What to manage as a tank?

[RinaB]

I expect the worste from tanks. And I'm not disappointed. Role abilities? Rotating mits? Yeah right.

[RinaB]

If I hear "as a gnb main..." I already know you're shit

[Supersnow845]

I think the discrepancy comes from you applying my thoughts to the current design of the game and then obviously it’s doesn’t work, like sure tanks are jointly responsible like the rest of the raid to meet the DPS check but that isn’t really a “tanking” responsibility even though tanks contribute to DPS. It’s probably my use of quotation marks as a haphazard way of representing the generally related airquotes. Like when I say tanking with quotation marks I more mean specifically tank things that involve taking damage, controlling enmity and that sorta stuff. Not what a tank does on a GCD to GCD basis.

Off tank responsibility is a serious concern i agree but now does the reverse situation of keeping the current meta do anything for the enjoyment of the off tank. The off tank is just an actual blue DPS at this point but that’s more because they won’t give the off tank responsibility, not necessarily because either one or the other job design favours it. You could also include this type of OT need to maintain agro by making swaps far more regular, so the OT needs to maintain some sort of agro parity with the MT but like I said these ideas aren’t fleshed out. If you don’t think enmity is the right way to achieve this that’s a totally valid opinion, I’m not saying I’m right here, just throwing out my ideas

I’m not so much asking for a static cost but some form of choice, so TBN is actually a good representation here because you CAN minimise its uses but it makes you squishier, TBN’s problem is more just the rest of DRK’s kit or shared mitigation can cover from the deficit of TBN’s you don’t use without really punishing you. This is similar to ED’s problem where its design isn’t exactly problematic, its problem comes from being a choice only one class out of 4 can make. Different stances generating different responses from different skills is more what I’m after here so TBN isn’t a perfect fit, but it is the closest tank CD to what I’m imagining

[Terhix]

Part of the OT problem is encounter design, but part of it is tank kits - namely invulns. Why tank swap when you can just press a button and ignore the mechanic? I don't know how many more examples like EX2 in Endwalker where WAR could solo tank the entire thing do we need before we get rid of invulns.

I’m not so much asking for a static cost but some form of choice, so TBN is actually a good representation here because you CAN minimise its uses but it makes you squishier, TBN’s problem is more just the rest of DRK’s kit or shared mitigation can cover from the deficit of TBN’s you don’t use without really punishing you. This is similar to ED’s problem where its design isn’t exactly problematic, its problem comes from being a choice only one class out of 4 can make. Different stances generating different responses from different skills is more what I’m after here so TBN isn’t a perfect fit, but it is the closest tank CD to what I’m imagining

I don't know what kind of a choice you have in mind that doesn't involve some cost somewhere. TBN is not the only tank utility that comes with a tradeoff, Passage of Arms is another - it's cool and adds a lot of flavor to PLD, and can be genuinely useful during prog, but then the optimal number of Passage of Arms casts in any fight you're attempting to clear is exactly zero because DPS is paramount. We already had WAR with different stances in the past and it lead to degenerate gameplay where you'd find a way to establish early aggro and then sit in the DPS stance while actively tanking because, again, DPS is paramount.

I hate to compare XIV to WoW, but tanks and healers in WoW arguably have none of the issues they do here (they might have others), yet tanks in WoW also never have to manage agro, and to the degree they have to actively maintain mitigation 24/7 while actively tanking (shield block, ignore pain, ironfur, consecration, etc.) barely ever does that come at a DPS cost, and their DPS in something like M+ is also very important.

[Carighan]

Part of the OT problem is encounter design, but part of it is tank kits - namely invulns. Why tank swap when you can just press a button and ignore the mechanic? I don't know how many more examples like EX2 in Endwalker where WAR could solo tank the entire thing do we need before we get rid of invulns.

This would be easy to fix - and would fix a healer issue at the same time - if damage on tanks was nontrivial.

Imagine a world in which tanks consistently and constantly took high damage. Say autoattacks by a raid boss happen every 2 GCDs, but hit a tank for 40%-60% of their HP or so. You'd need to CD these, right? But there's also CD-centric tankbusters coming. Solution? Swap with the other tank back&forth to alternative timer usage, just like in older MMOs. "I'm out!" -> other tank takes over while your CDs cycle. Bonus points if virtually every mechanic, even in dungeons, hits the tank harder if it wants to hit the whole group, by say expecting the tank to stand in front.

[CKNovel]

This would be easy to fix - and would fix a healer issue at the same time - if damage on tanks was nontrivial.

Imagine a world in which tanks consistently and constantly took high damage. Say autoattacks by a raid boss happen every 2 GCDs, but hit a tank for 40%-60% of their HP or so. You'd need to CD these, right? But there's also CD-centric tankbusters coming. Solution? Swap with the other tank back&forth to alternative timer usage, just like in older MMOs. "I'm out!" -> other tank takes over while your CDs cycle. Bonus points if virtually every mechanic, even in dungeons, hits the tank harder if it wants to hit the whole group, by say expecting the tank to stand in front.

We've had similar designs in the past.
What happened is that the responsibility went on the healers.

On top of that we already had better solutions where the main tank would take vulnerability up and force the MT to grab aggro or MT to invuln.
We also had double auto attacks in P3S or auto attacks being tank busters you need MT and OT to share in P8S.
Abyssos as a whole required more healing from the healers and surprisingly it wasn't popular with healers. After that, Anabeisos had a low healing requirement once again.

P8S was great for tanks. Too bad it was slightly overtuned for PLD and in such a sleepy tier...

[Supersnow845]

Abyssos was a terrible tier for healers because it enforces group mitigation use, but heavily punished the healers when the party didn’t mitigate properly

Since the DOT’s snapshotted on the initial hit they needed to be mitigated, but too many DPS would try to mitigate after the fact then blame the healer when the DOT ripped the party to shreds or the clown car of wonderful WAR mains who tried to “tank” the bleedbusters with thrill and nothing else then mitigate after the fact

You can’t give healers 30% of the mitigation but 100% of the responsibility for failing to mitigate

Everything else is fair though, I still think kaliya has the most interesting tankbuster in the game and it requires both tanks even if you try to invuln it. I could gush about kaliya all day, it’s still my favourite savage fight in the game and it has so many mechanics that I think would still work in the modern game

[BabyYoda]

This would be easy to fix - and would fix a healer issue at the same time - if damage on tanks was nontrivial.

Imagine a world in which tanks consistently and constantly took high damage. Say autoattacks by a raid boss happen every 2 GCDs, but hit a tank for 40%-60% of their HP or so. You'd need to CD these, right? But there's also CD-centric tankbusters coming. Solution? Swap with the other tank back&forth to alternative timer usage, just like in older MMOs. "I'm out!" -> other tank takes over while your CDs cycle. Bonus points if virtually every mechanic, even in dungeons, hits the tank harder if it wants to hit the whole group, by say expecting the tank to stand in front.

I think one of the solution for OT existing is not having OT..

Why we have MT and OT? let's think about it

We can have 2 MT that switch aggro to take less damage.. if not switched every 1 min damage received is +140% for example

OT currently feels like DPS with less damage and sometimes heal party

[Mikey_R]

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

GOOD

Not quite, it interrupts the flow of the rotation, which is bad. The DPS loss is just icing on the cake.

You also don't address the major concern about how you can properly manage something when you have no way to properly visualise what you are managing.

If you want to know what tanks should manage, it is incoming damage. Making the tank defensives more unique is a good start and there are still ways the can change the incoming damage profile of attacks. As an example, from the incoming damage, you take 50% of it as direct damage and the other 50% is dealt via a DoT at once the effect has ended, call it a 15 second DoT as an example. Or even as something slightly different still, 50% now and the rest is done at effect end in one bigger hit. etc.

For OT, we only need to look at past encounters at what they can do, tank only mechanics. Have them pick up an Add, have them take a tether from a healer etc.

As for in fight responsibilities, something I have mentioned in the past as a new mechanic is using stuns/interrupts to change the damage profiles of an attack. That strong raidwide is now a weaker hit initially but the rest is done as a DoT. This attack is now a stack rather than a spread etc.

If we want to talk about incoming damage being too low, normalise the sustain tanks have and adjust damage to better suit that environment, rather than leaving DRK in the dust. This could also impact how much healing a healer has to do, but healing isn't my forte so I won't say anything too much there.

There are other things that can be done to make tanking more interesting, one of the bigger ones being having more control over boss position, however, if you notice, even trough this thread, a lot of things that are mentioned are encounter design issues and not direct tank issues. I was excited when I started seeing adds in the first DT dungeon because it was something else I needed to consider. This then brings in another aspect, controlling the fight. We pick up adds, take tethers to protect the party, if we could move bosses, we can position them to make mechanics easier to deal with for the party. We should be the one controlling the boss.

Unfortunately, over the years, these things have been slowly eroded away and notice how nothing from the above has anything to do with enmity or enmity management.

[Mikey_R]

I think one of the solution for OT existing is not having OT..

Why we have MT and OT? let's think about it

We can have 2 MT that switch aggro to take less damage.. if not switched every 1 min damage received is +140% for example

OT currently feels like DPS with less damage and sometimes heal party

You cannot have 2 MTs in a fight unless there are 2 things that need to be tanked separately. All the tank swap does is swap who is in the MT spot and who is in the OT spot.