Lets stop fighting SE and work with them. What are your ideas?

[Waliel]

No, it was still boosted around Wrath of the Lich King. People used to require aggro mods for endgame raids and DPS had to hold off. You should've seen Warrior in Burning Crusade, they used to take gear off in outgeared content so that they would take more damage on purpose, that way they generated more rage from damage taken, allowing them to do more aggro. I distinctly remember at the pre-Wrath patch all tanks got a massive buff and you could just yolo instances after, because most of Burning Crusade dungeon challenge revolved around the trash mobs which were now easy to hold aggro on.

Rogues using a GCD on Feint to do no damage and decrease threat? Hunters doing Feign Death on cooldown? Boss starting the fight with AoE damage and a healer getting aggro and dying for healing it? Half of the bosses having a skill that did nothing but decrease the threat on current target? Good times.

I think it was a reference to this post

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...change-stances

Doesn't WoW do this or at least used to? Tanks are crit immune in their tank stances or otherwise they'd die to pretty much the first crit. Everything can crit in that game and had a damage 2x multiplier.

[Reynhart]

I think it was a reference to this post

I see. Well, this has still nothing in common with what i suggest at all, so I'll keep my conclusion.

[Duelle]

No, it was still boosted around Wrath of the Lich King. People used to require aggro mods for endgame raids and DPS had to hold off. You should've seen Warrior in Burning Crusade, they used to take gear off in outgeared content so that they would take more damage on purpose, that way they generated more rage from damage taken, allowing them to do more aggro.

The change I'm talking about was halfway through wrath. I know because I was there when the big thing was nerfing the threat coefficient to Revenge and buffing its damage to keep threat generation the same. That's also when we saw a temporary stint with Arms warriors tanking heroics due to the Revenge buff combined with the Unrelenting Assault talent (which removed Revenge's cooldown).

The removing gear thing (pantsless tanking) was because rage generation scaled with damage taken, and the better your gear was, the harder it was to generate rage in content you had outgeared. Your aggro mods were Sunder Armor (which dealt no damage, generated a good chunk of threat, stacked and increased damage taken from your attacks) and anything you got from Defensive Stance. There were some passive boosts that people came up with talents (Deep Wounds) and skills you used as filler (Concussive Blow, Shockwave, Thunderclap).

I read your post as aggro generation not being a thing anymore, when it most certainly is. While Wrath did bring up everyone's numbers, tanks were subject to aggro mechanics and still are, even now in Legion (which got rid of stances entirely).

[Shurrikhan]

Let me ask you a question. Imagine that, after the constant complain of having reduced the skill ceiling too much, every DPS get an updated and very complex rotation for very skilled players that allow them to do 50% more damage. But, the aftermath of that boost is that is would be almost impossible to not lose aggro without a really high tank stance uptime. Would you embrace using your tank stance more or would you come here asking for them to be nerfed back so you can retain your full personal DPS?

I would ask that the gap between tank and DPS direct contribution be reduced as not to bar double-tanking from most fights, and that SE find means by which the majority of the playerbase has the training to mostly pull off these rotations as to come within an range of optimal performance that would not frustrate skilled players or that the learning curve is re-tapered to decrease the output variance due to skill. (Personally, I haven't argued that skill ceiling has been reduced too greatly with Stormblood. I've simply argued that certain jobs now feel gutted until level 70—if not even after—or otherwise clunky, subtly to obviously afflicted by design flaw, or uncharacteristic of their formerly held identities. This is altogether a very different complaint, and not necessarily or even likely solved through more complex, especially if equally linear, rotations.)

In your scenario, no amount of DPS sacrifice for enmity on the tank's side would warrant their (doubled) presence, largely because of that amount of DPS to be sacrificed. "Sac strats" would be more optimal. Perhaps this disparity was given to show how rhetorical the question was, but I can only reiterate — tanks are DPS, a portion of the contribution of which comes with the ease by which they allow others to DPS. As strategies to provide that ease (in terms of actual GCD or uptime availability, not just difficulty) without the loss of dps that comes with a specialist class come out, often by means of the added damage of avoiding the specialist, that indirect portion shrinks. You can either maintain a base contribution that lets them remain, then, or they're replaced like any other specialist without enough work.

I've never "not embraced" tank stance, in so far as it is actually useful, which, I'm sorry to say, is only for the portion of time in which enmity combos alone will not suffice to hold enmity, or the use of a damage-reducing but enmity-enhancing multiplier over some portion of a fight actually allows for increased raid DPS. But until tank stance is more than just a safety CD paired with enmity conversion, that's all it can be. Even if players were grudgingly forced to use it for 80% of a given fight, the point would remain — as soon as it's not necessary, and ditching it would cost less (such as through reactivation cost in time, gauge, and mana) than maintaining it, drop it.

[Shurrikhan]

The change I'm talking about was halfway through wrath. I know because I was there when the big thing was nerfing the threat coefficient to Revenge and buffing its damage to keep threat generation the same. That's also when we saw a temporary stint with Arms warriors tanking heroics due to the Revenge buff combined with the Unrelenting Assault talent (which removed Revenge's cooldown).

I remember making use of my dual-spec for that... Protection tanking for big pulls, Arms tanking for single-target shits and giggles. Or just being able to pretty effectively off-tank mobs as a DPS Arms build. Good times.

I was one of those who originally went for Tactical Mastery in Vanilla because I really enjoyed the stance-dancing that came along with it (and weapon-swapping, often enough). I couldn't do the DPS of a pure Fury in PvP, but my harassment, mobility, sustainability, and shut-downs were top-line. Almost made me regret Warbringer when it came out, as compared to the potential removal of Rage penalties altogether when stance-dancing... It's not like it needed to be stances, in themselves, but I wanted to see more done with both the momentum and decisiveness (preferably still without any significant lock-in period) of the old Warrior...

Warrior and other "heavy" DPS classes that are able and optimal in sacrificing just a bit of DPS for the versatility of enmity and battlefield control will always have my heart. It's what made 1.2 Monk so great to me, even if I prefer the gameplay of... well, a sub-1.95 GCD Heavenward Monk, to be specific, I suppose.

[aleph_null]

No idea why some people are so fixated on the idea that tanks and healers should do considerably less dps than actual dps jobs. They have their raid dps buffs and utilities as well. Even if warriors do as much dps as a brd/mch you won't swap a brd/mch out for a third tank since you'd lose on their utilities, both defensive (mp/tp refresh, palisade) and offensive (songs, hypercharge). If warriors do as much dps as the jobs with little to no utility outside their personal dps like sam/blm then yes it's a problem.

If tanks do too little dps then one of the two tanks in static groups would feel obligated to swap to a dps job for floors that don't require two tanks, otherwise they'll just be a burden to the group. You can't build a static with 1 tank 2 healers and 5 dps either since you never know if solo tank is even possible before seeing the fights after release.

[ADVSS]

No idea why some people are so fixated on the idea that tanks and healers should do considerably less dps than actual dps jobs. They have their raid dps buffs and utilities as well. Even if warriors do as much dps as a brd/mch you won't swap a brd/mch out for a third tank since you'd lose on their utilities, both defensive (mp/tp refresh, palisade) and offensive (songs, hypercharge). If warriors do as much dps as the jobs with little to no utility outside their personal dps like sam/blm then yes it's a problem.

If tanks do too little dps then one of the two tanks in static groups would feel obligated to swap to a dps job for floors that don't require two tanks, otherwise they'll just be a burden to the group. You can't build a static with 1 tank 2 healers and 5 dps either since you never know if solo tank is even possible before seeing the fights after release.

I agree with this, maybe trade offs like old cleric stance wasnt so bad of an idea, where the trade offs are maximized and comparable dps, which could keep them relevant outside of power creep from gear...but considering how it got changed for healers, im not sure how they intend to balance this all.

Dunno how the JP community is reacting to all of this, its just sad when you have the full on debate, healers that dont dps,healers that rather dps than heal, tanks that dont dps, tanks that would rather dps than tank

[Reynhart]

If tanks do too little dps then one of the two tanks in static groups would feel obligated to swap to a dps job for floors that don't require two tanks, otherwise they'll just be a burden to the group.

This already exists. The second tank bring no utility to justify its presence outside of forced dual-tank content, and all tanks do less DPS than actual DPS, even if the difference is "small". Increasing that difference wouldn't change anything.

[aleph_null]

This already exists. The second tank bring no utility to justify its presence outside of forced dual-tank content, and all tanks do less DPS than actual DPS, even if the difference is "small". Increasing that difference wouldn't change anything.

The only relevant recent fights where you can solo tank were a9s and a10s, and it was only possible with super high dps (killing faust z in 30-40s, killing refurbisher before faust drops, pushing lamebrix to phase change right after the first tank tether), so it's irrelevant unless you're in a 99th percentile group. It's pretty much impossible in other fights, a1s had two bosses, a2s had the 4 jagd dolls, a3s and a4s had resistance down debuffs, a5s had concussion and tank buster combo, a6s and a7s had vuln stacks, a8s had multiple adds, a11s had multiple shared tank busters. Maybe a12s could be solo tanked but it requires some weird cheesing strat which ended up with lower group dps compared to standard compositions. If you can solo tank without weird strats then removing a tank and adding in a fifth dps would be a really big raid dps boost, thanks to raid dps buffs being multiplicative.

If the devs want to stick with 2/2/4 composition then there should absolutely be no fight that can be solo tanked in the raid tier, at least pre-echo. If they want to put fights that can be solo tanked then all the other relevant raid tier fights must be possible to be solo tanked as well, so people can do progression with 1/2/5 composition instead of making a tank guilty for not being able to gear up a dps job during progression.

tl;dr solo tankable fight is bad, unless every other fight is also solo tankable as well.

[Reynhart]

tl;dr solo tankable fight is bad, unless every other fight is also solo tankable as well.

Ok, sure. But then, if fights are designed to require two tanks, what's the issue with tanks doing significantly less damage than DPS ? Especially of the reason for that is because high damage output would result in high enmity generation that couldn't be covered with too much DPS stance. Frankly, I hope SAM will go more and more in that direction as ilvl increases.