Guild Wars 2

First, for all the people who haven’t see them yet, here is a screencap of all the shown traits for the Revenant during the latest PoI.

http://imgur.com/RCqawRo

I want to talk about a Retribution Major trait, Improved Aggression. What this trait does is double the duration of taunt on non-player chatacters and reduces the damage you recieve from taunted enemies by 20 %. Additionally, there is a taunt skill in Jalis’ legend that applies 3 seconds of taunt, slow, and costs 50 energy with no cooldown.

Do you think this is Anet’s way of experimenting with tanking in PvE? Do you think there will be any viability in a person trying to tank traditionally with a revenant using this trait?

Discuss.

It’s 50 energy, and you can taunt only on Dwarf stance.
So at best it’s 6 seconds + 6 seconds (when started from 100% energy) 12 seconds of having agro on yourself. Next 18 seconds (in wait for energy) you will spend auto-attacking becouse you will spend whole energy on taunting.
Is it “viable” tanking ? No it isnt. For price of having less than 50% of mob agro, you will just stand and do nothing (every skill except auto attack cost energy).

In the poI they seemed to be regaining energy pretty fast. I think you could gain 50% energy in 6-12 seconds. You just couldn’t spend it on anything else other than taunting.

Why is tanking pve specific? You will swap legends pretty often so you don’t tank all the time, need more info on type of pve also other classes will get upcoming balance so again need more info. As long as it promotes skillful play,group play,positioning,spec diversity it’s a +1 to me.

That info man need more of it!!!!

Eggs.3142:

In the poI they seemed to be regaining energy pretty fast. I think you could gain 50% energy in 6-12 seconds. You just couldn’t spend it on anything else other than taunting.

You regain 5% energy per second, so 10 seconds. In theory, this could mean 100% uptime at the cost of only being able to autoattack.

Keep in mind that Revenant is very likely to get nerfed. Also the only skill shown that applies taunt so far has a whopping 50 energy cost. Thief initiative used to be too easy to manage until it was nerfed, watch it happen to Revenant.

Morsus.5106:

Eggs.3142:

In the poI they seemed to be regaining energy pretty fast. I think you could gain 50% energy in 6-12 seconds. You just couldn’t spend it on anything else other than taunting.

You regain 5% energy per second, so 10 seconds. In theory, this could mean 100% uptime at the cost of only being able to autoattack.

Which, along with the need to stack toughness and healing, would nerf dps… you know, like a tank.

Interesting.

This is a good observation. I hadn’t noticed this, and until now I’d assumed Anet was not really introducing this kind of role into the game, but this really does make it seem more possible.

Now of course only one class being able to do this is unlikely to be viable in PvE play, because you’d face shortages. It makes me wonder not only if this is Anet’s intent to do, but also if that means they’ll likely incorporate something similar into other classes. They’d have to if they’re going to have party content where this is important.

@Silalus While I doubt that ArenaNet is actually trying to establish a trinity, if they were to go about such a thing, they would likely add the Taunt ability to the new specializations and then there wouldn’t be a shortage. For example, Guardian!Specialization would inflict taunt when using Shield skills and Mesmer!Specialization would summon Phantasmal Defenders whose attacks inflict Taunt. However, I still doubt ArenaNet is going down the Tanking road, especially considering that either A) the tank is useless in all old content or all old content, dungeons in particular, are reworked to include this new role.

We haven’t seen all options yet.

I bet there will be a weapon or trait regenerating bonus energy.

The foremost Problem is: The known taunt is singletarget, and as long as they don’t allow control-effects on Bosses it would only be useful against Elites in dungeons… which don’t require to be taunted in the first place because its better to just ’zerk them down (at least in the current dungeons). And some Elites like Fire Citadel Path 2 Assassins are also CC-Immune.

Morsus.5106:

Eggs.3142:

In the poI they seemed to be regaining energy pretty fast. I think you could gain 50% energy in 6-12 seconds. You just couldn’t spend it on anything else other than taunting.

You regain 5% energy per second, so 10 seconds. In theory, this could mean 100% uptime at the cost of only being able to autoattack.

that 100% uptime isn’t exactly right though. you start with 50%, so you’d need to wait until it’s at 100% to start stacking taunt long enough that you’ll have 50% again for a third taunt. that will leave you 2 seconds short of taunt before you can use your 4th one, and then it’s 60% uptime.

and it’s worth pointing out that it wouldn’t work on anything with defiance, since you can only CC a defiant enemy once before it gets immune again. so yeah, you can “tank” exactly one normal enemy from the group of trash mobs, and you can distract bosses every once in a while, at the cost of grossly undercutting your DPS and other stuff.

you’re better off timing the elite.

Let me just attach that image to the thread itself for convenience…

Loki.8793:

Additionally, there is a taunt skill in Jalis’ legend that applies 3 seconds of taunt, slow, and costs 50 energy with no cooldown.

Which is single target only, as mentioned above. And there is no situation in which it would be better to taunt an enemy that does not have any kind of CC resistance than to just DPS it faster.

Taunt will be useless in everything we have today. It may be that some of the encounters in HoT will be designed differently, but in all the current GW2 content, between using a character as DPS or using a character as a tank, even if tanking worked, it would be better to use a character as DPS.