Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[Thunda_Cat_SMASH]

snip

Uh... You're gonna have to explain the joke, I don't really get it.

[ADVSS]

possibly they can bake in damage buffs with rotations, ie disembowel in the ct combo etc. make dancing edge the secon part of aoelian, idk.
to the drg tanking lost city, i had a similar experience on my monk, when a tank left i ended up tanking the entire dungeon by spamming aoes uand such, it wasnt easy but it was managable. it kind of sucks that potd has taught us that tanks are useful only if a healer is present, otherwise another dps is better

[Shurrikhan]

possibly they can bake in damage buffs with rotations, ie disembowel in the ct combo etc. make dancing edge the secon part of aoelian, idk.
to the drg tanking lost city, i had a similar experience on my monk, when a tank left i ended up tanking the entire dungeon by spamming aoes uand such, it wasnt easy but it was managable. it kind of sucks that potd has taught us that tanks are useful only if a healer is present, otherwise another dps is better

Wait what? Disembowel IS the second part of the CT combo, and making Dancing Edge the second part of Aeolian Edge (replacing Gust Blade) would cheese almost all rotational thought in NIN dps.

And what sucks about finding a new meta for your irregular conditions (killing it before it reaches you, split tanking, and kiting, in the case of 4-DPS PotD)? I prefer to be able to the situation and make something new and interesting out of it than to just sit hesitant because you don't have your role quota.

(And heck, I rather enjoy Monk tanking, especially if I don't have to worry about any else's positional dps. If there's another melee with me... then I typically prefer Dragoon for tanking on a DPS class, or just having the party gradually figure out how to split tank and make the most out of Cure III and HoTs.)

I disagree. It's not even the meta that is wrong. It's the players' skill and mentality.

That. Exactly that.
And it's not even just the dps people fail to figure out. Kiting? Covering for squishier members? Mob gathering? Stunning key targets? oGCD debuffs? Tracking allied CDs? Not so much.
Hell, soft-swap tanking to keep up CD coverage on boss strikes? Nope; would rather dedicate an OT to wasting their toolkit or, at best, spending it on triple Fell Cleaves.

Very true. And having played DRG/BRD/BLM it is great fun calling them out (especially the bards... they have support but often refuse to use it).

Admittedly, I'm less likely to use it until my opener is done if I can't use it pre-pull (see no-countdown pulls) and there combined magic damage is considerably less than mine. In a heavy caster comp, though, I'd happily repop it on a third bar of mana to sync with their cooldowns if need be. Just a matter of payoff vs. butthurt (from tanks running from the edge of the arena, without prior indication, pulling the moment the last guy enters the room).

[Frowny]

I know it doesn't, I was poking at players who didn't read tooltips and claimed Foes reduced their damage and thus didn't want to use it. All these has happened a lot in the game so far, nothing much you can do when most players aren't improving themselves and a huge chunk of these players don't want to be pointed out for doing low DPS which actually makes runs significantly slower and even worse in harder contents, DPS check seems to be a common theme that most people aren't too fond of.

Very true. And having played DRG/BRD/BLM it is great fun calling them out (especially the bards... they have support but often refuse to use it).

[Sarcatica]

possibly they can bake in damage buffs with rotations, ie disembowel in the ct combo etc. make dancing edge the secon part of aoelian, idk.
to the drg tanking lost city, i had a similar experience on my monk, when a tank left i ended up tanking the entire dungeon by spamming aoes uand such, it wasnt easy but it was managable. it kind of sucks that potd has taught us that tanks are useful only if a healer is present, otherwise another dps is better

But having a tank makes dungeons easier though because tank is designed to take hits more than anything else. DPS will require more healings than tank as well. PotD is in this spot where you can solo it just fine, because as long as you don't tank too many mobs, nothing ever hits so hard and you have pomanders to aid you inside. I'd expect (I hope) new PotD at 150++ floor will require some serious compositions to tackle it through especially when rankings are at stake.

[Sarcatica]

Hell, woft-swap tanking to keep up CD coverage on boss strikes? Nope; would rather dedicate an OT to wasting their toolkit or, at best, spending it on triple Fell Cleaves.

This one depends on encounters actually. Most of the times though, a DRK/PLD can take hits for themselves and it only makes sense to do so if you are competent enough and are also into getting extra DPS through procs from Shield Swipes and Reprisal/Blood Price. This excludes mechanics that forces tank swap ofc.

[ADVSS]

But having a tank makes dungeons easier though because tank is designed to take hits more than anything else. DPS will require more healings than tank as well. PotD is in this spot where you can solo it just fine, because as long as you don't tank too many mobs, nothing ever hits so hard and you have pomanders to aid you inside. I'd expect (I hope) new PotD at 150++ floor will require some serious compositions to tackle it through especially when rankings are at stake.

true that, but have you tried 3 dps dungeons before? As far as the players skill making their dps terrible, how do you suggest that the devs could attempt to fix that issue its sort of something they cant fix, but is an issue that can cause content like story nidhogg completely unclearable even. Which can be a serious issue. if not addressed or fixed, which to me is probably why theyre doing this as their way of addressing the issue

[Sarcatica]

true that, but have you tried 3 dps dungeons before? As far as the players skill making their dps terrible, how do you suggest that the devs could attempt to fix that issue its sort of something they cant fix, but is an issue that can cause content like story nidhogg completely unclearable even. Which can be a serious issue. if not addressed or fixed, which to me is probably why theyre doing this as their way of addressing the issue

All of the guides on how to do huge damage are all made by the community. Openers are more or less the same with some variance on the fights, then the rest comes with properly managing your combos, dots, damage modifier and so on. It's safe to say that these players don't bother looking for those guides because they have no need to, or perhaps they just don't care at all. This IMO creates the illusion of "as long as I clear, my DPS is good enough", then comes the harder contents where they are struggling to clear and THEN this leads to another few problems like "my DPS was fine in that previous run (when in reality the person in question might have been carried in DPS), these other DPS are just doing very low DPS" or "I am doing low DPS and I need to improve". Now, stop for a moment here. Majority of the players do not know the real metric of their own DPS nor the standard of what they should aim for. This is for sure on SE, how do you improve players' skills to DPS better? There are multiple of ways to help players realize they are doing suboptimal DPS. The obvious one is to put a parser into the game so everyone has access to the information. But this has been a very controversial topic ever since ages ago and it remains that way, people even take it too personal and DPS players tend to be the offenders so far. SE probably can't put a gate to lock players out too just because they are incompetent to dish out standard DPS to clear like any Story mode which most players would be playing heavily.

For example:
1. DRK's whole DPS plan is on the Delirium when you wanna save mana, use mana for CnS and Souleater (DADP on mobs), have Blood Weapon up as much to be able to spam more DASE.
2. PLD's DPS = Goring Blade dot up all time, Royal Authority spam, shield proc for Shield Swipe, SwO up for as much as possible, maximize FoF on best 13 GCDs.
3. WAR's = Fell Cleaves, Maim and Storm's Eye up, Overpower/Decimate on mobs, Berserk appropriately for the best 9 GCDs.

Each and one of the DPS plans for everyone is based on their own priority system, DPS roles have their own priorities and even healers have them too.

SE needs to take a real stance (for the worse or better) to lessen the skillgap between top players and your averagejoes.

[Duelle]

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.

That doesn't have anything to do with the discussion. For every "PLD is the main tank" proponent you also had people like me that wanted to see neither tank get preferential treatment, because an unbalanced tank roster is only going to cause problems as the game ages and more tanks are added.

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.

This is also partly because of encounter design. Encounters that allow solo tanks work when the expected raid comp is 1 tank, two healers and 5 DPS. Problem is that the standard raid comp has two tanks, which makes this a really glaring problem when you take into account that the whole of raiding in this game is basically corridors leading to 1 boss. And this comes because raid comps are built around singular bosses instead of taking the whole raid instance into account. In a raid with 6 bosses, you can afford to make one or two bosses require a single tank with the second tank pretending to be a DPS because you still need that second tank for the other four bosses; ARR's raid design never took this into account.

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.

DRK also had the expectation of being a DPS since we already had a tank that used a two-handed weapon. Even now I say it was unnecessary and a ploy to lure people to the tank role by dangling something they wanted, even if it was in a role they had no interest in. For better or worse, it worked (I won't go into the precedent this sets nor the risk it represents for future jobs).

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 is also more of an encounter thing. An encounter where one guy grabs the boss and another grabs adds, or you have two bosses that are equally dangerous and must be kept apart, or absorbing tank-killing hits, or having both tanks split damage; all these would have encouraged people to look at tanks as equal participants. Also keep in mind the guys that wanted to not tank and pretend to be DPS as WAR were the ones pushing for it to be an off-tank (and shot down by myself and others with similar mindsets because, again, all tanks should be on equal ground).

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.

You can't dismiss aspects of tank gameplay under the guise of simplicity. Firstly because simplicity is not a bad thing. Second, it's not as easy as you claim, nor should be called the bare minimum when the point of being a tank is to survive, hold aggro and be positional and situationally-aware.

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 gameplay you're claiming comes from stance swaps was already there, specially in the case of PLDs. Even without the swapping nonsense, a PLD can easily weave in Royal Authority and Goring Blade as long as you have an aggro lead. At the most you drop Rage of Halone's debuff for 1 or 2 seconds between applications if you rotate all three. DRK also has similar damage combos and priorities built into them (though a little more generous due to Power Slash's large enmity bonuses).

Stuff got murky with WAR between Defiance/Deliverance's lack of a cost/penalty (unlike the Oaths and Grit), clearly unintended shit like triple Fel Cleaves and lack of mechanical punishment for tanking outside of Defiance/Shield Oath/Grit. The issues became even clearer when I saw the complaints that Shield Oath and Grit were flawed for costing MP and breaking combos when it's really that the devs forgot to add a cost to WAR's stances and simply rolled with it instead of admitting they screwed up. That raids used tank DPS as a crutch to not spend as much time gearing their DPS to meet checks didn't help at all.

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.

There's a reason I've been arguing for melee getting real interrupt abilities instead of 2 second silences and stuns on 25-second cooldowns (barring PLD). That aspect of combat design is a mess and I hope is one of the things the devs are looking at for 4.0. You can even justify gameplay simplification of melee DPS if you end up giving them interrupt duties and the like.
Non-sequitur:

nonsense about compliments

Now you project things that have nothing to do with me.

I personally dislike things that come from unintended use of mechanics because, as our friend Utsusemi has taught us, it creates problems down the road and messes with a LOT of design variables if left to fester. In addition, rolling a tank and being told to pretend to be a DPS with defensive cooldowns makes no sense, because that's not what you roll a tank for. You can have gameplay to deal decent damage (again, PLD with Goring Blade and Royal Authority joining Rage of Halone), but the metric you place so much value on is one that came from a design oversight and unintended use of a job's abilities/mechanics. The design itself points to using your various combos while staying in Shield Oath/Grit/Defiance when taking hits to the face (the fact the first two have actual costs and penalties, combined with the fact WAR has Unchained to bypass Defiance's damage penalty points to this) while doing the things expected of the tank (hold aggro, mitigate, being spatially-aware).

Funny thing is that I'd have no problem with it if the behavior in question had remained exclusive to one of the three tanks; we would just call it a gameplay aspect of that tank and move on with our lives. It's not, and some are using it to try to label others as poor players despite them doing nothing wrong (because a DRK in Grit establishing aggro with Power Slash then switching to Souleater/Delirium combos or a WAR in Defiance keeping Maim and Storm's Path/Eye up while also taking advantage of Butcher's Block high potency are playing like tanks), so I'm obviously going to voice my concerns.

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.

That literal tank also doesn't make itself softer when firing the giant cannon; the sturdiness of its plating stays exactly the same. Though I guess this would be part of an argument to remove stances entirely. And as I've said, if we're going to devalue the role of Shield Oath/Defiance/Grit in tanking, we might as well do so.

Entirely unrelated:

Attempting to placate the side I currently oppose, I'd offer the compromise of turning one of the tanks into a hard mode tank. We can have it require stance swapping to perform its primary function, effectively require a lot more button presses and ability management to deal its damage and mitigate. Kind of like a "hard to learn, really hard to master" type of tank.

Here's the caveat -- at maximum performance, it's no different from its contemporaries. Similar mitigation, utility and damage potential. It's not guaranteed a raid spot, and still has to compete with "simple is best" demagogues like me. Assuming this is truly about the gameplay ("tank gameplay is so boring") instead of questionable pursuits, we'd all get what we want, right? Those like me get to play like tanks, and those of the other side can press all their buttons and swap all the stances, with both sides generating similar results so that no one gets kicked to the curb.

[Lyth]

The problem with guides is that they're often designed for target dummy conditions. So while you can memorise and practice the rotation if you're completely lost, unless you understand the rotation from first principles, you won't be able to adapt to more complex situations. Do you know why the moves are listed in that order? Do you know their potencies? If you're playing at a slightly higher latency and you clip at points, can you adjust the rotation to adapt to it?

To be fair, some guide makers try to account for this and create a number of case scenarios. Use this opener if you're MT. Use this opener if you have a NIN. This can become quite dense to read. Ultimately, the guidemaker ends up learning more about their job from writing the guide than the novice player does reading it.

There are things that we sometimes take for granted when explaining a subject. What's the function of an oGCD? Which skills are oGCDs? What is DoT clipping? How do DoT ticks work, and how do I calculate the potency loss from clipping? DoTs are an important element of every job, but I've only seen one job guide (for SMN) actually explain the math behind it.

This brings me to another problem: math. There comes a point where you need to put the guides aside and figure out for yourself how the potencies trade-off. Most of this is just napkin math involving simple addition and subtraction, but quite a few people find this daunting.

There's a lot more to dps than the sequence in which you press the buttons. 20-25% of your overall dps as a tank or melee dps comes from auto-attacks. If you're not physically glued to a mob all times, you're losing a substantial chunk of your dps, regardless of your rotation.

When a mechanic comes up, you can see players' attention immediately shift to the mechanic. Suddenly, dodging or moving to the correct position takes the complete focus. Buffs, debuffs, and DoTs are dropped. Contact with the boss/mobs is broken, and dps drops. This is partially from lack of exposure, and partially from a fear of screwing up and wiping the raid.

But mechanics need to stay in your peripheral vision. You know exactly when it's coming. You can see the AoE markers appear, but it's not time to move just yet. You know exactly when the mechanic happens, and you leave at the last possible second, and come back to the boss at the earliest possible moment. This is especially important for jobs with very high APM, such as NIN and DRK, where you could be losing two attacks to other jobs' one. To play melee well, you have to be absolutely relentless. Guides can't really teach you this, but watching and playing with players who you know are better than yourself can.

In fairness, the auto-attack change in 3.4 was partially designed to address some of the performance difference resulting from differences in melee uptime.

DPS is a good way of assessing your overall performance and tracking your progress over time, but it's not particularly useful for actually getting better. Some people look at it and get discouraged, either giving up or getting angry at the system. Others pat themselves on the back, and use it as an excuse not to push themselves harder. Other metrics, such as DoT/buff/stance uptime are much more beneficial to making improvements. These all indirectly reflect in your dps, but they actually tell you where the loss comes from. I feel like this is feedback which can be provided to the player without their peers becoming overly judgemental.

The main challenge isn't recognising that you've made a mistake. The main challenge is in figuring out where it was made, and how to fix it. That's why some players continue to improve while others stagnate. They're just good at self-assessment.

EDIT:
@Duelle:
The discussion regarding PLD is linked to that thread we referenced earlier in the discussion "Four Ways to Die". Truth is, the idea of tanks maximising their damage output is not a new idea in this game. WAR OTs were experimenting with pentamelds as early as first coil, and it was well accepted in the community. It only suddenly became a "problem" in Gordias, when there was suddenly (gasp!) a legitimate alternative to the MT slot. There were a lot of MTs who had become entirely too comfortable playing in a style which was extremely sub-optimal, simply because expectations were low (who cares about their dps, they're just the MT) and non-tanks didn't pick up on it. When MTs were suddenly forced to change because dps checks got tighter and people finally caught on, they lashed out against it, which is really what that thread was about. This may not be you specifically, but I cannot bring myself to respect that kind of behaviour. We need to be challenged. We need to be accountable. We need to get better.

People tried to make DRK into a lot of things that it wasn't, based on whatever preconceptions they came in with. I'm personally delighted with how it turned out. Weapons are generally either one-handed or two-handed, so outside of a three-handed weapon user, it sounds like you were against the idea of another tank. I find MT interesting, but outside of very specific fights, PLD's gameplay generally doesn't cut it for me. I learnt to MT T9 on WAR during initial progression because I was desperate to find an interesting alternative, even though I have a preference for the sword aesthetic. I'm sure that there are other tanks out there who enjoy playing specific roles, but the playstyle that they're looking for doesn't exist yet. That's why we get new jobs every so often. Attracting non-tanks to the role is a bit of a bonus on the side.

You talk about tanks "pretending to be dps" disparagingly, as if they're sacrificing their ability to tank by outputting more damage. The thing is, because they know the damage patterns of a fight, they can do this without sacrificing their defensive capabilities. You only need to keep your shield up all the time if you don't have any idea when the damage goes out. True mastery of the fight comes when you know the damage patterns well enough to understand when this is necessary and when it is not. They do more dps because they mitigate more effectively, not because they sacrifice it wantonly.

I suppose I've tended to gloss over some of the things that you consider to be critical because, if you don't do those things, you can't tank (price of entry). But most of those things are significantly easier to do when you don't push yourself and play extremely safely. You can play with 100% Shield Oath uptime and mitigate tankbusters even if you know nothing about the fight. Some players may still struggle with it, but it really is the bare minimum required to clear. The skill ceiling is much, much higher, and that's what we're talking about.

If this doesn't fit you personally, then don't take it personally. Not everything that I'm writing is directed solely at you.