Boss Autoattack Damage and FFXIV's Tanking Meta

[Thoro39]

Another thing that should be added is that *most* bosses stop autoattacking(aka do 0 damage) whenever they are casting mechanics of any kind. This is especially noticeable in fights like Exdeath and O3S.
You can easily observe that after the first spellblade holy mechanic in O3S:
In the timeframe between "After the first spellblade holy mechanic" and "After the first completed game-mechanic", the boss executes just 5~6 autoattacks in a timespan of 40~ seconds while only casting 1 raidaoe, no tankbusters, no adds and otherwise avoidable aoe damage. That's 40 seconds where a tank staying in tankstance is doing very, very little.

And that's just one example of this happening in O3S, I'm sure you could easily find many more similar cases in O3S alone where autoattack damage is just not happening because of casted mechanics.

[bswpayton]

Most tanks don't use CDs in DPS stance to mitigate autos better. They see a vid or learn DPS stance is what you do, but not whats behind it. Their CDs just sit while they pew pew pew. Healers either get behind and the tank dies or wastes CDs healing instead of DPSing. Most of the base tries to emulate top groups, but don't play like top jobs.

Honestly, I'd like to see someone crunch the numbers. Which is better net party DPS effect? 20% increase of Tank in DPS stance with a healer blowing CDs to heal him.

Tank stance kills dps puts u in the thousands making ur healer have to do 1000 dps for some fights which can be hard to pull off

[konage]

Or people can see tank stance as another migitation/aggro tool if needed.

[Aomine1992]

I usually stance dance in O3s even tho she cast alot her autos do a lot of damage and crit pretty often but note as a DRK you can take crit hit even without grit idk about the other tanks I always do it as a DRK, for O1 and O2s you can literally take everything without tanking stance....Exdeath is doable without tank stance, on Neo hell no lol it's to.much damage for the healers to deal with instead of focusing on the MT because he isn't in tank stance but that's just my opinion

[AziraSyuren]

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.

There's nothing clunky about the optimization. It's one of the most fun and engaging things about tanking.

[aleph_null]

Tank stance kills dps puts u in the thousands making ur healer have to do 1000 dps for some fights which can be hard to pull off

Staying in dps stance without mitigating enough damage (including tank busters, cleaves, autos, aoe/mech damage, etc) is just passing on the responsibility to the healers and they have to cater to you. If you want to stay in dps stance then you need to learn how to mitigate well, coordinate mitigation tools and tank swaps as needed, so your healers can still dps comfortably. It's easy to do high dps as a tank by sacrificing healer dps, the difficult thing is to enable both the tanks and the healers to do high dps. When I check some tank's fflogs parse I always look into the other tank's dps as well as the healers', and then the buff tabs to check for single target cards.

[shao32]

There's nothing clunky about the optimization. It's one of the most fun and engaging things about tanking.

its a clunky optimization bcs we are not desing to do such tatctics, if you are having fun in having such useless skill i dont go in that, i play as tank in many mmo and this meta feels pretty wrong bcs is against our core desing, i dont have nothing against agresive tanking but if agresive tanking is the real way to tank in this game i wish we are desing around that and dont have conflict with our on skill sets, its really unfair how for now WAR is the only one who get the most benefic of this meta (more after cry to remove the gauge penalty) with DRK being the worse, i want a better sinergy on our tactics and our desings and our tank stances have a better desing around our performance and conten desing and not being so clunky.

[Jim_Berry]

tsk...the meta never bothers me.....if my hp is lower than 50% during autoattack, the party can enjoy full time tank stance no matter what tank I play, in 4 men, 8 men, raids etc.

Which is why I don't even question it anymore and just keep my stance active.

[Kerrath]

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.

If this change was made, I would quit FF14 without hesitation so fast you'd get whiplash. DPS stance is what makes tanking in ff14 interesting, period. Without DPS stance, tanking is a dull affair, kind of like healing without DPS spells would be.

If you really want to make tanks use tank stance more often, make tankbusters more frequent. As it is, we have cooldowns for every tankbuster, so tank stance is irrelevant.

[Freyyy]

If this change was made, I would quit FF14 without hesitation so fast you'd get whiplash. DPS stance is what makes tanking in ff14 interesting, period. Without DPS stance, tanking is a dull affair, kind of like healing without DPS spells would be.

You didn't read my post.