Tank Stances.

[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.