DPS stressors vs. Mitigation stressors

[Ultimatecalibur]

Not quite.

In any game, good tanks and healers will try to optimise their damage output once the basic survival requirements have been met. In ARR, players very quickly learnt that those survival requirements were fairly low. To add to this, things like STR/crafted accessories allowed tanks to do damage that was on par with (and in some cases exceeding) the lower end of the DPS player spectrum.

Actually the survival requirement weren't low in ARR. Fights in ARR were designed very differently. Most Tank swaps were "soft" in EXs and raids as they built around the number of debuff stacks the MT had and or the amount of cooldowns the MT burned through due to Tank Busters coming roughly every 30s or bosses getting damage up stacks. The tougher the MT was the fewer tank swaps needed to occur and the more likely they could solo tank the fight.

The Bosses in 2.0 and 2.1 had these mechanics:

• Ultima's Bane - Soft swap at 3 or 4 stacks with the 5 stack being an instant kill. Cooldowns were primarily used for soaking the 3 orb waves
• Garuda EX - Positioning was very important in this fight as the sisters (the Garuda clone adds) became impossible to kill if they were to close to the the enemy they were linked to. The Spiny Plumes were an add tank swap that inflicted Dot stacks the would explode if you got to many of them.
• Ifrit EX - Ifrit's rotation inflicted stacks of Suppuration (which decreased max hp) regularly. Tougher tanks could take more stacks between swaps.
• Titan EX - Titan's rotation inflicted vuln stacks roughly every 20 to 30 seconds. A tough enough tank could solo tank the fight if the dps could force phase transitions at the right times so that the stacks would fall off.
• Caduceus (T1) - Caduceus gained damage up stacks at regular intervals. A tougher tank meant that the dps needed to use the optional adds less often to reduce the damage up stacks.
• ADS (T2) - In the "correct" version of the fight the ADS inflicts vuln stacks on the MT regularly with a cleave. Tougher tanks in the correct version meant fewer tank swaps.
• Allagan Robots (T4) - Spinner Rooks inflicted a debuff that "decreased" max hp to the target's current hp (Thrill of Battle could actual give a Warrior more Max Hp than they normally had if timed right). Dreadnaughts healed and gained damage up stacks by eating the Bug type enemy if they got to close. With a tough enough tank a viable strategy was to feed the undamaged bugs to an Undamaged Dreadnaught to kill things faster in the timed fight.
• Twintania (T5) - She used a psuedo-tank buster Plummet roughly every 10s and a full tank buster Death Sentence every 30s. Death Sentence inflicted Infirmity which reduced healing received starting with the second phase.

The EX and Raids of the remaining 3 patches of 2.X more or less kept this style of tank mechanic design adding various other factors to switch things up. Tougher tanks were an asset during 2.X.

The Tank meta changed in HW due to the crazy tight enrages and swap or die tank busters of Alexander Savage. More DpS was more important than how long your tank could survive the bosses' onslaughts.

[Lyth]

Consequence of having to catch up again. I'll re-glamour at some point.

...

Early fights felt different for a few reasons.

1) Players were still learning how the game worked. Arguments about parry's viability happened as late as 2.4, whether tanks could "tank" out of stance was a debate leading into early Heavensward, and gearing for STR was a controversial concept for a long time. Even the best players going into Gordias felt fairly certain that PLD was going to be mandatory because of how defensive it was, and PLD/WAR was used on both A1S and A2S world firsts. Aaaaaand then Living Liquid happened.
2) Lack of cooldown resets on wipes meant that in prog, you had to readjust your cooldown rotation on the fly. Hallowed on cooldown just before the wipe? Well, I guess you're not using it on the first Flatten, then.
3) Phase changes and ability usage based on boss HP% rather than timestamps meant that fights had more variability to them. Phase change happened late? Alright, my cooldown rotation has completely changed and now I have to improvise.
4) The "formula" wasn't established yet.

I don't think that Ultima HM was particularly unique, even by current standards. Although I will say that Diffractive Laser was interesting in the fact that it was an unmarked tankbuster with no castbar and could be quite dangerous in certain parts of the fight depending on what mechanics it synced up with. I think modern tankbusters have lost their teeth not just because of how easily available invulns are, but also because they don't really sync up with other outgoing damage like autos. Oh no. The boss is charging his laser. For five minutes. With a castbar. What ever shall we do.

Garuda Ex was unintentionally really interesting. It just so happens that NA/EU players did the fight incorrectly and brute forced it. You were supposed to have Garuda on one tank, Superna on the other, and Chirada on the dps who stacked for downburst. Double Wicked Wheels were never supposed to be a thing.

Titan Ex solo tanking was a function of the fact that Hallowed was broken at the time and prevented stack application, allowing for stack resets.

Twintania was meant to force a swap on Death Sentence with the healing debuff. We just happened to ignore it with Lustrate.

T1/Caduceus is really the only one of these which doesn't really follow the current pattern. Irregular arena. Soft enrage where your tanks rotate cooldowns until the boss dies or the tank dies. It's incredibly simple, and yet it does mitigation in a way that's somewhat interesting. And invulns aren't quite so overpowered in this sort of scenario.

[Vyrerus]

T1/Caduceus is really the only one of these which doesn't really follow the current pattern. Irregular arena. Soft enrage where your tanks rotate cooldowns until the boss dies or the tank dies. It's incredibly simple, and yet it does mitigation in a way that's somewhat interesting. And invulns aren't quite so overpowered in this sort of scenario.

Heh, Holmgang didn't even have its invuln yet, though I remember that Hood Swing was subject to evasion check, meaning possible big returns out of Featherfoot on WAR. I remember once tanking it to 4 stacks of Steel Scales, and it was boosting to 5th stack when it died. A lucky DODGE from Featherfoot on a Hood Swing let me live during the 4th stack lmao. Meanwhile my PLD co-tank is over with the other snake, chilling like, "I have actual mitigation, teehee." He wasn't even sweating with a snake at 6 stacks. Just hallowed at 7. Easy day.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Some corrections/Observations:

Ultima's Bane -> That is an example of a hard swap. You must swap before 5 stacks or you die, end of story.

Its soft because the swap can happen at one of several points rather than a swap must occur at this one point. Depending on dps it was actually possible to avoid some swaps as the debuff would fall of while Ultima Weapon was doing a phase transition cast.

Spiny Plume -> The penalty for not swapping the Spiny Plume wasn't against the tanks, it was a hard party wide bust for tank incompetence. If you got three stacks, you would explode causing massive damage to everyone, generally only survivable with VIT melded accessories/latency/raise luck. This is a unique mechanic that I have not seen repeated in this fashion.

The explosion was an AoE but it hardly covered the full battlefield. The Spiny randomly targeting the person that was either number 1 or number 2 in enmity (due to most OTs not holding spot 2 on the enmity list it would randomly go after the healer) and the wipe mostly occurred if it chased after a healer during a sisters phase and the tanks didn't grab it of the healer at the right time. They have not repeated it in full due to the Spiny being too easy to kill with random ogcd AoEs and post-provoke shield lobs/tomahawks and the NA/EU playerbase coming up with an unintended tank arrangement for the sisters which caused problems with the swaps.

Ifrit Ex -> Due to the chain tether, swapping was controlled by the fight, often requiring a tank to take the full 5 stacks of Suppuration, and to try and swap while the OT still had the chain would result in the chained tank's death.

The tank tether only occurred during Nails and was more there to force the OT and tethered dps to stay in proximity while the dps was on the nails. If you swapped just before the phase started the tether was rarely a problem because the tether would end before the other tank got full stacks. It was more a problem if the MT went into the phase with 2 or more stacks potentially forcing them to tank with max stacks until the tether ended.

Turn 4 Dreadnaughts -> The first Dreadnaught needed to eat the 4 spiders, because otherwise physical DPS would go resource dry, necessitating resource singing, lowering raid DPS, failing the overall DPS check of the fight. This phase was proceeded by the double Spinner Rook + 4 spider phase, so you needed to have resource for AOEing that. The only Dreadnaught not fed spiders in this fight would be the second one, ideally.

Feeding was an intended mechanic but number of Spiders fed and how damaged they were before feeding was supposed to be a variable in strategies. You had plenty of time to kill 1 or 2 Spiders before feeding the rest to the first Dreadnaught without running out of TP, but feeding them all from the start was faster and only really possible with the durability of a Vit Paladin.

The tank meta "changed" starting in Second Coil. DPS checks started to really ramp up then, and it became apparent that not a lot of people were up to them, resulting in many groups only using two tanks if absolutely necessary, in order to have more DPS in the group. Tanks also started regularly full timing either pentamelded i70 accessories or STR accessories entirely, in order to help meet these checks. The Turn 8 boss was the first boss in the game to have over 1 million HP, having about 1.01 million HP iirc. There was also a Dreadnaught add with just under 100k HP. With a hard enrage time of 11 minutes, this meant the raid needed to do one hundred thousand damage every minute. This required a raid DPS of somewhere in the ballpark of 2000, and a good DPS at the time in entry level gear was capable of roughly 300~400. A good tank, in entry level gear, but with STR or Pentamelded accessories was sitting around 200~250. Every little bit mattered.

That was mostly because T8 expected the party to be in full weathered tomestone or better gear. Weapon upgrades were locked behind RNG (Wave/Tidalwave (no tokens here to guarantee) and Animus relics) or multiple weeks of tomestone grinding (Soldiery weapons). The OT swapping to Strength accessories was an easy way to boost average party dps especial since T6 and T7 could be stingy and drop only Fending and Healing accessories multiple weeks in a row.

I don't think that Ultima HM was particularly unique, even by current standards. Although I will say that Diffractive Laser was interesting in the fact that it was an unmarked tankbuster with no castbar and could be quite dangerous in certain parts of the fight depending on what mechanics it synced up with. I think modern tankbusters have lost their teeth not just because of how easily available invulns are, but also because they don't really sync up with other outgoing damage like autos. Oh no. The boss is charging his laser. For five minutes. With a castbar. What ever shall we do.

A lack of regularly occurring big hit psuedo-busters is one of my biggest complaints about modern fight design. No reason for the healer to keep the MT topped off if no attack in the next 30s can threaten them and we can't get much use out of Tenacity and Sheltron/Raw Intuition/Heart of Stone/The Blackest Night when all the tankbusters are covered by Rampart, 30% cooldowns and invulns.

Garuda Ex was unintentionally really interesting. It just so happens that NA/EU players did the fight incorrectly and brute forced it. You were supposed to have Garuda on one tank, Superna on the other, and Chirada on the dps who stacked for downburst. Double Wicked Wheels were never supposed to be a thing.

That formation also left Provoke free for use to swap the Spiny at less risk of a mistake.

Titan Ex solo tanking was a function of the fact that Hallowed was broken at the time and prevented stack application, allowing for stack resets.

Stack resets also happened with the phase transitions if they occurred slightly before Mountain Buster was coming up in Titan's rotation. If your dps were good enough and MT tough enough, you didn't need to tank swap or use Hallowed Ground until phase 4.

Twintania was meant to force a swap on Death Sentence with the healing debuff. We just happened to ignore it with Lustrate.

Death Sentence came out too often for that as Provoke was on a 40s cooldown. Every so often you were forced to take 2 Death Sentences between swaps.

T1/Caduceus is really the only one of these which doesn't really follow the current pattern. Irregular arena. Soft enrage where your tanks rotate cooldowns until the boss dies or the tank dies. It's incredibly simple, and yet it does mitigation in a way that's somewhat interesting. And invulns aren't quite so overpowered in this sort of scenario.

Also factor in that DpS could use the optional adds to reduce the damage up stacks and you have a fight were better mitigation and healing means greater dps output on the boss.

[Lyth]

Bloodbath should never have been a cross-class ability. Just designate a tank as your vampire tank, and give them all the lifesteal effects.

Role actions were a dumb idea from the start because they essentially took unique abilities that gave jobs their identity and donated them out for everyone to use. DRK and WHM were particularly hit hard by Stormblood's role action system. If you want player choice, then you need a job specific talent tree system.

...

Provoke was always reserved for Spiny, regardless of whether you used the JP or the NA approach. Garuda and Superna automatically swapped aggro tables when Chirada hit 50%. That was the "tank swap." NA players didn't understand this because both were on the MT, so they jumped and just came back.

Regardless, I think fight variability is essential to making meaningful tanking and healing gameplay. If the fight plays out the same way every time, then anyone can do it. You can create the most elaborate fight choreography in the world, but if it's completely scripted with set timestamps, it's always going to be inferior fight design even when pitted against Warcraft's most basic tank and spank, let alone their more elaborate stuff.