TANKING FOR HEALTH AND... WELL, HEALTH

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Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15170
Hey guys, let's talk about tanking. If you're using 2k3 chances are you can just leave right now, but feel free to stay if you're interested.

What we're going to do is come up with and discuss different types of tanks - characters that try to mitigate damage for the rest of the party. Here're my ideas for basic types of tanks. Again, feel free to add other types and discuss which you like/dislike. Remember that these can be merged with other types of tanking or other roles completely!

The Provoke Tank. These tanks taunt enemies into targeting them specifically. This can either be passive - in VX, front-row characters are targeted more often than middle-row characters which are attacked more often than back-row characters (this is due to the easily-manipulated odds stat) - or active, with a provoke/taunt/piss off/yell/whatever skill. From there, provoke tanks tend to either defend, or attack while raising their defense/healing themselves.

The Bodyguard Tank. Instead of drawing attacks, these tanks protect other allies from harm. This can also be passive, like Cover in the Final Fantasy series, or active; Line Guard and Bodyguard in Etrian Odyssey III reduce damage for a row of allies/a specific ally that turn. Rudras make it even easier and cheaper to be active but having the defend command target yourself or an ally. In general, this tank requires help with restoration because they tend to expend resources defending a group, or require healing by taking damage in place of another character.

The Dodge Tank. This can be used in conjunction with a provoke/taunt mechanic, but if you have possible evasion against, say, area-of-effect magic, this can be effective by itself. Dodge tanks tend to be passive; they simply have high evasion against physical attacks, ranged attacks, magical spells or some combination. Instead of mitigating damage, this tank is more about survival; they try to negate all of the damage at the risk of taking the entire brunt of it.

The Elemental Tank. This type of tank could even be a mage - they temporarily raise defense or evasion against a specific element. Naturally, they tend to be more situational and rely on patterns - you'll want them if that dragon boss uses Fire Breath every third turn, or charges up before using it.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15170
Sure!

Also, the bodyguard tank works well in games that don't have provoke/taunt, although drawing fire is probably the best way to tank in general.
Healer: The Healer extends the longevity of the group by constantly restoring their health. Often disregarded for its tanking role because they usually can't take any hits and often require another tank to be fully effective. In addition to restore health, they can often remove negative effects from the group or even heal someone who has zero health (which may or may not be death). Sometimes, his spells heal a set amount/percentage of hit points, or it is improved by the healer's magic attack stat, or a stat specifically for healing power (I don't see logic behind using a different one).
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
LightningLord2 brought up a decent idea that I'd like to expand on. If you have one character that can take a lot more hits than the others, but has no way to provoke enemies into attacking him any more often, it's still possible that he can be quite useful. He can be useful by his ability to heal the rest of the party.

In my RM2K3 game (shut up craze) I actually managed to pull this off by giving one character White Wind. If you haven't played many Final Fantasy games, White Wind is a spell that heals your entire party for an amount equal to the caster's current HP. So if you're almost dead, it's almost useless, but if you're at nearly full health while the rest of the party is almost dead, then it's glorious. The character can get White Wind near the end of the game, but gets a weaker version called Pale Wind (that heals half as much) pretty early on.

While the character in question doesn't actually have the highest HP or the highest defense, he DOES have a single-target healing spell that also grants regen status to the target, so a typical strategy is to have him use that to heal himself as soon as possible, and then keep using Pale Wind throughout the battle to heal everyone else. Giving him regen status is four times as good as giving anyone else regen status. Eventually you can get an auto-regen accessory to synergize him even better.

Ultimately this type of character is almost always the last person to die. Not because he has high survivability, but because the player makes the hell sure he is always healed. If you wanted use this type of character but put him in more danger, you could make White Wind heal everyone else, but not heal the caster. It could even hurt the caster, costing HP instead of MP. Then he wouldn't literally be taunting enemies, but he'd still be taking damage in place of your party members, in an indirect sort of way.

Another way a healing-tank character could work is if the character has a revive spell. Especially if it's an area revive spell, this could be extremely powerful. However, its utility is greatly diminished in games that rely on the player's party using a lot of buff spells, unless the buffs persist through death.
Not quite sure how this one would qualify, but...

I'm working with two variant streams of HP: Endurance (Physical HP) and Spirit (Spiritual HP, name subject to change). Haven't really considered Endurance-based Tanks, other than playing around a bit with the generic concept, but there's a specific class type at least half-dedicated to Spirit-tanking. The class in question are called 'Warders'; they count as active or semi-active Spirit-based Provoke tanks, if I'm following your definitions correctly.

One of the easiest abilities for a character to obtain from the Warder skillset is known as 'Intercede'. It acts as a perfect target redirection against most Spirit-targeting abilities. (Yes, that means appropriately typed AOE actions suddenly become very picky Single-target actions.) However, Intercede comes with two drawbacks: It burns some Spirit per turn, and it paralyzes the character using it. Until the effect runs out (auto-fades on Spirit=0, auto-fades after battle, still determining turncount), the character can't act. As yet, I haven't planned to put anything party-controllable that can remove the Intercede paralysis effect into play.

There are more costly (to obtain, as well as actual required cost) versions of the skill that negate the disadvantages, and others that add advantages as well. At the highest level of the Intercede chain, the Spirit degen becomes a stronger Spirit Regen, and the damage is either absorbed, or (if I can figure the coding out) the actual attack is reflected.

Again, though, this class type is a partial tank. It feels more along the lines of your 'Elemental Tank' example, since it only works against one of the two types of HP, and the 'off-brand' one at that.

Any comments? Am I going slowly (or maybe not so slowly) crazy with this?
slash
APATHY IS FOR COWARDS
4158
Lockez' idea is pretty damn impressive. Try this one one for size:

Vampire Tank: Manages to draw threat to himself somehow (preferably passively) and takes normal damage similar to every other character. However, his moves drain life from the enemy and heal himself - thus, he is self-sustaining as long as he keeps dealing damage.

Pros: Dependable damage-dealer AND becomes even more efficient with better weapons, because he heals himself more easily.
Cons: Extremely susceptible to situations where he cannot attack, such as being stunned, slept, slowed, or kept out of range.
My game has something similar to the Vampire Tank. Contrary to your example, though, she has the highest defensive stats in the game but can't draw threat to herself. Besides just draining HP, she can also drain TP (which costs a good deal of HP to do) as well as give a portion of her HP/TP to another character. She's also immune to HP and TP degens!

On the downside, she is very slow, her damage output is below average, her max TP is extremely low, and as I already mentioned she can't draw threat to tank hits directly.

(Another tank in the party has less defensively-oriented stats (because she is also the main source of Heat damage in the party) but can draw enemy threat by telling bad jokes. She can also protect allies from Heat damage (most elementally-geared characters have an ability like this) so I guess she's sort of a hybrid Provoke/Elemental tank who moonlights as a nuker.)
Two more tank types for your consideration; the Rage Tank and the Counter-attack Tank

The Rage Tank only works in games with some kind of Rage Points, which are gained when you get attacked. The idea is that you draw attacks towards you(I guess), and get attacked more, which gets you Rage Points, which you use to use skills. This tank could be combined with pretty much any type of tank, or even character in general; you could use the points to do damaging attacks, or add buffs, or add debuffs, or to heal, or maybe even to draw more attacks towards you. It's good in that it is a really flexible type of tank, however it may be a bit slow to start up(especially if Rage doesn't carry over after battle).

The Counter-attack Tank draws attacks to itself(I guess, once again) and then counter-attacks when damaged. Pretty simple, but a nice combination of drawing away damage from other party members and dealing damage to enemies.

Perhaps we need a thread like this for other character types? This has been a productive brainstorm imo.
oh wow i never considered making attacks on the character bestow Rage as well (i just mention this considering the second tank i described uses Rage for spells). actually with the whole drawing-threat thing that is pretty fantastic and i now feel like a dumbass. props pokemaniac
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15170
Healers/Supporters are NOT tanks - they do not mitigate damage, then restore the party!

Re: separate magic/healing stats, these are very useful in build-your-own-char games like Dragon Quest 9. Just because your Wizard passives bump up spellpower doesn't mean they're a good healer - it helps add balance and variety. Paladins might be able to raise their healing power but it wouldn't make sense for the paladin's passives to aid an Armamentalist's debuffing and inflictions (which spellpower affects)!
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
There are really only two roles. Defense and offense.

Mitigating damage and healing it are really the same thing, just disguised to appear different. They both increase the number of hits the party can take before you get a game over. As long as we're talking about all the possible ways to do that, we should talk about all the possible ways to do that.

If you really think there is a meaningful difference, I'd be interested to hear more. What about taking 40 damage and then healing 10 of it is so vastly, fundamentally different from taking 30 damage? The former is a healer, and the latter is a bodyguard tank. Obviously there's a small difference in that the former will kill you if you have between 30 and 39 HP. I don't think that's anywhere near as big a difference as, say, the difference between a bodyguard tank and a provoke tank.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15170
You're talking solely about the numbers and damage, when the role of the tank and healer/supporter are vastly different (although they can overlap on characters like paladins, they tend to focus on one or the other).

The tank is supposed to get out there and take that damage, while the healer stays back and keeps checking up on folks. It's as simple as position - tanks in front, healers in back. The only time tanks and healers are same are in stodgy old traditional RPGs, and even then DQ and early FF tend to have passive provoke tanks - the higher the slot in DQ, the more hits you take; FF (especially FF4) used very blatant rows. That's still boring, but it works.

Healers/supporters also different options than tanks, even if the pure numbers make healing and damage mitigation somewhat similar. Does Defend cure the rogue's Blind status? Nope. Does casting Regen lower the chance that an ally is going to be attacked? Nope. What you're saying is the same as "raising attack damage makes enemies die faster, which means they do less damage, which means Oomph is the same as tanking." (Pssst: this is wrong.)
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Eh, I'm not convinced that's really a good explanation. However I will grant that there must be some significant difference, because so many people see them as very different roles.

After thinking more, I think the biggest difference is that tanks are predictive while healers are reactive. A tank has to choose his defensive actions before the enemy. The enemy then might or might not use attacks that are mitigated by what the tank did. Meanwhile, healers know exactly what the enemy has done and so they can undo that damage in a situationally targeted way.

I think this is why I just dislike tanks in general, and especially bodyguard tanks. Their actions don't depend on what the enemy does. Their strategy is largely static. They usually just do the same thing no matter what, except in unusual circumstances. It gets really boring to me, doing the same thing every time. Meanwhile, healers have to adapt to the situation every single round and choose the most appropriate action. This kind of dynamic strategy feels a lot more appealing to me.

So with that in mind, let's invent some hybrids. I want some tanks that require reacting to the situation, that require paying attention to what's going on in the battle. But Craze apparently wants them to still feel like tanks and not healers, so we'll have to get creative.

Time Travel Tank
This tank doesn't have the ability to provoke the enemy - no, his ability is so much better. He takes hits for allies by swapping places with them, like the Cover ability. But he can only cover one ally at a time. How does he know who to cover? Simple - he can turn back time a single round and choose a different action. Most likely, only the tank's action would be able to be chosen again - redoing the entire party's actions would be quite powerful and should only be available rarely, if at all. Even the self-only version of time travel needs some sort of cost so you can't use it every round.

Tank vs. enemy whose abilities have visible charge times
So the enemy has an ability that's totally going to one-shot your healer, and he just used it. Or, rather, he just started using it. But because you're using an ATB or an ABS or some other not-completely-turn-based system, you were able to put some time between when he starts casting the spell and when the spell does damage. The tank uses this time to step in the way, or to cast a protective spell, or to otherwise do some action that will mitigate the damage.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15170
I totally forgot the In-Yo'-Grill Tank which can be useful for rogue hybrids. Basically, they get fast, one-turn debuffs to ATK/DEF/whatever that lets them go "haha, I'm spending my turn letting your updo loose while my cohorts pummel you;" kind of similar to a Provoke tank that can go "you. You MUST attack me this turn."

also - tanks are boring because most healers choose between Curaga and Curaga? Sometimes they use Curaga? Huh?
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Healers at least have to choose a target, they have to choose whether to use an area heal or a single target heal, they have to choose whether to heal or not at all. All of these choices change based on what the enemy did last round. It's at least something.

I'm really pleased that my immediate first reaction was "time travel tanks" though.

I also thought of another thing. The tank vs. enemy whose abilities have visible charge times (maybe could use a shorter name) could also have interrupt abilities, to just stop the ability from being cast at all. Probably with a non-100% success rate.
Ocean
Resident foodmonster
11991
Time Travel Tank
This tank doesn't have the ability to provoke the enemy - no, his ability is so much better. He takes hits for allies by swapping places with them, like the Cover ability. But he can only cover one ally at a time. How does he know who to cover? Simple - he can turn back time a single round and choose a different action. Most likely, only the tank's action would be able to be chosen again - redoing the entire party's actions would be quite powerful and should only be available rarely, if at all. Even the self-only version of time travel needs some sort of cost so you can't use it every round.
I think instead of that (or running off a sort of idea that came to mind after reading it), since the basic goal is trying to predict what the enemy is going to do, you could have either a stat influence it or a spell cast on an enemy to basically see what they might do. It could be something like
<80% Fire to Healer Mary>
<20% Attack to Healer Mary>
Although that might mean you can't just keep it default and would have to in the scripts be able to get the variables for who they will attack and what percentages. But yeah, if you can do that then a cover tank or a provoke tank might be able to do something. If cover tanks can't defend against magic you might as well spend it on healing or protection measures, or if you think the cover tank is really susceptible to magic.

Though knowing everything the enemy will do might take a bit of the fun out of reacting to the unknown, so perhaps some enemies could at times cancel the effect or maybe it wears off after a certain amount or higher enemy levels need a greater 'enemy attacker knowerer stat' (which is probably not the best name to call it) or something.
slash
APATHY IS FOR COWARDS
4158
RPGs need more tanks. I know people love things such as Crit%, Dodge%, etc, but I'm of the opinion that the less RNG that goes into a game the better. It makes your success in a battle based on a player's skill, not just whether he gets lucky or not, and it has the potential to be more satisfying because of this.
For instance, Garr in Breath of Fire III is clearly meant to be a tank, but because he doesn't have access to abilities that allow him to draw fire onto himself he isn't really any use to you; lots of games do this and it just leads to useless characters that people won't use.

Well there are the Formations that determine who gets hit the most times; the Attack formation has the point character targeted the most.

Also Peco is the best tank in the game, not so much Garr. People like to ignore the onion since he's silly as fuck lookin' and he starts off at level 1, but when you realize he has the highest HP and Defense growth in the game by far (like, in the hundreds), built in Regen, and you can apprentice him under Fahl to exaggerate all that even further, well, then shit gets real.

I put Peco in the front of the party and he soaked up da hits like mad yo
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