Boss Autoattack Damage and FFXIV's Tanking Meta

[Mycow8me]

I dont understand why ppl are so worried about it. If your group needs the extra DPS from a tank spending as much time as it can not in tank stance while maintanking... Their might be other issues. When your tanking the boss stay in your tank stance if u want. If your off tanking or waiting till next tank swap, take it off and deeps your heart out. If you want to experience some risk vs reward ask your healers if you can try staying out of tank stance as much as possible. See what works. You staying in tank stance and mitigating as much as possible might be allowing the healers to dps more.

Warrior can literally weave Inner release/zerk windows while maintanking with a convalescence and thrill of battle which is practically Defiance HP and healing while on deliverance then back to tank stance if it bothers you without needing to use your other cooldowns unless a tank buster is in the middle of this window.

Don't know much about pld or dork knight though.

[shao32]

snip

i know what its the point of the meta, and i dont have any problem with that, just how the meta and our tank stance dont match at all, i like to improve my skills as any other but this thing in particular its complety wrong, ¿why as a tank i have a "novice" stance when the other roles dont? its just ridiculous, why i cant dealt my best on tank stance and being optimun?, i understand the high risk high reward but i dont know why all tanks have to dealt with that, more when 2 are not desing for that.

SE dont pass this 2 years trying to cut down with nerfs for nothing, we asking for a definitive change and move on, i always say remove damage penalty bcs is the less agresive change for both styles of tanking.

[Hruodig]

i know what its the point of the meta, and i dont have any problem with that, just how the meta and our tank stance dont match at all, i like to improve my skills as any other but this thing in particular its complety wrong, ¿why as a tank i have a "novice" stance when the other roles dont? its just ridiculous, why i cant dealt my best on tank stance and being optimun?, i understand the high risk high reward but i dont know why all tanks have to dealt with that, more when 2 are not desing for that.

SE dont pass this 2 years trying to cut down with nerfs for nothing, we asking for a definitive change and move on, i always say remove damage penalty bcs is the less agresive change for both styles of tanking.

Well now you're just asking to have your cake and eat it too. No one's forcing you out of tank stance, but you are factually a less optimal tank for it. That's really what the deal is.

[Quri]

The tank meta ain't all that hard, you and your group needs to know the fight as the requirement. If you or either anyone in your group don't know the fight, stay in tank stance if main tank. Though ridding of damage penalty for tank stance would be a fine addition though DRK might be stuck as Main tank, as it is, there's no reason to not be in a stance.

[shao32]

Well now you're just asking to have your cake and eat it too. No one's forcing you out of tank stance, but you are factually a less optimal tank for it. That's really what the deal is.

And thas why i want the tank stance change for better except you want SE put another penalty in you tank swap.
Im optimal and i want to our stances have better sinergy with us in a way or another, i Guess im not asking for much, you want defiance and all the skills behind It stay useless for another 2 years?

[Thoro39]

I dont understand why ppl are so worried about it. If your group needs the extra DPS from a tank spending as much time as it can not intank stance while maintanking... Their might be other issues. When your tanking the boss stay in your tank stance if u want. If your off tanking or waiting till next tank swap, take it off and deeps your heart out. If you want to experience some risk vs reward ask your healers if you can try staying out of tank stance as much as possible. See what works. You staying in tank stance and mitigating as much as possible might be allowing the healers to dps more.

The difference between a good player and an average-complacent player is that the former readily accepts to carry parties through these "other issues" into a clear, while the latter just sits in tankstance and tells others that these issues are "not his problem" since he's tanking just fine, all while wiping repeatedly. Obviously any kind of advice should recommend good play, that helps any party, so the former is recommended while the latter should be avoided.

On the last sentence, there are plenty of instances in savage fights where the boss stops autoattacking( i.e. do 0 damage specifically to the tank) for a minute or more in O3S and many more fights, and in these instances, Tankstance is nothing but a disadvantage.
The "your healers might dps more" argument is also flawed, as it pushes the responsibility to deal DPS while doing their roleduties to the healers. Why should Healers dps when you as a tank do not bother to improve your DPS through stancedancing? That's a doublestandard.
In addition, the "extra heals" that a no-tankstance tank requires are much less of a dps loss than a full tankstance tank. A full tankstance tank deals up to 40~60% less damage than a proper dps tank, and it's enough damage loss to make fights harder for your party.

Harder? How? Aren't Tankstance Tanks supposed to be safe? Let me elaborate.
A properly played dps-oriented-party can afford 7 or more playerdeaths while still comfortably clearing the O3S-O4S enrage timer, while a party with fulltankstance tanks has a muuch lower leeway in clearing the enrage time, some parties even have to give up and wipe/reset after one single dps death. In the case of O3S and O4S, it means that a proper high dps party also has the luxury to use two heal LB3's instead of DPS LB3s to save a party without fearing the enrage timer.
The former then can therefore afford many more mistakes than the latter, while the latter requires perfect mechanical execution. So even if the full tank-stance Tanks play "safe", the party itself is at a much greater pressure and risk to play mechanically perfectly. That pressure to not be able to afford one single death or two on itself is an unsafe disadvantage.
Many, many times, I hear people say "We just dont have get a death", whenever they die to the enrage timer. It's one solution, but an easier solution is to deal more damage in the first place through proper good play with good rotation, including the tanks, so that any kind of deaths are not an issue in the first place when it comes to clearing a fight before the enrage timer.

It's how good parties clear difficult fights early, as learning a new fight to the extent of perfection always takes a certain time, while learning a proper opener/rotation and a general feel on when to stancedance as a tank is more of one-and-done instance that you have to learn only one time and then continue to apply and slightly adjust to every fight in the future, enabling your party to clear many battles before achieving/learning mechanical perfection for each specifically.

[MauvaisOeil]

The difference between a good player and an average-complacent player is that the former is readily accepts to carry parties through these "other issues", while the latter just sits in tankstance and tells others that these issues are "not his problem" since he's tanking just fine. Obviously any kind of advice should recommend good play, that helps any party, so the former is recommended while the latter should be avoided.

On the last sentence, there are plenty of instances in savage fights where the boss stops autoattacking( i.e. do 0 damage specifically to the tank) for a minute or more in O3S and many more fights, and in these instances, Tankstance is nothing but a disadvantage.
The "your healers might dps more" argument is also flawed, as it pushes the responsibility to deal DPS while doing their roleduties to the healers. Why should Healers dps when you as a tank do not bother to improve your DPS through stancedancing? That's a doublestandard.
In addition, the "extra heals" that a no-tankstance tank requires are much less of a dps loss than a full tankstance tank. A full tankstance tank deals up to 40~60% less damage than a proper dps tank, and it's enough damage loss to make fights harder for your party.

Harder? How? Aren't Tankstance Tanks supposed to be safe? Let me elaborate.
A properly played dps-oriented-party can afford 7 or more playerdeaths while still comfortably clearing the O3S-O4S enrage timer, while a party with fulltankstance tanks has a muuch lower leeway in clearing the enrage time, some even parties have to give up after one single dps death. The former then can therefore afford many more mistakes than the latter, while the latter requires perfect mechanical execution. So even if the full tank-stance Tanks play "safe", the party itself is at a much greater pressure and risk to play mechanically perfectly. That pressure to not be able to afford one single death or two on itself is an unsafe disadvantage.
Many, many times, I hear people say "We just dont have get a death", whenever they die to the enrage timer. It's one solution, but an easier solution is to deal more damage in the first place through proper good play with good rotation, including the tanks, so that any kind of deaths are not an issue in the first place when it comes to clearing a fight before the enrage timer.

Turning around the problem into "player's bad mind and refusal of responsabilities" won't change the fact it's a poor designed thing ATM. Some enjoy it, some don't, like pretty much everything on every subject and every situation, that's fine. But the core idea of tank stances, beeing "serious" role defining abilities obtained at lvl 30 supposed to define the core function of your job from the moment you obtain it, to your last breath (might be quite close actually), is a failure.

Some define it as skill, while it's a matter of party synergy more than individual skill. Some consider the tank stance is a babysit, other as a supposed allways on move.

The fact is, the game forked somewhere, somehow. When rezzes can be done up to seven times withouth failing a fight, when 100% dps stance uptime is achieved, where is supposed to be a hard bargain to deal with. It's tank and spank with acceptable failure around every corner. If the only difficulty SE can put in a fight is "Enrage timer" to ensure only a restricted amount of playerbase will ensure a kill, there is obviously a serious lack of imagination and long term sight here.

Now as some said (shinko, I believe), stances and IB are a thing of the past, which simply shows the poor ability of game devs to keep abilities mandatory and valuable with expansions passing by. Pretty dumb imo, to make things into making not only older content, but older skills and spells, less and less relevant.

[aleph_null]

The underlying issue here is that tank stance comes at a dps cost, while other mitigation skills, excluding TBN and IB, do not. Now given that premise, if you have a surplus of mitigation, obviously the first thing you "want" to reduce is tank stance uptime, simple as that. They need to give us reasons to not want to reduce tank stance uptime, which basically means the healers must contribute more extra dps than what we gain from switching to dps stance, though in that case we're just shifting the burden to maximize dps to them, and they can complain over that as well.

Another possible reason to make us not want to drop tank stance is to make it impossible to survive in dps stance, but that has problems as well. As I said above, if there is a surplus of mitigation, you'd give up the ones that cost you more first, in this case the tank stance. So you need to make sure that the "free" mitigation tools like rampart, vengeance etc aren't enough to mitigate incoming damage, but tank stance is. Now if you make it absolutely necessary to use tank stance AND all those free mitigation tools (.e. no surplus of mitigation) to clear contents, you'd get people complaining that tanking is too hard. Let's face it, if the tanks in Angered, Rushers etc need to be in tank stance to survive, even considering their exceptional healers and party members, your average PF tanks won't live.

If you want to give some leeway for average players, there needs to be a surplus of mitigation, if you want tank stance to not be considered a surplus, you need to either make the free mitigations much weaker than tank stance (in which case they might as well not exist), or make them no longer free (i.e. every single mitigation skill comes at the cost of some resource/dps/uptime, and they must cost more than what tank stances cost). In the latter case they just become the new "tank stance" and people will avoid them outside progression.

Tbh considering how the devs want to reduce the skill gap between good players and average players, they might as well remove tank/dps stances from all tank jobs, just like how they removed cleric stance dancing from healers.

[Mycow8me]

The difference between a good player and an average-complacent player is that the former readily accepts to carry parties through these "other issues" into a clear, while the latter just sits in tankstance and tells others that these issues are "not his problem" since he's tanking just fine, all while wiping repeatedly. Obviously any kind of advice should recommend good play, that helps any party, so the former is recommended while the latter should be avoided.

I dont want to argue with you but for the record... In general I think everyone should strive to do their best but what works well for one person/party may not work well for another. You could accept that their may be other issues and "carry" the party by pushing yourself but there are limits and even if there wasn't... you could elaborate on those other problems and not carry the party and everyone function better "as a whole". I think that is what a "good player" would be doing.

[Kerrath]

I dont want to argue with you but for the record... In general I think everyone should strive to do their best but what works well for one person/party may not work well for another. You could accept that their may be other issues and "carry" the party by pushing yourself but there are limits and even if there wasn't... you could elaborate on those other problems and not carry the party and everyone function better "as a whole". I think that is what a "good player" would be doing.

what?

the optimal way to play a tank right now is to sit in dps stance, bottom line. the benefits of tank stance are negligible and the penalties of tank stance are massive. It has nothing to do with other players in your party. A 'good player' strives to perform the best they can, and so by extension, a 'good tank' learns how to properly tank in dps stance.