Invulns: Problems and Solutions

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Originally Posted by DWolfwood

Said this in another thread, and the reason why I hate this idea when suggested, is because sometimes you want the full length of the invuln, and this doesn't help that at all.

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Well, if you think about it, with the 10 second duration, depending where you are at in your rotation, you'd be choosing between DPS or helping to heal off your Living Dead. You have to consider GCD timers. Don't think it'd be hard to let it ride for the whole duration, keeping that in mind. Other times you could take it off, almost by yourself, if you were able to have your combo line up right. It'd take some thought. I'm sure SCHs and ASTs would appreciate the help too, cause they ain't letting you ride the invuln for the full 10 seconds, that's for sure.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

I'm really not seeing it, neither in this raid tier nor in the previous tier. Maybe I'm overlooking something but I can't think of a fight where using an invuln let's you actually avoid doing a mechanic completely. I'm talking about something like O11s where you could ignore the rocket barrage mechanic by just having a PLD soak all of them with Hallowed or using tank LB3 to ignore the red fists, not just using an invuln on a tankbuster that you'd normally split.
Another good example, though not invuln related, would be O5s where you could completely ignore the intermission phase if you had a warrior in the party. I haven't found any of that mechanic cheese in an Eden fight so far, if you have please enlighten me.



Even the example of Hallowed in O11s was suboptimal at best because your pld lost several GCDs by sitting in a corner and an even remotely competent ranged dps could do the mechanic just fine without losing any uptime.

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I'd say I'm mostly talking about tank specific mechanics, stuff like Conflag, tankbusters, the split tank stack in E4S - you can go entire fights without ever having to even learn the actual intended way to deal with some tank specific sections. It's easy to overlook them as actual mechanics because they are pretty mindless even without invulns, but for me it was a major contributing factor towards just dropping the tier entirely after a few weeks of tanking. My worry is that the existence of invulns means the designers don't need to bother with more complex tankbusters or sections which require interesting uses of mitigation because they know you can just hit the "I'm fine for X seconds" button. They seem to have cracked down on being able to completely ignore full party mechanics, but it's worth considering the warping effect they might be having on tanking at a high level in general.

Sounds like every fight would become a boring fest of spam every cooldown.

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Originally Posted by ClickOnce

Sounds like every fight would become a boring fest of spam every cooldown.

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This mentality is kinda funny since that's literally what we do with dps CDs.

That said, I think invulns are fine. I would be much more interested in gameplay that was designed around "TANKING" rotations. As in, the damage coming in was not survivable on a constant basis without proper play, not JUST the occasional tank buster.

They could give us longer tank CDs (30s), more of them, etc.

Eddit - And to add to this, I think invulns provide a unique opportunity for gameplay that should remain.

I think the invulns existing as they are, is not a problem at all.

My reasoning:
In dungeons tanks should already be using their CDs on a rotation of sorts to help mitigate damage when you do large pulls, I do not see a problem with the current timers as I have been able to do this on every tank effectively. The only thing that's nice is Invulns give us the opportunity of a panic button or to make taking that damage more interesting, PLDs have the best one without taking any damage, the GNB's health goes to 1 but is invincible for 8s so plenty of time to heal up, and WAR and DRK can be avoided or useful to help situations - this is not meant to cheese anything but can spice up the gameplay a little bit.

When it comes to the ShB savage raiding and the recent designs they have done to them, as a tank, I do learn the proper way to do all the fights, it is entirely possible to mitigate or tank switch when appropriate - the point of the invulns in these fights is not for "cheesing" to avoid learning a mechanic, but to either make very complex parts easier or in the case of something got messed up, to save a run in the savage fight instead of having to rerun the fight over again. I think SE has done a great job in their fight design in introducing more difficulty for all roles, more responsibility of each role for the entire fight itself, while making it entirely possible for those interested in getting into savage content to learn and grow.

If the savage fights are considered too easy or simple for people, that's why the Ultimate Fights Exist. The invulns do not need to be removed or completely reworked when they are put there as part of the toolkit, finding inventive ways to use them IS part of the fun in my opinion. As a DRK main, I don't want to use my invuln to make it more difficult on my healers unless we have an understanding that - yes this will work - it was never meant to be a cheese other than making it easier overall for my party or healers or even my co-tank.

As for the CDs in savage content, in E5s I pretty much use them on rotation for the TBs of the main boss, but my OT does help when possible and I help my OT when possible. In E6s, other than conflag, i'm mostly free to use them as I take hits and cover my co-tank when they get the TB which makes it so I don't have to plan as much but the fight itself has more variety in its mechanics. E7s I do find to be the easiest of the latest tier. E8s everyone has responsibility, just different responsibilities, there is a needed tank swap - do some people cheese through it with their invulns? Possibly, but not all can, I am using my raid wide CDs strategically as well as making sure I use my personal ones at different points of the fight. Can these fights be done just using the CDs where absolutely needed? Sure, these fights were designed so a particular skill range can still conceivably clear content when put together and not just for the elite of elites.

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Originally Posted by DWolfwood

That said, I think invulns are fine. I would be much more interested in gameplay that was designed around "TANKING" rotations. As in, the damage coming in was not survivable on a constant basis without proper play, not JUST the occasional tank buster.

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Funnily enough the ARR and HW EX and Savage fights were mostly built that way. Tank swaps occurred more often than not because the tank ran out of mitigation cooldowns and would not be able to survive until they came off cooldown. The one flaw of this design was that once geared well enough (i.e. having 20% to 30% more hp than entry level) a lot of that content could be solo tanked.

There's nothing wrong with the concept. The problem is their availability. The recasts themselves look fine, until you remember that you have two tanks. Your team has an invuln available every 2-3.5 minutes. When they're so available that you can mitigate every tankbuster with invulns alone, then there's a problem. When they're so available that you can use them to cheese other mechanics, then there's a problem.

What makes conventional cooldowns different is that you have to actually know how much damage the tankbuster does. Can I get away with just Rampart, or do I need a 30% cooldown? Do I use one big cooldown, or stack two? If every tankbuster does the same amount of damage, then you don't really have to think about any of this. But if the damage on each progressive tankbuster ramps up, suddenly we have to ask ourselves how best to ration out our cooldowns. That's usually where invulns start to have meaning.

You know, this thread catching my eye again reminded me of a clip I took from Exdeath prog a few years back where I used all of DRK's mitigation to live through the second Thunder IIIx2 cause my co-tank was having a bad night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4scv0cEJ-w

Of course, healer shields were in play too, as well as Addle, but it felt pretty epic.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

Funnily enough the ARR and HW EX and Savage fights were mostly built that way. Tank swaps occurred more often than not because the tank ran out of mitigation cooldowns and would not be able to survive until they came off cooldown. The one flaw of this design was that once geared well enough (i.e. having 20% to 30% more hp than entry level) a lot of that content could be solo tanked.

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Yeah, no. I did all the endgame content at release in ARR and HW (all before nerfs etc.)

And none of it came close to actual tanking rotations.

If you're interested in what I mean, you should check out FFXI sometime. Just like XIV, you don't see the combat come together until level cap, and that game doesn't have a GCD. Instead, at higher levels, with haste etc, you'll be pressing OGCDs nonstop and tanks have to constantly be juggling their tank CDs and tank spells to survive.

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Originally Posted by DWolfwood

Instead, at higher levels, with haste etc, you'll be pressing OGCDs nonstop and tanks have to constantly be juggling their tank CDs and tank spells to survive.

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That can quickly turn the gameplay into a chore as well. Take ESO for example, you're constantly spamming abilties, like every 0.5 seconds constantly, either to keep up several buffs with different timers, several dots with different timers, spamming spells or magicka/stamina regen abilities all while spamming light or heavy attack at the same time. This might be more engaging than XIV for a while but you quickly get into handcramps territory and doesn't exactly require many braincells either because everything has such a low or non-existent cooldown.