If the Meta Feels Off, How Do We Actually Change It? A response to "Four Ways to Die"

(This thread originally began as a Reddit thread in response to Sapphidia's "Four Ways to Die" analysis, which has been quite thought provoking and has generated a great deal of discussion. Though my thread on Reddit was originally titled "Why The Tank Meta is the Way It Is," and did not include the last three paragraphs and closing line initially, having hashed it out with many different people - some of whom were quite angry with me - the post and my thinking has congealed into what is currently stated.)

First off, kudos to Sapphida for the thought provoking thread - I wouldn't have come to see the issue from the angle I do had the thread not been posted. I've been replying in and participating in the other thread, but because that thread has 500 comments now and most of my thoughts have been replies to comments buried anywhere in those 500, I wanted to have a chance to have more people see the issue from the angle I see it at. The worst that could happen is everyone thinks I'm stupid and the thread's downvoted and I lose all my internet points (;_;7), but on the more optimistic side maybe people will see why things won't (or even can't) change without a massive redesign.

The crux of the problem comes down to what a player is doing with their global cooldown rotation, and this seems to be the point that everyone is missing. All of the things that a tank can do to mitigate damage in this game are largely very passive choices or account for very little of their button inputs in any given fight. Even if you tweak with stats so that vitality somehow becomes preferred and people want to start stacking parry and other defensives on their gear, these are all still PASSIVE choices that do not reflect or have any impact on what a player is skillfully and actively doing in a battle.

In one of the responses I made to Sapphidia, I took the time to type up every single cooldown a tank has access to with the times that they're up and the cooldown timers that they're on. It isn't necessary to repeat that effort here. The point is, a tank will have 8 or so oGCD abilities to use in any given fight to help them mitigate damage to varying degrees of worth or worthlessness. Some of them rely on wholly unreliable mechanics (like Dark Dance and parrying) and so generally are not used in the hopes they can help a tank survive a high damage phase or big incoming attack (they'll still get used elsewhere but they're not "guaranteed mitigation" per se) and other tools are actually buffed by the "focus on STR meta," in particular Bloodbath, Equilibrium and Clemency as the self heals are all dependent on STR. But, in my opinion, it doesn't take a lot of effort to analyze a fight and figure out how, based on the durations of your cooldowns and the length of their recast timers, you're going to optimally press each of your 8 buttons when you need to. And a tank's cooldown rotation accounts for, let's say, 5% of their active button presses in a fight.

The only other option a tank has left to them to increase their mitigation in the current game design is a passive choice to have a tanking stance on or off (and this only applies to DRKs/PLDs, as WARs do not gain a flat mitigation buff in their tanking stance and if you actually do the math are slightly less efficient to heal than DRK/PLD in their tanking stance). I don't understand why people think they would feel tankier in a battlefield that requires them to have 100% uptime in their tank stance, stack full VIT (and would probably be less favorable to WAR since WAR doesn't have the mitigation buff in their stance) and require 100% healer uptime on them when they still only have the same 7 or so oGCD abilities to mitigate damage. If anything I'd feel less tankier because I'd just watch as my HP bar constantly shuffles from healthy to near dead with virtually nothing I can actively do to change it; all the while I'd be continuing to do what I'm already doing in the current meta, which is using the best damage dealing rotations I can while waiting for the next optimal oGCD button press.

Now, there are a few slight things a tank can do to mitigate damage coming in that's slightly more active. Paladins do have Shelltron and Warriors do have Inner Beast (the closest thing a DRK has to these is Reprisal but since it's based of parry procs and parry is currently an impossible stat to have real returns from it's difficult to really say Reprisal is a comparable ability). The issue with these skills is that for them to be of skillful use, you would still need the meta to continue to revolve around predictable big incoming hits, either something that has a cast bar (such as the A1S buster) or an obvious telegraph (like how Rav EX does blinding blade after tapasya). If you have a fight that's tuned just around truckloads of damage coming in all the time, these abilities become somewhat less useful, and you run into the scenario where you are just randomly using Inner Beast hoping one of the more random big hits you can't predict is mitigated in the uptime rather than low damage autos.

The only other active mitigation a tank has at their disposal are the debuffs they can put an on enemy (STR down for PLD, INT down for DRK and all damage down for WAR). You could design fights that require 100% uptime of these debuffs on bosses I suppose - the biggest DPS loser in this game would be the WAR who'd have a difficult time maintaining both storm's path and storm's eye while still being able to get butcher's block combos in (which are their highest potency combo) but it wouldn't change the fundamental issue as to why tank dps is important, which I will now get to.

As I've tried to lay out the case above, tank mitigation is almost either entirely passive (stacking defensive stats, choosing to maintain uptime in a stance) or accounts for very little of a player's active input in a fight (optimizing how you use 7 or so oGCDs and maintaining uptime on a 20s debuff). The real problem (if you personally have a problem, that is) with the way that tanks "feel" and why the meta will always favor tank DPS without a fundamental game retooling lies in what a Tank's GCD rotation involves. A tank is dealing damage every single time they use a GCD. And any given player's GCD rotation still accounts for 95% of what they are doing in a fight.

And it's really that simple. That's why tank DPS will always be a thing bleeding edge players care about and emphasize. Even if you force tanks to stack VIT and maintain uptime in their tank stance in order to meet the baseline mitigation required in a fight, raiders will always want tanks who can bring more DPS than those who can't. And then you'd have to ask yourself why the developers wasted time designing all of WAR's HW toolkit around a stance and abilities they now never get to use. If you adjust the meta such that healers have to babysit tanks 100% of the time and can't dps at all, tank dps ironically becomes that much more important because they have to pick up the slack left behind from the healers (or fights just don't have DPS checks anymore).

If the game were somehow redesigned so that the bulk of a Tank's GCD rotation impacted their mitigation, then the meta would be entirely different and people could have their "brick wall" Power Fantasy and what not. But honestly, look at it this way: if you're upset that you're not feeling valued because you can't just stack defensive stats, sit in a passive mitigation stance for an entire fight, and have a workable oGCD rotation that accounts for maybe 5% of your input for a fight, without looking at optimizing what you're doing with your GCDs, then you might want to consider whether you aren't just being lazy and entitled. I can sympathize if you want to play a tank and feel like a brick wall and be doing everything you can to mitigate damage, sure - but that's just not how the game is currently designed. "Everything you can do to mitigate damage" as a tank in this game lies in passive choices made before a fight's even begun (gear spec and stat spec) and about 5% of what you do in the fight. Unless a massive redesign of what a tank's GCD rotation looks like occurs, that will always be the case. And as long as that is the case, the style of tank play that you're looking for probably won't be in the game.

I am not trying to say that players who prefer a mitigation style of gameplay as a matter of principle are lazy and entitled. There are ways to change game balance so this becomes a viable strategy and still requires a great deal of skill and active player input to pull off. I am, however, saying that people who want to stack passive defensive buffs and mitigation, maintain 100% uptime in shield oath, and still clear content without changing anything else regarding the game balance are, in fact, quite lazy and entitled.

One way I think you could effectively change the meta so that mitigation tank strategies become viable (but you could still ALSO have the choice to run DPS tank strategies) would be if you changed the way tank GCDs worked. If they were more like healer GCDs, where you were making impactful choices (healers have to decide on each GCD whether that GCD will be used to cleanse, heal, or DPS), then the meta would be entirely different. Right now every tank GCD does damage AND generates enmity, and some even go one step further and additionally provide mitigation (storm's path, rage of halone, delirium). What if, instead, a tank had to choose whether they were going to deal damage, generate enmity, or mitigate on each GCD, but doing one excluded the other two until the next GCD (or even several GCDs down the line due to combo effects)? You could have fights where it might make sense for tanks to maintain maximum mitigation and healers to maintain maximum healing because the DPS gained by tanks and healers DPSing has to be weighted against the risk of the raid wide damage killing actual DPS players.

These sorts of tweaks are how you change the meta. Buffing passive defensives without addressing GCDs won't do a thing; if anything, it'd even more strongly encourage the meta we already have, because if you have stronger passive mitigation from your gear spec you have less and less of a reason to ever use your tank stance. Fixing VIT so that isn't worthless won't change the "how much VIT can I afford to lose in order to optimize raid DPS by increasing tank DPS without sacrificing too much healer DPS" theorycrafting that's going on now. Changing VIT so that it becomes how tank DPS is calculated just means you do not invest any points in STR and now you get to wear full fending, which makes maximizing tank DPS easier - and since nothing has been done about the GCD issue, tanks will still be judged based on the DPS they're bringing to the raid and meta will gravitate towards maximizing tank DPS.

So, having identified the root causes behind the current meta, and realizing that there is some dissatisfction surrounding it... let's start talking about how to actually change it!

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Originally Posted by Deezee

I don't understand why people think they would feel tankier in a battlefield that requires them to have 100% uptime in their tank stance, stack full VIT (and would probably be less favorable to WAR since WAR doesn't have the mitigation buff in their stance) and require 100% healer uptime on them when they still only have the same 7 or so oGCD abilities to mitigate damage.

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Because by design and gameplay principle, our tank stances are part of what set us apart from the DPS and healers. We are able to go defensive to hold the mob's attention to allow the rest of the group to do their thing. By nature the tank sacrifices offensive power, which is why this clicks to people who have played tanks.

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As I've tried to lay out the case above, tank mitigation is almost either entirely passive (stacking defensive stats, choosing to maintain uptime in a stance) or accounts for very little of a player's active input in a fight (optimizing how you use 7 or so oGCDs and maintaining uptime on a 20s debuff). The real problem (if you personally have a problem, that is) with the way that tanks "feel" and why the meta will always favor tank DPS without a fundamental game retooling lies in what a Tank's GCD rotation involves. A tank is dealing damage every single time they use a GCD. And any given player's GCD rotation still accounts for 95% of what they are doing in a fight.

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You're trying to correlate things that don't add up in the end because GCD attacks don't mean what you think to tanks. To a tank, attacks are not DPS to get on the meters. To us attacks are a means to hold aggro on a mob. You can shift stuff around to make tank soloing bearable (WoW ended up having to reduce threat multipliers and increase ability damage since before that you couldn't level as a tank spec without taking forever to kill anything), but the concept behind dealing damage as a tank remains the same. This is also why raid DPS in an ideal world should not hinge on what the tank is dishing out.

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And it's really that simple. That's why tank DPS will always be a thing bleeding edge players care about and emphasize. Even if you force tanks to stack VIT and maintain uptime in their tank stance in order to meet the baseline mitigation required in a fight, raiders will always want tanks who can bring more DPS than those who can't.

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And this is why tank damage has to be even across the three tanks and any newcomers to the roster. There is room for deviation with AoE (the way death knights and prot paladins had better AoE than bear druids and prot warriors), but on boss fights the difference should not be as big as what we currently see.

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And then you'd have to ask yourself why the developers wasted time designing all of WAR's HW toolkit around a stance and abilities they now never get to use.

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Deliverance was designed for off-tanking, since prior to this (during ARR) a WAR lost their core mechanic when not main tanking. This is why I was happy for WARs when I saw they were going to implement what is essentially WAR's answer to PLD's Sword Oath.

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As I said in the other thread, someone's feelings are going to get hurt at the end of the day as a result of changing the metagame, because this isn't even much about gameplay choices or skill, but about the fact that tank's are trying to go beyond the scope of their design. This isn't that different from the idiocy known as Utsusemi tanking in FFXI, and I'd personally want it squashed before it does even more damage than its already done. I'm aware SE's devs are stubborn on things like this, so I don't really expect them to change anything, but:

* The tank DPS threshold: This is something the devs have to decide and ensure that all tanks stay within the parameters set. They also have to drop the crap with DPS being utility, since that's part of what led to this mess. So if a main tank's damage cap is supposed to be around (these are examples) 800 DPS and an off-tank is supposed to be around 900 DPS, then PLD, DRK and WAR should be tuned around that damage output.

* Stance swaps: Since this is an unintended style of gameplay that contributes to the DPS disparity between the tanks, this also needs to go. WAR would be easy; simply make swapping from Defiance/Deliverance lose all Wrath/Abandon stacks. In addition, make dropping Shield Oath/Grit/Defiance have an enmity reduction effect. Enmity reduction is largely useless on a tank unless you're target-swapping and taunting, so it becomes more a way to discourage dropping stances unless absolutely necessary. Lastly, slightly nerf the defensive cooldowns at the baseline and have Defiance/Shield Oath/Grit boost their effects to "normal". This decreases survivability while out of tank stance.

* Utility: This is where things would need to get homogenized. Either get rid of Halone/Delirium/Storm's Path debuffs or make them equal. If one were to get rid of the debuffs, I would still want Storm's Path to decrease damage taken by the WAR by that 10% rather than reduce the mob's damage by 10%. Uptime on Divine Veil and Reprisal is low enough that PLD and DRK wouldn't become superior to WAR.

* Mitigation: Like with utility, this has to be made equal between the tanks. This means minimizing niches while still encouraging different styles of gameplay and still making all three equally hardy. Leave PLD as the traditional MMO tank (attacks that generate enmity and cooldowns for when things get hairy), increase WAR's focus on stacking mitigation + self heals and make DRK focus more on active mitigation (further develop the concept of dark arts?).

On the gameplay end, dealing with these issues should keep tank DPS and utility on a leash of sorts without allowing variances to cause one tank to get excluded.

Raid design is a bit trickier. If mitigation between the tanks is made equal, there wouldn't be a need to change damage types since the three tanks would be on par with each other. With tank DPS being kept on a leash, it doesn't matter which tanks a raid brings since they're equally useful; meeting DPS checks would be largely reliant on the DPS with a minor contribution from the tank. Damage taken by the tank would have to increase, first to justify tanks staying in Shield Oath/Defiance/Grit and second to challenge healers. Frequency of said damage may or may not place healer DPS in the hotseat, though.

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Assuming the above is done, by the time 4.0 rolls by we could see a tank (Samurai?) designed around stance swaps to placate those who liked the "old" metagame. At that point you'd just be introducing a new tank with unique gameplay that is still on par with its counterparts offensively and defensively (read: stance swapping at peak performance would still be equal to a full-time tank stance PLD/WAR/DRK). Everyone performs equally but has differing gameplay, creating something for everyone.

Might as well toss some stuff around and spice it up.
First, to tackle the absolutely nonexistent risk vs reward that is apparent in the endgame right now:

- More RNG to work around (yes, work around, not the one that decides your fate for you) in fights. Even simple things like T8 missles, T11, T9 meteors, you name it. Now just for the tank. Keep total damage done the same, but unpredictable so there is more risk in blowing your stacks or whatever there will be early.
- Less focus on huge busters, more focus on bursty damage sessions. This was initially the problem in 2.0-2.5 sequence, where PLD was best at mitigating the huge busters. The amount of damage done doesn't have to change, but give a way for all the selfhealing, which is some of the most prominent active mitigation, to actually do its thing. It also isn't super punishing for a WAR to say, miss an Inner Beast completely since healers will be able to catch the first bit.
- More mechanics overall which you have to constantly make decisions which aren't tied with your job's abilities. Think of moving, strafing, kiting, you name it. Meta can change in the simple things and errors will happen in the simple things, too.
- More bosses overall so the learning curve isn't ridiculously steep or requires a Great Gearwall of China to be built every single time.

More on topic:
So mitigation itself can be done in a few ways: either flat-out reduce the damage you take , or heal some of the damage you take to begin with. WAR is the best example in this since they have both and both are used regularly, too. On top of that, GCDs can also be made to reduce OGCDs semi-drastically. For all of this to work and not fall into a memorized pattern again, however, encounters as a whole need to be changed too (like above), but let's ignore that for sanity's sake.
Right now, WAR has a clear GCD-mitigation goal in mind: build those stacks so you can Inner Beast. For some reason though, the stacks also provide parry which I feel barely anyone even cares about. They also have the annoying decision that Butcher's Block branches the moment you hit your second button (Skull Sunder vs Maim) which means if we tie anything into Butcher's Block (let's say, guaranteed parry for 3 attacks in a mythical world where parry is not useless, it is called Butcher's -Block- after all) you need to predict a full GCD ahead. Say you wait out instead, you'll have to wait that full GCD after to do some selfhealing (if we increased the selfheal on either of the Storm combos drastically).
This means we need to add something to Skull Sunder and Maim, though, since we have no learning curve otherwise. For Maim, we could say it increases healing done by self by 40% (just random numbers). For Skull Sunder, the damage done by the enemy done to you for the next attack will decrease by 20%. This way, the combos still feel like they logically make sense (Maim first to increase selfhealing, Storm's X to selfheal and Skull Sunder to reduce damage, Butcher's Block to further reduce damage), with Inner Beast being the pinnacle should you need it.

Now for DRK you'd have to look into their mana, Darkside and Dark Arts. Maybe make Darkside more interesting to toggle, while branching options for Dark Arts. Also looking a little into the Power Slash combo. PLD has it off the worst since they don't really have a non-RNG mechanic right now that is tied into their GCDs. Something like making Clemency uninterruptable as a combo-finisher on Riot Blade, Shield Swipe reducing the cooldown on Rampart, reducing the duration of GB and RoH but allowing interaction with these debuffs (attacks during RoH reduce Shelltron's cooldown, attacks during GB increase RoH's debuff strength?). Heck, a Clemency finisher and something to use Shield Swipe for would even address their TP issues.

Keep in mind this is purely tossing around ideas and mostly highlighting issues where the current combo-system may fall short. In the end, as long as boss mechanics won't be different in the future, we'll still be stuck with an 'intended optimal rotation'. I'm merely tossing ideas out to give food for thought, but those ideas themselves already show that GCD mitigation isn't exactly the problem: the problem is having few to none meaningful choices. And this can be fixed in various departments, not necessarily within GCD mitigation. If anything, the issue is the sheer difference a DPS-optimised tank brings compared to a HP-wall tank. Tackle that difference first, make some different encounters, give something worthwhile in the way of passive mitigation and then let's see about active mitigation.

I'm sorry, but you missed a lot of the active mitigation capabilities of the tanks.

The Paladin in particular has a good amount of active mitigation abilities:

• 3 interrupts:
  • Shield Bash - High TP cost 6 second instant "general" interrupt on GCD.
  • Shield Swipe - Low TP cost RNG activated 6 sec instant "skill" interrupt/delay on GCD.
  • Spirits Within - Free once per 30s instant "spell" interrupt off GCD.
• 1 Dodge Boosting Debuff:
  • Flash - Low MP cost 12s Blind on GCD.
• 1 Damage Down Debuff:
  • Rage of Halone - Low TP cost 20s -10% Str on a 3 GCD combo at the cost of 60 potency.
• 1 Shield
  • Stoneskin (cross classed) - Low MP cost 3 sec delay 10% HP Shield on GCD.
• 2 Heals
  • Cure (cross classed) - Low MP cost 3 sec delay weak Heal on GCD.
  • Clemency - High MP cost 3 sec delay Strong Heal on GCD.

The main problem is that content is designed so that these abilities are mostly worthless or difficult to use. A large number of abilities are non-interruptible. The debuffs Flash, Shield Bash and Shield Swipe suffer from diminishing uptimes with an overly long resistance period when targets are not outright immune to their effects. RoH is useless in Magic damage heavy fights. The spells are easily interrupted by auto attacks and Cure is to weak due to non-scaling.

Even if your entire rotation was composed of mitigation moves, and your dps output was restricted to autoattacks, the underlying principle remains unchanged. If you're able to mitigate more damage actively, then you can afford to gear yourself more aggressively.

There is no benefit to surviving an attack by a large margin. You're either alive or you're dead. There is always a benefit to more dps.

1. At least double auto-attack damage and increase the intensity of cleaves in between tank busters. Reduce the focus on tank busters that require multiple cooldowns (for example, A1 and A4 only the tank busters do any significant damage to the tank and they hit ridiculously hard in the STR gear we were...well ok so they don't actually hit too hard) and instead make in-between damage extremely challenging without them.
2. Reduce focus on unavoidable heavy damage to the party (within reason given the new healer skills)
3. Allow interruptions like Silence and Pacification to work on more abilities and Slow on more enemies. Bring back crowd control in general (Bind, Heavy, etc.)
   (But really, never make 4 simultaneous interruptions required again)
4. Keep OT busy to prevent tank-swap cheese mechanics.
5. Mix it up between bursty cleaves and tank-busters and extended ones like Bahamut's Claw and the beams after Royal Pentacle. Flatten was a great example of how this should be done.

They also need to adjust the tanks a bit or it will never be possible to shift things back to the tank taking lots of damage (or it will be very difficult anyway to get a good blend of physical and magic damage in the course of a fight). WAR's relatively short cooldowns and PLD/DRK's relative strengths will continue to be a problem if they don't rethink them.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

I'm sorry, but you missed a lot of the active mitigation capabilities of the tanks.

The Paladin in particular has a good amount of active mitigation abilities:

• 3 interrupts:
  • Shield Bash - High TP cost 6 second instant "general" interrupt on GCD.
  • Shield Swipe - Low TP cost RNG activated 6 sec instant "skill" interrupt/delay on GCD.
  • Spirits Within - Free once per 30s instant "spell" interrupt off GCD.
• 1 Dodge Boosting Debuff:
  • Flash - Low MP cost 12s Blind on GCD.
• 1 Damage Down Debuff:
  • Rage of Halone - Low TP cost 20s -10% Str on a 3 GCD combo at the cost of 60 potency.
• 1 Shield
  • Stoneskin (cross classed) - Low MP cost 3 sec delay 10% HP Shield on GCD.
• 2 Heals
  • Cure (cross classed) - Low MP cost 3 sec delay weak Heal on GCD.
  • Clemency - High MP cost 3 sec delay Strong Heal on GCD.

The main problem is that content is designed so that these abilities are mostly worthless or difficult to use. A large number of abilities are non-interruptible. The debuffs Flash, Shield Bash and Shield Swipe suffer from diminishing uptimes with an overly long resistance period when targets are not outright immune to their effects. RoH is useless in Magic damage heavy fights. The spells are easily interrupted by auto attacks and Cure is to weak due to non-scaling.

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This pretty much sums up the huge shift in meta - 2.0 Primals/First Coil you needed Stun, Silence, Pacification, and Slow to some degree. This meant you could disrupt or interrupt the out-flow of damage from an enemy if you maintained and utilized your debuffs sparingly.

(Bad) Players whined about it it being too complex & demanding to properly utilize those secondary debuff skills.

So instead Square went with a simple formula for bosses -> Meet the DPS checks or fail.

Pacification never worked in BCoB and I don't believe it ever worked on HM Primals. T1 used Silence, T2 used 2 Silences, and T5 used Stun + Slow. A3S uses Stun + Silence + Slow in one phase and Stun + Slow in another while A4S is exclusively Stunning. The only thing really different CC-wise from BCoB to Alex Savage is the miniboss in the first floor didn't require any CC. I think BCoB is actually overhyped in terms of how much CC it required, A3S is arguably the same as T2, and T5 Dreadknights are basically the hands in the last phase of A3S. It'd be good if there were more of a focus on CC, I'd even love it if Sleeping something in a raid became a thing, but it's never really existed before. CC has been there, just never massively, it's always just been... the same.

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Originally Posted by eagledorf

Allow interruptions like Silence and Pacification to work on more abilities and Slow on more enemies. Bring back crowd control in general (Bind, Heavy, etc.)
(But really, never make 4 simultaneous interruptions required again)

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You can't really ask for more CC and then say "but don't give us any hard CC mechanics" in a Savage raid. 4 simultaneous interruptions isn't complicated at all and requires the smallest amount of raid coordination/communication - you get 4 people who can stun/silence and everyone calls out a thing, and you've got everyone else for backup. Nearly everyone aside from your casters should be able to do it, even SCH has Selene's silence (not the best, but it's still an option for backup).

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At least double auto-attack damage and increase the intensity of cleaves in between tank busters. Reduce the focus on tank busters that require multiple cooldowns (for example, A1 and A4 only the tank busters do any significant damage to the tank and they hit ridiculously hard in the STR gear we were...well ok so they don't actually hit too hard) and instead make in-between damage extremely challenging without them.

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I also think that all this would do is force tanks into tank stance and force healers to heal them more often (or go back to 1 healer heals, 1 healer DPS). Which is good! But at the same time, imagine not being able to leave tank stance and have less healer DPS in a fight like A3S. The gear wall would be insane, and A4S would be even more insane (especially if you couldn't do the sac strat). So if they do this, they also need to lower the DPS requirement for raiding by a ton.

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Keep OT busy to prevent tank-swap cheese mechanics.

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Tank swapping to spread mitigation CDs isn't really "cheesing", unless you mean something else. If you mean like... force a tank swap? Maybe? Then I'm on board with that. T12 is, I think, the best example of a good fight tuned for moderately difficult tanking and there was no true OT or MT in that fight. T9 Savage also did this similarly but not as many people got to experience that.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

The main problem is that content is designed so that these abilities are mostly worthless or difficult to use. A large number of abilities are non-interruptible. The debuffs Flash, Shield Bash and Shield Swipe suffer from diminishing uptimes with an overly long resistance period when targets are not outright immune to their effects. RoH is useless in Magic damage heavy fights. The spells are easily interrupted by auto attacks and Cure is to weak due to non-scaling.

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This is partly the result of the devs condensing stuff a little too much, and their approach to interrupts as a whole hasn't really helped.

Pacification is overpowered in concept and I would never want that to work on bosses (imagine preventing Ravana from using his frontal cleave via pacification, or preventing Titan from using Landslide). Silences would need to be a little more spread around to work (stunning bosses is overpowered, so that's a no-go), since even now your classes with reliable silences are PLD (tacked to a high damage attack, meaning we're giving up some aggro generation to silence), BRD (whose original selling point was Blunt Arrow) MCH (Head Graze) and NIN (Jugulate but the NIN has to sacrifice damage to be in the needed stance for it). DRG not having one and MNK having theirs be difficult to use (due to form requirements) isn't a good thing, since if you were to make interrupts more useful you need to make them required in raids, and those two don't have a way to meet that requirement. In essence, you'd be forcing raids to bring a PLD, a MCH and a NIN to everything and work out an interrupt rotation.

It's relatively clear that SE intends for Shield Oath/Grit/Defiance to be used while main tanking and for Sword Oath/no-Grit/Deliverance to be used while off-tanking and soloing. Outside of overgearing content, this was generally the case in ARR, and in HW, we saw the addition of an accuracy modifier on tank stances (which is only relevant while main tanking from the front of a boss, thus indicating intent).

But the encounter design isn't encouraging this in any way, which if I had to guess, is a case of one department not talking to another. It's my understanding that the class design team is different from the combat encounter design team, and while I'm sure they communicate, there may not be enough interplay between them so that both teams are achieving the same goals.

I honestly don't anticipate any major changes during HW regarding the tank meta, but I do expect 4.0 to bring some changes.

As for *how* the meta can be changed, active mitigation isn't entirely necessary though it would be one way to go about it. Tank busters need to hit harder if SE wants to continue with the current design trend of low-static damage combined with predictable damage spikes. For whatever reason, Alexander's tank busters seem to have much lower VIT thresholds (comparatively) than those present throughout the Coil of Bahamut. As it is now, i190 left side was enough to survive tank busters in AS1. If full i190 VIT had been necessary at a base level to make the tank busters manageable, then DPS-tanking wouldn't be as viable, at least not so early in the content's life.

We know they had a particular item level in mind for each floor of Alexander, but they seemed to have tuned the VIT requirement at a substantially lower item level than that. If the general item level minimum for an encounter is X, then it's reasonable for the VIT requirement to require a level of X minus some number Y, so that practice can still occur even if the DPS numbers aren't there yet (otherwise, the encounter would end at the tank buster every time), but they seem to have made Y too large this raid tier.

Off-tanks would, naturally, still want to stack STR (at least in fights without tank swaps), which is fine and so far as we can tell, intended.

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Originally Posted by Duelle

NIN (Jugulate but the NIN has to sacrifice damage to be in the needed stance for it)

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While your general point is correct, NIN doesn't lose damage by using their other poison. Both of them provide the same (20%) damage boost.

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Originally Posted by Duelle

* Stance swaps: Since this is an unintended style of gameplay that contributes to the DPS disparity between the tanks, this also needs to go. WAR would be easy; simply make swapping from Defiance/Deliverance lose all Wrath/Abandon stacks. To compensate, change Infuriate to work with both stances.

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I don't understand what you are saying here because Infuriate already works in both stances?

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Originally Posted by PotatoWafflez

I don't understand what you are saying here because Infuriate already works in both stances?

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I thought it only worked in Defiance. At least that's how I was using it while leveling WAR. >.>;;;

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Originally Posted by SpookyGhost

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Pacification did work on HM primals (ex. you can avoid Ifrit's breaths with Pacification and Radiant Plumes with Silence, but Eruption can only be Stunned). So did Blind, Silence, Bind, and Stun. This is part of the problem with having all the tank and party damage in certain mechanics that are too important to be interrupted, you can't let interruptions work most of the time.

I really hate the 4x stun in A3 Savage, but I suppose it's not really bad as long as Silence potions work so you can work around weird party comps or mistakes like you could in BCoB, but I prefer if each person has a few CC skills and they all get used instead of just forcing half the party to have a certain interruption all at once. In general though, it would be much better if crowd control provided some relief when used like the name implies instead of it being worthless 99% of the fight, then a wipe if even one person misses theirs during a certain 2s window. I didn't really think BCoB was a shining beacon of CC, the Chimera and Ifrit HM would both be far better examples.

As for my comment on keeping OT busy, I was imaging something like a PLD MTs and burns their cooldowns, then the OT provokes and uses Holmgang for the tank buster or something. That said, as long as they tune the fight properly it's fine and maybe even fun if the two tanks spread their cooldowns however they want.

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Originally Posted by Duelle

I thought it only worked in Defiance. At least that's how I was using it while leveling WAR. >.>;;;

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It works for both Defiance and Deliverance - it's the reason a 3x FC opener is possible.

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Originally Posted by eagledorf

Pacification did work on HM primals (you can avoid Ifrit's breaths, but not big mechanics like Plumes). So did Blind, Bind, and Stun. I'd also like if Silence worked some on casts like it does in old dungeons and just increase the frequency. This is part of the problem with having all the tank and party damage in certain mechanics that are too important to be interrupted.

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I actually forgot Pacification could work on Ifrit... mainly because back in 2.0 I opted to be the OT stunbot. But regardless, it was Ifrit, and I don't remember anyone intentionally saving Shield Swipe to stop breaths. The problem with using that now would be that only 1 job in the entire game uses Pacification and removing certain abilities from boss fights (like cleaves) would be ppppretty powerful. Silence for casts would be alright as you'd have a lot of options, but to give bosses relatively frequent attacks that can be Silenced you'd have to increase it's combat table and that could be a lot to juggle for XIV's playerbase.

Blinding Titan's MB when you didn't have any CDs or you goofed up was pretty cool, though now I wonder if people would even do it since it would cost them a precious GCD of damage lmao.

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I really hate the 4x stun in A3 Savage, but I suppose it's not really bad as long as Silence potions work so you can work around weird party comps or mistakes like you could in BCoB, but I prefer if each person has a few CC skills and they all get used instead of just forcing half the party to have a certain interruption all at once. In general though, it would be much better if crowd control provided some relief when used like the name implies instead of it being worthless 99% of the fight, then a wipe if even one person misses theirs during a certain 2s window. I didn't really think BCoB was a shining beacon of CC, the Chimera and Ifrit HM would both be far better examples.

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I think spreading out when what needs to be CC'd with X, Y, and Z is a good idea rather than lumping them all into one phase where everyone has to stun something, but I think that those phases do need to exist as they're a test of your group's coordination. Like T9 golems, but with CC instead of... feeding.... meteors... yeah. I also don't think Chimera or Ifrit work as great examples of CC - Chimera you watched for a cast bar depending on your party comp and silenced/stunned it (I think stun worked idk) and Ifrit you had your PLD have a very good trigger finger for when he saw the letter E on a castbar. Those were great uses of those two effects, but those were the only effects used in those fights. I think A3S is actually the most CC related stuff you have to do, but I wouldn't really put that as a great example of CC (though A3S is still a great fight none the less).

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As for my comment on keeping OT busy, I was imaging something like a PLD MTs and burns their cooldowns, then the OT provokes and uses Holmgang for the tank buster or something. That said, as long as they tune the fight properly it's fine and maybe even fun if the two tanks spread their cooldowns however they want.

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I think T12, as I mentioned, is a good example of achieving this - the OT always has something to do and so does the MT, thus blurring the line between who is what. I don't really have a problem with both tanks being able to blow immunities or all the cooldowns on certain tank busters simply because... immunities and CD timers are there for basically that reason, you've got an OT for a reason, etc. etc. but I do see your point. It would be good to have the OT be an actual tank (like tank adds or tank a 2nd boss ala A1S) than to be another DPS.

Chimera was good because you could choose what to stun. For example, if you used the stack up on the left leg strategy, you could ignore interrupting Dragon Voice or if you had two silencers you could silence both Ram and Dragon and use your stuns to eliminate other mechanics (like Keeper, the ground AoE that caused Slow and Frostbite could be stunned) and allow ranged to spread out, making mechanics that dropped AoE (Cacophony) easier to handle. Of course you could also choose to blow either stun or silence on cooldown and only use the other for interruption if you wanted that potency instead of crowd control or use your stun to freeze the Chimera so you can get positionals safely by making the mob turning predictable.

That was extremely fun. Good interruptions made a huge difference in how easy it was for DPS and you could prioritize positioning for melee or letting ranged turret. And yes, there was an advantage to having more interruptions, but you could actually make do even with none.

Ifrit was great because you could choose when to use Blind and Pacification to drastically reduce tank damage for certain phases or even safely move Ifrit (nails, for example, when you don't really want DPS on Ifrit) on top of cooldowns. You could also stun Eruptions, or stun other mechanics, stun or shield the knockback, and you could silence the hard Radiant Plume to let ranged DPS stand still. And failing any of these interruptions meant more damage and less DPS, but none of them was a wipe. It was just one way for tanks to increase party DPS and ease healing difficulty other than just pushing their own DPS or popping a cooldown.

Now you have interruptions that must not fail under any circumstances or no interruptions at all. There's no thought like "well, we have lots of melee, so why don't the healers stack on the Chimera and we'll stun Keeper and let the PLD silence Ram" or "We have lots of ranged, so we'll interrupt both Ram and Dragon so that you can spread out so Cacophany requires minimal movement. We'll pull out if Keeper gets both rear corners" or "I'm going to use Spirits Within on cooldown, which means you should macro Aetherial Manipulation to a melee because Radiant Plumes will go off". It's just you miss a stun and everybody dies, gg.

A lot of people will make the suggestion that if they return damage to the meta and force tanks to dedicate more to survivability, that the meta would change. People go about this in different ways but the result is all the same -- failure. The amount of damage in the meta is not the issue. It is the design of the role.

If tanks are not pushed to optimize DPS, then they are not forced to min max their GCD usage down to the specifics of whether or not it's worth it to stance dance. They're not forced to calculate down to the specifics whether or not they can use dCDs outside of tank buster mitigation to reduce general damage or push stacks.

Without the DPS focus, the role lacks depth. Why? The actual strategic and mechanic skill related to tanking suvivability is very minimal. You plan your dCD usage which you have set in stone after a handful of progression attempts and that's it. You keep ahead in enmity which is pretty brain dead.

So if we are to see the meta change, the tanks must change. Even if they change the encounters to include more healer / tank mechanics that restrict their DPS, it's still just another gimmick.

The encounters will have to change from static to more of a dynamic. In favour of reworking tanks, you will need to provide all tanks with skills that benefit the raid, and WAR does that out of the three currently.

So in order to keep WAR where he is, you will need to change encounters I think.

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Originally Posted by Brian_

A lot of people will make the suggestion that if they return damage to the meta and force tanks to dedicate more to survivability, that the meta would change. People go about this in different ways but the result is all the same -- failure. The amount of damage in the meta is not the issue. It is the design of the role.

If tanks are not pushed to optimize DPS, then they are not forced to min max their GCD usage down to the specifics of whether or not it's worth it to stance dance. They're not forced to calculate down to the specifics whether or not they can use dCDs outside of tank buster mitigation to reduce general damage or push stacks.

Without the DPS focus, the role lacks depth. Why? The actual strategic and mechanic skill related to tanking suvivability is very minimal. You plan your dCD usage which you have set in stone after a handful of progression attempts and that's it. You keep ahead in enmity which is pretty brain dead.

So if we are to see the meta change, the tanks must change. Even if they change the encounters to include more healer / tank mechanics that restrict their DPS, it's still just another gimmick.

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Exactly, this is basically a tl;dr of my OP and very little of the other discussion going on in this or other threads are addressing these basic realities.

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Originally Posted by Brian_

Without the DPS focus, the role lacks depth. Why? The actual strategic and mechanic skill related to tanking suvivability is very minimal. You plan your dCD usage which you have set in stone after a handful of progression attempts and that's it. You keep ahead in enmity which is pretty brain dead.

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This was basically always the issue that WoW had. (As of, August last year; haven't played since. Doubt it's changed much.) Because tanking was more about being a SHIELDWALL in WoW back before active mitigation, they decided to force tanks to dps well in order to tank well. ("Active mitigation" in a nutshell.) Unfortunately, it still isn't engaging enough for many folks.
The reality is, a tank should ALWAYS be pushing the envelope. Easiest way to do that is...you guessed it: to dps. A good tank balances when to be in dps stance with when to be in tank stance. Why? SE gave us these tools that allow tanking gameplay to be engaging. Help your group; use said tools.

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One way I think you could effectively change the meta so that mitigation tank strategies become viable (but you could still ALSO have the choice to run DPS tank strategies) would be if you changed the way tank GCDs worked. If they were more like healer GCDs, where you were making impactful choices (healers have to decide on each GCD whether that GCD will be used to cleanse, heal, or DPS), then the meta would be entirely different. Right now every tank GCD does damage AND generates enmity, and some even go one step further and additionally provide mitigation (storm's path, rage of halone, delirium). What if, instead, a tank had to choose whether they were going to deal damage, generate enmity, or mitigate on each GCD, but doing one excluded the other two until the next GCD (or even several GCDs down the line due to combo effects)? You could have fights where it might make sense for tanks to maintain maximum mitigation and healers to maintain maximum healing because the DPS gained by tanks and healers DPSing has to be weighted against the risk of the raid wide damage killing actual DPS players.

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I shall agree with the OP that Tank GCD can be fixed and will result in better gameplay experience overall. In fact, I believe that only by simply reducing Rage of Halone/Delirium/Storm's Path's effective timing from 20s to 10s, while doubling their effectivesness (RoH now reduces roughly 20% of boss' physical damage, Delirium 20% of boss' magical damage and SP just plainly reduces 20% overall damage dealt). Plus, making Sheltron/Reprisal some sort of a 10-seconds cooldown isntead of 30 ish but reducing their effectiveness will go a giant step towards achieving the aforementioned goal of better gameplay experience.

There's nothing really wrong with the style where tanks attempt to maximize DPS, the problem is right now that's all there is to the tank job.

In all of Alexander Savage, there are two times you need to use cooldowns (Plasma in A1 and Perpetual Ray after Royal Pentacle in A4) and 0 times you need your tank stance or anything other than STR accessories. If DPS is supposed to lend depth to the tank job, there either needs to be constant give and take and a few moments where you actually need to choose survivability over DPS or we need our rotations to be blown up to Summoner proportions.

So tanks are only supposed to pop cooldowns in 2 spots out of all of alex savage and be out of tank stance the entire time...

Remind me again why we hate healers so much?

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Originally Posted by eagledorf

There's nothing really wrong with the style where tanks attempt to maximize DPS, the problem is right now that's all there is to the tank job.

In all of Alexander Savage, there are two times you need to use cooldowns (Plasma in A1 and Perpetual Ray after Royal Pentacle in A4) and 0 times you need your tank stance or anything other than STR accessories. If DPS is supposed to lend depth to the tank job, there either needs to be constant give and take and a few moments where you actually need to choose survivability over DPS or we need our rotations to be blown up to Summoner proportions.

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It's more than two times lol
You forgot Drainage in A3S, and depending on strat, some parts of A2S

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Originally Posted by CGMidlander

You forgot Drainage in A3S, and depending on strat, some parts of A2S

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To me, A2S actually leaps out as being an encounter that's quite nicely balanced as far as tanking styles go. There's a lot of semi-predictable burst that comes in large amounts, there's various strats you can use, and whilst Warriors and Dark Knights can contribute heavily towards the speed ofthe encounter via their superior AOE, the high physical mitigation that paladins offer, coupled with some actually useful utility like Cover and HG in some of the more awkward waves, make this in my eyes the most "balanced" encounter in Alex when talking about the two tanking styles of glass cannon dps vs brick wall. You kinda want a bit of both here, and both extreme can be decent depending on strat.

Tanks certainly do gain benefit from being tanky here - whilst it's doable in slaying gear, the onus on DPS is more on good use of the gobwalker debuffs and excellent AOE rotations from the DPSers. Tanks can help but arent as essential as they are in the other turns with their more strict enrage timers. Even stacking lots of health was a viable thing when it first came out, as there's a lot of potential burst possible depending on how you split up the debuffers and jagd dolls.

Of course, most will say A2S is perhaps the easiest of the turns, and I doubt it's anyone's favorite. But still, the mechanics of the fight and the juggling of balance between wanting tanks that can tank loads of incoming bursty damage vs tanks that just output high dps means it's far less of a contributing fight to the current meta feel. I feel just as useful as a paladin with pentamelds on that fight as I would as a warrior with pure slaying. It's just a different kind of usefulness.

Ah, yeah Drainage is another place you need something, I forgot about that.

Not that having everything be about tank busters that oneshot you without a cooldown is a great thing, but at least it's something.

You don't really ever need anything in A2S if you're ok with making your healers and battery miserable (or can dodge Katstrahl). I mean, it would be horrible if you didn't use anything, but you won't get oneshot by not doing it. Maybe in the last wave...

I do agree A2 was one of the better turns for tanks as there were lots of ways to handle it and it did hit reasonably hard in short bursts. I think the only thing I don't like about that turn is the amount of responsibility and lack of complexity the car operator ends up with for so much of the fight.