And the slow death of the RPG based battlesystem

[Supersnow845]

I’ve always said that old tank stance was a good thing because it allowed tanks to actually show off their skill by knowing when they should enter tank stance to hold agro

People always say “oh it was actually a DPS mechanic because it relies entirely on pressing quelling strikes, not the tank” except this comes entirely from the perspective of the tank just not wanting to lose damage to enter tank stance. The equivalent argument of “I just don’t want to press my GCD heals” gets rightfully flamed as that’s a healers job. DPS not pressing their agro reduction could be corrected by entering tank stance, people act like if the WHM didn’t press shroud the tank just had to let them die. Knowing when is the right time to push for damage and when was the right time to play it safe and gain more enmity was a skill check for tanks they no longer have because now they just do everything without trying for anything

Supports should be reliant on the party being somewhat decent to reach their max potential, that’s what a support role inheritantly is

[VentVanitas]

I mean this whole "I shouldn't be punished for another person's mistake" mentality is contradictory to an MMORPG to begin with. yes, it sucks whenever you die because a tank/healer was too busy picking their nose, but it's a necessary evil for party based games otherwise we end up in this purgatory we have now where it feels like we're playing adjacent to other players rather than with them.

[Aravell]

I find it incredibly ironic that they put so much effort into designing a lot of the failure points entirely out of tank and healer gameplay so that a bad tank/healer won't hold back the party, while they also design fights where literally anyone can wipe the entire party due to body check mechanics.

[Lyth]

...

It didn't ever work that way in practice. Enmity generation only matters when you are securing aggro. Even if you didn't have access to NIN for Shadewalker/Smokescreen, you'd just pull in tank stance for a single enmity combo and swap out. WAR was better here because of access to Unchained, which temporarily removed the damage penalty from tank stance. Stormblood completely trivialized this, however, by adding in Shirk. Once you had the enmity lead, however, you could just cruise on that for the rest of the fight.

Adds were really the only place where enmity generation was interesting, simply because ARR had you prep for Savage Strike/Skull Sunder (because the animation on Rage of Halone/Butchers Block was too long before the damage registered). Heavensward simplified this because Equilibrium was really potent as an enmity grab. And again, once you had enmity secured, it didn't really matter.

Although enmity generation has significantly increased since Stormblood, that's in part to offset the fact that tank damage has significantly decreased relative to DPS. In ARR/Heavensward, it wasn't uncommon for a tank in STR gear to be competitive with physical ranged.

A lot of newer tanks at the time felt that tank stance was mandatory to tank, and were afraid of what would happen if they turned it off (i.e. they were afraid that they would instantly die or lose enmity). When you actually coaxed them out of doing so, they were amazed at the performance gains they had with no change to their rotation or additional effort whatsoever. It was great as an experienced player because it gated out a lot of the competition, but I don't think that's good gameplay design. It was a significant performance gap that didn't correlate with a significant skill gap. The stance system was also incredibly clunky, because this game doesn't handle buffs well, and ended up gating actions behind stances that we never used.

I've said this many times before, but the mechanic that really differentiates tanks is movement and positioning. You see it nearly instantly in any fight that allows player-controlled boss movement.

[Valence]

I mean this whole "I shouldn't be punished for another person's mistake" mentality is contradictory to an MMORPG to begin with. yes, it sucks whenever you die because a tank/healer was too busy picking their nose, but it's a necessary evil for party based games otherwise we end up in this purgatory we have now where it feels like we're playing adjacent to other players rather than with them.

Imagine a football player complaining they never get passed the ball right by bad team mates, and that the sport should stop favoring a meta of passes so that they don't suffer from the incompetence of their team.

[HappyHubris]

I mean that sentence is completely self-contradictory, regardless of whether you agree the aggro management was bad or not. "[You were punished] because tanks didn't do their job. This added nothing to the game"

Clearly it did then, if there was something in the game that had to be done properly or there were consequences. That's quite literally "adding to the game".

We need to clear out any mechanic that allows someone to fail by their party mates. Begone healing, threat, enrage timers, body checks, positioning explosions, etc.

[ThorneDynasty]

We need to clear out any mechanic that allows someone to fail by their party mates. Begone healing, threat, enrage timers, body checks, positioning explosions, etc.

Except of course, literally every non-filler encounter mechanic, like pointed out above.

It really feels like the devs have been staring at their work too long to remember to ask themselves what they are actually trying to accomplish, resulting in these weird worst of both worlds designs all over the game.

[Eraden]

Mao sees trinity system gettings watered down more and more and this makes Mao sad. Mao saw whats this leads to when Mao played GW2. When everyones can do everythings, one job/class becomes FOTM and fights becomes simple and borings. Mao does NOT likes what FFXIV becomings. Fights turnings into DDR is just a way for Devs to inject complexity into a game whats in all other respects becomings too simple.

[Malthir]

The narrative that jobs are becoming the same lol. I ask you to explain why and you couldn't. I ask you to explain how you would do it differently and you couldn't. I'm not even sure what people like you want. Overly complex rotations that feel really annoying to execute, against a boss that has to be boring by design because the rotation complexity is so high? Rotations are more enjoyable and diverse than ever before, they removed a lot of annoying busywork that encouraged installing third party addons so the players could focus less on the boss and more on their annoying rotations.

DARK KNIGHT AND WaRRIOR, Paladin also slowly moving in that direction there you go perfect example.

DPS have all but lost positionals, no class has a buff that another class also doesn't have. For example, back in the ARR day, on tanks paladins had flash which did aoe they had rampart which warriors didn't get back then. Same was the case for DPS they all had playstyles around rotations and abilities and effects that the other classes didn't have making each class feel more unique. They scrapped that remove positionals for the most part, gave all DPS's the same OGCD buffs, removed the mechanics from some of the buffs so they basically function exactly the same on every single class. Almost all mechanics in the game bar ninja revolve around pressing 1,2,3 to build a meter and add a token to an image, and then spending on an additional ability. For pretty much every class bar like 2.

[Shurrikhan]

I’ve always said that old tank stance was a good thing because it allowed tanks to actually show off their skill by knowing when they should enter tank stance to hold agro

People always say “oh it was actually a DPS mechanic because it relies entirely on pressing quelling strikes, not the tank” except this comes entirely from the perspective of the tank just not wanting to lose damage to enter tank stance. The equivalent argument of “I just don’t want to press my GCD heals” gets rightfully flamed as that’s a healers job.

You have that slightly inverted, at least as you present the relationship here.

If the tank were complaining about having to be in tank stance a few GCDs longer to avoid their top dps getting splatted because they couldn't be bothered to use Diversion, then yes, you'd tell the tank to suck it up because it's still ultimately an rDPS gain, just as you would when GCD heals would be necessary for survival.

That doesn't mean, though, that all else being equal, the variance in aggro management wasn't more a DPS mechanic than a tank one, just as dodging avoidable damage (as to avoid needing GCD heals) would have been an everyone mechanic rather than solely healers' jobs to make up for.

Tanks and healers, respectively, had fallback tools for failure, but having those fallback tools doesn't excuse refusing to use the actual primary and free ones.

:: This also gets into why tank stances being threat-centric was so wasteful. You never adjusted how you initially pulled based on Smokescreen or Shadewalker or the like; you just stayed in tank stance that little bit longer without them. Due to multiplicity between stance enmity modifiers and individual skill enmity modifiers, it was a waste (especially to longer-term rDPS) to use aggro skills outside of your aggro stance, making each other redundant.

That said...

people act like if the WHM didn’t press shroud the tank just had to let them die

I mean, an auto-crit Cure III during add spawns would take ~5 Flashes from tank stance to pull back, so... that wasn't always exaggeration. But yes, generally, it was recoverable.

(It did have the large theoretical downside of having to hold MP recovery to counter threat from burst healing if it couldn't be staggered from add spawns, though. The threat drop tool seemed decent, as it allowed for gathers and could save healers in emergencies, but I never quite understood why we'd want to tie it to a function that'd otherwise form, optimally in practice, a hit-on-CD bloat-button.)