Tank Stance Redesign

[Shurrikhan]

calling defiance the worst with only having in mind the stance effect its with all my respect a pretty poor argument, Defiance is not only a 25% HP and 20% heals of certain skills, is inner beast, steel ciclone and equilibrium, WAR alone will take better shields and regens, inner beast will add extra mitigation of his already incredible powerful defensive skill set and equilibrium with is up every 60 seconds will cover any extra damage on every tank buster the game trow at you, all this combine surpass the 20% mitigation of grit and shield.

When the kit is already balanced around having access to a stance-dependent skill (e.g. Inner Beast), that skill is not a bonus of the stance, but merely a weakness of being out of the stance.

Defiance is a gear-scaling stance where the others (Grit and ShO) scale with content, leaving it generally weaker in early prog by comparison.
It does not affect ability-based healing, despite that they are a tremendous portion of total effective healing, especially at critical junctures.
Its 20% increase to HP falls short of the 25% increase to eHP provided by 20% mitigation, and is not immediate where the others are.

Defiance isn't the weakest by any huge amount, but it is indeed the weakest tank stance. That WAR can sacrifice massive potency for a 6-second (let's say, 2.4 GCDs' duration) Rampart just over every 9 GCDs doesn't undo that. Without Equilibrium, it'd scarcely be touched, and even that's available only once per minute. And that, too, is more intuitively gauged as an opportunity cost attached to Equilibrium than an opportunity gained by using Defiance.

[Shurrikhan]

I think you are wrong, articulate but wrong.
I need FF to take away DPS from Tanks and Healers in dg's. If your DPSing then your not a tank, by default. If you are going to do this, then whats the point of DPS classes? Your job is to sacrifice your DPS for the safety of the party. Yes? No?
I mean it is in the name "TANK."
I truly do not mean this to be rude- but then go melee DPS.
My 2 cents~

But, that's already what you're doing? By being a tank, you are sacrificing DPS. That's not going to change any time soon.

The question is simply, why would you sacrifice more than you half to? That's like purposely overpaying for a fixed price item.

It's not a "role" thing. It's just sanity.

And let's take a look a look at that role. Traditionally, 'tanks' were not a thing. Instead, you merely had positions that had greater capacity and need to remain in the thick of things, and those with greater capacity and need to stay out of the thick of the fight. Those in front were less "tanks" than simply "fighters".

The entirety of tab-target MMORPG "tanking" comes instead from the accepted simplification of AI to a single metric: threat (renamed Enmity in our case). No AI except that the mob will use its abilities on cooldown on the target at the top of the enmity table. The basest, crudest, possible form of mob scripting. And yet people glorify that cheapened development with praise for "tanking". Someone's gotta smack that boss with oddly irritating wet noodles as surely as that guy back there needs to emoting every tenth second, on the dot, or the party will wipe. No integration. No coordination, save for the occasional forced downtime. Just, stack those stones. Keep stacking them. Or the party dies. That's tab-target MMORPG's "tanking", or at least the only thing unique to "tanks". Everyone can make space for their team as well as a tank, given they strike first and hardest. Everyone can thwart the enemy's offenses as well as a tank can. Everyone can hinder movement or stun to drive an enemy to a halt before it need be thwarted. And that remains uniquely tank territory is stacking stones. And even that's largely a trap.

See, you only need to stack so many stones -- just enough to stay on top and ensure that one-line mob keeps attacking you instead. And you only need so much eHP -- just enough not to die. So why would you pay more than you have to -- such that your party has to pay more in turn -- all to make out like enmity-stacking is a bigger deal than is, or really anything other than a concession admitted for effortless AI?

I honestly agree with this. Every other mmo gets it better then we do here. A tanks job is to tank. If not you are just a dragoon with more health. They have no purpose being a dps and it seems to only be causing everyone more stress.

A tank's job is identical to that of any other "role", or indeed any class or player: to make the party succeed more surely and quickly than if another role/class/player were taken instead. That's it. There's no secret to it. You ought to benefit the party as best your toolkit and personal skill allow in the context of the party and content. That does not require you to stroke that enmity meter for all its worth or waste people's time so you can assert your underpowered mitigation equivalence in place of XIV's overpowered healer throughput. It does not require DPS to stand in every AoE for the minorest of damage increases. It does not require healers to heal trifles rather than putting in far more significant throughput of their own.

[shao32]

When the kit is already balanced around having access to a stance-dependent skill (e.g. Inner Beast), that skill is not a bonus of the stance, but merely a weakness of being out of the stance.

Defiance is a gear-scaling stance where the others (Grit and ShO) scale with content, leaving it generally weaker in early prog by comparison.
It does not affect ability-based healing, despite that they are a tremendous portion of total effective healing, especially at critical junctures.
Its 20% increase to HP falls short of the 25% increase to eHP provided by 20% mitigation, and is not immediate where the others are.

Defiance isn't the weakest by any huge amount, but it is indeed the weakest tank stance. That WAR can sacrifice massive potency for a 6-second (let's say, 2.4 GCDs' duration) Rampart just over every 9 GCDs doesn't undo that. Without Equilibrium, it'd scarcely be touched, and even that's available only once per minute. And that, too, is more intuitively gauged as an opportunity cost attached to Equilibrium than an opportunity gained by using Defiance.

Sorry I have to disagree, every tank have something that scale with gear, TBN is fairly weaker that his bis version and PLD blocks shelltron, all jobs are worse with low gear, PLD will be the one that lose less.

WAR current skill set on deliverance match DRK and PLD ones, we can argue its even better on phisical figths, defiance not only add his bonus, it brings inner beast to have that 20% bonus on top of his HP bonus, having for 6 seconds a better stance that the other 2.

I will remember all tanks loose 25% dps for full tank stance uptime.

With all this in mind WAR is able to vengeance/rampart + inner beast + thrill/raw on top of his defiance bonus and heal himself after
Vs a DRK using rampart/shadow/mind + TBN on top of his 20% or a PLD using sentinel/rampart + sheltron.

Defiance don't have anything to envy to grit and shield.

[Lyth]

Thinking back, there was a similar debate over Cleric Stance, heading into Stormblood.

Outside of total uptime, tank stance usage is probably the single most influential factor on your dps. Tank "rotations" are very much simplified in comparison to dps jobs, and positionals are non-existent. The fear, I think, is that if you reduce or even eliminate this difference, there's not really a way to differentiate between tanks on the basis of skill.

But this is also a design crutch.

Even if you were to simply remove tank defensive stances across the board, players would still clear content. Damage would just scale differently. The bigger problem is that the standard encounter design doesn't really challenge tanking.

The single biggest issue in this is positioning. Having to dynamically position a boss in relation to a mechanic while not losing uptime for yourself and your teammates is supposed to be a core challenge in tanking. But a lot of boss movement in fights is artificial.They often reposition themselves and orientate themselves in order to facilitate a new raid-wide mechanic. Your job is just to not mess that positioning up. They helpfully animation lock themselves during casts so that you don't have to worry about messing up your teammates' positionals while dodging. I feel like if encounters made tank positioning a more central part of encounter design (and better yet, gave tanks more things to actually do), you'd see plenty of ways for tanks to differentiate themselves outside of minimising tank stance usage.

Stances are not a bad thing, but I don't think that everyone needs to have them. WAR and MNK's designs lend themselves very well to stances. They're free, instant, and the transition isn't clunky. You swap between them to access different parts of your toolkit. That's an interesting aesthetic. They don't necessarily even need to have intrinsic defensive or offensive value. It makes the jobs feel flexible.

PLD and DRK's stances don't really fit the jobs. They are clunky to swap between and have unnecessary costs attached. Because the transition is painful, abilities that are stance exclusive are effectively gated by the stances. It's not stance-dancing, it's stance-limping.

Truth be told, anyone who tells you that WAR has the weakest stances in the game either misunderstands the job, or is flat out trying to deceive you. A WAR in Defiance is the most defensive, most robust prog tank in the game. A WAR in Deliverance is the highest dps tank in the game.

With regards to the earlier discussion on lifesteal: Lifesteal isn't a mitigation tool. It isn't a substitute for defensive cooldowns. It does fall under the category of self-sustain, however, which falls under the broader constellation of abilities which are "useful, but not essential." Things like this give a job flavour and make it fun to play.

The problem with this game was that it was designed around your tank choices being either PLD or WAR. If you had five different tanks on release, each of them would have a more narrow niche out of necessity. Otherwise they'd all play the same.

Right now, WAR brings the best burst dps, sustained dps, raid dps buffs, raid defensive buffs, mobility, self-healing, knockback protection, and mitigation. Try and compare that to another MMO and you'll find that it has about five or six different tank concepts stuffed into one. On the one hand, that makes the job popular, because you have access to all the good stuff on one job. On the other, it actively stifles the development of other tank jobs. Anything that you design is going to feel like a cheap knockoff, because you already gave its core aesthetic away. It's shortsighted and bad for the game.

The way to fix it is to pick a aesthetic direction for each tank and focus on it. But you have to make concessions in some areas if you want to be really, really good at something else. Change is necessary.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I'm all for DRK/PLD getting some adjustments to their tank stances to make them as fluid as WAR. But to argue that tank stances should be removed is opinion based on ego alone. Image alone. If you don't need it or don't want it, then don't use it. Remember the last time SE catered to the high-end players? It nearly destroyed the game.

This is extremely disingenuous. For one, Gordias failed because they didn't properly tune it. Even the best players in the world couldn't clear Manipulator until week five, not because of skill but the fight simply being gear gated. They needed their weapons to have a chance, which is absurdly high. Secondly, many people screaming everything was super easy were actually casual players who say Coil go down in under a week and assumed it was a pushover. All that aside, a far bigger contributor to the game failing were the lack of basic QoL features. No CD resets upon wipe caused needlessly waiting around. No PF meant the raid recruitment pool was decidedly low, thus making it much more difficult to find groups at similar prog levels. And perhaps the biggest factor, 3.1 was a dumpster fire of a patch, leaving the game with virtually nothing for almost nine months.

People love to blame Gordias for everything, but they seemingly forget all we had in 3.1 was Void Ark, a raid so easy even the devs acknowledged as much, LoV and Diadem. You add that all up, plus the aforementioned and that's why the game suffered so much.

I think you are wrong, articulate but wrong.
I need FF to take away DPS from Tanks and Healers in dg's. If your DPSing then your not a tank, by default. If you are going to do this, then whats the point of DPS classes? Your job is to sacrifice your DPS for the safety of the party. Yes? No?
I mean it is in the name "TANK."
I truly do not mean this to be rude- but then go melee DPS.
My 2 cents~

Then the devs need to make content hit significantly harder because if I'm locked into tank stance yet dungeons remain a tickle fest, I'll just stop tanking. Likewise, Swallow's Compass is so laughably easy to heal, I have legitimately healed with nothing except Regen. So... what am I supposed to do in this scenario? Go AFK watching Netflix until the tank finally takes enough damage Cure II's worth casting? Once again, the community mindset is a byproduct of how undertuned content is. When I can do wall to wall pulls without Grit, why am I going to bother gimping myself by 20%? I would love to feel more like a tank in this game but the design philosophy makes it so I'm more an extremely buffed DPS because the devs are terrified of making things too hard for people who struggle to press Surecast and Medica II at the same time.

I can guarantee you one thing. DPS queues could increase astronomically if they simply locked out DPS on non-damage dealers. People willing to play either role, especially healers would plummet. And seeing how easy it is to cap tomes nowadays, I simply wouldn't even look at roulettes. The whole reason the devs didn't do this with Cleric Stance despite disliking how aggressive we play is because they know exactly what would happen.

[HyoMinPark]

I need FF to take away DPS from Tanks and Healers in dg's. If your DPSing then your not a tank, by default. If you are going to do this, then whats the point of DPS classes? Your job is to sacrifice your DPS for the safety of the party. Yes? No?
I mean it is in the name "TANK."
I truly do not mean this to be rude- but then go melee DPS.
My 2 cents~

Speaking from the perspective of a player who plays healer in almost all casual content, this would be a sure-fire way for me to never step foot in a dungeon again.

A tank inherently does damage while maintaining aggro. You’re proposing to remove the option to deal damage, so then tanks are now expected to spam abilities that literally do nothing to the mobs? Could you make gameplay any more boring? While this is my opinion, I’m sure that it is shared by plenty of others that would not want to participate in something so incredibly dull.

I guess I hope you enjoy ridiculously long queues as a DPS... Because that’s what you would get.

[Kabooa]

I guess I hope you enjoy ridiculously long queues as a DPS... Because that’s what you would get.

If going from 4200 to 3600 kills the job for you, you didn't like the job in the first place.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

If going from 4200 to 3600 kills the job for you, you didn't like the job in the first place.

Uh... healers would be doing zero damage in this scenario while the only tank who wouldn't lose a hell of a lot more than 600 dps is Warrior. And even Warrior still suffers a bigger loss. You're grossly underestimating the impact tank stance has.

[347SPECTRE]

The loss would be closer to 1000-1200 dps. That and not to mention defiance WAR is really boring on single target.

[Kabooa]

Uh... healers would be doing zero damage in this scenario while the only tank who wouldn't lose a hell of a lot more than 600 dps is Warrior. And even Warrior still suffers a bigger loss. You're grossly underestimating the impact tank stance has.

The difference doesn't matter. Lowering someone's ceiling doesn't change the range of a poor player from a good player.

If your max is 5000 now, but was then reduced to 4000, your lower end is going to proportionately drop.

If dropping that damage capacity makes you quit the job, you didn't like it to start with.