Tank Stance Redesign

[Shurrikhan]

Dread Spikes is an ability that DRK has, historically had, which serves a similar function. Why not merge it together with Blood Price? For the next X seconds, your attacks generate additional enmity. Attacks performed against you restore a minor proportion of the damage back.

Functionally, it's not all that different from "for the next X seconds, your %healing increases and your attacks generate additional enmity" or "for the next X seconds, your block rate goes up, Shield Swipe's recast is reduced, and you generate additional enmity."

I just don't see why you'd want to muddy an ability that puts the resources generated entirely under the DRKs control with passive spending of its output. Assuming proper balance, what you gain in HP generated and/or damage reflected you lose from other options, whereas providing pure resource instead puts those options fully in the DRK's hands. What DRK lacks, imo, isn't an stylized Rampart (but without any protection vs. being one-shot, since you can't reabsorb damage taken after you're already dead) so much as spenders strong enough to fill its iconic identity. It needs greater punctuation available to its MP spending and greater utility output from spending that MP.

That likely means trading out Darkside as a flat bonus to a toggle-able that causes your spells and abilities to spend additional mana for additional potency, to be used during burst or emergencies and avoided when banking for such. That certainly means upping the %-damage-to-HP modifier on Souleater and Abyssal Drain. And it likely means adding some vampirism-synergetic bonus to Grit, such as allowing self-overhealing to instead create a (continuously fading, by both flat and percentile rates) shield effect.

[Lyth]

[...]

I skipped some steps in my explanation.

From a defensive standpoint, it's relatively simple to remove stances from the tanks. It's just a matter of tuning baseline tank defensive values and mob damage output. What makes this different from, say, the removal of Cleric Stance from healers is that stances have the dual function of generating enmity.

The place where enmity matters the most is when you're grabbing initial aggro on the boss or a newly spawned add. That's also the point when you're at highest risk of losing aggro to a non-tank. The general solution to this is to Shirk. But there are situations where you can't rely on Shirk (i.e. your co-tank is on a different target, or is unreliable). Other solutions involve Unchained (WAR only) or Shadewalker (NIN only).

The simplest substitute for tank stance would be a role action ability that simply gives your attacks an enmity multiplier for a short period of time. It's also kind of boring. If you want to inject a bit of flavour, you just need to combine it with a fluff defensive cooldown.

For PLD, you're never going to use Bulwark in isolation to mitigate a tankbuster. So combining it with an ability that increases enmity and perhaps lets you throw in a few more Shield Swipes in the process achieves the above goal while fleshing out the job identity a bit. The same holds true for Dread Spikes. This isn't intended to substitute for the damage reduction of the old tank stances. That's a passive effect that can be built into the jobs at baseline. It's intended to convert a fluff defensive into something that serves a new but essential function.

[...]

I remember that post. I think it did a good job of capturing the growing pains that were associated with Gordias. It wasn't enough to get the best armor and stand in front of the boss, awing your team with how little damage you were taking. It wasn't enough to simply survive and RP fight the big dragon. You now had to study boss attack patterns and compensate for a dps-focused loadout with more skilled use of active, as opposed to passive defensive abilities. Your team now counted on your tanking skill to make the dps check.

I appreciate the sentiment. I wouldn't play a tank if the defensive gameplay elements didn't matter to me. But I felt that your post just about missed the mark then, and it still just misses it now.

Compare and Contrast
The main problem with tank stance is that it's passive. You apply it, and it stays on. There's functionally no difference between a game in which tank stance is mandatory and one in which the mobs all do 20% less damage. So do you attribute the lower damage numbers to the fact that the stance is making you "more defensive", or is it because the bosses don't hit all that hard? You may be "maximising your defense" passively, but it does nothing for the "role fantasy" that you described.

These "role fantasies" are established through contrast. WAR has a relatively low average GCD potency. So when you launch into Inner Release, you see a massive jump in your damage output. If all of WAR's attacks passively did more damage across the board, you'd lose the impact. What is a "powerful attack"? Is it 1000 damage? 100000? Numbers are meaningless unless you have a baseline to compare them to.

On the mitigation side of things, one of the most iconic tanking moments in this game was in T13, when your two tanks, standing side by side, get blasted by wave after wave of destructive energy. It's not passive mitigation that creates the impact of the scene. It's not 100% tank stance uptime. It's the fact that if you don't actively mitigate, the attack vaporises you. Passive effects, like the defensive stats from armour and tank stance, exist to separate tanks from non-tanks. But it doesn't give you the accomplishment of standing resilient in the face of an overwhelming attack. It's the threat, the sense of danger of being one-shot that does this.

The other problem with stances, as you describe them, is that players by nature will seek out ways to maximise their dps. You saw what happened with tank accessories at the start of this expansion. They removed STR from our accessories. What did we do? We equipped i270 STR accessories from the end of Heavensward and rolled cooldowns. You can try to make conditions more hostile for the player, but there's enough variation in skill that you're bound to find someone capable of pulling it off.

And what are these players really doing? They're not cheating the system. When they maximise their dps by replacing passive mitigation with a more nuanced use of cooldowns, they're creating that very sense of danger, that risk of being oneshot. They're creating that very same mitigation fantasy that the draconian stance system would seek to deny them.

Rewarding Mitigation
I don't really think that reactive skills and RNG crit effects are the answer either. If you have time to react to it after the fact, it's not all that dangerous. What you need is short recast, short duration mitigation moves like Sheltron and TBN which reward tight timing against cleaves. Sheltron-ing your way through Living Liquid's cleaves in Sword Oath was the OG mitigation challenge. It demonstrates an understanding of damage patterns and a mastery of fight timings.

It's worth noting that some of those "other MMOs" that you mentioned have similarly moved away from passive effects like defensive stances, precisely because they're clunky and don't really offer any real gameplay value if they're designed to be "always on".

You point out that there are players who like to do damage, and there are players who like to mitigate. Why not both? Abilities like Sheltron and TBN bridge the gap between attack and defense. You mitigate well in order to do more damage. The solution to reward both groups of players is to create synergy between the two.

I think another issue that we haven't really considered up until now is the idea of counterattacks. Shield Swipe generally benefits you more when you're actively tanking, outside of fishing for procs with Sheltron. But why does it have to be that way? What if your co-tank could proc it by taking damage from the boss? What if countering an attack provided a mitigation benefit to a teammate? Pyros showed us the fun of Reflect. What if the point wasn't just to mitigate, but reflect damage back to the boss through a well timed counter?

Enforcing tank stance is not the answer. The answer is to make mitigation more meaningful through use of contrast and active mitigation, as opposed to passive design.