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

[Dhex]

Currently everyone is a DPS role - with Healers and Tanks fulfilling auxiliary functions. Healers maintain raid health while maximizing DPS, and Tanks maintain monster orientation and utilize survival cooldowns while maximizing DPS.



If you roll back the clock to early 2.1 onward most Tanks were using large HP-pools and still needed constant attention. We were basically being baby-sat by Healers - all while contributing very little to completing the raid (killing the monster) outside of properly orienting/placement and utilizing cooldowns.







I personally would think it would be a step backward if as tanks we were again reduced to being baby-sat for the duration of an encounter.

[Hydrium]

I personally would think it would be a step backward if as tanks we were again reduced to being baby-sat for the duration of an encounter.

How would it be a step backwards to be able to focus on your mitigation? It's called a tank class for a reason...it tanks, if you were confused at character creation that's a problem on your end. As it stands it's like you said, we're all just DPS classes except some of us have a few more defensive options and a few others have some healing utility.

[karateorangutang]

How would it be a step backwards to be able to focus on your mitigation? It's called a tank class for a reason...it tanks, if you were confused at character creation that's a problem on your end. As it stands it's like you said, we're all just DPS classes except some of us have a few more defensive options and a few others have some healing utility.

This begs the question though.

Would it in fact be a step backwards?
I believe it might be.

Look at player trends from 2.0 to now. The more tanks were able to focus on DPS the more people flocked to play a tank class. It's dynamic, important, and fun. The real question isn't that tanks be tanks, it's how do you make tanks work in a game like this. Tanks need to have a feeling of power just like DPS and healers. In 2.0 they lacked that, hitting passive cooldowns in surviving damage was pretty boring to alot of people. This was fun for some, but the greater population hated playing tank. Many leveled DPS jobs and only raided on their tanks. As we progressed through 2.x you saw tanks gain more dps, it had the exact effect that you would imagine. Tank to other class rations went up. Queue lines went down. Tanks were more available then ever by the time 2.5 rolled around.

With the release of 3.0 they skewed it even further. There are more tanks in this game that in any other MMO I've ever played. They are considered to be fun to the greater population and that is a good thing. It's attracting new people to the roles and so we are a growing population that can keep up with the sheer numbers of DPS jobs in the game.

If this is replaced with a more classic meta there is a good likelihood that tanks will revert back to the state that they were in at release. Queue times go up for everyone and that strikes a bad balance with the rest of the population.

Theres more to look at then what you or I want. There's a trend in the ratio of these jobs to look at.

[Alahra]

Would it in fact be a step backwards?
I believe it might be.

This is almost certainly true and it's one of the main reasons I don't think we'll see any major decrease in tank DPS, regardless of how they adjust the calculations. I suspect what we'll end up with is tank DPS on par with full pentamelded accessories, so there might be a small decrease relative to going full Slaying, but I don't foresee tanks returning to the way they played in 2.0.

[Anthius]

The more tanks were able to focus on DPS the more people flocked to play a tank class.

Have they though? You're saying you notice more tanks. I myself haven't noticed any difference in the number of people playing tanks, none of the people I know, have switched, and in fact some people I know who do play tanks have stopped. My wait time as a melee dps in 2.0 was never long aside from when ninja's were first released and it's not really any different now so I don't notice this big influx of more tanks you seem to be talking about.

That being said I do think tanks should contribute to DPS, maybe a little less than they are now but not much. That is really up to SE who have the numbers to decide on where they want it to be though.

I honestly hope while they're adjusting numbers for tanks in 3.2 they remove the damage reduction from tank stances. Tanks should be at their best while tanking, and for me dropping my tank stance while tanking a boss just feels wrong. I do it, but I don't like it.

[AniCelestine]

My wait time as a melee dps in 2.0 was never long aside from when ninja's were first released..

Yeah an old post but really? Not long queue times back in 2.0-2.1? I gained atleast 3 levels crafting and gathering material for crafting per queue wait. I spent the rest of the 2.x patch doing dungeons/roulets as a tank cause of the 30+min queues as dps at the start. Now in 3.0 I get on my monk, select a duty, go on the queue (solo) it's about 20 seconds of waiting, rarely longer than 1min.

I guess Cerbeus didn't have tanks back in 2.0 and they migrated here from other servers during 2.1-2.5

/shrug.

As for people who don't enjoy the tanking meta in this game, don't tank. I see no reason to play as a class you don't like, but guess that's just me being weird.

/shrug

[Anthius]

Yeah an old post but really? Not long queue times back in 2.0-2.1? I gained atleast 3 levels crafting and gathering material for crafting per queue wait. I spent the rest of the 2.x patch doing dungeons/roulets as a tank cause of the 30+min queues as dps at the start. Now in 3.0 I get on my monk, select a duty, go on the queue (solo) it's about 20 seconds of waiting, rarely longer than 1min.

I guess Cerbeus didn't have tanks back in 2.0 and they migrated here from other servers during 2.1-2.5

/shrug.

As for people who don't enjoy the tanking meta in this game, don't tank. I see no reason to play as a class you don't like, but guess that's just me being weird.

/shrug

My bad on phrasing there by 2.0 I meant 2.X generally I don't remember 2.0 well enough but I don't remember 30 min wait times either, aside from right after the patch ninja's were released where we had hour long queues. Back then when I was queuing as dps it was 5-15 min as melee, and when I tried queuing as my ninja earlier this week it was more than 10 minutes before it popped.
Though thinking about it I do remember queues taking longer as a caster back then, to the point where I believe ranged dps gets a different queue than the melee for some reason, maybe something happened with the balance of casters vs melee to even out the queue times? I'm not even sure if that's how it works but from my experience in the 2.x patches it seemed to

I don't know, it's speculation I don't have the numbers.

As for someone's earlier comments on tanks being boring to play and eating while raiding. I think that's less class design and more on the fights since most fights seem to have less mechanics for the tanks to deal with than the rest of the raid.

[Dhex]

How would it be a step backwards to be able to focus on your mitigation? It's called a tank class for a reason...it tanks, if you were confused at character creation that's a problem on your end. As it stands it's like you said, we're all just DPS classes except some of us have a few more defensive options and a few others have some healing utility.

Because "focusing on mitigating" is boring. Nearly everything about incoming damage in this game is scripted and controlled. Most of 2.X you could have played one handed while eating a sandwich - save T5/T9.

Now we at least have to pay attention and contribute more than, "Critical button push! You survived the damage!" every 60s while on auto-pilot or drooling into our keyboard/controllers while our group figures out how to do enough damage or deal with a mechanic right. We matter now - our damage and ability to maintain output while still fulfilling our function to the party means what we, as tanks, bring to the table matters; and that's great because it makes the role more rewarding to fill.

Edit:

Additionally - Warrior in v1.22-1.23b was both. It fulfilled a DPS role and a Tank role - you stacked your Crit. Rate/Hit and STR materia and brought damage and self-healed. Warrior was at that point a perfect retaliation tank that dished as much damage as it took. When 2.0 dropped everyone who picked up Warrior was frustrated because it didn't function in the timed tank-buster script oriented damage output world we were/are playing in. Some people wouldn't take a Warrior (Titan HM) and in some cases couldn't take a Warrior (Coil Turn 4 & 5) because it didn't play like a traditional "pop a cooldown" mitigation first turtle-tank. It was not functional in that capacity so Paladin was king.

Why Warrior didn't measure up in key encounters was entirely because it's toolkit scaled off gear. Making pre-2.1 Warrior work hinged on being able to land a huge damage hit (Inner Beast) post-buster which - in turn - could literally heal you for most of your HP bar. Your healing bonus came from building & hold stacks. During big pulls you had to use Bloodbath & Vengeance together to weather trash packs Overpowering to maintain an inflow of HP & outflow of enmity; you did this until you could expend stacks safely to add damage/enmity/self-heal or had to expend stacks to make up a HP deficit. Since you had no PDT/MDT % cooldowns all mitigation was parry, stack building, and self heal all scaling off your damage. Defiance gave you your bonus HP - making VIT pointless. Yet people still stacked up on Fending accessories and couldn't understand why they seemed squishy. Warrior ruled against packs of monsters (still does). People figured out that melded equipment was the best way to make Warrior work 2.0 - to make tanks work better in general.

2.X players settled into a comfortable dual-tank setup where often Paladin was the primary target while Warrior dished damage and slipped in to manage a forced-swap mechanic or short high damage phase and nothing more.

This is a type of active tanking we do all the time now has been growing since BCoB - damage is central to function. Whether people can accept it or not. All tanks can sufficiently mitigate - only one suffers in the damage department currently. Square knows this and is going to address the situation.

I sincerely hope they don't go back to push-button-afk-eat-sandwich tanking with v3.2; they might change this or it may highlight this even more as it makes tanking invigorating and dynamic.