Back with original Cleric's Stance, I didn't play healers much, however, I always felt it was too punishing if you happen to make a mistake or not use it at all. Reducing healing, increasing damage AND swapping MND and INT was too much.

However, onto tank stance, which I have much more experience with.

Everyone seems to have this expectation that it was a trade off between a defensive build and a DPS build, by the end, it was not. Starting in ARR, the game and the playerbase were still very new and inexperienced, tanks were still at the point where, for the most part, it dodn't matter that you were in tank stance. However, towards the end of ARR, more and more higher end groups were playing around with tanking in DPS stance, though it didn't really catch on in the wider playerbase. Once HW was released, and the infamous Gordias raid, more emphasis on tanks and healers maximising damage, which meant they needed to be in DPS stance as much as possible. This was easily achieved with Warrior and to a lesser extent Paladin, mainly for the fact they had enmity increases on their DPS combos. Dark Knight got by with high damage and rising on the wave Warrior created.

Come SB, tanks in DPS stance was expected. Every DPS had an enmity reduction and the role of tank stance was, use at the start of a fight, swap to DPS for the rest. You then relied on your other party members to press that enmity reduction button so they didn't take enmity off of you. Guess how often that happened in random groups. However, rather than the DPS taking responsibility, it was the tank's job to correct for it and in the process, massively reduce their DPS. Tanks would complain about the DPS and the DPS would just say the tanks should do their jobs. It was a mess.

Then, with defensives being really strong, that you were in no danger from dying if you mitigated properly (which, for most content, was just mitigating the tank buster), there was really no upside to tank stances at all. Not to mention how janky some feel to swap (Warrior, again, getting the best deal). Any time you had to swap into tank stance, or use the enmity combo, it was just a punishment on tanks, which was largely caused by someone else being lazy.

Keeping enmity just above the party? How are you measuring that? You cannot accurately stay 'just above' when the scaling for the enmity bars changes throughout the fight. I have done many posts on the tank forums over the years explaining why, in my opinion, the tank/dps stances did not work how people thought they did and why SE came to the conclusion to make them as they are now. You aren't rewarded for using DPS stance, you were punished for tank stance.


Quote Originally Posted by Ath192 View Post
I enjoyed mana shift as a BLM - back when MP actually ran out if you misused it.

The only thing I didn't enjoy was TP and goad - the concept of your player getting too physically tired to attack was a bit too much for me.
Mana Shift is fine, but Goad bad, despite the fact they are basically the same thing. Run out of TP, Goad, Run out of MP, Mana Shift. Explain to me why you enjoyed one, but not the other as it seems to be a contradiction.