Boycotting Warrior 4.0 (Let's do it!)

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

Personally, I like turtle tanking, but I understand that different players have diferent taste, and enforcing a single play style will only reduce depth.

The better solution, since we have three tanks, is to design one tank for turtle tankng, one for agressive tanking, etc...and expand the meta so each type of tank have its own benefit. For example, in a party with a turtle tank, one healer could be enough and thus replaced by a 5th DPS...

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People who play poorly get to come on the forums and speak their piece as well.

Even with tank damage severely nerfed (a very bad move IMO) people will still rate tanks on how much DPS they do, since everything else should be automatic and is taken as a given.

More DPS = shorter encounter, the endgoal of any group.

Nerfing our DPS will just anger the majority of the players, chase some away from tanking completely, and lower the skill ceiling. In other words, it caters to the "bads".

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Originally Posted by Falar

people will still rate tanks on how much DPS they do,

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Relative to eachother, not to DPS. Our DPS relative to actual DD jobs should not be a concern, only our DPS relative to other jobs in our role.

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Originally Posted by Falar

Nerfing our DPS will just anger the majority of the players, chase some away from tanking completely, and lower the skill ceiling. In other words, it caters to the "bads".

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No, it won't. "Bad" players don't do "low DPS", they do "less DPS than what the optimal rotation can offer"
If you reduce tank damage by 30%, you'll still end with people doing twice the damage than others. These numbers will just become the new reference.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

No, it won't. "Bad" players don't do "low DPS", they do "less DPS than what the optimal rotation can offer"
If you reduce tank damage by 30%, you'll still end with people doing twice the damage than others. These numbers will just become the new reference.

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Nope.
Bad Players do Low DPS
That's a fact ;)

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

It's far from impossible. They designed PotD to be tackled as a 4-man team, yet some people are doing it solo. It's also not unheard of teams doing dungeons and raids with the less number of teammates when one disconnect, too. So, a skilled team might reduce their number of healers or tank because they master their job and the fight.

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Non standard composition is not something you'd even remotely consider when you're progressing in a content. It's only something you'd do post clear. Allowing the possibility of a turtle tank solo tanking fights, or a pure healer solo healing fights would require the fights to be designed without mechanics that require two tanks or two healers, which is quite the opposite of what the devs have been doing until very recently (a12s adds, chastening heat for example, are things that require two tanks that you can't really bypass by tankiness alone, you need some weird tricks like putting shadewalker on a dps or skipping the mechanic completely by killing the boss quickly). No matter how tanky a tank is, or how big the heal numbers of a healer is, you won't bring a single tank or single healer composition into a new raid content since you never know if there's any mechanic that require two tanks or two healers.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

What's important is not how many people managed to do it, but that stance-dancing is necessary for optimal result. It's not a gameplay choice. If you can't do it, then it means you lack something.

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Stance dancing is necessary for optimal results, but you need to remember that optimal results are also out of reach for the majority of the playerbase. 90% of the DF/RF/PF groups I've seen don't even optimize enough to clear raids out of tank stance. Yes, it means you lack something. So what's wrong with that? 99.99% of the playerbase are worse than the top tier world first raiders or speedkill groups. They're lacking something, either as dps, tanks or healers. But so what? You're not required to be as good as them to clear contents. No offense to you, but if you haven't even tried clearing a12s without tank stance then probably you don't even know that you're good enough to clear it even if you turtle tank there.

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Originally Posted by bswpayton

but the thing is nobody wants to tank , so why on earth would you force tanks into a play style that they arent asking for , leave tanks alone and let people who are willing to tank play them the way they want I dont get SE sometimes

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Balance and good design in this instance are more important than any of the other factors.

Intentional imbalances make the idea of a tank roster pointless if you're going to end up with two tanks that are "good" and everyone else being subpar. That's even the reason the devs did not include a new tank or healer with Stormblood, as tank and healer balance is not where it should be. That each tank should be different in terms of gameplay is a given, and there's more to differences in gameplay beyond whether you're pushing toggles more often than others or dealing more damage. While I think WAR getting RageInner Beast is a good idea, the DRK and PLD resource bars reek of pointless gimmick but can at least be seen as a step in the right direction.

As far as people not wanting to tank, I'd have to ask why they rolled PLD, DRK or WAR in that case.

PS: If we're still going on about losing resources when changing stances, just remember that stance swaps are supposed to have a penalty. The free ride is over, though I still think it should have been over around patch 3.1.

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Originally Posted by Falar

Even with tank damage severely nerfed (a very bad move IMO) people will still rate tanks on how much DPS they do, since everything else should be automatic and is taken as a given.

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This hinges on encounter design staying the same. With what they've done to healers, I'm curious as to whether EX and savage have gotten an increase in amount of overall damage taken by tanks and the raid, which would force tanks to become defensive and thus make the breaking point of playing WAR/PLD/DRK whether you can survive the damage from the boss rather than attempts at e-peen DPS.

Worst case scenario is things stay the same, where PLD (assuming the current potencies remain untouched) or WAR (because 6 fel cleaves) will rule the roost. Best case scenario being that if encounters as a whole change, tank DPS becomes a means of holding aggro and a minor contribution to overall raid DPS, since the rest is being generated by your melee and ranged DPS (which puts us on par with how the meta generally treats tanks in WoW, and that would not be a bad thing at all).

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Originally Posted by aleph_null

Non standard composition is not something you'd even remotely consider when you're progressing in a content. It's only something you'd do post clear.

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Well there was T8, so single tank progression is not unprecedented.

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Originally Posted by aleph_null

Non standard composition is not something you'd even remotely consider when you're progressing in a content.

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Maybe you'd think that it's irrelevant because it was "easy" content, but when we reached T5, T8 and T9 with my static, we went solo tank right from the start. We even tried T6 that way...not very successfully :(

Considering that tanks will soon receive several skills to mitigate damage on party members, maybe we could have a DPS "tanking" a big add for a little time while the five DPS burn it to the ground.

You're right that the Devs are trying their best to avoid that, but by doing so, they effectively corner their tanks into playing the same, making the imbalance obvious.

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Originally Posted by aleph_null

Stance dancing is necessary for optimal results, but you need to remember that optimal results are also out of reach for the majority of the playerbase.

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It's still irrelevant. There is still only one optimal way, and that could discourage players. It's like saying "It's not a big deal if there is only one BiS set, most people won't ever have it". If you want the BiS, you still have only one way to obtain it.

You're right, I didn't even try to clear A12S. Why ?
Because I don't like the actual tank meta. So, even if I put the effort in learning the fight to do it "optimally", it wouldn't be fun for me (In fact, it wasn't even fun to do A9S and A10S because I had to go WAR despite not particularly liking the job...).
If I knew there was a way to clear it as effectively with an usual setup, I might have tried it with my static.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

What's important is not how many people managed to do it, but that stance-dancing is necessary for optimal result. It's not a gameplay choice. If you can't do it, then it means you lack something.

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This is a good thing. In a game with near zero character growth (usually found in other MMORPGs as gear), you have to at least have player growth. Weaker players who can't use stances properly do lack something - knowledge and ability. This gives them something to try to acquire that won't be obsolete in the next raid patch. Just as an example, my group tweaked our cooldown/tank swap setup a whole lot on Brute Justice in order to optimize some things to make the whole fight easier/raise DPS and some of the lessons we learned there carried over to other fights. Another good one is Living Liquid - early on it was really important to really optimize your cooldown timing so that you could absorb multiple cleaves on one cooldown, etc.

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There is still only one optimal way, and that could discourage players.

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You seem to think that people have the default attitude of "if there's someone better than me out there, I'll never catch up to them. If something has a little complexity, I cannot learn it." Does the existence of Tool Assisted Speedruns discourage people from playing games normally? Even if there was a group of players out there that played 100% optimally, the game isn't balanced for them, so why would the existence of optimal play discourage the average joe?

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Originally Posted by Brannigan

This is a good thing.

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Player growth is a good thing. Only one type of growth for every job is a bad thing.

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Originally Posted by Brannigan

You seem to think that people have the default attitude of "if there's someone better than me out there, I'll never catch up to them. If something has a little complexity, I cannot learn it."

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What ? That's absolutely not what I'm saying. I don't care that some people are better than me. I care that there is only one way to be optimal and that I don't find that particular way fun. (Even before adressing the issue of PLD being my most beloved tank in a world where DRK+WAR was the supreme setup)

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Originally Posted by Brannigan

Does the existence of a World 8 in Super Mario Bros discourage someone who's only on World 1?

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Let's phrase it another way. You play a game with player choices and you are an honest pacifist. But then, you learn that the only way to get the golden ending is to kill everyone in sight. Would you still be motivated by that game ?