[Discuss] Bringing back mitigation-damage interaction

[Shurrikhan]

Again, missing the forest for the trees. You have assumed the defensive stance only affects one GCD on the healer side, but not how it affects the tanks. First we would need to determine whether it's a GCD swap or an oGCD swap, is there any recast and if so, how long is it.

You're again responding to largely the wrong person. I'm not the one advocating for the return of a "tank stance", only for at-cost sustain options less or not limited by CDs and certain changes to the balance of damage intake and healing output.

A "tank stance" is a means of at-cost sustain (that can nonetheless be a net increase to party dps when used effectively); it is not the only means of doing so.

It was implied that, the only time you would go into it was when you had no other options

Which, again, would be wrong unless the tank stance were specifically made to be useless for skilled players, which would be a complete waste and clearly not something almost anyone would intend or ask for. That'd be at least as bad as the button-waste of GCD healing in the present state of the game.

You're effectively claiming that if the mechanic is self-sabotaged, it'll be bad. But neither needs to be the case.

Why do you want to force the tank to do something that feels bad to use. Ignore DPS, just concentrate on how it feels.

Does it "feel bad", though, to occasionally have it be more optimal to spend your gauge on Inner Beast (for its healing and mitigation) than on Fell Cleave (for its pure damage)?

Would it actually feel bad to have flexible control over one's outputs, instead of solely their timings, and to be rewarded for knowing when opportunities afforded to others (e.g., your healer) will outpace the opportunities you can gain for yourself? Would it feel bad to have significantly more access to active mitigation? Would it feel bad to have a higher skill ceiling accordingly, even it may slightly lower the floor by giving players fallback options?

First we would need to determine whether it's a GCD swap or an oGCD swap, is there any recast and if so, how long is it. With a GCD to swap, you are effectively making the potency for that GCD 0, of which you might need another one to swap back, so if a healer can save 1 GCD of healing, it needs to outweigh the 2 GCDs the tank loses at minimum and this is before we talk about how it affects the burst phase.

It's not all that hard to balance, but neither is it my idea, so I don't know why you're demanding these answers of me. Again, I'm not the one asking for tank stance.

It's fully viable, and when done right would be a boon, but I do not think all tanks need to have an identical sustain-option mechanic (i.e., for all to have a tank-stance, or any other single mechanism), and I do not think a stance toggle is typically the best way to cover that purpose anyways. Find the person who actually wanted tank stances to get these responses from.

[Mikey_R]

Does it "feel bad", though, to occasionally have it be more optimal to spend your gauge on Inner Beast (for its healing and mitigation) than on Fell Cleave (for its pure damage)?

Would it actually feel bad to have flexible control over one's outputs, instead of solely their timings, and to be rewarded for knowing when opportunities afforded to others (e.g., your healer) will outpace the opportunities you can gain for yourself? Would it feel bad to have significantly more access to active mitigation? Would it feel bad to have a higher skill ceiling accordingly, even it may slightly lower the floor by giving players fallback options?

The problem is, there is no feedback to let you know you saved a healer a GCD, or that you have increased party DPS by using Inner Beast over Fell Cleave. It might have helped, it might not have, who knows? Maybe gear levels play a part, you might not need that defensive at higher gear levels, maybe the higher gear levels of the healer means they can just heal through it without issue. There is no way to know.

This compounds when you have alternate mitigation that has no drawbacks to DPS. Why would I use Inner Beast when I can Rampart or Vengeance, which have no impact on DPS, and also save the healer that GCD. When it gets to the point you HAVE to use the damage/mit tradeoff, are you going to feel better about it, knowing you may or may bot have saved a healer GCD, or, are you going to feel you have been unnecessarily nerfed.

You could make ALL mitigation have a DPS cost, but how would you balance that? Would stronger mitigations have a bigger impact to damage? Would they be the same? How about when you have to stack several together?

The other way is this damage/mit tradeoff is your ONLY form of mitigation. Then it is how often does it come up? How strong? How long does it last? How is it going to affect other content, ie. dungeon trash?

It might have been a good idea from the games launch, if they had kept the same design philosophy throughout the game, but they haven't. Even then though, I would bet questions would be asked. Why is it the tank that has to take the damage hit and not the healers (Talking in general here and not as the game is currently)? At which point, the game would change it so that tanks have no damage penalty for using the mitigation, which is exactly where we are now.

As for the big question (which goes for anyone who wants a damage/mitigation tradeoff), would it really fulfil what you want? Can you honestly say it would be a good addition? Or would it eventually go the way of old tank stances?