Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[Reynhart]

Personal dps does matter when it bolsters raid dps. Using the numbers you suggested, sure. But that's almost never the case.

IIRC correctly, that's how MNK, DRG and NIN are balanced, right ?

This seems like common sense; if you stop attacking an armored knight in order to cast a spell, they are going to stop defending and will proceed to beat the tar out of you.

Not necessarily. If PLD's spells were meaningful, it could be a great time to cast a really powerful defensive spell, without fearing interruption, to anticipate the next set of attacks.

[Sarcatica]

IIRC correctly, that's how MNK, DRG and NIN are balanced, right ?

The thing about raid DPS is both NIN and DRG have all the good utilities and they can output comparable damage. MNK becomes the selfish DPS that doesn't offer anything else other than the huge damage that matters way less than the 2 counterparts buffing the group raid DPS. No DRG means no Litany and your BRD/MCH will QQ. No NIN means no TA and that your MT will QQ. Both DRG and NIN give additional DPS that the raid enjoys which outweighs heavily the personal DPS that MNK brings. This is why you don't see any serious speedrun taking MNK, PLD (Faust Z parse has a 0:57 timing with PLD but the fight is short enough that PLD can still be used). Off calculation (i know its wrong to just compare 1 skill but whatever), FoF has more than 1/2 uptime VS Darkside at full uptime which means that you can "say" that FoF at face value wins by about 50% damage (overall 15% dmg from FoF for 1/2 uptime vs 10% dmg from Darkside for full uptime). Brain cancer-ed myself. Normally you have 1/3 uptime for FoF (that's 10%), but for this fight you enjoy about >>15% because it ends faster (0:57 timing), compare that to the flat 15% for full uptime for Darkside.

[Reynhart]

The thing about raid DPS is both NIN and DRG have all the good utilities and they can output comparable damage.

I think we can agree than reducing the time you stay in tank stance only increases your personal DPS. We could have utility skills for PLD and/or DRK (Since stance dancing is more clunky for them) not tied to stance dancing that would still increase raid DPS.
For example, PLD could have a Block skill on GCD. Meaning that it would take significantly less physical damage than WAR or DRK by blocking constantly (and would automatically sacrifice DPS), thus would require a lot less healing, increasing healer's room for DPS. As an OT, PLD could use its mitigation skills on the MT (adding it to the MT's own mitigation), allowing it to stay out of tank stance even for tankbusters, etc...

Off calculation (i know its wrong to just compare 1 skill but whatever), FoF has more than 1/2 uptime VS Darkside at full uptime which means that you can "say" that FoF at face value wins by about 50% damage (overall 15% dmg from FoF for 1/2 uptime vs 10% dmg from Darkside for full uptime).

Sorry, perhaps I don't understand your point exactly, but FoF has 1/3 uptime so 10% on average, and Darkside increases damage by 15%.

[Duelle]

I'm yet to see an official statement made to this effect.

This is because no one has bothered to ask the devs about that. Maybe whoever here is going to the London Fanfest should grab a mic and ask Yoshida about this during the Q&A.

PLD was no longer the de facto MT for every encounter, as it had been for nearly two years.

There's a difference between PLD not being instant MT and PLD not being wanted at all. So that part is built on a false premise. And I say that as someone who wants all three tanks to stand on equal ground instead of playing musical chairs.

It was no longer enough to simply to gear up with indestructible armor and go afk as a glorified striking dummy while the rest of your raid learned mechanics. Your team now had expectations, and you had to meet them.

This assumes tanks never have to watch out for things on their side, in addition to focusing on staying alive. I'd throw in things like being part of interrupt rotations and grabbing adds, but the first was never used after Coil and the second is rarely ever used.

Survival, aggro, positioning and spatial awareness are all crucial to the tank role. Not sure why you neglect to mention them.

The post points out that the main group who objected to this were "career tanks" from previous MMOs who came into FFXIV with preconceived ideas that tanks were supposed to be nothing more than damage sponges. Problem is, their "careers" weren't long enough.

Here you aim to belittle those who have played tanks before.

The people you're trying to insult are those drawn to the role of tank because they like the idea of holding a mob's attention while their allies stab the mob to death. Those people also know what comes with the role and the trade-off that comes with being a tank.

Stuff about MUDs

From a mechanics perspective, the whole point of a tank is that you trade offense for superior defense. Otherwise you could have any class doing the tanking as long as the healers are able to keep that person alive (basically the problem FFXI ran into once everyone could get -DT gear sets, causing people to mostly toss tanks to the wayside once a fight was learned).

Also keep in mind no one who understands gameplay designs would be against tanks dealing some damage. Otherwise we'd have people calling for the Lineage II Aggression spells (spells that dealt no damage but generated aggro equal to powerful nukes) as a means for all tanks to hold a mob. That's clearly not the case, especially since tanks need to deal some damage to do things out in the world (instead of taking forever to kill anything because your attack scaling is low, which I've seen first-hand) and it gives value to offensive stats since your enmity generated is tied to damage dealt.

We can start with removing the damage penalty on the tank stances, WoW did this because they realized (correctly I might add) that it's not necessary as long as the DPS stance provides enough of a buff that it's still more damage to be in said dps stance.

WoW had the benefit of mechanics that encouraged tanks to stay in their respective stances, though. Stances had been changed to act as the equivalent of gearing to defense cap by providing enough mitigation to make it desirable to not want to leave Defensive Stance/Blood Presence/Stance of the Sturdy Ox/Bear form as long as you were taking hits to the face (specially since in some cases your key tank mechanics were attached to the stances themselves). You were free to switch after a tank swap, which is fine.

[Lyth]

MNK, DRG, and NIN represent a trade-off of personal dps against damage buffs which boost raid dps. Tanks have one damage buff which boosts raid dps: Storm's Eye. It also happens to be on the tank with the highest personal dps. This is probably the main reason why you will see at least one WAR in every group. There are a lot of other quality of life features on the job that make it very comfortable to play, but tanks would find a way to work around having those if it conferred a raid dps advantage to do so.

It's harder to compare the value of a defensive ability or a utility buff to this, because you're comparing apples with oranges. A stoneskin cast from a PLD could free up a bit of extra healer dps. Then again, it might not. You could both end up shielding the same target (too many cooks spoil the broth: if you thought overwriting buffs was obnoxious with two healers, try doing it with a wannabe third). You could be paired with a healer who isn't taking advantage of the dps window that you're offering them. There's no hard and fast rule that says that a given defensive action provides a raid benefit.

This is part of the issue with PLD at the moment. PLD has access to some of the most powerful defensive and utility buffs in the game, which in turn gets balanced against its dps. These can be very situational. But when they do work, they can be very useful in progression, sometimes allowing you to trivialise or bypass mechanics. Once you and your group outgrow those defensive crutches, however, you're free to swap out to a higher dps tank. The majority of this fights this tier were physical, but they weren't tuned tightly enough to make PLD progression cheese necessary (that, and the fact that Reprisal's timings worked out extremely well for A11S).

I know that this is mainly a PvE discussion, but it's interesting to note that the same bag of gimmicks seems to have made PLD into a preferred tank for PvP, while DRK is relatively unused. Burst is more important in PvP, placing PLD and DRK on similar offensive footing. But their defensive and support capabilities are not similar. Their interrupt kits are not similar. You can't blindly give the three tanks identical offensive capabilities without consideration for their utility, interrupts, defensive and invincibility moves.

The offensive side of things is fairly straightforward. The defensive/utility side of things is a veritable mess.

To me, the ultimate tank design meta was WoW patch 4.3, where tanks did a good chunk of damage, but also had a lot of reason to be tanky (where "good tanking" meant holding aggro, positioning bosses/mobs well, navigating mechanics, mitigating tankbusters, and gearing for CTC). Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part to hope SE will move closer to that. Mind, that's just my opinion, so if we don't move that way, I may be sad, but I probably won't complain.

There's no problem as long as you have the ability to play aggressively, the ability to play defensively, and as long as the game constantly forces you to make decisions between the two. Weaker tanks either blindly keep tank stance on or blindly turn it off. It has to be a conscious decision based on your knowledge of the fight. I think part of the problem is that once people start to overgear content, you can pretty much stay out of stance of the entirity. But this is going to be a problem regardless, because you need to make it so that tanks of all skill levels can clear... eventually.

The most interesting element to tanking for me is effective movement and positioning. It also has the highest skill ceiling, although the auto-attack changes softened this somewhat. We're seeing a lot more fights which require movement, which in turn has made tanking a lot more fun.

[Reynhart]

It's harder to compare the value of a defensive ability or a utility buff to this, because you're comparing apples with oranges.

On my example above, if PLD could transfer Rampart and Sentinel to someone else, it's pretty clear what utility it could bring.
Suppose you have a WAR MT. For each tankbuster, it will probably use Defiance and (at least) one of its "increased eHP" skill. Considering that the effect of tank stance is around the same as Rampart, your WAR MT could stay in Deliverance, use its mitigation skills (Except Inner Beast, which seems to be avoided as much as possible anyway...) as he should have, and stack at least Rampart on top of that. And of course the PLD would stay in Sword Oath during all that.

Thus, having a PLD OT would increase the DPS of the WAR, without needed a personal DPS increase of the PLD of requiring the PLD to stance dance.
And I think it would fit pretty well with the concept of PLD

[Sarcatica]

I think we can agree than reducing the time you stay in tank stance only increases your personal DPS. We could have utility skills for PLD and/or DRK (Since stance dancing is more clunky for them) not tied to stance dancing that would still increase raid DPS.

That only applies to the DRG/NIN to the full 8 people benefiting from the buffs. It doesn't apply to tanks because that affects (kinda) how your healers heal you (even then, your tank stance uptime should be as long as you can take when you are speedrunning). When your mitigation is enough, anything else can be easily tunneled to DPS. PLD doesn't do anything too special either, block is not going to do anything much and again in speedrun, you are aiming to kill bosses ASAP and I can say for sure, DRK is better at this, you just have more CDs to use in a shorter fight. So no, I don't agree with "staying in tank stance" increases your raid dps. RUSHERS cleared A12s in less than 10mins. What do you think the tanks DPS at? Yep, at 1.5k++. I did almost 1.4k as DRK without AST, got 10:24 timing for A12S.

Alexander Speedrun tab: https://www.fflogs.com/rankings/13#boss=37&metric=speed

We have been at this for so long, IDK what to say anymore. There is no point to stay in tank stance because this topic is the skill gap you are witnessing, not because "tanks should be in tank stance to enable healers to dps more". It doesn't work that way if your healers are not good in the first place.

OPEN your eyes and see why these healers can still DPS and most of the healers you meet can't even heal properly. Same as most tanks and DPS. This is the skill gap between top raiders and majority of players.

[Reynhart]

So no, I don't agree with "staying in tank stance" increases your raid dps. RUSHERS cleared A12s in less than 10mins. What do you think the tanks DPS at? Yep, at 1.5k++. I did almost 1.4k as DRK without AST, got 10:24 timing for A12S.

So, basically, you're saying "Tanks can never increase raid DPS apart from stance dancing because staying in tank stance doesn't increase raid DPS now"...well, yes, it doesn't now, because the fights are only designed around this meta...that's the problem.

That's why I use, you know, words like "could" or "would"...

We could have utility skills for PLD and/or DRK not tied to stance dancing that would still increase raid DPS.

The game already has issues keeping three tanks and three healers balanced with this meta, what do you think will happen if we have a 4th one of each in Stormblood ?

Besides, speerunning is a totally different concept.

[Sarcatica]

The game already has issues keeping three tanks and three healers balanced with this meta, what do you think will happen if we have a 4th one of each in Stormblood ?

It's nothing new, there is always going to be the best jobs to bring to raid no matter what game you are in, top raiders just have to prepare themselves to be in that position to milk the future OPs.

EDIT: to elaborate, in all games anything near to perfect balance will never be achieved hence why you see defined metas, this applies heavily to the minority (top players) that affects the majority. When everything is balanced, game becomes stale and ofc no one wants that. When game introduces more fun things like utilities to whatever classes, guess what? There will still be no balance. People just tend to do whatever optimal and if you have been in games that top players have high influences, you will see the trend in that fashion.

[Lyth]

There's a difference between PLD not being instant MT and PLD not being wanted at all. So that part is built on a false premise.

In ARR, most players automatically assumed that PLD was the only possible MT, even though WAR was actually a better choice for many fights. We went through nearly the entirety of FCOB with people insisting that PLD was a superior MT for the first two phases of T13, only for six and seven-man carry groups to discover much much later that WAR was actually a pretty good choice. The problem wasn't the tank design, but player preconceptions. Even really skilled groups had them.

There were some fights in ARR in which the player base felt that a PLD solo tank was "optimal" and your OT would be required to swap to a 5th dps. That's really not cool. Hallowed's ability to bypass and reset stack mechanics played a role in this.

One of the reasons DRK was struggling to find a place in early HW was because players automatically assumed that two-handed weapons were less defensive than a shield. So they were trying to force it into a pure OT role which it wasn't really designed for.

Gordias had its share of problems, but actually seeing two out of four world-first clears on a non-PLD MT did wonders to change people's perceptions of tanks (half of the world-first clears in Gordias were still done on PLD, so it's not like there wasn't any demand). If you wanted to be MT, you no longer had to play PLD. This opened up the doors to not just DRK MTs, but WAR MTs as well. The responsibilities are more balanced as well, and we slowly moved away from the draconian MT/OT system to a more equitable way of divvying up the fights.

This assumes tanks never have to watch out for things on their side, in addition to focusing on staying alive. I'd throw in things like being part of interrupt rotations and grabbing adds, but the first was never used after Coil and the second is rarely ever used.

Survival, aggro, positioning and spatial awareness are all crucial to the tank role. Not sure why you neglect to mention them.

Sure. I've worked with some very skilled MTs in ARR who knew to do all those things while stance dancing and taking advantage of strength gear. But survival and aggro are fairly simple when you have 100% Shield Oath uptime and your only combo maximises damage, enmity, and provides a mitigation buff. It was very easy to get by on the bare minimum. It was only later in HW, when the skill set was expanded, you were forced to make trade-offs to make your dps count, that it became more blatantly obvious to non-tanks which tanks were genuinely talented and which tanks were simply coasting. You no longer had the luxury of Halone Shield Oathing your way to victory.

The reason why mandatory interrupts aren't as common is because PLD has a clear-cut advantage over the other two tanks, both in its ability to chain stun and in its ability to silence. These have also historically given rise to situations in which the player-base has considered PLD to be mandatory. There are still fights where these come up, and there were three fights in Midas where these were beneficial, although there were ways to work around the absence of a PLD because the interval between silences can be handled by a single player. Interrupts are not hard to do; it's just a question of whether the player has access to the right skills.

Movement-orientated fights are only recently becoming more common. Skill in this area shows up in both your personal and raid dps. You can easily tell the player who manages to gently guide the boss to a new position without costing autos from both themselves and their melee (you can usually tell the players who have spent some time raiding on a melee dps apart from the ones who have only ever played a tank). This was less obvious in a lot of earlier fights, were you legitimately were a target dummy.

The people you're trying to insult are those drawn to the role of tank because they like the idea of holding a mob's attention while their allies stab the mob to death.

I'm sorry if I offended you. If you like getting compliments from your circle of friends on how indestructible you are, then feel free to play that way. But what I object vehemently to is when players want to remove performance metrics simply because they aren't able to make them. If my dps is terrible, then it's on me to fix it if I want to improve. I'm not going to try to pressure the devs to have dps removed from tanking simply so that I can feel better about myself.

From a mechanics perspective, the whole point of a tank is that you trade offense for superior defense.

Actually, the point of a tank is to know when to trade offense for superior defense. We're frontline combat specialists versed in both. Tanks may have armor, but they also come with a giant cannon.

On my example above, if PLD could transfer Rampart and Sentinel to someone else, it's pretty clear what utility it could bring.
Suppose you have a WAR MT. For each tankbuster, it will probably use Defiance and (at least) one of its "increased eHP" skill. Considering that the effect of tank stance is around the same as Rampart, your WAR MT could stay in Deliverance, use its mitigation skills (Except Inner Beast, which seems to be avoided as much as possible anyway...) as he should have, and stack at least Rampart on top of that. And of course the PLD would stay in Sword Oath during all that.

Thus, having a PLD OT would increase the DPS of the WAR, without needed a personal DPS increase of the PLD of requiring the PLD to stance dance.

This would be pretty cool, and you can kind of do this with Cover. One gripe that I have is that when you're OT, you typically aren't involved with tankbuster mechanics until it's your turn to swap in. I much prefer seeing things like Laser X Sword and Ahk Morn where you're forced to team up with your co-tank to fend off the attack.

Another alternative would be to give the OT a special move to perform a timed counter-attack to debuff the tank buster.