How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Kabooa]

And if you fail to provide that experience, we'll find it elsewhere. And you'll be left with dps players looking for their single-player game experience. Hopefully the AI serves them better.

Hope you find it.

[Shurrikhan]

I have NEVER played a game where tanks and healer/support classes ever matched the popularity of a dps class. Doesnt matter the genre. Moba, fps, ARPG, MMO, whatever. Your assertion that they are disliked purely out of poor design is false. Unless you are asserting that no game ever has actually created 'well crafted' tanks and healers.

Certain MMOs have at least crafted periods of well crafted tanks and healers, during which time they were roughly just as popular.

Did these periods include those where, for instance, tanks were reduced to meat-shields or their awareness required was 'streamlined' to merely needing to stack an inflated threat/enmity metric briefly before going on as normal? No. Because that's just a whole lot less interesting, even, than what gameplay looks like without any tanks (where far more awareness and timing is required).

"People" don't dislike when healing and tanking roles become merely nominal.

Tanks and Healers dislike that.

"People" in general tend to err towards DPS roles.

"People" in general tend to err towards roles with greatest apparent reward per amount of apparent responsibility required. You can think of these rewards as largely "moments of glory" or instances where everything clicks.

For an XIV DPS, these instances can occur regardless of your team and therefore require far less responsibility and offer far more control relative to healers or tanks, but that need not be the case.

That case occurs, again, when roles are made nominal, unbending classifications, when tasks require "Tanks" more so than "mitigation", "Healers" more so than "healing", and "Damage-Dealers" more so than "dps" or "burst damage" because they remove the capacity for other roles to meaningfully contribute in those tasks.

Consider the difference between what tanking looks like in a game with enmity/threat, defensives, counters, and basically everything else that makes up a tank's toolkit, but with no tanks, and what tanking looks like in a game with said Tanks. On average, the latter actually has less tanking, by which I mean there is less tanking-related gameplay in terms of actual decisions, awareness, positioning, and so forth related to protecting one's team or their offenses while sabotaging the enemies or thwarting their offenses. Much is replaced with simply tossing up some "threat" and thereafter replacing the various tasks of interception, disruption, kiting, and so forth with something automatic. It becomes a matter of "Why tank when you can just be a Tank?"

And despite having thereby gutted the gameplay involved in tanking, for instance, because those benefits are now the result of passive specializations instead of actual actions that you, a "tank", have greater access to or benefit from but others can and must nonetheless contribute in, those responsibilities are removed from other "roles". Thus, the responsibility gap is increased. There is no point in putting non-tanks through the ringer of having to actually to tank, even if that part of their kits hasn't yet been shed as dead weight, because it's so just so much easier to trade good use of a toolkit (actual tanking) out for passive specialization anyways (nominal "tanking"). Now you have fewer moments of glory or instances in which everything "clicks" available to tanks even while moving massive areas of responsibility over to them alone.

And then we wonder then why Tanks, rather than tanking, end up with so much passive benefit that the group is badly dependent upon with so little apparent reward, and why the role that still mostly retains its complexity and moments of glory but only some third of its original potential responsibilities that would have required broader awareness ends up highly popular by comparison...

[Shurrikhan]

You don't need to generate the same amount of interest in tanks and healers as you do dps. Party slots are designed with the expectation that we're merely 1 in 4. It's also not like you have to do anything particularly intelligent to 'create' these players. You just have to create the gameplay that we're looking for. The problem is that game design is being driven by how a dps player might envision tanking and healing works, rather than how a tank would envision tanking or a healer would envision healing. Tanks are not just there to take damage. Healers are not just there to cast heals. Our worlds do not revolve around dps players, nor should they. We're here to help, but we're definitely not here to serve.

I doubt asking tanks what tanking should look like would necessarily give you a role more distinct from or altogether satisfying than what we have now. I doubt also that what we have now is a "dps player's view of what tanking should be".

Consider what a tank-less (i.e. 3-DPS) party must do in the upper floors of PotD to survive. Enmity is certainly a part of that, far more so than its ever been for actual tanks in XIV. But so is CC, kiting, swap-ins without Provoke, and so forth.

How is that more clearly point to the tanks we have than now, say, the tank veterans on the forums across SB complaining that Defiance and its tools were pure waste, admonishing any and all mitigation that would be excessive or didn't adhere to optimal schedules?

[Kalise]

"People" in general tend to err towards roles with greatest apparent reward per amount of apparent responsibility required. You can think of these rewards as largely "moments of glory" or instances where everything clicks.

Nah, people err towards DPS.

Even when other roles can provide more "Moments of glory" and said "Moments of glory" are much more impressive, people still gravitate towards DPS.

Consider this in relation to other games and genres. In a MOBA, the biggest, flashiest plays are done by the initiator. They get the sick set ups that allow their team to press their buttons and get the teamfight win. Yet, everyone wants to be the "Carry" that just stacks damage and right clicks on people (Or otherwise, spends half the game hitting mindless NPC's)

In a number of MMO's, healers have brought about the biggest and most influential moments of glory, by the nature of clutch heals/CC/shields etc. In ones where healing is actually well designed as opposed to the trash we get from most popular ones. Yet everyone still wants to be the DPS.

In FPS's such as Overwatch or TF2, the big influential plays are made by the Tanks (Reinhardt and Heavy) or Healers (Typically Ana, but Mercy has the biggest potential payout when she gets a full team revive. While Medic with his Ubercharge is literally the only way to push into many defences). Yet everyone wants to be Mr Shooty.

Consider the difference between what tanking looks like in a game with enmity/threat, defensives, counters, and basically everything else that makes up a tank's toolkit, but with no tanks, and what tanking looks like in a game with said Tanks. On average, the latter actually has less tanking

That depends on how the games are designed.

I've seen plenty of non-trinity games where the general strategy is the boss just ping pongs around the place getting kited while it swaps aggro constantly depending on who's arbitrarily the most threatening target (Which isn't nearly as well defined as "Who's doing the most damage" or "Who's actually using tank mechanics")

Meanwhile, I've also seen some trinity games offer a lot more in terms of actual tanking. With what springs to mind is playing Warrior in Tera where your primary means of mitigation was using iframes on a dodge roll (Which meant, you not only had to time it right, but you had to plan around the resources for your rolls as well as boss movement depending on the direction you rolled) as well as Riftstalker in Rift where your primary means of mitigation was teleporting about the place and getting damage reduction shields for doing so, which again, lead to a lot of resource management and boss positioning as each teleport had a unique destination.

Though I admit, the number of Trinity games that offer interesting Tanking is pretty low. I dare say because we're still in the wake of WoW and all the subsequent WoW-clones that thus all use the same system of "Tank do more threat" > "Tank use CD for Tankbuster" as their entire role.

I doubt also that what we have now is a "dps player's view of what tanking should be".

Consider what a tank-less (i.e. 3-DPS) party must do in the upper floors of PotD to survive. Enmity is certainly a part of that, far more so than its ever been for actual tanks in XIV. But so is CC, kiting, swap-ins without Provoke, and so forth.

I honestly doubt that they even bother thinking much about upper floors of PotD/HoH.

Since, there are achievements available for doing them solo, but literally only one job in the entire game can do it and even then, there's very, very few people who've actually done it.

I wouldn't even be surprised if they didn't even playtest the upper floors with 3x DPS and they simply did it with a 1/1/1 set up and were like "Yes, this is technically possible to do within our game. It's good to go"

How is that more clearly point to the tanks we have than now, say, the tank veterans on the forums across SB complaining that Defiance and its tools were pure waste, admonishing any and all mitigation that would be excessive or didn't adhere to optimal schedules?

Well... During StB, Defiance and its tools WERE pure waste. Acknowledging the facts about the game doesn't mean you don't know how to conceptualize actual tanking.

Heck, as it stands, we have excessive mitigation to the point where essentially the only reason to bring 2 tanks to raids is because of Tankbusters hitting 2 targets. Adding more mitigation won't do anything to fix that.

It also doesn't absolve the devs of making Tanks simply have the bare basics of a DPS rotation as their entire gameplay with a few oGCD defensive buttons to press when boss says to. The 123 rotation and IR burst is pretty much the skeleton of mDPS with no added frills or depth (Heck, unlike actual mDPS we don't even get any variation in 123 combos. Such as how DRG goes up to a 5 point combo, how SAM uses 2 different 3 point combos and a 2 point combo, how MNK uses 1.5-2 different 3 point combos with more emphasis on positionals. No, we just get 123 with WAR having a second "3" to press every 3rd string and PLD having the same but also a 4th button to spam instead of a combo...)

Nor does it absolve them of simply making "Tank" mechanics into literally a Tankbuster and that's it. With bosses auto-positioning (Which sounds like "We don't like it when tank move boss. Hard to DPS. Make boss move itself. Easy to DPS!") and otherwise Tanks simply focusing on the same global mechanics as DPS do (Which sounds like "It's fun for us, so it should be fun for them right?")

These are glaring issues that would be easily apparent to anyone who's actually played a Tank in the game. Just like many of the issues Healers have is incredibly apparent to anyone who's played Healer in the game. Yet, here we are, with Tanks still being just barebones DPS and Healers getting yet more healing GCD's they never use. If this doesn't suggest that Tank/Healer designs are coming from a bunch of DPS mains, I don't know what would.

[Shurrikhan]

Nah, people err towards DPS....]

...In FPS's such as Overwatch or TF2, the big influential plays are made by the Tanks (Reinhardt and Heavy) or Healers (Typically Ana, but Mercy has the biggest potential payout when she gets a full team revive. While Medic with his Ubercharge is literally the only way to push into many defences). Yet everyone wants to be Mr Shooty.

You realize everything I've just said about apparent responsibility vs. apparent reward and sense of (in)dependence also applies in every example you've given here, and proportionately to exactly that?

As soon as apparent responsibility was flipped by bringing out the 1/3/2 experimental format in OW, for instance, where fights were much more obviously made or broken by DPS, dps became the bottleneck for more reason than just there being fewer tanks in the mix. In the double-sniper meta, snipers had the most agency, but also the most responsibility and by far the least leniency and quickly became one of the most disliked roles except among those who truly believed they could carry (and were quickly shamed into humility by their 'deservedly' toxic teammates if they couldn't actually follow through).

And let's be frank, TF2 hasn't half the "MOBA components" of OW, which in turn ought to have fewer than an MMO, and HotS and DotA2, at least, show proportionately less lean towards ADCs as their responsibilities increase and late-game overpoweredness decreases.

Wherever responsibility is more observed than seemingly rewarded, people shy away. That DPS have so often come out ahead only points to a poor balance between roles. It's not a matter of taking someone new to a game with tanks/fighters, damage specialists, and supports and watching them be gravitationally sucked towards that central, shiny red role. It's a matter of what they do and how they do it.

(And even then, OW is almost always a 1- to 2-minute queue for a tank, 2-minute queue for a healer, and a 3-minute queue for a solo-queue DPS, and despite the horror stories that stuck us with Role Queue, the vast majority of teams did flex off DPS into working compositions; it just still allowed for ingenuity and playing to a party's strengths (mechanical skill, awareness, tactics-mindedness, etc.). And people did seem to be a fair bit more aware of what the other roles actually need in order to best support each other back before that split.)

Though I admit, the number of Trinity games that offer interesting Tanking is pretty low.

And yet you're convinced that tanks are avoided only because the inherently and always more attractive DPS role exists, and nothing to do with

I dare say because we're still in the wake of WoW and all the subsequent WoW-clones that thus all use the same system of "Tank do more threat" > "Tank use CD for Tankbuster" as their entire role.

Frankly, "WoW Clone" would be a rather gross overestimation of our present tanking situation.

Well... During StB, Defiance and its tools WERE pure waste. Acknowledging the facts about the game doesn't mean you don't know how to conceptualize actual tanking.

I never said otherwise, nor did I ever say that tanks "don't know how to conceptualize actual tanking". The difference is in how they pointed out the problem. We had multi-role players (typically midcore or more casual) who predominantly asked that Defiance, Grit, and Shield Oath should be less of a waste, and Savage tank-mains who insisted that tanking skills of mutual cost with damage output have only ever been and can only ever be a waste and therefore should be removed from the game. Given that we did in fact get the latter, the latter seems to have clearly been the more influential. This wasn't a "DPS-pandering" change. It was made, likely in equal parts, in response to tank-mains and for the imagined "New Player"-kun.

I will agree completely that the devs should have done more to read between the lines despite there being very direct requests for exactly what we got and outright dismissal of anything that didn't take SB's facts as the way things ("bloat" of Defiance and its ilk aside) should and would work, but we can't honestly say that the suggestions of well-placed tank mains before didn't point us right to where we ended up.

<From> Adding more mitigation won't do anything to fix that.... <to>...These are glaring issues that would be easily apparent to anyone who's actually played a Tank in the game. Just like many of the issues Healers have is incredibly apparent to anyone who's played Healer in the game. Yet, here we are, with Tanks still being just barebones DPS and Healers getting yet more healing GCD's they never use. If this doesn't suggest that Tank/Healer designs are coming from a bunch of DPS mains, I don't know what would.

Has nothing to do with my post. What part of my taking issue with XIV increasingly ridding tanks of their core mechanics and responsibilities and turning them into a nameplate + a dps kit is my "absolving them" of doing... exactly that? And for what it's worth, while I've certainly seen melee request that their tanks be less idiotic in dungeons or that their groups stack in the middle of the boss's hitbox so they can continue to position while participating in stacking mechanics, I have not once seen a DPS request that tanks no longer be allowed to position bosses. That change came out of left field.

[Kabooa]

Has nothing to do with my post. What part of my taking issue with XIV increasingly ridding tanks of their core mechanics and responsibilities and turning them into a nameplate + a dps kit is my "absolving them" of doing... exactly that? And for what it's worth, while I've certainly seen melee request that their tanks be less idiotic in dungeons or that their groups stack in the middle of the boss's hitbox so they can continue to position while participating in stacking mechanics, I have not once seen a DPS request that tanks no longer be allowed to position bosses. That change came out of left field.

For what it's worth, auto positioning bosses is less of an issue when the mechanic they auto position for is inflexible. That said, we could certainly use more mechanic strings similar to E7's add phase. I got some strong Mogushan Vaults vibes from that, and that concept (Mobile fight divided among multiple enemies) not only can be a great template for a boss fight, it has a great example in the Stone Guard from the aforementioned Mogushan Vaults on Heroic mode. Personal favorite to tank.

[Shurrikhan]

For what it's worth, auto positioning bosses is less of an issue when the mechanic they auto position for is inflexible. That said, we could certainly use more mechanic strings similar to E7's add phase. I got some strong Mogushan Vaults vibes from that, and that concept (Mobile fight divided among multiple enemies) not only can be a great template for a boss fight, it has a great example in the Stone Guard from the aforementioned Mogushan Vaults on Heroic mode. Personal favorite to tank.

That whole era has quite a few tanking gems... /nostalgia

Oddly enough, the most fun I have now is on the terrifying combinations like, say, Teaming-Skittish-Necrotic, where DPS are finally forced to play a part in my and their survival.

[Awful]

That whole era has quite a few tanking gems... /nostalgia

Oddly enough, the most fun I have now is on the terrifying combinations like, say, Teaming-Skittish-Necrotic, where DPS are finally forced to play a part in my and their survival.

Yeah I do miss me some Mythic+ with the affixes and seasonal affixes 14 almost has that they could put the Pomanders in from PotD as an incentive for buffs/boons but they'd have to redesign dungeons too which I doubt would happen. I also played Classic back in the fall while playing this and going from Classics dungeon vs 14 there's no "scary" mobs in 14, like in Classic in Stratholme Live side there's Battlemages that'll AoE your group that do TONS of damage, Scarlet Gallants that'll Crusader Strike your tank for big damage, Mobs that'll heal and mana burn your healers and bubble at low health, those are some examples but 14 never has any real threatening enemies in dungeons sadly.

I do agree though I miss those examples you gave like Teaming where DPS have to worry about threat, Tyrannical weeks were tough on some bosses, same with Fortified, even the seasonal affix with Bwan'samdis where you'd kill a % amount of trash and it comes back to life to decimate your group always kept me mindful of what trash to skip and what to kill for that %.