What if Tank classes could only meatshield?

[Giantbane]

short answer: no

long answer: no, just make fending accessories more desirable to tanks, ideally putting str+vit on them. Every other job gets stronger and more powerful with their accessories. Tanks should too.

[Duelle]

short answer: no

long answer: no, just make fending accessories more desirable to tanks, ideally putting str+vit on them. Every other job gets stronger and more powerful with their accessories. Tanks should too.

I'd be okay with fending accessories being turned into "of the Bear" (a WoW suffix for items with STR and VIT on them, greater VIT and decent STR on them, generally meant for tanks).

[Takamorisan]

I'd be okay with fending accessories being turned into "of the Bear" (a WoW suffix for items with STR and VIT on them, greater VIT and decent STR on them, generally meant for tanks).

Pentamelds are for that, yeah you are going to dish 5-15 million gil, but they are worth the investment since you will be able to benefit from both attributes.



Now on thread, I rather have this double function, adds more stuff that I need to learn and things you can actually do during combat. The only thing I'd say that the gameplay needs its a way to make dps/tank stance transition more flexible for PLD, the rest the game is going in the right direction IMO.

[Duelle]

Pentamelds are for that, yeah you are going to dish 5-15 million gil

Thanks for reaffirming why I would want fending accessories to be changed. >.>

On an item that is supposed to have 100 STR or 100 VIT (this is for simplicity's sake, since I know VIT and STR are weighed differently and most likely have different costs in the item budget), "of the Bear" would go for something like 30 STR and 70 VIT. Crafted accessories would still be better (since in theory they'd be closer to a 50-50 split) while the adjusted fending accessories would place you at less of a disadvantage.

What about not changing the current system, since it's actually enjoyable for a lot of tanks?

I really don't understand the problem with stancedancing, or why it ruins the 'feel' of being a tank. Do people just think heavily armored fighters never go on the offensive or something?

Generally the tank stays defensive while the guys the mob is not paying attention to go stabby stab stab until it falls dead. That's how it works.

I don't have a problem with stance dancing; I did play a warrior in WoW since vanilla (back when you had to stance dance for lots of things). The thing is designing a tank around stance-dancing, balancing its DPS and mitigation with the other tanks and let people go nuts with it. Maybe add a combo action that changes your stance, making it fluid rather than pressing extra buttons.

The problem is that people want to force every tank to do it, and when we play tanks to be defensive so that the DPS can go stabby stab stab, we have an issue.

[Voldemort]

You still get your feeling of 'reward' from doing damage, but the design would shift to you completely catering to your party members and boil down to you hoping that they can beat down that pinata before you get tired.

(Once again; design only effective in Raid/Dungeon content where players are more or less forced to rely on other people)

A problem now arises with the other classes of the trinity, and no longer a problem with Tanks.

See, according to the original proposition you mentioned, all damage to a boss or mob would be completely dependent upon the DPS. In which case two perfect tanks, two perfect healers, and three perfect DPS-es would be undone by one suboptimal DPS (because the damage required by 4 DPS may not be enough with 3 good/1bad DPS)

The fact that the tanks and healers can bring something to the table allows for flexibility in a party to have subpar members.
If a healer is terrific at their job, they dont have to sit there casting cure over and over..... which is what I see all too often in dungeons. Rather, the healer can help out a DPS who decides to get face-lasered by the boss, or attacking adds that spawn in a fight.
If a tank is terrific at their job (which is not hard at all in the least. A tank who strictly only uses the butcher's block combo should never, under any circumstances, ever lose hate), they should be able to do something else other than tank. Which includes using their own buffs to help the healer, or putting in their DPS to help the party overall.


If Im doing Bismarck EX, and the party is standing on its back shaking violently about to be thrown off, I as a tank would want to be able to use Fell Cleave in a pinch to push in that last bit of DPS to win.
Not solely rely on my four DPS, hoping they mastered their rotations.

All the people you see tanking in Deliverance stance are the ones who have mastered their job. They have learned how to push their job to the limit by keeping hate and contributing to the overall party DPS.

[DSaint]

OP MALEFIC PLAN / main post

Lol, you are an evil person!

But yes, I would keep playing my Paladin, because I like to:

Be a paladin.
And protect people.
And hold my shield.
And beautiful skill animations.
And yell: YOU... SHALL NOT... PASS!
And receive blame about wipes.
And instant queue lol
And forget to turn on shield oath.
And hold a SPECIAL lovely key with HG to that moments: " OMG, I'm gonna die!!! I don't want to die! Take that bard! He have a horrible voice! Eat him first! HAAALP!"

I like all that tank/pld stuff and some more -^_^-

[RapBreon]

The 2nd suggestion

It's the exact same problem. Zero difference. Ultimately your contribution and room to delineate yourself from other tanks (damage wise) is reduced to such a tiny variable it wouldn't matter if you were attacking or not.

While clearly parse mad tanks are the minority on these forums (of which I am one), certainly so too are the ones happy to contribute zero (or essentially zero) damage to an encounter, especially when they don't get anything new to do.

[Phoenicia]

I skipped the past 3 pages because I dun wanna read! :P

For tanking to be fun and interesting to me, I need to "feel" like I'm a threat to the enemy and that's why I'm focused. Not via imaginary taunts, but through "real threatening" actions. In the end I'm not tanking because I wanna get smacked due to some masochistic tendencies! (Though let's admit in, almost everyone in here has a small masochist in them! We're tanks!) I'm tanking to "protect" my allies and form a front line.

This can be done in many ways:

1- Look threatening! Be in that heavy armored with grim colors and spikes on my armor! What's worse than a scary big dude in metal-clad suit and lots of spikes? A scary big dude in metal-clad suit and lots of spikes that calls your mom names! Lol

2- "Feel" threatening! This beast hits hard! Ignoring them would probably be very bad. (SE chose this path mainly).

3- Be disruptive! This works more in PvP based games. Instead of just filling up an imaginary threat bar, you disrupt enemies... HARD! Be it by overly protecting allies via shields/covers/heals, or by interrupting everything the enemies try to do. Stun, interrupt, slow, heal, shield! They wanna go over to your healer? Snare and root! They GOT to and wanna hit a friend? Cover. They wanna heal? Reduce healing! Cast bar? Nope.jpg.

You know the saying: "Dogs that bark don't bite"?

Any combination of various levels of the three above ends up "good" for me.

To answer the OP question: If all I do is wave a metal stick with a pointy or concave end and see numbers in aggro, but not damage, I would not tank. Heck, the lack of point three in this game is probably why I'm SMN main atm. (Also that AF is too cute!)

[FaizeD]

Just make VIT the primary damage modifier for tanks and fix parry. /done

[Ralvenom]

What if in a world where upon entering a dungeon or raid, all of the Tank classes ability to do numerical Damage was completely removed and replaced with plain threat. The numbers you see when you activate a damaging weaponskill instead was aggro numbers generated.

That would be incredibly boring. It'd reminiscent of WoW back in the old days. Tanks had VERY LITTLE to do. And it sucked.