Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[Lyth]

Commendations are a notoriously poor gauge of performance. You could be getting comms because you sprint pulled that expert in 12 minutes. Alternatively, you could be getting comms because you're a rabbit tank who eats lalafells. It's hard to tell.

There are two arguments generally made to explain away poor dps on a tank.
1) I'm reducing the likelihood of a wipe by playing defensively.
2) I'm boosting healer dps.

These have been used over the past three years to defend everything from max parry builds, to vitality accessories pre-3.2, to 100% ShO tanking. They've also been consistently disproved by high dps tanks who not only clear consistently, but also are partnered with healers who do exceptionally high dps at the same time as their tanks. You don't do high dps at the expense of effective mitigation. You do it because you mitigate effectively. Trying to push dps that you're not capable of achieving through proper mitigation only leads to wipes.

[Sarcatica]

@Shao, just because you are not in tank stance, doesnt mean that you are doing good DPS. Most tanks are just bad at pressing buttons. OTs in DF reflect that.

People often mistaken personal dps as being selfish,for personal gains and etc. In fact, quite a good amount of raiding tanks understand the value of having a good personal dps, it reflects how good you are understanding the concept that SE puts and how much you can make use of those dps. There is nothing to be sad about how tanks are played currently, there is however one thing sad which is how the tanks can have the same tanking performance with such a huge gap of dps. Is pressing buttons in certain ways THAT hard? People blame too much about dropping tank stance but in fact people just suck at doing their dps rotation.

I was doing Sophia EX and this OT did 600 at end of fight, I was doing almost 1.3k as WAR there as MT. TLDR? People just suck at pressing buttons and this problem exists in all roles. Else how do you do such a low dps? I still remember I could do 400dps as PLD MT in T10 back in 2.55, how do you do 600dps nowadays anyway, even more as an OT or worse as a DPS? It just doesn't make sense. If you think DPS stance is a problem, look at how skilled the community is as a whole. This IMO is the one thing SE needs to address. Or is "my 12.99, my rule" still meta now?

Another thought: as long as DPS rotations exist, you always have the most optimal way of doing best damage and this game won't truly become casual by a far stretch.

[shao32]

excep ppl use a thir party program ppl dont know how many dps they are doing, the only way they have is looking if the tank is out of tank stance and looking if the mobs/boss is die fast.

for me and many others compared to ARR this dps meta feels off and wrong on the way our performance is judge by the dps we do and the time we spend out of tank stance and stay on cleric plus having only dps checks in bosses with a lot of aoes in raidsloke "savage", for me twintania and nael was the best raid bosses on they respectives tiers, tank and healers dps dont matter (bcs whe are a lot more busy trying to survive) and i hope we go back to that in 4.0 where i feel challenged like a tank and not like a pseudo dps-tank.

out tank stance/cleric on, well is ok, our jobs are easy and we can do it so we need do it to be "good".

[GeekMatt]

This is not an issue if you're playing completely casually, but if you're part of a progression-focused team with the goal of clearing fights efficiently, you have to be aware of what you have to offer your teammates, just as you're aware of what they have to offer you. "Just fine" may be acceptable to you, but it may not be to your team, especially if there are tanks who can offer everything that you can in terms of your "main function" while putting out 1.5x to 3x the dps. There's a big enough variation in tank skill and performance that non-tanks do notice and do care, and even being "MT" doesn't absolve you of afk-shieldwalling your way to a carry-clear. This may not have been the case in early ARR, when you could get away with this, but people outside of the tanking community have since caught on. Statics fall apart when there's a mismatch in drive between the players, and if you're not as "hungry" for the clear as everyone else is, then you shouldn't really be on that team. It's nothing personal.

You'll see one of two reactions when someone discovers that they've been under-performing. Either they'll deny it, get angry, give up, and try to drag everyone else down to their level ("Dear devs, delete dps stance from the game pls, to prevent its illegal use outside of solo content"), or they'll take it as a challenge and get better until they surpass their peers. Both personality types are in this thread. Even if self-improvement isn't your primary motivation (it should be, if you're playing for the challenge, instead of to keep up with the Joneses), at least let fear of letting your team down inspire you to do more than just coast until a clear "happens". You'll save everyone a lot of heartache if you do.

Alternatively, play how you want, and find other players who want to do the same. Just be honest with yourself, don't carry any pretences, don't make any excuses for yourself, and don't waste other peoples' time. It's only fair.

They should have [insert gobby NPC here] state exactly this as you unlock Savage Mode. However you choose to play, if you want to be in a static then you should find one that shares your level of investment.

[Reynhart]

i mean no matter how you mitigate place and agro a boss even to a level to make the healer don heal you at all

If you have the opportunity to play a tank so well that you literally mitigate/avoid enough damage to the point where you don't need any healing, it would be a far better testimony of your tanking skill than any uber DPS number you could achieve.

@Shao, just because you are not in tank stance, doesnt mean that you are doing good DPS. Most tanks are just bad at pressing buttons. OTs in DF reflect that.

Yesterday, I ended with a PLD main tank that only spammed RoH throughout all of A11...it was really sad. But, now, let's imagine something. His WS rotation was extremely bad, but we still won the fight. Do you think he learned anything from that ?
Now, if the WS rotation was part of your tanking capabilities (i.e, generating enough enmity and mitigating damage), he would have died...and we would probably have lost.

Yes, it's a pain to lose a fight, but when it comes to the playerbase, it's better to lose one fight because the MT tank can't be carried that letting bad tanks clear even that kind of content.

[Brian_]

If you have the opportunity to play a tank so well that you literally mitigate/avoid enough damage to the point where you don't need any healing, it would be a far better testimony of your tanking skill than any uber DPS number you could achieve.

Yesterday, I ended with a PLD main tank that only spammed RoH throughout all of A11...it was really sad. But, now, let's imagine something. His WS rotation was extremely bad, but we still won the fight. Do you think he learned anything from that ?
Now, if the WS rotation was part of your tanking capabilities (i.e, generating enough enmity and mitigating damage), he would have died...and we would probably have lost.

Yes, it's a pain to lose a fight, but when it comes to the playerbase, it's better to lose one fight because the MT tank can't be carried that letting bad tanks clear even that kind of content.

And healers can be carried through fights without casting a single heal. DPS can be carried through fights without dealing any damage. I'd say healing and DPS are pretty important to the roles of healer and DPS, respectively. What you're referencing isn't a problem with the jobs, it's a problem with the content. When you say "even that kind of content," that's the standard you're referring to. There is a good chance a good group could 4 man most of Alex NM if not for some of the body count checks. Using that as a bar to measure the design of a job is foolish.

There are only a couple fights every tier that actually test whether or not you play your job well and whether or not those jobs are balanced. Those fights were too hard for most people so that's why SE is considering changes to dumb-down jobs. Again, those changes are not being made because of the tanks that could perform their jobs well. They're being made because of all the tanks who couldn't. So, when you discuss changes, that's the perspective that must be taken.

As Brannigan pointed out, you and the people on your side of the argument are being dumb. You can't raise the skill floor on the job when the skill floor is already too high for the overwhelming majority of people.

[Shurrikhan]

As Brannigan pointed out, you and the people on your side of the argument are being dumb. You can't raise the skill floor on the job when the skill floor is already too high for the overwhelming majority of people.

You can if you include support that better bridges that gap, for instance tutorials that are actually worth a damn, built-in output parsers, and so forth.

As long as SE leaves any meaningful learning tools beyond one's tooltips purely in the hands of the community that gap is just going to get larger, until floor and ceiling are both inevitably cut and all but that "majority" are encouraged to leave.

[XiXiQ]

A lot of people here are right - it's come to the time when you're supposed to be juggling 32+ buttons, swapping from one HB to another constantly, watching a half a dozen or more different timers, watching what everyone else might or might not be doing, to the point where it's so overblown I am sure the majority of players have stopped giving a damn. This continually widens the gap between players. The real bottom line is this is a game, it's supposed to be fun - and frankly, as far as combat goes, it's just not anymore. When we get to 4, if I see I'm supposed to be juggling 40-odd buttons, and absolutely nothing has been done to address it, I am pretty sure I won't be the only one gone.

[Sarcatica]

This is predominantly the overall players' skills that SE is not willing to manage. SE can keep the current OR SE has 2 ways: either to piss off the hardcores and dumb contents down even more OR piss off the casuals to actually improve. This current stance of SE is one of the silliest things a modern MMO can do. It just feels to me that SE wants to retain both the casuals and the hardcores which is a huge deadzone. Majority of the casuals won't be able to clear Savage any time soon because they aren't on the right mind for it. This is why FCOB into Gordias was a huge mess, you can also argue Midas being on the same side. You see the trend here? People who cleared FCOB not necessarily able to clear Gordias, on the other hand, people who can do either Gordias or Midas, they should have cleared Creator by now or at least close to it. That's just how it is, the right mind and approach are needed for hard contents, not necessarily the job balance.

[Brian_]

As long as SE leaves any meaningful learning tools beyond one's tooltips purely in the hands of the community that gap is just going to get larger, until floor and ceiling are both inevitably cut and all but that "majority" are encouraged to leave.

It's easy to blame SE for how poor the game's support structure is for learning but when you are playing an MMO, you should expect to do your homework outside of the game or be social inside the game if you want to be good. It's as easy as seeing players in A12S gear and pming them for advice or finding / starting a relevant FC / LS for self improvement. With how bad a lot of players are, it's not simply an issue of not having the tools. It's about overall aptitude, engagement, and motivation. At this point in time, you basically have all the information on everything already out there. If people don't want to do the work to improve currently, that's not evidence that they will want to do the work even if SE improves the in-game tools. As long as SE doesn't just abandon the lower spectrum of their player-base (and in making adjustments to rotations / skills, SE clearly isn't), you're going to have players that just don't want to do the work or might not have the aptitude to excel even with the work. At the end of the day, what SE sees is their internal clear-rate data and we are all in the same pool in that data.

The players who are at the top are playing the same game as the ones at the bottom.

Like I said earlier, one of the core issues is the gap between players who can get the most out of what they're given and the ones that can't. SE clearly wants to close that gap by making it easier to get the most out of what you're given.

That's just how it is, the right mind and approach are needed for hard contents, not necessarily the job balance.

That's just not true. If every job could do 2000 DPS by pressing 1 button, then a lot more people would clear hard content. If every tank had on demand hallowed ground for every tank buster, then a lot more people would clear hard content. If healers had a surplus of infinite range instant AoE healing / shielding, then a lot more people would clear hard content.

Yea, the mindset is obviously also important. But, how hard or easy the game is to play also obviously has an impact on clear rates.