Honestly, I think that tank DPS stances are going to go the way of Cleric Stance. Not something you can stay in 100% of the time. Warriors kind of already have this via Unchained.
Printable View
This would be a fantastic change, and nearly every tank would benefit from it. The implementation of stances in this game is abysmal. Say goodbye to delays on clicking off Darkside and Grit. Say goodbye to awful GCD stance swaps. Say goodbye to stance locked abilities that only let you use part of your kit at a time. Just about the only people who might object are WAR mains, because they're the only ones who gain a relative and completely unnecessary advantage from the system. But even they suffer from stance locked abilities, like Equilibrium, Inner Beast, and Steel Cyclone. Imagine if you had access to all those abilities, and (!) you actually had to use them to clear content.
It's almost as good as removing Slashing resist down from the game.
Unpopular opinion I know, but if you want to DPS, play a DPS. Tanks should be meat shields. Low damage, high mitigation and health pools.
Quite frankly this meta of squeezing out as much dps from tanks and healers isn't healthy for the game at all and just leads to elitist attitudes.
How many times in healer thread do you see "You shouldn't be healing". Answer: A lot. WHM's are actually told they shouldn't be casting cure.
Gee Whiz, it's almost like trying to squeeze out as much DPS as possible while still performing your primary function is how you get better at this game.
If you want to 'fix' the trinity, how about making the tanking aspect of tanking actually engaging? Because right now it's get threat in 3 GCD combos, pray your OT shirks you, and press a button once every 2ish minutes when a tank buster comes in. That, or you can just fall asleep on the keyboard in your 500th hallway dungeon EXR. I just slogged through normal trials and EXRs to get my flying bear, and I'm absolutely done tanking until 5.0 at the earliest. Even optimizing damage, it's so unbelievably boring and unrewarding.
Why does low damage have to be a tank requirement? Tanks in dps stance already do much less than a dps, I don't see why it needs to be cut any further. In fact I'd bump it up a little. It just isn't fun to hit like a wet noodle and passively soak damage. As a tank I'd rather feel like a juggarnaut than a punching bag.
I personally don't want to just see high health and passive mitigation either. What I'd really like to see is higher self-sustain, a wider defensive toolkit and a rotation that offers oppertunity to push extra dps if you really know the class/encounter well. In other words, make playing tank to a high skill level really rewarding.
i don't mind if they increse the gap betwen tank/healer and DD dps next expansion, mostly if they fix tank and dps stances with it, not to ridicule levels but 50/50.
I was mostly pointing at the example of Deliverance and Sword Oath going the way of Cleric Stance. That would be horribly unfun. They should not be cooldowns, rather, SE should find a way to make Defiance and Shield Oath more useful outside of some niches scenarios and prog.
Agree, only thinking about "meating damage" during an hole fight would be boring.
However, creating a gameplay *around* threat management, like some spell to gain ability from another player during like 15 sec, or a less stupid Shirk, would be a good point imo. Like a really interresting threat system.
It would be good solution against the "dps before all" rule in this game.
What are tanks and healers supposed to optimize then? Mitigation, healing and enmity all have a threshold. And once passed, they're objectively useless. If I can reduce Tail End down to 50,000 with Vengeance+Rampart. I don't need to also throw Inner Beast on top of it nor would that optimize anything. Using that same example in regards to healing, Excog will cover all that damage. At which point, what are healers supposed to do, suck their thumb? Now yes, outgoing damage needs to be significantly higher, but forgive me if I harbor doubt SE would actually go this route. If they did, it'd require a near complete overhaul of their fight designs because even Ultimate allows ample DPSing from tanks and healers. Boss damage would need to be less predictable, random spikes (Hi crit autos!) more frequent and attacks as a whole faster.
This doesn't even cover an excellent point Sargent brought up: tank mechanics are practically non-existent. The closest we've come is tanks needing to be first and second aggro. A less predictable design could help alleviate this, but really, what are the chances SE makes all these changes? If they don't, forcing tanks into tank stance is a near assurance even less people play the role. I have long suspected the only reason they didn't simply disable Cleric Stance in battle is because they knew healers would abandon the role en masse.
Tank main here and yes i also agree with many people on this thread, tanking is way less fun and way less demanding than DPS. Healing is somewhere in the middle (healing is more frustrating than anything else).
When tanking (not savage) I can watch netflix at the same time and do just as well. Dpsing on the other hand requires way more attention if one wishes to do well, you have to deal with the boss mechanics and your own, plus making mistakes will most likely kill you, tanks can survive failing mechanics.