What's more important Guarding a healer, or defending?

[Rebmac!]

Lets say you're on aldarran, and there's 3 turrets, in a raid of 8, I'd think splitting up the raid, into a group of 5, guarding the middle, and 3, to rove between the other two (with help from the 5, if things get hairy), would be optimal... but my question becomes, whats more important for a "tank" to try your best, and keep others off your healer, or to guard the objective, so the enemy can't recapture it so you win the zone?

I guess it'll determine on the situation, but i'm just woundering what the "expected" role is. Is it the DPS's job to "guard" the objective, by killing the others, and the tanks job to focus, on whats attacking the healers only?

[Nwahs]

Hrm, it sort of depends how important each turret is or how you win a game. For example, if it was like a Battlefield conquest map, where your job is to control as many turrets as you could for the longest amount of time, my strategy would be to apply overwhelming combat power (all 8 of us) to one turret and take it over, then send 5 to turret 2, leave 3 at turret one to defend it. Once my team has two turrets, we would completely ignore Turret 3 and split into two perfectly balanced teams, each with a healer, tank, and two DPS. We would hold those turrets like the Alamo, and forget about Turret 3 unless we saw a tactical opportunity to take it and dominate the game.

This way, as a tank, our job would be to do what we'd normally do... when a group of enemies comes to us, we'd taunt their hardest hitting DPS(ers) to force them to fight us, thereby absorbing the brunt of the damage, and our healer heals us. Then our two DPS can either kill their healer or kill off whoever we are tanking, and THEY can protect the healers as off-tanks just like they would in PvE. That is how I would lead the PvP group.

I think there is no one answer to your question, it will depend on how many tanks you have, how they are geared and traited, what the objectives of the battle are, etc. I imagine, though, that your first instinct needs to be to protect the healer, only because you can assume that is the first target your opponent will aim for.

[AstralProjection]

Generally speaking, if your tank is alive but you lose the capture point, there's no point in the tank being alive : P Now, that's a sweeping generalization, which obviously won't hold up in every situation, but it should most of the time.

In games where kills don't affect team points, staying alive is an unnecessary pursuit. Sure, people worry about their "kill/death ratios" for bragging rights, but unless you're playing a game like deathmatch they don't necessarily indicate how good you are at playing a game, or at following directions.

In domination based maps like Alderaan, I'd argue that working toward survival or kills instead of protecting your objective is actually indicating that the player doesn't know how the game is scored.

I played an awesome match last night where our team ended up losing with 5 HP left on the Sith cruiser. If just one more person had interrupted a Sith click of a turret, we would've won. That's the difference between victory and defeat.

Now - the argument can be made that keeping your tank up is more important - I'd say only if the tank is posted up on the capture point smacking everyone that comes near it. In that case, by all means, heal that poor meatshield and keep the man alive. I'm just trying to point out that every decision a player makes in a warzone should be tempered by what the actual map objectives are.

If you never heal the guy at all your team is going to lose anyway, but if you have one enemy capping your point, and two enemies beating down the tank and he's ignoring the point - you want to leave him to die. Even if those two guys kill the tank and head for the point afterwards, you still bought your team an extra few seconds of points that it wouldn't have had otherwise.

Those extra few seconds would've won my match last night.

[timaselj]

Like our guild mates have said, it depends on the situation. Keeping the healer alive is always a good idea, but if that costs you a missions objective, it's not worth it.