What to manage as a tank?

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Originally Posted by CKNovel

I believe you missed the point.

I pointed out that Enmity management wasn't that big thing everyone believe it used to be and you seem to agree.
While I pointed out NIN, even if you remove it from the equation the result remains unchanged: DPS & Healers managed more the Enmity than tanks.

You're arguing for a comeback of heavier Enmity management and sharing your opinion how it could be done.
I'll discuss that topic when I see actual tank players asking for enmity management but they seems okay with that.

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either it was good or bad it is still better than high defense healers..

ShB was good spot for people who don't like emnity but this design show its colors in EW.. skills like bloodwhetting is a game breaking

there should be a design for this and I don't see anything other than mitigation management.. adding complexity to it make it much harder to mitigate certain attacks.. as hard as MNK, NIN, BLM rotations

this is the only way to save this sleepy role other than that we will still have this braindead job that is ruining healer role

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Maybe the problem was the fact that the NIN was the party arbiter of agro and not the agro mechanic itself

People always point to NIN as being the reason why the old agro system was bad but never look at the core of the system and realise it worked if you actually stuck it back in the hands of the tanks

Remove overpowered enmity control from NIN, remove the effect shirk had where each tank basically generated the other tanks enmity and then bump up the DPS/healers agro generation as a baseline.

now the tanks HAVE to occasionally resort to tank stance and the agro combos in order to hold agro. There is no “why didn’t you use diversion” or “WHM if you don’t use shroud before medica 2 im not helping you”, it becomes straight up a competence check on the tank to balance their DPS potential with their ability to hold agro.

This is the same concept as upping damage/pruning healing oGCD’s that like the old healing design enforced GCD healing. The only reason GCD healing is looked down on these days is because you generally don’t need it so using it either means someone made a mistake or the healer is less than competent. In a world where every 20 seconds you are faced with the decision of “press succor or die” then GCD’s wouldn’t be looked down on, the same system applies to tank agro

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I didn't play highend at that time.. but for your explanation I see more teamwork and synergy with this kind of design than the current one

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Remove overpowered enmity control from NIN, remove the effect shirk had where each tank basically generated the other tanks enmity and then bump up the DPS/healers agro generation as a baseline.

now the tanks HAVE to occasionally resort to tank stance and the agro combos in order to hold agro.

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I don't think that makes the game any more interesting, it's just a reverse Storm's Eye. Instead of using a lower DPS combo as little as possible to keep your damage buff up, you're using a lower DPS combo as little as possible to keep enmity up/minimize DPS loss. But it's not as clear as watching a buff, and you lose more damage when partied with a high personal DPS job compared to ones that buff the entire party.

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Originally Posted by CKNovel

Take time reading before answering with your feelings...
I've mentioned time and time again:
-Increase damage taken by the whole party and add significant raidwides and party wide debuff such as bleeding

ALL packs should have significant tank buster and have raidwides similar to The Strayborough Deadwalk's dolls but hitting harder
Tank excels at single target protection but are limited when helping the entire party.

-Restore Buff/Debuff play

What if packs would inflict a stackable "Physical Vulnerability Up" that would inevitably lead any tanks to be one-shot if the stack is too high?
What if tanks would get snared and unable to get out of AoEs without a Healer help?
As long as the game remains in this HP game we'll never solve the issue and go in a circle.

From the start that's what I want the battle mechanics to evolve into.

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In principle I'm in favour of much of this. I recently did the level 91 dungeon MINE with a WAR and was honestly kinda disappointed with just how little threat was posed to the party. Add to that me soaking a tankbuster in Tender Valley as WHM without issue definitely says there's too little damage in dungeons for the level of self sustain tanks have and that should be increased, both in terms of direct damage and secondary sources (status effects), I'd also be up for restoring auto-attacks during mechanics and even allowing them to crit.

I'd go so far as to say that tank busters need to be doubled in terms of output, all the way back to Copperbell Mines, it's so bad there I don't even think about it or the aoes as a healer, I just stand there and keep dps-ing. There are probably other instances that I'm not thinking of right now, so yeah... Looking back at ARR there are instances of environmental mechanics that aren't there in current design that would be nice to have back. I'm not convinced this would sort out tank balance by itself but it's a starting point that doesn't involve a reduction in power so nobody should complain, right?

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Originally Posted by Launched

I don't think that makes the game any more interesting, it's just a reverse Storm's Eye. Instead of using a lower DPS combo as little as possible to keep your damage buff up, you're using a lower DPS combo as little as possible to keep enmity up/minimize DPS loss. But it's not as clear as watching a buff, and you lose more damage when partied with a high personal DPS job compared to ones that buff the entire party.

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I mean the purpose of the tank is to hold agro and manage it as part of their responsibility. If you see managing a secondary responsibility of your role as nothing more than an enforced DPS loss then what’s really the point

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I mean the purpose of the tank is to hold agro and manage it as part of their responsibility. If you see managing a secondary responsibility of your role as nothing more than an enforced DPS loss then what’s really the point

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I don't think you see their point, you can't see the tree for the forest or how it would affect the other roles as well. You're thinking with individuals instead of the party as a whole.
While healers have the party HP for responsibility, they're expected to do as much damage as possible and the least amount of GCD heals, everyone knows that.
Well that would be the similar approach for tanks, they're expected to do as much damage as possible and the least amount of GCD enmity.

Jobs aren't equal when it comes to enmity generation. Pure DPS and Pure Healer generates far more enmity.
That means they would suddenly be less popular due to conflicting with tank DPS as not having pure Healers/DPS would mean an increase of party DPS.
We'd shift to a Shield Healer and Raidbuff Meta as it would be the most optimal composition.
You'd even see tanks using way more oGCDs heals to generate more enmity, pushing more WAR and PLD.

Remember SAM wasn't popular in SB and SQEX keep reducing SAM, MNK and WHM enmity generation or giving them tools to reduce it.
We're talking about facts and known history, not an hypothetical future. I'm not arguing about the mentality but how it would shift into a meta we've known.

I know your goal is to make tanks feels terrible to play but you haven't thought this one through and through.

“Your goal is to make tanks feel terrible to play”

I can’t improve on the absolute perfection that is the trashfire of modern tank design. Like I seriously would actively have to try to design tanks any worse than they currently are

I play tanks and I want them to be better and to me agro management is a core component of a tanks design. Why am I even here if I’m not controlling the raids agro. May as well slap tank stance on SAM and just delete the tanks with the current design. I have just as much right to discuss how I would make tanks better, you aren’t an arbiter of others ability to discuss a topic. I don’t enjoy the modern tanks both for what they do for healers AND playing them as tanks, you don’t get brownie points to be more qualified on a topic and have your opinion on modern tank design matter more because you like the modern design

Anyway as for your idea that it would enforce jobs that produce less personal DPS to increase the raids rDPS by forcing the tanks to spend less time generating agro that can easily be compensated by the same way we calculate rDPS itself considering that’s just a factor if the battle log that goes oh behind the scenes anyway. If you have a raid buff the damage you give with the raid buff is calculated towards your individual agro, for mitigation of the shield healers it’s counted as effective healing which generates healing agro, this is functionally how the old agro system already worked, trick generated rDPS agro, that’s part of the reason why it was given such powerful agro management tools

This is also ignoring the fact that a lot of what you are acting like will happen already happens and it really doesn’t affect the meta, the shield healers are already overwhelmingly more powerful, like it’s actually hilarious how much stronger the shield healers are, if a log could actually calculate how much overall safety the extra mitigation of the shield healers brings and add it as an form of rDPS the shield healers would be so ridiculously far above the regen healers that the regen role would be dead. Raid buffs are already preferred in the DPS, buffer’s already take up the top spot in all 3 DPS roles and speed kills already prioritise stacking raid buffs. This already happens and it doesn’t break the meta. This is to say nothing of the fact that jobs that have defensives already inherently save the healers damage over jobs that don’t and that doesn’t change the meta either

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

If you have a raid buff the damage you give with the raid buff is calculated towards your individual agro, for mitigation of the shield healers it’s counted as effective healing which generates healing agro, this is functionally how the old agro system already worked, trick generated rDPS agro, that’s part of the reason why it was given such powerful agro management tools

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Congratulations you just banned Dancer, Bard and Astrologian who just generates too much enmity with their buffs and mitigation.
Or in the reverse, pure DPS will be even more let down as they would generate too much enmity for the rDPS jobs. MCH would suffer a lot.

I'm pretty sure you're mistaken about trick attack generating enmity:
The XIV wiki that tracks changes doesn't mentions it., neither does the early infographic mentions anything about enmity.
But the XI wiki mentions enmity
I don't see any mention on rDPS enmity, if you have any sources I'll be glad if you could share them with me.

I’m confused first you say that pure DPS jobs will be locked out because they will generate too much agro relative to the buffer’s for this to be balanced then when I said “okay balance it by rDPS” which is what the classes are net balanced around and now suddenly the buffers are overpowered and thus wouldn’t work either

SAM does more rDPS than DNC does so who’s the banned one here?

How much enmity will AST be gathering if 3 pure and a PCT hits within their buffs? On top of all the mitigation and raw healing?
You don't have to tunnel on DNC, AST is far enough for an example.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

trick generated rDPS agro, that’s part of the reason why it was given such powerful agro management tools

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Also, the sources, pretty please.

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Originally Posted by CKNovel

How much enmity will AST be gathering if 3 pure and a PCT hits within their buffs? On top of all the mitigation and raw healing?
You don't have to tunnel on DNC, AST is far enough for an example.



Also, the sources, pretty please.

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That’s why you generate an agro gap in filler, you know like how BLM generates a damage lead in filler then PCT gains on burst. Agro would form like a secondary damage system for the tank so you’d kinda be playing BLM from an agro perspective but PCT from a damage perspective, they could also return or retweak old actions, like tank stance equilibrium generates healing, DPS stance generates agro

Oh as for the “trick generates rDPS” my apologies that appears to be a mistake on my part, there was a lot of rumour floating around in HW back when the system was more opaque and we didn’t really know how buffs worked properly (it’s the origin of why damage buffs are called utility when they really aren’t), I guess I just latched onto that particular rumour and forgot it was always a rumour, just considering it fact because I never got challenged on it. I can’t find any evidence on it either

Okay for Trick Attack, it's old and mistakes can happen.

However, if you want to pursue that idea for tanks you'd need to heavily rework tanks. GNB for example wouldn't work as you need to build cartridges.
Just picture the chaos that openers would be with tanks forced to build up enmity during openers.
WoW used to have that and they'd let the tank build up aggro while DPS were sitting still.

The very concept of enmity is flawed, either undertuned or overtuned, it's a system you'll have to play with. The best idea is to make its management through tank oGCDs, which is what we have today.

On top of that, you'd need to rework the enmity and its calculation, the tanks and their balance all to fix something that isn't broken.
I'm pretty much sure everyone would rather have those development resources put somewhere else.

I mean I’m happy to pursue massive changes to the ranks because I truly believe the tanks need massive changes

The healers are a mess and at this point as much as I argue on the forums I’ve basically given up on the healers, in my eyes the tanks are still salvageable because they are still a role that square enix favours and at its core tanking (like healing and true support) are roles I enjoy playing and as such I want to approach the problem of how incredibly stale tank design is

If this grand redo of the all the classes materialises in 8.0 (it won’t) the tanks I’d like their focus put back into enmity, boss positioning and party defence, not being blue DPS. And right now I think the most broken of those three categories is enmity because enmity functionally doesn’t exist. The tanks can’t lose it and if something happens to the tank the DPS and the healer can’t control it. Sweeping reworks to the tanks that focus in on defensive actions that control enmity and have shared actions across the stances, an increase in “control” for the tanks (similar to how T12 works) and a removal of focus on overly rigid burst windows that enforce relevant defensive actions into oGCD’s so they don’t affect the burst are all part of what I would suggest for tanks.

In my eyes the tanks should each have 2 stances like the old tanks, an agro stance and a DPS stance. Agro stance generates more agro at less damage but doesn’t interfere with resource generation, defensives in agro stance are more tailored towards healing and self preservation, they are your fallbacks, actions like current BW would have a niche here, strong healing in exchange for your damage. Agro stance actions would also provide partial compensation that may or may not be able to be weaponised in burst but still lead to overall loss so that agro stance doesn’t become an enforced part of the rotation like lilys are. DPS stance is the opposite, its defensives are focused around party protection and last ditch agro generators at the cost of damage. Resource generation is not impacted in either stance but their effects are reduced anyway as overly rigid bursts like GNB would be cut back so you aren’t basically just playing a blue DPS. There would also be no penalty for swapping so unexpected agro spikes could be compensated for

It’s totally fine if you don’t like my ideas, they aren’t terribly fleshed out and borrow heavily from the old tank design just with a lot of the pain points cut out. But that is the direction I’d like them to take tanks. Your suggestions in the other thread (or earlier in this thread I’m not sure) were good but to me they still enforce this current design of a tank first and foremost being a slightly easier melee DPS who’s entire decision making is exogenous to its rotation, that just happens in the background. The removal of the rotation from the core of the tank role is really what I what don’t like about current tank design (from a tank perspective) and why while well thought out why I don’t particularly agree with most of your suggestions (saying that in the nicest way possible)

But Enmity has never really been a thing tanks do. Going through the expansions, ARR, whilst the game was still young, you saw more tank stances, so it really wasn't an issue, however, even later on when top groups were starting to tank with DPS stance, the highest damage rotation included enmity generators. PLD only had the 1 combo and on WAR Butcher's Block was stronger and generated enmity.

Going into HW, WAR was the best tank, no questions, and it had no problems with enmity. Between Defiance + Unchained and it's absurd damage in Deliverance, it produced DPS levels of damage so it could easily keep up with enmity management. PLD had Savage blade and Shield Swipe (as an oGCD at this point) which generated enmity in their DPS rotation, which could easily keep up and DRK was the one that was left out, but generate a sufficient amount of enmity at the start of a fight, drop Grit and you are good to go. Helps that Darkside helped to mitigate the damage loss from Grit.

Stormblood, enmity was managed by the DPS, Diversion and Lucid Dreaming were the main enmity dropping tools and you were expected to use them. If you didn't the tank had to go into DPS stance and/or use their enmity combo. Which created a cascade of problems not only with lower damage from tanks but they also suffered in their resource generation, which leads to an even bigger loss. But whose fault was it when tanks didn't hold enmity? That's right, the healers and DPS for being lazy and not pressing that 1 extra button. It really wasn't a tank mechanic.

Then from then on, it is as we have it now.

At no point did the tank have a responsibility for specifically going after enmity generation past the initial enmity grab. It was always there as part of the DPS rotation or it was down to another role.

As for enmity generation (when it comes to damage), it is as simple as, the damage you do = the enmity it generates. This would have been why it seemed Trick attack boosted enmity generation, as it boosted damage, so more enmity generated.

As for enmity combos, how do you really plan to implement them? If they are a damage loss, everyone is going to avoid using them at all costs, especially if they halt resource generation. Imagine if a PLD in it's current state had to use it's enmity combo, but it didn't generate the Sword Oath combo or Divine Might after it. You can say, OK, add it onto the enmity combo then. You then end up with 2 combos where one does more damage but lower enmity generation and one does less damage but higher enmity generation. If we want to start talking about button bloat, this is one of the first places I would personally look. Not to mention current PLD only uses their basic 123 combo at most 3 times in a 60 second period, which would suck if you had to generate more enmity and restart the combo because you had it primed or you had to overwrite other buffs just for the enmity generation. That is just bad design.

Even looking at how you would display enmity, the longer a fight goes on, the harder it is going to be to show how much of a lead you have and as a result, how much you can get away with doing more damage, which leaves your rotation down to pure chance if you want to dance on the edge of what you can get away with or you play it extra safe and do less damage as a result. I could also see this leading to someone creating a 3rd party tool that gives a better idea of the enmity leads you have.

this is before we go into other factors that I have gone into great depth in the past. Enmity is not a good system. If you want to make tanks more interesting, you need to look at other things.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

As for enmity combos, how do you really plan to implement them? If they are a damage loss, everyone is going to avoid using them at all costs, especially if they halt resource generation. Imagine if a PLD in it's current state had to use it's enmity combo, but it didn't generate the Sword Oath combo or Divine Might after it. You can say, OK, add it onto the enmity combo then. You then end up with 2 combos where one does more damage but lower enmity generation and one does less damage but higher enmity generation. If we want to start talking about button bloat, this is one of the first places I would personally look. Not to mention current PLD only uses their basic 123 combo at most 3 times in a 60 second period, which would suck if you had to generate more enmity and restart the combo because you had it primed or you had to overwrite other buffs just for the enmity generation. That is just bad design.

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I never digged about PLD in that hypothetical scenario but this is a prime example that tanks would require a massive rework to make enmity work.
Gunbreaker would be an absolute mess if it couldn't generate cartridges with an enmity combo.
And let's not forget that the OT wouldn't have to deal with the "MT tax".
Even in case of double tank buster I'm 100% sure the OT will just taunt after the opener or the party will simply mitigate the targeted ally.
There's a good reason why the top MMOs on the market don't have complex enmity management.

It's just a bad concept from the start.
The ironic part is that today enmity is fully managed by tank and it's solely their responsibility.
Yet somehow people want to go back to where it's a party responsibility, when the title of the topic is asking what tanks have to manage.

Tanks have existential crisis and that shows from this post how they have nothing to manage..

We players can't find a solution because we are not a gamedevs we can point on an issue that dev can look into it and solve it

Emnity didn't work on old expansions but there should be other ways to give tank something to manage

Again you are looking at it from the perspective of “oh but what if this interrupts the flow of the tanks DPS”

GOOD

Like I said the tanks DPS rotation in its current form is completely pointless because the extremely minimal responsibility the tank has is completely exogenous to their rotation. I want tanks damage rotation to be completely intertwined with their responsibilities as a tank. Like healers you could drop tanks DPS rotation down to a single button and it wouldn’t change anything about how they “tank” because their tanking abilities don’t care about their rotation, which is just stupid. You have to enforce a choice of both having downsides because if you just went the more minor minor route of “every Holy Spirit charges holy Shelton” then holy sheltron would be balanced around not how much you actually need it, but how many holy spirits you cast which defeats the purpose

If your idea of tanking is “make the tanking oGCD’s more interesting and just leave the damage rotation sitting there being completely unrelated to actually being a tank” then I do not agree with anything that further emphasises that design

Enmity ties damage to tank responsibility, stances that have differing effects on your CD’s and your damage do as well. The last thing I want is to just leave the rotation rotting in a corner while they innovate on the tanking CD’s, it’s the worst facet of modern tank design currently

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Again you are looking at it from the perspective of “oh but what if this interrupts the flow of the tanks DPS”

GOOD

Like I said the tanks DPS rotation in its current form is completely pointless because the extremely minimal responsibility the tank has is completely exogenous to their rotation. I want tanks damage rotation to be completely intertwined with their responsibilities as a tank. Like healers you could drop tanks DPS rotation down to a single button and it wouldn’t change anything about how they “tank” because their tanking abilities don’t care about their rotation, which is just stupid. You have to enforce a choice of both having downsides because if you just went the more minor minor route of “every Holy Spirit charges holy Shelton” then holy sheltron would be balanced around not how much you actually need it, but how many holy spirits you cast which defeats the purpose

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https://i.imgur.com/13HcWNv.png

TBN is the one exception and it’s why I actually like TBN’s design

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Like I said the tanks DPS rotation in its current form is completely pointless because the extremely minimal responsibility the tank has is completely exogenous to their rotation.

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I'm sorry but this is just demonstrably and obviously untrue. To the degree that tanks being blue DPS is a meme, it's also true since you do need tank and healer dps to clear fights unless you outgear them, so doing your DPS rotation correctly is your responsibility as a tank. In content that does not have an enrage timer you obviously don't have to optimize anything, but that is also a content in which you can play a blizzard wizard BLM, a freestyle SAM, or some other walking sandbag that does less damage than healers, completely failing at the main purpose of your job as a DPS, and still get carried by the 3/7 other people without anyone making any comments about "responsibility".

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I want tanks damage rotation to be completely intertwined with their responsibilities as a tank.

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While I'd be down with the general sentiment here (though I don't think enmity is it), this not only doesn't address but actually makes worse the bigger problem tank role has in general, which is that OT has jack shit to do majority of the time in most encounters. If you tie tanking to DPS rotation then you'll just grow the gap between MT and OT gameplay even further.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

TBN is the one exception and it’s why I actually like TBN’s design

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Except TBN achieves the exact opposite of what you want. It's not a static cost of DPS that provides tank utility, it's a tank utility that comes with a risk of DPS loss, which ultimately leads to DRK players to underutilize it out of caution on a job that arguably needs to use its short CD the most. This also ties to the first point: you can go into Savage and use TBN a total of 2 times in a 10 minute fight for tank busters only, and clear just fine, or you can go into Savage, use TBN as much as your MP generation allows for it with no regard for dark arts, and fail to clear the fight because your DPS is now in the dumpster. I do like that TBN is mechanically most distinct from other tanks, but I also wouldn't call a tank utility that makes the tank player averse to using it good design.

I expect the worste from tanks. And I'm not disappointed. Role abilities? Rotating mits? Yeah right.

If I hear "as a gnb main..." I already know you're shit

I think the discrepancy comes from you applying my thoughts to the current design of the game and then obviously it’s doesn’t work, like sure tanks are jointly responsible like the rest of the raid to meet the DPS check but that isn’t really a “tanking” responsibility even though tanks contribute to DPS. It’s probably my use of quotation marks as a haphazard way of representing the generally related airquotes. Like when I say tanking with quotation marks I more mean specifically tank things that involve taking damage, controlling enmity and that sorta stuff. Not what a tank does on a GCD to GCD basis.

Off tank responsibility is a serious concern i agree but now does the reverse situation of keeping the current meta do anything for the enjoyment of the off tank. The off tank is just an actual blue DPS at this point but that’s more because they won’t give the off tank responsibility, not necessarily because either one or the other job design favours it. You could also include this type of OT need to maintain agro by making swaps far more regular, so the OT needs to maintain some sort of agro parity with the MT but like I said these ideas aren’t fleshed out. If you don’t think enmity is the right way to achieve this that’s a totally valid opinion, I’m not saying I’m right here, just throwing out my ideas

I’m not so much asking for a static cost but some form of choice, so TBN is actually a good representation here because you CAN minimise its uses but it makes you squishier, TBN’s problem is more just the rest of DRK’s kit or shared mitigation can cover from the deficit of TBN’s you don’t use without really punishing you. This is similar to ED’s problem where its design isn’t exactly problematic, its problem comes from being a choice only one class out of 4 can make. Different stances generating different responses from different skills is more what I’m after here so TBN isn’t a perfect fit, but it is the closest tank CD to what I’m imagining

Part of the OT problem is encounter design, but part of it is tank kits - namely invulns. Why tank swap when you can just press a button and ignore the mechanic? I don't know how many more examples like EX2 in Endwalker where WAR could solo tank the entire thing do we need before we get rid of invulns.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I’m not so much asking for a static cost but some form of choice, so TBN is actually a good representation here because you CAN minimise its uses but it makes you squishier, TBN’s problem is more just the rest of DRK’s kit or shared mitigation can cover from the deficit of TBN’s you don’t use without really punishing you. This is similar to ED’s problem where its design isn’t exactly problematic, its problem comes from being a choice only one class out of 4 can make. Different stances generating different responses from different skills is more what I’m after here so TBN isn’t a perfect fit, but it is the closest tank CD to what I’m imagining

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I don't know what kind of a choice you have in mind that doesn't involve some cost somewhere. TBN is not the only tank utility that comes with a tradeoff, Passage of Arms is another - it's cool and adds a lot of flavor to PLD, and can be genuinely useful during prog, but then the optimal number of Passage of Arms casts in any fight you're attempting to clear is exactly zero because DPS is paramount. We already had WAR with different stances in the past and it lead to degenerate gameplay where you'd find a way to establish early aggro and then sit in the DPS stance while actively tanking because, again, DPS is paramount.

I hate to compare XIV to WoW, but tanks and healers in WoW arguably have none of the issues they do here (they might have others), yet tanks in WoW also never have to manage agro, and to the degree they have to actively maintain mitigation 24/7 while actively tanking (shield block, ignore pain, ironfur, consecration, etc.) barely ever does that come at a DPS cost, and their DPS in something like M+ is also very important.

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Originally Posted by Terhix

Part of the OT problem is encounter design, but part of it is tank kits - namely invulns. Why tank swap when you can just press a button and ignore the mechanic? I don't know how many more examples like EX2 in Endwalker where WAR could solo tank the entire thing do we need before we get rid of invulns.

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This would be easy to fix - and would fix a healer issue at the same time - if damage on tanks was nontrivial.

Imagine a world in which tanks consistently and constantly took high damage. Say autoattacks by a raid boss happen every 2 GCDs, but hit a tank for 40%-60% of their HP or so. You'd need to CD these, right? But there's also CD-centric tankbusters coming. Solution? Swap with the other tank back&forth to alternative timer usage, just like in older MMOs. "I'm out!" -> other tank takes over while your CDs cycle. Bonus points if virtually every mechanic, even in dungeons, hits the tank harder if it wants to hit the whole group, by say expecting the tank to stand in front.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

This would be easy to fix - and would fix a healer issue at the same time - if damage on tanks was nontrivial.

Imagine a world in which tanks consistently and constantly took high damage. Say autoattacks by a raid boss happen every 2 GCDs, but hit a tank for 40%-60% of their HP or so. You'd need to CD these, right? But there's also CD-centric tankbusters coming. Solution? Swap with the other tank back&forth to alternative timer usage, just like in older MMOs. "I'm out!" -> other tank takes over while your CDs cycle. Bonus points if virtually every mechanic, even in dungeons, hits the tank harder if it wants to hit the whole group, by say expecting the tank to stand in front.

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We've had similar designs in the past.
What happened is that the responsibility went on the healers.

On top of that we already had better solutions where the main tank would take vulnerability up and force the MT to grab aggro or MT to invuln.
We also had double auto attacks in P3S or auto attacks being tank busters you need MT and OT to share in P8S.
Abyssos as a whole required more healing from the healers and surprisingly it wasn't popular with healers. After that, Anabeisos had a low healing requirement once again.

P8S was great for tanks. Too bad it was slightly overtuned for PLD and in such a sleepy tier...

Abyssos was a terrible tier for healers because it enforces group mitigation use, but heavily punished the healers when the party didn’t mitigate properly

Since the DOT’s snapshotted on the initial hit they needed to be mitigated, but too many DPS would try to mitigate after the fact then blame the healer when the DOT ripped the party to shreds or the clown car of wonderful WAR mains who tried to “tank” the bleedbusters with thrill and nothing else then mitigate after the fact

You can’t give healers 30% of the mitigation but 100% of the responsibility for failing to mitigate

Everything else is fair though, I still think kaliya has the most interesting tankbuster in the game and it requires both tanks even if you try to invuln it. I could gush about kaliya all day, it’s still my favourite savage fight in the game and it has so many mechanics that I think would still work in the modern game

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Originally Posted by Carighan

This would be easy to fix - and would fix a healer issue at the same time - if damage on tanks was nontrivial.

Imagine a world in which tanks consistently and constantly took high damage. Say autoattacks by a raid boss happen every 2 GCDs, but hit a tank for 40%-60% of their HP or so. You'd need to CD these, right? But there's also CD-centric tankbusters coming. Solution? Swap with the other tank back&forth to alternative timer usage, just like in older MMOs. "I'm out!" -> other tank takes over while your CDs cycle. Bonus points if virtually every mechanic, even in dungeons, hits the tank harder if it wants to hit the whole group, by say expecting the tank to stand in front.

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I think one of the solution for OT existing is not having OT..

Why we have MT and OT? let's think about it

We can have 2 MT that switch aggro to take less damage.. if not switched every 1 min damage received is +140% for example

OT currently feels like DPS with less damage and sometimes heal party

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Again you are looking at it from the perspective of “oh but what if this interrupts the flow of the tanks DPS”

GOOD

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Not quite, it interrupts the flow of the rotation, which is bad. The DPS loss is just icing on the cake.

You also don't address the major concern about how you can properly manage something when you have no way to properly visualise what you are managing.

If you want to know what tanks should manage, it is incoming damage. Making the tank defensives more unique is a good start and there are still ways the can change the incoming damage profile of attacks. As an example, from the incoming damage, you take 50% of it as direct damage and the other 50% is dealt via a DoT at once the effect has ended, call it a 15 second DoT as an example. Or even as something slightly different still, 50% now and the rest is done at effect end in one bigger hit. etc.

For OT, we only need to look at past encounters at what they can do, tank only mechanics. Have them pick up an Add, have them take a tether from a healer etc.

As for in fight responsibilities, something I have mentioned in the past as a new mechanic is using stuns/interrupts to change the damage profiles of an attack. That strong raidwide is now a weaker hit initially but the rest is done as a DoT. This attack is now a stack rather than a spread etc.

If we want to talk about incoming damage being too low, normalise the sustain tanks have and adjust damage to better suit that environment, rather than leaving DRK in the dust. This could also impact how much healing a healer has to do, but healing isn't my forte so I won't say anything too much there.

There are other things that can be done to make tanking more interesting, one of the bigger ones being having more control over boss position, however, if you notice, even trough this thread, a lot of things that are mentioned are encounter design issues and not direct tank issues. I was excited when I started seeing adds in the first DT dungeon because it was something else I needed to consider. This then brings in another aspect, controlling the fight. We pick up adds, take tethers to protect the party, if we could move bosses, we can position them to make mechanics easier to deal with for the party. We should be the one controlling the boss.

Unfortunately, over the years, these things have been slowly eroded away and notice how nothing from the above has anything to do with enmity or enmity management.

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Originally Posted by BabyYoda

I think one of the solution for OT existing is not having OT..

Why we have MT and OT? let's think about it

We can have 2 MT that switch aggro to take less damage.. if not switched every 1 min damage received is +140% for example

OT currently feels like DPS with less damage and sometimes heal party

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You cannot have 2 MTs in a fight unless there are 2 things that need to be tanked separately. All the tank swap does is swap who is in the MT spot and who is in the OT spot.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

You cannot have 2 MTs in a fight unless there are 2 things that need to be tanked separately. All the tank swap does is swap who is in the MT spot and who is in the OT spot.

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MT and OT is just a name can be replaced by T1 and T2 Mechanic wise

Depends on encounter tanks can swap each 1 min or less to get less damage received.. we already have this for example slash resistance

Swapping is only aggro not mechanic position

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Originally Posted by CKNovel

Already exist, in the form of "Interject".

O7S: An Add appears and if it's not killed in time it will wipe the raid. When it appears it cast Stoneskin that makes it unkillable if not interrupted.

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Had to look this up to check (it's Ultros)...shame it now dies before it has a chance to.

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Originally Posted by CaedemSanguis

Theres also a lot of bosses with cleavs

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It's just unfortunate cleaves are incidental since people don't know/remember which bosses cleave so they ultimately face all of them away regardless.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

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See while I don’t disagree with a lot of your offered suggestions it still leads to the problem of the original point where you said it’s bad to interrupt the flow of the rotation when I find that good. A rotation can never be good to execute on a support if there is nothing challenging that rotation on to be excited perfectly

Why as a tank do I even have a rotation if it has absolutely zero relevance to what I’m actually doing as a tank (note I mean here unique tanking things, I know all roles are responsible for DPS). Healer “rotations” are absolutely garbage but at least they can kinda sorta maybe be badly justified that they allow the healer to stop and and start at any time when they need to heal, meanwhile tanks are basically just playing 2 seperate classes at once. A slightly crappy melee DPS and a really really barebones tank with 5 buttons and these two halves never interact. That’s what I want to change. 14 is the only MMO I’ve ever played that has this weird design where supports also contribute massive damage (fine) but then split the damage and support aspect entirely away from each other and then still encourage you to focus overwhelmingly on the DPS aspect

Stunning, interrupting, taking tethers, adds, are all things I want back, but they still don’t change the fact that in the current tank design your damage rotation is completely exogenous to your ability to tank, it’s why I actually like TBN

In fairness, where extraneous things do exist, they are always outside of the rotation. With the possible exception of NIN's mudra, which is both within and without the rotation depending where you are in it and auto-fails if you do anything else (including, to my great frustration, teleporting). I don't see anything inherently wrong with this design principle, there is nothing stopping you having shared cooldowns in the extra-rotational kits so that you still have to choose between things (in the same vein as Edge/Flood of Shadow), it could even be set up so that you have a switching/branching rotation, so you can trade dps for enmity or mit or healing as you go around the merri-go-round of your rotation. In fact, if these had a shared cooldown of 10s you'd have to plan ahead.

I too would like to see those tank mechanics make a big comeback but I think there's plenty of room for interactions with the tank rotation without making these things interrupt it.

The old branching style of rotations and rotations relying on stance is really what I mean

I don’t mean straight up “break your entire rotational loop just to press bloodwhetting”

I want choice, I want branching rotations, I want stances, I want choice that means that “press the highest DPS option” isn’t always the correct option

Outside of a paradigm shift in encounter design, I don't see how one can sensibly engender a scenario in which the highest dps button is not the best option, even if we do something like WHM's lily system, at best you create a set of buttons that are pressed, if at all, for being dps neutral. Not to say I'm against such a thing, I'm entirely in favour of anything that makes tank play more interesting, in the same way that I'm in favour of making healer and dps play more interesting. I think there is room, if not for an outright return of stances (since I'm not exactly thrilled about those returning to my own role so I'll not support that precedent), there is room for making enmity more dependant on pressing enmity buttons, at the expense of dps. I think there's potential for making bigger dps buttons that share cooldowns with enmity/heal/mit buttons but I'm not an authority on tanking or game design so I'll limit myself to floating such ideas and let experts in one or both of the relavant fields discuss the (de)merits.

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Originally Posted by Alice_Rivers

Outside of a paradigm shift in encounter design, I don't see how one can sensibly engender a scenario in which the highest dps button is not the best option, even if we do something like WHM's lily system, at best you create a set of buttons that are pressed, if at all, for being dps neutral. Not to say I'm against such a thing, I'm entirely in favour of anything that makes tank play more interesting, in the same way that I'm in favour of making healer and dps play more interesting. I think there is room, if not for an outright return of stances (since I'm not exactly thrilled about those returning to my own role so I'll not support that precedent), there is room for making enmity more dependant on pressing enmity buttons, at the expense of dps. I think there's potential for making bigger dps buttons that share cooldowns with enmity/heal/mit buttons but I'm not an authority on tanking or game design so I'll limit myself to floating such ideas and let experts in one or both of the relavant fields discuss the (de)merits.

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Yeah, it would not work without first requiring tanks to, well, tank. Actively. Which is a shame that we don't have that - we also don't really have healing for healers in a non-trivial way - but I guess it worked for making more people play Tank/Healer if I compare modern wait times for DPS to old ones, even with years more age on the game. Just doesn't make for good job design, as much as it worked for duty finder.

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Originally Posted by Alice_Rivers

Outside of a paradigm shift in encounter design, I don't see how one can sensibly engender a scenario in which the highest dps button is not the best option, even if we do something like WHM's lily system, at best you create a set of buttons that are pressed, if at all, for being dps neutral.

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It's a bit more complex than the lily system as it is tied to gauge management throught combo GCDs.

The solution is simple, not tie it with DPS. Have one combo that generates enmity and the other generates some sort of mitigation or healing?
Well nope, most tanks would focus on the enmity combo without thinking about the mitigation/healing combo.
On top of that you end up with more button bloat...

That's why I've been arguing for the restoration of battle mechanics such as cleanse, interrupt or purging. Interrupt might be too strong but what if a ennemy cast would lose side effects if it was silenced?
Things that don't need to work on new battle systems as they already exist, we simply need to expand on it.

That's a thought, isn't it? They used VPR to showcase their button changing system and PLD has been using it for a bit with it's blade combo, it would be the same 1-2(-3) but they could have oGCDs that switch it in similar fashion to SMN's Egi summons (which themselves could use an overhaul but's a completely different topic).

Anyway, coming back to what I had intended to type when I read your post, I agree that existing mechanics need to return. If I could choose one new thing to implement though it'd be flavour phases for dungeons like in Vanaspati, it's a perfect candidate for a "Protect/Evacuate civilians" event either during a pull or during a boss.

P.S. I feel like tank gauges are underutilised and should be prerequisites to more abilities, with more generation to compensate.

Your sanity as you drift into sleep