Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[Ekimmak]

I think MMOs have painted themselves into a corner by reserving all the fun, flashy stuff exclusively for DPS classes for so long while tanks get...shield bash. Now they're at the point where they have to practically bribe people to play tanks.

Maybe they should make it so that tank LBs are a requisite for most savage content?

I dunno. I'm quite happy to play tank, even if I my skill level is competent instead of brilliant. I think I prefer tanks because it's a lot easier to tell if I'm doing something wrong (i.e. the boss is hitting someone else or I'm dead). With DPS, you can't really tell if you're playing competently or not unless you go into SSS. I suppose healers have the same benefit, but I struggle a lot more with juggling "job role" and "bonus damage" because they have different targets between them.

[Reynhart]

So you've kept your hate above all your teammates.
Then what?
So you can survive the tank buster,

Now what?
What separates you from a common tank that can meet the same check?

I'd be really happy to answer these questions if every instance of "I wanna be challenged as a tank, not as a would-be DPS" wasn't brushed away by the community with a "Doing DPS is a tank's job"

[Shurrikhan]

I'd be really happy to answer these questions if every instance of "I wanna be challenged as a tank, not as a would-be DPS" wasn't brushed away by the community with a "Doing DPS is a tank's job"

And the broad alternative was given last page. With a single difficulty level, basing a tank's job much higher on mitigation events would mean that the difference between a good tank and a mediocre one isn't just dps, but primarily whether they're still living.

Now, I do really like a desperate fight to survive, but if every 20th second is a "do this or die", how is the average or under player going to feel when tanking? Rather than "I think you can do more dps than that, yah?" or "Where's mah stance-dancing, tank?" where most current fights don't need that much from the tanks anymore, you have death, repeatedly, from any under-performing tank.
Not to mention that there then becomes virtually no chance, under that added boss damage (only alternative being less combined mitigation/restoration/damage/utility from tanks, mostly from the mitigation side), of a dps being able to hold on for a moment of tanking when the real tanks go down.

Even then I do think it's a decent point for debate, as I think our goal constantly should be finding community and—better yet—ingame means to try to bring up our struggling players rather than dumbing down content for them (typically to their disbenefit, however more broadly inclusive we intended for the game to be in doing so), but just keep in mind that SE probably has a decent, if overly cautious, reason for what they've done with tanks lately—they're playing it safe.
Should they not? If so, what all should they change (in this one regard)?

[Sarcatica]

No matter what, tanks' DPS will still be a validated metric to judge if the tanks are good enough to clear raids. Even if SE designs raids around much higher tank checks requirement, you can't have tanks doing something like 500dps like most tanks will do realistically. Not to mention that hard tank checks mean that most tanks are still going to fail. Pros and cons weigh each other. I welcome a much harder tank busters like T13 or even harsher actually. If you like to be a turtle so much, you should prove how good you are at mapping enough CDs for harder tank busters. That's however still within the scope of raid tanks to do just as well as current meta, so nothing much will be changed anyway.

Basically it still comes down to how skilled you are, that's universal.

Most people here probably didn't even clear T13 before 3.0, much less before 2.5 ended. So you pretty much have the demographic supporting how most tanks couldn't cope with the hard hitting tank busters.

[Reynhart]

No matter what, tanks' DPS will still be a validated metric to judge if the tanks are good enough to clear raids.

Not necessarily. It's currently a valid metric because that's the only real way you can differentiate tank players.

Let's suppose another type of tank...
Disclaimers :

• Enrage is very lazy design. It should burn in hell unless it's explained by a very good lore reason (For example,killing a boss before something explodes...)
• I won't put actual numbers because it would require ground testing. So every reader is free to imagine what "a part of", "a portion of" or "a percentage" mean to be balanced
• I'll imagine a new tank job and don't bring any changes to the existing ones, since, even if I like the more turtle approach, I totally understand why some people don't.

...that we will call the Mystic Knight.

Contrary to other tanks, this one wouldn't have a DPS mode, but instead have two tank stances: Physical Shield and Magical Shield (Yes, these names arent't very sexy, but at least, they're obvious). What theses stances do is negate the damage dealt by the tank, but instead apply a stacking shield (With current value displayed on screen) for the same amount of the damage you should have done. (Applying a shield would give enmity) The shield will reduce physical or magical damage depending on the stance you're on (See, obvious names ). Like WAR, you would lose the shield you built if you don't have any stance.

So, the basic idea would be to master your rotation to stack the highest shield possible, since every boss attack would deplete it, and switch stances depending on the type of attack you want to mitigate. On top of that, you could have "mitigation" skills, that instantly increases the current shield by a fixed percentage, negates the shield depletion for a small duration, or reduces it but apply it to the whole party...

Thus, the main purpose of this tank would be to reduce damage (on him and on the party) as much as possible...which is pretty much what a tank is supposed to do, while still needing to work on its rotation to generate good numbers. The main difference is that every room you have to improve will still be tank-oriented, wether it is generating high "per second" numbers, or stance dancing.

[FallenWings]

Not necessarily. It's currently a valid metric because that's the only real way you can differentiate tank players.

Let's suppose another type of tank...
Disclaimers :

• Enrage is very lazy design. It should burn in hell unless it's explained by a very good lore reason (For example,killing a boss before something explodes...)
• I won't put actual numbers because it would require ground testing. So every reader is free to imagine what "a part of", "a portion of" or "a percentage" mean to be balanced
• I'll imagine a new tank job and don't bring any changes to the existing ones, since, even if I like the more turtle approach, I totally understand why some people don't.

...that we will call the Mystic Knight.

Contrary to other tanks, this one wouldn't have a DPS mode, but instead have two tank stances: Physical Shield and Magical Shield (Yes, these names arent't very sexy, but at least, they're obvious). What theses stances do is negate the damage dealt by the tank, but instead apply a stacking shield (With current value displayed on screen) for the same amount of the damage you should have done. (Applying a shield would give enmity) The shield will reduce physical or magical damage depending on the stance you're on (See, obvious names ). Like WAR, you would lose the shield you built if you don't have any stance.

So, the basic idea would be to master your rotation to stack the highest shield possible, since every boss attack would deplete it, and switch stances depending on the type of attack you want to mitigate. On top of that, you could have "mitigation" skills, that instantly increases the current shield by a fixed percentage, negates the shield depletion for a small duration, or reduces it but apply it to the whole party...

Thus, the main purpose of this tank would be to reduce damage (on him and on the party) as much as possible...which is pretty much what a tank is supposed to do, while still needing to work on its rotation to generate good numbers. The main difference is that every room you have to improve will still be tank-oriented, wether it is generating high "per second" numbers, or stance dancing.

Conflict in discussions always sparks more discussion, that is what a forum is for no? I insist that you put forth more ideas of the turtle tank concept. This being my first take on a trinity based MMO, I've only really tasted FFXIV's style of tanking so I'm quite curious as to the differences of this and the "traditional" meat wall style and it's boons over this.

While I wouldn't mind if there was a tank that focused solely on personal and party mitigation, I want there to be acknowledgement that this has to be considered in balance of the other tanks.

By your example, we have the Mystic Knight, who when played at an exceptional level is KING of mitigation. Potentially capable of solo tanking even (double tank mechanics aside).

What SE wants to do however, despite the current balance, is makes ALL tanks work together in ALL tank setups and ALL content.

Because of the nature of DF and the now upcoming RF, the weakest of tanks mitigation wise must be able to MT and meet the required mitigation check. Yes?

So if we introduce this ultra tank, what benefits can it bring to offset the major DPS loss? What makes it viable in correlation to the other setups?

And before you begin, we cannot consider solo-tanking because that not only breaks the idea of ALL tanks in ALL compositions, but also breaks the DF matching system.
And no, no content designed strictly for Mystic Knight, because as I said, all tanks must be able to participate.

[Sarcatica]

When new raid contents are released, the minority (top players) of the community will dictate what's good and what's optimal to bring. As developers, SE also can't just make a job strictly better that leaves the rest to dust. WAR is way too preferred as OT, while you have PLD/DRK taking a huge chunk of the tanking duty, so you can't use this base as "WAR is best tank" because WAR has IB tied to Defiance which happens to the the best tanking CD in the game but too wasted in contents that don't need that sort of mitigation. PLD/DRK comp can still clear any contents just fine (back in A4S era, there was this static with PLD/DRK comp and they cleared just fine), same deal in Creator Savage due to the lenient DPS checks so far.

Any 4.0 changes to tanks haven't been discussed deeply by the developers, so you are free to speculate all you want BUT the point is skilled players can adjust easily and that's the bottomline. Savage raiding is also not for everyone, that's something you have to understand, if Creator Savage rustles your jimmies, I am sure 4.0++ will too, because the difficulty should ramp up based on what was told in the livestream so far and you bet it will be as close as Midas/Gordias by end of the next expansion.

Ultimately every game is different, if you like your "OH I AM SO TANKY I DONT DIE FROM ANYTHING" tank, this is probably not your game to showcase that. We base the DPS meta on the effectiveness and efficiency, if you aren't into minmax, that's your problem.

[Reynhart]

So if we introduce this ultra tank, what benefits can it bring to offset the major DPS loss? What makes it viable in correlation to the other setups?

The major part of higher mitigation is requiring less healing thus giving more room for healers to DPS. The current problem we have is that even the lowest mitigation already allows healer too much DPS uptime...so much that it's becoming a standard. I suppose the Mystic stances shouldn't totally negate the damage though, as it's really hard to compensate a party member actually doing 0 damage Besides it wouln't change the idea that mastering its rotation would fit a surviving goal and not a killing one.

As for solo tanking, yes, it's a viable answer. Consider a fight were tankbusters appears very often. With a "usual" two tanks setup, you'd have to swap during the fight to let CD timers refresh. With this tank, you wouldn't need to. It's a different strat for a different job, but it doesn't prevent "any tanks setup to work on any content". For example, even if the Mystic Knight could solo tank the current Sophia EX, it wouldn't make other tanks suddenly unable to clear it in a usual setup.

Ultimately every game is different, if you like your "OH I AM SO TANKY I DONT DIE FROM ANYTHING" tank, this is probably not your game to showcase that. We base the DPS meta on the effectiveness and efficiency, if you aren't into minmax, that's your problem.

The question is still "Why ?". Why do all tanks automatically have to follow the exact same meta ?

[Eliroth-Kaminari]

PLD Give PLD bit shorter cooldown dmg AOE. Remove GCD on stances.
DRK Give DRK 1 addion manna regen in DPS stance, Remove GCD on Grit, Give some tought on LD because hp pool size increas make that skill less smart by patch.
WAR Give war 1 more Tanking Cooldown (Dont give wrath on it or it will be eaten by greed for dps)

[Lyth]

Solo tanking doesn't make tank dps less useful. If you designed a tank that could solo a fight, you're going to prefer players who offer more dps while solo tanking. You could design a solo tank job who main heals while singing songs and baking cakes, but the instant groups saw a player who knew do all those things while maximising their dps, that player would be preferred to tank content.

"I wanna be challenged as a tank, not as a would-be DPS"

This is a nice sentiment. If you want a challenge, though, you have to seek it out.

Groups like Lucrezia used to do below minimum ilvl clears of older fights between raid tiers, such as i55/AF T5 and i90 T9. To facilitate this, the game now includes a minimum ilvl option. This can provide some fairly stringent mitigation checks. You can't really say "I want to be challenged" unless you've already exhausted the existing challenges in the game, as well as imposed some of your own. You can always find ways to push yourself.

When I think of mitigation challenges, I think of fights in which the tanks take more damage and survival becomes more dependent on cooldown use. This means less access to "tanky" gear and less passive damage reduction. I don't think you can request "tankier tanks" and "mitigation challenges" in the same breath.