Absolutely, and this is a subject I plan to touch on. A taunt is an essential tool for a tank and both should have this, however I believe their toolkits should benefit groups in different ways as you suggested.
As long as they are capable of covering the same basic principles, we should find ways for them to compliment each other. I have a few drafts pertaining to this topic, they’re just very long so I’m trying to edit them down a bit.
The player doesn’t get to choose as of now, it just happens when you raise the hammer. We understand and appreciate the feedback regarding being forced to taunt though, we’ll think about if there’s something different we want to do about it or not.
There has to be a different way of attaining aggro. Unless every boss in the game was designed with this in mind (not considering the trash mobs throughout the dungeon) then this simply would not work. Imagine pulling aggro every 10 seconds just because you want to do damage. There is no way to get globes other than the weapon raise and taking damage, so if you have a very skilled tank in your party this would be an extreme injustice to them because no matter how well they do their job, they will always lose aggro to the paladin (at least every 10 seconds).
I can honestly say Sift, Alu, and J were the sort of caster I was thinking of when I was playing the Paladin, and it made me worried that Warrior would always be prefered over Paladin due to the strong agro holding and tools. Mages like Sift, J, Alu, and others that can cast like brilliant freaks would prefer the current warrior over the Paladin simply due to the way tool sets are working.
I’m not even sure the Paladin could properly deal with high end bleed damage from rangers either.
Actually this applies to strong groups, for fresh 20s and less experienced groups the tank swap often was a vital strategy to manage a boss. The current state of the game with lots of gear-maxed-out people doing same content over and over is bad to argue from, in reborn we hopefully will have more diversity and more frequent challenges/new content and then again there will be a difference in strategy between less active, small guilds and the hardcore ones with people putting tons of time into the game to gear up, practice their skills etc.
I went with groups who don’t even need a healer anymore in the entire dungeon, but that is because of maxed gear and highly trained provokes/movement; a player who just started dungeons can’t likely do that.
For example with my small former guild we swapped at soul keeper in the early days of tradu mines and I remember it helped on more, so even if bosses are not specifically designed for that, it always was a good workaround; same like groups going with 2 healers at the costs of a more lengthy fight etc.
The point of this thread was to expose a discrepancy between jobs of the same role and how it can affect combat design moving forward. Even if the situations I’m bringing up are from original Orbus, or things that don’t matter right now, this is about how the future of combat can be designed in Reborn because the class mechanics implemented now can greatly limit or expand what is possible to do in the long run.
My immediate apprehension towards automatically using taunt off cooldown stems largely from how boss fight rotations from Tradu on all followed this familiar scheme: 3 hits, aoe, tankbuster. Or a variation just in a different order.
I do realize the plan is to move away from this in Reborn. The reason I bring it up now is because things like the Warrior shield recharge timer and Musketeers being solely cooldown based played a large role in locking us into that 15 second or so style rotation.
I’m not trying to say the fights were bad in Original Orbus, or the other mechanics aren’t great. It feels truly amazing to perform well in the game, and I’d rather be here than on a screen based MMO any day.
In VR we can’t have nearly the depth of toolkits possible on standard mmos, so every choice we make in this area will have a large impact.
I’m trying to convey my concern that if Paladin gets locked into forcibly using their taunt on a 10 second cooldown, any mechanic that could involve using taunt will always be locked into a timer that works for it like what we saw with boss rotations due to the Warrior shield recharge timer.
To make matters worse, PLD abilities are all gated behind having orbs to spend. And the only ways to get orbs are taking damage or using lightning strike, which will burn your taunt unless you’re keeping super close tabs on the timer. So in raids for example, if you’re in an off tank position and you have no orbs, you’re dead weight. This wouldn’t make for very fluid or satisfying combat structure, in my opinion.
There are other scenarios, such as what if I just want to taunt at a specific time? What if it’s just one mob walking up and I want to hold the taunt for the group following it? What if I’m dealing with super gnarly DPS in my group and I want it to jump the aggro gap when they pull off of me?
There could be any number of reasons to want control over when you taunt. Even if it is just those few, I have a hard time imaging a reason why it would be sensible to have taunt forcibly used off cooldown by comparison. I am open to listening to the thought process though, these things are super important.
At the moment I really think we should find a solution that involves player input and make the taunt an active use ability, not an automatic use on an ability that gates the orbs needed for everything else Paladins do.
I really like what Axile is trying to spark here and I HOPE its resonating with the dev team.
I’d gladly give up having to pick up a book over and over to get crits for a guaranteed taunt. Hell, make the cirt book also taunt and have a cooldown?
Tank swaps are not going away in the new game, and the Paladin will receive the ability to control their taunt, most likely it will be moving to one of the Librams.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read all of this and take it into consideration. I really appreciate it, and would like your reply a thousand times if I could!