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

[Izsha]

To be honest one of the things that baffles me about SE is that they haven't taken advantage of the fact that in 8 Mans you can split the party into two completely cohesive 4-man groups with a tank, healer, and two DPS each.

Imagine a savage raid that actually was a raid. Where your goal was to do a speed run down two trash-packed halls side by side with two 4-man parties simultaneously, with mechanics where you specifically have to swap individual members in specific instances in order to clear the fight. Stuff like transferring keys/cargo across from one area to the other, or placing the two trying to swap in a mini-arena on order to use abilities that only that role has access to in order to deal with enemies, or allow two separate arenas to be close enough together that the healers can heal both tanks and/or prey targets in order to deal with one side getting bombarded, or just to barely let you use Ranged LB3 on a pair of giant packs.


Hell that would be a unique enough arena in of itself without having to make it a full-scale dungeon.

They have actually done some of that back in the days when there was trash packs in raids like split groups in alexander, or multiple times in 24 man raids. They also have the party split in Alphascape 4 right now, or 'soft' splits anytime there are two bosses in a fight that self destruct. Someone mentioned being thrown for a tank swap, while not exact, they did have the interesting byakko tank swap among others.

If you look throughout the game there are many examples of basically everything suggested in this thread, and more but usually as 1 offs, or a watered down version to 'test' it in a single instance. SE is a conservative JP company. Western games tend to just boldy strike out in new directions and see what happens, and that leads to a lot of variety and creativity. But it also leads to complete and abject failures that piss off everyone. Sure nax had all this great stuff, but what happened before and after? Instead of sticking to what worked they tried a buncha new shiz and re-made their game 7 times over. Playing it safer is just the mirror of the same double edged sword. Balance is in the middle, but thats a company culture question more than 'right' answer.

[Lyth]

There's a problem with partial homogenisation. The more similar that you make two abilities, the more their differences stand out.

If you take Sentinel/Vengeance/Shadow Wall, all three fulfil the same function. But there are very clear winners and losers. Vengeance is the clear winner, with 5 seconds extra duration, as well as the ability to deliver a 55 potency attack every time you take damage. Sentinel is probably the loser here, as the 10% extra DR that it offers doesn't offset the 60 second longer recast.

The same is true with shielding and temporary HP. In this game, temporary HP beats out shields. Why? You get healed for the amount of bonus HP that you gain. In order for the two to be truly equal, you'd have to lose that amount of HP when the effect wore off (potentially killing you in the process, à la Last Stand).

There are some things that you can trade off, though. Burst dps will always, always trump sustained dps in practical situations. Anything that causes an uptime loss, be it a mechanic, or be it an untargetable boss, will cause burst to pull ahead. If you're trying to make a dps check, you want burst, not sustain. So if you want a job to have a clear advantage in burst, it has to be the lowest dps on a target dummy. One of the many problems with WAR over the history of this game is that it consistently offers the best burst dps, best sustained dps, and an essential raid buff. Pick one. Not all three.

There are other things which either add flavour or give you creative solutions to problems. Cover is a pretty unique ability. It's not essential, and you can't really equate it to any other ability. But that's fine. You don't need a WAR or DRK equivalent. The same is true for lifesteal. This is why lines need to be drawn. You can have your super powerful Fell Cleave and crazy burst IR window. Just don't encroach on our turf.

[Kalise]

To be honest one of the things that baffles me about SE is that they haven't taken advantage of the fact that in 8 Mans you can split the party into two completely cohesive 4-man groups with a tank, healer, and two DPS each.

Sounds similar to a variety of WoW boss encounters that lead you to having split groups.

Examples being:

Gothik the Harvester in Naxxramas, where there was a wall put up splitting your two groups and enemies spawned in one room and when killed their spirit went into the other room and spawned another enemy. So, one team was feeding mobs into the other team.

The Conclave of Wind in The Throne of the Four Winds required two bosses to be actively tanked and 3 targets to be DPSed and killed at the same time.

Galakras in Siege of Orgrimmar required a team to stay on the ground and deal with the siege of orcs and the mini-boss while another team needed to fight their way up 2 different towers and gain control of the cannons on top (Which then needed to both be used to bring the boss down out of the sky)

Spoils of Pandaria in Siege of Orgrimmar also required 2 separate teams to clear each side of the room. With the potential to have people use periodically spawning ropes to let them cross over to the other side to assist.

Gara'jal the Spiritbinder in Mogu'shan Vaults needed a team to go into the spirit world and deal with all the shadows that would build up over time (As well as a healer to manage health levels so that people could exit when needed, which was the same "Reach full health" mechanic as Manxome Molaa Ja Ja in Wanderer's Palace (Hard) ability Doom)

Perhaps not as detailed as your suggestion, but even outside it's glory days, WoW did quite often try and get people to have to split up into smaller groups in raids (That said, Tanking many of these encounters was boring AF since it was literally just "DPS this trash" or "Face tank this add that has no abilities" and "Taunt on X Stacks"... It's always so annoying that games just don't find a way to make the OT actually do something interesting... I think the most engaged I've ever been during OT duties was as a Druid in Cataclysm, but that was because Feral back then had the talents and gear to be 90% of a DPS when you went into cat form without losing out on any tanking proficiency in bear form...)

But yeah, a simple battle plan of having a main force go into the front of a particular engagement, while a secondary splinter group goes around the flank and takes out key targets is a thing that could be done for a dungeon/arena/raid. I mean, it's a pretty staple PvP plan and one I used a lot in Warhammer Online in the open world PvP, but never really gets utilized in PvE content and instead it's all about the full group just zerging onto a boss and that's it...

[Kalise]

There's a problem with partial homogenisation. The more similar that you make two abilities, the more their differences stand out.

The same is true with shielding and temporary HP. In this game, temporary HP beats out shields. Why? You get healed for the amount of bonus HP that you gain. In order for the two to be truly equal, you'd have to lose that amount of HP when the effect wore off (potentially killing you in the process, à la Last Stand).

Which is why balance of this kind of thing is more difficult than just giving classes the same skill for example as a Role Action.

You'd need to adjust values so that they provide a similar overall effect, even if on face value there's a huge discrepancy.

For example, in order for an AoE shield to be worth as much as an AoE health boost, it'd need to be at a higher % value (Mostly due to the fact that max health has additional benefits such as boosting certain skills like Upheaval as well as percentage healing such as Benediction. But also because max health and thus the heal, will always grant you that heal, while a shield that times out doesn't give you the full value - Which does mean that an excessive duration on a shield can help even things out)

There are other things which either add flavour or give you creative solutions to problems. Cover is a pretty unique ability. It's not essential, and you can't really equate it to any other ability. But that's fine. You don't need a WAR or DRK equivalent. The same is true for lifesteal. This is why lines need to be drawn. You can have your super powerful Fell Cleave and crazy burst IR window. Just don't encroach on our turf.

Which is why it's essential to provide tanks with a baseline level of utility across the board that each one of them has, in order to allow for interesting mechanics to be used to keep a player engaged.

While also trying to ensure that each tank has some level of uniqueness in how it performs. Like my previous example of WAR doing more raw damage than the other 2 tanks, but PLD and DRK still being able to be equally useful for DPS checks by way of how they could enhance the DD's that will be able to burst/sustain DPS for them if using the suggested "PLD can buff damage and DRK can debuff enemy defenses" line of balancing (Of course, such things would need to scale with DPS stats in a comparatively equal manner to that of WAR's raw damage)

[Grimoire-M]

They have actually done some of that back in the days when there was trash packs in raids like split groups in alexander, or multiple times in 24 man raids. They also have the party split in Alphascape 4 right now, or 'soft' splits anytime there are two bosses in a fight that self destruct. Someone mentioned being thrown for a tank swap, while not exact, they did have the interesting byakko tank swap among others.

If you look throughout the game there are many examples of basically everything suggested in this thread, and more but usually as 1 offs, or a watered down version to 'test' it in a single instance. SE is a conservative JP company. Western games tend to just boldy strike out in new directions and see what happens, and that leads to a lot of variety and creativity. But it also leads to complete and abject failures that piss off everyone. Sure nax had all this great stuff, but what happened before and after? Instead of sticking to what worked they tried a buncha new shiz and re-made their game 7 times over. Playing it safer is just the mirror of the same double edged sword. Balance is in the middle, but thats a company culture question more than 'right' answer.

I don't really count A12S as a split boss fight when Filter arbitrarily turns it from actually being that into O6S because the second boss is effectively turned into a temporary add due to how multi-dotting and snapshotting works in this game. Resonance could easily be replaced with a tether on both tanks and charges have been done before in Ravana and Twintania, so it's not a stretch to imagine them being done simultaneously via two sources.

And SE did stick to what worked, which is what got us into this mess. Because Gordias was rushed and the reaction was so bad, SE wound up removing design space they still had available to them on the basis of one bad raid tier, instead of looking at the problem more closely. I feel a lot of their design decisions are simply made in bad faith, but maybe that's just the community difference.

[Deceptus]

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.

I agree with this stance but man, oh man, the current decent tanks would REVOLT over this.

[SargentToughie]

I agree with this stance but man, oh man, the current decent tanks would REVOLT over this.

It happened before, during the launch of Stormblood. Tanks were put back on STR, our accessories had none of it, causing tank players to go back and wear i270 accessories. That combined with the fact that tank mechanics in general (especially WAR) got gutted when stance dancing, and you had a tank player base that was right properly outraged.

Do that when also releasing two shiny, new, hotly anticipated DPS classes at the same time? Well the results spoke for themselves.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I agree with this stance but man, oh man, the current decent tanks would REVOLT over this.

And I will be among those tanks. Like I said, if we could optimize tank mechanics which also required tank stance, I'm all for the change. If I'm sitting in Defiance because daring to dip out for more than an Inner Release window causes the BRD to immediately rip makes for very uninteresting gameplay. I'm basically being told, "No. You can't optimize your DPS because we don't like you doing damage. Sit in tank stance like a good girl even if the extra mitigation/HP is completely unnecessary."

As others have already stated, tank stance just isn't fun in its current inception. It's the equivalent of healers getting Cleric Stance back but being unable to use it in eight man content. Healing wouldn't magically become more interesting. You'd just be standing around or contributing paltry DPS because the devs were too afraid (or stubborn) to innovate.

Something you have to be mindful of when insisting tanks and healers should just do this one thing and "suck it up." If enough players revolt, we all suffer. You'll have less tanks and healers because what enjoyment those players had was taken away. In fact, if healer DPS were nerfed significantly enough, you'd likely see statics moving towards a 1-1-5 comp; forcing healers to solo heal the entire fight. Why? Well, there isn't much point to bringing two healers when both will sit around idle for half the fight. And since every fight can be solo healed, well... you've now opened a new can of worms.

[Derio]

I just have a feeling that they are going to do 1 of 2 things.

1 - Buff other tanks to WAR level

2- Nerf WAR

Its that simple, I hope its the first option.

I just hope they learned their lesson from 3.x and 4.x with both the tank and healer jobs.

[ArianeEwah]

Before I start with my rant, a little nit-pick on the OP.

…the fact that Holy Spirit was more damage than WAR's Fell Cleave…

Holy Spirit never did more damage than Fell Cleave. In 4.0 Holy Spirit had 430 pot, Fell Cleave 500.
Requiescat increases damage by 20% – for WAR’s Fell Cleave we got „slashing“ (+10%), Storm’s Eye (+20% in 4.0), Deliverance dmg bonus +5%, and Berserk +30%. Deliverance alone was enough to outdamage a buffed Holy Spirit (516 vs 525 pot)
Holy Spirit is just „PLD’s Fell Cleave“. (Even more since 4.2 IR changes; 5 FC vs 5 HS)

I agree with everything else in the OP.

Others have already added accessories and Yoshida’s comment about tank damage.
But before get into that I want to point out the things SE actually did right in 4.x.

(TL;DR below.)

• Enmity: They changed some (dps) combos to stop this „my aggro combo has highest potency gain“ as OT. They also added Shirk, buffed Diverison, changed Refresh and Tactican (poor BRD+MCH still lost Quelling Strikes – 3.x Diversion)
  No more aggro ping pong games.

• Parry/Tenacity: Parry was useless for so many years. Tenacity still might not be the highest DPS gain, but that is fine. At least it is a DPS gain now, and significant at that. Mitigation bonus is a niche tho.

• PLD overhaul: Way overdue, not just potency-wise, but also rotation- and design-wise. imo PLD is the best designed tank right now.

…now the things they did wrong… oh boi…

• Accessories: This (big) topic probably exists since the launch of FFXIV. I just can’t understand how is it possible that SE still wasn’t able to fix such a simple problem?!
  If we ignore the 3.2 band-aid VIT+STR season, tanks always melded STR into their accessories (or VIT into their STR accessories)
  For other jobs you rarely saw them wearing VIT accessories melded with their main stat. Well, since 4.0 that isn‘t possible anymore, and every other role is melding secondary stats outside of Ultimate.
  But tanks… still melding STR as usual. That also means: DEX, INT and MND materia are USELESS, and they should be removed from the game, just as resistance and elemental materia got removed.
  But SE’s attempts to ‚fix‘ this problem just made it worse. They are just getting mired in it even further.
  And now we hear Yoshida say: „Tanks still deal too much damage.“ I. am. speechless…
  FYI: The best healer duo does about 9-10k combined in every Alphascape fight. The highest combined tank damage is about 10-12k.
  If tanks do too much damage, then so do healers. If they want reduce tank damage, adjust their power scaling, same with healers.
  I see those numbers, and I don’t understand where Yoshida gets this (dumb) idea that tanks deal too much. Just because it is ‚easier‘ to DPS as tank – and necessary – doesn’t mean they deal too much in comparison.
  There are also plenty of suggestions out there, on reddit, official forums in every language, other forum websites etc. It’s not like people wouldn’t give you ideas, but yours, SE… your solutions are just the worst.
  FIX your damn problem, SE!

• Direct Hit: Another problem SE created themselves. While it’s not a big one, it’s still there, shows bad design, and lazy work. DH should’ve been a role stat, just as Piety and Tenacity. But the team was too lazy to adjust the stats on tank (and healer) gear, thus we still have DH+Tenacity on gear on lvl 60 and below. And just because they were lazy to differ here, DH automatically became the best melded tank (and healer) stat after Crit… well, until they changed WAR’s IR…
  The team was too lazy to adjust old accessories, to lock them behind roles, just as it was too lazy to adjust the stats on old (tank and healer) gear in general.
  Now, I expect Piety to be removed in 5.0 with TP+MP-merge, too. If that’s the case, Tenacity has no place in this game either.

• Tenacity/(Self-)healing: This is a little of a nit-pick. Did you notice that probably every healing skill (including self-healing skills, like bloodbath or Inner Beast) have lower pot value than damage pot, once we hit 61+?
  Bloodbath’s tooltip in 3.x said „Converts 25%...“, since 4.x it says „Converts a portion…“. In reality those old 25% til 60 translate to ~20% on 70. Why is that a thing? It’s yet another example of bad design. Tenacity is there to reduce the damage taken, so it’s a buff, right? But: as tanks rely on (self-)healing the most, and it has been reduced, this design is actually a nerf. It doesn’t matter when you take 5 or 10% less damage thanks to Tenacity, you lose ~20% on healing compared to lvl 60 values.

• Role Actions: That change hit DRK the most, both gameplay and balance wise. This job lost Low Blow, Reprisal, and Dark Dance/Anticipation. Every action, alone or in combination, defined DRK’s gameplay. In HW DRK might not have been the best designed job ’cause they were forced into MT pos, but it was fun (at least for me). Stormblood changed DRK into a WAR wanna-be with a faster GCD (Bloodweapon), weaker DPS and mitigation, higher skill floor, and low reward to skill ratio.
  Role Actions „must-equip“ skills for every tank were Rampart, Provoke, Shirk, Reprisal, and either Awareness or Convalescence. WAR got Rampart for Foresight (+), PLD lost one (Awareness/Conva) and gained one (Reprisal). DRK on the other hand lost 2-3 actions, for nothing. Even now, after every tank has access to every Role Action, DRK suffers from action changes to Low Blow, Reprisal and Anticipation.

• DRK downfall: Role Actions, PLD overhaul, WAR re-design mid-expansion, missing synergy between the other tanks and healers, and the higher skill floor, just screwed DRK. It’s might not be unplayable, but still undesireable. Some might like the new gameplay, but most just don’t. Also, getting a major mitigation tool – TBN – only after reaching lvl 70, feels obstructively. Increased Dark Arts usage, double ressource-management, risky investment… I don’t think anyone would really WANT such a gamble job.
  (Btw SE changed SCH-Excogitation from „not-healing when not triggered“ to „heal anyway when duration runs out“. But TBN still doesn’t provide 50 Blood when not broken. That makes playing any duty overgeared a pain.)

• Tank stance(s): Still clunky for DRK and PLD, completely neglectable with Shadewalker. WAR is still king in this section.

TL;DR:
SE did good in changing enmity tools, parry to tenacity and PLD.
But they failed so many major design changes because of wrong decisions and half-assed work. DRK falls behind, Role Actions are a mess. Every change mid-expansion feels like/is a band-aid. Tanks are still the least played role, and if SE continue like this, this wouldn’t change.