Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[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.