We need better tank armors...
I don't play tanky. You don't play tanky. Nobody plays tanky! They are useless as they are... Please make them better! ^^
We need better tank armors...
I don't play tanky. You don't play tanky. Nobody plays tanky! They are useless as they are... Please make them better! ^^
A general stat boost would be nice. Alternatively more status condition resists on some.
Also. Striker armors(for example) at 5* have +4 health from scratch. Tanky armors(exept ancient) have +4... Something is wrong here... Do we see the same?
Just an extra idea that popped into my head, so be extra crittical of this one! ^^
- Ironmight: Chanse of giving stun.
- Volcanic: Chanse of giving fire.
- Ancient: Chanse of giving curse.
Nobody uses Tanky armours as they are. Why? They're not tanky! They should ruin your movement speed. They should ruin your attack speed. You should still deal a lot of demage, and you should still be able to take a lot of demage. That's what tanks do. They have slow dodge, slow attack speed, high demage, and high HP/Armour.
Stat boosts in Spiral Knights isn't that big outside of combat ones. You'd have to add massive amounts of defense for it to actually absorb damage - higher health values help this tank thought process.
People don't use tank armors because there's not much to tank in this game anyways. There's much more to movements and dodging attacks outright that being quick on your feet and hitting hard are what matter most.
I'm sure many people will agree that tanking is lackluster, but that's going to be the case until offensive armors have lower survivability. Until they do, tank armor will be useless.
Yes, but tanks as they are, are still underpowered. They are not tanky and they don't deal much demage. Just giving them demage like the offensive armours have feels wrong though. Therefor I suggested condition statuses.
Let me provide some alternative condition stats.
- Ironmight: Good chanse of giving Moderate stun.
- Volcanic: Fair chanse of giving Moderate fire.
- Ancient: Low chanse of giving Strong curse/Good chanse of giving Moderate poison.
All of these give better crowd control and/or higher demage. It also makes heavy/slow weapons like big swords or bombs beneficial as you attack many enemies at once, and therefor effect many enemies at once. Not all of these bonuses deal demage, but they still weakens your enemies, and makes it easier for your teammates to attack. That is usefull in itself, and gives you a biger pourpose as a tank on the team.
Edit:
Tank armours shouldn't absorb demage. They should however make you take less demage than with other armours. A shadowy tanky armour could also be a nice thing.
In the Spiral Knights area, making tanks high damage high defense low mobility sort of kills tanks as well. Mobility is what keeps you alive, it's why movement and attack speed increases are sought after.
Additionally, in most cases where this sort of thing has been suggested, it's a bad idea to have an armor type inflict the same status they resist. Thematically it makes sense, but in effect, it would have little to no use. Hitting a fire construct in volcanic plate won't really be helpful.
Instead, I would opt to add one new feature across all armor types - regen! That is, once you take damage, you will regenerate a portion of the damage you took back. For offensive armors there would be no regen, for class armors there would be minimal (10%) regen. For defensive armors there would be moderate regen (25%). For heavy armors there would be high regen (50%). This effect does not occur when hit to 5 pips of health (base health) or less. Health regenerates slowly and only counts the last hit you took - being hit multiple times in rapid succession will not heal you for all the hits you took, instead only the final one.
With this mechanic, having more defensive gear will actually provide you with defense, albeit over time.
Tank armours shouldn't absorb demage. They should however make you take less demage than with other armours.
Those are literally two ways to say the same thing. Absorbing the damage means taking less damage, hence your armor taking the hit rather than you.
Good point. Let me alter them quickly. Still just a small sugestion.
- Ironmight: Good chanse of giving Moderate stun.
- Volcanic: Good chanse of giving Moderate Ice.
- Ancient: Good chanse of giving Moderate poison.
Tanky armours already lowers your movement speed, and the ancient set also lowers attack speed. That's fine. Now give them better defecive stats and HP to compensate.
I don't understand. Should you get health regen based on the damage you do, or the damage you take?
"Tank armours shouldn't absorb demage. They should however make you take less demage than with other armours.
Those are literally two ways to say the same thing. Absorbing the damage means taking less damage, hence your armor taking the hit rather than you."
Sorry for my incompetence with the English language. I'm not a native English speaker. ^^
giving tank armor a passive shield would fix this (it absorbs a certain amount of damage before you start taking it.) high damage attacks would still break the shield and damage you but you are so slow that it leaves you vulnerable to this so it wouldn't be OP.
A fine suggestion! ^^
I belive the devs should have a lot of material to go on now. It still would be interesting to hear more though! ^^
i want a tank armor that lets you morph transformer-style into an ACTUAL tank
^
This is the suggestion that we should go with.
Tanky armours already lowers your movement speed, and the ancient set also lowers attack speed.
It's actually the other way around. Plate sets lower your attack speed, but ancient also hits you in the movement speed.
Should you get health regen based on the damage you do, or the damage you take?
The damage you take. This is essentially making you have higher defense, but prevents you from being careless.
@Umbra
That would be pretty neat! ^^
A lot of programming though. :P
@Fangel
Sounds alright, but it would practically be the same as having dobble the armor if you go by 50%, so that may be a bit much. Giving them all higher armour stats and HP would be an easier solution to the problem.
The problem with giving tanky armours just a lot of extra defence is that there is a serious amount of diminishing returns due to the way SK's damage system works.
At depth 25, a Gremlin Thwacker does about 15 pips of raw damage (40 * 15 = 600).
This damage will be split normal/elemental. Let's pretend it's a 50/50 split even though it doesn't just because it makes the calculations a little easier. So that's 300 elemental damage, 300 normal damage.
If you get hit while wearing Chaos set, that's 125 defence. Final damage:
300 elm.dmg. - 125 elm.def. = 175
+ 300 nrm.dmg - 125 nrm.def = 175
----------------------------------------
= 350
Nearly half damage for the strongest attack thwackers are capable of. Not bad for a glass cannon set!
The formula is going to get a little more complicated when we plug in Volcanic Plate because defence > dmg/2 and things get muddy there. I have charts.
300 elm.dmg - 140 elm.def = 160
+ 300 nrm.dmg * (1 - (1/2 + 0.19 * LOG10((400 - 300)/15 + 1)))) = 100
--------------------------------------------
= 260
So that defended it further. You save a bit over 2 pips of health on that attack and all you need to sacrifice compared to chaos is +4 damage, +4 ctr and +2 asi.
Let's double the defences of Volcanic Plate from 200 normal, 125 elemental to 400 normal, 250 elemental. I'll save you the math:
147
Now that looks pretty good! You defended a lot of that damage! The problem comes when you use one piece chaos, one piece buffed volcanic plate:
187
You get basically all the defence a full set of Volcanic Plate has to offer by just wearing one piece of it. A full set becomes worthless.
There's some merit to it. Certainly getting people to wear one piece of tanky armour is better than 0.
The health regeneration effect would allow tankier armors to retain their current defense values (therefore retaining the value of the full set) while artificially increasing their defensive capabilities. This means over time you can take more damage, but if you get swarmed it won't do you much good. Healing up to 50% of your health back after being hit has the nice side effect of gaining potentially 100% more health as every hit you take is halfed if you can avoid additional damage, not just the damage you resist.
As Zeddy said, adding defense boosts hybrids, not so much tanky sets. As I see it, having health regen after being hit helps heavier armors more than simple hybrids. You might see the same outcome with people wearing one piece of heavy armor and one piece of offensive armor, however the hybrids will be just as squishy as before if not careful.
This also would add a bit of new meta to the lockdown scene. Boosting defense numbers just means you'll see more offensive class + correct plate armor strikers while health regen means a powerful striker can tick away at someone the same way, however should a guardian be good at spacing and counter attacking they'll last much longer if they're wearing plate gear.
This is interesting... I don't understand your math, but anything that makes the tanky armors usefull, without making it OP is good! ^^
How does this combine with health points? If they all had the health points of Acient would this be a good thing?
Adding health points is good, but I think it would mostly contribute to hybrids. Already BKC + Ancient is a sorta popular combo.
Making tank armours better would involve more than just buffing the tank armours. Glass cannon sets would also need reduced health.
I like the original intent of the attack speed/move speed penalties for being a heavy armor clad tank. I would like for them to diversify the playstyles w.o penalizing players for choosing to be different. An option would be to stick with the slow heavy hitting style and give them a huge damage boost, but at the cost of attack speed. If you are swinging a big heavy slow weapon, it should hit HARD. Another way to help add a tanky melee playstyle would be to have some sort of thorn effect. Reward a tank for blocking extra hits for his party by dealing more damage for being hit. Make people want to be the tank in the party. Make other high DPS armors have even less survivability and rely on teamwork and composition instead of solo hard carrying an entire party.
The demage boost thing for a tanky armour just seems wrong. Not sure why. Love the thorn idea though, but this would have to be when your shield gets hit as well. I don't think all the tank armours shouldn't have thorns, but if only ancient had it, it would give you more reaso to farm vana in order to get it. ^^
I'm actually on board with giving damage bonus to tank armour. I'm thinking something like:
The reason why damage bonus is important for tanky armours is because you need a certain amount of damage per hit in order to interrupt enemies.
Seems good!, but why have 2 charge time reduction for guns?
Wouldn't simply 1 charge time reduction for everything be easier? (To shorten the effect list. Alternatively not have charge time reduction?)
Would also love to see some kind of thorns on ancient! ^^
Guns gets charge time increase, the CTR is for swords (volcanic) or bombs (ironmight)
The idea is to lead the plate sets into a swordy/bomby playstyle, like the guardian shield does.
If wearing a set of tank armor gave you flinch immunity that would be amazing
Ancient Plate Armor is practically useless defense-wise at this point because only Normal defense is worthless in Tier 3.
What if we gave it split Normal+Shadow instead?
Pure normal resist has very niche use in T3 ... Basically built for Trojans and Tortodrones
The game tries to lie to you about this, but actually every attack even in T3 has at least some amount of normal damage in them, even bullets. Melee attacks (like the particularly vicious gremlin thwacker spin attack) still have a good chunk of normal defence in them.
@Holy-Nightmare
I'd absolutely love flinch resistance for tank armours.
There could be a cursed plate set, armor that has a chance to curse when you are attacked. I feel like curse would suit tanking perfectly since it does damage when an enemy attacks, and you would be trying to trigger as many attacks in close range to apply the debuff as possible.
That's a pretty good idea! ^^
Could be one you can only get through shadow lairs. That would make shadow lairs more tempring.
How would you go about making them better?