Party roles

The four roles

Your role is a small bonus for you plus an aura for everyone near you. It never gates a fight: a balanced party is safer and faster, and any mix of roles can clear.

Taking a role

• Roles begin once you have a subclass (level 3). Before that you have none, including all of The Fall.
• Your class decides your roles. A fighter tanks or deals damage, a paladin can tank, heal or smite, a bard heals or deals damage, a cleric heals or calls the storm, and a rogue only deals damage. Casters never tank: a summoner's minions can hold foes, but the summoner stays behind them. Songs and auras that lift a party come with the damage and healer roles. 5 classes can tank, 5 can heal and 14 deal damage (the table below).
• Your subclass starts you in the roles its path is built for. Your class's other roles open when you learn a keystone or capstone that carries them: a Champion fighter who learns the Bulwark keystone can tank.
• Your first role is your subclass's first. Switch any time out of combat with the role chips on the Talents sheet; the chip shows on your party frame, in the lobby and in chat.
• Talents carry role tags, and the Recommended order on the Talents sheet is different for each role you can take.

Taunts and threat

• Foes keep a short list of who is hurting them. Damage adds threat; a tank's ×3 multiplier and a damage dealer's −20% change who is on top. Each entry fades with a 4 second half-life, so a foe turns to whoever is dealing with it now, and a challenger needs 10% more (30% from afar) to take a foe off its current target.
• Heals count too: 40% of the healing you actually do becomes threat on the foes near you.
• A taunt holds a foe on you for 3 seconds (1.5 on bosses) and leaves you at the top of its list afterwards. Shouts hold every foe nearby; single taunts reach 8 tiles. Repeat taunts shorten: ×0.6, ×0.3 within 8 seconds, then the foe is Unswayed for 4 seconds.
• A red crest above a foe means it is held by you. An orange “!” shows a foe going for someone else, pointing at the foe and never blaming a player. While a foe is held, the tank takes 15% less from it (Defiance).
• Damage dealers have ways out: some skills and talents drop threat, or pass it to the tank or a pet.

Heals and shields

• Ally heals go to the party member who needs them most within 9 tiles: low health, a tank holding several foes, or someone a telegraphed attack is aimed at. Pin a focus on a party frame to send them to one person.
• A heal that lands on an ally under 25% health pops Saved!. Healers gain Atonement: 12% of their own damage heals the most wounded ally near them.
• A shield absorbs damage on you or an ally, up to 30% of their health, holds for 4 seconds, then fades. A new one replaces a smaller one and refreshes a larger one.

Interrupts

• Some foes and bosses wind up a spell. A blue bar and ring mark the casts you can stop. An interrupt cancels it and shows Interrupted!.
• A foe that is interrupted is silenced for 1.5 seconds. A boss cannot be silenced; it is Staggered instead and takes extra damage for 3 seconds, a window to punish.
• A skill that interrupts gets 25% of its cooldown back.

One buff per kind

Every party buff belongs to a family: Inspired, Guarded, Hastened, Mending, Keen, Barrier. An ally gets only the strongest one in each family, so two bards' Inspirations do not stack, but a bard and a druid do. The four role auras sit in four different families, which is why a party of four roles beats a party of four tanks: all four auras apply.

Role loadouts

Keep two talent builds and swap between them for free in town. Changing a build is a normal reset. Up to 2 setups, one per role: save your current talents as a role's loadout from the strip at the top of the Talents sheet, and switch in town at no cost, at any level.

Sellswords and roles

Each sellsword can take a role: a tank holds foes, a healer keeps you standing, damage kills things. Pick one here and they fight that way. The role dial sits on the Party sheet and on each member's card in a run. Each sellsword offers the 1 or 2 roles their subclass is built for (their class decides, as yours does), and a slider fine-tunes how they do it.

Finding a group

• Role chips show on friends, the directory, chat lines, the lobby and party frames. A lobby shows Party roles: each role lit with who holds it, or dimmed as open (never as a warning).
• Group-finder posts can list the roles they still want (“Wanted: healer, tank”), and you can filter the posts by role.
• Switch on Fill the gap and when you join a party you take the first role it is missing. On: when you join a party, you take a role it doesn't have yet.

Where classes fit