[Tanking] Letter to the Producer: Questions without Answers (Q-A)

We've all been through it before. You're sitting around, idly flipping through the forums, when suddenly you come across the latest dev team Q+A thread. That rare mob that shows up only once per expansion. Quickly, you hurry over, hoping that it’s not already been swarmed and thoroughly ganked. Hoping that someone hasn’t already asked your burning questions about Aymeric’s dating life, the story of how Yoshi-P saved FFXIV, or on whether the next housing update will allow you to apply Woad Blue dye to Stuffed Rabbits.

You remember fondly that one time that the dev team took the time to answer your brilliantly thought-out question on how to use the keybind function to bind all your buttons to Fell Cleave. Read the manual they said, chuckling fondly to themselves, happy to waste five more minutes on the subject. Or that time that you suggested that tank gear progression actually improve your damage output, and they made an impassioned commitment on the spot to improving your enmity generation. Hopefully this session will be even more productive.

Jokes aside, as part of the apparently small subset of the forums actually interested in the gameplay of FFXIV, what questions would you want to see the dev team actually answer in a Q+A session, if they didn’t waste so much time dodging the challenging questions with fluff? What would you ask if they were obliged to answer the questions that actually matter to you?

If I could ask only one question, it would be on why the development team seems incapable of designing fights from a tanking perspective. Fights are designed on rails, with bosses positioning and orientating themselves independently of what the tank does. You have an abundance of defensive cooldowns, but you’re just going to invuln-swap the four tankbusters in the fight anyways, and you generally have a backup tank if you mess up. You’re a glorified melee dps who doesn’t do comparable damage. It’s a low impact role, and the dev team seems committed to reducing its impact and value further with every expansion. When will you start to design content for tanks?

In the interest of being more concrete, I would like to know how much DPS SE think tanks should be doing, ideally, relative to the other roles in the party and why.

If they're not going to improve tank engagement through mechanics or fight design, then I, personally, would at least like to be able to contribute more through sheer force.

I tend to avoid playing tank in PF nowadays for a variety of reasons, but one of the reasons is that the role feels low impact. I'm almost starting to think, to my great disappointment, that the biggest contribution tanks make in PF is actually just getting the party into the fight.

If i have only one question for them it would be:

This last expansion jobs quality has been drop specially on tanks and healers by a great margin, we can see how constant are the complains about how DRK gameplay is no more and now is a WAR clone and how both jobs are not enganging anymore gameplay wise,AST card system, SCH gameplay gone, how useless and unwanted Tenacity and Piety are for each role and how encounters are extremly uninteresting for both roles due the total lack of mechanics around healing and tanking and how similar are the jobs on each roles betwen other things.
Seems like the Dev team have troubles dealing by the increased amount of jobs and are affecting the development of the current ones affecting more the roles and jobs i mentioned before, are you considering increase the amount of members on the Dev combat team to solve and avoid this problems in the future and properly manage all the jobs the game have and the ones are coming? and if it yes are you consider add Devs specialized on tanks and healers so they can design, fix and implement necesary changes and ajustments during and post new expansions launch?

the upcoming digital fanfest will have a Q&A. a Live one and I think? another one during the live letter. there will probably be a thread to do with that later.

making your own Q&A thread I'm going to say is pointless because they won't be looking at it.

The first and last time that they tried a properly Live Q+A was the 2018 NA Fanfest at Vegas. Even the "Live" Q+A at the EU Fanfest following that was not actually live - you submitted a question in advance. It could be that the majority of the playerbase only wants to know about glamour options or questions that we already have the answers to, or it could be that they just cherry-pick out the fluff. You'll maybe get one question in a blue moon about job design, stats, or raid encounters, despite them sometimes being among the most upvoted questions. In short, if you tend to participate in these subforums, you generally don't find answers to your questions at Q+A sessions.

You could say that posting in these forums at all is pointless because they won't be looking at it. The last dev post in an English language section of the forums was over two months ago, and that was only to post a recap of the last Live Letter. I'm just curious to know how much dissonance exists between what players here want to know about and what actually gets answered at these events.

All I'm hoping for is they get rid off the design philosophy of our current 5.0 tanks. Tanking has to change, wether that is through the change of fights from the perspective of a tank, or introducing a new system. I doubt they'll be looking at this thread anyway. It's worth a shot though.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

What would you ask if they were obliged to answer the questions that actually matter to you?

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I would ask why a lot of needed mitigation cooldowns have such garbage percentage values as this game basically frowns upon healers who actually heal.

A few specific ones:

1 - Piety and Tenacity are stats that ONLY work for healers and tanks, yet Direct Hit (marketed as the "DPS only" equivalent that only appears on Damage gear) is one of the most valuable DPS stats a Tank can meld for. Was this intentional, and are you planning on changing it?
2 - Related to the above, Warriors are the only tank that DON'T want to meld for Direct Hit due to the mechanics of their cooldown. Do you see it as a problem that Tank players have to meld differently on this job compared to the other three tanks, making swapping job harder, or would the design team prefer to see MORE diversity in how the different tank jobs gear up?
3 - Are you happy with the current implementation of Tenacity, which is almost universally shunned as a throwaway stat by the raiding community?
4 - Are there any plans for encounters where mitigation outside of occasional scripted Tank Busters actually makes more of a difference to success than pure DPS?

Yeah!

1.Why do Melee DPS have 3 sets when they have to meld for the same stats but Warrior is stuck with fending? I leveled a whole new character just because of this.
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...cter/35056391/

2.When can tanks get a dedicated job designer, who doesn't treat it as a necessary evil.

With stuns and interrupts being available to all tanks, are they going to design encounters that take advantage of these skills more, or are they still going to be relegated to mainly stopping attacks in trash packs?

To add onto this, as I know not everyone reads all posts, an idea I have thrown around is to allow attacks to be stunned/interrupted, but still allow the attack to go off, but with a different effect or attribute. EG. a raidwide does damage and applies paralysis, if you stun the boss, the attack still goes off, but the paralysis is removed, making it a pure damage raidwide. Of course, there are many possibilities with this system that could be played with and I think it could pave the way for more unique mechanics.

I would love to know what their design philosophy is on invulns. They're powerful to the point where they take the teeth out of encounters and devalue the rest of your defensive kit. Two of them (Living Dead, Superbolide) are fairly universally disliked for having terribly designed drawbacks that the original two jobs don't have to put up with. Is there any plans to re-examine these abilities and their power balance?

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

To add onto this, as I know not everyone reads all posts, an idea I have thrown around is to allow attacks to be stunned/interrupted, but still allow the attack to go off, but with a different effect or attribute.

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You could very easily tailor this to difficulty setting in raid content. At normal difficulty, make it so that if you use an interrupt on an ability with a flashing cast bar, you do extra damage and build a chunk of limit gauge, without preventing the baseline ability from occurring. At higher difficulty settings, add on penalties (and perhaps a raid wipe) if you miss your interrupt.

The Endwalker trailer highlighted that upgraded Shield Bash move, so perhaps it's time to make actively countering attacks an important part of tanking.