Thread: Threat and My Captain

I don't normally post on forums, just read them so please bear with me and I apologise if this post loses track and I start to ramble.

I haven't been playing very long so I still have much to learn but I chose Captain because I liked the idea of being a jack of all trades. Having the ability to help my friends in multiple ways was far more appealing than being stuck to one path. I'm only level 46 at the moment and I seem to be having a few problems with my threat. I usually duo with a Champion and for regular fights I dont really need to be trying to take the aggro because the Champion is hard enough to take the damage and stuff usually dies too fast anyway.

My problem comes when we group up with our Kin for instances. I do try to switch my traits around so that they are suited to what role i'll be taking and while my damage is fine, my healing is fine, my tanking/threat leaves alot to be desired. If someone else grabs aggro, I struggle to pull it off them. I use my noble mark, threatening shout, cutting attack + grave wound and improved routing cry. I also use a Halberd.

Now, i'm not complaining about the capabilities of the Captain as i'm pretty sure the fault must lie with me and something i'm not doing that I should be. Is there anything else I can do at this level to help or is this something that will resolve itself as I gain levels? Any advice would be most welcome

Originally Posted by Linnyani

I use my noble mark, threatening shout, cutting attack + grave wound and improved routing cry. I also use a Halberd.

Try doing this first. (double check that it works for your level). Noble mark, cutting attack, grave wound > then threatening shout and routing cry.

Grave wound gives us a 10% threat bonus that lasts for 10seconds so have that buff up before you use your other threat builders. I think that works for lvl 40 but again not positive.

Also the champ may have something called Ebbing Ire. He can use that to help you build threat.

Here is one of our community guides on tanking.

You can't keep more than three targets effectively on you and only one of them you can keep so that it won't turn to dps classes. Captain tanking is about using the force taunts when they are needed as in when you lose aggro due getting stunned etc. Also keep in mind that you can keep an aoe force taunt up for 20 seconds with improved time of need assuming no resists are occurred.

Start of a pull should go like this. You pick the target that will be focused down first and put noble mark on it. Then you do threatening shout and go to melee. Start with defensive strike if survivability might be an issue, if not start with cutting attack+grave wound. Now you have agressive stance and Threatening shout coming from cooldown. It's important to use threatening shout whenever it can be used. Now if theres a lot of aoe damage going on some mobs will turn on your dps and thats the time to use routing cry. Also use rallying cry whenever you can as that healing aggro helps.

In my opinion they should give the grave wounds 10s force taunt to battle-shout as right now you can't save the force taunt part of it for a bad spot as you use it every time you can to get agressive stance. And that battle-shout force taunt would help us a lot in getting back those stray dogs that go out for your healers or someone else. Only this would make things much better for us as tanks.

Originally Posted by Nouhau

In my opinion they should give the grave wounds 10s force taunt to battle-shout as right now you can't save the force taunt part of it for a bad spot as you use it every time you can to get agressive stance. And that battle-shout force taunt would help us a lot in getting back those stray dogs that go out for your healers or someone else. Only this would make things much better for us as tanks.

Well, it shouldn't be part of grave wound that is for sure. Attach it to valiant strike and lower the cd to 30s or something.

Attaching it to battle shout would be pretty rough since it'd make us waste a taunt if we wanted to get to our crit-chain.

Your crit chance while geared for LoM should be so low that fishing defeat responses through crits will only be a waste of power and damage or threat wise the same thing. You do the bs+db/pa+BoE chain to keep elendils buff up so spamming that DS will give you power. Maybe battle-shout isn't the right skill for my suggestion, but I don't see any others. It's ranged, its cooldown can be lowered with a trait to 15s. Sure striking will decrease it even more and in LoM you have time to sure strike due to one hander being much faster. If you are a 2-hander tank I'm not gonna argue with you, but 2-handed tanking is one of the stupidest things in this game and as a tank it makes you act slow and those shield bonuses are too much to give up on.

Originally Posted by Linnyani

I use my noble mark, threatening shout, cutting attack + grave wound and improved routing cry. I also use a Halberd.

you hit the high points there man, all I can say is aggro is kinda a struggle. Got the +theat on threatening shout and grave wound legacy? EDIT: I mean trait, there is no legacy

Originally Posted by Nouhau

If you are a 2-hander tank I'm not gonna argue with you, but 2-handed tanking is one of the stupidest things in this game and as a tank it makes you act slow and those shield bonuses are too much to give up on.

Whoa whoa, harsh language on the halberds there.

Threat is concern #1 for a tank, and holding it is cappy tank's most difficult challenge. We got heavy armor mit curves, we can gear right with the correct mindset. But sometimes you gotta take everything you can get for threat gen.

S&B is the best thing you can do for survivability, no argument there. I made a 1-hander for optimizing survivabilty--when I can get away with it. Say a single target boss fight, where I get a few ebbing ires.
The Halberd is the best thing you can do for threat gen. Call it a necessary evil, call it a bandaid. The attack speed does suck. But don't call it stupid, 'cause sometimes we need all the help we can get for threat. Just look at the OP.

Originally Posted by Nouhau

Your crit chance while geared for LoM should be so low that fishing defeat responses through crits will only be a waste of power and damage or threat wise the same thing. You do the bs+db/pa+BoE chain to keep elendils buff up so spamming that DS will give you power.

There are times it can be useful to trait 4 LoM when a captain is not main-tanking, and still retain plenty of crit chance. Threat skills can actually crit, although i think the only one of ours that could would be threatening shout. (Noble mark can, but only the initial pulse... and i'm not really sure if that has any effect)
Even if you were main-tanking you really have nothing better to do than go through bs/db/boe. You'll lose damage if you don't.
Besides that... Force taunting every 11-13 seconds, with a 10s duration, is probably too OP to make it through balancing. Although maybe since we don't have a threat leech we deserve it?

In other news, i tank with S&B also. 1h weapons affect the duration of cries as well as attacks. Stats on shields are way too good to give up, and the lower attack duration makes up for everything else.

I though this thread was about acting as the tank, not the offtank and you don't have much crit rating in tanking gear.

You can't seriously consider yourself a tank with a 2-hander. You are sacrificing too much on defensive stats that come with the shield and especially the critical defense is crucial here. For offtanking of course why not but you don't need 5 LoM and the capstone for offtanking, it's just the way it is. Halberds bonus threat is only applied to autoattacks and it doesn't add much to your threat generation ability and I consider swords passive better for every job because hitting those important skills is pretty much what the captain is about in every build.

I said I'm not gonna argue with the 2-hander tanks but here we go again.

And for offtanking. With 5 red you can hold the aggro and do over 1000 dps. With 5 LoM you can hold the aggro do approx 500 dps.

Where is it said that Halberd threat only applies to auto attacks? If it's true, then the halberd's lost all attraction to me. But I can't find that information anywhere.

Actually I just repeated someone else in these forums. I don't have any proof of this either, he just sounded like he knew this. So i might still be wrong!

Originally Posted by Nouhau

I though this thread was about acting as the tank, not the offtank and you don't have much crit rating in tanking gear.

You suggested making one of our main skills into a force-taunt. Should i have made a new thread to discuss?

Originally Posted by Nouhau

You can't seriously consider yourself a tank with a 2-hander. You are sacrificing too much on defensive stats that come with the shield and especially the critical defense is crucial here. For offtanking of course why not but you don't need 5 LoM and the capstone for offtanking, it's just the way it is. Halberds bonus threat is only applied to autoattacks and it doesn't add much to your threat generation ability and I consider swords passive better for every job because hitting those important skills is pretty much what the captain is about in every build.

I said I'm not gonna argue with the 2-hander tanks but here we go again.

And for offtanking. With 5 red you can hold the aggro and do over 1000 dps. With 5 LoM you can hold the aggro do approx 500 dps.

I generally agree about 5red for off-tanking, but there are times where you need the force taunt. Well maybe not need... You can let the hunter tank if he wants to... And really the only thing that comes to mind is tanking grims in FnF t2, and various trash pulls in ToO. Because really who traits 4 yellow's for off-tanking anywhere else.

Thankyou everyone for the replies. I will keep at it and have a bit of a fiddle with my rotation until I get it right

Originally Posted by Nouhau

Halberds bonus threat is only applied to autoattacks and it doesn't add much to your threat generation ability and I consider swords passive better for every job because hitting those important skills is pretty much what the captain is about in every build.

if halberds threat does apply only on AA (with which I tend to agree) same goes for sword's to-hit bonus or daggers crit

so please tell me which skills this would affect and how this would be significantly better than a halberd?

regarding crit chance and tanking, even if you have T: OG & remove some crit boosting gear you can still crit reasonably often on PA with 4+ targets (and a legacy) which opens our quite useful buffs (all 3 actually help with tanking some way or the other, sometimes even better than RtC which has no threat element on it's own other than dmg - yes taunt is not a threat builder)

just my 2 cents

Originally Posted by ky4n

if halberds threat does apply only on AA (with which I tend to agree) same goes for sword's to-hit bonus or daggers crit

so please tell me which skills this would affect and how this would be significantly better than a halberd?

regarding crit chance and tanking, even if you have T: OG & remove some crit boosting gear you can still crit reasonably often on PA with 4+ targets (and a legacy) which opens our quite useful buffs (all 3 actually help with tanking some way or the other, sometimes even better than RtC which has no threat element on it's own other than dmg - yes taunt is not a threat builder)

just my 2 cents

I admit I don't have the cold hard facts here, but the descriptions are as follows.

Sword wield: Your hit chance is slightly increased. Some say it's only one percent so it doesn't make a big difference. And how I understand this anyway is that it increases your overall hit chance.

Halberd wield: Your attacks generate greater threat. Yes, not skills but attacks. And anyway if the sword adds 1% hit chance the halberds additional threat generating is probably so small that it really doesn't make a big difference either even if it added the threat part to skills too.

So I guess you shouldn't base your choice of weapon on the passive, but what you prefer.

The reason why I favor swords are the animations. I used only halbers while leveling. Then at level 65 I got a crafted second age sword and it felt just so much faster and better. Again I don't know is there a real difference but shadows laments and deva blows seem to execute much faster while wielding 2-handed sword. I've tried the hammers, clubs and axes too, but they have the same slow feeling to them that halberds do. Haven't got any numbers to support this though cause I don't possess the time or the interest to test it through.

Originally Posted by Nouhau

I admit I don't have the cold hard facts here, but the descriptions are as follows.

...

Then at level 65 I got a crafted second age sword and it felt just so much faster and better. Again I don't know is there a real difference but shadows laments and deva blows seem to execute much faster while wielding 2-handed sword. I've tried the hammers, clubs and axes too, but they have the same slow feeling to them that halberds do. Haven't got any numbers to support this though cause I don't possess the time or the interest to test it through.

FYI, little need to test, they provided the "cold hard facts". ;-)

Originally Posted by Developer Diary: SoM Combat Changes

All weapon speeds have been normalized around the following categories of weapon, i.e. all weapons in each of these categories use the same speed rating:

* One-handed weapons (sword, axe, mace, hammer, dagger, club, spear and implements)
* Two-handed weapons (sword, axe, hammer, staff, club, halberd, rune-stone, and implements)

"Sometimes survival comes down to not being hit. Actually, most times." -the chicken skill, Bob and Weave