Opinions: Should tanks work for aggro?

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Originally Posted by aodhan_ofinnegain

Tank Stance was not job identity for 2 out of 3 of the tanks mate, they were an atrocious mess of a system that benefitted only 1 tank, as far as I'm concerned the old stance system can stay in the ground where it belongs.

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That's because they gave up on it after DRK was introduced. Though this is a pattern not exclusive to tanks.

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Originally Posted by Marxam

That's because they gave up on it after DRK was introduced. Though this is a pattern not exclusive to tanks.

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PLD and DRK had to sacrificing damage while in Tank Stance, where only War had a means to bypass, PLD and DRK having to pay MP and GCDs you use theirs, where War only had a 10 second cooldown, the old stances were s**t period. There is no saving grace for them, nor for emnity combos.

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Originally Posted by aodhan_ofinnegain

PLD and DRK had to sacrificing damage while in Tank Stance, where only War had a means to bypass, PLD and DRK having to pay MP and GCDs you use theirs, where War only had a 10 second cooldown, the old stances were s**t period. There is no saving grace for them, nor for emnity combos.

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There is a part of me that wished they kept the stances but designed them similarly to Defiance/Deliverance.

Defiance nailed the defense vs offense trade off and was an actual component of WARs gameplay and should've been a core tank component, instead of how bland PLDs and DRKs were. And im not in the camp that this was "a key defining element of WAR" at the time. A key feature of a tank shouldn't be "its a well designed tank".

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Originally Posted by SiriusSaltstice

There is a part of me that wished they kept the stances but designed them similarly to Defiance/Deliverance.

Defiance nailed the defense vs offense trade off and was an actual component of WARs gameplay and should've been a core tank component, instead of how bland PLDs and DRKs were. And im not in the camp that this was "a key defining element of WAR" at the time. A key feature of a tank shouldn't be "its a well designed tank".

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100% agree. Many PLD and DRK mains asked for a similar stance system to be implemented, myself included, and often received responses like, "but PLD and DRK both got instant 20% damage reduction" along with many other excuses for it not to be done, regardless of pointing out how flawed their arguments were.

Current stances now are most definitely better than before for PLD and DRK, but it could be improved upon but I doubt it will in 6.0 to be completely honest.

Every coin has two sides. Threat generating stances made tanks lose damage for their duration, but they also served to give tanks higher skill ceiling and damage potential.
You wouldn't give a tank near dps damage just "because". But if said tanks had to earn that damage with player skill in a high risk/reward scenario (get too greedy with damage, lose aggro, wipe your party), then that's another story.

This made playing a tank exciting - there was a goal to strive torwards where both player skill and dediction to obtaining good gear mattered and were amply rewarded.
In current, rather sterile environment of nearly guaranteed aggro the moment you pop tank stance and 0 damage penalties for it, the room for skill expression is much less and rewards for that nearly non-existant.
Tank damage will be capped by a "glass ceiling" because big rewards come with big risk and a challenge. Take both away - the big rewards have no right to exist.

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Originally Posted by Zefirez

Every coin has two sides. Threat generating stances made tanks lose damage for their duration, but they also served to give tanks higher skill ceiling and damage potential.

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Not really. They were just toggles and for the most part play style and rotations stayed the same between Tank stance and DpS stance with only output changing once WAR got Deliverance and Fell Cleave in HW. OT(dps stance) rotations and MT(tank stance) rotations were pretty much the same with only output being different. The main effect of the ShB tank stance changes was to actually normalize MT and OT damage.

The closest thing to skill increasing dps involved DRK abusing the unlinked nature of Blood Price and Blood Weapon to increase MP generation with stance dancing when they where meant to be mutually exclusive MP generators.

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You wouldn't give a tank near dps damage just "because". But if said tanks had to earn that damage with player skill in a high risk/reward scenario (get too greedy with damage, lose aggro, wipe your party), then that's another story.

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Tanks got near dps damage more from unintended access to dps gear (Strength Accessories) and Str melds not from stance dancing. Strength Accessories gave close to a 30% increase in damage output. This increased damage output also increased enmity generation which delayed loss of aggro which meant you could stay in dps stance longer which increased dps even more compared to stance dancing Vit tanks.

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This made playing a tank exciting - there was a goal to strive torwards where both player skill and dediction to obtaining good gear mattered and were amply rewarded.
In current, rather sterile environment of nearly guaranteed aggro the moment you pop tank stance and 0 damage penalties for it, the room for skill expression is much less and rewards for that nearly non-existant.
Tank damage will be capped by a "glass ceiling" because big rewards come with big risk and a challenge. Take both away - the big rewards have no right to exist.

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Tanks didn't do more damage because of skill they did more damage because they increased enmity generation and dps with unintentional gearing, shifted some of the enmity management to others, abused the effects of Provoke and Shirk, and then increased the amount of healing required to complete content.

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Originally Posted by Zefirez

Every coin has two sides. Threat generating stances made tanks lose damage for their duration, but they also served to give tanks higher skill ceiling and damage potential.
You wouldn't give a tank near dps damage just "because". But if said tanks had to earn that damage with player skill in a high risk/reward scenario (get too greedy with damage, lose aggro, wipe your party), then that's another story.

This made playing a tank exciting - there was a goal to strive torwards where both player skill and dediction to obtaining good gear mattered and were amply rewarded.
In current, rather sterile environment of nearly guaranteed aggro the moment you pop tank stance and 0 damage penalties for it, the room for skill expression is much less and rewards for that nearly non-existant.
Tank damage will be capped by a "glass ceiling" because big rewards come with big risk and a challenge. Take both away - the big rewards have no right to exist.

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I'm going to go back to Stormblood as it is the most recent example of tanks having the 2 stances.

Is it really a higher skill ceiling? Whether the tanks could get away with using DPS stance constantly was based on whether the DPS used their enmity control. If they didn't, you were either forced into tank stance or had to use enmity combos. This isn't an indication of your skill level, its is just a show of lazy DPS, which you have no control over.

Enmity combos? again, depends on the DPS but the biggest hit for them was the fact they ruined the flows of jobs by providing less resources and delaying when you can execute your resource skills or just losing out on uses in a fight. The fact you have had to use the enmity combo was not down to your skill as a player, but it was at the whims of the dps.

This is the main point I have been saying throughout this thread. Your ability to hold enmity in DPS stance was directly linked to how lazy your DPS players were. There is no peek performance to be obtained when your DPS are lazy, just you having to nerf yourself to do your job. You had to do worse for the group and that feels awful to do. Why should you play worse just because the DPS are lazy.

This even stretches to gear. If you happen to be a fresh 70 player and get paired up with a highly geared DPS, you have to use your enmity tools to keep hate, you have to play worse and not hit that skill ceiling, just because you happen to have a lower gear score.

When you actually sit down and think critically about the impact having tank stance and enmity combos actually has on the game and realising most avenues you go down the tank has to mess themselves around because of someone else, you should quickly come to a point where you realise, they just don't work as people envision them. I have yet to see anyone give a compelling reason for the existence of old tank/dps stances to return and I just cannot see it happening, however, I am open to idea, just expect me to jumo in and go, but why?

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

Is it really a higher skill ceiling?

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Well, WAR had Memeheaval opener. Really, that extends to Unchained + Upheaval more generally. It wasn't a consistent DPS gain, but it did mean you could dip into Defiance for 10 seconds more or less guilt-free for access to Equilibrium.

Tank stances, more generally, did allow for more skill expression, but only in suboptimal scenarios. So, no, they didn't raise the skill ceiling (except minorly for WAR) in the sense that highest level play would involve using tank stance (when you were able to deal damage, anyway).

There was also ARR's Unchained Defiance opener, which was consistently optimal due to how the Crit buff was set up at the time. I've never really considered it to be particularly clever gameplay, but your mileage may vary. More accurately, prior to this expansion, the stance system only benefited WAR, and there was no way to offer the other tanks parity without getting a massive backlash. Good riddance to that.

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Originally Posted by Zefirez

Tank damage will be capped by a "glass ceiling" because big rewards come with big risk and a challenge. Take both away - the big rewards have no right to exist.

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It's interesting what we considered to be the 'big rewards'. Chasing the coattails of damage dealers? Embarrassing them when they underperform? That should be baseline.

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Originally Posted by Zefirez

0 damage penalties for it

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Yeah, except for the third tank nerf. At the start of this expansion they took away huge chunks of damage from all tanks by taking away their DPS stances entirely, and then had the audacity to put full STR values on accessories, but impose a flat damage reduction on how tank ATP scales versus DPS.

Tanks are wielding butter knives now, with no way to really sharpen them.