SE please, let the Tank role be about tanking again!

[Midaja]

Note first: This is all about savage raiding, not expert dungeons or stuff.

I'm a main SCH since T5. So, after finally clearing A3s last night, I just want to say something that was bothering for the last few weeks.

This is the first MMO I played, where, since Heavensward, tanking in high-end raids is all about DPS. As a raid leader, I'm so getting fed up with my tanks always asking if they can swap an additional piece of pentamelded crafted accessory (!) with a pure strength one, while I see them surviving tethers with 500-1000 HP and surviving cleave + auto-hit with 50 HP.
I'm so getting fed up with my tanks whining about not getting any gear, while, when a tank-acce drops, they're just like "Uh, I don't want it. Do you want it? Nah, there's no strength on it and parry just sucks..."
If a role doesn't want the gear that was designed for them, in my opinion there's just something wrong with the design.

Not only that tanks just NEED to do as much DPS as possible, because without an optimal DPS setup you just can't meet some of the DPS criteria without the tanks (and healers) giving as much as somehow possible, but now they (especially WAR) seem to be thinking, that they really are DPS-classes now, more than tanks.

I really love the actual hard-tuned encounter design, but I really dislike, that you force every role to just have to DPS. Also I play a healer because I want to heal and be challenged by the healing needed, not by healing as less as possible while doing as much DPS as possible.

So, while this is a class- and especially encounter-design problem, returning to the tanks, what could you do to change this?


Credit for the following list goes to participants in this thread

List of possible changes:
Stances
- Increase def-bonus of tank-stances & increase boss-damage outside tank-busters
- Reduce the DPS-difference between tank-stance and non-tank-stance
- Remove (DPS) stance
- Higher impact on tankiness in dps-stance

Class- / Encounter-design
- More active mitigation / things for tanks to do
- Design the encounters, that tanks just WANT to be as tanky as possible
- Going with ^, make some boss-skills (or all they do) shred a tank, if not in tank-stance (by dealing bonus-damage if not in stance e.g.)
- Make hard enrages more forgiving, while skills like hand of pain and liquid limb still demand going all-out in DPS for all roles (maybe add some more of those, I like them)
- Cap (and balance) the tank-DPS at about 1/3 of what a DPS can do (in raids)

Stats- / Gear-design
- Redesign tanking accessories (e.g. add STR, DEF and / or MDEF, make STR-accse DPS-class-only, reallocate benefits of STR to VIT)
- Since crafted accessories should still be worth something, make tank-accessories having def-stats only, so that same-ilvl melded accessories can still deal more DPS with only DPS secondary stats on it
- Boost the parry-stat (and maybe add another def-stat)
- Add more defensive secondary stats (e.g. crit-immunity, increased healing income)

[pandabearcat]

Your suggestions mostly just involve tanks doing less dps while doing still the same thing that they're currently doing, except now they get less out of it.

There is no such thing as enrages being more forgiving. DPS checks are not a pass/fail system, its just a linear scale based on ilvl. So maybe they set the bar is 95% of max dps at ilvl 190. Well if you're ilvl 194 this becomes like 90% of max dps, at ilvl 200 its 80%, etc. So regardless tanks will still probably go into dps stance because why not, at that ilvl their healers will be healing more too.

Tanks wanting to be as tanky as possible requires a complete overhaul of the tanking system because there is no "skill" involved in making tanks as tanky as possible. They have no say in their mitigation past a handful of cooldowns that mostly involve saving all for one buster. So really tanking is a healer check not a tank check. Once we have actual active migitation and tanks have a say in how and when they use their abilities then you might start designing encounters around that.

Tanks mechanics are mostly boss positioning and tank swaps - mitigation doesn't have anything to do with it and your suggestions probably will not help.

My suggestion is to get rid of stances entirely and find a more interesting threat and active mitigation system.

[Reynhart]

There is no such thing as enrages being more forgiving.

Yes, there is.

Bahamut's Favor is an enrage, but not like "You automatically wipe after that point". Meaning that if you have a competent and sturdy tank, he can survive more stacks thus compensating for any lack of DPS, be it gear, rotation, or fails during mechanics.

Getting rid of tank stance is a problem too, because you either give tank a DPS output too close to real DPS, or you give them a really low DPS and killing mobs solo will take forever. If you want to prevent stance dancing (Which is not a very good idea for now since it's the only real way of pushing your job for now), you just adjust the enmity modifiers so that you'll quickly lose it to DPS or healers without the tank stance.

As for the mitigation system, for me, it could be based upon combos and procs, requiring you to maintain a high Mitigation By Second. For example, the 3rd hit of your combo could give you an increase block/parry rate, or a stoneskin effect, etc...

[pandabearcat]

That is still just a random upkeep and tanks are still rote 123145 rotations or what have you.

The difference between a hard enrage and a soft enrage is what you described, but it is not an "easier" enrage. You still need a dps set or heal set to beat it, and it gets easier with gear. You cannot just tune an encounter to just always be the right difficulty.

What exactly is wrong with tank dps being similar to dps dps? You're afraid tanks will be used instead of dps? Good joke, people are up in arms about a 5-10% dps difference just between dps, if a tank does 80% of a dps's job it is not going to be a problem, in any sense. In fact it would be better for tanks, as you'd have more of them pushing dps where it matters which is a skill discriminator.

I meant get rid of tank dps stances, btw.

[AnimaS]

we'll just go ahead and take away Broil and all your dots as well. actually let's get rid of cleric stance.. and , no none of that is feasible. Warrior gains emnity by doing more damage. No we cannot throw it out, not feasible.... if you have a warrior taking a tank buster in deliverance he/she is an idiot unless using Holmgang for some reason. Capping tank dps is virtually the opposite of the entire job description of warrior. Before deliverance we just had defiance off, maim and eye are +30% ... why? for Butcher's Block the highest potency and emnity combo.

"They" = dicto simpliciter , a sweeping generalization. You are basically attempting to presume all of them (warriors) are annoying and have less health, and complain about their drops? Here's a suggestion: Get another game.

[Midaja]

I wouldn't mind making cleric stance not be usable while in combat at all... I would appreciate it, if any. As I said, as a healer I want to be challenged by healing and not by dpsing. If I want to roll on DPS-items and let all my thinking of "how could I do a better job" be about "more DPS!", I would just play a DPS-role.

Reducing tank-DPS would not be my preferred way of handling this, just saying. I don't have that much of a problem with their DPS-output being near a pure-DPS-class as it may sound. My problem is, that tanks just stopped thinking about anything else than DPS and the fact, that the gear actually designed for tanks is pretty useless at the moment. This mainly applies for accessories, since tank-accessories just don't have any strength on them, why my preferred way of changing this would be to just put it on par with the gear tanks like to equip more at the moment, which is pentamelded accessories and STR-stuff, by also giving it strength and making it be wearable by tanks only.
Tanks would keep equipping their VIT-stuff, would have much higher HP, bosses could strike harder, making losing enmity / gaining enmity of a non-tank-class more punishing and healing would be more about healing.

If we keep up the thought of removing the DPS-stance, we could go with the same that I said about cleric stance - just make it unusable in combat. Actually, going with that, the damage boost of those stances could be increased, so that tank-DPS would remain of what it is now, while the stance, but much less without / in tank-stance.
Going solo would therefore not suffer under the fact, that the tank's DPS wouldn't be as important in dungeons / raids anymore.

edit: Oh, and by hard enrages being more forgiving I meant, that the timer could just be a bit less hard tuned, or use more soft enrages, like it was before Heavensward.

[Freyyy]

IMO they shouldn't decrease the tank DPS. They should just increase the difference of tankiness between tanking stance and no-tanking stance by a large amount and make everything hit a fucking lot harder, faster and everytime, not only at scripted moments, thus requiring to tank in tanking stance. They should also add more active mitigation to all tank jobs to make us more involved into actual tanking. Currently, focusing on only pure tanking is super easy and boring.
And to solve the accessory issue, just make them all class-locked like left side gear and add STR and DEF/MDEF values to fending accessories.
They should also do something about parry and tank stats in general. Maybe add a stat that increases healing received, and another stat that makes you take less critical hits ?

It would require a lot of reworks to make the tank role focused on tanking in this game. I hardly see it happen outside of a new expansion.

[pandabearcat]

If they made tanking gear convert VIT to STR, halve STR contribution for tanks, and do a bit of number balancing, you would

1. Not force people to sink millions into pentamelds
2. Not have tanks compete with dps for str gear.
3. Not have issues with tanks that go all STR and have not enough vit.
4. Not have issues with tanks that go all VIT and not have enough damage/threat.

All tanks will be beefy, and hit as hard as they need to, without any gear competition.

Of course, its too logical to happen.

[Reneta_Xian]

I feel I agree with you. As a healer, when I'm in an instance, I like that my role is healer (not DPS). And it seems like with HW, I'm expected to put out more DPS by stance dancing and this actually gets really annoying, not just in raiding. I don't at all find healing boring, whether I'm healing a well geared tank, or a poorly geared on. The expectation that the game is designed that I absolutely have to stance dance and DPS to win, and beat encounters actually kind of annoys me. Especially with the fact that I mainly take 1 or 2 friends and pug everything. I picked healer, not DPS. Also, I have chronic pain issues, and I'm physically disabled. Sometimes, stance dance DPS as a healer isn't feasible for me. That said, healer classes do have decent damage output, so dungeons, raids and instances should be scaled with that in mind, but not dependent on Healer DPS, especially with how bad MP consumption is with DPS skills at the game's current item levels.

[Kydi]

Bosses need to be made dangerous outside of tank stance. FFXIV is the only mmo (to my knowledge) where the tank can step out of "tank mode" and survive for more than a couple of hits.

Boss damage should be of the level that will utterly annihilate a dps if they take the boss for more than a couple of seconds. Now, the temporary fix for this is, in my opinion, increasing the damage dealt by bosses by about 50%, and increasing the tanks stance reduction to 40% for paladin and dark knight and something like 20% for warrior. Now your tank has to be in tank stance to survive more than 2-3 hits. This would also mean that your healers would need to heal more as there is more danger from auto attacks. Reduce the boss HP to compensate and you have a bit more definition back in the meta.

Similar to others in this thread, I do enjoy seeing large numbers, but that's for when I'm playing dragoon. As a tank, I would mush rather be having to really worry about damage outside of tank busters.