Tanking 2

Playing World of Warcraft as a semi serious Paladin tank recently I've become quite interested in the tanking mechanic and come up with an idea of how to implement 3 very distinctly different ways of tanking and through that opening up for the idea that not only using a heavily armored fighter as a tank as mentioned in Tanks.

To implement these major differences I will introduce a new main mechanic, a diminishing avoidance; this will make each avoided attack reduce your chance to avoid the next attack and each means of avoidance will be reduced individually. This will affect dodge, parry and block. The reduction will be based on full avoidance and current avoidance and will then replenish with a percent of max value, the replenishing value can be increased by talents in some jobs and also "jumped up" by skills, taking one turn of actions.

The function to calculate this would look something like the following:
choseLargest(choseSmallest(avoidanceCurrent*A% , avoidanceMax*B%) , avoidanceCurrent*C%), meaning while avoidance is higher than a certain % of max A% will be reduced, otherwise B% will be reduced but the reduction will never be higher than C% of current.
for example for A = 45%, B=20% and C=75% and avoidanceMax = 100% and replenish is 5% per second and an avoid happens every 3rd second.
The first attack would reduce avoidance to 55% and then increased to 60, 65 and 70
1: 55 - 70
2: 38,5 - 53,5
3: 29,4 - 44,4
and will finally stagnate on 20,0 after 13 avoids (under 25% from 9 dodges) since 75% of 20 is 15 and that equals the replenishing rate.
With these values the stagnation is at 20% meaning a character would need 500% to keep it over 100% at all times.

This mechanic forces a change to the hit mechanic and the hit table, probably it will work as it does when total avoidance (plus block) is lower than 100%, if over it will create a new hit table with only dodge, parry and block at an equal ratio. This means if you can make dodges and parries stagnate over 100% you should not have any block at all and would probably do best to dump your shied if you have one, this won't be an issue very often though as shield using jobs won't be able to do that without block.

So the three distinct types will be armor tank, avoidance tank and resistance tank. Of course this is a simplification as all tanks will need to have some armor, avoidance and resistance, however a heavy armored plate and shield tank will not have to rely on complete avoidance but will take heavy damage most of the time and need lots of heals and probably not be able to handle single very hard hitting or magic using targets very well, while an avoidance tank will do well with slow hitting targets and rarely, if ever, need any heals but have huge problems with several or very fast hitting targets as the avoidance diminish will be too quick for the replenishment and therefore quickly die.

Armor tank: the armor tank relies heavily on a big hit point pool and high armor value for an even higher efficient hit point pool against physically hitting targets. The armor tank will use shield for damage reducing blocks which combined with dodge and parry will lower the avoidance reduction (since it is divided by 3). However in heavy armor dodging in particular is harder and an armor tanks will rarely reach a level where they can block or avoid all attacks. Armor tanks specialize in taking low damage frequently as they mitigate damage more than avoid it. Typical armor tanks are Warriors and Paladins.

Avoidance tanks: often lightly armored and without shields the avoidance tanks relies heavily on never taking any damage at all, having very high dodge and parry the avoidance tanks should be able to keep their total avoidance over 100% at all times. In cases when the avoidance drops below 100% they should have skills to increase avoidance, temporarily guarantee an avoid or heavily reduce the damage of the next attack. Typical avoidance tanks are Fencers and Corsair.

Resistance tanks: heavy metal armor often has low resistance making the armored tanks unsuitable to tank magic using targets, thick skinned animals and humans and leather wearing resistance tanks however are excellent at this. Typical resistance tanks are bears (shape shifted Animagi or tamed pets) and Battlemages.

Hybrid tanks: some tanks lie somewhat in between the three distinct roles and can handle situations of various sorts, these can for example have both high armor and high resistance like Barbarians, medium armor and shield but still high on avoidance like Swashbucklers or somewhat high avoidance, high natural armor and high natural resistance like Monks.