Boss Autoattack Damage and FFXIV's Tanking Meta

[aleph_null]

snip

If you risk dying to that one wyrm tail then you should either cd there or let your healers know to not let you drop too low. Tank survival is both your job and the healers', there's no such thing as "I just cd here and there, and if I die elsewhere not my fault" and if you want an optimized (not tank catered) run, you need to let your healers know what cds you're using and you need to know what heals your healers use on you. If you don't have enough cd to mitigate then ask your co-tank to cover or do tank swaps when needed. Let your dps know too if you want palisade/apoc/feint/addle/minne at specific times. Those are mitigation tools as well.

I honestly don't like the saying "if you die to autos your healers need to be replaced" since it oversimplifies things too much. Your healers may expect things to go differently, like eos healing the tank or the tank surviving long enough until charybdis since they'd drop to single digit so having high hp before that would be a waste if the tank could survive without a heal. If your healers never let you die to stuffs then they probably haven't found their limits yet. I'm sure whoever came up with that saying was half joking or didn't mean it to be taken literally.

[Sarcatica]

Healers with the change to Cleric Stance is like a godsend for them, it enables both healing/dps without even thinking if you CAN go into Cleric Stance or not. Tanks however do have to count how many GCDs they need to dip in their aggro combo before doing more dps. So far the tank busters should already be planned beforehand, tank stances are just used to have that "safety" in either or both aggro/dmg taken spike. The only one encounter since 3.0 I absolutely had to be in tank stance for a few of the tank busters was A8S, back to back flamethrowers into double punch was particularly obnoxious.

It's sad though, seeing people spending most of their time in DPS stance but can't even get a decent number. Looking at you PLD OTs in O4S doing 2k only.

[Brannigan]

You can now check combined tank damage or combined healer damage on fflogs. -

Neo Exdeath is an odd case because he doesn't auto attack. You're mitigating everything with abilities regardless, so tank stance affects healing requirements there even less than normal. I (and most people I assume) only use tank stance on him for enmity before the tank attacks, and that's mostly because we don't have a ninja right now.

That's not to say I disagree with the overall conclusion, but that fight in particular is a bad example.

[shao32]

its sad see how the tank stances loose they value more and more every day, really they need to fix that somehow, sacrifice our defense for clunky optimization feels bad.

[aqskerorokero]

A simple change could be bind every defensive cooldown to the tank stance, and with only role action available while dps stance, a change like this would end the discussion for a long time.

[FPZ]

A simple change could be bind every defensive cooldown to the tank stance, and with only role action available while dps stance, a change like this would end the discussion for a long time.

It would also kill most of tanking player base who put effort into their class and learn to optimize their fights in DPS stance.

No.

[MyaValentine]

It would also kill most of tanking player base who put effort into their class and learn to optimize their fights in DPS stance.

No.

I can see this being more of aproblem than a fix but what else do you suggest it should be done to the tank stance? at this point I forgot to put my tank stance on for v2 yesterday and tank it with no problem not even my healers knew I didn't had it on our aggro is so strong specially as paladin that it's almost impossible to lose it, shirk makes it even easier to tank swap on dps stance.

[Freyyy]

I think that to fix tanking stances they should just delete every drawback they have. No damage decrease, no ability locking (Fell Cleave, Inner Release, Blood Weapon, Blood Price). Tanking stances should just give the %mitigation and the agro, and be off the GCD with no cost, and DPS stances should be deleted or turned into passive traits. That way, the only reason to turn it off would be not to accidentally steal aggro when you're OTing.

Why am I thinking that way ? Because the "aggressive tanking" meta has changed. Before, back in ARR, the "aggressive tanking" meta consisted in proper stance-dancing which required actual skill to be properly achieved. We were switching between stances because we actually needed them sometimes back then. WAR for example didn't have a DPS stance, they didn't have FC, and they didn't have Rampart, Raw Intuition nor Equilibrium. PLD didn't have Sheltron and Clemency. Tanks back then basically had less defensive abilities to compensate for the lack of tanking stance, and WAR actually used to not lose any DPS by switching back to Defiance for 20s or less when Unchained was available (it was even a DPS gain when combined with Zerk, since IB was the hardest hitting skill, and being in Defiance was the only way to build stacks). So we used our tanking stances for tank busters and other big damage phases. Only Rampart or only Sentinel weren't enough for big tank busters such as Ravensbeak, Revelation, Flatten or Akh Morn. We needed those extra 20% from Shield Oath. We needed that IB on top of Vengeance and the extra eHP from Defiance. "Aggressive tanking" consisted in optimizing both your cooldown usage and the moments where you'd switch back into tanking stance because you needed it in order to gain DPS. It was a careful task. It added a very interesting mechanic to tanking.

But it changed. Partly because of encounter design perhaps, but mostly because starting from HW, while levelling up after 50, tanks gained extra defensive tools which were available regardless of stance, while healers also gained extra healing tools which made the task of keeping-the-tank-alive-while-healing/protecting-the-rest-of-the-party a whole lot easier (stuff like Tetra, Asylum, Emergency tactics, Indom for example; powerful oGCD healing tools). Now, you just never use your tanking stance outside of the first blind runs. You don't even pull the boss with it anymore. You just DPS and use your CDs when needed. Tanking stance is a button that you only press when shit starts hitting the fan and healers need some safety to raise some people. And even in most of those cases, the extra 20% mitigation won't even save you from a wipe. "Stance-dancing" doesn't really exist anymore. It's just an empty shell of what it used to be.

To make the tanking stance and tools like IB relevant once more, they have two options :

1. Delete a lot of the defensive/healing tools that tanks and healers currently have. Basically, make both tanks and healers less powerful defensively. This would give back a lot of value to the tanking stances and IB, since we wouldn't have enough CDs to mitigate everything. This option would change the way we play and might not please everyone since it's a direct nerf to both tanks and healers.

2. Do what I first suggested. Delete every single drawback that the tanking stances have and either delete the DPS stances or make them passive traits. Make tanks able to achieve their highest DPS regardless of their stance. And increase every boss and monster's damage so that the damage we take while in tanking stance is the same as what we currently take without it, that way CD usage wouldn't be trivialized for both tanks and healers. Drastically decrease every aggro multipliers to compensate for the much higher uptime that we'd have on our tanking stance. This option wouldn't change anything to the way we play, it wouldn't make tanking or healing any easier either. We'd just toggle it on when tanking because it's free aggro and mitigation, and toggle it back off when OTing to prevent us from stealing aggro instead of just never using it outside of emergencies like we currently do. This option also fits with what they did to healers by making their damage scale directly from MND, essentially deleting "stance-dancing".
That way, they could also focus on adding complexity to how tanks play by other means without having to bother with the different stances.

[FPZ]

I can see this being more of aproblem than a fix but what else do you suggest it should be done to the tank stance? at this point I forgot to put my tank stance on for v2 yesterday and tank it with no problem not even my healers knew I didn't had it on our aggro is so strong specially as paladin that it's almost impossible to lose it, shirk makes it even easier to tank swap on dps stance.

My personal opinion? Well I would say most of the tank community still heavily utilises tank stance, whether it's due to their play-style, group outlook or just comfort levels. I don't think it's a huge epidemic as it was with the healer meta (where they made cleric a CD instead of a toggle.)

Personally I feel bosses need to do less predictable damage, the meta for the longest time has been very segmented attacks and fluff damage followed by busters, cleaves or heavy hitting autos (e.g tail slaps in O1S). And with the invul tool-set from Warrior (I main WAR so will use this as an example) you basically nullify a lot of damaging mechanics from busters multiple times in the fight. (twin bolts x2, o2s buster, o3s critical hits, o4s thunder).

All in all, it is what it is unfortunately.

[Galgarion]

Aside from inner beast for tankbusters, warriors don't get much value from their tank stance in a single target fight, so staying in defiance seems wasteful. Of course I only play normal content so what works for me might not count for the majors.