Quote Originally Posted by Valence View Post
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Sure, let me clarify.

In a traditional 'trinity' design, tanks are designed to either proactively or reactively reposition the boss in order to ensure that the party can continue to safely and efficiently do damage. Sometimes this is by moving a boss out of hazards, and sometimes this is by repositioning the boss in a way that lets players swap off of another target back to the boss without losing uptime. As dps players, part of your skill is in anticipating how your tank will act (including in cases where you're teamed with an inconsistent tank) and positioning yourself in a way that maximizes uptime. This sort of fight design reached its peak in Heavensward but doesn't really exist anymore because the inherited game code has problems with snapshotting and executing boss actions.

In an ARPG design, you have little to no control over boss movement, but you rely on animation tells to make predictions about how to position yourself to optimize your damage output. It's still all about anticipation, but you're less reliant on having a consistent and competent tank to guide movement. As melee, that may mean that you know the exact second when the boss rotates to perform an action which may mess up a positional, or as ranged it may mean that you've identified the one pixel that you can stand in that let's you cast through the next two mechanics. If you want to push the player harder with this type of design, then you need more complex timings from the boss. And to be able to respond to that, you need the player to have access to more movement tools that let them reposition in subtle ways without having to stop performing actions.

The problem at the moment is that FFXIV is straddling these two fight design styles. If the former was the chosen approach I would go back to tanking in a heartbeat, because that's what I enjoyed about the role. If it's the latter, I'm probably going to enjoy melee the most. The problem is that you have such long periods of downtime between mechanics when you're just unloading into the boss, such that all roles feel equally underwhelming. This is why I think that a lot of the frustration comes down to fight design. If you can comfortably reduce a scenario down to target dummy conditions in your head, you've solved the fight. Rotational changes aren't going to fix this. Movement actions open up possibilities for more uptime, which in turn lets you push the player harder to maintain it.