[Discuss] Bringing back mitigation-damage interaction

[Shurrikhan]

I think a lot of stuff is getting lost or obfuscated here, so I want to bring it back to the start.

The initial idea was, a tank defensive that reduces the tank's damage in some way in order to use a defensive action.

The initial idea... from what post? The first post merely asks a spitball question about tank stances, be they for defense or enmity. The second, mine, immediately points out that tank stances are NOT required for decisions in of output (between greater offense or sustain) and that, especially if healers' contexts weren't so abysmal right now, we could easily see situations where at-cost flexible options to mitigation see optimal use even without that being the difference between life and death in that moment.

There's no insistence on CD -> take damage debuff -> defensive action unlocked.

Note that "sustain" is anything that keeps you and/or allies alive for longer. In any fight won by reducing the enemy's HP to 0 (so, every fight in XIV and most fights in every other MMO), its value is ultimately the rDPS difference you get for spending that much less time dead or under Weakened/Brink of Death.

• By and large, in the present context, most of each healer's sustain is "flat", not timing-sensitive. The total amount of damage negation or restoration rarely vary with incoming (Exaltation) or past (Macrocosmos) damage intake. And rarely would --not that either see use-- a Regen create less total effective potency than a Cure II, because we aren't so stressed by incoming damage that we'd ever have to preempt it with something that may eventually overheal nor that we'd have to forgo the over-time option with greater maximum potency. As such, it ends up extremely simple.
• On the other hand, especially until Endwalker, the majority of tank sustain has been timing-sensitive; affecting a dense period of damage intake with % damage reduction or % damage recovery (a Death Strike -style action) is hugely more valuable than affecting a shallow period of damage intake because the sustain that most tank actions produce is not only potentially bottlenecked by but even scales with that context.
• Unlike flat actions (just plain healing, especially where it's not bottlenecked or complicated in any way), time-sensitive actions can see optimal use some of the time even while being unnecessary at others.

The tank role has never had the expectation of reducing their own damage in order to increase their own defence, except...

So, that "never" is... half the time tank stances were in the game, despite tank stance's gains being pathetically undertuned relative to its costs and a largely unusable mechanic on all but WAR due to its costs in changing stance.

How the healing kit currently operates, or potentially operates has no implications as to whether a tank's mitigation tool should or should not reduce said tank's damage output.

It is literally the same question of GCD heals on healers.

If the present context has turned GCD heals into "useless bloat", then you have two options:

1. You remove GCD actions, just as tank's control over their outputs were removed, thereby locking the game even further into hyperscripted but simple timing puzzles with their answers searchable online, or
2. You revert the massive simplifications of healer gameplay and gutting of healing requirements such that healers' 1-50 portion of their kits are actually still compatible with endgame (while increasing their offensive ppgcd in compensation for GCDs likely to be lost to healing --be that through returned or new downtime actions or simple buffs-- thereby improving their solo experience, too).

It's the same damn thing.

Removing all offensive/defensive control from tanks forces combat design to be increasingly precisely and invariably scripted (with any randomizations being wholly interchangeable insofar as the defensives used), because you cannot otherwise push tanks to their limits without breaking them during minimum item level. It also means every fight has to either be the same in its tank damage or has to just not even really push them, because every tank only has that identical set of CDs, with no flexible space.

That lack of output control homogenizes tank defensives and fight design, both. And it makes tanks feel less like tanks, just as surely as leaving healing requirements so low (or reducing healing them even further as to retain accessibility) so that healer CDs are wholly sufficient in themselves and then removing healer GCDs, instead of improving healing requirements/contexts, would make healers feel less like healers.

This, on the other hand, is what is missing from tanks.

It's not just one or the other. And the more tanks' available interaction with fight design remains constrained around that (homogenized) set of tank CDs alone, the less can be done to leverage being a tank in interesting ways.

Insisting on having ONLY a strict set of homogenized CDs gives you ONLY what mechanics could align with all of them or could equally be done by any DPS with a personal anyways. It's an unnecessary constraint, and it makes no more sense than asking for GCD heals to be removed instead of improving that context.

If you want to point out simplifications to the game, you should be concentrating here

This is such a blatant and unnecessary whataboutism.

To point out that tanks (re)gaining control over their outputs (higher damage ceiling, but generally averaging to about the same personal DPS and perhaps slightly higher consequent party DPS in practice under optimal use of at-cost mitigation) would increase the variety and depth of tank mechanics that can be included in our fights is not somehow mutually exclusive with wanting more tank mechanics. It's futureproofing largely for that purpose.

Without that flexibility, fights are more constrained because you literally have to build around that finite resource (those CDs), which in turn constrains how different tanks can be from one another, since you can't push the limits of any single one without either causing imbalance or making the others identical, because there is literally no fallback, no flex, no room. It's just those CDs. That's all you get for gameplay. That's all you get for fight design.

All for what, to satiate a try-hard's no-clear's refusal to actually math anything out and their insistence instead that anything with direct cause cannot be a net gain, or that a fight is unclearable because not dying would cost them 80 potency? What is the reason for insisting that tanks should have nothing analogous to GCD sustain (percentile mitigation, in their case) nor Aetherflow trade-offs between damage and sustain? Who would be victimized by making it so we could open up fight design and have tanks actually play more differently from one another, including in their actual tanking (not just their Blue DPS rotations)?