How to make tanks more fun to play (devs please read)

[Orophin]

Tanking's just not for everyone, and this spreads over all MMOs that have the Holy Trinity. Some people don't want the responsibility while others prefer to heal or do damage. I tanked in MMOs for 10 years before ARR relaunched and I just wanted to do something different. That's why I DPS now over tanking.

Apart from making them completely overpowered, there's really not much SE can do to attract people towards playing a tanking class. Regardless what abilities they give them, at the end of the day they're going to be a class designed to soak up damage, and to a certain extent, lead the charge into battle. This play style and responsibility just doesn't work for everyone.

[Ehayte]

Almost forgot....

Ahh...I finally came to a place of peace and I can now ignore troll posts.

You are silly.

[therpgfanatic]

Tanking's just not for everyone, and this spreads over all MMOs that have the Holy Trinity. Some people don't want the responsibility while others prefer to heal or do damage. I tanked in MMOs for 10 years before ARR relaunched and I just wanted to do something different. That's why I DPS now over tanking.

Apart from making them completely overpowered, there's really not much SE can do to attract people towards playing a tanking class. Regardless what abilities they give them, at the end of the day they're going to be a class designed to soak up damage, and to a certain extent, lead the charge into battle. This play style and responsibility just doesn't work for everyone.

...except that I am the kind of player who typically plays a tank in MMORPGs and enjoys tanking. And I think the tanks could be better, because there are parts that are more frustrating than they ought to be as compared to playing a tank in other MMORPGs.

[jwang]

Why are you leveling a GLD to DPS? It's a tank class through and through and is designed as thus. You're there to soak up damage, not to deal it. Also, Sword Oath tanking is perfectly viable since the extra damage component from auto-attacks generate additional threat, and the damage boost to Halone combo from not having Shield Oath up will make it perfectly capable of holding hate. If your GLD can't hold hate, it's because he's either not using enough enmity abilities or your LNC is attacking something that your GLD isn't actively tanking.

[therpgfanatic]

Also, Sword Oath tanking is perfectly viable since the extra damage component from auto-attacks generate additional threat, and the damage boost to Halone combo from not having Shield Oath up will make it perfectly capable of holding hate.

Paladins have significantly less HP than Warriors do, and thereby need the constant 20% damage reduction from Shield Oath.

Unless you believe you can survive Mountain Busters w/o it. Which hasn't been my experience. Even using Flash to blind him right before, I don't see any way for an appropriately leveled Paladin to tank Titan without Shield Oath. And that's true for several other boss encounters.

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This thread seems to be getting a lot of trolling because it's in the General Discussion. There is a similar post in the tanking section which has a lot of good ideas, too and I think the devs should read it as well.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-to-see-happen.

[BotenAnna]

Almost forgot.

Shield Oath over-rides Sword Oath. So you can't even use Sword Oath while tanking.

And as I mentioned before, the theorycrafting assumes the Paladin is standing in one place the whole time, which is not the case in actual play.

The fact of the matter is, at i70 (with relic) my character does 76 to 150 points of damage per ability, while everyone else (even the White Mage in Cleric stance) is pushing 500-900 per ability. And White Mages do have Stone II, which does a fair amount of damage, too.

I've also started leveling up a Lancer, and the first thing I noticed is that I can solo FATES that were crushing my Gladiator because he couldn't deal enough DPS to beat down the monsters. Yet another reason why DPS matters; before someone can tank at lv50 they must stick with the class until lv 50. It's pretty frustrating to level a Gladiator due to the low DPS.

If you're having your back to the enemies for more than a second when dodging aoes, you are doing things very very wrong. I've talked with the people in DM who made the charts that you're misreading regarding combo enmity about autoattack in particular and it's a huge chunk of your damage as a PLD or WAR. Sword Oath is a good DPS increase and completely viable when you're not struggling to stay alive or hold threat.

Furthermore, while you levelled a PLD in 2.0 likely so it made sense at the time, levelling PLD through FATEs is horrible now when you can just get dungeon instaqueues and also help solve the problem that you are trying to solve with your suggestions. It's a bear to get through those kill quests and such, but a DPS chocobo and sword oath helps a lot.

Speaking of, have you rolled MRD and tried it yet? I'm eagerly awaiting your trip report.

[saden]

I didn't read the original post, but I will when I have the time and post more thoughtfully on the subject. The only thing I will say right now is that I have no desire to level a tank in this game at all. I might get PLD and WAR to 50 just so I can have every class/job at 50 (for new job releases, etc), but I probably wont be gearing them up at all.

That being said I always say that I'll probably be a tank in this game if they just release more tank jobs. Almost every MMO I have played I chose tank because I just enjoyed it. When I played EQ2 (started about 2 years ago) I decided to go with a DPS for the heck of it and that carried over to FFXIV as I mainly play a BLM. I havent been playing very long (about 2 months), but I've completed about 70% of the "endgame" content and still have no desire to go tank. In fact, I've had tanks tell me it's just boring. Usually, the release of new classes in a game breathes new life into the players and the developers and those new classes (or jobs in this case) tend to be interesting.

If Ninja ends up being a tank-job then I'm going Ninja. I just hope they release at least 2-3 jobs at once. Preferably 1 tank, 1 dps/support, 1 heal/support (read: OR support either way like a BRD is or a full support healer). That way the game isn't cluttered with a majority leveling that 1 single job that they release and gearing that job up. I could just imagine the queue times even if you are playing a tank/healer.


Something about this game makes tanks so boring. I can't quite put my finger on it, but every other MMO I've played (EQ, EQ2, DaoC, WoW, Lineage, CoH, and more) the tank or tank-types were always interesting and fun. Well...okay they weren't much fun in WoW, but that's WoW...

[therpgfanatic]

Something about this game makes tanks so boring. I can't quite put my finger on it, but every other MMO I've played (EQ, EQ2, DaoC, WoW, Lineage, CoH, and more) the tank or tank-types were always interesting and fun. Well...okay they weren't much fun in WoW, but that's WoW...

In other games, it helps when the tanks' DPS feels like a meaningful contribution to the party. Off-tanking sucks completely because you do so little damage you may as well not even be there.

Auto-attack might be 25% of a Paladin's damage, but that doesn't mean it's significant damage. I'm pretty sure autoattack isn't 25% of anyone else's DPS. And the 25% assumption only works if you look at a specific, long time frame; auto-attack isn't 25% of the damage a Paladin does on weak trash mobs that die in a few Halone combos. There is too much theorycrafting held sacred by players that doesn't work off the spreadsheet and limits their viewpoints on how actual gameplay works.

I also hope Ninja isn't a tank job. Samurai I can understand, since they wear armor, but it doesn't make any real sense to me for Ninjas to be tanks. Ninjas should be dual-wielding DPSers as they are in most FF games. I'm pretty sure Ninjas as tanks in FF11 was an exploit that never got addressed.

In my opinion new tank jobs should be Samurai, Dark Knight and Rune Knight (Mystic Knight). Maybe a Beastmaster too, that'd be interesting to have a Coeurl pet helping an axe-wielding plate warrior tank the boss.

[juniglee]

If you want to deal damage, play a DPS. If you want to tank, play a tank. You can't have the best of both worlds, because otherwise it completely negates the point of having one or the other - if a tank can deal DPS level damage, why take a DPS in at all? Just go 3 tanks, 1 healer, and call it a day.

Also to point out that Sword Oath vs. Cleric Stance argument. Cleric Stance always ends up dealing more damage, because it goes off the MND stat (healer's primary stat). When Sword Oath swaps out STR and VIT, then you might have an argument. Regardless, on my i90 PLD, using a combo'ed Rage of Halone on Sword Oath without Fight or Flight, I am hitting about 300 damage or so. On my i79 DRG, a non-crit combo'ed Full Thrust usually hits for about 800 - 900 damage. So it is still at least 1/3rd of a DPS' damage. Also, keep in mind that my PLD has about 350 STR, and my DRG has about 450 STR, so I cannot account for if they both had equal STR.

Don't worry about the numbers too much, know that if you didn't help DPS, you just might not be able to pass that DPS check. I cleared Twintania yesterday, with about 1 minute or so to go before we hit the enrage timer. Your contribution could mean the difference between seeing an extra Dreadknight, or an extra Conflag. Try going to a fight like Twintania where the off-tank does nothing but helping DPS for most of the fight, and compare the results if you were to help DPS, and you were to do nothing.

Or you can just play a Warrior/Marauder using DPS accessories - Marauder is better for having more cross class skills, given if you want to do DPS, you don't need Defiance, and all the other Warrior/Defiance-related skills anyway. I think I've heard numbers where a Marauder with Raging Strikes was critical striking Titan Extreme using Butcher's Block for 2000 damage (don't quote me on this).

Also: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post1868212

According to the link above, the poster's Inner Beast crits for 1.3k, and he main tanks everything in the game bar Ifrit Extreme and BCoB Turn 5 using pure STR build, and i90 DPS accessories.

Sounds like you're playing the wrong class, you should be playing a Marauder/Warrior.

[therpgfanatic]

Sounds like you're playing the wrong class, you should be playing a Marauder/Warrior.

This thread is about how to make both tanks more fun to play.

How does your solution increase the number of tanks in the game? If I change from PLD to WAR, it doesn't do anything to increase the appeal of being a tank. It doesn't encourage more people to play tanks.

This is not something players can solve for themselves by switching classes.