my thoughts on how to make tank jobs more engaging

[ReiMakoto]

Snip

To touch briefly on a few ideas here cos that is one big wall of text.

Yes tanks should have to work harder to achieve the same result overall, tanks are currently the easiest role in the game, healers may only have 2 damage buttons but they do have to fiddle about with their healing, tanking is currently simplified dps where you occasionally press a cooldown or move an enemy. Bigger numbers is satisfaction for a lot of players, dismissing it as just bigger numbers on a website is very reductive.

You challenged Quah to come up with more in depth dps rotations, but I would like to ask how do you make tank design more inherently "tanking" focused without a massive overhaul of raid design as well. Everything in this game is telegraphed to the nth degree and our cooldowns are on long timers, moving cooldowns to be on a lower timer and making you use them more could be a way to go, but would substantially break old fights and I would argue isn't much more interesting. Personally my idea is reintroducing an MT, OT stance split, but have them have the same damage potential, with MT converting damage taken into dps in various ways depending on job and OT having more dps abilities due to ability swapping.

Personally I don't think that tanks who want to deal a lot of damage are a bad thing, and honestly I think its what got a lot of people into the role in HW and SB with Warrior, I dont think anyone in their right mind wants tanks to do more or the same damage as a dps, but from personal experience with myself and my friends improving as a tank was always fun because you could see how high your damage was compared to some dps, but as the adps statistics on fflogs shows for now vs SB we're doing less and less, and yes comparing adps now to dps then is valid, because it was perfectly possible to get high parses in SB without single target padding which is the only thing that adps filters out.

[Lucy_Pyre]

tanks are currently the easiest role in the game.

Every role in this game is braindead easy. Tanking is easy, DPSing is easy, healing is easy. None of them require any brain power until you get into savage/ultimate content.

[Quor]

To touch briefly on a few ideas here cos that is one big wall of text.

Yes tanks should have to work harder to achieve the same result overall, tanks are currently the easiest role in the game,

Purely subjective. And as Lucy said, nothing is "hard" until you start getting into savage or ultimate.

healers may only have 2 damage buttons but they do have to fiddle about with their healing, tanking is currently simplified dps where you occasionally press a cooldown or move an enemy. Bigger numbers is satisfaction for a lot of players, dismissing it as just bigger numbers on a website is very reductive.

How is it reductive when that's exactly what people have been asking for? They've even justified it by somehow tying "fun" to how much dps they do. Would they feel like they're having as much fun if fflogs didn't exist? If everything as we know it today was exactly the same, only ACT and fflogs didn't exist (and thus no one knew their dps) would that make the job less fun to play? How does generating an arbitrary number reduce (or increase) the fun of a job on it's own? Or put another way, if looking at the damage you deal with a job and deciding "this is too low" is enough to ruin the "fun" you have in a job, then you're on the wrong job. By design, tanks do not deal as much damage as DPS do. That's why we have DPS; to deal lots of damage.

And again, if a combination of low job population coincided with a noticeably lower amount of damage dealt, then there would be justification for "I'm not having fun because my damage is too low" with the implication being that you can't engage/complete content (which is where the fun is) because you aren't dealing enough damage to beat said content and thus are excluded from it. In this sense, the "fun" isn't derived directly from the big numbers, but rather the lack of numbers directly impacts a job's ability to participate successfully in content, indirectly locking them out of having "fun." But that's not the case right now, as every tank can beat everything in game just fine. While an argument could be made that DRK and WAR are a wee bit behind, it's nothing that some very minor potency buffs couldn't fix (or an encounter design that favors a 90s cycle instead of a 60s cycle).

You challenged Quah to come up with more in depth dps rotations, but I would like to ask how do you make tank design more inherently "tanking" focused without a massive overhaul of raid design as well.

That's the whole point. I - and many other tanks - want a return to the tank-centric stuff that happened more frequently in HW and ARR. We want tank things to do! We play tank so we can tank, not so we can dps. Every job should be rewarded for maximizing all parts of their kits in their efforts when engaging content. As it stands now, the tanking side of things has been dumbed down so far that the level of thought/effort required to successfully tank all but the hardest stuff is pitiful. One way to increase complexity would yes, be to make tank dps rotations more complex, but all that's doing is making tanks more like a dps, which is just more line blurring and watering down of job identity. People are already upset that WAR and DRK are basically 80% similar, do you really want to make all four tanks even more similar to both each other AND the DPS jobs?

Everything in this game is telegraphed to the nth degree and our cooldowns are on long timers, moving cooldowns to be on a lower timer and making you use them more could be a way to go, but would substantially break old fights and I would argue isn't much more interesting. Personally my idea is reintroducing an MT, OT stance split, but have them have the same damage potential, with MT converting damage taken into dps in various ways depending on job and OT having more dps abilities due to ability swapping.

Maybe it's the old WoW and FF11 vet in me, but there are no "long cooldowns" in FF14. A long cooldown is your 2hr in FF11, or Recklessness/Retaliate/Shield Wall in WoW. As for your idea, I think I get where you're coming from, but then you're just bringing things back to the HW/SB days, and not necessarily in a good way. However, if the incentive for the MT to stay in their "MT stance" was great enough, you could be on to something. I do like the general idea of a tank taking damage and using that to somehow dish it back; the difficult part would be coming up with something that's unique to each tank to set them apart. Maybe one tank - WAR for example - could be more about directly returning the damage they take on a more immediate basis while MTing, but another tank (let's say DRK) would "store" that damage and unleash it using special attacks in their OT stance. Likewise, the DRK could "charge" some damage dealt while in OT stance to unleash as a big burst when first entering MT stance. Both tanks are getting the same amount of damage overall, but the way in which they deliver it differs. That would be interesting.

Personally I don't think that tanks who want to deal a lot of damage are a bad thing, and honestly I think its what got a lot of people into the role in HW and SB with Warrior, I dont think anyone in their right mind wants tanks to do more or the same damage as a dps, but from personal experience with myself and my friends improving as a tank was always fun because you could see how high your damage was compared to some dps, but as the adps statistics on fflogs shows for now vs SB we're doing less and less, and yes comparing adps now to dps then is valid, because it was perfectly possible to get high parses in SB without single target padding which is the only thing that adps filters out.

Wanting to deal decent damage as a tank or a healer isn't a bad thing at all. The problem I have with many suggestions nowadays is the - for lack of a better term - "narrow minded-ness" of the ideas presented. It's a noble goal to want to improve and challenge yourself within your own job and role. It's a noble goal to want to contribute meaningfully to an encounter. None of that is bad. What *is* bad is when the solutions to these problems focus around an arbitrary increase in tank damage with little-to-no consideration for the larger design of the game. Just throwing 1k dps at tanks and calling it a day (something that was suggested a few months ago, resulting in a HUGE thread, plus a number of spin-off threads) isn't the answer. Adding more complexity to dps rotations with no actual gain isn't the answer. If complexity is going to be added to a job, then the reward for properly engaging in that job should be greater. Simply boosting a role's dps contribution while simultaneously increasing boss HP isn't the way to go, as it devalues the contributions of the other roles for no good reason.

With all that in mind, directly addressing the very real issue of job engagement on tanks cannot be accomplished by simply focusing on dps. Possible changes to rotational complexity, done correctly, can be one solution to this, but it's not *the* solution. The last thing we need is even more job homogenization. What we definitely need more of is a re-focus on tank-centric encounter design. That is to say, having a tank do tank-like things correctly in order to maximize not only their contributions but also to enable the rest of the party to maximize their own contribution.

[bundythenoob]

snip (did i do it rite?)

Before I start addressing some of these points, I want to begin by prefacing with the reason as to why I wrote my initial ideas the way i did.

I believe that the good ole days of HW/STB job design are over. Square Enix has made very little changes to tanks and healers through the year that SHB has been up, and their reluctance to share info with not only the tank community, but healer community as well, has left me thinking that the more casual fight design (such as emnity changes and auto positioning bosses) and job mechanics are here to stay. I made a few suggestions keeping in mind SE's new design direction. I do feel that current DRK and WAR have room to improve with their current kits, and I'm sure they'll add more stuff during the next expac, but I am trying to think of a more temporary solution to help the current versions of the jobs feel better, while also thinking of a more permanent design direction that they can take, which led to the ideas in this thread.

I am all for adding more responsibilities for tanks to do, but since square seems to only want to implement that at the highest tiers of play, I am thus asking for an APM increase and the tweaking of job skills to make the leveling experience and everyday combat feel better.

I am advocating for an increase in how fast tanks can play by changing how fast their key cooldowns or resource building can come up, because I believe that would be a healthy way to naturally increase the skill gap, increase job damage, and also help bring back some complexity to the jobs, but I am not asking for more damage in the form of numbers being bigger. I am being vague in my posts because I am not a game designer, and I think that the way a job feels is just as important as how it performs, and I hope square can translate that feeling into the job gameplay. as most tanks have said, if the job doesn't feel fun to play, they won't care if it's balanced.

I did however, think of a few examples to use to illustrate my point. keep in mind these are just example values, and would of course be changed.

for your point on adding more tank-related tasks for us to do, i am all for it. I have been wondering for years why SE hasnt implemented stuff into their dungeons and trials like:
more tank swaps due to tankbusters actually hitting hard if you dont use cooldowns
more add phases, such as the kind who can shred healers or dps who are too high on emnity table, or enemies who leave hazards on floor if not killed in time
more debuffs that require tank swaps or healer intervention
more focus on positioning of boss relative to party instead of auto positioning bosses
less telegraphing aoe patterns to the floor in pretty colours, more reliance on context clues such as body language or environmental signals

sadly, all I can think of is that they want to appease both casuals and hardcore, but its only hurting the overall playerbase due to content being faceroll tier until savage. most "hard" trials are a joke, alliance raids are getting easier and easier, and even EX used to be more difficult, with stuff like permanent deaths from falling. there is no longer a middle ground in terms of difficulty, and there is not much of anything in the way of fight design tutorials or job mechanic tutorials. not even job related responsibilities beyond the smith guys. I simply didn't comment on adding more tank like tasks for us to do, because I feel that square would have to go back and redo all of the older content in order to do that. they seem to implement such stuff in savage and ultimates though, so they can always do that at those difficulties.

as for the tank damage thing, I will make up some numbers to make my point a little clearer. these of course wouldnt have to be exact values.

I am not asking for tanks to do more damage and then simply raising the damage required. I am asking for the damage required BY AN AVERAGE tank to increase, which will of course naturally increase due to an APM increase.

lets say for example, a current average tank can output 10k damage for the clear, a DPS puts out 30k, and a healer puts out 10k.
this would mean that the current "accessible" baseline for tank contribution would be set to around 10k dps.
then with the APM increases, the average tank would naturally output 13k because of the APM increase, which would become the new BASELINE for tank damage required for most faceroll content.
however, due to the APM increase, the skilled one can put out as much as 20k. this of course would be a large increase to the speed of which a skilled tank can help make the clears, while giving the newer tank a metric to work towards to improve their gameplay. this would also not add to tanks doing more "busy work", because their new baseline would still be using the accessible version of damage output, thus rewarding the hard worker with faster clears, a smoother job experience, and a stronger sense of having contributed to the fight.

I am also asking for a rework to the leveling kits of tank jobs, because even though they all feel nice to play at level 80, a majority of the content in this game is synced, and I believe most of the leveling kits are only hindering our ability to better intuit how to play the job correctly, while simultaneously feeling like a chore to play. Most DPS have their full rotation by lv 50, and only get more tools to add onto it until lv 80. on the other hand, most tanks dont even feel complete at 50, let alone by lv 70. DRK doesnt even get its complete aoe rotation until 72, which is one of my BIGGEST gripes with its current design. its aoe design from lv 30 to 71 is very limited in how much resource it can build and spend due to the lack of stalwart's mp generation and long BW cooldown/short duration, yet it is very easy to spend all of that mana and have nothing left for a long while besides its 1-2-3. new DRK players can't begin to learn how to build mana and spend it at the same level due to BW being unlocked 5 levels after Flood, which only hurts the level sync experience. PLD not having a stronger sheltron that comes up faster at higher levels makes it feel weak in the personal mitigation dept. hell, PLD could use its gap closer earlier too, like at lv 52, which would help players learn how to optimise damage while minimising travel time between boss and safe spots from aoes, a skill which is much needed at higher levels of play. WAR needing gauge to use its gap closer, but not being able to generate that gauge outside of combat feels clunky. I strongly feel that simple tweaks to the leveling kits of tank jobs would help ease a lot of the experience, and would allow players to learn how to optimize their job at a faster rate, since they would have access to those tools and resources much earlier, thus solidifying those important skills earlier too.