Tank Stances.

[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.

[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.

[Yorumi]

"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.

It's not so much the dps meta responsible for this. In swtor back when I played you couldn't take tank stance off in fights but tanks were still concerned with maximum output. You had to have absolutely perfected openers and rotations to keep the hate off the dps, especially the opener. If you didn't push as hard as you could it had a cascading effect through the raid lowering overall raid dps and hitting enrage timers.

Look at it another way, imagine if dps classes were all saying "ugh what's with this push to do good dps, I don't care if I'm 30% lower dps than I could be, who cares, I don't want to do all that positional stuff or worry about a good rotation." Or better yet "I don't feel like dodging aoes, it's not my job to reduce damage." Pretty sure the party and the forums would be screaming at that person. Well do you see the parallel?

While I certainly don't condone the kind of behavior some engage in when another member isn't performing at absolute peak, I do understand the frustration people feel when others are suggesting they want to perform 20-30% below their ability. A big problem is people using a preconceived notion of a job and using that as the end all be all metric of judging it. If the meta were to change and tanks were required to stay in tank stance going all out to hold hate and prevent damage, and healers were expected to be casting a heal every gcd to keep people alive, you wouldn't accept a tank who's losing hate all the time and taking so much damage he either barely survives or doesn't at all. Likewise you wouldn't accept a healer letting people die cause they're just standing around doing nothing. Yet make that "do dps" and suddenly it becomes so awful to expect that of players.

As I said we shouldn't insult, but I also don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to improve and use the abilities of their class. when someone is farming expert I don't find it unreasonable to expect them to have progressed beyond spamming two combos like a robot.

[Jpec07]

Look at it another way, imagine if dps classes were all saying "ugh what's with this push to do good dps, I don't care if I'm 30% lower dps than I could be, who cares, I don't want to do all that positional stuff or worry about a good rotation." Or better yet "I don't feel like dodging aoes, it's not my job to reduce damage." Pretty sure the party and the forums would be screaming at that person. Well do you see the parallel?

I will say this once again, and this will probably be my last post in this forum, because it's become an echo chamber that passive aggressively drowns divergent opinion, so pay attention:

MAXIMIZING YOUR DPS IS AN INCIDENTAL GOAL TO TANKING AND SHOULD NOT BE USED TO MEASURE A PLAYER'S PERFORMANCE AS TANK. YOUR PRIMARY GOAL AS A TANK IS MANAGING INCOMING DAMAGE, WHICH IS PRIMARILY ACCOMPLISHED THROUGH KEEPING HATE, NAVIGATING MECHANICS, AND MANAGING YOUR COOLDOWNS AND ABILITIES TO SURVIVE THE HITS YOU ARE TAKING.

Yes, good DPS is good, and people should strive to maximize their output. Killing things faster pushes phases, and makes things slightly more convenient to your party members. But as a tank, your ability to output damage is a background goal. You are built to generate enmity and maximize your survival. A player who spends 100% of their time tanking in their defensive stance is not somehow performing 20-30% worse than a player who does the entire thing in their DPS stance.

Good on you if you tank in DPS stance, but don't you dare look down on players who don't (that last part wasn't necessarily targeted at you, but it is something I've seen a lot of here).

[Kaitoo]

:

yeah well that what you describe only works if the tank role in the game was very classical and archial to the holy trinity



the problem is, this is not the case, so yeah maximizing your dps (while fullfilling your job as dmg sponge and doing mechanics ofc) as a tank is indeed the better thing to do in this game right now and player who dont do it are "worse"

[Yorumi]

snip...

I'm starting to suspect you're the type of person that brings the toxicity on yourself. The attitude you displayed in the last post is exactly the kind of attitude that frustrates players and makes them want to hurl insults. That doesn't make them in the right, it's just an observation. When pointed out that performance is measured by utilizing all the abilities of your class to their potential you scream back in bold and all caps that it's not your job to do any more than the bare minimum. I'm not trying to be mean but it really shouldn't be surprising that going into a cooperative game and screaming at the top of your lungs "I'm doing what I want and screw the team and all of you" that it won't go over very well with the community.

Do you not think it's maybe a bit toxic to respond with screaming rage to a person trying to explain a situation?

You're falling right into the preconceived notion that I specifically talked about. You're looking, not at what a tank is in this game, but what you believe a tank should be. Then raging against the community because a tank in this game doesn't match you're preconceived notion.

However i think its a "problem" (inbefore no its not muh duh advance gameplay) how much emity is generated and how fast, which "enables" a far more "dumb" stance dance imo.

I agree. I'd prefer far more intelligent tanking that what we have now.

[Awful]

Snip

And that's your notions of what tanks should be and I disagree with it, we are meat shields who can do DPS and that is the ultimate goal of tanking it's not hit tank stance and spam your threat combo. Screaming and bolding what you want your opinion to be is pretty selfish people do like the tank DPS focus right now because they can pull it off as it's not a background goal, learning to maximize both defense and offense is what you want as a tank. It sounds like to me that you are okay with people doing the bare minimum which is something you shouldn't spout to other tanks in the forums, it's not elitist to tell people how to improve or toxic, it's ideas like yours and screaming "LOOK AT ME" in the forums that is the problem.

So please don't describe how you think a tank should be, talk about what we already have in game and talk about that instead of yelling how people respond to your questions who are more adept in explaining the various reasons why tanks are the way they are. You forget that this is an MMO where everyone has to do their part tanks, healers, DPS, everyone, just because you don't like how tanks are you shouldn't be bringing everyone down to your level because you don't like the way it is. I'm sorry if this is harsh but this is the state of the game right now it could change in 4.0 but I highly doubt it.

I agree. I'd prefer far more intelligent tanking that what we have now.

So would I, stance dancing is fine as it is but i'd rather want something more meaty and with more intelligent design, working for threat, or a dynamic change in how tanks are, we'll have to wait until the live letter to see if anything of worth is changing with how tanks are handled.

[Kaitoo]

I'm sorry if this is harsh but this is the state of the game right now it could change in 4.0 but I highly doubt it.

while im sure they not gonna change tankin in that what Jpec07 described, as yorumi said i hope they change how emity works because its mind numing dull atm. which actually results in the current form of tank stance usage

not that i am saying tank should not able to dps whatsoever or anything, just a observation

[aleph_null]

I will say this once again, and this will probably be my last post in this forum, because it's become an echo chamber that passive aggressively drowns divergent opinion, so pay attention:

MAXIMIZING YOUR DPS IS AN INCIDENTAL GOAL TO TANKING AND SHOULD NOT BE USED TO MEASURE A PLAYER'S PERFORMANCE AS TANK. YOUR PRIMARY GOAL AS A TANK IS MANAGING INCOMING DAMAGE, WHICH IS PRIMARILY ACCOMPLISHED THROUGH KEEPING HATE, NAVIGATING MECHANICS, AND MANAGING YOUR COOLDOWNS AND ABILITIES TO SURVIVE THE HITS YOU ARE TAKING.

I respect your opinion but I won't agree with this. I try to measure a player's performance relative to the limit of the job's ability to contribute to the group, which includes any "secondary goals" such as high dps output, and/or ability to cover for other people's mechanics which may result in higher raid dps output (for example taking the dps jail in a7s, which isn't a tank's job per se). A tank who is able to keep hate, do mechanics, manage incoming damage, and contribute a lot of dps on top of those will be objectively better than another tank who is only able to do the first three while doing less dps. Same thing as a healer who is keeping everyone alive while outputting dps being objectively better than another healer who is only keeping everyone alive without doing any dmg.

I won't say a tank in 100% tank stance is performing 20-30% worse than a tank in full dps stance, since dps is not the only responsibility of a tank, but I do say that the latter tank is a better tank, if they're able to fulfill their other responsibilities well (mitigation, mechanics, positioning, aggro etc) while contributing more overall raid dps (not staying in dps stance at the cost of making the healers struggle and dps less).

Lemme rephrase then. This meta can facilitate toxicity by justifying people's nasty attitudes. There will always be shitty people, no doubt, but a meta can offer a justification for their awful moods and elitism.

That's mainly why the DPS meta can bother me (That's the part I hate) but also because tanking feels like a secondary function and damage is primary, but the role implies the reverse. It's why I dropped War (Really feels like a 5th DPS sometimes lol) and played Monk. Tanks can feel like they get hate as a by product of DPSing and them happening to generate more enmity, rather working to build it and working towards maximizing mitigation and easing the burden on DPS and healers. Or, ya know, being a tank.

But I love tanking at heart, so I'm leveling a Pld and Drk right now. Maybe I just didn't like War.

Meta composition will always exist, and people who follow meta blindly will also always exist, so it can't really be helped. The current "dps meta" in raiding is probably caused by the type of damage in raids. Almost everything is scripted, with little room for randomness, so you can script your actions to respond to that, which means that it's very easy to coordinate your cds (and the other tank's and healers') to cover all the big damage spikes without needing the extra cushion from tank stance (if I could stack 2-3 cds for every tank buster then adding extra 20% mitigation from tank stance won't do much, probably won't even save the healers one gcd). This game's raid encounters don't reward playing defensively as much as offensively (skipping phases, killing boss before the hard phases).

The devs can force players to stay in tank stance by raising the outgoing damage on tanks, but considering the skill gap between average players and the best players out there, if they make the best players need tank stance to survive, most likely the average players won't be able to keep up even in tank stance. On the other hand, whatever requires the average players to be in tank stance would probably not be enough to force the best players to go into tank stance.

One last thing I'd like to add, if you feel that war is like a 5th dps, you probably are playing it suboptimally (apologize beforehands if it offends you, but that's not my intention). If you (and your group) play optimally, at the very least you'll be pulling the boss, either with unchained or shadewalker, and you'd do several tank swaps to maximize mitigation while staying out of tank stance (for example: first tank buster war uses A, B, C, then drk provokes and uses D, E, F for the second tank buster since the war ran out of mitigation, similarly war will provoke again for the third buster since this time it's the drk that ran out of mitigation). The current "style" adopted by the vast majority of players is the MT-OT role assignment, where the OT (in most cases war) only dps and pick adds (if any), and that's extremely inefficient since the MT will probably have to spread their mitigations thinly to cover all the tank busters and cleaves in the fight. This is one of my speedkill attempts that I recorded, if you're interested you can check it out (or check the best speedkill groups out there like delete diadem or angered) https://youtu.be/P52pux8_0Q8.

[SpookyGhost]

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.

It's relevant in the only content that matters. If people are being jerks in 4man dungeons then just kick them. It's not the meta's fault that people are stupid.