Can we please get aggro management back?

[Fluffernuff]

Alright, so all I've really done is jump on one statement I simply wanted to give much more context to, but I'll take a crack at the actual discussion.

I'll get my thoughs more succinctly out of the way first;
I agree that enmity mechanics can be far more engaging. HOWEVER, if you truly believe what we had before was more engaging, then you are either looking through rose tinted glasses or werent there to play through it.

Now I know it's a bit of a hot take to throw some people's feelings under the bus like that, however...

To be absolutely frank, if you left your tank stance on, threat was never even an issue. leaving tank stance on during ARR, HW, and SB is and was exactly the same as it is now. Threat become a complete non-factor.

Threat only became interesting after the higher tier of players started pushing DPS optimization that threat management from others even became more valuable. Threat was only interesting after we removed tanking stance from the formula entirely. However, all of this "interesting gameplay" came from everyone EXCEPT the tank. The tank didnt play any differently. the DPS did. And thats if the tanks were either newer to raiding, lesser geared, or flubbed the opener.

Frankly speaking, this is why NIN was so evergreen. Everyone dogpiles on TA, but Shadewalker and smokescreen were EXTREMELY valued, not only for the opener, but to nearly remove the need for other DPS to manage aggro.
NIN completely controlled who had aggro, and last I checked, NIN wasnt a tank.




all this to say:
I agree with your guys' idea. But it's frustrating to watch you barking up the wrong trees. We need to move forward, not regress. From a tanking perspective, HW/SB enmity is 100% regression. We need something... else to make things more interesting. As an aside, I feel the tanking ROLE right now is in a bit of an identity crisis.

[Venur]

Aggro manageman in MMO is just a cockhold for DPS. You have a super burst opener that would be so fun to release but nop, wait till the tank have aggro.

It doesn't requiert more skill from the DPS its just a boring little feature.

Square should just remove tank passive mitigation and replace it with active mitigation/avoidance to make tanks funs.

[Claire_Pendragon]

tank stance balance stuff-

It took 7 GCDs in order to make turning on the stance neutral in DPS. by the 8th GCD you were finally at a DPS gain. So you had to go w/o needing the tank stance for 8 GCDs.
PLDs and DRKs were already penalized in some shape or form. (including the MP cost for DRK) WAR had no activation cost, nor resource cost.
This sounds fair, but in reality it wasnt fair to WARs, because people didnt understand that inner beast wasnt meant to be an "On demand CD for TBs" in the same way it is now, or was used then.

ALL tank stances were either meant for threat, or tank busters. Tank stance took up a GCD for PLD in 2.0, and WAR had to use up a GCD for inner beast.
They were meant to both be used for TBs. WAR gained the extra max HP, followed by a self heal to fill the newly obtained max HP. (aka, akin to TBN)
But PLDs could just sit in tank stance, leading to less dmg taken in prolonged dmg intake, and stack other CDs to make them too tanky, to the point SE had to change WAR to match what PLD could do. (PLD needed nerfed, not WAR buffed, as this ruined tanking mitigation forever)
Once WAR gained the -20% dmg taken, it made for an awkward scenario where WAR was essentially doubling up on its surivival, with both 20% more HP/healed amount, and 20% mitigation.

This is mostly why people started seeing IB as the TB CD that IR is today, but still saw PLDs tank stance as a stance, and not a CD.
HW tanking was designed around the idea tank stances were youre "Free CD" thats always available, if you didnt plan your cooldowns correctly, so it came at a cost." PLD being 2 GCDs for stance dancing, DRK was 1 GCD and MP, and WARs was a GCD and beast gauge for IB.
So adding an additional cost to the beast gauge was unfair for mitigation purposes. But it WAS fair for "threat" purposes, as WAR already had so many ways in which to handle threat over the other 2 tanks. (And DRK was so bad, you wanted a NIN to keep their threat up high, and a WAR to open the pull with, as even a PLDs threat wasnt as good enough lead for a DRK to tank out of tank stance)
In the end, threat was essentially a joke in SB due to shirk being added, so there was no reason to add a penalty to WAR for its high threat, since shirk allowed for easy threat on DRk and PLD.
So yes, the beast gauge penalty to stance dancing was unfair, but it makes sense why they 'thought' it was reasonable.
(Granted they also though giving WAR and PLD more useful tools over DRK was also a good idea. They thought shirk was a good idea, despite just needing to fix provoke into having a 6 second effect that makes the target hit u, even if you're not the highest in threat. which would bring back the need to use threat combos for tank swaps, etc. But most of the SB/ShB team are the B team, with the biggest people being pulled away secretly for FF16 (or what we assume is FF16) as they left before the patches to HW.)

1) Not everyone wants to 'pick a different tank.'

I rather have that, than me currently not wanting to pick any tank, because i dislike them all.
You're assuming all players want the current system. Also, this rule already applies to DPS. Just because most players dont like dealing with cast bars, and being too stationary, doesnt mean we shouldnt have casters. Yes, if they picked a mage, and complain they dont liek cast bars, you do tell them to pick another job, like a physical ranged. (if they picked them for ranged) You do not just make every job ranged, with instant casts, and no positionals, because you dont want to make players choose their playstyle.

You mostly cherry pick peoples opinions who align with your own, either because you tune out opposing opinions, or you mostly didnt hang around people who had the opposing opinions.

Most players complain when they get hit by an obvious orange telegraphed AoE marker. Does that mean we should remove all AoEs in the game? and just let ppl sit still and hit a stationary target?
Obviously this rhetorical question brings up how ppl can say "This is so much easier" than prior stuff, because the difficulty is taken out, but that doesnt mean its actually better as a product.
But Im also not biased enough to think that giving an option to aid players wouldnt be fun for them. I know what I enjoy wont be what others enjoy. I also know ppl are good/better/more interested in different stuff. One finds DoTs annoying, some find cast bars annoying, some find positionals annoying, some find timers ticking down annoying. But going back to those who like tanking, they may like different aspects of tanking, be it threat, mitigation, DPS, or a combination. Most people play DPS, making tanks/healers just DPS is only partly the answer. I have no interest in playing a tank, because playing a DPS is more rewarding than tanks atm.

For #3, most tanks played DRK... so i disagree with your statement. WAR was the least played tank by a lot. i hated SB DRK because HW DRK was more engaging. SB DRK was just faster paced, and felt unga buna to me. (I actually felt more engagement from SB WAR than SB DRK, due to threat control.) I didnt like how WAR and PLD had tools in which to cheese mechanics, but DRK just had weaker/lesser versions of what the other 2 had. Either weak enough to not be able to cheese something, or if it could cheese it, the other was better at it.
I dont feel the content should have been designed this way (I doubt it was intentional) but DRK was originally a reasonable~ middle ground before WARs changes put it above DRK.
But despite my dislike of DRKs treatment, DRK was still super popular, and even world firsts were using DRK.

As for your statement about the oGCD tank user, i didnt lay out a full blown job for you. I gave a simplistic answer. also, you have rampart for every pull as a tank, how would u not have tank stance up for every pull? i even keep up storms eye buffs between pulls, before AoEs refreshed them. im sorry, thats a problem with the tank player. next you'll tell me how DRKs who ran out of MP in HW meant that DRK was a flawed job. if u didnt have MP, there went your AoE threat, and u couldnt pull hate on the next pack of mobs. (You kept MP, or built up MP before the mobs died)

[Fynlar]

Except this wasnt exactly true. Aggro management between casual content and raid content was different, something that people typically dont make distinctions about.

I don't really know (or care) about raid content. I don't do that stuff.

All I can speak about was what I was doing, which is usually DF roulettes, and in said DF, I was seeing problems.

As a whole, the role is too simplistic. No positionals, tank CDs are literally "Push button to mitigate", threat isnt a thing to worry about, and depending on the tank, there is little in the way of rotation.

You say that, but I am currently living with someone who is utterly terrified of the tank role far more than either of the other two, because it means they have to take more of a "leader" role in dungeons, and they very easily get lost or turned around without other people to follow.

This sort of thing really depends on your perspective.

As for the tank CD thing in serious content, IMO the tank role was all about figuring out how to most effectively space out your CDs and swaps. The few times I have dabbled in easier ex/savage content, I distinctly remember having to actually coordinate with the other tank when would be the best time to pop our invulns, for instance. Or, sometimes big attacks do not have a charge bar or a clear telegraph, meaning you need to learn the patterns of the fight to be able to know when to have popped a CD in advance.

Sure, once you learn it and figure out the optimal way of doing things for your group, it becomes monotonous, but what doesn't feel like that in this game after enough time/practice? It isn't only tank stuff that suffers from this.

[Claire_Pendragon]

You say that, but I am currently living with someone who is utterly terrified of the tank role far more than either of the other two, because it means they have to take more of a "leader" role in dungeons, and they very easily get lost or turned around without other people to follow.

(This is just a side comment)
Unfortunately, no amount of fixing to tanks will change tanks running ahead of the group to pull, nor change a players ability to navigate a dungeon (in this case, a hallway)
They already tried making dungeons easy enough to run straight through, and players still get lost (yes i know a few too)

[Fluffernuff]

Indeed, claire. There's really alot of nuance to to the whole stance dancing argument, and has changed from patch to patch and expansion to expansion. Barring WAR, the stances have always been designed around mitigation+threat together. however, thats from the dev team's perspective. IN(at least) the NA community, it never really trended that way unless you were at the more high end, where the factors such as mitigation were more.... required.
That being said, the only real threat management that occured was from the *rest* of the party(Or the NIN), and not the tank itself. It wasn't an active part in a tank's gameplay. The only thing that changed without a stance was the occasional different combo; which only happened if you were undergeared, messed up, or in HW's case, a tank swap was coming.

On the specific topic I poked at; I dont really think wanting more interaction in your video game is wrong or misguided, I mostly just have/had an issue with a lie of omission to push a particular view.


as for the friend, tanking has had alot of it's background tedium removed over time, but I can definitely see why people are still terrified of picking it up. Tanking as a role is extremely frontloaded and starts out harder than it ends. And then you add in people treating an average to bad tank(which a complete newbie to the role will be) like refuse, and it's not a fun time. Overcoming a stereotype or stigma isnt always easy. and negative reinforcement can really lock in some bad feelings

[Melichoir]

snip snips

I am personally not looking at it through rose tinted glasses, Im just weighing pro and con gameplay. By no stretch of the imagination do I think that HW or SB threat management was the pinnacle of perfection. I remember times when things were stupid where I would have threat issues as a DRK in HW, even with grit and gear and etc. It wasnt common, but there were a few occassions for it. Usually when paired with Savage raiders who go ham. But the issues then was more to do with numbers than with mechanics themselves. Modifying numbers would resolve some of the issues in casual play.

But that system was actually a system. What we have now is..well nothing. We dont have anything. Pressing 1 button to tank isnt a system. In a 4 man dungeon, there is 0 reason to not have tank stance on. In a normal 8 man trial or raid, you can leave tank stance on and just spam shirk on CD and be fine 99% of the time. Its only in savage where things can get squiffy.

[Awful]

Yeah but that was pretty much part of the tank identity - managing threat and making sure you could hold the boss. Before it was a management game, now youre nothing but a dps that has better mitigation. You want threat, turn on tank stance. Thats pretty much it outside of fringe stupidity cases, and even then people complain about tanking.

The great irony about SB is that people still had trouble managing aggro in 8 mans. I mean Circle Shirking was a pretty straight forward concept, if you really had to go that far. Even then in casual content, literally just turn tank stance on and use your aggro combo and it was hard for people to take it off you. But of course, to many people trying to be "Leet DPS Best Savage Skillz Evar" and drop their tank stance not even realizing theyre not doing the class rotation properly to begin with so aggro gets away from them.

But Instead of teaching people how to properly manage threat, the Devs (unfortunately) decided to gut the system and dumb it down to "Press 1 button" for threat. And frankly, considering how some people continue to witch about tanking cause "Using CDs to hard", I woudlnt be suprised if yoshiP comes out next xpac and just makes tank mitigation passive or remove tank busters all together. Afterall, its to hard to learn basic mechanics of when to use one or how many to use.

Yeah admittedly Im a bit bitter about it, and DRK being so unsatisfying to play from a playstyle PoV makes it worse. And while I know its anecdotal, the people I generally see who say "Yeah, this version of drk is the best version" are people who never played it in SB or HW or people who are bad at tanking. The average player wanted to play DRK for the Edginess, but complained it was to hard or to spammy, so they dumbed it down. I just feel like the biggest problem I have with the Devs and balance is that they keep listening to the 'average guy/gal' and just make everythign stupid easy so "Everyone can play it!", shafting anyone who enjoyed the play style and difficulty of the class. And this continuous driving of the skill floor down overall just impacts the game negatively.

Bah. Ok.

I wasn't disagreeing right now we have nothing that makes us stand out as tanks all we have left is positioning and DPS those are the only 2 things that matter, we have way too many CDS to compensate for mistakes and tank swap moves we just invuln them like in E3S or E7S there's no thought to it. Not to mention 3/4 tanks play the same: Slam your burst into a window, whereas PLD has 2 windows for its burst which doesn't help with the similarities in tanking, nothing really stands out other then minor CD usage but at the end of the day they all hit 1-2-3/gauge/spender etc.

I hope in 6.0 we get something different, more engaging, right now tanks are just beefier DPS even in savage content, not job identity or class fantasy, DRK is just a edgey WAR, WAR is a beserking DRK, GNB is the shiny new toy when broken down plays similar to them all. I know i'm a broken record but even when I started SHB leveling I could feel it there's just no thought to tanks anymore and you can get away with so much when performing so bad in any form of content no one will identify "what is a good tank", say what you will about stance dancing but at least if tanks made the effort instead of 1-2-3 in tank stance 10,000 times you could tell who a good tank is.

Tanks have always been a thankless job but ShB really exacerbates this as they're unrewarding to play, very similar to one another, and no defining features other then their signature moves like IR for WARs, TBN for DRKs, Gnashing Fang Combos, and PLD holy magic + sword play, you can work hard and you still feel like you're contributing nothing other then hitting a boss with a wiffle bat, I'd honestly not be a tank right now but I've been a tank main since ARR so I guess I can't break the habit.

Bottom line is class identity is sorely lacking right now and the core roles for both healers and tanks just feel very unrewarding which leaves me with a feeling of dread if this continues in 6.0.

[Ultimatecalibur]

ALL tank stances were either meant for threat, or tank busters. Tank stance took up a GCD for PLD in 2.0, and WAR had to use up a GCD for inner beast.

There is so much wrong with this sentence that I barely know where to start. IB took 8 or 9 gcds to perform if you were starting from no stance.

They were meant to both be used for TBs. WAR gained the extra max HP, followed by a self heal to fill the newly obtained max HP. (aka, akin to TBN)
But PLDs could just sit in tank stance, leading to less dmg taken in prolonged dmg intake, and stack other CDs to make them too tanky, to the point SE had to change WAR to match what PLD could do. (PLD needed nerfed, not WAR buffed, as this ruined tanking mitigation forever)

First off there was absolutely no reason for WARs to stance dance in 2.0 (Paladins didn't stance dance either because incoming damage was high enough and constant enough that you wanted the damage reduction constantly when MTing). You were either MT in Defiance where you were building up Wrath stacks or OTing with Defiance off. Wrath stacks were initially the source of the Warriors increase healing, the Warrior either sat on 5 stacks of Wrath and had a similar amount of incoming healing as a Paladin or was 20% more difficult to heal because they had spent their 5 stacks to overheal themselves.

During 2.0, if a WAR outgeared content they were pretty much invincible in Defiance, but if they did not the were incredibly squishy as the were primarily reliant of self-healing damage after it occurred and boss damage often outclassed their self-healing.

Once WAR gained the -20% dmg taken, it made for an awkward scenario where WAR was essentially doubling up on its surivival, with both 20% more HP/healed amount, and 20% mitigation.

No... after the 2.1 changes WAR and PLD had similar ehp and healing received profiles. IB giving a 20% mitigation was actually the equivalent of the PLD's Rampart and is what let WARs survive T1-T5 tankbusters.

This is mostly why people started seeing IB as the TB CD that IR is today, but still saw PLDs tank stance as a stance, and not a CD.

You are wrong. The introduction of Deliverance and Fell Cleave is what turned Defiance, Grit and Shield Oath into psuedo-cooldowns. Prior to 3.0, Warrior could not stance dance as you were required to be in stance to build Wrath and the moment you left it you lost all stacks. With the introduction of Deliverance and the fact it shared stacks with Defiance, swapping between dps mode and tank mode cost the Warrior nothing. Prior to that it took 7 to 8 gcds to fully activate Defiance.

HW tanking was designed around the idea tank stances were youre "Free CD" thats always available, if you didnt plan your cooldowns correctly, so it came at a cost." PLD being 2 GCDs for stance dancing, DRK was 1 GCD and MP, and WARs was a GCD and beast gauge for IB.

No, it wasn't. People started using them as cooldowns with 3.2 due to the damage in A5S through A8S being tuned for tanks in i220 gear rather than tomestone/raid gear like A1S-A4S were tuned for. After you reached a certain average ilevel you didn't need the mitigation gained from tank stance to survive non-tankbuster damage anymore.

[Claire_Pendragon]

IB took 8 or 9 gcds to perform if you were starting from no stance.

Correct, but that doesnt change why WARs tank stance was oGCD... (Plus if we're going an extra step further, then we should mention infuriate for giving you enough for a IB.)

First off there was absolutely no reason for WARs to stance dance in 2.0 (Paladins didn't stance dance either because incoming damage was high enough and constant enough that you wanted the damage reduction constantly when MTing). You were either MT in Defiance where you were building up Wrath stacks or OTing with Defiance off. Wrath stacks were initially the source of the Warriors increase healing, the Warrior either sat on 5 stacks of Wrath and had a similar amount of incoming healing as a Paladin or was 20% more difficult to heal because they had spent their 5 stacks to overheal themselves.

You forget SE was adamant that WAR could MT all the bosses PLD could, and players only saw WAR do it with the old system, once they grinded up enough gear. (As you state after this quote) This alone means an overgeared PLD could have survived it w/o tank stance being on 100% of the time. (Also there were groups who had PLD use sword oath to tank back then, but they quickly changed their tune when they saw how much easier it was for PLDs to stay in shield oath.) (EDIT: forgot to mention that WARs passive healing from Defiance, and later parry mitigation, was somewhat competing against PLDs natural shield blocking, which was active no matter which stance. Which I think is why the "awkwardness" remained even later.)

No... after the 2.1 changes WAR and PLD had similar ehp and healing received profiles. IB giving a 20% mitigation was actually the equivalent of the PLD's Rampart and is what let WARs survive T1-T5 tankbusters.

You are correct here, as my mind was thinking of HW WAR at the time i mentioned this, as its when I started to notice the awkwardness of having both a GCD IB, and a passive HP increase from tank stance. (Because you now had more CDs to handle more TBs) But to be fair, WAR still had Holmgang in 2.1, which most people werent as adamant on using for just TBs, as surviving the hit wasnt considered "effective" but instead lowering the amount of healing needed. Lastly, most WHMs never saved swift cast to Stoneskin the tanks before TBs, and/or didnt just hard cast it early enough, since it was much harder to memorize the timing of when TBs go out. (Too many ppl i know how to rely on 3rd party programs/methods to warn them of TBs) Based on how I see fights now, vs then, I think there's methods we coulda utilized more, in which to make 2.0 and 2.1 WAR more viable than we realized.

You are wrong. The introduction of Deliverance and Fell Cleave is what turned Defiance, Grit and Shield Oath into psuedo-cooldowns. Prior to 3.0, Warrior could not stance dance as you were required to be in stance to build Wrath and the moment you left it you lost all stacks. With the introduction of Deliverance and the fact it shared stacks with Defiance, swapping between dps mode and tank mode cost the Warrior nothing. Prior to that it took 7 to 8 gcds to fully activate Defiance.

Ignoring infuriate again, this is semi right, and semi wrong. HW solidified them being CDs, but they were always a "DPS penalized CD" regardless if people saw them as such or not. They raised survival, at the cost of offense, and could be chosen to be on or off. The difference being that ARR content was designed with DPS jobs in mind, and only a small amount of DPS from tanks. The penalty meant nothing, therefor its the same as if it wasnt being treated as a CD. (Which is why you're semi right) But you still have to ask yourself why they made the job this way, and it wasnt to be random. They put IB on the GCD to compensate the fact the stance was oGCD. They gave PLD a DPS stance, but not WAR. And the DPS stance was on the GCD. This was done intentionaly from a gameplay perspective.
But with HW introducing savage fights that required tank DPS, the punishment was now noticeable.

No, it wasn't. People started using them as cooldowns with 3.2 due to the damage in A5S through A8S being tuned for tanks in i220 gear rather than tomestone/raid gear like A1S-A4S were tuned for. After you reached a certain average ilevel you didn't need the mitigation gained from tank stance to survive non-tankbuster damage anymore.

I can kind of agree, but its somewhat of a grey area, in that its still a tool with a punishment, but its also great for groups who want to learn the fight, despite not having the DPS to clear yet. The only reason A1-4 was so hard hitting, was because they expected you to have grinded for more iLv (which was the case with coils as well, to an extent, depending on which floors we're talking about)
So again, this doesnt mean they werent CDs, but its true they were used as a learning tool as well, and became less so by the next tier. (But job design is usually decided when the 1st teir is being made. Only patch adjustments are balanced to future tiers.) Was A1-A4 clearable with tanks who didnt use tank stance? Yes. And if u did, or didnt use tank stance, your group needed an unreasonable high iLv to clear. So your point is sorta moot.