Holding aggro

[Crass]

Am I understanding correctly that without procs or aggro-reducing effects like FD, tanks hold aggro by doing more damage than anyone else?

That always seemed odd because it forced casters to be "weaker" than melee classes both for damage and defense.

Anyways my question is: in high end fights, with all the tools like procs, how does the main tank's damage output compare to others'?

[WarpathEQ]

The damage output of the tank will be material but no where near the top of the DPS charts. This is partially because the tank is not optimising for DPS, they are optimising for agro which in the tank world is most heavily driven by procs that add hate without adding damage (or atleast significantly more hate than damage).

Some procs however are categorized as white damage meaning the hate they generate is the same as the dmg output, similar to when a rogue stabs the mob.

In terms of casters I'm not as familiar if direct damage nukes are white damage or if the hate is different than a 1:1 ratio of the damage output but all casters have mitigating factors. Wizards get a spell to reduce their hate. Mages, necros, and chanters do a lot of damage via pets which don't directly contribute to building hate on the caster.

Some non-damage spells like roots, snares, and mez's generally have high hate which is why you often see a mob bolt for the caster when one of these break. Similarily slows have high hate which is why there is a small buffer of time between when the tank engages the mob and the casters run in to debuff and slow the mob.

Hybrid classes that sometimes tank i.e. rangers, shadow knights, and paladins all have high hate spells they can use to hold agro much better than a warrior, but on the beefiest mobs in the game only the warrior has enough beef to live.

[Jimjam]

Tanks are designed to hold aggro by bashing with a shield, which should generate more hate than a normal swing on account of it’s chance to stun. Unfortunately the game was broken for years, so instead warriors rely on pumping out a bunch of swings + damage bonus to make aggro instead (note it is swings, not hits or damage that really count, but weapons with the potential to do damage will generate more hateful swings). This is combined with taunt which takes you to the top of an npc’s hate list (this was also broken, only working on mobs lower level than your character for many years).

Warrior is nevertheless fun to play.

Warriors also synergise with many other classes for most of the levelling career as root can be used to force the warrior to tank (by standing on the rooted enemy’s tippy toes).

[Swish]

Noob tip: Don't press taunt if you already have aggro...only when you lose it.

[Duik]

Casters like wiz are not made weaker by delaying high damage spells, it is part of the game to allow a war to build hate. They cannot deal 1100 damage in 10 seconds, but they can sustain against 1000s of points of mob damage while they build hate. They love clerics and keep them as pets for this reason. Some famous warriors have whole harems of them!
Many clever casters wait until there is 2 or 3 ice comets (frigsample) worth of health left to finish it to stop mobs healing or fleeing or gating.

Mileage varies as others will have different/better strategies.

[kjs86z2]

Originally Posted by Crass [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Am I understanding correctly that without procs or aggro-reducing effects like FD, tanks hold aggro by doing more damage than anyone else?

That always seemed odd because it forced casters to be "weaker" than melee classes both for damage and defense.

Anyways my question is: in high end fights, with all the tools like procs, how does the main tank's damage output compare to others'?

There's a spell line called Root that 8 out of the 14 classes get. Very useful.

[Snaggles]

Well MT damage will be at or higher than any melee due to damage shield stacking but that aggro doesn’t transfer to the tank.

Aggro itself is a factor of maximum damage potential per swing (damage/delay/damage bonus) and proc aggro. Balancing both potential dps and procs is ideal because there are great procs with horrible ratios and visa versa.

This game is always designed to hamstring a class in one way or another. It encourages teamwork and patience when perfecting technique. Warriors take hits better than any other class on disc outside melees with 100% avoidance for a short time. However they struggle with aggro. If they had both of these locked down the game would be even easier.