Tank Stances.

[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.

[KingFrost]

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.

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.

[Yorumi]

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.

What defines "being a tank"? In everquest, one of the earliest MMOs, warrior, the one and only raid tank, was also the 3rd best dps in the game, behind rogue and monk. Likewise, berserk tanking was a thing in everquest. Warriors would go berserk below 40% hp and that turned all crits into cripling blows which had like a 3 or 4x modifier on them. In ffxi the use of the skill "defender" was frowned upon because it lowered damage too much, and ninjas were favored as tanks for their ability to take little damage while also dealing decent damage.

The concept of a tank doing damage is not foreign to mmos, nor is it new to ff14. I wasn't really until more recently that it was arbitrarily decided that tanks do no damage and shouldn't care about it. But that's not even entirely true. As I mentioned with swtor's intense openers and pushing tanks as hard as possible just to hold hate. How is it really different from doing damage? You're still spamming skills in a proper order for maximum effectiveness. How is it somehow more authentic for a warrior in ff14 to spam butcher block in defiance vs deliverance? You're doing the same thing you're just altering the numbers you see. The only rotational difference with deliverance is...oh wait there is none. Drks just do a different 3 hit combo and plds just swap halone for royal.

The dps meta and "elitists" are scapegoats. I tank all the time, in dungeons I'm in defiance full time during trash pulls and other than opener deliverance full time for bosses. I've never once has one person say any complaint about my tanking. Ever. My rotation wouldn't change one single bit if I was using defiance on bosses. Beast is the same key as Cleave and cyclone is the same as decimate. Few people, if any, expect perfection in dungeons, but a good way to get on people's nerves is to go everywhere shouting "I don't want to use my class to it's potential." In a cooperative mmo you are expected to perform the way the community deems a class should perform. I know it sounds harsh but I don't think I've ever seen someone complain about elitists or a toxic community in an mmo when it's not about someone not wanting to do their job and complaining that other people in a team based game have expectations.

[KingFrost]

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I feel like me properly replying to your comment would be just me repeating myself since it's starting to feel like people are reading what they want to read from my posts or reading one and not the others to try to prove me wrong, when honestly I pretty much am in agreement with everyone in the thread.

Where did I say I don't want to play my class to it's fullest potential? I don't recall ever saying that or even alluding to it. In fact, I actually said mastery of one's class is necessary and expected to beat on content raiding, including stance dancing, and that in the overwhelming vast majority of play, stance dancing isn't necessary, but always welcome.

When did I ever say toxicity was a overreaching issue in the community? Oh wait, I didn't. I said it exists, which it does, as evidenced by anyone trying to provoke discussion being attacked with negative assumptions made of them. Acknowledging it's existence is not the same as saying it's prevalent. Nor does acknowledging the meta playing some role in it's validation mean the meta is bad. I didn't word my first post properly, I will admit that, but I've since clarified what I meant​, and, again, never said anything that would close to suggest I'm an advocate of subpar play or gating one's own potential because you want to force what you consider to be a tank into the game's meta. That counter-productive and hurtful to a team because of one's own pride. That's stupid.


When did I say a tank doing damage is bad? I didn't. I celebrate optimization, and even said I stance dance when possible despite me just leveling. What I said was that tanking can feel secondary to damaging. I have never once said tanks can't or shouldn't do damage.

Again, if you read what I had posted, you'd already know this.

[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.

[KingFrost]

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:/


The 5th DPS comment was referring to it's kit more than anything else. I just don't like Deliverance personally​.

Again, I don't disagree with anything you're saying. I've already co-signed the play in your speedkill in this thread, saying maximum DPS (And by extension, optimized tanking) is a necessity in top tier raiding and speed kills. I never said I wanted tanks to stay in tank stance or should have to be in it all the time by game design. I... never said I had a problem with stance dancing, and even said I do it myself.

I've said what I gotta say. At this point I feel like I should go to quoting myself to make it easier for those not reading the topic or my posts. I can't keep repeating myself every post. It's tiresome.

[aleph_null]

I never said I wanted tanks to stay in tank stance or should have to be in it all the time by game design. I... never said I had a problem with stance dancing, and even said I do it myself.

Oh don't worry, I do read your posts and understand where you're coming from. I just wanted to add my opinion on what contributed to this "dps meta" currently prevalent in this game and your comment about war being a 5th dps (which is very understandable if we look at how the playerbase treat tanks as MT and OT).

I appreciate the way you and Jpec respond to this dps meta by admitting that maximizing dps while minimizing tank stance uptime is indeed beneficial for the group, despite your dislike for the meta. Some people who don't like the dps meta actually chose to ignore everything and advocate that tanks should stay in tank stance and healers shouldn't dps, which imo is detrimental to the playerbase.

[KingFrost]

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I can't quite explain how refreshing that was to read.

My War being a 5th DPS mentality mainly stems from back my 2.0 or 2.x days.

[SpookyGhost]

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.

Sorta, yeah. There's an inherent problem with changing everything so that 100% tank stance uptime is the efficient and optimal way to do things, however, and that's that you can no longer carry. Now all the DPS actually have to put the work in, which will lead to the toxicity shifting from tanks to the DPS. Which you'd think "that's fair enough, DPS should be held accountable" but then you have to consider that 99% of the DPS in this game are people just banging their fists against the keyboard and hoping something happens. I guess it'd be a good cleansing of the lazy DPS players, but I dunno if that'd be particularly healthy for the game, especially since in order for this to have any impact you'd also need to make 4man dungeons require 100% tank stance.

This, however, is talking about taking it from one extreme to the other. I think the real issue is that tank stance simply is never needed, even when tanking. In 2.0 tank stance was still a thing and the DPS meta was about taking off said tank stance when the damage was low or you could immune the tank buster (at least in the case of PLD). This was a much more comfortable meta and I don't actually think this bled too heavily into the lower tier of players since it took actual understanding of the fight and your job to pull off correctly. In 3.0, though, tanks became so insanely OP relative to the content that tanking out of your tank stance is essentially brainless.

Essentially, a good fix for the current meta is to get a proper in-between where tank stance actually exists again outside of world first prog (and even then it barely does). I'm not entirely against just completely re-shifting the focus to 100% tank stance uptime as I actually initially played WAR b/c planning out my IB/Unchained usage was fun and made fights more engaging, whereas now I only use Unchained on the pull and stray as far away from IB as humanly possible. I honestly am probably not going to play tanks anymore in 4.0 unless they change things, my previous posts were just sort of saying "ignoring the DPS meta while we have it is a bad idea if you want to help your group". Which, fair enough, wasn't really what you were saying - I'm glad you clarified as I actually empathize with a lot of your points.

(Really feels like a 5th DPS sometimes lol)

Also it really, genuinely is and it doesn't even do the same damage as a dedicated DPS. All you do is your DPS rotation and occasionally hit CDs - which, imo, is another important point: If they're going to refocus tanks on actually tanking, they need to incorporate more ideas like WAR's stack usage into DRK and PLD. Both of those jobs literally play exactly the same in and out of tank stance, and both essentially boil down to "press the defensive CD when a tank buster is coming".

[aleph_null]

I think having frequent mini tank busters and possibly a bit of rng element involved might incentivize the use of tank stance. If the big damage spikes come every 1-2 minutes we can stack several mitigation cds, but if the damage comes in smaller spikes spread throughout the entire phase/encounter, we can only spread our cds and if that's not enough mitigation, we'll have to go into tank stance. Back in 3.2-3.3 I think tanks still went into tank stance in a8s phase 2 and for the final punch + beam combo without LD/HG, in a12s at low ilv tanks might go into tank stance for the general's might add in phase 2 (I usually started in deliverance, do my berserk rotation, go into defiance and pop unchained, before going back into deliverance with vengeance and thrill up), though with exceptional group dps it's no longer necessary since the adds die so quickly.