If knights had defensive, would there be any reason to have warriors?

[long.liam]

If knights got all the same Disciplines that warriors got, would there be any reason for warriors to exist?

[Keebz]

They'd still have higher HP and better mitigation, so would be more forgiving and require less mana over a long fight.

[long.liam]

They'd still have higher HP and better mitigation, so would be more forgiving and require less mana over a long fight.

The difference between Warrior and Knight HP and AC is pretty small. In BIS gear they may even almost same amount of HP and AC.

[Videri]

I don’t think so, no.

Knights get 5.2 hp per stamina, whereas warriors get 6 hp per sta. 6*255 - 5.2*255 = 204, a significant chunk. (And there is no softcap on stamina.)

But the snap aggro is significantly better than relying on swings and procs.

I think it’s a really cool game balance choice that the class with the very best hp and mitigation has slightly limited aggro generation, whereas the classes with on-demand aggro have slightly less hp and mitigation (and much less damage output). The end result is that all 3 classes are needed, and there are many ways to play.

[Toxigen]

Warriors will still pump out more threat on long fights.

Have fun casting FoL on AoW.

Would it help on quakes / speed clearing? Sure. You're still not main tanking anything hard though, hope this helps.

[pasi]

I think if there was any era for it, this would probably be it. Mid-late Velious where knights have their upgraded skill caps, but prior to 1) AAs and 2) Discipline System Revamp (group-timers)

AAs may widen the HP+mitigation/avoidance gap, but the main thing differentiating the two is AE taunt. Knights could get 1200 threat a cast, but they lacked anything like AE taunt - i.e a 100% success rate taunt (the AE part of it being icing on the cake). A single ability which guarantees the person goes to the top of the aggro list. So, you can seamless transition from WS ranger or prior defensive warrior to the next.

The other key ability that knights lack is an instant burst avoidance ability for getting a CHeal chain switched over -i.e. furious, fortitude, weaponshield, etc. The discipline system revamp put these abilities on separate timers than defensive.

Those are the main two abilities knights lacked to raid tank well. Obviously, warriors also have a natural advantage in terms of HP and AC softcap returns. Knights do eventually get a defensive-type ability something like 10 years later, but iirc it's capped (at least initially) at some number of damage mitigated.

Knights are the red-headed step child of early EQ. In an ideal world, you'd want 1 Paladin to buff DS and 0 SKs. Later on, there's occasionally a mob that fears where they offer some advantage, occasionally a mob like Arch Lich that can be cheesed via Knight, a random DA hammer for rolling the dice with rampages, and the occasional useless AA ability that could crash the zone to respawn PoFire. But that's pretty much it.

[Lampolo]

Wars have triple attack, higher skill caps, berserk, and other disciplines that make them better. Knight's always feel like shit to play with. Fuck them and their stupid mana. Sk and pally can not exist imo. Will never grp with them unless hard up. Knights are barely better than rangers. If monk did not exist sk would be fine

[Crede]

Warriors will still pump out more threat on long fights.

Have fun casting FoL on AoW.

Would it help on quakes / speed clearing? Sure. You're still not main tanking anything hard though, hope this helps.

Ogre SK would be fine on AoW. If knights got def then we'd be seeing a lot more ogre SKs IMO.

[Keebz]

Knights are the red-headed step child of early EQ.

Well in classic they are just straight up better than warriors at tanking. Kunark is where the pure melees get severely overcompensated.

[Keebz]

While we're here though, my thoughts on disc balancing for knights:

Buff Sanctification (duration/cooldown) enough that Paladins become a compelling choice for AoE heavy fights.

Buff Leechcurse into a bump, such that it auto ripostes (maybe only 66%) of the time. SKs can now bump properly and are more useful for pull team/engages. I also want to give them Sightgraft/Harmshield, but that's another thread.

[pasi]

Well in classic they are just straight up better than warriors at tanking. Kunark is where the pure melees get severely overcompensated.

I'd mostly agree with this.

A warrior with a mallet is optimal for the handful of raid bosses - most of which are PoSky. Since most of the level 50 raid content is clearing trash, I'd agree with giving SK/Paladin the nod over warriors. Sub-optimal and slightly insane, but Ogre Shaman aren't that far behind the knights at 50 either. There's very few 50 mobs that are tankable by War/SK/Paladin that couldn't be tanked by an ogre shaman.

Though the nice part about playing a warrior in classic is that half the server is mages/necro/enchanters (assuming you have coerced them to group). You don't need to be the top threat to hold aggro. You just need to be the highest threat PC in melee range awhile everyone else is below the mage, necro, and/or enchanter pets. If a pet is top of the hate of list and you're the highest threat person in melee range, you are "holding aggro."

As far as fixing knights, I see no problem with giving knights a defensive-type ability that either has a lower duration or lower mitigation (say 35% versus 50%). They would still be a trash-tier raid class.

[Crede]

While we're here though, my thoughts on disc balancing for knights:

Buff Sanctification (duration/cooldown) enough that Paladins become a compelling choice for AoE heavy fights.

Buff Leechcurse into a bump, such that it auto ripostes (maybe only 66%) of the time. SKs can now bump properly and are more useful for pull team/engages. I also want to give them Sightgraft/Harmshield, but that's another thread.

Yea sks really got the shaft compared to pallies when you look at spells. Shoulda had harmshield and a lich(I know yeli has a wep). Also shoulda gotten bind pet as you said.

[Nibblewitz]

Did anyone mention evasive discipline?

[Videri]

Did anyone mention evasive discipline?

That's a good one too! Great for Venril Sathir (so that maybe fewer lifetaps will go off if the rune chain has a gap), or for tanking lots of lesser bosses back to back, or certain other fights...I can't remember which one that's kind of surprising but smart if you think about it.

Does Evasive lower our hit rate, though?

[Snaggles]

Warriors will still pump out more threat on long fights.

Have fun casting FoL on AoW.

Would it help on quakes / speed clearing? Sure. You're still not main tanking anything hard though, hope this helps.

Resisted spells are still a ton of hate. If not, rangers couldn’t bump with two flame licks.

Most of this game can be knight tanked. You just need a lot more clerics to stay mana neutral. It’s just not an exercise worth the practice.

[Vivitron]

You don't need to be the top threat to hold aggro. You just need to be the highest threat PC in melee range awhile everyone else is below the mage, necro, and/or enchanter pets. If a pet is top of the hate of list and you're the highest threat person in melee range, you are "holding aggro."

It probably should work like that, but it doesn't.

If you have one pet and one player melee in melee range and aggro is pet > caster > melee, the mob will chase the caster.

This is usually an edge case that is hard to notice, but can be an annoyance in a low man monk/enchanter setup. Suppose the enchanter tags off the flop and puts some slows into the mob before the monk returns to melee. The mob will chase towards the enchanter just far enough to get out of the monks melee range, then it will return to hitting the pet.

If you have multiple other things in melee range other than the high aggro pet, the npc can skip to other things in melee range instead of the caster or the tank. I don't know the full rules on what the npc chooses to hit but sometimes this will cause it to hit a pet even though players are in melee range. Other times an early slow will make it look like a rogue over aggroed.

[Jimjam]

Did anyone mention evasive discipline?
Evasive absolutely destroys group content. Especially by higher level when you can spend half the time under effect of this disc.
Does Evasive lower our hit rate, though?

Not noticeably- evasive certainly opens up many more mobs as becoming soloable meaning it skewers down incoming dps much more than it does outgoing dps.

[Naethyn]

The real tragedy is monks get block with a fist and knights and warriors can't block with a shield equipped. This one change would likely make it so knights could tank zlandicar and other targets that monks can do easily because they have block.

[Jimjam]

Agreed, shieldblock would be cool, and imo if bash generated aggro as designed (similar to stun spells) proper sword and board tanking would get a proper look in (at a range of contexts - grouping as well as raiding).

[Toxigen]

Shieldwall disc for pallies and SKs.

[greatdane]

Defensive disc should have just never been put in the game in the first place, but base proc rate should have been much higher. Outside of a select few utility weapons, and of course the fact that it's a warrior's only real source of aggro, procs are nearly worthless. Like 97% of procs in this game are irrelevant. You get some weapon from fucking NToV which has a damage proc, and it turns out that it amounts to half of 1 DPS because it procs like twice a minute even with max dex. What's the point? Some of the rarest and supposedly most high-end weapons in this game have procs that deal less than 100 damage. It's so pathetic, honestly.

I'm not calling for a change here, but the original developers were just so milquetoast when it came to this shit. There's like all of 20ish weapons in the entire game (during the P99 era) that have procs that really matter. Half of those matter because they happen to be warrior tank weapons, and it doesn't actually matter what the proc is, because it's often something completely meaningless like a -5 AC debuff or a stun that any endgame mob is immune to anyway--it just matters that it generates x amount of aggro. So dull.

But yeah, if knights got defensive, they'd be better tanks for anything except AoW and a select few other bosses who hit so hard that having marginally more HP and mitigation is important. For almost all raid content, being able to grab solid aggro from the first moment of the fight and hold it reliably forever would be worth far more than a tiny edge in raw survivability, because in all likelihood, any given boss fight never actually has a single moment where those 300 extra HP and 3% better avoidance/mitigation actually made a difference; but being able to DPS/debuff to everyone's full potential immediately when the fight starts makes a very real difference. That's why knights are vastly superior tanks for any content that doesn't call for the use of defensive discipline.

[Jimjam]

If we’re talking about fixing war aggro then they should have just adjusted bash to generate aggro similar to stun spells. That was the intended mechanic to push melees working as tanks to use sword and board.

[pasi]

Defensive disc should have just never been put in the game in the first place, but base proc rate should have been much higher. Outside of a select few utility weapons, and of course the fact that it's a warrior's only real source of aggro, procs are nearly worthless. Like 97% of procs in this game are irrelevant. You get some weapon from fucking NToV which has a damage proc, and it turns out that it amounts to half of 1 DPS because it procs like twice a minute even with max dex. What's the point? Some of the rarest and supposedly most high-end weapons in this game have procs that deal less than 100 damage. It's so pathetic, honestly.

I'm not calling for a change here, but the original developers were just so milquetoast when it came to this shit. There's like all of 20ish weapons in the entire game (during the P99 era) that have procs that really matter. Half of those matter because they happen to be warrior tank weapons, and it doesn't actually matter what the proc is, because it's often something completely meaningless like a -5 AC debuff or a stun that any endgame mob is immune to anyway--it just matters that it generates x amount of aggro. So dull.

But yeah, if knights got defensive, they'd be better tanks for anything except AoW and a select few other bosses who hit so hard that having marginally more HP and mitigation is important. For almost all raid content, being able to grab solid aggro from the first moment of the fight and hold it reliably forever would be worth far more than a tiny edge in raw survivability, because in all likelihood, any given boss fight never actually has a single moment where those 300 extra HP and 3% better avoidance/mitigation actually made a difference; but being able to DPS/debuff to everyone's full potential immediately when the fight starts makes a very real difference. That's why knights are vastly superior tanks for any content that doesn't call for the use of defensive discipline.

The game was 2 years old and most of even the hardcore raiders weren't 60 until Luclin. There was UO and EQ, so it wasn't like MMORPG design was fleshed out much either. The game barely attempted endgame class balance until PoP as well. Ergo, I don't think much thought went into this stuff.


Anyhow, even though most weapon procs in this era are milquetoast, this era tends to have a much higher number of unique procs than later expansions.

Off the top of my head: AE effects like Earthshaker, Rain effects like Bladestorm/PWC/SoS, SpinStuns (broken here), huge DDs relative to era like Dawnfire/Undead Legions/Ranger Shards, Epics in general, Razorfang of Xygoz, Bone Melt, slow procs, Theurg Star, etc.

Later on, procs seem to get more streamlined to things like hate, DD, stun DD, rune.

[Snaggles]

The OG devs assumed content would take longer to burn though. They weren’t prepared for people to hit level 50 in a week during the release.

To limit progression you make something hit harder, give it more hps, or mess with mechanics to make to a challenge. Best tank in the game with less than an ideal aggro lock means people need to be on pins and needles for aggro. So did they just flub it, did it on purpose, or saw the results and didn’t care because they were swimming in sub money that wasn’t being affected? Um, yes.

The original devs did not like knights or hybrids in general so far as the raid scene, we never used them to tank anything outside group content, 20 years later p99 and other sims have repurposed these classes. Burning more mana to heal a worse tank with castable aggro so you can slow faster and nuke harder would have broken most of their brains. AA’s fixed some things but I like the nostalgia from this era a lot.

[Raj]

Well in classic they are just straight up better than warriors at tanking. Kunark is where the pure melees get severely overcompensated.

[Atmas]

Warriors can put out huge damage with berserk, a good weapon, dps buffs and disc. It almost never happens on raids because they are always on stand by for rotating in as MT.

For pretty much anything that doesn't require defensive it's going to be more mana efficient to heal a Knight. Everything dies faster because DPS can jump right in without worrying about stealing agro. Things get slowed faster. The raid early slow/less rez metrics look a lot better with knights.

[Wychway]

100% success rate taunt (the AE part of it being icing on the cake). A single ability which guarantees the person goes to the top of the aggro list.

Equip earthshaker.
Train.
AE taunt
riposte disc
lolololololololololololololololol

[Jimjam]

Ripostes don’t proc. You gotta train rampage (well, that got nerfed not to proc either but it used to work). Iirc warcry was broke and worked like a second rampage too.

[Dulu]

Agreed, shieldblock would be cool, and imo if bash generated aggro as designed (similar to stun spells) proper sword and board tanking would get a proper look in (at a range of contexts - grouping as well as raiding).

I like it.

[greatdane]

To be honest, if bash generated aggro like a stun, holding aggro would be totally trivial and there would be even less reason to play a knight.

[Jimjam]

To be honest, if bash generated aggro like a stun, holding aggro would be totally trivial and there would be even less reason to play a knight.

I imagine if shield bash aggro wasn't bugged in classic, the difference in the meta would have had a great impact on the development of character balance in the expansions - for example if warriors could hold aggro easily with a shield they wouldn't have needed to be given defensive in Kunark to justify their use as a tank over knights.

The entire game could have unfolded differently.

[AgKnight]

Warriors will still pump out more threat on long fights.
.

Lol, just no, warrior cannot rival to a knight chain casting their agro spells... And despite the DC nerf I can still spam agro for around 10min without resorting to any twitch or similar artifice...defensive and higher mitigation makes warrior unbeatable as raid tank, no discussion but if you think a warrior can out agro a knight who goes full agro you are definitely wrong...

[greatdane]

I imagine if shield bash aggro wasn't bugged in classic, the difference in the meta would have had a great impact on the development of character balance in the expansions - for example if warriors could hold aggro easily with a shield they wouldn't have needed to be given defensive in Kunark to justify their use as a tank over knights.

The entire game could have unfolded differently.

To an extent, yes; but at the same time, they also clearly designed the content itself such that defensive was strictly necessary for most raid bosses. It's anyone's guess if they did that in order to keep warriors as the main tanks, but if we pretend there was a world where bash generated aggro like a stun and warriors didn't get defensive, raiding would have been borderline impossible outside of what scraps you can do in-era without defensive.

Imagine doing AoW or Vyemm with knight tanks. If I recall, AoW wasn't actually killed until like the week Luclin launched, and that was with defensive. It might not have been doable until PoP otherwise. That disc is such a silly bottleneck to almost all raiding, and I don't think I get the impression that it was put in as compensation for the fact that bash's stun aggro didn't work. It was just a sign of the neolithic age of game design.

[Snaggles]

The OG dev's knew what they were doing. Gave the best mitigating highest HP tank aggro issues. Played with raid npc hps. Gave weird mechanics to raid bosses it took 20 years to reverse construct.

What made some things trivial gave light to other metas like ranger bumping and knight tanks. Even druids can really shine on P99 because people arent automatically delegating them to a meme. Pulling hate, charming stuff, etc.

[AgKnight]

What I don't understand is that other melee got some bump disc while knights have absolutely no useable disc to tank...a minor defensive on our hour long cooldown or anything to bump you would have made sense...not having something to replace defensive makes lots of sense but only getting a disc to make ht less resistable (only fully resisted 95% of the time with the disc on) or some HP regen 1-1.5k max depending on your fps while bards can deftdance, ranger can weaponshield and monk can stonstance and voidance... They missed great opportunity there, they could have been creative, I would have loved a disc to share the damage I take on the whole group...

[Snaggles]

Sanctification is no defensive or evasive but it’s does has its purposes. It blocks VS’s life tap and as I understand pretty much all VP dragon spells. It also blocks dragon roar/fear which if timed well can really help while the engage is being established and the real tanks are running in circles.

[Ennewi]

Knights could've really benefitted from two-handed dueling shields with block enabled and increased bash damage; it's not as though knights rely on melee damage for aggro anyway.

[Ennewi]

If I recall, AoW wasn't actually killed until like the week Luclin launched, and that was with defensive. It might not have been doable until PoP otherwise.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010803055639/http://pub4.ezboard.com/femarrgeneral.showMessage?topicID=6151.topic

Purifyre
Veteran
Posts: 1363
(7/28/01 11:08:27 pm)
re:
With the Avatar downed and now Tunare Brad must be crying in his beer hee hee

brumfondl
Veteran
Posts: 94
(7/29/01 12:41:37 pm)
Re: re:
Avatar of War = 35-40 mins
Tunare = 15-20 mins

Conclusion:
AoW > Tunare as I have always said :)

NB: Anyone who starts making rational arguements against this post can shove it where the sun don't shine. This post has no rational basis except direct time comparison so I don't wanna see any crap about force size or anything like that. Rallos is better than Tunare and that is that... You're wrong and I'm right nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah :p

PS: I hate it when I read my posts and see spelling mistakes
Brumfondl Majicthise
Daughter of Hatred
60 Level Servant of Rallos Zek
"A good deed never goes unpunished" – Gore Vidal

Edited by: brumfondl at: 7/29/01 12:43:46 pm