Tank Stances.

[aleph_null]

About tank stance uptime vs healer dps gain, generally it's agreed that the extra healer dps gain doesn't outweigh the tank's dps loss from staying in tank stance for a long period (unless maybe war using unchained), assuming sufficiently competent tanks and healers. There are cases where it's better to stay in tank stance, like a8s 2nd phase with those robots, a tank staying in full dps stance would put too much strain on the healers. However, as everyone probably knows already, this is talking about playing at a high level where people push themselves to gain even a few seconds shorter clear time, and it's generally not a good idea to assume or expect this level of play with PUGs. In JP data center, PUG strats for savage/ex contents often rely on simplicity and ease of execution with little concern over dps/speed optimization. For easier contents like roulette dungeons and normal mode raids, you can definitely have very little tank stance uptime without straining your healers though, especially for war/drk due to their dps contribution (mobs die faster) and self sustain, unless the healer is undergeared or just not very good (I usually do one big pull to gauge the healer's ability to keep up, since for the first pull all my cds will be up generally it's not a problem, unless it's a very big pull like sohr khai before first boss).

As for people following the meta set by the top players, despite playing nowhere near that level, I personally believe that it's because it's very easy to blame something other than your competence (or lack of) when you can't clear something. It's very easy saying that your group is failing dps check because you don't have drg/nin/mch, compared to admitting that some people in your group are underperforming relative to other players with the same jobs (including tanks not going into dps stance enough and healers not contributing enough dps -- I won't argue whether they "should" do that or whether those are their jobs, but in most cases they probably "can" do that to help the group if they're failing dps checks). It can't really be helped though, mathematically there will always be a composition which is better than any other composition for a given fight, unless the jobs are homogenized so much. Though I do hope that the devs will bring the "non-optimal" compositions closer in performance to the optimal composition, which will lessen the emphasis people put on having optimal composition.

[Venjenz]

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.

Stance dancing adds one button to the boring button mashing. One whole button. And since most folks macro that one button to swap what is on two other buttons, the actual mechanics of what buttons you mash doesn't change either. After that one button, it comes down to learning fights. In fights you know, DPS stance and all your other skills will be put to better use because you know what's coming. In fights you don't, you'll be more defensive and less optimal in how you use everything, choosing bunkering down as the way to progress safely.

So it comes down to "do you know the fight and do you have your stance macro'd to swap buttons?"

[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]

i dont know about stance dance.

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. Good warriors can pull and build emity so fast that it not gonna drop off untill end of the fight without using any emity skill whatsoever. The ammount of emity generated atm. in the game is to high imo and i hope this does not contuinie further and get to a point like in other games where basicly being a tank means you are dps where every skill you have has 50x emity/aggro multipplier and you have 2 more survival cds then dps


i dont think they should remove aggro managment, especially in a game iwth 2.5 cgd. dumbs only the role farther down

[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.

[KingFrost]

...

I only thought you were replying to me since your post directly referenced a post mine, saying how a few minutes matter for enrage timers when I was referencing content where that usually doesn't matter, and you still haven't properly read my posts, lol. I specifically called raiding and savage material niche.

Not really sure how I'm misleading anyone. Top tier content - Stance dance (Once again, this is expected for that level of play. Blah blah mastery blah blah). Outside of that it's not a necessity, but a welcome addition to DPS. So it's really not that big a deal for how much it's being discussed and how much discord it breeds here. Feel like I've said this 4 times now.


I've done on content raiding​ with a tank. This was back in the Coil days. Mainly stuck to trials tho. Played War since it sucked and didn't like it after the expansion. I'm already fairly used to changing stances when it makes sense to maximize damage. I do it now when just leveling, but none of my posts were about defending myself and my play, just the game and community in general.

[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