The endless battle - Tank attributes

[Hruodig]

By the same token, your Meta is irrelevant to SE and they will design gear and encounters around their design imperatives. They will balance skills, stats and potencies based on their criteria, not the DPS meta. If their goals conflict with the DPS meta, guess who wins?

And it's on se to change that in a meaningful way, which they have utterly failed to do time and time again so far. Ultimately the meta will always revolve around maximizing raid dps in order to clear encounters faster-as long as the win state continues to be "reduce boss's hp to 0", that will not change.

[Kosmos992k]

And it's on se to change that in a meaningful way, which they have utterly failed to do time and time again so far. Ultimately the meta will always revolve around maximizing raid dps in order to clear encounters faster-as long as the win state continues to be "reduce boss's hp to 0", that will not change.

And this is what I do not understand about encounter design in FFXIV. It's overly focused on tank busters so you have to have a tank front and center. If reducing the boss HP to 0 as quickly as possible is the goal, then the best strategy for the boss is to kill the healer and the DPS and ignore the tank. It strikes me that with a lot more adds, crowd control to protect healers and DPS becomes more important. So if our gear and abilities are able to largely mitigate the damage of adds, yet the adds could quickly shred the non tanks; the best way for the tank to kill the boss quickly is to maintain good crowd control of the adds, and intercept large focused AoEs. After all, with even rudimentary AI, Bosses should know that killing healers takes priority over tanks, and killing DPS comes next to reduce the rate at which they are taking damage.

But encounters are frequently designed around a single Boss, large front cleaves and AoE Mechanics that affect everyone. So the MT keeps the boss pointed in the right direction to avoid cleaves and the DPS beat the living crap out of the Boss from behind. Followed by everyone dancing to the new AoE tune. I think that we need more adds in boss fights and less emphasis on central AoEs. Make the tanks earn their living by keeping others alive, make it more interesting than simply popping a CD to mitigate a tank buster.

[Hruodig]

And this is what I do not understand about encounter design in FFXIV. It's overly focused on tank busters so you have to have a tank front and center. If reducing the boss HP to 0 as quickly as possible is the goal, then the best strategy for the boss is to kill the healer and the DPS and ignore the tank. It strikes me that with a lot more adds, crowd control to protect healers and DPS becomes more important. So if our gear and abilities are able to largely mitigate the damage of adds, yet the adds could quickly shred the non tanks; the best way for the tank to kill the boss quickly is to maintain good crowd control of the adds, and intercept large focused AoEs. After all, with even rudimentary AI, Bosses should know that killing healers takes priority over tanks, and killing DPS comes next to reduce the rate at which they are taking damage.

But encounters are frequently designed around a single Boss, large front cleaves and AoE Mechanics that affect everyone. So the MT keeps the boss pointed in the right direction to avoid cleaves and the DPS beat the living crap out of the Boss from behind. Followed by everyone dancing to the new AoE tune. I think that we need more adds in boss fights and less emphasis on central AoEs. Make the tanks earn their living by keeping others alive, make it more interesting than simply popping a CD to mitigate a tank buster.

I mean, it just sounds like you're whining about them not making the kind of game you want them to make, to be frank. If they did go down this route, the truly good players would either adapt and make the best of the new design, or find a different game that plays the way they want to play.

[Kinkoz]

And this is what I do not understand about encounter design in FFXIV. It's overly focused on tank busters so you have to have a tank front and center. (...)

But encounters are frequently designed around a single Boss, large front cleaves and AoE Mechanics that affect everyone.

Then... The encounter design isn't overly focused on tank busters, is it?

Killing the boss ASAP has been a focus throughout almost the entirety of content since the initial raid tiers of 2.0 as fights are either designed such that, in wars of attrition, the boss will generally exhaust the entire party's resources before the boss ever runs out of things to throw at everyone, or there is always a hard enrage built into place to prevent the former. It's one or the other a predominant majority of the time.

So if our gear and abilities are able to largely mitigate the damage of adds, yet the adds could quickly shred the non tanks; the best way for the tank to kill the boss quickly is to maintain good crowd control of the adds, and intercept large focused AoEs.

The first part of what you said are already things, though. As for intercepting large, focused AoEs... Do you mean stack/soak mechanics? Because, otherwise, how is it beneficial at all for the Tank to eat extra, unnecessary damage? That just puts extra strain on the healers, which increasing the chance of failure.

After all, with even rudimentary AI, Bosses should know that killing healers takes priority over tanks, and killing DPS comes next to reduce the rate at which they are taking damage.

But almost no boss in the game is designed like that. I don't even think most MMO bosses in general are designed like that, not counting ones that have an intentional mechanic accounting for such.

Make the tanks earn their living by keeping others alive, make it more interesting than simply popping a CD to mitigate a tank buster.

Pretty sure that Tanks are already doing exactly like that by making sure the boss isn't melting everyone else with its hard-hitting auto-attacks and tank busters.

[YitharV2]

But almost no boss in the game is designed like that. I don't even think most MMO bosses in general are designed like that, not counting ones that have an intentional mechanic accounting for such.

TERA actually had quite a lot of those mechanics. It was referred to as secondary aggro as the boss would target the 2nd highest in aggro. Darkan in Sky Cruiser Endeavor Hard Mode (SCHM) had a specific mechanic that would target healers when they tried to ressurect a party member.

[TaranTatsuuchi]

Tank DPS is the meta that *players* derived.
...
It's players assuming the developers should play by the players' rules and not vice versa.

I doubt SE intends for a MT to just do 1 enmity combo in tank stance at the start of the fight and then rock DPS stance the rest of the fight. That's not tanking, that's not managing enmity. That's DPSing with using defensive cooldowns occasionally to lower your healing burden sometimes.

SE's intends and pov are irrelevant to the meta. I don't care what they want me to do, I care about what I, and the people in my group can do.
...
It's the dev's oversight if what they intend us to be able to do doesn't match what we can actually do, and it's on them to fix/change/leave it. I don't care if the devs don't want me to do zero enmity combo in the entire fight, but if I can get away with that then I will. I don't care if the devs don't want my group healers to spend half their casts on dps spells, but if they can then they will.

The Meta is organically derived based on the mechanics and design of the game content...

What SE want, and what they design can be different things.
And that's what we're seeing now...

SE is enforcing their want regardless of how the design functions.


If they want to change the Meta, they have to change their design in a way that incentivizes players to work that way.