Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[Jpec07]

While I'd have to disagree in part with SE tending rarely to overshoot with changes, they do at least hold back better than certain MMOs, sure, and I do hope they consider exactly how they think the actual gameplay of the "DPS meta" is somehow wrong before they attempt to modify it, rather than taking forum labels as the end all be all. (Case in point: the so-called "dps fixation" was just as present at release; there were just fewer people maximizing their jobs yet and standing as guides to the others. The rest comes down primarily to fight design, one tier in particular, and hype's positive-feedback loops.)

The issue with the "death by a million needles" mantra is that it intends to de-emphasize skillful (read: timely & trimmed) tanking in order to force particular toolkit use. A high-party-dps-check fight does the same in the opposite direction, but if Midas and the Creator are any indication, that isn't likely to be the design direction anymore. Periodic and rotational attacks put more responsibility on tanks by allowing them to better focus their input- vs. output-scaling, but the only alternative to that is to literally try to take away control, or the rewards for learning a fight. In other words, it's a spectrum between either interceptable, memorizable/analyzable/somehow-knowable damage and faceroll damage that keeps you from taking any output gambles, or in doing so leaves you susceptible to RNG.

Now, there is probably some point of better equilibrium on that spectrum that can de-emphasize tank dps slightly without having to adjust stance multipliers, tank damage generally, etc., with minimal cost to skillful-to-rewarding gameplay. Alternatively, it may require certain tank toolkit revisions so that, apart from Inner Beast, our debuff weaponskills, and maybe the saving DA-SE crit, we aren't dependent solely on our cooldowns for mitigation, allowing more frequent damage and interception that less skillful players can more prevolently and with lesser loss use their tank stances for while more highly skilled players, now under an even higher ceiling, can still maximize outputs and avoid tank stance where possible if they so desire.

I suppose that's fair. I would like to see more white damage, though, and more reward for tanky tanks, but perhaps a million needles need not be stabbed (aside: Accupuncturist [ACP] could be a very interesting healing job concept).

They'd also need to be careful with that last paragraph, lest we fall into WoW's rotational mitigation gameplay, but I do think it could liven things up a bit, and make tanking gameplay more interesting without necessarily raising the minimum skill threshold (oh to have RoH be compelling!).

[Shurrikhan]

I suppose that's fair. I would like to see more white damage, though, and more reward for tanky tanks, but perhaps a million needles need not be stabbed (aside: Accupuncturist [ACP] could be a very interesting healing job concept).

They'd also need to be careful with that last paragraph, lest we fall into WoW's rotational mitigation gameplay, but I do think it could liven things up a bit, and make tanking gameplay more interesting without necessarily raising the minimum skill threshold (oh to have RoH be compelling!).

To me the ideal looks a lot like just... more stance-dancing, decisive enough to make each swap crucial and weight in the decision, but free enough to have lots of points that make that decision available, which by now comes down mostly to Oath and Grit revisions. My favorite way of playing WAR I found when doing minimum ilvl Ex roulette dungeons for kicks (good memories from around Pharos Sirius HM) where it become maximally efficient to swap pretty close to the cooldown (one of the reasons I've argued that Defiance/Deliverance's CDs, along with those of skills like WM, GB, and Cleric Stance, should scale with attack speed).

In the strict sense of the word, our mitigation is already more rotational than WoW's, in that we'd be ideally popping RoH/Del/SP every third combo for maximum efficiency, but yes, its definitely more integral to WoW tank's gameflow, where there tends to be a particular ratio of regular to mitigating/absorbing/self-healing strikes or between such ability tools and the resources funding them. While I wouldn't want to jump to that design style just because it might seem more intricate or appealing, I'd like to see it used where it can produce results — starting from the result desired, and then backtracking to an identity-appropriate tool, and hopefully making our tanks more distinct in the process.

Hopefully more distinct than WoW's tanks, even, because with the all-in-one idea (or if we actually took that further, such as by balancing out stat weights a bit more across jobs, keeping gear role-specific instead of job-specific, and maybe even revising the leveling system eventually) we aren't actually bound to the same necessary at-all-costs sense of balance that WoW's one main spec (or you're spending a whole lot more time) system is. We can take a turtlier tank, losing some dps there, and gain it back with greater healer dps or even some weird life-spender dps shenanigans across the rest of the group composition, as long as those designs are each individually appealing.