What to manage as a tank?

[BabyYoda]

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.

MT and OT is just a name can be replaced by T1 and T2 Mechanic wise

Depends on encounter tanks can swap each 1 min or less to get less damage received.. we already have this for example slash resistance

Swapping is only aggro not mechanic position

[VictorSpoils]

Already exist, in the form of "Interject".

O7S: An Add appears and if it's not killed in time it will wipe the raid. When it appears it cast Stoneskin that makes it unkillable if not interrupted.

Had to look this up to check (it's Ultros)...shame it now dies before it has a chance to.

Theres also a lot of bosses with cleavs

It's just unfortunate cleaves are incidental since people don't know/remember which bosses cleave so they ultimately face all of them away regardless.

[Supersnow845]

snip

See while I don’t disagree with a lot of your offered suggestions it still leads to the problem of the original point where you said it’s bad to interrupt the flow of the rotation when I find that good. A rotation can never be good to execute on a support if there is nothing challenging that rotation on to be excited perfectly

Why as a tank do I even have a rotation if it has absolutely zero relevance to what I’m actually doing as a tank (note I mean here unique tanking things, I know all roles are responsible for DPS). Healer “rotations” are absolutely garbage but at least they can kinda sorta maybe be badly justified that they allow the healer to stop and and start at any time when they need to heal, meanwhile tanks are basically just playing 2 seperate classes at once. A slightly crappy melee DPS and a really really barebones tank with 5 buttons and these two halves never interact. That’s what I want to change. 14 is the only MMO I’ve ever played that has this weird design where supports also contribute massive damage (fine) but then split the damage and support aspect entirely away from each other and then still encourage you to focus overwhelmingly on the DPS aspect

Stunning, interrupting, taking tethers, adds, are all things I want back, but they still don’t change the fact that in the current tank design your damage rotation is completely exogenous to your ability to tank, it’s why I actually like TBN

[Alice_Rivers]

In fairness, where extraneous things do exist, they are always outside of the rotation. With the possible exception of NIN's mudra, which is both within and without the rotation depending where you are in it and auto-fails if you do anything else (including, to my great frustration, teleporting). I don't see anything inherently wrong with this design principle, there is nothing stopping you having shared cooldowns in the extra-rotational kits so that you still have to choose between things (in the same vein as Edge/Flood of Shadow), it could even be set up so that you have a switching/branching rotation, so you can trade dps for enmity or mit or healing as you go around the merri-go-round of your rotation. In fact, if these had a shared cooldown of 10s you'd have to plan ahead.

I too would like to see those tank mechanics make a big comeback but I think there's plenty of room for interactions with the tank rotation without making these things interrupt it.

[Supersnow845]

The old branching style of rotations and rotations relying on stance is really what I mean

I don’t mean straight up “break your entire rotational loop just to press bloodwhetting”

I want choice, I want branching rotations, I want stances, I want choice that means that “press the highest DPS option” isn’t always the correct option

[Alice_Rivers]

Outside of a paradigm shift in encounter design, I don't see how one can sensibly engender a scenario in which the highest dps button is not the best option, even if we do something like WHM's lily system, at best you create a set of buttons that are pressed, if at all, for being dps neutral. Not to say I'm against such a thing, I'm entirely in favour of anything that makes tank play more interesting, in the same way that I'm in favour of making healer and dps play more interesting. I think there is room, if not for an outright return of stances (since I'm not exactly thrilled about those returning to my own role so I'll not support that precedent), there is room for making enmity more dependant on pressing enmity buttons, at the expense of dps. I think there's potential for making bigger dps buttons that share cooldowns with enmity/heal/mit buttons but I'm not an authority on tanking or game design so I'll limit myself to floating such ideas and let experts in one or both of the relavant fields discuss the (de)merits.

[Carighan]

Outside of a paradigm shift in encounter design, I don't see how one can sensibly engender a scenario in which the highest dps button is not the best option, even if we do something like WHM's lily system, at best you create a set of buttons that are pressed, if at all, for being dps neutral. Not to say I'm against such a thing, I'm entirely in favour of anything that makes tank play more interesting, in the same way that I'm in favour of making healer and dps play more interesting. I think there is room, if not for an outright return of stances (since I'm not exactly thrilled about those returning to my own role so I'll not support that precedent), there is room for making enmity more dependant on pressing enmity buttons, at the expense of dps. I think there's potential for making bigger dps buttons that share cooldowns with enmity/heal/mit buttons but I'm not an authority on tanking or game design so I'll limit myself to floating such ideas and let experts in one or both of the relavant fields discuss the (de)merits.

Yeah, it would not work without first requiring tanks to, well, tank. Actively. Which is a shame that we don't have that - we also don't really have healing for healers in a non-trivial way - but I guess it worked for making more people play Tank/Healer if I compare modern wait times for DPS to old ones, even with years more age on the game. Just doesn't make for good job design, as much as it worked for duty finder.

[CKNovel]

Outside of a paradigm shift in encounter design, I don't see how one can sensibly engender a scenario in which the highest dps button is not the best option, even if we do something like WHM's lily system, at best you create a set of buttons that are pressed, if at all, for being dps neutral.

It's a bit more complex than the lily system as it is tied to gauge management throught combo GCDs.

The solution is simple, not tie it with DPS. Have one combo that generates enmity and the other generates some sort of mitigation or healing?
Well nope, most tanks would focus on the enmity combo without thinking about the mitigation/healing combo.
On top of that you end up with more button bloat...

That's why I've been arguing for the restoration of battle mechanics such as cleanse, interrupt or purging. Interrupt might be too strong but what if a ennemy cast would lose side effects if it was silenced?
Things that don't need to work on new battle systems as they already exist, we simply need to expand on it.

[Alice_Rivers]

That's a thought, isn't it? They used VPR to showcase their button changing system and PLD has been using it for a bit with it's blade combo, it would be the same 1-2(-3) but they could have oGCDs that switch it in similar fashion to SMN's Egi summons (which themselves could use an overhaul but's a completely different topic).

Anyway, coming back to what I had intended to type when I read your post, I agree that existing mechanics need to return. If I could choose one new thing to implement though it'd be flavour phases for dungeons like in Vanaspati, it's a perfect candidate for a "Protect/Evacuate civilians" event either during a pull or during a boss.

P.S. I feel like tank gauges are underutilised and should be prerequisites to more abilities, with more generation to compensate.

[Gullis]

Your sanity as you drift into sleep