Are Element Tanks Balanced?

I wanted the genuine opinion of the community on this matter.

I've noticed a theme in builds; Prism, Gemini, Morph-Stardust, Hive master items...it's becoming overprevalent and in my opinion causing some significant stagnation in what people believe can be done for builds. I'm not sure if this is because element tanks are overpowered, or just -seem- it at first glance. I don't know what to do, because I've heard both sides, the side that says it's overpowered, and the side that says it's balanced, give credible and reasonable arguments.

Note that due to the intricacies of the system, even if it's found to be overpowered doesn't mean necessarily that it will get nerfed, because I suspect it isn't the items themselves that are overpowered, but the system itself, and figuring out a way to keep it useful but at the same time fixing it from being overpowered will be quite the task. We just need to know if it is indeed a task that should be undertaken. So, I figure I'd bring up a poll about it and see what you all think.

Leave your discussions below, but do try to keep civil as much as you can.

 

just nerf morph-stardust and so many issues will be fixed
a helmet with such huge elemental defence, huge skill boosts, mana regen, and decent health should not be able to work for literally any build and be the best option in the game for said builds

 

It depends on what you use it for. I think rainbow tank builds are best in the hive because pretty much every mob in there does elemental damage, including Qira herself. However, if we're talking about LI, the bosses in there do more neutral damage. A rainbow tank build in LI is still useful I guess, but not as good as say, a warrior tank build.
But of course, this is just in PvE. I don't do PvP, but I'm sure that rainbow tanks in the nether are hell to deal with because almost everyone does elemental damage because of powder specials and all that.

 

That would bring an angry mob.

 

the best solution is to give archer stone shield and let escape be repeatable in mid-air... that would solve many problems

 

That has nothing to do with Element Tanks. Neither of those are relevant in any way to the topic at hand.

 

Why do you want to give something that stop arrows, to someone who shot arrows ?

 

I'd say this is actually because there's no good way to harness neutral damage beyond level 20. I've yet to see any build, much less a good one, that uses a weapon with only neutral damage as its main on purpose.

Maybe empowering neutral damage could be a check on rainbow tanks in PvP at the very least?

 

is poison neutral :^)

 

The thing about this is... it feels necessary to do this in most builds. Having less than 200 in a given defense feels inadequate both in PvP and PvE in my opinion because of how hard endgame bosses hit the player.

 

Yeah i agree. This is evident by the infused hive weapons. For neutral damage they do shit damage and are outclassed by the Wybel weapons. However, if you choose 1 element and put 5 tier 6 powders of the same element, they do way more damage than the Wybel weapons, and comparable to mythics of that element. For example, a fire powdered hive dagger does roughly the same damage as inferno.

 

If we define an elemental tank item as a Hive or Rainbow defense item, then I can't remember the last time I've seen a well-designed build that didn't have it.

One thing about elemental tank items is that they sometimes coincide with skill point items - Morph-Stardust, Prism, and Diamond Fusion Necklace, for example, have both really good skill points and very good elemental defenses. Personally, I tend to make very skill point heavy builds, so items like these become necessary for the skill points. If, for example, there were a +5 rainbow skill point ring that didn't give +rainbow defense, I'd probably take that over Prism a majority of the time.

Also, there's just the thing that those items are simply way better. Master Hive armor is just super good, and so is Morph-Stardust and the like. Some items that are pretty good but don't give good elemental defenses just get outclassed by those rainbow items more often than not, sometimes even without factoring in the rainbow defense. (Although this isn't comparing a rainbow and a non-rainbow item, take Hetusol and Leo. One has horrible defenses. One has great mana regen and insane health regen. Guess which one's which?)

And yes, mechanically, elemental defenses are just really good. Bad defense items, such as Nether's Scar, aren't used as much simply because they have those awful defenses. They clearly lower survivability a lot, and in my experience people tend to want to reduce the chance of dying. (Unless they're that kind of person who enjoys taking risks a lot.) The only prevalent usage of an item that kills your defenses that I can think of is Centipede, and that's only because +tier is broken.

 

k

Anyway, I lost interest in Wynncraft because I'm left unsure on what build I should go for. I didn't even start on the Corkus quests yet since I feel my build isn't good enough. I don't know what build would be good because the items in said build could be nerfed at any time. I would rather not have any hive items because if I use a build that requires a hive item, and another item in that build is nerfed effectively making that hive item not required or needed for a new build, I would have wasted a voucher that I cannot get back.

 

Right now the way I see it right now elemental tanks only are broken really in pvp because the fact that most people use elemental weapons but I feel like balancing them we would be unnecessary as its already known that pvp isn't the main focus of the ct,also elemental tanks don't really dish out that much damage compared to other builds however you also have to compare to the most common alternative high agl that non elemental tanks run normally being able to dodge many attacks in a row it doesn't matter if your weapon deals elemental or neutral.Agl builds also do massive amounts of damage because you can run any gear and just put 100 into agl and get the 70% dodge rate. so I find balancing a build that only stops elemental types of damage really isn't worth wasting the cts time, one other thing I would like to point out that to make a good ele tank you have to have good quality of gear you can't just throw on any morph-stardust,gemini, and prisms they have to have high quality stats

 

Imo poison doesn't work well against mobs that have high health, like the LI bosses. For example, For the mummyboard, it's better to just get a weapon with curse on it and spell spam. Which goes back to my point of elemental damage being superior to neutral.

 

IMO it's more an issue of the system than the items...

Particularly against other players, elemental defense is way too effective, especially against builds using high attack speed weapons. This issue has been mentioned before by more qualified individuals than myself, use the search bar if you want some in-depth threads.

Additionally, there's not enough actual reward for stacking up damage percentages, compared to the gain of using item slots to gain more health, defense, mana, etc.

The "glass cannon" playstyle simply doesn't do enough damage to compensate for it's costs, because no matter how much damage you have, the system's biggest factor is the base damage of your weapon, meaning "slapping a high damage mythic onto a generic tank" is highly viable.

This is also why Pure will never be good unless it gets a redesign.


Tagging some people who understand damage and defense calculations better than I do would probably be a good idea...

 

If you say that running a glass cannon build can't output enough damage to be viable look at people running yolo cata builds doing 7k melees and 30k spin attacks also because cata's base is so high it pierces elemental tank builds its extremely viable people with cata say the only thing that can live their build is agl builds

 

Can you add an option that states that it is just the system that is broken.

Element Defense is great against general weapons but horrible against high base damage weapons. One of the things that is necessary is factoring in Attack Speed. Same goes for stuff like Quake and Chain Lightning (though Chain Lightning is more debatable)

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Guess what? Cataclysm is built tankily. Its high damage is just too much anyway (even without glass cannon armor).

 

Thing is

Other Cata builds (this one, for example) are tanky and get over 30k spins


30k altogether isn't too great for glass Cata

 

Wrong sir.

Infused Hive Wand: 150-250 damage, fast attack speed. Avg 200 damage*2.5= 500 dps
Wybel Ivory Wand: 125-170 damage, normal attack speed. Avg 147.5 damage*2.05=302.38 dps

Infused Hive Spear: 250-400 damage, normal attack speed. Avg 325 damage*2.05= 666.25 dps
Wybel Horn Spear: 240-310 damage, slow attack speed. Avg 275 damage*1.5= 412.5 dps

Infused Hive Dagger: 200-300 damage, very fast attack speed. Avg 250 damage*3.1= 775 dps
Wybel Tooth Dagger: 170-220 damage, fast attack speed. Avg 195 damage*2.5= 487.5 dps

Infused Hive Bow: 400-600 damage, normal attack speed. Avg 500 damage*2.05= 1025 dps
Wybel Fluff Bow: 410-490 damage, slow attack speed. Avg 450 damage*1.5= 675 dps

Honestly might be worth doing.