Further tank homogenization is pushing me away from tanking

Wanting every tank to have functional skills like gap closers is casual entitlement? Missing the days of tank stance dancing? I think we need to take the rose-tinted glasses off.

HW DRK was a fastpaced reactionary Tank. Much more engaging then what we have now. You can argue that all the tanks function like a Warrior when it comes to DPS especially since Tanks are more balanced then ever when you compare and contrast PPS.

Gap closers are fine. But job identity is important and needs to do something another class can't. Which I'm not seeing much of.

I really feel for DRKs considering they were gutted and gave all their utilities to everyone else.

'Stance Dancing', much like 'Fireweaving', is one of those archaic terms that relatively few people actually understand and sounds much more impressive than it actually was in practice.

Rose-Tinted: I weaved between stances every second GCD to survive massive amounts of damage and push my dps while tanking Blaster and Swindler together.
Reality: Tank stance uptime = 0%. Equilibrium on add spawn. Shadewalker please.

On gap closers, it's worth noting that there's always a trade-off between range, recast, target, and so on. Shukuchi is on a 60 second recast, for example, compared to Gyoten or Onslaught's 10 seconds. En Avant has half the range of these on a 30 second recast. Hell's Ingress/Egress is 20 seconds for 15y, with no charges. I think you'll find that each individual player will have preferences with these. Do you want more range? Shorter recast? More charges? Pure utility without the obligation to keep it on cooldown? I love movement actions, so I'll pick the shorter recast every time, and I generally prefer fights where you're not sitting on one target for the entirety. While range and opportunity costs are probably less important for me.

I think that if you pick up a new job, you should miss having certain features available while simultaneously enjoying the advantages that you wouldn't have elsewhere. When you can have two players argue over which job has the better action and not have a mathematical answer, then you've done your job in terms of balance. I think now that they've killed off a lot of historical advantages that were on older jobs back in ARR, the devs can probably start to experiment with these things more and take some risks. The portal system could be clunky in execution, but I don't really care. It's unique and will lead to some clever gameplay tricks.

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Originally Posted by Sazuzaki

Then I guess we should give BLM teleport or Fire 4 to all the casters now then. I kid, but it's improved it from a balance perspective. From a gameplay perspective, it really sucks knowing that everything you do, another tank can do as well. Each tank should have it's own strengths and weaknesses that should go further than just "drk has tbn so it cant self heal much".

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But BLM already has a teleport in Aetherial Manipulation. No other caster would use Fire IV either because RDM already has higher Potencies with everything but Jolt II + they would just burn themselves out of mana and Summoner would be the same, ignoring the fact that the 2.8 sec cast would fuck 'em over.

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Originally Posted by IckeDerTyp

And here I am, still being sad you don't get to stance dance as a war anymore.

We can do two things, give SE feedback that they'll ignore, for better or worse. Or wait until we actually get to play stuff and then give em feedback again :D

Shb didn't kill tanking and I doubt EW will! If anything, I doubt they can make it worse in the first place, so it's all uphill from here ^^

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Ya know i failed to mention that Warrior was the exception for me. It did stance dancing well! Sword oath just felt bad and dark knight was eh

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Originally Posted by kiritolove27

Some background info to who I am and when I came into the game for better understanding; I started playing this game as soon as Stormblood began, and what got me to play the game was watching the trailers of Heavensward, the reviews of how awesome DRK was back then. In the Risk versus reward class, I went through Stormblood's savage content as a tank main and did the same now in SHB. Ever since Stormblood, the developers have been moving towards giving every other tank what they had that they didn't, now everyone has a gap closer, and their cooldowns are all the same.

Playing each tank feels too similar, specially DRK and WAR, with delirium being a bad inner release.

During the live letter, the devs said the tanks would be getting some CD in which if you use it at the right time, you get benefits......this sounds precisely like TBN; why is every tank now getting a TBN equivalent? Why does every tank need a gap closer? Why does every tank need an inner release? They don't.

People are always quick to point out that DPS queues always take long, well let me tell you that not having interesting tanks that feel unique from each other will only push the tank mains that have stuck with the role to different roles.

I know they said they don't want to go back to the complexity of the 3.x series. I wasn't there, so I can't say if it were better or not. I am only advocating for more individualism from each.

I know this thread is probably a year late since the changes we've seen are potentially being finalized, and any further changes will take months, if not years, to happen. I feel defeated to know that tanking has only gotten less and less fun with each expansion, and the trend continues.

Goodbye, tanking, my old friend.

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The devs think that job identity is how the job looks and is defined by the job's animations. The homogenization is here to stay. Get used to it.

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Originally Posted by AnjouMaaka

The devs think that job identity is how the job looks and is defined by the job's animations. The homogenization is here to stay. Get used to it.

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Bingo, and I'm with the devs on that one.

Except for DRK. It's about as durable as a dried autumn leaf and can heal itself about as well as one; so in that regard it is quite differentiated from GNB, PLD, and WAR.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

'Stance Dancing', much like 'Fireweaving', is one of those archaic terms that relatively few people actually understand and sounds much more impressive than it actually was in practice.

Rose-Tinted: I weaved between stances every second GCD to survive massive amounts of damage and push my dps while tanking Blaster and Swindler together.
Reality: Tank stance uptime = 0%. Equilibrium on add spawn. Shadewalker please.

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That was only the reality in the best case scenario. If your dps were very good, or you were slightly undergeared, you didn't have access to a NIN (which would happen often in any content outside of Savage, and even then a lot of players weren't consistent with shadewalker usage, because their rotation was a lot to keep up with on its own), if you died at all, if your healer was spamming cure III/Medica II, if adds spawned, if you lost uptime, and probably more I'm forgetting, it was very possible for you to lose aggro and have to swap back to tank stance. No, you didn't swap every other GCD, but simply the fact that it could happen at all gave you a reason to stare at the MNK/BLM's aggro bars.

Oh and you would also sometimes swap for the damage mitigation or HP% increase.

The argument that stance dancing was bad as a concept because in execution it was badly balanced is always confusing to me. The fact that you could remain 99% of the time in offensive stance due to tools like shadewalker doesn't mean the concept is bad: being able to keep an optimal set of abilities by skillful or clever use of tools available, either individually or party wide, is not bad in principle by any means. Remove shadewalker from the game and good luck staying 100% of the time in tank stance with competent dps players in the party. People constantly point at shadewalker like it somehow invalidates the whole concept. And even then, it's just a problem of balance, where shadewalker can be reduced in effectiveness, spread across more jobs or made into a role action, or have similar abilities on other jobs. Not a problem of concept else it's like saying BLM doing garbage damage right now completely invalidates the idea of black mage...

I'm not arguing for the return of that mechanic though. Whether we like it or not for other actual reasons, fair enough.

Stance dancing isn't bad, the problem was it was inescapable for people. Most casual tanks definitely didn't like that they had to learn stance dancing for optimal damage.
There should of been tanks with this function removed and just a basic stance that doesn't take away damage but give the tank a lower baseline damage. It's just like the healer issue in HW/SB, not everyone wanted healers with a lot of management of damage so there should of been options for that.
Also didn't help that ff14 just doesn't have very good servers so your connection jittering could make stance dancing annoying.