Another Tank Rework Thread

[lulublululu]

Hi everyone. I've been playing FFXIV since release & MMOs for around a decade. By day I work as a professional game designer+developer. Through my time playing FFXIV, I've developed my critiques of the game's systems, and I thought I'd like to publicly share the result of some of my designbrain clinking its gears. I'd like to welcome discussion, and I'd enjoy brainstorming with you all, but it's only fair I confess I'm mostly making this thread to bring some things to the developer's attention, if possible.

Suggestions I make, when I do, will largely be paladin-centric as a limit to my experience, but I've also played warrior a bit and heard much of friends' experiences with it. I'd like to largely avoid making specific suggestions, as I believe the development team will ultimately have the best judgement in any specific matter.

I'm targeting tank design, because I often hear players express frustrations with the role. Please do not consider this a comprehensive analysis, but simply an idea dump I've done for leisure in my spare time.


1. Enmity manipulation is the core of tanking, yet lacks complexity to create fun dynamics to play with.

Outside of gearing well, there is no in-combat way to increase your enmity generation during pinch situations, and there's nothing you can do if your party out-paces your enmity generation. This is largely a non-issue due to careful number balancing on the developer's part.

Tank design faces the challenge that, if enmity is too hard or infeasible to expect players to build sufficiently (keeping mob attention), then the whole party breaks down.
Even in high level encounters, tanks have a very limited toolset for generating enmity. It's something you could say is taken for granted within their design, yet makes up a huge component of their function. This is a particularly huge issue in low level content, where tanks often struggle to maintain enmity for lacking their full suite of enmity-building skills.

How obfuscated this element of their design is makes learning the tank role a significantly larger hurdle for new players compared to other role. Even in the player UI, enmity is given a largely backseated display compared to other elements (like health and MP), which suffer even worse for their lack of self-evidence; for anyone who doesn't know what the symbols & bars mean, they'll have no way to know what they're looking at represents enmity. The term itself, enmity, even goes largely unexplained. Even the excellent (through frequently smothering) Active Help System does very little to explain these UI & mechanics, which are crucial tools to playing your role; very frequently, new tanks in low level duty finder groups will often need intricate coaching from other players. This creates a lot of friction in the group & an unnecessary burden on other party members, sometimes even resulting in the duty failing for the tank being unable to adapt so quickly.

2. Tanks, geared and played well, can do very little to make further impact on an encounter

The second core component of tanking that follows keeping enmity up is taking damage. Tanks are tanks because they're a better damage sponge than other players, each class/job having their own utilities for doing so. Beyond timing cooldown usage well in tune with the demands of the fight, there's little tanks can do to further impact the encounter. Paladins are especially bad in this regard, where due to their low dps potential & skill complexity (which mostly comes from defensive cooldown management), off-tank duties practically leave them sitting around with their hands in their pockets.

3. Many players choose tank roles, seeing their Tough & Powerful aesthetics, and choose them expecting to be damage dealers, becoming either sorely disappointed with what they get or flat out not playing their role at all.

4. Boss encounter design reflects how little tanks have to offer in party dynamics, often giving encounters boring gimmicks(ex: towers in Labyrinth of the Ancients' Behemoth fight) or extraneous adds(ex: almost everything) to make use of any tank that's not holding the boss. Or even more recently, reducing the slots given to tanks, such as in Syrcus Tower.

5. Tank debuffs (Pacification, Stun, etc) have, at best, very niche uses and at worst none at all. Paladin has a good chunk of their abilities dedicated to these types of effects, yet are completely useless in many fights due to the immunity system. Why should players have these tools if they're largely inapplicable, except in very marginal ways? Why not design encounters to leverage & challenge these tools in interesting ways, knowing that the players have them, rather than making them simply useless?

6. Tanks have few faculties for manipulating mob positioning. Many DPS classes have skills to bring them closer to or farther from mobs in some way, yet Tanks curiously lack these, despite them often needing to manipulate mob positions the most. While Holmgang is a notable exception, it's clearly designed for different circumstances, and lacks applicability as a significant gap closer for its 6y range. This creates many tedious circumstances for tanks, especially when they struggle to peel aggro from a partymate in unfortunate situations.

So as a conclusion:
1. The enmity system often proves to be a needless barrier to new players, and tanks lack the faculties to utilize the system in any interesting way.
2. Tanks lack potential to impact the fight outside of keeping enmity & being as little a strain on healers as possible.
3. Tanks don't function like DPS classes, despite them giving off that impression to new players.
4. Encounter design often reflects how little tanks have to add to party dynamics.
5. Tank debuffs (Pacification, Stun, etc) have, at best, very niche uses and at worst none at all.
6. Tanks have few faculties for manipulating mob positioning, despite that often being their responsibility.

My personal suggestions are as follow.
Most importantly, I'd like to advocate for reworking the UI to make enmity mechanics more self-evident. As a corollary to that, as enmity generation is often a trivial but crucial task, I believe it should be made easier for tanks to generate and hold it, and making *what* you do once you have that enmity a more critical element of the class design. Tanks should be given better faculties to contribute to the fight & support their party; Cover and Rage of Halone's strength debuff are good examples, yet rarely give chance to apply in any meaningful way. While giving tanks more DPS capability, and also more complexity for Paladins, could solve certain issues for off-tanking, I believe it alone wouldn't be a comprehensive solution to making tank, on a fundamental role level, more enjoyable to play. People like doing a lot of damage, they like that feeling of being indestructible; why not leverage the role fundamentals to synergize this? For instance, WoW has a mechanic called 'Vengeance', which increases your damage output for holding enmity on mobs; it gives players a fun thing to play with that works into their role's responsibility. I'm not suggesting implementing this exact mechanic, but it's a good example of making the tank role fun in areas this game often leaves tanking more tedious & stressful than it need be, especially in comparison with other roles' design.

[silvach]

Well, you got some good points out there but it's debatable if anything of this will grant any kind of attention from SE devs side. However, we still can theorycraft and argue about the changes that this game needs (or don't, depends on point of view). The problem with tanks, or the problem with whole FFXIV (not a problem for me tho) is that people are used to big numbers and fast action. Most of the MMORPG out there point the "fast-piece action" as the main advantage of their games, where FFXIV is quite the opposite. You got global cooldown that slows everything down, you got relatively small numbers to work around (the damage, the stats, the math behind it) and you are left without any kind of choice of making your class (cross-class skills in current state is a kind of joke). All these "flaws" makes the FFXIV something that seems "boring". You just stay there and repeat same action until you have to move or switch targets. But this is the game tempo, you cannot do anything with that, you would have to rework the battle system, remove the GCD (or make it shorten by a massive amount) and add some more cross-class complexity. In my humble opinion this will be served to us in expansions. More cross-class abilities, higher level cap and more content to work around. If we would have everything now SE would have to do step back at some point (like WoW did with oversimplifying the talent trees). I'm looking forward to what they will do in the future. Cross-class abilities are crucial here, and if pointed in good direction can be really game changing.

As for tank itself, the class is to be played as meat shield with enmity generators. You can't ask them to make tanks DPS output similar to DPS classes because what would be the point of rolling DPS then?

[Kydi]

Coming over from TOR, it isn't just a long global which is the problem.

I've just finished leveling a paladin, my first role, to 50. However, I don't really feel that driven to play it at endgame. I started on the relic reborn quest last night and read up on the boss fights earlier. It would appear that for the endgame bosses, my job is quite often to stand there and use my stun every now and again. I can use oGCD abilities, but if I miss a stun we're stuffed. I contrast this with TOR when I'm managing 2 stacks of defensive buff together with a stack of offensive, plus cool downs, plus movement and tank swap mechanics and the odd add with a global cool down a second less than FF and it's easy to see why tanking is a bit plain.

I think it might have been a conscious decision on the part of the developers to make rotations fairly simple and the GCD long due to consoles (I'd agree that a rotation with lots of abilities won't be easy on a controller compared to a keyboard and mouse), but that shouldn't stop them adding more interesting mechanics to the fights.

What you say about effects also rings true. As a paladin I have a few, but the only one which really seems to be used is stun. Everything else is fairly moot due to the gradual/instant resistance to it.

[silvach]

Kydi I can agree with you that some fight are just plain and straight boring. However, when you start doing EX trials it becomes better. Early game (even early end-game) should be "boring' for experienced players, but the curve should rise the further end-game you reach. It starts to be interesting at EX trails and turns 5 - onward. Of course these will at some point become trivial, but that is just normal as you obtain gear and experience.

And about the "effects" - as a healer or OT I rarely see PLD using flash on single target. And this is mistake. 21 second of blind (when chain-flashed) is something worth mentioning. Even smaller number of PLDns re-apply the blind after some time (when immune fells off). Ask yourself how many times you were fighting the boss and didn't use a single flash?

PLDs don't use their utility skills to maximum, and yet you want more of them? There are few tanks I've met that actually re-apply some effects after the immune is down. Even the 9 seconds of stun on some straight tank and spank fights are helpful as your Healer can switch to DPSing.

[VargasVermillion]

The problem with tanks regarding damage is that you can't make them deal dps that's too significant, otherwise people would catch on to the fact they can have good defense and still deal enough damage to carry a fight. Simple fact is that even if tanking was really in-depth a lot of people just don't like the role.

Also people underestimate pallys Off tank dps compared to warriors, warrior does beat pally in aoe dps and dps while in defiance compared to shield oath but a pally in sword oath using their skills correctly can OT dps about as equally as a warrior and i believe better (barely) on single targets.

[Kydi]

snip

I'm very happy to hear that the fights will get more interesting. Reading up on the relic fights I was starting to regret tanking and thinking I should have gone dragoon.

I agree that certain skills are utilised properly. I generally have a similar rotation for 1-3 enemies as I do more - lob, halone on 1, flash, rotate combo, flash when blind wears off, repeat. I figured it was logical to use flash as a quasi-DCD, although that might be just because I've talked other things.

I do think this game needs something to make tanking more interesting, whether it's just a few extra oGCD abilities or something else I don't know. What I would like to see is the PLD stun being oGCD with a cool down (shorter than most and keeping the TP cost). At least that might alleviate the stun lock role.

[krazyrs]

i would like to see 2 reworks on PLD
1 being flash, hate that my ilv102 PLDs flash has the same effect as a fresh 50 (maybe add a trait sub to it that increases with vit or attack or def idk)
and 2 just seeing additional effect: increased enmity on cos (match WARs overpower in terms of effectiveness)

[dramamine]

i would like to see 2 reworks on PLD
1 being flash, hate that my ilv102 PLDs flash has the same effect as a fresh 50 (maybe add a trait sub to it that increases with vit or attack or def idk)
and 2 just seeing additional effect: increased enmity on cos (match WARs overpower in terms of effectiveness)

Flash enmity generation is based on weapon damage. It's actually pretty comparable to overpower, except overpower can benefit from the damage increases from unchained, berserk and other buffs like that, while there's nothing a paladin can do to make flash more effective.

The only benefit to flash is that you can spam it pretty much indefinitely by weaving in RB combos, while a war will run out of TP pretty quick if he does nothing but overpower. But that doesn't come close to making up the difference in burst group enmity generation that a warrior can get from all their buffs.

[KingOfAbyss]

Well, from a Leisure standpoint, you sure hit the nerve ^^

Nice compilation and suggestion.

1- reworking the UI to make enmity mechanics more self-evident. (yup)

2- easier for tanks to generate and hold enmity. (please, but I think with lvl cap we might just get the right skill - hopefully)

3- being indestructible: hmm no, not all like the feeling of it. I view myself more as a shield; I know I'll take damage, but if my healer partners are not there to work as a team, I am nothing more than a crippled DPS that will die.

4- comparison with other role's design: that's exactly what we shouldn't be doing. Each role is different than the others, yet completes the team. the so-called shortage of tanks comes from the fact that people loves to kill while seeing huge numbers, no matter what class it is. If a game makes it so the Healer output in DPS would be the best, you bet that the game would be filled with them. To make a Tank close to DPS, although fun to see (perhaps Samurai or next tank, Gun-class with crazy evasion) might change the way some people see tanks and might consider the role.

I think it's more like: Warrior was bad, they adjusted it a bit, now it's PLD that needs a little TLC.

[Cessna]

Actaully this a big problem on endgame.

Many statics loath the idea of having 2 tanks in their proper gear since they view it as a dps loss. Square if they are going to put in 2 tanks fights needs to enforce that and not let the statics get around this. When I tank in dps gear I should need every inch of gear or wipe the raid. Better yet I should be one shot for this foolishness. Endgame is not like that and dps war or getting rid of the off tank entirely is retardly easy. Turn 8 is the most glaring example and to a lesser extent turn 9.

I think part of the problem is that square developers underestimate the player community and what they are capable of when it comes to tanking. For example it was revealed that square expected players to require full weathered soldiery to beat turn 8. Instead what players did was they got rid of one tank and made the main tank pop all of his cooldowns and the addition of the extra dps pushed them beyond what square thought was possible. We need to close this gap between the developer and player experience levels or tanks will countinue getting shunned.