DPS stressors vs. Mitigation stressors

[Masked-dingus]

regarding 6.0 and tanking, i really fear the worst, considering they already took all the fun out of tanking ( at least it was funnier for me when you had tdeal with your two stances during swaps etx )
and also considering that except GNB, all 3 other tanks are about '' hit that 1 spell, and then spam this other one ''

i sum-up a bit but what i think is going to happen is what in the future they will slowly make every tanking job have a '' generic tank gameplay '' only with a different skin/glam

[Lyth]

Since the beginning of the game it has ALWAYS been about dps, from dungeons to raids to Fates. There was a bit less of a focus on it for tanks from ARR to Stormblood though but that never stopped them from trying.

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.

A lot of FFXIV tanks liked this because it meant that tanking was a role that had a lot of carry potential. Healers struggling with a tough mechanic? No problem, keep yourself up with bloodbath. DPS accidentally bound all their buttons to auto-attack? No problem, you were the reason that they made the dps check anyways. Everyone else dead? No problem, just Holmgang/Berserk that last 1% and get your team that cutscene.

Problem is this, though. The dev team doesn't understand these motivations. In ARR, they assumed that you stood in tank stance with full VIT accessories and maxed out parry/accuracy gear. In Heavensward, they started to catch on to this and tanks were hit by progressive nerfs to their itemization and damage output. Surely tanks are just there to hold the boss still and absorb damage! Can't have them embarrassing the DPS players that make up the bulk of the sub money, now can we?

First, they targeted our primary stats. Late Heavensward brought in a lot of failed attempts to readjust VIT and STR and dissuade us from using melee dps accessories. Stormblood brought in Direct Hit, while simultaneously limiting its access to tanks and healers. It also locked tanks out of melee dps accessories, while the accessories that we did have access to had no progression in STR stats.

One of my favourite moments in this was when they responded to the tank complaints about the lack of stat progression on their accessories. "What do you mean you do less damage? Oh, you must mean that you want more enmity. Here, have some emnity buffs." <snicker> And then tanks threw those new Stormblood accessories out the window, grabbed their old i270 melee dps STR accessories, and proceeded to do damage on par with their BRDs again. Oh how fast they backpedalled then!

And now we have the present situation. The devs learnt from their previous mistakes and our previous sneaky tricks, and have just flat out scuppered tank damage output. So that style of gameplay that you enjoy? It's been systematically targeted and stamped out. And it will probably get worse from here.

The problem is that removing the dps elements from tanking have actually revealed how shallow tanking is at baseline. Mob movement is full of jank and stutter, because they can't move and activate abilities at the same time (even Warcraft circa 2004 could do this properly, but 1.0's potato code fails us yet again). Bosses move, orientate themselves, and lock themselves into place in case your tank's movement causes the fight script to break (which is the same reason why we can't have knockback/draw in effects in PvE anymore).

As for mitigation, this game is so scripted and we have such easy access to invulns that it just becomes an issue of pressing the correct cooldowns at the correct timestamps. And I feel that if this was the primary reason that tanking interested you, you'd probably be marginally more interested playing a healer (not that they find the present state of gameplay anymore interesting than you do.)

In short, we have neither the DPS carry potential of early expansions, nor do we have the mitigation/positioning challenges that you'd find in, say Shadowlands.

I think this game is great if you're a DPS player, and right now that's where all the carry potential is. Great cinematic fights, interesting story. But tanks and healers might as well not exist in these scripted fights on rails, without any real threat outside of team jump rope. They don't have impact. And people play those roles specifically to have impact and to carry. And when you can't, your options are to either switch to DPS, or find a game that values its tanks and healers.

[Voidedge_Ragna]

We lost Tp, We lost Stances, We lost any sort of Enmity synergy and we lost the need to think about Threat control.
So next we get is the Free style combo thing, so we dont have to worry about any pesky combos ... 1 2 3 ? nah man 2 1 3 should work too.

That and we remove hp, just keep it full.

[Lyth]

TP didn't have much gameplay value. It just added to the many reasons why BRD was a guaranteed slot. And all the TP restoration skills from Heavensward onwards made it largely pointless. Stances haven't really had much gameplay value either. The only time that "Stance Dancing" actually was relevant was on ARR WAR, due to Defiance's Crit Bonus and the fact that Fell Cleave didn't yet exist. With regards to enmity and aggro - most modern MMOs have realised that doing fake damage requires the same skillset as doing real damage, and that the latter is more fun than the former. As for combos in this game - well, the PvP designers seem to have acknowledged that pressing 1-2-3 in a preset order is pretty much the same thing as pressing 1-1-1. It's just a conceit of ours that having a fixed rotation of 6 buttons is the pinnacle of gamer skill. If you want a combo system to have meaning, you need to have random procs and cooldown resets that change your rotation around dynamically.

I think that if you want tanking to be enjoyable again, you need a few things:
1) Fix mob movement/positioning/skill activation jank.
2) Design fights that are genuinely threatening to your tank outside of the standard team jumprope.
3) Introduce a lot more fight variability, both in terms of damage output and healing.
4) Limit team access to invulns and rezzes.

Outside of that, tanks need to have more value than they do now. Either:
a) Go back to ARR/HW style situations where your tank has dps carry potential
b) Make it such that your ability to clear fights is dependent on how well your tank positions/mitigates (the traditional approach)

Or both. If not, watch your tanks and healers walk next door to games that do these things. These are just the bare minimum to stay competitive.

[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.

[ItMe]

And people play those roles specifically to have impact and to carry.

Word
For a long time I mained PLD for the party support and pinch clemencies.
But... the group is fine without Passage of arms, and my DRK friends were bothered when I'd use Cover or Intervention to help them... so I moved away from the job.

[ADVSS]

Word
For a long time I mained PLD for the party support and pinch clemencies.
But... the group is fine without Passage of arms, and my DRK friends were bothered when I'd use Cover or Intervention to help them... so I moved away from the job.

Pretty much nailed everything i ever couldve said as well. Lyth is right about all of it.
Even if ARR had the HOLY trinity, it was still skewed by the cross class system, they even ripped tank abilities like bloodbath off of tanks because they should be DPS actions, and people are using the holy trinity as an excuse for the role to be further butchered. Was most fun ARR to HW, got weird but managable in SB and now its just downright a joke to what it started as. As stated 1 2 3 can easilly be 1 1 1 next expansion. Carry potential was a big part of it, cause it felt great to live through that 1% etc as well.

[Vyrerus]

Actually the survival requirement weren't low in ARR

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first Savage mode raid came in this tier as well, showing the playerbase an even greater need for high DPS.

As for general raid, Swap or Die came into play more in Final Coil. Turn 11 had Main and Secondary Head. Turn 12 had Revelation.

It is weird to see Lyth's character's eyes. I got too used to the blindfold.

[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.