Thread: Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

Originally Posted by Sarcatica

The thing about raid DPS is both NIN and DRG have all the good utilities and they can output comparable damage.

I think we can agree than reducing the time you stay in tank stance only increases your personal DPS. We could have utility skills for PLD and/or DRK (Since stance dancing is more clunky for them) not tied to stance dancing that would still increase raid DPS.
For example, PLD could have a Block skill on GCD. Meaning that it would take significantly less physical damage than WAR or DRK by blocking constantly (and would automatically sacrifice DPS), thus would require a lot less healing, increasing healer's room for DPS. As an OT, PLD could use its mitigation skills on the MT (adding it to the MT's own mitigation), allowing it to stay out of tank stance even for tankbusters, etc...

Originally Posted by Sarcatica

Off calculation (i know its wrong to just compare 1 skill but whatever), FoF has more than 1/2 uptime VS Darkside at full uptime which means that you can "say" that FoF at face value wins by about 50% damage (overall 15% dmg from FoF for 1/2 uptime vs 10% dmg from Darkside for full uptime).

Sorry, perhaps I don't understand your point exactly, but FoF has 1/3 uptime so 10% on average, and Darkside increases damage by 15%.

Originally Posted by Lyth

I'm yet to see an official statement made to this effect.

This is because no one has bothered to ask the devs about that. Maybe whoever here is going to the London Fanfest should grab a mic and ask Yoshida about this during the Q&A.

PLD was no longer the de facto MT for every encounter, as it had been for nearly two years.

There's a difference between PLD not being instant MT and PLD not being wanted at all. So that part is built on a false premise. And I say that as someone who wants all three tanks to stand on equal ground instead of playing musical chairs.

It was no longer enough to simply to gear up with indestructible armor and go afk as a glorified striking dummy while the rest of your raid learned mechanics. Your team now had expectations, and you had to meet them.

This assumes tanks never have to watch out for things on their side, in addition to focusing on staying alive. I'd throw in things like being part of interrupt rotations and grabbing adds, but the first was never used after Coil and the second is rarely ever used.

Survival, aggro, positioning and spatial awareness are all crucial to the tank role. Not sure why you neglect to mention them.

The post points out that the main group who objected to this were "career tanks" from previous MMOs who came into FFXIV with preconceived ideas that tanks were supposed to be nothing more than damage sponges. Problem is, their "careers" weren't long enough.

Here you aim to belittle those who have played tanks before.

The people you're trying to insult are those drawn to the role of tank because they like the idea of holding a mob's attention while their allies stab the mob to death. Those people also know what comes with the role and the trade-off that comes with being a tank.

Stuff about MUDs

From a mechanics perspective, the whole point of a tank is that you trade offense for superior defense. Otherwise you could have any class doing the tanking as long as the healers are able to keep that person alive (basically the problem FFXI ran into once everyone could get -DT gear sets, causing people to mostly toss tanks to the wayside once a fight was learned).

Also keep in mind no one who understands gameplay designs would be against tanks dealing some damage. Otherwise we'd have people calling for the Lineage II Aggression spells (spells that dealt no damage but generated aggro equal to powerful nukes) as a means for all tanks to hold a mob. That's clearly not the case, especially since tanks need to deal some damage to do things out in the world (instead of taking forever to kill anything because your attack scaling is low, which I've seen first-hand) and it gives value to offensive stats since your enmity generated is tied to damage dealt.

Originally Posted by Khalithar

We can start with removing the damage penalty on the tank stances, WoW did this because they realized (correctly I might add) that it's not necessary as long as the DPS stance provides enough of a buff that it's still more damage to be in said dps stance.

WoW had the benefit of mechanics that encouraged tanks to stay in their respective stances, though. Stances had been changed to act as the equivalent of gearing to defense cap by providing enough mitigation to make it desirable to not want to leave Defensive Stance/Blood Presence/Stance of the Sturdy Ox/Bear form as long as you were taking hits to the face (specially since in some cases your key tank mechanics were attached to the stances themselves). You were free to switch after a tank swap, which is fine.

I would not say that I think the tanks need to be simplified more but at the same time I'm not quite sure if the tanks are currently fine as is either. For one, I want the tanks to have a bit more agency and be more active in their mitigation and I think a good place to start with that would be reducing the cooldown on some of our defensive moves. For example, cooldowns like Foresight/Shadowskin/Rampart, in my opinion they should only have around a 60 second cooldown and thus able to be used more often while some of the stronger ones like Shadow Wall and Sentinel should be the two minute cooldowns that we have available. Staying on paladin specifically for a moment, I really don't think Bulwark needs to be a 3 minute cooldown, in my opinion it should have the same cooldown as Dark Dance (60 seconds).

As far as drk goes, I think it could use a few reworks. Dark Dance is pretty unreliable outside of the gimmicky DA DD/DA DP combo on trash, Blood Weapon can't be used in Grit, I think the MP cost of Grit should be much closer to the Pld MP cost for Oaths, and also in my opinion the MP restore on C&S should be baseline regardless of whether you DA it or not. I'd also prefer MP drain on Darkside that we see in PVP brought over the PVE side and I'd also like to see Sole Survivor's PVP effect work on PVE enemies as well. Drk could use a bit more utility and I actually think the Sole Survivor debuff perfectly fits that.

Originally Posted by Lyth

It's harder to compare the value of a defensive ability or a utility buff to this, because you're comparing apples with oranges.

On my example above, if PLD could transfer Rampart and Sentinel to someone else, it's pretty clear what utility it could bring.
Suppose you have a WAR MT. For each tankbuster, it will probably use Defiance and (at least) one of its "increased eHP" skill. Considering that the effect of tank stance is around the same as Rampart, your WAR MT could stay in Deliverance, use its mitigation skills (Except Inner Beast, which seems to be avoided as much as possible anyway...) as he should have, and stack at least Rampart on top of that. And of course the PLD would stay in Sword Oath during all that.

Thus, having a PLD OT would increase the DPS of the WAR, without needed a personal DPS increase of the PLD of requiring the PLD to stance dance.
And I think it would fit pretty well with the concept of PLD

Originally Posted by Duelle

There's a difference between PLD not being instant MT and PLD not being wanted at all. So that part is built on a false premise.

In ARR, most players automatically assumed that PLD was the only possible MT, even though WAR was actually a better choice for many fights. We went through nearly the entirety of FCOB with people insisting that PLD was a superior MT for the first two phases of T13, only for six and seven-man carry groups to discover much much later that WAR was actually a pretty good choice. The problem wasn't the tank design, but player preconceptions. Even really skilled groups had them.

There were some fights in ARR in which the player base felt that a PLD solo tank was "optimal" and your OT would be required to swap to a 5th dps. That's really not cool. Hallowed's ability to bypass and reset stack mechanics played a role in this.

One of the reasons DRK was struggling to find a place in early HW was because players automatically assumed that two-handed weapons were less defensive than a shield. So they were trying to force it into a pure OT role which it wasn't really designed for.

Gordias had its share of problems, but actually seeing two out of four world-first clears on a non-PLD MT did wonders to change people's perceptions of tanks (half of the world-first clears in Gordias were still done on PLD, so it's not like there wasn't any demand). If you wanted to be MT, you no longer had to play PLD. This opened up the doors to not just DRK MTs, but WAR MTs as well. The responsibilities are more balanced as well, and we slowly moved away from the draconian MT/OT system to a more equitable way of divvying up the fights.

Originally Posted by Duelle

This assumes tanks never have to watch out for things on their side, in addition to focusing on staying alive. I'd throw in things like being part of interrupt rotations and grabbing adds, but the first was never used after Coil and the second is rarely ever used.

Survival, aggro, positioning and spatial awareness are all crucial to the tank role. Not sure why you neglect to mention them.

Sure. I've worked with some very skilled MTs in ARR who knew to do all those things while stance dancing and taking advantage of strength gear. But survival and aggro are fairly simple when you have 100% Shield Oath uptime and your only combo maximises damage, enmity, and provides a mitigation buff. It was very easy to get by on the bare minimum. It was only later in HW, when the skill set was expanded, you were forced to make trade-offs to make your dps count, that it became more blatantly obvious to non-tanks which tanks were genuinely talented and which tanks were simply coasting. You no longer had the luxury of Halone Shield Oathing your way to victory.

The reason why mandatory interrupts aren't as common is because PLD has a clear-cut advantage over the other two tanks, both in its ability to chain stun and in its ability to silence. These have also historically given rise to situations in which the player-base has considered PLD to be mandatory. There are still fights where these come up, and there were three fights in Midas where these were beneficial, although there were ways to work around the absence of a PLD because the interval between silences can be handled by a single player. Interrupts are not hard to do; it's just a question of whether the player has access to the right skills.

Movement-orientated fights are only recently becoming more common. Skill in this area shows up in both your personal and raid dps. You can easily tell the player who manages to gently guide the boss to a new position without costing autos from both themselves and their melee (you can usually tell the players who have spent some time raiding on a melee dps apart from the ones who have only ever played a tank). This was less obvious in a lot of earlier fights, were you legitimately were a target dummy.

Originally Posted by Duelle

The people you're trying to insult are those drawn to the role of tank because they like the idea of holding a mob's attention while their allies stab the mob to death.

I'm sorry if I offended you. If you like getting compliments from your circle of friends on how indestructible you are, then feel free to play that way. But what I object vehemently to is when players want to remove performance metrics simply because they aren't able to make them. If my dps is terrible, then it's on me to fix it if I want to improve. I'm not going to try to pressure the devs to have dps removed from tanking simply so that I can feel better about myself.

Originally Posted by Duelle

From a mechanics perspective, the whole point of a tank is that you trade offense for superior defense.

Actually, the point of a tank is to know when to trade offense for superior defense. We're frontline combat specialists versed in both. Tanks may have armor, but they also come with a giant cannon.

Originally Posted by Reynhart

On my example above, if PLD could transfer Rampart and Sentinel to someone else, it's pretty clear what utility it could bring.
Suppose you have a WAR MT. For each tankbuster, it will probably use Defiance and (at least) one of its "increased eHP" skill. Considering that the effect of tank stance is around the same as Rampart, your WAR MT could stay in Deliverance, use its mitigation skills (Except Inner Beast, which seems to be avoided as much as possible anyway...) as he should have, and stack at least Rampart on top of that. And of course the PLD would stay in Sword Oath during all that.

Thus, having a PLD OT would increase the DPS of the WAR, without needed a personal DPS increase of the PLD of requiring the PLD to stance dance.

This would be pretty cool, and you can kind of do this with Cover. One gripe that I have is that when you're OT, you typically aren't involved with tankbuster mechanics until it's your turn to swap in. I much prefer seeing things like Laser X Sword and Ahk Morn where you're forced to team up with your co-tank to fend off the attack.

Another alternative would be to give the OT a special move to perform a timed counter-attack to debuff the tank buster.

Originally Posted by Ahrniel

I see absolutelly no issues to tanks dpsing, it is in the basics. You are a melee fighter, you wanna grab attention? Gotta cause enough pain and fear for that, that means damage. The only reason tanks grab attention is thanks to cheap artificial fear called enmity, if you wanna know what is true fear, talk to my fellow Black Mages, they know what is true solid fear.

Enmity isn't about fear it's about anger. Which is why people calling it "Threat" is misleading. "Hate" is the better term. In a way it makes sense. If you were having a duel and a guy was there constantly flashing a light in your eyes (PLD) you'd kill him first cause he's annoying you and you can't see or focus on the fight while he's doing that. WAR is basically screaming in your ear and DRK is just generally intimidating.

Originally Posted by Cabalabob

Enmity isn't about fear it's about anger. Which is why people calling it "Threat" is misleading. "Hate" is the better term. In a way it makes sense. If you were having a duel and a guy was there constantly flashing a light in your eyes (PLD) you'd kill him first cause he's annoying you and you can't see or focus on the fight while he's doing that. WAR is basically screaming in your ear and DRK is just generally intimidating.

You know how lame that sounds don't you?
You call their attention by being annoying? Rogues should be MT GG no RE.

Originally Posted by Ahrniel

You know how lame that sounds don't you?
You call their attention by being annoying? Rogues should be MT GG no RE.

Doesn't really matter how it sounds, it's basically fact. One of our hate tools is literally called provoke. What do you think that means? What pain and fear are you causing when you taunt them? Except maybe hurting their feelings.

As for ninja they have enmity control skills. Shadewalker makes it seem like the tank is the one performing their enmity gain and smoke bombs to hide the other people who are building enmity. Hate control by making it seem like someone else is doing it is a common thing with thief or scout type classes (thief's trick attack in ffxi)