MMO Archives - Page 398 of 430 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Tanking Tamriel

April 4, 2014April 4, 2014 by Belghast

A Shift in Tanking

I had a conversation the other morning about Dragon Knight tanking, and what abilities I use. As a result I thought it might be a useful blog post in waiting. The big thing about Elder Scrolls Online is that as a tank we have to throw a lot of our preconceived notions away. In previous games our mission in life has been to generate as much threat on as many targets as possible, and somehow through the grace of your healer manage to stay vertical. This is very much not business as usual in the Elder Scrolls. The moment I stepped into a dungeon I admit that I tried to do this, and found that my healer simply could not handle keeping me alive. There really are no AOE “threat” tools, nor is there really even a concept of threat as we know it in other games.

Instead of focusing all of the healing on a single player, the ESO method is more to try and spread the damage out among multiple targets at the same time evenly. As a tank you still play a crucial role as you can handle the hardest hitting targets while the healers/dps deal with the squishier targets. It takes some getting used to, but when it works it just works seamlessly. The group make up is far less important than it has been in other games. We’ve managed to make dual healers, and dual tanks work… which would have been a recipe for disaster in other games. The biggest thing is that the ESO dungeons require you to play in a much more fluid manner than before. Since a lot of the mob interactions are not static, you need to be able to adjust to changes as they happen.

Tanking Tamriel

I thought I would start off by talking a bit about the abilities that I use while tanking dungeons. Please note, that Belghast Sternblade my main is an Imperial Dragon Knight, and I have focused on Sword and Shield and Heavy Armor obsessively. I don’t even have an alternate weapon loadout because I have been purely focused on this one thing that I like doing. Here I am going to walk you through my hotbar, and some of the choices I have made to support being “tanky”.

1 – Fiery Grip

This is the most archetypal Dragon Knight ability and generally one that people take immediately when they get their first skill point. I used to do this but now end up taking it as a second pick due to reasons I will explain later. Who does not love Deathgrip and feeling like Scorpion from Mortal Combat. This will become the most crucial ability you have in that you can use it to gank mobs away from squishier targets and will use it to pull with. I have not spent any points on morphing the ability, and at present I am leaning towards Extended Chains, the morph that increases distance.

2 – Ransack

This ability morphs from Puncture, and is literally the first thing I always choose when I am building a tanky DK. The reasoning behind the first pick is that whatever you pick first… will ultimately be the ability you are able to morph first since skills begin leveling the moment you place them on your hotbar. This is the bread and butter tanking ability. Ransack taunts the target for 15 seconds, deals damage, decreases the targets armor, and buffs your armor by the amount decreased. As a result this will literally be your most useful key to press ever since it does four different things at once and increases your survival while doing it.

3 – Stone Giant

Stone Giant is a morph of the ability Stone Fist from the Earthen Heart tree. At face value it is an extremely useful ability because it knocks the target down for a short period of time. This will allow you to interrupt abilities that normally could not be interrupted. Additionally it has a slightly longer than melee range allowing you to knock a target down and reduce damage on someone else. When you morph it however you get a short term armor buff after casting it allowing it to also function as somewhat of a survival ability as well.

4 – Dark Talons

This ability allows you to lock a number of targets down by encasing them in a cage of bone. While at face value this does not make a ton of sense for a tank build, since you are going to be up close and personal anyways… it does when you realize that it is a short term CC allowing you to control the flow of the mobs at the beginning of an encounter. I tend to hang back and as the first group of mobs comes running in, case this locking down most of them and giving the healer and dps time to acquire targets.

5 – Razor Armor

This ability is my one size fits all damage reduction buff morphed from Spiked Armor. I try my best to keep this on me at all times during a fight, or at least during the times when I am tanking the heaviest of hitters. Namely this ability increases your armor for 20 seconds and deals damage to your attacker while doing so. The morph makes it so you get an additional 25% armor increase for the 2.5 seconds. This is more in the line of pre-emptive triage when you know you are going to be taking more damage.

The Passives

That is my toolbox abilities and pretty much the only ones I use other than swapping in a view situational abilities. If I know we are going to be fighting Daedra or Undead I tend to swap in Silver Bolts for Stone Giant, since the effectiveness of that ability greatly eclipses the minimal survival you get. If I am soloing, I swap out Dark Talons for Shield Charge, because I like ping ponging around the map and I don’t generally need to lock down targets. Occasionally I will swap in Consuming Trap if I know I will need healing after combat. For the most part these are the only active abilities I have, and I am completely fine with that.

What I do focus on instead are the passives. I take the opinion that I would rather be awesome all of the time than some of the time. If you look at the heavy armor, racial, and sword and shield trees… there are a number of amazing abilities that passively increase your resistance and general sturdiness. Essentially if it passively improves my ability to survive, I want it, and I will prioritize it over picking up an active ability since you can only use five at any given time. Were I rebuilding my level 16 character, I would have gotten the five abilities above and simply not touched another ability period until I had soaked up all of the passives.

The Pull

Setting up the pull for the fight is likely where you will have the most trouble adapting to the way Elder Scrolls Online works. Generally speaking I gank a priority target over to the group using Fiery Grip. In doing so you want to make sure no one else in the party touches anything else. A large group of mobs will run at you, but if you take the time to notice not all of them will be attacking your group. In fact if you are fighting humanoids some of them will stand back like a crowd in a Kung Fu movie and cheer the combatants on. It is important to be able to evaluate the situation and deal with only the targets that are actually engaged in combat. If you accidentally hit one of the more passive opponents they will engage and give you one more add to deal with.

This is why I feel that abilities like Dark Talons are so important. As the tank I hang back after ganking that first target to me and see who comes running up after the squishies. As that pack of mobs comes into combat range, I tap Dark Talons locking them in place and giving my group time to figure out what the kill order will be. All of this is of course improved by having access to voice chat, but in theory each dungeon is going to have certain priority targets. Healers mainly will be the thing you need to focus down first, then likely Evokers or other mage types as they can do a large amount of AOE ground effect damage making it harder to stay out of the fire. As a tank you will focus on the harder hitting melee targets. If it has heavy armor, it is going to try and tank down your healer… stop them from doing that.

The above video is of us running Fungal Grotto, and it was shortly after starting this dungeon… after running several other dungeons… that we made the connection to how the mob behavior is working. My friends and I are learning this from scratch just like you guys are, so I do not claim to understand everything about the pull behavior. That said I feel confident that our working theory is going to test out. Fungal Grotto was immensely easier thanks to our wait and see stance on the pulls, and adjusting to only the mobs that actually decided to attack us. It is tank instinct to charge into the fight and try and make everything angry at once… this instinct will get you killed rapidly. This is a thing I have had to stop doing myself, and as much as I hate to admit it… we are far better off for this change in my personal behavior.

Combat Tactician

The most crucial skill we have noticed yet is the need to be able to adjust to things as they are happening. The problem with the way mob packs are designed, is it is damned near impossible to determine what mobs are going to aggro and engage at any given time. Similarly you have to be able to shift focus to pick up new high priority targets as they engage the battlefield. You might be fighting five trash mobs, and when you take one down… the boss of the encounter might engage even before the rest of the trash is finishes. It is crucial to be able to calmly shift focus to what just became the new highest priority for you as the tank. This involves a lot of faith in your team mates, that they will also similarly adjust.

Another instinct that you will have to completely obliterate is the “burn down” mentality of hopping on the boss and damaging it at all costs. Generally speaking this is always the wrong answer. Dungeons in the Elder Scrolls are for the most part about mitigating the amount of damage incoming to the party, and in a big pull the easiest way to do this is to knock out a hard hitting but squishy target. In fact I would say that more than likely damaging the boss is always your LAST priority. You want to try your best to clear all adds before you focus on the boss at all. Think raid encounter, and prioritize the things that can kill you and your friends over the big thing that hopefully the tank is going to deal with. Additionally as the tank make sure you are doing everything you can to reduce the amount of damage you are taking. This means juggling cool downs, and making sure you block, dodge and interrupt everything that you can.

The Elder Scrolls is already one of the more difficult tanking experiences I have encountered in an MMO. That said it is also one of the most empowering. I am no longer a big dumb meat shield that’s entire purpose is to piss off everything equally and somehow survive. I became just as valuable and tactical as other party members because what I choose to taunt, and choose to stun matters greatly in the overall success of the dungeon. My decisions matter, and not in a ham handed tank all the things way any longer. If you are familiar with MOBAs, this style of tanking will feel similar. As tank you are essentially there to direct the flow of combat, and interrupt whatever it is that the enemies are trying to do. If you master it, the dungeons will become far easier. I am so far from mastery at this point, but I feel like I am at least stepping down on the right path.

#ElderScrollsOnline #TESO #Tanking #Dungeons #DragonKnight

Banished Cells and Fungal Grotto

April 3, 2014 by Belghast

Life in Tornado Alley

A few days at it was 40* out, and now it is 72* this early in the morning. While yes I live in Oklahoma, where the weather pattern can change in the blink of an eye. However even for us this seems a bit abrupt. It seems that Tornado season has snuck up on us. Over the next several evenings we have a chance of a Tornado each and every night. The high today is supposed to get up to 83* and it reminds me all too much of last year. When we jumped from temperatures in the 40s to temperatures in the 90s over a few weeks. It seems like we are getting less and less of a “spring” to enjoy. Thankfully nothing has really materialized yet out of the Tornado threat, but we still have several more nights of watching the local station to make sure nothing is going on.

Today is the day we purchase our new refrigerator. We ended up deciding on a side by side, because it gives us more freezer space. We eat an inordinate amount of frozen foods, and really don’t keep much in the fridge side apart from leftovers. Additionally I have always wanted ice and water in the door. Growing up we never had a fridge that was not the traditional over/under kind, and I coveted going to friends houses where they had cold water “on tap”. We’ve spent most of the week eating up anything from our freezer to attempt to make the transition that will likely occur this weekend “easier”. We waited this long primarily because we have a friend who works at the appliance store, and they are starting a 10% off sale today. It will be nice to just have this over with and have a new and fully functional fridge in its place.

Banished Cells and Fungal Grotto

In MMO gaming there is what is “doable” and then there is what is “optimal”. Folks have relied on the Holy Trinity mixture of 1 healer, 1 tank and 2-3 dps for years as the “optimal” build. However in Elder Scrolls Online the lines get blurred a bit. So far we have made two healers, a tank and a dps work fairly well, and struggled a bit with the 1/1/2 combination that would seem optimal. To mix things up a bit we decided to try running a few dungeons with 2 tanks, 1 healer, 1 dps. It was somewhat painful, but once Kodra and I got the hang of working together it actually went pretty smoothly. I feel like in Elder Scrolls there is not really a viable option that does not include healing… however there are several different ways to build a high survival dps. Similarly I think someone with crowd control would be able to make up for there being a tank.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVThe next mixture I would like to see is now that several of us are 15 and can do weapon swaps… to throw on a two hander or dual wield and run the dungeons to see if we can get by without a “true” tank. Another interesting thing we figured out is that apparently after running Spindleclutch, we had access to all three dungeons via the waystone network. So as a result we ended up running the Banished Cells in the above video, and Fungal Grotto in the below video. I am not sure what was going on with either Twitch or OBS for for whatever reason both of the videos exported to youtube SUPER jerky. If you watch the twitch version it seems to be just fine, so I might try deleting the youtube version and re-exporting.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVOne of the interesting things we learned is along the same lines as what I was talking about yesterday regarding splitting the pulls. It seems like the mobs in these dungeons fight in “Kung-Fu Movie Mode” of sorts, in that when you pull one, a number of them will engage you, but not ALL of the pack. The others will sit back and cheer on the ones fighting, but if you engage them… they will engage you back. This means that things like charge and dragon’s leap are really bad ideas in the Elder Scrolls Dungeon infrastructure. As a result we changed up our methods and started pulling with me yanking a single mob out with fiery grip. Then working on the fly to lock down whatever happens to come with the pull.

After figuring this out… Fungal Grotto went remarkably smooth as did a Spindleclutch run that we did afterwards. I think we finally figured out the “plan” of the dungeons, and it is pretty damned awesome. I like that the mobs seem to interact, and while you may aggro an entire pack… they won’t necessarily all come at once leading you to have significantly longer and more endurance sapping fights than short term brute force ones. We managed to make it through a lot of those huge pulls, because we had more healing than we needed. Now that we know the “real” way to run the dungeons, I feel like we could mix up the group make up quite a bit and come up with lots of potentially winning combinations.

Amazing Soundtrack

Another really awesome thing from yesterday is that the Elder Scrolls Online soundtrack is now available for purchase. At first I was a bit pissy when I found out that neither the collectors edition or digital deluxe editions included the soundtrack. However upon seeing it, I am guessing a big part of the reason why is just how big the soundtrack is. Right now you can get it for $8.99 on Amazon and it is a whopping 47 tracks. I guess if you are so included you can pay what seems to be the iTunes tax and get it for $16 bucks there as well. Apparently it is also up on the Google play store for $9.49, and as such available through their Google Music streaming service if you are so inclined. Whatever your venue of choice… I highly suggest you grab this.

Elder Scrolls Online is a gorgeous game, and similarly has an amazing soundtrack… however in the game you are under a constant state of sensory overload. Listening to the soundtrack I was in awe of just how great some of the tracks were, that I knew i had heard snippets of in game… but simply was not able to fully appreciate. I am hoping that the Battle Bards do an upcoming episode on the soundtrack, as with 47 different tracks… there really is something for everyone on it. I don’t care… I am definitely a fan boy here, but that is perfectly okay. This is now pretty much on my permanent “coding” and “writing” music selection. Over the years I have found myself listening to more and more game/movie soundtracks and less and less traditional music. I feel like it is easier to zone into whatever I am doing when the track is primarily instrumental.

Spindleclutch’s Revenge

April 2, 2014 by Belghast

Wabbajack or Bust!

One of the last big decision points we had to make was picking our PVP campaign. Essentially how Cyrodil works is that there are these campaign groups that are functionally like “servers” in that it represents one constant group of players from all three sides during a 90 day “season”. These sides fight for control of Cyrodil and attempt to crown an emperor by holding all of the barrier keeps surrounding the White Gold Tower. Each of these campaign groups is named after a weapon from elder scrolls lore. Currently the most populated is “Auriel’s Bow” which is benefiting from “first in the list” syndrome… where people simply click the first option and go with it. Oddly enough “Dawnbreaker” is another really high pop server, because for whatever reason a ton of serious Aldmeri Dominion pvpers decided to set up camp there.

As explained in my first video of the night, we have put our heads together and reasoned Wabbajack to be a good place to be. For those who are not TES lore junkies or who have not played Oblivion or Skyrim… Wabbajack is the weapon of the mad god Sheogorath. You are just as likely to zap your foe as to turn them into a bunny… or even rain down cheese from the heavens. More importantly however it seems like quite a few of the more organized Daggerfall folks have chosen the server for their own, so I believe it will be a place where we might have a fighting chance against the Aldmeri and Ebonheart hordes. We chose Daggerfall expecting it to be less populated, and as a result have an easier time getting into Cyrodil instances. Unfortunately as the video states Slurms has ended up on Auriel’s Bow for the time being, but we are hoping he will get the ability to swap to us for free.

Spindleclutch’s Revenge

Last night my friends and I… or at least a slightly different group of friends… decided to go back into Spindleclutch in the hopes of completing the quest that had apparently bugged out the previous night. The primary difference this time around was that we had two dps, a healer and a tank… the traditional dungeon makeup. To complicate things, we had a player healing who had literally not had a healing staff in his inventory until a guild member crafted and mailed him one on the way to the dungeon. So needless to say we had a few issues we needed to work out. Overall we managed to make it through the dungeon, but at times it was through sheer force of will. The above stream video documents our journey through the depths of spider hell.

For not having played a healer in ESO before, especially a night blade healer… Kodra did a remarkable solo healing the dungeon. Essentially we are realizing that the night before we simply brute forced a lot of the encounters with pure healing throughput in the fact that we had two healers who had rolled and were leveling AS healers. This run through the dungeon was very similar to our first run through the dungeon almost a year ago. There were many packs of mobs that flat out murdered us… especially once we got into the “corrupted” section of the dungeon. Some of the group tactics were a nightmare and it was all I could do to try and juggle everything and also somehow manage to keep up enough stamina to be able to block power attacks. At this point I am realizing I need way more stamina, and plan on dumping the next several skillups into that trait.

While there was quite a bit of faffing about before the dungeon, in trying to get over to Spindleclutch and get everyone zoned into it… I think we managed to run the place in roughly 45 minutes which is not too bad. One of the things that would have really helped out quite a bit is the addition of crowd control. I’ve considered spending a point and picking up dark talons, as being able to lock down a large group and at least keep it off the cloth wearers would have been extremely beneficial. The other cool thing is that I somehow managed to get several viewers during the dungeon, one of which even congratulated us on our victory. I am so used to no one watching my streams that it was rather odd knowing I had an audience that was not a guild member and likely not also in the same mumble channel as me.

Tonight there are already tentative plans to step back foot in the dungeon and see what trouble we can get into. At this point I seem to be the only tank in the level range of the dungeon, and while I do not mind being the token tank… there is only so much spelunking that I can take in a night. My wife and I have made plans to start trying to walk around 10 pm, and this means I need to make sure I am not engaged in something around that time of the evening. So essentially it cuts one potential dungeon run out for the night. I am sure in the next few days we will have more tanks entering the level range to take the pressure off me. My hope is that soon we can have multiple spindle groups going at the same time.

Feed your Claim

Just a really quick and friendly reminder… if you are like me and now completely enthralled by Elder Scrolls Online… don’t forget to log into Landmark periodically and feed your claim some copper. The upkeep mechanic while not extremely brutal, is there and constant and could involve the repossession of your claim. Since several of us managed to get in early enough to grab some pretty choice spots… I would hate to see any of us lose them to forgetting to feed the upkeep bank. Currently you can have roughly 5 days worth of resources stacked up in your claim bank. Every two to three days just to be certain, I have been logging in and depositing additional copper ore into the bank to keep it “topped off”. I really wish I could farm up enough to keep it healthy for a month or so, but I can see their desire to limit it to a small amount so that players are constantly having to log in.

Spindleclutch Age

April 1, 2014 by Belghast

Tax Time

Last night my wife and I had agreed to get our taxes done. Normally we do this over spring break but various reasons, one of which was a death in the family caused this to not happen. Tax time is one of those things that causes undue stress in me. While the only time we had to pay federal is when I was doing a lot of contract work, I still live in fear of someone having screwed something up. The IRS are a truly humorless group, and I always picture the agents from the matrix when I think of them. They would give zero shit that someone in HR screwed up our withholdings.

As a result we end up procrastinating until we reach the point where it is either April or almost April and we are pushed into action to finally deal with it. Last night once again we were relieved when it was finished. For once we somehow dodged the bullet of having to pay state taxes, and are getting a small refund back from there. We ended up doing just fine, and like every year we ask ourselves why we were so frightened of the process. In part I guess it is because there is some magic number we are supposed to have paid in taxes for the year, and I feel like it is pulled out of thin air. That it doesn’t really feel like it is based on anything we have control over. I guess I just hate the fact that some agency has complete and total control over our fate.

Hail Yes

While we were out and about we needed to run a few errands, one of which was a trip by Target. I pretty much avoid Wal-mart like the plague… not for some higher social justice reasoning, but instead because it is nearly impossible to get out of there in under an hours time. They have 50 cash registers and maybe 3 open at any given time. The addition of self checkout has improved this a bit, but still it ends up severely damaging my cool having to deal with the store. So I generally opt for a trip to Target and the Grocery store separately to make up for that one Wal-mart trip. I did see a rather sad sight while at Target, they had a big stack of copies of Defiance that they had on clearance for $13 a pop. I considered picking one up for the 360, but then remembered that I am far less likely to play anything if it is on a console.

As we were leaving the store, the wind smelled like rain and there was a massive storm front rolling in from the north. My wife turned to me and said… in true Oklahoma fashion “It looks like it is about to rain.” Granted we had a conversation earlier that there was no chance of rain listed in the forecast. As we walked to the car I replied “nope, it’s going to hail” as I saw little pieces of ice bouncing off the pavement. So yeah… bright and sunshiny out one moment, dropping ice on my head the next… you have to love Oklahoma weather. Another thing of note… getting hit in the head by hail hurts like a mother. In fact right now I am remembering that we still have our stuff from target out in my wife’s car… because when we got to the house it was still pelting ice at us and we opted NOT to carry it in.

Limbscather

Just north of the city of Daggerfall in Glenumbra is a skull and crossbones symbol on the map. When you see one of these it marks the location of a “world boss”. This one in particular is limbscather, a named lurcher/treant thing. At level 7 he is damned near impossible to solo as is the case with most world bosses. You can tell a world boss by the special unit frame and the number of red dots to either side represent just how difficult the encounter is. In theory you can solo most single dot encounters, as you get to double dots it starts to get rougher and then finally the triple dot encounters will damned near always kill you. When I first logged in I was milling around finishing up some quests, when guild members talked about pulling together a limbscather group.

One of the things I am always down for is killing world bosses, regardless of how much lower level they are. In part because you are almost always guaranteed a filled soul gem from killing them. Additionally sometimes they drop really nice blue loot for the level. Even if you can’t use it, you can always deconstruct it for the chance of getting a blue temper to upgrade your gear later. That is one of the things I love about the system, that you can take temper from one item to upgrade the quality of another item later. We killed him a few times before we all got bored of it and moved on. A few people managed to pick up the blue staff he drops, which I mistakenly thought was a healing staff… but is apparently a frost staff.

Spindleclutch Age

The overarching goal of the evening for me was to be able to get to the level that I could reliably tank Spindleclutch, the very first dungeon in the Daggerfall Covenant. Almost a year ago we tried the dungeon in beta and had never managed to pull together a group since. At that time it was a truly brutal experience, so we wanted to make sure we were at least level 12 before zoning in this time around. Thankfully in the months between the dungeon got a good tuning pass, either that or we were simply more prepared for what came with it. Back when we ran it that first time, the first pull of the dungeon managed to wipe us without mercy. This time around it went much smoother and while we got a lot more mobs than you would in a World of Warcraft style dungoen, we were able to manage it.

The interesting thing about an Elder Scrolls Dungeon, is that tanking in them is far less like a WoW style dungeon, where you gather everything up and hold onto it while the party burns it down, but instead more like tanking in a MOBA. As a Dragon Knight Sword and Board tank I have various tools at my disposal to temporarily taunt a mob onto me, through either the ransack morph or fiery grip. As a result I spend most of the fights trying to temporarily distract the encounters and get them to focus on me just long enough for the damage to get them low enough to be able to finish them off. The result is that players need to focus fire specific mob types to make sure they go down first, in order to survive the fight. The various encounters are really good at employing group tactics, and at one point last night we had two healers healing each other.

There were definitely times however when I was needed to truly “tank” a mob, and I was able to do this fairly well. While the game does not have a traditional aggro table, there were plenty of things I could do to either knock down the boss, taunt it, or yank it across the room to keep it from tearing apart my team mates. I would not say that the game necessarily has a strict alignment to the holy trinity, and we entered the dungeon with a sub optimal group… namely two healers, a dps and a tank. However the extra healing seemed to make up for the fact that we were really low on damage. I think you could probably run the dungeon without a tank but instead just have to rely more on knockdowns and snares to burn down the encounter before it killed you. I really enjoyed the dungeon in beta for all its brutality, but I have to say I enjoy the better tuned encounters a heck of a lot more.

My absolute favorite feature however has to be the way dungeon loot works. Just like every other mob in the game, each player gets a personalized roll on the loot table. However unlike the world bosses, every bit of this loot is tradable. So this meant after each boss we killed, there was much swapping of gear around to make sure the item went to someone who could use it. I wound up walking out of there with two blue tanky rings, tam got a damned nice blue two handed axe, rae a mana regen neck I believe (after I had to toin coss to decide who got it…. seriously where is the effing /roll command people), and I believe Damai walked with something but I cannot be sure. I am anxious to do the dungeon again tonight if we can muster the people. The quest bugged a little bit when trying to complete the dungeon, so we still do not have full credit for the place.

If you have a fear of spiders… Spindleclutch is going to be a rather terrifying experience. I don’t necessarily like spiders having grown up in a house with brown recluse… but I managed to get through without much issue. Also there is this area, where you have to cross a broken down bridge held together only by spider webs, that did kinda tweak my vertigo a bit. The dungeon looked absolutely amazing and it had a fun design that was not as on rails as Warcraft, but still funneled you towards the destination. The only negative is that the experience while good was not great, but that is to be expected. I think had we been able to complete the quest it would have been really good. They had to nerf dungeon experience, in part because testers were living in them during the beta weekends. I remember one group that ran Spindleclutch from level 10 to level 30. Hopefully as we get more people into the level range we can get a bunch more guild dungeon runs going.