Tactics: Tanking in TERA

No longer solely about hitting a taunt button, how can you maximize your tanking ability?

A common question that people ask is, how will tanking work in an action based Role-Playing Game (RPG)? In traditional style MMORPGs, as most of you know, it involves tanks that build threat, hate, enmity, whatever… using their attack and taunt skills. As a result of this, the mob focuses on that player, and in most situations, everyone else is pretty free to do as they please aside from dealing with positional Area-of-Effects (AoEs) or mob adds. TERA does have the traditional aggro and taunt systems, but what about special attack patterns, target switches and projectiles in an action combat system? What can you do beside relying on building and maintaining a numeric value?

Players are able to make use of collision or body blocking, to actually get in the way of attacks, to assist in defending your team. Additionally, due to manual blocking and evasion, you must learn the proper cues and develop reflexes to optimize your damage avoidance, mitigation and positional team defense. Not only do these higher demands on player skill add interesting dynamics to PvE game flow, but it enables a much larger potential for PvP tanking than seen in traditional systems. No longer do you need a pillar to hump (a common arena or battlegrounds tactic from other games which involves getting line-of-sight by repeatedly shuffling around a pillar often just shortened to “pillar humping”) you could use your friendly local lancer.

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block = loss threat
# Apr 18 2012 at 11:27 AM Rating: Default
Speaking of skill, it is not common for dps to slow down so lancer tanks can gain aggro. When you do your job and block attacks 2 things happen. You lose threat. Your team does not use your shield to shelter behind. Just stack threat generating mods for your skills and try to gain and hold hate, Good Luck. You just don't find people who work with the game mechanics unless forced to, unlearn the AoE group dungeon speed tactics of WoW. In effect every game is a clone here with minimal or no CC, and no need for it.
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