What to manage as a tank?

[Supersnow845]

How much enmity will AST be gathering if 3 pure and a PCT hits within their buffs? On top of all the mitigation and raw healing?
You don't have to tunnel on DNC, AST is far enough for an example.



Also, the sources, pretty please.

That’s why you generate an agro gap in filler, you know like how BLM generates a damage lead in filler then PCT gains on burst. Agro would form like a secondary damage system for the tank so you’d kinda be playing BLM from an agro perspective but PCT from a damage perspective, they could also return or retweak old actions, like tank stance equilibrium generates healing, DPS stance generates agro

Oh as for the “trick generates rDPS” my apologies that appears to be a mistake on my part, there was a lot of rumour floating around in HW back when the system was more opaque and we didn’t really know how buffs worked properly (it’s the origin of why damage buffs are called utility when they really aren’t), I guess I just latched onto that particular rumour and forgot it was always a rumour, just considering it fact because I never got challenged on it. I can’t find any evidence on it either

[CKNovel]

Okay for Trick Attack, it's old and mistakes can happen.

However, if you want to pursue that idea for tanks you'd need to heavily rework tanks. GNB for example wouldn't work as you need to build cartridges.
Just picture the chaos that openers would be with tanks forced to build up enmity during openers.
WoW used to have that and they'd let the tank build up aggro while DPS were sitting still.

The very concept of enmity is flawed, either undertuned or overtuned, it's a system you'll have to play with. The best idea is to make its management through tank oGCDs, which is what we have today.

On top of that, you'd need to rework the enmity and its calculation, the tanks and their balance all to fix something that isn't broken.
I'm pretty much sure everyone would rather have those development resources put somewhere else.

[Supersnow845]

I mean I’m happy to pursue massive changes to the ranks because I truly believe the tanks need massive changes

The healers are a mess and at this point as much as I argue on the forums I’ve basically given up on the healers, in my eyes the tanks are still salvageable because they are still a role that square enix favours and at its core tanking (like healing and true support) are roles I enjoy playing and as such I want to approach the problem of how incredibly stale tank design is

If this grand redo of the all the classes materialises in 8.0 (it won’t) the tanks I’d like their focus put back into enmity, boss positioning and party defence, not being blue DPS. And right now I think the most broken of those three categories is enmity because enmity functionally doesn’t exist. The tanks can’t lose it and if something happens to the tank the DPS and the healer can’t control it. Sweeping reworks to the tanks that focus in on defensive actions that control enmity and have shared actions across the stances, an increase in “control” for the tanks (similar to how T12 works) and a removal of focus on overly rigid burst windows that enforce relevant defensive actions into oGCD’s so they don’t affect the burst are all part of what I would suggest for tanks.

In my eyes the tanks should each have 2 stances like the old tanks, an agro stance and a DPS stance. Agro stance generates more agro at less damage but doesn’t interfere with resource generation, defensives in agro stance are more tailored towards healing and self preservation, they are your fallbacks, actions like current BW would have a niche here, strong healing in exchange for your damage. Agro stance actions would also provide partial compensation that may or may not be able to be weaponised in burst but still lead to overall loss so that agro stance doesn’t become an enforced part of the rotation like lilys are. DPS stance is the opposite, its defensives are focused around party protection and last ditch agro generators at the cost of damage. Resource generation is not impacted in either stance but their effects are reduced anyway as overly rigid bursts like GNB would be cut back so you aren’t basically just playing a blue DPS. There would also be no penalty for swapping so unexpected agro spikes could be compensated for

It’s totally fine if you don’t like my ideas, they aren’t terribly fleshed out and borrow heavily from the old tank design just with a lot of the pain points cut out. But that is the direction I’d like them to take tanks. Your suggestions in the other thread (or earlier in this thread I’m not sure) were good but to me they still enforce this current design of a tank first and foremost being a slightly easier melee DPS who’s entire decision making is exogenous to its rotation, that just happens in the background. The removal of the rotation from the core of the tank role is really what I what don’t like about current tank design (from a tank perspective) and why while well thought out why I don’t particularly agree with most of your suggestions (saying that in the nicest way possible)

[Mikey_R]

But Enmity has never really been a thing tanks do. Going through the expansions, ARR, whilst the game was still young, you saw more tank stances, so it really wasn't an issue, however, even later on when top groups were starting to tank with DPS stance, the highest damage rotation included enmity generators. PLD only had the 1 combo and on WAR Butcher's Block was stronger and generated enmity.

Going into HW, WAR was the best tank, no questions, and it had no problems with enmity. Between Defiance + Unchained and it's absurd damage in Deliverance, it produced DPS levels of damage so it could easily keep up with enmity management. PLD had Savage blade and Shield Swipe (as an oGCD at this point) which generated enmity in their DPS rotation, which could easily keep up and DRK was the one that was left out, but generate a sufficient amount of enmity at the start of a fight, drop Grit and you are good to go. Helps that Darkside helped to mitigate the damage loss from Grit.

Stormblood, enmity was managed by the DPS, Diversion and Lucid Dreaming were the main enmity dropping tools and you were expected to use them. If you didn't the tank had to go into DPS stance and/or use their enmity combo. Which created a cascade of problems not only with lower damage from tanks but they also suffered in their resource generation, which leads to an even bigger loss. But whose fault was it when tanks didn't hold enmity? That's right, the healers and DPS for being lazy and not pressing that 1 extra button. It really wasn't a tank mechanic.

Then from then on, it is as we have it now.

At no point did the tank have a responsibility for specifically going after enmity generation past the initial enmity grab. It was always there as part of the DPS rotation or it was down to another role.

As for enmity generation (when it comes to damage), it is as simple as, the damage you do = the enmity it generates. This would have been why it seemed Trick attack boosted enmity generation, as it boosted damage, so more enmity generated.

As for enmity combos, how do you really plan to implement them? If they are a damage loss, everyone is going to avoid using them at all costs, especially if they halt resource generation. Imagine if a PLD in it's current state had to use it's enmity combo, but it didn't generate the Sword Oath combo or Divine Might after it. You can say, OK, add it onto the enmity combo then. You then end up with 2 combos where one does more damage but lower enmity generation and one does less damage but higher enmity generation. If we want to start talking about button bloat, this is one of the first places I would personally look. Not to mention current PLD only uses their basic 123 combo at most 3 times in a 60 second period, which would suck if you had to generate more enmity and restart the combo because you had it primed or you had to overwrite other buffs just for the enmity generation. That is just bad design.

Even looking at how you would display enmity, the longer a fight goes on, the harder it is going to be to show how much of a lead you have and as a result, how much you can get away with doing more damage, which leaves your rotation down to pure chance if you want to dance on the edge of what you can get away with or you play it extra safe and do less damage as a result. I could also see this leading to someone creating a 3rd party tool that gives a better idea of the enmity leads you have.

this is before we go into other factors that I have gone into great depth in the past. Enmity is not a good system. If you want to make tanks more interesting, you need to look at other things.

[CKNovel]

As for enmity combos, how do you really plan to implement them? If they are a damage loss, everyone is going to avoid using them at all costs, especially if they halt resource generation. Imagine if a PLD in it's current state had to use it's enmity combo, but it didn't generate the Sword Oath combo or Divine Might after it. You can say, OK, add it onto the enmity combo then. You then end up with 2 combos where one does more damage but lower enmity generation and one does less damage but higher enmity generation. If we want to start talking about button bloat, this is one of the first places I would personally look. Not to mention current PLD only uses their basic 123 combo at most 3 times in a 60 second period, which would suck if you had to generate more enmity and restart the combo because you had it primed or you had to overwrite other buffs just for the enmity generation. That is just bad design.

I never digged about PLD in that hypothetical scenario but this is a prime example that tanks would require a massive rework to make enmity work.
Gunbreaker would be an absolute mess if it couldn't generate cartridges with an enmity combo.
And let's not forget that the OT wouldn't have to deal with the "MT tax".
Even in case of double tank buster I'm 100% sure the OT will just taunt after the opener or the party will simply mitigate the targeted ally.
There's a good reason why the top MMOs on the market don't have complex enmity management.

It's just a bad concept from the start.
The ironic part is that today enmity is fully managed by tank and it's solely their responsibility.
Yet somehow people want to go back to where it's a party responsibility, when the title of the topic is asking what tanks have to manage.

[BabyYoda]

Tanks have existential crisis and that shows from this post how they have nothing to manage..

We players can't find a solution because we are not a gamedevs we can point on an issue that dev can look into it and solve it

Emnity didn't work on old expansions but there should be other ways to give tank something to manage

[Supersnow845]

Again you are looking at it from the perspective of “oh but what if this interrupts the flow of the tanks DPS”

GOOD

Like I said the tanks DPS rotation in its current form is completely pointless because the extremely minimal responsibility the tank has is completely exogenous to their rotation. I want tanks damage rotation to be completely intertwined with their responsibilities as a tank. Like healers you could drop tanks DPS rotation down to a single button and it wouldn’t change anything about how they “tank” because their tanking abilities don’t care about their rotation, which is just stupid. You have to enforce a choice of both having downsides because if you just went the more minor minor route of “every Holy Spirit charges holy Shelton” then holy sheltron would be balanced around not how much you actually need it, but how many holy spirits you cast which defeats the purpose

If your idea of tanking is “make the tanking oGCD’s more interesting and just leave the damage rotation sitting there being completely unrelated to actually being a tank” then I do not agree with anything that further emphasises that design

Enmity ties damage to tank responsibility, stances that have differing effects on your CD’s and your damage do as well. The last thing I want is to just leave the rotation rotting in a corner while they innovate on the tanking CD’s, it’s the worst facet of modern tank design currently

[Oizen]

Again you are looking at it from the perspective of “oh but what if this interrupts the flow of the tanks DPS”

GOOD

Like I said the tanks DPS rotation in its current form is completely pointless because the extremely minimal responsibility the tank has is completely exogenous to their rotation. I want tanks damage rotation to be completely intertwined with their responsibilities as a tank. Like healers you could drop tanks DPS rotation down to a single button and it wouldn’t change anything about how they “tank” because their tanking abilities don’t care about their rotation, which is just stupid. You have to enforce a choice of both having downsides because if you just went the more minor minor route of “every Holy Spirit charges holy Shelton” then holy sheltron would be balanced around not how much you actually need it, but how many holy spirits you cast which defeats the purpose

[Supersnow845]

TBN is the one exception and it’s why I actually like TBN’s design

[Terhix]

Like I said the tanks DPS rotation in its current form is completely pointless because the extremely minimal responsibility the tank has is completely exogenous to their rotation.

I'm sorry but this is just demonstrably and obviously untrue. To the degree that tanks being blue DPS is a meme, it's also true since you do need tank and healer dps to clear fights unless you outgear them, so doing your DPS rotation correctly is your responsibility as a tank. In content that does not have an enrage timer you obviously don't have to optimize anything, but that is also a content in which you can play a blizzard wizard BLM, a freestyle SAM, or some other walking sandbag that does less damage than healers, completely failing at the main purpose of your job as a DPS, and still get carried by the 3/7 other people without anyone making any comments about "responsibility".

I want tanks damage rotation to be completely intertwined with their responsibilities as a tank.

While I'd be down with the general sentiment here (though I don't think enmity is it), this not only doesn't address but actually makes worse the bigger problem tank role has in general, which is that OT has jack shit to do majority of the time in most encounters. If you tie tanking to DPS rotation then you'll just grow the gap between MT and OT gameplay even further.

TBN is the one exception and it’s why I actually like TBN’s design

Except TBN achieves the exact opposite of what you want. It's not a static cost of DPS that provides tank utility, it's a tank utility that comes with a risk of DPS loss, which ultimately leads to DRK players to underutilize it out of caution on a job that arguably needs to use its short CD the most. This also ties to the first point: you can go into Savage and use TBN a total of 2 times in a 10 minute fight for tank busters only, and clear just fine, or you can go into Savage, use TBN as much as your MP generation allows for it with no regard for dark arts, and fail to clear the fight because your DPS is now in the dumpster. I do like that TBN is mechanically most distinct from other tanks, but I also wouldn't call a tank utility that makes the tank player averse to using it good design.