Don't repeat the past a third time, Yoshida.

[Launched]

Most jobs have at least a few abilities which are incredibly situational in PvE. Why does WHM still have Repose? What is BLM supposed to do with Freeze? The original version of Shake it Off had more widespread application than either of these actions.

Old skills are a pretty bad excuse to leave WAR with one that had almost no use. Every other job got 5 good skills/traits at 62+, except WHM with its Lily traits, and those have had plenty of complaints. Why should WAR players be fine with getting one less skill/trait than 14 other jobs? I've played PLD for most of this expansion and there's really nowhere I've thought "I could really use 4.0 Shake it Off now".

[Lyth]

Next expansion, I'm not really sure what else you're going to demand. A better version of Cover/TBN, perhaps. More Fell Cleaves, perhaps. An I win button, perhaps. You've either got a monopoly on or ripped off nearly every action a tank could want.

It's a terrible design choice. If you want to fix tank balance and encourage more players to tank, then you stop catering to WAR players and start treating all tanks equally.

[shao32]

Old skills are a pretty bad excuse to leave WAR with one that had almost no use. Every other job got 5 good skills/traits at 62+, except WHM with its Lily traits, and those have had plenty of complaints. Why should WAR players be fine with getting one less skill/trait than 14 other jobs? I've played PLD for most of this expansion and there's really nowhere I've thought "I could really use 4.0 Shake it Off now".

Oh yeah how those selfish ppl dare to think they skills that have being useless since ARR and HW have more priority over a WAR skill that is just situational at best, such injustice, thank God SE know what they do and make shake it off the stronger of tank shields.
/sarcasm.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

While I agree Shake it Off needed a change, it boggles the mind why they turned a near completely worthless ability into the best tank AoE shield in the game. How do those extremes even happen? Frankly, I'm of the opinion they need to remove abilities from tanks and healers and start fresh. Decide what each job will identify as and build from there. Is Warrior going to be the Berserker styled tank? Okay. Give it raw damage and HP sustainability but far less mitigation tools. The devs seem utterly terrified, or perhaps too stubborn, to do a rework like this yet we have Yoshida lamenting tanks not wanting to play like tanks. Well, yeah. You've given them all the tools imaginable so they don't have to be. And you design your content to never force it on them.

Apologies for the rant. This design philosophy just baffles me sometimes.

Old skills are a pretty bad excuse to leave WAR with one that had almost no use. Every other job got 5 good skills/traits at 62+, except WHM with its Lily traits, and those have had plenty of complaints. Why should WAR players be fine with getting one less skill/trait than 14 other jobs? I've played PLD for most of this expansion and there's really nowhere I've thought "I could really use 4.0 Shake it Off now".

Because Warrior has arguably the best kit in the damn game? People aren't necessarily mad Warrior received some adjustments. They're upset Warrior got those adjustment almost immediately yet WHM, DRK, MCH, MNK, RDM, BLM and SAM all were left in the dust for months. Case in point, RDMs told the devs for months their damage was far too low but Yoshida insisted Verraise was enough to compensate. Two full tiers later... they finally give in because surprise, surprise, Verraise isn't all that useful unless you're dying to shit you shouldn't be. Speaking of RDMs, they have Tether—a completely useless bind. Going by the WAR standards, if they complained loud enough, SE should change that into 90s Troubadour. That's how absurd the Shake it Off change was.

[Lyth]

Here's the thing. If you want players to play tank, you have to figure out what draws players to the role and what makes them tick. A good tank is a facilitator. We do whatever needs to be done to make the group function more effectively. Sometimes, this means mitigating in a way that assists our healers. Sometimes, this means pushing out more dps so that our damage dealers can make a dps check.

But the most central function of a tank is this: tanks control space. They set up the fight. They control how it unfolds through effective positioning. And they control re-positioning in a way that allows the entire team to maintain good uptime.

You know why tanks care so much about damage? It's because you've given us nothing else to care about. Mitigation is trivial. You have abilities like Holmgang on a 180 second cooldown, which let us negate every second tankbuster. Positioning is trivial. Bosses re-position themselves, re-orientate themselves, and animation lock themselves in place. Your job is to move to where they spawn or jump, and just hold them where they are. It's like the people designing this fights for this game either have never played a tank before, or have no passion for the role. Because content is not designed for tanks, we play like we're a glorified melee dps.

And they're just not listening. With the advent of Stormblood, tank accessories were designed so that they just didn't offer any significant dps progression. So what did we do? We used i270 accessories. That should have been a warning sign in itself. Hey, maybe this design decision isn't what the players want.

You're not going to get us to "play like tanks" by removing the last thing that the role has going for it. The only way that you can do it is by designing content for tanks. Make us position. Give us fights with genuine, unscripted, tank-controlled movement. Make us mitigate.

Even despite the fact that we forced them to make some concessions with our accessory progression, you still hear Yoshi-p mention how tanks do too much damage, as recently as the Las Vegas Fan Fest Q+A. Do you know the one thing that I don't want to hear, as a tank main? I don't want to hear a non-tank main tell me that we're doing too much damage. I want to hear from someone who is equally passionate about tanking. I want to hear from someone who designs content for tanks. And I want to hear from someone who wants to make the tanking experience better for all of us.

People like playing dps, but there will always be a need for tanks. Those new dps players aren't going to want to wait around for hours until they find the odd person still willing to tank for them. You can't bribe us by making WAR into an overpowered supertank. I'm sorry, but Blizzard does barbarians better. This is a Final Fantasy game. Give me my greatsword or gunblade.

Do you know why 1.0 failed? It wasn't because of technical design issues. It was because you failed to listen to the people playing your game. And you're making that exact same mistake again. It's pride and a lack of communication that causes this game to repeat the same mistakes again and again.

[SargentToughie]

Snip

Big +1 to this, would give more if I had the chance to.

During my long tenure as a tank main in this game, it always felt to me like the dev team simply wasn't listening to the concerns or complaints for the playerbase, and would often just smash a baseball bat into our knees for no good reason. The fact that Warrior even launched in the absolutely pitiful state it was in at the start of SB was appalling, no matter how fast it got hotfixed or how hard it got buffed afterwards. Their whole design philosophy going into Stormblood seemed to be to directly attack the players that enjoyed maximizing their damage, at the cost of all else.

It feels like, simply put, we're not listened to. Just like Lyth said above, that Q&A was a big hit to my desire to come back and tank in 5.0, since Yoshida seemed to say almost dismissively that tanks are still doing too much damage.... Okay, and? What are you going to do about it? Are you going to give us more mechanics to deal with? Are you going to change the way that tanks play in this game in any meaningful way? Because as the launch of SB proved, if you just gut tank damage and do nothing else to change the role on a deeper level, you have a mass exodus.

Veteran tanks have complained for years that tanking is boring as sin. Are we ever going to get listened to?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Veteran tanks have complained for years that tanking is boring as sin. Are we ever going to get listened to?

Yes... if you're a casual player who whines your tank/job of choice doesn't play how you like it to in dungeons.

I wish I were being factious. Unfortunately, a lot of their balance decisions aren't centered around good players trying to push the limits of each individual jobs, but instead around the casual playerbase. Now I get it, they make up the bulk of people playing this game. That doesn't mean it isn't an incredibly shortsighted, and quite frankly poor, design philosophy. Casual content is so laughably undertuned you can queue on classes and breeze through pretty much everything. Sadly, it's this backwards approach that causes so many balancing issues. A prime example of how flawed their approach is are the stupid attack debuffs. When the producer of the game outright says "we don't balance Bard and Machinist around piercing. And giving it to either would make them overpowered" it highlights just how out of touch they are with players who care even the slightest bit about optimization. How, how can you design two jobs and not account for almost 400 damage only one other job gives them? It's taken Bard utterly dominating almost the whole damn expansion—with Dragoon riding its coattails—for them to finally admit, "hey... maybe they were right about this."

Sadly, my speculation regarding tanks isn't a needed overhaul to what few mechanics they have. Instead, I suspect they pull back heavily on abilities like Shirk and Diversion while removing aggro dumps from Elusive, Lucid and Refresh purely because this will force tank stance/aggro combos—in turn weakening tanks. I just cannot imagine they will ever move towards less scripted mechanics because of the perception it would be too hard for casual players. Ironically, it's that design approach that makes tanks want to hyper focus on their DPS. As Lyth said, you've given them nothing else to care about. You can't optimize enmity. Either you're first, second for a specific mechanic, or someone's dead. You can't optimize mitigation since any damage that matters comes in predictable bursts. And you can't position properly for a mechanic since most bosses jump. All you can do is crit your Fell Cleaves.

Sorry, Yoshida. But I'm not going to care about Inner Beast or Defiance when the only optimization tool I have is Crit/D.H Fell Cleaves. Five of them now!

[SargentToughie]

Sorry, Yoshida. But I'm not going to care about Inner Beast or Defiance when the only optimization tool I have is Crit/D.H Fell Cleaves. Five of them now!

Hilarious, that. Inner Beast is one of the best buttons in the entire game for the purpose of actually tanking, but at the same time, it's also so much overkill when tanks just chew on even the Savage level Tank Busters with basic cooldowns/shields, or just ignore them outright with invulns.

It worries me just how correct you probably are. This dev team has shown us time and time again that they're nothing if not apathetic towards the voices of the high level tank players, to the point where so many of us have just straight up abandoned ship.

I just hope that if they administer yet another shortsighted, heavy handed bat to the knees of tanks at the start of 5.0 again, that they learn a harsh lesson from it. Then again, I'd also hoped that the beating they took on SB's launch did that, and here we are again watching history repeat itself.

EDIT: that interview when Yoshida talked about Piercing Debuff, and how it would make BRD/MCH overpowered was actually infuriating. I can't believe I'd forgotten about that until you reminded me. Also, I'm pretty sure that as of 4.4, Piercing Debuff is up to a value of like 500-600ish DPS, isn't it? Or maybe that's the Battle Litany talking, which actually allows DRG to double dip on being a mandatory tag-along to the BRD show, as a proc donkey.

[HyperiusUltima]

There's a lot of discussion that I'm enjoying reading. What matters is that we're heard, and that the developer is reminded of what they've done so that they don't repeat it again. Again, as I said before, all I can hope is that they listen and take our input from Tanks so that we can make them better. Since I've recently been working on Savage as a Tank Job, I can already tell that things are so simple there is literally NOTHING to chew on in the meantime except damage. The Boss's Positioning is really all that matters, not the mechanics since Main Tank just sits there and takes the boss where it needs to be; that's really all there is to it. If we had Tank Mechanics that revolved around something then we'd actually be more aware of it.

Like hell, TAKE A LOOK AT ULTIMATE ULTIMA. The Tank mechanic was for Tanks to take the damage from the orbs there as a group since the damage is split. I LOVE those kinds of mechanics more than anything else. It gives Tank interaction with the boss, and doesn't make it an oversimplified damage dealer. You can even go back to Heavensward's Alexander Days that had tank interactions up the wazoo instead of point and drag.

[Lyth]

It's disheartening, though. Only a fraction of our posts actually filter through. It doesn't matter if we're having the most groundbreaking discussion ever. It has to be flagged, translated, and then brought to the devs' attention. We had thread after thread of feedback on DRK this expansion across many, many months, but the only thing that finally caught the devs' attention was hundreds of upvotes in a few critical threads. Then they were like "Huh, there's a problem with DRK?" That's also probably why they're much more up to date with opinions on housing and glamour than they are on what tanks think or feel about the game. Another glamour thread? Mash that 'Like' button.

I don't even think that this game is designed for casual tanks, either. Enmity generation is a much bigger barrier to entry for newer tanks, because of gear. The biggest fear of a new tank is not dying. It's losing aggro. That's really what keeps people in tank stance.

From a balance perspective, the discrepancies between the tanks become much, much wider when you look at average to lower skilled play. Part of this has to do with the differences between playing a job which puts out burst vs. sustained dps. But it also has to do with stances and enmity generation. WAR is the only tank job with true oGCD stance swaps which don't have any resource costs attached. They're the only job that has a way of negating the penalty associated with tank stance. They have the least amount of opportunity cost associated with their enmity generation and the best snap aggro generation.

If you're really designing around the casual player, the first thing that you do is address that. Kill off tank stances altogether. Simplify enmity generation. This is virtually never where the actual tanking challenge comes from. No matter how you set things up, experienced tanks will always find the minimum required enmity threshold and sit there.

The most challenging part of tanking comes from being forced to manually reposition a boss in response to mechanics. But oddly enough, the biggest positioning challenges seem to happen in dungeons, when you're pulling a bunch of mobs. How do I set up this pull? How do I position these AoEs so that they don't land on the group? Paradoxically, this falls off dramatically when you get to raid content, because everything has to be a scripted dance.

I've said this before, but they actually got it right with A7S. Your tank made a massive difference to your team. You could run the boss around the arena while dodging balls and cats, but nobody would get their GCDs off properly, yourself included. But if you slowly backstepped while anticipating what was happening around the arena, you could do all of your re-positioning without costing anyone in your team a single GCD. Watching really good tanks do that fight was incredible. I wish I could give you some links, but nobody seems to keep their old stuff.

That's the nice thing about fights which actually have meaningful tank movement. It's not all that intimidating for newer players, but if you execute them well, your presence in the raid is like a global dps buff.

This isn't a radical new concept, either. It's common enough in certain other games to introduce some form of tank-controlled movement into fights as a primary mechanic, even if it's something as simple as moving a boss around the edge of the arena in a fixed direction. You just need someone on your design team who actually thinks like a tank, and not like a dps.