Four Ways to Die - why the Tank Meta feels "off".

[Rhaja]

I really enjoyed reading this post last night because it addresses so much of the issue. When I was maining a WAR in 2.1 I fell in love with the damage focus of it, and went all STR before Xeno made his guide which greatly helped justify my focus. However when I look back to tanking in WoW, and being a "tank" in Guild Wars 2, the thing I loved the most was being a wall. I remember pulling a lot of enemies and laughing while quoting Wallace from Fire Emblem "HAHAHA! Come, break your weapons upon me!"

While tanking is fun in this game, that concept of being a wall is completely gone. You have so little control over beefing yourself meaningfully that it just feels completely pointless. The only time I stacked VIT was while leveling DRK because my fiancé told me how off the healing felt for AST. What really gets me about the all STR focus though is it only feels fun on WAR.

WAR is like an adrenaline rush. I haven't had a chance to level it past 50 yet, but I remember getting massive crits with Inner Beast and how good it felt. Because even though I was doing the damage, I was also setting up a six second window of reduced damage and getting healed for it. Inner Beast was great, and WAR's kit worked so well around that method. I remember how great it felt when I learned I could pop Vengance, Berserk, Maim, and Blood Bath while spamming Overpower in DD first room pulls. I busted out laughing when my buddy told me he gave up healing me and instead dropped aero on as many mobs as possible before going into holy spam, and then going back to healing. It was great because it was designed like that. I don't get that sensation on DRK or PLD, ever. Its just "Yay did a nice crit".

My buddy who also fills the role of pocket healer rolled WHM for two reason. "To be the whitest mage ever" (aka a beast healer) and because he loves the support role over anything else. I remember him enjoying doing some damage as a healer, but he never wanted to focus on it. For him, even on his PLD, it was always "Backup DPS". He considered it a bonus for great party performance, not a requirement. When he's on his toes and having to keep the party alive he's truly enjoying the game. When he has time to DPS he's half bored and ready to call it an early night. Now with AST and it's cards he gets more of a support sensation while healing, but to him DPS is the lazy, boring side of an MMO. (yes he's tried maxing damage, it still doesn't do it for him.)

But in regards to the tanking topic, it's as I've said in FC chat "If there was an honest benefit to stacking VIT I'd be wearing all Fending right now. But so long as Emnity benefits from STR, and self healing benefits from Attack, there is no point in having that extra thousand or two HP when I can regain that in one Soul Eater."

[Lastelli]

Very interesting read, but I believe that you might have missed a point. The tanking meta actually hasn't changed so much, it's just that the content has become more difficult, thus forcing midcore raiders into adopting a hardcore style. Alexander savage is harder than coil. This is savage after all, the idea behind it is that you can only clear it if you go somehow beyond the boundaries of your job. The real big issue here in my opinion is that there's no midcore content currently, so those parties that engaged coil in a more casual way, taking their time, waiting for the next step of the relic weapon saga to finally beat that dps check have nothing to do except trying to do some savage only to find out that it is beyond their reach. But the "aggressive style tanking" has been a reality since the second coil at least, as well as the the hybrid dps/healer style for sch.

[Sapphidia]

Very interesting read, but I believe that you might have missed a point. The tanking meta actually hasn't changed so much, it's just that the content has become more difficult, thus forcing midcore raiders into adopting a hardcore style.

I've seen people use this argument a lot, and they're missing the point. Yes, it's more difficult. Yes, more difficult content needs more optimisation from tanks and healers to contribute to DPS due to the enrage timers. But this is EXACTLY WHAT THE PROBLEM IS.

Where's the boss that hits so hard you need to rotate cooldowns constantly for 2 minutes then tank swap so your OT can do the same whilst yours cool down? Where's the boss that kills you in 2 seconds if you don't meet minimum HP requirements and get constant shields. Where's the boss that requires paladins to weave stoneskins between auto attacks because they hit so hard? Where's the boss that needs a paladin spamming clemency as an offtank because the healers run out of mana? Where's the boss that needs Warriors to time constant Inner Beasts for 2 minutes solid else they run the risk of being one shot.

THIS is the problem. The challenge is ONLY about DPS. Tanks are walking into content undergeared (eg, 190 gear in week 1 of alex savage when it's more tuned for i200) and are not only surviving absolutely fine, but they're spending over half the time in their DPS stances and wearing Slaying accessories. Where's the reason for a tank to gear up or improve their skill at -mitigating- damage. "Difficult content" does not just mean "hard dps checks". It's just one sided and boring design to have encounters that ONLY test your dps output and force you to do nothing but think of DPS outside of a few scripted tankbusters. Of course, it's probably equally boring to only have pure incoming damage mitigation being the only test of a tank. It's a balance issue.

I'll leave you with a quote from a raider that replied to my reddit copy of this thread, that states it all better than I could:

I just think it's sorta ridiculous that I'm tanking the legs in A4S outside of grit, with 4x slaying, both of my healers are in cleric stance, and I'm literally being kept alive with a regen and one heal ever 20 seconds.

Bring back tank damage

That's the issue. Tanks are being tested on their ability to do damage and there's almost zero incentive to actually become -tankier-.

I'll certainly concede that the DPS tank meta existed to a degree in the coils, but not to the amount we have now. T5, T9, T13, all did huge amounts of constant tank damage and although it was certainly -possible- to do these in . Heck I remember the first batches of T13 had all the healers and DPS in additional vitality gear to be able to survive all the constant bursty AOE damage if i'm correct?

I may be wrong but I don't think any of the first clears of those turns had tanks spending 80% of their time in their DPS stance and wearing full slaying the whole time whilst healers spent most of their time in cleric stance? I'm sure there was SOME DPS stance tanking but those are all encounters where you can really feel the additional "security" of having a well geared tank with a decent enough HP pool.

[SpookyGhost]

I largely agree with the OP. When I first leveled WAR and got into tanking (XIV is the first MMO I've taken seriously) I heartily enjoyed being able to self heal for such absurd amounts - at the time, that was the fun of WAR. Obviously at that time WAR wasn't balanced well enough to make the self healing actually... manageable so things were changed greatly in 2.1. In a sense, WAR got homogenized with PLD, they didn't really develop the self healing aspect and instead focused on % mitigation. WAR still had self healing, but the focus became more about being able to deal high tank damage in and out of tank stance while providing solid utility and having solid mitigation (especially in the form of IB, which was amazing vs Death Sentence at the time).

STR based tanking started with WAR. At first it was to increase the self healing returns you'd get from IB - in place of having more gear, you could stack more STR and get higher healing output. This was good, however because of the way WAR was designed having less health and more self healing only made you a bigger pain for the healers to understand when they needed to heal you (possibly leading to your death). In 2.1, STR based tanking became a bit bigger and it was used for a different reason - damage. Gryphonskin accessories became extremely good, providing not only VIT + STR but also DEX (which actually affected Parry at the time, as well as Block for PLD). Things evolved more and more over time and the meta started to shape around it. Eventually we found ourselves in 3.0, where tank damage is extremely important and STR tanking has become the mainstream way of tanking rather than the niche.

The reason for this, as pointed out, is that damage on the tank is simply too low and DPS checks are too high. Mitigation easily takes a back seat to damage - yeah, you still have to mitigate damage to deal it, but tank stances are largely ignored because there's simply no reason to use them. Miunih posted elsewhere that tanks and healers are essentially DPS with added responsibility - I agree with this, and I think the OP has the same mindset. You can't really be a beefy tank without hurting your group, which is the last thing you should ever want to do in Savage content. I think a lot of tanks, especially PLD mains, don't like the current meta and are just forcing themselves into it for the good of their group.

I personally like dealing large damage as a tank and balancing my defensive CDs to compensate. As WAR, it requires strict learning of the fight GCD to GCD and it feels extremely engaging. I think that this is the main draw of DPSing as a tank - it feels like you've put in a lot of work to get rewarded with more damage.

I was going to post this in another thread, but I think it sort fits the mold here. Active mitigation is something often discussed in regards to tanking in MMOs - it's been solidified into WoW tanking as a whole and it shows up in other games too (Lancer in Tera is basically BUILT on actively mitigating). I think this might be a good way to take tanks in XIV, and I think it wouldn't be too hard to do. IB currently costs 5 stacks of Wrath, reduces damage by 20% for 6s, and will heal you for the damage dealt. If Sheltron and DA + Darkmind were made more similar to IB, I think that they could up tank damage massively outside of tank busters and still give us that feeling that we're actually doing something that has an effect on survival. My idea is essentially to make Sheltron and DA + DM mitigate both damage types and have a small CD, adjusting IB to compensate if needed (say 3 stacks instead of 5). Then give Sheltron and DA + DM additional effects - say Sheltron gives a small Convalescence effect or DA + DM gives a small potency damage reflect. Obviously other adjustments would be made and this is by no means perfect, but I think a shift to making tanks actively mitigate large damage (in a non-RNG way) would satisfy both camps.

[Sapphidia]

Yeah I think the main point of my post was simply : This is how the meta is. This is -why- the meta is. This is why the meta feels fun to a lot of warriors and other players who favor aggressive dps, but understand there's a lot of players who are unhappy about this and don't enjoy it.

I don't think the meta is likely to change, and I think the mechanics of the game in general are likely to make it too hard to drastically alter the entire way tanks go about mitigating stuff. That said, some small quality of life changes, some gearing changes, and a bigger focus on high incoming tank damage in hard encounters would go quite some way to making it not feel quite so hugely swayed into the "dps>all" camp.

[Deezee]

I've gotta give you kudos for such a thought provoking post... I first saw it on reddit and posted a bit there but have continued to think about it and came here to see what others had to say.

I've seen people use this argument a lot, and they're missing the point. Yes, it's more difficult. Yes, more difficult content needs more optimisation from tanks and healers to contribute to DPS due to the enrage timers. But this is EXACTLY WHAT THE PROBLEM IS.

Where's the boss that hits so hard you need to rotate cooldowns constantly for 2 minutes then tank swap so your OT can do the same whilst yours cool down?

We could argue whether there aren't already fights that meet this condition (I feel as though there are) but rather than do that, let's just cut to the chase...

There is no such thing as "actively mitigating damage" in this game. To mitigate you pop an off global cooldown defensive ability. Depending on the type of damage that's coming in, you can pop several in a row and stack them, or you can spread them out over their durations. That's about all there is to "actively" mitigating damage in this game. At the very highest tier of active mitigation you have applying your damage down debuff if it's necessary (Rage of Halone / Delirium / Storm's Path), or something like Shelltron/Inner Beast/maybe reprisal fits here but not really since parry procs are garbage because parry is garbage and if you can't rely on your mitigation happening it's not worth building strategies around. Aside from that you can increase mitigation by choosing to be in your tank stance (if you're a PLD or a DRK).

What are you doing for the rest of those 2 minutes while the damage is coming in? The same thing anyone else is doing: using their GCDs. And what are tank GCDs built around? Dealing damage. No matter how you tune a fight, no matter how much super damage is coming in and how much you make the healers baby sit the tank, the fact of the matter is there's not really a thing such as "active mitigation" - you can only turn on cooldowns at the right time. They're oGCD. So the rest of your time is spent optimizing your GCD rotation, which revolves almost entirely around doing damage.

Without fundamentally redesigning any combination of game systems, tuning fights so that you're taking boatloads of damage and healers having to babysit you isn't going to make you "feel" tankier. Even if you tuned a fight to be so damage intensive that both healers had to maintain 100% uptime on both the tanks who both had to be in tank stance the entire time (and WARs were out of favor because they didn't have a mitigation buff in their tank stance) AND you had to wear full fending to have enough HP to survive a buster or high damage phase... that doesn't change the fact that all you do to actively mitigate stuff is optimize an oGCD rotation that consists of like 8 skills (generally 4 of which are actually useful and the other 4 you just kinda use because they're they're to press) and, if you're a DRK, pray for reprisal procs. Other than that, just as with any other fight in the game, the rest of your time is spent managing your GCDs, and all of your GCDs have to do with dealing damage, and with healer DPS out of the question because of the uptime, you've actually ironically created a scenario where tank DPS is that much more important. (No, you can't bring the hypothetical maximum amount of tank DPS to the encounter because they're locked to fending and tank stances as per the hypothetical, but they still need to optimize their GCDs to do the most DPS, especially with the loss to healer DPS and because there's nothing else to do with GCDs on Tank classes.)

If anything I'd feel LESS tanky in this kind of playing field because I'd constantly have to pray my healers could keep me up and there's nothing for me to optimize once you figure out the very easy and always the same optimal cooldown rotation timing. Moreover any type of safety net you could have from self-healing potential would be down the drain because you've dumped all your STR so now all your self heals are crap.

TL;DR: If you want to "feel" more like a tank who's "doing everything" they can to mitigate damage so that the rest of the raid can do what they're "supposed" to do, then you need to fundamentally change what tanks do for their GCD rotations (ie, create some kind of system where every GCD is effecting your mitigation somehow) which would require redesigning and rebalancing almost everything about the game.

[Ibi]

Also for the idea of VIT increasing defense, there were previous systems that used VIT as flat damage reductions and PDEF/MDEF as percent damage reduction. Obviously, the calculations are different in FFXIV, but that might be one suggestion to promote the use of VIT. It still runs in to the problem of a soft cap for survivability though and the high demand to meet dps checks.

They could also replace the VIT on Fending accessories with Blunt/Piercing/Slashing Resistance (since the stats exist in game, and are almost completely ignored at present). As you say, you still run into a soft cap, but at least Fending accessories become theoretically desirable that way.

[RapBreon]

Love the current meta; looooooooooooooove beating DPS on DPS (when I'm not playing DPS for my static).

[Syzygian]

This thread and everything in it, and in the entire tanking forums i guess (related to these survivability vs. dps issues with tanking) frequently does not cop to the fact that everything tanks are getting away with doing right now is due in large part to healers, and the skill involved in executing these kinds of encounter approaches wherein tanks are forsaking all forms of passive mitigation for raw DPS is something that healers are 99% entitled to.I don't play my job any different when using a DPS build than I do with a tanking build. But a healer's job changes immensely between those two choices I make. Too many tanks run around these forums essentially championing their healer carries. Its been mentioned elsewhere, but being carried by DPS is far less shameful for a tank than being carried by healers, this is pretty universally excepted MMO logic and I feel it still holds true even in this DPS-centric meta.



I personally am one of the wall minded tanks that has adapted to the DPS meta. On A3S right now wearing 3 pentamelds and 2 i210 slaying rings, and spending about half the fight thus far out of tank stance. I feel terrible honestly, but healers are so used to this they aren't accustomed to seizing the opportunities that more bulk on my part would provide. In progression in savage the DPS difference between my DPS build and my tankier build is about 150 DPS on my part for the former and about 100 dps for SCH and 50 dps for WHM on the latter. This obviously varies widely between not only different skill levels but also playstyles, comfort with the fight, and varying strategies/CD rotations. But it illustrates to me that, at the very least, approaching a fight from a more DPS-minded standpoint on the part of the tank does negatively impact healer DPS and limits how they are able to play their jobs to some extent no matter how small.



The other big problem that the OP alludes to is that the issue is with choice. Tanks have a choice of what to equip and how to play their job and one way is seen as correct with respect to progression and one is seen as correct with respect to intended gameplay and design. Both make reasonable arguments but again, Tanks by their very nature must be adapatable and thus regardless of preference tanks will adapt to whatever trend is leaning towards an advance in progression.



Anyway the solution to this problem should be something simple and minimal; the simplest solution is often the best one.



For healer DPS: Get rid of cleric stance, replace it with a stacking buff that continues to grow the longer a healer goes without casting a non-damaging ability, starting out weaker than cleric but being able to stack up much higher than cleric, granting near DPS-level numbers and rewarding parties for finding strategies that allow healers to make use of their DPS tools rather than neglecting half their skillset for most engame encounters.

For tanks: Restrict access to other jobs accessories, give tank accessories about half the STR that you see on equivalent ilvl slaying accessories, and an equal amount of vit (roughly equivalent to current pentamelds).



This will enable both tanks and healers to deal solid damage, encourage tanks to creatively manage CDs around mechanics to allow healers to maximize DPS uptime while still dealing high damage themselves, and allow raid design to stay the same since in all likelihood, it probably won't change much.

[Dererk]

One of the other problems as a tank is str determines how much hate your generating on mobs so more str means your going to have an easier time holding it.

And I find it frustrating on trying to figure out how to gear right side because of the acc cap for tanks so this is another problem I think.