Skyforgin' and Tankin'

Been playing a lot of Skyforge the past week.  It's fun enough to fill my current MMO void while I'm still taking jaunts into Heroes of the Storm and Trove (since the Steam release I've had two separate groups of gaming buddies get into it).

Skyforge is a Russian MMO, and like a lot of foreign MMOs there is an awful lot that is either not explained very well period or not explained very well probably due to poor translations.  And like a lot of second- or third-string MMOs the external resources for the game are really poor when they exist at all, so I'd like to do what I did with this blog way way back when I started it circa Guild Wars 2 and try to collect information and strategies until someone else picks up the torch with a bit more organization and competence.

I can begin by talking a little bit about tanking so far, since that what I have modest experience with in MMOs and have been doing mostly in Skyforge.  I've only had access to Paladin so far.  Threat is very easy to get and hold and you have plenty of tools to get it and hold it and get it back if you need to.  As I get into the 4k+ prestige range though I'm starting to notice a lot of enemies--especially normal trash mobs--in normal+ level Adventures are tuned to completely squash you if you're not on the ball.  And this isn't entirely in terms of fight mechanics; a modest size group of Swarm-type mobs can and will wreck your shit if you aren't popping regular shields and your group isn't fast enough with the damage.

It gets worse in Group Adventures where you start having to treat every trash pull like you're approaching a boss.  Which is frustrating because the bosses, by contrast, are pretty well tuned for group play--for the most part.  Not having regular healing can really make things frustrating.  Maybe I'm doing things wrong or maybe I keep getting stuck with incompetent supports (I haven't played support enough to understand how viable or essential their role is, but I really should) but I switch off to DPS every so often to try to see how other tanks are behaving and I see the same kinds of issues.

One thing I've noticed that has helped, and have noticed other tanks catching on to, is that kiting enemies seems to be one of the safest ways to do things.  For example, pretty much all issues I had handling the pre-boss mini-boss of Mare Sacro Monestary were resolved by getting threat on the boss, picking up adds whenever they spawned, and running in a big ring around the outside of the room while the group blasted everything.  The gauntlet portion of the last boss of Daren Facility seems to virtually require a similar strategy.  Threat is not difficult to manage so you don't need to be constantly poking enemies, and enemy pathing is kind of strange; enemies don't seem to want to pass through each other and, when swarming, will gather around you in a circle--which is frustrating on many levels but can be abused to limit the number of enemies attacking you at once.  Also, ranged enemies seem to react very poorly to being LOS'd and may often sit there just staring at you from around the corner instead of attacking anyone.

This game very very desperately needs some way to mark targets; choosing which targets to kill first is a huge problem in this game.  Good and bad parties in this game can be distinguished by something as simple as whether or not everyone has the same sense in picking targets.

Anyways, that's all for now.  I'm going to do a writeup on MSM as soon as I've run it again to get accompanying screenshots.