Dancer - Evasion Tank. Fabulous Support.

[Kitru]

I don't think some of you read my post

I actually understood that it was a joke from the beginning. It's pretty obvious that you intended it to be a satirical poke at the people that *want* Dancer to be a tank job. I was agreeing with you about the absurdity of it, not criticizing you because I believed that you were supporting the idea.

Everyone please come into this thread and have a bonerific discussion about how evasion tanks are broken and do not work.

Welcome to the internet, where every discussion immediately goes out of the OP's control as soon as they make the first post. Some people think that DNC would make a great evasion tank and some people believe that evasion tanks are completely and utterly horrible which is why DNC should never be made into a tank. Your OP brought up both the absurdity of a DNC being a tank as well as the fundamental flaws in a tank relying too heavily upon RNG based mitigation mechanisms so both of the topics that I mentioned before pertain to it.

I realize that you might not like a pseudo-serious/pseudo-intellectual discussion about different ways to implement tanks and their relative strengths and weaknesses, but this isn't *your* internet. If it's brought up and it is actually related to the OP in some way, it's open season to discuss it even if it wasn't actually your intent to do so.

[Techro]

but this isn't *your* internet.

OH! I forgot to mention my name is Al Gore. So yes it is, it's mine But now that you have used quelling strikes on my troll. I will have an intellectual discussion with you about Evasion tanks. I believe someone stated that it would be nice to have an evasion tank that is skill based earlier, not sure if it was you, I like this idea. The problem is that once it is mastered it will break the current balance WAR and PLD have in how tanking works in the game. Dancer as an evasion tank, as funny as it sounds, in theory or paper would work, unfortunately would never work quite as well in game. I would love to see a different style of tanking in the future that is not a replica of generic MMO tanks that exist now. Not only in this game but all MMOs. WAR has a somewhat different approach to tanking but still linear. Do you have any thoughts about making a different way of tanking?

[Kitru]

I believe someone stated that it would be nice to have an evasion tank that is skill based earlier, not sure if it was you, I like this idea. The problem is that once it is mastered it will break the current balance WAR and PLD have in how tanking works in the game.

This is actually one of the major problems with skill tanks in general. The idea behind them is that how good the player is affects the performance of the tank. In a game state where you've got static tanks and skill tanks, the skill tanks *inevitably* outperform the static tanks when they're played properly. WAR is *supposed* to be a skill tank, though its crippled by the "skill" aspect relying upon a non-scaling self heal and a CD suite that is laughable at best.

Do you have any thoughts about making a different way of tanking?

It's important to separate the *style* of the tank from the mechanics that it uses. Style exists on a continuum between static and skill based. A pure static mitigation tank would have absolutely no CDs and a pure skill tank would have no passive mitigation (i.e. cloth grade armor, no parry chance) but a massive and diverse suite of powerful CDs and would have the same mean mitigation. Every tank (barring a few from games like City of Heroes/Villains), however, exist as hybrids of varying degrees. WAR is more skill intensive than PLD, but PLD still has a skill aspect attached to it what with Flash's Blind debuff, Stoneskin casting, and the fact that it even *has* a CD suite (even if said suite is super simple to use).

On top of all of this, even the *mechanics* of a tank are not completely discrete. WAR and PLD both have aspects of evasion tanking in them because they can dodge (more than the passive amount as well given that PLD has Flash, WAR has Featherfoot). They've also both got self-healing, given that PLD also gets access to Bloodbath (PLD also gets Cure, but I think we all agree that Cure on a PLD is a joke). The mechanics really are spread into 4 categories: static mechanisms (defense, Shield Oath), RNG mechanisms (dodge, parry), reactive mechanisms (increased healing received, self healing), and proactive mechanisms (increased hp, absorb shields). All tanks draw from at least 2 of those (static and RNG) and most draw from at least one of the others.

Even within the mechanics, there's further categorization because you have to analyze tank survivability across 2 discrete areas: eHP (i.e. burst survivability) and mean mitigation (i.e. how much healing you have to get). RNG and reactive mechanisms do absolutely nothing for eHP and a large portion of reactive and proactive mechanisms don't scale effectively and, as such, have drastically diminished value on mean mitigation. This is less of a difference between tanks and more of a necessary consideration: all tanks *need* to have a satisfactory minimum eHP so that they don't just die, which means that you can't rely upon reactive and RNG mechanisms too heavily, and all tanks *need* to have roughly equal mean mitigation (just *roughly*; it's often considered entirely appropriate for "unreliable" tanks that have lower eHP thanks to relying more upon reactive and RNG mechanisms to have higher mean mitigation; the same is often true for skill tanks who really *should* have some benefit for the increased skill required to play them effectively).

So, with all of this in mind, there's a lot you can do to make a new tank, though it's not so much creating a new *style* of tanking but creating a new combination of the existing elements that is both interesting and hasn't been done into oblivion before.

Style-wise, tanks almost always end up being at least 75% passive tanks, simply because that's the baseline that you have to build off of, what with heavy armor, parry rating, and all of the other tank stats that make it so that you're more durable than a DPS even when you're just facerolling and doing nothing else. PLD ended up with about 80%: high armor, shield, and the CD suite is strong but provides a good deal less when you average it out. WAR is about 70%: Wrath generation/consumption matter a lot but you're still. When designing a new tank, the automatic stuff like high defense and parry rating cover at least 50% of that. The tank stance and constant effects would add another 20%, so you really just have to decide how to allocate the remaining 30%, which is more of a question of how you're going to design the overall playstyle and CD suite, which gives you a lot of room to play with.

As to mechanics, you have to play a delicate game but you can do some really weird stuff that really hasn't ever been done before. Imagine a tank with cloth defense, 65% evasion, and 100% +hp: measured against WARs and PLDs, it would take damage in very burst amounts and get healed for percentage-of-total-life less than either WAR or PLD (both of which are often considered to be *very bad*) but the fact that their mean mitigation is so high means that the healing is acting against a similar amount of incoming damage as a WAR or PLD. This imaginary tank would be a fully functional tank that uses a mechanical construct that I'm not sure has ever been used.

Of course, even with all of the weird ways you could put together the mechanics and whatever interesting playstyle you decide to give it, you still have to have the class make sense. Players are often willing to stretch credulity with the intersection of theme and playstyle/mechanics, but there are limits, especially when you're pushing extremes. How would you explain the imaginary uber-evasion uber-hp tank that I imagined up earlier? The only one that I could come up with was some kind of PGL based Berserker, but even then, it gets kind of wonky what with having a *completely* different measuring stick for performance. You have to *explain* how you got to where you are, which is why most tanks tend to be in bulky heavy armor (explains high defense) wielding "heavy" weapons or no weapons at all (suggests strength or toughness since you're not really relying upon finesse), while also keeping player perceptions in mind (people tend to think that big weapon + heavy armor = tank and light armor + small weapon = DPS and most aren't really that good at gauging the comparative performance of tanks without just looking at hp and, with one class that has double the hp, it gets really weird for many players, especially healers).

It because of this last point that tanks often end up being considered so generic: when you go too far away from the standard mold, people start freaking out and not knowing what to think. City of Heroes/Villains had a *lot* of different mitigation loadouts (Regeneration, which was pretty much all self healing; Invulnerability which was a lot of passive damage reduction with a healthy dosage of dodge; Stone Armor, which was almost all damage reduction and some self healing; Super Reflexes which was *all* dodge; and a whole slew of other sets that ran the gamut) which did a lot of weird things to the community where you couldn't even be sure how a tank would perform without looking at their powersets (a Fire Armor tank wasn't really a tank so much as a durable DPS and an SR Scrapper would oftentimes fall over dead for no apparent reason because the RNG just decided that it was time for them to die). It also had *loads* of balance problems because there was so much diversity, but that's a completely different point. People really didn't know what to think about a lot of different sets because they all performed *so* differently, and the same is true when you start looking at creating a suite of tank job/class options for a game: you have to have enough classes to provide a reasonable number of thematic and mechanical options and each of those options needs to be different enough from each other to justify its presence while not being *too* different that it boggles the mind of the uninitiated (imagine how a random pug would feel when a tank with 10k hp joined their AK group *and they found out that 10k is actually on the low side for that class*).

Personally, when I'm designing a class, I try to go a bit heavy on the skill side of the style continuum (70%, so noticeably more skill oriented than "average") and draw from as many of the mitigation mechanics as makes sense for the class itself. I don't really go into building the mechanics and then choosing a job to put over it. I'd rather look at the job and build from there.

[cearka]

I want dancer back soooo bad.

[Nahara]

As to mechanics, you have to play a delicate game but you can do some really weird stuff that really hasn't ever been done before. Imagine a tank with cloth defense, 65% evasion, and 100% +hp: measured against WARs and PLDs, it would take damage in very burst amounts and get healed for percentage-of-total-life less than either WAR or PLD (both of which are often considered to be *very bad*) but the fact that their mean mitigation is so high means that the healing is acting against a similar amount of incoming damage as a WAR or PLD. This imaginary tank would be a fully functional tank that uses a mechanical construct that I'm not sure has ever been used.

This was essentially my thought process when I was putting together my idea for how a Dancer tank would work (link in my signature). The amount of damage they sustained would be about on par with the Warrior and Paladin, because while getting struck would make them take more damage than a heavy-armored tank, those infrequent, clean hits have to get through their protective network of Dodge, Parry, and Perry Strength.

[Kitru]

This was essentially my thought process when I was putting together my idea for how a Dancer tank would work (link in my signature). The amount of damage they sustained would be about on par with the Warrior and Paladin, because while getting struck would make them take more damage than a heavy-armored tank, those infrequent, clean hits have to get through their protective network of Dodge, Parry, and Perry Strength.

The problem with your idea is that only has the RNG mitigation mechanisms to rely upon. It would provide it with the necessary mean mitigation but do absolutely nothing for the eHP, which is the problem that people always bring up with traditional evasion tanks. Your DNC as tank would need to have a *massive* increase to its max hp to justify the reliance upon dodge and parry rather than static mitigation. It's for this exact reason that I don't see Dancer making much sense as an evasion tank: does it really make sense for a *dancer* to have twice the hp of a Paladin? It makes sense for a Berserker since, you know, Berserker, but *Dancer*?

[Codek]

Although it would require a complete re-work of balancing all classes (very unlikely to happen), I think it would be cool if the Dancer was built as a tank where it generates exceedingly high threat at the cost of not being able to tank hard hits.

This is how I would vision it:
1. DPS damage and threat would first need to be opened up to the point where they have the ability to exceed the current tanks threats by a high amount with the reward of high DPS.
2. Bosses will generally be built with the idea that they will eventually reach a point where it's far to risky to allow a dancer to continue tanking (say at 30% HP left).
3. The Dancer will build high threat while being a semi-effective tank early on and swap out with another tank for surviving the ending phase.

For balancing purposes, I would give dancers a crutch where they have an ability that allows them to block/parry only when it's spammed. This sacrifices all Threat gen for eHP and that ability can be used to balance the difficulty of keeping them alive for hard hitting moments (if need be). If not enough threat is built up during the early phase, then it's a wipe as the dance can't risk using any other abilities to generate more threat.

This would allow strategy where having a dancer work with another tank will maximize the most DPS can do. There would probably also be a need for more synergy between PAL/WAR to keep that combo relevant as well.

[PiedPiper]

Rather than a dancer, I would think that a xi style ninja (I know, I KNOW, ninja supposed to be enfeeb dps, and ninja kinda broke 11, just wait) could be an interesting evasion tank. I really enjoyed the play of balancing shadow casts, it required a lot of up-keep and timing, it was a bit skill intensive (more than current pld is). So lets not call it ninja, or dancer, lets call it "Ative Casting Dodge Character."

At present, both tanks have the same ehp. I would see no reason not to continue this trend for all future tanks. Not that odd for a martial/eastern class--monks and blackbelts have always had ALL the hp. From a balance perspective, as a pld, I would resent a new tank with a higher base line eHP. Now, (in theory) warrior gets a healing bonus, paladin gets a flat damage mitigation bonus, so we would need to add some new flavor here. This would be the passive bonus that is the buffer to keep the tank alive should thier activie mitigation fail--basicly "should rng decide they need to die" and they fail to dodge. Would be silly to make it just "always dodge x % of an attack" cus that's just nimble pld. Perhaps a deathward style move (like sentinel/snow in 13, not that I have much positive to say about him) that prevents any attack which hits the ACDC for say, 30% or more of its total health from killing it (leaving them with 1 hp, next attack would kill of course since the ACD now has less than 30% hp to loose).

The class would also perhaps lack flat mitigation cool downs, getting only cool downs centered around its dodging. Maybe, the main enmity combo grants 1 shadow at the end, they ahve two - three spells on lenghty (15-30-45) cool downs that are timed to cycle complexly together, a major cool down just resets all shadow cds (or one that acts as an instant cast). Perhaps their three minute coold own could be two instnat shadows (I feel all tanks should have one button that says "this next attack, this one next attack, I can solve this." For PLD this is sentinel, for War this is thrill of battle.

I don't think it should be possible for a tank to keep 100% evasion, but 60-75% with "perfect" play could be reasonable. The tank would be cured at the rate of their total hp as a pld, but take the damage of a warrior when hit. Thier play would center around choosing exactlyw hich attacks to mitigate / what time periods to be evading. This tank would be essentially invuln for some periods, but need heavy healing for others. They would be the hardest class to heal while taking damage, but be able to give their healers rest periods.

[ByakkoSeven]

I would like to kinda see some sort of implementation of a deflection tank rather than evasion tank... so dmg gets spread across others, rather than constant dodging all dmg at all...

[Techro]

Imagine a tank with cloth defense, 65% evasion, and 100% +hp

Dancer would fit. I am in favor of doing these sort of things "weird stuff", this leaves the game as a wide open market for you. I believe that FF will eventually get to a point where there are enough classes/jobs where one can create their own version of something. Even though there is a certain measure of skill you will have to add. There will always be a "casual" way to play through any game > Paladin. FF is encroaching on adding difficulty on a level where the casual and the "pro" players can enjoy the same content.