Thanks to everyone who came out to test today.  Things went pretty well and I got some good data in my group.  To everyone else who played feel free to post your feedback from the playtest here.

I was in the group with Aeralik, two fighters, SK and pally, one healer, an illy and Aera on a lock. 

Vest and Kahli were the tanks. 

Everyone mythicaled, tanks were pretty fabled, no avatar gear as I could tell. Healer was mostly legendary. 
I didn't die once, except on last mob in cavern. Tank did a pull to group there, and on single target, I can put out a lot more dps there. 
I had tc. 

Aggro was pretty solid on the tanks, I had it sometimes, but the healer had no probs keeping me up. 

I think the fighters tanked 90%+ in defensive. 

One of them complained about dps in off stance. 

Deep Forge 
All: (08:55) 10245832 | 19151,09 [Tiath-Bolt of Ice-41804] 
Tiath 3546123 | 6628,27 
Tehom 2055331 | 3841,74 
Vestr 1519624 | 2840,42 
Kahli 1464935 | 2738,20 
Aeral 1389567 | 2597,32 
Tinyh 239640 | 447,93 
Arila 30612 | 57,22 
Tehom 0 | 0,00 
Tiath 0 | 0,00 

Caverns 
All: (13:27) 18343103 | 22729,99 [Tiath-Bolt of Ice-41495] 
Tiath 6015074 | 7453,62 
Aeral 3355967 | 4158,57 
Tehom 3300029 | 4089,26 
Kahli 2810160 | 3482,23 
Vestr 2514338 | 3115,66 
Tinyh 232479 | 288,08 
Edgri 74598 | 92,44 
Arila 40288 | 49,92 
a fet 170 | 0,21 
Tiath 0 | 0,00 
Tehom 0 | 0,00


_________________
-Ti

Razhish’s Cloak of Flowing Power has had its proc replaced with Praetor’s Strike.

why... nerf a good item?

I was suprised at how well both a paladin and SK held aggro off a high dps Wiz.

'course there is not much you can do about a wizard wielding a hatespike? (Malefic Fury) and 15k dps in the first 15 sec of a fight, but that was the only aggro death.  Playing a templar, my hate meter hovered in teens or even lower except on the occasional incoming.  I do like the pet health bar in the new group window, nice feature for priests.

In another group playing a gimp/alt illus, control spells seemed to only pull aggro if casting on inc - really had no issues with aggro with a bruiser/sk tanking, nor did the assassin.

So Aggrowise - I can't see much to complain about.

Now about the dps of that gimp warlock - "A" something .....

p.s. "mostly legendary" bite your tongue !

I have tested as SK 190AA raid tank geared.

1.
Couple thing that I didn't like about stance change was having recast time, which is have to wait for casting another stance after cancel one stnace. So when casters got adds on their back and defensive tank doesnt realize (well yeah, I don't think this bruiser was tanker at first palce that he couldn't keep good aggro on defensive either, but thats his player skill), tank (SK) on offensive can't grab aggro immediately to off tank because of stance. I have to cancel offensive stance, then wait for defensive stance recastable then cast defensive then build hate.... if casters still alive till that. It's hard to take aggro on neutral (no stance) when casters used AoE damage and getting beating. Unless all tanks have some spell/ca like holy ground which pops up 24 hate position for duration, its very hard to grab aggro on no stance stage nor offensive stance when hate went off to casters and need to off tank. Things get worse in raid as caster probably die in sec if off tank doesnt grab hate asap.
So remove recast time for defensive <> offensive stance and making rescue/assult 24 hate postion or giving similar skill like holy ground of paladin is necessary for other tanks to use offensive stance. Otherwise, only paladin can use offensive stance without worrying about hate position because of one overpowered spell, holy ground which seems not good idea.

2.
Another thing about SK's defensive stance has double penalty as having
  decrease melee damage multiplier of caster by 0.5
  AND
  reduces the base damage of spells by 10%

along with weapon skill reductions. I have read as Aeralik saying this is because SKs are much mroe spell/ca damage oriented than other tanks while in defensive, which makes sense on base spel dmg 10% penalty but then why have to have same penalty on melee damage multiplier like other tanks. No less amount but same amount. Giving double penalty only to SK seems unfair.

3.
On SK's offensive stance, I have to say I don't see much increase on damage for sacrificing alot and having penalty. Damage increase pretty much come from INT raise of offensive stance only which is very low impact after buffs from group (and depends on base INT gear of SK).

4.
While SK on offensive stance, SK's encoutner taunt can't be used at all. I hope this is bug as SK would like to use debuff part spell even offensive stance.

5.
On SK's offensive stance description, its saying "inability to apply taunt effects", but doesn't have this effect listed in effect listing. I'm guessing this is bug. This is making SK still getting message of raising hate msg showing up in chat window during offensive stance when sk used these threat raising spell/ca. I'm not sure if threat is actually raising but I think it does. Just can't use encounter taunt spell at all.

Overall I like the idea of offensive/defensive stance after these issues have been solved.

My group consisted of:

Me (Guardian), Ranger, Bruiser, Mystic, Coercer, Dirge.

We did The Crucible Zone.

In defensive stance, I didn't lose agro once, on any fight..ONLY the non-curable fear would cause me to lose it. I had no Moderate on anyone in the group, and my avoidance on the Dirge.

In offensive stance, I took aggro only a few times from the Bruiser. I must admit, when I wanted to take it, I did. When the Bruiser started to get the hang of it, I never took it again. The only death in the instance occured when the ranger pulled aggro from a group encounter from the Bruiser.

The average parses were 6k ranger, 6k coercer, 5k bruiser(2k bruiser defensive) 3k dirge, 2k me (4k me offensive).

My continued and now proven hypothesis is as follows: I changed nothing how I play and did my job accurately and well.

I was the illusionist in the group with Aeralik. I was honestly going into the test expecting aggro to be much more wild than on live, and was very surprised to see how stable things were. Aggro would switch between the two fighters, but only due to the current bug about taunts working in offensive stance. We tested Deep Forge for single-target aggro and Caverns of the Afflicted for AE.

Aside from the last fight we did at the end of Caverns of Afflicted, aggro was never really an issue at all, and we had clicked off Trak shield effect so it didn't skew things while keeping on wicked wands of malice and so on. It's also worth noting that we didn't have any classes that'd modify aggro in any way, like a dirge, troubador, coercer, etc. I believe the +aggression component of the warlock skill buff would have modified taunt values, but it wasn't up during our testing.

Overall, I was very pleased with how the changes looked, though I can understand concerns of fighters who feel they may not contribute enough damage in defensive stance.

Raid geared 191aa Bruiser here that ran Deep Forge with Reahov twice earlier today with two slightly different group set ups.  For the most part I am very unhappy with these changes. Deep Forge is a zone I have run many times on live and the run through today came out much differently than I had hoped.  I normally run the zone in Offensive stance and hold agro fine with high Bruiser dps but due to the changes on the test server I am forced to tank the zone in Defensive and rely on taunts instead of dps to hold agro. The results I witnessed during this runthough was that the increased taunts DO NOT replace the agro generating ability of the lost DPS. I do not believe it is a matter of skill to relearn how to play my class from the ground up only to run out of power from spamming the so called "taunts" and taunt generating CAs. That is how tanks are to be played now is it not?? After seeing the changes in action I feel the bruiser class lacks the tools necessary to be an effective tank POST GU51.

My suggestion is to let Bruisers do what they do best and that is to tank and taunt in offensive. Yes there IS risk in tanking offensively as I can get high spike damage and wipe but that is a risk I should be allowed to take if I choose to. Tieing taunts to only be usable it defensive stance severly limits my options in doing what I need to do to keep the group safe. There has to be more ballancing done here as the bruiser seems completely watered down as a tank.

Novusod wrote:

Raid geared 191aa Bruiser here that ran Deep Forge with Reahov twice earlier today with two slightly different group set ups.  For the most part I am very unhappy with these changes. Deep Forge is a zone I have run many times on live and the run through today came out much differently than I had hoped.  I normally run the zone in Offensive stance and hold agro fine with high Bruiser dps but due to the changes on the test server I am forced to tank the zone in Defensive and rely on taunts instead of dps to hold agro. The results I witnessed during this runthough was that the increased taunts DO NOT replace the agro generating ability of the lost DPS. I do not believe it is a matter of skill to relearn how to play my class from the ground up only to run out of power from spamming the so called "taunts" and taunt generating CAs. That is how tanks are to be played now is it not?? After seeing the changes in action I feel the bruiser class lacks the tools necessary to be an effective tank POST GU51.

My suggestion is to let Bruisers do what they do best and that is to tank and taunt in offensive. Yes there IS risk in tanking offensively as I can get high spike damage and wipe but that is a risk I should be allowed to take if I choose to. Tieing taunts to only be usable it defensive stance severly limits my options in doing what I need to do to keep the group safe. There has to be more ballancing done here as the bruiser seems completely watered down as a tank.

couldn't you tank in mid stance??

MirageKnight wrote:

I have tested as SK 190AA raid tank geared.

1.
Couple thing that I didn't like about stance change was having recast time, which is have to wait for casting another stance after cancel one stnace. So when casters got adds on their back and defensive tank doesnt realize (well yeah, I don't think this bruiser was tanker at first palce that he couldn't keep good aggro on defensive either, but thats his player skill), tank (SK) on offensive can't grab aggro immediately to off tank because of stance. I have to cancel offensive stance, then wait for defensive stance recastable then cast defensive then build hate.... if casters still alive till that. It's hard to take aggro on neutral (no stance) when casters used AoE damage and getting beating. Unless all tanks have some spell/ca like holy ground which pops up 24 hate position for duration, its very hard to grab aggro on no stance stage nor offensive stance when hate went off to casters and need to off tank. Things get worse in raid as caster probably die in sec if off tank doesnt grab hate asap.
So remove recast time for defensive <> offensive stance and making rescue/assult 24 hate postion or giving similar skill like holy ground of paladin is necessary for other tanks to use offensive stance. Otherwise, only paladin can use offensive stance without worrying about hate position because of one overpowered spell, holy ground which seems not good idea.

Then what would a paladin have that makes it different than anything else?  As of the moment, Holy Ground is the ONLY ability that the paladins have that give them any form of competition as the MA.

You are not allowed to have the awsome loving that the shadowknight just got, and then start asking to get the paladins ONE and ONLY unique spell remaining that gives a raid a reason to want them.  Especially above all else when the paladin is supposed to be the king of agro.  You have sneering assault, rescue, death touch (which I might add still does not take power although the paladin's equivilant does, and alot at that...) and your superior aa end line abilities not to mention healing through your offensive spells rather than having to cast them seperately.  If you are unable to snap agro off of the squishy, then that is the squishies problem for not doing their job, or it is your problem for not doing your job.

Keep us posted on the next in-test group!  Thank you for taking the testing to the level of actually running the groups with us Aeralik.  I'll be there next time with my paladin/warden/wizard (assuming I don't have to work right durring the middle of it again)

I seem to have read differently to you as I recall he said ALL tanks should have something LIKE the Paladins Holy Ground. We all know that us SK's got some awesome loving recently but that was _LONG_ overdue as any other tank who would always get selected over an SK for MT spots would tell you. Just because we got that loving to correct the situation we had been in for years doesn't mean we can't ask for dumb proposed 'adjustments' to be addressed.

To not be able to grab aggro due to a five second delay in switching stances is just not the way to correct what is perceived as an over power on SK's. Simply removing the aggro/threat aspect of all Spells/CA's in offstance and reducing the Spells/CA's base damage by 10% in defstance would be enough to finalise the balance and I for one would be happy with it.

I did went into Deep Forge as part of a 4-person group; Guardian (me), Pally (Boli), Coercer (Meshur) and Warden (Megera).

Guard was largely TSO shard armour (T1) and jewelery with bits of T1-2 fabled dotted here and there.  No Myth.

Pally was very well geared, Myth and lots of stuff from VP.

Coercer is pretty well geared, Myth'd, mish-mash of the good legendary and raid loot fabled.

Warden was mostly legendary geared, no Myth.

1)  Looks like The Doomsmith's script is a bit broken.  There where no hammers up in his room and he would throw out his massive incurable aoes, we could do nothing to stop them (no hammers visible to kill).

2)  Is it intended that all CA with large taunt components (Guard examples are Infraction, Gut Kick, Lay Waste and Slanderous Assault and the AA ability Sneering Assault) still operate as taunts while in offensive stance?  The only abilities that became greyed-out were my primary single and group taunts and rescue.  I am unsure on higher taunts from the TSO tree as my test-copy character is not specced into them.

3) In terms of hate; neither myself nor Boli noticed much in the group to raise a complaint about (Though the Pally primary taunts being unusable in offensive stance was a major talking point as they are important for pally dps due to their debuff component).  However we didn't really have much aoe dps (Or much dps in general).

4)  Guard in group mode was ok in this group, I had enough lee-way on the single target hate to be able to switch targets and spread the hate about somel

My one concern is on how this scales.  In a group situation having 4-5k Hate per second is enough to hold aggro off all but the most insane dps classes (single target) but in a raid it will not be, with players in comparable gear to my own doing 6-7-8k dps.  It is hard to tell but it does not seem that taunts are effcted by debuffs and while they are getting some gear to add +hate, +hate gain, +hate crit and the like there is still no-where near as much capacity for scaling as a dps class gets.  When I consider also that the buffing and debuffing potential of a raid can greatly increase dps whilest at the same time not really increasing Hate generation (especially now that the large buffs of dirges and coercers has gone) and the de-hate possibilities have gone the way of the dodo (no more -50% hate from trouby) I am left feeling that raid aggro could be a bit of a sticking point.

As it is now on live I have trouble holding aggro off dps classes if the group is unbuffed (ie, no dirge or coercer).  That lack of buffage reduces their dps a bit but it reduces my hate generation far more than it effects their dps.

As it is on test an unbuffed situation appears to be very comfortable for aggro control, but with the massive possibilities for melee and spell dps buffage in stacked groups/raids I fear that hate generation will fall behind in this this area.  I understand that you want dps classes to have to concider their actions whilest dpsing, but it is a fine line between holding off for a second to make just that little bit of difference needed for the tank to maintain aggro and having to hold off for 10-15 seconds in every 60 which is simply frustrating.

Anyway, I hope someone has had a go at some easy raid content and can allay my fears.

I just don't like the idea of the 5sec recast time on stances. I have had macro's set up for years to switch from offencive to defencive (swapping out gear and buffs). SOE first made it so I couldn't switch gear out while in combat now I can't change stances?

What good is Peeling a mob if I go splat cause I can't switch to defencive stance? Sorry but because you can't come up with insightful ways to fix something you instead break something else. As a programmer I can't imagine my boss being ok with me disabling a button because it didn't work right. 5sec recast on stances is not a fix it's a work around and a sorry one at that.

All these changes have become nothing more then controls to make us play your way. Why not just rename the game "The Matrix" and turn me into a battery already. I feel like a robot with these changes.

/press_button_1
/sleep 100
/press_button_2
/sleep 100
/press_button_3

You are taking all the fun out of the game. As a Monk my main role in a raid is to DPS and to snap any back if the tank goes down and the ST does not have aggro. You gave me tools to fill that role now you are taking them away. I was a big supporter of the orginal changes but now you are just putting bandaids on everything.

REMOVE THE STANCE RECAST TIMER.

Typical sequence running Crucible TSO instance on test:

01 - Pull

05 - Amends cast to add a hate proc once every 4 seconds for 20 seconds.

15 - Fight ends.

...

20 - Pull

25 - pray

35 - Fight ends.

...

40 - Pull

45 - pray

55 - Fight ends.

...

60 - Pull

65 - Amends is finally back!

75 - Fight ends.

rinse and repeat.

-----

Scenario 1 - Amends is a new snap-aggro ability

If this is true so that a tank only needs a hate proc once every 37.5 seconds and a slight increase to hate gain to go along with their normal taunts, why do Guardians need the hate proc on a portion of block/damage and monks need the 9% transfer and 10 times per minute hate proc?

Scenario 2 - Amends is part of base aggro generation

Why is the recast 1 minute so that is is unavailable 2 out of every 3 fights going at a reasonable pace through an instance (forget chain pulling or the like)?  No other single target tank even has to worry about recasting their being hit proc or hate siphon, let alone have it unavailable 2/3rds of the time.

-----

When an ability is so clearly broken on paper, it's not difficult to confirm that on test.  Of course, you have to tank an instance that is hard enough that normal taunts can't handle it without the added hate from the transfer/procs that guardians/monks enjoy.  We intentionally experimented on test to find if that breaking point existed and it did.  It's not a matter of holding aggro when it can be easily done with normal taunts - you have to push it to expose the weakness that will come up again and again in real play.

Lastly, I really appreciate the support the vast majority of the community has shown on this issue.  Most fighters look at these numbers and say, 'yeah, I see how that is broken."  So again, I want to stess that I don't think anything should be done to nerf guardians or monks aggro.  You simply need to restore a permanent and reasonable hate siphon to the paladins so that all 3 enjoy some form of a permanent beneficial hate modifier for an ally, and paladins regain the passive always on no power hate procs the other two classes already have on test.

VALKOR wrote:

Typical sequence running Crucible TSO instance on test:

01 - Pull

05 - Amends cast to add a hate proc once every 4 seconds for 20 seconds.

15 - Fight ends.

...

20 - Pull

25 - pray

35 - Fight ends.

...

40 - Pull

45 - pray

55 - Fight ends.

...

60 - Pull

65 - Amends is finally back!

75 - Fight ends.

rinse and repeat.

-----

Scenario 1 - Amends is a new snap-aggro ability

If this is true so that a tank only needs a hate proc once every 37.5 seconds and a slight increase to hate gain to go along with their normal taunts, why do Guardians need the hate proc on a portion of block/damage and monks need the 9% transfer and 10 times per minute hate proc?

Scenario 2 - Amends is part of the baseline aggro generation

Why is the recast 1 minute so that is is unavailable 2 out of every 3 fights going at a reasonable pace through an instance (forget chain pulling or the like)?  No other single target tank even has to worry about a castable ability, let alone one that is unavailable 2/3rds of the time.

-----

When an ability is so clearly broken on paper, it's not difficult to confirm that on test.  Of course, you have to tank an instance that is hard enough that normal taunts can't handle it without the added hate from the transfer/procs that guardians/monks enjoy.  We intentionally experimented on test to find if that breaking point existed and it did.  It's not a matter of holding aggro when it can be easily done with normal taunts - you have to push it to expose the weakness that will come up again and again in real play.

Lastly, I really appreciate the support the vast majority of the community has shown on this issue.  Most fighters look at these numbers and say, 'yeah, I see how that is broken."  So again, I want to stess that I don't think anything should be done to nerf guardians or monks aggro.  You simply need to restore a permanent and reasonable hate siphon to the paladins so that all 3 enjoy some form of beneficial hate modifier for an ally, and paladins regain the passive always on no power hate procs the other two classes already have on test.

You make it seem like if you don't have Amends up you can't tank. Even without my 7% (READ SEVEN PERCENT) transfer I can hold aggro. I use the taunt keep SOE gave me.