What if Tank classes could only meatshield?

[FallenWings]

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.

What if STR meant nothing and VIT instead helped scaled your aggro generation much akin to how STR scales your damage.

Naturally skills and gear would be redesigned to this new idea but the question is; Would you play a tank design like this?

In a world where Tanks can only generate aggro and mitigate hits, healers can only heal and cast debuffs or whatever it is they do, and DPS were the focus of all damage on party to boss.

Would this be fine?

[RapBreon]

No. I would die of boredom unless threat became super hard to manage. Then we'd have another problem, the class being to difficult for even basic play (you think there is crying now...just you wait).

It could feasibly work in a game with a completely different style...like an action game, but not a hotkey based MMO - not enough to do to make that kind of gameplay engaging.

[Khalithar]

Removing damage entirely? No thanks. However, I'm all for adding VIT scaling to our abilities instead of STR. I'd be happy if SE would either make it so tanks could only equip fending gear or get rid of it entirely and have us just wear Str gear and re-balance the numbers appropriately. I have no preference either way, I'd rather they just put an end to this stupid debate once and for all and give everyone one specific set of gear to wear and nothing else.

[Yaichiro]

You can guess the answer from healers' responses which usually summarized as only healing without doing anything special is boring.

For me it would really depend on the fight itself. If the raid is going to be something similar to what we have then I won't even bother playing tanks. However, if the battle system for tanks also got changed by adding for instance parry similar to assassin creed in which you can throw the balance of opponents or twisting their arms and deliver a hit (block+atk) I think it would be more awesome and more enjoyable.

Though lets face it. We won't have a major change to how battles are executed since it will shatter the core of the game and it would be more realistically to implement a new game for such new battle engines.

[_Pigzig]

whats the point of continuing to attack after you have enough threat? lame

[Kydi]

I wouldn't play a tank where enmity was the only outcome of my abilities. I'd feel I have to be doing something to bring the boss' HP down.

However, I would love to see a world where tanks were required to have "tank mode" on when holding the boss, and had tank stats which actually mattered - for instance, Parry (affecting both parry and, if applicable, block rates), Evasion (what says on the tin) and Resistance (overall damage reduction and healing received increase). These stats would only be effective when in a tanking stance.

This is the first MMO I've played where the tanks are encouraged not to be in a tank stance in order to do more damage. Bosses with higher sustained damage and lower DPS checks would, in my opinion, be much more interesting than the current meta in which tanks are essentially a DPS class with extra cooldowns. To put in perspective, I've moved from a world where tanks would output approximately 1,000-1,500 DPS on a boss fight, DPS would do around 3,500-4,500. This meant that everyone's role was far better delineated than in FFXIV. Tank DPS was a nice to have, but was not vital to success beyond a point, more important was to be able to survive sustained outgoing damage from the boss.

[Alphras]

I read this argument quite often, but I always wonder.

Why would it be more interesting if thanks are not able to tank in Sword Oath/Deliverance/without Grit for some time of the fight and wouldn't need to care about personal dps? How is having less things to care about and optimize in a fight more interesting (the same goes for healers)?

[Kydi]

I wouldn't say they don't need to care about personal dps, just that there should be less focus on the amount of time one can spend not being in tank stance being such a defining factor in being a good tank.

In my opinion, instead of having the tanks focus on dishing out max dps they should be focused on allowing the others to dish out max dps by mitigating as much as possible, meaning less healing required etc. In addition, and I'll admit I'm not talking about savage here, having extra tank swaps, positioning requirements etc. would become easier if there was more focus on tanks being tanks and controlling the boss than grabbing initial hate and then staying in dps stance as long as possible. I think it's a general issue with the meta, that the lines have become blurred between the trinity, and instead we look to be moving to dps, dps who can take a hit and dps who can heal.

Personally I would find tanking more enjoyable if the goal was to focus on handling large amounts of incoming damage on an ongoing basis, mitigating it (through specific gearing and through abilities) and then having a swap mechanic to enable stance switching etc. Similarly healing would, in my opinion, be more enjoyable if the dps part were simply dot if possible, but your actual role is to keep healing.

Just my 2 pennies.

Edit: I should probably add that this is coming from an experienced mmo player, but not necessarily an experienced FFXIV player.

[AriaEnia]

It will be interesting if the monsters deal only massive damage everytime, tank buster in every 4 seconds, that the healers can only heal, and tanks have to stack vit and agro generation is so small that he only has to keep agro from dps, survive with cooldowns and the dps, well just dps.

[Duelle]

Why would it be more interesting if thanks are not able to tank in Sword Oath/Deliverance/without Grit for some time of the fight and wouldn't need to care about personal dps? How is having less things to care about and optimize in a fight more interesting (the same goes for healers)?

It's not a question of whether its interesting or not. People who roll tanks don't do it for the numbers. Sure, it feels good to do decent damage, but at the same time it shouldn't supersede why we have higher defense and HP than the DPS and healers. As I've said before, tanking outside of tank stance is unthinkable in other games between mitigation gained from the stances and enmity modifiers being tied to same.

This said, you can and should aim to do the best DPS you can...while in tank stance with the level of mitigation you were balanced around, not using tools meant for off-tanking (i.e. when you're not the mob's main target) in unintended ways.

It was sort of novel at one point, but it's beginning to creep its way from a novel thing you do for shits and giggles to the mainstream, and that's a problem.