Can we please get aggro management back?

[MariaArvana]

I rather have that, than me currently not wanting to pick any tank, because i dislike them all.

And Square disagrees based on how they designed the tanks in SHB. We can agree to disagree on this one, as its personal opinions.

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 can assume what you want, I'm just speaking from the evidence that Square made tanking much easier overall as a response to how it ended up in SB. Sure, many players may not want the current system, but I'm willing to bet just from multiple friends I've chatted to and have enjoyed tanking since the beginning of SHB that many also enjoy this system. As to the 2nd point, jobs within role group have universally similar concepts. Making a tank that sucks at building aggro compared to the others would be the equivalent of making BRD have to stand closer to its enemy all the time to use weapon skills. It'd make for an alternative gamestyle, but compared to others in its category, there's a fundamental difference between it and the others.

Lets use an even better example. Remeber BRD back in HW when it had castbars? How it fundamentally changed an aspect of the ranged role and people complained ad naseum about it, especially when it was apparent MCH was built with castbars in mind, whereas they were obviously tacked on to BRD to create parity? yeah.

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.

Rhetorical or not, the purpose of Square changing aggro was to make the role more popular to people adversed to tanking. They have literal terabytes of statistics of their playerbase and multiple language forums to funnel info from. When they decided to change aggro management, it's pretty obvious it was based on a statistical decision to benefit the majority, whether you personally enjoy the end product or not.

For #3, most tanks played DRK... so i disagree with your statement.

FFlogs from HW & SB severely disagrees with you. WAR was the absolute KING for basically two expansions straight. for the entirety of HW it had a permanent 10% damage down on the boss, making it basically mandatory for any serious to kill raid group in the early weeks. Then IR came in SB and especially in 4.2 when it got changed, WAR was just an unstoppable force in raids due to how absurdly it could generate aggro compared to the other two tanks without suffering dps loss, creating large rdps contributions with slashing, etc. and PLD in SB got insanely strong, and was in the vast majority of ultimate clearing groups. DRK got left in the dust in SB. It wasn't until SHB that WAR finally resigned from its throne.

Alexander Savage had 18k parses that involved a WAR compared to DRK/PLD's 10/9k.
Alphascape Savage had both WAR & PLD sitting around 16l-18k parses compared to DRK's 6k.

Let those numbers sink in. WAR was literally played in raids almost 3x as much as DRK in SB, and 2x as much in HW. So no...DRK was far from the 'most' played. Literally the exact opposite, Empirically.

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)

You must have never been in a dungeon run that melted mobs ultra fast if you're getting rampart every pull. My bf gets rampart every other pack (or boss) because a good group can completely annihilate a pack in about 30-45s. Also, rampart is 90s vs the 120s (2min) you mentioned in your post for your theoretical OGCD. A small difference, but in a 12 min run of a dungeon, is quite a huge chunk of time relationally.

Also, considering how low threat gen for a tank is without their stance, I was giving you a simplistic reason why your tank OGCD idea was flawed. If there's no way to guarantee it'd be up for every pull, or worse, it can be unavailable for a length of time when you'd need it for the next pack, it would be a logistical nightmare to balance it's uptime in dungeons vs uptime in raids. Developers have to account for EVERY situation when designing something, no matter how mundane. As far as your DRK example, I wouldn't count that as flawed job problem, as it had an easy solution; save some MP. Or alternatively, turn off darkside between pulls, as Unleash was immensely low cost and you'd regen enough MP between pulls to use it. Whereas a single button, which when pushed, has a Cooldown till it can be pressed again, and would provide a tank with the means to do their job, could potentially NOT be up for a pack, is an actual flaw that would need to be fixed ASAP.

I have no doubts Square thought of many ways to solve the aggro problems to promote more tanks playing the role, but they most likely just simply took a look at player behavior (dps max aggro min) and decided to save themselves from their constant balancing headaches and made the system what it is now. Let tanks have fun with their rotations and playstyles without having to worry about aggro outside of initial securing it. Let them be the tanky dps they keep trying to be. Ultimately, the official forums are but a tiny fraction of the playerbase, only Square knows how popular the new system is, as they'll have the tank played % statistics across the entire playerbase to know if their system has worked or not, while we argue on mere conjecture.

[Claire_Pendragon]

stuff

I never said SE agreed with me, nor that most players do.
Also physical ranged used to be under the same category of ranged with casters back in the day of 2.0. But because BRD had no positionals, and no cast bars, everyone was playing it. (along with its buffs, but thats not why people were all playing BRD for endgame. they were tired of it being hard to dodge AoEs as melee/casters) So if everyone is doing it, its clearly the direction the game should go...
Im obviously saying most of the tanks should play as they currently do.

Also the context of WARs being less popular than DRK was in reference to SB time frame, Not HW. Secondly, the number of peopel who play a job, vs those who upload parses arent the same numbers. SE were the ones who released these numbers in direct response to people complaining about DRK. Saying WAR was the least played, and DRk was the most played.
DRK was still used for ultimates world first clear, despite having a disadvantage. (and not in the way im suggesting there should be differences. it was at a disadvantage from just not being as good at max play)
As for HW I have no idea how popular WAR really was. I did see a lot of DRKs and WARs.

Also, in a dungeon, I would run to the wall. After that is usually the boss.
If I ever had to only pull less than that, then yes, the DPS is low enough that I had to slow down. Why else would I slow down? If the healer was struggling, then the adds werent dying fast enough. (Which is most common in leveling dungeons, when poetic gear stops being as effective, and they have not yet received the gear from this or later dungeons yet.) Also, as a WAR, I try to keep my storms eye buff up between pulls. As a DRk i try to keep my dmg buff up between pulls. When I make bigger pulls I would drop them, due to the amount of time running from start to wall. But in smaller pulls, like with 1-2 mob groups, i never drop the buff, unless there is a loading screen. These buff require having a target to hit.
So I disagree with the idea that 1-2~ min CD on such a move is too awful. I do agree its possible 2mins may have been too strict, which is why I suggested a 1min one. Which there is no way that is too long, not with a multitude of oGCDs and abilities to help u maintain it. (As a class built around such a mechanic would have. Looking at jobs like MNK, and BLM having methods to maintain stuff between pulls, and during downtime.)

Remember HW DRK? if you ran out of MP, you couldnt even use your basic AoEs to hold hate on the next pull.
You gained most of your MP from abilities you used in combat. The only way you had time to regain the MP, is if u made small pulls, thus increasing the amount of time u spent out of combat. But that was perfectly usable. Plenty of players freaked out about losing MP, but it was actually quite easy to handle, and even offered options to make it easier on the players who struggled. You could even equip flash from PLD, which used only 60% of the MP an unleash did, and turn off dark side, and there was no way you'd ever have MP issues then. ive seen ppl do it, who were too scared to leave dark side up, and use unleash, much less abyssal drain, and DA+DP. DA+DP was half yoru MP gone at the start of the next pull. Turning ur tank stance back on cost you a chunk of MP too, i forget how much, i think 15-20%. followed by abyssal drain, there went all yoru MP at the very start of the fight. You didnt regain that from natural regeneration, you regained it back by dropping tank stance at the end, and using blood weapon at the end of fights, while watching your MP near the last 3rd of the fight.
If you didnt use abyssal drain over unleash, u were doing less DPS. if you didnt DA+DP you were missing your strongest AoE move, and most effective use of MP in trash packs. (This also means dont pop blood price too early, as you wouldnt gain as much Mp back from the 20%~ miss rate from blind.)

But obviously DRK wasnt impossible. You could even play sub optimally, and still do just fine. The timers werent the issue.

Also, considering how low threat gen for a tank is without their stance, I was giving you a simplistic reason why your tank OGCD idea was flawed. If there's no way to guarantee it'd be up for every pull, or worse, it can be unavailable for a length of time when you'd need it for the next pack, it would be a logistical nightmare to balance it's uptime in dungeons vs uptime in raids. Developers have to account for EVERY situation when designing something, no matter how mundane. As far as your DRK example, I wouldn't count that as flawed job problem, as it had an easy solution; save some MP. Or alternatively, turn off darkside between pulls, as Unleash was immensely low cost and you'd regen enough MP between pulls to use it. Whereas a single button, which when pushed, has a Cooldown till it can be pressed again, and would provide a tank with the means to do their job, could potentially NOT be up for a pack, is an actual flaw that would need to be fixed ASAP.
.

But to give a simplistic answer to this, w/o going into complex systems. Flash vs Total Eclipse.
The solution to "just use unleash" is the equivalent of "Just use Flash" on PLD, instead of Total Eclipse.

So if you messed up, and for some reason you didnt have ur tank stance oGCD, you'd use a "Flash" equivalent.
for clarification, When I say tank stance, I mean EITHER a stance for threat, or a stance for mitigation. Not both. I never liked the idea both were tied together.
So depending on which ever you think it it is, I used the Flash example. It can be the mitigation (20% evasion) or the threat. But it does 0 dmg, so you can get through leveling content just fine, but its not the optimal option to use. (I would technically give it a secondary use, so as not to be button bloat, but thats another story)

I feel you assume I plan to be punishing with stuff. Ive never been a fan of high punishment jobs. Look at RDM vs BLM. BLMs rotation is extremely simple. But if it messes up, it gets FAR more punished than RDM. yet peopel say RDM is the easier job, when in reality, both are easy, but a bad player gets more out of RDM, since they wont be punished as hard.
I had no intention of heavily punishing players. If anything, I intend to have backups, to help them get out of failures, rather than just sit there and wait till they are allowed to start over fresh. But thats my mentality. I also know some players want punishing jobs as well, which I noticed also tends to fit the players who like "jack of all trade" playstyle types. So Id imagine making the tank that only somewhat struggles with all 3 categories, would be the one thats more punishing if it fails. (but im also one to think there should still be a jack of all trades that isnt punishing.)
Im terrible at coming up with ways to balance punishing with fun. A job can feel rewarding, w/o being broken. example, GNB. Its practically as simplistic as the other tanks, and yet feels far more satisfying to play than WAR. GNB is the jack of all trades in playstyle, and not the best at any one thing either. Im not good enough to figure out why that is, nor be able to replicate that. So thats probably where my limits in design fall short.

they most likely just simply took a look at player behavior (dps max aggro min) and decided to save themselves from their constant balancing headaches and made the system what it is now.

While possible, there's also the fact that the current team, that designs the jobs, is only 4 people, and all of which primarily play DPS. If anything, this is why they took the easy route to just simplify them/blue DPS them, knowing most of the player base would be ok with it.
As threads have talked about this prior, I feel they need more people on the team who play healers and tanks, and also love/care about those roles, rather than working on them because they have to. (Also doesnt help the primary team leaders who designed most of ARR/HW, were taken off of FF14, to work on the new "unnamed new project"(FF16) right as soon as HW dropped.)

[ForteNightshade]

Also the context of WARs being less popular than DRK was in reference to SB time frame, Not HW. Secondly, the number of peopel who play a job, vs those who upload parses arent the same numbers. SE were the ones who released these numbers in direct response to people complaining about DRK. Saying WAR was the least played, and DRk was the most played.
DRK was still used for ultimates world first clear, despite having a disadvantage. (and not in the way im suggesting there should be differences. it was at a disadvantage from just not being as good at max play)
As for HW I have no idea how popular WAR really was. I did see a lot of DRKs and WARs.

Citation needed because I do not recall SE releasing any information.

Regardless, when it comes to job balance, Savage and Ultimate are the only content that matters because nothing else remotely tests the jobs enough to be relevant. And in Savage, Warrior utterly dominated both expansions. Even in that UCoB WF, they dropped Paladin not Warrior despite Paladin being the best prog tank due to Clemency. That alone goes to show you the sheer dominance Warrior had over the meta scene. It should also be noted Dark Knight was never "bad" just inferior. So citing that group x killed Ultimate means nothing. That player was a good tank who happened to like Dark Knight not that Dark Knight was better. Objectively, it wasn't.

In Heavensward, Paladin warmed the bench since so many fights had magic based tank busters. Dark Knight was not only decent but got in by virtue of Dark Mind essentially being a free CD. And a powerful at that.

Remember HW DRK?

Yes. It was the best iteration of Dark Knight. Sadly, they keep insisting on "fixing" it. :c

[Claire_Pendragon]

Why do we keep bringing up WARs performance? Ive only been talking about playstyle. I keep thinking you guys misunderstand what I'm even suggesting. Every job has a job gauge, and in the case of tanks, WAR/DRK have a DPS buff to maintain, PLD has a DOT to maintain, and GNB mostly doesnt have to maintain anything, other than just use its strongest moves in its own dmg buff window. (Like WARs zerk window)
Now replace the gauge or maintained buffs with another stat (While keeping DPS the same), and they functionally act the same, even with the same playstyles they currently use.

KEEP THE PERFORMANCE EQUAL.

We all agree WAR was broken. No one disagrees with that, other than delusional people. The only argument was about popularity, to which was already not related to the point, as I mentioned the sole purpose of what I suggested was for the MINORITY of people, NOT the majority. And because it was for the minority of people, we would still need to keep most tanks like they are now, since the current tanks are for the majority of current players. (Secondary argument was how much work it would be to balance, to which my argument was built around a few issues, mostly "from the ground up" logic, rather than how to adjust the current jobs, which is reasonable to say is too much work.)

[Khalithar]

I wanted them to get rid of tank stances entirely, what we got is the next best thing.

Aggro management is better this way and it let's us tanks focus more on the boss. I hated stance dancing when I was doing SB savages and for the longest time I wished I didn't have to choose between aggro and extra damage and now I don't. I don't need to waste a GCD swapping back if the dps are close which in turn stops me from delaying or interrupting my rotation. I think this was a change for the better and I welcomed it.

[Melichoir]

And Square disagrees based on how they designed the tanks in SHB. We can agree to disagree on this one, as its personal opinions.

They wanted to fix issues tehy saw, and came up with solutions that work in the short term with long term pitfalls. We can all agree on one thing though: The devs dont always get it right and some of the things they implement horribly suck.

While they dumbed down tanking to "Press x to tank", they did it at the cost of role and class identity, and from what I understood, they did it to get more people into the role (a lot like how htey tinkered with healing for the very same reason). And I dont think that it was inherently a bad idea. Yeah, making taking easy to get into and functional in casual content should be a thing. It's just instead of just doing 1 main change - No damage penalty on tank stance - and work outwards from that, they overhauled warrior and DRK in frankly stupid ways. Admittedly, PLD seems to be the only one benefitting form the new system, and GNB is fine as it's the first xpac with it. But thats because they feel like they kind of have a rotation or identity to play around, GNB the most, and a distant second being PLD.

Though I wouldnt get used to it. I hold no illusions that the devs wont come in with a wrecking ball come 6.0 and cut down tanking to 5 buttons max and neuter what playstyle and class identity GNB has.

And in Savage, Warrior utterly dominated both expansions. Even in that UCoB WF, they dropped Paladin not Warrior despite Paladin being the best prog tank due to Clemency. That alone goes to show you the sheer dominance Warrior had over the meta scene.

My understanding of Warrior Dominance stemmed from two primary factors - Damage was really good and having holmgang on a 3 Minute CD was ultra powerful for Tank busters.

[basketofseals]

KEEP THE PERFORMANCE EQUAL.

The difference between tank jobs hasn't been significant since HW. Despite DRK being the worst tank for the entirety of an expansion, it still got world for for an ultimate fight.

Whatever issues tanks are having, performance is not one of them. No matter what, someone's going to be the "worst" by default, but that doesn't make the job bad.

[Claire_Pendragon]

The difference between tank jobs hasn't been significant since HW.

did you mean to quote me? i dont really understand why you're telling me this.

[basketofseals]

did you mean to quote me? i dont really understand why you're telling me this.

Because for some reason I cannot tell the difference between "was" and "is." My bad.

[MariaArvana]

I'll have to reply later when I have more time to write up more walls of text, but I wanted to reply to a quick point.

Also the context of WARs being less popular than DRK was in reference to SB time frame, Not HW. Secondly, the number of peopel who play a job, vs those who upload parses arent the same numbers. SE were the ones who released these numbers in direct response to people complaining about DRK. Saying WAR was the least played, and DRk was the most played.

That chart they released includes people who leveled DRK/PLD/WAR to 60 then never touched it again. Saying they're an accurate number of tank activity in actual level 60 content at that time is the equivalent of saying FF14 has 14mil players, or WoW has 100mil, when their actual active playerbase is usually 10% of that. Or releasing a statistic that included every single person who ever entered Eureka Anemos, regardless if they stayed for 1 second or all the way to Hydatos and then claiming it was indicative of Eureka's popularity. When you talk about active players, you use data that empirically provides whats being actively played at max level constantly, which FFlogs did. and WAR was untouched on its golden throne until 5.0 in terms of active play, where DRK was either taking the silver medal (HW) or bronze (SB).

And sure, not everyone uploaded. But stats are super great for analyzing, and a lovely thing called extrapolating that is used extremely often in the world of statistics because its a great tool. With WAR being played almost 3x as much in raids than DRK in SB, even if we could include all the missing players, there's a large enough sample of size of parses that we can make extrapolations that the ratio would stay the same or similarily. We aren't going to be finding 12k more DRKs that never uploaded without finding a lot more WARs/PLDs that never uploaded too. And there's no statistics of which tank was most actively played at max level across the entire playerbase, so that enters the realm of simple guessing or personal experience and not the realm of the empirical. But considering how much the meta drips down to lower-end groups and players (I.E: bad tank players trying to copy the dps tank meta and failing horrbly at it.) I wouldn't be surprised if the FFlogs ratios could be extrapolated even further.

They wanted to fix issues tehy saw, and came up with solutions that work in the short term with long term pitfalls. We can all agree on one thing though: The devs dont always get it right and some of the things they implement horribly suck.

Considering it takes all of 1 milisecond for someone to realize a 10x enmity multiplier on a tank stance would completely annihilate any output a dps can do gives a pretty big insight into what they desired in this system, and how its most likely a huge success for them. If it was at like 4x I'd be more inclined to think on your lines, but the 10x multiplier was extremely intentional. In their eyes, they extremely got it right, as the system is acting perfectly as intended, regardless of how each individual player views it.

Also, the identity thing is honestly an opinion. When I look at WAR, I still think 'berserker with immensely powerful skills', even in 5.0. I still see PLD as the holy shield knight that protects the weak, which several of its mitigation abilities (Intervention, Cover, Clemency) attribute well to its identity. When I play DRK, I know I'm playing a DRK thematically, just as I know when I'm playing a WAR. Job identity goes far beyond than just a few key skills being homogenized; the aesthetics of their skills, their AF, and their flavor CDs are all extremely unique to give each a powerful identity.

My understanding of Warrior Dominance stemmed from two primary factors - Damage was really good and having holmgang on a 3 Minute CD was ultra powerful for Tank busters.

WAR was dominant for many primary reasons beyond that:
-Unchained giving WAR the highest aggro gen bar none with the smallest damage loss, to the point it was a raid dps gain to bring a WAR over PLD/DRK combo due to the dps the other two would lose from having to secure aggro, ESPECIALLY PLD.
-(HW only): Storm's Path had a 10% all damage down debuff on it, which meant that not bringing a WAR to raid automatically meant your whole party took 10% more damage from EVERYTHING in the encounter. When there were extremely powerful raid busters floating around (J-kick, J-storm, Mortal Revolution, whatever the heck Allthink's electric raid buster was, Cascade, Whirlwind(?), Mega Holy, etc.) on top of giving a free 10% mitigation to your co-tank whenever they had aggro meant WAR was almost mandatory for low week prog, and gave healers extra offensive GCDs from less damage having to be healed across the entirety of the fight. WAR was increasing a lot of people's dps inadvertedly while also being the highest damage tank.
-WAR was the only tank to give slash resist, meaning you increased NIN dps due to them putting up slashing is a dps loss. And if you had some weird comp like PLD/DRK/no-nin or no-SAM? yeah, your whole raid suffered.
-(HW only): Equilibrium giving TP recovery every minute making WAR impossible to bottom out, where a PLD was basically out of luck after 2 minutes without BRD/MCH/NIN intervention and DRK would eventually lose the war of TP attrition even with blood weapon.

WAR was a case where it's one minor weakness (The fact defiance doesn't give you the effective 20% mitigation immediately due to needing to be healed first, where Grit/Shield Oath did) was effectively eliminated or a non-issue at all, leaving a job with no weaknesses competing against two jobs with much larger weaknesses. Which is reflected well in its active play statistics, but also in how Square homogenized certain abilities so that one tank wasn't completely annihilating the others due to some trick/synergy within its toolkit vs fight design.