Opinions: Should tanks work for aggro?

[Anhra]

They are not golden rules, they are guidelines that encapsulate general scenarios, but not this one.

If the DPS already used their tools and you lost it, it's your fault. This shouldn't need explanation.

There were two distinct scenarios in Stormblood, both of which were not the fault of the DPS.

1. Prior to Alphascape, Samurai and Monks had no dump. Once diversion was gone, they had no options to reduce threat. Conversely, tanks had options to increase threat. Losing threat was the tank's fault.

2. Bard and Machinist only had dumps, meaning the opener was extremely volatile. You either planned for this and built the initial hate should you lack help, or you didn't and you lost threat. Tank's fault.

You don't necessarily need skills to reduce enmity as DPS, everyone who has eyeballs notices that there is a ranking about who holds how much aggro and even what position they are in. If you are on 2nd place on the meter you can always just stop attacking and wait for it to drop or you choose the quickest method and simply bite the bullet in a short blaze of glory.

If a tank ever has trouble with enmity generation it is because he/she
A: reached the maximum potentially drawn out enmity
B: tries to increase on his overall damage dealt at the loss of enmity or
C: does things intentional just for the heck of it.

In case B and C, it can easily be said that it is the tank's fault, because of poor judgment on his part, intentional or not but on the matter of case A, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that either the DPS overstepped its boundaries, or its the rare case of the Game's fault for not providing proper tools for this matter.

You can imagine this like a orchestra, a single trumpet can have a positive impact on the performance if played well, but if you go out of your way just to get noticed, the whole thing will collapse and is the trumpeteer who will eat the tomatoes head on first. From the audience (boss) and then from his teammates.

[Mikey_R]

You don't necessarily need skills to reduce enmity as DPS, everyone who has eyeballs notices that there is a ranking about who holds how much aggro and even what position they are in. If you are on 2nd place on the meter you can always just stop attacking and wait for it to drop or you choose the quickest method and simply bite the bullet in a short blaze of glory.

This, is the single stupidest thing I have read in a long time. I don't know how often you play a DPS, but if you have to stop attacking a boss so that you do not rip enmity, THAT is bad design. A DPS player should NOT be punished for doing their job, which, in your own words;

As for the matter of DPS, their role is the most selfish one since all they are required to do is as much damage as quickly as possible, with normally having the most complex skills for doing so.

(From post #182 in this thread)

So, you imply you want the DPS to do the most they can, but then punish them when they do. However, I am also going to quote this:

If a dps gets himself killed because they steal aggro, they only get themselves to blame, mindlessly spamming the biggest numbers should be punished by bosses and force dps players to opimize their gameplay by also paying attention to these kind of things.

(From post #187)

How do you optimise. In a static, it is theoretically possible, but the random dungeon where you don't know the tank and their capabilities, you would have to potentially hold back just because of the unknown. It is just is not something you should worry about in random dungeons.

However, this STILL goes back to how do you balance this? Not just between gear levels (aka lower geared tank and higher geared DPS) but just between the different DPS in general. BLM would have to hold back, but BRD could go all out. If this is the case, what is the point in playing BLM? Might as well keep yourself busy all the time with BRD rather than having to sit and twiddle your thumbs for a few second whilst the tank gets to that last hit of their combo.

This system does not allow DPS to shine. They are held back based on the gear level and skill of the tank. It doesn't matter how good you are as a DPS, the tank is going to hamper you. Dungeon run times will be solely placed on the tank. No one person should have that much control over a run. If you are a highly geared DPS, you should be able to use your skill and gear to enhance the dungeon run, not be potentially throttled for something out of your control.

This is clearly an idea that was not properly thought out at all and I have just scraped the iceberg on what as wrong and the next time you make a suggestion, I propose some amount of thought on how practicable the idea actually functions in the real world.

[ItMe]

I wonder if this (gestures vaguely at all of Mikey_R's excellent post) isn't potentially where FF14's "tanxiety" came from.

[Anhra]

This, is the single stupidest thing I have read in a long time. I don't know how often you play a DPS, but if you have to stop attacking a boss so that you do not rip enmity, THAT is bad design. A DPS player should NOT be punished for doing their job, which, in your own words;

(From post #182 in this thread)

So, you imply you want the DPS to do the most they can, but then punish them when they do. However, I am also going to quote this:

(From post #187)

How do you optimise. In a static, it is theoretically possible, but the random dungeon where you don't know the tank and their capabilities, you would have to potentially hold back just because of the unknown. It is just is not something you should worry about in random dungeons.

However, this STILL goes back to how do you balance this? Not just between gear levels (aka lower geared tank and higher geared DPS) but just between the different DPS in general. BLM would have to hold back, but BRD could go all out. If this is the case, what is the point in playing BLM? Might as well keep yourself busy all the time with BRD rather than having to sit and twiddle your thumbs for a few second whilst the tank gets to that last hit of their combo.

This is clearly an idea that was not properly thought out at all and I have just scraped the iceberg on what as wrong and the next time you make a suggestion, I propose some amount of thought on how practicable the idea actually functions in the real world.

It might sound bad for you on paper, but in reality it really isn't that much of a big deal. If aggro is being lost, because of lets say, a BLM, the boss first has to turn arround, walk towards the BLM and then at first starts auto attacking him (unless he is lucky enough to get the attention during the moment the boss prepares its tankbuster).

My point on it is this, there is more than enough time for a tank to react on this in more than just one way. There have been similar aggro systems in other MMO's and it worked out just fine, with only the worst tanks ever losing aggro, so i don't see a problem with things being spiced up a little.

Our current tanking situation is as simple as it can possibly get, you can't lose aggro at all as a tank unless there is another tank arround with the same buff.all im asking here for with these ideas is, to loosen this up a little to have some more difficulty, something this game clearly should have more of arround.

[Absurdity]

This is clearly an idea that was not properly thought out at all and I have just scraped the iceberg on what as wrong and the next time you make a suggestion, I propose some amount of thought on how practicable the idea actually functions in the real world.

Whether or not it was properly thought out I can't say but it's nothing new. It's very reminiscent of the mindset of more oldschool mmos where the holy trinity was the be-all-end-all of game design.

Tanks existed solely to get hit in the face, stacking nothing but defensive gear and buffs to survive for longer than 10 seconds, their abilities were designed to have some kind of aggro modifier because they did absolutely no damage.

Healers simply existed to heal people, as in having to spam low cost and low potency heals most of the time to not run out of resources.

And damage dealers existed to... well, deal damage... but never too much damage and never immediately because, as we established, tanks did 0 damage so even with their aggro modifiers they needed to build an aggro lead first before dps could start doing anything.

If you then ran into the issue of a tank being undergeared or just not that good... tough luck, gotta twiddle your thumbs until they have established their aggro lead.
Back then you just accepted it because it was all you knew, there's however a reason we don't do that anymore nowadays.

As someone who tanked in 2005 I can tell you that in hindsight it was probably the most boring and unsatisfying gameplay ever, spamming your 1 efficient aggro generator 9 out of 10 times while simply facetanking the damage because most of your defensives had 10+ minutes cooldown, being completely dependant on your healbots for your own survival while also doing laughably low dps.

[testname]

No

There are better ways of playing than simply more agro

[Lyth]

One point worth noting. SE has progressively been nerfing the relative raid dps contribution, as well as the gear progression of tanks with each expansion. If tank damage output becomes irrelevant, then there is no 'trade-off' between dps and enmity. You might as well be spamming your enmity combo. Irrespective of which side of the argument you fall on, tanks need to do significantly more damage, or this entire discussion is moot.

[ForteNightshade]

One point worth noting. SE has progressively been nerfing the relative raid dps contribution, as well as the gear progression of tanks with each expansion. If tank damage output becomes irrelevant, then there is no 'trade-off' between dps and enmity. You might as well be spamming your enmity combo. Irrespective of which side of the argument you fall on, tanks need to do significantly more damage, or this entire discussion is moot.

This is something that really irked me in Shadowbringers. While pure conjecture on my part, I suspect they don't want to make DPS players feel inferior seeing tanks or healers surpass them (since they know plenty of people parse). Otherwise, there really isn't a need to lower tank DPS to the extent they have.

[Kabooa]

This is something that really irked me in Shadowbringers. While pure conjecture on my part, I suspect they don't want to make DPS players feel inferior seeing tanks or healers surpass them (since they know plenty of people parse). Otherwise, there really isn't a need to lower tank DPS to the extent they have.

What irks me is that they really didn't.

What they did do is remove / reduce the number of buffs that actually go out.

Tanks, with the exception of warrior, were as selfish a class as Black Mage and White Mages. Our standard measuring metric this expansion changed, and with the changes to the number and amount of raid buffs going out, it really shouldn't be a surprise where the tanks have landed. There's effectively been almost no change from Stormblood to now for tanks.

What did change is that healer baseline potency got massively increased.

This bogeyman of "They're just trying to keep us down" is what gets tiring.

Tanks could use (but do not need, there's a difference) a small corrective increase, but I guarantee that the 2-3% boost is far less than what's being asked for.

[Lyth]

Early Heavensward


Late Shadowbringers


I think most hardworking tanks and healers would be more than happy if their damage outputs overlapped with that of lower skill dps players. The semantics around how it's done doesn't matter.