Opinions: Should tanks work for aggro?

[DRKoftheAzure]

If anything the exact opposite has and will continue to happen. Boss fights have progressively gone more and more from hp% based phased auto-attack rotations with phase based mechanics to tightly scripted timeline based mechanic dances that rely mostly on pattern memorization as each expansion has released.

Would you put it past the devs to replace that with just stock auto attack damage...?

[Ultimatecalibur]

Would you put it past the devs to replace that with just stock auto attack damage...?

Yes, I can conclude that the devs have no intention making fights less mechanically complex by returning to the stock auto-attack rotations of ARR and HW. My fears are that the tanks' role in future fights will tend more and more towards vestigial as auto attack damage becomes even more meaningless.

[Sani2341]

I think Tanks should work for something to make playing them engaging.

Before ShB that something Was aggro.

Healers still have to put in some work to keep the party alive (and get rewarded with more time pressing their 1 dps Button for doing it Well)
And dps naturaly still work to Deal as much dps as possible.
But for Tanks, aggro was replaced with nothing. Mitigation is still just 'press one of these when necessary.' and for most of Them, while still better of than healers, their dps Rotation is not as engaging as most dps's.

Now i do not want sb aggro back, as it in the end was just busy work and rarely mattered after a few gcds ime.

But there needs to be something to do That's not just 'be a worse dps'.
In WoW Blizzard decided to move Mitigation from something mostly passive to something you'd need to activly build resources for to use. Now SE doesn't need to go that same Route, But they need to add something to make tanking engaging and fun again. As is, only Thing i do with my blue dps is to do some o3n once a week to slowly Grind Towards the Tank mounts.

[SnowVix]

If anything the exact opposite has and will continue to happen. Boss fights have progressively gone more and more from hp% based phased auto-attack rotations with phase based mechanics to tightly scripted timeline based mechanic dances that rely mostly on pattern memorization as each expansion has released.

trust me, HP-gated mechanics being gone is a good thing, as anyone who has done Haukke hard lately can tell you

Yes, I can conclude that the devs have no intention making fights less mechanically complex by returning to the stock auto-attack rotations of ARR and HW. My fears are that the tanks' role in future fights will tend more and more towards vestigial as auto attack damage becomes even more meaningless.

i'm not sure how you're saying auto attack damage is meaningless when the e8s autos did over 1/8 of a tank's HP (2 autos destroy a TBN, so back of the envelope puts that at 1/8 per), or will chunk a caster

[Ultimatecalibur]

trust me, HP-gated mechanics being gone is a good thing, as anyone who has done Haukke hard lately can tell you

Not saying phased based was good, just that the fight design trends have shifted more towards timeline based (with generous secret hp% thresholds for forcing phase transitions).

Haukke (Hard)'s problem is the same as that of most 2.X content: the ilevel sync is set far to high. Haukke (Hard), Copperbell (Hard) and Pharos Sirius (being tuned for i60) all had problems at release even with characters in i90 gear. Having a max ilevel of i110 just makes things worse.

i'm not sure how you're saying auto attack damage is meaningless when the e8s autos did over 1/8 of a tank's HP (2 autos destroy a TBN, so back of the envelope puts that at 1/8 per), or will chunk a caster

E8S seems to be one of the few exceptions rather than the norm of things. How many other modern fights have respectable auto-attacks/auto-attack rotations?

[ItMe]

E8S seems to be one of the few exceptions rather than the norm of things. How many other modern fights have respectable auto-attacks/auto-attack rotations?

E3S autos popped my TBNs.
Seat of Sacrifice EX did too.
So did Hades Ex thinking about it.
I'm surprised how many bosses have meaty autos to be honest.

[SnowVix]

Not saying phased based was good, just that the fight design trends have shifted more towards timeline based (with generous secret hp% thresholds for forcing phase transitions).

Haukke (Hard)'s problem is the same as that of most 2.X content: the ilevel sync is set far to high. Haukke (Hard), Copperbell (Hard) and Pharos Sirius (being tuned for i60) all had problems at release even with characters in i90 gear. Having a max ilevel of i110 just makes things worse.



E8S seems to be one of the few exceptions rather than the norm of things. How many other modern fights have respectable auto-attacks/auto-attack rotations?

the autos in this tier are definitely still meaty, as i can confirm from getting chunked pretty hard after tank deaths even after switching to Fists of Earth until the tanks were raised

[Ultimatecalibur]

E3S autos popped my TBNs.
Seat of Sacrifice EX did too.
So did Hades Ex thinking about it.
I'm surprised how many bosses have meaty autos to be honest.

Dealing 25% of a tank's mhp in 6s isn't actually that much damage considering that a healer can heal more than that in a single gcd spell. Truly "Meaty" auto-attacks should be expected to require nearly constant healing to counteract.

the autos in this tier are definitely still meaty, as i can confirm from getting chunked pretty hard after tank deaths even after switching to Fists of Earth until the tanks were raised

Tanks have nearly twice the Def/M.Def of the Monk, an inherent 20% damage reduction and between 0% and 10.7% mitigation from Tenacity. A conservative estimate means that an attack only deals about 2/3rds the damage to a tank as it would a dps. Combine that with tanks having 60% more hp than dps and an attack that would kill a dps with 2 hits barely does 40% of a tank's mhp. Fists of the Earth might barely shift a 2 hit kill to a 3 hit kill.

[ItMe]

Dealing 25% of a tank's mhp in 6s isn't actually that much damage considering that a healer can heal more than that in a single gcd spell. Truly "Meaty" auto-attacks should be expected to require nearly constant healing to counteract.

Sounds like we just have a different definition of "meaty."
And yikes, if the autos needed constant healing I don't wanna see what the actual attacks do...

[Jpec07]

Dealing 25% of a tank's mhp in 6s isn't actually that much damage considering that a healer can heal more than that in a single gcd spell. Truly "Meaty" auto-attacks should be expected to require nearly constant healing to counteract.

This would help a lot with my wall-o-text a few pages back. Either healing needs to be nerfed so that healers actually have to pick targets to prioritize, or damage output from bosses and enemies needs to be buffed. Non-DPS roles are, frankly, really boring in this game, and adding a threat back into the mix would help. Savage seems to be an okay world, but even then, once you get gear, the fights are down to memorizing scripted mechanics and dancing the right choreography. But outside of Savage? The casual game is kind of awful for tanks.

Right now, on basically all non-savage, you barely need to touch your mitigation. Maybe pop one of your CDs for a tankbuster if you're low, but more likely you time something like TBN for the tankbuster because it gives you a DPS boost. You don't have to play with any form of optimization with regards to your mitigation because you just don't need it. Your gear supports you, and your healer can keep you alive without ever having to use a GCD spell. It's boring for everyone who isn't a DPS because there just isn't any danger to it, and the damage rotations for those jobs (which is what you wind up doing at all times) are generally braindead. And most mechanics that you have to learn are just "move out of the colors on the floor so you don't take unnecessary damage" - and they're so scripted that there isn't any thinking involved. It's just "pause your boring DPS rotation for a few moments while you move and wait for the boss to stop moving."

That's not good encounter design, especially when the damage that you would take if you didn't do the mechanic is negligible. That's just boring.

Aggro management is a staple of traditional tanking, but FFXIV doesn't really employ traditional tanking anymore. Aggro management was made easy, and as a result, more people are tanking. But the problem is that aggro management was one of the challenges involved in encounters as they used to be designed, so when they take that away, they leave a shell behind.

I'm not sure what they can do about it. Reverting to a world where aggro management is actually challenging doesn't seem like a good idea, because then you alienate the new tanks. But I'm also hesitant to suggest that they need to go down the route that WoW did of Active Mitigation, because I have a bit of PTSD from when Blizzard did that (though then again, I rather trust SE to do a good job with keeping the jobs playable and entertaining, unlike Blizzard).