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Using shadows for warrior tanking
Right now, warrior shadows are mostly useless for tanking except in specific and rare situations. I like the idea of making shadows do the tanking and would like to see it become something of the core warrior tanking style.
This would involve adding 2 new skills to the warrior skillset. Both would only be usable in Defensive Stance:
1) Summon Shadow skill
Use up 500 resolve to summon a shadow right where you are. The shadow remains indefinitely for as long as you stay in like 100 m range. As long as the shadow exists, all aggro that you generate as a warrior goes to the shadow instead. It also acts as a wall (tank with block up) so bosses don't go through it. The shadow has infinite hp. It also has 50% dmg reduction. All damage it takes gets transferred to you and then your armor, block, iframe state apply.
So, say the boss hits for 100 k dmg. Only 50 k gets transferred to you as a warrior. If it is blockable, and you block, you take no damage from it. If the damage is iframeable, and you iframe, you do not take any damage from it.
Also, this damage is applied to you separately from the damage that you take you yourself. Meaning, in situations where the boss does a huge aoe attack, the damage that would hit your character is calculated separately from the dmg transferred to you by your shadow, otherwise you would get a huge bleed and probably get oneshot through block.
If the attack has a debuff component to it and you do not iframe / block properly, you get the debuff transferred to you. The shadow itself will not get debuffed directly. Once you have one shadow active, you obviously cannot summon another shadow. And if you die, the shadow gets destroyed too.
2) Kill Shadow skill
You grab all aggro that your shadow currently holds and teleport right where it is, get a short iframe time while your camera turns around to where it was facing when you first summoned the shadow, and the shadow gets destroyed. This skill should probably cost around 500 resolve.
This skill is what you will use to reposition a boss if you have to. You kill the shadow and then move the boss to where you want it to be, drop another shadow and go on as usual.
Notice that these two skills could be combined into a single one that swaps based on whether you have a shadow on the ground or not. If they are combined, the skill should have a cooldown of around 1 to 2 seconds so you don't accidentally burn 1000 resolve by mistake due to lag or something.
The idea behind this is, you get to use your normal warrior backcrit setup and dps from behind the boss, so you would do more dps than when you tank from the front. However, you also would need to consider that your shadow is taking damage too and you need to block damage coming from it. You have to keep track of 2 things taking damage: your character, and your shadow.
My opinion is that it would make warrior tanking unique and interesting enough that people might come back to it. I am also not sure what the effects of this will be in PvP since i am a PvE only kind of person. Also, the numbers listed are just numbers i thought were right for it (50% dmg reduction on shadow, 500 resolve cost). I don't really care about the numbers, those can be adjusted. What I am interested in describing is the skill itself.
Let me know your thoughts on this. And thank you for reading this huge wall of text. I'll add potential issues i think of as i come across them below.
This would involve adding 2 new skills to the warrior skillset. Both would only be usable in Defensive Stance:
1) Summon Shadow skill
Use up 500 resolve to summon a shadow right where you are. The shadow remains indefinitely for as long as you stay in like 100 m range. As long as the shadow exists, all aggro that you generate as a warrior goes to the shadow instead. It also acts as a wall (tank with block up) so bosses don't go through it. The shadow has infinite hp. It also has 50% dmg reduction. All damage it takes gets transferred to you and then your armor, block, iframe state apply.
So, say the boss hits for 100 k dmg. Only 50 k gets transferred to you as a warrior. If it is blockable, and you block, you take no damage from it. If the damage is iframeable, and you iframe, you do not take any damage from it.
Also, this damage is applied to you separately from the damage that you take you yourself. Meaning, in situations where the boss does a huge aoe attack, the damage that would hit your character is calculated separately from the dmg transferred to you by your shadow, otherwise you would get a huge bleed and probably get oneshot through block.
If the attack has a debuff component to it and you do not iframe / block properly, you get the debuff transferred to you. The shadow itself will not get debuffed directly. Once you have one shadow active, you obviously cannot summon another shadow. And if you die, the shadow gets destroyed too.
2) Kill Shadow skill
You grab all aggro that your shadow currently holds and teleport right where it is, get a short iframe time while your camera turns around to where it was facing when you first summoned the shadow, and the shadow gets destroyed. This skill should probably cost around 500 resolve.
This skill is what you will use to reposition a boss if you have to. You kill the shadow and then move the boss to where you want it to be, drop another shadow and go on as usual.
Notice that these two skills could be combined into a single one that swaps based on whether you have a shadow on the ground or not. If they are combined, the skill should have a cooldown of around 1 to 2 seconds so you don't accidentally burn 1000 resolve by mistake due to lag or something.
The idea behind this is, you get to use your normal warrior backcrit setup and dps from behind the boss, so you would do more dps than when you tank from the front. However, you also would need to consider that your shadow is taking damage too and you need to block damage coming from it. You have to keep track of 2 things taking damage: your character, and your shadow.
My opinion is that it would make warrior tanking unique and interesting enough that people might come back to it. I am also not sure what the effects of this will be in PvP since i am a PvE only kind of person. Also, the numbers listed are just numbers i thought were right for it (50% dmg reduction on shadow, 500 resolve cost). I don't really care about the numbers, those can be adjusted. What I am interested in describing is the skill itself.
Let me know your thoughts on this. And thank you for reading this huge wall of text. I'll add potential issues i think of as i come across them below.
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Comments
1) Oneshots that are like KDHM "Get back"
When KDHM was first released, the attack where the first boss says "Get back" and puts fire puddles on the ground, you usually got oneshot if you took any damage at all from the fire puddle. You had to get away fast. So the "kill shadow skill" should be instant and cut any animation lock you are in and teleport you there and have absolutely no animation lock after you teleport (kind of like gunner's Command: Recall).
It might be good to make it so that your camera angle doesnt get swapped around too but that might do more harm than good.
2) Debuffs like Manglemire snowman
If a party member gets the snowman debuff and runs to your shadow, you will get the debuff and cannot really do anything about it. This can be pretty annoying if you are like right on top of your healer and a party member runs to your shadow while in snowman form. So the shadow should be very clearly visible so that party members treat it as an ally. However, it should also be easily distinguishable from normal players so healer's don't try to heal them.
I do not believe healers should be able to heal the shadow and then allow the heal to be transferred to your character but that might be an interesting idea to experiment with. Let me know what you think of this.
3) Debuffs like SSHM retargeting
The shadow will take the debuff and send it to you, the warrior. So you would have to get rid of the shadow when the mechanic comes up and run away from the boss to allow your other party members to take the debuff. Again this touches on the importance of instant cast and no animation lock on the "kill shadow skill".
Warrior skills do not have a lot of bonus crit on them or any noticeable aggro on them. So your highest aggro skill is scythe and you have to build stacks to get it. This makes warrior aggro fluctuate a lot and is rather unreliable in my opinion.
I am not saying warrior tanking isn't fun at the moment but i tried both lancer and warrior tanks and they feel really similar to me, with lancer being better built for tanking. I see no reason to have 2 classes have the same type of gameplay so i'd like to see warriors do something interesting with shadows. Or, as you said, this could be turned into a new class, but since my idea came from using warrior shadows, id like to see it go to the warrior class.
EDIT: Since my idea only involves adding the shadow skill, you arent forced into using shadows, you can still tank the usual warrior way if you hate using shadows. On some bosses that tera devs come up with eventually, it might even be impossible to tank using shadows. I haven't thought of any such boss yet but it might happen. That is why i made sure that you still can tank the old way if you have / want to. The shadows will end up with a slight dps boost so its good to use it, but if you hate it, its totally fine to tank the normal way too.