Removing tank buffs and incorporate them into rotation?

Just an idea but what do people think about the notion of no longer having tank buffs like rampart etc and instead, have buffs on tank weapons skills that increase mitigation and potentially a bigger buff on the finisher of the rotation, I feel like having these buffs are really just a waste of buttons and could be incorporated into our movesets, they could use those extra buttons for more mechanics for each class. What do you all think?

This is another part of why I miss managing enmity. We had combo actions that increased the amount of enmity we got and it worked wonderfully with tank stance (and I don't think anyone honestly prefers souleater over Power Slash, and I also miss Butcher's Block). Considering brutal shell exists in the game i wouldn't mind seeing it make a return in that sense in both aoe and single target.

Though, I do like having the option to use cooldowns, so I'd opt to at least have a couple I can place on myself or another party member (i.e nascent, HoC, TBN, etc) if they ever took that route, and keep the party-wide mitigation actions.

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Originally Posted by Zairava

This is another part of why I miss managing enmity. We had combo actions that increased the amount of enmity we got and it worked wonderfully with tank stance (and I don't think anyone honestly prefers souleater over Power Slash, and I also miss Butcher's Block). Considering brutal shell exists in the game i wouldn't mind seeing it make a return in that sense in both aoe and single target.

Though, I do like having the option to use cooldowns, so I'd opt to at least have a couple I can place on myself or another party member (i.e nascent, HoC, TBN, etc) if they ever took that route, and keep the party-wide mitigation actions.

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Maybe keep one unique one for each class like shadow wall for Drks and the other tanks equivelant then? Yeah I completely agree with you it used to be more enjoyable when gameplay was driven by rotation IMO

That depends on if, by rotation, you actually mean something you rotate in a fixed or mostly-fixed sequence.

If so, then no, I don't want skill that should be used to preempt mechanics that have no reason to be timed to our rotation... to be tied to our rotations. That would defeat their whole purpose.

If you just mean you'd rather they be GCD skills on which to spend time up to X amount before incoming damage... then also no, since the only way for that to add any decision-making value (rather than merely making tank mitigation painfully less responsive by sticking those CDs on the GCD) there would be for those to compete with more purely damage-dealing GCDs, at which point tank gameplay just becomes a matter of "stack once to survive tankbuster A, twice to survive tankbuster B, thrice for C, etc," with none of the --however faint-- depth of skill scheduling.

Do I wish the mitigation were more interactive? Sure. Do I think it's presently lackluster? Yes, definitely. But strapping all that to weaponskills alone leaves it little space for interesting synergy.

Shuffle some of tank's mitigation off to GCDs at offensive cost (though as to still be an rDPS gain through healer damage saved) and tune tank damage higher to compensate, but do not remove mitigation CDs altogether; give us more to play around, not less, and certainly do not tie mitigation inseparably to rigid damage-dealing rotations.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

That depends on if, by rotation, you actually mean something you rotate in a fixed or mostly-fixed sequence.

If so, then no, I don't want skill that should be used to preempt mechanics that have no reason to be timed to our rotation... to be tied to our rotations. That would defeat their whole purpose.

If you just mean you'd rather they be GCD skills on which to spend time up to X amount before incoming damage... then also no, since the only way for that to add any decision-making value (rather than merely making tank mitigation painfully less responsive by sticking those CDs on the GCD) there would be for those to compete with more purely damage-dealing GCDs, at which point tank gameplay just becomes a matter of "stack once to survive tankbuster A, twice to survive tankbuster B, thrice for C, etc," with none of the --however faint-- depth of skill scheduling.

Do I wish the mitigation were more interactive? Sure. Do I think it's presently lackluster? Yes, definitely. But strapping all that to weaponskills alone leaves it little space for interesting synergy.

Shuffle some of tank's mitigation off to GCDs at offensive cost (though as to still be an rDPS gain through healer damage saved) and tune tank damage higher to compensate, but do not remove mitigation CDs altogether; give us more to play around, not less, and certainly do not tie mitigation inseparably to rigid damage-dealing rotations.

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I mean splitting the load over the weaponskills, for exmaple rampart, say your 1 2 3 attack combo each added damage mitigation giving a portion of the protection that rampart give, then make it stackable and give it a short duration, this is obviously overly simplified, but the idea is to make the tank weaponskills moves that mitigate.

At the minute tanks pretty much have 1 single target rotation and 1 aoe rotation, If they removed the tank buffs they could potentially add in additional weaponskills combos split all mitigation buffs across weaponskills and OGCD attacks. That gives us actual potential for growth, would have proper rotations and not just press 123, press the take less damage button and keep pressing 123, throw out OGCD when available.

2.0 Drk was a good example of this, your weaponskill combo when hard slash>spinning slash> power slash. The other rotation hard slash>syphon strike>delirium (and i believe you used to chose between power slash or souleater as a finisher or delirium) and you had your aoe weapon skill but the didn't add the combo to Drk till like shadowbringer.

Granted it was one very simple branch but they reduced the branches down to one instead of elaborating the branches and driving mechanics from them.

Generally speaking it's always more fun for the player to have more options not less.

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Originally Posted by Malthir

I mean splitting them over the load of the weaponskills for exmaple rampart, say your 1 2 3 attack combo each added damage mitigation giving a portion of the protection that rampart give, then make it stackable and give it a short duration, this is obviously overly simplified, but the idea is to make the tank weaponskills moves that mitigate.

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And will these have cooldowns?

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At the minute tanks pretty much have 1 single target rotation and 1 aoe rotation, If they removed the tank buffs they could potentially add in additional weaponskills combos split all mitigation buffs across weaponskills and OGCD attacks. That gives us actual potential for growth, would have proper rotations and not just press 123, press the take less damage button and keep pressing 123, throw out OGCD when available.

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Gauge-spenders aside...

DRK has, for all intents and purposes, a single ST rotational weaponskill and a single AoE weaponskill (Spell, technically, to further screw SkS) that, by being split over 3 or 2 GCDs, respectively, is disproportionately weakened by being interrupted (be that by other combo skills or the fight ending).

GNB has a further higher potency ST skill on a cooldown. WAR functions similarly, but with effectively two charges on said skill and a softer cooldown generally. PLD has both a softer cooldown and may use it a further time in two-target situations; it also has the outlier of a 6-step filler combo and making its 9-step rotation ranged once per minute. Simply put, WAR and GNB use their stronger path after 9 filler GCDs while PLD uses it after 6.

But consider that DRG, for instance, has no more GCD rotational complexity than any of those, despite spending 10 buttons --up from, say, WAR's 6-- on CD-less weaponskills.

tl;dr: It's not about the buttons in a combo or rotation, nor the number of combo paths, but how one uses them. (Depth in practice is not significantly correlative with button count in this game, nor necessarily in any game.)

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2.0 Drk was a good example of this, your weaponskill combo when hard slash>spinning slash> power slash. The other rotation hard slash>syphon strike>delirium (and i believe you used to chose between power slash or souleater as a finisher or delirium) and you had your aoe weapon skill but the didn't add the combo to Drk till like shadowbringer.

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DRK did not exist in 2.x. Assuming you mean 3.x, that is still not an example you'd wish to follow, unless you intend for the alternate combo (Power Slash) to only be used at most a couple times per ~5 minutes, and almost all of that use to be right at the start (after which time they can be macro-swapped right off your bars).

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Generally speaking it's always more fun for the player to have more options not less.

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I have to expect from what you've posted thus far you're greatly underestimating how narrow of constraints something must operate under for it to be an actual option.

I can elaborate upon request, but the short of it is that options (and, ideally, its consequent decision-making) requires constraints enough for one's actions to actually feel like decisions and that those options have, in themselves, varying strength based on context (whether internal, as per interaction with prior or later actions, or external, such as in preempting or responding to raid buffs, incoming damage, likely procs, or whatever else).

Throwing more buttons to press without deeply considering what would be optimal under what conditions and how many competitive paths of action those conditions can allow for... will typically just produce bloat.

Sounds like an awful idea, you would just use as little mitigation as possible to get max dps.

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Originally Posted by Malthir

2.0 Drk was a good example of this, your weaponskill combo when hard slash>spinning slash> power slash. The other rotation hard slash>syphon strike>delirium (and i believe you used to chose between power slash or souleater as a finisher or delirium)

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That's not how it worked. You had to choose between Delirium and Soul Eater, and you did that based on dps. If you had enough MP for Dark Arts you used SE, otherwise you used Delirium because it was higher potency. The INT debuff was automatically kept up like that.

PLD and WAR have examples of how your idea doesn't work. HW PLD never wanted to use Rage of Halone because it was weak, so you didn't get the STR debuff. HW WAR often used Butcher's Block over Storm's Path because it was stronger, so you missed out on the 10% damage down. People don't want to lose dps.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

And will these have cooldowns?
tl;dr: It's not about the buttons in a combo or rotation, nor the number of combo paths, but how one uses them. (Depth in practice is not significantly correlative with button count in this game, nor necessarily in any game.)

I can elaborate upon request, but the short of it is that options (and, ideally, its consequent decision-making) requires constraints enough for one's actions to actually feel like decisions and that those options have, in themselves, varying strength based on context (whether internal, as per interaction with prior or later actions, or external, such as in preempting or responding to raid buffs, incoming damage, likely procs, or whatever else).

Throwing more buttons to press without deeply considering what would be optimal under what conditions and how many competitive paths of action those conditions can allow for... will typically just produce bloat.

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Yes I meant 3.0 sorry, I also meant souleater or delirium not or powerslash.

I'm not asking necessarily for more buttons, Essentially I'm proposing that tying our mitigation to our moveset is more engaging than press button to take X amount of reduced damage for X amount of time.

It's all depended on how they implement it, the proposal of adding additional moves would be because we would be essentially freeing up 6 buttons if they remove the buffs, technically no less or more button pressing is occurring, it's a matter of allowing the player to actively play instead of passively play.

Press button to take X amount of reduced damage, the general player will use most of them in almost every fight and then use them again once they are off CD. They're OGCD they cost nothing and they functionally mean nothing in the sense of your gameplay. It's passive play.

Active play is creating systems that buff you based on your choice of input, some moves increase your mitigation/parry/block, moves that reduce the damage the opponent is dishing out/moves that blind etc. If balanced properly when stacked up equate to the same thing as the buffs we currently have, you mitigate the same amount of damage but at least it's active not passive

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Originally Posted by Launched

PLD and WAR have examples of how your idea doesn't work. HW PLD never wanted to use Rage of Halone because it was weak, so you didn't get the STR debuff. HW WAR often used Butcher's Block over Storm's Path because it was stronger, so you missed out on the 10% damage down. People don't want to lose dps.

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It was badly balanced not a bad concept, the problem with reducing gameplay to being passive is as that escalates in each expansion the gameplay becomes less fun. The game becomes less engaging because you're doing less, it devolves to the issue that WOW had, gameplay and classes became bland and generic to fit the idea of "reducing bloat" but at the same time it reduces player agency.

Same principle applies with them removing aggro, it functionally removes tanks gameplay you can face roll your keyboard never loose aggro, you're no longer a tank, you're a DPS with more health.

The simple solution is to remove some tank defensive buffs and replace them with nothing. It must be a miracle that tanks managed to survive a higher cleave and tankbuster frequency in ARR with the likes of Rampart, Sentinel, and Hallowed.

I think that if you wanted to keep things exciting, you could reward precise timing on certain designated special attacks (i.e. red arrow) with a special offensive counter, especially since the short recast cooldown can be used from both the MT and OT position. Or have a well timed interrupt stagger the boss. But I don't think that the answer lies with more defensives.

I don't like the idea of tying mitigation to our combos because you won't have as much control on it.

Tying defensive effects to weaponskills that are a part of your rotation either result in them always being up, like Heavensward Delerium, or having no proper control over their timing and usage. Both of those situations seem boring and less than ideal.
Tying defensive effects to weaponskills that are not tied to a set rotation but are based on cooldown just makes them tend to be used as another damage ability, foregoing the defensive aspect for the dps.
A small level of passively applied defense is fine and already exists for each of the tanks, but trying to make the prominent defense abilities like that would not work out well.
The closest thing to this that I could see maybe, emphasis on the maybe, working would be removing the defensive buff from the Tank Mastery trait and rolling that into some sort of weaponskill rotation or another ability that has to be managed and kept up similar to how some of the dps buffs like Darkside and Surging Tempest (aka Storm's Eye) are kept up.

That'll be a nope from me coach.

Maybe tie some minor mitigation to the weaponskill combos, something like 2% mit on your 123 combo up to 10%, improving the base tankiness even when between mit CDs as long as we can keep uptime while still having the CD as normal or maybe rebalanced to account for this base mit...

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Originally Posted by Luizgazen

Maybe tie some minor mitigation to the weaponskill combos, something like 2% mit on your 123 combo up to 10%, improving the base tankiness even when between mit CDs as long as we can keep uptime while still having the CD as normal or maybe rebalanced to account for this base mit...

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Most of the tanks already have some form of small defensive component tied to their basic 1-2-3 combo. DRK has the heal from Soul Eater, WAR has the heal from Storm's Path and GNB has the shield+heal from Brutal Shell. PLD is the only one that is a tad different in that it has passive mitigation from Block which is their approximate equivalent to what was listed for the other tanks, although they do now get those heals from Holy Spirit and Holy Circle as part of their Requiescat phase of their basic rotation.

No thank you.

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Originally Posted by TouchandFeel

Most of the tanks already have some form of small defensive component tied to their basic 1-2-3 combo. DRK has the heal from Soul Eater, WAR has the heal from Storm's Path and GNB has the shield+heal from Brutal Shell. PLD is the only one that is a tad different in that it has passive mitigation from Block which is their approximate equivalent to what was listed for the other tanks, although they do now get those heals from Holy Spirit and Holy Circle as part of their Requiescat phase of their basic rotation.

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Yeah i know, i mean just make that mitigation actually mean something, i just used an example before but anything that makes the mit from the combo actually useful rather than just fluff

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Originally Posted by Zairava

This is another part of why I miss managing enmity. We had combo actions that increased the amount of enmity we got and it worked wonderfully with tank stance

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There really wasn't any managing enmity on tanks, it was mainly on DPS/Healers.

All tanks did is one Enmity combo and drop tank stance forever. And hope you had DPS/Healers cooperating their minus enmity abilities, and HW+ always have a Ninja.

It is bad idea IMO in a raid it will force you certain rotation to align your buffs with tank buster and it will be more trouble some in add phase because adds hit like truck.

Edit: Removed game suggestion part.

Isn't this just BLU tanking (e.g., Bad Breath, Magic Hammer, Dragon Force, Chel' Gate, Cactguard, etc.)? With more of the buttons stapled directly to damage and being even less flexible (since the mitigation is tied to a combo)? Which... I like BLU, but tank is far and away the most jank role to try to play BLU on. Dragon Force as a "Rampart/Sentinel you have to cast" feels absolutely awful, as does dying to something because you got server ticked on casting Diamondback. Things like Bad Breath for a "debuff tank" idea are neat, but would be better served as a unique foundation for a job (which is sorta already does, with BLU in tank mimicry). Nor does that kind of "upkeep mitigation" appeal to current tank design - aside from Reprisal no full job tank really has such a thing.

So, maybe add a weaponskill or two, like an alternate combo finisher on a cooldown, that grants some mitigation. However, I definitely wouldn't want to see this as the core basis of all tanks.