps and tank build when needed. Also once we get up in lvls with people i can imagine there will be rotation options. With 200+ guildies this is bound to happen its just how flexable everyone wants to be is all

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Jedi Airfree'taa Tank

So in my Wow Guild we have 3 tanks in 10 man raid group. The three of had a discussion and decided that we would do a rotation.. 1,2 then 2,3 then 3, 1.... We did the same thing with our healers and DPS... agreed upon a rotation and brought folks in new each week.

Now with that said is you shouldn't do a full change over each week.. I recommend 50%... the 'vets' increase the chance of success and pass along information the new players learn and get a chance at gear that will help them the next week when THEY are the vets.

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Captain Zeece / Sgt. Perrian
Order of Sixty Six Webmaster
Guildmaster for The Exiled Lords




Co-host of Geekhead Radio
look me up on Twitter, Google + or Facebook - Clayton Havens

Let me also throw in that this allows people that have never tanked a chance to do it in both hard modes and Operations. Operations tanking is like Heroic on steroids... being good at one does not insure you will be good at the other... This provides some safety.. allowing people to step into the water and not have to worry about drowning.

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Captain Zeece / Sgt. Perrian
Order of Sixty Six Webmaster
Guildmaster for The Exiled Lords




Co-host of Geekhead Radio
look me up on Twitter, Google + or Facebook - Clayton Havens

I really do think that some of the people who defined their character as a tank will decide to be a dps instead when they find out what tanking is really like. That's how it was in WoW, when people saw how easy it was to just dps, and how much work and responsibility it took to tank, most decided to dps.

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There are a couple of issues with this. Not insurmountable issues, but still issues we need to think about:

1. TOR doesn't have dual-speccing yet, so you have to pay every time you want to change talents. The cost of this increases over time, and may be unviable for some players.

2. Trying to switch between tank and DPS requires you to seek and maintain two sets of gear. This can cause further issues when the tank is rolling on DPS gear, and full-time DPSers feel they should have had priority.

3. A lot of us who rolled tanks did it because, well, we want to tank. I don't want anyone to feel like they have to change their playstyle because of the guild. I especially don't want to have to get into a discussion about who should have to change, and who should get to keep their role. If we had enough of our current tanks respec voluntarily, that would certainly solve the issue. But I'm very against pushing that on anyone.

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Jedi Master Tir-Jin Meteos, The Order of 66
PC GAMER - T.J. Hafer

This is so true. I didnt take into account of the respecing cost. That does pose more of a challange

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Jedi Airfree'taa Tank

You know looking at the numbers there isn't a huge difference between the trooper DPS spec and the tank spec, the only thing a trooper tank misses out one of two top tier abilities in their DPS tree's. If you compare the skills between the tree's the differences are pretty minor

I would venture that even an Ion Cell specced Vangaurd can pull off a decent amount of damage just using their core abilities.

If anything you just need two sets of gear, a high endurance set and a high aim set, when your the official tank your in your endurance gear, when your not throw on the aim gear, if you happen to pull aggro well its not like your going to die in a hurry and plenty of time for the real tanks to pull it pack, maybe even give them the second they need to get back ahead of the damage curve.

I don't really see a problem.

If someone has run any hard numbers to show the true DPS difference between for DPS spec vs tank spec on the vanguard I'd be interested to see if there any significant difference.

The Good dpsers doing quite a bit more damage than tanks

How do we know this? Because tanks are givin a +50% threat boost to their all their attacks.

This plus the known threat mechanics of 110% for melee and 130% for ranged means that if a tank is doing say 100 pts of damage a second their threat its = to 150 pts per second... and that if meleer exceed 165 pts per second that pull aggro and ranged 195 pts per second....

If you watch the live streams from the Nightmare Operations groups you will see this in action. When the dpsers exceed the threat limits for too long the boss turns on them and poof.. dead DPSer.

Now this isn't to see that tanks can't DPS.. they can... but that hot swap ability is only going to be useful in lower level content... like flashpoints... as soon as you get into operations you are not going to beat the enrage timers with tanks dpsing.

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Captain Zeece / Sgt. Perrian
Order of Sixty Six Webmaster
Guildmaster for The Exiled Lords




Co-host of Geekhead Radio
look me up on Twitter, Google + or Facebook - Clayton Havens

Yeah, I can attest that my damage is pretty much Bantha poodoo as a tank-specced Guardian. All of my skill points are devoted to making Soresu better, generating threat, etc. So when I switch to Shii-Cho (my only DPS-friendly saber form), I might as well not have any talent points at all. Factor in as well the flat 3% less DPS I'm doing than someone using one of the DPS-specific forms, and you end up with a pretty low bar.

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Jedi Master Tir-Jin Meteos, The Order of 66
PC GAMER - T.J. Hafer

Perhaps what is needed is then some info on how to turn tanks into DPSers or at least more effective hybrids.

Which skills are "essential" to get your best DPS in your Vangaurd/Guardian, so as long as you've got ranks in those you can afford to put your other points elsewhere maybe get some commited tankers to start looking at other options.


There's also a 3rd factor for Vanguards anyway. If you like PvP and your a Vanguard then you know the Defence tree has a great PvP skill called Storm, basically force leap for the trooper. But what you may not know is that Hold the line in the less popular tactics tree is quite a viable PvP skill as well giving you freedom from speed inhibition and giving a 30% speed boost meaning you can get your sprint speed while in combat.

Perhaps educating tankers about their other options may entice some of them away from their default choice of tank and tank skills.

The thing is, at that point, they're basically DPS specs. Most MMOs simply don't support having a foot in both worlds. You spec one way or the other, and an attempt to split the difference will just leave you bad enough at both that you can't get anything done. Like Perrian said, a build that tries to be good at two things is not going to hold up at the Operation level.

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Jedi Master Tir-Jin Meteos, The Order of 66
PC GAMER - T.J. Hafer

I found this thread to get the ball rolling

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=161399

Pretty much agree's with what your saying TJ

so In a nut shell anyone who wants to tank basically needs to level a second pure DPS char to 50

WTB character duplicator , or dare I say dual spec patch

This is a very cool and interesting spec, but again, it's a DPS Vanguard spec. He only puts 8 points in Shield Specialist, and they're all damage talents. This is not a functional ops-level tanking spec, it's just a more balanced combination of all three trees for DPS rather than focusing on one. Pretty much functionally identical to just speccing your Vanguard for pure DPS.

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Jedi Master Tir-Jin Meteos, The Order of 66
PC GAMER - T.J. Hafer

First and foremost, let me strongly suggest the following:

TheOrderOfSixtySix does not have any "official" raid groups, we are a casual guild and while we welcome raid groups to form, the requirements to join them are up to that group.

If the officers would be so kind as to adopt that policy, which would be in line with almost every other large casual guild such as Alea Iacta Est. For instance, here is their statement:


A policy such as this focuses on making certain we don't hurt people's feelings. This is why I started the group I did, with a NAME, and a distinct identity. It's not an official Ops group, it's the Ops group I'm organizing. Period. Full Stop.

This is the most important thing I think about the Tank problem. I leave the rest for my next post.

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