Tank adjustments we can agree on?

[Sapphidia]

Hypothetical question: how would the balance of the game be skewed if the three tank stances didn't come with -20% damage?

So Shield Oath/Grit was literally less damage taken and extra threat, and defiance was threat, health, healing and access to different moves. Paladins and Dark Knights would stay in stance 100% and only drop stance when they wanted to tank swap and dps something without having huge threat. Warriors would probably sit in Defiance a lot more and mostly just stance dance to use specific moves.

I only ask as that was how i've seen other games do it - take WoW for instance, where the tank stance for protection paladins was literally "you do more threat with this on" and nothing else. Outside of PvP balance, tanks didn't really suffer a damage decrease in their tank stance (and if they did, it was compensated for by access to moves/talents that ended up doing more damage when tanking compared to a DPS stance).

The issue right now is that as Freyyy has stated, Warriors are designed to stance dance because they have a kit that allows access to different moves in different stances. Stance swapping is accessing different parts of the toolkit. A Fel Cleave is -far- more damage than an Inner beast both due to the potency AND the damage down of Defiance. Equilibrium has both uses. I guess steel cyclone/decimate is fairly similar. But in general, Warriors have been designed with the dancing in mind.

Paladins and Dark Knights -seem- like their stances are merely a "role designation" from the view of the devs - they're either in "I'm tanking something" or "I'm the OT and just DPSing at the moment" modes, as they're so much clunkier to toggle and they don't have anywhere near as much impact in the skill use. They're purely a "do I want 20% damage or 20% less damage taken" toggle that doesnt flow with their abilities, but the player base has minmaxed to the point where they're using a clunky kit in an optimal way that -probably- wasnt how the devs intended the class to be played.

I'm not saying removing the damage penalty is the answer, but it feels like if they arent going to make Grit/Oaths easier or more fluid to swap in combat, they should make tanking in the tanking stance more desirable. What if, for example, they hugely buffed the threat and damage of Shield Swipe and made it apply the Slashing Down Debuff.... but you could only use the skill in Shield Oath? Something like that so paladins and drks feel like actually being in their tanking stance isnt for the most part an entirely negative thing.

Most tanks now, on hard content, use their tank stances in the same way they might use a short duration cooldown: incoming damage, pop tank stance + rampart/skin or something, absorb big hit, back to DPS stance. This feels fine for Warrior due to the fluidity of the kit, but just feels "off" for the other two tanks.

[SpookyGhost]

Hypothetical question: how would the balance of the game be skewed if the three tank stances didn't come with -20% damage?

Unchained would need to be changed, other than that I don't think it would have any real negative effect.

[Freyyy]

A Fel Cleave is -far- more damage than an Inner beast both due to the potency AND the damage down of Defiance.

Inner Beast ignores the damage penalty of Defiance. It's just less potency and -5% because you're not in Deliverance. Otherwise, I agree with everything you said.

[Duelle]

Hypothetical question: how would the balance of the game be skewed if the three tank stances didn't come with -20% damage?

So Shield Oath/Grit was literally less damage taken and extra threat, and defiance was threat, health, healing and access to different moves. Paladins and Dark Knights would stay in stance 100% and only drop stance when they wanted to tank swap and dps something without having huge threat. Warriors would probably sit in Defiance a lot more and mostly just stance dance to use specific moves.

I would welcome this to a degree, as that would put a dent on stance-swaps while MTing (something I want to very much see be tossed into the void to never return).

It'd bring the 3 tanks closer in personal DPS since with slashing debuff PLD and DRK are supposedly around 10% behind WAR. This would however also call for Unchained to be redesigned since it'd serve no purpose if your suggestion was implemented, and that would potentially cause problems if it were turned into yet another DPS booster for WAR.

The issue right now is that as Freyyy has stated, Warriors are designed to stance dance because they have a kit that allows access to different moves in different stances. Stance swapping is accessing different parts of the toolkit. A Fel Cleave is -far- more damage than an Inner beast both due to the potency AND the damage down of Defiance. Equilibrium has both uses. I guess steel cyclone/decimate is fairly similar. But in general, Warriors have been designed with the dancing in mind.

I'll contest this. Deliverance, Fel Cleave and Decimate are there to give WAR an answer to Sword Oath while off-tanking. My guess is something in the way abilities are programmed required Deliverance/Defiance be off-GCD so as to not lose stacks (since losing 5 stacks of Abandon/Wrath when swapping is a much stiffer penalty than interrupting combos and losing some MP). The way Equilibrium works also hints to this, since it's a self-heal in Defiance (turning it into a decent recovery cooldown while tanking) and TP recover in Deliverance (to help TP upkeep while off-tanking).

If the job were truly designed around stance dancing, the cooldowns on Deliverance and Defiance would be 2.5s instead of 10s. You'd also have more diverse abilities per stance instead of essentially DPS versions of Inner Beast and Steel Cyclone. It's pretty clear the devs felt WAR not having access to something akin to Wrath stacks while off-tanking was a bit of a waste, and it was corrected with the HW skills.

Paladins and Dark Knights -seem- like their stances are merely a "role designation" from the view of the devs - they're either in "I'm tanking something" or "I'm the OT and just DPSing at the moment" modes, as they're so much clunkier to toggle and they don't have anywhere near as much impact in the skill use. They're purely a "do I want 20% damage or 20% less damage taken" toggle that doesn't flow with their abilities, but the player base has minmaxed to the point where they're using a clunky kit in an optimal way that -probably- wasnt how the devs intended the class to be played.

Looking at PLD and DRK, one can see they were designed to stay in Shield Oath/Grit while tanking and going Sword Oath/Darkside-only while off-tanking/DPSing.

What if, for example, they hugely buffed the threat and damage of Shield Swipe and made it apply the Slashing Down Debuff.... but you could only use the skill in Shield Oath? Something like that so paladins and drks feel like actually being in their tanking stance isnt for the most part an entirely negative thing.

This sounds like a good idea.

[Teiren]

but the player base has minmaxed to the point where they're using a clunky kit in an optimal way that -probably- wasnt how the devs intended the class to be played.

This is exactly correct, and this is exactly what's upsetting me. This game started out being as casual as possible, which is why Oaths/Grit work like they do, and I think they need to keep it that way because people will just go back to WoW if they try to do overly difficult/annoying gameplay. However, at the same time even people that don't play MMORPGs to death will eventually learn and grow frustrated with this Oath/Grit system (many probably already have), so they definitely should change it.

Most tanks now, on hard content, use their tank stances in the same way they might use a short duration cooldown: incoming damage, pop tank stance + rampart/skin or something, absorb big hit, back to DPS stance. This feels fine for Warrior due to the fluidity of the kit, but just feels "off" for the other two tanks.

I'm not primarily a tank, and I haven't done Savage yet, so these are all honest questions that I'm not trying to be accusatory or inflammatory with:
How is this possible?
Why would a tank stress out his healer(s) like this?
Putting aside player psychology (which is still important), isn't healer DPS higher than tank DPS?
Therefore, aren't you contributing more DPS by reducing damage taken by as much as possible in order to let the healer DPS more and heal less?

I've played WoW for many years, and if a tank ever tried something like this they would die before the healer could heal them. Is Savage's damage output on the tank really not deadly enough? It already seemed almost lethal on Normal before everyone outgeared it to hell and back. Burden of the Father's burst was somewhat a nightmare. I assumed it would scale up properly in Savage.

[Lucke]

Putting aside player psychology (which is still important), isn't healer DPS higher than tank DPS?
Therefore, aren't you contributing more DPS by reducing damage taken by as much as possible so you need to be healed less often and letting the healer DPS more?

As I understand it, of the 3 classes, DRK and WAR DPS blows PLD DPS out of the water. So going VIT PLD and Shield Oath while letting the healer DPS is just as good as a WAR or DRK pushing out DPS at the cost of having the Healer heal more rather than DPS. So really, I guess it depends on the tank. I go full turtle no matter what though, to make healing me a little less stressful.

So like in terms of DPS: VIT/SO PLD with healer DPS = STR WAR/DRK with healer healing.

[karateorangutang]

As I understand it, of the 3 classes, DRK and WAR DPS blows PLD DPS out of the water. So going VIT PLD and Shield Oath while letting the healer DPS is just as good as a WAR or DRK pushing out DPS at the cost of having the Healer heal more rather than DPS. So really, I guess it depends on the tank. I go full turtle no matter what though, to make healing me a little less stressful.

So like in terms of DPS: VIT/SO PLD with healer DPS = STR WAR/DRK with healer healing.

In most cases yes WAR will blow PLD DPS out of the water, especially in aoe situations. I run STR on my PLD too and running in SwO is never really an issue. The issue with PLD isn't single target DPS in SwO, but its DPS in ShO and AoE damage potential in comparison to DRK and WAR.

Also at the end of the day, there is almost no situation where tank dps won't be greater than healer dps. That goes for PLD too ( again AoE is an issue here).

[karateorangutang]

I'm not primarily a tank, and I haven't done Savage yet, so these are all honest questions that I'm not trying to be accusatory or inflammatory with:
How is this possible?
Why would a tank stress out his healer(s) like this?
Putting aside player psychology (which is still important), isn't healer DPS higher than tank DPS?
Therefore, aren't you contributing more DPS by reducing damage taken by as much as possible in order to let the healer DPS more and heal less?

I've played WoW for many years, and if a tank ever tried something like this they would die before the healer could heal them. Is Savage's damage output on the tank really not deadly enough? It already seemed almost lethal on Normal before everyone outgeared it to hell and back. Burden of the Father's burst was somewhat a nightmare. I assumed it would scale up properly in Savage.

I'm no expert either, but this is what I gather. In the current meta tanks can achieve the survivability needed fairly easily. Since fights are so scripted and generally auto attacks hit like wet noodles then you can coast pretty easily in DPS stance most of the time without being a giant burden on healers. A good tank with a good awareness of a fight can switch back and forth without placing a huge burden on MP. Additionally, the tank's DPS when doing this is greater than the DPS the healer could be doing otherwise.

The only way to fix this problem without changing stances would be to make healer DPS sufficient enough to make the extra time they would have while we are in our tank stance worth more than us being in DPS stance.

Then we are talking about total game balance though and that is an issue. Honestly though when I'm running tank stance on bosses, etc. The amount of extra incoming damage is completely laughable.

[Freyyy]

Putting aside player psychology (which is still important), isn't healer DPS higher than tank DPS?
Therefore, aren't you contributing more DPS by reducing damage taken by as much as possible so you need to be healed less often and letting the healer DPS more?

Absolutely not, it's the contrary. The DPS a healer gains from a tank being more tanky is and will always be inferior to the DPS a tank gains from going STR + DPS stance. The reasons for this are simple : Healers need to completely stop to perform their primary role in order to start DPSing, whereas tanks can do both at the same time, they're damage-dealing jobs and constantly hitting the boss. Tanks have most of the time even more uptime than DPSers themselves on the boss. The second reason is that healers don't meet the accuracy in order to have 100% hit chance, so their DPS is at some degree tied to RNG on raid content. Even with melded accessories with accuracy, they can't have enough to fully meet the cap. The only situation where healer DPS gain can be superior to tank DPS gain is for massive pulls during dungeons with a WHM and a PLD.

With that said, going into DPS stance and wearing STR in Savage doesn't stress out the good healers. The fights are completely 100% scripted and are always the same with almost no RNG involved except "who will be targetted by this mechanic ?". By good enough CD usage and proper stance-dancing, the incoming damage in this game are a real joke and completely predictable which makes healing more of a song to learn perfectly and repeat everytime you do the same fight than just being like "oh this guy got hit, I heal him, oh my god this tank got destroyed, I need to heal him right now !". It's more like "Oh, we gonna get raid-wide damage soon. Pop mitigation, make sure everyone is topped off, pre-cast AoE heal/hots. Tank is getting only auto-attacks for a little bit of time now, let's keep regen on him and SCH go cleric stance. Oh, spike damage on the tank incoming in X seconds, let's stoneskin/adlo him and make sure he's topped off, he uses a CD so he will take almost no damage, top him off, throw a regen, go back to DPS."
The tank being in DPS stance doesn't change anything about that. Fluff damage is still gonna be fluff damage. As long as you have your tanking stance and CDs for spike damage, there is no stress for healers.

[eagledorf]

Snip

Yes, basically the damage on the tanks in Alexander is a joke even out of the tank stance. It's a direct consequence of how they've designed Dark Knight (as opposed to PLD) and will probably continue until they abandon their entire philosophy surrounding DRK/PLD. If you watch my video of A4, you can see that the tank buster even with no cooldowns, in STR gear, and in Sword Oath leaves me with 7k HP or something while the autos are barely over a Fairy heal+Regen tick unless they Crit. The only time the tank is in any real danger is if the party is taking heavy damage and the healers are ignoring them. A2 is actually an exception for about 20 seconds right at the end, but that's about it.

Tank DPS is usually higher priority right now than healer DPS for a few reasons. One is that once a healer has their DoTs up, they're spamming low potency and high MP filler spells. Another is that stance dancing cancels your combo on PLD or DRK, which has the potential to be a major potency loss on top of that while healers can swap out and in perfectly smoothly (even smoother than WAR). The final one is that tank DPS is reasonably higher than healer DPS on single target (PLD included). It would require substantially more punishing content for mitigation to be worth it since healer DPS is higher than what is lost from being in the tank stance so if it starts becoming a question of if they can swap into Cleric and apply their DoTs or not it is better to play defensively.

As Freyy pointed out, it was like this prior to 2.0. It's a problem SE made for themselves with 3.0

@Freyy

The idea of Sole Survivor giving TP is a good one so I mentioned it in my OP post. The two issues I see with it are that it wouldn't help if there are no adds that MT can target shortly before they die and that if it works out of Grit it has the potential to be poorly balanced since DRK gets some TP regen already from Blood Weapon. I suppose the former isn't so bad since in the worst case scenario DRK still has Unmend and the latter probably wouldn't be too bad either (and easily fixed if it is).