Healer & Tank DPS (WoW vs FFXIV)

[zipzo]

WoW shifted the paradigm into tanking not being as much about maintaining aggro so much as doing your rotation to put forth as much active mitigation as possible.

Every tank in WoW has loads of either self-healing, self-shielding, self-armor buffing, or evasion buffing, all of which they generate through their respective rotations.

I wouldn't really call what they did a shift. It was more like a gutting. And like I said before, why couldn't we have both? Did it make the role too complicated?

Tanks were just as focused on constant active mitigation even in vanilla (see: holy shield for Paladins and shield block for Warriors). Some important elements were passive (e.g. Gearing to be uncrushable or uncrittable) but all the way through Cata there was still a short cd defensive cooldowns that you needed to use intelligently.

The only thing that has changed drastically more lately is that tanks now possess the ability to contribute massive self-healing, making the necessity for a healer only reserved for very hard hitting bosses and extremely high level mythic+ dungeons where the scaling is set so high that mobs hit for boss-level amounts. In their current state, tanks can solo (easily) pretty much all content in the game that isn't current raid content or high level difficulty dungeons. Think bloodbath Warriors in HW (that's the best comparison I can think of to FFXIV).

Personally I don't see the positive contribution of giving tanks such abilities in the first place. I think that tanks should be reliant on healers, healers reliant on tanks, and both be reliant on DPS to end the fight. That's the magic of the trinity...they should all work in tandem, and when you start gifting abilities of one to the other (in this case, the ability to heal on a tank excessively) you start to corrupt that trinity and ultimately it leads to imbalance (IMO).

And for me it's definitely the least painful amputation of what traditionally makes up a tank, mostly because it has only ever been one of three rotational or stance-based concerns, as a triad of damage, protection, and threat. Now, that protection can still come in a myriad form. The damage also can come in self-investment or target-investment, and as damage multipliers, DoTs / stat buffs, or, in the latter case, direct damage. But enmity can only ever be enmity. The more you focus action on enmity, especially purely upon enmity, relative to the number of other paths of action, the more you homogenize internal gameplay. Now, shades or pairings of enmity growth, as often the design concept behind WoW tanks (even the solo-pathetic Sunder Armor), can avoid that problem to an extent, but even if that were perfectly baked into the surrounding toolkit to allow for the most variance possible, you are still deferring or balancing concerns of damage, mitigation, self-healing, damage investment, mitigation investment, healing investment, utility, and so forth in order to ensure that you have a sufficient margin of an incredibly bland metric—enmity. It doesn't vary with different mob behaviors (except in threat wipes, if you can even call that variance), and provides no variance to said behaviors (unlike HP thresholds and so forth). You manipulate nothing but a consistent target via a flat threat table.

As long as enmity remains that dull, I'm not sad that other things have been given room to rise to the fore in WoW tanking. At most, I'm a bit sad that tanks have gotten so strong, both passively and by normal rotation, that there's rarely reason to strip mobs off my tank and kite them briefly, being able to provide damage shifts and support as a non-tank... not that I still can, given that streamlining has occurred not only from the tank side through enmity increases, but also the DPS side through ability pruning.

Here's how I see it. Enmity/threat is the only element of the 3 that can present a varying experience from 1 time to the next. Positioning is just where you put the boss/mob. Cooldowns is just timing. People in this very thread have complained about how things are too predictable, and it leads to just popping the cooldown at the precise time it's most effectively used and that's it. What you have then is a completely forgettable element of the gameplay of being a tank because it becomes automated.

Enmity/threat is not an automated element of the gameplay. You actively need to perform your threat gains effectively, and the experience is going to differ usually every single time you do a given piece of content because you'll likely be paired with different DPS. Maybe holding aggro is easier to this group, maybe holding aggro is tougher, it completely depends on the people in your group.

Hence, aggro management is the only interesting element of tanking because it stands to be the only part of tanking that creates the potential need for you to improvise, or make good decisions, and play well.

Positioning and CD usage are just one and done elements of tanking. You put them in the right spot, forget it, you make yourself aware of the best time to use a CD, and forget it.

Enmity you can't forget, there may always be somebody climbing the chart faster than in your other groups either because of spectacular DPS or because you flubbed your perfect threat rotation. It's a wild card element, and hence, the most interesting and potentially exciting. That is why threat/enmity/aggro management is single-handedly the most interesting part of Tank gameplay, and why when it is removed, tanking becomes boring.

[Shurrikhan]

Here's how I see it. Enmity/threat is the only element of the 3 that can present a varying experience from 1 time to the next. Positioning is just where you put the boss/mob. Cooldowns is just timing. People in this very thread have complained about how things are too predictable, and it leads to just popping the cooldown at the precise time it's most effectively used and that's it. What you have then is a completely forgettable element of the gameplay of being a tank because it becomes automated.

Enmity/threat is not an automated element of the gameplay. You actively need to perform your threat gains effectively, and the experience is going to differ usually every single time you do a given piece of content because you'll likely be paired with different DPS. Maybe holding aggro is easier to this group, maybe holding aggro is tougher, it completely depends on the people in your group.

Hence, aggro management is the only interesting element of tanking because it stands to be the only part of tanking that creates the potential need for you to improvise, or make good decisions, and play well.

At best, that is true of some fights in this game alone, and only if one excludes all the ways to optimize both your and your healers' dps.

Yes, there is little to no active mitigation in this game beyond pre-planned cooldowns popped per specific events... in this game. That is failing of the game, however, not of the very concept of mitigation mechanics. And it's why there are quite a few people who have been suggesting more integral systems by which to involve mitigation.

That said, enmity in this game is one thing and one thing only: the GCDs of inferior output to be used when they least get in the way of personal (tank) DPS. Yes, there are fewer when you have a Ninja and an off-tank using VokeShirk. Yes, there are a lot more when you have a Samurai who refused to use Diversion. But nothing about the concept changes. The impact is no more than that of positioning dungeon mobs with chained zone AoEs as to minimize loss of positionals for your melee jobs. It's no more than matching your CDs to Apoc, Feint, Palisade, and healer CDs. They are all equally shallow, each essentially automated. It's literally just increasing or decreasing the amount of reduced-efficiency GCDs required in order to maintain your passive increase to raid input/intake efficiency. In a sense, that can be interesting. But XIV is far from executing it in any particularly interesting way. It's essentially a system in place to increase the raid DPS offered by Ninjas and add another obligatory DPS CD in the form of Diversion (and Shirk, for that matter).

Don't get me wrong; I want enmity to really be a thing. But as long as it's just a threat table, and its related skills pure (or amounting to pure) enmity bonuses, it's not going to be anything more than a flip-side of tank DPS, meant to differentiate good from bad tanks (and far less by who holds aggro as much as while maintaining how much personal output).