Thread: Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

Originally Posted by Sarcatica

2. PLD don't have enough CDs to cycle in A12S, leading to taxing WAR to tank some tank busters, unlike DRK (DADM OP). PLD's overall A12S clear is about 10% of DRK's.

I mean it's not amazing but you do have at least a Rampart for everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBzS...ature=youtu.be

took this tonight just cause I wanted to paladin it. Played drk on the other floors for funsies. Paladin and DRK are really too similar so sometimes you just gotta accept that you'll have to switch.


Anyway to get back on topic if they want to close the gap between decent tanks and bad tanks they'll probably need to make tank stance way more required for actual tanking - probably by by buffing tank stances to like 40% (or equivalent) mitigation and increasing boss damage to match. Alternatively they could make the tank stance enmity (even more) required. That'd suck but it's one way to do it.

Originally Posted by Brannigan

One Ilm Punch is the actual best place to start).

I am legit the saddest person alive every time I read this (I'm just mildly sad and prone to hyperbole at midnight). This skill is incredible for pvp and we're going to probably lose it because they can't figure out what they want out of it in PvE.

Awareness can head right on out the door, though.

I mean yeah One Ilm Punch is a great PVP skill... so they should make it a PVP skill. There's no reason there can't be a PVP-only WS. Actually, what I'd prefer is if they just added like 4 other dispels to the game and then made dispelling buffs a thing in PVE, but that's not gonna happen. Monk has a LOT of garbage though compared to other classes. Like their stances are all of questionable value (you could probably give them all 3 at the same time and it wouldn't be OP), One Ilm Punch, Haymaker, the AOE Silence, etc. Featherfoot looks good compared to some of those.

Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Except I'd imagine those two concepts are much more distinct than our three tanks.

I don't want to go into this much, but suffice to say I'm glad Utsusemi tanking doesn't exist here and will likely never darken our doorstep. Trust me, you do not want that garbage messing with balance and design here like it did in FFXI.

Heck, it sounds like one's a meat-shield and the others a kiter, which would have very real scaling differences, differences in how the tank MUST be played, and more.

Grr...okay fine.

Nonsequitur:

The reason they called it blink tanking was because Ninja in FFXI had a skill called Utsusemi that gave them stacks of invulnerability (WHM and RDM had a spell called BLink that did the same thing, except the proc was not guaranteed and the cast time was long). The ability was meant for self-preservation, but players, being players, used it as a way to tank mobs.

So while a PLD or WAR would get their faces bashed in and require lots of constant healing (because exp parties LOVED going after the equivalent of skull-level mobs because said mobs gave 200 exp per kill, ignoring that to kill these mobs it took forever and required you abusing the stat system to get around level correction), a NIN spamming Utsusemi would hold aggro via Provoke + whatever damage they were dealing and require little to no healing at all (a really big deal because not having to wait for healer MP between pulls meant you could kill more mobs without rest).

Players eventually kicked WAR to the curb from tanking (and so did the devs, which is why they later gave it more damage-oriented skills), and decided PLD was a blood tank (took damage), and NIN was a blink tank (took no damage from most attacks, including spells).

The devs eventually got around to tweaking Utsusemi a bit and started giving mobs abilities that stripped all invulnerability stacks, but it was still a broken ability that messed with a LOT of aspects of class design and player dynamics. It was basically as if WoW's devs had never nerfed Reckoning Bomb under the excuse that it made paladins unique or some nonsense.

Putting similar mitigation systems on each under different guises that do not bring out different gameplay

I'm not sure how you're equating pushing a button to reduce damage (PLD), stacking additional effects with on-demand mitigation (WAR), and negating damage while recovering HP (DRK) into similar mitigation systems.

I won't deny that tanks should have common denominators (an invincibility, a strong flat percent mitigation cooldown and the ability to taunt mobs), nor that all tanks should have some baseline mitigation before getting into the gameplay and mechanics of each.

I feel like I get what you mean, but again, I just don't think Drains are going to be the way out, especially not standard ones. Nor refunders/reactive drains.

I wouldn't limit DRK entirely to drains. They'd just be a more noticeable aspect of how they mitigate damage. I mean, comparatively speaking it's not like Death Knights had only Death Strike+Blood Shield to mitigate damage. It was a combination of those mechanics plus Icebound Fortitude, Bone Shield, and inherently superior parries. The same principle would sort of apply here.

Originally Posted by Brannigan

Anyway to get back on topic if they want to close the gap between decent tanks and bad tanks they'll probably need to make tank stance way more required for actual tanking - probably by by buffing tank stances to like 40% (or equivalent) mitigation and increasing boss damage to match. Alternatively they could make the tank stance enmity (even more) required. That'd suck but it's one way to do it.

There are two 'gaps': a skill gap and a performance gap. The present stance design allows a tank who is less familiar with the damage patterns in a fight to give themselves an extra defensive cooldown by sacrificing their damage output. You sacrifice performance to tank something that is pitched at a higher skill level. It's a bit like having different difficulty settings.

If you make tank stance mandatory, or if you remove stances altogether, then you can't pitch the same fight to people of different skill levels. Failing a mitigation challenge results in a death or a wipe. Without the safety net of tank stance, a fight pitched at a higher difficulty becomes inaccessible to less experienced tanks, instead of merely lowering their dps. The fights then have to be pitched at an easier difficulty, to allow for players with inefficient cooldown usage to clear.

If you wanted to reduce the performance difference without running into this problem, you would need to reduce the damage penalty on tank stance. This would make it so that higher tank stance uptimes would reflect less poorly on your dps. I'm not advocating this, nor do I feel that this needs adjusting.

I would, however, like to see fights where it was more challenging, but still possible to stay out of stance, potentially through carefully timing short duration, short recast cooldowns like Sheltron (in addition to correctly managing long recast cooldowns, though: if you can mitigate everything with just a short recast move alone, then it defeats the purpose of having a cooldown rotation). I'd like to see fights that cater to a broader range of skill levels, rather than a narrower range. The skill gap is a good thing - it gives players more room to grow. The only requirement is that the content remains accessible (i.e. narrower performance gap) so that novice tanks have the opportunity to do so. There doesn't need to be a compromise, as long as both needs are met.

So, harkening back to an old thread from a little over a year ago, SE might not be satisfied with the fact that progression-level tanks "need" to stance dance to be successful. But the problem isn't tank design here so much as encounter design.

Fights in FFXIV require dedicated tanks specifically and exclusively because of tankbusters. The white damage they do to tanks is simply not enough to usually require any more healing than Regen plus the occasional Cure/Cure II (this may be different in Savage), and usually the damage that tanks take outside of tankbusters is comparable to the rest of the group. Especially when this is coupled with tight DPS checks, the push for maximizing tank DPS is natural - since they only need to be "tanky" once every 30 seconds, they can spend the rest of the time maximizing their output and contributing more to group success (this is also why Parry is so undesirable - there isn't enough incoming damage to make it worthwhile in most cases).

If they want to change it, they will need to up the ante for how much damage tanks take, and how frequently. "Death by a million needles" would need to be the mantra--but in this case, too, they'd need to adjust how tanks work (though not in a way to eliminate DPS stances--that would be silly, and more something Blizzard would do). Instead, I imagine we'll see a few PLD skills revisited, as well as an adjustment to the combat table to make Parry more desirable.

In any case, I don't imagine we'll see too much of a change to either of these things. SE is a lot more iterative in their changes than some other companies, and they have tended very well to avoid overshooting the fixes they need to make. Many very strongly like this DPS meta, and it would do them well to consider that as they move towards Stormblood.

Originally Posted by Jim_Berry

I think tank jobs should lose tank and dps stances, and rely on actually needing to keep enmity rather than being a dps (like PLD, NIN, and WAR in FFXI).

Nin, War & Paladin could all be excellent damage dealers... I don't get this comparison. Tank in XIV has nothing in common with tanking in XI other than tanks in both games maintain threat.

Are you implying that tanks never lost threat in XI? Most of the difference can be swept away by the fact that Provoke in XI actually generated considerable amounts of threat whereas here it is a snap taunt. Simply using abilities Provoke/Warcry/Flash on CD in XI was all you had to do to keep threat and people still failed at it regularly.

Also there was an equivalent mechanic to stances in XI in the gear swaps. If your tank wasn't changing to a WS gear set (for the purpose of doing more damage and therefore more threat/enmity/aggro/chooseyourfavoritewordandinserthere) then they were doing it wrong.