So there's been a lot of discussion over the past months about the state of the current tank meta and its huge focus on DPS. There's a huge number of players who not only adore the current tank meta, but have gravitated towards playing a tank instead of a DPS -purely- due to this shift in focus. However, there's a smaller number of players, the type that gravitate towards tanks in MMOs out of a desire to feel as tough and durable as possible, who are having a less than stellar time in the current state of FFXIV.
(Warning : Huge Boring Essay incoming. Feel free to ignore entirely or just skip to the TLDR if you're not interested! This is what happens on a Thursday between Node Repops...)
On forums, a lot of tanks asking questions pertaining to things like Str vs Vit, dropping tank stances for DPS stance, and maximising mitigation are being told one universal thing: maximise your dps. If you don't try to maximise your DPS you suck as a tank. There's a lot of truth in this, but I feel there's a great amount of misunderstanding in the community regarding the players who don't favor the DPS style: namely that it isnt because they're shirking responsibility or arent -capable- of maximising dps, just that to them it feels "wrong" at a very core level and isnt fun. I wanted to discuss a few things pertaining to this, and why it's going to be hard to please everyone.
What IS the current Tank Meta?
As anyone with some 3.0 raiding experience will tell you, the current tank meta is very much focused on DPS. Contrary to how a lot of veteran MMO players might expect to have to build and play as a tank, the way top end raiding works is such that if played properly a tank can contribute a large amount of DPS to the raidgroup's overall total. The catch? In order to do so, they have to sacrifice quite a large amount of "tankiness".
This is causing quite a bit of friction in the tank community. The majority of tank players love it - tanks are now in a state where they're very dynamic to play and you can truly compete as a DPS. Players who hated low damage tanks in other MMOs are flocking to the Warrior and Dark Knight because suddenly they're able to play as a tank but as a class that feels like the DPS classes they enjoy.
The minority though are silently seething. There's something quite "off" about the tank meta in terms of expectations and satisfaction for a small number of players - in general these players are often "career tanks" from previous MMOS, and tend to gravitate towards the Paladin class. For them, the current tank meta is making them unhappy, but it's very difficult to articulate this feeling without simply being accused of being -bad-.
In this post I hope to bring up some discussion topics that might help explain why these players feel unhappy at the current situation, and if anything can be done.
Four Ways to Die - what other MMOs do.
What's caused a lot of confusion in the tank community is the expectation brought into this game from other MMOs, be it WoW, Tera, Rift, whatever. There are SOME MMOs that have a DPS focus on the tanks (Aion springs to mind) but in general, a lot of the traditional MMOs allow tanks to focus primarily on their tanking stats and tanking rotation. They might still contribute a lot of DPS naturally, but they'll mostly be looking to make themselves as tough as possible via gearing/talents/playstyle etc.
In order to fully understand the way tanks are expected to play in FFXIV at the top level, you have to ask the question "what causes a tank to die in an MMO?". Two obvious answers which don't really pertain to the argument are "lag/dcs" (which can happen to anyone) and "messing up a mechanic". There's plenty of instakill mechanics in FFXIV raids that will kill someone or the entire raid if you don't move in the right place or pass a debuff over or somesuch, but those arent really relevant here.
What we need to understand is how a tank that is tanking a boss in an MMO can die, assuming they have a healer healing them. Usually an MMO will have encounters that tend to fit into only one or two of these ways, forcing tanks to gear appropriately. Here's the four primary ways an MMO can setup raid bosses to kill tanks:
1 - Constant Incoming Damage. This is the kind of fight where a boss throws so much damage at a tank that even with a healer spam healing them the healer literally cannot keep up with the rate of incoming damage. The tank dies because the incoming damage rate is higher than the heal rate. This is fairly rare, but usually used in gearcheck encounters. Provided that this sort of heavy tank damage is happening for the entire encounter, the way a tank survives is simple: they get as much mitigation as possible. Dodge, Parry, Armor, Block, whatever, along with a huge health pool. It all helps. In addition, the healers probably need to gear up for bigger heals too. Tanking cooldowns will help, but if the damage is constant for an entire fight you'll need to be able to survive outside of cooldowns via raw tank stats.
2 - Healers Out of Mana. This one was fairly common in earlier days of WoW raiding. You basically throw lots of damage at the tank, but it's fairly easy to heal. However, the fight is quite long, and eventually healers will simply run out of mana and THEN the tank dies. In order to prolong healer mana, the tank would need as much mitigation as humanly possible. Maximum health wasnt important really, just dodging, blocking, parrying and flat armor. Healers would gear up for bigger heals and mana regen, and thus the fight just got easier and easier the more gear you had provided the tank geared for being tanky.
3 - Random Burst Damage. This method of tank damage was notably present in Black Temple era WoW, and eventually was moved away from. Here, the tank takes a constant very very heavy stream of damage, but the healers have very powerful heals and almost infinite mana. The idea being that a tank can survive maybe 2-3 seconds at max without a heal, and as long as heals are incoming they're fine, unless they take something like a double crit in a row, or two undodged attacks, or an attack and an AOE. In other words, they need to be able to survive the possibility of a big spike of damage at ANY TIME whilst healers funnelled massive heals on them constantly. The only way to gear up to survive these fights was to stack massive amounts of Health and armor - Effective Hit Points. Dodge/Block/Parry would make the bursts less common, but a tank needed the ability to survive 3 undodged attacks without a heal or there was always a risk of them suddenly dying from 100% -> 0 in 2 seconds.
4 - Predictable Burst Damage. THIS is the style that FFXIV uses in the most part. What you have is a boss that does constant damage on a tank, but in general the damage isnt particularly tough to heal through. You can generally survive it without any cooldowns, outside of your tank stance, and usually without that much health. The thing that kills tanks here is a huge tank buster move, usually on a strict timer and with an obvious cast bar. The damage incoming during this moment of Ouch is far beyond the incoming damage of the previous 3 death types, but only happens for a short time. Thus, for these encounters the tank merely needs enough mitigation to be able to survive the 2-3 second moment of tank buster - usually, popping one or two tanking cooldowns will be enough even in low vitality gear. Outside of that 2-3 second period of damage, tanking stats basically don't matter.
So those are the four ways MMOs over time have thrown damage at tanks, and you can see that for the first three tanks are encouraged heavily to be as tanky as possible at all times during the fight - the success of the fight hinges on their ability to take as little damage as possible from start to finish. In FFXIV though, that test on damage taking often only comes in very short bursts, and tanks tend to have a much larger amount of "Oh Shit" tanking cooldowns to cope with them.
When you then couple that method of tank death with the fact that:
a.) A lot of FFXIV raids have very tight enrage timers.
b.) Tanks can contribute almost as much DPS as a pure DPS class if played properly.
The message is clear - being tanky is very much superfluous to being high damage. You can stack mitigation and health up the wazoo if you want, but it will only have a very minor impact on the success of your raid. Healers wil be able to heal you fine anyway, and all you're doing is giving them a slightly bigger cushion to allow for them to make mistakes.
That's fine... but the benefits gained from maximising your DPS output far outweigh a small cushion for making mistakes. Certainly in the early days of Alex Savage raids, fights were literally -impossible- to do without tanks meeting certain dps levels, because a raid otherwise wouldn't be able to meet the enrage timer and would die.
The Fifth Way to Die.
It's worth mentioning there IS a fifth way a tank can die that doesn't really fit in with the four ways above: the tank misplays their tank rotation. Now this isnt usually a factor in a lot of the more passive MMOs like FFXIV/WoW etc, where you're mostly relying on RNG rolls and raw tanking stats to survive. In an action oriented game though, something like TERA, tanks are often expected to constantly watch a boss and their animations and time blocks and dodges with pinpoint precision every couple of seconds. A good tank in these kind of MMOs could often kill a boss without taking a single bit of damage if they were really good at timing their blocks/dodges.
This sort of active mitigation isnt present in a lot of the less action-based MMOs of course, but it's worth mentioning that there ARE MMOs out there that have a way to test a tank's ability to take and deflect damage outside of just "what gear are you wearing" and "did you pop a big cooldown at this particular moment".
Sacrifice for the Cause.
So we've seen that in FFXIV at present, there's a lot of emphasis on the DPS element of tanking. What does this mean in principle though, and why are some people against it? The key to understand here is that FFXIV's skill and gearing system is setup that you have to make several choices between DPS and survivability - but what ARE these choices and what are their impacts?
- Prioritising Strength over Vitality. This is the big one. You can either have a 20k health pool by having 35 stat points in Vit, and wearing 5 Vitality Accessories... or you can have a 15k health pool by having it all in Strength instead and do about 25% more damage. 4-5k health is a massive amount but... just doesnt really matter. Outside of the cooldown'ed tankbuster, this is just a cushion to make healers feel safer. Nevertheless, it's still a "tank stat" and a high health tank IS easier to heal even if not by much, due to slightly more time before they need that lifesaving heal.
- Completely ignoring the Parry Stat. Parry is garbage in FFXIV. It's all over the place but every single tank ideally wants to avoid it. It's the only "tank stat" that we actually have on gear other than Vit, the other secondary stats are purely dps boosting, but even then we still ignore it. Parry gives terrible returns point-for-point, and even if it DID give returns, more frequently parrying low damage attacks doesnt really affect the success of a fight. Healers arent running out of mana and tanks can't rely on parry in the tank buster moments. It's just better to ignore it and stack more DPS stats.
- Fighting in DPS Stance as much as possible. This is the "scary" one. To maximise your DPS, a tank should be tanking in Deliverance, Sword Oath or dropping Grit as much as humanly possible. That's a flat -20% damage taken gone due to maximising damage.
- Ignoring the damage-reducing debuffs. All three tanks have attacks that debuff the target and reduce the damage that target deals to some degree (10% by storms path, around 7-8% less damage done via physical/magical stuff for Delirium/Halone). There's virtually no need to keep these debuffs up 100% of course, and generally they're only applied for the tankbuster moments, if that. Tank rotations prioritise the moves that do the highest damage and keeping up these debuffs will usually result in a DPS loss (though delirium less so due to its use in a dps rotation).
Individually all of these make perfect sense. Combine them together and you have a MASSIVE difference between a tank that maximises their damage and one that plays tanky. A 20k hp full Vit Paladin who's stacked parry, keeps Rage of Halone up and stays in Shield Oath WILL be miles easier to heal than a Sword Oath full Strength dps monster... but that doesnt matter. The sword oath paladin can still survive those tankbuster moments, and whilst there's a higher chance of random death during the "quiet" periods, the damage they put out vastly outweighs that cushion.
Player Fantasy and the Joy of Axe.
So why is any of this a problem? One reason: Player Fantasy.
When players roll a class in an MMO, they generally have an idea on what they want out of it. They'll want to feel powerful, they'll want to feel like they're doing their job. Everyone wants to feel useful, everyone wants to feel good at the game and everyone wants to feel like they're doing the best they can for their teammates. But in addition to this, people gravitate towards a class for a "feeling".
You look at the Warrior, and you see a hulking berserker with a huge axe. A complete brute, raw strength and unrefined damage. What would your "average" Warrior player want to feel when playing their character? They'd want to feel like a threat. They'd want to feel scary to their opponents, to feel that every slow swing of their axe was capable of massive damage. They'd obviously want to feel tough too, but the archetype of the berserk warrior charging into battle with no shield is one of aggression, damage and power. The current tank Meta is perfect for this kind of desire - balancing damage done for incoming damage, that element of risk. The ability to do almost as much damage as the dragoon next to you... and huge satisfaction from seeing gigantic numbers pop up when that Fell Cleave crits.
I'm not saying ALL Warriors have this fantasy, but you can see how satisfying this image of a Warrior is when aligned to the way a Warrior plays. Dark Knights likely feel similar - a lot of players gravitated towards them simply because they were "the class with a two handed sword". They want to feel powerful and threatening, this magical behemoth that strides into battle wielding a huge weapon and dark magics, diverting their power between vicious destructive attacks, and self preservation.
But what about your average Paladin player? It's a little less black and white. The image of the stalwart knight protecting their comrades, clad in plate with a huge shield, deflecting blows left and right. THIS kind of archetype tends to attract the kind of player that wants to feel like they're swatting off incoming blows without harm, this immovable wall between danger and their friends. What would the satisfaction be for such a player fantasy? To see huge gigantic bosses swatting them and see tiny damage done numbers popping up. To face the fire breath of a gigantic dragon and shrug it off as if it were a fly coughing on them. To stand whilst a whole army of smaller opponents wail on them to no avail.
There are obviously some paladins who favor the idea of being a master of the sword, weaving in fast and powerful slashes and forgoing their shield in favor of rapid elegant damage. These players are also the kind who'd adore the current tank meta.
But for the immovable brick wall lovers, the current tank meta feels very very wrong. Sure, they'll get the satisfaction of seeing high damage numbers, of maximising their class, of feeling like they're contributing highly to their team, but in order to do that they have to give up their fantasy of the immovable wall. That high crit Royal Authority might feel great, but probably wouldnt feel as great as being hit by a gigantic tank buster and seeing your health bar move about 1 pixel.
That opportunity to swap to a DPS stance and do raw dps during a moment of lesser damage would feel fantastic to the aggressive tank players, but to the player who gravitates towards the Brick Wall tank fantasy, there isnt much enjoyment there. They'd do it, but the satisfaction of higher damage would be countered by the awkward feeling that you've chosen to make that part of the fight harder to heal for your healer... even if it's a very low risk of death.
Rewards and Power.
Above all, the current state of the tank meta means that if a tank joins a group with 20k health... they'll be laughed at. It's almost like a test of manhood amongst the community now - high health is (rightly) synonymous with low damage, and people don't want that. A tank who wanted to pride himself on being incredibly tough to kill will be pointed and laughed at in the current meta.
The issue with this is that MMOs in general are about increasing the power of your character. You raid, you kill stuff, you get rewarded with loot. Loot that increases your power. For DPS this is easy - you get loot that increases your damage output and you see a marked increase in your DPS. The rewards you get increase your "player fantasy". For healers, their rewards increase the size of their heals but ALSO increase the amount of damage they deal - Cleric Stance means that a healer who has a power fantasy of being a controlling warlock type, as equally able to destroy as to heal, can thrive from the same loot drops as those that want to heal for millions.
With tanks though... the reward system again goes against the Power Fantasy of a tank that favors feeling tough and immovable over the high damage threat. A tank gets a new chestpiece? Awesome, they'll do more damage and have more health... but that health boost probably means that they can then just swap out a vitality accessory for a strength one. They needed X vitality to survive the tankbuster but any more is excessive and should be shaved off for more damage. Increasing the item level of a tank's left side gear generally means that they can just wear more Strength gear on the right side.
The end result? A tank in i200 gear will probably feel just as tough as a tank in i180 gear. They'll do a LOT more damage of course, but probably will have dropped all hints of vitality accessories and be tanking things in pure strength. Thus, a tank that has the power fantasy of being as tough as nails doesn't really see any huge impact into the aspect of their play that they like the most. They'll see huge dps improvements but that health bar will still move the same amount when hit in the face by the Oppressors plasma beam.
Couple this with the fact that Fending Accessories are often seen as a wasted drop, it's impossible for a tank to get excited about anything which improves their tankability. They're neither praised for their toughness or expected to enjoy any rewards that improves it.
The Downward Filter into Casual Content.
Now if it isnt clear by now, the vast majority of what i've been talking about is related to raiding, specifically the more cutting edge Savage raids. It always amused me that people defend the need for tanks to minmax their damage in order to hit enrage timers due to the fact that raid teams were tackling the first weeks of Alex Savage "undergeared".
If players were "undergeared", how come tanks could survive by tanking almost entirely in DPS stance and using strength accessories in a lot of cases? Where was the incentive for tanks to improve their tank-ability if the content was clearable in the first few weeks whilst playing that high risk high damage style? The answer is in that good old fourth way to die - there's no incentive. Boosting your health pool and mitigation beyond what's needed to survive an encounters tankbuster is just not important compared to improving your DPS.
The issue now is that the philosophy of high damage high risk tanking is filtering down from the raiding scene into the casual scene. It was always there to a degree - it was generally better to wear strength accessories in easy content as it made it go faster, but it's pretty much a coin toss of personal choice. Full vitality tanks are "fine" in 4mans as long as they can actually keep aggro, but they're undesirable. They gain nothing from the high health pools really unless they're pulling four rooms at once with a laggy healer.
The problem with that though is that the mentality of Str>All and "tank outside of tank stance" is filtering into levelling players who don't really understand the positives and negatives. It's one thing to tank the A1S Oppressor in Deliverance with a good healer keeping you up, it's another to pull a pack of Aevis in Stone Vigil normal mode at level 41 with an undergeared healer and drop Defiance and expect not to get killed in 3 seconds. There's a time and a place, and I'm a little worried that the downward filter from how to optimally play a raid tank is going to start having awkward effects on new players who are told how to do it and then fail miserably.
A minor point though - but for tanks who enjoy feeling like solid walls, at least levelling content allows them some kind of arena to do this. The problem is that whilst a high health full-tank style actually tends to result in MORE success in levelling dungeons, the community's disdain for this kind of tank playstyle is likely to gradually filter across. I've already seen it happen - fresh dark knights wearing vitality accessories being chided before they even reach level 40, whereas it's probably the right thing to do given gear levels and the way Duty Finder works.
So what can be done?
The million dollar question... and we don't know. Does anything even need to be done? The next hard raids wont be coming out until 3.2. All we know is there'll be a bit more physical damage rather than magical so Paladin mitigation wont be quite as far behind Dark Knights as it was on A4S... but this doesnt really say if anything is going to change for the meta.
The problem we have currently is the binary notion of tanking. If you change encounter methodology in FFXIV to be more like first three "ways to die" listed above, then you're likely to upset FAR more players than you please. Imagine if every encounter in the next raid requires Warriors to stay in Defiance 100%, only ever using Inner beast as much as possible for mitigation, and to stack vitality due to huge burst damage. No fell cleaves, no strength spec, no interesting stance dancing. I'd wager most Warriors would probably consider rerolling to dragoon or something.
This is currently where a lot of Paladin players sit though. They do their best, they maximise their damage, they prioritise strength and use Sword oath as much as possible... but they don't feel like their archetype of a tank doing this. They might enjoy it to a degree, and I'm sure a LOT of paladins do like it, but there's that small subset that just feel the current way of doing things is unsatisfying for how they want to feel about their character.
The Fifth Way to Die is perhaps the thing to look at. Some way of allowing tanks to use skill to reduce damage more, a more active tank playstyle with viable payoffs. Imagine if Sheltron lasted 3 seconds and had an 8 second cooldown, but bosses would throw in constant physical mini-tank busters at random points with telegraphed animations. A good paladin would mitigate a huge amount of incoming damage via skill and timing rather than just stacking stats... but the imbalance with the other classes would mean it would either be pointless or paladins would be too vital.
Is there a tradeoff? Should they try to balance it that playing in a way that forgoes personal DPS but makes a tank a lot easier to heal somehow increases party damage via making it easier for OTHERS to dps? On paper the idea of the Warrior needing constant healing but doing huge dps themselves, vs a Paladin who needs so little healing that healers can dps much more frequently SOUNDS good... but it never really works like that in practise.
So.. that TLDR.
The current tank meta is fun and rewarding to any tank that enjoys a dynamic class that focuses on DPS, yet deeply unrewarding for any tank player that wants to feel like their progression as a character comes from being more and more unkillable. This feeling is not just a factor of the requirement for strict enrage timers, but many other factors including the philosophy of incoming tank damage and the bizarre gear stat system that forces tradeoffs.
If the current tank meta doesn't change, I feel a lot of disgruntled tanks will quit the role. However, these tanks are very much in the minority, and changing the way things work is likely to drive away the much larger numbers of tanks who enjoy FFXIV tanking purely BECAUSE of the high DPS focus.
Just spare a thought for the few tanks that want to do their best but hate having to purposefully make themselves squishier to do so.
Four Ways to Die - why the Tank Meta feels "off".
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10-15-2015, 09:38 PMSapphidiaFour Ways to Die - why the Tank Meta feels "off".
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10-15-2015, 11:01 PMSinaloa
After 20 MMo´s I have played so far I never have seen a game with that many players willing to play tanks. Naturally with increasing numbers you will see bad players more often than you would with dedicated payers only. But SE has done a good job luring players into tanking. Thats a good thing. I can live with the slightly worse feeling when tanking myself.
Do you remember the times of 300 minutes minimum dungeonfindertimes for dd´s? Those were the times that sucked. Today is okay´ish. -
10-15-2015, 11:47 PMSida
Your post was very well written and enjoyable to read. Something that I couldn't help but think, lot of the points go for the healers too at the moment. Healers in XIV are expected to dps, the more the better. The skill in healing required seems to be measured in how much dps time you can pitch in. And yet there are those healers who'd like to find their enjoyment in this game in being good healers without need to dps but as you pointed about Paladins, that point is very hard to bring out without being labeled lazy or sub par. What causes this? There simply is not enough threat that the healer should stay on their toes ajust for healing all the time. Even with the big pulls in ex dungeons a good healer is expected to be able to toss in damage. There is not real threat to run out of mana that in the past in other games had to be spared to heals and only heals.
I must admit I haven't looked I to raiding but as I hear healer dmg is more than expected there as well. Propably mostly due that fourth way to die. Unlike in the other three, healer needs to stay hot on the heals only for the said tank busters. That leaves disgruntled healers who are told "well its quite ok not to damage as long as you don't mind staying mediocre and don't want to the end game content." That's rather far from the ideal of support class who heals and buffs the group in exchange for not being out to kill stuff. -
10-16-2015, 12:14 AMMalicewolf
I just love everything about this post. As I've been getting more involved in trying to improve myself as a tank, I've realized that my expectations on what I thought I needed to be and what the players expect were very different. And as you said, raid tank mentality has started leaking to the more casual play style as well. This gets frustrating as the lower tiers have a combo of both mentalities. I've been berated on both ends in dungeons. I'll play one as a defensive aggro with shield oath and get called a bad tank for not dishing enough damage and the next dungeon, I'll have sword oath and get called a noob for not using shield oath during a boss fight and causing the healer to heal me more.
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10-16-2015, 12:22 AMDonjoYou're right, but I think Sapphidia is making a slightly different point. Her observed difference between the roles is that, for Tanks, gearing for damage comes at the cost of gearing for tankiness. Healers and DPS maximize all aspects of their role with a single set of gear. Tanks don't. They're the odd one out in so many ways that it's a bonafide wonder that SE has gone so long without explicitly addressing it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sida
If Tanks were shifted to be allowed to maximize Tankiness and Damage at the same time in completely natural manners(ie. By wearing Fending Gear of the highest item level) then the discussions surrounding them wouldn't be nearly so heated and conflicted. -
10-16-2015, 12:33 AMRisvertasashi
Very interesting read. Explains my feelings a bit... I guess I'm one of those 'invincible wall' tankers (or I would be, anyway) but the game just doesn't support this playstyle.
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10-16-2015, 01:21 AMSidaMm, I got the feeling that while the gearing was clearly part of her point, as that is a heavy decision in tank play at the moment, it was still mainly about the expectations of how some people think tank should be, versus the reality to which the tanking in XIV at the moment has grown to. I see it that tankiness expectation is sort of comparable to healyness. A healer who could and should juggle her targets, spells, and mana management to keep the party alive without having time or resources to feasibly be able to think anything else. That if they miss a beat and toss a HoT to wrong target that means at least one death. Currently such situations are rare and usually only symptom of otherwise lightly played group.Quote:
Originally Posted by Donjo
But, that is how I interpreted her post, that her main point was that tanks who want to feel like tough walls don't necessarily feel the tanking in this game as rewarding as it could be. -
10-16-2015, 02:28 AMArkenne
Quite the long read, but very interesting indeed.
I've been playing the 3 tanks and I gotta say that of the 3, the PLD is the one I enjoy the most on big pulls.
It feels so safe to do risky things with it, because it simply takes no damage to begin with, despite having thrown all my VIT accesories but one, and rolling on STR points.
Unlike the WAR that feels like it needs to kill everything... and it really does XD
DRK is very shinny.
This new tanking meta... gotta say it gives me a very complicated feeling. -
10-16-2015, 02:45 AMshao32
long read but fun.
im a wall lover tank, and i like fending for much shucks in this game, i love mi big hp pool in mi DRK, but thats not mean i play the job bad or i dont try to do the most damage i can, many player like how i tank many dungeons and primals ect ect, and no bad opnions.
i dont have any problem to max mi dps, i go warr full str to roulette for example.
the real problem for wall tanks and rage dps tanks are the accesories, solution? very easy, make tank damage scale whit vit, hp lover happy, dps lover happy.
im alwais say yoshi need remove the name of vit and re-name like vigor stat, all clases take hp from vigor and tanks take hp and damage and end of the story, then now the tanks only call noobs other for terms of skill, thats means more easy to devs see the and prever tank damage to designe future conten, faust whas a joke for top raid players, and a pain for the rest. -
10-16-2015, 03:08 AMAshkendor
That was a long read, but a good one.
Yep, same here. I started off the game playing in full Fending (it makes sense, having tanked in other games), but have adapted somewhat to fit how tanks are played here. I have pentamelds and am in the process of building a 210 Slaying set, and I tank in Sword Oath as much as I feel safe doing (I could probably do more, but I'm finding it hard to find a happy medium between "the aggressive tank" and "that idiot that never uses tank stance"). The thing is, the current meta just doesn't really support Paladins at all. We're the lowest in DPS and even if we did offer additional mitigation over the other two, nobody would care unless it were flat-out impossible to survive the mechanic with the other two tanks, which is just exchanging one type of problem for another.Quote:
Originally Posted by Risvertasashi
I dunno. I've thought about switching to DRK because I keep hearing and/or reading a bunch of crap about all Paladins basically getting carried through raids, which really yanks my chain cause I work my ass off for the clears I get. Nobody carries me. I really do enjoy Paladin and the people I raid with have made it pretty clear that they really don't mind if I don't switch. I just like the aesthetic of a sword-and-board knight, and I (mostly) like the way it plays. I think it could use some tweaking (enmity/potency increase, maybe some changes with the utility of a few skills and let's face it, if the current meta is going to persist then we need a dps boost to be considered anything but a last resort again), but I'm overall pretty content with the way the class feels.
That, and Hallowed Ground makes me feel like a boss. -
10-16-2015, 03:41 AMKyne_Lyons
I just do what the content requires, personal preferences are always left wayside in the name of progression.
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10-16-2015, 06:24 AMKacho_Nacho
I'm one of those old school brick wall tanks. Forgoing survivability for DPS just sounds wrong. Maybe that's what the cutting edge groups are doing but I plan on having a nice health pool and some great damage mitigation when I tank.
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10-16-2015, 06:57 AMAnova
Hmm, I'm wondering if SE should improve healer DPS and healing on tanks so that beefy tanks can contribute to the party by putting less pressure on healers. Overall team dps will then rise as a result and make beefy tanks viable as a support build.
And did not know about the 20k hp tier for tanks. -
10-16-2015, 07:18 AMAriaEnia
Yeah been in a neverreap dungeon with 21k hp paladin and one drg left the dungeon after saying "suck tank" before even start. I just shrugged then another drg came in and we started the run. Finished the dungeon in 18 minutes (12 minutes left on protect buff)
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10-16-2015, 07:59 AMAwful
Very good post it sums up how I feel about tanking and honestly i've been gravitated towards playing a Summoner more than my tank because I don't feel like a meat shield, I feel like a DPS class with better emnity and defense. I just don't agree with a lot of the design choices for tank there's only so many defensive stats that we use and there's not much (parry: useless, Hp: we use enough till we feel comfortable then switch out.) I find it so odd that I got full fending when 3.0 came out feeling so giddy about being a tank then I remembered that near the end of 2.X we used slaying as Str contributed to our defenses (paladins more than other tank classes.)
I do miss the old style MMOs such as WoW where when I did gear up I felt like a beefy tank getting dodge, more hp, more armor, more block but in here I just improve my dmg and slowly increase my defense + magic defense. It's such an odd concept to me that i'm gearing as a DPS while i'm playing a tank it's like looking both left and right at the same time. -
10-16-2015, 09:43 AMKabooaThat doesn't exclude having strength, or dumping parry.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kacho_Nacho
Parry isn't amazing damage reduction, and you get 'amazing' health with i200+ leftside. i200+ right side is plain overkill in regular dungeons, and equates to maybe 1 extra hit in a relevant raid. -
10-16-2015, 10:13 AMIndigoHawk
3.0 has been really bad for defense tanks. It's been great for dps tanks. Before 3.0 I would look at a tank with high health and respect the work getting the gear. Now I wonder if they can hold aggro or if they have high health because they're new.
In 3.0, I changed to str stats, and now only use a couple fending accessories. I don't feel I've become a better geared tank at all since 180. I do more dps now and do't struggle with aggro, but in terms of survivability, about the same ... at least for paladin. I barely have more health than dps and healers. I don't feel like a tank.
On warrior, increased dps means I swap to dps stance, pop some buffs and mitigation, and heal myself while going through fell cleaves. It's fun, and I'm playing warrior mostly now. I prefer paladin but warrior has better debuffs, benefits more from dps gear, and can change stances easier. They're an excellent main tank or offtank with basically no disadvantage in 3.0 right now. -
10-16-2015, 10:34 AMKacho_NachoUm... I don't know what you mean when you say i200 + left side or i200 + right side. *embarrassed* I'm a new arrival from WoW.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kabooa
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10-16-2015, 10:58 AMSapphidiaLeft side and Right side refer to the slots on your paperdoll character sheet: Left Side is the armor parts - chest, head, belt, gloves, pants and boots. Right side is the five accessories.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kacho_Nacho
As of now, tanks dont get much choice in their Left Side gear - they use the highest item level in each slot they can, as it all contains strength and vitality. When it comes to the Right Side slots though, they have a choice between full Strength with no vitality at all, pure vitality jewels, or some mix and match of both (or melded crafted accessories with a bit of str/vit on each). Basically the right side slots is where you get the chance to tweak how much strength or vitality you're taking into a fight, outside of the 35 stat points.
The i200+ means item level 200 or above (in this case, Esoterics Tome gear or anything from Alexander Savage). Basically the consensus is that if you have item level 200 or greater in all of your left side armor parts, this equates to so much vitality that it's just pointless to have any vitality on the accessories, so tanks will most likely use nearly full Slaying strength accs on the Right side at this gear level, in virtually all encounters ingame. -
10-16-2015, 11:19 AMAmiaze
Firstly, excellent post, OP. I actually cracked open a small bottle of wine while reading this and had a blast. Excellent points, and major kudos to you.
And I have to say that I completely agree, but I wanted to focus in on one specific point that you mentioned before anything else:
I've seen this quite a bit recently, and it's really what worries me the most about FFXIV's stance that everyone should by DPSing in top-tier content. The demand becomes so high from the playerbase that newer players (or newer tanks/healers) believe it to be the "correct" way to play. I was leveling AST in The Aery the other night and had a DRK who was perfectly geared for the dungeon -- in fact, I believe he may have been a bit over-geared -- but I had to fight to keep him alive. Every mob he pulled made his health plummet as if he were, ironically, a DPS. I kept checking his gear over and over again, trying to figure out why he was taking so much damage, until a friend of mine pointed out that he was using all STR gear.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sapphidia
The demand for DPS is, currently, so high that it almost completely overshadows each and every job's original intent. While leveling PLD, I've found myself questioning why my healers were allowing my health to drop so low that I was using literally every defensive cooldown I had to stay alive during trash mob pulls, just to realize that it was because they were DPSing. As a result, I did not have cooldowns prepared for upcoming boss fights. Not even cross-classed abilities were up.
Tangent:
I'd like to touch on your point about the mentality of the "player fantasy" from a DPS/Healer perspective before moving to Tank. When I originally picked FFXIV up, as my first MMO, I went straight for ARC. When I learned that it later turned into BRD, I fought it tooth and nail. I didn't like the idea of being a support class because I thought it would go against how I'd built my character, and the reason I'd picked my class in the first place. Eventually, I did it and wound up enjoying it. I would eventually switch to WHM for numerous reasons, but wound up loving the job because I liked the idea of having something to actively manage. I did not like that I couldn't discern how much damage I did to a boss during an endgame raid, or that to play my support skills, I had to lower my own damage.
Now, that same issue of player fantasy disconnect has returned. I'm nearly done gearing out MCH (which I was very excited for come Heavensward, enough that I ditched healing for a while), and I've gone back to healing, this time with AST. And it will certainly be what I take into Savage and all other content, but for once, I'm not really excited to do it. Why? Because I know I'll be required to DPS more than I feel I should be. Now, to make my point clear, I normally DPS quite a lot as a healer; but if I see someone's health fall into the 75%-80% range, I will switch and heal them, or throw out a more powerful heal while still in Cleric Stance to boost them back up. I'm very much for playing my role and being as useful as I can be, even if it means stepping outside of my normal job requirements.
However...I remained a healer for most of A Realm Reborn because I realized I didn't like to DPS as much as I thought I did. I enjoyed keeping my party alive and quickly figuring out ways to mitigate or heal damage when we missed a mechanic or failed to miss a DPS check. When I'm in a leveling dungeon, it's normal for me to not DPS at all. In fact, I won't until I'm positive that we're well-geared enough for the tank to not suddenly drop to a critical point in their HP. I'll do a few runs where I do not DPS, then go back and do it again and DPS as much as I can while keeping everyone healed so that I can grow used to being flexible. But now, to do Savage, I have to do more than just step outside my role to help maximize my input: I have to more or less forget about healing altogether for the sake of DPS. Healers in Savage are literally just DPS that have good healing capabilities...at least, that's how I feel about it.
End tangent
I say this to point out that the disconnect isn't just with tanks.
Now, as an alternate character, I am leveling PLD for HW progression. But I'm finding the same issue. Again, I know I'll be required to DPS, but I'm enjoyed fighting to keep enmity from people (not those who purposefully steal it, mind you, but those DPS who are just very good at their jobs or high geared). I can understand this for WAR or DRK, but I'm a PLD. I've leveled this job before on my main character, and I loved it because it wasn't designed to DPS. I was managing and micro-managing much like I did as a healer, except I was doing it only for myself. I was just mitigating incoming damage so that my healers could keep me alive.
I've honestly just come to terms with the fact that the game is heavily DPS-focused...I like flexibility, although I prefer testing my abilities for the job I signed up for rather than something I didn't. I signed up to be a medic. That doesn't mean I cannot use a gun, but I shouldn't be expected to take out an army or have pin-point accuracy. My biggest concern with this is, as you've said, what this shift does to the rest of the playerbase. -
10-16-2015, 03:32 PMSidaPlease no, that is backwards. I mean, the part of healer dps. It's like saying "we don't feel being dps should be part of the tank job, so let's make it bigger part of another job it doesn't really belong to."Quote:
Originally Posted by Anova
What I'd rather see is that fights would actually start dealing damage enough that a) tanks need to be tanky and b) healers still need to concentrate on healing. I recall in some other game where even the trash mobs, if giving few hits to dps meant dead dps. Here about any dps can shrug of at least one mob because they just don't hit for all that much. And giant pulls are possible for the same reason. The mobs just don't hit all that hard. -
10-16-2015, 04:13 PMYaichiro
I think the best solution to improve the situation is to allow VIT increase physical/magic defence instead of improving HP. For a game that has healers it is pointless to improve HP beyond the threshold that you need to avoid a single hit death whereas defence mitigates all incoming damage and thus incoming damage can be made hard to allow a proper use for wall tanks.
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10-16-2015, 04:49 PMAnovaI think it's just because there's a huge jump in gear. I don't know if you remember running Neverreap or Fractal in i160 gear, but healers and tanks really had to be careful changing between dps and tank/heal stances. Now, everybody is geared about 30 to 40 levels above it and are just blazing past it, so I can't say this was how the dungeon was intended to be run. Also, if we make the raid hits that big, there's no way the tanks are going to survive them in the earliest gear stages without using holmgang, hallowed ground, or living dead. And you know the CDs on those won't allow consecutive tank busters that would wear the healer down.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sida
Anyway, the dps healer idea was just a quick suggestion based on the presumption that defense and VIT is like accuracy. Once you reach a certain value, any more becomes useless (or greatly diminished returns) for that dungeon. However, it's true that healers don't need to worry about letting tanks die and can have longer dps bursts with higher hp tanks. I just suggested that if a tank stacks VIT for reduced damage and hp, a healer could be able to use that extra buffer to deal out the difference in damage equal to the difference between a full VIT and STR build. It's not going to be a big difference, but one that simply makes VIT feasible in a party situation (perhaps more so in specific cases where aoe or matk is better). Healers do not do that much as much damage as a tank currently and have a lot of mp problems when they dps. We would need to make heals more effective on VIT tanks too (possibly making VIT a stat that increases healing power when receiving) to help make VIT tanks offset the extra mp costs of healer dps.
The other options are that tanks passively reflect damage based on VIT, or healers lose some of their mitigation abilities so tanks need more VIT. Neither solution is perfect though as one turns VIT in to a damage stat and the other removes a great deal of complexity and nuance to the healer class. Increasing overall damage or decreasing tank pdef/mdef is a possibility, but one that's easy to overcome with overgearing (which is the current problem).
Also for the idea of VIT increasing defense, there were previous systems that used VIT as flat damage reductions and PDEF/MDEF as percent damage reduction. Obviously, the calculations are different in FFXIV, but that might be one suggestion to promote the use of VIT. It still runs in to the problem of a soft cap for survivability though and the high demand to meet dps checks. -
10-16-2015, 05:59 PMKydi
The fundamental issue with VIT, even if it were to give a passive defence increase, is that you still only need enough to survive the tank buster, with any more being essentially wasted. I do agree that this would be a very nice thing to have (passive damage reduction) but it would have to come with a change in meta to remove the tank buster mechanic and replace by continuous high damage output from bosses. With a meta designed around spikes, there's really no need to gear for anything but surviving those spikes.
On the original point, I would categorize myself as the type of tank who likes to be the immovable object. However, I am more than happy to be pushed to dps as hard as possible when off tank. In that instance I think it's perfectly valid to expect tanks to dps. Where I think the issue lies (with the meta, not with the players) is that the focus is on spending time outside of tank stance whilst still having the boss wail on you. The easy solution would be to up the boss damage to such a level that 2 hits outside of tank stance will kill you, and add a substantial damage reduction to all tank stances. However, I can understand that this might be met with resistance from many tanks, so probably wouldn't happen. -
10-16-2015, 06:12 PMDuelleWhat's pulling people to those classes are the aesthetics. The gameplay may become part of the reason once they level it enough, but some people just want to be the guy with the big axe/sword. It's a popular aesthetic and I can't fault them for wanting to sign up for that reason.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sapphidia
This said, using DPS as a lure is a losing proposition due to the inherent nature of tanking. You play a tank to sacrifice damage for survivability. That's the core of the role and supersedes anything else you want to add to it. You don't roll a tank for e-peen deepz or to top meters. You do it because you want to be the one to somehow survive the 100-foot tall firelord's stomp.
As I said in the reddit thread, calling people who don't like the meta a minority is disingenuous. There's a difference between adhering to the meta for the sake of progression and actually liking it, and there are plenty of people who hate the meta but follow it because they want raid clears.Quote:
The minority though are silently seething.
Yes and no. There's a reason the 2.0 WAR questline emphasizes taming your inner beast for the protection of others instead of lashing out at your enemies or cleaving someone in half while in a berserker rage (the latter is even painted as a very bad thing in the storyline); the abilities themselves reflect that quite well. The HW WAR questline repeatedly hammers on that point, too. In part because the writers help shape the player fantasy and justify why this dude with a huge axe is a tank (an archetype known for dealing less damage than the DPS).Quote:
You look at the Warrior, and you see a hulking berserker with a huge axe. A complete brute, raw strength and unrefined damage. What would your "average" Warrior player want to feel when playing their character? They'd want to feel like a threat. They'd want to feel scary to their opponents, to feel that every slow swing of their axe was capable of massive damage. They'd obviously want to feel tough too, but the archetype of the berserk warrior charging into battle with no shield is one of aggression, damage and power.
We had people complaining about this during ARR's launch, too. Individuals whose argument was "WAR has a huge axe so why aren't I topping DPS meters?", forgetting the fact they're a tank and why tanks deal less damage than the DPS.
Non-sequitur:
I'm of the opinion WAR in part created the problem because of how Deliverance and its related abilities were designed. The intent is crystal clear: the devs felt that WAR having to drop Defiance and losing their entire resource system while off-tanking was a waste (and I agree with that notion). The main issue is that they made it too easy to switch from Defiance to Deliverance, and in making it too easy allowed it to creep into parts of the gameplay it shouldn't be involved with. That in turn affected the other tanks because one of the three was able to pump out more damage, causing the other two to try to mimic it to keep up. And while one was able to sort of get away with it (DRK), the other could not and has suffered for it (PLD).
Keeping the design's intent in mind, what the devs were most likely expecting is WARs to tank in Defiance and make use of Abandon stacks while off-tanking (via Deliverance) and having damage-oriented abilities in that stance so that the system doesn't go to waste. The way Equilibrium is designed also points to this, since the TP from it is useful while off-tanking (for upkeep, and we know what a big deal this is for off-tanks in general) while the self-heal is useful while main tanking. Chances are they figured the 10-second cooldown was enough to discourage stance swaps, and allowed the 1:1 Wrath-to-Abandon conversion so that WARs don't get screwed over during taunts. They were likely not expecting triple fel cleaves and players ignoring tank-oriented skills.
Going the route of hindsight, the mistake was allowing 1:1 Wrath/Abandon conversions. While I'm not in favor of switches dropping all stacks, reducing stacks by one half rounded down when switching would kill triple Fel Cleaves. Making Infuriate a buff that is lost upon switching (leading to any stacks added by the ability to be lost) would also have helped in keeping things under control. It would also mean that Unchained's purpose is not completely undermined like it currently is.
As I've been constantly saying in these discussions, "shit rolls downhill". And I'm glad to see it brought up here.Quote:
The problem with that though is that the mentality of Str>All and "tank outside of tank stance" is filtering into levelling players who don't really understand the positives and negatives.
Changing the damage type is a band-aid on a bullet hole, and has a big chance of placing DRK in the latrine (specially if the next tier favors physical damage). While encounter design would need to change a bit, the issue won't really be fixed unless all three tanks are adjusted as well.Quote:
Does anything even need to be done? The next hard raids wont be coming out until 3.2. All we know is there'll be a bit more physical damage rather than magical so Paladin mitigation wont be quite as far behind Dark Knights as it was on A4S... but this doesnt really say if anything is going to change for the meta.
I guess I'll be the one to say it: a person that rolls a tank without understanding why a tank doesn't deal huge e-peen damage rolled a tank for the wrong reasons.Quote:
The problem we have currently is the binary notion of tanking. If you change encounter methodology in FFXIV to be more like first three "ways to die" listed above, then you're likely to upset FAR more players than you please. Imagine if every encounter in the next raid requires Warriors to stay in Defiance 100%, only ever using Inner beast as much as possible for mitigation, and to stack vitality due to huge burst damage. No fell cleaves, no strength spec, no interesting stance dancing. I'd wager most Warriors would probably consider rerolling to dragoon or something.
Again, don't dismiss those who don't like the meta as a minority.Quote:
If the current tank meta doesn't change, I feel a lot of disgruntled tanks will quit the role. However, these tanks are very much in the minority, and changing the way things work is likely to drive away the much larger numbers of tanks who enjoy FFXIV tanking purely BECAUSE of the high DPS focus.
If this is really about more involved gameplay, then I'll throw out a suggestion I mentioned in both the reddit thread and another thread on these forums: a "hard mode" tank. A tank that is designed to stance dance and do all that comes with it. The catch is that at peak level gameplay it'd be on par with a Grit DRK or Shield Oath PLD. Everyone talks about how fun and "interesting" the gameplay is, so this way they get their wish and those of us who like being a brick wall are not undesired anymore because numbers-wise we're on par with each other. -
10-16-2015, 06:15 PMKhalithar
Long time wall style tank here reporting in. The OP's point is spot on, I to made the switch to str accessories because there's no reason not to. You don't need the 19-20k hp for any of the content, it's just overkill, I float around 15-16kish with my str gear and I'm fine as is. I loved being geared up in other mmo's able to shrug off the insane damage done by bosses or pulling three rooms worth of enemies that couldn't even scratch me (once I'd geared up of course). I don't get that in this game, I have to agree that those big royal authority crits feel great but as I focus on maintaining my dps and tanking in sword oath, I feel as though the tanking meta in the game has lost it's way and forgets what it means to be a tank.
But it is difficult to say what can be done. For a start, I'd say make Slaying gear mnk/drg only and Fending gear War/Pld/Drk only then alter the item's budget away from vit to have some str on it so tanks have more hp and still have some of the str they want. Whether you favor the current meta or not, I believe we can all agree that it's wrong for the accessories to be meant for tanks to be considered useless/waste of a drop. -
10-16-2015, 06:50 PMKacho_NachoThank you for the information, Saphidia!Quote:
Originally Posted by Sapphidia
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10-16-2015, 07:09 PMRazem5791
Greetings
I am Razem Shneider from the Marlboro server. I'm a tank and didnt lvl up any DPS class on this character, because tanking is actually what I do best in any MMO I play. Not like I hate DPSing for exemple, but I'm way too clumsy for that. Im an old-timer tank, since I've been doing that for more than 10 years, starting on FF11 as a WAR/NIN, then as a palatank for 10 years in WOW and finally as a gladiator/paladin from when A REALM REBORN has been launched. I agree with Saphiddia on this. It's sure It helps to do good dps as a tank, yes. But it gives much stress to a healer depending of some fights and situations. As Saphiddia said, we have mitigation skills to reduce damage and on cooldowns, we count on our natural defense, giving time for healer to heal others on emergency. I have switched from Paladin lvl 60 to Dark Knight, yet I decided to not lvl up marauder for the DRK since I plan to use my paladin skills with my DRK. I believe to be worth the try and the survival... -
10-16-2015, 07:29 PMRazem5791
I forgot to add a point : the aggro. We can change to dps stance (Sword oath, darkside and so on...) Still, with Flash and AOE aggro spell for DRK, We can't do as much damage than a BLM, a NIN or MONK, right. We may add some dps to them but we will clearly loose aggro to them since they will always catch aggro fast on us. And you all know that they wont have as much natural defense than us. Making healer work on the dps and at time heal so much so he gets aggro himself.
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10-16-2015, 09:45 PMkarateorangutang
OP's analysis is pretty spot on and I agree 100%. I played PLD in XI and generally go for the most support/defense minded tank because that keeping enmity was always more fun to me than just doing a big number. I think that's what has turned me off PLD in HW. It's still viable, but doesn't command the sheer threat that WAR does. For me its not being a wall, but being a threat that makes me enjoy tanking. In this meta though, WAR just feels more like that threatening protector than PLD does. Now that could change in the future and I would gladly change back as I love the sword and shield aesthetic much more.
Also, just to be honest, the thing that really irks me about the whole STR/VIT debate is the survivability aspect of it. I use 3 melded acc and 2 str for my tank. Incoming damage has never, ever, ever been an issue as long I was a reasonable ilvl for the fight. If dps and healers are running into tanks who seem like paper tanks because they are DPS'ing then they are simply doing it wrong. Intelligent and liberal use of cooldowns is what makes that whole mindset possible. If your in DPS stance in a pack of mobs without a cooldown up at all then thats is simply bad tanking. Not popping cooldowns when there are the most mobs up is also a common mistake. The misconception is that defenseive cooldowns aren't important for some reason.
At the end of the day, if your running with a paper tank, watch their buff bar for a bit, if you don't see cooldown's being popped at all, then something needs to be said. I would be willing to bet that in most cases it's simple forgetfulness or lack of understanding. These two things are easily corrected for the betterment of not only the party but the tank themselves. -
10-16-2015, 09:46 PMRhaja
I really enjoyed reading this post last night because it addresses so much of the issue. When I was maining a WAR in 2.1 I fell in love with the damage focus of it, and went all STR before Xeno made his guide which greatly helped justify my focus. However when I look back to tanking in WoW, and being a "tank" in Guild Wars 2, the thing I loved the most was being a wall. I remember pulling a lot of enemies and laughing while quoting Wallace from Fire Emblem "HAHAHA! Come, break your weapons upon me!"
While tanking is fun in this game, that concept of being a wall is completely gone. You have so little control over beefing yourself meaningfully that it just feels completely pointless. The only time I stacked VIT was while leveling DRK because my fiancé told me how off the healing felt for AST. What really gets me about the all STR focus though is it only feels fun on WAR.
WAR is like an adrenaline rush. I haven't had a chance to level it past 50 yet, but I remember getting massive crits with Inner Beast and how good it felt. Because even though I was doing the damage, I was also setting up a six second window of reduced damage and getting healed for it. Inner Beast was great, and WAR's kit worked so well around that method. I remember how great it felt when I learned I could pop Vengance, Berserk, Maim, and Blood Bath while spamming Overpower in DD first room pulls. I busted out laughing when my buddy told me he gave up healing me and instead dropped aero on as many mobs as possible before going into holy spam, and then going back to healing. It was great because it was designed like that. I don't get that sensation on DRK or PLD, ever. Its just "Yay did a nice crit".
My buddy who also fills the role of pocket healer rolled WHM for two reason. "To be the whitest mage ever" (aka a beast healer) and because he loves the support role over anything else. I remember him enjoying doing some damage as a healer, but he never wanted to focus on it. For him, even on his PLD, it was always "Backup DPS". He considered it a bonus for great party performance, not a requirement. When he's on his toes and having to keep the party alive he's truly enjoying the game. When he has time to DPS he's half bored and ready to call it an early night. Now with AST and it's cards he gets more of a support sensation while healing, but to him DPS is the lazy, boring side of an MMO. (yes he's tried maxing damage, it still doesn't do it for him.)
But in regards to the tanking topic, it's as I've said in FC chat "If there was an honest benefit to stacking VIT I'd be wearing all Fending right now. But so long as Emnity benefits from STR, and self healing benefits from Attack, there is no point in having that extra thousand or two HP when I can regain that in one Soul Eater." -
10-16-2015, 10:02 PMLastelli
Very interesting read, but I believe that you might have missed a point. The tanking meta actually hasn't changed so much, it's just that the content has become more difficult, thus forcing midcore raiders into adopting a hardcore style. Alexander savage is harder than coil. This is savage after all, the idea behind it is that you can only clear it if you go somehow beyond the boundaries of your job. The real big issue here in my opinion is that there's no midcore content currently, so those parties that engaged coil in a more casual way, taking their time, waiting for the next step of the relic weapon saga to finally beat that dps check have nothing to do except trying to do some savage only to find out that it is beyond their reach. But the "aggressive style tanking" has been a reality since the second coil at least, as well as the the hybrid dps/healer style for sch.
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10-16-2015, 10:10 PMSapphidiaI've seen people use this argument a lot, and they're missing the point. Yes, it's more difficult. Yes, more difficult content needs more optimisation from tanks and healers to contribute to DPS due to the enrage timers. But this is EXACTLY WHAT THE PROBLEM IS.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lastelli
Where's the boss that hits so hard you need to rotate cooldowns constantly for 2 minutes then tank swap so your OT can do the same whilst yours cool down? Where's the boss that kills you in 2 seconds if you don't meet minimum HP requirements and get constant shields. Where's the boss that requires paladins to weave stoneskins between auto attacks because they hit so hard? Where's the boss that needs a paladin spamming clemency as an offtank because the healers run out of mana? Where's the boss that needs Warriors to time constant Inner Beasts for 2 minutes solid else they run the risk of being one shot.
THIS is the problem. The challenge is ONLY about DPS. Tanks are walking into content undergeared (eg, 190 gear in week 1 of alex savage when it's more tuned for i200) and are not only surviving absolutely fine, but they're spending over half the time in their DPS stances and wearing Slaying accessories. Where's the reason for a tank to gear up or improve their skill at -mitigating- damage. "Difficult content" does not just mean "hard dps checks". It's just one sided and boring design to have encounters that ONLY test your dps output and force you to do nothing but think of DPS outside of a few scripted tankbusters. Of course, it's probably equally boring to only have pure incoming damage mitigation being the only test of a tank. It's a balance issue.
I'll leave you with a quote from a raider that replied to my reddit copy of this thread, that states it all better than I could:
That's the issue. Tanks are being tested on their ability to do damage and there's almost zero incentive to actually become -tankier-.Quote:
I just think it's sorta ridiculous that I'm tanking the legs in A4S outside of grit, with 4x slaying, both of my healers are in cleric stance, and I'm literally being kept alive with a regen and one heal ever 20 seconds.
Bring back tank damage
I'll certainly concede that the DPS tank meta existed to a degree in the coils, but not to the amount we have now. T5, T9, T13, all did huge amounts of constant tank damage and although it was certainly -possible- to do these in . Heck I remember the first batches of T13 had all the healers and DPS in additional vitality gear to be able to survive all the constant bursty AOE damage if i'm correct?
I may be wrong but I don't think any of the first clears of those turns had tanks spending 80% of their time in their DPS stance and wearing full slaying the whole time whilst healers spent most of their time in cleric stance? I'm sure there was SOME DPS stance tanking but those are all encounters where you can really feel the additional "security" of having a well geared tank with a decent enough HP pool. -
10-16-2015, 10:40 PMSpookyGhost
I largely agree with the OP. When I first leveled WAR and got into tanking (XIV is the first MMO I've taken seriously) I heartily enjoyed being able to self heal for such absurd amounts - at the time, that was the fun of WAR. Obviously at that time WAR wasn't balanced well enough to make the self healing actually... manageable so things were changed greatly in 2.1. In a sense, WAR got homogenized with PLD, they didn't really develop the self healing aspect and instead focused on % mitigation. WAR still had self healing, but the focus became more about being able to deal high tank damage in and out of tank stance while providing solid utility and having solid mitigation (especially in the form of IB, which was amazing vs Death Sentence at the time).
STR based tanking started with WAR. At first it was to increase the self healing returns you'd get from IB - in place of having more gear, you could stack more STR and get higher healing output. This was good, however because of the way WAR was designed having less health and more self healing only made you a bigger pain for the healers to understand when they needed to heal you (possibly leading to your death). In 2.1, STR based tanking became a bit bigger and it was used for a different reason - damage. Gryphonskin accessories became extremely good, providing not only VIT + STR but also DEX (which actually affected Parry at the time, as well as Block for PLD). Things evolved more and more over time and the meta started to shape around it. Eventually we found ourselves in 3.0, where tank damage is extremely important and STR tanking has become the mainstream way of tanking rather than the niche.
The reason for this, as pointed out, is that damage on the tank is simply too low and DPS checks are too high. Mitigation easily takes a back seat to damage - yeah, you still have to mitigate damage to deal it, but tank stances are largely ignored because there's simply no reason to use them. Miunih posted elsewhere that tanks and healers are essentially DPS with added responsibility - I agree with this, and I think the OP has the same mindset. You can't really be a beefy tank without hurting your group, which is the last thing you should ever want to do in Savage content. I think a lot of tanks, especially PLD mains, don't like the current meta and are just forcing themselves into it for the good of their group.
I personally like dealing large damage as a tank and balancing my defensive CDs to compensate. As WAR, it requires strict learning of the fight GCD to GCD and it feels extremely engaging. I think that this is the main draw of DPSing as a tank - it feels like you've put in a lot of work to get rewarded with more damage.
I was going to post this in another thread, but I think it sort fits the mold here. Active mitigation is something often discussed in regards to tanking in MMOs - it's been solidified into WoW tanking as a whole and it shows up in other games too (Lancer in Tera is basically BUILT on actively mitigating). I think this might be a good way to take tanks in XIV, and I think it wouldn't be too hard to do. IB currently costs 5 stacks of Wrath, reduces damage by 20% for 6s, and will heal you for the damage dealt. If Sheltron and DA + Darkmind were made more similar to IB, I think that they could up tank damage massively outside of tank busters and still give us that feeling that we're actually doing something that has an effect on survival. My idea is essentially to make Sheltron and DA + DM mitigate both damage types and have a small CD, adjusting IB to compensate if needed (say 3 stacks instead of 5). Then give Sheltron and DA + DM additional effects - say Sheltron gives a small Convalescence effect or DA + DM gives a small potency damage reflect. Obviously other adjustments would be made and this is by no means perfect, but I think a shift to making tanks actively mitigate large damage (in a non-RNG way) would satisfy both camps. -
10-16-2015, 11:34 PMSapphidia
Yeah I think the main point of my post was simply : This is how the meta is. This is -why- the meta is. This is why the meta feels fun to a lot of warriors and other players who favor aggressive dps, but understand there's a lot of players who are unhappy about this and don't enjoy it.
I don't think the meta is likely to change, and I think the mechanics of the game in general are likely to make it too hard to drastically alter the entire way tanks go about mitigating stuff. That said, some small quality of life changes, some gearing changes, and a bigger focus on high incoming tank damage in hard encounters would go quite some way to making it not feel quite so hugely swayed into the "dps>all" camp. -
10-17-2015, 12:36 AMDeezee
I've gotta give you kudos for such a thought provoking post... I first saw it on reddit and posted a bit there but have continued to think about it and came here to see what others had to say.
We could argue whether there aren't already fights that meet this condition (I feel as though there are) but rather than do that, let's just cut to the chase...Quote:
Originally Posted by Sapphidia
There is no such thing as "actively mitigating damage" in this game. To mitigate you pop an off global cooldown defensive ability. Depending on the type of damage that's coming in, you can pop several in a row and stack them, or you can spread them out over their durations. That's about all there is to "actively" mitigating damage in this game. At the very highest tier of active mitigation you have applying your damage down debuff if it's necessary (Rage of Halone / Delirium / Storm's Path), or something like Shelltron/Inner Beast/maybe reprisal fits here but not really since parry procs are garbage because parry is garbage and if you can't rely on your mitigation happening it's not worth building strategies around. Aside from that you can increase mitigation by choosing to be in your tank stance (if you're a PLD or a DRK).
What are you doing for the rest of those 2 minutes while the damage is coming in? The same thing anyone else is doing: using their GCDs. And what are tank GCDs built around? Dealing damage. No matter how you tune a fight, no matter how much super damage is coming in and how much you make the healers baby sit the tank, the fact of the matter is there's not really a thing such as "active mitigation" - you can only turn on cooldowns at the right time. They're oGCD. So the rest of your time is spent optimizing your GCD rotation, which revolves almost entirely around doing damage.
Without fundamentally redesigning any combination of game systems, tuning fights so that you're taking boatloads of damage and healers having to babysit you isn't going to make you "feel" tankier. Even if you tuned a fight to be so damage intensive that both healers had to maintain 100% uptime on both the tanks who both had to be in tank stance the entire time (and WARs were out of favor because they didn't have a mitigation buff in their tank stance) AND you had to wear full fending to have enough HP to survive a buster or high damage phase... that doesn't change the fact that all you do to actively mitigate stuff is optimize an oGCD rotation that consists of like 8 skills (generally 4 of which are actually useful and the other 4 you just kinda use because they're they're to press) and, if you're a DRK, pray for reprisal procs. Other than that, just as with any other fight in the game, the rest of your time is spent managing your GCDs, and all of your GCDs have to do with dealing damage, and with healer DPS out of the question because of the uptime, you've actually ironically created a scenario where tank DPS is that much more important. (No, you can't bring the hypothetical maximum amount of tank DPS to the encounter because they're locked to fending and tank stances as per the hypothetical, but they still need to optimize their GCDs to do the most DPS, especially with the loss to healer DPS and because there's nothing else to do with GCDs on Tank classes.)
If anything I'd feel LESS tanky in this kind of playing field because I'd constantly have to pray my healers could keep me up and there's nothing for me to optimize once you figure out the very easy and always the same optimal cooldown rotation timing. Moreover any type of safety net you could have from self-healing potential would be down the drain because you've dumped all your STR so now all your self heals are crap.
TL;DR: If you want to "feel" more like a tank who's "doing everything" they can to mitigate damage so that the rest of the raid can do what they're "supposed" to do, then you need to fundamentally change what tanks do for their GCD rotations (ie, create some kind of system where every GCD is effecting your mitigation somehow) which would require redesigning and rebalancing almost everything about the game. -
10-17-2015, 01:04 AMIbiThey could also replace the VIT on Fending accessories with Blunt/Piercing/Slashing Resistance (since the stats exist in game, and are almost completely ignored at present). As you say, you still run into a soft cap, but at least Fending accessories become theoretically desirable that way.Quote:
Originally Posted by Anova
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10-17-2015, 01:58 AMRapBreon
Love the current meta; looooooooooooooove beating DPS on DPS (when I'm not playing DPS for my static).
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10-17-2015, 02:15 AMSyzygian
This thread and everything in it, and in the entire tanking forums i guess (related to these survivability vs. dps issues with tanking) frequently does not cop to the fact that everything tanks are getting away with doing right now is due in large part to healers, and the skill involved in executing these kinds of encounter approaches wherein tanks are forsaking all forms of passive mitigation for raw DPS is something that healers are 99% entitled to.I don't play my job any different when using a DPS build than I do with a tanking build. But a healer's job changes immensely between those two choices I make. Too many tanks run around these forums essentially championing their healer carries. Its been mentioned elsewhere, but being carried by DPS is far less shameful for a tank than being carried by healers, this is pretty universally excepted MMO logic and I feel it still holds true even in this DPS-centric meta.
I personally am one of the wall minded tanks that has adapted to the DPS meta. On A3S right now wearing 3 pentamelds and 2 i210 slaying rings, and spending about half the fight thus far out of tank stance. I feel terrible honestly, but healers are so used to this they aren't accustomed to seizing the opportunities that more bulk on my part would provide. In progression in savage the DPS difference between my DPS build and my tankier build is about 150 DPS on my part for the former and about 100 dps for SCH and 50 dps for WHM on the latter. This obviously varies widely between not only different skill levels but also playstyles, comfort with the fight, and varying strategies/CD rotations. But it illustrates to me that, at the very least, approaching a fight from a more DPS-minded standpoint on the part of the tank does negatively impact healer DPS and limits how they are able to play their jobs to some extent no matter how small.
The other big problem that the OP alludes to is that the issue is with choice. Tanks have a choice of what to equip and how to play their job and one way is seen as correct with respect to progression and one is seen as correct with respect to intended gameplay and design. Both make reasonable arguments but again, Tanks by their very nature must be adapatable and thus regardless of preference tanks will adapt to whatever trend is leaning towards an advance in progression.
Anyway the solution to this problem should be something simple and minimal; the simplest solution is often the best one.
For healer DPS: Get rid of cleric stance, replace it with a stacking buff that continues to grow the longer a healer goes without casting a non-damaging ability, starting out weaker than cleric but being able to stack up much higher than cleric, granting near DPS-level numbers and rewarding parties for finding strategies that allow healers to make use of their DPS tools rather than neglecting half their skillset for most engame encounters.
For tanks: Restrict access to other jobs accessories, give tank accessories about half the STR that you see on equivalent ilvl slaying accessories, and an equal amount of vit (roughly equivalent to current pentamelds).
This will enable both tanks and healers to deal solid damage, encourage tanks to creatively manage CDs around mechanics to allow healers to maximize DPS uptime while still dealing high damage themselves, and allow raid design to stay the same since in all likelihood, it probably won't change much. -
10-17-2015, 02:27 AMDererk
One of the other problems as a tank is str determines how much hate your generating on mobs so more str means your going to have an easier time holding it.
And I find it frustrating on trying to figure out how to gear right side because of the acc cap for tanks so this is another problem I think.