How do we feel about the tank changes?

[Nyarlha]

What is your source for that please ? If it's really the case I'm pretty sure that breaking TBN is only going to be ONE option to proc "Dark Arts". Because in the job trailer the DRK isn't getting a TBN broken at all and he's still able to use the "Darkside extender" move. I doubt that they just had him have Dark Arts from the start because the video lasts way more than 10sec. You're either spreading some misinformation that even the leaks didn't talk about, or your source is incomplete and we're going to have another option. I highly doubt that they'll make DRK THAT clunky again after all the feedback on all the previous states the job has gone through.

Please wait for the full job skill list to be available for us to see before jumping on any kind of conclusion.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...on_leak_gives/

Yup, Mara totally missed something. Yes, you get Dark Arts when TBN breaks. Dark Arts allow you to cast Flood of Darkness and Edge of Darkness for FREE. You can still cast them and apply/refresh Darkside with them without Dark Arts but at the cost of MP (3000).

[Sollats]

After watching both trailers in detail and taking notes from their live stream, I enjoyed some of the changes, but majority of the changes hurts a lot. Tanking in general isn't all that much fun unless you are doing things to change up what you normally do in rotations. I.E. cooldowns and other stuff, which they have been bringing in and honestly I enjoyed some of that with the cross abilities that they added. They removed "Cross abilities" and just made it general abilities which is fine, but homogenizing tanks to literally bring to the party the same thing is awful. What's the point of leveling any other tank job other than to look different or maybe do something slightly different. I enjoyed DRK cause it was slightly different than War and PLD since both have a definitive burn phase in their rotations. Now it looks like all tanks have a "Burn" phase in their rotation, they all have a heal, a shield, party shared shields and heals, no debuffs to differentiate any from the other. I can't imagine being synched to lower level until I see what abilities they will have since that's more likely changed. Honestly I enjoyed tanking because it felt like a difficult role to master first entering but now with it dumbed down so much, either the mechanics of bosses need to be interesting, or tanking will be so bogged boring I would have to swap main jobs if I even bother continuing in a game that promotes less synergy of jobs.

[Freyyy]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...on_leak_gives/

Yup, Mara totally missed something. Yes, you get Dark Arts when TBN breaks. Dark Arts allow you to cast Flood of Darkness and Edge of Darkness for FREE. You can still cast them and apply/refresh Darkside with them without Dark Arts but at the cost of MP (3000).

Oh okay so it's just the new way to "refund" TBN's cost. I like it. It's basically giving you back the MP you spent on TBN that you would've spent on these other abilities otherwise.

[Lyth]

Now see, I had been under the assumption that SE assumes the tank currently getting beat in the face by the boss is in old Tank Stance, which is now guaranteed via the trait for -20% damage taken.

Do you think they will adjust damage up to factor this in, or will they keep the damage the same? That's a 25% increase in EHP that the players have by and large ignored that they now get for free, plus whatever scalar is applied based on item level (it says Str/Vit, but that goes up with Item level since you can't meld it now)

It's hard to predict how the content will be tuned at launch, but it's a lot easier to get the devs to change the difficulty of a subsequent tier than it is to get them to make role or job changes.

In the long term, I suspect that we're going to see people in casual content surviving unmitigated "tankbusters", and active mitigation and timings will likely become relevant when you get to raid content. I would be surprised to see a significant shift in mitigation difficulty.

[ExLegen]

Tanking in ff14 was never a challenge.
- stay on tank stance for a couple gcds;
- change to dps spec and never look back;
- mitigate dmg on tank busters;
- rotate/switch tanks with taunts.
- the only tank challenge is to squeeze as much dps as possible (I hardly call that a challenge)

Making tanking challenging is more than modifying tanks themselves, it’s modifying content and encounters.

They can lots of stuff to increase the skill ceiling of tanks without touching tanks directly.
- make bosses and some enemies imune to taunt. Make tanks figure out switches and loss of agro.
- make some bosses skills drop a % of agro.
- give some encounters an agro reset at some points in the fight.
Well we can keep going about ways to make tank job more challenging without messing with specific toolkits.

I also hope they don’t make tank stance boring to the point I can just autoattack and not lose agro.

[Big-Isaac]

To be honest, those suggestions sound very fiddly and micro-manage-y in execution.

IMO the best thing you could do to bump up the skill ceiling of tanking is active mitigation.
I.e. make enemies hit extremely hard and design the tanks so their gameplay revolves around mitigating that damage. The better you play, the less damage you take.
If you play well, your damage taken is smooth and manageable for the healers. If you mess up, you get hammered into the ground.
DPS could simply be a by-product of your efforts to mitigate damage, with optimal defensive play resulting in the most DPS as well.

[Novak_04]

Making tanking challenging is more than modifying tanks themselves, it’s modifying content and encounters.

They can lots of stuff to increase the skill ceiling of tanks without touching tanks directly.
- make bosses and some enemies imune to taunt. Make tanks figure out switches and loss of agro.
- make some bosses skills drop a % of agro.
- give some encounters an agro reset at some points in the fight.

I'm sensing a theme here...

There are other things they can do to make tanking intricate, challenging, and enjoyable. Designing encounters where boss positioning matters would be a nice step in the right direction. Currently, there are a ton of fights where the boss resets his/her own positioning (Chaos and Midgardsormr as examples), or they are rooted in place (Phantom Train, Chaddernook). Part of our responsibilities in an encounter is to ensure the boss is where he needs to be when he needs to be there, whether it be for safety of the raid, maximizing dps output, or otherwise.

Another method for making things more challenging is simply by making defensives matter. If they're leaning toward more active mitigation uptime, then give mechanics that force us to use them. Something like "deals 120% of the tanks max health in damage, reduced by CDs," or "must have mitigation up or else you get an invuln stack." These would encourage proper uses of defensives. Furthermore, if would give merit to Sheltron, TBN, and Inner Beast... allowing them to serve a purpose on something other than tankbusters (granted, Inner Beast was never used in high-level play anyway, but this is about more than the 1%).

[Reynhart]

IMO the best thing you could do to bump up the skill ceiling of tanking is active mitigation.

You could have one tank whose stance apply a cumulative shield on yourself than scales on your damage/potency. So, even when if your main focus is on surviving, you'll still be better if you use a proper WS rotation.

You could also have skills that increase your shield gain for a short period or time, or even one that multiply your current shield value, so you'd have to gamble when you'll you apply it. Do you use it on CD, or do you wait until you have built your shield a little more, at the risk of taking a hit that would reduce it in the meantime.

[Lyth]

Out of all of the things that a tank can do, enmity management is probably the single least interesting of them all. There's very little difference between the "maintain a minimum level of enmity while maximising dps" game and the "maximising dps" game. People get upset if you lose aggro, sure, but that's just because it's disruptive to what your team is doing.

Focus on the stuff that matters: positioning, movement, mitigation. These are the defining features of tanking. But these are also a function of fight design, not of job/role design.

[Bright-Flower]

I'm sensing a theme here...

There are other things they can do to make tanking intricate, challenging, and enjoyable. Designing encounters where boss positioning matters would be a nice step in the right direction. Currently, there are a ton of fights where the boss resets his/her own positioning (Chaos and Midgardsormr as examples), or they are rooted in place (Phantom Train, Chaddernook). Part of our responsibilities in an encounter is to ensure the boss is where he needs to be when he needs to be there, whether it be for safety of the raid, maximizing dps output, or otherwise.

Another method for making things more challenging is simply by making defensives matter. If they're leaning toward more active mitigation uptime, then give mechanics that force us to use them. Something like "deals 120% of the tanks max health in damage, reduced by CDs," or "must have mitigation up or else you get an invuln stack." These would encourage proper uses of defensives. Furthermore, if would give merit to Sheltron, TBN, and Inner Beast... allowing them to serve a purpose on something other than tankbusters (granted, Inner Beast was never used in high-level play anyway, but this is about more than the 1%).

Some fights with more dynamic positioning could be interesting. Maybe even some mechanics like the steam vents in sohm al hard or the water spouts at the end of arbroretum hard where we need to pull a boss through something to weaken its defenses. Not in every fight but things like that now and then would be neat.