DualShocker Interview - 3.5 pt 2 next week, supposedly

[loreleidiangelo]

And only in this game are the requirements for "everything else" so minimal that "how much damage can you do" becomes the most important question for both tanks and healers as WELL as dps.

FFS, SE, just design encounters that require tanks and healers to do their jobs.

Fixing healers is kinda easy - nerf healing potencies, up healing requirements, possibly do something about how brutally effective their DPS is while in Cleric Stance, boom. But how would you "make tanks tank", exactly? Looking at the design of something like a PLD, which relies heavily on cooldowns, if you simply make things hit super hard so that a tank always needs to have CDs up to soak damage...well, it'll work well at making WARs tank, because they'll be using Inner Beast instead of Fell Cleave (I don't play DRK so not sure how they'd be affected), but how would PLD handle that same scenario? They don't really have a "spammable" cooldown outside of Shelltron, which is 30 seconds and...not super great, tbh, because of how parry works in this game. (It also doesn't affect magic damage, so rip pretty much every major raid boss ability in the game.)

And how exactly would you make offtanks "tank more" instead of sitting in DPS stance? Endless dual bosses a la T1? Constant add waves to manage? There's only so much you can do to try to regulate how much damage tanks do...even WoW, which IMO has a lot better trinity balance still doesn't really find ways to make off tanks do a whole lot outside of swaps and adds.

Sorry if I seem like I'm attacking you, since I actually agree that the slow distillation of the trinity into "who can deeps moar" also bugs me, but I've struggled to find a solution for tanking woes for some time now that would work outside of a straight tank re-design. Things like, dropping fire n' forget tank stances in favor of making those same effects be maintenance buffs that tanks have to use certain combos to keep up, etc, to make them feel more like they're tanking and less like they're DPSing. And I don't really know how well that would translate here, all things considered.

[Ultimatecalibur]

But how would you "make tanks tank", exactly? Looking at the design of something like a PLD, which relies heavily on cooldowns, if you simply make things hit super hard so that a tank always needs to have CDs up to soak damage...well, it'll work well at making WARs tank, because they'll be using Inner Beast instead of Fell Cleave (I don't play DRK so not sure how they'd be affected), but how would PLD handle that same scenario? They don't really have a "spammable" cooldown outside of Shelltron, which is 30 seconds and...not super great, tbh, because of how parry works in this game.

Paladins and the Parry stat would actually benefit from a high number of constant high damage blockable/parryable attacks. Single hit/Double hit Tankbuster-centric design of raids is the nemesis of RNG based Mitigation.

30% chance of 20% mitigation is a 30% chance of survival vs 1 100% HP tank busters but becomes 6% average mitigation versus 100 1% HP attacks.

[Zojha]

But how would you "make tanks tank", exactly?

In theory it's fairly simple: Both tanks need to be engaged by opponents, i.e. have aggro from something (basic tank function 1) and they both need active mitigation tools that are required to survive (basic tank function 2, reliant on tank function 1).

First one is easy: Additional enemies that one tank alone can't cope with. There's nothing else you can do, it's the definition of tanking, so no way around that if you want to make an off-tank tank instead of being a DPS (or redundant). Second one is the harder one.
A classic from fighting games would be timed mitigation: Hit the button "just" before the enemy hits and you parry/block/whatever, potentially with a combo system to work off that. Neat idea for bosses, but doesn't work as well on trash. Dodging telegraphed attacks is a form of active mitigation as well, but not tank specific - In fact, due to positionals, we generally don't want tanks to move much. You can try something akin to Inner Beast, i.E. stack management, or maintenance buffs as you yourself have suggested. They already try to work with proccs (like Reprisal). I'd say short cooldowns, short durations and timing is the key to crack that. Tank busters would be a lot more frequent, but hit less hard and the mastery in tanking would lie in mitigating as much as possible to give the healer more breathing room with their mana - Too many mistakes -> Out of Mana -> Wipe. Good tanking -> Spare Mana -> Balance cards for everyone? Something like that.

Good players "will" end up having downtime in those fluff roles (otherwise worse players can't play them), so it's going to go back to damage either way. To preserve the role fantasy, best you can do is to gimp their direct damage abilities and give them damage support buffs instead. But that opens the can of worms that is solo play...

But that's just the mitigation side - One can also make the aggro side more complex in a similar vein, but that requires non-tanks to be able to survive the occasional hit in case your tank isn't all that great. Juggling the two could lead to a decent dynamic that can keep players busy at least.

Anywhoo, reducing the DPS focus is all about raising the bar for healing/tanking. And there's ways to do that. Whether it's wanted or not is a different question - Some people enjoy being glorified DPS with short queues. But that's a different topic >_>

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Fixing healers is kinda easy - nerf healing potencies, up healing requirements, possibly do something about how brutally effective their DPS is while in Cleric Stance, boom. But how would you "make tanks tank", exactly? Looking at the design of something like a PLD, which relies heavily on cooldowns, if you simply make things hit super hard so that a tank always needs to have CDs up to soak damage...well, it'll work well at making WARs tank, because they'll be using Inner Beast instead of Fell Cleave (I don't play DRK so not sure how they'd be affected), but how would PLD handle that same scenario? They don't really have a "spammable" cooldown outside of Shelltron, which is 30 seconds and...not super great, tbh, because of how parry works in this game. (It also doesn't affect magic damage, so rip pretty much every major raid boss ability in the game.)

And how exactly would you make offtanks "tank more" instead of sitting in DPS stance? Endless dual bosses a la T1? Constant add waves to manage? There's only so much you can do to try to regulate how much damage tanks do...even WoW, which IMO has a lot better trinity balance still doesn't really find ways to make off tanks do a whole lot outside of swaps and adds.

Sorry if I seem like I'm attacking you, since I actually agree that the slow distillation of the trinity into "who can deeps moar" also bugs me, but I've struggled to find a solution for tanking woes for some time now that would work outside of a straight tank re-design. Things like, dropping fire n' forget tank stances in favor of making those same effects be maintenance buffs that tanks have to use certain combos to keep up, etc, to make them feel more like they're tanking and less like they're DPSing. And I don't really know how well that would translate here, all things considered.

Tanks are somewhat limited in they will always be a partial DPS. The issue is more how little they actually require mitigation. For example, a Dark Knight can handle both A9 and A10 without ever turning on Grit, provided they have a Ninja to help control their aggro. Even A11 and A12, you'll barely need your tank stance once you've seen the fights. One potential solution would be less predictability. Say they adjusted it so all three tanks could swap stances off the GCD ala Warrior. If the boss suddenly did unpredictable high tank, it forces the tanks to mitigate with their tank stance-- turning it into a cooldown itself. Not necessarily a perfect solution but it's the first that came to mind. Perhaps forcing both tanks to stack together for more mechanics might be another option. Unfortunately, I cannot imagine the devs would ever go into the unpredictable route because that would make learning fighters harder.

They could be mean..

Want an encounter where DPS is not all that matters?

How about this one?

Boss at 95% health does two (2) tankbusters back to back...on the HEALERS!!!

It is a guaranteed attack for 100% health and ignores all shields. Lose 1 person and the boss gets a 10% damage reduction boost that lasts for 1 minute. Lose 2 characters? You cannot damage the boss for 10 minutes.

Solution? Cover. The PLD or PLDs gets to save one or both of the healers from dying. Thus the run can continue.

In this case, the PLD mitigation matters, it's actually all that matters. DPS is secondary.

Bad part of this? Either WAR or DRK or both are excluded.

This would never happen, and I'm not saying it should. But this is simply and example of a fight where the usage of abilities is key, not how much DPS you generate as a tank.

All this accomplishes nothing except forcing Paladin into the meta. You literally couldn't complete the fight without one. Either Dark Knight or Warrior will be flatout ignored even more so than Paladin is currently. Not to mention, forced mechanics such as this are rarely fun. It's entirely artificial and would only sour players on the fight. None of this accounts for being unable to damage the boss because you messed up a mechanic is boring. It lacks any creativity and most groups would simply wipe to try again, thus invalidating it regardless. Another thing... A9S and A10S enrage at 11 minutes. So... yeah.

[Naunet]

And how exactly would you make offtanks "tank more" instead of sitting in DPS stance?

Well I dunno. Those other MMOs must be doing /something/ right, because "how much damage does my tank do?" is about as far from my mind as "what breed of pig would look the best in my yard" when I'm raid leading in WildStar. It's simply not a consideration, nor has it ever been a consideration in the other MMOs I've run raids in. Except for this one. :/ And though WildStar's raids are certainly amazing, they do also boil down to "get a boss's HP to zero" - just as EVERY MMO out there does.

So yeah, I'm a little unsure as to what to change in FFXIV because honestly there's just not that much of a difference... the mechanics are vastly more complex and engaging in WildStar I guess. But even in MMOs with similar levels of raid complexity, you don't really see this meta cropping up to such a degree as it does in FFXIV.

[Lambdafish]

So yeah, I'm a little unsure as to what to change in FFXIV because honestly there's just not that much of a difference... the mechanics are vastly more complex and engaging in WildStar I guess. But even in MMOs with similar levels of raid complexity, you don't really see this meta cropping up to such a degree as it does in FFXIV.

Honestly, I think the existance of WAR and SCH in general are to blame. There shouldn't be a tank or healer that are designed to DPS. Imagine the game where your two options were DRK and PLD, would DPS be considered as much?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Honestly, I think the existance of WAR and SCH in general are to blame. There shouldn't be a tank or healer that are designed to DPS. Imagine the game where your two options were DRK and PLD, would DPS be considered as much?

Currently? Absolutely. In fact, people would double Dark Knight in that case because it pulls higher DPS in the off tank role. A good Dark Knight can nip at the heels of a Warrior provided they have a Ninja. As for Scholar, some groups go Astro/White Mage and you're still expected to be DPSing on either. Damage is everything in this game regardless of the job you play.

[Evergrey]

Damage is everything in this game regardless of the job you play.

But DMG doesn't have to be everything. If people just relaxed a little and enjoyed the content instead of rushing it. Everything is manageable even without tank/healer dps.

But, this is a game, and people have done the same thing over and over and over. So it's only natural that people want to rush through it so they don't have to spend more time doing it.
It's hard to keep everything new and fresh. That's why alot of people take a break so they don't tire themselves out with the same content over and over.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

But DMG doesn't have to be everything. If people just relaxed a little and enjoyed the content instead of rushing it. Everything is manageable even without tank/healer dps.

But, this is a game, and people have done the same thing over and over and over. So it's only natural that people want to rush through it so they don't have to spend more time doing it.
It's hard to keep everything new and fresh. That's why alot of people take a break so they don't tire themselves out with the same content over and over.

That is their enjoyment. I, for instance, enjoy jumping into new content and figuring out where I can improve; what tweaks I can make to my rotation. And while healer DPS isn't a necessity, tank DPS is. That is partly how they maintain aggro.

[Evergrey]

That is their enjoyment. I, for instance, enjoy jumping into new content and figuring out where I can improve; what tweaks I can make to my rotation. And while healer DPS isn't a necessity, tank DPS is. That is partly how they maintain aggro.

Yes, some people enjoy it, but it's not necessary to complete content. So in that way "DMG is not everything".
I just like being picky with words and point it out. =P