Tank Stance/Shirk - Get rid of it.

[MikoRemi]

There's no need to have an enmity combo when there's just having a stance in general. Turn on if you want aggro, turn off if you don't. At that point yes, Warriors have their buff combo, and then their general gauge/healing combo, but neither has to be the enmity combo when you can do that with anything if you have stance on.

If people want more choice, they could always consolidate the Storm's Path and Storm's Eye combos to one button each which frees two buttons to possibly add two more finishers for various other purposes sure, but having one be strictly for enmity is not necessary. Can always just make it an option in the configuration if people want to choose between 111 or 123 if it's truly a big enough deal I guess but it's just a waste for one finisher to simply generate enmity and have no other function.

[Mikey_R]

Not saying do exactly that, but the point is, two abilities can do the same damage while each having some other secondary effect. Yes, yes, you could math out the 10 extra Beast Gauge as damage, but even if they gave you the same amount, you'd still generally prioritize Storm's Path for the free healing while still wanting to use Storm's Eye for the buff.

That's the thing though, people don't use Storm's Path for the healing, they use it for the extra beast gauge, the only reason Storm's Eye is used is because it has a damage buff and the extra damage it grants outweighs the extra damage from the 10 beast gauge. To show this, Surging Tempest is a 10% damage buff, the amount of damage that has gained over 1 combo is 114 potency. Taking Fell Cleave's 520 potency for 50 Beast Gauge, translates to 104 potency for 10 gauge. After just 1 combo, Surging Tempest has outdone the damage from 10 extra Beast Gauge. The healing has played no part in this.

So to use your example, it'd be like if Royal and Halone did the same damage, but Royal also did a small heal or shield, but while generating far less enmity. The player would thus use Halone from time to time to prevent losing enmity while prioritizing Royal when they didn't need the enmity boost due to the self-heal, but a 200 or so potency heal also wouldn't be so powerful that players would grumble whenever their thumb had to grace their Halone button with its presence.

If you make the heal/shield pretty much useless, it doesn't provide a meaningful reason to use it, not to mention, since you cannot control when you get the heal, it isn't even reliable. So, with this in mind, the combos are essentially the same as there is no meaningful benefit.

That is, there can be difference, where the difference is meaningful but minimal and non-damage related - such as contrasting self-healing or mitigation (GNB's -2 makes a small shield, too) vs threat - so that one isn't always "by default the correct choice".

There isn't really a choice though, since enmity is a binary, you either have it or you don't, you get enough enmity to keep it and use the other combo for...some reason. I know you heal, so can you say when the last time you noticed the combo heals from DRK, GNB or WAR make an impact? Or you didn't heal just because of that? Note that this is different to PLD's heals on Holy Spirit, you have a bit more freedom in where you can use it (outside burst) and it is the strongest heal from the tanks combo actions. As a reference, PLD's magic is 400 potency, DRK with Souleater is 300, WAR Storm's Path is 250 and GNB Brutal Shell is 200 (with a shield).

There's a thread in the healer forum discussing what makes "meaningful choice", and it's a complicated question, but for my part, I contend when one choice is so inferior that it is never picked, that isn't a real choice. They should be distinct so that you have reason to pick one over another, but not so different in some significant way that one is considered always the better option such that the other is never touched.

Is that then a choice then? If there is a benefit to using combo A over combo B, until combo B becomes better for some reason, then there isn't a choice in what you do, unless you want to say that there is the right choice and the wrong choice.

To bring this back to WAR. You can say you have a choice to use Storm's Eye over Storm's Path, or vice versa, but if you want to bring out the most potential, you obviously start with Storm's Eye for the damage buff, but there is no point doing it again, you can use the other combo for more resource gain and still keep the damage buff up after all, so that becomes better.

And that is the difference, the 2 combos play off of each other, to further boost the damage of the Warrior. However, 2 combos doing the same, except enmity, do not play off of each other. It is just an empty choice with the only reason to use one over the other is enmity, which then doesn't give a reason to use the other combo.

[Renathras]

Right, but that's my point: Suppose Storm's Path was cut down to also generate 10 Beast Gauge. Now, the only difference between them is Storm's Path does healing and Storm's Eye does the damage buff. People would still use Storm's Path, swapping to Storm's Eye to refresh the debuff. That is, using the one that has a non-damage focused tangible benefit (healing) but using the one that has a non-damaged focus alternate tangible benefit (upkeep buff) when doing so is needed. Replace "upkeep buff" with "enmity" and you have a system that works. There isn't a desire to "reduce uses of Halone to 0" when Halone does the same damage as Royal, but Royal does healing instead of enmity. Likewise, it wouldn't cause people to spam Halone since they'd be giving up free healing to do so and there's no benefit of generating excess enmity.

Again, I'm not saying I'd advocate for precisely this, but my point is, there is a way to do it where it's something to play around with.

"Is that then a choice then?" - When was it ever? At least it gives something to manage and play around with where presently there is nothing.

[Mikey_R]

Right, but that's my point: Suppose Storm's Path was cut down to also generate 10 Beast Gauge. Now, the only difference between them is Storm's Path does healing and Storm's Eye does the damage buff. People would still use Storm's Path, swapping to Storm's Eye to refresh the debuff. That is, using the one that has a non-damage focused tangible benefit (healing) but using the one that has a non-damaged focus alternate tangible benefit (upkeep buff) when doing so is needed. Replace "upkeep buff" with "enmity" and you have a system that works. There isn't a desire to "reduce uses of Halone to 0" when Halone does the same damage as Royal, but Royal does healing instead of enmity. Likewise, it wouldn't cause people to spam Halone since they'd be giving up free healing to do so and there's no benefit of generating excess enmity.

You missed the part where the combos play off of each other to become greater than their parts. Only using Storm's Path or Storm's Eye allows you to do some level of damage, but by combining the strengths of the 2, you get to do even more.

By replacing the damage buff with enmity, you suddenly lose that connection between the combos. You can use only Storm's Path or Storm's Eye and your damage is the same. The only reason you use Storm's Eye is because you need enmity, but you lose nothing by just using Storm's eye over and over, except the small heal that isn't even relevant. They don't complement each other in the same way.

But that doesn't mean it had to be a damage buff, adding a DoT to a combo does the same thing. Going back to old PLD combos, you wouldn't spam Goring Blade and you wouldn't spam Royal Authority (assume no Atonement/Divine Might for the sake of argument), however, you use Goring every 3 combos to keep the DoT up, fill the rest with Royal Authority, and suddenly, the outcome is greater than the 2 parts individually.

Even going back to HW DRK, you had to balance your MP and, if you done it right, you could Dark Arts a Souleater to do more damage. This is something that doesn't necessarily come out of a more rigid rotation involving DoTs or buffs, but rather how you manage a resource to ensure you don't run out and thereby lose out on something else (in HW DRK's case, Darkside).

Bear in mind, this is before we even get into tracking enmity in a fight, because that is a mess in and of itself which makes playing around enmity with any sort of precision a hopeless task, so you end up, as I said, just spamming the enmity combo anyway, mixing in the other combo when you feel like it. At this point, you aren't managing anything.

[Renathras]

Okay then.

Never mind.

The game is locked into exactly what it is forever and nothing interesting or exciting can ever be introduced because it will either be more damage and only one pattern which will be boring and uninteresting and no better than what we have now, or it will be a meaningful difference you don't personally find interesting or fun. So there's no reason to discuss anything further. We have achieved perfection.

And with that, I will bow out of the conversation. The floor is yours.

[Elkanah]

I just... want to have my tank stance on and not have to turn it back on again if i go into lower content through df (since all tank stances start at level 10 now lol)

[Absurdity]

I know you heal, so can you say when the last time you noticed the combo heals from DRK, GNB or WAR make an impact?

It was absolutely noticeable over the duration of a savage fight when compared to PLD's 0 healing on their basic combo, even more so back in ShB when they had no passive healing at all...and that was before analyzing fight logs and seeing the actual healing generated by just your basic combo.

[Mikey_R]

It was absolutely noticeable over the duration of a savage fight when compared to PLD's 0 healing on their basic combo, even more so back in ShB when they had no passive healing at all...and that was before analyzing fight logs and seeing the actual healing generated by just your basic combo.

Because I'm not delving into curiosity, did you notice a difference how you healed each tank, whether it was before or after EW and was this down to specifically the combo healing? If so, did it change how you approached the fight, so that each tank had to have different healing strategies, or was it the same regardless of the tank?

The reason I am being specific here is because I am specifically talking about the healing from combos. Things like Aurora and Equilibrium aren't counted as these are heals you can control and therefore they will be more noticeable when used appropriately.

It is also worth saying you cannot just look at a log, look at the healing and say, well, they healed a lot, so it is useful. As I eluded to in the previous paragraph, the healing from controllable sources shouldn't be factored in, then, from the healing that is left, you have to deduce how much of that was useful healing, as anything over max was wasted and of that, how often did you make a healer over heal because of what you healed? If the healer's heal was going to heal you anyway, the heal from combo didn't even matter.

So, realistically, how much did they actually help?

[SerophisRagnarok]

okay then by this logic we need to also get rid of Summoning carbie/fairy, Kardia, Dance Partner, etc. just hit the button dude. jeez.

[SerophisRagnarok]

I just... want to have my tank stance on and not have to turn it back on again if i go into lower content through df (since all tank stances start at level 10 now lol)

funny thing is the lowest level roulette content is level 15 (Sastasha) if i'm not mistaken. so 100 percent agree. if stance is on it should always be on.