Tanking feels unimportant

[BarretOblivion]

No, I think tanks are in a pretty fantastic spot right now, and the last thing they need is to get in on the positional game. Positionals, as they exist already, are basically a lazy way to add artificial complexity to melee DPS rotations, we hardly need more of them.

Also, from an Ex-Warrior, come off it man. Warrior has had years as the unquestionable best tank in the game, had a shoddy Stormblood launch, and got instantly buffed back up to being amazing. Watch, 5.2 comes around and they're going to buff Warrior in some absurd way to make it reclaim it's throne.

Besides, Warrior isn't even that far behind, really. This is the most parity all the tanks have ever had.

When I am struggling to stay awake playing a tank... something is wrong.

[SargentToughie]

When I am struggling to stay awake playing a tank... something is wrong.

That's very true, actually. Lots of things could be wrong. Sleep Apnea, poor diet, sleep schedule, general fatigue...

Not sure what that has to do with playing a tank though, that's general health/wellness.

[Bhearil]

That's very true, actually. Lots of things could be wrong. Sleep Apnea, poor diet, sleep schedule, general fatigue...

Not sure what that has to do with playing a tank though, that's general health/wellness.

Dont try to derail the issue. Problem is that Tanks in general most of the time are the most simplistic classes outside of their burst windows and even then are not THAT intense. After a while it feels so simple that you can eventually turn your brain off and still perform decent your role. One thing is muscular memory and another not needing brain cells to play at a bare minimum level due to how simple it is.

Right now tanks have a very low floor and ceiling which means you "cap" too quick and have no way to improve which derails the motivations since "hey i can no longer improve with this job since i reached its peak, so ill try another job because it gets boring after a while". Self improvement is a great motivator as well as having a fun gameplay, lack both and people wont play that job for long, hell even lacking one too much can be a killer, look how popular monk is right now since its no longer the DPS God and is one of the least played jobs in the game due to his kit being a complete mess and unchanged since 2.0 mostly

[SargentToughie]

Dont try to derail the issue. Problem is that Tanks in general most of the time are the most simplistic classes outside of their burst windows and even then are not THAT intense. After a while it feels so simple that you can eventually turn your brain off and still perform decent your role. One thing is muscular memory and another not needing brain cells to play at a bare minimum level due to how simple it is.

Right now tanks have a very low floor and ceiling which means you "cap" too quick and have no way to improve which derails the motivations since "hey i can no longer improve with this job since i reached its peak, so ill try another job because it gets boring after a while". Self improvement is a great motivator as well as having a fun gameplay, lack both and people wont play that job for long, hell even lacking one too much can be a killer, look how popular monk is right now since its no longer the DPS God and is one of the least played jobs in the game due to his kit being a complete mess and unchanged since 2.0 mostly

Fair complaints, but compared to tanking last expansion, what's really changed? The only thing that's different is a unified tank stance, and slightly different (if more robust) rotations.

My argument is that those 10 seconds, and those 2 enmity combos you did at the start of a fight last expansion were never compelling gameplay, and the people in this thread complaining that tanking has been "made boring" are pointing at the wrong issues. I love the general direction they've taken with tanking in ShB, and I'd like to see them continue to expand upon it in the future rather than just throw it all away.

EDIT: As a follow up comment, every single job in this game is pretty straightforward once you've taken the time to learn it's basics, and you only need to take one step into Duty Finder to understand why that is. Even after all they've done to streamline the game you still see things like Ice Mages, Dragoons that don't use BotD, tanks that waffle with enmity, etc etc. Those that complain about the lack of complexity in this game should work on bringing the rest of the players up to speed first. Don't ask for seconds when about 50% of the people playing in the game don't even understand what's on the current plate.

[Quor]

Even after all they've done to streamline the game you still see things like Ice Mages, Dragoons that don't use BotD, tanks that waffle with enmity, etc etc. Those that complain about the lack of complexity in this game should work on bringing the rest of the players up to speed first. Don't ask for seconds when about 50% of the people playing in the game don't even understand what's on the current plate.

I've often made a comment similar to this, but what you said encapsulates it more clearly than I ever have. There is a strong bias on the forums in assuming a kind of playstyle that is essentially "perfect" when it comes to discussing job balance. This is very much a bad belief to run with, because the truth of the matter is the level of play among people who post on the forums is likely more skilled than the average. After all, your run of the mill player probably won't come to the forums and participate in a dozen+ page thread on job balance; that's likely something reserved for the more passionate/dedicated players in the game. But this belief that the cream-of-the-crop is really the middle-of-the-road really skews perceptions on a lot of issues, and not for the better.

[BarretOblivion]

Fair complaints, but compared to tanking last expansion, what's really changed? The only thing that's different is a unified tank stance, and slightly different (if more robust) rotations.

My argument is that those 10 seconds, and those 2 enmity combos you did at the start of a fight last expansion were never compelling gameplay, and the people in this thread complaining that tanking has been "made boring" are pointing at the wrong issues. I love the general direction they've taken with tanking in ShB, and I'd like to see them continue to expand upon it in the future rather than just throw it all away.

EDIT: As a follow up comment, every single job in this game is pretty straightforward once you've taken the time to learn it's basics, and you only need to take one step into Duty Finder to understand why that is. Even after all they've done to streamline the game you still see things like Ice Mages, Dragoons that don't use BotD, tanks that waffle with enmity, etc etc. Those that complain about the lack of complexity in this game should work on bringing the rest of the players up to speed first. Don't ask for seconds when about 50% of the people playing in the game don't even understand what's on the current plate.

Well for 1 tanks lost alot of our job skills that kinda added a bit of depth to staying alive, anticipation, convelesence, aggro management is now completely gone, and oh DRK basically became 2.0 WAR. Oh yeah, they also lost stuff to their classes generally speaking too. Lets not also forget although our classes didn't change... that's the entire point. We got almost NOOOOTHING from lvl 70-lv80 NOOO CHANGES, so we are expected to play the exact same jobs for 4 years? (namely PLD/WAR) Why did we get ignored? ARR to HW expanded the jobs in meaningful ways, SB changed all tanks again fairly radicully from HW... so why the -blam- did tanks get shafted this expansion? For the removal of tank stance? That's the excuse????

There is a difference between straight forward and one look at a job and I figured out 95% of the job with the only thing to learn is an opener. WOOOOOOOOOW.

[SargentToughie]

Well for 1 tanks lost alot of our job skills that kinda added a bit of depth to staying alive, anticipation, convelesence, aggro management is now completely gone, and oh DRK basically became 2.0 WAR. Oh yeah, they also lost stuff to their classes generally speaking too. Lets not also forget although our classes didn't change... that's the entire point. We got almost NOOOOTHING from lvl 70-lv80 NOOO CHANGES, so we are expected to play the exact same jobs for 4 years? (namely PLD/WAR) Why did we get ignored? ARR to HW expanded the jobs in meaningful ways, SB changed all tanks again fairly radicully from HW... so why the -blam- did tanks get shafted this expansion? For the removal of tank stance? That's the excuse????

There is a difference between straight forward and one look at a job and I figured out 95% of the job with the only thing to learn is an opener. WOOOOOOOOOW.

Let's try to pull this apart one at a time.

- I don't have any comments on the DRK changes, since I don't play DRK. A few DRK players in my circle love the job right now, but most forum people seem upset. I'm sorry that DRK isn't satisfying to you this expansion.

- Awareness, Anticipation, and Convalescence were all meme buttons, and you'd basically never use them independently and rely upon them as worthwhile cooldowns. In fact, I'd argue that the buttons we did get in their place- Modified Shelltron, Modified Raw Intuition, Heart of Stone: these short duration, short CD mini-mitigations make for more interesting defense management, since you can juggle them between major CDs. Not to mention new Reprisal, we got Arm's Length, we actually have just as many defense buttons as before, with more raid utility in the form of Heart of Light and Dark Messiah.

- Aggro Management, as I've argued before, was never fun. 10 seconds in tank stance, 2 enmity combos. At best this delayed the time it took before you started your DPS rotation, at worst it desynched your buffs for the entire fight. An enmity combo done meant less meter for WAR, and it meant less MP, and less Blood for DRK and PLD, not to even go into the fact that certain buffs/abilities straight up couldn't be used while in Tank Stance, Blood Weapon. Doing an enmity combo, being in Tank Stance, did nothing but delay the parts of your job that were fun to use, and this was true for Heavensward and Stormblood- it's what pushed me away from the role for that whole expansion.

- On the subject of nothing changing: What exactly are you expecting? We got a new tank in Gunbreaker, and the one tank that did see robust, extensive mechanical changes, everybody on these forums seems to hate. Paladin and Warrior mostly saw iterations and small improvements, which are indeed for the better. This is a game with 17 jobs, and the devs can't afford to throw out everything that they had previously in order to give each job this "new experience" that a good bulk of players don't even want. If I like how current Paladin, or Warrior play, what happens next expac when I've got a new job wearing Warrior's clothing? I'm probably as pissy as the DRK players are right now with the new DRK they hate so much.

On that same note, bear in mind that most of the jobs in this game retain the same skeleton over time. None of the DPS jobs chained all that much either, with the exception of MCH, which got an extreme overhaul to fix the inherent design flaws. You say tanks got shafted this expansion, everybody got "shafted" by your definition, which I don't agree with. The only people I feel should be rightfully outraged are the healers, who got stripped down to one nuke, a DoT, and AoE, and a few frilly side buttons like Assize.

- On learning a job and it's simplicity: This is an MMO, not Tekken. Good job, you can read tooltips and use the internet. You can now master every single job in this game.

[Quor]

- I don't have any comments on the DRK changes, since I don't play DRK. A few DRK players in my circle love the job right now, but most forum people seem upset. I'm sorry that DRK isn't satisfying to you this expansion.

My opinion on this is that a lot of people either don't think to or don't want to use TBN as it's intended. Which is to say, a DRK should be keeping one eye on the party list at all times, looking for opportunities to absorb incoming damage via a well-placed TBN. Given that's it's based off of the targets HP, chances are high it will break from any mechanic that goes to a healer or dps. Since it's a dps neutral skill for the DRK as long as it breaks, you stand to purely gain by using it as often as possible to absorb as much damage for others as possible. Any bit of healing that can be saved is another GCD that can be used on Glare or Malefic or Broil. From a pure combo-based perspective DRK is very simple, but the meta game for DRK is less about combos and has shifted to be more more about resource management via MP, Blood and cooldowns. A lot of people haven't adjusted for that yet.

[Quor]

Well for 1 tanks lost alot of our job skills that kinda added a bit of depth to staying alive, anticipation, convelesence, aggro management is now completely gone, and oh DRK basically became 2.0 WAR. Oh yeah, they also lost stuff to their classes generally speaking too. Lets not also forget although our classes didn't change... that's the entire point. We got almost NOOOOTHING from lvl 70-lv80 NOOO CHANGES, so we are expected to play the exact same jobs for 4 years? (namely PLD/WAR) Why did we get ignored? ARR to HW expanded the jobs in meaningful ways, SB changed all tanks again fairly radicully from HW... so why the -blam- did tanks get shafted this expansion? For the removal of tank stance? That's the excuse????

It's a consequence of player-developed meta to deal with the challenges of the game. The addition of enrage modes to all bosses coupled with the necessity of dps checks (because if dps checks didn't exist history shows that people will opt for the safe and reliable route) meant that pushing damage was important for everyone. Tank stances came with drawbacks to damage, so you wanted to stay out of them as much as possible. Threat management helped to bring tank stance relevance, but with the addition of anti-threat skills (Diversion/LD for every non-tank on top of NIN's unique threat management tools) meant that tank stance was mostly obsolete beyond the opener, and it's value was questionable even then. So SE saw the writing on the wall and went "ok fine, let's just bake tank stance into a single unified buff and do away with the damage penalty." After all, that's what the player base was showing them they wanted. WAR was immensely popular in SB after the final IR change and PLD was widely praised as finally feeling "complete" with the addition of Requiescat/Holy Spirit. Why fix what's broken? After all, the WAR IR rotation prior to it's current incarnation was much more specific and involved, with much greater room for error. I also personally found it more fun, having to hold your combo at just the right time to line everything up perfectly for that delicious final FC. But I dunno, I guess there were a lot of complaints about combo's dropping and Eye falling off, so the combo window got increased and Eye gained some duration. Now instead of carefully managing your combo and properly refreshing Eye, you can basically hit IR as soon as it's up with little thought beyond what mechanics may interfere with your uptime.

Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not. Personally, I appreciate what Square was attempting to do, but at the same time I miss that careful, perfectly timed combo management that was the difference between a good WAR and a great WAR. It's kinda how I've felt about DRK ever since Scourge and old Delirium (and Fracture) were removed. But the sad reality of the situation is that's the direction the game was being pushed by the players.

There is a difference between straight forward and one look at a job and I figured out 95% of the job with the only thing to learn is an opener. WOOOOOOOOOW.

As I've said before, now is the time to really bang the drum about 6.0 stuff. Hell, they re-worked parts of WAR pretty extensively throughout SB and they obviously didn't shy away from doing something similar with NIN recently. Maybe WAR can get the same treatment. As long as the amazing tank balance is maintained I say why not. The question becomes what to do then, since it's unlikely that Square will just throw a few additional cooldowns at a job and then call it a day. Not that having access to 2-3 more defensive CD's would solve the problem anyway.

[Maeka]

Dont try to derail the issue. Problem is that Tanks in general most of the time are the most simplistic classes outside of their burst windows and even then are not THAT intense. After a while it feels so simple that you can eventually turn your brain off and still perform decent your role. One thing is muscular memory and another not needing brain cells to play at a bare minimum level due to how simple it is.

Right now tanks have a very low floor and ceiling which means you "cap" too quick and have no way to improve which derails the motivations since "hey i can no longer improve with this job since i reached its peak, so ill try another job because it gets boring after a while". Self improvement is a great motivator as well as having a fun gameplay, lack both and people wont play that job for long, hell even lacking one too much can be a killer, look how popular monk is right now since its no longer the DPS God and is one of the least played jobs in the game due to his kit being a complete mess and unchanged since 2.0 mostly

FFXIV was always about movement, and dodging the boss's attacks. Which, I might add, is a little difficult if the rotations are too complex. There's a reason I refuse to play Black Mage in duty finder, for example. Trying to keep track of Enochian and not let it drop, finding the time to MOVE out of AoEs and then hurry up and cast a spell to keep the timers ticking is just not fun IMO. Some people find it fun, but I sure don't.

Tanks need to pay attention to new mobs popping in that they need to grab, they need to keep the boss facing away from the rest of the group, and in some fights there's other duties to do, etc.

I really don't need a complex rotation ontop of that. DPS can be a bit more complex because they aren't really needing to pay attention as much, other than the basic where to move mechanics. Tanks have things like paying attention to when a boss is going to use a tank buster or what-not.

I don't mind the easier rotations on tank, because I got other things to do. And I'd like to keep it that way.

If you fall asleep while playing as tank, then maybe you should not tank. Play one of the other roles instead. Or just stay out of Duty Finder and only do Savage/Extreme/Ultimate.