Opinions: Should tanks work for aggro?

[Grimoire-M]

Stance dancing didn't give this in Stormblood. It just added situational rotations for you to memorize and didn't add strategic decision making.

Other classes also had more aggro tools such as Diversion, Shadewalker, and aggro cuts spread across Lucid Dreaming and the former Ranged resource cooldowns. That management would fall entirely on the tanks now (which I can believe shirk is enough to undo as it was capable of doing that over time before), and could encourage more tank swaps simply to use Unchained windows and Shirks, or to simply dump damage on the tank with more cooldowns. It drastically affects prog and inconsistent groups. Plus it enables fights with aggro resets like O4S.

[ADVSS]

I don’t really see any downside to using what we have seen SE already to accomplish the same goals in less buttons as it stands, as I don’t see SE removing or changing any current tank cooldowns. The primary reason for returning stance dancing is to give players more strategic decisions regarding threat, mitigation, and DPS. It accomplishes those goals without necessarily changing encounter design all that much or requiring more ‘unique’ button presses. However, we do need those types of encounters to actually exist first, but given our current toolkits, I don’t think it would accomplish much that just amping damage frequency wouldn’t accomplish as well. It’s not necessarily hard to implement as Lyte notes, but I don’t see SE doing it, and I’d expect that if they did they’d first add more buttons that can be used on a short CD first just to cover for mistakes they made. And given their lacklustre class design and reluctance to evolve their encounter design, I think Stance Dancing is simply the easier sell.

To the both of you, it is correct that the fight design sort of makes this the way it is. There are "some" bosses(namely that one dude that appears in stone vigil hard, sohm al hard, and in nidhoggs trial) that has this sort of methodology, but the way it is handled is that tankbusters then are completely avoidable without any need of a cooldown at all, except as an oh shit" button. Personally, I'm not sure they will design more fights with this sort of formula, i feel like the lowest common denominator would not be too friendly with tanks beign able to avoid damage altogether, get lucky and survive the hit with a quick cd, or ohko because they werent skilled or paying enough attention to the quiet tells to run behind the enemy. So I tend to agree, they arent going to drastically change fight designs despite both healers and tanks being unhappy about some of the redundancies over balance and what they feel both roles have to have or else. That being said, I would be fine with stance dancing for more damage or something, but what I'd really like to see is more interactive cooldowns or things that reward you more often for just tanking, cd like Vengeance or old Vengeance if they changed it. Tank gets hit like he's supposed to, enemies get reflected damage back. Or old reprisal/low blow where getting hit had a chance to proc a full charge to reuse the skill before cd. Things like this, and skills/cd with more synergy like Awareness/Raw intuition, or even the most rediculous combination, dark dance and blinding enemies with dark passenger. I dont know, im not on the maths department. I sort of like to see what the job can do, not that its just like the other 2 or 3 in its role. Sometimes thats unmathable like raw numbers like DPS and HPS

[ADVSS]

Stance dancing didn't give this in Stormblood. It just added situational rotations for you to memorize and didn't add strategic decision making.

To be really honest, dps didnt want to manage their aggro, and I think they kind of rule this out. In the gist of things I get what they are saying, making it fully the tanks responsibility. They can easilly give Grimoire what he wants from this, more things to do in rotation, more aggro responsibility by simply doing this: Remove tank stance, bring ultimatum back with 2 charges, give provoke 2 charges and shorten its cd time by at least half. The ironic part is that it will irritate better tanks, and will make less skilled tanks that use provoke in their rotation look like pro's. I dpmt think most of us will want something that dumbed down for the sake of making all enmity control manually the tanks doing for artificial difficulty of the role(strategic), sure they could do it a different way with stance dancing, but they will not. They removed cleric stance too, which was healers version of stance dancing, they will never bring that back. So we have to kick that idea personally, and think of a better alternative without losing more tanks to the changes they keep making.

[Grimoire-M]

To be really honest, dps didnt want to manage their aggro, and I think they kind of rule this out. In the gist of things I get what they are saying, making it fully the tanks responsibility. They can easilly give Grimoire what he wants from this, more things to do in rotation, more aggro responsibility by simply doing this: Remove tank stance, bring ultimatum back with 2 charges, give provoke 2 charges and shorten its cd time by at least half. The ironic part is that it will irritate better tanks, and will make less skilled tanks that use provoke in their rotation look like pro's. I dpmt think most of us will want something that dumbed down for the sake of making all enmity control manually the tanks doing for artificial difficulty of the role(strategic), sure they could do it a different way with stance dancing, but they will not. They removed cleric stance too, which was healers version of stance dancing, they will never bring that back. So we have to kick that idea personally, and think of a better alternative without losing more tanks to the changes they keep making.

Personally I’m used to taking full advantage of the scant forms of utility DPS roles tend to get, to the point of being a MP battery, addle/apoc/Erase spamming raise bot SMN back in SB. My problem with aggro management skills being given to DPS/healers again is it enables tanks to go full ham on DPS stance without penalty. Whether tanks can or should get away with threat management is a purely class design issue, while active mitigation necessitates encounter design that supports it properly. SE won’t even use crowd control abilities more than three times in one or two major encounters for an entire expansion. Ramping up cc usage, to me, would add that interactive feel without adding more buttons. As for stance dancing, the reason it was a problem for healers was due to the INT/MND swap, nothing more. The penalty for using stance was much, much higher, on a role that actively relied on reactionary non-damage GCDs being used if you screwed up. Meaning the penalty was much, much higher. Tanks, by and large, do not even come close to having those issues, even with their worse QoL.

[ADVSS]

Personally I’m used to taking full advantage of the scant forms of utility DPS roles tend to get, to the point of being a MP battery, addle/apoc/Erase spamming raise bot SMN back in SB. My problem with aggro management skills being given to DPS/healers again is it enables tanks to go full ham on DPS stance without penalty. Whether tanks can or should get away with threat management is a purely class design issue, while active mitigation necessitates encounter design that supports it properly. SE won’t even use crowd control abilities more than three times in one or two major encounters for an entire expansion. Ramping up cc usage, to me, would add that interactive feel without adding more buttons. As for stance dancing, the reason it was a problem for healers was due to the INT/MND swap, nothing more. The penalty for using stance was much, much higher, on a role that actively relied on reactionary non-damage GCDs being used if you screwed up. Meaning the penalty was much, much higher. Tanks, by and large, do not even come close to having those issues, even with their worse QoL.

All of those skills got scrubbed this expansion, which is sort of what im talking about the direction they are heading with the roles. Swapping int/mind did similar things besides flat stat swapping, it lowered their healing and boosted the damage they did, under that stance. Making their ability as healers, more difficult, in exchange for dealing damage. Again kind of the point i am talking about, making your basic function harder for more "strategic" (aka extra damage) gameplay. Basically, if you want them to go back to stances, for damage, wouldnt it be better to just lower defense in place of extra damage? Its obvious that enmity management is probably stuck to where it is at, and will be made even easier, in the future. Thats the only way i can find them mildly more strategic, but i can guarantee they dont have the balls to do that to the tank role.

[HeulGDarian]

I think the only way they could put stances back in is if they made it so that they both provide the same thing but differently.
What do i mean with that. What if they took nascent flash/raw intuition and instead made it so that they are stances. One stance gives you healing the other defense.
The biggest problem with stances was that dps one was always the better one, simply put you cant balance dps and utility cause every time dps wins.

[shao32]

personaly yeah i think they should work for agro and if not on agro they should work at something, make the role being more than just 4 jobs that form part of a party only bcs the system force you to it and not bcs they don't offer any kind of value in 97% of the content of the game.

all being said i belive we are sufering mitigation and healing powercreep apart of every encounter not doing enough damage to require our existence outside of the arbitrary tankbusters we even rarely see this days.

[ADVSS]

I think the only way they could put stances back in is if they made it so that they both provide the same thing but differently.
What do i mean with that. What if they took nascent flash/raw intuition and instead made it so that they are stances. One stance gives you healing the other defense.
The biggest problem with stances was that dps one was always the better one, simply put you cant balance dps and utility cause every time dps wins.

Possibly. I think we should wait to see what they do with monk for 5.4. In fact, oddly enough as far as SE stance on stances, i think we need to see what they do with mnk, who has what 3 stances? Is it any surprise to anyone that they would mainly resort to a specific stance over the other 2? This actually might be more important for tanks than they realize(who are praying for stances to return). Personally, i think they're trying to ditch stances, since most people probably default to one primarily, only switching for the situational benefit ala tanks using ts for the passive defense buff, then going right back to all deeps.

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

Possibly. I think we should wait to see what they do with monk for 5.4. In fact, oddly enough as far as SE stance on stances, i think we need to see what they do with mnk, who has what 3 stances? Is it any surprise to anyone that they would mainly resort to a specific stance over the other 2? This actually might be more important for tanks than they realize(who are praying for stances to return). Personally, i think they're trying to ditch stances, since most people probably default to one primarily, only switching for the situational benefit ala tanks using ts for the passive defense buff, then going right back to all deeps.

I'm not looking for stances to return, they're an outdated archaic mess that only ever allowed, ONE tank to benefit from them, while the 2 remaining tanks suffered heavy detrimental losses for extra defense that wasn't needed. Stances were in no way, shape or form, strategic, well thought out or interesting in the slightest. Only one stance was used after the start of the fight, the tank stance was ignored for the rest of the fight.
This has been the state of tank play since the beginning of HW, until ShB. SE forced a more DPS centric meta to materialize with Gordias. Once this came about, there was no way to turn back the want for more DPS.

On a side note, it still makes me laugh when you see people complain when they had to press 1 off global once every 2 minutes, back in SB that DID NOT interfere with their rotation in the slightest, to reduce aggro.

Current stance is fine as it is, as I said earlier in this thread, enmity is never gonna be engaging, it's always gonna be binary in XIV, you have it or you don't. Better SE actually focus on more interesting aspects to make tanking fun again.

[ADVSS]

I'm not looking for stances to return, they're an outdated archaic mess that only ever allowed, ONE tank to benefit from them, while the 2 remaining tanks suffered heavy detrimental losses for extra defense that wasn't needed. Stances were in no way, shape or form, strategic, well thought out or interesting in the slightest. Only one stance was used after the start of the fight, the tank stance was ignored for the rest of the fight.
This has been the state of tank play since the beginning of HW, until ShB. SE forced a more DPS centric meta to materialize with Gordias. Once this came about, there was no way to turn back the want for more DPS.

On a side note, it still makes me laugh when you see people complain when they had to press 1 off global once every 2 minutes, back in SB that DID NOT interfere with their rotation in the slightest, to reduce aggro.

Current stance is fine as it is, as I said earlier in this thread, enmity is never gonna be engaging, it's always gonna be binary in XIV, you have it or you don't. Better SE actually focus on more interesting aspects to make tanking fun again.

I totally with you about this statement. +100