Tank Stances.

[aqskerorokero]

Yea, do that with Paladin, without the tank stance the healer will scream you to death.

After being "pushed" to play drk ( I really like drk too, but more for a badass looking....). I figured out
Shadowskin+D dance+DD+Abyssal drain is just simple as 1234, no matter what stance you are using. I dare say if one make a macro and copypaste to a newbie Drk with first 3 abilitys, he can do that huge mega pull without any problem.

And tbh, I can\\'t stand pro player hint that a drk using 1234 is "skill", a paladin doing 123 is brain dead boring.

After all, casual players will play whatever they feel fit their play-styles. If they transit to more advanced style, they will still be attached to the first job they picked. If not ?! may be they brainwashed by those senpais to play a meta job/style. Let the FUN come first, and Effectiveness after.

Best tips to new players? Tell them what NOT to do and leave the rest to themselves. Teach how to fish, instead of give a fish. :P

[Fernosaur]

Yea, do that with Paladin, without the tank stance the healer will scream you to death.

After being "pushed" to play drk ( I really like drk too, but more for a badass looking....). I figured out
Shadowskin+D dance+DD+Abyssal drain is just simple as 1234
And tbh, I can\\'t stand pro player hint that a drk using 1234 is "skill", a paladin doing 123 is brain dead boring.

There's a lot more thought going into DA'ing Abyssal Drain without tank stance in a big pull and using Blood Price efficiently than the thought going behind staying in Shield Oath and spamming Flash or Rage of Halone, though. It's not a particularly complex series of buttons to press in order, but there's more learning about the class and synergy between skills going on behind it. It also requires better MP management, of course.

I agree that going Sword Oath on big pulls is kind of a waste of time because PLD doesn't really get much out of it like WAR and DRK do, though, but that's less about player skill and more about PLD having what is possibly the worst job design in the game. PLD compensates lack of AoE by "letting the healer DPS longer," after all, lmao.

[KingFrost]

I hate this dps-centric meta. It's only bred toxicity in every part of the community, it seems. And like every meta, how the top 1% plays bleeds into all other levels of play. Unless your pushing the limits of difficulty in this game (New raid tier and speed farming), the difference between being in tank stance 80% of the time or 20% of the time probably saves minutes at absolute best if the DPS is good and doing it's Job. I dunno, if the tank is good period, then time in tank stance won't change much for the overwhelming vast majority of play.

[SpookyGhost]

I hate this dps-centric meta.[...]

The faster you push phases/kill the boss, the less abilities you have to deal with, the higher chance you have of clearing the fight. If it's casual content then it's w/e, you'll kill it regardless, but if it's a raid then you should be contributing as much as you can for the good of the team. If the team decides you're better off in tank stance 80% of the time, then that's fine... but generally that's not the case, so it's useful to learn how to stay out of tank stance optimally without getting yourself murdered.

[KingFrost]

snip

Yes, I'm aware of all that. Did you not read my entire post? My point is that the shitshow that ensues from the meta isn't relevant the overwhelming vast majority of the time, and where it is relevant, well, stance dancing is already a norm and required.

But outside of that niche (Savage raids and speed farming), it really isn't that relevant how much a tank optimizes their DPS relative to the stance (For clarity, I'm assuming their DPS and rotations are on point, but they play in tank stance more rather than less or vice versa. I'd even include a War that only goes Deliverance for Abandon usage). It's a DPS loss for the tank, but probably a gain for the healer anyways, so it's likey again, going to save a few minutes (And that probably a conservative estimate).

It's a strange phenomena that occurs in most meta centric games. Where issues are blown out of proportion or an unnecessary level of weight or importance is placed on people where that shouldn't be the case. Seriously, if we're talking about leaving a tank stance as a necessity, the tank will do it since it's​ raid tier content. If it's not a necessity, the DPS should be good enough to where a tank might cut the run time by 10% at most, which if they do, great, if not, then it's no worse than a Monk forgetting Fists of Fire or a BLM that absent-mindedly placed his Ley Line in imminent danger, only the latter should be criticized with some level of scrutiny since it's in the role title

Incidentally and on topic, I think tank stance shouldn't have the damage penalty, if only the cease this constant bickering over deeps deeps deeps.

[Pileus_Storm]

Then the game would just be boring button mashing. Obviously, you follow the mainstream players concept of covering content without utilizing any of the ingame character customization. You just make players get you through with minimal playing effort.

[Lyth]

It's worth noting that the enrage timer on most fights doesn't go much past ten minutes. Saving "a few minutes" represents bypassing a significant portion of the fight.

I know this has been done to death before, but defensive stance usage doesn't have much to do with healer dps in boss fights. If an auto hits for 5k raw damage, the stance mitigates 1k. Your healer doesn't manually heal that. It comes from regens and the fairy. You're sacrificing 15-25% of your damage output for no benefit. In fact, if you look at some optimised Faust runs even pre-echo, neither healer is actually casting heals. It's all done through clever use of cooldowns and instant casts. Some of the optimisation tricks that they do are pretty amazing, really.

Your damage output as a tank isn't really a test of your rotation. Tank rotations tend to be relatively simple in comparison to your average dps job. Tank dps depends on your defensive stance usage because it illustrates how well you understand the damage pattern in a fight. If you don't understand how much damage goes out and when, then you're forced to play more defensively, and your damage output suffers.

Toxicity has nothing to do with the meta. You can find groups who are happy for you to sit in defensive stance for the entirety of the fight. The problem is, they may not live up to your expectations in terms of skill. Perhaps they may struggle to get a clear, or not clear at all. Toxicity only happens when there's a mismatch in effort, skill, and expectations. If you want to set your expectations for others higher, then you should expect to be held to a higher standard yourself.

[Jpec07]

I've gotta be honest. I don't feel welcome here anymore, and it took awhile for me to get over the paranoia that people in the game might mistreat me for opinions I've expressed here in this forum. It's one thing to question my ability as a tank, but insulting my friends--who I only mentioned for the perspective they bring--is another thing entirely, and is a level of toxicity I have never encountered before on the internet (and I know it was more than just one person, because the post in question has several likes).

That said, thank you, KingFrost, for saying what I've basically been trying to say through the entirety of this thread, and just about any discussion where the idea comes up.

Incidentally and on topic, I think tank stance shouldn't have the damage penalty, if only the cease this constant bickering over deeps deeps deeps.

To this end, I actually think they should get rid of stances entirely, as it would eliminate people trying to tank in the DPS stance and promoting it as the One True Way. It would also raise the floor, so to speak, and allow them to more finely tune enmity values and damage formulae. Bake in 20% mitigation, 300% enmity generation, and accuracy bonus as a level 15 trait of the classes/jobs in question, get rid of the damage debuff, and you've got a situation where tanks can't belittle one another for not adhering to the Meta.

For PLD, it would basically have no effect. You lose Sword and Shield oaths and gain a bit more DPS as MT.
For DRK, you gain access to Blood Weapon as a tank, which gives the job a much faster pace.
For WAR, Fell Cleavus gets neutered a bit, but stack abilities are no longer stance-bound (so you get to choose on the fly if you want the damage of Fell Cleave or the mitigation that comes with Inner Beast). Unchained gives you a DPS buff akin to PLD's Fight or Flight. Otherwise, basically nothing changes.

"But it would make the jobs boring!" Maybe, but it would let people focus on tanking, and it would get the Eliteist Tanks to stop crapping on people who don't agree with their balls-to-the-wall max-DPS-or-git-gud philosophy.

Toxicity has nothing to do with the meta. You can find groups who are happy for you to sit in defensive stance for the entirety of the fight. The problem is, they may not live up to your expectations in terms of skill. Perhaps they may struggle to get a clear, or not clear at all. Toxicity only happens when there's a mismatch in effort, skill, and expectations. If you want to set your expectations for others higher, then you should expect to be held to a higher standard yourself.

In game this is true, but the community extends beyond the game. I have witnessed and personally experienced a metric shittonne of toxicity around this topic in the FFXIV tanking community--and almost invariably it is the DPS fanatics harassing the turtle tanks. You cannot reasonably argue that this toxicity in the community at large is not because of the DPS meta. If there was no DPS meta, and there was no standard for aggressive playstyle, there would be a lot less argument on these forums and Reddit, a lot less of people insulting each other, and a lot less nastiness in general regarding tanks. This isn't necessarily an indictment of the meta itself, but people who follow it tend to seem to adopt some kind of god complex versus those who don't, and fancy themselves somehow better.

[KingFrost]

snip

If you're going to reply to me, please properly read my posts. I never said I was against stance dancing, nor should one not do it when optimization is key. In fact I actually said previously if the DPS is needed (Which it usually is for new raid content), then that level of optimization is often required to even frequently participate with consistent results (IE A static). On-content raiding requires mastery of one's job and the fight, to push those numbers and beat that enrage timer, and the fight period. This is known, Khaleesi. This doubly applies for speed farming for phase skips, and where 30 seconds over 15 runs may equal another run.

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, and if not, I apologize, but I was never talking about on-content raiding, or general raiding period, but mainly DF, which is what was being primarily discussed. I'm assuming since everyone knows you have to be on your A game at the highest tiers of play and the only place this is consistently an "issue" is most, if not any, tier lower. My "few minutes" statement was in reference to saving time in dungeon runs or story prog 8 man instances, which again, is a conservative estimate and likely a gross exaggeration.

Just as well, all metas breed toxicity. No matter the game, if there is a larger number of people taking it seriously, toxicity shall exist. Just look at my involvement here. I properly worded my arguments only in regard to tanking and more casual content, only for someone to immediately say I make people carry me while doing the minimum. I think a lack of willingness to understand others or realize how not serious something is breeds as much toxicity as what you say breeds it.

That said, thank you, KingFrost, for saying what I've basically been trying to say through the entirety of this thread, and just about any discussion where the idea comes up.

Most arguments simply arise from misunderstanding or bad messaging. This thread has a a lot of both it seems.

[Lyth]

[...]

I don't think it really matters to most posters here whether you use tank stance or not in practice. There are also plenty of players out there who don't mind either way. If you're happy with the way that you play, don't worry about it.

Tanking discussions are often done from the standpoint of self-improvement. Text doesn't lend itself particularly well to discussing the positional aspects of tanking; these would lend themselves much better to a VOD review. So most of what you see discussed here will be in terms of rotations, cooldown usage, and dps output.

For the player looking to improve their tank dps, the first question usually asked is: "What's your defensive stance uptime?" This is because it has the biggest overall impact on your dps and gives insight into how you tank.

If you try to claim that defensive stance uptime doesn't impact your dps, or if you try to claim that it interferes with healer dps, people will disagree with you. This is because these statements are factually incorrect. It's nothing personal against you or your playstyle.

The real reason why the "defensive stance debate" bothers people so much is because they feel compelled to "keep up" with other tanks out there. Honestly, you don't have to. If you show up to a story-mode dungeon or trial in half-decent gear and just do your basic enmity moves in defensive stance, most people will be thrilled just to see you. They might even think that you're the greatest tank that they've ever seen. Mirror, mirror, on the wall...

There will always be better tanks out there. Even if you took away defensive stances entirely, or you locked players into them, you're not going to equalise player skill. Some people just have been practising for longer. Tanks will still find ways to improve themselves and and make themselves more useful and desirable to their team. That's not to mention that inflating enmity generation across the board by a flat rate creates new problems when off-tanking. So you're still not off the hook there, either.

If you're satisfied with your current level of performance, then that's great. But please allow others with a drive for self-improvement to seek it out.

[...]

I don't recall previously replying to you in particular. Most of these discussions tend to go in circles, after all, and I probably won't convince you either way. I just wanted to correct a few misconceptions that were scattered throughout the thread. If some of these were yours, my response was aimed at the readers who might be misguided by them.

To be frank, I did find the backtracking in your posts to be confusing. At first, you seemed to suggest that defensive stance usage only mattered in progression raiding and speedruns. Then you extended it to savage raiding in general. Now it looks like you are suggesting that the only content where it doesn't matter are story mode trials and dungeons. This is a fairly sizeable chunk of content to be calling "niche".

Now that I've had a chance to look at your character, however, I can better understand where you're coming from. During the levelling process, you are absolutely correct to focus on the fundamentals and your rotation, and stance dancing isn't really a priority. It can be quite a change from what you're previously used to on MNK, and you need time to adjust. Later on, when you finally hit 60 on your first tank job and get some entry level gear, you can start to experiment more. Defensive stance usage and tank dps doesn't really matter so much until you start entering into pug farm content (i.e. ex trials, simple raids) where there's a chance of failure.

If someone forces you out of your comfort zone while you're trying to get down the basics, don't hesitate to explain your situation to them. But don't let this deter you from trying out stance dancing when you're ready.

Toxicity doesn't come from metas. It comes from players. If you adopt a defensive, antagonistic stance, you'll see toxicity wherever you go. If you stay positive, and try to push yourself for the sake of your team, you'll see that it's a wonderful community.