Tanking in Endwalker: Steps Forward and Backward in Fight Design

[Eorzean_username]

The problem with bosses not re-centering is that it creates more opportunities for players to get mad at each other, and for players to feel intimidated or discouraged because they can't do something the "ideal way".

I am not advocating for or against this, because if I had my way we'd all be back to HW style mechanics and design and everyone would hate me for making the game a giant inconvenient PITA again with bowmages and Geirskogul eating Blood timer and Darkside sapping MP and so on.

But what I am saying is that, realistically, given the way the game is now, the developers are clearly trying to avoid situations where players get bullied for not knowing obscure tricks or unintuitive optimizations.

Especially with how infuriatingly-unresponsive a lot of bosses are to moving and positioning in FFXIV's engine, proper boss positioning becomes something of an exercise in either being psychic, or memorizing the entire encounter pattern(s) and reacting very quickly and precisely in the narrow windows that you actually have before a boss cast-locks itself into position for another exasperating 30 second span.

That leads to people being intimidated about tanking, and also getting a lot of heat from frustrated other players for positioning "wrong". Even if the Tank is trying to position correctly, it can become impossible if you don't know the exact moment a boss is moveable, or you don't know the exact pattern ahead of time (and can thus preposition before anything even appears).

Case in point — the ability for well-meaning but unpracticed Tanks to turn Califosteri into a murder-fest by making her Haircuts undodgeable if they spin her the wrong direction when she jumps to the edge of the room.

Having bosses just put themselves in the correct location makes the Tank role a much more accessible experience in the "Mario Party" system of FFXIV Roles, where everything is hypothetically intended to feel equally-comfortable for players.

It's another situation where a minority of players (dedicated Tank mains) love a certain feature of a class or role, but it becomes a turn-off and stressor for the majority of players. So it gets excised or watered-down in order to try to drive up minority participation numbers, and reduce stress/complaints from those trying to fill the role.

Same as removing positional mitigation — it used to feel pretty clever to use Raw Intuition correctly, or kite around carefully so you still got Blocks in. But it was a PITA for controller-users and awkward in general with XIV's engine, so we ended up getting omnidirectional mitigation in order to increase accessibility.

Is this kind of design shift good? Errrr ehhh I'm not getting into that... it's the usual can-of-worms, with subjective opinions on both sides. But I think the autocentering simplifying Tank positioning is very much intentional, in order to try to reduce the "bad vibes" that less hardcore Tank players receive from other players. You know — taps forehead You can't blame someone for not knowing all the positioning tricks, if there's no positioning tricks to know.