Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[Shurrikhan]

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).

How would stance-dancing as an option be redundant with, rather than enhanced by, combo choices? From the very moment I got Goring Blade onward in leveling, especially before the enmity buffs and if my DPS were actually really good for once, I was typically swapping once per FoF, scoring an enhanced GB, RA/RoH, RA, GB with both damage buffs up for the multiplicative bonus, because it was worth the occasional extra RoH per tri-combo in Shield Oath in order to allow that much greater damage contribution later. Preparation and pay-off, small-scale and large-scale. If that seems a redundancy to you—no, I don't what to say—and if it doesn't, I don't get the what point is here.

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.

I don't believe the triple Fell Cleave was in itself unintended at all, nor do I think they "forgot" to add a cost to WAR stances. WAR had a variable stance cost in 2.x. Changing from DPS non-stance to a stack-retaining DPS stance two levels later would seem to be purposeful removal of that cost on a theme that SE felt should WARs should push over the added levels. What I think they may have underestimated is the communities' tendency to gawk and stare, and to sacrifice potentially greater returns for unique strength, just because the latter's more spectacular (namely: OT WARs blowing all their defensive abilities for 3FC, again and again, even if no single MT has the toolkit to handle all incoming damage on its own unless the whole team can actually manage to push phases, which at starting ilvl will take more than just the OT's added damage).

Then again, they did make the original, typically-a-DPS-loss variant of Wanderer's Minuet. So if the same team's behind each, who the hell knows?

As for the last bit, I've just never personally seen this. I've only ever seen the MT prioritized up to what the expected necessary eHP is for the next floors, or the shield-healer as an alternative when necessary for raid survival, the nuke-healer for output, or the top dps. OT's always seemed to be back of the line.

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.

[?] Because doing the math and knowing exactly how much health you need, and how little healer potency it will cost compared to your bonus potency, is a questionable pursuit?

Forgive me if I'm reading too much into this based on your suggested WAR changes before with near-obligatory swaps just to use certain weaponskills, but wouldn't that just be a high APM tank, rather than a hard mode or high skill-ceiling tank?
And why remove a huge portion of interesting gameplay from every other tank, pigeon-holing all any "skillful play" tank into a single job?

If you don't care about maximizing performance to achieve better results, then what would be wrong with finishing raid content with a like minded group a couple weeks later than others?
And if you do care, then shouldn't you be looking to add skill ceiling and entertaining concepts and complexity to your preferred style of play instead of simply trying to devalue anything that would compete with it? Why only the reductive?

Your "placation" here is basically a "I don't like how things are done now, so let's exile those who do to a fringe camp as to have less sway."
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@Lyth
Kind of makes me wish a XIV version of the real-time complete tracking warcraftlogs was an official thing... But in the meantime, at least it's easy enough to learn the breakpoints and spot-configure rotations according to mechanics. So long as one actually spends the moment to consider the math.

Makes me wonder if SE will eventually try to go to actual depth on any of these core mechanics in their in-game tutorials, or if we might eventually get improvements on mentor, or even some form of spectator, systems.

[Ultimatecalibur]

I don't believe the triple Fell Cleave was in itself unintended at all, nor do I think they "forgot" to add a cost to WAR stances.

...snip...

Then again, they did make the original, typically-a-DPS-loss variant of Wanderer's Minuet. So if the same team's behind each, who the hell knows?

I actually think that Triple Berserk Fell Cleave was unintentional. Without Client/Server latency from long distances (a situation the expansion was likely tested in with the QA team being in/near the server building) and on paper, 3FC every 90 seconds is impossible without a GCD of 2.22 or less. This latency problem is likely what also caused problems for WM and other abilities at release.