Thread: The Effects of Ranged Tanking

Hello and welcome to another week of Muscommunication. This week I would like to explore something that is definitely new to genre of MMO's and no, it isn't story. BioWare has introduced ranged tanking to the game. Certainly other games have had interesting mechanics where a ranged class was designed to tank a certain encounter but that is a far cry from having a defined tank wrapped in a ranged package. Will this be a good thing? A bad thing? Will it even make a difference? Read on.


Let's start with the "traditional" perspective on what tanking actually looks like. Typically there is a class that is built with some survival mechanisms. More health, damage reduction, avoidance, you get the idea. Then they couple this with the ability to generate a higher amount of threat than everyone else so that the mob focuses their attacks entirely on that character. Under almost every other circumstance this character will be a melee character.

The implications of this are bigger than some might suspect. This means that traditionally both the mob and the player are standing directly next to each other in melee range. This is important since a very common mechanic in boss fights will include a few of the following:

• Boss location - It may be a mechanic that if the boss is standing in a certain spot, they receive a buff. Or on the contrary if the raid is standing in a certain location they get a debuff, etc.
• Positioning - This would indicate where and what direction the boss is facing. A common example would be facing a dragon away from the raid so that only the tank is hit by a breath weapon.
• Movement - Since both the tank and the boss need to remain within melee range, if one moves, so must the other. This is often important in relation to the previous two points since many raid encounters revolve around some form of movement.

Now, as you can see by these examples, the fact that the boss is also melee oriented is important. Although ranged tanks are a newer concept, certainly raid bosses are not. Well as we have seen in previous games, when a boss is primarily ranged it honestly changes the whole raid dynamic from what most would consider to be "standard." This means many of the raid staples, such as those mentioned above, are thrown out the window. For example. if you need to move a boss, you will need to either break line of sight or go out of range to get them to move. Since this is often very difficult, unless the environment is designed specifically for it, we rarely see these kind of mechanics on ranged bosses. Typically on these raid encounters, the environment becomes more of a hazard than the boss themselves.

This begs the question, what will ranged tanking actually do? Well, the answer of course is not simple, because on one hand it does a lot. One the other, it does precisely nothing. This will depend largely on how BioWare designs their encounters and if they ensure that they build encounters around having both melee and ranged tanks available.

Let's start with the "it will do a lot." If you looked at all of the points that make melee tanking important you can immediately see some issues that arise with a ranged tank. One thing especially that will need to be considered is how the ranged tanks gain their survivability. Are they gaining it through the ability to kite? Heavy snaring and crowd control so that it is more about not getting hit, then it is about surviving when you do get hit? I find this hard to believe, if this was the case than any kiting class could realistically be a tank (Smuggler anyone?). The truth is that ranged and melee classes just behave differently and it will be interesting to see how BioWare designs around this as well as how players adapt to ranged tanks as a whole.

I actually discussed this is a previous article when I discussed my concerns over building raid encounters with the cover system in mind. Well, whether you realize it or not, ranged tanking delivers some of the same issues which are also influenced by cover. One of the most important things to any raid encounter is position. Where is tank, where is the boss, where are the healers, the dps, you get the idea. Well as I already mentioned, ranged tanks will operate differently than tradition when it comes to mob positioning.

Does everyone remember when our favorite BioWare employee Brandon Miletta was on stage representing us at PAX West and playing a flashpoint? When he was in that flashpoint they had a trooper tank who's only role was to simply hold onto the boss. While that was going on, Brandon was jumping all over the place off-tanking the adds while the DPS burned down targets. What was interesting about this is that with both the boss and the tank being ranged, both the tank and the boss never actually moved anywhere. The boss came out, the tank got aggro, and they just stood there shooting at each other until the encounter ended.

Now that encounter was a simple tank-n-spank, obviously, but what would have happened if there were abilities and effects that needed to be avoided? If you look at the room there are only a limited number of places for the Smuggler to get cover and as the primary DPS in the group it would be very important that they could be used to maximum efficiency. What I feel this leads to is that BioWare environment and raid encounter designers will really need to think on their toes and test the ever living hell out of every encounter.

With that being said, there is also a portion of me that thinks that ranged tanking will quite literally make no difference at all, especially if ranged attacks on these tanks have no minimum range. Basically what will happen is that these classes, although being ranged, will just end up using all of the skills from melee range anyway.

The last point I want to hit is something that will be a huge benefit to the ranged tanks in tanking regardless of which of the above it ends up being. That is the ability to generate threat from range. Any of you who have tanked knows that one of the most difficult things to do is regain threat on a mob that breaks loose. Especially if they beeline for a healer or a ranged DPS'er. Well this becomes dramatically simpler when your primary aggro generation has a 30m range, right? I will be curious to see how they will compensate melee tanks for this. With so many ranged mobs in this game I have concerns about a melee tanks ability to round up mobs, maybe this games tanking will be defined by melee tanking melee and ranged tanking ranged. I suppose that will be good enough to add diversity.

Just like many of my other topics, I am saddened to say that this is likely a topic I will return to in a later topic. However, when we think about it, just like the cover system I think ranged tanking could provide an innovative new look on some old raiding principles.

So what do you think? Will ranged tanking mean anything, or will it all just be the same? You plan on playing a Trooper or Bounty Hunter? Have you thought about how this might effect you? Let me know! Comment below or head to the discussion thread. As always you can also always email me musco@torocast.com or throw me your comments on Twitter. Thanks for reading!

-eric


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It's really kind of an issue with me in terms of ranged tanking. I posted a thread a long time ago about my concerns, but things still aren't clear. If you are playing as a melee dps character with a ranged character strafing to avoid damage, are you going to have to just follow the tank around hoping to get in a few lucky hits? Ranged tanking just raises a lot of questions. It's not like I don't want to see something new, but I think the videos available for this raise more questions than they actually answer. Then again, perhaps that's what BioWare had in mind.

Either way, new is typically better, if it flops it flops. BioWare will simply have to change the mechanics of the trooper class. On the other hand, it seems like it would be fun and somewhat realistic to hunt for cover and keep your allies out of trouble in the process. Definitely a new type of challenge.

A simple way to regain agro as a melee tank with out ever having to move, regardless of where the mob is running off to, is and always has been the use of taunt abilities that have distance inately... give the melee tank this ability and the imbalance of melee v ranged tanking ability to hold distance agro is leveled out quickly. As any raider should know, if you have taken agro, simply stop attacking/helaing/whatever until the tank has regained substantial agro. this has never been a problem in the past regardless the encounter unless the dps or otherwise fails to understand this concept. You do bring up some other interesting questions though, and im sure time will tell and things will change before all is deemed balanced and functional.